EFF: FCC Adopts Hollywood "Broadcast Flag" Mandate. [Hack the Planet]

This just boggles the mind. "We all know" the government agencies are in the hip pockets of "the industry", but even by those standards this is a lopsided ruling, 110% in favor of "the content industry" with all the costs completely shifted onto the manufacturing side of the industry, and by extension everybody who needs to buy that equipment.

Canonical asymmetry; we are all actively paying for the protection of the content industry while they pay nothing. This is already asymmetrical, but how much do you want to bet that while they will produce nothing without this bit, nothing we buy at "normal consumer prices" will be able to produce this bit? A little unfair to make this accusation since it hasn't happened yet, but history is quite on my side; see DAT copy protection.

Communication Ethics book part for Robustness. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for Simplicity. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

I have finally posted the remainder of my essay, The Ethics of Modern Communication. With this I lift my previous request not to link to the work-in-progress.

This is the end of over three years of work for me, so I hope you enjoy it. Additions may be posted and I someday hope to clean up the Misc. chapter, but I believe it is ready to go. Mental note, since this is the summation of this weblog up to this point I really need to add it to the sidebar.

Communication Ethics book part for The Goals of the Ethics Framework. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

NY Times: Music-Sharing Service at M.I.T. Is Shut Down. To Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard and is a director of the university's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, that incident shows that the world of copyright has grown so arcane that even the major players do not even understand it. [Tomalak's Realm]

I disagree. It's not the "arcane world of copyright" here, it's the "arcane world of music licensing". It is not copyright law in dispute here, it is what contracts have allowed whom to do what. The only copyright "fix" here is to somehow mandate simpler contracts and as neat as that may sound on first blush, it could only backfire. There's really no way to avoid this when you have contractual relations amongst that many entities.

Communication Ethics book part for Conclusion. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for Exercise: Making a Good Law . (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for ``Cheat Sheet'' for Lawmakers. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for The Law. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)