Monday, September 6, 2010

Artist and anti-copyright innovator Nina Paley, creator of Sita Sings the Blues , has posted an edited video with excerpts of her talk “Sita Sings the Blues: a Free Culture Success Story” at The Next H.O.P.E. (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference, July 16 2010 in New York City. The talk includes:

why I insisted on authentic songs, what is and is not property, software is culture, the difference between Share Alike (copyleft) and other Creative Commons licenses, why I paid to legally license the old songs, how noncommercial copyright infringement is still illegal, legal costs, benefits of audience sharing & decentralized distribution, the Sita Sings the Blues Merchandise Empire (sitasingstheblues.com/store), open-licensed merch, audience goodwill, how fans support artists, rivalrous vs. non-rivalrous goods, the Creator Endorsed Mark, migrating Flash files to open formats, gift income, commerce without monopolies, why I encourage legal sharing, and more!

It is quite impressive to see an artist like this in front of this audience explaining how rivalrous goods are property and nonrivalrous goods are not, and how free distribution of the latter can be used to sell the former.

As my TLS co-blogger Dick Clark observed to me,

HOPE is a pretty big deal. That was the same con where Adrian Lamo got booed for ratting out Bradley Manning.

But don’t think this is just filtering in. I was talking in 2001 with Eric Corley, aka “Emmanuel Goldstein,” the organizer of HOPE and founder/editor of 2600 Magazine about your article, Against Intellectual Property. There are a lot of anti-IP hackers (and libertarian hackers too, if the Jargon file observations on hacker politics are correct). Information Longs to Be Free, baby.

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The Daily Anarchist has posted a nice, short interview of Walter Block by Seth King, touching mostly on Block’s history in the libertarian movement and his thoughts on the prospects for liberty and the tactics and strategy libertarians employ. A few interesting excerpts:

Seth: Would you mind explaining to me exactly what Anarcho-Capitalism means to you?

Walter: The first part of this phrase, Anarcho-Capitalism, means that there shall be no government. Private firms will undertake all supposed government functions, such as protection from foreign and domestic enemies, adjudication, supplying supposed public goods such as light houses (in a by gone era), flood control, education, welfare, health, money, etc. The second part means that the law will support private property rights, money, etc., in contradistinction to left wing or socialist anarchism.

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Newt Gingrich, a serial adulterer and disciple of New Age futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, makes a singularly unlikely Crusader. Yet apparently at some point in the past year or so Gingrich looked in a mirror and saw Don John of Austria looking back at him.

An epiphany of that kind would explain Gingrich’s perverse determination to depict the contrived controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” as a contemporary Battle of Lepanto. A more reasonable explanation would be that Gingrich, one of the most penetrably insincere figures in American politics, is trying to distill irrational populist resentment into a propellant for a presidential campaign.

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Article: “Criminals With Badges”: Denver’s Militarized Police

by September 6, 2010

Anyone unfortunate enough to be found guilty of “contempt of cop” can expect swift and brutal “justice” at the hands of the criminal, militarized Denver Police Department. Read the Full Article by William N. Grigg Afterwards, discuss it below.

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