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Where can I post comments to Hillary Clinton’s remarks on Internet Freedom?

These issues are very fascinating. And I would like to thank Google for providing a platform such as Sidewiki where I am posting this comment, where anyone can comment on any website even if the webmaster has disabled user comments.

I have not yet seen Hillary Clinton’s remarks and Q&A but I would like to comment on the issues just briefly:

- US Technology companies control a very large share of the worldwide technology industry. Could anyone provide % of actual capital in tech industry controlled by few US corporations?

- Sure I don’t like it at all that the Chinese government imprisons that many people and has probably one of the worse death penalty policies in the world. But do consider that for example the USA also does have huge amounts of prisoners, does also have the death penalty and does also listen in on all Internet conversations, even it is pretty well known that the US government has backdoors everywhere on the web. Does anyone know how much information Google provides to the US government and to other European governments about Google users?

- I would very much like that China improve their policies sooner rather than later. It would be very impressive if Google can the Obama administration can convince the Chinese Government that they all jointly sign a new Internet Freedom treaty that would:

1. Stop the useless Chinese firewall, filtering search results on tiananmen/falung gong just does not make any sense. Comon, be a bit progressive on this guys. It is actually ridiculous to block that.

2. Filtering adult material to hide it from Children is absolutely a good and worthy project which I think all countries should collaborate on. And Google DNS and Safe search type technologies should be used by all ISPs by default. Though very important fact should be it should be easy for any registered adult to unlock their connection and get unfiltered access. The filter should only be a default on all main DNS to protect children from adult contents. Very important not to confuse adult filtering with censorship.

3. Piracy should be legalized globally. Sure artists and content creators must be compensated appropriately. There should be new international author rights regulation that should compensate content creators directly without anymore of the same intermediaries of old media. For example, musicians, film makers, journalists, writers, photographers should get paid and find funds directly from a central global license for all contents that everyone should pay towards. This can be done using clever online statistics of popularity of all contents, by creating a registry of content creators and their works, and by letting users opt-in to provide accurate statistics on their content consumption and use ratings to provide better recommendations and filters to find the best contents. Leaving copyright laws of the past dictate this future of Internet content distribution would just be wrong. China and the USA must agree on a solution that improves content, finances much better creation and gives all users free access to all of it.

4. Sure the US technology companies are doing a pretty good job building the Internet and making all kinds of technologies. But they may also be slowing progress in terms of not yet making technology available to the 5 billion poorest people in the world. A new agreement on Technology goals such as power consumption of devices, price of devices, free access to spectrum and broadband, those things need to be taken care of globally. For example, 700mhz TV spectrum needs to be used globally for free unlimited wireless broadband for all. $100 Laptops with 200 hour battery life need to be manufactured as soon as possible and to be made available everywhere in the world. Honestly, capitalistic corporations might not be able to profit when laptops are sold below $100 and when wireless broadband is free for all. But those are very important decisions that politicians need to agree upon.

If Google can reach all this I would thank them so much.

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• China Paints Google Issue as Not Political (nytimes.com)

Without the permission from Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, I hope he wouldn’t mind, I am here posting the email conversation that I had with him back in September 2007 over email:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Rick Falkvinge (Piratpartiet)
Date: Sun, Sep 16, 2007 at 4:14 PM
Subject: Re:(Case 7134) Concerts are not enough income for artists
To: Charbax

Hi,

sorry for the delay in responding.

Yes, I know about flatrate propositions. I think they are terrible.

The reason is that copyrights rest on three things being static:
1) what is PUBLIC (commercial) vs. PRIVATE (noncommercial) distribution;
2) what is AN CREATOR vs. what is A LISTENER; and
3) what is A MANIFESTATION vs. what is AN IDEA.

The first assumption has been evaporated, so some are trying to lick the wounds of the broken system by proposing that the culture-producing elite be compensated by what amounts to a tax.

The problems with this are many. First, nobody has managed to explained the obvious - WHO shall be compensated FOR WHAT, and WHY. No losses have been proven to artists, only to distributors which aren’t needed anymore.

Second, if you assume that there is damage, how the collected tax shall be distributed. I strongly disagree that there is any fair way of measuring this: when blank media (cassette) levies were introduced in the 70s, the measuring came from what was being played on radio. This does not work any more. Any measuring system that involves money WILL be gamed, and any institutionalized measuring system will quickly be technically obsoleted by new p2p technologies.

Third, even if there is loss to the existing system, and there is a fair way of distributing money, why would it be in society’s interest to do so? Everybody wants more money for less work; artists are by no means alone in this aspiration, but it’s usually against society’s interest to grant that wish. This proposal would amount to taxing and hindering a new and more efficient technology in order to subsidize and institutionalize a much less efficient one. It makes absolutely no sense from a macroeconomic point of view.

Fourth and most importantly, the proposal assumes the model of small culture-producing elite that distributes culture top-down to the masses. This is no longer true; in the words of Larry Lessig, we have gone from a “read-only culture” to a “read-write culture” where everybody partakes, shares, remixes, shares again, and where somebody’s work becomes the next person’s idea. This total shift collapses the next two fundaments of copyright. There is no division of creator vs. fan anymore; everybody is a creator. There is no division of manifestation vs. idea anymore; a manifestation becomes an idea as soon it is released.

None of the three assumptions that make copyright possible are true anymore.

Cheers,
Rick Falkvinge (Piratpartiet)

—–Original Message—–
From: Charbax
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2007 04:52:47 +0200
To: Rick Falkvinge
Subject: Concerts are not enough income for artists

>I just saw your cool video presentation at Google.
>
>Have you seen the french Global Licence proposition. It’d be a 10€ tax that
>would fund all artists based on popularity and quality of their creations
>and performances. (15 million french Internet users x 10€ per month =
>1.8billion euros per year for artists if this tax was limited to only
>people
>using the Internet, or if it’s a global free culture tax on all citizen then
>it would be 60 million french people x average of 10€ from taxes per month
>would be = 7.2 billion euros per year, much more money than what artists are
>paid today in France)
>
>I think a lot of artists want to earn money for their creations and the
>industry of arranging concerts is so archaic, maybe even more archaic than
>the copyright industry (I’m not saying meeting people in real life is not
>cool, the way it’s currently managed is a mess, we’d need last.fm google
>maps blogs forums to make it better). As for selling band t-shirts is also
>kind of archaic since people want to download the PDF and print the T-shirts
>themselves.
>
>Monitoring popularity and quality of all music, movies, pictures, software
>even text I think is possible by simply using the computers and the Internet
>for what they are for, counting usage, monitoring use, rating and more Web
>2.0 usage without ever having to remove people rights to privacy as the
>usage monitoring can simply happen on a voluntary percentage of all users
>which provide good enough popularity and qualitative statistics.
>
>–
>Charbax,
>Nicolas Charbonnier
>

To which I replied:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Charbax
Date: Sun, Sep 16, 2007 at 7:30 PM
Subject: Re: (Case 7134) Concerts are not enough income for artists
To: “Rick Falkvinge (Piratpartiet)”

Thanks a lot for your reply!

> No losses have been proven to artists, only to distributors which aren’t needed anymore.

Well I think the loss to artists has been the culture and copyright industry until today. It has never worked for artists. I want a system that works much better for artists, and I don’t think telling them they can earn money from concerts and selling T-shirts is going to improve the artists situation.

> how the collected tax shall be distributed. I strongly disagree that there is any fair way of measuring this (…) Any measuring system that involves money WILL be gamed

I believe the Internet and computers provide the perfect tool for measuring this. We just need a good software and a neutral government doing the measurments. It’s like saying neutral website statistics aren’t possible, well I do think it would be possible, just install toolbars such as the Google Toolbar, but instead have it be something like the Last.fm audioscrobbler (which people will install voluntarilly) and have a neutral entity such as the government or the European Union check every users identity and control each users statistics against automation and unusual behaviour, so I think people who will try to game the system can easilly be detected like this.

And also add to that something like Razorback to measure activity on p2p networks, have the state host the Trackers and have every user connecting to the Tracker be identifiable through this same voluntary Last.fm/google Toolbar kind of approach. Where users are checked for their identity only in the purpose of measuring popularity of files and never to be used for any other purpose (such as invading peoples privacy, or using the collected data in a court against the user)

> This proposal would amount to taxing and hindering a new and more efficient technology in order to subsidize and institutionalize a much less efficient one.

I am not exactly following you on that point. Is there anything new and more efficient then p2p filesharing and legalized HTTP  streaming and downloads?

Today people are taxed so the government can maintain museums and pay artists in art schools and artists that do exhibitions, public performances, movies, music, everything already somewhat is partially paid for through taxes. I just suggest there should be more weight on the tax-supported art then to leave it at being a commercial activity paid for by centralised investors that take away the rights and the freedom from the artists so that they can make more money.

> There is no division of creator vs. fan anymore; everybody is a creator. There is no division of manifestation vs. idea anymore; a manifestation becomes an idea as soon it is released.

So are you saying there is no need to pay the talented artists so that they can make a living spending their whole time making this art?

I am suggesting many more artists should be able to make a living then today where only a few top artists can make a living and where most of the cultural industries revenue is never even touched by artists.

I’m just suggesting a reorganisation of that revenue and a large expansion of that cultural revenue. I think the artists deserve a much larger revenue than they have today. So to me 5€ per month average per citizen is just a start amount to show how huge this tax would actually mean, 5€ per citizen would expand the global artists revenue by many times compared to what it is today, but that amount could easilly grow when people will realise how much good it brings to be able to support so many new artists, many more then have ever been able to make a living out of their work, ideas and performances.

Also, I think it is certainly possible now much more then ever to find out which person was the initial creator, the artist that initially got an original idea. With digital and analog fingerprinting technology, much more then ever, now we can have a fair means of letting everyone be creative and share their ideas not being afraid of their ideas being robbed and having the knowledge that they could get paid if their idea turns out to be original, useful to the society and appreciated by many people.

Just as with the patent system, the copyright system needs to be brought into the 21st century, and we need to use the computers and the internet to administrate intellectual propriety much better and allow for a free flowing sharing of ideas without forgetting who is the originator of ideas and who have the most talents, thus enabling and integrating many more creators then ever.

I still have the very same opinion on this flatrate culture tax proposition, the same opinion I have had probably back since 2005 or before that. We need an EU wide flatrate for all culture on the Internet. That tax should be levied at the ISP level or even better, it should simply be implemented on all EU citizen (based on each EU citizen’s income levels).

I certainly hope that Rick Falkvinge in Sweden has changed his opinion on this proposition since he replied my email in September 2007 with such dissapointing quote “I know about flatrate propositions. I think they are terrible.”

He then goes on to argue that there are no more artists, that there shouldn’t be a “culture-producing elite be compensated by what amounts to a tax.”

I think he is wrong on thinking that this tax would only have to go to any kind of elite. The whole point of the flatrate culture tax would be to monetize all cultural outputs on the Internet by all Internet users in a totally transparent and equal way!

An example of this might be, if you write a blog post and 500 people read it, you might earn somewhere between 50 cents and 50€ in culture tax based on how much readers liked your text and how much a share it constitutes of those readers usage of culture on the Internet. If you upload a video from your mobile phone to Youtube and 50 thousand people watch it, the culture tax might pay you somewhere around 500€ on top of whatever income you might get from Youtube displaying advertising. Again all based on how much culture is consumed overall by all users, based on how much people like your video (registered by user ratings), based on how original your video is (measured through usage statistics), based on how long time people spend on your video, based on how many people remixed your video and more stuff like that.

Without the implementation of a culture tax on a European level or on a Country level, I don’t think that any of the Pirate Party’s political agenda points will be considered by any other large amount of parlamentarians.

Although the number of registered users of http://barackobama.com is impressive, their multi-user blogging portal at http://my.barackobama.com is cool. I wonder how many of those hundreds of thousands of blog posts that were actually read or how much those user-generated blog posts actually mattered.

As far as I understand it, the way Barack Obama’s campaign had the worlds best usage so far of the Internet in a campaign (second best could be Ségolène Royal’s lost french presidential campaign), has been especially to collect money in the form of millions of small donations. And to do the online organizing of getting out the vote efforts in the form of getting millions of supporters to personally call voters (which is better then robocalls), knock on their doors, do meet-ups, know about local events and stuff like that. Also the usual most effective way to communicate with supporters has been newsletters.

Putting some wiki, chat or user-generated blogging type blog comments on http://change.gov I think may be more of a gimmick then really useful and powerful. Live webcasts from the White House would probably be an awesome highlight and a worlds first. Already right there, they could provide hundreds of interesting hours from those meetings, those deliberations, commities, speeches, diplomatic meetings and all that.

I think they need to create an online congress where every citizen is a representative, can vote on all ideas, can suggest ideas, can amend ideas, express themselves in meaningful ways. Then all this needs to be done using clever algorithms to promote the good ideas automatically using clever new wisdom of the crowds algorithms. On the Internet, one vote shouldn’t count as one vote, votes should count proportionally with the influence and activity each verified user has on the rest of the community. This way, an algorithm can automatically filter out the experts and the representatives.

Here is what I think we should do:

1. Nationalize all banks progressively. Start with taking major equity, and move progressively towards all major banks being controlled by the state.

2. Introduce a new worldwide currency. This currency should be digital only, it should have a bunch of guidelines and should be managed in total transparancy. No financial speculation should be allowed. It should be the currency to serve humanity, to serve society. There should be very specific rules for people to be able to exchange their old currencies to this new worldwide currency. Eventually, all developped and emerging countries should all use that same currency.

3. Amend the worldwide human rights to include the right for food, the right for global healthcare and the right for global education. Those problems can be fixed and should be fixed very quickly using basic computerised models to effecively target all the food, healthcare and education to the places in the whole world that need it.

4. All countries should agree immediately to stop all pollution. Access to the new worldwide currency also requires full protection of the environment.

Google knows with 99.9999% certainty that there is a real person behind each Google Account. They simply have usage statistics and usage behaviour detectors that can verify that a Google Account user is a real user and not a bot. This makes it IMPOSSIBLE to game such a Google Reviews system.

There is nothing wrong with self promotion, and promoting your friends and family is just fine. Google knows when you are self promoting yourself and Google knows when you are promoting your friends. Google knows everything about you, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. This means Google can weight each Review differently and output the Reviews differently in a personalized way for each user.

Imagine what will filter up to the top for search queries such as “Who should be the president?”, “What should we do about Iraq?”, “Are Oil companies doing good?”, “What should my neighbour do with his garden?”

Google could in fact realise this idea that I’ve had for the last 4 years, Google could become the Truth Engine, making a system that uses the collective intelligence of all the people and outputs 100% the truth. This would force every politician to follow orders from the population, this would make direct democracy a reality.

Do you want to know the truth about anything in realtime? Simply look it up on Google. Do you know something, do you have some proof, do you have some evidence, do you have some ideas? Simply publish them on Google, based on your profile and usage behaviour, and other users appreciations of your submitions, your Truth can become the truth.

You can see a video of this feature at TechCrunch.com: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/is-this-the-future-of-search/

If you want to give the country back to the people, why not use the Internet to change the way democracy works.

We need an online parliament where every person is a representative of the people, where good ideas and the truth automatically are highlighted using direct democracy and algorithms. Any leader should then promise to serve the will of the people by using this democratic system on the Internet.

Representative democracy was invented before the airplane, before the telephone and before the Internet. We need to upgrade democracy.

I posted this suggestion as a comment to the Hillary Clinton and Obama video on Youtube in Unity, NH.

Today ICANN announced that they will open up for unlimited amount of top level domains and they will start to use all alphabets. I think this is fantastic news. This means the value of .com .tv .eu and all other current TLD domain sharks today all have gone bankrupt. This is the news they hoped would not happen.

I think that the new rules should be following:

- The Democracy involved at ICANN should rule on sharked, spammed or unused domains. As well as trademarks automatically are monitored using a database so suspicious attempts at registering trademarks will be identified.

- ICANN should control the whole system themselves using a central Google Apps like infrastructure that can scale to cover all TLD and all domains for the whole world.

- Domains should be free, no price, nada. Other then perhaps a very small fee to cover the costs of maintaining the whole DNS, database and ICANN controlling system. Thus price for a domain should be probably less than 1 dollar per domain per year. ICANN should remove all the domain registrar business, we don’t need it. The price of a domain should be public knowledge and nobody should pay more than that price.

- To register a domain you need to give your real identity to ICANN, you have to register your business and be able to submit tax papers and government controlled verification in case of a conflict.

This will be just like newsgroups, the value of .com and all current TLDs will decrease, and now the value instead is going to be the content and the relevancy. Today is a great day for democracy online, for relevancy of searches, for the quality of the content online, for the semantic web and for the freedom of speech.

I was there during the french presidential campaign in France, when I was filming the 462 videos for http://sego.tv with a selection at http://videos.desirsdavenir.org. I was invited a few times during the campaign when I was in Paris to the campaign headquarters as I was working with the webmaster team.

This video was filmed just a few minutes after she did her concession speech, a few minutes after the official final election results appeared on the french TV channels at 8PM on the 6th of May 2007.

I still think the french socialists were robbed the vote by a right wing which controls all media in France thus most of the information channels during a political campaign. France has illegal oil, gas, nuclear and other special interests around the world as well as there are unethical monopolies inside and outside of France, which forced Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency and which made sure not to loose control over french politics.

I believe in a democratic revolution in Europe which could change the fundaments of the society and change the way every country is governed. The revolution will happen on the Internet.

Now I am covering the parliamentary election campaign of the Radical Left party in Denmark at http://radikale.tv.

Watch in HD resolution

I am filming many of the videos at http://radikale.tv which is my contribution to the Radical Left party´s campaign in Denmark. The election day is on the 13th of November and the campaign has been going on for a week now.

Yesterday something quite awesome happened in Florida. A 21 year old student asked 3 very interesting questions to John Kerry:

Why did John Kerry not challenge the 2004 presidential election outcome?

Why did John Kerry not want to impeach Bush?

Was John Kerry in a secret society with Bush at Harvard?

Instructed by some mysterious man in a grey suit, the police grabbed Andrew Meyers, tackled him to the floor, tasered him infront of everybody and escorted him to prison. This has become an Internet hit, and some people think the best quote from Andrew Meyer during that episode was “Don’t tase me, bro”.

Here I picked some more classic quotes from Andrew Meyer at http://video.nbc6.net/player/?id=157250:

“There are people that know I’m here, you can’t just like kill me.”

“Oh my god, they’re giving me to the government.”

“Ask them where I am cause they’re gonna try and kill me.”

“Could you please come with us and make sure they don’t kill me?”

Bravo Andrew Meyer, this episode is a great idea for a movie, and if he spins it right, he could continue to ask the hard hitting questions on a video-blog and in the mass media. He should request an uncensored conversation with John Kerry broadcast on the Internet and in the mass media. John Kerry still hasn’t answered those 3 questions that Andrew Meyer asked before he was arrested.

He shouldn’t focus on the police fuckups. He should focus on the change that he would like to bring to the American Democracy. He should request to have an uncensored conversation with John Kerry and to be broadcast live on American TV and on the Internet. And also he should request to have his questions to politicians aired and the mass media should help him bring those questions to any politician that he would like. Democracy should be about anyone being able to ask any question they like to anyone else.