The Magic Bakery Metaphor

Think of us (every writer) as a huge bakery and all we make is pies. Magic pies, that seem to just reform after we sell off pieces of the pie to customers. And each pie can be divided into thousands of pieces if we want.

The Magic Pie secret ingredient is called ???Copyright.???

Every story we write, every novel we write, is a magic pie full of copyright.

We can sell parts of it to one publisher, other parts to another publisher, some parts to overseas markets, other parts to audio, or eBooks, or game companies, or Hollywood, or web publishers, and on and on and on. One professional writer I knew sold over 100 different gaming rights to different places on one novel. He had a very sharp knife cutting that magic pie.

So each professional writer has this Magic Bakery, making magic pies that can be cut into as many pieces as we want and many of the pieces can return as if never taken, even after being sold off. (You must learn copyright to really understand this.)

It may reform, you have it, you can sell it, you still got it. Magic, indeed. And there isn’t really magic is there? Except what the State can coerce for this fantastic minority.

Under SOPA, every single one of the services that Abe uses can be obliterated from his view without him having any remedy. Abe may wake up one morning and not be able to access any of his photos of his children. Neither he, nor his students, would be able to access any of his lectures. His trove of smart online discussions would likewise evaporate and he wouldn’t even be able to complain about it on his blog. And, in every case, he has absolutely no power to try to regain access. That may sound far-fetched but under SOPA, all that needs to happen for this scenario to come true is for the Attorney General to decide that some part of PickUpShelf, SunStream, SpeakFree and NewLeaflet would be copyright infringement in the US. If a court agrees, and with no guarantee of an adversarial proceeding that seems very likely, the entire site is “disappeared” from the US internet. When that happens Abe has NO remedy. None. No way of getting the photos of his kids other than leaving the United States for a country that doesn’t have overly broad censorship laws.

There are millions of US internet users just like Abe. If you are one of them, I urge you to make your voice heard by going to AmericanCensorship.org or EngineAdvocacy.org/voice.

“If you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear” except from blunt instruments wielded by the stupid and their flunkies.

Our approach is to comply with valid court orders, warrants, and legal mandates, but in this case there was no such court order.  Thus, to evaluate Homeland Security’s request, we asked them several questions similar to those below to understand the legal justification:

• Have any courts determined that the Mafiaafire add-on is unlawful or illegal in any way? If so, on what basis? (Please provide any relevant rulings)
• Is Mozilla legally obligated to disable the add-on or is this request based on other reasons? If other reasons, can you please specify.
• Can you please provide a copy of the relevant seizure order upon which your request to Mozilla to take down the Mafiaafire  add-on is based?

To date we’ve received no response from Homeland Security nor any court order.

“We’re wearing jackboots and you can trust us, just do as we say.” When the State doesn’t obey the law, its in a poor position to call anyone else criminal.

Homeland Security???s ICE unit is not happy with a Firefox add-on that allows the public to circumvent the domains seizures carried out during the past several months. In an attempt to correct this ???vulnerability??? in their anti-piracy strategy, ICE have asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site.

Addons.mozilla.org, soon to be a “rogue” “terrorist” website, but of course, ICE isn’t waiting for SOPA, which is after all only a post-hoc rationalisation for the actions already taken against Wikileaks. It’s this kind of enforcement that makes me hate copyright.

today, while basic connectivity remains an important issue, there’s a new digital divide emerging; a digital skills gap. We may have a large number of households that have great connectitivity, but they use it for “notworking” – surfing, downloading and social-network-idling – instead of as a key part of their intellectual life and citizenship.

Once there’s more than one divide, things get insignificant exponentially

You can only throw so much good money after bad. Because eventually, you end up with nothing but a warehouse full of tablets, and a faded memory of a company that used to be pretty damn special.

Elegiac.