We used to have cake, now we've barely got icing
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I just finished watching this great Cory Doctorow talk:
https://media.ccc.de/v/pw20-392-we-used-to-have-cake-now-we-ve-barely-got-icing
"Back then, free software was icing on the cake. Then they stole the cake and left us hoping for a little icing every now and then. Now, software has eaten the world and shit out a dystopia.
"When free software licensing was born, software copyrights were essentially nonexistent, software patents didn't exist at all, terms of service weren't enforceable and there was no anticircumvention law. In other words, you were legally permitted to clone or interoperate with any digital product. Today, we think of free software as a way for a company to say, "We probably won't sue you if you write code that can interoperate with ours" - but when free software started, it was more like, "I know I've got the absolute legal right to reverse engineer all your code and make a competing product, but that's such tedious work. Please, make it easy for me by giving me your sourcecode." Back then, free software was icing on the cake. Then they stole the cake and left us hoping for a little icing every now and then.
"This makes a huge difference because software has eaten the world and shit out a dystopia: a place where Abbot Labs uses copyright claims to stop people with diabetes from taking control over their insulin dispensing and where BMW is providing seat-heaters as an-over-the-air upgrade that you have to pay for by the month. Companies have tried this bullshit since the year dot, but Thomas Edison couldn't send a patent enforcer to your house to make sure you honored the license agreement on your cylinder by only playing it on an Edison phonograph. Today, digital systems offer perfect enforcement for the pettiest, most bullshitty, greediest grifts imaginable."
> "a place where Abbot Labs uses copyright claims to stop people with diabetes from taking control over their insulin dispensing and where BMW is providing seat-heaters as an-over-the-air upgrade that you have to pay for by the month."
I probably could do with BMW marketing policy.
However, I think education and health should be free, not encumbered by patents or any sort of technological monopoly.
> I probably could do with BMW marketing policy.
>However, I think education and health should be free, not e ncumbered by patents or any sort of technological monopoly.
Education and healthcare are of course more important than seat-heaters in your car. But what makes the BMW thing disturbing is that rather than paying for a car with certain capabilities and then owning it, you'll pay for the right to use a car whose capabailities can be remotely switched off by the vendor unless you keep paying and do as they say, which of course means that your vehicle is under constant surveillance.
Did you watch the talk? I copy/pasted the description to give a rough idea of what it's about, but it does not do justice to how well Doctorow lays out these issues.
> Did you watch the talk?
I have mostly been skipping through it for now. It is too rich for me to digest in one take, so I have downloaded the opus audio. The core argument about monopolies is absolutely spot on.
"IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, my critics and my customers."
"We have a lot of openness right now, we have very little freedom."
What I meant about BMW is that most of their customers would not switch or stop paying anyway. I do not think that low to mid-range manufacturers have an incentive to follow suit any time soon. I agree with the principle that law should protect customers against such practices though, and not the opposite.
In fact I would like to use a voice recognition tool to transcribe it, so I could read it instead.
EDIT: sorry, this is off-topic. I shall listen to the audio. I usually find it easier to focus on a written text than to focus on speech but this would require manual transcription.
you probably finished listening to the video, but for the sake of others: https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/ is the original article.
This talk is excellent.
It is actually so much spot on that it got me totally depressed about the current state of affairs.
It seems that economic power has become so concentrated that only another cataclysm might open an opportunity to turn the tables. And I do not want to be wishing for a cataclysm.
Someone said that while according to Marx, workers had nothing to lose except their shackles, they now have expensive home theaters to lose, and that makes for a whole lot of difference.
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