Virtual Thought

I was talking to some friends of mine about the various levels of covert surveillance they have their children under.

Apparently, waiting up in a bathrobe as your child sneaks through the backdoor at three in the morning isn’t enough… now we should listen in on our child’s IM conversations and install cameras to watch their behavior at the door.

I am not a parent. I have little real-world experience regarding concern for my child’s safety. I can imagine that I’d want to do almost everything in my power to ensure that my child escaped the rigors of childhood free form unspeakable horror.

This, however, goes too far. I think one of the goals of raising children is to raise responsible adults who can function well in society.

A while back, Boing Boing had a little write-up about a 92-year-old blogger named Donald Crowdis. Mr. Crowdis’ blog is thoughtful and funny, but, really, after reading that write-up and every post up to that date I immediately forgot about his blog. I meant to track it, but this was just before I started using an RSS reader so I had a tendency to “lose” interesting blogs.

Boing Boing wrote about Mr. Crowdis again today because of his post, It Bothers Me That I Have To Go.

Seriously, I read his post and almost cried at work. I had to go do other things for a while, walk around, stretch my legs.

...[M]y writing bothers me, because I have to be careful to be legible, even to myself. I am quite sure I have had a stroke (the final medical diagnosis is still pending)... I know I must go fairly soon. I just don’t like the idea.
I’ve floated on the remark “Been there, done that” for some time now, but the notion that the moment is approaching when I can no longer say this bothers me. The truth is, I don’t want to go.
There are many reasons. For too long I have behaved as if I could postpone going indefinitely, and thus have so many things that I must do first. I don’t want my successors to find out how much I could have done that isn’t done, not by a long shot. There are numerous notes and letters I must write. There are places I’ve wanted to travel, but never had the chance. Actually, each of you can, if you think yourself into my age, fill out the list. At least you can try to understand why I say that I hate to go.

For some reason, reading this post, looking at his smiling picture, thinking about him writing this post at 9:30 at night while his wife is in a nursing home, while he sits in front of his computer having recently suffered a stroke and unable to write… I felt crushed by this overwhelming sadness: imagining him, plaintive, explaining to his anonymous readers that the idea of his death scares him… it’s too much!

After work, I came home and was puttering around and, for whatever reason, decided to re-read his post. This time, though, I just out and out wept. I wish I could give this guy a hug. I really wish he didn’t have to die, or, at least, not be scared. It makes me want to run around screaming… I dunno.

BTW: Beware the comments on his post. There are some good ones, but mostly the chaffe splits fairly evenly into bland new agey-ness, Christian Godliness, fuck-it-all and listen-to-ME-being-scared-of-death… nothing that would comfort me were I in his position.

So I’m talking to a friend of mine about building a NAS and, possibly, a media server. We were commiserating on the state of DRM and how it limits our choices: Since I’m an iTunes user I have to use Apple TV to enjoy my media on my AV system in my living room since no other product can work with Apple DRM… dammit. By the same token, I’m not about to use Vista and its crippling of the end-user experience in the name of protecting content.

He steered me towards an ArsTechnica story about how DRM isn’t about piracy and is, in fact, a way of creating false scarcities in an effort to ensure traditional revenue channels. Of course, the flies in the face of my growing admiration for agalmics in relation to digital media of all types. I mean, c’mon: I can perfectly reproduce any digital thing I want at little or no cost… so why are we applying traditional economic models here?

The two arguments I hear the most go thusly:

1. If you are not paying someone for every digital copy of media you are stealing.
2. The content creators would make no money without a structure for generating revenue.

These are both a bit stinky:

1. Am I stealing when multiple people come over and watch the DVD that I purchased, or listen to the music that I own? What if I lend it to them? What if, heaven forbid, I make a copy for myself because CDs have a tendency to not survive for very long? What if I bought a movie on DVD and want to enjoy it on my iPod, or stream it from my in-house NAS to my TV? None of that is stealing.
2. I differentiate here between content creators and content producers. Content creators are the actual artists who, y’know, write stuff; content producers are the ones who distribute and try to control all that content… in this case the RIAA. Who would we want to protect, the creators or the producers? The creators of course. Who does our current system protect? The producers!

But I digress… I’ve heard people question why Microsoft would bow to the RIAA on this since, really, it’s Microsoft that should be in control of this relationship (since it owns 95% of the machines in the market it can use its position to dictate to everyone else how they’re gonna play in that market). Instead, though, MS says, “Okay, we’ll make everything more fragile and jump through all these hoops and force all the hardware makers to jump through these fragile little hoops as well.” Why is that?

I think it’s the side benefit to MS that makes this interesting: Vista’s content-protection scheme squeezes out the open source hardware support necessary for people to run open-source OSes on their desktops.

Since open source hardware drivers, by definition, can’t keep proprietary content protection schemes a secret, as required by the licenses, and because the licenses themselves cost money… no more hardware support for open source OSes. Microsoft gets a bit of a win on this one.

But where are the consumers in all this? Nowhere.

Robert Anton Wilson passed away today. Good writeup over at Boing Boing.

I can’t quite believe that he’s gone. I can’t quite read the last blog entry without getting too much of a sense of time passing by.

Fnord!

A variety of truly dumb patents are romping around in IP(intellectual property) space… apparently these people are innovating within a process, but I don’t buy it:

• Linked lists (probably going to challenged because of the original linked list patent)
• Sandwiches
• Swinging side-to-side

So, yes, indeed, I am against current patent laws guarding “innovation”. Argh. So frustrating.

Suppose I just bought a brand new video iPod. Naturally, I want to be able to watch several of my expensive DVDs on the thing since, y’know, I bought those DVDs so I could watch the movies on them. Naturally a few businesses would spring up that would fill the need of ripping these DVDs and putting them on the iPod for me so I don’t have to run Handbrake on them myself or anything. That sounds like a good idea.

Except the fucking MPAA thinks that this pre-ripping service is illegal.

What a bunch of horse puckey that is. See, the fucking MPAA thinks that you should have to purchase the same piece of media every time there is a new format. Too bad that you have a video iPod, a PSP, a media center PC and a DVD player and you’d have to, effectively, buy the same piece of media four times, one for each format... that’s the way it is, says the fucking MPAA.

Well, I disagree. The fucking MPAA thinks that this is wrong. They enforce this through the DMCA. But is it really wrong in, say, any kind of real moral or ethical sense? No, of course not. They’re worried about their bottom line.

See, the DVD costs $18.99… the vid for the iPod costs $9.99… the PSP movie costs $13.99… and the media center PC is, probably, out of luck (crappy video download services notwithstanding). So the fucking MPAA is seeing about $43 in revenue because I had to buy the same piece of media in three different formats (I couldn’t even get an acceptable format for the media center PC).

Now take the case where I buy the DVD and I rip it into the different formats I would need to play it on my media players… the fucking MPAA would get $18.99… and that’s it! Because I would take it on myself to copy the movie (which I’ve purchased!) into several different formats.

The difference ($25!) is between media distribution and format distribution. The movie is the media… what it “comes in” is a format. I don’t buy formats, I buy media.

If I buy a toaster in the USA and take it to Europe, do I pay full price for another toaster because the plugs and voltage are different? If a city re-paves the roads, do I buy another car? If I buy new socks, do I have to buy new shoes? These are all cases where some ancillary fact of the product I already own has changed around… and, yet, I don’t have to re-purchase the base product itself. In all these cases, the answer is, “No.”

Then why should I buy another format when I already own the movie?

What I’m doing by converting the format of the media I’ve already purchased is fair use. I’m making a backup. If I photocopy the first few chapters of a book I’ve purchased and carry around only that pice of it because it’s easier for me to use… fair use! If I rip my entire CD collection to MP3 so I can transport it more easily inside my iPod… fair use! And this, of course, is no different.

Makes me want to scream.

So I’m lurking around digg (like ya do) and I came across the Most Flirtatious Avatar? story.

So I slouched on over to see this flirtatious avatar:

This fascinates me (it helps that she’s pretty). WTF? I love innovative advertising and I love spotting viral corporate advertising (herding cats anyone?) but this is something else… is this exploitive? Was this on purpose? Did she have a director telling her to mouth words, smile, shift, lean forward, all that? To what purpose?

Am I blowing this out of proportion?