Disqus - Latest Comments for Seth Finkelstein

Re: Why Saul Hansell is wrong on AP

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:59:40 -0000

What people don't understand is that sending lawyer letters IS a corporation's idea of how to start a "conversation" :-).

[And if you don't believe that, remember, A-list blogger's idea of "conversation" is ranting from on-high to their audience below, and possibly bullying critics - it bears very little resemblance to any sort of reasoned exchange of concepts with equals.]

Re: News flash: Wikipedia is run by people!

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:33:15 -0000

My column is available now:

"Inside, Wikipedia is more like a sweatshop than Santa's workshop."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/0...

Re: Wikia search: Let’s give it a break

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:34:00 -0000

If you want to see what I mean by sycophants, read:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/03/the_b...

Regarding the rest, I'm keeping quiet for the moment.

Re: News flash: Wikipedia is run by people!

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 19:25:43 -0000

Mathew, my own column on it comes out tomorrow, so I'm in a better position to discuss my own take on it then (sigh, it'll be bogosphere "old news" at that point).

I actually don't even mention the secret mailing list angle, I cut that for space.

But anyway, Wikipedia rank-and-file may not be in revolt, but there are a lot of Wikipedia people unhappy at what looks like political backroom factional dealing having to do with Wikipedia's judicial system.

Re: News flash: Wikipedia is run by people!

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:31:24 -0000

My column is available now:

<a target="guardian"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/06/wikipedia">http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/06/wikipedia

<a target="guardian"
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/06/wikipedia">Inside,
Wikipedia is more like a sweatshop than Santa's workshop

Re: Deadpool claims another victim: Edgeio

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 02:21:29 -0000

But isn't that (infrastructure over product that proves itself) almost all of "Web 2.0"? And his main source of attention?

[Do you see why I tend to just say "Bah , humbug"? :-) ]

Re: Video interlude: Techmeme time-lapse

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 15:32:01 -0000

"ants in the desert erecting a giant anthill" - you said it, not me!

Little ants on the bottom and a few kings of the (ant)hill :-(

Re: Russell Smith: Web-bashing 101

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 04:51:11 -0000

Bah, humbug - facile, blog-evangelizing argument because, well… it’s easy.

You do several rhetorical fallacies, which I see over and over in blog-boosting posts.

Claim: Writer points out news coverage is not getting better
Fallacy: Say MSM is not great.
Of course, the writer didn't say that. The blog-evagenlist just finds it a good strawman to knock down.

Then there's the two-step, "blog" means "journalism", except when it doesn't.

Oh, why bother, I've been around this too many times :-(

Re: Russell Smith: Web-bashing 101

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:20:48 -0000

The fallacy here is formally called "Tu Quoque" ("You Too Fallacy"). Your assertion ("You shouldn't ...") would mean that nobody could ever point out that the hype of the blog evangelists is false (unless they were perfect themselves).

Re: Russell Smith: Web-bashing 101

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:55:25 -0000

That turns every refutation of blog-evangelist snake-oil into a media forum, which I think is unreasonable. I do not see the need to follow every short statement which points out that the web hype is unfounded and untrue with wearing a hairshirt.

"This snake-oil doesn't work. In fact, it makes you sicker than conventional treatment".
"Hey! In fairness you must point out mainstream medicine doesn't always work either. Side-effects were invented by mainstream medicine!"

Re: Russell Smith: Web-bashing 101

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:14:39 -0000

Talk about fallacies!!! You definitely believe in being unfair.

Re: Russell Smith: Web-bashing 101

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 23:31:41 -0000

Smith's point is not that MSM is perfect, but that blogs are essentially the echoing part with nothing else. Note:

Perhaps the most depressing of them is the fact that despite the massive proliferation of news-headline websites and "citizen" news sites (that is to say, blogs), there is no more actual news being found and reported.

In brief: The evidence shows snake-oil (blogs) doesn't help.

Blog-evangelists cannot deal with this as a fact. They have to launch into attacks on the writer, distractions, fallacies, etc, because THEY NEED TO GET ATTENTION. And the way to get attention, is by playing to the crowd. Which is sort of Smith's point.

[Pre-emptive: "The MSM plays to the crowd too!" . Sometimes. The problem is blogs have much less else.]

Re: Russell Smith: Web-bashing 101

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 04:32:36 -0000

"actual news" means not bloviating, opinionating, punditing, etc. but finding out things that are, well, new.
There is extremely little of it, and the web-hype was that all the "citizen-journalists" would be generating a huge amount of such news.

Really, one of the most frustrating things I find in these discussions is the necessity of repeating, over and over, the elementary points at issue.

Re: Russell Smith: Web-bashing 101

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 04:52:16 -0000

I should make a FAQ. This one is "The MSM shouldn't generalize about blogs"

Re: The blogosphere as high school, part XVII

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:03:45 -0000

Bah, humbug.

IF YOU'RE NOT ON THE A-LIST, YOU DON'T GET HEARD!

And then you get a bunch of A-listers and A-list-wannabees whiners attacking you.

The proof is the simple problem of claiming that worthiness just happens to manifest almost exclusively in well-off white men (aka Where Are The Women)

Re: Trolling for links: The top tech bloggers

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:39:36 -0000

Ah, the wonders of the bogosphere, where anyone, I mean the BigHeads, gets heard, and it's so democratic, I mean oligarchical ...

Re: Trolling for links: The top tech bloggers

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:03:00 -0000

And another strawman falls to the that venerable blogger weapon, the Big Sneer ...

Re: Web 2.0 in limbo? Let’s get a grip

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 05:26:24 -0000

Bah, humbug.

This post regurgitates the most dangerous idea: "IT'S DIFFERENT THIS TIME"

As in: "The bottom line is that the Web makes it so much easier to start and run a business " - it's different! Not like the old bubble! DON'T LEARN THAT LESSON!!!

In fact, I'd argue starting and running a real business is pretty much as hard as it's always been. People are confusing a shift in expenses with a revolution in economics.

Re: Web 2.0 in limbo? Let’s get a grip

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 02:45:17 -0000

"I had a feeling you would be dropping by, Seth."

And, see, it wasn't different this time! :-)

Again, you're confusing one component with an overall process. That's a very standard evangelist ploy, Since the laws of mathematics haven't changed, to a good approximation, the net results will never be different.

150 years ago, were their railroads like [BigName]? 100 years ago, was there TV and radio like [BigName]? 50 years ago, was there cheap air travel like [BigName]? All of these created a few new big businesses - and also lots of failed businesses. It's never different, in that there's always people running around saying that this time it's different.

Re: Techmeme and the “A-list” canard

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 05 May 2008 23:26:34 -0000

BAH HUMBUG!

Let me know how many links I can post without triggering a spam-trap, this utter nonsense is a FAQ by now.

Here, have one: Jon Garfunkel: "The New Gatekeepers"
http://civilities.net/TheNewGatekeepers

Re: Techmeme and the “A-list” canard

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 05 May 2008 23:57:26 -0000

Don't have a cow, man.

I would in fact claim your statement ("content from unknowns") is false, except in a trivial way. That is, blog-evangelists don't say: "With all the newspapers and trade-journals being published, with all the 24/7 news programs, there is still plenty of room for content from unknowns or little-knowns to emerge and be recognized in the mainstream media - and look, x% of people quoted or sound-bited come from The Long Tale!"

Have another link:

Nick Carr: "The Great Unread"

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/08/the_g...

Re: Techmeme and the “A-list” canard

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:21:30 -0000

Aye Carumba!

By "except in a trivial way", I meant you could give it a meaning where it was true, but that meaning would be trivial, depending on what you meant by "plenty of room". There are almost by definition few high attention slots, but it would likely be said to mean something like "lots of chances to win the (attention) lottery" (even though very few people do win), and that's what I'd mean by trivial.

The idea of the comparison is how one could construct similar spurious reasoning to "prove" the MSM is open, democratic, anyone can break-in (pointing to the few people who do), etc.

Oh, have another link:

Shelley Powers: "Guys Don't Link"

http://burningbird.net/connecting/guys-dont-link/

Re: Memo to Jakob Lodwick: Grow up

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:07:25 -0000

Cue another iteration of the hypester's song :-(

Marketer: Look! This is amazing! Fantastic! Revolutionary! World-changing! Never been anything like it before!

Chump: I tried it. It didn't work. It's nasty and damaging.

Marketer: WHAT DID YOU EXPECT YOU WHINER?!?

Re: Memo to Jakob Lodwick: Grow up

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:04:29 -0000

My impression is that he was/is running a video site, not earning money from being a blog/"conversation"/"self-expression" conference-club evangelist.

That is, he took the Kool-Aid, the evangelists were happy to "use" him while he said it tasted good, and when he got sugar-shock, then it was: SHUT UP, FOOL! Nobody FORCED you to drink that Kool-Aid. IT'S YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT!!!

The underlying problem is that the blog-world is extremely exploitative and personally destructive, and marketers need to construct excuses that it's a particular person's failing whenever this is demonstrated.

Re: Memo to Jakob Lodwick: Grow up

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:35:04 -0000

By the way, the Kathy Sierra incident was far more complex that the way the story is usually told (which tends to omit any hint that the facts were different from the most sensationalist narrative). See my column at:

Accusations of sex and violence were bound to grab the headlines

Re: Memo to Jakob Lodwick: Grow up

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:48:21 -0000

Well, regarding research, I was partially relying on your description - "... the brash young millionaire co-founder of Vimeo and CollegeHumour.com, and one-time blogging boyfriend of party girl-blogger Julia Allison ..." :-(.

Re: Joanne McNeil on Boing Boing's "erasure" of Violet Blue

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:52:59 -0000

People have asked. The Boingers aren't talking.

See latimesblogs.latimes.com/webscout/2008/06/violet-blue-scr.html

Re: Denton: Evil genius or just plain evil?

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 20:11:30 -0000

"barriers to his bloggers going off and starting their own equivalent networks ..."

I think you've been taken in by the mythology here. The cuckoo-clock repeating of "Low barrier to entry! Low barrier to entry!" seems to have as much factual basis behind it as that cuckoo. Because if it were really true, why haven't a bunch of bloggers simply cut out Nick Denton ?

Re: Let’s all grow up a little, shall we?

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:01:45 -0000

> "Why not just put on a conference and let people decide for themselves whose is better? Would that be too much to ask?"

Yes. Remember rule #1 of A-listership: GET ATTENTION!

Re: Legless chihuahuas and social media

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:43:06 -0000

Nonsense. There's no fence like there's no A-list (sigh, per topic). It's a bit of denial put forth against what's patently obvious from any glance at the *audience* numbers.

A service like this is another demonstration of it all.

Re: Yochai Benkler: An antidote to Andrew Keen

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 05:25:06 -0000

Bah, humbug :-(

Re: The blogosphere is growing up

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 17:10:56 -0000

Mathew, thanks for the link.

Note it's not about being "a fairly decent guy" or not.

Rather, money has influence. Every time this comes up, those influenced say "I'M A GOOD PERSON!" (== I'm not for sale). But the outright sale is kind of a trivial case. There's a whole range of complicated effects that shouldn't be reduced to that triviality.

Re: Revenge of the M-listers? Sign me up

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 19:09:46 -0000

This is extremely well-known, in terms of selection and network effect.

The problem is that it's very, very, hard for even a determined group of M-listers to promote themselves, and even so, it just doesn't match the power of an A-lister.

This is what EXPONENTIAL means :-(

Re: Has blogging jumped the shark?

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 02:54:32 -0000

Actually, "Family Circus" is sometimes now written by the original cartoonist's son, and you can often tell the difference - this was almost certainly one of those.

But blogging has definitely transitioned, from "in-crowd" to "serious sucker bait". Whether you want to call that "jumping the shark", or "business opportunity", is a matter of perspective.

Re: Does being transparent ruin a PR blog?

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 01:24:44 -0000

I think the issue is more that PR and blogs is about successfully faking sincerity - which contains within it the implication that there are times when they will unsuccessfully fake sincerity.

I haven't seen any evidence that this will discourage future attempts, huffing and puffing from blog evangelists to the contrary.

Re: Good luck with the Google-killing, Jimbo

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 02:14:50 -0000

It looks like that screenshot is of a project which might have led to the current one, but isn't the current one.

That is, Wikia seemed to have had an *internal* search engine in development (which is what is in the screenshot).

Then I conjecture someone threw money at Wales, and he decided to take it and run with an *external* (whole-web) search project.

Re: Is Wikipedia really in danger?

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 01:41:50 -0000

I've updated my post with a link to the financial statement (I can't put it here because otherwise my comment will get trapped in the spam-filter). Operating expenses for 2006 were "$47,777", indeed triple (loosely) the 2005 figure of "$18,067". But that's not going to break the bank. They spent half again as much in travel as operating expenses.

Hosting expenses in 2006 $189,631.

There's no way you get "$5 million" from numbers like that.

They had half a million IN CASH there!

Does Not Compute.

Re: Why should we celebrate tech IPOs?

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 07:54:32 -0000

The sheep must be fluffed before they are fleeced.

Re: Boucher Puts DMCA Reform on the Back Burner

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:02:08 -0000

Because the DMCA stuff there is not problematic to the, err, "free-market competitive winners of commerce", while the Grokster stuff *is* bothersome.

Re: Hey Google — stop linking to us

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 16:22:18 -0000

Mathew, "because Sam Zell is rich" would mistate what I meant - it's more like "because the evidence shows that Sam Zell is a successful businessman".
That is, as a matter of probability, I would assume there was an idea that was either being garbled or wasn't apparent to me, rather than this guy who seems to have expertise in the topic just spent a zillion dollars on a transaction where he lacked the most basic understanding.
While not an absolute guarantee, such an assumption is a good bet.

Re: DeLong leaves PFF

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 21:37:03 -0000

I'll just pipe up that I was fascinated to find out that DeLong made ~ $140K in 2003 for being a PFF "Senior Fellow" (from PFF's public tax data). A jolly good fellow indeed. Think-tankery is quite the business.

Re: Ron Paul Good, Ron Paul Spam Bad

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:45:02 -0000

Hey Tim, refering to the little party in the next post - do you NOW understand a little bit better how I've come by my attitude about Libertarianism?

I'm not asking if you agree with me (obviously) - I'm asking if you can better fathom what has formed my views.

Imagine dealing with such flamers for EVERY POST, ranters who would like nothing less than to drive you out in the name of their mind-flayed cult - and eventually succeeding.

Re: Cerf: Nationalize the Internet?

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:03:29 -0000

Richard, I went into the "free speech" issue in my post. Look, "Net Neutrality" originated as a movement in the _Brand X_ court decision. Everything else has been about justifications for the two sides of that dispute, both of which are in essence big (huge) businesses. Which means a favorite right-wing narrative of Bad Liberal isn't to blame, no matter how crowd-pleasing it is to launch into denunciations of ivory-tower eggheads who supposedly have brought woe unto the world with their crazy academic theories.

I read Vint Cerf as merely re-iterating the position of one side of that dispute - that network upgrades should be funded as government-built infrastructure, and hence any given tier of access should be available on a no-buyer-discrimination basis (that is, _Brand X_ was wrongly decided and should be undone). This is neither a difficult nor an irrational position. But it has the word "government" in it - that causes certain knee-jerk ideological reactions, of which the post here is a fine example.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Internet Habits and the Presidency

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:24:32 -0000

You have no shame.

Al Gore "invented the Internet" - resources

Re: Is DRM a Legal Barrier or a Physical One?

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 03:59:36 -0000

Sadly, The terminology is basically obscuring the points of contention.

DRM itself is a private mechanism, I'd say that's true. HOWEVER, it is widely believed that the private mechanism will be ineffective in practice without government laws enforcing it, e.g. the DMCA. That's the deep issue.

Libertarian-types are often put in a quandary by this, as it looks really bad to be calling on government force, on men with guns, to stop people from using their legally purchased physical property in legal ways, in order to support a clearly government-granted monopoly right. It's just a tough position to support for a Libertarian. So *some* of them resolve this conflict by pretending that the issue is somehow about having a law forbidding corporations from using the private mechanism of DRM. They can then write the standard screed that makes them very happy, that business is good, and anyone who wants government to interfere is bad. The compulsion to write this article is driven by their cult need to chant their mantras, not by any connection to reality. So it often puzzles people who do not suffer from their religious dogma. The thing to understand is that it's not analysis, it's like a hymn, "God is great" ("Business Good, Government Bad").

Now, some of them are smarter, for Libertarians. They are able to resolve the tension above in a slightly less silly way, by focusing on the property rhetoric. If the issue is framed as enforcing property rights, they're also very happy, since that's one of their few permitted uses of government. They don't want to think deeper, since that would put them back in the tough quandary above. Alternately, they can write again generically that business is good, praise business, that's also easy.

This Libertarian mentality problem being played out is what you see in the discussion on this topic. There are basically very few things a Libertarian will write (though endless variation). And the mental block they have regarding thinking about complex business-government interaction, onerous for debate in general, is particularly ill-suited here.

Re: Linux in trouble

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 22:33:40 -0000

Overblown. This argument has been going on for a while, particularly with graphics drivers. Yes, it can get nasty at times. But Stallman didn't create it, he's merely personifying it - that's a very big difference.

And it would be a big mistake to view it as about some crazy hippy guru - a lot of it comes from the lawsuits filed against programmers, which focus the mind far more than ideological pronouncements.

Re: When Nunberg attacks

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 15:59:02 -0000

I think combining the old start of this post with the one you have now would be better (in terms of being amusingly self-referential). That is:

[Left-wing political activist and linguist Geoff Nunberg][who wrote Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show, ] ...

As to whatever similarities between Chomsky and Lakoff, I'd put it in the category that the US and China seem close when you're off on another planet entirely.

Re: Market Forces At Work: The PR Backlash Against Google Chrome’s EULA

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:14:35 -0000

Umm, folks, this wasn't a "market" matter in the first place. Various Google people have made it clear that the TOS was just a boilerplate thrown-together for a relatively low-level project.

The point which makes the argument in this article laughable and ludicrous - and I mean that, I'm not just being colorful, it's pretty much blithering nonsense - are examples such as "arbitration" and "no class action" clauses, which have been bitterly fought in court, and where corporations don't care about the bad publicity.

Re: Market Forces At Work: The PR Backlash Against Google Chrome’s EULA

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:09:36 -0000

@Jim - Do you even know what I'm talking about? I'm serious. That sounds rhetorical, but I mean it. Do you know the issues I'm describing? Your reply is pure knee-jerk sneer.

Bleh. I really shouldn't do this. Libertarians are like cuckoo-clocks, their "Cuckoo" is "Markets".

[Tedious explanation - denial of class-action affects HUGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE! It is one of the major legal tools against corporate abuse.
"Arbitration" is almost a Libertarian fantasy, where you contract away all your legal recourse]

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Lessig vs. Rosen on Net Porn Regulation

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 14:52:49 -0000

People interested in issues of Internet censorship and community standards might want to read my now-released work for the Nitke v. Ashcroft case:

Nitke v. Ashcroft : Seth Finkelstein expert witness report

http://sethf.com/nitke/ashcroft.php

"I. Opinion of Witness with Basis and Reasons Therefore

A provider of content via the Internet cannot reasonably be expected to know the location of readers, if the context is one in which location would lead to a denial of the ability to read the content."

Re: Market Forces At Work: The PR Backlash Against Google Chrome’s EULA

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:23:55 -0000

I'm "fixated" on arbitration and class action suits because they are obvious counter-examples and extremely important. Yes indeed, you didn't mention them. No personal offense meant, but that is why your argument is babbling nonsense, because those are a few elephants in the room which make a mockery of your post.

To wit: "my point is that such criticism and the threat thereof together provide a powerful check". But they don't. There's no powerful check.

Let me try to outline how nonsensical, how absurd, is what you've written - note, I mean this literally, I'm not being gratuitously rude.

GOOGLE DID NOT WANT TO HAVE THOSE TERMS. IT WAS A *MISTAKE*. AN *OVERSIGHT*. NOT SOMETHING THEY WANTED TO DO!!!

WHEN COMPANIES *DO *WANT OPPRESSIVE TERMS, THEY *IGNORE* THE FLAMERS (see arbitration, class-action, for proof).

THE ONLY THING WHICH HAS WORKED IN *MANY* CASES IS *G-O-V-E-R-N-M-E-N-T R-E-G-U-L-A-T-I-O-N* (see European Union reverse-engineering rights for proof).

Your whole so-called "argument" is based on finding power where there is none.

It's meaningless to project anything from trivial case that when a company has a drafting error, they'll change it, to when they deliberately and intentionally do want to take away customer's legal rights. In fact, your "happy medium" is joke, literally - if a company makes a copying error, they'll fix it if people complain, and if a company wants to take away legal rights, they'll ignore people who complain, so each side sometimes wins and sometimes loses ....

Re: Finkelstein on Singleton and DeCSS

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 15 May 2006 23:34:13 -0000

Solveig, the point is that there was a large team effort at building a free-software Linux DVD player. That's not disputable. For those purposes, it's extremely misleading to obsess on a couple of trivial arguments with one kid, who (no disrespect meant), for *decryption* work, was only tangentially related to the actual reverse-engineering.

I understand the rhetorical reason for the mudslinging. But it *is* mudslinging.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » What About File Sharing?

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 14 May 2006 05:24:29 -0000

Basically, nobody knows how to solve it all. The immediate problem of DMCA critics is demonstrating the DMCA is a harsh and stifling law, not a workable solution. Solveig's paper is characteristic of the counter-offense, the reply that:
1) Nobody important gets hurt (Felten's "Happy Endings")
2) If somebody did get hurt, they were dirty pirates anyway (DeCSS aspersions)

But this doesn't get us to a solution.
I think licensing does have some promise, but it's hard to pursue. I've heard that the idea is discussed at times. But there's a lot of inertia in trying to preserve the old system. I doubt any theoretical proposal would be accepted, and I suspect any experiment would have to keep under the radar. Sometimes the future is utterly unpredictable.

Re: Our Deadly Organ Donation System

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 27 May 2006 01:36:43 -0000

Amanda: In both cases, money is paid for a human body (part). Now, if this is a replaceable body part, it's not a problem - there's a market in human hair, for example. If it becomes an irreplaceable body part, that produces an incentive to irrepairably exploit others (if you sell your hair, well, it grows back - eggs, sperm are generally useless, blood regenerates - but internal organs don't).

I'm trying to make this simple:

1) Do you know about China and organ-harvesting of prisoners?

2) Do you know about historical "baby-farming"?

3) From 1) and 2), can you see that cash-for-kidneys could be a problem?

[Tim, do you see this also?]

If we don't even get past the basics, there's no point in anything else.

Re: Our Deadly Organ Donation System

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 26 May 2006 21:35:20 -0000

When "reward" means "pay money", it should be obvious how that can very quickly become problematic. "Rewarding" people in ways which don't translate into immediate profit are one thing - cash-for-kidneys quite another.

Look, it wasn't all the far back in history when *people* were bought and sold in this country, and again, there's still a market in slaves in some parts of the world. I think organizations which are aware of existing slave trades, and the killing of prisoners for organ transplant material, have every reason in the world not to want to see a financial market in organs created in rich countries.

Re: Our Deadly Organ Donation System

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 26 May 2006 22:45:58 -0000

Re: Our Deadly Organ Donation System

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 26 May 2006 20:07:56 -0000

Err, even today, in certain parts of the world, children get sold into slavery. Or look up "baby farming". Or the issues with organ-harvesting in China, that's a horror story which is quite real and not a Libertarian thought-experiment.

Though I'm glad to see you admit there's other values besides "a full-blown free market in organs".

But, really, do you believe nobody has every thought of the wonders of organ-selling? That is, "It's an obvious point, but it's one that seems lost on the "bioethicists" who are currently ...". If that's just political rhetoric, then all it deserves in reply is counter-rhetoric. More seriously, the fact that people do respond to "incentives" is exactly why bioethics want to guard against the perverse incentives in organ-selling.

Riding ideological hobbyhorses is not a viable "alternative approach".

Re: Our Deadly Organ Donation System

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 26 May 2006 19:05:15 -0000

You say: "The best solution would be to allow financial incentives to organ donors"

Just to confirm, you support organ-selling, correct? A billionaire can offer someone some cash for their ... liver? kidney?? HEART???

How does this interact with parental rights, by the way? Can said billionaire offer the money to a parent to make the parental decision for their *child* to donate the organ? How about the money if the parent will attempt to "convince" the child to donate the organ?

Is the financial "incentive" to donate organs part of the rights which can be sold for a debt? (adds new meaning to the phrase "the credit company owns me")

Inquiring minds want to know!

Re: CleanFlicks and the DMCA

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 21:23:34 -0000

I believe the reason was instead that they didn't want to present a *court* with a sympathetic circumvention defendant:

CleanFlicks, copyright infringement, and DMCA

Re: Wikipedia, Whipping Boy

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 21:21:10 -0000

Tim: Imagine a mine field. It's 95% safe. See the problem?

Wikiepdia is far, far, too vulnerable to malice.

Whenever this point is brought up, there's an immediate cultish denial - There's errors elsewhere too, screams the Wikifanatic. Don't believe everything you read, they excuse. But the dead trees and the old media don't have systems where any random flamer can mess with an article. That's a problem.

Re: A Psychological Explanation for Censorship and Claims of “Media Bias”

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 22:58:41 -0000

Some quick points:

1) It's possible for both sides to be correct, in a sense. The news report can be shoddy all around. This doesn't mean it's good.

2) It's also possible that one side is correct and the other is wrong, but complains anyway (the "working the refs" theory).

3) It's possible for both be correct in the sense that they mean different things - I've seen this a lot in the case that a news report presents a leftist but in a clearly negative manner. The left will say the negative presentation is bias, the right will say that presenting the leftist is bias because the left was on the show at all, so given that legitimacy.

The PTC theory is common, and while I strongly disagree with it, you're using a straw-man. The logically consistent version is "Adults can handle this, but *some* children will be damaged". The usual phrasing is "You think children are little adults!" (which is usually an absurd accusation in a literal sense, but the idiomatic meaning is clear).

Re: A Voluntary Online Code of Conduct to Avoid Internet Censorship

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 10:09:45 -0000

Adam, there are so many things wrong here I don't even know where to begin ... it's like being in a time-warp.

1) The Internet is international. Not "All companies doing business online" care about US religious fanaticism.

2) We've *been* here. *Many* times. The effect was to split the civil-libertarian opposition, as those in favor of touting censorware set out to smear and discredit the critics of censorware.

3) Any proposal which draws its power from the threat of goverment action is government censorship by another name.

Oh, to hell with it. Why even bother?

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » For Shame!

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 21:34:40 -0000

"no reasonable person ... would mistake ..."

"(not evidenced by a Technorati search, incidentally) ..."

Well, many people don't consider Nick Douglas, who writes Valleywag, to be a reasonable person, but he is reasonably read:

"That's so old media
Photo of NickDouglas 4 hours ago in Valleywag, Silicon Valley's Tech Gossip Rag by NickDouglas Ã?ÃÂ· 2,156 blogs link here

That's so old media [ Railroad illo - Valleywag] Who commissions an op/ed about Net Neutrality from the inventor of the web from a man who ... metaphor? The New York Times, which today published a piece by Tim Berners-Lee doing just that. "
(I alerted him to the ringerness in a comment, and he's corrected it now)

"Rank: 211 (8,483 links from 2,161 blogs)"

Honor would indicate a retraction, Kevin.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » For Shame!

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 20:24:25 -0000

I repeat: If someone can't at least see why this has an appearance of impropriety, that is deeply problematic. Which is one reason I'm less charitable. The silliness is very grating. It's one thing to maintain there was no fraudulent intent involved. It's quite another to be shocked, shocked, that someone would ever suggest such a thing could happen in this fine establishment.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » For Shame!

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 19:51:54 -0000

I'm suggesting that somewhere along the path to the piece's appearance on the New York Times Op-Ed page, whatever politics is involved got a dose of sleaze. You're very naive if you don't see there's at least the appearance of bad dealings, especially given the contentiousness of the Net Neutrality debate.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » For Shame!

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 19:19:56 -0000

Tim, *maybe* I'm being too hard on you personally. To spell it out: It is an old and longstanding sleazy campaign tactic to find someone with a similar name to a real candidate, and put them on the ballot to cause confusion. These people then say things like "Oh, my name is Georgie Bush? What a coincidence! Well, it is my real name. Surely you don't expect me to avoid politics ...".

Someone along the line did that with you, and that's the reason there's an Op-Ed in the New York Times on Net Neutrality today "By TIMOTHY B. LEE".

At best, taking you at your word, you were used.

Note I'm not involved in Net Neutrality, I've stayed far away from it, for my own reasons. It just annoyed me to see Berners-Lee being sandbagged like that.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » For Shame!

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 18:09:38 -0000

C'MON GUYS! That's one of the oldest dirty tricks in the political playbook. If you don't know what's going on, then my name is Jesse L. Jackson.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » For Shame!

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:08:58 -0000

As Matt Stoller said:

"This is just disgraceful. A guy named Timothy B. Lee published an Op-Ed on net neutrality reiterating the telecom positioning, and claiming that the market for broadband services is competitive. It is not. Timothy B. Lee sounds an awful lot like Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and strong net neutrality proponent."

Dirty politics, Tim. Libertarians are supposed to be against fraud.

Re: Carr Misreads Benkler

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 13:48:51 -0000

Noel, please do NOT call me a Libertarian! Them's fightin' words :-).

Anyway, as someone deeply embedded in the debate, again, I use Open Source to denote the people who have no particular moral opposition to proprietary software, but believe source code access is simply a better business policy (which includes the above-mentioned software engineering issues), while Free Software denotes those who believe proprietary software is akin to censorship.

What I think you're describing is the Open Source rebuttal of the closed-source argument. The closed-source viewpoint is that restricted access is the *only* workable business model. The Open Source rebuttal is as you say, that *other* workable business models can be built by using different sources of economic returns to the participants.

But, critically, Open Source is NOT DENYING CLASSIC ECONOMICS! It's simply saying that closed-source is blinkered and limited in its framework. It's a "10% of a lot rather than 100% of a little" type economic argument.

Too many evangelists then make the mistake of saying that since the Open Source argument is about using different, more indirect, economic incentives, that's somehow not economic at all, and WOW, IT'S A REVOLUTION WHERE PEOPLE WORK FOR FREE!!! This is very stupid, and confusing, but it sells, for a lot reasons.

Re: Carr Misreads Benkler

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 19:34:49 -0000

"... but its the difficulty of distinquishing them from RMS ..."

It's really very simple. The Open Source people are concerned with a business model. The Free Software people are concerned with a moral stance. This is meant to be descriptive, not judgmental.

Grasp this distinction, and they should be easy to tell apart.

Re: Framing the Copyright Debate

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 09:13:45 -0000

Tim, it's much easier said that done. My own experiences in that direction have been very unpleasant. Lessig is regularly distorted, to the point that his actual very moderate position sometimes seems irrelevant to the ideological rant that (some) Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians want to write.

It's just hard to form alliances across ideological lines. Political crossover is a pundit's dream in proposing, and an activist's nightmare in execution, when crossover in theory becomes crossfire in practice.

Re: The Egalitarian Blogosphere

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 04:47:59 -0000

Sigh ... so many fallacies, so little time ...

I track my website with the zeal of a marketing firm. Statistics are often inflated, and I want *real* answers. The number of people *reading* *what* *I* *write* is quite low. I don't want to confuse that with the number of people who have a headline in their aggregator, or get directed to my site because they're looking for "free sex" and I have a page that ranks high on that search (it's a fun outcome, but it's not what I'm talking about here). Such hype is a clear example of the sales-pitch I'm arguing against.

"My blogging led directly to a quote ..."

No. That's misleading. I don't want to be too harsh on you Tim, but the stark truth is that your being part of a loud PR flacking system is what led to that, not "blogging" per se. Please don't stamp your feet here and proclaim "No, no, it isn't so, it's because I'm just so smart and clever and blogging is so great". Sorry, I'll have none of that, as I've seen the sausage being made. It's because there's a enormous noise machine pushing those views. And I made a deliberate choice not to be a part of it because I couldn't stand the reactionary ugliness of it. Where's *my* New York Times Op-Ed, huh?

"Seth apparently is, chasing the mirage of fame and fortune."

More like "intellectual influence and making a nice living from it", but that seems to be equally a mirage.

"totally misunderstand the mathematics of power laws."

Oh, utter blithering nonsense. I have a degree in Mathematics AND a degree in Physics from MIT (true!). DO NOT lecture me on mathematics, unless you have more to back it up than a very silly idea that we can't use English to informally refer to a section of a exponential curve because such a curve has a continuous value. If I write a paper on it, I'll define it in terms of median value and such, OK? It's the same thing as when someone says "Well, what's "rich", 'cause all Americans are rich compared to starving Africans". (yes, I know some people do make that argument, it's an attempt to blur the meaning - I'm *not* a Libertarian, remember).

"What's different about the blogosphere is ..."

Saying doesn't make it so.

Re: Heads or Tails

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 02:06:10 -0000

"Why should people pay to read the Times's anointed pundits when there are as good (or at least nearly as good) pundits whose work is available for free?"

For the same reason they pay $$$ for WATER when there is as good (or at least nearly as good) stuff coming out of the kitchen faucet.

I'm not going to bother finding the links, but there's a lot of debunking of Anderson, to the extent that yeah, there's a shift, but it's more like 80/20 to 70/30 - matters if you're in the retail industry, but nowhere near as big a deal as it's being hyped.

Beware anyone who tells you "This new technology makes things all warm and fuzzy". It has a habit of not working out that way (things change, but not necessarily the way the hypester predicts).

Exhibit A: The DMCA.

Re: Summary of Latest ICRA Summit on Internet Free Expression & Child Protection

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 04:40:05 -0000

Sigh ... thanks (in a way) for the write-up.

I don't have the strength to go through it all, yet again. But your strategy is a really, really, bad idea. The problem is that once everyone has built up the industry censorware structure, the goverment imposes censorware.

I will say this very loudly, since I know you are a Libertarian-type:

THE GOVERNMENT IMPOSES CENSORWARE

Proof: China. Iran. Saudi Arabia.

And many initiatives in the US - libraries, copyright. Child pornography.

I understand the theory. Please don't repeat it. I've heard it (wow, have I ever). However, you are operating under a deep misconception, with a model of the world which does not match the censor's model, and is also overall contradictory (i.e., government overreaches power, but an effective censorware system will not be used by government).

If you care, I can dig up some links. But again, this is ground which has not only been well-trod, but pounded into a bloody spot where the dead horse was ten years ago.

Re: Washington Stock Exchange Takes Off

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 22:00:31 -0000

How is it better than, e.g., Intrade.com ? That's had extensive scope and focus on political events.

WSX isn't even using real money!

Re: Washington Stock Exchange Takes Off

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 09:18:07 -0000

As I'm sure you know, this sort of betting has been done in e.g. England, for years. And has also been going on for years with the "Iowa Electronic Markets". The problem is, market-worship to the contrary, it's not really all that useful. For some extremely deep reasons - e.g. accurate information doesn't sell well in the media.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad thing. But it's already been around, and done nothing much except produce some self-referential punditry.

Re: The Long Tail of Politics

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:04:41 -0000

The problem is that in our modern world, there's lots of problems that simply can't be localized.

One of the deep problem with Libertarianism is that it has yet to internalize the Civil War, on many levels. One of those lessons: It doesn't work to have half a country where some people are regarded as *property*, and half where they have human rights. And the Founders tried very very hard to make that work, because it was such a deep division. But it tore the country apart.

To spell it out: You can't declare yourself a Confederate, so that you can own slaves. You can't have some market choices, like whether or not to have a market in slaves.

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia?

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 05:09:25 -0000

[insert tongue in cheek]

But ... but ... that's Communism! You're talking "from each according to his abilities, to each according to needs". And who own the articles? Where's the private property in each microcontribution?

Don't you have faith in the free market, to work out a solution? It's an opportunity, for micropayments!

And I thought this was a Libertarian blog :-)

Re: Piet

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 04:10:19 -0000

Noel, this is the "paracopyright" argument. We start with copyright, which says certain word-patterns are *property*. They're *owned*. Nobody else can use those word-patterns(with some minor exceptions). The usual way of resolving the conflict is to say it's an "expression", not an "idea", and there's multiple ways of expressing the idea.

Now we get to the DMCA, which is copyright to a whole new level. Not only are the word-patterns *owned*, but the technical means are pre-emptively declared a kind of corporate version of a state secret. If you tell anyone how it works (too precisely), even if you find out just by looking at it, that's arguably a tort or even a crime. That's really quite an extreme legal enforcement of business models.

Re: The Reluctant Libertarian

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 04:38:23 -0000

It really helps to understand the context Lessig wrote that. My own essay, Libertarianism Makes You Stupid came out of the same background.

The problem was there was a certain ideology that held that The Internet was some sort of otherworldy place, where the State was an anachronism. So for every issue, what you were supposed to do was to rant, very loudly "Government BAD! Business GOOD!". And that was the height of social analysis (I know people are going to think I'm exaggerating, but you had to have been there). The last chapter of Code is basically devoted to saying this is utter BS, and harmful BS.

Benkler's book has some of the old otherworldly argument in it, so that's why it's appealing to Libertarians, among others. And it's being taken by the marketers as intellectual backing. But, in my view, it's a deeply flawed argument, just the New Era hype in more academic clothes. So it ends up as merely another item in the dispute between blog-evangelists (both Libertarian and Liberal) and the skeptics.

Re: Plagiarism vs. Copyright Infringement

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 10:13:34 -0000

Full study: Plagiarism by Wikipedia editors

The critic knows the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement, and I believe the journalist does too. Both are problems for Wikipedia, just not the same problem.

Re: Tech Policy as a Case Study in “Liberaltarianism”

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 01:43:51 -0000

Tim, I think you're mixing up cause and effect. Nobody can change it, because it's a fundamental issue with the structure of Libertarianism.

Re: Tech Policy as a Case Study in “Liberaltarianism”

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:07:26 -0000

As a practical matter, while Libertarians are neither conservatives nor liberals, they are also not equally far from either - they are much closer to conservatives in power than liberals in power. Sort of like Jews are not Christians or Muslims - but they are closer to Christians than to Muslims (so a Jewish/Christian alliance against Muslims is a lot more likely than a Jewish/Muslim alliance against Christians).

From another direction, the saying is "Republicans who like to smoke pot" - not "Pot-smokers who like to vote Republican".

Anyway, Libertarians are very loud in the tech-policy corner of the world. But in terms of general politics - we're talking rounding error significance (except for Ralph Nader-like spoiler situations)

Re: Tech Policy as a Case Study in “Liberaltarianism”

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 18:56:53 -0000

Sorry, Tim, your heart is in the right place (err, accurate place?), but:

WE TRIED YOUR IDEA AND IT DIDN'T WORK

The idea of a Libertarian-Liberal alliance is a pundit bloviating. That person has obviously never, ever, done anything on ground level.

I want to second Adam Thierer's comment from those of us who have tried to make alliance with Libertarians but aren't Libertarians. Which is, frankly, that Libertarianism Makes You Stupid. Any alliance tends to degenerate into Libertarian proselytizing where the cult of business-worship tries to take over the group, with endless dogma recitations. They drive everyone else away, and then they're happy, because they've "won". I've been there, and it's extremely destructive.

Re: Graham on the Gap Between Rich and Poor

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 19:29:08 -0000

"Where does wealth come from? People make it"

Yeah, but it's a long way from that platitude to thinking that superrich and starving poor is The Moral Order of things.

After all, it's equally true that:

"Where does GOVERNMENT come from? People make it"

It's a lot easier to see "government" as some sort of evil if you don't understand that it's just people. To kids, their parents just *do* things, etc. ...

[The *whopper*, the thing that's slipped-in, is that there's no reason that the system of dividing-up what is made has to follow any particular form. Especially not laissez-faire capitalism.]

Re: Vaidhyanathan Hates “You”

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 00:06:54 -0000

Y'know ... it's not worth it. I suppose in some formalistic system, I'm obligated to spend hours trying to teach pigs to sing. But I'm just too worn-out for that these days.

Society is more than business. That's the divide. If you don't believe that, there's not a whole lot more communication which can occur.

Re: Vaidhyanathan Hates “You”

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 00:10:53 -0000

PS - Tim, take note - This is why a Liberal/Libertarian alliance just doesn't work in the long run. Again, Libertarians are neither Liberals nor Conservatives - but they are *not* equally distant from each side.

Re: Vaidhyanathan Hates “You”

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 02:55:27 -0000

You wrote:

"He seems to think that social interactions on this new-fangled Internet doesn't count as "real" social interaction. And he hates the idea of companies making big pots of money by facilitating these interactions. I find both of those concerns baffling."

Agree or disagree, I don't find those concerns baffling.

He's saying: Marketing isn't civilization. Data-mining businesses are NOT social empowerment.

There's also some deeper issues about net-community vs real community. It's possible to go too far with this critique, which generates a backlash, but the core critism is meaningful in my view.

Re: Vaidhyanathan Hates “You”

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 03:36:22 -0000

"Vaidhyanathan (and I guess you) seem to believe that the fact that a company is making a profit is proof, all by itself, that no empowerment is going on."

This is what I mean by : "Society is more than business. That's the divide. If you don't believe that, there's not a whole lot more communication which can occur"

Sigh ... Tim, I don't want to be unduly personally harsh on you, reflecting my decade of frustration with Libertarians. But there is a fundamental mental block that Libertarianism induces that makes it very hard to discuss the topic. I've had this sort of conversation many, many times. Libertarians are so fanatically fixated on business and profit that they simply can't grasp certain criticisms on the issue. It's very much like fundamentalist Christians who simply can't get that pagan religions don't have a God and Satan.

It goes like this:

Liberal: This isn't all that great. It's a rather minor and not so wonderful effect
Libertarian: knee-jerk leftist and old fogeyism. ... hates the idea of companies making big pots of money [i.e.: COMMIE!]

And it just gets worse from there.

Re: Vaidhyanathan Hates “You”

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 05:50:09 -0000

Quote: "And he hates the idea of companies making big pots of money by facilitating these interactions."

The whole point of SV's article is that those companies are the ones empowered, not "You" (as in civic society) - but this just isn't getting across.
Because the *concept* isn't there.

Re: Vaidhyanathan Hates “You”

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 21:35:30 -0000

This statement is the core of the dispute: "enabling the individual to express him or herself more effectively is inherently empowering."

Express *what* and *how*? Empowering marketers to sell better, and data-miners to find the buzz, is not very helpful in *building* *civic* *society*. Confusing these senses of the word, making the former seem to stand for the latter, is a very profitable profession.

Richard: What you claimed about DDT is completely wrong. It's not even debatable. It's a right-wing Urban Legend. Here's a comprehensive DDT ban refutation.

Now, in terms of empowerment, did that do any good? You're empowered to spread nonsense, and I'm empowered to post the correction - but what's the result? Does the myth or the truth spread faster?

Re: Vaidhyanathan Hates “You”

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 05:56:54 -0000

Richard, you hit several "bingo" points on the page I linked above. You don't care. That's what I call "autorant".

One of us has to be wrong. Which one? DOES IT DEPEND ON EVIDENCE??? Or what's more popular or appealing?

This is why there's no great gain in certain areas from the Internet. Because "fools" are "empowered" as much as experts, and there's more of the former than the latter.

Re: Save Us from Fox News, FCC!

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 04:24:48 -0000

I'm not even going to bother.

Re: Save Us from Fox News, FCC!

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 13:46:49 -0000

It was something of a nod to the problems in your ideas of a left/Libertarian alliance. The purpose was not to comment on this issue _per se_, but rather to note yet another example where left vs. Libertarian thinking is at odds at a very deep level. So there was method in the madness.

Re: Save Us from Fox News, FCC!

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 04:43:40 -0000

Experience, Tim. It's experience. I've been there.

It's less of a matter of going out of my way, than being in situations where I really shouldn't (a weakness of mine).

Re: DRM on 9/11 Commission Report

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 09:47:03 -0000

I have a long blog post on this particular issue:

Making Fair Use of cut-and-paste restricted PDF files

Re: Boucher Puts DMCA Reform on the Back Burner

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:53:46 -0000

To be less flippant - the DMCA provisions of the new bill are, overall, extremely minor. Yes, the MPAA/RIAA/etc will scream about anything, no matter how trivial. But the actual changes being proposed do not address the core problem with the DMCA, of the prohibition on *tools*, as pointed out. So it's really not very threatening to the MPAA/RIAA/etc. even if they do their standard screaming.

In contrast, the Grokster portion is likely to be a much more *real* fight, one where there just may be some _economic_ interest affected. Thus, there's an incentive to keep that low-key for the time being. Have the flaming be on the sideshow, not the lion's den. Or at least, that's my take on how Boucher wants to play it.

Re: Wikipedia Doesn’t Make You Coffee Either

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:55:51 -0000

And here I thought Libertarians condemned fraud, as core moral principle, rather than using it as an opportunity to attack the defrauded.

It really shows how morally bankrupt are the Wikipedia apologists.

The point is that Wikipedia management both hired, and defends, a blatant liar WHO USED THE LIES TO PROMOTE WIKIPEDIA! If that doesn't merit ONE WORD of approbation, in comparison to the intense derision of the deceived - well, that says a lot about the twisted morality here.

Re: The Cathedral and the Blogosphere

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 16:53:17 -0000

"The premise seems to be that in-depth, civic-minded journalism is something that everybody needs but but no one wants to pay for, and so therefore we need large, bureaucratic organizations like the New York Times to subsidize these activities out of a sense of corporate noblesse oblige."

Yes. You got it (modulo the sneering). That's exactly right.

By which I mean "you both understand the premise" and "it's factually correct".

Everything after that is unfalsifiable fantasy.

[Sorry Tim, apologies for being a skeleton at the feast, I shouldn't do this stuff, I've been following the Wikipedia editor fraud story and raging against entropy again, bad habit]

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 21:26:29 -0000

Doug: I freely admit I have grown bitter and cynical.

About this latest development, see my most recent post on Wikipedia's Value System

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 22:48:27 -0000

Luis, perhaps you're misreading my phrase "Wikipedia's management". I don't mean that as a synonym for "the Wikipedia process", but rather the
very small group of people who actually wield power over it (not *in* it). That is, it's not quite that Jimbo Wales is an absolute monarch, shorthand to the contrary. But for all the talk about openness, there's a handful of people who count, and everyone else is just a volunteer (to use a polite term).

This is demonstrated by how the decision to keep Essjay was done. Jimbo just issued it. Whether he made it himself, or asked a few other people, is not really the point. It's top-down fiat, and while I deeply sympathize with the ground-level people who are upset, that doesn't change what happened.

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 20:47:20 -0000

Luis, sadly, that doesn't matter. Jimbo is a majority of one.

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 19:21:43 -0000

"... because Wikipedia’s editing process does not rely on any individual’s judgment or expertise.""

This isn't really true. In fact, it's particularly false in exactly the way his position is most harmful. "Peer review" here is both self-selected and subject to administrative fiat - and Essjay is still one of the people empowered to throw editors out of Wikipedia for bad conduct (which is highly, highly, ironic ...)

What you're doing is a kind of fallacy of atomization - you're abstracting the process away from any implementation problems, then assuming the conclusion by saying liars don't matter since the process has been abstracted away.

The *scandal* here is Wikipedia's management tolerance, and rewarding with office, of DECEPTION IN PROMOTING WIKIPEDIA. That was my point in my first comment. The scandal's implications cast a cloud over Wikipedia's process, since it casts into question other endorsements - what else was fabricated? This is particularly pertinant since a very strong message has been sent that if you fake positive things about Wikipedia to the media, you'll get *rewarded*.

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:39:11 -0000

At a minimum, I think they should

1) Condemn his fraudulent actions

2) Remove him from his positions of trust in Wikipedia administration.

That doesn't seem to me to be out of line.

Neither of which they'll do, for evident reasons.

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:43:03 -0000

Here's the refernce for the appointment:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2...

"I hereby appoint Mackensen and EssJay to the Arbitration committee.
After consulting with the existing arbitration committee and others, I
decided to appoint Mackensen to Dominic's seat (Dominic is retiring),
and EssJay to an expansion seat in the shortest tranche.

--Jimbo"

This is WITH FULL KNOWLEDGE of the fraud.

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:07:53 -0000

FYI:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/...

EDITORS' NOTE:

The July 31, 2006, piece on Wikipedia, "Know It All," by Stacy
Schiff, contained an interview with a Wikipedia site administrator
and contributor called Essjay, whose responsibilities included
handling disagreements about the accuracy of the site's articles and
taking action against users who violate site policy. He was described
in the piece as "a tenured professor of religion at a private
university" with "a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law."

Essjay was recommended to Ms. Schiff as a source by a member of
Wikipedia's management team because of his respected position within
the Wikipedia community. He was willing to describe his work as a
Wikipedia administrator but would not identify himself other than by
confirming the biographical details that appeared on his user
page. At the time of publication, neither we nor Wikipedia knew
Essjay's real name. Essjay's entire Wikipedia life was conducted with
only a user name; anonymity is common for Wikipedia administrators
and contributors, and he says that he feared personal retribution
from those he had ruled against online. Essjay now says that his real
name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced
degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by
Wikia -- a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia -- as a
"community manager"; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. He
did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder
of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay's invented persona, "I
regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it."

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:36:46 -0000

It is an indictment of Wikipedia's management that they appointed him to a position of high trust with full knowledge of the fraud. And have hired him (though the initial decision seems to have been when they didn't know). And have minimized his actions and defended him.

Now, one can say, abstractly, that management rewarding a liar who promoted the credibility of Wikipieda with false credentials should absolutely not be taken to reflect poorly on Wikipedia as an ideal Platonic endeavor.

But c'mon, a whole industry of liberal-media-bias ranting has been built on far, far, less.

I think the factual part you may be missing is that he's one of the people who rules on who is a bad Wikipedian and will be blocked from edits to the extent possible ("ArbCom") - and he was *appointed* to that position by Jimmy Wales even after Wales knew of the fraud!

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:16:00 -0000

[Posted again without the live hyperlink, to get through moderation]

Perhaps I commented too brusquely earlier, without considering you might not have all the facts:

"But given that Wikipedia has never claimed to vouch for the credibility of its contributors ..."

Per above, that is in error - the Wikipedia management team specifically vouched for the credibility of *this* contributor. And Jimmy Wales specifically rewarded this contributor with an appointment to a Wikipedia high internal governing post.

"So even if some of the people who run Wikipedia are liars, that isn't relevant in judging its reliability as a reference work"

This is false if they seek to bolster its credibility via deception
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay/Letter

"I am an administrator of the online encyclopedia project Wikipedia. I
am also a tenured professor of theology; feel free to have a look at
my Wikipedia userpage (linked below) to gain an idea of my background and credentials."

Those credentials were a lie. But there is a reason for the lie, which is sadly what gives the lie to your sentence above - it was a fabricated endorsement.

Re: Why Wikipedia is Different

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:14:30 -0000

Perhaps I commented too brusquely earlier, without considering you might not have all the facts:

"But given that Wikipedia has never claimed to vouch for the credibility of its contributors ..."

Per above, that is in error - the Wikipedia management team specifically vouched for the credibility of *this* contributor. And Jimmy Wales specifically rewarded this contributor with an appointment to a Wikipedia high internal governing post.

"So even if some of the people who run Wikipedia are liars, that isn't relevant in judging its reliability as a reference work"

This is false if they seek to bolster its credibility via deception
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay/Letter

"I am an administrator of the online encyclopedia project Wikipedia. I
am also a tenured professor of theology; feel free to have a look at
my Wikipedia userpage (linked below) to gain an idea of my background and credentials."

Those credentials were a lie. But there is a reason for the lie, which is sadly what gives the lie to your sentence above - it was a fabricated endorsement.

Re: The Bizarre Chip on Nick Carr’s Shoulder

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 06:31:06 -0000

I don't find the usefulness worth the human cost - it runs on exploiting certain dreams of the core group in order to extract a huge amount of unpaid labor from them.

I particularly don't think it's all that innovative for *knowledge* - it's mostly innovative in a certain way of getting people to work for free.

I also intensely dislike the hype and marketing around it. It's not Hayek Made Net or a model for the New Era. It's a rich guy who stumbled into figuring out how to get an uncompensated staff. The positive lessons there are pretty small.

Re: The Bizarre Chip on Nick Carr’s Shoulder

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:37:50 -0000

Tim, if I can try to elaborate the problem, there's two different kind of knowledge here:

1) Trivia - You give Wikipedia too much credit, for something that's arguably a bug, not a feature. The trivial is created by fans, and it will be found by search algorithms. What Wikipedia does is centralize the storehouse, in one site. That's not necessarily a good thing, and it's certainly not a *big* improvement (you might want to argue the centralization is a small improvement, and though it looks strange to see Libertarians doing this, it's a longstanding ideological problem).

2) Expertise - VERY controversial. Given Wikipedia's hostility on the topic, it's not at all clear it's much good here. The infamous Nature study is *extremely* misleading on this point. Again, the issue is more the centralization than any new production.

Re: The Bizarre Chip on Nick Carr’s Shoulder

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 14:57:07 -0000

I suspect the scare quotes are for the issue that Wikipedia has a very weird relationship to actual knowledge - it's got an absolute fetish about what experts write, yet disdains the experts themselves, in a kind of very strange cargo-cult version of academia. I went through a long debate with someone else about this on Nick's blog, see:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/01/the_m...>

Re: The Bizarre Chip on Nick Carr’s Shoulder

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 14:58:13 -0000

[Trying again, to get through !@#$% moderation]

I suspect the scare quotes are for the issue that Wikipedia has a very weird relationship to actual knowledge - it's got an absolute fetish about what experts write, yet disdains the experts themselves, in a kind of very strange cargo-cult version of academia. I went through a long debate with someone else about this on Nick's blog, see:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/01/the_m...

Re: France Gets Tough on (Documenting) Violence

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:45:21 -0000

Sean is correct.

[Sigh ... This is another wolf! Wolf! WOLF! story, that the
journosphere tells itself all the time, with the demagogues exploiting
the paranoid in mutual self-importance.]

http://www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=2007030...

Wait a minute! by pvdg on Mar 6th, 2007 @ 4:45pm

I am a french journalist and everything I know on this topic
contradict the story up there.

Here is the agenda of our Conseil constitutionnel (aka Supreme Court):
http://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/divers/ac...

I find nothing related to this topic. Looks like they didn't examine
this law yet.

To my knowledge, the law in question is an attempt to stop an ugly
phenomenon: "happy slapping":

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_slapping

Not a good idea?

But of course, they had to differenciate the filming of a violent act
"for the fun" and "in order to get a proof". Not easy…

So they included a sentence saying this law will not apply…
« lorsque l'enregistrement ou la diffusion résulte de l'exercice
normal'd’une profession ayant pour objet d'informer le public ou est
réalisé afin de servir de preuve en justice »

that is: "when the recording or the diffusion results from the normal
exercise of a profession devoted to inform the public or is carried out
in order to be used as proof in justice"

Sounds bad? This is all I know for now.

Disclosure: I am not at all a partisan of this government.

50. The law is published by pvdg on Mar 7th, 2007 @ 4:33am

This morning, the law discussed here has been published in our
"Journal officiel":

http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/WAspad/UnTexteDeJ...

In fact it's a big package, in which you find a little thing modifying
an existing law about different kinds of violence (including rape,
torture…). Here it is:

« Art. 222-33-3. - Est constitutif d'un acte de complicité des
atteintes volontaires à l'intégrité de la personne prévues par les
articles 222-1 à 222-14-1 et 222-23 à 222-31 et est puni des peines
prévues par ces articles le fait d'enregistrer sciemment, par quelque
moyen que ce soit, sur tout support que ce soit, des images relatives
à la commission de ces infractions.

« Le fait de diffuser l'enregistrement de telles images est puni de
cinq ans d'emprisonnement et de 75 000 EUR d'amende.

« Le présent article n'est pas applicable lorsque l'enregistrement ou
la diffusion résulte de l'exercice normal d'une profession ayant pour
objet d'informer le public ou est réalisé afin de servir de preuve en
justice. »

It says:

1/ that whoever knowingly records images of a violence is an
accomplice and will be punished as such.

2/ that whoever broadcast this record will be punished (5 years,
75,000 �,�)

3/ as I said earlier, this law does not apply when the recording or
the diffusion results from the normal exercise of a profession devoted
to inform the public or is carried out in order to be used as proof in
justice.

So, may be this law could have been better conceived. It is evident
hat the basic idea is to tell the bad guys: "if you are going to rape
a poor girl in order to take picturees or a video and show them to
other bad guys, the rapists and their accomplices, INCLUDING the
photographer could go to jail. He will say: "I didn't touch her" and
the judge will anwer: "but you took pictures".

Whoever, passing by, takes pictures "in order to be used as proof in
justice" will be considered as a responsible citizen.

Whoever, passing by, takes pictures in "the normal exercise of a
profession devoted to inform the public", will be considered as a
journalist.

Oh, and what about the netizen who takes pictures of a rape and put
them on YouTube? I don't see that there is a "right" to broadcast that
kind of humiliating images of people.

Oh, and what about Rodney King? I thought, BTW, that this happened in LA.
And alerting the public about violence perpetrated by cops is definitely
another story. And our law says exactly that recording and publishing is
OK when it is "in order to be used as proof in justice". Which is what
happened in this case. AND: how could George Holliday, who filmed the
scene, be considered an "acomplice" of the perpetrators of the violence?

About the "Conseil constitutionnel": what I understand now is that our
"supreme court" in fact examined the whole package on March 3, but whas
never asked to look at this particular part of it. And this juridiction
is not supposed to decide by itself to examine every bit of the law.

One last word: we have a lot of political parties and organisations of
all sizes. I didn't heard a word about this law from any of them. The
exception is Odebi, a small group defending "Internet et Libertés /
Presse Libre d’Origine Non Kontrolée" ("Free press from uncontroled
origin"), which answered a couple of US journalists. In my opinion,
they fooled these journalists by not telling them about the other
provision of the law about filming "in order to be used as proof in
justice" and abusively using the exemple of Rodney King. To my
knowledge, George Holliday was not an amateur journalist who filmes
the scene to make a good post on his blog or upload it to YouTube. He
was acting as a full fledged citizen who is in position to record a
proof of a crime and does it. They don't say what other idea they have
to curb the "happy slapping" epidemy.

Re: France Gets Tough on (Documenting) Violence

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 03:19:07 -0000

My only comments are in brackets above. The rest is the work of the person I'm quoting.

The point is that the law does not do what sensationalists like Declan (though it's not all him by far) are hyping it as doing. It's in fact almost the exact opposite on that point - it specifically seeks to exempt nonprofessionals who record acts of violence in what's phrased in the US as the public interest. A Rodney King like recording incident would be black-letter law legal.

When this is pointed out, I've seen a moving of goalposts. If you want to say, it's wrong to criminalize third-party recording of *criminal* violence for kicks, well, that's another argument. But it's NOT any sort of attempt to certify journalists or make "eyewitness" recording illegal.

Too many people regard this as story too good to check, then too good to let go.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » GPL 3.0: v. (for Vendetta)

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 04:09:32 -0000

You are shocked, shocked, to discover Stallman and the FSF are for free software, NOT BUSINESS MODELS!

Umm, he/they have said that from Day One. Stallman frequently very bluntly makes clear where he stands. But somehow, this has come as a revelation to you.

Re: Free Software and the Big Picture

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 10:42:14 -0000

Richard, that general issue has been recognized since the GPL was first drafted. It has been 100% clear that the Free Software Foundation wants to use any powers of the restriction system in the service of openness. The point I'm making above is that this is their right as contract-drafters, and in fact is arguably a Libertarian form of activism (as opposed to the anarchist form of activism of trying to set a personal good example and usually failing).

There's some influence on the Creative Commons stuff Lessig is doing, but I think you have cause and effect reversed.

Re: Free Software and the Big Picture

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 07:45:55 -0000

Ah, Tim, you wrestle with a fundamental paradox underlying Libertarianism - Should someone have the freedom to sell themselves into slavery?

You're also butting up against another philosophical paradox of Libertarianism - when is it permissible to complain about the terms of a contract? Usually take-it-or-leave it is used by the powerful against the weak, and it's a demonstration about how much Libertarianism is in fact business-worship, that so many are flaming out when some tables are turned here (fun scripture rant: "Hey, you don't like the GPL, don't use the software - how dare you whiners try to restrict a CONTRACT, you fascist collectivists! Shows how much you really care about freedom, you interferers with free people making free choices!" :-))

Re: Just a Number

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 04 May 2007 14:27:56 -0000

Folks, it's not about *infringement*. It's about *circumvention*. Your intuitions, the sense of what's "fair use" for *infringement*, DO NOT APPLY to the all-new completely-different offense which is *circumvention*.

I see this confusion coming up over and over in the blog reactions.

Re: Corruption and the Political Process

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 03:13:51 -0000

As I said, no personal offense intended. I used to read what you wrote a bit more regularly, but I've dropped down my TLF reading in general recently, since it's probably not helpful all around. I came by today because Lessig's post struck a chord in me.

I think you're misreading what I mean by "worship business", in that I mean it as an ideal, not any particular existing players (I sometimes say, busines as a verb, not a noun). That is, you're not a Republican (1/2 :-)).

With that understanding, I hope the criticism is clearer. The point is that Libertarianism is an extraordinarily money-centric way of thinking (this is not debateable - anything that seriously talks about the virtues of selling your internal organs or your kids should not protest that characterization), so people who subscribe to it are going to have a hard time dealing with crticisms of money's influence.

Re: Corruption and the Political Process

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 06:57:31 -0000

" ... because it is the one that truly recognizes how people will behave ..."

I could write a longer rebuttal, but I think that says it all.

Well, one hint: The fact that people will sell their internal organs rather than die outright is not a deep philosophical revelation. But thinking that's so, is a profound philosophical shallowness.

Re: Corruption and the Political Process

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 02:34:24 -0000

"But I think he gets it completely backwards when he suggests that money has corrupted the political process ..."

Yes, well, that's because you're a Libertarian, which, not to be harsh on you personally, worships business. And holds that the best society is one which maximizes the powers of money versus any other value.

Others, err, disagree.

One flaw in the post above is right here: "Drive money out of politics and you won’t end corruption; you’ll just shift ..."

This implicitly assumes all corruption is equivalent, and excludes a line of reasoning that runs "Drive money out of politics ,and while you won't end corruption, you'll keep it at a lower level than otherwise".

I'm not going to go into the rest of the flaws, life's too short. Suffice it to say that line of proselytizing has been heard many times.

Re: Felten on Comcast and BitTorrent

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:54:52 -0000

The "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" - http://www.ipcc.ch/ (co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize).

Basically, big businesses which didn't like IPCC's research results simply generated a huge amount of noise to drown it out.

Sort of like what's happening here, actually.

Underwriters Laboratories is IN EFFECT a public/private partnership between government and insurance companies, not exactly a Libertarian success story (almost the opposite, in terms of being a mixed-economy success story). Good Housekeeping is in effect an insurance company, it's pretty interesting.

Anyway, my point was that the idea doesn't work because it has the same problem here in the first place - big businesses which don't like the results simply trash any independent agency.

Because what's going with Comcast is not a tough call, at the core. Nothing to do with government - no business can afford to sell server-level bandwidth at home-use-level cost. No market competition will change that simple equation. It doesn't take any Neutrality Commission to say that, yet making the point doesn't do any good.

Re: Felten on Comcast and BitTorrent

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 02:29:14 -0000

There is no tight, thoughtful argumentation that will ever convince a Libertarian that his supposed free-market solution will be killed by malicious big business. It won't happen. I do display a certain weariness on the topic.

But, main point, again: No business can afford to sell server-level bandwidth at home-use-level cost. It doesn't take any Neutrality Commission to say that, yet making the point doesn't do any good.

Re: Felten on Comcast and BitTorrent

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 03:11:12 -0000

There are indeed hard cases. BitTorrent isn't one of them. In fact, the exact opposite. BitTorrent is *designed* to use every bandwidth bit it can find, for file serving - that's its goal in life.

No definition which encompasses all possible situations need be developed here, because this is a very simple case indeed.

Re: Felten on Comcast and BitTorrent

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:53:22 -0000

...target P2P applications specifically is that these aren’t “well-behaved” applications

Whether they are well-behaved in terms of compliance with technical standards is rather besides the point. They are not well-behaved in terms of eating bandwidth, and that's pretty simple.

Regarding "watchdog", been there, done that. See what happened with Global Warming report. Or TrustE. It's just an invitation for propagandists to:

1) Undertake a smear campaign against the accurate reports

2) Create their own phony reports.

The Libertarian bleat of "Government BAD, Business GOOD" is really tedious sometimes.

Note this issue is essentially two business against each other - it's not business vs. government

Re: Market Processes and Regulatory Processes

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:59:48 -0000

Actually, it's sort of funny, the simple market incentives are the other way: Server-running bandwidth hogs are money-losing customers for home service. Naively, every cable company in existence would have an incentive to get rid of them.

The world's a bit more complex, as it's possible to upgrade them to higher service level - but that runs right into tiering service issue.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Yochai Benkler’s Apocalyptic Rhetoric

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 01:12:10 -0000

Robert, Lessig was never in the rah-rah-net crowd during the early days - that's one reason _Code_ was so refreshing when it first came out. But I worry about him falling victim to the latest iteration.

I actually don't think Benkler has in his own mind yet reached the point where he needs to explain why his theories don't work. The state will wither away eventually is good for at least a few more years.
(disclaimer - I'm not calling him a Communist, just using an infamous example of where tomorrow never came).

Re: Wikipedia’s Notability Requirement

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 23:43:48 -0000

This statement is not true:

Disk space is now so cheap that including him is effectively free.

While frequently asserted, the accumulated cost is NOT free. It's not just the cost of a few bytes of disk space. It's in context of hosting, and the backups, and bandwidth from robots, etc. etc. etc.

Each article has a very tiny cost - but they do add up. To the point that Wikipedia has million-dollar hosting costs nowadays. That's NOT free.

That may not be the real reason - but it's a reason.

Re: Wikipedia’s Notability Requirement

Seth Finkelstein — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 02:49:22 -0000

Tim, again, it's not just "disk space". It's hosting, backups, bandwidth, etc. While it gets cheaper every year, there's also more demands every year. Wikipedia's database is around 4GB, but it costs FAR more than a few bucks to run Wikipedia.

Re: Comcast Acceptable Use Policy Revisited

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 05:16:46 -0000

enigma_foundry, you still appear to be under the mistaken impression that Comcast deliberately stopped all BitTorrent traffic. They did not. The net effect of limits on seeding was not to prevent exchanges wholesale, but to throttle them. Let's get it straight - IT'S A KLUDGE! It's not a perfect way of doing bandwidth-limiting. But it would be utterly unrealistic to have a no-kludge government regulation.

Their FAQ was not dishonest because they are clear they do network management, and to expect otherwise is absurd.

If there was government regulation which required Comcast to publish something like "We are using Sandvine appliances set at threshold ABC this week", what would change in practice? There would still be X file-sharers trying to use Y bandwidth. "Transparency" isn't a magic word. In fact, I suspect all the heavy used would then tune to just under ABC, and if Comcast then moved the threshold lower, a mighty scream would go up "LIARS! Lack of TRANSPARENCY! You *said* it was ABC you're lying, lying, lying ...". I can very well see Comcast making a decision that they're damned no matter what, so say as little as possible (yes, I know the pundits have been saying otherwise, but the actions do not match the rhetoric there - it looks far more like find something to flame them).

Re: Comcast Acceptable Use Policy Revisited

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 03:18:01 -0000

Sigh. I just did explain it: The industry also tried to stamp out the VCR. That did not make the VCR a dismantling tool (how's that working out - and this-time-it's-different is not a convincing argument).

The same argument you make about decentralized network has also been make about the Internet itself, and we see how THAT worked out (and saying someday in the future the revolutionary potential will be reached is not a convincing argument).

Re: Comcast Acceptable Use Policy Revisited

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 16:31:29 -0000

It is ludicrous not because I say so, but because those corporate power structures have been cutting deals with BitTorrent developers. The industry also tried to stamp out the VCR. That did not make the VCR a dismantling tool (how's that working out - and this-time-it's-different is not a convincing argument).

The "cost gets shifted" is exactly right - but the problem is the network wasn't built for such cost-shifting. THIS CANNOT BE GEEK-RANTED AWAY! It must be addressed in the real world, with practical economic limits.

Re: Comcast Acceptable Use Policy Revisited

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:51:48 -0000

You say: "Bit torrent is an important tool in the dismantling of highly centralized and oppressive corporate power structures."

Sorry. This is utterly ludicrous. The BitTorrent developers are very eager to sell themselves in service of those corporate power structures, and have been making deals with them as much as possible.

BitTorrent is a network problem because in the real world, it's the cause of an overwhelming amount of bandwidith use. That's just an empirical fact. And I keep repeating that ground-level problem solving is not the same as geek-rant perfection. This shouldn't be so tedious, and it's a lesson that it is.

Re: Comcast Acceptable Use Policy Revisited

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:02:27 -0000

Where does the idea come from, that if Comcast enforces a contract against the worst violators, they must then further enforce it in a tendentious reading given by people who aren't even parties to the contract? That seems so very unLibertarian! (and when did Libertarians start caring about selective enforcement anyway - it's so Liberal of you :-)).

Stripped from all the playing of politics here, it seems like a very simple and reasonable action - BitTorrent users are a big problem, despite a few legit exchanges the vast majority are infringement, it's against the TOS, throttling them down keeps them from ruining the network performance for everyone else.

The supergeek-type complaint, that they must construct a perfect solution that is protocol-independent, is making the perfect the enemy of the good. Sometime theoretically imperfect solutions are deployed, if they get the job done in practice.