Digital Citizen

Marie-Monique Robin’s “The World According to Monsanto” is one of the most important recent documentaries because it exposes one of the most well-organized and dangerous corporations and because of Robin’s clearly conveyed research.

This documentary aired in France on 11 March 2008 but I doubt it will show up in the US. Monsanto advertises widely so they have the ear of a lot of media corporations which control the vast majority of what shows up on American television and movie theaters.

Viewers of another favorite documentary, “The Corporation”, will recognize a few of the faces and names in “The World According to Monsanto”.

“The World According to Monsanto” impresses upon you (and expertly defends) that this is a fight for control of the world’s population through controlling its food. As Vandana Shiva says, Monsanto’s effort is more powerful than bombs. Farmers around the world see a future where they can’t afford the patent licensing bill because they can’t avoid the GMO seed. The public (whether unknowingly or with no other viable option) eats the GMO food that raises one’s risk of a host of health problems including cancer.

Monsanto refused Robin an interview but their framing of the issue is heard clearly throughout the film. Robin uses Monsanto’s website to explain what things are, illustrates her points with citations from Monsanto’s internal documents (liberated by court order), and does the investigative reporting legwork to clearly explain to us how world domination through patent law and genomic manipulation is not at all far-fetched. The stakes are enormously high. I highly recommend seeing this documentary.

The Wall Street Journal conducted a test in which three groups of consumers were shown coffee and in a separate test they were shown t-shirts. In each test the group was told the products were “ethically produced”, a second group was told the products were made under unethical conditions, and a third group (the control group) was told nothing about the products.

The Wall Street Journal concluded that “consumers were willing to pay a slight premium for the ethically made goods. But they went much further in the other direction: They would buy unethically made products only at a steep discount.”. In the test involving coffee beans: the consumers given unethical information about the production of coffee beans were described as demanding to pay $2.42 below the control group, while the consumers given ethical information $1.40 over the control group’s price. WSJ also suggested a go-slow approach to maximize income for the effort noting that “companies don’t necessarily need to go all-out with social responsibility to win over consumers. If a company invests in even a small degree of ethical production, buyers will reward it just as much as a company that goes much further in its efforts.”.

So decades of trying to separate business from ethics are paying off for modern businesses; perhaps not as much as their owners would like, but still the climate is such that a token show of ethical behavior pays off as much as genuine pursuit of ethical behavior in earnest.

The frame for the debate with these tests and their results is clear: fitting ethics into the market is right and proper so long as there’s no room to critique the heartless market for its lack of ethics. No amount of death, dismemberment, starvation, birth defect, wage slavery, or suffering in any form can possibly compete with the pursuit of money and power. Doing right by other people is not valued for its own sake. This is the system people have created, maintained, and defended as a reasonable way to do business with one another. It’s okay to behave this way at work no matter who is adversely affected. Remember this extract of Mark Achbar’s commentary track from the excellent movie “The Corporation” (Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Speex) where he talks about how people can compartmentalize their wickedness?

For businesses, ethical responsibility is merely a market tactic—an ad campaign which will go away when ethical behavior becomes an unsaleable commodity (or perhaps not producing enough sales to justify the effort). The market must remain dominant, not asking the most important question one can ask: How should we treat other people? Hence even for the corporate “hero” of the “The Corporation”, Ray Anderson, there are strongly enforced limits on what he can say on the record without betraying his role as a corporate CEO and he works within them, perhaps struggling to do so.

The Canadian Broadcast Corporation recently released “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister“, a competition show where five candidates competed to become the crowd favorite. The show is licensed to share. There’s been some buzz about it online (1, 2) and for good reason: their take on DRM is right-headed

While plenty of TV networks have experimented with offering shows online for free, it is CBC’s use of DRM-free BitTorrent downloads that is the most interesting. Guinevere Orvis, one of the interactive producers on the show, told me that the motivation for this choice was their desire for the “show to be as accessible as possible, to as many Canadians as possible, in the format that they want it in.” As for DRM, she said: “I think DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don’t realize it.” She added that “if it’s bad for the consumers, it’s bad for the company.”

and this alone puts them considerably ahead of American broadcasters who are still not clear on how they can retain control over every copy of every show, restrict copies electronically, and track viewers so as to more effectively sell them stuff. For American media distributors, DRM is still taken seriously. It’s this kind of thinking that creates a huge competitive edge for those who treat their viewers better. The CBC is way ahead of the US’ PBS in terms of licensing, DRM-freeness, and modern decentralized distribution of their shows.

But the most interesting part of this show has to do with the level of debate, a debate you won’t hear on American TV.
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The New York Times’ review of Dell machines featuring the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution is a recent illustration of the problems one faces confusing price and freedom, then deciding that freedom (the more important of the two) isn’t worth talking about.

But why would anyone want to use Linux, an open-source operating system, to run a PC? “For a lot of people,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, “Linux is a political idea — an idea of freedom. They don’t want to be tied to Microsoft or Apple. They want choice. To them it’s a greater cause.”

That’s not the most compelling reason for consumers. There is the price: Linux is free, or nearly so.

The same could be said of a copy of Microsoft Windows or MacOS X that comes with a computer (the cost of either when purchased with hardware is quite low). An illicit copy of the software costs no money at all, and Microsoft and Apple will probably do nothing to you if you get a copy from someone illicitly. Both companies agree with the implied message of this article that popularity is king, so why stifle people who are helping others become dependent on their favorite proprietor? The only way you can respond to this is if you learn to value software freedom for its own sake.

When all you see is price, you throw away something more valuable. Proprietors know this and are eager to get you into their thrall. Talk about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

To explain to people what freedom means (and how “choice” is a profound misreading of freedom–after all, Microsoft and Apple give you “choice” all by themselves, pick your master!) you have to be willing to say the things the Times apparently isn’t willing to say. You have to be willing to mention that bringing users into the free software community without teaching them about freedom isn’t helping the cause of freedom as much as teaching them about freedom because these new users have no reason to reject proprietary software. If all one values is price, then there is no reason to reject low-priced proprietary alternatives. When a proprietary alternative functions in a better way than the free program, users need a reason to actively choose their freedom. The free software movement provides that reason—social solidarity and helping oneself, one’s neighbors, and one’s community—and the open source movement doesn’t.

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Tristan Rhodes describes the pitch and allure of the open source movement perfectly and simultaneously (perhaps inadvertently) describes why that pitch has so little allure to those who frame the issue in terms of price:

What is the main benefit of open source?

The short answer is that open source reduces the cost of software. It is widely accepted that software is a necessary cost of doing business in today’s environment. Therefore, it is beneficial for companies to find ways to acquire software that minimizes that cost.

If price is chiefly important, there’s no reason to favor “open source” software over an illicit copy of a proprietary program that performs better. Some proprietors exploit this weakness and offer their software at low or no cost. There’s no way to teach people to favor fundamentally important issues such as building and defending community. It’s a great example of knowing the cost of something and not its value.

The philosophy of the younger open source movement is an inadequate response to the older free software movement; the ethics the open source movement never discuss keep coming up (any discussion of digital management restrictions (DRM), the recent update Microsoft pushed on Windows users without the the user’s consent are recent examples). An ethical approach to computing is critically important in the short and long run. As a result of not stressing free software freedoms for their own sake, one learns how to lose those freedoms. This issue is explored more deeply in the essay “Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software” (an updated version of the older essay “Why “Free Software” is better than “Open Source”“):

The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program which is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users’ freedom. How will free software activists and open source enthusiasts react to that?

A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, “I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?” This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.

The free software activist will say, “Your program is very attractive, but not at the price of my freedom. So I have to do without it. Instead I will support a project to develop a free replacement.” If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.

She likes the largest multinational corporations and disfavors the smaller ones. Cory Doctorow on Marybeth Peters is illuminating:

Marybeth Peters, the US Register of Copyrights, has come out in favor of the controversial 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying “it did what it was supposed to do.” The DMCA makes it possible to sue companies that make music, video and ebook players that play back DRM file-formats without permission, giving Apple the right to sue Real for making its own music player to run on the iPod. This aspect of the DMCA is a form of “private law,” allowing companies to attach any conditions they want to their offerings, and criminalizing competition that gives you a better deal.

The DMCA also makes it possible to censor the Internet by sending “takedown notices” to web-hosting companies alleging that some of their content infringes copyright. This system has been widely abused — Diebold used it in an attempt to silence critics who’d published a whistleblower memo that showed that the company had supplied faulty voting machines in US elections; the Church of Scientology uses it to silence their critics; serial troll Michael Crook used it against websites that criticized him, and the Science Fiction Writers of America recently sent a notice that resulted in the removal of dozens of non-infringing works and works by authors whose copyright they don’t represent, including my own novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and a list of good sf books for junior high students. Andrew Burt, the Science Fiction Writers of America VP who sent out the list, has since characterized it as containing only three errors because only three people complained — but most people who receive DMCA takedown orders assume that they must be infringers and do not complain.

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Democracy Now! made a typical error when describing the latest Microsoft antitrust violation fine. Here’s how DN! put it on today’s show:

In business news, Microsoft has lost an anti-trust appeal before Europe”s second highest court and has been ordered to pay a record $690 million fine for abusing its dominance in computer operator systems. The court upheld a 2004 antitrust ruling from the European Commission.

Amy Goodman (audio, high-quality audio, video, and transcript)

But DN! doesn’t put that figure in perspective. Without understanding how much money that is to Microsoft, this figure is left to be interpreted in the context of the reader’s pocketbook. Such an interpretation will not accurately convey what a slap on the wrist this really is.

In late 2005 Gervase Markham, a free software hacker who works for Mozilla, placed the 2004 Microsoft €497 million fine in a larger context—In 2003, they made £14 million a day from Windows client operating system licences alone.. This doesn’t include any other Microsoft activity (such as hardware, documentation, or their other proprietary software such as Microsoft Office) all of which benefit from their illegal and anti-competitive activities.

According to the XE.com currency converter £14 million a day is roughly $28 million a day (as of 2007-09-17), so Microsoft’s latest fine of $690 million is worth about 24 days of Microsoft Windows OS licenses at their 2003 level. Microsoft has delayed this for so long they’ve made enough money to cover this fine many times over. Suddenly the new fine doesn’t sound that large unless you are naive enough to believe that a month’s worth of money from only one of Microsoft’s many lucrative activities will effect substantive change in Microsoft’s behavior.

And the kicker is that Microsoft is only a symptom of the real problem with software proprietors. All software proprietors are monopolists who would behave similarly if given the chance.

The latest change to iPod software that rendered the audio listening device less interoperable has been broken. This isn’t the first time iPod and iTunes-related algorithms were broken and it won’t be the last.

Read more about the news or download a local copy of the public domain source code that implements the new hashing algorithm.

Here’s a sample of what people are saying about the latest break:

Really the only “correct” solution is for folks to stop using Apple products.

Ian Monroe

screw you and your pathetic failed attempt to use your ridiculously trendy device to lock its owners into your sorry excuse for music playing software.

i know you’re afraid of the linux desktop eating away at your precious niche market, but at least you could play fair.

Ryan Lortie

Although we -the Linux community- can choose not to buy iPods, many other people will. And it is our goal to make Linux a viable modern computing platform that allows people to use all of their existing devices.

Breaking the hash is not really a long-term solution, as they can keep making the process harder every time. The long-term solution is for iPods to have a standard interface that third parties can communicate with.

This probably should be compounded to the EU’s findings on Apple’s anti-trust practices to ensure open access to a popular device.

Miguel de Icaza

Background

Apple has changed the way iPods work so that only Apple’s software can successfully manipulate the songs on an iPod. Until the new arrangement is reverse-engineered, Apple has locked in iPod users into their software, transforming a more useful general-purpose audio listening and file carrying device to something that chiefly obeys Apple’s wishes.

Lennart Poettering is a free software hacker, author of important software including Avahi (which helps computers connect to each other and discover services) and PulseAudio (which allows computers to play multiple sounds simultaneously, even sending audio over networks to be heard somewhere else). He is quite familiar with the relevant protocols Apple uses to allow iTunes to share files and send audio around the network. These aren’t the kinds of programs one uses directly but they’re quite necessary for any modern system.

Analysis

Poettering’s analysis of Apple’s latest move is quite apt. There’s more on this issue from Boing Boing and Hubert Figuiere, another free software hacker.

At one point, Poettering concludes to use a technically inferior protocol to do the job DAAP does because DAAP is not an open protocol and UPnP is an open protocol:

I believe that DAAP is the superior protocol in comparison to UPnP MediaServer. (Not really surprising, since I wrote most of Avahi, which is a free implementation of mDNS/DNS-SD (”Zeroconf”), the (open) Apple technology that is the basis for DAAP.) However, due to the closedness of DAAP I would recommend everyone to favour UPnP MediaServer over DAAP. It’s a pity.

Apple did the right thing with the mDNS/DNS-SD protocol (which allows computers to see what services they offer and help make it easier for ordinary users to connect computers together on a local network). Apple allows everyone to use mDNS/DNS-SD and encourage broad acceptance by publishing complete specs under a license that encourages implementation, allow an Apple employee to help with technical questions, and build valuable programs and devices which use the protocol.

But make no mistake, if Apple were a more popular consumer electronics company they would treat you no better than they could get away with. Best not to become dependent on them.

Update

A little over a day after this news broke, Apple’s latest exclusion scheme has been broken.

Today is Software Freedom Day, a day when we celebrate the freedom of free software for its own sake, relishing in the community we’ve built around sharing and treating each other as partners. Free software is software that respects the user’s freedom to run, share, inspect, and modify the program for any purpose at any time. You don’t have to do these things, they’re permissions not commands, but (like freedom of speech) you miss the freedoms when they’re absent. The price of the software is not the central issue despite that the freedom to share the software means you can often get free software for free (yes, English uses the same word for both price and permission). You never know when you’ll need the freedoms of free software, so it’s good to have these freedoms all the time for all of your software.

So here’s hoping you’ll install and use more free software! What programs could you use? There are too many free software programs to mention them all, but you can visit the FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory or try these favorites of mine (which happen to be on my computer as I type this):

• Firefox & Thunderbird—a great web browser and email program. If you’re distributing modified versions of these programs you’ll probably be more interested in working with the IceWeasel and IceDove derivatives which don’t carry Mozilla’s restrictive trademark license or the non-free crash reporter program “Talkback” (one can easily uninstall this from Firefox and Thunderbird as well by going to the Tools menu and picking Add-ons then finding the Talkback add-on and clicking its “Uninstall” button and restarting Firefox or Thunderbird).
• The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program)—my preferred bitmap image editing program
• Inkscape—my preferred vector image editing program
• BZFlag—a great shoot-em-up tank game you can play online or solo
• VideoLAN Client—a nice all-in-one media player
• Rhythmbox—a fairly simple audio player you can use to share music as well
• gNewSense GNU/Linux—a free software operating system
• Fedora GNU/Linux—a free software operating system (tends to carry more up-to-date software than gNewSense)
• K3B—CD/DVD burning and copying software
• Frozen Bubble—a very addictive game you can play over a network or solo. I hear an operating system release was delayed due to the developers getting hooked on this game.