handyfloss

Today the power supply has failed again twice: first for some 15min; 10min later, for some other 5min.

Here goes the updated list of blackouts I have been able to compile, with comments if any:

1. 2005-Dec-13
2. 2005-Dec-21
3. 2006-May-26 (The card-based automated access to the Faculty broke down)
4. 2006-Jun-04
5. 2006-Jun-08
6. 2006-Jun-13
7. 2006-Jun-16
8. 2006-Jul-04 (Orpheus didn’t fall)

Summary: 8 blackouts in 204 days, or 25.5 dpb (days per blackout). 19 days since last blackout. Average dpb went down by 0.8.

First post in the series: here

Leo en el Diario Vasco un artículo haciéndose eco del enfrentamiento entre SGAE y usuarios de material informático (o sea, tú y yo), en relación con el famoso canon por copia privada que se aplica a medios como CDs y DVDs.

El preclaro Farré afirma (refiriéndose a los fabricantes de soportes de almacenamiento digital), con su acostumbrada hipocresía:

Lo lógico es que compartan una mínima parte de esa ganancia con quienes crean esos contenidos […] ¿Venderían tantos soportes si no se pudieran copiar las obras?

Este es el puñetero argumento de “gracias a la música se venden más CDs vírgenes, por lo tanto los autores deben recibir una parte del pastel”. Dejemos a un lado si dar dinero a la SGAE equivale a darlo a los autores de la música, o si la SGAE realmente representa a los autores españoles (muchos de los cuales no se adhieren a ella), o en qué lugar queda la música CC… Supongamos que SGAE=música (aguantad las risas, es un suponer).

Pues bien, ese argumento seguiría siendo FALSO.

Es falso y bien falso. El mercado libre no funciona de esa manera, querido Farré.

Supongamos que yo vendo coches. Supongamos que vendo 1000 coches este año. Supongamos que el año que viene la compañía X inventa un combustible más barato. Como el combustible es más barato, la gente empieza a comprar más coches, y mis ventas suben a 2000 coches en el 2007. ¿A alguien en su sano juicio se le ocurriría pensar que la compañía X puede pedirme un “canon” por los coches que vendo, alegando que “gracias a ellos he vendido más”? Pues a nadie, claro.

Supongamos que, en vez de inventar un combustible más barato, X inventa un coche solar. La nueva competencia hace que mis coches sean impopulares, y mis ventas del 2007 bajan a 500 coches. ¿Tengo derecho a demandar a X por hacer que mis ventas bajen? Pues no, claro.

Si acciones de terceros negocios afectan favorable o desfavorablemente al mío, lo tengo que tomar como imponderables del mercado, y adaptarme al cambio sin rabietas y sin pataletas. Pero parece que la SGAE no ha entendido esto: en un mercado justo y libre, NADIE COBRA POR BENEFICIOS INDIRECTOS A TERCEROS.

Es más, tampoco es tan claro que la música beneficie la venta de soportes digitales, pero no al revés, ni en qué medida se dan estos beneficios mutuos, o en qué medida afecta la música a la venta de soportes digitales, comparada con otros factores. Legislar el cobro de un canon indiscriminado en estas circunstancias es irresponsable, y nuestros políticos deberían ser conscientes de ello.

Alguien podría alegar que en el ejemplo de coches y gasolina barata, el vendedor de gasolina también se beneficia de la venta de coches (así que el beneficio es mutuo), pero con la música “pirateada” no pasa eso: la música beneficia la venta de soportes digitales, pero no al revés. Pues bien, esto es otra mentira. Yo planteo la pregunta: ¿acaso se vendería tanta música (CDs originales) si los usuarios no tuvieran un medio barato y fiable para hacer copias? ¿Acaso la música en CDs habría ganado tanta popularidad si no pudiera uno pasarla a MP3 u OGG en su ordenador, o a un reproductor portátil? Recordemos cómo MS-DOS se hizo tan popular en su momento gracias a que se podía “piratear”. Sí, señores, sí, gracias a que eran bien sencillo de copiar.

Hay una corriente de usuarios descontentos (entre los que me encuentro), que reduce su compra de CDs por desprecio a unas discográficas mafiosas, a un canon injusto, a unos artistas mezquinos y ruines, y a “protecciones” anticopia y DRMs abusivos. Leed, por ejemplo mi carta a Bebe.

Está claro que la venta de música se ve perjudicada por esas medidas, pero cada cliente descontento que pierden por sus abusos, ellos lo atribuyen a las redes p2p y al “pirateo”. Por otro lado, cada CD que en mi grupo de investigación utilizamos para hacer una copia de seguridad, se lo apropian como si lo usáramos para grabar a Bisbal. ¡Menuda jeta!

Cada día me tienen más harto estos ladrones.

I have come to know that Microsoft has planned to add to MS Office a plug-in for licensing the documents thus produced under one of the Creative Commons licenses (if the author so wishes, of course).

You can read about it in Slashdot, C|Net and Lawrence Lessig’s blog.

Now, a lot of people see it as something possitive (including Enrique Dans[es]), but I don’t see it completely clear. It seems to be a big boost to the popularity of CC licenses, no doubt about it.

But, is it good news to the freedom of the culture?. It would seem so, since more people will license their works under a CC (many even unwillingly, because they hit the incorrect button in their toolbar, or have the defaults of their Office wrongly configurated), but it is not. They key point is twofold:

1) What the hell is this plug-in good for? What can the author achieve with it that is not promptly achieved just adding a “This work is licensed under blah-blah-blah” manually (keyboard-lly)? It is implied that someone will write a 500-page book, but is too lazy to manually add a statement that could be inserted clicking the ultra-mega-kewl MS Offiz plug-in button…

2) What good is it to free one’s artistic (or otherwise) work under a permisive copyright, if it is burdened by a proprietary format such as those MS Office saves under?

These two facts (doesn’t benefit the author, doesn’t benefit the freedom) make it clear that (as all the steps MS takes) it mainly benefits MS. It effectively helps the author refrain from controling her work too tightly, but moves this “control” into its (MS’s) own hands. Free distribution of important, interesting, popular CC documents will make it even more important to have MS Office if these documents are DOC or similar. More so, MS could threat to cut support for the readers of such documents, increase their price, tighten the piracy controls for MS Office, and/or legally prosecute the compatible readers (OpenOffice.org)… all that supported by a more tight grip in the freedom of choice of the public.

And remember: all the aforementioned attacks to the users’ freedom can only be done from a power position… power given to them in first place by the users. Don’t fall for it!

Acabo de escuchar, por enésima vez, Delincuencia, de los míticos La Polla Records (de los que también hay artículo en inglés en la Wikipedia).

Reproduzco la letra, para que el lector vea que todo sigue igual, que no ha perdido vigencia. ¡Pero es que han pasado 22 años desde que se publicó esta canción!

Delincuencia

Liquidar la delincuencia
es una plaga social
una raza despreciable
una raza a exterminar.
Banqueros, unos ladrones[1] sin palanca y de día
políticos estafadores[2] juegan a vivir de ti
Fabricantes de armamento[3] eso es jeta de cemento
las religiones calmantes y las pandas de uniforme
la droga publicitaria[4] delito premeditado
Y la estafa inmobiliaria[5]
Delincuencia, delincuencia es la vuestra.
¡Asquerosos!, delincuencia es la vuestra
vosotros haceis la ley.
Explotadores profesionales
delincuencia es todo aquello
que os puede quitar el chollo[6]
que os puede quitar el chollo.

[1] Sin comentarios
[2] P.e. Marbella
[3] Los paises desarrollados seguimos vendiendo al tercer mundo las armas con que se matan.
[4] En estos 22 años los anuncios han seguido siendo cada vez más idiotizantes, no menos.
[5] Joder, parece que el tema viene de lejos, ¿eh?
[6] SGAE, MPAA, RIAA, DRM, Treacherous Computing…

I just found the following quotation as the signature of a guy in a Dillo browser mailing list:

Naturally the common people don’t want war… but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

— Hermann Goering, Nazi and war criminal, 1883-1946

This morning I had breakfast watching some journalists on TV, discussing the morning news in a kind of informal debate. They were speaking about judge Grande-Marlaska’s latest decissions, and about the Justice being independent from the Political power (as it should be in a democracy).

Now, one of them uttered the following phrase:

I don’t think the judges are driven by what the politicians ask them to decide, because if it were so, I’d be very afraid.

Yeah, just like that! Not only once. She repeated the same motto, slightly changed to “[…], because if it were so, we would not be able to say we live in a democracy”

And no one corrected her in any way! No one had the guts to tell her: “Silly you! That is an argumentum ad consequentiam, and therefore a logical fallacy“.

What kind of idiots are feeding us with news, if they forget any kind of rigor in their argumentations? Their public display of broken logic will end up idiotizing the spectators, who will assume any non sequitur is a valid argument.

[Update: (Nov 19, 2007) The LinuxAdvocate.org link seems to have disappeared. You can find a related analysis in PDF format at cybersource.com.au]

You can find a nice explanation, in everyday english, of what the different clauses of the Windows XP EULA (End Use License Agreement) mean at: LinuxAdvocate.org.

The original EULA can be found at the Microsoft site, and below is a comparison with the wonderful xxdiff graphical file (and directory) comparator. It proves that the EULA given at LinuxAdvocate.org is correct, because the grey text (the quoted EULA) is equal in both sides, and the only difference is the added (green) sections in the LinuxAdvocate.org side, which correspond to the explanations.

Figure 1: xxdiff of WinXP Eula (right), and LinuxAdvocate.org explanation (left). Click to enlarge

Interesting excerpts:

You agree that at any time, and at the request of content providers Microsoft may disable certain features on your computer, such as the ability to play your music or movie files.

These restrictions apply to all software that you get from Microsoft in the future. Future software may contain further restrictions.

Microsoft may cancel any service that they provide to you at any time and for any reason.

You agree that Microsoft can automatically and without your consent put new software on your computer.

Microsoft assures you that Windows XP Home will work correctly for the first 90 days. They do not assure you that Windows XP Home or any service packs or hot fixes will work correctly after this time.

Uff, follow the link above and read it yourself, because all the clauses are juicy.

Think of the kind of subjugation commercial software asks from you. Think freely. Think free. Think FLOSS!!

Today the power supply has failed again, so here goes the updated list of blackouts I have been able to compile, with comments if any:

1. 2005-Dec-13
2. 2005-Dec-21
3. 2006-May-26 (The card-based automated access to the Faculty broke down)
4. 2006-Jun-04
5. 2006-Jun-08
6. 2006-Jun-13
7. 2006-Jun-16

Summary: 7 blackouts in 184 days, or 26.3 dpb (days per blackout).

First post in the series: here

What do pharmaceutical, commercial software, film and discographic companies have in common? Well, among other things, fear to piracy. The three of them make products that are first generated at a high cost, but are afterwards trivially replicated. Actually, patents are designed with this into mind. From the Wikipedia entry for patent, one of the four main reasons for patents would be that:

[…] in many industries (especially those with high fixed costs and low marginal costs and low reverse engineering costs – pharmaceuticals and computer software being the two prototyical examples), once an invention exists and has been tested, the cost of actually turning it into a product is typically six times or more the R&D cost. Unless there is some way to prevent copies from competing at the marginal cost of production, companies will not make that productization investment.

Recently I discussed with a friend the recurrent subject of fair use of copyrighted material, and the applicability of the term “piracy” for downloading music and movies from the Internet. We stumbled upon a thorny double moral problem, because my friend would not see any moral or legal problem in downloading copyrighted material from the Internet, while at the same time a patent breach (he actually holds some drug patents) would outrage him!

Justifications for the alleged legality and morality of p2p sharing of copyrighted material abound. You can find out about them in the Justification section of the copyright infrigement entry of the Wikipedia and in the Legal controversy section of the p2p entry of the same source.

Influential bloggers also post in defense of the p2p interchange, and I will mention three Spanish ones: Enrique Dans (e.g. 9-Jun-2006, 3-Jun-2006, 1-Jun-2006), David Bravo (12-Jun-2006, 25-May-2006, 10-Apr-2006), Nacho Escolar (4-Jun-2006, 29-MAy-2006, 22-May-2006, 10-Jun-2004).

Now, one of the main mottos (to which I actually agree), is that the technology has made difussion of culture so easy, that the audiovisual industry has to change its business model, because the present one is obsolete and tyranical with the user, appart from no longer enforceable by the stablishment. Something similar happens to the commercial software industry: the rise of the much more efficient and legally, morally and practically sound, free software (the FLOSS that gives its name to this blog), makes it ridiculous to mantain the 80s and 90s proprietary software model.

However, although criticism to present market models make some of us turn to media licensed under Creative Commons (mainly music), and software licensed under the GPL and other free licenses (like the Debian GNU/Linux operating system or the web browser Firefox), some others feel that downloading copies of commercial of software (Windows, Photoshop, AutoCAD, ChemOffice…), or copyrighted material (music and movies) from p2p networks is somehow OK.

Much could be said about the morality and/or legality of this practice, but, for the sake of the argument, let’s accept it’s legal and moral. Let’s accept that sharing any audiovisual material through a p2p network is fair use, and that any attempt from the lobbies that control these materials to stop it are not only condemned to fail, but also injust.

OK, I can accept that, but… why not apply this to the pharmaceuticals?. What is the difference? A pharmaceutical company makes a big effort to discover new drugs, and then market them if approved by the corresponding autorities. The exclusive marketing of a drug, or a fair compensation when marketed by third parties, is ensured through patents. A patent, according to the Wikipedia, represents:

[…] the exclusive rights granted by a state to a person for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or composition of matter (substance) (known as an invention) which is new, inventive, and useful or industrially applicable.

The exclusive right granted to a patentee is the right to prevent others from making, using, selling, offering to sell or importing the claimed invention. The rights given to the patentee do not include the right to make, use, or sell the invention themselves. The patentee may have to comply with other laws and regulations to make use of the claimed invention.

This is very interesting. The researcher (the musician), comes up with a new drug (a new song), and wants to get a just reward for her effort. She patents the drug (puts the song under copyright), which gives here a negative right to ban any other person from even producing the drug (performing the song) without her prior approval.

Usually the researcher (musician) is not directly able to market her invention (distribute her music), and so conveniently hands it down to someone who can, e.g. a pharmaceutical company (a discographic company). They are the ones who make the effort to put it in the market, passing the due approvals (bribing the due radio stations for advertising).

Now, when someone else wants to make use of the publicly available instructions (the publicly available p2p network) to produce the drug (to download, listen and/or perform the song) herself, the patent holder (copyright owner) has the right to prevent her from doing so. The pharmaceutical company (the discographic company) can even choose not to market the drug (the song) at all, if it is not economically advantageous for them. The patent (copyright) allows them to do so.

Now, the parallelism is absolute, and hence I can’t see the difference between the following examples:

a) A kid likes a music group, but can not afford, or does not want to pay for, their CD, so resorts to eMule to download it. Now, no-one can prosecute her, because it is legal.

b) There are thousands in Africa dying of a disease that is not mortal in the first world, because there is a (patented) drug that can cure it. Unfortunately, the Africans of this example, can’t afford the price the pharmaceuticals charge… so tough luck. Now, the Red Cross, or even an African individual, downloads the “recipe” for the drug from the Internet, and starts producing it and giving it away for free. Is it prosecutable?

What is the difference between a) and b)? If the drug could be put online, and downloaded as a piece of music or video, would it be any different? How come the latest Hollywood blockbuster, or MTV hit, are of public interest and hence should be publicly and freely available, regardless of the wishes of the lobbies behind its production, and the drugs that can potentially save millions are not?

For me, that’s a non sequitur.

Today the power supply failed twice within a couple of minutes, and it just fed me up. I don’t know if our supplying company (Iberdrola) was the culprit or not. Most likely it was, as it has definitely been in the past.

I am presently a member of Prof. J.M. Ugalde‘s research group, in the Chemistry Faculty of the Donostia Campus of the UPV-EHU (University of the Basque Country), and thus the reader must realize that the blackouts I’ll enumerate have affected several Faculties in the University Campus, as well as the Donostia Internatinal Physics Center (DIPC), a first-class research center located nearby. The latter has suffered plenty computer problems (hard disks, power supplies and motherboards breaking down) due to the numerous blackouts. Needless to say, so has our Computational Chemistry group.

I would like to highlight the facts that:

• The blackouts are innacceptably frequent. We live, allegedly, in the first world.
• Each blackout, each interrupted computer activity, each fried down computer… represents a kick in the groin for the research activities. The irresponsible ways of Iberdrola are effectively handicapping the progress in the Basque Country. Yes, as simple as that.

Without further ado, here goes the list of blackouts I have been able to compile, with comments if any:

1. 2005-Dec-13
2. 2005-Dec-21
3. 2006-May-26 (The card-based automated access to the Faculty broke down)
4. 2006-Jun-04
5. 2006-Jun-08
6. 2006-Jun-13

Summary: 6 blackouts in 181 days, or 30.2 dpb (days per blackout). How much is acceptable? 100 dpb, maybe? 365 dpb (one a year)? Certainly one a month is not.