Sorry, I don't really buy the argument that copying a fashion design is as easy as copying a photograph - have you every tried to reproduce a skillfully made piece of clothing?

In fact, most of the items in your first list require considerable skill, investment, or both to reproduce (exception: rules of games), whereas most of the items in the second list don't (exceptions: choreography, architecture). While I don't believe that current copyright laws strike the right balance between protecting artists from cheap copies, allowing audiences to benefit from cheap copies, and encouraging creative derivative works, I can understand why copyright would be more important for things that are easy to copy than for things that aren't - and your lists seem to show that copyright applies almost exclusively to things that can be copied without much skill.

I absolutely agree with you, however, that the argument about protecting creativity is badly framed. The question should not be, "Is the work creative?", but rather, "Does the work require creativity to copy?"

Reframing the question in that way suggests an interesting alternative rationale for copyright law: if we want to maximise the benefit of copyright to creative people as a whole, we should remove protection from anything that requires creativity to reproduce, in order that those who reproduce it can access it as freely as possible, maximising the number of creative reproductions. Furthermore, we should create exceptions to copyright for substantially creative derivative works.

For example, copyright would be removed for songs and musical scores, since performance requires both creativity and skill, but it would be maintained for recordings of songs, since replicating a recording requires neither.

But then we get into some interesting grey areas. Is a recording that samples another recording sufficiently creative to justify an exception to the copyright protection of the sampled work? What about a mashup of two recordings, with no original material? What about a mixtape?

Fortunately, we have judges and case law to deal with grey areas like this: after an initial period of boundary-testing I hope we'd establish some rules of thumb about what's "creative use" of a copyrighted work and what's "mere replication". Once we reached that point we'd have a system that encouraged substantially more creativity than the current system, much of it based on the forms of creative reuse that fans of Larry Lessig's Free Culture (myself among them) like to point out as being ill-served by the current system.

Do you have any alternative to bombing other then letting the terrorist thrive to plot more attacks and put more innocent lives in danger?

So your justification for killing innocent people is that not doing so would put innocent people in danger? Want to take a minute to ponder that logic?

I mean seriously, what is the other options here?

This might sound a little extreme, but the other option is not to invade and occupy an ungovernable country. Fine, the U.S. wanted to destroy Al Qaeda's base in Afghanistan. That was accomplished by the end of 2001. What the fuck are large numbers of NATO troops still doing in Afghanistan nine years later?

Does the U.S. seriously think that "nation building" is either (a) possible, or (b) going to keep Al Qaeda out of the country? If so, I've got bad news: nation building is not possible (Afghanistan has never been a nation state and won't be one in the next 100 years, political power is divided among too many tribal, ethnic and religious groups), and nation building is not going to keep Al Qaeda out (Bin Laden is quite happy sheltering in Pakistan, which is, guess what, one of the most advanced nation states in the region). The only sane solution is for the U.S. to go the fuck home and launch the occasional special forces raid against any Al Qaeda bases that might emerge... which does not require a permanent presence on the ground or widespread civilian casualties.

That is the other option.

Gah, accidentally modded you Redundant instead of Insightful... replying so my moderation gets discarded. Bloody trackpads. ;)

For those who aren't familiar with Shoreditch, this music video provides a quick primer.

The plaintiff has not proven distribution in this case, so the damages in question are for copying the songs, not for distributing them.

Please consider uploading some information about Cisco's involvement to WikiLeaks (or any other site that you trust to preserve your anonymity).

Pressuring American companies to end their involvement in internet censorship would be more effective in the long term than a 40ft shipping container full of Kindles, and would help to undermine some of the "USA good, China evil" hypocrisy surrounding this issue.

Are you talking about restriction regarding books, or all areas of life? I feel a Libertarian wind blowing.

Hey, that wind is private property - I hope you've signed a service contract with the wind supplier. We don't need no commie freeloaders feelin' our Libertarian wind without paying!

China's kind of like the neighbor kid that knocks on my door and offers to mow the lawn for $20. It's not that I can't mow myself, but when it's so cheap to pay someone else why do it myself? If he ever didn't show up for a couple weeks I'd just do it myself, but as long as he's offering I'll keep paying him.

So you keep paying the kid to mow your lawn for a couple of years. One day he shows up with his own lawnmower. No point having your own mower when it's not being used, so you put your mower on eBay. A few years later you lose your job at the lawnmower factory and find yourself mowing lawns for $20 a time, of which $5 goes to the kid for borrowing his mower.

Oh, also the kid is exerting increasingly firm control over the South China Sea, but I'm not sure how to work that into the analogy. ;-)

In his first ever public speech a few days ago, the head of GCHQ, Britain's equivalent of the NSA, explicity stated that nuclear deterrence was not a suitable model for cyber defence "because small-scale but significant cyber attacks happen every day".

It's unusual to see open disagreement between such statements, which are usually carefully orchestrated; I wonder whether it reflects an underlying conflict between DHS and the new Cyber Command, with GCHQ siding with Cyber Command?

"Cyber" has had an interesting history - from military research in 1948 (Norbert Weiner coined "cybernetics" while working on anti-aircraft guns), to 1980s science fiction, to 1990s business buzzword, to military strategy in 2010. Which raises the question, can military planners only understand their own technology through the lens of science fiction?

If I want to take down some government, I don't have to do the hard work any more.
Just find any insecure organisation in the same country and use it to launch some trivial attack against the US government.
The US government then does my attack for me, bombing the entire country and my target.

You have a bright future at the CIA. ;-)

seems pretty likely to me, a lot of snakes won't eat their prey unless it's moving, this will probably re-enforce that trait.

Oh fantastic, so we're creating selection pressure for ADHD? Now we'll have to bomb the island with live kittens laced with Ritalin...

Here on Slashdot there tends to exist the mindset of "blame the shooter not the gun" and the corollary "and certainly don't blame the maker of the gun". For most civil libertarians, those are axioms: that tools are value-neutral, and you criminalize their improper use, not their mere existence or the act of manufacture.

I'm glad you've raised this issue, because I think it points to a deep contradiction in the way many technologists think. We worry about the misuse of technology, and yet we refuse to take any responsibility when we create technologies that are easily misused - or, worse, that have no morally defensible purpose. We need to crack this debate open - we need to move beyond the childishly simplistic statement that "tools are value-neutral" and start asking how much responsibility we have for deciding what kind of tools exist and how they can be used, and we need to start acting on those responsibilities, even if it means a pay cut.

A few years ago I was on holiday in Vietnam. While touring a rural area, I saw cluster bomb canisters that had been dropped on villages. You probably know what a cluster bomb is: a large canister that scatters small 'bomblets' over a wide area, which later explode when people disturb them. If you drop a cluster bomb on a village, children who are playing or herding animals or collecting water are going to be killed or horribly injured, some of them months or years after the bomb is dropped. What really struck me about these canisters was that the manufacturer's name was proudly painted on the side. AEROJET GENERAL CORPORATION, USA.

I just couldn't understand who could be proud of making such a thing. This is a device that is designed to tear beautiful human bodies into shreds of meat. Some engineer in California spent a lot of late nights perfecting those child-shredding bomblets, and then he went home and kissed his own children goodnight, and he didn't see the contradiction, because he was hiding behind the mantra "tools are value-neutral". But it's bullshit. Some tools have moral uses, some have immoral uses, some have both, and people disagree about what's moral. Yes, it's complex! But you can't just whitewash all that complexity by saying "tools are value-neutral". It's nothing more than a lie that helps engineers to sleep at night. That's all it is.

How do you block Freenet? Seriously, how do you block it and not other services?

If Freenet is banned, the government can collect the address of every "opennet" Freenet node in a matter of hours. Then it's a question of finding the "darknet" nodes. A simple heuristic will probably catch most of them: recursively look for any address that has at least three long-lived, encrypted, two-way UDP streams to known or suspected Freenet nodes. The standard of proof at this stage is probable cause (or the French equivalent), rather than overwhelming evidence, so a heuristic approach is good enough. Wholesale traffic interception isn't needed: it's sufficient to monitor known or suspected nodes.

Now the government raids the owners of all the French nodes, confiscates their hard drives and decrypts their Freenet caches. There's bound to be some nasty stuff cached there on behalf of other nodes, even if the owners never uploaded or downloaded anything bad. The government charges the owners with "running a Freenet node" (so it's not necessary to prove what they uploaded or downlaoded) and makes a highly public announcement that it busted an extensive child porn / terrorist / neo-Nazi network thanks to the new anti-Freenet law. Then it waits for the handful of node operators it didn't catch to shut down their nodes and never say the word "Freenet" again.

Part of the problem here is that Freenet's design requires all nodes to belong to a single network, so if you have a heuristic for identifying Freenet traffic you can start from any node and 'unravel' the whole network. But to be fair to the Freenet designers, the alternative - lots of small, isolated darknets - isn't very appealing to users, because the only people you end up communicating with belong to the small intersection of "people I trust" and "privacy nuts". I'm a privacy nut who trusts his friends, and even for me that intersection isn't large enough to make for much of a conversation.

I've always wondered why people in this situation didn't build private networks based on protocols other than IP. A quick glance at /etc/protocols shows dozens of different protocols that can be carried by ethernet --- there must be something there that's sufficiently flexible to build a useful network out of but can't be carried by the Internet without protocol conversion.

It's even easier than that - just patch every host (and every router, unfortunately - but hey, Cisco, here's where you get your billion dollar contract) to set the version field of IP packets to something that's invalid on the internet - let's say 3 - and to reject all other versions. That's got to be, what, a ten line patch? After that you can use off-the-shelf software for all the higher protocol layers, but if someone accidentally connects the private network to the internet, no packets will pass between the two networks.