Swarm Management: People’s friends are better marketers than you, for the simple reason that they are those people’s friends, and you are not.

But first, before we go into marketing, let’s take a moment to reflect on the nature of the swarm.

In the last chapter*, we talked a lot about formal structures of the swarm. Keep the working groups to seven people in size, split the informal groups that approach 150 people in size into two. This will have come as a surprise to some, who would believe and maybe even insist that a swarm must be leaderless and fully organic.

(*this is an excerpt from an upcoming book, Swarmwise. That “last chapter” has not been published yet.)

I do not believe in leaderless organizations. We can observe around us that change happens whenever people are allowed to inspire each other to greatness. This is leadership. This is even leadership by its very definition.

In contrast, if you have a large assembly of people who are forced to agree on every movement, including the mechanism for what consitutes such agreement, then you rarely achieve anything at all.

Therefore, as you build a swarm, it is imperative that everybody is empowered to act in the swarm just through what they believe will further its goals – but no one is allowed to empower themselves to restrict others, neither on their own nor through superior numbers.

This concept – that people are allowed, encouraged and expected to assume speaking and acting power for themselves in the swarm’s name, but never the kind of power that limits others’ right to do the same thing – is a hard thing to grasp for many. We have been so consistently conditioned to regard power as power, regardless whether it is over our own actions or over those of others, that this crucial distinction must be actively explained. We will return to explore this mechanism in more detail in chapter five, as we discuss how to create a sense of inclusion and lack of fear as we mould the general motivations in the swarm.

As a result, somebody who believes the swarm should take a certain action to further its goals need only start doing it. If others agree that the action is beneficial, then they will join in on that course of action.

The key reasons the swarm should not be leaderless are two. You will notice that I refer to ”its goals”. Those come from you, the swarm’s founder. If the swarm would be allowed to start discussing its purpose in life, then it would immediately lose its attracting power of new people – who, after all, feel attracted to the swarm in order to accomplish a specific goal, and not out of some general kind of sense of social cohesion.

The second reason is these very mechanisms, the swarm’s culture of allowing people to act. These values will be key to the swarm’s success, and those values are set and established by you as its founder. If the swarm starts discussing its methods of conflict resolution, meaning there is no longer any means to even agree when people will have come to an agreement, then the necessary activism for the end goal will screech to a halt.

Therefore, I believe that leaderless swarms are not capable of delivering a tangible change in the world at the end of the day. The scaffolding, the culture, and the goals of the swarm need to emanate from a founder. In a corporate setting, we would call this ”mission and values”.

But I also believe in competition between many overlapping swarms, so that activists can float in and out of organizations that best match the change they want to see in the world. One swarm fighting for a goal does not preclude more doing the same, but perhaps with a slightly different set of parameters.

So the sum of this little introspective reflection is that the vision of the swarm’s end goal comes, and must come, from you – its founder. However, as we shall see, this doesn’t mean that you can control the message being told to every single being, or that you should even try to do so. Rather, you should encourage the opposite.

You do the vision. The swarm does the talking.

Traditional marketing says that a message needs to stay constant to penetrate. My experience says that’s total hogwash.

It may certainly be true that you can influence routine buying patterns or even routine voting patterns with simpleton messages of the one-size-fits-all type. But if you want activists, people who walk an extra mile to make a difference, then it’s a different ballgame entirely.

You don’t want a routine pattern when you’re looking for activists. You want people who are energized, who feel like kings of the world and who can’t wait to make a difference with their bare hands.

Try to do that with a TV ad. You can’t. No matter how many millions you spend on it, it cannot be done. (This disregards the fact that swarms form in money-strapped environments in the first place.)

”A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

Our language is a social marker. Our choice of words matter, as do minute details in their pronounciation and timing. Our language is a marker of group inclusion, and more importantly, of group exclusion.

If somebody comes up to you and tells you a factual statement in a language that you identify as that of a group you dislike, you are very likely to discard that message as false, despite its actual truthness. In the same vein, if somebody that dresses, speaks, and acts in a manner consistent with your social standards tells you a factual statement, then you are likely to accept it as plausible and maybe examine it on its own merits later.

This sounds obvious. Yet, it has not been used in the marketing of ideas before swarms arrived on stage.

The recipe is ridiculously simple: communicate your vision to everybody, and let the thousands of activists translate your vision into words that fit their specific social context. Don’t make a one-size-fits-all message that everybody has to learn. It will be a one-size-fits-none.

Let me give a tangible example. When I speak about the opportunities associated with the obsolescence of the copyright industry, I can do so in many different languages. If I were to speak about this before a liberal entrepreneur crowd, I would say something like this:

”There is tremendous opportunity in the cutting of this link from the value chain. The copyright industry intermediaries no longer add value to the end product or service, and so, on a functioning market, they are going to die by themselves. There is a problem here, as their monopoly prevents that. Therefore, we must assist in this cutoff, as removal of that overhead allows for growth of the overall market, future opportunities for the artist entrepreneurs, and for new jobs that take the place of the obsolete ones.”

However, speaking to dark-red communist groups that celebrate the Red Army Faction as heroes, I would choose a different language:

”I think it is fantastic that the cultural workers have finally assumed control over their means of production, and that we finally have the ability to throw off the middlemen parasite capitalists who have been profiting for decades off of their hard labor. We should help our brothers and sisters to make this transition happen, and help them turn the captured middlemen profits into new jobs for our culture.”

Factually, these two statements are completely identical. I am saying the exact same thing. But one wording would not work for the other group; you would get thrown out of the room and the curiosity in your swarm discarded for good.

Granted, these two settings are extreme contrasts to make a point. But even a subtle sign of not belonging can be enough to get your idea and vision discarded in a conversation.

This is why you need the activists – thousands of them – to translate your vision into many different social contexts as you have activists. Only then will you be able to electrify their friends with your vision, once that vision is clad in the language of that social context.

Don’t think you can do this yourself for every setting. You don’t master every nuance of language and social code. Nobody does. I may be able to switch languages rudimentarily from years of training in different settings, but I can’t easily change appearance. If I arrive in a suit at a place for a presentation, and they turn out to be laid-back hippie types, then that’s it. No word I say after that can change their perception of me.

It is also important, and imperative, that your activists not only are encouraged to translate your vision, but also to interpret and apply it to specific scenarios. In a political swarm, for example, that means they need to be able to translate general principles into specific policy on the fly, and express it in appropriate language for the context – always without asking permission. A three-activist rule can apply here, or you can empower everybody straight off the bat. When this starts to happen without any central planning and control, the swarm starts to really fly.

There will be people in the swarm who object to others’ interpretations of the vision and general principles, of course. This brings us back to the distinction between empowerment of the activist self, versus the power to crack down on the work of others. The golden rule of the net springs to life: ”If you see something you don’t like, contribute with something you do like.”

This rule is absolutely paramount, and it is you who must enforce it.

One of the worst things that can happen to the swarm is the emergence of a back seat driver culture, where those who do are punished for it – and it is your responsibility to make sure that people who do things are rewarded, even – importantly – even when you think they weren’t exactly on the money.

Otherwise, a back seat driver culture will emerge that punishes those who take risks and do things they believe in, a mechanism that is critical to inspire others in the swarm. If this doesn’t happen, because people become afraid of doing so, the swarm dies.

EXCERPT FROM UPCOMING BOOK

This is a draft part of the upcoming book Swarmwise, due 2012. It is an instruction manual for recruiting and leading tens of thousands of activists on a mission to change the world for the better, without having access to money, resources, or fame. The book is based on Falkvinge’s experiences in leading the Swedish Pirate Party into the European Parliament, starting from nothing, and covers all aspects of leading a swarm of activists into mainstream success.

Quality Legislation – Zacqary Adam Green: Before a court can restrict a citizen’s freedom with a prison sentence, it must prove guilt. Why don’t legislatures require the same burden of proof when making laws?

This may seem like a silly comparison; common wisdom would never equate imprisonment with a law being on the books. They certainly don’t feel like the same thing — unless the law in question is unjust, unnecessary, or just plain unwelcome. Take, for example, the US federal government’s law which refuses to recognize same-sex marriage. The fact that, were I to one day marry, I’d have to limit my residence to a select few states — and still be regarded as “single” for federal tax purposes, regardless — certainly feels like imprisonment to me.

Laws, like imprisonment, are a restriction on individual liberty. They are a limitation on what an individual is allowed to do, plain and simple. This is not an argument against laws, in favor of lawlessness; this is simply a statement of fact. Just because some laws are necessary does not change the fact that they do restrict liberty.

And that’s the key thing to think about: we should not restrict anyone’s liberty unless it is absolutely, positively necessary, without a shadow of a doubt. Our court systems already recognize this; it’s arguably necessary to throw a murderer in jail, but it’s not necessary to throw a person falsely-accused of murder in jail. This is why courts require evidence before they will convict an individual of a crime, and then — as a consequence — restrict that individual’s liberty.

Legislative bodies, on the other hand, do not insist on evidence to make laws; they base their decisions solely on the opinions of their members. There is no requirement for these opinions to be based on evidence, which is why they often are not. We regularly take away freedoms based solely on the whims and beliefs of our elected officials, and not based on whether it is necessary to take these freedoms away. Certain behaviors are deemed wrong until proven right — or just wrong, despite proof to the contrary.

For too long, we have seen that beliefs, morals, or sentiments are not an appropriate basis for lawmaking. We are also well aware that they are not an appropriate basis for criminal justice. Why do we allow laws to be made without proof of their necessity, but disallow criminal convictions without the same?

Before acting, courts ask themselves the question: will justice be done? Legislators must begin doing the same.

Infopolicy – Zacqary Adam Green: Information technology, among all that it does, brings together two things which are wonderful when apart, and frightening when combined: children, and sex. For the past couple decades, this has, understandably, freaked us all out. We need to calm down and have a talk about it.

In his defense of freedom of “icky speech”, Neil Gaiman observed, “The Law is a blunt instrument. It’s not a scalpel. It’s a club.” This exemplifies how much of the world has reacted to the intersection of technology, sex, and children: by wildly flailing around with a gigantic legal club, more often smashing itself in the head than solving any problems. Let’s explore how:

Kids Looking At Pornography

The Internet is really, really great for porn. Porn is so easy to find online that even a child could do it. The problem, so it would seem, is that this is exactly what children end up doing. And as they approach and go through puberty, boy oh boy do they find porn.

Such porn-finding is unstoppable. Nobody ever clicks “No, I am not 18 years of age or older” when visiting a porn site. No web filtering software can stand up to the resourcefulness of a curious and hormonal teenager. No law will convince a maturing human being not to seek out sexually explicit material. The underage psyche interprets barriers to pornography as damage, and routes around it.

For some reason, this is seen as a bad thing. Exposure to graphic depictions of sex are considered somehow harmful to children, teenagers, and anyone below the arbitrary age of 18, 21, or whatever. But as generations of kids raised on surreptitiously-accessed Internet porn grow older, little evidence of harm shows itself. Rampant porn-viewing hasn’t been shown to increase rates of sexual assault or sexual violence; in fact increasing availability of porn has correlated with a decline in rape. On that note, what pornography may also do is aid in young people’s exploration and discovery of their own sexualities as they mature — a hypothesis which, if true, isn’t particularly malignant.

Yet, we insist on criminalizing this perfectly normal behavior by sexually developing human beings. In many cases, this illegality concerns the willful distribution of pornography to a minor — giving the pornographer, not the minor, the blame. But here’s the thing: nobody has to distribute or market pornography to a minor. They’ll find it all by themselves.

Kids Willfully Creating “Pornography”

It starts to get a bit more problematic when that exploration goes beyond passive viewing; apparently, kids these days are into something called “sexting”. At its most innocuous, a child or teenager snaps a nude or sexually explicit photo of themselves, and sends it (often via MMS) to a friend, crush, or significant other. All of a sudden, through their own free will, the kid’s become a child pornographer.

Of course, this behavior is far from unique to minors. Information technology has enabled consenting adults from all walks of life to share sexually explicit imagery of themselves with one another. MMSes and emails between friends aren’t even the half of it. Webcams and video chat software weren’t on the scene for five minutes before somebody realized that they could be used to transmit their genitalia. There are sexually explicit social networks and YouTube-clones where people can expose themselves to millions of anonymous viewers. There’s even a fusion of these two in live video broadcasting websites which permit people to stream real-time images of themselves doing scandalous things without very much clothing on. As with all sexually-charged things that consenting adults do, sometimes minors decide to give it a try themselves.

Child pornography laws are meant to prevent the abuse of minors. When minors decide, by their own volition, to take nude or sexually explicit images of themselves and share them with loved ones, friends, or even anonymous acquaintances, it’s hard to describe how that could possibly constitute abuse. Sadly, because of the law, all parties involved end up liable for the heinous crime of child pornography: both the recipient, regardless of age, and the exhibiting minor.

Laws intended to protect children from sexual abuse now have the effect of criminalizing behavior that — in the context of our contemporary world — is perfectly reasonable for a pubescent minor to engage in. It’s not really that weird, strange, or appalling that sexually-developing young people might want to show off their bodies to their fellow sexually-developing young people; the only weird part is this new medium of exhibition they’re using. Before the Internet and cellphones, kids just took off their clothes for each other in person.

Much like with physical, flesh-and-blood sexual intimacy, educating children about why they shouldn’t make themselves into porn stars isn’t going to work; they’ll still desire to, and they’ll still do it. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. The sanest course of action is to educate them about responsibility: “use a condom” is to real sex as “don’t send pictures of your boyfriend’s dick to all of your other friends” is to explicit image sharing. But the reason for that advice should be basic common sense and human decency, not because doing so will force you to register as a sex offender at age 14.

Actual Child Pornography and Pedophilia

What about the actual abuse from which children need to be protected? The sexual abuse of children — or anyone, for that matter — is rightfully illegal, and absolutely reprehensible. But in our zeal to destroy reprehensible things, most societies have gone further, and made it illegal to access or possess images of this abhorrent abuse. Unfortunately, the uncomfortable truth is that banning the possession of child pornography doesn’t do any good.

First of all, child pornography is a wonderful scapegoat. Copyright lobbyists regularly use child porn to incite moral panic, and make their proposals to censor the Internet more palatable. And much like these “piracy-stopping” censorship schemes, child pornography bans don’t stop the sexual abuse of children involved.

Before the Internet, child pornography was distributed secretly among close-knit networks of pedophiles. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that the recipient of child porn might be no more than two or three degrees of separation from its creator — the actual person who had committed the sexual abuse. Today, a single child rapist can anonymously distribute their “work” to thousands of people with a single click of a mouse. The downloaders often have absolutely no idea who the perpetrator was; their arrests solve nothing.

Furthermore, there is no conclusive evidence that viewers of child pornography are more likely to act on their fetishes and commit sexual abuse of a child. In fact, based on the aforementioned “porn lowers rape rates” study, one could reasonably hypothesize that the exact opposite is true.

The criminalization of viewing or possessing child pornography only serves to get “revenge” on people who are interested in it. It does not lead to the imprisonment of child rapists, it does not give justice to the victims, and it does not stop potential pedophiles from acting on their urges.

What would, in fact, stop potential pedophiles from acting on their urges is mental health treatment. If at all possible, societies should not view sexual diversity or fetishism as a mental illness; it’s not a particularly harmful thing if somebody is sexually aroused by, oh, let’s say, being hit in the face with a pie. Sexual attraction to children, on the other hand, isn’t something that can be reasonably accommodated — hence, a mental health problem.

But much as the criminalization (and resulting stigmatization) of drug use makes addicts afraid to seek treatment, people suffering with pedophilia fear the consequences of getting help. In researching this article, I got an anonymous source to put it in his own words for me:

When I was 17 I looked at a lot of porn, just like anyone my age. I was curious about it all. I didn’t even know I was gay until I got curious about gay porn. So I looked at all the varieties, twinks, jocks, black guys, Asian guys, groups, all of it. Weirder stuff too like bondage, BDSM, some of it I liked for a while, some of it I never went back to. Then I started looking at kids. I was curious, and a horny teenager, so it wasn’t like it was that creepy. But every time after, I felt horrible. I could see how scared those kids were in the pics but I didn’t stop. I told myself, it’s just because I’m young, I’ll grow out of it, but I’m 20 now and still can’t stop myself sometimes. I wouldn’t ever go and do it for real, I know that. I like guys my own age and older, so it’s not like I can only get off to kids. But I still hate myself for it. But if I go out and tell someone I need help, the feds might come and knock down my door. So I don’t know what to do.

This is the sort of person who needs a therapist’s couch, not a prison cell. But our irrational rage at all things pedophilic deny this man his health, his sanity, and his right to be a productive member of society. He’s not alone, he’s just the one brave enough to break the silence.

Conclusion

The intersection of sexuality and children is understandably frightening. It’s a very primal instinct to want to protect children, and sex — as something that many full-grown adults still haven’t fully come to terms with — seems threatening with its emotional complexity, and its potential for abuse. The Internet and other information technology make it easier for everyone to encounter all types of information, and consequently, for children to encounter sex. But there are two things we must remember:

1. Sex is perfectly fine, and something that children need education of, not protection from.
2. Sexual abuse is not perfectly fine, and is its own distinct concern.

If we truly care about protecting children from sexual abuse, then it behooves us to do it effectively. Knee-jerk reactions, moral panics, and emotion-based policymaking do not protect our children. Ineffective laws only serve to make politicians and civil servants look like they’re doing something, in a ploy to win public support. And that is almost as disgusting as abusing a child.

Civil Liberties: The news just broke: Germany says it will not be signing ACTA for the time being.

The news (Spiegel, Netzpolitik) seems to cast the future of ACTA into serious doubt. The accord requires signatures and ratification from all 27 of the European member states as well as from the European Parliament itself.

It started with Poland announcing a hold to the ACTA ratification, which – just like that – put the whole agreement in doubt. Few people seem to know this, but Poland is a heavyweight in the European Union’s policymaking.

That was followed by the Slovenian Ambassador apologizing in public for her signature on the agreement, saying she had failed in her civic duty, and calling for anti-ACTA rallies, which is profoundly unique.

Since then, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Latvia have stepped forward and said they’re putting ratification on hold.

With Germany – the European Union’s superpower, by far the heaviest politically – now saying that it won’t even sign ACTA for the time being, much less ratify it, it looks like we can actually win this fight and kill ACTA dead in the water.

And let’s be clear: while the US and Japan could theoretically have ACTA between them, without the European Union, there is effectively no ACTA at all.

Tomorrow, there are anti-ACTA rallies all over europe. This is one seriously impressive map of rallies:

Tomorrow, rallies all over Europe demand freedom of speech and protest laws that were made in backroom deals by corporate executives.

It makes me proud to see people rising up and demanding their civil liberties to apply even when they’re on the net. In history, it will probably seem amazing how, for a time, that seemed to not be obvious.

(Meanwhile in Sweden, the government officials are going to extremes to deny any and all interviews concerning ACTA. We’ll have to see how long that can hold.)

Activism – Zacqary Adam Green: The copyright industry is not going quietly. The legitimacy of its monopolist and consumerist practices are still upheld by policymakers and panicking creators who haven’t seen any real alternative in action. I humbly submit my silly cartoon about people with inanimate objects for heads as a first step in that direction.

Your Face is a Saxophone is a surrealist satire of the advertising industry, which makes fun of actual companies and brands. It tells the story of the staff of Buzzword Marketing, and their dealings with the absurd demands of their corporate clients. Also, everybody has inanimate objects instead of heads for some reason. It’s either an artistic statement on how consumerism objectifies us all, or an excuse for us to not have to animate their mouths moving; you decide. As a bonus, Your Face is a Saxophone is Public Domain under CC0.

My friends and I formed a group called Plankhead to produce the series. At the beginning of 2011, we released the first full-length, 25 minute episode — a pilot that we pitched not to a TV network, but to the Internet. We were able to raise enough money from individual donors to make a second one, which came out astronomically better than the first. Naturally, we’d like to continue the series — we have five more episodes planned, and we’re starting on the third in the next few weeks. But this isn’t just yet another crowdfunded indie project.

Your Face is a Saxophone started out as an assault on advertising. Since it began, I’ve realized that the problems with advertising are just one part — along with the copyright monopoly, unchecked greed, the pursuit of censorship, and other problems — of the holistic problem that is the ancien régime of the corporate entertainment industry. Much like these motivations, Your Face is a Saxophone is a part of a larger whole; a prototype for how to produce, promote, and proliferate culture in complete opposition to the problematic habits of the copyright industry.

I certainly hope you find the show entertaining. But even if you don’t, let me explain why you should still help it succeed:

The Problems

Advertising
In conceiving the project, I decided I was fed up with advertising-supported media. Humanity had created the Internet — possibly the most empowering technology of the millennium — and yet had failed to come up with a better way of sustaining its contents than by splattering ads all over everything. At best, it’s annoying and ugly — São Paulo, Brazil mayor Gilberto Kassab famously called advertising “visual pollution” when banning billboards in 2006. At worst, advertising has a chilling effect on free speech, making it too unprofitable to say something that corporations disapprove of.

So, I decided to prove that a full-length TV show could be made without advertiser support — by making it something that nobody in their right mind would want to sponsor.

But how to finance a show without ad dollars? There’s grants, but that just gives the veto to governments or private foundations instead of corporations. No question: it would need to come from individual fans — the people who actually care about the message. So, that’s why we crowdfunded Episode 2 of Your Face is a Saxophone, and plan to continue that.

Obviously, crowdfunding alone can’t go very far; Mike Masnick reminds us often that “Give it away and pray” isn’t a business model. That’s why many independent creators make their money selling T-shirts, mugs, mousepads, posters, and other merchandise. Except that falls into the trap of…

Selling a Product
The chief reason why the copyright industry is running around with its head cut off is because its products — music, movies, news, information — are no longer products. Everything digitized can, and will, be made available for free, regardless of its creator’s wishes. You can’t sell a non-scarce good.

Obviously, many companies and artists still try this by “selling” digital downloads. But it’s been said that the way to compete with piracy is to respect your customers; selling a glass of tap water is not respectful to your customers.

Whereas the old guard tries to recreate the scarcity of information by lobbying to destroy our civil liberties, more nimble independent players simply find new scarcities to sell. This often takes the form of merchandising, which the copyright industry does its fair share of as well.

But that runs into another problem: everything can, and will, be digitized. Why buy an official T-shirt, poster, mug, or mousepad when you can print your own? 3D printers are set to drop in cost, increase in capability, and pervade society through the next decade, making the sales of merchandise into a very short-sighted business plan.

Merchandising also alienates the audience, reinforcing the false dichotomy of producer and consumer. It turns the art into yet another advertisement, and the fans into nothing but customers for the mass-produced crap which the art is hawking. Speaking of which…

Monologue Culture
When you hear the term “consumerism” thrown around, you often think of what I just alluded to: people being sold a bunch of crap in massive quantities. But the copyright industry fosters another type of consumerism: the consumption of monologues.

Most media takes the form of a creator or author communicating a message to the audience. The audience’s response, input, or thoughts do not matter, because they can’t change the message. This isn’t inherently a bad thing — indeed, it’s often a good thing for one person’s message to be communicated without meddling from others. The problem is that the audience doesn’t feel invested in the message. It doesn’t feel like it’s theirs.

The works which foster large, devoted fanbases are the ones which capture an audience’s imagination. A well-built fantasy world will inspire thousands of fan-fiction spinoffs; a great piece of music will inspire thousands of cover performances; a video game is already more engaging simply because it’s interactive, but open, hackable code will inspire thousands of modifications. Works like these do get the audience invested, and give them a sense of ownership.

This creates two challenges. First, not every story worth telling, song worth performing, or creation worth creating has the capacity to inspire direct remixing; Hitchcock’s Psycho isn’t the most fertile ground for a fan-fiction movement, for example. That point, I’d like to get back to. For now, let me digress with the second challenge: the fact that the copyright industry makes such creative communities illegal.

Creative Monopolies
Through use of the copyright monopoly, the industry acts as an oppressive creator’s guild. If you’re not a member of their inner circle, they don’t want you to be creating anything. They can achieve this because there is no such thing as “originality” in creative work; everything is based on, built on, or inspired by something that came before. Sometimes, the best new work comes from directly appropriating the past.

This is what makes the copyright monopoly so powerful. Hollywood can license a soundtrack of popular music, but an independent filmmaker cannot. Live performance venues cannot exist without paying licensing fees to the Big Three record companies, just in case a performer does something that might intersect with a copyright. Spinoffs and sequels to stories are the exclusive domain of the original publisher, and fan-fiction is regularly intimidated or sued out of existence. These are just a few examples of the hundreds of ways in which copyright monopolies are used to financially repress artists outside of the guild.

The attacks on civil liberties by the copyright industry aren’t about irrational fears of piracy or lost sales. The executives in charge aren’t that stupid; they’re well aware that the entertainment industry is growing, not shrinking. It is chiefly about stifling competition from the masses themselves. They fear that if we can meet all of our entertainment needs with YouTube videos, independent music, local art communities, and other such things, then we’ll no longer want to watch their TV and movies, listen to their music, read their books, or play their games. And they’re right. As Clay Shirky said in his legendary TED Talk, “Time Warner has called, and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming, not producing, not sharing. And we should say no.”

The problem is, having entrenched themselves and stifled competition for over a century, the copyright industry has our work cut out for us.

Nowhere Else To Go
While I was drafting this post, Paul M. Davis of Shareable happened to put out an article describing many of my concerns. Davis is ambivalent towards Techdirt’s Sky is Rising infographic, and writes:

For the truly DIY — the creators with limited resources who live precarious lives to pursue their passions while navigating an ever-changing media landscape — the effect of the Internet is far more complex than optimistic infographics and studies often suggest.

[A]s traditional sources of industry support (promotion, distribution, and simple business admin) crumble, it can take longer for indie artists to reach the critical mass of audience awareness to quit their day jobs. In the meantime, the workload for creators has increased, until they begin consistently making enough money to hire others to handle the additional labor that the Internet adds to the equation.

It’s unquestionably a good thing that the Internet is dismantling the copyright industry’s distribution monopoly, but its promise of eliminating their stranglehold on promotion hasn’t been fully realized. Before the Internet, creative people had to play the lottery, hoping that a corporate agent would notice them and scoop them up. Now, creative people still have to play the lottery, hoping that somebody with a large social network will notice them and tweet a link to their website. The odds may be better, but it’s still a raw deal.

The notion that artists need to work a day job until they one day “make it” is a tragedy, not a desirable component of a healthy society. As I’ve touched on previously, distracting people by forcing them to worry about meeting their basic needs holds back human progress. The copyright industry has done a poor job of solving this problem, but thus far, so has the Internet. As Davis says, DIY promotion for an unknown artist is still absurdly difficult.

I’ve witnessed this firsthand, in fact. The second episode of Your Face is a Saxophone was released at the end of October 2011. The reason you’re seeing this article months later is because working full-time on its production bankrupted me. When I said we’d raised enough money to make the episode, I was referring to buying new equipment — there wasn’t much left over to cover anybody’s cost of living. While finding and keeping a day job, I neglected to open-source the assets and project files, enact a promotional strategy, finish subtitling the new episode, or do much of anything that I’d needed to. Being unable to pay one’s bills is, as you can imagine, very distracting.

The Solution

It’s these problems that we’d like to tackle with Your Face is a Saxophone, using it to lay the groundwork for a new creative culture. Others may have pioneered the bits and pieces I’m about to describe, but it’s time to put them together in a cohesive, intentional whole.

Free and Open Source
Your Face is a Saxophone is CC0 Public Domain. Once an episode is finished and released, it belongs to the commons, irrevocably. We wouldn’t be able to enforce any copyright monopoly on it even if we someday lost our minds and wanted to.

Furthermore, it will be entirely open source. All art assets, audio, project files, and (if feasible) renders will be made available to the public. We’ll use as many open formats as possible (sadly, I haven’t had the time to learn Blender, so the first two episodes’ project files are in the propirateary (that’s not a typo) Apple Motion 5 format).

We won’t use creative monopolies, and through open source, we’ll chip away at the monologue culture problem. To further attack that…

Selling a Process
As my experiment in impromptu filmmaking shows, people enjoy creating things — and it’s not just self-described “artists” who find the creative process to be just as entertaining, if not more, than experiencing the final product. This is why video games which spark people’s creativity — for example, anything that Will Wright has ever been tangentially involved with — have proved to be so massively popular.

But not every message worth communicating can be expressed in an interactive medium. There will always be a place for monologue media — for immutable text, sound, or imagery comprised solely of the vision of its author(s). That’s why we need to blur the line between audience and author, consumer and producer, by bringing the fans into the creative process.

We can’t — and shouldn’t — finance Your Face is a Saxophone by selling access to the finished episodes. Instead, we sell access to the community. Everyone who contributes any amount of money to Your Face is a Saxophone becomes a producer of the show.

To describe what that means, here’s an excerpt of an email I sent to current producers a couple weeks ago:

Though Plankhead does provide entertaining things to the world, it’s not — as people who wear suits and have far too high incomes would say — our “core business”. We don’t aim to sustain ourselves (or, in suit-speak, “make money”) by saying to people, “You are the audience”. We do that by saying, “You are the artist”.

If you’re receiving this email, then you were instrumental in the creation of Your Face is a Saxophone. That makes you an artist, because you brought art into being. You’re all artists. Guilty as charged.

And you know how else you’re all artists? Have you ever heard a song, and then hummed it to yourself in your head for hours and hours afterwards? Have you ever quoted a movie to your friends? Ever gone halfway through a terrible pun, put on sunglasses, finished it, and then screamed YEAAAAAAHHHHH? Those are all creative acts. Even if you didn’t make up any original words or sounds, performance — even if nobody’s watching — is creative. You’re all artists.

Everyone has that burning drive to create. Some people have it during urination; they should probably see their doctors and get tested. For everyone else, Plankhead is here to help.

Enough of this abstracty mumbo-jumbo. Let’s talk concrete stuff:

For Episode 3 of Your Face is a Saxophone, we’re going to keep you updated, every step of the way, with production. And you know what I want you to do? Respond. Make comments. Make suggestions. Throw us ideas. Help us create this thing. If you think something should be animated differently, let us know. If you think there’s a hilarious prop missing from a background, tell us. Maybe you can even draw it for us and we’ll put it in. If you think Dave needs to re-record a line because he’s not making Blake sound enough like an adorable idiot, say so. Be a part of the process.

We’ll be putting up wikis and forums and stuff to make this kind of thing easier, but also suggest ideas for how we can share the production process, and get your input. Help us create the creative process.

For future episodes, we’ll also be letting you into the writer’s room. I’ve only written the scripts up until Episode 3, so I’m going to need everyone’s help to flesh out the stories for the remaining four episodes.

YFIAS isn’t just a prototype of a new way to finance art. It’s also a prototype of a new way to create it: having the community involved every step of the way, blurring the line between fan and creator.

This will effectively make our revenue stream completely indifferent to file-sharing. It won’t even be possible to lose a “sale” to a free download, and we’ll be able to brag that we have a 0% piracy rate.

For-Progress, Not For-Profit
We reject the notion that art is an investment that needs to be recouped. It is a desirable end in and of itself. The copyright industry views art as an incidental logistical concern on the path to making money; if they believed they could make more money selling toilet paper, they’d do it. This is the root of the problems that they cause.

I’m not seeking personal financial gain from Your Face is a Saxophone; my cost of living just happens to be a necessary expense of the project. And I’d wager that most artists feel exactly the same way about their work.

We’ll use the success of Your Face is a Saxophone to build Plankhead, our organization, into a support network for artists. A cooperative media company, owned and operated by its creative workers. Were I pitching it to a Silicon Valley venture capitalist — people who like to hear things like “it’s an AirBnb for Facebook games” or whatever — I’d call it “a Mondragon for media”. When we get to that stage, we will promote any work in any medium that is A) technically competent and B) willing to be released under CC0 — and finance it if possible. We’ll do our best to keep personal taste out of the vetting process, because all art has a right to exist.

Ultimately, the goal is not to make artists fabulously wealthy; it’s to keep them fed and clothed so that they can concentrate on creating things.

How You Can Help

To make this happen, we need producers and volunteers.

Today, I’m setting a new fundraising goal of $3000. That amount of money would allow me to devote my full time to animating the third episode for three or four months. If we raise even more than that, we might be able to add a second or third animator to speed the process along. You can contribute and become a producer through our donation page.

We also need people who can help produce, promote, and proliferate the show. A comprehensive list is on our volunteering page, but a few examples include:

• Subtitle translators
• Torrent seeders
• Social network/blog promoters
• Web technicians/designers
• Python coders who can figure out how to automate the “lip”-sync animation so that we can switch to Blender already (or anyone who can help us switch to Blender in any way, for that matter)

People who make significant volunteer contributions will probably get producer status out of the deal.

Ultimately, we need you to help us prove that this works. Let’s give the world hard, concrete evidence that even a traditional TV-length show with no copyright protection whatsoever can be successful. Let’s show that we don’t need to create a false pretense of buying and selling digital “goods” to sustain artists. Let’s validate the idea that art for art’s sake is something that society values, believes in, and wants to exist.

Repression: Documents have emerged from the European Commission that give a glimpse of the planned crackdown on online freedoms of speech post-ACTA. We’re seeing entirely new mechanisms and means of squelching dissent, mechanisms and means against pretty much anything online.

A European Commissioner responsible for the governing of 500 million people who refers to his constituents as “consumers” and describes complying at legal gunpoint as “cooperation” is just a small taste of the newspeak in the documents we find here, documents that are intended for the post-ACTA timeframe. Oh, and he doesn’t rule out shutting down your income streams either. It is not hard to see where this particular mindset comes from – and no, it is certainly not Locke’s ideas of a constitutional government or anything similarly responsible. It’s filled to the brim with terms we would otherwise only see in reports from the copyright industry lobby.

The first document is named “Proposal for a Revision of the Directive of Intellectual Property [sic] Rights”, and the second document is named “Notice and Takedown procedures”, refering to eroding the common carrier status of the ISPs (the European mere conduit).

Repression is good, so more repression is better, says the European Commissar... eh, Commissioner.

Let’s take a look at what these documents say in more detail, and translate it from the dangerously newspeak legalese. Here’s what the first document outlines as policy roadmap in the post-ACTA timeframe:

The policy options being considered include: (a) rendering the rules on obtaining evidence from intermediaries more detailed thus making possible the identification of those infringing intellectual property rights on a commercial scale and of the financial circuits involved.

Yeah, this is a lock-in of what was voluntary in IPRED1: giving the copyright monopoly cartels the subscriber identities of IP addresses accused of infringing the monopolies, something the police can’t even legally get in most European countries (including Sweden).

Yes, this specifically means that the copyright industries get more far-reaching powers than the Police.

But do note the ACTA/TRIPS keyword “commercial scale” being used. Also, note that “financial circuits” are being mixed into the things that must be identified by an ISP. This can refer to any income stream.

This would be particularly important to fight IPR infringement in the on-line environment.

Yeah, the Net is a problem. Again. Everything was better the way it used to be.

This would also require a clearer definition of “commercial scale”, so as to make sure that professional counterfeiters rather than individual consumers are targeted;

Here, we note three things:

First, this small part sounds good in substance. Today, uploading of a single music track by a random teenager is deliberately seen as targetable and targeted (refer to the US Cables on the matter of IPRED1, for instance). At the end of the day, though, I would be careful to draw the conclusion that individual citizens wouldn’t be targeted – especially since the rest of this roadmap specifies the means and methods for doing exactly that (for instance, with the IP Address subscriber data we just read about).

Second, the ACTA keyword “commercial scale” is used. However, this might just as well refer to the old TRIPS definition of “commercial scale”. It is impossible to know if ACTA redefines “commercial scale” in any meaningful way, as the negotiation protocols are still secret.

Third, having said that, the overall thought pattern here is thoroughly alarming. The European Commissioner refers to his constitutents using the word consumers. That is not a mindset I want to see in any policymaking.

(b) fast-track lowcost civil procedures (including as regards the granting of injunctions, the award of damages, the use of corrective measures etc) for straightforward infringements of intellectual property rights

Whoah, whoah. A whole lot of bad things here.

Fast-track, low-cost civil procedures: Civil procedures means “lawsuits against ordinary people”. Fast-track means “without delays caused by due process of law and exercising of rights”. Low-cost means “preferably in bulk”.

Including…: Granting of injunctions means “cutting of net access before a trial takes place, one way or the other”. Award of damages, well, we know about that one all too well. Use of corrective measures can be many things, but specifically includes destroying goods used for infringement.

and (c) the possibility to act against webpages holding content that violates intellectual property rights (see in this regard the Roadmap regarding the initiative on procedures for notifying and acting on illegal online content).

Ah, so we’re talking about censoring entire websites as well. The roadmap referred is appropriately named “Notice and Takedown”.

These policy options would require the amendment of the existing directive.

Ah, so this is indeed a resurrection of the horrible but previously killed IPRED2 – only much worse than the original IPRED2.

Complementary measures in softlaw instruments designed at disrupting the business/value chain of counterfeiters and at increasing the cooperation between intellectual property rights holders and intermediaries (e.g. internet service providers, shippers and couriers, payment-service providers etc) could not be excluded

Whoah! Whoah! Hold your horses!

First, the newspeak here causes my bullshit bingo cards to spontaneously explode. To begin with, let’s highlight the word cooperation. In normal speak, cooperation is an action of mutual consent and mutual gain. Here, there is no such thing as mutual consent or reciprocity; the Commissar^H^Hioner tries to force “cooperation” where one part gains and the other loses massively at legal gunpoint – specifically, internet service providers are ordered to bend over for the copyright industry. All in the spirit of, eh, “cooperation”.

In other words, ISPs are going to be forced to police the net in some fashion, going against its users and customers – all spun in the language of the positive resulting worldview of the copyright monopoly cartel.

But there’s more. Did you notice “payment service providers”? This is the first time I’ve seen credit card companies and similar being threatened with “cooperation” with the copyright industry in a European context. If you’re thinking of SOPA, you’re drawing the right parallels here.

Other measures aiming at promoting the legal offer could also be envisaged.

“Other measures” have previously included sending political propaganda to schools promoting the copyright monopoly. It could be pretty much anything, it leaves the door wide open.

All in all, this is a completely horrible document that shows how the European Commission prepares to legislate post-ACTA. The proposals above have already entered the legislative process and will result in a real legislative proposal. We need to stay more vigilant than ever.

The second document, the one about Notice and Takedown procedures, doesn’t contain much of real substance (yet). However, it should be noted that it specifically mentions caching. Just like TPP, it may therefore try to regulate technical caching in the infrastructure with regards to the copyright monopoly, which would be… quite insane, frankly. But we don’t know yet; it just mentions caching in passing, which is cause enough for alarm.

See also La Quadrature du Net‘s press release on who’s who in this game.

Infopolicy: I live in Stockholm, Sweden. A hundred years ago, one of the largest employers in the city was a company named Stockholm Ice. Their business was as straightforward as it was necessary: help keep perishable food edible for longer by distributing cold in a portable format.

They would cut up large blocks of ice from the frozen lakes in the winter, store them on sawdust in huge barns, then cut the blocks into smaller chunks and sell them in the streets. People would buy the ice and keep it with food in special cupboards, so the food would be in cold storage.

(This is why some senior citizens still refer to refrigerators as “ice boxes“.)

When households in Stockholm were electrified in the first half of the last century, these distributors of cold were made obsolete. After all, what they distributed was the ability to keep food cold, and everybody could suddenly do that themselves.

This was a fairly rapid process in the cities. With the availability of the refrigerator from circa 1920, most households had their own refrigerator by the end of the 1930s. One of the city’s largest employers – distributors of cold – had been made totally obsolete by technical development.

There were many personal tragedies in this era as the icemen lost their breadwinning capacity and needed to retrain to get new jobs in a completely new field. The iceman profession had often been tough to begin with, and seeing your industry disintegrate in real-time didn’t make it any easier.

But here are a few things that didn’t happen as the ice distribution industry became obsolete:

• No refrigerator owner was sued for making their own cold and ignoring the existing corporate cold distribution chains.
• No laws were proposed that would make electricity companies liable in court if the electricity they provided was used in a way that destroyed icemen’s jobs.
• Nobody demanded a monthly refrigerator fee from refrigerator owners that would go to the Icemen’s Union.
• No lavishly expensive expert panels were held in total consensus about how necessary icemen were for the entire economy.

Rather, the distribution monopoly became obsolete, was ignored, and the economy as a whole benefited by the resulting decentralization.

We’re now seeing a repeat of this scenario, but where the distribution industry – the copyright industry – has the audacity to stand up and demand special laws and say that the economy will collapse without their unnecessary services. But we learn from history, every time, that it is good when an industry becomes obsolete. That means we have learned something important – to do things in a more efficient way. New skills and trades always appear in its wake.

The copyright industry tells us, again and again and again, that if they can’t have their obsolete distribution monopoly enshrined into law with ever-increasing penalties for ignoring it, that no culture will be produced at all. As we have seen, equally time and again, this is hogwash.

What might be true is that the copyright industry can’t produce music to the tune of one million US dollars per track. But you can’t motivate monopoly legislation based on your costs, when others are doing the same thing for much less – practically zero. There has never been as much music available as now, just because all of us love to create. It’s not something we do because of money, it’s because of who we are. We have always created, ever since we learned to put red paint on the inside of cave walls.

What about movies, then? Hundred-million productions? There are examples of garage-produced movies (and one even has beat Casablanca to become the most-seen movie of all time in its native country). But it may appear true that the argument is somewhat stronger with the blockbuster-type cinema productions.

A recent article of mine dispels this, too; blockbusters can make double  their investment back before a digital copy can even exist in the wild, so it will not be an issue. Investments will  happen.

But I’m going go out on a limb here and say, that even if it is true that movies can’t be made the same way with the Internet and our civil liberties both in existence, then maybe it’s just the natural progression of culture.

I spend quite a bit of time with teenagers through my work with the Pirate Party. One thing that strikes me is that they don’t watch movies, at least nowhere near the quantity I did when I was a teenager. Just like I threw out my TV set 15 years ago, maybe this is just the natural progression of culture. Nobody would be surprised if we moved from monologue-style culture to dialogue- and conversation-type culture at this point in history. Immersive gaming stands out as an excellent candidate to replace movies.

After all, we have previously had operettes, ballets, and concerts as the high points of culture in the past. Even radio theaters (and famous ones). Nobody is particularly concerned that those expressions have had their peak and that society has moved on to new expressions of culture. There is no inherent value in writing today’s forms of culture into law and preventing the changes we’ve always had.

Everywhere I look, I see that the copyright monopolies need to be cut down to allow society to move on from today’s stranglehold on culture and knowledge. Teenagers today typically don’t even see the problem – they take sharing in the connected world so totally for granted, that they discard any signals to the contrary as “old-world nonsense”.

And they certainly don’t ask for a refrigerator fee.

Activism: Just look at this map. I’ve never seen anything like it in terms of people all across Europe demanding their freedom of speech and being angry against backroom corporativist deals that steals their most basic civil liberties.

Today, Sweden rallies for freedom of speech, a free net, and firmly against ACTA. Late yesterday, it was announced that Poland is suspending its ratification of ACTA indefinitely. The Slovenian ambassador signing the document (which has no legal effect whatsoever) has publicly apologized and called people to rally in Ljubljana, Slovenia for their rights.

This is not Hollywood versus Silicon Valley, as oldmedia likes to frame it. This is Hollywood versus The People. For decades, they have trained us to think in black and white, in good versus evil fighting for domination of the free world. And now, they’ve gone and put themselves in the role of evil villain.

The copyright cartel thought they were battling Google.

They’re not.

They’re waging war against the people, with the help of the politicians.

And we’re not standing for it. We can’t change the copyright cartel, but we can send a clear message to the politicians that 250 million Europeans sharing and preserving contemporary culture is not a problem. It is a power base of 250 million voters  that will kick you out of office  if you dare so much as touch the net.

And there are visible cracks in the façade, especially seeing Poland falter and the copyright cartels visibly shaken from the SOPA defeat in the US, with the politicians having started to pay attention to what the Internet wants. We can win this.

Today, Sweden rallies. List of rallies below (via Christian Engström, Member of European Parliament):

• Stockholm: Sergels Torg, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Göteborg: Götaplatsen, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Malmö: Stortorget, at the Karl X Gustav statue, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Helsingborg: at the Magnus Stenbock statue, 13:00. [Facebook]
• Umeå : Apberget, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Kalmar: Giraffens Köpcentrum, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Sundsvall: Torget, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Karlstad: Stora Torget, 12 noon. [Facebook]
• Borlänge: Jussi Björlings torg, 12 noon. [Facebook]

(The observant will note that less than half of these rallies are marked on the already-impressive map of European rallies. Makes me wonder what the map would look like if all rallies were included.)

Most of Europe will rally next Saturday, on February 11. That’s going to be something, too. Let’s give Europe the best of precursor to those rallies from Sweden that they could possibly get!

As of early morning on February 4, 11,000 people have committed to coming to the Stockholm rally, with another 3,500 maybes. Those are numbers that would overfill the Plattan plaza by a wide margin. I’ll be at the rally in Stockholm, Sweden, and will be taking plenty of imagery and will follow up here.

The Outcome

UPDATE AT 1500: Seeing that this story is #3 on Reddit Front Page at the moment (server is holding… holding…), I want to follow up with the outcome right here:

Rally at the Sergels Torg plaza in Stockholm, Sweden. Anna Troberg, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, speaking (at left) and maybe 1/3 of the crowd.

The turnout was like nothing I’ve seen for a February rally in Sweden. In -20°C, there were well over a thousand people protesting corporate rights over their freedom of speech; normally, you’re lucky getting 50.

Also, there was a very clear recurring theme among the Members of European Parliament speaking, MEPs from three different parties. They all told the story of how software patents had been defeated in Europe, followed by the crucial “amendment 138″ in the Telecoms Package, which aimed to shut people off en masse from the Net. Well, thanks to diligent activists and people on the inside, we managed to get as strong safeguards in place as possible against shutting people off. But the monopoly lobbyists never quit. Now they’re at it again, this time saying that if authorities can’t shut people off en masse due to that “amendment 138″, maybe they can get private corporations – the ISPs – to do it instead through third-party liability forcing certain terms of service and wiretapping. Hence, ACTA.

Fortunately, and this was a consistent message from all Members of European Parliament, we have the blueprint for defeating ACTA. We need to repeat what we did with the software patents and with the Telecoms Package. It takes hard work, it takes tons of activism, but we know exactly what to do and how to do it, and most importantly: we know that we can win.

As the rally concluded, everybody was determined to win this fight, having heard the clear message that it takes work but is perfectly doable.

UPDATE 2: There are more photos from Christian Engström, Member of European Parliament here. Free for any use (CC0 / Public Domain). Here’s one of his photos, showing the protester crowd:

Freedom of Speech – Andrew Norton: The US as an ‘idea’ is dying. The country that used to pride itself on free speech, democracy, and being ‘the last remaining superpower’, is now apparently drunk on its own power. With unchecked powers expanding at every turn, and terror laden missives booming out from government departments, the country seems to be taking a counterbalancing position from those who embraced freedom in the Arab Spring of last year, and is actively cracking down on freedoms previously embraced as a national advert.

The US likes to be known as the land of freedom and integrity; indeed the first verse of the US National Anthem – the Star Spangled Banner – ends:

O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Over the last ten years, the answer has turned into a resounding NO!

Over the last ten years there have been many laws passed ostensibly about ‘fighting terrorism’, but which boil down to naked fear. A fear from the populace that some nebulous ‘terrorist attack’ will kill them all (despite the fact you’re more than 70x more likely to be just plain ‘murdered’ and 150x more likely to die on America’s increasingly poor quality roads than be present at a terrorist attack) which has supported a government that is increasingly spineless and cowardly. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the many instances over the last few months involving the uses of the police, when it comes to the First Amendment.

There have been many well documented clashes between police and the various ‘Occupy’ camps around the country in the last few months. Police officers have on occasion responded with excessive violence and weapons that did not fit the situation. In those instances, video recordings have made it clear what has happened, and often contradicted police reports and claims. Yet, as was pointed out a few months ago, there’s usually very little in the way of repercussions when police officers break the law.

Take for instance Joe Arpaio. The self-described ‘toughest sheriff in America’ is no stranger to controversy. There have been a number of wrongful death cases which his department has lost, his central jail lost a lawsuit about unconstitutional conditions in 2008, and the verdict was reaffirmed in 2010 when he still hadn’t improved them. He was feeding inmates bad food (commonly known as ‘poisoning’) and was broadcasting video footage of in-processing after arrests to the web, prejudicing trials (otherwise known as perverting the course of justice) and because of general misconduct, his whole department had their ability to enforce Federal Immigration law stripped by the Department of Homeland Security (and I remind you, that’s the same department that has no problems with sexually abusing 6yo’s in the name of ‘security’, so you KNOW it’s bad) which was why Arizona passed SB 1070 – the ‘papers please’ law. He’s also under investigation for witness, voter and candidate intimidation, harassment of newspapers, and for ignoring serious sexual assault cases. So has he been punished in any way? No, of course not. As Sheriff, he is almost untouchable.

It seems that both police officers and politicians have an allergic reaction to video cameras being pointed at them by the public. A search on YouTube will return LOTS of videos of police officers reacting ‘badly’ to being videotaped. Often the argument put forward by the police is that people are interfering in their work by videoing them. In other states, with two-party consent for audio-recording where there’s an expectation of privacy, police officers going about their duty have arrested people for wiretapping, a felony which often carries 5-10 year prison terms just so you’re aware, recording video is ok, recording audio is the no-no. Generally when these cases are made public, some prosecutors back down, but some stick at it. Almost inevitably the courts decide that no law was broken, because there was no expectation of privacy at the time of filming.

Compounding this is that most police cars in the US have dash-cams recording both audio and video, even in those states. So while the police officer is free to record audio and video at all times, a person involved in an encounter with that same police officer can’t record their own copy, because the police officer has some expectation of privacy? It’s an amazing double-standard. (The pinnacle of such double-standards goes to the Claremore Police Department in Oklahoma, who do not consider the dash-cam recordings to be public records under the state’s Open Records Act, and amazingly, a court agreed. The Department of Public Safety, aka the State Police force, also lobbied successfully in 2005 that the state legislature exempt state patrol dash cams from that legislation.)

Thankfully MOST courts are standing behind citizens and saying clearly that recording police officers in the course of their duties is NOT wiretapping, or a felony, but is in fact a protected 1st Amendment Activity. Yet that doesn’t always stop the police. In Pennsylvania, despite rulings that it’s legal going back to 1989, police there will sometimes arrest for ‘wiretapping’, with documented cases as recently as 2007, and still no adequate recourse for the victims of officers acting outside the law.

The occupy movement has also brought another spotlight onto the First Amendment. The ability to petition the government and protest is the less well known side of it, but it’s there. However, the ability to do so has been severely curtailed in recent years, from the ‘free speech zones’ created during the Bush era (and later copied by the likes of China) to the storm-trooper raids on the Occupy camps. The arrests and intimidations of the police against media attempting to cover the camps, and the police actions against them are further attacks on the first amendment.

In fact, the US has dropped a significant number of places down the current Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, from 20^th to 47^th, because of this. NYPD’s Deputy Inspector Bologna, and UC Davis Police’s Lt. John Pike are now symbols on the net of excessive violence. And their punishment? Bologna has been reassigned to Staten Island, and Pike has been on ‘Administrative leave’ (with pay, which was $110,000/year in 2010).

Oakland, which also made a splash with video of a young ex-Marine getting shot in the head and then pelted with flash-bangs is already in trouble. They’ve been under court orders to improve their behavior for almost ten years now (after a gang of police officers called the Rough Riders were planting evidence, using excessive violence and falsifying police reports) and have been given a March ultimatum, or else the city will have control of its police force taken from it. It’s a step that should have been taken 5 years ago, when Oakland PD failed the original order, yet unlike any normal person that had failed a court order, they were not disciplined, but let slide for another 5 years.

Politicians are also getting in on the act. One of the more unusual stories this week was the arrest of a documentarian from a US Congress committee hearing. The hearing, on fracking, was going to be recorded by Josh Fox, (who has already produced one documentary on the topic, the Oscar Nominated Gasland) as well as credentialed ABC news reporters. The Republican chair of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Andy Harris (R-Md.), directed Capitol Police to arrest him for ‘unlawful entry’. The issue there was not so much one of ‘not wanting to be filmed’, as the cable-funded C-SPAN network was filming the hearing, but an attempt to deny Fox the ability to have his own high-quality shots for a follow-up documentary.

As far as violating the First Amendment, there can’t be a clearer example. Worse, the oath of office Rep Harris took on assuming office is as follows:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

In undertaking his actions on February 1^st, Rep. Harris violated his oath of office, by actively acting against the First Amendment. So what’s the consequence of that? The same consequences as when Joe Arparo violated the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th, and 8^th amendments, as when Pike and Bologna attacked protesters, using chemical weapons on people exercising their 1^st Amendment rights. Nothing.

The serious issue is, there’s no accountability – no respect for the law – by those whose job is to write the law or enforce it. This goes for former members of Congress who have turned into lobbyists as well, demonstrated by Chris Dodd’s blatant admission of bribery when SOPA lost its support.

One North Carolina State Rep, Larry G. Pittman, made news last week for suggesting public hanging should be brought back to increase the deterrence of murder (and he included abortionists there, making him part of the ironically named ‘pro-life movement, better characterised as anti-choice), and that appeals should be filed all at once. Given the often questionable nature of US Capital convictions, it’s rather disturbing. Especially as violations of what is deemed the country’s HIGHEST law, the Constitution, are rarely punished at all. Funnily enough, there are laws specifically to deal with it.

18 USC § 241
If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; or…
… They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both

and

18 USC § 242
Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if bodily injury results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include the use, attempted use, or threatened use of a dangerous weapon, explosives, or fire, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both;

Perhaps hanging, with only one appeal, would deter people from violating the country’s highest tenets, not that it will happen. Those that wield the power rarely feel the need to submit to the rules they lay on everyone else. And that’s the REAL problem. Until that problem is fixed, the Constitution is just a piece of paper.

Repression: In an inadvertent slip, the European Commission reveals that ACTA will indeed bring censorship to the Internet. As usual, they say this in the calmest soothing tone of voice.

The European Commission, which is sort of the Administration in the EU, published a rebuttal to “rumors on the net about ACTA” and tries to set the record straight. Note the two first points: “ACTA ensures people everywhere can continue to share non-pirated material and information on the web. ACTA does not restrict freedom of the internet. ACTA will not censor or shut down websites.”

There is one word on their web page that stands out and reveals so much more about the nature of ACTA:

“Non-pirated”. Everybody will be free to share “non-pirated” material. All of a sudden, there is a qualifier  to what information we are able to share on the net; this qualifier has never been there before. We have always been able to send whatever we like, and possibly answer for it afterwards.

This is very, very serious. For what it says here is that the net will only be usable for government-approved communications; the government takes itself the right to determine what the net is usable for and what it isn’t usable for. To 250 million Europeans who share culture and don’t see anything wrong with defying an immoral monopoly, this is an arrogant slap in the face, but it’s more  than that and worse  than that. Any qualifier  to what can be communicated — “non-pirated” in this case — always means “government-approved”, that only governmentally approved communications may take place.

And this is serious for the deepest of democratic reasons: Any communications technology must be compatible with dissent.

At the same time as the government takes itself the right to determine what can be communicated and what cannot, a communications technology stops being compatible with dissent.

Now, the prudent question here would be if it isn’t true that some information has never been free to share, and that you can get prosecuted for doing so? This would be a very relevant observation.

There are many things you’re not allowed to share in terms of information. Military secrets, medical journals, libel/slander, ongoing criminal investigations, just to name a few. All of these have always been possible to share on the net, but if caught doing so, you can be hauled off to court for it. After the fact.  The postal service has always still been usable  to share this information.

And yet, the one single thing listed as impossible to share over the net is violations of the copyright monopoly. If the Commission really was referring to things that you were legally  unable to share, you’d expect military secrets to come first, followed by governmental hush-hushy documents. But no.

This is an obvious slip trying to calm people into saying that everything will be as before, but the forced factual correctness of it reveals that we are indeed talking about censorship.

Another objection here would be that the language requiring ISPs to police the net was taken out of ACTA. That is… not quite so. The specific phrase requiring that was taken out in one revision, yes. But in the same revision, the same thing was re-inserted in another place. Specifically, this text was inserted:

Desiring to promote cooperation between service providers and rights holders to address relevant infringements in the digital environment;

It looks fairly innocent, like most legal text where you don’t have the full context. To fully appreciate the impact of this text, one needs to know the background leading up to it and the negotiations. Hax writes a bit about it here (in Swedish). The gist of it is that it’s enforcement of extrajudicial censorship, plain and simple, through threats of third-party liability.

UPDATE – seeing that this story is climbing on Reddit, and now hitting frontpage, I’m inserting the fuller explanation from the summary of today’s anti-ACTA rallies:

…there was a very clear recurring theme among the Members of European Parliament speaking, MEPs from three different parties. They all told the story of how software patents had been defeated in Europe, followed by the crucial “amendment 138″ in the Telecoms Package, which aimed to shut people off en masse from the Net. Well, thanks to diligent activists and people on the inside, we managed to get as strong safeguards in place as possible against shutting people off. But the monopoly lobbyists never quit. Now they’re at it again, this time saying that if authorities can’t shut people off en masse due to that “amendment 138″, maybe they can get private corporations – the ISPs – to do it instead through third-party liability forcing certain terms of service and wiretapping, shutting people off outside due process of law at the copyright industry’s fingerpointing as well as trying for live, realtime censorship. Hence, ACTA.

(original article continues)

ACTA will bring censorship. Extrajudicial censorship. At the request of a bloody entertainment  industry. That is shameful. 

Tomorrow, Saturday February 4, large-scale rallies against ACTA take place. I will be at the rally in Stockholm, Sweden at Plattan at noon.