Who benefits from your support for “online music”?

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FreePress.net claims that “[o]nline music is in danger”:

Online music is in danger. A recent ruling by an obscure regulatory board threatens to put independent and public radio on the Internet out of business.

The “Copyright Royalty Board” is dramatically increasing the royalties “webcasters” must pay every time they stream a song online. Public Internet radio like NPR is especially at risk.

The rules could shut down nonprofit and smaller commercial Internet radio outlets and force larger webcasters to play the same cookie-cutter music as Clear Channel. So much for new online alternatives.

No, online music is not in danger. FreePress.net is talking about music from members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a lobbyist organization for corporate record labels. It might become more difficult to webcast tracks published by RIAA members due to a new fee schedule. But there are plenty of artists licensing their music to share. It’s time to work with those artists and send a clear message to the major label artists that they need us more than we need them.

More importantly there’s the question of (even indirectly) doing business with the RIAA””why lobby to play those tracks when the RIAA treats the public so badly? Answering this question can easily bring one to conclude that it’s not ethically justifiable to do business with the RIAA.

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Why is the University of Illinois stumping for the RIAA’s interests?

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Nate first pointed me to the latest University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign mass mailing. Since then, the letter has been posted online in a publicly-accessible fashion. In case you wondered why doing business with the RIAA is troublesome, check out what their supporters in the University of Illinois have sent to everyone in the University:

The University does not condone the use of peer-to-peer software for illegal file sharing. Those who engage in it violate U.S. Copyright laws as well as the campus’s own policies, including the Student Code and Policy on the Appropriate Use of the Computer Network. Additionally the University bears significant costs associated with responding to DMCA violation notices and the network capacity absorbed by file sharing reduces its availability for general research, teaching, and administrative purposes.

Since copyright infringement is civilly and criminally punishable, there’s no need for University policy to say anything about it. Such duplication raises the possibility that the University policy will inaccurately capture the complexities of copyright law and be more restrictive than copyright law is. Responding to DMCA notices properly is part of the cost of doing anything online; the only way to avoid it would be to take down one’s Internet connection. This obviously poses far more practical problems then can be accounted for by avoiding DMCA violation notices. Invalid DMCA violation notices are out there (Uri Geller, Michael Crook, NFL, Viacom with help from Google, just to name a few) and not something one can pin on “use of peer-to-peer software for illegal file sharing”. The language above suggests that file sharing is not a proper part of “general research, teaching, and administrative purposes” when just the opposite is true.

Often the software used for the purposes of illegal file sharing comes bundled with ‘spyware’ and other software that maliciously captures personal information that contributes to identity theft. You can learn more about protecting yourself from identity theft by reviewing the information at http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/security/index.html. Further, some file sharing programs, even when used for legitimate purposes, will use your computer to transfer illegally obtained material between other users. I strongly encourage you to remove software used for file sharing as well as to immediately remove any illegally obtained material such as music or movies.

BitTorrent software is the most popular peer-to-peer file sharing software: “BitTorrent accounts for an astounding 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet — more than all other peer-to-peer programs combined — and dwarfs mainstream traffic like Web pages.“. Most BitTorrent software in use (such as the official client and Azureus) qualifies as free software””software users are free to run, share, and modify at any time for any reason. Free software, unlike proprietary software, grants everyone the freedom to inspect, improve, and share the software. Thus, free software BitTorrent programs are far less likely to include spyware and other malicious code; the community inspects free software and removes the objectionable parts. If you don’t believe they’ll do this, as would be wise, you can inspect and modify the program before you run it (or hire someone to do this for you). Compare that to a proprietary program: No matter how you get proprietary software you set yourself up for all sorts of malevolent programs. The RIAA (and now UIUC) would love for you to believe there’s a link between malevolent software and file sharing programs so that you don’t use a popular means of sharing tracks whose copyrights are held by RIAA members. It’s silly to draw a distinction between what are commonly called peer-to-peer programs (like BitTorrent) and other means of sharing files (like UIUC’s own “NetFiles” service, FTP programs, etc.) on the basis of computer safety. In order to truly understand the proper parameters of this issue, you have to understand software freedom. UIUC should teach students about software freedom for its own sake, not threatening them at the behest of the recording industry.

Calling for UIUC network users to stop using and remove file sharing software is preposterous, reveals who UIUC really works for on this issue, and poses bad consequences for the user. File sharing software is necessary for modern computer use; you would complain if your OS came with no ability to share files between computers. Many free software operating systems are distributed via BitTorrent because BitTorrent allows the community to take on some of the load in distributing data. Discouraging use of file sharing software makes it unnecessarily harder for students to install a free software operating system and enjoy software that respects their freedom.

With the announcement by RIAA, MPAA, and others of the intent to target college students with law suits, it should be noted that many of the students sued have settled out of court for amounts on the order of $4- 5000.

How many of those settlements happened because the students were too poor and scared to defend their case? Will the University legal facilities available to students help them if they are accused of copyright infringement by the RIAA?

SEIU/UNLV health care forum notes

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Some notes on what I saw during the recent SEIU health care forum held at UNLV which was rebroadcast on C-SPAN:

  • The host claimed that Sen. John Edwards‘ health care plan is the only one that features details on how it will be paid for. This is not true. HR 676 has been around for a few years and has plans to raise taxes and cut the military budget to pay for universal health care. She also repeatedly complimented Edwards on how he said he would raise taxes to help pay for his health care plan.
  • Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton‘s health care plan details are non-existent (Obama promises something in the next couple months). They also don’t define universal health care in terms of the government providing health care for all Americans; both Senators keep the HMOs intact by offering something that merely adds another choice alongside extant private coverage plans (Obama made reference to extant insurers not getting all the upfront money the government would likely put into a national health care plan, Clinton wants to force insurance companies to insure everyone with no exclusions for pre-existing conditions). Clinton wants employer-based health care as well—she wants employers to provide insurance to the workers or pay into a pool which will help pay for insurance. Either Senator could end up simply requiring Americans to acquire health care for themselves like how Illinois drivers must get car insurance in order to legally drive their car. This is not at all what Americans think of when they think of universal health care. It was good to see a tough question for Obama coming from an audience member; her question highlighted how little Obama had to offer a health care forum. I see I’m not the first to understand that their appearances benefited the event more than it benefited the public. The corporate media has already narrowed the race to these two candidates and their appearances gave this event a better chance of being covered in mainstream media.
  • Sen. Chris Dodd spent his time talking about things other than the particulars his health care plan. Accordingly, there’s not much to say about his plan because judging by what he brought to this forum, it doesn’t seem to exist. He wants Americans to have a health care program as good as the one he has, but disturbingly he didn’t say he’d extend the extant Congressional plan to all Americans. When asked by an audience member, Gov. Bill Richardson said he’d extend the Congressional plan he enjoys.
  • Rep. Dennis Kucinich‘s plan will make it illegal to compete with the national plan. H.R. 676 is a single-payer system you can find online. A related story from the Corporate Crime Reporter addresses why a mix of public/private health care won’t work. I said it years ago when the bill was first introduced and it’s still true today: H.R. 676 continues to be the plan to beat.
  • Sen. Mike Gravel said “employer-based plans are a non-starter” and criticized all the Democrats except Kucinich for not challenging the status quo. He endorsed a single-payer voucher plan. Vouchers are annually issued to Americans and the user pays a co-pay and a deductible. If you want more than what your voucher covers, you pay for it. You’ll have a choice of doctors, hospitals, and 5 or 6 insurance plans in the voucher system. You “might see a public plan if we don’t see the medical and pharmaceutical plans shaping up”. The size of the voucher will be the cost of your medical bill in the previous year. There are no pre-existing condition exclusions. Preventative care will come from the bully pulpit of the President somehow. He wants to phase out Medicare/Medicaid over time. Funding for his plan was unstated; he started to mention it but then didn’t.
  • Public and private health care plans covering the same thing means the rich healthy people will buy the health insurance they like and the poor will get the government plan which will suffer a “death spiral” according to Kucinich.
  • Health care tied to employers means you lose your health care when you lose your job. Some jobs won’t come with health care at all and the government will not be incentivized to help those with multiple part-time jobs.

Overall, given how many of the Democrats simply brought nothing to discuss, it was a very cynical event. Obama, Clinton, and Dodd treated the audience badly by not having a detailed plan to go over. Edwards’ and Gravel’s plans keep private insurance intact and for that reason alone neither plan will serve the public well. Kucinich brought something specific to look at and direct your representatives to endorse. On the merits of the issue, he took the event.

One Laptop Per Child is progressing

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One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is an important project which makes and distributes inexpensive laptop computers for children in poor countries. The machines run a GNU/Linux operating system and use free software for almost everything. The machines require very little power (no more than a child can generate through a crank, as I understand it) and the display is low-power. The machine can be safely disassembled by a child including the screen which has no mercury as is common in LCD displays in every laptop display you’ve seen.

See what they’ve been up to in their new video, the first of what promises to be a series.

The video is licensed to to share under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 2.5 license (local copy).

Stand up against bullies: Stop doing business with the RIAA

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The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a proxy for its members—mostly corporate record labels. The RIAA has launched more lawsuits against everyday people than I can count. They aim their lawsuits at people like your neighbor and your neighbor’s children. The defendant is encouraged to settle out of court and pay the RIAA well before any investigation occurs, so the RIAA hasn’t actually done their homework by the time your neighbors get sued. Who are these defendants? Ray Beckerman explains:

As to the defendants, since no investigation is made to ascertain that the defendant is actually someone who engaged in peer to peer file sharing of copyrighted music without authorization, there are many defendants who have no idea why they are being sued and who did nothing even arguably violative of anyone’s copyright. Defendants have included people who have never even used a computer, and many people who although they have used a computer, have never engaged in any peer to peer file sharing.

Sometimes the cases are misleadingly referred to as cases against ‘downloaders’; in fact the RIAA knows nothing of any downloading when it commences suit, and in many instances no downloading ever took place.

It is more accurate to refer to the cases as cases against persons who paid for internet access which the RIAA has reason to believe was used by some person — possibly the defendant, possibly someone else — to engage in peer to peer file sharing.

Beckerman would know because he and his partner Ty Rogers defend people against the RIAA. They also blog about their work. Beckerman also posts to Slashdot from time to time.

In a recent Slashdot thread discussing a defendant’s lawyer who stood up to the RIAA, Beckerman has some choice words about the RIAA:

The RIAA is absolutely a schoolyard bully.

I disagree with your outlook.

Here is mine.

Rule Number 1: All bullies are also cowards.

Rule Number 2: The only way to stop bullies is to beat them.

Rule Number 3: When you draw blood they run away because of Rule Number 1.

It’s time to stop doing business with the RIAA.

Why would you give them your vote or your time?

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On Sunday, 25 March 2007, actor Sean Penn said

Let’s unite not only in stopping this war, but in holding this administration accountable.

Stopping the war

Before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, there was a very well-organized and well-publicized march across many countries. Of course, the mainstream media did their best to misrepresent the protesters, but the protesters’ message was clear: Don’t invade Iraq.

In 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) campaigned for president and argued that he would manage the Iraq occupation better than Pres. George W. Bush. The American anti-war movement stopped their campaigning and supported his pro-war candidacy while simultaneously discouraging third party and independent anti-war voices from participating in the presidential race.

In 2006 the US grew more displeased with the ongoing occupation. In the mid-term elections, Americans shuffled the deck chairs of the Titanic by putting Democrats in power in both houses of Congress. In mid-May 2006 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s spokesman Brendan Daly said that impeachment would be “off the table” for Pelosi. Why? Pelosi told the Washington Post “You never know where it leads to.”.

The Democrats’ first order of Congressional business included a few non-binding time-wasters which left the occupation intact: the US is still in Iraq with no signs of leaving any time soon.

In March 2007 the Democrats voted to give Bush $124 billion to continue the war (more than he asked for) and a timetable to end the war that is so far off in the future the timetable can easily be redrafted or canceled.

Holding this administration accountable

By late March 2007 no serious organized opposition to Pres. Bush has mounted. At the rate the Democrats get around to putting up a real challenge to Bush, Bush won’t have much of his term left. Impeachment is a first step; consider this excerpt from Democracy Now! on Monday, February 23rd, 2004 (audio, video, transcript)

Amy Goodman: We interviewed Dennis Kucinich. He said that he thought this would be the stupidest thing to try to impeach him because after all it’s a Republican Congress, they wouldn’t do it, and it would gain sympathy for Bush that the highest — the way to — in a sense to impeach him is to vote him out of office for the people to impeach him.

Ralph Nader: Well, impeachment is not conviction. Impeachment basically is a very fair public hearing in the House of Representatives to determine whether he should be charged with high crimes and misdemeanor, and if he is, it goes over to the Senate for a trial. But I think that our founding fathers put this in the Constitution to hold presidents accountable between elections, and it certainly would highlight the issue, and isn’t this the president who campaigned in 2000 on responsibility and accountability, and that actions should have consequences? So, I favor the use of the impeachment powers.

It’s unlikely that Pres. Bush will face a war crimes trial after he leaves office. I don’t recall anyone caring about, say, Bill Clinton bombing the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan after his second term expired.

So how long will it take to get most people to see that neither major corporate American political party wants to end the occupation of Iraq? There are objectors in both of these parties, to be sure, but not enough to make a difference.

For example, Democratic Party anti-war Rep. Dennis Kucinich is virtually alone in asking if it’s time to impeach (local copy).

More on recent developments:

Mark Shuttleworth: “All the applications in Ubuntu are free software”

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The most recent edition of “Questions please…” features an interview with Mark Shuttleworth, head and chief sponsor of Canonical and the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution. The license for the recording is as follows:

Verbatim copying and redistribution of these entire recordings is permitted worldwide and without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Thanks to Questions Please… for making the recording available in a format everyone can play and licensing it to share.

About 12m15s into the recording, the topic of proprietary software came up:

Jonathan Roberts: Do you think there is a danger in trying to attract new users by trying to add proprietary bits to GNU/Linux?

Mark Shuttleworth: Yeah, very much so. So we’ve always resisted the temptation to add proprietary applications. And we have tons of users who wanted Java before Sun had said they would GPL Java, and they still haven’t finished the process of GPLing Java so it’s not completely in Ubuntu. Similarly with Flash and Adobe Acrobat and other sort of, proprietary bits and pieces that people really really do want that we just won’t add to the distro. We absolutely see Ubuntu as a way of introducing people to free software applications; to a complete free software environment.

Now we draw the line in terms of hardware enabling and we draw the line quite hard. We say that […] the driver that it takes to enable the hardware that you bought we will ship. And so we’ve always shipped wireless drivers, for example, and we’re discussing turning on by default the 3D drivers and all this would make things like Compiz and some of the newer video applications and so on just work out of the box. Other distributions take a different view, some say that firmware is unacceptable, some say that firmware is acceptable. So Debian, for example, in all of its recent releases, has made an exception to its free software guidelines for its kernel package to allow it to ship firmware, which is essentially proprietary software. So different distributions have taken different views on that and we take—our dividing line is between kernel and applications. All the applications in Ubuntu are free software only and we stick to that despite suitable pressure to do differently.

Jonathan Roberts: And that’s a good—in my opinion, that’s the best approach I think.

Ubuntu boasts about distributing Opera for Ubuntu users—all the software Ubuntu users need to run the proprietary Opera web browser is available “with a couple of clicks” according to their press release. Ubuntu also claimed that “Ubuntu will always be free, and will not have restrictive licenses associated with it.”.

How can we make sense of these diametrically opposed claims?

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How’s your McJob treating you?

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McDonalds wants “McJob” taken out of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Boing Boing’s rebuttal is worth reading, not just for reasserting the point about McJobs—”an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector”—but why you shouldn’t fear trademark law stopping you from using “McJob”.

A mild example of one way you can help curtail corporate power; as we’re reminded in the movie The Corporation, you can still get to them.

Who benefits when challengers give into the establishment?

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Gervase Markham’s blog has a post about OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument format which I found interesting.

A few of the respondants make points I tried to rebut, but my response (below) doesn’t appear in the list of followups there.

“My least favourite feature is that you can’t open a word document without it bugging you to save it when you close it, even when you never made any edits!”

I can’t reproduce this. I had a friend of mine with access to Microsoft Word 2003 make me a .doc file. I opened it in OpenOffice.org (OOo) 2.1 and then I closed that document; I made no edits. OOo didn’t prompt me at all, it just closed.

“Also, every time you try to save a file in word format it bugs you that your ‘losing some formatting’… why don’t they just give it up and make .doc the default format?? (Okay maybe thats taking it a bit too far)”

I wouldn’t want to use the latest .doc format (there are more than one of them and not even Microsoft’s software does the right thing with all of them) instead of ODF. I can edit ODF outside of an ODF program (such as a text editor) and that’s a big benefit to me because OOo’s find/replace needs some enhancement (finding paragraph breaks within a specific style and replacing them with line breaks, for example). I recently had to do this for a large ODF document. Large documents in Microsoft Word don’t work well. For whatever reason, Microsoft Word exhibits odd behavior in large documents.

But if you want to use .doc all the time by default, and if you don’t want to be warned, OOo has two preferences you can set to make this so. See Tools -> Options… and then go to the Load/Save section and pick “General”. There you can turn off the warning about not using OpenDocument format (ODF) and you can set the file type you want as the default for various document types. I think it would be going too far to make these settings the default, as well as being remarkably one-sided: nobody says Microsoft Word should make ODF the default filetype, even though ODF predated Office Open XML (OOXML) by months (or was it years?) and is more accessible for both implementors and users. It simply isn’t wise to let corporate fealty or wishful popularity push us into a non-standard that hasn’t stood the test of time (let alone cleared the hurdles of those who have read some of the OOXML spec).

“Is that “there is” or “there was”? People are already moving to the new MS Word […]”

Most people I know are not using the new Microsoft Office (nor are they using Microsoft Windows Vista). But more importantly, asking if “‘there is’ or ‘there was'” puts aside recent history. Microsoft Word .doc formats predate OOo by many years and OOo still manages to get a wide audience. So even if OOXML support doesn’t appear in OOo or some other free software programs for a while, there remains a big opportunity for free software. We know we can get people to switch; it’s not easy, but it can be done. And we have a format that is more widely deployable—ODF, so that’s one thing we can currently help propagate by use.

Footnote: By “wishful popularity” I mean the popularity others say will be the case someday but hasn’t been the case up to now and isn’t the case now. Since OOXML isn’t popular now, now is a good time to work for increased use of ODF instead. Considering this more now, it’s clearer to me that the best reason to avoid .doc isn’t properly technical—as .doc reverse engineering has proven, one could use this file format and accept the difficulties with document interchange. The best reason for avoiding .doc centers on working against anti-social mechanisms (like secret proprietary formats) that deny us our freedom and (as this poignant essay says) “buttress the Microsoft monopoly”.