Related link: http://www.bass-station.net/

Someone’s gone ahead and built the shared, collaborative music space I’ve previously called a “Wifi Wiki Hifi” — and they’ve built it into a 1980’s boombox (also sometimes affectionately referred to as a “ghetto-blaster”).

The Bass-Station puts a Wifi-enabled server machine with music sharing and community-driven playback software inside a portable stereo.

More info is available at this Bass-Station project directory.

Do you ever ask the guy playing the music too loud on the bus or train to turn it down?

I think it’s fascinating that the major news sites (NYTimes, Washington Post, C/NET) are outspoken about Geer losing his job immediately after contributing to a report highly critical of Microsoft’s monopoly, but none of them link to the actual report!

I believe this is it:

http://www.ccianet.org/papers/cyberinsecurity.pdf

Now that I have had a moment to actually read the report that may have
gotten Dan Geer fired, I think I understand the situation a bit better. Yeesh. It’s probably about 5% tech and 95% anti-Microsoft vitriol. It doesn’t offer any solutions, it only repeats the mantra “Monoculture is bad so you should stop using Microsoft, only Microsoft won’t let you”. Taking just the objective points, the whole thing could be boiled down to a single page (or maybe just a paragraph).

Maybe the authors know their intended audience better than I do, but I still find it hard to believe that one’s job would be threatened by such a silly paper. If I’m going to be fired over something I wrote, I sure hope that it reads better than that report!

Why all of the hooplah over something that might as well have come from the user comments on Slashdot? And perhaps more interestingly, with all of the buzz about this highly controversial report, why are so few sites linking to it?

Are journalists afraid of going the same route as Geer for criticizing the Microsoft juggernaut? Maybe the fact that the CTO of a major security corporation was let go after contributing to the report (on his own time!) is newsworthy, despite representatives from @Stake denying it. Maybe the text in question wasn’t worth referring to, in the eyes of the editors (but then, why do some of them link to microsoft.com and nowhere else?)

Alas, we’ll likely never know the real truth about Dan’s situation or why the news outlets are careful to tiptoe around Microsoft’s feelings. But if you find yourself in a position of being threatened to keep your opinions to yourself, even if you go to great lengths to make it clear that they are your opinions (and not those of your employer), I highly encourage you to speak your mind. If we find that we’ve built a sleeping giant, it’s our duty to light a fire under them from time to time, whether they like it or not.

Have you ever been censored or threatned to keep quiet by your employer? (Anonymous contributions welcome! =)

Related link: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001036

AaronSw: Fixing Compulsory Licensing

In a followup to his Privacy, Accuracy, Security: Pick Two post, outlining some of the inherent problems of “compulsory licensing” schemes, Aaron Swartz outlines a decentralized way to allocate compulsory levies to creators, based on digital cash.

LawMeme calls this a “Proto Whuffie“, after the reputation-currency in a Cory Doctorow novel, but since this involves real cash, it’s actually more like the sorts of voucher systems often proposed (and sometimes implemented) when policymakers believe that too little consumption of a particular class of goods would occur otherwise, but they still want to leave production of the goods and allication of the expenditures to the individual decisions of private actors.

Examples include food stamps — to boost consumption of food, both for the benefit of the poor and for food businesses (the US Dept. orf Agriculture, not the Department of Welfare, administers the food stamp program) — and school tuition vouchers — to boost spending on youth education above what parents in a private education market might spend. The general approach has sometimes been denigrated as “voucher socialism,” especially in the context of debates over school vouchers among economic libertarians, but in most cases, a voucherized market should be better than command-and-control socialism, where a small group of bureaucrats allocate (or set the politically-gamed formulas for allocation) of involuntary payments.

In the creative compensation/compulsory licensing sphere, this proposal could work out to “compulsory payment but voluntary allocation,” and would form the least objectionable “compulsory licensing” scheme of all I’ve seen proposed.

In particular, it could reduce the chances that cartels of those who are already well mobbed-up with the federal government (copyright, broadcast, telecom, and government-contracting giants) could rig the whole system for their own eternal enrichment, small creators be damned.

Vouchers could also minimize, but not eliminate, the possibility that a compulsory license fees would be denied to controversial forms of art, like disfavored political viewpoints and “obscene” material (eg “nazi pornography”).

There remain the problems of all voucher systems: some people will pretend to be of the recipient class — in this case creators — to be able to collect and convert vouchers to cash. Even among “true” creators, a de facto exchange rate between vouchers and cash will emerge, at which a person can reliably “sell” their vouchers, rather than giving them as a reward for creative output. But I know I’d prefer these problems to a system of total monitoring and bureaucratic, formulaic allocation, and perhaps compulsory proponents would prefer these problems to not having compelled payment for digital art at all.

How would you prefer creators be incented to create, without control over when copies are distributed?