Ah it's good for the paranoid to know they are being followed :)
>you do some fantastic
> work, no question, and i'll take a moment to thank you for
> it.
Thanks, and it's good to know its not my political work, but me as a human being who pisses you off :)
> in a simple case like this, where NYP has been--dubiously,
> i think--'repurposing' LBO traffic on a for-profit basis,
> there is of course a world of 'rights' and 'controlling
> legal authorities' with which one can frame the problem
> both theoretically and practically.
You missed the Al Gore joke (too subtle I guess) where I was implicitly making fun of my own proposal by invoking Gore's felicitious phrase about the endless shades of enforcement, of whether a law is a law if there is no one around to regulate it "controlling legal authorities", etc. Which ties into your broader comment:
>to do so theoretically
> is to announce a collective preference (like the nettime
> .sig line) and trust that others will honor it. to do so
> practically is to invoke the language of the law, with the
> more or less implied possibility that these apparatuses
> could be brought to bear. as time goes by, it has become
> ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that far too many people take the latter
> course far too often, with the result that laws and insti-
> tutions, both properly and quasi-juridical, are prolifer-
> ating out of control. this cumulative process is dangerous
> in the extreme, because the net results are twofold: a
> growing regime of ever-less accountable institutions and
> a thickening jungle of laws too numerous to enforce except
> on an ad hoc basis. both of these movements fuel a situa-
> tion in which the rule of law slowly is slowly mutating
> into the functional equivalent of state terrorism--whether
> expressed in civil or criminal terms, it doesn't matter--
> more often than not in the service of plutocrats.
Now, I am still confused about why I am on your shit list, since while I am not at your end of the anarcho-libertarian wing of cyberpolitics, I generally have advocated a pretty anti-IP law line on intellectual property rights, from copyright to patents. And while I am studying law, I have a pretty anti-dependence on-the-law belief system -- just ask Charles from our discussions of international law. Almost all the activism in my life has been non-lobbying, non-regulatory with a large portion connected to union struggles where the legal strangulation of the law is the enemy of worker freedom.
Yes, I have a fondness for open source software as a nice fuzzy soft-socialism in cyberspace, which may rub your more anarcho-libertarianism (excuse me if that is the wrong designation) the wrong way. Sure open source is subject to regulatory pressure, but completely commercial software is as well.
So, since your "bug up your butt" predates my interest in open source, I am still confused about your more general animus since it transcends this particular issue. You made a mention in a post a week or two ago about my "trademark 'strategic' cynicism" around the "Sweet Home Alabama" discussion because I expressed interest about the actual audience political response to the song, rather than the singer-songwriter intentions.
So I am curious for a better definition of this trademark "strategic cynicism."
And if you convince me this trademark is valid, what controlling authority governs it so I can sue anyone who tries to copy my ideas? :)
-- Nathan Newman