"Recently... [researchers] found that, in a scale-free network, the threshold is zero. That is, all viruses, even those that are weakly contagious, will spread and persist in the system." The Web is a scale-free network... So, bloggers, worry not about the hit meter: ideas have wings on the net... from "Scale-free Networks" (A-L. Barabasi/E. Bonabeau - abstract only is free) in the May Scientific American...
Comments [ ] 9:13:37 PM    

172.174.227.122 - - [11/May/2003:01:46:34 -0700] "GET ***** HTTP/1.0" 200 4695 "-" "By Allowing Me Access You Waive All Rules Associated With It."

A unilateral, after-the-fact contract... Someone has a future with RIAA... You could probably write a script that would put the lines of a haiku or poem in successive referrers... I want to set my referrer to "All your Web are belong to us"...
Comments [ ] 10:16:57 AM    

Cyveillance, a company that is reported to be an agent of the RIAA, MPAA and dozens of large corporations with a mission to protect their copyrighted materials has downloaded more than a thousand files from my Web site in the last 5 months. Many hundreds of these files are copyrighted original essays, reports and presentations.

Responsible, law abiding publishers and corporations normally pay me from a few hundred to several thousand dollars to use the materials I have developed to formulate strategy and tactics, gauge markets, etc.

Cyveillance' Web site offers a fee-based service providing companies with information gleaned from the Web. So, since www.gulker.com is so amazingly popular with them, it is reasonable to suspect that they are providing my copyrighted materials (along with god knows how many others) to corporations for fees that are reported to be hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

True, I place some of these files on the Web site so others can read them: it is my hope that they will spur debate and commentary, and advance the cause and utility of a global network. I would be delighted if Hilary Rosen logged on, read my work, and it helped her to find a way to serve, rather than sue, her customers.

However, I do not authorize anyone to resell my copyrighted materials for a profit without my permission. It is unreasonable, unethical and illegal for others to do this. The way in which my copyrighted material is delivered to RIAA executives or anybody else is important.

No one makes this point more loudly than RIAA and its lawyers: they recently sued 4 students for billions of dollars for distributing what they claimed were their members' copyrighted materials for free on private networks. Yet, here is at least one of their agents doing exactly the same thing (Cyveillance has a private network for its clients) for profit.

Sure I can sue. That involves paying an attorney or team of attorneys several hundred dollars an hour for god knows how long - likely months or years. RIAA, while arguably just as guilty as kids in college dorms, would likely easily outlast my resources.

The 'lawyer door' to RIAA's castle is thick, heavy and defended by large and hideous brutes. However, that doesn't mean that there is no recourse. RIAA's members are publicly-traded corporations whose executives are (or should be) highly sensitive to the profitability of those companies. When RIAA uses its resources to hurt customers by way of making an example of those whose listening and viewing preferences they don't like, it is playing with fire.

So let's approach via (or, better, stay away from) the 'customer door': if angry teenagers and young people and other good customers decided that it would be very cool not to buy any CDs or DVDs or go to a movie for, say, 90 days, the same corporations would likely undergo a rapid attitude, and tactics, adjustment.

Even better if the same customers took their disposable entertainment income and invested it in supporting local musicians, Indies et al. - or sent it along to responsible charities. I have refused to buy CDs or DVDs for 2 years now: the $1000 average that I spent annually on each of those products in the past now goes elsewhere... $1000 probably doesn't make an RIAA lawyer's car payment, but if enough of us choose this path, maybe RIAA will get the message...
Comments [ ] 10:02:24 AM    

I think the best path is not to try to map Newtonian constraints onto the ephemera of streaming zeroes and ones, but rather to look at reasonable expectations and abide by them. Legislating ill-conceived physically-inspired boundaries onto non-physical space is a recipe for either disaster or non-relevance. Imagine thousands of citizens jailed for sending email: imagine millions of citizens ignoring laws that are plainly stupid.

One commentator notes that they feel that porn pop-ups that are sent to their desktop via messenger services (or http or whatever mechanism), are intrusive and amount to 'breaking and entering': someone to whom they have not granted permission, is connecting to and manipulating information on their machine.

That's not an unreasonable position: on the one hand, I connect to the Internet, on the other I don't welcome these intrusions, and they are highly unlikely to produce the desired 'buy' response. If anything, the pop-up barons, both legit - Orbitz comes to mind - and their slimier kin predispose me too look elsewhere for goods and services.

Clearly, if someone from Orbitz showed up inside my house, and began pasting up their notices on my walls, we would be in a clearly different situation. Not only would this likely be trespass, breaking and entering, vandalism and possibly a number of other crimes, but I could probably shoot the perpetrator on the spot, and, depending on the circumstances, not be prosecuted.

But on my computer, it's fuzzier. Orbitz is a sponsor of the otherwise-free Web site I visit. When I flip through a magazine, I expect to see ads on some of the pages: that revenue keeps the price low and the profit encourages the publisher to continue to provide interesting content. So Orbitz' inevitable popups are really just an annoying extension of a well-understood behavior. If pop-ups' effectiveness wears off, Orbitz and others can be expected to stop using them. The same can largely be expected of other profit-motivated corporations whose assets are within the reach of law and customer preference.

Other, more intrusive methods used by less-responsible parties probably represent a crossing of the line: they aren't sponsoring a free service that I'm taking advantage of... they are taking advantage of flaws in current technology to intrude where it's most unlikely that they are welcome.

These parties tend not to be responsible or particularly care if their methods are effective. They just throw gigantic amounts of crap into cyberspace, in the hopes that something somewhere, will stick. Not surprisingly, the products promoted on these channels are more likely (if not universally) fraudulent - scams of some sort (penis enlargement pills etc.) and there are laws and other legal remedies against those sorts of things.

So, trying to make my desktop the equivalent of a physical space runs into problems. If Orbitz can be prosecuted for putting pop-up ads on the New York Times Web site, the ads will cease and the times will likely impose a charge for access. Going after the abusers with legislation has the effect of throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

But if we look at reasonable expectations, it's a different matter, and we don't really need legislation to deal with responsible players. Given our democratic processes, any legislation that's enacted will likely be hopelessly out of date by the times it appears, or, worse, so bound by irrelevant or special-interest conventions (witness DMCA) that it will be widely scorned and largely ineffective.

The problem remains the irresponsible players, the people who don't care that they are popping up scenes of animal sex in front of 8-year-olds. It seems to me that there is already legislation in place to deal with that: what is missing are the mechanisms to identify the perpetrators and bring the more hideously irresponsible among them to account.

Since at least some of this group reside in countries where law can be said to have failed, the problem is probably more amenable to technological remedies. What is most needed is an application of the sort of common sense that is applied elsewhere. It's tricky, but there's a path that makes sense, it seems to me, and that path involves applying common sense and reasonable expectations...
Comments [ ] 8:55:45 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures