January 2012

New York Times Tells Us Only Chinese Near Slave Labor Could Handle Steve Jobs’ Demands. A good critique by Yves Smith. Not just "near slave labor" but massive government handouts from the Chinese made it possible for factories to handle Jobs' constant last minute design decisions. Our own government, by contrast, asks Steve Jobs if Apple work is ever coming back to the US, Jobs says no (according to the Times' source), and our government sighs and says "it is the will of the market." Yet Steve Jobs is a hero to many.

Mutant Sounds was one of the innocent parties hurt by the Megaupload mob war (the Hollywood mob, using the feds as enforcers, vs what some might call the robin hood mob). MS was just using Megaupload to host music, no allegations of infringement were made against them. (On a side note, it could be said that MS specialized in what the US Supreme Court has called "orphan" works [pdf--see Breyer dissent], where it's too expensive or difficult to track down the original creator to obtain copyright permission. Many publishers won't touch orphaned work, the risk of an owner surfacing is too great, consigning a huge cultural legacy to the slag heap. There is no clear right and wrong here -- fair use is not evolved enough to tell us what is truly "illegal.")

Shutting down a host with thousands of non-infringing users just because of some bad eggs offends the most basic notions of fairness. Lauren Weinstein offers a couple of good analogies:

One analogy is the safe deposit boxes in a bank. There are certainly cases where the government seizes specific boxes, or states sell off the content of "abandoned" boxes (both controversial issues, I should add).

But the Megaupload case is more akin to the government seizing every safe deposit box in a bank because the bank owners (and possibly some percentage of the safe deposit box users) were simply accused -- not yet convicted -- of engaging in a crime.

What of the little old lady with her life savings in her box, or the person who needs to access important documents, all legitimate, all honest, no crimes of any sort involved.

and

You don't arrest everyone at a football game because a wanted criminal may be among the crowd. At least, not unless you're attempting to channel the old East German "Stasi" secret police sensibilities.

Everyone gets how unfair this is and the effect is a loss of any respect for Hollywood's claims to be an aggrieved party. They are a cartel, doing what they can to preserve power. We ask governments to protect us from gangsters, not help them.

Update: And if "basic fairness" isn't enough reason to rethink this, the Naked Capitalism blog also asks: Did the Feds Just Kill the Cloud Storage Model?

This GIF of rotating, intersecting planes made by Julapy using his code called "ofxDither," an add-on for openframeworks, looks "cool" but it's mostly about style, isn't it?

If there is a point to making 1-bit artwork at this late date it's to have an image that loads super-fast because it's effectively weightless: a neutrino in a web increasingly dominated by heavy elements.

1-bit GIFs in the 2.7 Megabyte range are like an Iron Butterfly. Or a Lead Zeppelin.

Glenn Greenwald, Salon:

...SOPA opponents were confused and even shocked when they learned that the very power they feared the most in that bill — the power of the U.S. Government to seize and shut down websites based solely on accusations, with no trial — is a power the U.S. Government already possesses and, obviously, is willing and able to exercise even against the world’s largest sites (they have this power thanks to the the 2008 PRO-IP Act pushed by the same industry servants in Congress behind SOPA as well as by forfeiture laws used to seize the property of accused-but-not-convicted drug dealers...

Julian Sanchez, Cato (possibly Koch-funded, sorry):

There are good reasons SOPA and PIPA attracted more attention [than PRO-IP]: Instead of “seizing” domains directly at the registry, they would have imposed blocking and filtering obligations on thousands of ISPs and search engines, creating a whole host of technological and security problems. There was also the private right of action, which seemed more susceptible to abuse by overzealous copyright owners who were able to find a friendly judge. But the central power of the government to shut down web domains is already there in PRO-IP, and has been used to seize hundreds of sites already — wrongfully in at least some cases.