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August 9, 2001
Let's mod that up to 6 
| | It's a shame you have to read halfway down a Slashdot thread for Whatever before you run into something as funny as this. |
Open sore
| | Let's pause to observe that Paul Ferris was fired by LinuxToday and Kevin Reichard still works there. |
| | Paul stood for what was right, and worked to resolve it from the inside, for the good of the company (Internet.com, which owns LinuxToday), in keeping with the company's own stated policies about honest behavior. Reichard, by Paul's account, stonewalled Paul on the astroturfing matter and challeged Paul to prove that the Linux community even exists. |
| | It's good that Paul Ferris finally got a chance to make Linux Today a better publication. Too bad he had to be fired before he could do them the favor. |
| | Michael Hall, LinuxToday's Managing Editor, today published an "Editor's Note" that puts a glossy spin on his site's "new chapter." In that chapter, Kevin Reichard is "phasing out of his involvement" in LinuxToday while its staff struggles to square the absence of demand for dishonesty with its rationalized practice: |
| | We will also not permit the use of pseudonyms by staff members in our talkbacks. Though debate continues on the acceptability of the practice, that debate will invariably involve gray areas that we believe are best avoided by forbidding the practice. |
| | No tobacco industry lobbyist could have said it better. |
| | What makes that grade of rationalization possible is the vast difference between the two conceptual metaphors by which an organization like LinuxToday understands itself. It is conceived both as a publication and as a channel. One places the highest value on honesty, integrity and the reader's trust. The other places the highest value on capturing and holding eyeballs and routing them through allied channels, all to hold those eyeballs long enough for advertising to penetrate them. |
| | At relatively elderly businesses like newspaper and magazine publishing, this involves a clear operational as well as ethical separation of church (editorial) and state (publishing). Dot-com publishers like Internet.com don't have it so easy. They're still too new, and the business pressures are felt by everybody. |
| | The funders of online publications like LinuxToday still avoid visiting the fact that there has never been, and never will be, any reader demand for eyeball penetration. (And I suspect there never would have been much dot-com madness if the VCs had paused to ponder the message delivered by the MUTE buttons on their remote controls.) |
| | When LinuxToday discovers its inner church, it will be because they listened to their most principled editors and readers. |
| | I wish them the best — not just because I'm a nice guy, but because there's really nothing else like LinuxToday. In spite of its errors LinuxToday has been a supurb news aggregation and conversation site for the Linux Community. It would be sorely missed. |
Subversion redux
| | On the one hand, it's pretty nice coverage in the Chicago Tribune. On the other, it makes Cluetrain sound like an old rock song. Which I guess it is by now. |
| | Thanks to EJN for the link. This is getting to be a daily thing with this guy. |
Resistance is futile
Unruly hoards
| | Good Interview of Larry Lessig by Richard Koman at O'Reilly. I like the way Larry calls copyright holders "hoarders," and explains why copyright, even more than the patent issue, is the real battleground here: |
| | ...technology is actually granting copyright holders more control over content than copyright law itself would require. And that means that when provisions like the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are used to protect technology that's protecting copyright interests, the law is actually protecting a stronger copyright interest than copyright law itself would protect, because when you crack a technological protection system, even if it's for the purposes of fair use, the tools used to crack it are criminal under the anti-circumvention provisions. So the effect of fair use in a digital rights management world can shrink quite dramatically, and what this essentially means is that the power to develop technologies that enable the distribution and research into the technologies for encryption is essentially centralized into the hands of those digital rights management companies that are supporting mainly traditional Hollywood or media interests. |
| | Brings to mind something I wrote back in '95 that recalled Thomas Jefferson's perspective on the abounding nature of the good ideas we call inventions: Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. |
| | Copyright hoarders are, in Whitman's perfect words, "demented with the mania of owning things." Making the hoarders even more maniacal is the ownership-resistant nature of the work they insist must not just be owned, but protected by brute force. |
| | And, as Larry points out, it's working. As a result the First Amendment is getting far less respect than the Second: |
| | Employees at Smith & Wesson don't have to fear that the FBI is going to swoop down and arrest them because their products led to somebody being killed, yet employees of software companies need to fear that some FBI agent is going to swoop down and arrest them because it's possible that somebody used their code to steal the latest John Grisham novel. |
| | I'm not big on war metaphors, as you probably know. But this is one place where the battle is real. |
No story
| | Hm. I submitted the No Logo item to the No Logo site and nothing happened. At some level, that makes sense. |
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