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September 24 2011
G E N I U S H A C K E R GENIUS HACKER g e n i u s
W A N T E D
contact me if you are or if you know a skilled and creative code-writer / software developer (C, C++, Javascript, htlm5, CSS3) who is interested in collaborating on a start-up based in Auckland New Zealand with a view to becoming part of the foundation team with a substantial share in the IP and Company – and for more information … get in touch!
August 09 2011
to placard: letter on arts funding crisis, to demolish an idea
[-The following went to Spectre -]
State arts funding does not have the interests of the artist or of art at its centre as its reason. It is rather a symbolic – political and economic and ethological – allowance that such things might emerge as artists and arts which if they do may be managed and organised, judged and branded.
The critical economy appears to be the next major franchise, of the semantic Web, for example, as copyright on material expression ceases to stick, given digital dissolution, and ownership of opinion arises, stratifies and propagates through personalisation of services, through P2P recommendation. +, like, :> … However, arts funding provides pre-eminently for the ecology that supports managers, organisers, and critical apparati, even if the latter often give the impression of parasitism. When societies do not allow the critical threshold of economic freedom to be reached such that a stage of emergence can be insured, then what is at risk is an ecology or network.
The state in removing itself from the art/arts equation by withdrawing funding eliminates a hub from this network. This may not destroy the network but its deleterious effects will ramify throughout it.
The current system of tertiary student loans in New Zealand we know to cost more to run than the previous system of student allowances. In fact, this was known before the system was implemented. Likewise, looking only at economic indexes, cutting state funding for the arts, above an ascertainable threshold of sufficient funding, costs the state more than continuing its support.
How is it possible to ascertain the amount of funding that suffices? Where the existence of significant arts institutions is threatened, where that significance is given the larger meaning of ‘acting as a hub for the (artistic, social, civic, ethological, economic, political, critical, and so on) network,’ is where the threshold lies.
Theatres and cinemas are clearly hubs, but that the former is also an artistic hub, bringing the company responsible for the work together in the same institution as that in which it is shown. Theatre therefore displays even more hub-like characteristics when it has a resident company and is not simply the venue for visitors.
Much of this discussion seems to have recycled notions of economic lean-ness or efficiency, whereby the arts in Europe have grown fat, Brad Brace for one advocating a crash diet and the dynamic individualism of a lean mean art-making machine. [visit him here] Is an excess of funding than what suffices in sustaining significant arts institutions adequate justification to cut state funding?
I would like to live in a society in which such a problem arises. Justification is usually from the macroeconomic, with all the attendant ironies that even minor financial institutions are worthy of state bail-outs. And as they devolve on macroeconomic arguments they have recourse to the unscientific theories of fashionable economic thinking, or ideology.
It is this idea that cutting state funding somehow works or creates benefits that needs to be demolished.
May 25 2011
URGENT: Submission to Ministry for Economic Development
The New Zealand Ministry for Economic Development has released a Discussion Document, Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Regulations 2011, as follow-up to the Copyright Infringing File Sharing Amendment Bill, to which I ask you to give your urgent attention, not least because submissions on the Document may be received by May 27 2011, tomorrow. Here is the Discussion Document: http://www.med.govt.nz/upload/Copyright_regulations_discussion_doc.pdf
A brief description and statement opposing the Discussion Document follows. Please forward it to ip.policy@med.govt.nz with the subject line:
Submission on the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing),Regulations 2011 Discussion Document
We are utterly opposed to the Discussion Document in its current or any form that may be derived from it in discussion.
Far from protecting intellectual and artistic property, far from protecting from infringement the rights of holders of copyright, the Discussion Document requires the infringement of the right to privacy of legitimate users of the internet.
The Discussion Document proposes that holders of copyright pay ISP’s to issue notices where they suspect internet users have shared files under copyright.
It requires that three notices are sent, of detection of suspected infringement, warning and enforcement, the latter entailing punitive actions against the internet user.
There is in the Document no provision for appeal by the internet user, since at this stage legal sanction only extends to the ISP.
The Discussion Document further requires that the alleged offender – who is found such before any legal process of determination – is identified to the Ministry of Justice by his or her ISP.
The Discussion Document suggests the imposition of a fine of not more than NZ$15 000, which may be used to recompense the holder of copyright and the ISP.
It is the responsibility of the Ministry of Justice to impose punishment not to hear the case of the internet user. The principle asserted is guilt before innocence.
We suggest that the Discussion Document is already a political, moral and legal embarrassment.
We urge that it is torn up and public apology is made by the parties responsible for drafting it.
We further insist on the repeal of the Copyright Infringing File Sharing Amendment Bill.
Putting guilt before innocence and so much less: Infringing File Sharing – the draft bill on copyright … up to $15 000; are ISP’s that hard up?
Submissions due on this draft by this Friday, May 27. Submit that the idiots responsible for drafting it ought to be repealed before it is introduced.
…here it is !!!
The essence of this document is not the assumption of responsibility on the behalf of holders of copyright, creators of content, artists, their agents, and so on, or for any moral or legal principle, but the evasion of responsibility and its deferral onto purely economic terms. Hence, a fascism borne of expediency.
We read:
A three notice process, administered by internet service providers
(referred to in the Bill as internet protocol address providers (IPAPs))
Punitive measures are to be imposed on so-called “internet account holders” by and at the discretion of the Ministry of Justice.
The onus seems to rest at present entirely on the “rights owner” to provide all relevant details of infringement of copyright by file sharing, plus the full voluntary complicity of the ISP (or IPAP) in identifying the alleged infringer by address.
Under the Bill, an IPAP will be required to send up to three notices to an internet
account holder. These will be a detection notice, a warning notice, and an
enforcement notice.
How required?
Regulations should also ensure that internet account holders are given enough
information in a notice that they are able to understand the regime and their
obligations under it, and that they are sufficiently informed about copyright and
the implications of file sharing that infringes copyright.
This reads very strangely. Is file sharing a clearly chosen action? or, given that internet use can mean nothing other than sharing files, is it largely passive? a matter of partaking of – and sharing, via links – what is simply ‘out there’? A partaking, rather than a taking then…?
The bill makes itself appear more attractive by being self-funding, and a revenue-generating exercise:
Section 122R of the Bill provides that an IPAP may charge a fee to the rights
owner for performing the functions required of it under the Bill.
On fees to rights holders:
The range of notice fee estimates would between $2 and
$28 per notice for the on-going costs of the regime.
Not so effective a revenue generating exercise then? (Regime!)
a higher fee for the later notices also reflects the
additional matching, information logging, and identification an IPAP must perform
for these notices. For the rights owner, persons receiving enforcement notices
are likely to be more serious, repeat infringers, and are more likely to eventually
be taken to the Tribunal. A rights owner may be more willing to pay a higher
notice fee through the later stages of the regime, due to the fact that they can be
more certain they will be able to recoup the fee from the infringer via the
Tribunal. However, on the other hand, the additional expense of further notices
may deter rights owners from using the latter stages of the system.
A large part of this document is about creating commercial incentives for ISP’s to dob in infringers, having got their mits on the $$$ of the interested party, the rights holder.
the Copyright Tribunal may award under section
122N. Section 122N(4) states that an award must not exceed $15,000.
Of course, there are provisions for ISP’s and rights holders to make claims to recuperate costs of pursuing these matters as far as the Tribunal.
See:
The fact that the Tribunal can require an internet account holder to
reimburse the rights owner for the fees they have had to pay an ISP to
send notices under the regime, and the fee to take a claim to the Tribunal,
would be taken into account. In certain cases, this amount plus the
amount of compensation for the market value of the infringed works could
constitute a sufficient deterrent in the eyes of the Tribunal, and therefore a
further deterrent amount may not be required.
Something of a reversion in terms here to ISP rather than the preferred IPAP. IPAP is indeed preferred because it denotes narking on the account holder, providing evidence of infringement, naming names and, for money, giving out the address of the infringer. What is wrong with this? Isn’t there an agreement between internet account holder and ISP to the effect that such things as names and addresses ought not be given out, even for money?
In sum, if anything like this gets into law, we are looking at the ordinary workings of stupidity, fascism’s proxy. The real infringement of rights here is that of the so-called internet account holder to privacy.
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