Tag Archives: copyright

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Revenge of the Sneakernet

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sneakers-from-powerlinesBuilding on Paul’s post on writing and piracy, I thought I’d flag an article by Rasmus Fleisher (of Sweden’s Piratbyrån) on the future of copyright;

According to one recent study 95 percent of British youth engage in file sharing via burned CDs, instant messaging clients, mobile phones, USB sticks, e-mail, and portable hard drives.

Such practices constitute the “darknet,” a term popularized by four Microsoft-affiliated researchers in a brilliant 2002 paper [opens pdf]. Their thesis is simply that people who have information and want to exchange it with each other will do just that, forming spontaneous networks which may be large or small, online or offline…

One early darknet has been termed the “sneakernet”: walking by foot to your friend carrying video cassettes or floppy discs. Nor is the sneakernet purely a technology of the past. The capacity of portable storage devices is increasing exponentially, much faster than Internet bandwidth, according to a principle known as “Kryder’s Law.” The information in our pockets yesterday was measured in megabytes, today in gigabytes, tomorrow in terabytes and in a few years probably in petabytes (an incredible amount of data)…

In other words: The sneakernet will come back if needed. “I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. “When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ – what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”

And there’s something about the idea of the sneakernet which, particularly when approached from a speculative angle, really captures my imagination.

Imagine – five years from now. With the internet collapsing under the bandwidth-distorting weight of iPlayer streams and mobile videoblogs, you watch the sun rise from the dovecot, anxiously fiddling with your (slightly battered) GPS-enabled iPhone as you await the feathernet delivery of a USB primed with the entirity of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks collection. For many, the most important question – was the USB in ordered directly from the publishers, or a copy from a mate?

[Image by kookalamanza]

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Criminal malware – now with End User License Agreements!

Eula Hotel signMalicious software and obfuscatory legalese – two bad tastes that, I imagine, taste even worse together. [image by j l t]

Thankfully, as I’m not in the business of trying to turn a profit by building botnets, it’s not a flavour combo I’ve encountered myself, but there are reports that such things really do exist. Caught with the same economic problem as legitimate software houses – an infinite good, easily reproduced – malware crews are including EULAs with their program packages.

Of course, a malware author can’t fall back on the courts to enforce the terms of the agreement, and so the threatened actions are a little more, er, direct – basically, if you mess with the code they’ll rat you out to the antivirus companies. But, in the words of Mike Masnick at TechDirt:

“… we already know that almost no one reads normal software EULAs, so I somehow doubt that the online scammers using this software are bothering with the fine print either.”

I can’t say I’m feeling too sad about that.

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Copyright and the SFWA – here we go again

Hooo-boy. Remember the Scribd/Science Fiction Writers of America dust-up a while ago? It would appear the fat lady has not yet sung.

Andrew Burt, the man behind the Scribd DMCA take-downs, was removed from the SFWA Piracy Committee because of the incident. But now, despite recommendations to the contrary, the committee has been re-established under a new aegis (the Copyright Committee) … and Burt is back at the helm.

Charlie Stross is, to say the least, livid – especially as he was part of the exploratory committee that recommended, among other things, that Burt be kept well away from copyright issues.

Scalzi is politely baffled.

Cory Doctorow is, unsurprisingly, not very impressed either.

I’m not even going to pretend to understand the deep architecture of this debate – I’m not a professional writer, much less a member of SFWA – but from an outsider’s perspective, no matter how valid their motivations may be, the SFWA is displaying a marked lack of smarts by going back on themselves and, in the process, annoying three of the most popular and publicly outspoken writers on their roster. Not very pragmatic, really.

I think Steve “My Elves Are Different” Wilson has struck the nail firmly on the head in this instance. In the meantime, I think this will be the sf story of the moment for a few weeks to come.

[tags]writing, copyright, SFWA[/tags]
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Optimal Copyright Term

What is the optimum length of copyright (from a social benefit perspective)? Rufus Pollock calculates it to be 14 years in this paper (pdf). He’s a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge University, and reached his conclusion based on a few assumptions (which he backs up with data): (a) that as copyright length increases, it encourages the creation of new works, (b) up to a certain point, after which it can inhibit the creation of new works, and (c) that the optimal length of copyright is in part a function of the cost of production, so that as the cost of production falls so to does the optimal copyright length. [slashdot]