Just to be clear, the authority model of the US is that all rights are inherent in the people, no granting is required. The people, through their representatives, then authorize the government to exercise selected powers, in the people's name.
Which makes your point even more important. It's not merely that our government has "forgotten" our rights, they are illegally exceeding them. They have broken our agreement.
I am definitely one of those who feel that the original intent of copyright law has been so distorted that it is now possible to have it serve its opposite purpose: to prevent, rather than promote, the useful arts.
I am with the author in spirit, but not in the letter. This article does little to advance the cause. It is largely just than a collection of raw assertions, with little reliance on authority or logic that I can see.
What does shouting "liar, liar, pants on fire" truly accomplish? Very little. Especially since the author has not established any examples of lying anywhere that I can see. Congressman Waxman clearly believes that copyright law is the key to funding innovation. That is a difference of opinion, not lying.
So, please, let us move on. It is very easy to lay blame and to critique. Much more difficult is to propose a solution.
We have a problem between two communities: the entrenched copyright-holding community, and the consumer. What can be done to bring these two groups to a better understanding of each other's needs?
First, I think we can agree that copyright is a good thing. The right to control copying, after all, is the basis upon which open source licensing rests.
Secondly, I think we can agree that getting something for nothing is unsustainable over the long term. People ought to pay for what they use. None of us would last very long if we never charged anyone for our time and effort.
Thirdly, I think we can agree that the current business model for monetizing the right to copy doesn't work very well. Copyright holders try to control distribution and use, which is impossible. Consumer scofflaws use content they haven't paid for, which is unfair.
Add these together, and I think it's pretty obvious that what we need is a consumer-friendly way to pay for the content we use. If content creators were compensated IN PROPORTION to how widely used their works are distributed, they would want people to use the internet to share.
It sounds simple, but it hasn't been cracked yet. Can we propose such a consumer-friendly payment system that would be lucrative enough to draw the next generation of talent away from the old, out-moded system, and into the new?
"So if the voters can't see the counting then there is not [any] point in holding elections!"
This is perhaps a bit overstated. The practical reality is that any time thousands of things have to be counted, there are going to be issues of trust regardless of any counting method used.
In the first place, each individual voter certainly doesn't want to see each individual vote counted. They will delegate that to an organization such as an Electoral Board to handle the operation. So, that's a layer of trust.
Secondly, the local government has to select and train people to help with the vote operation itself. Those people need to be honest brokers, and not rig the system from the inside. Individual voters aren't involved in this selection or training, so, there's another layer of trust.
Before a person can vote in the first place, they have to be officially recognized by the government. So, all the people who create the voter rolls, and maintain them, they need to be trusted, too.
By the time we get down to the actual machine used to do the counting, one realizes that the real security of the process is based on people. Whether the method of counting is by hand, by optical scan, by software, by voice, or whatever method, people are needed to validate that the count was done properly. So, last of all, the voter needs to trust the people in the polling places, and the auditing groups that verifies those results, all the way up the line.
All that said, I agree that having software-recorded votes is an ultimately opaque process, and that does make me uncomfortable. Doing a re-count means going back and re-verifying the checksums of each of the votes recorded to the primary and backup media, so there is some pretty good assurance that the data gets stored. However, the opaqueness doesn't let a human re-verify that the original intent was selected properly in the first place.
I think the best answer here is to use electronic _ballot_ machines to generate dual machine- and human-readable ballots, and then automate the counting via optical scan. Such a system could be kept very honest by pulling random samples out during the vote, and running dual machine- and human-counted results.
I am a volunteer Officer of Election in the city of Fairfax, VA. We use electronic voting machines. The machines arrive at the polling place completely sealed in plastic cases. There is a tamper seal on the lid embossed with a serial number.
The procedure for putting the voting machines into the cases and sealing them involves multiple people, and multiple, hand-written copies of the serial numbers. These are all verified during the un-packing operation by a different group of people.
The machines themselves have additional seals and safeguards with serial information (such as the number of votes cast at the last election). These values are written down in hand from election to election, and the are cross-checked and compared to the values in the machine during the un-packing operation.
The ballot is electronically stored on data cards separately supervised. Besides being cryptographically secured, the physical access to these cards is secured.
Anyone interested physical tampering with the case would have to duplicate the tamper seals and deal with the encryption, software updates, and ballot card access issues.
I guess this could be done, but my take is it probably couldn't be done by a single person or group. You'd have to have insider help.
People have thought this problem through. Just saying something is possible doesn't mean it's likely.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Dave Marney.
Re: Constitutional grants
Just to be clear, the authority model of the US is that all rights are inherent in the people, no granting is required. The people, through their representatives, then authorize the government to exercise selected powers, in the people's name.
Which makes your point even more important. It's not merely that our government has "forgotten" our rights, they are illegally exceeding them. They have broken our agreement.
Re: I think I missed something
The rules for spending the public's money are different than those of a private company. Providing an open bidding process is one of them.
A rather thin rebuttal
I am definitely one of those who feel that the original intent of copyright law has been so distorted that it is now possible to have it serve its opposite purpose: to prevent, rather than promote, the useful arts.
I am with the author in spirit, but not in the letter. This article does little to advance the cause. It is largely just than a collection of raw assertions, with little reliance on authority or logic that I can see.
What does shouting "liar, liar, pants on fire" truly accomplish? Very little. Especially since the author has not established any examples of lying anywhere that I can see. Congressman Waxman clearly believes that copyright law is the key to funding innovation. That is a difference of opinion, not lying.
So, please, let us move on. It is very easy to lay blame and to critique. Much more difficult is to propose a solution.
We have a problem between two communities: the entrenched copyright-holding community, and the consumer. What can be done to bring these two groups to a better understanding of each other's needs?
First, I think we can agree that copyright is a good thing. The right to control copying, after all, is the basis upon which open source licensing rests.
Secondly, I think we can agree that getting something for nothing is unsustainable over the long term. People ought to pay for what they use. None of us would last very long if we never charged anyone for our time and effort.
Thirdly, I think we can agree that the current business model for monetizing the right to copy doesn't work very well. Copyright holders try to control distribution and use, which is impossible. Consumer scofflaws use content they haven't paid for, which is unfair.
Add these together, and I think it's pretty obvious that what we need is a consumer-friendly way to pay for the content we use. If content creators were compensated IN PROPORTION to how widely used their works are distributed, they would want people to use the internet to share.
It sounds simple, but it hasn't been cracked yet. Can we propose such a consumer-friendly payment system that would be lucrative enough to draw the next generation of talent away from the old, out-moded system, and into the new?
Re: The point of elections
"So if the voters can't see the counting then there is not [any] point in holding elections!"
This is perhaps a bit overstated. The practical reality is that any time thousands of things have to be counted, there are going to be issues of trust regardless of any counting method used.
In the first place, each individual voter certainly doesn't want to see each individual vote counted. They will delegate that to an organization such as an Electoral Board to handle the operation. So, that's a layer of trust.
Secondly, the local government has to select and train people to help with the vote operation itself. Those people need to be honest brokers, and not rig the system from the inside. Individual voters aren't involved in this selection or training, so, there's another layer of trust.
Before a person can vote in the first place, they have to be officially recognized by the government. So, all the people who create the voter rolls, and maintain them, they need to be trusted, too.
By the time we get down to the actual machine used to do the counting, one realizes that the real security of the process is based on people. Whether the method of counting is by hand, by optical scan, by software, by voice, or whatever method, people are needed to validate that the count was done properly. So, last of all, the voter needs to trust the people in the polling places, and the auditing groups that verifies those results, all the way up the line.
All that said, I agree that having software-recorded votes is an ultimately opaque process, and that does make me uncomfortable. Doing a re-count means going back and re-verifying the checksums of each of the votes recorded to the primary and backup media, so there is some pretty good assurance that the data gets stored. However, the opaqueness doesn't let a human re-verify that the original intent was selected properly in the first place.
I think the best answer here is to use electronic _ballot_ machines to generate dual machine- and human-readable ballots, and then automate the counting via optical scan. Such a system could be kept very honest by pulling random samples out during the vote, and running dual machine- and human-counted results.
Voting machines have tamper seals
I am a volunteer Officer of Election in the city of Fairfax, VA. We use electronic voting machines. The machines arrive at the polling place completely sealed in plastic cases. There is a tamper seal on the lid embossed with a serial number.
The procedure for putting the voting machines into the cases and sealing them involves multiple people, and multiple, hand-written copies of the serial numbers. These are all verified during the un-packing operation by a different group of people.
The machines themselves have additional seals and safeguards with serial information (such as the number of votes cast at the last election). These values are written down in hand from election to election, and the are cross-checked and compared to the values in the machine during the un-packing operation.
The ballot is electronically stored on data cards separately supervised. Besides being cryptographically secured, the physical access to these cards is secured.
Anyone interested physical tampering with the case would have to duplicate the tamper seals and deal with the encryption, software updates, and ballot card access issues.
I guess this could be done, but my take is it probably couldn't be done by a single person or group. You'd have to have insider help.
People have thought this problem through. Just saying something is possible doesn't mean it's likely.