How SOPA Changes Current Law

SOPA has been making the rounds of headlines across the internet and print media this last couple weeks.  It is a bill to criminalize “illegal” content online.  So, someone posts a snippet of a song owned by a record company on your website, and you are now a criminal.  You are not just a person with a legal dispute between you and someone else. The Federal Government is also standing between you and that someone else.

This represents a dramatic shift in copyright law in recent years.  At its inception, copyright law was designed as a civil matter.  If a copyright holder felt their material was used illegally, the holder was granted the right to take any offenders to court, at their own expense, as one would do over a contract dispute.

Criminal matters are intended to be those issues that threaten the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of the general public.  For issues where the interests of only a few select entities are at stake, our once wise Constitutional legislators designated those issues as civil matters.

By rightly applying civil law to copyrights it allowed a means for creative industries to protect themselves from other people within creative industries.  It was never intended as a legal bludgeon to be wielded by copyright holders against the general public who did not profit off of their contact with the copyrighted material.  The idea that an individual obtaining a copied version of copyrighted material equaled theft was never a part of the design of copyrights.

Copyrights and Capitalism

The reason copyright laws were designed as a civil matter, is that otherwise the heavy (and politicized) hand of government would become an over-bearing force on our Free Market system.  For real Capitalism to thrive a Free Market must be allowed to define how the economic system of any given period of time is formed.  By allowing the fair system of a Free Market to decide which business models fail and which business models succeed, we prevent the often ignorant and short-sighted influence of a powerful government from making wrong decisions about who should be allowed to succeed.

In other words, if a government were to make a decision that a current business model was the correct one, and begin passing laws that cement that business model in place forever, then that government does not have the best interest of the entire economy at heart.  Instead a true Capitalist system encourages any and all business models to exist.  And a government that wishes to promote the ideals of Capitalism does not lend itself to any industry as its personal strong-arm to prevent competitive threats.  Instead, such a government would stick to its original purpose of promoting freedoms of its people.

How Did We Get Here?

The reason we have come to the point where a government intended to protect individual liberties is asserting itself as the unpaid bully of select business models is that we have gradually slid far from the ideals of Capitalism and into the morass of Corporate Socialism.  We have allowed ideas like “too big to fail” and “vital industries” to slip into our vernacular.  We have fostered the socialist idea that the role of our government is to make sure certain favored entities remain unscathed.

The idea that we reduce government’s power in our lives, and thus in our economy, has been replaced with the idea that our government is responsible to see that people and entities succeed.  If only we could return to the morally superior value of laissez faire, we might have a chance to form a new media industry that learns to compete in the technological world we have evolved, instead of needing a thuggish government to protect its interests with the threat of imprisonment.

Right now, we have given ourselves a government that is not bright enough to see past the whining of the music and movie industries, at their real purpose–maximizing personal liberties.  We should start looking for candidates to get us out of this mess as soon as possible.

In the past year I have listened to a chorus of mobile device users telling the rest of the world how everyone will soon be getting rid of their desktop computer.  The rest of the world usually does a good job of not responding.  Whether it’s because they are insecure about their own understanding of technology trends or because they just aren’t sure, I am certain many people aren’t speaking up who don’t feel the same way.  Well, for the rest of those tech users out there, I am going to have to stand up and say, “it just ain’t so”.  Mobile computing will definitely grow.  But it will not replace the desktop as it is used today!

Before the iPad fanboys have a conniption, let me explain.  There are some issues with the actual physics involved in humanity’s current technology that prevent the mobile processor from performing at the level of demands of the desktop.  Our processors are, unfortunately, still based on electricity.  This causes heat.  The smaller those little wires are made, the more they heat up.  At the computer capacity of the dumbed-down cell phone, this is not a problem.  As long as computing demand remains low, you won’t need the increased power required to dissipate that heat, which must be done to prevent chip meltdown.  I can perform my simple web browsing and emailing, posting on Facebook or even a quick game of chess with my friends.  Oh, and if I want something really complex and visually mind-blowing, I can even play Angry Birds.  That’s right.  For the most part, the most graphically sophisticated game on a cell phone that can be played is equivalent to every game that can be found on Kongregate.  Don’t you dare ask them to do dual display on even 1680 x 1050!

The reason for this low capacity cannot be physically overcome until something like completely optical computing becomes a mass-produced reality.  That won’t happen within the next 15 years.

What the purely mobile users forget is that not everyone is happy with personal computing that is all done at the power level of a Flash app.  My step-son is into using GIMP for very complex photo editing.  If he had to wait 45 minutes for every color curve edit or perspective transform, he would surely give up on the hobby.  My wife and I both heavily use LibreOffice for spreadsheet and word processing needs.  We need to work with our bank accounts, investment data, news and personal correspondence quickly and use multiple programs to get it done during our precious free time.  For my hobbies I run Eclipse, Matlab, SolidWorks and I use SSH — all at the same time.  The power of a mobile device cannot handle these programs.  It also can’t handle the input appropriately.  I love my Droid Charge.  But swyping an email into it is done out of necessity because I’m on the run.  Not when I’m at home and I can kick back with the power of my ASUS G73S laptop.  Yes, I’ve heard of the possibility that in the future everyone will hook their phone up to a Bluetooth monitor and keyboard at home.  But people will never have a reason to do that until the phone can do EVERYTHING!  Hasn’t anyone noticed how little demand there is for Bluetooth monitors?

I think those that predict that mobile will replace everything are simple computer users.  And that’s fine.  If an iPad truly does everything you need, then use it.  But, your needs are not universal.  There are plenty of people who will use a netbook to work on a spreadsheet on the bus because they just can’t get their work done without a real OS that can run complex programs.  Personally, I think I will never buy a tablet because, as I have said before, for me it’s the worst of both worlds — it runs with the power of my phone and is basically as bulky to carry as a netbook.

And as I said, I love my Droid Charge!  Sure, it’s cute that I can write a quick email from the doctor’s office waiting room.  But when I need to communicate above the level of Twitter or get work done beyond a quick SSH, I need a real computer.  And I am certain it will remain that way for a very long time to come.

Dear Mr. Shuttleworth,

The news of Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s mobile business is a potential game changer for the mobile computing market.  The reasons Google made this purchase were obvious; they needed an arsenal of patents to fight the illegitimate battles of the patent wars to protect Android.  As I have described in my previous post, these wars are an unfair and obtrusive burden on the entire tech industry, preventing innovation and bogging down our legal system.  It’s too bad Google had to do this.  I must admit I feel bad for their position.  There may also have been the incentive to prevent fragmentation of the Android landscape by gaining more control of Android implementation.  This incentive would have been secondary at best given the threat of the current law suits.

The speculation has already begun that Google’s ownership of Motorola will push other phone and tablet manufacturers away from Android.  There was a reason that Microsoft never entered the retail computer market with its own desktop PC.  Just as Pepsi’s ownership of fast food companies Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC caused many companies like Wendy’s to reconsider promoting the business of another fast food competitor, Samsung, HTC and LG are now going to re-look at their commitments to the Android platform.  With options like MeeGo, webOS and GridOS immediately available, there will not be much investment needed to port another operating system to many of their current phones.

It already runs on a tablet. When can I see it on my Smartphone?

What many Linux fans would love to see is an actual Linux desktop ported to a Smartphone.  We can already buy a tablet with Ubuntu.  I’ve heard they aren’t too bad.  But, personally, I still see the tablet as the worst of both worlds.  It is basically as bulky as my netbook and has the ability to run the same programs that my phone can run.  With the exception of an actual Ubuntu tablet I suppose.  (Although I would still like to see a demonstration of how well Matlab runs on an Ubuntu tablet.  I always thought I was so cool to be able to run Matlab on my Linux netbook.  Such are geeks.)

It seems Canonical’s mobile strategy has been to enter through the back door, i.e. tablets.  Many mobile computing users are not going to use a true Linux mobile device if it can only be found on a tablet.  Mark, you must know that we are waiting for it.  The Ubuntu Smartphone.  You have obviously been preparing for it.  The iconified Unity desktop has obviously been custom made for mobile.  We have already seen that many Android Smartphones can be rooted and then forced to run Ubuntu.  Not that it works great.  But it is possible.

Many Android users are accustom to rooting their phone and flashing it with another ROM.  The vendor supplied versions of Android are made to be defective by design with restrictions and removal of features.  So we are almost always looking for alternatives.  You could promote Ubuntu directly to Android phone users.  “How would you like to try a better operating system on your Android phone?”  That would get the Smartphone manufacturers’ attention.

Of course there is work to be done.  You will probably need to run it on an altered kernel.  You will need to develop the appropriate interface changes and … oh yes, I almost forgot … it needs to be able to make a phone call.

But if there ever was a time to invest that extra amount of capital into Canonical and the Ubuntu platform it is now!  The mobile computing field suddenly looks more fluid than ever.  Canonical is well positioned to jump in and offer another alternative.  But there needs to be a bit of a push.  I hope you see the same opportunity that I do.  If you can make it happen, we might actually have some real freedom in the mobile software platform.

“The secret to success is to own nothing, but control everything.” — Nelson Rockefeller

The Patent Problem

Patent law in the United States has always been framed with the intent to promote innovation.  Because there has generally been a large amount of capital required to produce such innovations as the railroad, the airplane and modern medicines, the government wisely decided to allow an incentive for these investments by means of protecting the rights of companies to have exclusive claim on profits made for research they have done for a limited time.  By allowing room for an innovation to breathe, we had created an economy where everyone could benefit by the rapid rate of technological progress.

Today, however, these profits are protected not for innovators but for a minimal investment by patent trolls.  The incentives were never intended to create a viable career for lawyers and companies that harass smaller companies for unintended violations of patents which should have been obvious industry practice.

We are left with an economic result that does not encourage innovation, but instead creates a chilling effect in the technological field.  It doesn’t encourage the necessary competition that must exist for a capitalist economy to grow.  It instead encourages companies to acquire a war chest of patents that they can use as ammunition against other companies in the battleground of patent law litigation.  If anyone has been watching the wars between Motorola, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Oracle in recent years, then it is obvious that we are wasting a significant amount of our national resources in the attempted of Rockefellian control of everything technological.  I think we could and should spend those resources more efficiently.

The Copyright Conundrum

Copyrights were also created to promote the progress of the sciences and the arts.  The United States patent law was written to be a civil matter which had as a purpose to prevent authors from losing profits to printers and other copycat authors at the treat of a civil suit which must be pressed by the copyright holder.  It was never intended to be used as a criminal statute against the purchaser of such works.  Such an idea would have been laughable because it would be both unenforceable and completely against one of the key freedoms necessary for capitalism to work: ownership.

But capitalism now has a problem.  The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) passed by President Clinton makes it a crime to tamper with your own possessions.  As I have stated before, ownership must mean you can make all decisions of your possession for capitalism to work.  How did we ever get to the point where tampering your own possessions was against the law? The old guard of companies that exist today cannot see how to make money off of their own industry, except by means of the heavy hand of government.

Besides the obvious violation of personal liberties that the DMCA imposes, it poses a serious threat to our Republic because it is unenforceable.  In order to enforce such a law, we would have to pass another law that makes it a criminal act to purchase, build or own a digital device that does not have DRM (Digital Rights Management) built into it, to prevent users from being able to move information in the way they see fit.  And doing that would be such an egregious violation of our personal freedoms that it would be looked back upon by future generations as Prohibition is looked back upon by ours.

The Simple Solution

Capitalism must always mean that there are winners and losers as technologies and people change.  The problem we have is caused by a legal system which is devoted to keeping afloat business models which do not really work in the modern technological realm.  So we have been imposing drastic attacks on our own freedoms in order to keep the old business models working.

The solution really is simple: stop!  We will go through a period where large companies lose their ability to make money the way they always have.  Of course, they will complain to no end about this.  But we shouldn’t listen.  There will be new players that can innovate and change the way our economy works.

Ending the criminalization of data transfers may mean that selling pieces of plastic called CDs and DVDs will no longer be a viable means of profit.  But new businesses for artists to pre-sell their creations could be formed.  An artist could offer their album up for pre-sale and not release it until they have achieved a desired amount of sales, for example.   This would still leave room for the current copyright laws to apply to commercial use restrictions.

I would not suggest ending all patents, as mechanical and medicinal patents are still very necessary for innovation.  Ending patents should only apply to software.  The small amount of capital required to create software and the obvious nature of almost every software patent shows that patents do not incentivize innovation it the field of software.  Besides that, Free Open Source Software (FOSS) has shown that truly great creations can be made on very little capital and are very likely with collaboration instead of competition (i.e. Firefox, Blender, VLC Media Player, LibreOffice and Linux Mint).

We really live in a new paradigm of technological and economic possibilities today that we have never really properly addressed.  I believe if we stop and rethink the structure of our legal system and apply to it our value of personal liberty, then we can create law that better suits the possible future that the Internet Age promises.

When I first began using Linux as my primary operating system, I did so to try to solve some problems I was having with Microsoft Windows.  My computer had begun to feel like it was not under my control.  Updates were being downloaded and installed during inopportune times and they were requiring me to completely shut down my computer nearly every time, or nagging me to do it anyway.  I was running anti-virus software that was buggy and bloated and slowing down my computer.  In order to maintain all of the recent security updates, I had to literally hand over the contents of my hard drive to Microsoft on a regular basis to prove that I had not hacked Windows (Windows Genuine Advantage).  My music, videos and even the font files on my computer were told what they could do by Microsoft’s DRM efforts.  Being a lover of liberty and a bit of a security freak, I was rubbed the wrong way with many of the issues that Microsoft had taught me I just had to live with.

I decided to give Linux a try, just as a LiveUSB at first, so I could see what was possible.  I dreamed of being able to replace every function I needed out of a computer with Linux.  I knew there was nearly no susceptibility to viruses with Linux.  I knew it was built with networking and network security in mind from the very beginning.  The security freak in me liked it already.  But, of course, it needs to work!  While I do have a couple of needs that I cannot fill with Linux at the moment (Netflix and 3D parametric CAD package, i.e. Solidworks), I was very happy to learn that it did indeed solve my major computer frustrations and fill nearly all of my computer needs.  So now, all of our computers run Linux, and we dual boot into Windows on a couple of them.

If you use Linux for a while, you get to know a very interesting culture that surrounds the FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) community.  There are the Richard M. Stallman absolutists that believe every piece of software that runs on a computer must be FOSS and completely configurable by the user.  I respect these guys.  I can’t say I always agree, but I can always understand where they are coming from.

But I also learned of a group that I was quite surprised to find myself being lumped in with: Communists.  While the price of FOSS is obviously appealing to anyone, the philosophy of the Communists especially appreciates FOSS.  They get very uppity at the idea of having to pay people for things; especially if those people belong to large corporations.  I find their hate of profits to be completely irrational.  Profit is the measurement of how efficiently our endeavors are supplying the needs and wants of our society with our society’s resources.  We do not have unlimited resources (man-hours, materials, etc.), so the only way to truly make everyone richer is to use those resources as efficiently as possible.  So, in capitalism, we reward those who use our resources efficiently with more access to our society’s resources.

In order for a capitalistic system to work however, people must be allowed to own what they earn.  And ownership of a thing means that you must be able to make all of the choices regarding what happens to that possession, barring any use that infringes upon the freedoms of others.  That was the philosophy the United States was fighting for during the Cold War.  The USSR believed firmly that only the state was allowed to own anything.  The US fought this idea to maintain our rights to own what we earn.

Well, and this is where I might get a bit preachy, Microsoft and Apple are the new Communists.  They have taught us that we should not be allowed to own our computers.  They should.  They think we shouldn’t have the right to own our music, videos, codecs or fonts.  They prevent us from moving them from device to device as we see fit.  Meanwhile, Linux lets you own everything about your computer and the software that it runs, from the operating system right on down to the files, codecs and fonts.

I want developers to be able to make a profit on what they create.  Companies like Google, Mozilla, and Red Hat have shown that you can make a profit while giving people the source code and letting them own their computers and the software that runs on them.

So, there you have it.  Not only do you not need to be a Communist to use Linux, but to be a true Capitalist, you SHOULD use Linux!