 |
|
|
||
Visit our sponsorsFill up our coffee fundBlogAdsBuy it!Most EmailedVisit our sponsors |
Get our Digestifs du jourNibble daily on our brainy goodness with our daily syndication digest. You'll receive an email with a list and links to the previous day's posts.
culturekitchensThe Publisher Daily servings of political dissent Grassroots News and Feminist Bloggers A new kind of vouyerism Art + Code + Philosophy Got any dirt, tips, leads or money for us? Then drop us a line or two at editors [at] culturekitchen [dot] com or use our general contact form to reach everybody in the editorial team ASAP. Hot Topics
Member's articles and stories
Recent reviews
| |
Google AdsThe Big Dialog
| ||
Who's onlineThere are currently 1 user and 802 guests online.
Online users | ||
Instant CongressUpcoming eventsWords to live by
So the recent struggles about network neutrality have led me to recognize something I hadn't quite seen before. And that something in turn makes more puzzling the debates that have been raised around network neutrality.
The something to recognize is that in a fundamental sense, fair use (FU) and network neutrality (NN) are the same thing. They are both state enforced limits on the property rights of others. In both cases, the limits are slight --the vast range of uses granted a copyright holder are only slightly restricted by FU; the vast range of uses allowed a network owner are only slightly restricted by NN. And in both cases, the line defining the limits is uncertain. But in both cases, those who support each say that the limits imposed on the property right are necessary for some important social end (admittedly, different in each case), and that the costs of enforcing those limits are outweighed by the benefits of protecting that social end.
So from this perspective, it is easy to understand those who reject FU and NN (who are they?). And it is easy to understand those who embrace FU and NN. What gets difficult is understanding those who embrace one while rejecting the other --at least when that rejection is articulated in terms of "government regulation".
Subscribe Buttons                    | ||
First Free Children's Room
There you go, good example . . . a real free gift compared to compulsory schooling, free in admission AND free from coercion or co-option.
Ironic that free school (meaning forced upon all kids, hard to wrap my mind around that even as I say it) promised social progresss to save so many kids FROM forced labor and exploitation by desperate social and economic forces, when a century later it would itself become the very labor and exploitation from which they desperately need saving.
Even as local government took over both libraries and schools from private benefactors and churches, libraries seem to have stayed more true than schools to this noble purpose of a Children's Room: to "attract and better serve" children -- rather than corral them, count them and force them to work for free all day as the staff dictates.
Are "public" libraries public only when the taxpaying public pays and operates them, or was Carnegie's first Children's Room historic because it WAS openly public and free despite also being privately run, without government funding or control? Are Bill Gates' influential computer high schools still public schools if he's paying the bills? If Oprah wanted to build and run a girls' political leadership prep school in NYC instead of South Africa, and Bloomberg designated it as a free "public" magnet to which all girls could apply, and if the City sponsored vouchers or scholarships for the selected ps students, payable to Oprah, would that make it both? Neither? Right, wrong, weird?
Put all this culture clash together and what DO we think Oprah is doing? More Carnegie library, more Disneyland, more Agassi, Gates or Bob Jones? Chris Whittle, Moe and Chubb, Bill Bennett, spas and summer camps, Osama Bin Laden's camps? Maybe a little Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or the Vatican? Could we make the case for a little of all of these, perhaps? . . .