p2pnet.net News:- Yesterday’s The copy fight has ended post sparked interesting reactions, but in sum, No it hasn’t, seemed the most common response.

“Yawn,” posted Digital Copyright.ca’s Russell McOrmond.

I always find some technical people amusing when they believe it is possible to author software to “route around” the law. When they are taken to court for facilitating infringement they’ll find out that judges don’t take to kindly to people who have that little respect for the law.

While there are major flaws in current copyright law, the solution is to work together to try to fix them, not pretend it is possible to avoid them.

For those who want to flame me for this, I have thick skin and will largely ignore you. I just wish everyone else would ignore you as well as we keep getting worse laws because far too many people attempt to flee rather than fight.

Dreddsnik agreed the, “solution is to work together, but emphasised:

Those in charge have no interest in working together, and have shown outright contempt for any proposed solution that does not involve just handing over the keys to the kingdom. More and more people are finding it impossible to have faith in a system that is becoming openly corrupt.

If people without means to fight are the ONLY ones interested in a solution .. what is left, honestly?

McOrmond’s reponse?

5+ years ago I was in the same mindset, that the system was corrupt and there was no way to influence it. While I still believe there are problems, I have more of a respect for politicians who are for the most part less informed than they are corrupt.

I’m only one person, and thus far haven’t been paid for my work, and have managed to have considerable influence on policy discussions here in Canada. I don’t have a legal background (beyond a highschool law course) and yet I’m now able to have quite advanced conversations about Copyright policy with lawyers specializing in copyright law.

Your signature offers an important part of the solution: boycotting those who are part of the problem. I believe, however, that while boycotting the RIAA is useful that boycotting governments will only be harmful to us. The reality is that there are more of us than there are of them, and if we all just got off our butts and spoke to policy makers I believe we’d win.

We also heard from Jason Rohrer, creator of the MUTE p2p application, He said:

Ah… this is an old, old project (slashdotted several years ago??),” he said. ” This was the project that inspired my Monolith project way back when.

But there’s much more to it than that.

“The Big Hack,” which is the mother project of the OFF, is some sort of online “alternative reality game,” where you can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t.

There are various “characters” posting to the boards on that site.

One of these characters, “White Raven,” contacted me by email out of the blue (as I recall) a few years ago asking for help. He claimed to be a blind hacker that programmed with a digital screen reader. He made a big deal on the boards about being blind, and his icon featured a figure with a blind person’s walking cane – thus, I can’t tell whether he’s really blind or not (and it certainly adds dramatic flavor).

Anyway, according to White Raven, the “players” on the Big Hack site sucked him in to their game without him realizing it and he started working on implementing their ideas in the form of the OFF.

Actually, according to him, even the Big Hack folks thought of it as real at first, but the parent company (the umbrella over the Big Hack website) switched to calling it a game later on for some unknown reason – apparently to screw White Raven somehow.

I can’t remember what help White Raven was asking for – maybe help in releasing or promoting the OFF software. We actually spoke on the phone once, and he seemed like a nice enough guy.

As you can imagine, my head was swimming with “real or not?” questions at that point, and I decided not to get involved.

However, the underlying ideas stuck with me after my various exchanges with White Raven, and I eventually explored those ideas in my own way with the Monolith project. I do give credit to White Raven at the bottom of the Monolith website.

Still, some questions remain:

What is The Big Hack?

Who is White Raven, really?

Is any of this real?

Or is it all just part of an “alternative reality” game?

Stay tuned. Definitely ;p

3 Responses to “OFF – is it real?”

1. Reader's Write Says:
   August 15th, 2006 at 8:55 pm

   It is real. There is a software and it is running.

2. Reader's Write Says:
   August 15th, 2006 at 11:24 pm

   Is anything in the digital world ‘real’?

3. Reader's Write Says:
   August 16th, 2006 at 2:26 am

   Where’s it running too????

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