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Rickard Falkvinge: PayRight to Replace CopyRight?

Economics/True Cost, Innovation, Knowledge
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Rickard Falkvinge

PayRight: A CopyRight / Patent Reform Proposal to Make Piracy Obsolete

Copyright and patent monopolies can be reformed to be less terrible, but in the long-term they need to be reformed into smithereens with a sledgehammer. Politically, this may be impossible. Practically, doing nothing to encourage creativity and innovation may not even be desirable. Erik Zoltan and I have a new alternative: the Payright System.

The full proposal is available here, but at 35 pages it’s a lengthy read. I’ll do my best to sum it up here.

Erik Zoltan
Erik Zoltan is the mastermind behind the Payright System; I only served as a contributing editor. Zoltan is the Massachusetts Pirate Party‘s co-founder and representative to the US Pirate National Committee. He can also divide by zero, count to infinity, and roundhouse kick Chuck Norris.

Copyright concerns the right to copy. Payright concerns the right to get paid. Under Payright, a creative work or invention can be distributed, modified, reappropriated, and built upon with no restrictions. If you monetize a work, you just have to share a predetermined percentage with the original creator(s).

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NIGHTWATCH: Fall of Jordan Impact on Israel?

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government
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Click on Image to Enlarge

Jordan: Update. Anti-government protests occurred for four days last week and might still be taking place. However no mainstream news services have provided recent update reports on anti-government ferment in Jordan.

Comment: The Gaza story has more glamor than Jordan, but threats to the Hashemite monarchy are far more significant for the stability of the Middle East than the Gaza fighting.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota:  The three dictatorships that surrounded Israel and provided stability for Israel despite the cost to their own populations, are in turmoil.  Egypt is no longer stable; Syria may re-stabilize but is at risk; Jordan is increasingly at risk.  It is Israel's tragedy that it is an invented state; that it has chosen to be genocidal toward the Palestinian people whose land it has taken over; and that it has relied on its stability and survival on three dictators.  This is not a sustainable proposition.

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Michel Bauwens: One Click Collaborative Politics

P2P / Panarchy, Politics
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Michel Bauwens

Co-operative politics for busy people

A new online tool allows co-operatives to make decisions through the internet – meaning members can be more involved

Patrick Kingsley

The Guardian, 22 October 2012

Participatory democracy doesn't work, some say, because it takes too much time. If you've got to take the kids to school, do the shopping and – who knows – maybe have some downtime, you probably haven't got the energy to help run a cooperative bank.

The bureaucracy of cooperative politics, says Charles Armstrong, an anthropologist who has spent years studying communities in Italy and the Scilly Isles, “excludes a lot of people who would otherwise be willing to contribute”.

But what if much of that bureaucracy could be done remotely? For Armstrong, that's not just a hypothetical question. In partnership with Cooperatives UK, he is about to launch a new online tool that allows cooperatives to make decisions through the internet.

It's called One Click Orgs, and caters for groups that want to organise online with a few clicks of the mouse (geddit?) Having targeted non-profit organisations since 2008, from next week it's aimed at co-ops – be they small or large, completely non-hierarchical or managed by a board. “The platform will cover almost every piece of workflow that is part of how a cooperative operates,” says Armstrong. “It means that all the record-keeping – who the members are, what the share holdings are, who's authorised to do what – is automated. If someone wants to make a proposal, that's all electronic. If you're on a train and you have an idea for something, you can initiate that from your phone then and there. And people can vote on that, wherever they are.”

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Yoda: The Future of IT is OPEN

Hardware, Software
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Got Crowd? BE the Force!

What Cisco and Dell's Cloupia and Gale acquisitions mean to the future of IT

Art Fewell

NetworkWorld, 20 November 2012

Its been a wild and crazy few years as the last of the client-server era norms clear out and new norms for the cloud era emerge. Last weeks grabs of Cloupia and Gale technologies was a brilliant counter to the increasing power of Microsoft and VMware and provides tremendous insight into the future of IT

EXTRACT:

Since it is that time of year, I will end this on an off-topic note … as we all prepare to take off for the holiday and share in giving thanks with our families, one thing I will be grateful for is the wild success that OPEN has had this year.  While we could look back and talk about the cloud and SDN or at the broader economic battles our civilization has faced … what has stood out to me about 2012 is the fact that the largest corporate behemoths in the world all were forced to embrace open technologies and industry landscapes were toppled by the power of open. MITx and Coursera launched massively available online courses giving away the best education in the world freely. We see massive open-source powered clusters driving the economics that today are making it possible to do things like devoting the resources of an entire supercomputer to pediatric cancer patients individually. And while all the change we face can give us a lot of heartburn and stress, I cant imagine anything greater than getting to witness and even take a small part in the amazing possibilities that technology is creating to solve the challenges that humanity faces in this world, and just to be able to live in this amazing time for the growth and evolution of humanity, for this I am truly thankful.

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Mini-Me: Spinning Benghazi

Government, Ineptitude, Military
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Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Mainstream Media Caught In Snarl Of Tangled Benghazi Yarns (Larry Bell in Forbes)

Tightly spun accounts of when and what the president and top administration officials knew and did prior to, during and following the deadly 9/11 terrorist attack on our Benghazi consulate are unraveling at warp speed.

The Benghazi Circus (Joe Klein in TIME)

There were two attacks in Benghazi that night. The first was a spontaneous response to the anti-Islamic film that had caused similar protests in Cairo and elsewhere. That is important: there would have been no terrorist attack if the film hadn’t provided the opportunity for mayhem.

The Benghazi Test: How and Why Obama's Foreign Policy Passed It (Dominic Terney in Atlantic)

Benghazi is what a “scandal” looks like when there aren't any real scandals to talk about.

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Robert Steele: Big Four Audit Firms “Not Our Job to Detect Fraud”

Commerce, Corruption
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Robert David STEELE Vivas
Click on Image for Bio Page

I do not make this stuff up.  Of course one has to recognize that “best practices” are defined to favor the larger players, and the larger players are very interested in things like import-export pricing fraud and other less than ethical tax avoidance strategies.  But the idea that the Big Four do not consider it part of their job to detect fraud when evaluating companies for acquisition, I find reprehensible.  In addition, Hewlett-Packard was insanely cavalier at multiple levels, not least of all in assigning $6.6 billion as the intangible asset value of “good will” in the purchase of Autonomy — for that alone everyone at HP who signed off on the deal should be walking the plank.  What troubles me as I continue to reflect on the importance of transparency, truth, and trust, is that fraud is so heavily embedded into our politics and economics that the Big Four feel absolutely no shame in adopting such an outrageous position.  As a society, we are broken.

Hewlett-Packard's Autonomy Allegations: A Material Writedown Puts All Four Audit Firms On The Spot

Francine McKenna

Forbes, 20 November 2012

You can bring a Big Four audit firm to court for missing a major accounting fraud but it’s much harder to bring the auditor to justice.

Deloitte was the auditor of Autonomy, a UK software firm acquired by HP in 2011 for $11.7 billion. HP announced today it is writing down more than $5 billion, or almost half of the acquisition price, because of “serious accounting improprieties, misrepresentation and disclosure failures”.

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