Prokofy Neva 's Techdirt Comments
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On the post: Second Life Gang Using Copyright To Stop Discussion Of Its Tactics?
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On the post: Second Life Gang Using Copyright To Stop Discussion Of Its Tactics?
Prokofy Neva ( profile ), 04 Feb, 2010 @ 11:43pmDMCA Used on Virtual Whistleblowers
Of course, TechDirt has no credibility in publishing this story as you have little respect for property rights yourself, and you only get interested in DMCA takedown stories because you want to undermine property rights and bang on corporations, not because you care about journalism. Consistently, your stories about Second Life have involved whining about how SL hasn't opensourced its code to your satisfaction, or hasn't undermined intellectual property sufficiently so your copyleftist friends can "share". This is not what this particular story is about.
The Justice League United, a role-playing group in Second Life, first used their takedown tactics on my blog at secondthoughts.typepad.com when I published the documents leaked by a character who infiltrated the JLU organization. Various file-sharing sites like sharebee also got the takedown notices when the Alphaville Herald later published stories linking to the amassed material of this vigilante group, then the Herald itself had the material removed too after not complying with the notices (I didn't comply either but maintained that DMCA notices were being filed frivolously in a chilling effect on investigative journalism).
I published the JLU document that contained the "brainstorming notes" about a scripted device designed to work with the SL client in gathering data on avatars, piping it to a third-party wiki, and then *making it available on demand inworld to officers of JLU*. THAT is what is at issue. The device itself, designed to violate privacy and scrape and store information including chat lots offworld for ue later inworld, violates the TOS (and RL civil rights).
The Herald has it muddled -- journalists should be insisting on the right to report on public speech inworld, just as they do in real life, especially on public matters in the public interest. The vigilante antics of the JLU aren't a private matter, but impact the public interest as they have taken it upon themselves to spy on their fellow users outside the TOS.
But we should not reinforced a pernicious reading of the TOS in violation of First Amendment protections that would imply that journalists -- or Justice Leaguers -- don't have the right to copy and/or report on public speech in a virtual world on third-party blogs. Indeed, given the closed nature of the private corporation Linden Lab and the closed nature of these vigilante groups, it's the only way you can function. It's a classic whistle-blower's role, and it's a role that not only journalists or bloggers can claim, but citizens' groups, too.
What's in violation of the TOS is scraping the speech and then piping it back inworld to use to harass, follow, speciously abuse-report, etc. people they don't like, not the publication of chat on third-party blogs -- because Linden Lab has no jurisdiction over third-party blogs.
I believe my publication of their plans to spy on people is like a RL equivalent of an expose of a quasi-official group, or non-state actor operating with the tactic consent of a state, that spies on people so as to violate their civil rights. It's not "publication of a design document of a business" which is what JLU says it is (they elevate their RP group to the level of a business and their documents as copyrighted invention documents, but it's surely a stretch).
This may all seem silly and superficial and "in a game," but that's because tekkies don't grasp the larger issues here, that as communications virtualize more and more (in the cloud, on social media, etc.) and mega private corporations with millions of users gain more and more control of people's online communications, civil rights are being violated, just as they are violated if the U.S. government taps telephone conversations. It doesn't become less of a rights issue just because it's in a virtual world, or a private corporation enables their special friends in a vigilante group to spy on others.
Focusing on the fact that the JLU itself violates the copyright of Marvel comics is a distraction -- spying on people with scripted devices in a virtual world to violate their civil rights is wrong whether or not you yourself violate copyright; invoking DMCA takedown notices to stop whistle-blowers who protest this violation of both TOS and RL legal privacy right is frivolous and pernicious. -
On the post: Jaron Lanier Gets Old And Crotchety; Maybe He Should Kick Those Kids Off His Virtual Reality Lawn
Prokofy Neva ( profile ), 15 Jan, 2010 @ 12:33amT-Shirts Do Not Feed Your Family
All you folks claiming (falsely) that musicians can make money through Creative Commons on something other than t-shirt sales please give us names, spreadsheets, facts, figures. It's fake.
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On the post: Jaron Lanier Gets Old And Crotchety; Maybe He Should Kick Those Kids Off His Virtual Reality Lawn
Prokofy Neva ( profile ), 15 Jan, 2010 @ 12:30amGood for Lanier's Fight Against Collectivism!
I can see the bastion of technocommunism, TechDirt, that collective farm of Silicon Valley tech, is really put on the run by Jaron Lanier's successful and increasingly publicized new book.
Good!
Indeed we *are* sharecroppers on the Google system which *you* benefit from as tech bloggers but we ordinary people do not benefit from except for a few pennies for our blogs. Sure, people "share" for all kinds of spiritual and psychological and sociological reasons, but you need to get paid and make a living, too, and not everybody can make that living by snide web 2.0 copy-writing.
I just went to hear Lanier speak, and he doesn't at all hate the Internet. He speaks in a balanced and rational way (unlike you) about the need for the Internet and the web to connect people. What he opposes is the *collectivism* of web 2.0. And he's right to oppose that Bolshevik destructiveness that has killed the music and news media industries and only benefited Google. A course correction is sorely needed.
People do not "hate" micropayments; tekkies who usurp the right to speak for people among the unelected wired hate micropayments that threaten their power. I love micropayments. They're great. They work great on Facebook or in Second Life. So let's have them all over. Once people start *getting them* they will not find it so hard to *give them* -- duh!
You're making the same mistake he describes others as making in confusing the quantity of music shared with quality.
In fact, we *are* going to change the architecture of the Internet away from you lords of the cloud that first invented and possessed it so that it can be made to serve other people than you. -
On the post: Linden Lab Gets Legal With Helpful Resource On Using Second Life For Education
Prokofy Neva ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2009 @ 11:27amPaid Educational Consultants, Not Victims of Bullies
We can always count on TechDirt to post pieces that undermine copyright. Would there be a case of trademark assertion that you'd approve of?! We saw TechDirt before banging on SL over the question of "bulk permissions," and your flogging of that issue did a great deal of harm in inciting a determined minority of copyleftist coders to demand bulk permissions, which led to bugs that caused theft exploits, and created a climate of impunity only increasing the theft of IP in SL.
LL didn't just register these marks yesterday -- they registered them 18 months ago and notified the community on their blog repeatedly and there were extensive conversations about it. There was a means to register inworld use of the term "SL" but it was made clear that "Second Life" and "SL" could not be used on third-party websites or products because these terms were trademarked. And it's *ok* to trademark intellectual property.
In fact, there were several very high-profile cases in the last year of SL community businesses that used to have "SL" in their names and changed them due to this announcement. The independent online newspaper "Second Life Herald" changed to the "Alphaville Herald". The shopping site SLexchange.com changed to Xstreet and then was bought out by Linden Lab and became XStreetsl.com. The SL educators were well aware of these developments; they just thought they were exempt because they're special.
I was one of many residents that changed my site formerly using these terms. Why not? I expect LL to protect the copyright of me and my tenants, and I see no reason why I shouldn't respect theirs.
It's HUGELY misleading to portray the education wiki as somehow some exclusively non-profit and non-commercial enterprise. Nothing of the kind. Many of the people calling themselves "educators" in SL in fact are *paid consultants* in sole proprietor or small business hustling their consulting around the software -- some of them very highly paid -- who make a *business* selling educational software and "solutions". They have a vested interest as a class to keep their work tools free or low cost, so they constitute a very aggressive lobby on behalf of open-source and against this trademark effort, but they're hiding behind "service to the community".
There are also educational insitutions in SL that in fact have HUGE grants from the government or private foundations to perform their projects in SL and they also have *a vested interest* in having all the software, knowledge bases, content, etc. be free so that they can maximize *their grants and their own position*.
This is not a tale of a victim of some brutal and rapacious and indifferent company harming innocent volunteers in non-profits. It's a story of fiercely competing businesses using the slogan of education around consulting services more than anything else. -
On the post: How Reuters Should Be Responding To The AP's Suicide
Prokofy Neva ( profile ), 27 Jul, 2009 @ 05:50pmSomeone Should Sit Down Masnick & Explain AP is Non-Profit
I think it will be interesting to see how AP does with this, and I wish them well, because news-gathering is work, and it needs to be paid for, just like programming code is paid for, and techdirt.com never questions *that* -- but just looks for the Internet to provide tekkies with lots of free work tools and free content so they can charge consulting fees on top of that.
DRM isn't the evil thing techdirt imagines, it's just that it's evil *for this class of people* who need free work tools and content from Google to support their consulting and widgeteering businesses.
The idea of fair use, i.e. quoting 250 words out of a passage, was not intended to enable people to sell ads on top of the fairly-used material. This skewed and copyleftist tendentious notion of what "fair use" may be having a meme ride now, but it won't stand up in court eventually. "Fair use" was intended -- hey, just like Creative Commons!!! -- to enable people to share and share alike works of art and literature and film by referencing rather than copying wholesale, which would then lead to both knowledge of works in the culture in general, and sales of the full work or rights to the works -- which is required to enable content producers *to make a living*. (There are only a tiny number of people who can make a living the Free way, by selling books and taking lecture fees to induce others to Free up their content lol).
This Free tendentious notion of "fair use" cynically takes that basic notion of sharing without a copyright fee in "fair use" -- and cynically turn it on its head, in order to make not only el-cheapo aggregator sites and spam sites use the links against ads, but all kinds of bloggers grabbing the RSS feed. In fact all of this together does drain away revenue, and the idea that it leads to traffic back to AP or the original sites paying AP like newspapers to view the ads isn't backed by any factual reports. It doesn't do that as anyway can see who has a website and looks at how traffic works.
The AP is a non-profit organization. Yes. It is not some evil imperialist capitalist media magnate. It's a *service*. Other news operations pay per story because they don't have the budget for bureaus and correspondents and editors everywhere. AP then survives on the payment from those articles. The aggregators and others defeat the simple means of this simple non-profit service from making a living *to cover its costs* -- something that Creative Commons and Freetards should appreciate more than they do on techdirt. So it's really quite disgraceful to see a writer on a website making its money off ads, inciting the mob to get commercial sites to kick a non-profit service in the teeth.
The nasty tone and level of snark in this article lets me know that this story is like a lot of stories: class warfare, by a class of people who fear loss of their free work tools and "liberation" of other people's content (bloggers and coders).
The tone alone is a giveaway, but the misrepresentation of "fair use" as a concept and the failure to understand that AP is a non-profit making entity add to the faulty argumentation.
The biggest hole in this argument, however is this very vague and murky and subjective concept, always invoked by those insisting on Free work tools, of "value add". Huh? Could you define that? What is "value added" about paying an ad agency that sells links and key words, as Google does? The revenue for online ads has nowhere near matched what the old paper ads used to be.
Most of the revenue in the Google system seems to accrue to Google itself in a really stunning serflike pyramid where legions of blogger-serfs earn pennies, providing the free tillable land of their blog space for Google to sell ad space for free on. Some miniscule percentage of bloggers can make anything remotely like "a living" from the Adsense. Those buying the ads often get disappointing results except in a very select niche of tech services. Value?
I really don't think there's anything magical or permanent about the Google ad agency scheme and its hangers-on. Social media outside of the Googlian empire could seriously challenge it once they figure out how to give away the same sort of serflike rights of AdSense to users of Twitter and Facebook to incentivize them -- and add the real-time and select-my-followed magic sauce.
But if none of these bad arguments sunk this techdirt screed being seized on now by freebies and value-vandalizers destroying the news business, the last argument should: the call for rivals to kick this ostensibly "losing" AP in the teeth and "liberate" and "vandalize" further by offering the RSS headlines for free.
Therefore, while supposedly touting "positive value," Masnick is inciting "negative value" by urging everyone to to liberate and steal moar. -
On the post: EFF Agrees That Copyright In Second Life Is A Mess
Prokofy Neva ( profile ), 04 May, 2009 @ 08:04amTake it to Open Sim, Catharina
Um, I can see YOUR problem. YOUR problem is obvious. You are advocating overriding property rights and forcibly defaulting to copyleftist-driven theft and trying to cover that up with "ease" and "choice".
A petition signed by 129 goofs in their mom's basement? Please. Another petition with the opposite of your copyleftist cause would give the lie to that -- guess I'll have to start one. A Linden coming to help implement this? No way. M Linden, fortunately, isn't so stupid as to give away the store.
It's not just about newbies; it's about anybody wanting to have *choice*. Choice is not given by taking all choice away, i.e. forcing an opt-out in order to make putting in permissions an option. Defaulting to NO PERMISSIONS is a forced march with only an opt-out recourse to recover one's copyright. The overwhelming majority of people WANT the permissions on their and respect them, even if your tiny sect doesn't.
Your entire cause is given the lie by the actual facts of SL. When tekkies with ideological fixations like yourself do make freebies, in fact, more often than not, they put them "copy/no transfer" because they are horrified at the idea of anybody selling their precious freebies.
And in fact, the overwhelming majority of content creators would be horrified to find what you are up to here, Catharina, they haven't been informed, they can't be expected to take part in the wonky tekkie JIRA, and you are trying to put one over on them. Stop it. Take your copyleftism to Open Sim where they don't care about permissions and IP.
Keep your paws off Second Life. -
On the post: EFF Agrees That Copyright In Second Life Is A Mess
Prokofy Neva ( profile ), 04 May, 2009 @ 06:40amEFF Needs to Keep Their Paws of SL
Catharina, don't misrepresent yourself here. You can't unilaterally force something into the viewer with only 95 votes, and the Linden that implied this was being undertaken in fact has left Linden Lab. You evidently represent a tiny minority of copyleftists in Second Life. It's absolutely right that the default of objects is that indeed they are on closed permissions, i.e. proprietary to prevent especially newbies from unwittingly losing their creations by inadvertently giving them away. All the flags are perfectly flexible in the current iteration to signal any intent from sharing to selling so there's no need to monkey with it under the case of "choice" - the choice is already there, with built-in protection against un-choice.
If you want to give away everything for free and make it copyable, you're able to do that with the existing tools and don't have to forcibly impose the Freetard Republic on everyone in Second Life.
Once again, I see evidence that the "Electronic Freedom Foundation" if in fact they are embracing this, isn't really about freedom and copyright but about undermining the link between creativity and commerce, just like Creative Commons and Lawrence Lessig. No thanks.
Let's go back to the urban legend that sparked this latest spasm. This idea that you have to ask permission for every single screenshot of a scene in SL is patently ridiculous. It's a concoction by lawyers looking for work in virtual worlds, and has been hyped by several lawyers in particular on the conference circuit of late -- recently a conference at Stanford flogged this concept, which is why you seepeople freaking about it now. There is no lawsuit testing this. There is certainly no court case testing this. No one has ever launched anything anywhere near a lawsuit against someone taking a screenshot in SL of a scene as a violation of copyright, although they have launched lawsuits, which have been settled out of court, about copyright infringement of specific creations like clothing and furniture.
No, this is all Lawrence Lessig's work. He was happy to flog copyright for the little guy in Second Life when he saw it as an engine to challenge what he saw as a powerful and potentially very popular software company making a 3-D world, and go against the tide of games like World of Warcraft where the game gods own everything. But as soon as people then enjoyed that freedom and the recognition of property rights to make income and prosper, then it evidently became ideologically distasteful to him, and the EFF. Lessig was nowhere to be found then when it came time to protect the little guy's copyright against rampant theft and the distinterest of LL about exploits in the viewer -- he was too busy browbeating people to give everything away.
Just because there is an "analogue hole" in SL as with any digital property doesn't mean that the DRM that is used on it is somehow ineffective or cumbersome for those that want to "share". That problem always annoyingly hyped by irritated tekkies that they can't copy their tunes on to various laptops and devices doesn't obtain in SL because due to the properties of virtuality, many items you buy are copyable but not physically transferrable so you can place out different copies or use them repeatedly without violating copyright.
The SL DRM is brilliant. It works as the codification of intellectual property rights and a social injunction against theft the way web pages never succeeded in doing (because the Web 1.0 engineers didn't want it to succeed, given their own copyleftist ideology). It works to signal the intent of the maker and ensure that he can make an income from his creativity.
Please come and take my poll which helps give the big lie to Creative Commons:
http://www.ask500people.com/questions/do-you-use-creative-common-licenses
Second Life, unlike the music industry online, has proved to be a way for people both to encourage creativity and sharing AND make a living by insisting on protection of intellectual property. EFF needs to keep their paws off this in this worst kind of way. -
On the post: AP: The News Gatekeeper is Dead! Long Live The News Gatekeeper!
Prokofy Neva ( profile ), 02 Nov, 2007 @ 11:42pmsn't this the same Associated Press that pressured Google to pay for the same thing?
And that's wrong because...why? Gathering and writing and distributing news is work, and it needs to be paid, and the costs need to be covered. AP is a non-profit service that charges fees to cover these services. Um...and what's wrong with that? Everybody is supposed to work for free for you to fill your news habit?!
Re: Re:
Of course there would be a story as I explain. The idea that something is wrong only if you are hypocritical under some coders' code, and not wrong because it violates law, is one of those tribal understandings of geek that makes it so hardd to establish the rule of law online.