Follow up on comment above
Arrived in Calif and had waiting for me, Clay Shirky’s “Here comes Everybody”

Just started it
May nudge my thinking of dealing with politics
Bypass the “power brokers”

I suspect that Obama is better at this than the Clinton’s

Have you read the articles over at Techdirt that I mentioned? If not, you might find some interesting things there.

I am well aware of Article 1, section 8. The fallacy I’m referring to is the assumption that that section was based on. The assumption that patents and copyrights do promote progress. The articles at Techdirt have pointed out that some of the founders were rather dubious about the wisdom of including that provision. I encourage you to read those articles. They are very interesting, for more than just that one point.

We have the Caxton and Luddite faithful on the one side, and on the other, the technicians of the instantaneous diffusion device we call The Internet.

Unfortunately, we have a silent schism between these two sides. Those who already recognise how completely ridiculous a legal constraint against unauthorised reproduction or distribution is in the digital domain pay no mind to it. Whereas those who’ve been educated to respect our last three centuries of authorial myth and legend, regard copyright as the essential bulwark of humanity’s cultural survival.

Heliocentricity or not, that is the question. Copyright is either an unethical mercantile privilege, or it is a natural human right.

Will mankind’s culture really come to an end if our cultural liberty is no longer suspended to provide a commercially lucrative privilege to printers?

Perhaps copyright is a three hundred year long crime against culture?

And what of patents? These regal boons to suspend the poeple’s liberty that should never have outlasted the monarchies that fashioned them, should shock any nation that believes itself emancipated and yet finds itself still subject to them.

You are playing an apples and oranges argument. In the first place, my comments were built on bringing copyright back to 14 years. Your argument that the ‘copyright bargain’ is a fallacy is nonsense. It is explicit in the law as well enumerated in the US Constitution,
Article 1 Section 8:
‘To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries” which is where you probably brought the patent into the mix.

Your assumption of the fallacy has merit as copyright has been gutted in terms of not requiring deposit and registration which was removed in 1976.

Eliminating copyright entirely is a foolish notion from a societal standpoint, as even back then the founders recognized that not every useful act in society involved looking at the backend of a mule in a field, nor as middleman with a store. Consider that your ability to engage in discussion is a direct result of being educated by folks who wrote books and the folks who used them to teach you the basics of communication. But hey, if you feel that authors and artists should not be compensated because it is not ‘real’ work/production, by all means, adopt one or two and pay their bills.

You wrote:
“eliminating copyright altogether probably would be even better, as well as being a whole lot more harmonious with modern technology.”
Harmonious with modern technology? Good Grief! talk about your right click, save as mentality. We can stop creating, which will over time eliminate all those pesky intellectual property lawsuits, but ask yourself, do you really, really think that we have reached our peak as a civilization, regardless of whether or not current democracy is better than the alternatives?

Doc : on democracy being something works on the micro, maybe, just maybe on the meso scale, likely not on the mega or meta scale.

100% agree, and, in part because part of my college major was PoliSci (the others being Econ and African Studies)

Note that all but PoliSci have since been much revised

PoliSci as taught was all about polls, craft polls to find attitudes
Trouble is – people lie, so polls fail.
http://looneydunes.blogspot.com/2008/03/politics-and-markets.html

I find myself all but ignoring National, often even State politics as there is virtually no addressing true issue, just selling soap, pandering for votes.

Local on the other hand seems to work.
I serve on boards, try to adjust my schedule to attend town meetings, talk to elected neighbors, sometimes share a sandwich or beer with elected officials.

At this level, you can build communication, maybe even a bit of “trust” and try to get things done.

Somewhere between town and county, moving up towards state offices, the chain weakens, eventually fails.

(it would be an interesting study to see where the crossover is, and where lobbying takes over)

In Michigan we went to “term limits” and ended up with the only ones who knew how to run things are the lobbyists.

Other : great comment on the hubris of climate change.
Some change may indeed be anthropogenic but there is also a political agenda on the part of some.

Did the life forms that evolved oxyphotosynthesis say “whoops” there goes the neighborhood?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_Catastrophe

“We have nothing to fear, except those who have something to sell”

“Don’t listen to anyone who has a book to hype, a conference speaking career, or most importantly, any involvement with start-up companies trying to get bought. Because what they sell is YOU.”

I think the jury is in on the subject of Global Warming. One needs only recognize that the Great Lakes are barely older than the Pyramids. The topography where Russ and I both live (upstate New York and Boston, resepectively) was abandoned by the glaciers that shaped it, in what is essentially the geologic present.

In other words, glaciers have been in retreat, and seas have risen, almost steadily, ever since the last ice sheet finished depositing Cape Cod and Long Island about 20,000 years ago. They will continue until they stop in the next few hundred to few thousand years, and then return to buldoze everything, including civilization, back into Dixie, a few thousand years after that. There is no sign, Global Warming withstanding, that these cycles will stop.

There is also no doubt that human wastage has contributed to the current warming trend, bringing the inevitable a good bit closer to happening. What we can do to stop or reverse it invites countless answers, none sure to work. The catastrophe about to be visited on the planet is non-trivial in the extreme, and we should do our best to address it realistically. That is, we should be prepared to sacrifice our own conveniences for those that maximize the continued abundant variety of nature, of which we are but a subordinate part. Won’t be easy. Might be impossible.

But it would be the height of hubris, by the creature that invented rationalization, to believe (a) that we are entirely responsible for what nature has been doing for dozens of thousands of years already, (b) that we are equally able to reverse it, and (c) that our main job is to preserve ourselves and civilization as we know it. Because all three are wrong, even if we are right that Global Warming is happening.

I’ve often wondered the same thing.

My feeling is that constructive contribution to maximum useful effect is the best policy for everything from marriage to writing code. That’s what open source is, essentially.

I think it will work for governance as well. We can call it democracy, but it’s not necessarily majoritarian, any more than code production is majoritarian.

I don’t have this thought out either. I am sure, however, that the presence of the Net in the world, with its contribution-threshold-lowering qualities, has changed the conditions in which we live, if not also many of the rules.