News Brief, Mission of Burma Edition
Joshua Foust on Apr 18 2007 at 10:37 pm | Filed under: Developmental economics, Domestic Politics, Foreign affairs, Libertarianism, Media, Military Matters, Race, Religion and theology, social science
Cross-posted on The Conjecturer.
The Pentagon
- This account of an NSA Recruiting drive wasn’t all that remarkable, except for one bit I had never heard before. “It was mentioned that people who had done a lot of illegal file sharing were turned down and told never to apply again.†Now, how they define “a lot†leaves much to be desired. But I don’t know of a single computer literate college student who has not done any illegal file sharing. Can the NSA afford to be that picky in choosing its candidates? Does the CIA and other intelligence agencies have such stringent (and, in my view, unrealistic) criteria for its 21-year old recruits? (Note: Noah Shachtman makes the same point as well.)
- Now that I think of it, this is kind of similar to their attitude on drugs. Until recently, the criteria was that any illegal drug use, at any point in your past, was grounds for clearance denial. That has since been amended to “within the last 12 months†for most clearances, including the CIA. A similar standard should apply to the NSA.
- Not exactly Pentagon, but it is US-strategy related: an article I wrote on American strategic opportunities in Turkmenistan is up over at World Politics Watch. Go, read.
Around the World
- A fascinating look at EU relations with Uzbekistan, two years after the Andijon massacre. If your Russian (or translation service) isn’t up to snuff, it is along similar lines to much of what Nathan has been reporting lately.
- A fascinating World Bank paper on economic growth and political and social trends in pre-civil war and post-civil war periods. They find that once peace is achieved, sustained growth rates of 2% are common. This suggests civil wars, though disastrous, may not necessarily be ruinous.
- Foreign Policy takes a look at social norms and attitudes of the infamous Muslim community of England. Since it is a survey, I would immediately question their methodology. I do wonder, though: how many Muslims were first-generation immigrants, and how many were born there? In other studies of Muslims in Europe, the first-gen immigrants deeply believe in their adopted homes and wish to integrate, while their children, the victims of systemic if unofficial discrimination, are most often the ones who become radicalized.
- Sudan has been caught secretly shipping guns to Darfur, on planes disguised as UN aircraft.
- Georgia, looking east. They stand to win big from any new petroleum infrastructure (both oil and gas) around the Caspian. To paraphase a familiar saying, “All pipes lead to Tiblisi.â€
- The U.S. is acting like it’s a shock the Iranians are sending weapons to Afghanistan. Even if it means sending weapons to a group of Sunni extremists who would just as happily behead the Ayatollah as the U.S. Ambassador. Iran’s policy, as with its abduction ploy, is short-sighted: rather than seeing the longer strategic picture of dealing with an American presence in Kabul versus a Taliban presence, it has gone for the short term gain of trying to bog down the American military presence next door. Unless they’re supremely confident of their ability to prop up the Emir of Herat (Ismail Khan, currently a member of Parliament) as a buffer zone, Iran has to be banking on its policy to fail or fall short. In other words, it is a confusing decision… highlighted by the upswing in violence in Iranian Baluchistan.
- The National Union of British Journalists has voted to boycott Israel because a BBC reporter was abducted by Palestinians. I could easily be mistaken, but might their holy outrage be better expressed against, I don’t know, the Palestinians who supported his abduction, rather than the Israelis who oppose them? To say nothing of the much-flouted principle of media neutrality applying only to dictators and thugs…
Back at Home
- Judges and bad companies hate you, and they hate your innovations. Acacia, a company known for buying and then suing patents, has decided to sue everyone because they use hyperlinks on CDs. This is akin to when Amazon patented the mouse click in Internet transactions: frivolous, deceptive, dirty, and bad corporate policy.
- Radley Balko on the problems of prohibition. I have to confess that if marijuana were legal, I’d probably smoke it every once in a while. But it would be the same as my drinking habits—really only on the rare occasions my friends can hang out. I don’t drink during the week, just as I wouldn’t smoke during the week: maybe I’m a lightweight, but pot leaves me braindead the next day. And before you freak out over my admission of drug use, consider that I graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder—Boulder!—where not only are there multiple greenhouses growing surprisingly high quality hydroponic stuff, but in nearby Denver possession was legalized. And the remarkable thing is, just as when alcohol was re-legalized, the vast majority of users were responsible and stable. A fraction of a percent of abusers shouldn’t ruin it for the rest of us.
- The Manhattan Institute released a report about Myths and Facts concerning energy and the environment. They’d make Bjorn Lomborg proud.
- While absent-mindedly jogging on the treadmill last night, I watched Le Journal, an international French news program. They ran a report on Blacksburg, which would have been hilarious for its ignorance if it weren’t taken so seriously in the francophone world. After going through the requisite scenes of mourning and confusion, the reporter traveled to a gunshop miles from campus, and declared (I’m paraphrasing), “children can walk into shops like this and purchase machine guns as long as they declare they are not criminals.†They then said America has a centuries-long tradition of gun worship, we indoctrinate our children into gun usage they way the French indoctrinate their children into soccer play, and this is why we are such a violent and uncaring society. No wonder Europe hates us, if they have such atrociously unethical reporting.
- Though in fairness to Der Spiegel, they published a series of emails and blog counterpoints to their own summary of hostile European editorials about the shooting.
- Distraught Koreans think this is the new 9/11. Umm, no.
18 Responses to “News Brief, Mission of Burma Edition”
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Well, no, not exactly. "File sharing" is stealing, plain and simple. Using drugs is something that our betters have decided we can’t do because its not good for us. File sharing is a violation against others, while using drugs is violations against one’s self.
Just because it’s easy to do doesn’t make any less of a theft.
Well, yes and no. There are, in fact, many arguments over the morality and property rights involved in file sharing. I am of the opinion that file sharing in fact violates no rights, and that an insistence on the traditional music industry in fact props up a system that stifles artistic and technical innovation, leading to vast unintended consequences. Laws like the DMCA, passed with the intention of halting music piracy, have come to be used to stifle common technical processes like hyperlinking.
Anyway, the point here isn’t to belabor the arguments for or against the morality of file sharing. Such a debate exists about drug users as well (such as the argument that it is impossible for drug users to exist in a vacuum, therefore the state has an interest in regulating or limiting their use). The point is the NSA handles file sharing, an activity that is indicative and encouraging of technical expertise and innovation, the same way it treats felonies like murder. That’s foolish.
There be many who argue, but there are not many arguments, and there are none that satisfactorily account for the fact that songs are property. Just because you have a CD with some copies of songs on it doesn’t make it your to sell. For example, if you owned a Beatles album when their entire collection was sold to Michael Jackson, you couldn’t plausible think you would be entitled to a cut of the proceeds could you?
So it would be fine with you then if instead of attributing this entire post to you we simply "shared" it amongst ourselves and put out there for everyone as our own, to profit from as we see fit? What if we decided to bundle a bunch of these posts together and sell them as a book, would you feel entitled to a cut of the proceeds. In short, your opinion is based on something other than law and fact. It’s based on your desire to have something for free that others worked very hard on creating and delivering to you in format that you could then "share".
I won’t defend the DMCA since I know very little about it, but you are obviously incorrect about hyperlinking since you can find it everywhere, including right here in this post. Copyright law, IMHO, should be enough to protect property rights. Of course, perhaps if more people respected the value of property rights we wouldn’t need the DCMA to essentially criminalize the theft of intellectual property.
Who’s doing that? I didn’t introduce morality into the discussion. I’m just calling "file sharing" what it is; theft.
That may be a moral argument (although, actually, I think its more of a utilitarian, cost-benefit, externalities argument), but it is not comparable to violations of copyright. While one can conceivably construct an argument that your behavior towards yourself has some effect on me, therefore I can justifiably seek state intervention, that does not create a "right" for me to control your behavior. The very foundation of our country is based on individual rights, some control over which we have voluntarily relinquished to the state in order to receive the benefit of the state protecting those individual rights. The fact that I am the owner of my mind and the things that are uniquely derived from it is unquestioned and deeply rooted in not just the history of this country, but in the history of the law. To equate the harm caused by someone stealing the product of my mind with the fiction that must be created to justify teh state’s intervention in my personal activities is to forget first principles.
It may not be practical at this point, but how can an Executive agency, from the branch charged with faithfully executing the laws of the land, condone blatant and rampant theft? That being said, perhaps you are right that some time limit should be placed on it instead of a blanket rejection.
MY point is that I don’t want anyone to get confused into thinking that "file sharing" and smoking pot are in any way comparable. Just because you want to do it, doesn’t make it a right. If somebody else must necessarily be involved in your enjoyment of it, then it’s not a right.
No one is talking about selling anything for profit. The moment you can explain to me the moral and property distinctions between a mix tape and a P2P network, you’ll have a decent case. But the file sharing debate is tricky for your argument in that it is not commercial. I wouldn’t make a profit if I ripped the lastest Björk album and made a torrent seed. Further, many bands, such as Wilco, have found that releasing their albums for free on the Internet actually increased their final album sales, and increased the numbers of people buying tickets to their shows as well. So it’s not a strict property argument, at least from any kind of objective good. The equivalent would be book publishers (but not necessarily authors - you do realize that the RIAA shares none of its lawsuit windfalls with the artists on whose behalf it sues children, and that the artists themselves, even big time ones, rarely ever see direct profit for their album sales?) objecting to their book being placed in a library where any ruffian could come in off the street and read it for free.
Well, you guys WERE doing that, until Lance invited me to double post here. Moving on…
Umm, hyperlinks ARE an issue, right now. Read the content of this post for info on a recent ruling, in which a company claims to own the patent on hyperlinking from a CD to the internet, and is suing basically everyone in existence. Your argument about the use odf the DMCA amounts to “if people wouldn’t keep making so much meth we wouldn’t have to criminalize allergy sufferers.” You like, like the legislators who have restricted Claritin and Sudafed, and possibly baking soda? “We wouldn’t write bad laws if you people would stop breaking laws that didn’t exist before we wrote this bad law” is a pretty piss poor argument.
And your last characterization of my argument is disingenuous. I’m not arguing that file sharing is okay because I want to do it—believe it or not, I actually buy CDs—but because I think digital copyright laws, including court rulings on file sharing made by judges who through their statements demonstrate an apalling ignorance of the technology in question (equivalent to calling the Internet a series of tubes), actually contradict the original purpose of copyright and patent as laid out in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution: to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts.”
Digital copyright laws stifle that progress, they have been proven to. It is bad law, worthy of repeal, and certainly not of consideration at an agency desperate for younger technically qualified applicants to replace its rapidly retiring boomer force.
I should amend the property argument I made above. The debate over P2P isn’t about property rights, though that is what the RIAA says it is. It is really about protecting a business model that fails in the Internet age. Artists and labels that have adapted to contemporary technology have thrived. Artists and labels that have not, including (or perhaps especially) in the RIAA, have not. It is ultimately about protecting an outdated business model, nothing more. None of the P2P activists (and I barely consider myself one) think music isn’t property. Lessig’s writings on Free Culture and what that really means for property rights is instructive in this case.
Heh. You almost had me, but I did link and suggest they go to your place. If you had asked me to stop I would have, and I did decide if I liked it so much I should just have you do it her. Free, just like you do at your place.
I will admit I am not sure I agree with either of you. In fact, I think I may post on it this weekend when I have time to deal with it properly.
Nevertheless, I think it is a problem, and one we need to get a handle on. I tell my children not to engage in using mass file sharing programs, even though I have no problem with them sharing with just their friends (or for that matter with me, or me with them.
It isn’t like a library though. I don’t think profit is the issue. If I write a book, I don’t mind if the book is shared once it has been bought. However, I would have a real problem if I was trying to make it as a novelist and someone were mass printing and distributing the book to people for free. It pretty much kills my incentive for spending a year of my life creating it (or more.) I could choose to allow that, but it shouldn’t be okay just because technology has made it possible for it to be easily scanned by anybody and reproduced cheaply.
Nevertheless, I agree with your point that the policy of the NSA is too restrictive.
Lance to make that analogy work the book industry would have the work like the music industry, which means you’d have to not only make essentially zero money on book sales while your publisher got almost all of them, but also charge money ($5, $25, $50, $200 a ticket depending on how popular you are) to hear you give talks on the book. If you made all your money from people liking your book enough to hear you in person, and zero from actual book sales, as is the case with almost any artist on an RIAA label, you’d be much more okay with giving the book away for free.
Now, I think you exaggerate on the album sales. In fact I know many artists who claim very different economics, but it doesn’t matter to what I say anyway. The principle is the same even allowing for what you are saying.
Oh, and you were the one who brought books up anyway.
Oh it totally depends on the contract the musician signs, the great irony being that signing to a small label usually means you are more likely to make a sustainable living that striking out on one of the Big Four. But books are an analogy, to demonstrate how deeply unfair the music industry treats its artists. Are authors asked to fund their own marketing and book tours? Some are, but many are not—and a great number of authors have their trips fully subsidized by whomever invites them to speak. Musicians are not afforded that luxury, and unless they can get enough people interested in their sound to have a successful tour, they go hungry. That’s all albums are as far as they’re concerned—not an end in and of themselves (it’s never about the music), but as marketing and advertising for the tour.
How about another analogy. Imagine having to pay money to walk into Brookstone or Smarter Image to play around with all the shiny gadgets and massage chairs regardless of whether or not you bought any. Now imagine someone bought a bunch of them and let his friends play for free. Should the friend be sued for infringing on Brookstone’s property rights?
I don’t care if he let his friends play for free. If he mass produced them at zero cost to play with, yeah, I have a problem.
It doesn’t make one bit of difference if you make a profit on it or not. Robin Hood didn’t make any profit either, but there is no illusion that what he was doing wasn’t stealing. And in fact if consider the issue carefully you will see that you are indeed making a profit by saving money that you would have spent on music and purchasing other things. As for the distinction between mixed tapes and P2P networks, legally speaking there is none. Both are an illegal appropriation of someone else’s property (although, to be fair, making copies of a work for one’s own use is exempted).
Bully for them. They are free to do what they wish with their own music. The Grateful Dead made an entire career out of allowing people to tape their concerts and trade them freely. Of course, you couldn’t just bring a tape recorder into the concert with you. You had to apply for a position in the taping area and have the proper equipment so that the band could have some quality control. And maybe that is a business model that the music industry needs to emulate. But none of that changes the fact that the intellectual property belongs to the artists and/or the recording companies. Just as neither Wilco nor Björk would want anyone making decisions about what they can cannot do with their property, neither they nor anyone else should be making decisions about what others do with their own property. For example, Metallica certainly does not feel the same way:
Why should Metallica be forced to give away its intellectual property for free?
Where is exactly that you think you’ve made such an argument? There may be a viable argument as to the extent of intellectual property protection under the law, but there isn’t any doubt that it is a matter of property.
Not exactly. If the "ruffian" were to print out copies of the book and distribute to whomever he pleases, then there would be a problem.
I think Lance already handled this issue above, but let me add that, to my knowledge, we never copied your work in toto and placed it here without attribution and/or linking. I think you know what we did falls under the fair use exception to copyright law.
I think I misunderstood your point there. I thought that you meant hyperlinking was made illegal under the DMCA.
Does it? In explaining that I would not defend the DMCA I simply meant to point out that such a law came into existence because the RIAA et al. are having a rough time protecting their property interests. I don’t necessarily agree that they need such a law (and, I actually agree with you about the inadequate business model), since IMHO copyright law should suffice. As I understand it, and I may be wrong here, the DMCA was passed to allow suits to be brought against firms like Napster that facilitate P2P sharing. A better analogy, in that case, would be laws that prohibit the use of radar detectors, or rather, laws designed to make the selling of radar detectors illegal.
OK, fair enough. You are completely wrong on the law, but I shouldn’t have characterized your argument as being about your desire for free music. Even though everyone else I’ve ever spoken with about the issue who has taken your side of the argument has freely admitted that they just don’t want to buy the music (e.g. they only like one song on the album, they’re not so sure they like the music that much, etc.) you did not make any such argument.
Regarding the law, as I said before you may have a valid argument that copyright protections are too lengthy, etc., but the technology involved does not, in any way, change the fact that intellectual property belongs to someone. If I created a portable transportation beam with which I could transfer physical objects from one place to another instantly, that wouldn’t make legal for me to use the technology to transfer a big screen TV from Lance’s house to mine. When you or anyone else distributes property, intellectual or otherwise, without paying for it, you deprive the owner of his property’s value. That’s called theft.
One last thing. My original point was that illegal drug users should not be equated with illegal file sharers because the crimes are completely different. Pot smokers are committing a wrong that is malum prohibitum ("wrong because prohibited"), while P2P networks are committing a wrong that is malum in se ("wrong in itself"). Larceny, i.e. theft, is considered to be among malum in se crimes.
I don’t mean to say that this settles the issue, or that there are no valid arguments to be made that violations of copyright law are actually malum prohibitum (even as I wholeheartedly disagree with such arguments), but to equate a harm done to one’s self with a harm done to someone else misses an important distinction. I simply wanted to draw attention to that distinction.
I disagree with your characterization regarding pot smokers. Talk to most religious fundamentalists (excluding, obviously, rastafarians) and you’ll see drugs, alcohol, and the like characterized as malum in se. That there may be specific religious strictures doesn’t necessarily reduce it to an argument about prohibition, as prohibitions can be changed simply by passing new laws, whereas commandments from God are indistinguishable from any kind of inherant moral argument. And the concept of "wrong in itself," implying a universal morality, is itself tricky and subject to a great deal of interpretation. Is suicide, for example, wrong in itself, or wrong because it is prohibited? We would disagree with the Japanese on that (including whether it is wrong at all). So simply arguing an inherent wrong over something as amorphous as property rights (and it is amorphous in a philosophical sense) isn’t a persuasive argument to people who think the property laws need revision.
Similarly, there are a range of arguments to be made about property rights in a digital medium (and modern, western countries with a history of property rights come to dramatically different conclusions than we do about those rights’ ultimate expression). Jessica Litman wrote an informative book on this topic, called Digital Copyright, in which she examines how the electronic age has made digital property rights to restrictive they threaten to strangle the very thing they were erected to protect: creativity. The problems inherent to these laws was further driven home in Dave Koepsell’s The Ontology of Cyberspace. Lastly, another high influential book (for my own evolution of how I believe digital property rights have been exploited) is Laurence Lessig’s Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Anyway, my point (again) isn’t that there isn’t property involved, or even that there isn’t law breaking, but that the laws themselves are wrong and ultimately counterproductive. The very same property rights you think are protected by suing file sharers are used to suppress previously accepted forms of expression, stifle technological innovation, and ultimately freeze out the idea of consumer rights.
Ironically (given my original comparison), the unintended consequences of these laws (which include attempting to ban Wi-Fi) are similar to the unintended (and fascistic) consequences of our drug laws, especially now RIAA agents are allowed to conduct legal raids on private citizens. In a great many cases, what counts as legal piracy in fact winds up being promotional genius: the entire anime boom, with all the billions of dollars it brings companies like Disney, would not be here today if it weren’t for early media pirates, stealing movies to which they did not have rights and distributing them for free.
How about one last hypothetical? Please tell me the property rights involved when I buy a used CD. Neither the artist nor the record label receive any financial windfall from the transaction. As far as they’re concerned, the sale might not have ever happened. Now, if the previous owner had made a perfectly legal copy for his own personal use, is he required by law to destroy or delete that copy once he no longer has physical ownership of the media he legally copied? If he isn’t, then what is the difference - in property rights, mind you, not the intricacies of our chaotic laws - between that and file sharing?
Or, if you really want to get into the status of the property rights you think are so inviolate and intuitively obvious, we can examine the aftermath of Kelo. Or we could discuss the wave of ruinous and meritless lawsuits filed by the RIAA. And, despite all that, the industry is considering allowing unrestricted filesharing for a flat subscription fee — the very solution proffered by Sean Parker when the original Napster was sued in 1999. Again, all of the property issues brought up by the current state of file sharing could be addressed by a more sensible (and less Luddite) view toward the technology involved. There are very few people who think music should be given away for free. But there are a huge number of people who find the current and hyper-restrictive methods of legal distribution so stupid and backward as to be unworthy of consideration. And, to bring it back to my original point: this is why the NSA’s stance on file sharing (especially in terms of clause as vague as "too much," as if a little theft was okay for NSA clearance, but only with music and movies) is so stupid.
Josh:
Are you going to answer any of my questions are are you just going keep raising new arguments that are at best tangentially realted? There’s not much point debating this if you aren’t going to address any of the actual points that I’ve made, much less my primary argument that a crime against one’s self is completely different than a crime against someone else.
Perhaps you can make a viable argument that intellectual property laws should be changed, and I might even agree with you. But the fact is that intellectual property laws going back farther than even our own Constitution are what they are, and under those laws file sharing — i.e. depriving the rightful owner of a song of the value of that song — is recognized as theft. The technology involved has nothing to do with the fundamental rights underlying the law.
This entire comment is so full of arrogance and condescension I’m not even certain how best to reply. You imply that I don’t understand property rights, accuse me of being a luddite, and stupid because I recognize P2P file sharing as violative of copyright law, and yet you can’t even acknowledge the points where I’ve agreed with you. Furthermore you haven’t demonstrated even a cursory understanding of the actual legal issues involved and instead point off in the direction of others’ writing on the topic. Suffice it to say, unless you’ve have something to say that actually addresses anything I’ve written, or you want to lay out an actual argument in your own words, I’m done with this thread.
I think our disagreement comes down to a totally different perception of what digital property rights are, and how they should be protected. I don’t deny that the current law makes the use of file sharing networks to distribute unlicensed content illegal (don’t forget there are MANY legal uses for "file sharing," and the NSA should probably distinguish between those and illegal ones). You are absolutely right that the law prohibits me from distributing an album like that. I just think the law is wrong, that is misapplies the idea of property rights, and that it has been upheld and reinforced by people who misunderstand what is really involved. I apologize if I made it seem personal, or directed against you. I did not mean any personal offense, and if I did so then I choose to blame it on these slapdash responses I jot out during rare free moments at work. Your arguments from the law are correct. I just think the law is wrong.
As for my use of outside references… umm, isn’t referencing the work of experts (including legal experts) supposed to be a good thing, especially when discussing a legal matter? I pointed to those books because my views were directly informed by them. I figured that would be preferable to simply rambling. I’ll make more of an effort to construct my arguments in a vacuum next time, so I can avoid referencing other people.
And, to address your bolded sentence, I don’t think file sharing is really a crime against someone else (malum in se). We have decided it is a crime because we have decided that is how we will define the extent of digital property rights. Why that isn’t fair game for argument eludes me.