copyright

Welcome to Life – The Singularity, Ruined By Lawyers (video)

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Welcome to Life – the Singularity, Ruined by lawyers is a video that is as funny as it is smart. For this reason, even though it has been making the rounds on the internet for quite some time now, I decided to repost it below for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!

 

Welcome To Life: 

Hello, and welcome to Life. We regret to inform you that your previous existence ended on January 14, 2052 following a road traffic accident. However, your consciousness was successfully uploaded to the Life network by your primary care provider. You may be experiencing some confusion. Please remain calm. Life contains *ting sound* Your mental state is being temporarily adjusted in order to calm you. Please do not be alarmed. Life contains over thirty thousand unique activities, networking with millions of other digitized minds, and the ability to contact undigitized friends and family. Please accept these terms and conditions in order to continue Life. Your attention is particularly drawn to Section 2: Usage Rules and Limitations, Section 9: Privacy, and Section 11: Restricted Mental Activities. Thank you.

Please select a Life plan.

Terms and conditions

THE LEGAL AGREEMENTS SET OUT BELOW ARE BETWEEN YOU AND LIFE DIGITAL PERSONALITY MANAGEMENT INCORPORATED (HERAFTER “THE PROVIDER”) AND GOVERN YOU USE OF THE PROVIDER’S SYSTEMS WHICH INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO, THE COMPILATION AND SIMULATION OF YOUR DIGITAL PERSONALITY UNDER THE DIGITAL PERSONALITIES (RIGHTS OF DECEASED PERSONS) ACT 2050.

THE AGREEMENT APPLIES WITHOUT PREJUDICE TO ANY PREVIOUS AGREEMENTS AND CONTRACTS THAT YOU MAY HAVE ENTERED INTO WITH THIRD PARTIES, IMPORTANT” ACCEPTING SIMULATION AS A DIGITAL PERSONALITY MEANS YOU WAIVE YOUR RIGHT TO POST-MORTEM RELEASE OF DEBTS AND OBLIGATIONS. YOUR LIFE MAY BE AT RISK IF YOU DO NOT KEEP UP REPAYMENTS ON A LOAN SECURED ON IT.

1. PAYMENTS AND REFUNDS POLICY

You agree that you will pay for services purchased from the Provider, as well as upgrades, enhancements and experience (“Apps”) selected from third-party simulation enhancement entities (“App Providers”). The Provider accepts payment by direct transfer from bank accounts in the US, UK, France, Germany and Australia. In the event your payments become significantly in arrears, the Provider reserves the right to a) search your digital personality for the details, locations, and access requirements for assets that you owe in relation to its services (see: Section 9, Privacy) and/or b) terminate your simulation without notice (see: Section 13, Notice of Termination).

! Rejecting these terms will result in termination of your simulated personality.

Accept

Reject

Welcome To Life

Tier One is our premium offering, allowing full uninterrupted simulation of your pre-terminal state. It includes unlimited modification of your body plan, accelerated learning and recall, and full personal backup facilities. Tier Two is our advertiser-supported offering. It contains many of the features of Tier One, but at a significantly reduced cost. Some areas of the environment, such as the sky, may be replaced with targeted advertising, and your personal brand preferences may be altered to align with those of our sponsors. Tier Three is our value offering. Thanks to our commercial partners, your experience at this tier is unlimited. However, some activities, senses, and visual rendering options may be subject to a Fair Use Policy. More complicated mental processes, including subconscious thought, creativity and self-awareness, may be rate-limited or disabled at times of significant server load. Thank you.

Your stored mind contains one or more patterns that contravene the Prevention of Crime and Terrorism Act of 2050. Please stand by while we adjust these patterns. Your stored mind contains sections from 124,564 copyrighted works. In order to continue remembering these copyrighted works, a licensing fee of $18,000 per month is required. Would you like to continue remembering these works? Thank you.

Legal compliance
UNDER INTERNATIONAL TRACE AND COPYRIGHT LAWS, WE ARE UNABLE TO STOR WHOLE OR PART COPYRIGHTED WORKS AS PART OF A DIGITAL PERSONALITY WITHOUT THAT PERSONALITY TENDERING A LICENSING FEE DETERMINED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER. THE FOLLOWING COPYRIGHTED WORKS ARE WHOLLY OR PARTLY CONTAINED WITHIN YOUR STORED PERSONALITY TO A DEGREE THAT CONTRAVENES THE RIGHT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY HOLDERS:

MUSICAL WORKS OR PERFORMANCES: 57,384
VISUAL WORKS OR PERFORMANCES: 43,586
OLFACTORY WORKS OR PERFORMANCES: 124
OTHER WORKS OR PERFORMANCES: 23,470

You have insufficient funds in an financial reserves to pay this licensing fee.

! Copyrighted works are being deleted.

Welcome to Life.

Please stand by. Welcome to Life. Do you wish to continue?

© Published By Enyay tomscott.com

Reason.TV: Too Much Copyright!

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“This disconnect between the public’s view of copyright and fair use and what should and should not be prosecuted, versus the ‘copyright maximist’ view of the law, is our generation’s Prohibition,” says Ben Huh, CEO and founder of Cheezburger and a loud voice in the recent backlash to SOPA and PIPA, two congressional bills aimed at curbing internet piracy.

Copyright exists to “promote the useful arts” according to the Constitution. But is it still doing that? And should the government protect so-called “intellectual property” in the same way it protects other forms of property? Reason.tv posed these questions to Ben Huh, as well as a professor and a movie studio representative.

Tom Bell, a law professor specializing in property law, has serious reservations about attempts by groups like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to equate property and copyright through ad campaigns admonishing viewers with messages like, “You wouldn’t steal a car. Downloading pirated movies is stealing.”

“As soon as we start using [the word] ‘copyright’ for ‘property,’ we start taking less seriously our property rights for things like cars and houses,” says Bell. “When you steal a candy bar or a car, you’ve left somebody without something to eat or something to drive.”

But the MPAA’s head content protection counsel, Ben Sheffner, thinks that piracy is a major problem that needs to be stopped.

“If this kind of piracy is allowed to run rampant, it’ll deprive the public of the next great film,” says Sheffner.

So, if the purpose of copyright is to incentivize the creation of artistic works, is it still doing its job? The data points to today’s copyright regime doing little more than enriching the corporations with the strongest lobbyists.

“Is there a market failure in the production and dissemination of expressive works?” asks Bell. “I don’t there’s any risk that we’re going to run out of songs, or books, or movies, or software any time soon.”

While the MPAA and other entertainment industry trade groups have bemoaned the effects of rampant internet piracy on creative output, the numbers tell a different story. Research shows more music and books produced than ever before between 2005 to 2010, production of feature films growing by a factor of more than 4 in 14 years, and the number of video game companies exploding by a factor of 18 in the span of three years.

Still, the MPAA stands behind Chairman Chris Dodd’s statement, made in the heat of the SOPA battle, that the U.S. could look to China’s site-blocking laws as a positive example of anti-piracy regulation.

“If site blocking broke the internet, the internet would’ve been broken a long time ago,” says Sheffner. “There’s ways to implement these narrowly tailored remedies that really cut off these ‘worst of the worst’ web sites.”

Written and produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Tracy Oppenheimer and Weissmueller. “The Day the LOLcats died” written and performed by LaughPong. Additional music:”Thomas Kinkade Pays His Respects to Walt Disney” by Der Christer Schytts; “Twinklebox” by Ephemetry; “Betty Boop” by Ergo Phizmiz; “Frog Legs Rag Tag” by James Scott; “Mickey Impression” by thehottestguy23.

Approximately nine minutes.

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Copyright Was Just The Beginning: Cory Doctorow on the Coming War on General Computation

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I have always been a huge fan of Cory Doctorow’s – I read his books, I listen to his podcast, I watch his numerous and always ground-breaking keynote speeches and I value his insights and expert opinion.

This time, however, Cory outdid even himself.

Below you can watch Doctorow’s seminal keynote speech given at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress in Germany.

In addition, since the original video recording was released under a creative commons licence and given the immense importance of the topic, I decided to post the audio via my Singularity 1 on 1 podcast.

So, you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the full video recording below. I hope you find it as inspiring, as enraging and as profound as I did.

Enjoy!

 

Abstract:

“The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to “secure” anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

And general purpose computers can cause harm — whether it’s printing out AR15 components, causing mid-air collisions, or snarling traffic. So the number of parties with legitimate grievances against computers are going to continue to multiply, as will the cries to regulate PCs.

The primary regulatory impulse is to use combinations of code-signing and other “trust” mechanisms to create computers that run programs that users can’t inspect or terminate, that run without users’ consent or knowledge, and that run even when users don’t want them to.

The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression.

Our duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse.”

To read the full English transcript of Cory Doctorow’s keynote speech click here. (Read German version here.)

Audio Update:

Cory Doctorow’s Interview with CBC’s Spark on the coming war on general-purpose computation

 

Video Update: Cory Doctorow at Google – The Coming Civil War over General-purpose Computing

Who governs digital trust?

Doctorow framed the question this way: “Computers are everywhere. They are now something we put our whole bodies into—airplanes, cars—and something we put into our bodies—pacemakers, cochlear implants. They HAVE to be trustworthy.”

Sometimes humans are not so trustworthy, and programs may override you: “I can’t let you do that, Dave.” (Reference to the self-protective insane computer Hal in Kubrick’s film “2001.” That time the human was more trustworthy than the computer.) Who decides who can override whom?

The core issues for Doctorow come down to Human Rights versus Property Rights, Lockdown versus Certainty, and Owners versus mere Users.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/gbYXBJOFgeI[/youtube]

 

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