The reason is this: those who exploit the copyright and patent system stifle ideas that have every right to spread. Ideas only have a future if they are shared. That goes for software just as well as it does for philosophy and music. Open-source software licenses don’t impose restrictions on others’ use of ideas and code, but closed-source ones do.

As I’ve learned from the economists (Ludwig von Mises, et. al.) I have a tendency to look not only at what is, but at what might have been, and what could be.

We live in a world where “intellectual property” is strongly enforced. It is generally perceived as a legitimate form of property. The enforcement of “intellectual property” is so popular that countless lawsuits have been filed in this country to protect it. The latest example is Apple, suing HTC for infringing upon such ludicrous patents as a touch-screen unlocking feature vague enough to describe every phone that can be unlocked via touch screen on the market.

This absurd lawsuit, not unlike SCO’s lawsuit accusing IBM of “stealing” UNIX code in order to contribute to Linux, or the RIAA suing innocent people to keep sound waves from spreading, is symptomatic of a bigger problem: the legal system  of copyrights and patents is a barricade against the flow of ideas. This stifles innovation and wastes innumerable man-hours on sorting out which ideas belong to who, who paid enough to get to use them, and who might be “stealing” an idea.

Thanks to this system, success depends on being the first one at the patent office rather than being the one with the best idea. Creative competition is now waged in the courtroom in order to restrict ideas, rather than being waged in a race to make improvements. With this system, innovators are hermetically sealed units who only share information on the basis of complex legal documents and high ransoms. These ideas belong to this company, those ideas to another, and never, supposedly, the twain shall meet. Why the balkanization of ideas? How does this make our lives better?

This is what is. What could be is a world in which technological ideas are shared, to the benefit of everyone… or at least not repressed. Men like Richard Stallman set out to create that world. So far they have been met with far more success than anyone at first expected.

Spend a few months using an operating system built out of Free Software or open-source software and the difference will become obvious. You’ll notice that you can do just about everything you did on the old proprietary system, except you never had to click through a litany of license agreements (where you give your Scout’s Honor that you’ll obey the orders of the publisher). You never had to tromp over to the Best Buy to purchase some rather simple functionality like partitioning or disc burning. On top of it all, you have a vast library of applications, with free lifetime updates, free of charge. There are no secrets, no surprises.

Free-as-in-freedom Software is able to give such a worry-free experience because the ideas are permitted to flow freely. The creators of the software aren’t waiting to bash in the head of anyone who dares to be inspired by their work.

This is what might have been if Western civilization never adopted the monstrous notion of “intellectual property.” There is no natural right to control what goes into and out of someone else’s mind. Giving someone else information does not make their brain your property.

That’s the moral reason for my choice to avoid Windows when I can. The practical reason is that sticking with an open-source platform is just easier and more fun. I’m not your typical Linux zealot: I’m not interested in convincing you to switch.

I think one day the superior model — that of sharing information rather than locking it up — will simply outperform the proprietary competition, and people will make the switch without ever realizing what transformation took place.

We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it … We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours. (emphasis mine)

This, from the company whose flagship software product, Mac OS X, is built upon a foundation of BSD Unix. For those of you who don’t know, the BSD license is the most liberal, most open, most non-intellectual-property-enforcing license I know of in the software world. It is just short of committing your code to the public domain. This is what Apple uses as the basis of its most important software product after iTunes.

This is very similar to what James Watt did to Mr. Hornblower. Watt’s steam engine was merely a small, key improvement of someone else’s technology. He had no more right to it than anyone else once he put his idea out there, but he was the first to take advantage of the legal system and patent it, and so he waged a campaign of destructive litigation against everyone who sought to compete with him or sell improvements on his technology, effectively holding back the industrial revolution for decades.

Take note: No technology since the discovery of simple machines and fire is completely original. If someone wants to offer proof to the contrary I will gladly revise it.

Innovation is a process of incremental improvements. The iPhone did not spring fully formed from the mind of Zeus. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, the touch screen, the cellular antennae, or even the notion of third-party applications on a handheld device. What Apple did do was offer an incremental improvement upon the combination of portable technologies we refer to as the smartphone. Their contribution was significant, no doubt, but it hardly entitles the company to hold the industry hostage so that no further improvements can be made outside of an Apple monopoly.

Make no mistake, the first destructive act in this controversy was Apple’s decision to sue. HTC engaged in creativity and innovation, and created something competitive, and Apple had two options:

1. Do something positive: such as improve its own product to compete
2. Do something negative: such as attacking the competitor

I have great faith in Apple’s power to compete. Lots of smart people work there. This is why find it very disappointing that Apple would choose the route of litigation. Patents and copyrights are not natural rights. You do not have the right to control what goes into and out of the minds of others.

From my point of view, Apple surrendered its monopoly on the ideas in the iPhone the moment they sold their first unit. The designers of the HTC phones were influenced by the iPhone by its very existence. Once in the wild, it is impossible to control or contain an idea.

I sincerely hope Apple loses its lawsuit.

The story takes place in 1892 in the midst of soaring unemployment, monetary chaos, and government and corporations going bankrupt left and right. It is the story of a man who in spite of the bad news, insists on an indomitable optimism. He is either visionary or crazy. He is sinking the last of his wealthy family’s money into a long-shot railroad company on the verge of bankruptcy.

Will he send his three-generation household into poverty, or will he build a railway empire that will both make him fabulously rich and save the economy at the same time?

I don’t know the answer just yet. I’m only half way through. Garrett has a talent for evoking the epic drama involved in entrepreneurism.

Why should you listen to me?

I speak from experience. I’ve sold thousands of items on eBay, both personally and professionally, with a total in sales in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are a few things I’ve come to understand about this marketplace in the years since I created my first account there in September of 2000. For the record, my own personal account is currently a Top Rated Seller, with all-time 100% positive feedback rating, and a Power Seller. I believe this status is about to disappear since I quit selling there.

eBay: The good times

When eBay first appeared, one of the revolutionary features it offered was a feedback system by which buyers and sellers could gauge each other’s reputations. You could read a seller’s feedback, and if you were smart, you would take a look at the feedback history of those who had left them negatives, as well. This was a brilliant system. It rewarded discerning users with a better experience, and punished rude users with frustration and ostracism.

No one wants a black mark on their reputation. This created an incentive to both sides to seek some kind of resolution before resorting to negative remarks. The beauty of this system is that it complies with economic reality: all transactions have two sides, both of them human, and both of them with equal rights not to be abused.

eBay: Tilting in favor of buyers at the risk of losing sellers

In May 2008, sellers lost the ability to leave negative feedback on bad buyers. This eliminated a key dynamic to gauging whether or not a buyer or seller was reputable. eBay claimed the reason for this change was, according to Bill Cobb:

…that buyers are more afraid than ever to leave honest, accurate feedback because of the threat of retaliation. In fact, when buyers have a bad experience on eBay, the final straw for many of them is getting a negative feedback, especially of a retaliatory nature. [emphasis mine]

Now, we realize that feedback has been a two-way street, but our data shows a disturbing trend, which is that sellers leave retaliatory feedback eight times more frequently than buyers do … and this figure is up dramatically from only a few years ago.

From that point on, only sellers could be rated negatively. This tipped the market drastically in favor of the buyers, and needlessly antagonized many sellers. Don’t get me wrong; the free market is automatically tilted in favor of the consumer at all times. Whenever it isn’t, that’s evidence of some very unfair intervention from an unjust third party. That’s just its natural tendency.

I’ve observed two things under the new regime. eBay has succeeded in removing some of the fear in buying on eBay. They have also given buyers room to be downright belligerent. I have seen too many buyers in the last year resort immediately to threats the moment they detect a problem with their purchase. In the old environment of mutual feedback, such automatic vitriol was discouraged.

I don’t doubt for a second they’ve increased buyer traffic to the site. I also suspect eBay will continue to lose prestige as an online marketplace. Cobb laments that some buyers leave eBay because they receive one bit of negative feedback.

What about the sellers who do that?

After nursing a perfect feedback score for nine years, I left eBay because of one negative feedback. I got the buyer to reverse it because it was a misunderstanding, but I realized then just how easy it was for a single buyer to damage my margin, my reputation, and on top of it all, waste my time, over something that wasn’t even a problem to begin with.

Negative feedback is inevitable for sellers, but not inevitable for buyers

As a buyer, it’s easy to get positive feedback. Pay for the item on time.

As a seller, it’s much harder. In any item description, there is going to be some term or phrase someone finds ambiguous. The Internet is filled with people with bad tempers, short fuses or unrealistic expectations. Some of them win auctions. The Web’s veil of anonymity doesn’t help matters. This is a medium where it’s easier than ever to view the other person as some kind of unthinking goblin. The old feedback system at least humanized both sides because the risk of bad feedback was mutual.

Sellers with any kind of volume are going to run into these rage-prone outliers, and are now completely defenseless against them. Once he pays for the merchandise, the buyer is completely immune. He has the seller completely at his mercy, no matter what he misunderstands, misinterprets or wrongly assumes. Should the buyer choose to vandalize the seller’s feedback rating, the seller’s only recourse is the dim possibility that an appeal to eBay might undo the damage.

In Cobb’s January 2008 letter, he said “sellers leave retaliatory feedback eight times more frequently than buyers do.” I want to call attention to the fact that calling a line of feedback “retaliatory” is a value judgment. Based on your metric for calling feedback “retaliatory”, Bill Cobb’s number could have been just about anything. I’m not privy to eBay’s data or methodology on that one, and I don’t doubt they’re doing their best to be accurate, but this principle is still true.

“Retaliatory” feedback isn’t always a bad thing

If “retaliatory” is defined as leaving bad feedback in response to bad feedback, this is not in and of itself a bad thing. What it could mean is that a higher proportion of bad feedback left by buyers is pure nonsense that must be righted by a response. The higher likelihood is no surprise. Feedback integrity is far more important to the seller than to the buyer, so sellers would naturally be more defensive.

“Retaliatory feedback” is perhaps a bad thing for eBay if the number of people capable of handling online commerce with maturity is too small for their traffic hopes, but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the health of the market.

Conclusion

As a company, eBay’s success is dependent on the success of the sellers. They know this. eBay collects its fees exclusively from sellers. They have a difficult job: the consumer eBay must satisfy to stay in business is the eBay seller, yet those very sellers depend on their buyers. For the best results, eBay’s managers have to figure out how to best satisfy two groups whose self-interests are often opposed. I don’t envy their position. Maybe I’m completely off-base and they have done the right thing, but the eBay stock price has so far not regained the high it was at the month before this policy went into effect. I suspect eBay is over-thinking their problems. The fee and rule system has become a bloated morass of variables that could change at any moment, and often do.

No wonder sellers are switching to the stable, predictable world of selling on Amazon, and the much more civil Etsy experience.

This seller at least is through with eBay. I just don’t need the drama.

Maybe I should go ahead and submit it to the Mozilla team for review to finally make it an official add-on!

It provides the following tools in a toolbar at the top of the browser:

• A quick calculator to find 15%, 20%, or 50% of any number in those cases when a seller needs to issue a partial refund.
• An input box and drop-down menu to paste in order numbers and navigate straight to the order page (bypassing the home page or search page), on numerous markets, so long as you are already logged in.
• An input box and drop-down menu to paste in USPS or UPS tracking numbers and jump straight to the tracking page without first bringing up the parcel service’s home page.
• A bookmark menu of market site login pages.

The Washington Post reports that the Federal Reserve pulled in $45 billion in 2009. In 96 years of operation, the Fed never made so much money in a single year.

From the article:

Wall Street firms aren’t the only banks that had a banner year. The Federal Reserve made record profits in 2009, as its unconventional efforts to prop up the economy created a windfall for the government.

With unemployment climbing to Great Depression levels, businesses shuttering and too-big-to-fail getting by only by government life support, exactly what was the Fed doing that was such a grand profit center?

It might have something to do with this:

This hockey stick graph should concern you a lot more than Al Gore’s. Federal Reserve loans to banks have jumped astronomically. It would be crazy if the Fed didn’t rake in monstrous profits. The Federal Reserve has the unique privilege of not only originating the money, but also of collecting interest on loaning it out.

That is the source of the “record profits,” which are not so much profits as they are stolen property. Neil Irwin, who wrote the article at MSNBC.com, got it wrong when he said that “The Fed, unlike most government agencies, funds itself from its own operations and returns its profits to the Treasury.” It does indeed give money to the treasury, but the way it makes its money is not fundamentally different from tax-funded agencies. The arbitrary printing of money is just a stealthier tax. It’s a tool of wealth redistribution that simply debases the dollars rather than taking them directly out of your paycheck. When the government bailed out AIG, FNM and FRE, when they bailed out Citigroup, Bank of America, GM and Chrysler, it was all with stolen funds. Conservatives are fond of saying our children and grandchildren will have to pay that debt, but we also pay it right now. The economy could have recovered by now, but instead, the resources that would have gone toward recovery were shifted without our permission to the most worst-performing businesses in the market. Those companies should have simply taken their losses, declared bankruptcy, and let the rest of us get on with life.

Since the Fed spent 2009 redistributing your hard-earned wealth and mine into the balance sheets of the Wall Street gang, collecting a hefty fee along the way, of course both of them are going to have “a banner year.” Enron had a banner year in 1999.

Ron Paul, I admire for his merciless grip on economic reality, and his commitment to ending some of the worst policies of Washington. Stein, I respect for his mountainous scholarship and his willingness to say the unpopular in order to defend science from dogmatic theist-haters. Anyway, here’s that exchange:

Ron Paul’s response in a Campaign for Liberty video:

As always, Ron Paul is way too nice. Stein is clearly gobsmacked that anyone could possibly think of terrorists as anything other than psychotic animals, and he can only categorize Paul’s attempt to humanize people we might hate as “anti-Semitic.” I can only explain this in one of two ways:

1. He is convinced that terrorists aren’t human. In other words, they have no motivation. They are simply mad dogs that need to be put down.
2. He is unable to distinguish between the so-called Israeli “occupation” in the Middle East from the American occupations in several Middle Eastern countries.

It sounds like Stein believes both, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he isn’t so hateful as to subscribe to #1.

I would dislike it for being an overt environmentalist movie, but apart from this it lacked certain things that make for good cinema. Even a movie with a political slant can be good if you get me to care about what’s going on in the characters’ lives. This one didn’t, and here’s why:

The Story

The movie starts off well enough, with Jake Sully, a disabled Marine hired to fill the role of his dead twin brother. His serendipitous genetics make him a money-saving choice for the corporation trying to quell the locals enough to mine their planet’s landscape for the unobtainium buried beneath it.

We’ve actually got the start of a really neat story here. Here’s a guy whose regular life really sucks. His family is dead and his legs are useless, but through an avatar —- a proxy body identical to an indigenous alien —- he can run, jump, and even fly, in a beautiful paradise so long as he lives a lie. This could be a great premise, a story about living with loss, about addiction, or betrayal, maybe climaxing when he has to choose: fakery and excitement versus drudgery and truth, but that’s not the story Cameron wanted to tell.

The story also pits two rival groups against one another: an aboriginal population deeply in love with their home, and a technologically superior group with the might to invade and take over almost totally unchallenged. This could also have been a story about the tragedies that happen when a big, strong civilization crashes up against a small and weak one. But the movie wasn’t about that either.

Instead, Jake Sully is a blank slate. He and the other characters even say so before he ever sets foot in the alien world. There’s nothing he really wants, so there’s no real tension. This blank slate enters an alien body, and is abandoned in the alien world within hours. The moment he meets an one of the aliens, a Na’vi, she chastises him for not honoring nature. He thrusts himself wholeheartedly into their world and doesn’t come out except for the obligatory video log and food. Obviously, he sides with the pure, innocent natives rather than the irredeemably evil humans, and leads a resistance against the mining enterprise and succeeds, with the help of a ragtag gang of the only four non-evil humans on the planet.

The Characters

I’ve covered the protagonist above, but the rest of the characters are similarly empty. None of them are anything you haven’t already seen in a dozen other movies. The leader of the “security force” is an entertaining but stereotypical military sadist caricature that reminds me of Sergeant Slab Rankle from Invader Zim. The corporate boss of the project is one-dimensional in his pursuit of the company’s goal: more unobtainium. In general, the humans behave like the worst of the American colonists in Pocahontas.

The Na’vi hail from every fictionalized pre-technological tribe you’ve ever heard of. We have the matriarch, the patriarch, the warrior and the princess. Their political system appears almost identical to the Acquarans, from a poorly-executed episode of the great show Farscape.

If you’ve watched the movie, try an experiment. Try to describe any of the characters without resorting to their appearance, their surroundings, or their role in the film. In other words, describe them in terms of personality, desires and fears. This can be done with well-written, three-dimensional characters. Han Solo, Tyler Durden, pretty much anyone from Lost. The only real person I can pick out of Avatar is perhaps Sigourney Weaver’s character.

The Message Through the Visuals

I could have been willing to let all of the above go and simply enjoy the spectacle. If I didn’t have friends who were artists, I’d be tempted to conclude that any heavy-handed message I read into this movie during the first half or so was just in my imagination. But alas, they’ve taught me better than that. There are visual messages embedded throughout the film. Consider the following:

• The heroic Na’vi, the ones who are symbiotically and irrevocably linked with every organism around them, also happen to be beautiful, bio-luminescent, 11-foot-tall supermen with carbon-fiber skeletons. Next to them, humans look like dirty, squat little toads.
• Humanity’s banner vehicle is an ugly bulldozer the size of an aircraft carrier. It performed exactly the same function as the villainous, smoke-spewing, sludge-spouting machine in Ferngully, and that is to say it indiscriminately mowed down trees carving a path through the jungle.
• The human settlements were strip mines, airfields and quarries devoid of the slightest hint of life.
• The entire alien world glows.
• You never see a Na’vi do anything except joyous jungle gymnastics in between hunting and sleeping. The implication is that they live a life of nearly perfect ease.
• Near the beginning, Jake Sully in his Na’vi form is attacked by a series of nightmare creatures. After he is rescued, Na’vi life seems completely undisturbed by wild animals even though they live outdoors 24/7.

Cameron chose to show us (and not show us) these things on purpose. The Na’vi could have been homely and short, or they could have been cycloptic tentacled beings. Humanity’s emissary might have been something else, like a surveying party or a machine that cleared a narrow path to possible dig sites for less obtrusive shaft mines.

The Message Through the Plot

I think it was obvious from the get-go that Mr. Sully was going to abandon his human life for a life with the Na’vi. That’s an acceptable outcome, and it could have been done without being an environmental sermon. Maybe he chooses that life for the adventure, maybe for love. The sad fact is that the plot contained no lure whatsoever for Jake Sully to remain human. The judgment the movie is making for us here is that the life of the Na’vi is preferable to the life we live.

The humans perform outrageous, unnecessarily cruel acts, but have no motivation. Sure, an important Na’vi landmark is between them and more unobtainium, but we have no idea what the function of this rare element is. It’s never mentioned. All we’re told about is its monetary value. I feel its purpose is important information, because people in the movie appear willing to commit genocide to get more of it. Would it feed a starving Earth? Cure cancer? Generate energy? If this question had an answer, it would give us a little insight into the humans and provide a little moral conflict. Instead, Cameron seems to dub this completely unimportant information. The judgment the movie makes for you is that whatever high-value use the unobtainium is for, it is immaterial compared to the destruction of one community’s heritage, on a planet brimming with life. We’re all entitled to our value judgments, and the above is a decent one, but the movie should lead us to draw these conclusions ourselves.

The climactic battle includes all of the animals in the ecosystem, predator and prey alike, uniting against the human invaders. Certainly, there was a sci-fi biological explanation for it, but this is Gaia-ism to the core. This is a movie about nature fighting back. It is a story of the biosphere actively struggling against those cruel enough to extract anything from it.

I’m sorry, but extracting things from nature is how we got rich enough to make movies like this in the first place.

I could have forgiven the bleh characters and the stereotypical plot, because this movie follows the Hero’s Journey trajectory quite nicely and I’m a fan of simple hero stories. But has invited us through this film to engage in Doublethink. He has told us two opposing thoughts simultaneously in his movie: that nature will kill you in an instant, and that it is your nurturing All-Mother.