The Indelible Bonobo Experience

Renaissance Monkey: in-depth expertise in Jack-of-all-trading. I mostly comment on news of interest to me and occasionally engage in debates or troll passive-aggressively. Ask or Submit 2 mah authoritah! ;) !

Photo Post
In a grandiose display of Foucauldian irony, one of the greatest anti-capitalist debates of our time has been reduced to an intellectual commodity. We wish to emphasize one important point. We do not contest Icarus Films’ exclusive legal right to distribute the debate within the narrow confines of our present legal order; what we do contest, however, is the very nature of that order as it prioritizes the private ownership of public knowledge over its widespread dissemination among the very public that helped to produce it. The creation and use of knowledge is a collective enterprise that cannot be jammed into the suffocating straitjacket of a privatized intellectual commodity. The video we shared was broadcast on Dutch public television in 1971. The production itself was paid for by Dutch taxpayers and made possible entirely by the creative input of two of the world’s most staunchly anti-capitalist thinkers, whose intellectual product was subsequently alienated by producer Fons Elders (a “professed anarchist” who also acted as the incapable moderator of the debate) and appropriated by international companies that did nothing to make the debate possible. Now the entire world is barred from seeing it just because this company owns an exclusive legal right to its distribution in North America. Again, our issue here is not with a distributor of great documentary films that clings on to a somewhat outdated business model in the hope of squeezing a few bucks out of a 40-year-old public debate. Our issue is with a system that forces the employees of such a company to chase us down the streets of cyberspace in order to satisfy the profit motive that the market imposes upon their boss. This is precisely the “private tyranny” of the marketplace decried by the great thinkers of the Left, including Chomsky and Foucault in this debate. Ironic, isn’t it? (via Chomsky-Foucault debate removed due to copyright | ROAR Magazine)

In a grandiose display of Foucauldian irony, one of the greatest anti-capitalist debates of our time has been reduced to an intellectual commodity.

We wish to emphasize one important point. We do not contest Icarus Films’ exclusive legal right to distribute the debate within the narrow confines of our present legal order; what we do contest, however, is the very nature of that order as it prioritizes the private ownership of public knowledge over its widespread dissemination among the very public that helped to produce it. The creation and use of knowledge is a collective enterprise that cannot be jammed into the suffocating straitjacket of a privatized intellectual commodity. The video we shared was broadcast on Dutch public television in 1971. The production itself was paid for by Dutch taxpayers and made possible entirely by the creative input of two of the world’s most staunchly anti-capitalist thinkers, whose intellectual product was subsequently alienated by producer Fons Elders (a “professed anarchist” who also acted as the incapable moderator of the debate) and appropriated by international companies that did nothing to make the debate possible. Now the entire world is barred from seeing it just because this company owns an exclusive legal right to its distribution in North America. Again, our issue here is not with a distributor of great documentary films that clings on to a somewhat outdated business model in the hope of squeezing a few bucks out of a 40-year-old public debate. Our issue is with a system that forces the employees of such a company to chase us down the streets of cyberspace in order to satisfy the profit motive that the market imposes upon their boss. This is precisely the “private tyranny” of the marketplace decried by the great thinkers of the Left, including Chomsky and Foucault in this debate. Ironic, isn’t it? (via Chomsky-Foucault debate removed due to copyright | ROAR Magazine)

Posted in chomsky copyright debate dutch copyleft intellectual property ip icarus icarus films anarchy anarchism freedom libertarian philosophy linguistics capitalism knowledge dissemination roar foucault noam chomsky michel foucault | 4 notes
Vid Post

futurejournalismproject:

The DRM Chair

Taking the lead from the Digital Rights Management embedded in our music, books and other things made from ones and zeros, Thibault Brevet and friends created the DRM Chair for the latest Deconstruction contest. 

Via Brevet:

The DRM Chair has only a limited number of use before it self-destructs. The number of use was set to 8, so everyone could sit down and enjoy a single time the chair.

A small sensor detects when someone sits and decrements a counter. Every time someone sits up, the chair knocks a number of time to signal how many uses are left. When reaching zero, the self-destruct system is turned on and the structural joints of the chair are melted.

take that, ip fanbois :)

Posted in drm dmca copyright intellectual property ip chair deconstruction brevet | 74 notes
Link Post

In the Wake of Aaron Swartz's Death, Let's Fix Draconian Computer Crime Law

anarchyagogo:

Outpourings of grief and calls for change continue to flood the Internet after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, only 26 years old.

Aaron was one of [the EFF] community’s best and brightest, and he achieved great heights in his short life. He was a coder, a political activist, an entrepreneur, a contributor to major technological developments (like RSS), and an all-around Internet freedom rock star. As Wired noted, the world will miss out on decades of magnificent things Aaron would have accomplished had his time not been cut short.

Over the past two years, Aaron was forced to devote much of his energy and resources to fighting a relentless and unjust felony prosecution brought by Justice Department attorneys in Massachusetts. His alleged crimes stemmed from using MIT’s computer network to download millions of academic articles from the online archive JSTOR, allegedly without “authorization.” For that, he faced 13 felony counts of hacking and wire fraud (pdf), which carried the possibility of decades in prison and crippling fines. His case would have gone to trial in April.

The government should never have thrown the book at Aaron for accessing MIT’s network and downloading scholarly research. However, some extremely problematic elements of the law made it possible. We can trace some of those issues to the U.S. criminal justice system as an institution, and I suspect others will write about that in the coming days. But Aaron’s tragedy also shines a spotlight on a couple profound flaws of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in particular, and gives us an opportunity to think about how to address them. (read more at link source)

It’s not just the copyright regime that’s a total clusterfuck (though, granted, that is much more so than other areas of law), but there is a fundamental problem with the common law system and, more specifically, with the way the law is applied. I haven’t seen a study on how many people commit suicide while being in a trial (or as a result of ~) but I suspect the number is far greater than we imagine. Meanwhile, if you talk to law students or recent graduates, they’ll tell you that the system we have now is inferior or at best equal to what we had in medieval times (!!!).

Sadly, it’s only when a truly special individual falls through the cracks in this manner that anybody pays any attention to the massive hijack of lives and resources that “justice” has become.
Posted in aaron swartz suicide law trial kafka kafkaesque criminal copyright ip intellectual property usa mit prosecution | 19 notes