You’re right Professor, this is bullshit not worth spending any time on. I see it now, and it took me a semester, your class, a couple of discussion with you and an essay to realize it. Neverthelss, if what I write is obvious to you, then what you rightly point out on Superman and the dying Fifth Republic is obvious to me. What is obvious to some may not be obvious to all. The topic I chose to write on wasn’t that obvious to me at the beginning of the semester, but you taught me, we discussed about it, and I have learned. And unfortunately, back in my country now, I see that for many people those things are not obvious at all.

Please don't stack revisions on top of one another: just edit the page. Prior versions are maintained in the history, and it is easier to see the changes.

Actually, of course (though you don't say so), also because the very owners it's supposed to conciliate won't go along. If Sarkozyville enacted a compulsory license and permitted sharing, The Pirate Bay would move to Paris. But the rest of the world wouldn't pay the stupid fee. So the owners would then have to continue militarizing the entire Net, but they would be even more defeated before they start than they are now.

And besides, the whole subject became less important once it became more important for Superman to suit up and save the French from the total collapse of civilization, which only he could achieve, by maintaining the AAA. Turned out perfectly, too, n'est-ce pas? Now, facing the only unemployment problem he really cares about, namely his own, it is most important for Superman to figure out how to avoid going to jail for corruption without having to fake senility at his young age. Which pretty much ensures that it will be left to some Francois Hollande or other to accept the bribes of the entertainment industry next time around. Given that by then, the almost-still-existing Fifth Republic will be trying to balance its first budget since Pompidou (the idiot, not the world Centre of ugliness), all the entertainment bribery in the world won't be able to offset the fiscal and political collapse of the "thousand little Greeces" inside France.

As you know, I don't think there's much intellectual merit in pointing out the same old same old objections to the same old same old tired bullshit nonsense of the global entertainment oligopolies in one or another piece of stupid pending legislation that can't work in places that don't care. This essay has now achieved, I think, all what little can be achieved in that form, even as the measures it is compelled to pretend to take seriously are now shown by the flow of events to be pretty much the same non-functional and irrelevant crap they always are. Revising won't help, because you can't make this aspect of the world less stupid and trivial. The real payoff is in learning how to select other topics to spend one's thought on.

The Global License :Smoke and mirrors.

October 2011 : France has been trying to sue children for the past three years under the HADOPI legislation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_lawand apparently it is not working the way the French government expected it to work. Not efficient, too burdensome. Fair enough, let’s come up with something else. Here is the way it would work. In order to « compensate » authors, each and everyone of us will pay an extra 5 and 6 euros a month on our Internet bills. This « compensation » will be included in the price we pay to Internet Service Providers. Internet users will pay a fixed price to Internet carriers. The money collected would go to « collecting societies », somekind of SACEM (the equivalent of the ASCAP in the US). The money will then be dispatched among authors. This would depart from the current Hadopi legislation, under which unlicenced P2P? ? sharing is prohibited.

The dispatch would be done according to the « traffic », meaning that the artists would be compensated according to how many people downloaded their work. That sounds fair, right ? That way we forget about HADOPI, we download and upload freely (well for a few euros at least) and artists get compensated. Why not? But the questions is how is the dispatch of the money going to be handled ? Pro GL say that it would be enough to calculate the traffic of each artist. So the more an artist is « shared » and downloaded the more money he or she will get. The calculation will be based on popularity. What we are told is that this system will enable small or unknown artists to get something, even a little bit. No more intermediaries (record company, the music industry in general). Authors would get proper compensation, and that is the most important thing, right ? The project is obviously designed to protect unknown or non famous artists. Who is going to calculate the traffic, how is it going to be calculated ? Does it mean that exchanges will be monitored and controlled somehow? Who will operate this control? Internet providers, independent societies?

Surprinsingly the debate around the GL has focused on authors and compensation. Compensating artists seems to be an obssession for the GL advocates. And they try to sell us this concept of GL, because it is fair, because it is right, and because that the way it should be. We cannot turn down a project that protects artists right?

But in the end this looks like just another tax. The only concern is: would artists be fairly compensated ? What I believe is that as long as they don’t want to understand that the structure of all this is wrong we are not going to do anything good. The music industry collapses: face it. The way we access culture is changing : deal with it ! Thinking within a structure of intellectual property does not help at all.

The thinking pattern behind GL is still the same as the one behind Hadopi, art is perceived as a marchandise. Same as Hadopi. But I guess the GL is just a way to sweeten the pill. The fact is that neither the Socialists nor the Conservatives understand that the music industry is slowly dying. The GL is just a honey trap. This being said, France won’t be able to implement the GL anyway. That would require too many resources. GL will fail just like HADOPI. And who cares about what I download or upload apart from collecting societies. So how come France is still wasting its time on such things? What I believe is that it does not matter if it works or not. France is just trying to monitor everything on the net. HADOPI, LOPPSI laws have paved the way for filtering and controling the net. GL is the frosting on the cake. The GL kills two birds with one stone: comforting the dying Music Industry and preparing control of the net.

In order to accomplish its goals, the GL requires that the downloading activity of users be monitored, so that the money be dispatch, in theory, in a fair manner. Whether this would be accomplishing by tracking computer traffic, or whether it would dealt with by the automatic pre-installation of spyware, this still implies that somewhere, government officials have a mean of controlling the activity of all users on French internet network, and, again, we have no guarantees as to the use they will make of this possibility. But this can be dodged.

This is not new though. So why is France persisting in creating this kind of absurd regulations? Non cost effective and non efficient regulations? Because, the system as we know it will soon die, power might change owners and that scares my Government. The French Government is desperate and worried. HADOPI, http://www.laquadrature.net/en/french-loppsi-bill-adopted-the-internet-under-control GL or whatever it can come up with is just a way to postpone the end of their World in which the music and the movie industry are ruling and where the concept of ownership is the keystone. Those regulations are only designed to gain time.

Meanwhile, they monitor us a little bit more, somehow feeling that they control things, it makes them feel better for a while, until they realize that the power is slipping away again.

READY TO BE READ (modified version of my first paper) The Global License :Smoke and mirrors.

October 2011 : France has been trying to sue children for the past three years under the HADOPI legislationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_lawand apparently it is not working the way the French government expected it to work. Not efficient, too burdensome. Fair enough, let’s come up with something else. Here is the way it would work. In order to « compensate » authors, each and everyone of us will pay an extra 5 and 6 euros a month on our Internet bills. This « compensation » will be included in the price we pay to Internet Service Providers. Internet users will pay a fixed price to Internet carriers. The money collected would go to « collecting societies », somekind of SACEM (the equivalent of the ASCAP in the US). The money will then be dispatched among authors. This would depart from the current Hadopi legislation, under which unlicenced P2P? ? sharing is prohibited.

The dispatch would be done according to the « traffic », meaning that the artists would be compensated according to how many people downloaded their work. That sounds fair, right ? That way we forget about HADOPI, we download and upload freely (well for a few euros at least) and artists get compensated. Why not? But the questions is how is the dispatch of the money going to be handled ? Pro GL say that it would be enough to calculate the traffic of each artist. So the more an artist is « shared » and downloaded the more money he or she will get. The calculation will be based on popularity. What we are told is that this system will enable small or unknown artists to get something, even a little bit. No more intermediaries (record company, the music industry in general). Authors would get proper compensation, and that is the most important thing, right ? The project is obviously designed to protect unknown or non famous artists. Who is going to calculate the traffic, how is it going to be calculated ? Does it mean that exchanges will be monitored and controlled somehow? Who will operate this control? Internet providers, independent societies?

Surprinsingly the debate around the GL has focused on authors and compensation. Compensating artists seems to be an obssession for the GL advocates. And they try to sell us this concept of GL, because it is fair, because it is right, and because that the way it should be. We cannot turn down a project that protects artists right?

But in the end this looks like just another tax. The only concern is: would artists be fairly compensated ? What I believe is that as long as they don’t want to understand that the structure of all this is wrong we are not going to do anything good. The music industry collapses: face it. The way we access culture is changing : deal with it ! Thinking within a structure of intellectual property does not help at all.

The thinking pattern behind GL is still the same as the one behind Hadopi, art is perceived as a marchandise. Same as Hadopi. But I guess the GL is just a way to sweeten the pill. The fact is that neither the Socialists nor the Conservatives understand that the music industry is slowly dying. The GL is just a honey trap. This being said, France won’t be able to implement the GL anyway. That would require too many resources. GL will fail just like HADOPI. And who cares about what I download or upload apart from collecting societies. So how come France is still wasting its time on such things? What I believe is that it does not matter if it works or not. France is just trying to monitor everything on the net. HADOPI, LOPPSI laws have paved the way for filtering and controling the net. GL is the frosting on the cake. The GL kills two birds with one stone: comforting the dying Music Industry and preparing control of the net.

In order to accomplish its goals, the GL requires that the downloading activity of users be monitored, so that the money be dispatch, in theory, in a fair manner. Whether this would be accomplishing by tracking computer traffic, or whether it would dealt with by the automatic pre-installation of spyware, this still implies that somewhere, government officials have a mean of controlling the activity of all users on French internet network, and, again, we have no guarantees as to the use they will make of this possibility. But this can be dodged.

This is not new though. So why is France persisting in creating this kind of absurd regulations? Non cost effective and non efficient regulations? Because, the system as we know it will soon die, power might change owners and that scares my Government. The French Government is desperate and worried. HADOPI, Loppsi//www.laquadrature.net/en/french-loppsi-bill-adopted-the-internet-under-control GL or whatever it can come up with is just a way to postpone the end of their World in which the music and the movie industry are ruling and where the concept of ownership is the keystone. Those regulations are only designed to gain time.

Meanwhile, they monitor us a little bit more, somehow feeling that they control things, it makes them feel better for a while, until they realize that the power is slipping away again.

It's a good idea to write a first sentence that pulls the reader into your subject and your view of it. This one is passive, generic, and somewhat obscure,

France has been trying to sue children for the past three years under HADOPI legislation,

You don't need to explain HADOPI for all the non-French readers who have no idea what it is. Because this is a wiki, you can just link to something that defines and explains HADOPI, so anyone who needs that information can simply click. Not linking and not explaining, however, is not feasible: readers who don't know what you're talking about will promptly give up.

Here's a statement of historical development. You'd want to give people a link to something that explains the acronym DADVSI anyway, and here's your chance to link something that will give the backstory to the proposal.

Here is the way it would work. In order to "compensate" authors, each and everyone of us, will pay in between 5 and 6 euros a month as an extra on our Internet bills. This "compensation" will be included in the price we pay to Internet Service Providers.

Assuming everyone pays ISPs?

That way, we'll be able to download whatever we want, without being worried about the fines we would have had to pay under HADOPI legislation. Sounds good ? The idea came out when discussions on DADVSI law took place in 2005 in the French Parliament. The GL had been rejected at that time.

Second time you've said this, and you could skip the repetition, saving space, but also the second time you haven't linked anything for someone who wants to read up.

The idea was to legalize P2P exchanges. Internet users will then pay a fixed price to Internet carriers. The money collected would go to "collecting societies" some kind of SACEM (the equivalent of the ASCAP in the US). The money will then be dispatch among authors. Right now P2P exchanges are not legal under Hadopi law.

Not quite right. What is not legal under HADOPI is copyright infringement, including unlicensed peer-to-peer sharing of copyrighted works. All the non-infringing peer-to-peer sharing of information that happens in the Internet, which is most of human digital activity because the Internet is peer-to-peer communication, is still legal. So is use of tools like Bittorrent to conduct licensed distribution of copyrighted works. (We members of the human race share petabytes of, e.g., works under free software and Creative Commons licenses every day, and all of that would be or is legal even in hexagonal Sarkozyland.)

The dispatch would be done according to the "traffic," meaning that the artists would be compensated according to how much people downloaded their work. That sounds fair right ?

That way we forget about HADOPI, we download and upload freely (well for few euros at least) and artists get compensated. Why not ? But the questions is how is the dispatch of the money going to be handled ? Pro GL say that it would be enough to calculate the traffic of each artist. So the more an artist is « shared » and downloaded the more money he or she will get. The calculation will be based on popularity. What we are told now is that this system will enable small or unknown artists to get something, even a little bit. No more intermediaries (record company, the music industry in general). Authors would get proper compensation, and that is the most important thing right ? Here we go. The project is obviously designed to protect unknown or non famous artists and we get rid of Hadopi at the same time. At least that what we are being told. Who is going to calculate the traffic, how is it going to be calculated ? Does it mean that exchanges will be monitored and controlled somehow (more than right now) ? Who will control ? Internet providers, independent societies ? Intrusive surveillance of the flows of datas (already happening but that would become somehow official in this case) ? The calculation would be made according to quantity, the compensation would be done in terms of consumption, not in terms of quality. Again, this new structure would be based on consumption, the key word. And what if I'm encrypting my flow of datas ?

Why, what if? The actual point you are setting up but not making here is that the system would depend on the maintenance of an insecure and completely monitored net. In other words, government is proposing to tie its desire to monitor everything to a scheme that benefits copyright industries and collecting society parasites disguised under the apparently unquestionable rectitude of compensating artists. You could just say that.

No, it's just trade association bullshit. Why bother even quoting it? You can prove that most trade association propaganda is self-evident crap, but that's not a big victory. Your own announcement up above that the owners have to live with the extinction of their industries is pretty much the same thing, after all. They're not going to. Realism says you're not going to make culture free to everybody by mere pronouncement any more than they're going to be able to keep it proprietary by slinging bullshit at press conferences. The actual situation is a conflict of incommensurable forces. One of them is wealthy and powerful in the present, stocked up with purchased lawmakers in all parties, possessing expensive press agentry and unlimited resources to make propaganda. The other is weak in the present, consisting of anarchists making technology and a new style of politics, possessing the allegiance of a large fraction of the people who will be running the world in twenty-five years. Right now, the owners behave strongly and try—unsuccessfully—to control the future. Later, with an infrastructure of technical freedom heavily embedded in the entirety of global capitalism, our young colleagues grow up and take over the world in the ordinary course of demographic replacement, sweeping away the owners' institutions just as decisively as the 20th century swept away the institutions of the ancien régime.

I do not believe this is the solution. It's hard for France to get away from the "droit d'auteur" culture. I don't think we need a GL, we need a new economic model. The thinking pattern behind GL is still the same as the one behind Hadopi, art is perceived as a marchandise. Same as Hadopi. But I guess the GL is just a way to sweeten the pill. The fact is that neither the Socialists nor the Conservatives understand that the music industry is slowly dying. No one is talking about patronage, donation is a bad word in my country. The GL is just a honey trap, as inconsistent and unfair as Hadopi is, but very well disguised under what my potential future government calls fairness.

It might be interesting to inquire what difference it makes what "France" wants. "France" can set the price at which people buy packet-moving services. "France" can make claims about what technology is available or usable by citizens, but only to the extent that it can fulminate prohibitions that may or may not actually reflect what happens. It cannot, as you point out at the beginning, actually implement, with any sufficiently tolerable expenditure of resources, something like the "three strikes, you're out" mechanism of HADOPI; its bluff on that subject has now been called. Isn't "France" just another clapped-out fundamentally weakened system of political corruption, about to blow its banks and its postwar dream of civilizing the Teutons for the ninety-seventh time since the Gothic invasions? When all is said and done, who cares what "France" says on this subject? Everyone can see quite clearly that the rules make no actual difference at all to what music people listen to, or what films they watch, even inside the hexagon during the closing hours of the Fifth Republic.

(Draft)

The Global License :Smoke and mirrors.

October 2011 : Time to do a check up. France has been trying to sue children for the past three years under HADOPI legislation, and apparently it is not working the way the french government expected it to work. Not efficient, too burdensome. Fair enough, let’s come up with something else. As the next presidential elections will be held in June 2012, the Socialist Party running for presidency is getting ready and is already considering a new project : The Global Licence. Socialists (few of them though) have been standing against HADOPI and proposed, when the DADVSI legislation was adopted, this Global Licence thing.

Here is the way it would work. In order to « compensate » authors, each and everyone of us, will pay in between 5 and 6 euros a month as an extra on our Internet bills. This « compensation » will be included in the price we pay to Internet Service Providers. That way, we’ll be able to download whatever we want, without being worried about the fines we would have had to pay under HADOPI legislation. Sounds good ? The idea came out when discussions on DADVSI law took place in 2005 in the French Parliament. The GL had been rejected at that time. The idea was to legalize P2P? exchanges. Internet users will then pay a fixed price to Internet carriers. The money collected would go to « collecting societies » somekind of SACEM (the equivalent of the ASCAP in the US). The money will then be dispatch among authors. Right now P2P? exchanges are not legal under Hadopi law.

The dispatch would be done according to the « traffic », meaning that the artists would be compensated according to how much people downloaded their work. That sounds fair right ? That way we forget about HADOPI, we download and upload freely (well for few euros at least) and artists get compensated. Why not ? But the questions is how is the dispatch of the money going to be handled ? Pro GL say that it would be enough to calculate the traffic of each artist. So the more an artist is « shared » and downloaded the more money he or she will get. The calculation will be based on popularity. What we are told now is that this system will enable small or unknown artists to get something, even a little bit. No more intermediaries (record company, the music industry in general). Authors would get proper compensation, and that is the most important thing right ? Here we go. The project is obviously designed to protect unknown or non famous artists and we get rid of Hadopi at the same time. At least that what we are being told. Who is going to calculate the traffic, how is it going to be calculated ? Does it mean that exchanges will be monitored and controlled somehow (more than right now) ? Who will control ? Internet providers, independent societies ? Intrusive surveillance of the flows of datas (already happening but that would become somehow official in this case) ? The calculation would be made according to quantity, the compensation would be done in terms of consumption, not in terms of quality. Again, this new structure would be based on consumption, the key word. And what if I’m encrypting my flow of datas ?

Surprinsingly the debate around the GL has focused on authors and compensation. Compensating artists seems to be an obssession for the GL advocates. And they try to sell us this concept of GL, because it is fair, because it is right, and because that the way it should be. We cannot turn down a project that protects artists right ?

But in the end this looks like just another tax. No one in the debate, whether experts or politicians have asked themselves : can people pay for it, do the people want to pay for it ? Right, it is just few more euros on your Internet bill. But believe it or not some can’t just afford to add those 5 or 6 euros ! And why would they anyway. It is not even about about much we will pay, it is about paying for it. Again, we pay or access to culture. The only concerns they have is : would artist be fairly compensated ? who’s going to pay for calculating the traffic ? I hear those concerns. But what I believe is that as long as we don’t want to understand that the structure of all this is wrong we are not going to do anything good. The music industry collapses : face it. The way we access culture is changing : deal with it ! Thinking within a structure of intellectual property does not help at all. You want culture, then pay for it that the way it works now. Edouard Barreiro, representative of UFC Que Choisir (a french consumer association) said that « people would be more willing to access culture because they would pay for it ». New philosophical statement : I pay, therefore I want. Is that all about it ?

I do not believe this is the solution. It’s hard for France to get away from the « droit d’auteur » culture. I don’t think we need a GL, we need a new economic model. The thinking pattern behind GL is still the same as the one behind Hadopi, art is perceived as a marchandise. Same as Hadopi. But I guess the GL is just a way to sweeten the pill. The fact is that neither the Socialists nor the Conservatives understand that the music industry is slowly dying. No one is talking about patronage, donation is a bad word in my country. The GL is just a honey trap, as inconsistent and unfair as Hadopi is, but very well disguised under what my potential future government calls fairness.

Paper Title

-- By NatachaEsteves - 14 Oct 2011

Section I

Subsection A

Subsub 1

Subsection B

Subsub 1

Subsub 2

Section II

Subsection A

Subsection B

# * Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, NatachaEsteves

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of that line. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated list