Skepticus
New Member
Hi All
This topic has been on my mind for quite some time and I thought I would put some effort in today, to bring it foward and put it on the table, to see what you all think about it yourselves. I do warn you this is a long post, but I do hope it is worth the read
This idea has had the potential to be considered in many other contexts and may have been brushed on in related subjects but it is relevant in all censorship/freedom of speech dialogues that youtube is a party to. At the heart of it lies the fact that youtube is not really a free speech environment. As long as it allows comments to be censored, and buckles to every false DMCA complaint, it is more a part of the problem than the solution. Youtube also seems to be shamefully poor at listening to and acknowledging public criticism and consultation. This is not surprising, as a subsidiary of Google I wouldn't expect anything better.
The only problem with this designation of youtube as a 'freedom of speech obstacle' or 'gutless censor' is that its service is a huge commodity on the Internet and one that is relied upon heavily by huge masses of people. What we all (the Internet public) seem to have inadvertently done once again, is jumped on a bandwagon and surrendered our control and choices to a single authority; a corporate dictatorship and by so doing, we've created a virtual monopoly for it's video publishing services. We are at the mercy of a single corporate curmudgeon but ironically WE ARE the power base from which it holds market dominance. Mindless consumerism and the lust for instant gratification has allowed big business to exploit us on an individual level time and time again. When you combine the vested interests being able to exploit compatibility issues they create and perpetuate themselves, you have a divide of commitment that forces the consumer market to jump on and stay on one brand or the other. It happened with VHS vs Beta and Microsoft vs Apple vs GNU/Linux.
It also happened on the Internet with dozens of competing services and social networking sites that tend to require dominance over a subservient user base. I can use myspace and facebook independently by all means but what follows, is that everything I do in one is ignored in the other. My list of friends is different in both and I find myself either adding information and content to either one or the other. The duplication and redundancy becomes laborious, so we tend to choose one social networking site as our default and neglect the others, until all of our friends have moved to the more popular network. It happened with myspace being overtaken by facebook. You don't actually even need compatibility issues such as Microsoft has been so given to creating and exploiting. Once you have a market lead, your competitors automatically have compatibility issues. They who do not have access to the largest user base, are automatically incompatible.
When it comes to sharing information/media of any kind, the same potential monopolization issues will arise. We will always be pawns to a greedy corporate dictatorship, as long as we give up our consumer power and refuse to change products or services simply because most other people are still using that service. When people will not cut their losses and vote with their feet, they become putty in the hands of the corporate goons. We should all choose which products or services we endorse, with respect to it's individual features, quality service value etc. When the feature we want most, is for everybody else to be using the same product or service, then we present a vulnerability which is ripe for exploitation. The desire for compatibility and access to each other, can be exploited as the commodity itself. Our desire for common points of reference, access to each others personal info, shared data and common networking protocols, is not something any company should be able to sell back to us as a commodity.
The data we create and content we provide for each other, is not a valid asset that any company should have the power to exploit. It is so easy to see why this is so, and also trivial to avoid the situation, if only people would:
I have been a staunch dissident of Google since I learned about it's abuse of the page ranking system, the refusal of Adwords to serve a website that is critical of Scientology and The fact in itself, that it willingly accepts Scientology's filthy bloodstained money and promotes it with advertising services. If Google is going to censor anything, it should start with it's marketing department and look at who it gets into bed with. Likewise the vast majority of subject matter being advertised in all these Google ads polluting the Internet from head to toe, seems to consist of the lowest and seamiest kind of scamming you could hope to find in even the back pages of the trashiest tabloids. "You are the 10,000 visitor... Click here to claim you exclusive prize... blah blah." How can anybody be so gullible? But a better question might be, why doesn't Google clean this shit up? Why does it not care to maintain some standards? Well the short answer must simply be greed. The scam artists pushing this shit pay well and nobody (except for me it seems) mounts an campaign of abhorrent disgust and refuses to do business with Google. For a while I had been using an alternative search engine, Wikia Search, which I loved, but it was not gaining enough 'popularity' (theres that damn word again) to justify it's maintenance and had to be closed down. I have closed any of my miscellaneous accounts such as Blogger, which belong to Google and shut down my main Google account.
I still however, remain a reluctant and discontent participant in youtube, which for now I am willing to treat as a separate company (which it is) albeit one that is owned by Google. While this is the case, it is hardly going to have any agenda or social ethos that is contrary to Google and it's cannons. Youtube makes up a sizable portion of my on-line activities but I am mostly still a viewer. While I have mirrored a couple of vids, I am mostly prone to watching the action and joining in on the comments. That in itself has been a thorny bed of contention, because the youtube comment software does not function very well at all. For starters the quality of discourse possible is limited to what you should expect from software, which was designed for short one off comments. Fair enough, but that is not how many people seem to want to use it. If you hadn't noticed by now, when I start writing I tend to have plenty to say and my posts tend to go into whatever detail I feel like embellishing them with at the time.
Writing for me (and many others) is a 'stream of conciseness' process. The typical youtube comments form is replete with attempted efforts to have a fully fledged group discussion between two three or several people. The only improvement it has gained to facilitate this process, is the one level of nesting which at the very least, allows separate threads to be identified. The 500 char limit is a pain in the ass, as is the way it seems to disagree with text that is cut and pasted (as you would do to quote existing dialogue). As well as that it balks at too much whitespace and or character returns The software doesn't just refuse to post either. Oh no, it doesn't put you back in a the functional edit window, with your failed post in tact, but unsubmitted. Instead it greys out the whole thing and even refuses to give you a functional cursor that could be used to select the existing text and copy it to the clipboard. Even then, because it usually wont accept text from the clipboard, I think it would still fail. I think that has to do with a Unicode or some 'text format' issue between the clipboard, the browser and the youtube software. Anyhow, just a tip I have found to work around the loss of content in these webforms, is a Firefox extension called Lazarus. Despite the fact that I dislike the biblical sounding name, it just works. Install it and it will save your bacon.
Before I used this Lazarus utility, I had been perpetual frustrated by the fickle youtube interface refusing to accept various posts, and often found myself starting them over again because they would not post if they had been pasted from the clipboard. I would copy them to a desktop post-it note, just so I could see what I had previously written and If it failed, I would be able to rewrite it, modifying anything which might be causing the problem. So apart from being owned by Google a corporate villain, who has undeserved power on the Internet, youtube provides this buggy un-user-friendly interface that is unsuitable for the discussions so many seem to want to have and on top of that, it also acts as an enemy of free speech and bows to every petulant or mischievous false DMCA complaint laid to cover it's own ass, because it is too lazy or tight to spare the effort or resources to investigate and Just doesn't give a fuck about how un-justified or ill-conceived the DMCA attack may be. Why would youtube give a shit? It's parent company is actually advertising the Church of $cientology for fuck sake.
I want to get the fuck away from Google and that means youtube too. But because everybody else in my community, seems to insist on bending over and taking it up the ass from Google and youtube it seems that I have to submit to the same fate. That, or just be deprived of access to the same media that the vast majority are party too creating and sharing. There needs to be an alternative that allows publication of media (particularly videos) in a much more comfortable public forum (such as this very forum software we are using) and it needs to be built with Open Source software and subject to terms of service that are democratically decided by a completely open and democratic process. The site needs to be run FOR the community and BY the community. It needs to be presented in the spirit of Open Source from top to bottom. It needs to abhor censorship and uphold freedom of speech as far as legally and practically possible, and it needs to go mercilessly for the jugular of anything that would compromise or obstruct the course of free speech and open democratic principals.
I have been of the mind that there are a number of initiatives which could be launched to make some inroads into the general problems we see for the way information is monopolized on the Internet and in the world at large. Some of those initiatives are huge, much more grandiose than anything I could hope to accomplish, while one or two might just be within grasp, if I a few good people were helping to pull in the right direction.
A) International Internet Governance
I do believe there will come a time when the whole world will have to be governed by a single government. In fact the defacto standard is arguably becoming USA government and law, being applied to world affairs, while the UN is supposed to be the only international body with legal precedence over individual countries. I know little about world politics, but I think the writing is on the wall. The world will have a universal government of sorts and how it comes to pass will be up to us. Will we simply let the corrupt and already powerful authorities manipulate us like the corporate monopolies do today? Or will we wrest control over the things which we should have the upper hand to stake our own claim to. One way to see the transition happen the right way and to guide the process of becoming a unified world, is to demand a jurisdiction for particular matters, which should be deliberated over the Internet by democratically elected councils. Instead of each country having it's own copyright law for instance, the existing countries need to give up their jurisdiction over copyright law and cede to international democracy. What could make more sense? How can copyright law be taken seriously, if each country has separate, arbitrary and sometimes contradictory laws about copyright. How can any author feel protected if the law under which they publish, can be usurped by laws in a different jurisdiction?
B) Copyright Reform
The simple fact that has been laid bare in the above point, is enough to mandate copyright law reform, but the usual laws accepted in the democratic world, in so much as they do share some common ground, still need some serious reform in and of themselves. The existing laws were set down to protect authors and publishers in the age of the printing press. They worked arguably well to protect the investment of paper publishing of books and vinyl records which required a serious commitment to the investment. In our modern age of digital self publishing the commitment required is close to zero. The lead time is instant and the available public stage frontage is wide enough to give every artist center stage and every observer a central seat in the front row. I would contend that copyright actual needs to be abolished. The only right that needs protecting is the initial publishing and attribution right. That is you have the right to claim a piece of work as your own and anybody who presents it publicly (the first time - premiere if you will), must have documented proof of authorization from the writer. People who produce intellectual and creative work should be rewarded once off for their efforts, not ongoing royalties for umpteen years after their deaths. Royalties which continue to make the undeserving beneficiaries of their estate countless millions of dollars after they are gone.
Publishers (or record companies), however will have to vie for the most talented writers or performers and the one off payments will have to be lucrative enough that royalties are not needed. Publishers should be protected by their publication rights an that ensures no other commercial publisher can simply start publishing the same material for sale as retail media. Performers and writers could also still expect rewards for 'appearance money' as they do now. I think it's a bit rude as it stands, when celebrities put their hand out and expect to be paid for public appearance, given the public will ultimately pick up the tab for this and their popularity with the public, is ultimately the reason they are granted the opportunity to earn such high rewards in their main stream income, which often involves ongoing royalties.
The public should be left alone if they wish to copy any work once it is published, there should be no law which protects anything from being copied. It simply isn't practical or reasonable. It is a nightmare to police, and creates unintended consequences such as these false DMCAs. It isn't reasonable as it's a victim-less crime to gain possession of a file, which nobody had to be deprived of, in order for you to gain it. While information can be digitized and copied for free and without the need to purchase it on any physical medium the 'sharing' of any information by copying it should rightfully be regarded as out of legitimate legal bounds. Considering how the Internet works in particular, anything that is published on the Internet, must automatically be exempted from copyright. After all, anything you access with your web browser is automatically COPIED into your temporary Internet folder or web cache. You may have no idea that a web page contains copyright material when you click on the link to it, but nevertheless if it does then your browser will faithfully download a copy of this material and by the letter of the law you should be liable to copyright violation if the copyright owner sought to take legal action. The Internet and our standard web technology, is simply unable to comply with the existing copyright legal framework.
C) Common Personal Information Protocols.
The idea here is to mandate a protocol or set of protocols, that describe a persons 'personal information'. It would contain the kind of information you would see in their 'bio' or their main profile page of any number of miscellaneous accounts of one kind or another that we are constantly being asked on the Internet to create and then populate with our personal information. It gets to be a tiresome chore and frankly a huge time sink. It's all very well for the owners of these sites to think their site is the greatest thing since sliced cheese, but nobody else has to agree. I might want to try it out and then decide that some other site has better functionality and now I find myself filling out another web form asking for very similar kinds of information.
What some smart cookies have realized, is that there is a need for a universal login system with an associated profile that contains a representative set of these kinds of articles of information. This can be entered once and used as a universal gateway to any number of affiliated sites who might then present the opportunity to login with your login details provided by the gateway account company. There are already a number of these universal login gateway repositories around, but there are a few small hangups with them. None of them seem to have gained very much traction so far, perhaps because they lack any other draw cards and people forfeit the opportunity to sign up to them, because they are stuck in the moment and fail to see how many times they will duplicate the same effort filling out yet another form to create a profile on yet another website. For the time being the existing websites are also retaining their existing login system and running the universal gateway system in tandem. That's probably for the better as it happens, because the last thing we need is another opportunity to have our common needs exploited by another indispensable monopoly. When they all start demanding that to access our website or it's functionality, you need to join X Y or Z gateway and have a profile set up with them, then we will be in the same shit, but much deeper. Our personal information will then be a commodity which we will have little choice about sharing or whom we may wish to share it with.
Before that day arrives, I would suggest we knuckle down and invent some robust protocols for storing and sharing our 'bio' or login/profile details The important fields should be decided, what form of database would this information be held in, what queries would be available, etc etc. The permissions would be user configured and access could be conditional by domain. The protocols might be expected to make use of some highly secure public/ private key system like PGP and OF COURSE none of this should be given over to the control of a private entity. This Personal Information Protocol (PIP?) ties in with another idea I have to make a universal protocol for personal information managers. Everything from the Things to do list (a nested hierarchy), to appointments, contacts and even budget info, could be accommodated in a universal protocol that allows people to share and coordinate their PIM information with each other.
D) Browser Based ID and built in support for various services that are typically web based.
The above item is an idea in it's own right, as is the following, but they may ultimately be combined together as this next item can apply to a vast plethora of potential or actual software based services which might be embedded into web pages as website content.
Anybody who was a lover of the usenet, the original text based Internet forums, who eventually found themselves drawn to the bright lights of the web based forums such as this one, if in in the early days they had a slow dial up modem will tell you... 'web applications just suck'. It isn't worth the pain of waiting for pages to refresh whilst using a 54kbps modem. There is so much overhead to be saved by any application which does all of it's actual computing at home on the users system (client side), while the only information which needs to flow across the network is the actual user data that is being used to form the message or the content of the communication. If that content is only text, then the transmission can be blisteringly fast. The only downside to this, was that you needed to have a dedicated program to access these forums, which had to be installed on your own system. No biggie. In those days anybody could get Netscape Navigator for free download and it came with a suit of Internet applications including a 'news reader' (not the same as the 'news' you watch on TV or read in a news paper - usenet forums were known as 'news groups').
Anyhow, the need to keep network traffic to a minimum and transmit only the message portion of a web page dwindled as scripting languages became ever more sophisticated, but mainly because Internet connections grew faster and cheaper. Meanwhile, web pages became more and more heavily ladened with graphics and clever programming functionality. When broadband was rolled out the floodgates opened. Now the network speeds are so fast and cheap while hard drives are so large and cheap, that nobody bothers to be the slightest bit concerned about constructing websites with sophisticated software functionality, which must all be transmitted across the network as even that is a small fraction of the gigabytes of data we consume in downloaded (or streamed) music, videos and such like. We now have leisurely access to vast seas of data and our fast cheap connections, can sustain even the most greedy, for a few tens of dollars a month.
Yet still, in principal it seems like such a flagrant waste of bandwidth, to stream a complete web based applications across the Internet, as scripts to run in every browser, every time you load a new website with particular software built in, for each browser session. There are however, better reasons to reconsider the strategy of websites having massive software programs built in, which rely on embedded code, and consider a return to client side installed functionality. Like the old news readers of yore, nobody needed to own any central repository the 'news groups' (forums were 'carried' on a huge number of servers which worked like peer to peer file sharing software). The system seemed to need no maintenance beyond the authority which was (probably still is) vested with the management of the 'name space', that is how the names are grouped and what names are allowed etc. One domain (alt) is reserved for unrestricted naming and anybody can foist a new group in the alt domain, under any existing node in the name space. But anyhow I digress.
The point is I can't see what benefit there is to the corporate model of the central server/repository (along with it's obligatory maintenance and physical ownership). In fact I see huge disadvantages. Every time things change and peer to peer networks are usurped for central repositories (such as the take down of the Napster P2P), the self managed, autonomous community take a massive body blow, and things go drastically backwards. The community need to recognize peer to peer as a massively empowering model for community communication and development. This needs to happen, before some greedy would-be monopoly, realizes the potential for developing direct web-top applications for harvesting (and potentially monopolizing/exploiting) our very own personal identities.
One strategy to explore is based on the fact that we all use web browser software to access the world wide web. Many of the popular software functionality we use from websites today could be incorporated into the web browser as client side software. Instead of accessing our email account with a dedicated email program, many of us now use web-mail and most email providers also provide a web-mail interface. The main reason is convenience of course. But we could enjoy the same convenience, if our web browsers allowed us to login to our general (decentralized) account with all our profile information using any web browser anywhere (OK maybe only firefox at first). It would load our profile info and login to our email as well as load our configuration settings such as our bookmarks, preferences and such like.
I can even envisage browsers with their own built in virtual IP addressing space (because real IP numbers are mostly transient and resigned each time anybody reboots their broadband modem.) If web browsers can locate each other given a virtual IP system mapping back onto the real IP system, then you can count on locating the machine which holds all of your profile info and you could even have the browser you are using virtually morph into the very same browser you use at home. In fact it could be your browser back home being accessed and executed and the graphical elements being morphed onto the browser you are using from some remote location. That would be no harder that existing VNC code integrated with not much more than the skin changing functionality. That, along with these new features for maintaining and accessing a personal P2P profile database and the protocol to share it, we would have the makings of a ubiquitous browser.
Other functions which I have envisaged may be build back into the browser with client side (non scripted/web based) software is a pared down web server, so basic websites may be built on your own hard drive and the need for expensive (or any) web hosts might be avoided, particularly for those with only basic needs. Again if the browsers have their own virtual IP assignment mapped onto the real IP the issues with dynamic IP assignment can be quashed.
E) Usurp web based services such as youtube and Google with ones that are community owned and managed.
For the sake of the current concern over the publication of videos and censorship, in the environment where the web browser is an anonymous peer to peer application, you have the opportunity to build in all of the functionality of youtube or any other video portal. Instead of being accessed from a web based application on a bunch of servers at youtube central, your browser may hold the executable software and it render all the panels, dialogues, tabs and windows it needs to do everything that youtube does and all of the code to do it would be right there in firefox or whatever other browser joins in the fun. Now for the good bit. This ubiquitous peer to peer network built into the code-base of Firefox and adapted by any other browser which cares to join the fray, is also capable of indexing and accessing all of the video material on the youtube servers. A spider may be written to go onto the youtube website and harvest all the useful data to do searches and import blurbs, comments and everything associated with any of the videos on the site.
Nothing prevents anybody from having the best access to youtube without actually visiting the website in the conventional manner, that is by hitting the web-servers at youtube with a page request and having our web browser render the page requested. Instead the browser uses its inbuilt parasitic powers and treats youtube rather like a free public data base. If you see a video you wish to mirror and you don't mind spearing the hard drive space, then you can hit a convinient 'mirror' button and it will be stored by simply shifting it from your browser cache (assuming you watched it) to your 'mirror' folder. Now when somebody files a false DMCA, youtube can remove the file to their hearts content, it wont prevent the network from continuing to publish the file as if had never even been touched. You will have all the benefit of youtubes existing repository (where they even carry the overheads) and all the benefits of a seamless overlay of the meta-network were files may be cached for peer to peer publication. You may in a sense be on a smaller network, which nevertheless contains the entire larger network in it's access mechanisms. You can have access to everything that youtube offer, but then you have the separate browser repository that is provided by the peer to peer functionality which comes built into the code-base of your browser software.
The question is presently: Why would anybody use one of these minor video sharing sites, when most people use youtube? The question would then become: Why would anybody restrict themselves to youtube, when they can have all the benefits of access to existing youtube material and even more published on the peer to peer network, while only using the software included in your existing web browser. There a numerous other web based services which could benefit from being incorporated into the browser including alternative advertising (imagine the browser parasitising all Google ads), email even a good forum software package could be built into the web browser interface, so that not only could the compatible forums be accessed from it but it could (again assuming a built in web server could be implemented) be used by anybody to create a forum on their own hard drive. No need then for dedicated paid servers or hosted solutions.
The essential idea behind the whole approach, is that everybody has a web browser and it is the first port of call when we wish to visit any website. So the browser has the first and last say about anything we ask for and view on the world wide web. Take control of the browser and you have control over almost everything we do on the net. To break out of any divisive ploy on the Internet and circumvent monopolies, you need to look at Firefox, because at least the most popular browser a this time, is also conveniently open source software. The Firefox coders, might even enjoy the idea of undermining corporate exploitation and helping the private information of their individual users from being exploited. It's a strategy I think is worth considering.
This topic has been on my mind for quite some time and I thought I would put some effort in today, to bring it foward and put it on the table, to see what you all think about it yourselves. I do warn you this is a long post, but I do hope it is worth the read
This idea has had the potential to be considered in many other contexts and may have been brushed on in related subjects but it is relevant in all censorship/freedom of speech dialogues that youtube is a party to. At the heart of it lies the fact that youtube is not really a free speech environment. As long as it allows comments to be censored, and buckles to every false DMCA complaint, it is more a part of the problem than the solution. Youtube also seems to be shamefully poor at listening to and acknowledging public criticism and consultation. This is not surprising, as a subsidiary of Google I wouldn't expect anything better.
The only problem with this designation of youtube as a 'freedom of speech obstacle' or 'gutless censor' is that its service is a huge commodity on the Internet and one that is relied upon heavily by huge masses of people. What we all (the Internet public) seem to have inadvertently done once again, is jumped on a bandwagon and surrendered our control and choices to a single authority; a corporate dictatorship and by so doing, we've created a virtual monopoly for it's video publishing services. We are at the mercy of a single corporate curmudgeon but ironically WE ARE the power base from which it holds market dominance. Mindless consumerism and the lust for instant gratification has allowed big business to exploit us on an individual level time and time again. When you combine the vested interests being able to exploit compatibility issues they create and perpetuate themselves, you have a divide of commitment that forces the consumer market to jump on and stay on one brand or the other. It happened with VHS vs Beta and Microsoft vs Apple vs GNU/Linux.
It also happened on the Internet with dozens of competing services and social networking sites that tend to require dominance over a subservient user base. I can use myspace and facebook independently by all means but what follows, is that everything I do in one is ignored in the other. My list of friends is different in both and I find myself either adding information and content to either one or the other. The duplication and redundancy becomes laborious, so we tend to choose one social networking site as our default and neglect the others, until all of our friends have moved to the more popular network. It happened with myspace being overtaken by facebook. You don't actually even need compatibility issues such as Microsoft has been so given to creating and exploiting. Once you have a market lead, your competitors automatically have compatibility issues. They who do not have access to the largest user base, are automatically incompatible.
When it comes to sharing information/media of any kind, the same potential monopolization issues will arise. We will always be pawns to a greedy corporate dictatorship, as long as we give up our consumer power and refuse to change products or services simply because most other people are still using that service. When people will not cut their losses and vote with their feet, they become putty in the hands of the corporate goons. We should all choose which products or services we endorse, with respect to it's individual features, quality service value etc. When the feature we want most, is for everybody else to be using the same product or service, then we present a vulnerability which is ripe for exploitation. The desire for compatibility and access to each other, can be exploited as the commodity itself. Our desire for common points of reference, access to each others personal info, shared data and common networking protocols, is not something any company should be able to sell back to us as a commodity.
The data we create and content we provide for each other, is not a valid asset that any company should have the power to exploit. It is so easy to see why this is so, and also trivial to avoid the situation, if only people would:
- A) Respect themselves and appreciate the power of consumer resistance.
- B) Understand what is theirs and be willing to protect it. Your personal information and intellectual/creative property is not trivial. It is why there is such a demand for things like Youtube. When it is amassed together with similar contributions of others, it is the single most valuable commodity on the Internet.
- C) Appreciate the power of common, community intellectual property agreements such as the GNU GPL and Creative Commons licenses. Giving corporate monopolies the flick and preventing them from ever sinking their teeth into us is just trivial these days. You simply demand that anybody in control of your personal information and creative/ intellectual products honors a commitment to provide their database and code base under the terms of a public license.
I have been a staunch dissident of Google since I learned about it's abuse of the page ranking system, the refusal of Adwords to serve a website that is critical of Scientology and The fact in itself, that it willingly accepts Scientology's filthy bloodstained money and promotes it with advertising services. If Google is going to censor anything, it should start with it's marketing department and look at who it gets into bed with. Likewise the vast majority of subject matter being advertised in all these Google ads polluting the Internet from head to toe, seems to consist of the lowest and seamiest kind of scamming you could hope to find in even the back pages of the trashiest tabloids. "You are the 10,000 visitor... Click here to claim you exclusive prize... blah blah." How can anybody be so gullible? But a better question might be, why doesn't Google clean this shit up? Why does it not care to maintain some standards? Well the short answer must simply be greed. The scam artists pushing this shit pay well and nobody (except for me it seems) mounts an campaign of abhorrent disgust and refuses to do business with Google. For a while I had been using an alternative search engine, Wikia Search, which I loved, but it was not gaining enough 'popularity' (theres that damn word again) to justify it's maintenance and had to be closed down. I have closed any of my miscellaneous accounts such as Blogger, which belong to Google and shut down my main Google account.
I still however, remain a reluctant and discontent participant in youtube, which for now I am willing to treat as a separate company (which it is) albeit one that is owned by Google. While this is the case, it is hardly going to have any agenda or social ethos that is contrary to Google and it's cannons. Youtube makes up a sizable portion of my on-line activities but I am mostly still a viewer. While I have mirrored a couple of vids, I am mostly prone to watching the action and joining in on the comments. That in itself has been a thorny bed of contention, because the youtube comment software does not function very well at all. For starters the quality of discourse possible is limited to what you should expect from software, which was designed for short one off comments. Fair enough, but that is not how many people seem to want to use it. If you hadn't noticed by now, when I start writing I tend to have plenty to say and my posts tend to go into whatever detail I feel like embellishing them with at the time.
Writing for me (and many others) is a 'stream of conciseness' process. The typical youtube comments form is replete with attempted efforts to have a fully fledged group discussion between two three or several people. The only improvement it has gained to facilitate this process, is the one level of nesting which at the very least, allows separate threads to be identified. The 500 char limit is a pain in the ass, as is the way it seems to disagree with text that is cut and pasted (as you would do to quote existing dialogue). As well as that it balks at too much whitespace and or character returns The software doesn't just refuse to post either. Oh no, it doesn't put you back in a the functional edit window, with your failed post in tact, but unsubmitted. Instead it greys out the whole thing and even refuses to give you a functional cursor that could be used to select the existing text and copy it to the clipboard. Even then, because it usually wont accept text from the clipboard, I think it would still fail. I think that has to do with a Unicode or some 'text format' issue between the clipboard, the browser and the youtube software. Anyhow, just a tip I have found to work around the loss of content in these webforms, is a Firefox extension called Lazarus. Despite the fact that I dislike the biblical sounding name, it just works. Install it and it will save your bacon.
Before I used this Lazarus utility, I had been perpetual frustrated by the fickle youtube interface refusing to accept various posts, and often found myself starting them over again because they would not post if they had been pasted from the clipboard. I would copy them to a desktop post-it note, just so I could see what I had previously written and If it failed, I would be able to rewrite it, modifying anything which might be causing the problem. So apart from being owned by Google a corporate villain, who has undeserved power on the Internet, youtube provides this buggy un-user-friendly interface that is unsuitable for the discussions so many seem to want to have and on top of that, it also acts as an enemy of free speech and bows to every petulant or mischievous false DMCA complaint laid to cover it's own ass, because it is too lazy or tight to spare the effort or resources to investigate and Just doesn't give a fuck about how un-justified or ill-conceived the DMCA attack may be. Why would youtube give a shit? It's parent company is actually advertising the Church of $cientology for fuck sake.
I want to get the fuck away from Google and that means youtube too. But because everybody else in my community, seems to insist on bending over and taking it up the ass from Google and youtube it seems that I have to submit to the same fate. That, or just be deprived of access to the same media that the vast majority are party too creating and sharing. There needs to be an alternative that allows publication of media (particularly videos) in a much more comfortable public forum (such as this very forum software we are using) and it needs to be built with Open Source software and subject to terms of service that are democratically decided by a completely open and democratic process. The site needs to be run FOR the community and BY the community. It needs to be presented in the spirit of Open Source from top to bottom. It needs to abhor censorship and uphold freedom of speech as far as legally and practically possible, and it needs to go mercilessly for the jugular of anything that would compromise or obstruct the course of free speech and open democratic principals.
I have been of the mind that there are a number of initiatives which could be launched to make some inroads into the general problems we see for the way information is monopolized on the Internet and in the world at large. Some of those initiatives are huge, much more grandiose than anything I could hope to accomplish, while one or two might just be within grasp, if I a few good people were helping to pull in the right direction.
A) International Internet Governance
I do believe there will come a time when the whole world will have to be governed by a single government. In fact the defacto standard is arguably becoming USA government and law, being applied to world affairs, while the UN is supposed to be the only international body with legal precedence over individual countries. I know little about world politics, but I think the writing is on the wall. The world will have a universal government of sorts and how it comes to pass will be up to us. Will we simply let the corrupt and already powerful authorities manipulate us like the corporate monopolies do today? Or will we wrest control over the things which we should have the upper hand to stake our own claim to. One way to see the transition happen the right way and to guide the process of becoming a unified world, is to demand a jurisdiction for particular matters, which should be deliberated over the Internet by democratically elected councils. Instead of each country having it's own copyright law for instance, the existing countries need to give up their jurisdiction over copyright law and cede to international democracy. What could make more sense? How can copyright law be taken seriously, if each country has separate, arbitrary and sometimes contradictory laws about copyright. How can any author feel protected if the law under which they publish, can be usurped by laws in a different jurisdiction?
B) Copyright Reform
The simple fact that has been laid bare in the above point, is enough to mandate copyright law reform, but the usual laws accepted in the democratic world, in so much as they do share some common ground, still need some serious reform in and of themselves. The existing laws were set down to protect authors and publishers in the age of the printing press. They worked arguably well to protect the investment of paper publishing of books and vinyl records which required a serious commitment to the investment. In our modern age of digital self publishing the commitment required is close to zero. The lead time is instant and the available public stage frontage is wide enough to give every artist center stage and every observer a central seat in the front row. I would contend that copyright actual needs to be abolished. The only right that needs protecting is the initial publishing and attribution right. That is you have the right to claim a piece of work as your own and anybody who presents it publicly (the first time - premiere if you will), must have documented proof of authorization from the writer. People who produce intellectual and creative work should be rewarded once off for their efforts, not ongoing royalties for umpteen years after their deaths. Royalties which continue to make the undeserving beneficiaries of their estate countless millions of dollars after they are gone.
Publishers (or record companies), however will have to vie for the most talented writers or performers and the one off payments will have to be lucrative enough that royalties are not needed. Publishers should be protected by their publication rights an that ensures no other commercial publisher can simply start publishing the same material for sale as retail media. Performers and writers could also still expect rewards for 'appearance money' as they do now. I think it's a bit rude as it stands, when celebrities put their hand out and expect to be paid for public appearance, given the public will ultimately pick up the tab for this and their popularity with the public, is ultimately the reason they are granted the opportunity to earn such high rewards in their main stream income, which often involves ongoing royalties.
The public should be left alone if they wish to copy any work once it is published, there should be no law which protects anything from being copied. It simply isn't practical or reasonable. It is a nightmare to police, and creates unintended consequences such as these false DMCAs. It isn't reasonable as it's a victim-less crime to gain possession of a file, which nobody had to be deprived of, in order for you to gain it. While information can be digitized and copied for free and without the need to purchase it on any physical medium the 'sharing' of any information by copying it should rightfully be regarded as out of legitimate legal bounds. Considering how the Internet works in particular, anything that is published on the Internet, must automatically be exempted from copyright. After all, anything you access with your web browser is automatically COPIED into your temporary Internet folder or web cache. You may have no idea that a web page contains copyright material when you click on the link to it, but nevertheless if it does then your browser will faithfully download a copy of this material and by the letter of the law you should be liable to copyright violation if the copyright owner sought to take legal action. The Internet and our standard web technology, is simply unable to comply with the existing copyright legal framework.
C) Common Personal Information Protocols.
The idea here is to mandate a protocol or set of protocols, that describe a persons 'personal information'. It would contain the kind of information you would see in their 'bio' or their main profile page of any number of miscellaneous accounts of one kind or another that we are constantly being asked on the Internet to create and then populate with our personal information. It gets to be a tiresome chore and frankly a huge time sink. It's all very well for the owners of these sites to think their site is the greatest thing since sliced cheese, but nobody else has to agree. I might want to try it out and then decide that some other site has better functionality and now I find myself filling out another web form asking for very similar kinds of information.
What some smart cookies have realized, is that there is a need for a universal login system with an associated profile that contains a representative set of these kinds of articles of information. This can be entered once and used as a universal gateway to any number of affiliated sites who might then present the opportunity to login with your login details provided by the gateway account company. There are already a number of these universal login gateway repositories around, but there are a few small hangups with them. None of them seem to have gained very much traction so far, perhaps because they lack any other draw cards and people forfeit the opportunity to sign up to them, because they are stuck in the moment and fail to see how many times they will duplicate the same effort filling out yet another form to create a profile on yet another website. For the time being the existing websites are also retaining their existing login system and running the universal gateway system in tandem. That's probably for the better as it happens, because the last thing we need is another opportunity to have our common needs exploited by another indispensable monopoly. When they all start demanding that to access our website or it's functionality, you need to join X Y or Z gateway and have a profile set up with them, then we will be in the same shit, but much deeper. Our personal information will then be a commodity which we will have little choice about sharing or whom we may wish to share it with.
Before that day arrives, I would suggest we knuckle down and invent some robust protocols for storing and sharing our 'bio' or login/profile details The important fields should be decided, what form of database would this information be held in, what queries would be available, etc etc. The permissions would be user configured and access could be conditional by domain. The protocols might be expected to make use of some highly secure public/ private key system like PGP and OF COURSE none of this should be given over to the control of a private entity. This Personal Information Protocol (PIP?) ties in with another idea I have to make a universal protocol for personal information managers. Everything from the Things to do list (a nested hierarchy), to appointments, contacts and even budget info, could be accommodated in a universal protocol that allows people to share and coordinate their PIM information with each other.
D) Browser Based ID and built in support for various services that are typically web based.
The above item is an idea in it's own right, as is the following, but they may ultimately be combined together as this next item can apply to a vast plethora of potential or actual software based services which might be embedded into web pages as website content.
Anybody who was a lover of the usenet, the original text based Internet forums, who eventually found themselves drawn to the bright lights of the web based forums such as this one, if in in the early days they had a slow dial up modem will tell you... 'web applications just suck'. It isn't worth the pain of waiting for pages to refresh whilst using a 54kbps modem. There is so much overhead to be saved by any application which does all of it's actual computing at home on the users system (client side), while the only information which needs to flow across the network is the actual user data that is being used to form the message or the content of the communication. If that content is only text, then the transmission can be blisteringly fast. The only downside to this, was that you needed to have a dedicated program to access these forums, which had to be installed on your own system. No biggie. In those days anybody could get Netscape Navigator for free download and it came with a suit of Internet applications including a 'news reader' (not the same as the 'news' you watch on TV or read in a news paper - usenet forums were known as 'news groups').
Anyhow, the need to keep network traffic to a minimum and transmit only the message portion of a web page dwindled as scripting languages became ever more sophisticated, but mainly because Internet connections grew faster and cheaper. Meanwhile, web pages became more and more heavily ladened with graphics and clever programming functionality. When broadband was rolled out the floodgates opened. Now the network speeds are so fast and cheap while hard drives are so large and cheap, that nobody bothers to be the slightest bit concerned about constructing websites with sophisticated software functionality, which must all be transmitted across the network as even that is a small fraction of the gigabytes of data we consume in downloaded (or streamed) music, videos and such like. We now have leisurely access to vast seas of data and our fast cheap connections, can sustain even the most greedy, for a few tens of dollars a month.
Yet still, in principal it seems like such a flagrant waste of bandwidth, to stream a complete web based applications across the Internet, as scripts to run in every browser, every time you load a new website with particular software built in, for each browser session. There are however, better reasons to reconsider the strategy of websites having massive software programs built in, which rely on embedded code, and consider a return to client side installed functionality. Like the old news readers of yore, nobody needed to own any central repository the 'news groups' (forums were 'carried' on a huge number of servers which worked like peer to peer file sharing software). The system seemed to need no maintenance beyond the authority which was (probably still is) vested with the management of the 'name space', that is how the names are grouped and what names are allowed etc. One domain (alt) is reserved for unrestricted naming and anybody can foist a new group in the alt domain, under any existing node in the name space. But anyhow I digress.
The point is I can't see what benefit there is to the corporate model of the central server/repository (along with it's obligatory maintenance and physical ownership). In fact I see huge disadvantages. Every time things change and peer to peer networks are usurped for central repositories (such as the take down of the Napster P2P), the self managed, autonomous community take a massive body blow, and things go drastically backwards. The community need to recognize peer to peer as a massively empowering model for community communication and development. This needs to happen, before some greedy would-be monopoly, realizes the potential for developing direct web-top applications for harvesting (and potentially monopolizing/exploiting) our very own personal identities.
One strategy to explore is based on the fact that we all use web browser software to access the world wide web. Many of the popular software functionality we use from websites today could be incorporated into the web browser as client side software. Instead of accessing our email account with a dedicated email program, many of us now use web-mail and most email providers also provide a web-mail interface. The main reason is convenience of course. But we could enjoy the same convenience, if our web browsers allowed us to login to our general (decentralized) account with all our profile information using any web browser anywhere (OK maybe only firefox at first). It would load our profile info and login to our email as well as load our configuration settings such as our bookmarks, preferences and such like.
I can even envisage browsers with their own built in virtual IP addressing space (because real IP numbers are mostly transient and resigned each time anybody reboots their broadband modem.) If web browsers can locate each other given a virtual IP system mapping back onto the real IP system, then you can count on locating the machine which holds all of your profile info and you could even have the browser you are using virtually morph into the very same browser you use at home. In fact it could be your browser back home being accessed and executed and the graphical elements being morphed onto the browser you are using from some remote location. That would be no harder that existing VNC code integrated with not much more than the skin changing functionality. That, along with these new features for maintaining and accessing a personal P2P profile database and the protocol to share it, we would have the makings of a ubiquitous browser.
Other functions which I have envisaged may be build back into the browser with client side (non scripted/web based) software is a pared down web server, so basic websites may be built on your own hard drive and the need for expensive (or any) web hosts might be avoided, particularly for those with only basic needs. Again if the browsers have their own virtual IP assignment mapped onto the real IP the issues with dynamic IP assignment can be quashed.
E) Usurp web based services such as youtube and Google with ones that are community owned and managed.
For the sake of the current concern over the publication of videos and censorship, in the environment where the web browser is an anonymous peer to peer application, you have the opportunity to build in all of the functionality of youtube or any other video portal. Instead of being accessed from a web based application on a bunch of servers at youtube central, your browser may hold the executable software and it render all the panels, dialogues, tabs and windows it needs to do everything that youtube does and all of the code to do it would be right there in firefox or whatever other browser joins in the fun. Now for the good bit. This ubiquitous peer to peer network built into the code-base of Firefox and adapted by any other browser which cares to join the fray, is also capable of indexing and accessing all of the video material on the youtube servers. A spider may be written to go onto the youtube website and harvest all the useful data to do searches and import blurbs, comments and everything associated with any of the videos on the site.
Nothing prevents anybody from having the best access to youtube without actually visiting the website in the conventional manner, that is by hitting the web-servers at youtube with a page request and having our web browser render the page requested. Instead the browser uses its inbuilt parasitic powers and treats youtube rather like a free public data base. If you see a video you wish to mirror and you don't mind spearing the hard drive space, then you can hit a convinient 'mirror' button and it will be stored by simply shifting it from your browser cache (assuming you watched it) to your 'mirror' folder. Now when somebody files a false DMCA, youtube can remove the file to their hearts content, it wont prevent the network from continuing to publish the file as if had never even been touched. You will have all the benefit of youtubes existing repository (where they even carry the overheads) and all the benefits of a seamless overlay of the meta-network were files may be cached for peer to peer publication. You may in a sense be on a smaller network, which nevertheless contains the entire larger network in it's access mechanisms. You can have access to everything that youtube offer, but then you have the separate browser repository that is provided by the peer to peer functionality which comes built into the code-base of your browser software.
The question is presently: Why would anybody use one of these minor video sharing sites, when most people use youtube? The question would then become: Why would anybody restrict themselves to youtube, when they can have all the benefits of access to existing youtube material and even more published on the peer to peer network, while only using the software included in your existing web browser. There a numerous other web based services which could benefit from being incorporated into the browser including alternative advertising (imagine the browser parasitising all Google ads), email even a good forum software package could be built into the web browser interface, so that not only could the compatible forums be accessed from it but it could (again assuming a built in web server could be implemented) be used by anybody to create a forum on their own hard drive. No need then for dedicated paid servers or hosted solutions.
The essential idea behind the whole approach, is that everybody has a web browser and it is the first port of call when we wish to visit any website. So the browser has the first and last say about anything we ask for and view on the world wide web. Take control of the browser and you have control over almost everything we do on the net. To break out of any divisive ploy on the Internet and circumvent monopolies, you need to look at Firefox, because at least the most popular browser a this time, is also conveniently open source software. The Firefox coders, might even enjoy the idea of undermining corporate exploitation and helping the private information of their individual users from being exploited. It's a strategy I think is worth considering.