"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Net Neutrality Goes Down In House Committee

The Markey Amendment (which would affirm the principle of Network Neutrality in new Telco Regulations) was defeated in a House committee today, but the vote was much closer than it was previously. Stoller explains:

Ok, so the vote on the Markey amendment to protect the internet has happened, and it was voted down, 34-22. That is a big deal. It's too bad we lost the vote, but we expected that loss. What we did not expected was the narrow margin. By way of comparison, the subcommittee vote was 23-8, which means we should have gotten blown out of the water. We did not. All four targeted Dems by McJoan on Daily Kos flipped to our side, and many of the Congressmen both for and against this campaign mentioned the blogs and angry constituents.

There's a white hot firestorm on the issue on Capitol Hill. No one wants to see the telcos make a radical change to the internet and screw this medium up, except, well, the telcos. And now members of Congress are listening to us. The telcos have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and many years lobbying for their position; we launched four days ago, and have closed a lot of ground. Over the next few months, as the public wakes up, we'll close the rest of it.

I watched the markup and the voting, and there was noticeable defensiveness among Congressmen on the wrong side of this. They are wrong, they know it, and they are ashamed. Now they know people are watching. So we didn't win this vote, but this close margin was nonetheless a smack to the jaw of the insiders, and a clear victory for the people. Now the battle moves out of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and onto more favorable terrain.

The action now will be in the Senate, which is indeed more friendly terrain for our interests here. Let's keep the pressure on.

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Drupal Camp NYC

My friend Aaron Welch and I will be doing a two-day training on Drupal development at DrupalCamp NYC. This training is free, and we're going to be encouraging people to bring in real-world problems they're trying to solve. Could be a good resource for folks looking to build skills or just score from free consulting.

I suppose this makes me some kind of expert. Doh.

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And Now The Circle Is Complete

Bush hires FoxNews talk-radio host to be his new press secretary as poll numbers approach record lows (he's treading into Nixon territory now).

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Launched

Oh, and just now we launched this thing:

The Sunlight Foundation

And last week this one:

Moms Rising

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Launched

Oh, and just now we launched this thing:

The Sunlight Foundation

And last week this one:

Moms Rising

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Slashdot On Net Neutrality

The techno-rabble weigh in, and as usual the nerds get it:

Seriously though... we will just surf the nets!
(Score:4, Funny)
by crazyjeremy (857410) * on Tuesday April 25, @02:09PM (#15198595)
(http://users.mtrx.net/funnypics)
I can see it now... if they fail, we will soon be surfing the netS. One of them will be like BETA INTERNET, the other like VHS INTERNET. After some debate (and a brief LASERDISC INTERNET) BETA INTERNET will die.

VHS INTERNET FOREVER! (Until DVDs... then DVD INTERNET FOREVER! (Until Xvid INTERNET))

There's a healthy skepticism towards the telcos, which have hardly been paragons of businees or engineering excelence.

Stupid competition, stupid capitalism (Score:2, Insightful)
by SlappyBastard (961143) on Tuesday April 25, @02:34PM (#15198820)
What is funny is that the telecoms didn't get real horny for this issue until the DSL price war broke out.

What I always love is that Big Business in America supports a free and open market for about an hour, and then gets all huffy because competition and efficiency force them to work harder.

Suddenly, free enterpise becomes bullshit, and they start pining for a mercantile economy.

If the value proposition for putting up new lines isn't there, maybe Verizon can just ditch its FIOS roll-out and leave us with really old, worn-out copper wiring that runs dial-up at a blazing 7 kbps.

Why is it the government's job to fix their value proposition?

My favorite though:

Damn It! (Score:2)
by gasmonso (929871) on Tuesday April 25, @02:14PM (#15198640)
(http://religiousfreaks.com/)

The US created it and damnit the US can destroy it!

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Rich get Richer -- Profits Over Wages

Just some statistics I googled up:

  • In 2005, Exxon/Moble posted the highest profit ever for a US corporation. That operating profit amounted to more than $700,000 per employee of the company.
  • Wal*Mart, the worlds largest employer, had an operating profit of nearly $15,000 per employee. That's more than the average cashier pulls down in a year.

Why are people in the middle or working class going nowhere while debts pile up? Why are the most fantastically wealthy pulling away from the just regular rich? Because massive corporate profits are being reaped at the expense of real wages. That's one big reason why.

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1st DeanSpace IRC Meeting

Drummy dug up this old gem. That's gonna be three years ago come June.

Funny. It doesn't feel like all that much has changed.

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Copyfight Continued

John Scalzi caught my trackback before, and replied to a post that could have been construed as flame-bait -- I called him and his readers "squares" -- with a friendly and reasonable response. His point, that this woman who wrote some Star Wars Fan Fiction was in open violation of copyright, and that in light of her occupation as an editor and publisher this calls her professional compitence into question, is probably correct. My point sort of sailed over everyones' heads.

I came into the middle of a semi-professional catfight , and so my response was seen as off-topic. Also, given the writerly audience, I certainly didn't help myself out with "editors who help people right better." Still, my own spotty writing aside, I think I can distill our departure based on this comment from Mr. Scalzi:

Also, let’s not make a moral crusader out of Ms. Jareo. She didn’t publish her fan novel to subvert the existing copyright norms; she published it because she didn’t really think she’d get caught. It’s explicit in her “interview” on the subject, where she says “Yes, it is for sale on Amazon, but only my family, friends and acquaintances know it’s there.” Elsewhere in her interview she doesn’t offer *challenges* to copyright law, she offers *rationalizations* as to why existing copyright law shouldn’t apply to what she is doing, none of which hold up in the real world. As Ms. Jareo was not challenging copyright law, just arguing it shouldn’t apply to *her,*...

See, I think the above is exactly why this author is a great moral case, even if she's not necessarily an intentional crusader. Maybe she's not up on the law because she works mostly with poetry or with technical manuels, or I dunno, but it seems to me that she's doing what any person un-initiated in the particulars of copyright would probably feel it natural to do:

  • She wrote a story inspired by one of the better epics of a previous generation.
  • She wanted to make it available for her extended social network.
  • She took advantage of Amazon's web services that help her do this.

To me, this makes it even more resonant than if she was trying to commit some act of self-conscious civil disobedience. She was doing what felt right, and it just so happens that there are compelling economic, moral and even legal arguments that what she did was right, and the way we run Copyright in the US today is wrong.

So yes, I'm upset about how we deal with ideas, information and creativity as a society. As far as I'm concerned "the way it is" -- wherein Michael Jackson lives off Beatles royalties and you need written permission to have a snippit of TV on in the background of a documentary -- is wrong. It gets more deeply and darkly fucked the more you dig into it, especially on the high-tech end of things, and it's not just unjust; it's important. I believe that this really is important for our future: that culture remains a public commodity and that knowledge of how the world works is free.

Stick with me though, because that wasn't even the point.

Even more than arguing against the way things are, or where they're headed, I was attempting decry the way in which people who seek to be successful, and thus by necessity learn "how the real world works," often become semi/un-conscious proponents for the extension and continuence of this status quo, letigimate or not. I'm decrying the internalization of socially maladaptive norms. This is how corrupt institutions sustain themselves: by co-opting potential sources of dissent. This is was what initially drew my reaction.

I don't think you can draw a clear bright shining line between "the morality of current copyright law" and how you treat this case. You reify an immoral regime when you henpeck dissidents. Whether they happen to be clever or thoughtful or not, you've adopted The Man's mindset and are enforcing his way of seeing the world. That's what I see when I read a bunch of apparently intelligent people backslapping one-another over how "stupid" someone is in their violation of copyright.

It smacks of squaredom (or maybe cognitive dissonance) to say you'd cheer a person who'd take this kind of fight to the Supreme Court, and yet turn around and snipe at someone who just tries to get away with the same thing on a much smaller scale. It speaks to a subservience to the Law which I don't think the Law generally, and especially this law in particular, deserves.

And that's my meta-point: it sucks that so many professional creators settle down to work on Maggie's Farm. This is probably on the top of my mind because I'm in the stage of life where people start making all sorts of sacrifices for their careers, and those who have not yet internalized the tribal norms of one institution or another are under increasing pressure to do so. It's a shame that it happens like this.

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Copyfight Continued

John Scalzi caught my trackback before, and replied to a post that could have been construed as flame-bait -- I called him and his readers "squares" -- with a friendly and reasonable response. His point, that this woman who wrote some Star Wars Fan Fiction was in open violation of copyright, and that in light of her occupation as an editor and publisher this calls her professional compitence into question, is probably correct. My point sort of sailed over everyones' heads.

I came into the middle of a semi-professional catfight , and so my response was seen as off-topic. Also, given the writerly audience, I certainly didn't help myself out with "editors who help people right better." Still, my own spotty writing aside, I think I can distill our departure based on this comment from Mr. Scalzi:

Also, let’s not make a moral crusader out of Ms. Jareo. She didn’t publish her fan novel to subvert the existing copyright norms; she published it because she didn’t really think she’d get caught. It’s explicit in her “interview” on the subject, where she says “Yes, it is for sale on Amazon, but only my family, friends and acquaintances know it’s there.” Elsewhere in her interview she doesn’t offer *challenges* to copyright law, she offers *rationalizations* as to why existing copyright law shouldn’t apply to what she is doing, none of which hold up in the real world. As Ms. Jareo was not challenging copyright law, just arguing it shouldn’t apply to *her,*...

See, I think the above is exactly why this author is a great moral case, even if she's not necessarily an intentional crusader. Maybe she's not up on the law because she works mostly with poetry or with technical manuels, or I dunno, but it seems to me that she's doing what any person un-initiated in the particulars of copyright would probably feel it natural to do:

  • She wrote a story inspired by one of the better epics of a previous generation.
  • She wanted to make it available for her extended social network.
  • She took advantage of Amazon's web services that help her do this.

To me, this makes it even more resonant than if she was trying to commit some act of self-conscious civil disobedience. She was doing what felt right, and it just so happens that there are compelling economic, moral and even legal arguments that what she did was right, and the way we run Copyright in the US today is wrong.

So yes, I'm upset about how we deal with ideas, information and creativity as a society. As far as I'm concerned "the way it is" -- wherein Michael Jackson lives off Beatles royalties and you need written permission to have a snippit of TV on in the background of a documentary -- is wrong. It gets more deeply and darkly fucked the more you dig into it, especially on the high-tech end of things, and it's not just unjust; it's important. I believe that this really is important for our future: that culture remains a public commodity and that knowledge of how the world works is free.

Stick with me though, because that wasn't even the point.

Even more than arguing against the way things are, or where they're headed, I was attempting decry the way in which people who seek to be successful, and thus by necessity learn "how the real world works," often become semi/un-conscious proponents for the extension and continuence of this status quo, letigimate or not. I'm decrying the internalization of socially maladaptive norms. This is how corrupt institutions sustain themselves: by co-opting potential sources of dissent. This is was what initially drew my reaction.

I don't think you can draw a clear bright shining line between "the morality of current copyright law" and how you treat this case. You reify an immoral regime when you henpeck dissidents. Whether they happen to be clever or thoughtful or not, you've adopted The Man's mindset and are enforcing his way of seeing the world. That's what I see when I read a bunch of apparently intelligent people backslapping one-another over how "stupid" someone is in their violation of copyright.

It smacks of squaredom (or maybe cognitive dissonance) to say you'd cheer a person who'd take this kind of fight to the Supreme Court, and yet turn around and snipe at someone who just tries to get away with the same thing on a much smaller scale. It speaks to a subservience to the Law which I don't think the Law generally, and especially this law in particular, deserves.

And that's my meta-point: it sucks that so many professional creators settle down to work on Maggie's Farm. This is probably on the top of my mind because I'm in the stage of life where people start making all sorts of sacrifices for their careers, and those who have not yet internalized the tribal norms of one institution or another are under increasing pressure to do so. It's a shame that it happens like this.

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