Episode: 1283
Title: HPR1283: Ken gets to talk with Ambjorn about politics
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1283/hpr1283.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:55:01

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Hello everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and today's show is another on camp 11. Yes, I know a year and a half ago
with Amber elder
about his thesis on politics
Hello my name is Ken Fallon and we're at a camp is more or less over and I'm here for my lap was probably my last interview
Sorry, you didn't catch your name. My name is Ambeer and elder. So how are you doing? What prompted you to come to al camp today?
Well, I wanted to come for a couple of reasons. One was to participate in this fantastic community
and the other was because I wanted to take my research that I've been doing at the American University of Paris
and tested in front of an audience and then take the opportunity when I had a bunch of
let's say self-identified geeks in one place to ask them some questions and
see who they were and how plugged in they were to the community and to politics in general. So what's your thesis?
My thesis is trying to examine the attempt of
the free and open source software community to influence
public policy on technology issues at the international level. This involves also the national level and the local level as well.
And my thesis is my hypothesis is that the
the floss community is failing to influence the debate to influence the effects of policy,
to influence the content of policy and that we can do better,
that there are practical steps we can take that are based on
the experience of previous advocacy attempts.
I'm talking about the sharp end where laws are made. So I'm specifically focusing on
actor, the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, which was recently passed,
was recently the negotiations were recently concluded and is I still believe in the process of
being ratified by states around the world. And I was, and I'm trying to examine
why organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation didn't have more of an effect when we have
strong ideas when we have a worldwide community and when the best interests of all of the parties,
including the state parties and the industries that help to write the actor treaty,
as well as us, the free and open source software community, all of our best interests are in a different treaty.
Can you just tell, I know what actor is, but can you just tell the listeners a little bit,
quick tube in the summary of what actor is? Boy, I'll try. Actor is a trade agreement
between multiple parties, including most importantly the United States,
and Europe, and Japan, Canada, Mexico. I'm not going to make mistakes on it, so I'll stop there.
The a trade agreement, that seems innocent enough, doesn't it?
There are many trade agreements, many of them are productive and good and in fact international
trade has been very good to our community. In this case, the name doesn't reflect the content
of the treaty. What actor actually does is coordinate enforcement of intellectual property laws
across these different nations. What that means is, well, it does something quite radical, I believe,
subject to correction by the legal scholars, which I'm not. I'm a political scholar.
I believe it introduces a form of international law that is serving, supposed and incorrect interests
of industry. That's a criminal international law. The kind of international, criminal international
law has, until this point, been a matter of genocide, and crimes against humanity, mass murder,
mass rape, and this is criminal internet, because this has been international law, an intellectual
property for a long time. This is criminal international law, an intellectual property, and this
is a real new and strange development. But surely, it seems only right and proper that counterfeiting
of Gucci products, that sort of thing, should be stopped at the border. I don't see any problem with
this treaty. It says, yeah, prompting some discussion. Well, there are parts of the treaty
that I think are easier to defend than others. The part of the treaty that was most controversial
was the part of the treaty dealing with, certainly, most controversial in the Floss community,
was the part dealing with the enforcement in the digital environment. I have to think back a
little bit about ticking through the articles of the treaty in my mind. Part of it is that it
it institutes extra-digital processes. Putting aside the digital environment for a moment,
it institutes processes that are outside of the normal course of law. And outside of the normal
course of law, and therefore, it institutes a sort of a parallel legal system that only applies
to intellectual property. And I think, okay, coming down to this is about movies, this is about
record industry, this is about. Yes. I'm not an international law expert. Yes. The word used in the
treaty is phonograms. And if you go and look at the sources of the treaty, it applies. It's very
strange. Different sections of the treaty have different scopes and applied to different kinds of
things. In general, it references a very broad category of intellectual or serious categories of
internet intellectual property, including trademarks and copyrights and patents and circuit designs
and indications of origin. Sorry, can you repeat the question again? So I'm actually sure that I'm
just wondering, what does the cover actually, from our point of view, is it just music?
Or does it extend beyond that? Or is it a wide brush that covers lots of things?
That's a very complicated question to answer. In some cases, it covers a broad brush. In some cases,
it doesn't. The way it's going to be, and there are many at least clauses where they say,
countries will at least institute a certain level of protection, but they may promote a higher level
of protection. And all the way in which it'll be realized will depend a little bit on the action
of the Acta Committee, which will continue to promote the principles and discuss the principles of
Acta between members and perhaps in the following trade agreements with other states. I'm sorry.
The effect on the free and international, the free and open source software community is I think
one more, it's its relationship that it establishes between government and ISPs, for example,
this is the digital copyright section, where ISPs are assuming, and you see this in other
national laws that are being passed on, they're assuming the responsibility for the enforcement
of other industries and intellectual property, just as the government is assuming
responsibility for enforcement of intellectual property, who's the responsibility for which
perhaps should really lie in the industry themselves that can bring complaints about it.
So this relationship has a, you worry about having a suppressant effect on free speech,
because intellectual property that the subjects of intellectual property are mostly
artifacts of speech, they are. Movies as you say, music as you say,
would you extend to software at all?
It's a software, because we don't have software patents in Europe, but
we'll give it a de facto software patent then.
It won't apply to software patents differently than it applies to any other patent,
and I can't tell you, I'm sorry, I can't tell you exactly, I don't remember exactly where
patents are specified in the treaty and not, as I say, it goes in and out. The point of my research
is that when people tried to influence the act of treaty, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation
tried, when other groups, I can't remember who else they worked with, but when in general,
the groups of our community tried to influence, they found the decisions had already been made,
that act was, of course, negotiated in secret, and by the time civil society came to the table,
that we couldn't get any information about it, and we had a really hard time,
making sure that some more dangerous provisions didn't get included.
So, what I'm focusing on is using all this previous experience, for example,
of the environmental movement, because over many years, they have successfully
campaigned for things, and they found ways of addressing themselves to the sharp end of politics,
where decisions are made, which is often not in the front line in decision-makers,
but in the people who back them up and who support them, who feed them ideas and opinions.
They got them re-elected. Absolutely. They're also our ways of exerting pressure,
international, trans-nationally, so that when a movement has allies abroad, for example,
recently, this is not, aside from the act, but recently there was the send-law that was passed
in Spain, and the local... I believe the send-law is a version of one of these three strikes laws.
Yes, okay, great, great.
And it was originally the subject of a great, enormous number of campaigns,
sorry, excuse me, originally, it was a subject of campaigns within Spain, and the organizations,
the advocacy organizations reached out. They used information that they got from Wikipedia
to change the conversation, so that instead of being an issue, actually, the content of the law,
the issue was that the law actually had been written by the U.S. trade authority, and therefore
it became an issue of independence of the Spanish government that reached out to the EFF, so
this is one of the patterns that can be used by the free and open-source software community
to try and get what we want, to try and put pressure on people who are passing laws that
changed the nature of the internet, which is so important to all of us.
Unfortunately, the send-law, although it was originally the first attempt to pass send-law
was a failure, the Spanish parliament took recess when they came back,
the law passed without any problems.
And unfortunately, we see here in the U.K. as well, a law similar to that, just got cleared
in the clean-up.
It's happening all over the place.
So, your premise, I guess, is that you feel we're not doing well enough.
I don't feel we're doing well enough, and most importantly, I think we can do better,
and that there are clear methods for doing better. There is this boom-ring effect
reaching outside of the country. There are, as I talked about targeting the policymakers,
there are framing strategies that one can take to make sure that where you're fighting the
battle is where you have the best rhetorical arguments, and that you're speaking the language
that people will agree with and understand what you're doing. And I'm not absolutely condemning
the efforts of fantastic organizations. I just feel that,
out some, some quantum, some real research, some search for evidence of where the points of
failure are will help us to identify where we can use these proven techniques to help us get
what we want. And that's what I hope will come out of my research.
Yeah, I think as a geek, the thing I have in common with everybody here is that we listen to
podcasts somewhere, links, guys, and I don't really want to bring my religion, religious beliefs,
my political beliefs into it. Do you think that that is any factor on people not getting behind
organizations that are promoting that will be able to act on change?
You're talking about other belief systems aside from...
Well, just within the free and open source community, we're here because we're into the free
and open source community and we don't want to push political agendas or religious agendas
or whatever. And in this case, it's a political agenda.
Yeah. Do you think maybe that's the reason why people don't get behind the free sulfur foundation
or organizations that can combat these trade agreements like that?
I think the real reason people don't get behind it is because they don't see how it applies to
their lives. And this is the job of advocacy making very clear connections between what a government
does and the harmances to the individual when that's the strongest argument to make or talking
about the loss of a resource as the environmental movement has done. Or talking about
real principled ideas that the women's movement appeals very directly to people's sense of
right and wrong and justice, individual justice. And there are cases of all of these in our community.
There's a great example from the end of the last century when the DCSS algorithm
which was decrypting, was aimed at decrypting, oh no, I don't remember where I started the sentence.
DVDs, I guess, it's not. Yes, but I don't remember where I was going with it.
Oh, okay, anyway, I can't remember what it was an example of women's movements and then this is a good example
of at the beginning of the century. In the women's movements, what did they do in the beginning?
That there was a sense of right and wrong. Yes, right. So the example of the DCSS algorithm
at the end of the last century in the late 1990s where an individual was arrested and prosecuted
for having made an algorithm that seemed obviously an issue of free speech. And
this specific instance of injustice mobilized a huge number of people and they were creative,
brilliant responses which defended him and eventually, obviously, resulted in the spread of the
DCSS algorithm and people on the next can watch DVDs. Okay, so you know we definitely have an example
where we can definitely help. Yes, and we have helped and we've been successful in the past.
I just want to see the spread and I want to see our choice of strategies based on evidence.
So why are you here this weekend? I'm here this weekend to present these arguments to my
fellow geeks for the first time and see how they play and try and get examples and get instances
and I've made a survey that I've put online with lime survey and I'm trying to get the people
here to fill it out and tell me a little bit about who they are, what their sense of politics is
so that I can use this example to build the argument about where the point of failure is in our
community. I have some theories but I want to get the evidence. And is this going to be limited
to people here or can we extend it to people who listen to this podcast here? I think what I'd
like to do is set up a second survey for the listeners of the podcast so that I'm really eager
to make sure, I'm intent to make sure that I don't blur boundaries that I know who I'm talking to,
I'm who I'm getting evidence from so the evidence can be as strong as possible so we get a good answer
instead of a sloppy fast answer. I'd be very interested in the results of your surveys anyway.
I'm going to publish them online in a blog that I have yet to set up but the title
that I've selected is Netizen of the World I expect will be on WordPress and so yeah so the
results when they're available will go there. I think it's a very very very important topic one
that we've left a little bit on the back burner here in the open source community so I look forward
to you. Is there anything else I missed here on the YouTube? I don't think so. I just wanted to
mention that there are to emphasize again that there are people doing really good work that
there are people who like Simon Fipps who talked at this conference who have a great knowledge
of politics and then how decisions are made and I'm only looking to compliment and enhance their
good work. Fantastic. Okay, thank you very much for the interview and as always you can tune in
tomorrow for another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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