Digital Copyrights could become a bigger pain in the tukhus.

Article: Congress Seeks to Expand DMCA

(Hat tip: LGF)

My original LGF comment

Digital copyright protection is one of those wonderful topics that get people yelling at each other. The entertainment and software industrial complex are the major victims of copyright infringement, because that’s what people download and pirate — Movies, music, TV series, video games, and applications intended for serious productivity. I will not dispute the fact that software piracy is essentally theft, and that it’s wrong. That’s not my point today.

My point has nothing to do with the ethics of software piracy. Rather, I simply wish to state the fact that it is insane to believe that one can continue to make money from a product by trying to control the distribution of that product, when current technology makes it possible for anyone to make dozens of perfect copies with minimal effort.

Ultimately, attempts to criminalize copyright infringement with steeper penalties, to create more and increasingly pernicious protection mechanisms — are an exercise in futility as far as actually stopping the practice of copyright infringement. All they’re doing is putting temporary stumbling blocks in the paths of the hackers and making life more unnecessarily tedious for the rest of us. If the big names in the entertainment and software industries do not give up on this, and we don’t stop them, it will bring about the age of technofeudalism.

Technofeudalism is a resurrection of the medieval feudal economic model, except that the peasant class now includes people of all levels of wealth, lording over which are the companies that control the software and entertainment we use. It is a world where our productivity is governed by proprietary formats, and software is no longer purchased but subscribed to. It is a world where there is freedom in the physical world, but cyberspace is a realm of serfs and vassals. Whether or not this can be avoided depends on whether or not our needs can be fulfilled by people operating on different business plans. And incidentally, this smells like a good sci-fi story in the making.

Anyway, to sum up, a business model that depends on controlling the distribution of the product will be no good in years to come.

In my prophetic opinion, a comparatively better business plan in years to come will be a release-focused profit model (similar to the ‘patronage model’ and more or less the same as the ‘ransom method’ except with a prettier name) In fact, you can mark this down as an Ultimate Solution™ to the digital piracy problem.

Announce your product, provide a demo/teaser for free, declare that the real thing won’t be released until you receive a certain amount of money, and when you do release it, go ahead and release it for free download, accepting the fact that people are going to propagate copies amongst each other anyway.

There is much to be appreciated from this. First, it focuses the money-making on something the developer is able to control–initial release. You do not even attempt to control distribution. Second, it favors continued productivity, rather than making one thing and expecting to milk it for the rest of your life.

It would be adapted easily to most enterprises that are affected by copyright infringement. Software of just about any kind– no problem. TV series… no problem.
Music will be a little different though. Teasers aren’t feasible for that, so musicians will have to release a greater proportion of their recorded work before they can expect to convince people that the rest of their stuff is worth holding for ransom, and they will have to make the majority of their money from live performances.
The movie business would be significantly altered by this model. Theaters would have to work a lot differently.

There are, of course, some details that would have to be worked out, like how people would get their money back from canceled projects and how much time people should expect to wait before the product is delivered, but these are relatively minor details.

A new Press Secretary.

With all the names being thrown around for possible replacements for Scott McClellan, the White House Press Secretary who is resigning, there is one name that should be considered very seriously: Kim du Toit.

He lists his exemplary qualifications here.

Happy Hitler Day!

It’s 4/20, which is Hitler’s birthday, the anniversary of the Columbine shootings, and the Oklahoma city bombing. No better memorial could be given to these acts than to make sure that this kind of crap doesn’t happen again.

If you run an art school, check your applicants to see if they have blogs with disturbing politics on them. And let them in if they do. Their art will be interesting, and at least they won’t be killing people.

If you run the sort of place that sells ammonium nitrate fertilizer, get to know your customers. If a first-time buyer doesn’t have a farm and is buying a lot of fertilizer, there might be a serious problem.

If your head of state is calling for the extermination of the Jews, please assassinate him.

If your kids are going to a public school, pull them out. The vast majority of kids survive it with only a modicum of emotional scarring. However, even though the chance that they’ll be driven to a homicidal frenzy is very small, it’s not a chance you should take.

And of course, many of these outrages can happen on short notice, which is part of why massive civilian gun ownership is so important.

Amnesty International: Masters of Moral Equivalency

There is nothing quite as indulgent for an international news reporter as finding an excuse to equate the United States with places like China, Iran, and Vietnam.
BBC News carried this Amnesty International press release, which wailed about the number of countries in the world that still use the death penalty.

However, Secretary-General Irene Khan said in a statement that the death penalty remained the “ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights”.

It contravened the “essence of human values”, and was often applied in a discriminatory manner, followed unfair trials or was applied for political reasons, she said.

It is with the utmost gravity that I must report that Secretary-General Irene Khan is an idiot. It can hardly be called an ultimate irreversible denial of human rights to kill someone for egregiously pretending that said rights don’t exist. If anything, the proper use of the death penalty protects human rights.

The concept of human rights ends in a dead end if you take the position that everybody always has them, and cannot do anything to forfeit them. In order for it to work, you have to understand that the moment you violate a particular right for someone else, you suspend it for yourself until amends are made. If you don’t understand this, then you are essentially excusing criminals for their actions by refusing to stop them.

For first-degree murder or multiple cases of other degrees of murder, the death penalty is entirely appropriate. It is the only punishment that fully answers the crime, and an excellent safeguard against that person commiting such crimes again.

Okay, let’s assume that you’re one of those people who says the death penalty would be fine if it could be applied fairly with protections against political, racial, or any other kind of unfair discrimination. It sounds very much like you want to eliminate the human factor completely from the sentencing process. Because people are biased, people can’t be involved, right? All death sentences would be decided through an omniscient Flowchart that lays out which circumstances lead to death. That Flowchart would have to be made publicly available, and you know what happens then? A multitude of special interest groups will jump onto the Flowchart like a pack of wolves, and push for amendments to the Flowchart until it is more convoluted than a public school district’s protocol for firing teachers with tenure. Before long you’ll be desperately begging to go back to the days of yore, when it was pretty much up to the jury.

Just to make it clear, I support the death penalty in the following cases:
First degree murder
Multiple or repeated counts of other degrees of murder
Child molestation
Multiple or repeated counts of rape

And of course, I support the unrestricted proliferation of firearms and the use of deadly force in the defense of self or others, which would make a host of lesser crimes potentially life threatening to criminals.

But you in Europe, with your pathetically backward and primitive understanding of human rights, protect the enemies of civilization and sow the seeds of your own destruction. Do you want to live or not?

I propose this Constitutional amendment.

The sum total of all taxes required to be paid by each individual person shall not exceed ten percent of that person’s income.

—

Why ten percent? Well, I think an upper limit on taxes is a good idea. And it shouldn’t be very high. So ten percent seemed like a good number. I figure that asking for more money than God is probably blasphemy anyway.

A Precision Guided Humor Assignment: Solving the WMD Trailer Mystery

Just what were they really making in those Winnebagos of Death?

Reinvention

This is the George, formerly of georgeguy.blogspot.com (now defunct). I deleted my old blog in a fit of rage directed at Google (They being the owners of Blogger/Blogspot). I later decided that would be silly and achieve nothing. At one time I had a fabulous idea to monitor the Daily Kos and respond to all the most outrageous postings there, hoping that Kos would take notice of me, call me an idiot, and alert the rest of his enemies to my existence so that they could all unite under my banner.

Delusions of grandeur, they were. A reason I canceled my blog was because I thought that blogging had eaten into my work on my webcomic, Thinginess of Chaos, and I was simply trying to do too many things at once–and something had to go. But I realize now that my ideas are just too important to keep to myself. You see, delusions of grandeur are important, because sometimes they become self-fulfilling and are no longer delusions. Imagined greatness can be the first step to real greatness.

If I had given up on blogging I would have ended up trying to deliver all my important messages through my comic and I’d just end up messing things up. That wouldn’t be fair. So instead, I bring you my new blog.

Why this title? I don’t know, it seemed cool. That’s honestly why I chose it. Some may think it blasphemous to call oneself a prophet. Here are the first four definitions of “Prophet” from the American Heritage Dictionary:

1. A person who speaks by divine inspiration or as the interpreter through whom the will of a god is expressed.
2. A person gifted with profound moral insight and exceptional powers of expression.
3. A predictor; a soothsayer.
4. The chief spokesperson of a movement or cause.

Number 1 is the definition most theologically-minded people think of– a prophet is someone who speaks on God’s behalf. I can’t say I’ve received any grand visions. I don’t know for sure if God is actually telling me to say anything. I do know that something is driving me to speak when I see a new crisis on the news, and since I haven’t ruled out God yet, I’m going to give myself the benefit of the doubt and say I am a prophet.
Number 2 is easy. Do I have profound moral insight and exceptional powers of expression? Well, I don’t have a criminal record so the first bit is certainly possible, and I have been praised as a good writer before, so the latter bit is definitely true.
Number 3 is also simple. Much of predicting the future is simply a matter of knowing human behavior and calculating the future impact of present decisions. I can’t say I’ve received direct divine revelation of the future, but I have paid a little bit of attention to history.
Number 4 is easy too, but I have to say what neofederalism is now, which is the relevant movement. Essentially it’s a variation of New Federalism, which was actually one of Nixon’s things. There are New Federalist movements which I can’t claim to be the chief spokesperson. The main goal of neofederalism is to attempt to bring as much government as possible back to the most local level possible, so that people in California are no longer afforded the ability to vote for laws that Pennsylvania, that voters in Philadelphia are no longer able to wield power over the residents of Lewistown. That would be a huge accomplishment in itself. And of course, it is also an attempt to bring American neoconservative philosophy full circle, back to our foundational roots.

There will be real content upcoming, and cartoons.