tjaerv

Released into the public domain, very cool!

"The Five Eyes Alliance" is a good moniker for that: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/is-the-f...

Links to the actual upstream posts by Doctorow:

http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-p...

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

Read up on homomorphic encryption: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

Excellent slides. thank you. Is the recording perchance available somewhere?

Indeed. Copyright is ultimately an outgrowth of the privatization of government censorship in sixteenth-century England.

For those interested, a readable summary of the history of copyright can be found at: http://questioncopyright.org/promise

Falkvinge himself also has a multi-part history of copyright blog series, found at: http://falkvinge.net/2011/02/01/history-of-copyright-part-1-...

> Owning and asserting a copyright does not make you a monopolist [...] All property rights are monopolies.

Copyright is not a property right, it is exactly a state-granted monopoly privilege, instituted on ostensibly utilitarian grounds. See http://stpeter.im/writings/essays/publicdomain.html

Cory Doctorow has elsewhere explained how IP used to be discussed in terms of a "creative monopoly" until the 1970s when the copyright industry began actively promoting the "intellectual property" moniker. The reason? It's a lot easier to go hat in hand to Congress to ask them to protect your "property rights" than to petition them to further extend your monopoly privileges. In much the same way, they'd like to now redefine copying as "theft". "You wouldn't steal a car." Don't fall for it.

As of 2008: "For example, as of 2008, there were over 300 terrorists captured using intelligence generated from XKEYSCORE."

Anyone have an idea why they'd give a 5-year-old figure? One would hope that the figure as of 2013 should be more impressive?

Exactly. Economic incentives trump legal mandates.

Landley speaks to this in his Toybox presentation, noting that the forced source code contributions resulting from the Busybox lawsuits were absolutely worthless.

Yes, because of licensing. See his recent presentation at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0

The video of the presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0

Another such backlash is the Unlicense: http://unlicense.org/

> Currently, anyone can create an account on GitHub and without proof-of-positive-ID can apply any license to any code they choose to upload. Whether they have the right to issue this license is unknown to the user other than by direct due diligence.

A good exemplar of this from just the other day:

http://lists.gpl-violations.org/pipermail/legal/2013-July/00...

Creative Commons for code would be CC0: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/27081

Yes, the conclusion feels like a letdown. With the title of his post ("post copyright") you might think he'd have something to say about releasing code into the public domain, yet there's no mention at all of this. How is licensing your code under the copyright monopoly supposed to be "post copyright"?

The introduction at http://unlicense.org seems spot on for the topic of the blog post:

  Why use the Unlicense? Because you have more important things to do
  than enriching lawyers or imposing petty restrictions on users of your
  code. How often have you passed up on utilizing and contributing to a
  great software library just because its open source license was not  
  compatible with your own preferred flavor of open source? How many   
  precious hours of your life have you spent deliberating how to license
  your software or worrying about licensing compatibility with other   
  software? You will never get those hours back, but here's your chance 
  to start cutting your losses. Life's too short, let's get back to
  coding.

The real counterweight is to release your code into the public domain, opting out of the copyright industry's game altogether. See http://unlicense.org/

> I'm pretty sure that Stallman would love a post-copyright world...

See http://rudd-o.com/monopolies-of-the-mind/thoughts-after-my-d...:

"Richard is against abolishing copyrights because, to his view, without copyright, enforcing copyleft would be impossible."

Looks like you're in good company, as well: https://github.com/search?q=Unlicense&type=Code&s=indexed

Plenty of public domain software on GitHub, with more being created all the time: https://github.com/search?q=%22public+domain%22&type=Code&s=...

Nice catch about GitHub's Terms of Service.

From https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service:

  > ...by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow
  > others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be
  > viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your
  > repositories.

The notion that the NSA would deem it worth their while to go out of their way to honor GPL legalese seems not a little …optimistic.

It may be a cultural difference. As I recall, Landley's examples are from the East (Sony, for example). Intellectual property as a sacred institution is somewhat less established there than in the West.

The point is that users who would give credit will do so anyway (without needing a gun held to their heads), and those who won't, won't. A license only changes things by giving the recourse to sue in the latter case. If you aren't going to sue anyway (as Landley isn't, anymore), then there's not much point to using a relatively restrictive license.

I recommend watching the Landley talk. He used to be among the most rabid copyleft advocates, before the BusyBox fiasco and GPLv3.

On that note, Bernstein on Moen: http://cr.yp.to/distributors.html

Slapping a copyleft license on your project doesn't mean that people magically won't use it where that use would be "infringing". It only means that you can sue, if you should learn of it.

See this recent talk by Rob Landley, of BusyBox fame, on how casual and widespread GPL infringement is in large corporations, and why he no longer advocates the use of the GPL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0

Landley's the guy who started the infamous BusyBox GPL lawsuits that then spiraled totally out of his control, so he has more skin in the game than most.

GPLv3. Blech.

"This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as 'intercept partners'. […] some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation and GCHQ went to great lengths to keep their names secret. They were assigned 'sensitive relationship teams' and staff were urged in one internal guidance paper to disguise the origin of 'special source' material in their reports for fear that the role of the companies as intercept partners would cause 'high-level political fallout'."

> "All the way to the legal limit."

Too bad the NSA doesn't observe legal limits.

Find the sub-reddit for the bitcointip bot at: http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcointip

The term you actually want is "license-free software": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License-free_software

There's some more to be found regarding the terminology here: http://ar.to/2010/12/licensing-and-unlicensing