Nice quote

"If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter."-George Washington

Excellent quote from George Washington.   Across the globe those that defend freedom are being fought by the enemies of freedom, the enemies of mankind.  We must hope that freedom prevails over the tyranny of the few.

comment on censorship | free speech

I do not support the notion that fiction and freedom needs to be restricted on the basis some rare individuals might be slightly influenced to commit crime. Fiction involving serial killers might inspire some to become such, fiction about drug dealing and gang life may inspire such, violent video games and movies may motivate a small fraction to act violently or commit crime.

For starters you have to abandon the foundation of the abrahamic faiths, free will, to even entertain such notions. If an individual has free will or moral agency you can never say a work of fiction CAUSED x crime.

And again even if it caused x crime, an innocent activity that harms no one shouldn't be censored because of the actions of another, an individual could go with Jewish religious attire out into the streets, and this could provoke a neo Nazi to commit a crime against them.   Should wearing Jewish religious attires be banned because it may cause a small fraction to become violent or criminal in some rare cases?  Of course not.

Comment on Fake news

Regards fake news,  I find this, which is not just mass media censorship but an attempt at net censorship, and apparently with attempts to carry fines and legislation to back it.  I find this offensive, this is the most condescending movement I've seen in quite a while.   So rather than carry an information campaign to educate the public, perhaps attach valid counterpoints to debatable news in social media and mainstream sites.

No rather than attach meaningful arguments and evidence against any one controversial news piece, we're told not only are we not capable of telling truth from fiction, but we're implicitly labelled willfully ignorant basically going against the facts and not being able to accept the facts even when presented with such.   In essence saying one side is wrong without any debate, to censor the topic and prevent it from being brought up for discussion.   IF the public is incapable of informed voting, of informed action, heck this is basically claiming the faculties of a large segment of the general public are so compromised they're basically incapable of becoming informed.

I think this is wrong headed move, this shows a total lack of respect and patronizing tone with the general population, we should not be sponsoring censorship on a global scale, we should instead focus on an education campaign.  HONESTLY how little faith must you have on the common people, to say they've to be kept from certain topics, as if they were small children, rather than debated on these controversial topics?

Who gives an entity or group the AUTHORITY to be the arbiter of TRUTH, to say what's real and what's not, what's true and what's not?   Even the most backed of scientific findings is open to questioning, the idea of a solid incontrovertible truth, there is simply too much noise to derive this in such a complex system, especially by entities of such limited capacity.   

On the ridiculousness of IP laws, copyright

The US copyright law:

To perform or display a work “publicly” means—
(1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place
where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family
and its social acquaintances is gathered; or
(2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the
work to a place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device
or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance
or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the
same time or at different times.

Ah, their ridiculous attempt to rule out devices which are merely natural extensions of the body. Problem with that is Stephen Hawking, and other people with neural interfaces, they need devices to even interact aptly with the world.

Also we can define both the muscles of the body and their action as both natural device or process.

If money is a form of speech, ideas are speech. When banks exchange money they exchange digital data, digital numbers, there is a numerical quantity equal to any work of art that is possible. So if we are free to exchange money which today is basically just fundamentally digital numbers, we are free to exchange those numbers at any value including ones corresponding to works of art.

Say, I have a lot of money, and say I send a precise quantity of money, but the quantity corresponds to the compressed form of some copyrighted work. Are you saying it is illegal in principle for me to send this precise quantity of money? Don't you see how ridiculous and self-contradictory that is.

Inflation alone will ensure quantities get big enough that you can send precise quantities corresponding to any of the reasonable size finite set of works of art. Or are you going to DICTATE what precise quantities of money people can send to each other?-source kurzweilai

Article over at phys.org on ending copyright and patent law

Abolishing patent and copyright laws sounds radical, but two economists at Washington University in St. Louis say it's an idea whose time has come. Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine see innovation as a key to reviving the economy. They believe the current patent/copyright system discourages and prevents inventions from entering the marketplace. The two professors have published their views in a new book, Against Intellecutual Monopoly, from Cambridge University Press.

"From a public policy view, we'd ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether," says Levine, John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics. "There's plenty of protection for inventors and plenty of protection and opportunities to make money for creators. It's not that we see this as some sort of charitable act that people are going to invent and create things without earning money. Evidence shows very strongly there are lots of ways to make money without patents and copyright.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2009-03-economists-copyright-patent-laws-economy.html#jCp

The right idea, if you ask me.  Freedom of ideas, the free exchange of information, that is the way it is meant to be.