I especially recommend it to those who only know RMS by reputation, and not from his actual writings. This one is particularly cogent, concise and undesrtandable. I consider it mandatory reading for any layperson interested in modern copyrigyt issues.

Team /. + CambodiaSchools.com = Bootstrapping Cambodia, part 2

This is the most ridiculous thing I've read in a good long while. The implication that ALL artists, be they authors, musicians, poets, coders, etc. are singularly motivated by profit, is just so patenly absurd that, if it wasn't for the rest of the post, I'd consider it a blatant troll.

How much did you get paid for that little essay you just wrote, that was "given wholesale to the public"?
Then again, if it DID happen, the crap I lay down on my 4-track and would be MORE than happy to distribute for exactly jack-squat would constitute the entirety of "modern culture". Heh. Cool.

Somehow I get the feeling that I wouldn't be alone.

s/FNORD//g to email me

You write: Eliminating copyright forces a political view on EVERYONE. Further it forces an incorrectly assumed point of view on EVERYONE.

RMS writes: United States copyright law considers copyright a bargain between the public and "authors" (although in practice, usually publishers take over the authors' part of the bargain). The public trades certain freedoms in exchange for more published works to enjoy. Until the White Paper, our government had never proposed that the public should trade *all* of its freedom to use published works. Copyright involves giving up specific freedoms and retaining others. This means that there are many alternative bargains that the public could offer to publishers. So which bargain is the best one for the public? Which freedoms are worth while for the public to trade, and for what length of time? The answers depend on two things: how much additional publication the public will get for trading a given freedom, and how much the public benefits from keeping that freedom.

RMS also writes: Copyright 1996 Richard Stallman Verbatim copying and distribution are permitted in any medium provided this notice is preserved.

I hope this clearly demonstrates that RMS believes in copyright and does not advocate eliminating it. In this respect you are correct: if we eliminated copyright, we would eviscerate the GPL. Luckily, he does not believe this, nor does any reasonable proponent of copyright reform. The key is to shift the balance out of the hands of the publisher/distributors and back towards the public/individuals.

Team /. + CambodiaSchools.com = Bootstrapping Cambodia, part 2

If you don't want to use the property *I* created on *my* terms, don't use it at all. Ok?

Yes they can. I have no copyright on the work that I do, and yet I am compenstated for it. Copyright is very little protection for authors and the creators of work. Mostly these days the IP laws are used as a stick to beat these people over the head with.

"At a certain point, you're working (say) 14 hours a day making ends meet. "

Then perhaps you should be asking questions about your society. In the last 100 years our production output has increased enourmously. We could easily produce enough to feed, cloth, and house ourselves. And yet we are working longer and longer hours, and many of us are, as you say working 14 hours a day to make ends meet. How has that come about I ask myself?

Phil

Perhaps if you actually read the article carefully? Or perhaps you are trolling?

The key point is fairly simple. Copyright was put in position to protect the rights of those who produce intellectual property. Like myself for instance.

The problem is that most intellectual property is now held by a few enormous corporations, and changes in the copyright law support only these corporations. Something like the internet has the possibility of changing that of course. The music companies for instance hold onto their position because they control the means of distribution of music, which are CD's and previous records. The internet could reduce these distribution costs towards a marginal cost of zero. Bang goes the recording industry. Musicians could distribute their own work freely.

Now of course these companies are aware of this possibility. They would not be the first industry to be destroyed by technology. The DCMA is one example of them fighting back against this.

Where do the artists and IP producers come into this situation? Well at the moment we are screwed over anyway. I have no control over the IP I produce (or at least the IP I produce for a job). Indeed changes in the law in the last decade mean that I can not even work in my spare time and own the IP.

In other words once I have created something I have no part in the decision about what happens to it. This is the situation that copyright, and other IP law has got us into.

Now of course things like napster don't help out artists either. What napster does however is force us to re-evaluate the justification and end results of IP law. The DCMA is it actually pretty draconian, which is what you would expect to happen at first. The thing is with these draconian laws though is that sooner or later they get broken, when they piss enough people off. If artists help to embrace this change then its possible that they may be able to benefit from this change. If they condemn it, or ignore it, then they will probably remain as screwed over as they are now.

Phil

``The founders wanted to put your copyright into the public domain at your death, then it was 20 years, now 75. What use do you have for your IP when you are dead?''

If I'm not mistaken, one of the biggest lobbyists for extending the copyright period was Disney. You see, Mickey Mouse was about to go into the public domain. Just how would Michael Eisner continue to receive $500M/year in salary/etc. if Disney Corp. didn't have the exclusive rights to Mickey Mouse? Of course Walt Disney didn't have much use for the MM copyright but the leaches that run Disney nowadays did and bought an extension to the copyright laws to make sure that the gravy train didn't dry up during their lifetime.

--
CUR ALLOC      20195.....5805M

What right do you have to *copy* my recipe then?

What inherent *right* do you have to take my recipe?

Inherently, once you show me the recipe, there is no law of physical nature that prevents me from reproducing the recipe to the letter and using to create cookies, even in competition with you. To assume that a government-granted monopoly system is "inherent" is begging the question.

Well, there is no law of physical nature that then prevents them from sneaking up behind you and OJ'ing your neck.

Except the law that if you do, you will go down there. Four major religions (Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism) have a religious law against taking of life but no law against sharing of information. (Besides, OJ was never found guilty of any homicide.)

It's called civilization, folks. You set up rules that people can agree on. Hopefully they are logical rules, which is to say, things similar to the Golden Rule and Your Rights End Where My Nose Begins.

Except my village is several kilometers away from your nose. You aren't harmed in any way when I copy your cookie recipe unless you accept copyright. I'm not taking anything from you unless you accept copyright, as you still have the cookie recipe. Try reasoning your argument for perpetual copyright from a standpoint that doesn't assume copyright as one of its premises.

Anti-IP whines are nothing more than bleats about not being allowed by Daddy to copy others' months or even years of hard work with no consequences.

How much did you copy to create that very sentence? Every single word has appeared in another published work. It's a good thing the English language itself is largely unencumbered by government-granted monopolies; otherwise, the owner of the English language would have us all in debtors' prison.

If you don't want me to copy your recipe, don't show it to me. Copyright was designed to be a bargain that promotes the progress of science and the useful arts by saying, in effect: "To compensate you for creating this, you get a monopoly for x years; after that, anybody can copy it." This article is about the fact that corporations managed to bribe Congress into laws that keep the "anybody can copy it" from happening within a natural person's lifetime. And we can do little or nothing about bribery without lots of money to out-lobby the lobbyists; everybody has a price.

Under current DMCA inspired copyright law the mere act of tasting your cookie and guessing the recipe is not allowed. Even if the recipe is not the same if I make a similar cookie that has a similar taste I can be sued for this.

Another point is that this isn't like stealing the cookie recipe. THis is more like cloning your cookie using a matter cloner (tm;) and giving away free cloned cookies to everyone that asks for one. I dont even know what the recipe is because the cloner takes care of all of that. All I know is that I put your cookie into one slot, apply a house-hold current, and a virtually infinite amount of cookies appear out the other side. I can even transmit these cookies to the other side of the world without having to actually spend any time doing so. Now, if we find a product that can do this we will have an accurate anology to the current state of digital copyright.

The world is an illusion!

The E-mail addy is real!

What's all the fuss about? Doubleclick is very willing to share it's cookies. I have 300 cookies on my hard drive right now. ;)

That's a bit of an overgeneralisation in my opinion. I think there are lots of common points between physical property and intellectual property. Obviously not in all cases, scarcity being one aspect.

Here's a short extract of something I wrote recently, which compares IP and phyiscal property. Please read it all before you call this a troll too:

Many people don't like the term "intelluctal property", because how can you "own" an idea, a thought, especially where your idea are often based on other peoples input which was freely given to society. While I personally hate the term for that reason too, I think it's interesting to note the parrallels between property owners in the past, and IP owners today. Historically, if you were a landowner, you had huge power over your tenents, only landowners had a vote, and if a disagreement was between a landowner and a non-landowner, the scales tilted heavily to the landowners side.

Are we entering a similar era with intelluctal "property" where only the IP owners have power, laws are passed to heavily benefit only IP owners, and battles between IP owners and normal people are totally one sided? Look at all many of the company battles today are over IP, the company attacked can often only defend if they have an IP defence, so companys are arming themselves with "patent portfolios" - not for research purposes, but purely for attack and defence

Is creativity now simply a unit of currency, something to be bought and sold, a weapon to be used for attack and defence, and managed so it increases the bottom line and benefit to society is only "allowed" if it adds to the renenue?

Is that really what the meaning behind copyright law should be?

Society's laws should benefit society, and if a law benefits a group of people, it should be as a means to that end, and not an end in itself.

Here's a short extract of something I wrote recently, which compares IP and phyiscal property

It appears to be a series of disjointed statements that fails to address the fundamental difference between objects and information.

We can't both have the keyboard that I typed these words on. If you take it away from me, I have less. But the words themselves exist on /. , on your PC, and on caches in between. And yet I still have them on my PC. So what exactly have I lost?

When the RIAA and MPAA talk about protecting intellectual property and moral rights, what they're actually lobbying for is special market protection for physical objects: CD's, DVD's, movie theatre seats. The whole crux of their argument is that information should be treated like objects, because if it isn't, they won't make as much money.

And note that they always phrase it as "we'll lose money", which acknowledges that their only argument against moving to online distribution is that they'd make less money! And they're right, because who'd pay twelve bucks to leech three good tracks and nine sucky ones from Napster? And yet we queue up to pay that much for the same mostly sucky information on a 20 cent CD object, and we do it because our choice is to get reamed, or get lost.

Instead of competing to make and sell good music in a convenient way at a fair price, the industry colludes to force us to buy objects padded with complete dross. They know information isn't like objects, and they don't even attempt to deny it, they just bribe politicians to ban traffic in the information itself, because, hey, that would hurt their stock options, and geeez, that can't be right.

How do you propose to compensate companies that develop new drug formulas and such.

By giving them a government-granted monopoly that lasts just long enough to compensate the company for the money spent on R&D. This works in the domain of drug patents, but it's falling apart in the domain of copyrights, which last 96 years (or life + 71) thanks to the Walt Disney Company, which every 20 years lobbies for another retroactive 20-year extension to copyright terms. It completely goes against the spirit of the "for limited times" language that the Framers wrote into the Constitution.

That's the kind of bullshit you're arguing for. Your IP is not an island. It exists on the foundation of other works, you don't deserve a universal monopoly on your ideas anymore than everyone your derivative life (and everyone else's) is based on deserve royalties when you do something that's unoriginal.

Perhaps but you make one mistake in rejecting the comparison of PP to IP on source grounds (not copying grounds) in some simple way:

Outside of land most PP rests on other people's PP that has been exchanged.

How is that you ask? Well, let us take those mythical cookies: you needed flour, sugar, etc. Unless you are VERY self-sufficient some of those items were someone else's property. You obtained that property and made it your own and made it the basis for your cookies. In this case your usage consumes the full value of the property in the sense that the property owner cannot reuse it. IP has the advantage of perpetual reuse (in a general sense, there are exceptions). Because of that the costs of using IP to create derivitive works are much lower without some kind of legal structure (copyright).

That is where the real difference exists, not in its dependance on the work of others but that new IP can be created from old IP without consuming it. No one would claim your car goes public domain after X years because doing so removes it completely from your use. Yet even if my music goes public domain I can still listen to it or play it and thus maintain use.

Historically we have been able to insure that at least some users pay the creator because the costs of creating a copy were high. Modern publishing is built on this fact (see notes below about publishing) where the publisher pays the creator and creates copies for a fee.

Thus, we run into the current problem with IP in general that the OSS movement has most closely addressed: If production costs after the first one are almost nil how much should we charge for it and how should we assess that charge?

• We could charge the first user the full cost and after that everyone could get it for free. This is the simplest system and is somewhat describes how publishing works, especially music publishing (not in the lawyer's mind, but in practical terms). A publisher buys the material from the creater and gives it to you for free, but charges you for physical media (Napster is simply the end product of confusing selling physical media and selling IP). The downside is it gives no one the incentive to be first Publishing worked until the mid-90s because quality media was too expensive for you to make from a transient form such as a computer file. Now that you can generate high quality, transportable versions of music the music publishing industry will change (even if they fight real hard...the law cannot long stop reality).
• We could give it away for free and accept donations. This is used very successfully for performing arts from street musicians to lounge players with a tip jar. It has also worked okay in the Windows/DOS world as shareware. I will not even harzard to guess if this is practical as long term solution. I would point out that the donations are not necessarily directly money. Creating promient and successful OSS has led to some people getting jobs and minor participation has probably been used as resume bullets.
• We could make the first X users pay and then make it free. This is in theory current copyright law, although the extensions have moved closer to the fears raised in the article above. Basically, the idea behind copyright and patent was you could charge for others to use your IP for a certain number of years and after that it was free. The more compelling the IP the more users in the those years and hence better pay for better quality (in a rough way).

What we can no longer do is confuse IP with the PP used to transmit it.

Herb
Again, feel free to sentence me to death if my questions annoy you. I'll come back in 5 minutes anyway. -Sythian

Since when?

Since it was intigated two centuries ago. If only the author has the right to distribute his work, then the flow of information is restricted. How can you say it is not?

People seem to think that once I have created something, you have the right to do what the hell you like with it.

Bull!

But I don't, even under the original implementation of copyright, which is quite liberal compared to the DMCA. I can read your work as many times as I like, I can sell it or give my copy away. I cannot make a copy of it and distribute that copy.

The DMCA tries to permit you to force me to pay you every time I re-read your novel, or listen again to a recording of your song, whether I bought that copy, or heard it on the radio, or encoded it to a conveniently portable format for my digital listening device.

Is this what you're defending?

Once I've created something, surely I am the only person who gets to decide what happens to it?

No, you are not.

You wouldn't say you have the right to do what you want with cookies I had baked,...

Once you sell those cookies to me, they are no longer yours. I can do with them as I please.

...so why do you think that with my *intellectual* property?

Who says I do? If I buy a copy of your novel, I can, in fact, do whatever I want with it, short of distributing a new copy of it. You should have no right to extract payment from me for each time I read it. The DMCA, however, gives you that right, even though it is practically unenforceable, as Napster has shown.

Is this really what you are defending?

--just roll a fatty and shut up

Yes you are, but for a limited amount of time. After that, material passes into the public domain. The problem with things like the DMCA and CSS is that they effectively extend the copyright on the material on a DVD indefinately.

It doens't ever become okay to break the so called copy protection (i.e. access control) on a DVD and copy the work, so the work effectively never enters the public domain.

Another problem with the control system on DVD's is the region coding. That system is in place to prevent the transfer of a material that has already been paid for. It would be akin to placing some kind of protection on a book published in the USA that made the ink go invisible when you took it overseas.

Now I can understand why they did it, and for new theatre releases they might have a good argument as to why they should be allowed to do it, but they effectively destroyed their own legitimacy when they kept the region coding even for re-releases of old films.

The problem is not that content producers tried to protect their copyrights, the problem is that they made a quick grab to extend them at the expense of the public.

--- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com

The "theatre release" based argument is based on the film companies finding it cheaper to release the films in the USA then, when the run is over, shipping the reels abroad to show there. This being cheaper than making reels for the whole world then trashing them in a couple of weeks.

Now, the question is, should the full legislative force of a government, particularly a "people's government" be brought into play to restrict citizens rights to save corporations a bit of cash?

And Sen. Kennedy had the cheek to ask Ashcroft if he thought we had a tyrranical government.

Rich
Sig: Hey, how come the sigs suddenly shrank?

What crap. People seem to think that once I have created something, you have the right to do what the hell you like with it.

Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 27.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28.
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Once I've created something, surely I am the only person who gets to decide what happens to it? You wouldn't say you have the right to do what you want with cookies I had baked, so why do you think that with my *intellectual* property?

I see your point but...

Suppose in the future I can clone those cookies that you baked and that a friend of mine purchased one of your cookies. Then I can make as many of those as I want. Your cookie ends up being the same as intellectual property.

So then, yes, it was your cookie. And it would be nice if everyone would give you something of value to obtain one of your cookies. But the point is that you do not really have a right to obtain value for those cookies. People can clone them, and knowing that, you have to decide if you want to share any of your cookies, because once you share it, it's out of the bag (so to speak ;-) If you don't want anyone to have one of your cookies, then don't give (or sell) any of them. That's the only way to truely keep something yours. If you share it (even if you share it for money) chances are others will to.

It might suck for you (I would agree actually) but the point is, if you let something out to the public, you can't control it. The thing that you do have control over though is the things that you let go in the future. And that is what I think everyone seems to be forgetting.

The public is willing to pay for things that they deem valuable. So if your "cookies" seem valuable, they will find some way to pay you for them. If you first released chocolate chip cookie and only one person bought one, and everyone else cloned it, then you would have no reason to continue to bake cookies. The public then would be depriving itself of new cookies. I don't think they will do that. I think that even if we could clone those cookies, the public would find a way to pay you for your efforts to encourage you to bake new interesting cookies (assuming of course that you actually can bake good cookies).

Copyright is about the public agreeing to give up something to you so that you can afford to continue to come up with new kinds of cookies. It's a deal made between the public and the creator: "We'll agree to limit cloning if you'll keep makeing cookies". But it's not a right guaranteed to the creator. And, the public may change it's mind later and decide that we gave you too good of a deal and that we want to re-negotiate. It's not a method of insuring that you get rich from coming up with one really good type of cookie.

If you really don't want someone to have something, then keep it locked up and don't show it to anyone. If you do have an idea that you want to share, then share it. If the public wants to encourage you to continue to share ideas, they will offer you a deal (Copyright). If you don't like the deal they're offering, don't share your ideas. If the public isn't getting enough new ideas, they'll re-negotiate more to your favor so that the new ideas start flowing again.

It might suck, but that's free trade.

Apparently, so we are told, copyright is restricting the flow of information. Since when? Surely you wouldn't say locks prevent the free exchange of stuff from shops?

You seem to be capable of forming cogent sentences, so I'll assume you're not actually dumb enough to make a direct comparison between information and goods. I guess that makes you a troll then.

Let's talk mp3's. If I leech a song, what has the property owner (OmniGlobalHyperMegaCorp, not Joe Artist) actually lost? Do they have fewer songs to sell? No, they do not. They have the same number of songs, but one less customer. And guess what: I wasn't a potential customer, as I've never, ever bought music. It's too expensive, and even back when I couldn't get it with a button click, I just didn't care enough to do it the old fashioned way and dub tapes. So, once again: what has the owner lost?

They failed to gain, I'll admit that. But that's all. Information is not a limited resource, they've still got all the information they ever have, they just need to drop the price to make some money off of it.

Incidentally, I'm an author. And I understand that success comes from selling property at the right price, not trying to sell information at the wrong price. That's why I'd never put the words that comprise a novel on the net unless it bounced off of every slush pile of every paper publisher in the known world first. I pragmatically accept that if you make information too easy to share, and too hard to buy, it will be shared for free and you'll never see one red cent. I expect that eventually the RIAA and MPAA will see that too and start offering carrots as well as sticks.

This is why corporations can now have so much pull in government. They can throw lots more money towards causes and lobby groups which in turn become the major accountability factors for any one elected official. It therefore benefits elected officials to pay more attention to corporate interests than to the individuals in their constituency. That's why laws like the DMCA get passed.

We are at a critical juncture in our nation's history, and I fear that if we as individuals do not stand up to 'unfair', ambiguous, and generally stupid rules (like the DMCA) that benefit big money (corps.) while hurting individuals, we will become a nation (possibly a world) governed by corporations who have their profits in mind more than the well-being of society. And sitting idly by while we let government 'take care of us' with all kinds of social programs, not only will we allow corps and big money to take control, we will actually encourage others grabbing for more power to control our individual lives. Hitler grabbed power because the people wanted a 'savior' to fix all their problems for them. He turned out to be nothing more than a power hungry, lazy, murderous dictator living off the people's hard work. He did nothing to improve their situation in life. In fact, Germany lay in ruins by the end of WWII. Do we really want someone to fix all of our problems for us, or should we take a stand and work hard to improve our own life? The school violence, the gun control debate, the drugs everywhere, and all the other ills of society could greatly be reduced when we realize that most of those ills come about because everyone wants to be lazy and 'let others take care of it' instead of us taking our individual lives into our own hands and working hard to improve whatever situation we have been given.

Today's attitude: Life handed me lemons, so I'm gonna sue to get back the oranges I so rightly deserve!

My question is: What makes you deserve oranges?

"Nangi namaj perez, Pray Naked." - 77's

Dear Caveman,

If you ever go out of your cave, ( with proper eyewear protection) you might notice that Americans are working harder and longer today than at any other moment in history. Americans work harder and longer than any other industrial nation. They are still less productive than many European workers because of the abysmal American "education" system, but they work harder and longer. In fact, a research pointing out that Americans suffer from extremely high levels ( for a population) of sleep deprivation has just been released. Say "An american refrigerator" in Europe and they understand you want a really big refrigerator. Say "American vacation" and they laugh.

Americans don't need to work harder. They need a break. They need a good night sleep, an extra hour for a familly dinner. They need to stress a little less about whether they can afford to pay emergency medical bills. An extra two hours a day and a longer vacation will do wonders to such problems as school shooting, drugs, gun, etc.

All these things have been achieved by other nations, which proves that they are not unacheivable.

Exhorting Americans to work harder is a trully cheap shot at the expense of this overworked nation. It would be better to figure out who takes home the fruits of all this excessive labor.

-- look, cheese ahoy!

You know, you don't have to live like a hunter-gatherer to simplify your life. Many Americans have these problems because they need a large income to satisfy their excessive desires. They see luxuries (new cars, movies, eating out, houses) as being absolutely essential to their well-being. Why? Maybe they're spoiled. Maybe it's a keeping-up-with-the-joneses attitude where if their neighbors bust their asses to get cool stuff, then they do too. Perhaps commercials convince them they have to have certain things. Too many people are trying to live way beyond their current means, when they don't really have to. It's a choice. Not having that Playstation 2 (or Playstation 1) is a choice. Not having that large TV is a choice. Not having that new car is a choice (usually). These aren't grand irrestible forces that we just have to bow to -- people have the ability to say no to luxury. But instead they redefine luxuries as "essentials." They have made the decision that increased working hours and more financial stress is worth the extras that they get from it. Myself, I don't think it's worth it, but then again I was taught to "spend wisely," something which has clearly fallen out of favor.

Obviously I am speaking in generalities and there are always exceptions. But I still believe that hyper-capitalism can only drag you down with it if you're willing to play along with it.

Take the NOSPAM out of my address if you're responding by mail..

I think it has gotten much worse over the last 20 years or so, and I admit that I am at times quite guilty of not caring about others. I'm used to doing that because that's the culture I grew up in. In other countries, the family unit is held sacred and not to be broken. In America, we have divorce rates of 65% (my best guesstimate, but it's not far off). Ask any foriegner, and they'll tell you that Americans are generally rude and rather selfish. (That's why the Europeans don't like American tourists, cause we're generally moronic jerks).

When we realize that being involved in politics (at least voting - which 50% of Americans do not do), being involved in our own children's lives (which again, I would say we are woefully not doing enough of), and caring for our neighbors will change our society, I would say that we will change society. And yes, that will take some hard work.

You're most likely correct about Americans being more overworked than the rest of the world, but why is that? It's because both parents have to have jobs to pay off the cars, boats, vacations, and other things that they've overspent money on. So really, the overwork comes from trying to keep up with the Jones', not from trying to help out the Jones' when they fall upon hard times.

Since I do not want to show myself as a complete hipocryte, here's a quick story of my own life:
A certain guy my age that I met at my church had fallen on hard times. He was in grad school, just married 8 months ago, was in the process of dealing with his wife's recent infidelity, had diagnosed mental issues, and had very little money. To make a long story short, I let him stay at my apartment (we split rent, but it was definitely cheaper than his alternatives), and I generally offered advice from time to time on his situation with the divorce. He now is finishing grad school, divorced, and just got a city planning job in Indiana. Although this was the most difficult thing I have ever done, and a lot of emotional WORK, it was better for both of us! I learned a lot about myself, and he got back on his feet and will be a successful member of society.

"Nangi namaj perez, Pray Naked." - 77's

-- look, cheese ahoy!

While you were doing it, how much energy did you devote to monitoring toxic waste disposal, resisting encroaching copyright issues, fixing pork barrel appropriations in Congress, stopping 'soft money' corporate influences in government, and writing open source? o_O

Do you see that the level of work that is needed is not just hard but _impossible_ to dump on private individuals in a libertarianesque freemarketish way? That you cannot coordinate individuals to counter or resist composite entities like corporations (or governments!) because there are just too many of the latter to be able to deal with? Alvin Toffler wasn't so far off the mark in 'Future Shock'- but the nasty part is, with the increasing pace of all things, the corporations increasingly get to run amok and their interests are pretty well understood by now. You'll come home from helping your friend and also working with neighbors to fight a nearby toxic waste burning facility, will collapse on your chair and the seat will _explode_ because some corporation felt like making special high-tech cushioning materials that were spontaneously combustible. Reading the fine print as you try and scrape your ass off the ceiling, you see that the warranty is void if you collapse on the chair in an immoderate manner.

*g*

Okay, so that _was_ funny, but do you see the point? I think we can't continue to have the culture you speak of for much longer. It affects our corporations and our government and leaves us ill-equipped to defend ourselves against these monsters we've created in our own image.