Tag: Non-partisan blog posts

Thankfully, An End Of Something

A bit quietly, something ended the other day when Lessig packed it in, leaving the unproblem of intellectual property and digital media behind. Having beaten the drum and been a leader of the idea that copyright should not apply to expressions, much to the disgust of the creators of ideas who own and make money off of those expressions, we now find ourselves in a world where the proprietary interest has won out. The “mash-up” world of 2004 that Boingsters would have had us believe in never was just as the world of groceries bought via the internet promised in 1998 disappeared.

This is a wise decision as, in one way, nothing much as really changed from the effort while in another the world has largely moved on. Simon of Living in Dryden illustrates it all very neatly in this passage from a recent post:

About ten years ago, I went to a conference on web development. Everyone was talking about ‘disintermediation’ and how “brick and mortar stores” would get crushed. Consumers would be able to go straight to the manufacturer’s web site, or to a shopping web site of some kind, and order their products directly. All of the supply chains and middlemen (intermediaries) were going to vanish, leaving only producers of goods and their warehousing and delivery. Or something like that. That hasn’t really happened, except in a few categories of items where the Web turned out to be especially effective. Computer geeks, maybe because they heard this story enough times, often buy computer products online. It’s easy for an online bookstore to maintain the tremendous inventory some book buyers dream of, and for some reason a lot of people seem to like making travel reservations online. Even when it sort of works, though, this “disintermediation” is kind of perverse, sending goods all over the place from all over the place. Large online sellers, like Amazon, end up with hugely complicated supply chain management systems and warehouses all over to manage this process. Importers, wholesalers, and web site managers still act as ‘intermediaries’. Is it really that much less mediated than going to a store?

In January 2005 when Lessig was a bit more of a popular ideas man, I listened to him interviewed on NPR’s The Connection and took down some notes on the vision. He believed that under copyright the rules for content in text differed from that in film and music and image. The “next generation of blogs,” he said, will mix to create more powerful social commentary. Never.

That’s because plenty hasn’t really happened. News media have taken on a form of inter-connection with consumers but the balance has not really altered. Blogs have not advanced beyond scrapbooks and on-line journals but also things like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook have made it easy to participate in on-line experience without adding much substantive content and certainly without any real collaboration. And no one is surprised now when deals are made to ensure rights holders interests are respects and thereby, rather than being an obstacle, used as a platform for further development. These things are good. There has been no disruptive revolution, no need to fire millions of grocery store clerks, truckers and shippers or artists. Subscriptions to local newspapers are up. There has been change and the good from digital media have enhanced what was. But no revolution.

Like most with strong firmly-held beliefs, Lessig worked hard, thought a lot of good thoughts but missed the point…as, to be fair, a lot of people did. Alarmingly, however, he now wants to rid us all of “corruption” which he seems to define this way:

In one of the handful of opportunities I had to watch Gore deliver his global warming Keynote, I recognized a link in the problem that he was describing and the work that I have been doing during this past decade. After talking about the basic inability of our political system to reckon the truth about global warming, Gore observed that this was really just part of a much bigger problem. That the real problem here was (what I will call a “corruption” of) the political process. That our government can’t understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.

That form of corruption appears to be an effort to stomp out disagreeing with Lessig. Here we go again. Good luck on that one.

No Break On Canadian Passports

Why can’t we make a cheaper simpler and secure tool like the US is planning:

Ms. Harty said a planned introduction of a passport card – “that card will be wallet-sized and about half the price” – should ease the problem for Americans who cross into Canada for work or on day visits. The passport card will be available only to U.S. citizens. In Canada, the Harper government has no plans to offer an equivalent card.

No, we have a less-secure, as-expensive, bulky plan. Excellent.

Group Project: Group Thought

Yesterday Jay wrote the following about his own comment:

David, my bad…

If the CPC wants to advertise on Pam Anderson’s left nipple it’s cool with me. (But it was a fun rant nonetheless.)

My immediate reaction was that he would never have written that if we had been talking about a union rather than a political party of the right. This raises an interesting point that is one of the fuzziest in the world of political blogging. When organizations with power that demand your loyalty and coerce your funds and represent your opinion are the organizations you favour, it is OK. But when it is an opposing position, it is Satanic. Yet the function of the coercion is essentially the same whether it is a trade union, a political party, a religious community or a sports team. Chris actually illustrated the point well in relation to peanut butter.

So that being true, why do we hold on to our given set of ideals so closely if we know the failings of all ideals? Why not admit that we live from individual anecdote to anecdote as the lamb lives from one blade of grass to the next?

Good Sweep For The Sox

I don’t agree with the NYT’s headline “Things Going Right for Red Sox, but for All the Wrong Reasons“. Over the weekend Manny hit, Wakefield stilled the spin of his knuckleball, Pedroia and Youkilis are turning out to be home grown gold. Sadly, the Yankees have found their form but they fell back a game for the first time in weeks nonetheless. The Sox’s last two opponents of interleague play, the Braves and the Padres, are far tougher than those the Yanks face, the Rockies and the Giants, so it will be an important week to have a large amount of supportive angst milling in the gut.

Brilliant – As In Perhaps Not Brilliant

It appears Ottawa is awash with straws these days as there are any number of neato ideas with which one can grasp so as to make one feel better about oneself, such as this:

“It’s getting harder and harder to reach people through the regular media. Fewer people are watching the network news … fewer people are reading the newspapers,” the Immigration Minister said. “So we have to find new advertising outlets to reach them, to get our message through. And the people who follow NASCAR are our kind of people. They’re hard-working families, they’re taxpayers who play by the rules. And those are the people that we’re targeting.” Conservative insiders have been saying for several months that the party strategy is to go after the large number of Canadians who consider themselves middle class.

Brilliant. Sponsor a race car, convince me you have the stuff it takes to run a majority. Next idea?

The dopey anti-journalist message is gold as well.

But What About The Mike Schmidt Era?

I have something of a spot for the Phillies as, in the old days of the Expos and the NL East and national media that was not so Toronto-centric as to singlehandedly kill off a team, it was once possible to watch them. But they are one of those teams, like the Cubs, known more for their failings than anything:

Defeat has been as spectacular and excruciating as it has been regular. On May 1, 1883, the team lost its inaugural game; by the end of that miserable season, a pitcher named John Coleman had lost 48 times. From 1938 through 1942, the Phillies lost at least 103 games each year. The franchise has set awful records for futility — with a collective earned run average of 6.71 in 1930 and 23 consecutive defeats in 1961. And, of course, 1964 brought one of baseball’s most infamous collapses, when the Phillies held a 6 ½-game lead in the National League with 12 games to play and blew the pennant after losing 10 in a row.

Good story in the NYT about the losing-est team in sports history who, in large part because of Mike, won the World Series when I was in grade 12 leaving me forever with a skewed understanding of their legacy.

Speaking Of Constitutional Law…

It is a very instructive day in the news if you are interested in constitutional law. Yesterday, the US courts confirmed the primacy of the person and the bar on making things up:

The appeals court yesterday ordered the trial judge in the case to issue a writ of habeas corpus directing the secretary of defense to release Mr. Marri from military custody “within a reasonable period of time to be set by the district court.” The government can, Judge Motz wrote, transfer Mr. Marri to civilian authorities to face criminal charges, initiate deportation proceedings against him, hold him as a material witness in connection with a grand jury proceeding or detain him for a limited time under a provision of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. But the military cannot hold him, Judge Motz wrote. “The president cannot eliminate,” she wrote, “constitutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention.”

These sorts of things are difficult cases and we have a natural gut reaction that bad people ought to be treated badly, differently. The trouble is the job of determining who and how has to be done on a principles and public basis or there is a veering towards a genial sort of authoritarianism where others take care of things you do not know about in ways that you do not understand. They become your betters, too, as a result.

A Moment’s Thought For The Grown-ups Who Govern

Jay and I have been discussing the Atlantic Accord and likely both been making errors all over the place but none as silly as the ones likely being made in the political forum these days:

“I am concerned about this allegation we’ve broken the [Atlantic] accords…We have done no such thing. It’s a contract. We don’t break contracts. We respect contracts. Normally, I expect, if someone says you’ve broken a contract, they are going to follow that up by going to court to make you abide by the contract. But I don’t see that happening…We can’t let that allegation stay out there forever. At some point we will consult tribunals ourselves, if that’s necessary, to get a ruling on our respect for the contracts.” The political dare was met with scorn by Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams and Nova Scotia Premier Rodney MacDonald, who said they will not be drawn into legal battles that would only deflect their criticisms of the recent federal budget…

Stephen Scott, a professor of constitutional law at McGill University in Montreal, said the Atlantic Accord is a political arrangement, not a contract, so a lawsuit could not be used to force the federal government to uphold its provisions. But, he said, the premiers could go to their own provincial appeals courts to get orders declaring how the agreement should be interpreted.

So you have the leader of the country daring other leaders into a court case over a legal principle that probably does not exist. Classy or troubling?

But to what political end? Where is a seat one with this approach? Maybe rural Alberta, itself the beneficiaries of the greatest non-reimbursable Federal windfall in Canadian history, will now vote 75% Conservative instead of 70%. But what is a Conservative government without seats in Atlantic Canada? Unless, it takes Ontario – nothing. Is there now a practical resignation to the reality of minority government?