] To reward those who can attract a paying audience, and
] the firms that support them, much shorter copyrights
] would be enough. The 14-year term of the original
] 18th-century British and American copyright laws,
] renewable once, might be a good place to start.

The economist presents a radical copyright proposal.

Economist.com | Copyrights

] Proponents of the machines assert that any invasion of
] privacy is not alarming because there's not much privacy
] left to invade. Grocery stores already track customers'
] personal information with loyalty cards, for example.

Bars in Northern California start collecting your detailed personal information in the process of doing an age check. The arguement above is particularly disturbing.

SacTicket // Nightlife // Taking license

] This anti-SUV fervor strikes me as a classic geek assault
] on jock culture. Here are the geeks: thoughtful, socially
] and environmentally conscious. They understand that only
] spiritually shallow people could possibly get pleasure
] from a motor vehicle. Then there are those jocks. They
] cruise through life infuriatingly unaware of how morally
] inferior they are to the geeks. They make money, become
] popular, play golf and have homes that are too large. And
] they're happy! For all the wrong reasons! And so every
] few years the geeks pick on some feature of jock life
] (McMansions, corporations, fraternities, country clubs)
] and get all worked up about it. And you know what? The
] jocks don't care! They just keep being happy. The geeks
] write, protest and fume. The jocks go to St. Croix.

I am geek and I hate the whole anti-SUV thing. I own an SUV. I love my SUV. It gets better fuel milage then my previous car. It served my old office car pool very well. It also serves my friends interests very well, as I'm always moving stuff for them that they can't fit in their cars.

I particularly love it when I hear bitching about my SUV from someone who drives an older car that gets less then 12 mpg. How bout that as an outlet for you eco angst, bitch about people who have old cars! Couldn't afford a new car? You suck! Needed cargo space? You suck!

I wish people would at least get specific with their bitching, and limit it to vehicles that fall into that under 20 mpg class, which is not limited to SUVs.

If there was HEV version of my vehicle, I would have bought it. Sorry, I needed cargo space. I didn't mean to shit on anyone's eco parade.

WSJ.com - The Scarlet SUV

Interesting little piece on wealth distribution:

Specifically, the number of people with some value of wealth w is proportional to 1/wE. Pareto claimed that E is generally has a value of between 2 and 3. The bigger this value, the greater the extent to which extreme wealth is suppressed - and the more socialist the economy.

Burda's group define liberal economies as those in which E is less than 2, and social economies as those in which E is greater than 2.

Wealth spawns corruption

Anti-war protests in SF, about 6 blocks away from my old flat.

Helicopter Pictures of SF Demo : SF Indymedia

] So out of despair some might see civil disobedience --
] hacking and freely distributing songs and films over
] digital networks -- as the only remaining response to the
] excesses of the copyright regimes and the hold they have
] over courts and Congress.

It is. Has been for awhile now. Its better to concentrate on creating new ways of doing things out in the open though. Be ready to educate your peers about these issues when they start to effect them. Etc..

] While disobedience might be more fun, the power of civil
] discourse remains. In fact, the ruling gives public
] interest activists both motivation and ammunition in the
] continuing battle against the excessive expansion of the
] power to control information and culture.

And thats the key.. These IP issues trample way into the territory of economic policy. The courts and congress are reactive to this type of thing. They will walk right up to the edge of an issue, step 2in back, and wait to see what happens.. Rince, repeat, give a decade or two..

The angry mob is only going to grow..

Salon.com Technology | After the copyright smackdown: What next?

] Public Knowledge is a public-interest advocacy
] organization dedicated to fortifying and defending a
] vibrant "information commons" - the shared information
] resources and cultural assets that we own as a people.

A very slick new public domain oriented political group.

Public Knowledge

] Peace in a country like the Ivory Coast is a myth. It's
] tribe vs. tribe, religion vs. religion, till one side
] wipes out the other. And if that never happens, then the
] sneak attacks and small-time massacres will just go on and
] on. And if that seems terrible to you, try this thought on:
]
] Maybe they LIKE it.

An informative if also informal brief on the basic problems in Africa.

eXile #157 - War Nerd - Live from the Skeleton Coast - by Gary Brecher

] "Arnold Kling, in his article, Content is Crap, writes,
] 'While there are many Net-heads who share Dan Gillmor's
] [and Larry Lessig's] enthusiasm for Creative Commons, I
] do not. It has little or no significance, because it is
] based on a strikingly naive 60's-retro ideological view
] of how content intermediaries function.'

I recommend this for two reasons. First, and a minor observation, here Slashdot attempts to assemble a thread between a number of bloggers. If all of these people were using MemeStreams, the thread would already be organized and would be much easier to follow. :)

Second, Kling is wrong for all the right reasons. He argues that the Creative Commons License is useless because its simply a way to end run around the publishing industry, and the publishing industry is very important as a filter for the the mass of information available to us. However, and it is probably well understood by the readers of this site, the publishing industry is not a very good filter. They don't find the content we really want, because its too risky or too expensive or because it threatens them in some fundamental way.

We need to put the power to filter in the hands of the people, as we have put the power to elect a government in the hands of the people, and for exactly the same reasons.

And with the power to filter in the hands of the people there is a need, a requirement, for looser copyright restrictions. Artificial Scarcity, in this environment, it what prevents people from getting a hold of your ideas, not the thing that incents you to make those ideas available. And for this reason I think systems like Creative Commons may be quite important.

You're not selling artifically scarce "copy" for cash. You are giving copy away for reputation. Reputation is attention, and you can turn attention in cash.

Slashdot | Carping Over Creative Commons

] Brilliantly, seditiously remixed State of the Union
] address video.

This is really well done...

I've been wondering how long it was going to take for this kinda stuff to show up..

Deconstructing Bush...