From: Michael S. Lorrey (mike@lorrey.com)
Date: Mon May 03 1999 - 12:56:33 MDT
Karsten Bänder wrote:
> > > For all works in the Library of Congress to be transcribed into digital form and
> > > made available on the Internet would be a wonderful thing, and would do much to
> > > expand the breadth of human knowledge, and I might even term it a just use of
> > > tax dollars. To be sure, there are copyright issues involved, but any number of
> > > uncopyrighted works or those whose copyrights had expired could be put online.
> > > If one can go to a library and check out a copyrighted work for free, why not
> > > over the Internet? It will certainly enhance inter-library loan when more
> > > material is available for electronic request and delivery.
> >
> > Use tax dollars to pay for the wholesale ripoff of millions of people's
> > copyright rights? I don't think so. It will have to be a pay as you go
> > system, with micropayments for each use of copyrighted material.
>
> Oh yeah, and here we are again - information only for those whoe are able to
> pay. I do not want do be considered Socialist - my mother comes for Eastern
> Europe and I had the chnace to wittness the spirit of a Communist
> Dictatorship myself - but Information is something which should not be kept
> this way. Your copyright is kept by not allowing anyone to falsify it, but
> it should be available freely - anywhere. You know, lack of information and
> communication is one of the main causes of poverty. Manhattan has more
> telephones than the entire African continent. Most of Africa is still in the
> stone age, mainly because there are a whole lot of people who do not want a
> change to this. You want it to remain this way?
There is a distinct difference between preventing opportunities to access, and
allowing access to those who pay a fair market rate for such access. Failure to pay for access to information from which the accessor gains material benefit is theft. You are free to either originate your own information and give it away as you see fit, but you are not free to give away my information without paying for it, or by talking me into being as 'altruistic' as you. Forcing altruism denigrates the whole concept of altruism.
> But to keep you capitalists happy: The state might pay you some bucks if the
> information you provide is interesting enough so that the public interest is
> served with the publication of the information in question.
Or if special interest is served. If I'm a independent metallurgical researcher who develops a new alloying process, should the wealthiest metal corporations in the country or the world be able to use my process freely to its own huge benefit without compensating me? If one company pays me for the research, why should its competitors benefit from the investment that that one company made in the research?
> Think logical, we'll have to get away from this capitalist way of using
> information. We need the synergy effects of the mass availability of
> information, when and wherever it is needed. The non-availability of
> information is in fact a typical trait of any hierarchy. Information means
> power. If you control the flow of information, you control all people who
> get the information (or not). This is not keyed to a 1984-style
> dictatorship, it works with any form of government, up to and including a
> democracy.
In a free information society, those with the greatest means to realize benefits from the information will control it, i.e. the wealthiest corporations, because they can afford to get product to market quickest to seize market share. Information monopolies benefit the small startup proportionately far more than large corporations. Information rights is the most important issue of the next century, because it will determine whether our minds are enslaved to or freed from the government-industrial conglomerates. If you want a Matrix- like future, then eliminate intellectual property. Such a choice will quickly make us all just mental peas in a pod.
> Take for example the american war of 1863. Haven't you been taught that it
> was fought to free the slaves? I was told this, too. But no country ever
> fought a war out of humanitarian ideas. That war was fought because the
> North would not tolerate the decision of the South to make an independant
> state. It was an economic war, the industrial north against the agricultural
> south.
The south declared its independence as soon as Lincoln had won sufficient electoral votes to be declared president, because one of his Republican Party platform planks was in fact the abolition of slavery. At that time the Republican Party was more heavily weighted with slavery abolitionists than it is currently weighted with anti-abortionists. The emancipation proclamation was not a fact until several years into the war, so in that sense you are right, and the position of the southern states was constitutionally sound. That does not, however make the war not a war of ideas. Current day revisionists are starting to buy the long time revisionist position of southern historians, which call the Civil War the "War of Northern Agression", but what do they know? They might as well buy the neo-Nazi revisionism that WWII was "The War of Anglo-Russian Agression".
> The same is true for the second world war. You wouldn't want to tell
> me the US entered the war because of the fate of the Jews? Or that Britain
> and France entered the war because of the fate of Poland? Bullshit. It was
> simply a question of distribution of power.
The US entered the war against Germany because as soon as we declared war against Japan for the Pearl Harbor attack (which at least some Americans knew something about, granted), Germany declared war on us and started sinking our own US flagged ships openly. Up to that point, they only sunk UK flagged ships coming from US ports and ships where no flag could be determined.
As Chamberlain's appeasement demonstrated, the UK was definitely not interested in getting into a war, but did in fact honor its treaty commitments to Poland. Keep in mind that the Polish royals were related to the British royals...
> Much the same is true for Zaire/Congo. The old dictator - Mobutu - was a
> French puppet, the new monkey dictator - Kabila - is remote-controlled by
> the US. Of course, a democratic state would never do such evil things. Of
> course, humanitarian ideals are held very high within a state who respects
> the human rights and the politics are streamlined accordingly. Of course no
> politician gives a penny for these empty words. As long as they keep this
> information for themselves and no one gets really involved, this works fine.
Intellectual property rights are not observed by tyrants. Democratic states observe IP rights. That should be the end of the conversation.
>
>
> > Most information on tapes is raw data, lists of names, numbers, etc.
> > Magnetic tapes, stored properly, do not crumble or otherwise degrade
> > easily. I am still using 9 track magnetic tapes that are older than I am
> > on a regular basis for list processing operations.
>
> Wrongo, BASF conducted a test which concluded, that even under ideal storage
> circumstances, 100% reliability is guaranteed only five years. Your 9-track
> magnetic tapes still work because they store a huge stream of analog data.
> Your ears have a built-in noise-reduction which screens out most of the bad
> audio data that comes in. But gradually, the quality of these recordings
> will fade. In adio recordings, the quality simply gets worse. In data tapes,
> it gets lost, because eventually, the errors destroy too many bits of data,
> making an error correction impossible. Much more with the high-packed data
> tapes of today.
You are confusing 9-track with 8 track. The first is a data format, the second is an audio format. My IBM mainframe definitely depends on clean tapes. 9-track does not degrade as quickly as you state because the tape is so wide and because the data density is so low. 1600 to 6250 bytes per inch of tape gives each byte a LOT of real estate to maintain a charge on. Degradation comes from a) moisture, b) oxidization, c) EMI. Stored properly, all of these sources are minimized. I can read 30 year old data very easily off of these tapes onto the mainframe. I do not listen to them with my ears...
> I visited a large picture library some years ago and was surprised to see
> that most of the color photos were transferred to black-and-white
> diapositive films. This is simply because over the time, the colours
> eventually fade and change. If you look at a photo from the early sixties,
> you'll notice some strange colour defects. After all, the chemical process
> doesn't stop whne the picture leaves the lab. Today, this practice hasn't
> changed - only that the pictures are stored in digital form too, this time
> in colour.
Tapes do not rely on chemical reactions, but on magnetic fields. Granted, if the medium oxidizes, the fields are lost. Proper storage prevents oxidization. Of course the lowest quality tapes will degrade easier. Iron degrades far faster than, say, platinum, silver, or gold tapes.
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