What youth rights means to me

(First published in a Facebook thread earlier this year...)

1. I believe any law that treats people differently because of their age is inherently unjust. Lowering age limits is a step in the right direction, but ultimately laws should be based on individual competence/experience rather than age.

Every age-based law uses age to stand in for some other quality that's harder to measure, like the ability to drive a car safely or cast a meaningful vote. The authors of those laws know they'll needlessly deny rights to some people on the wrong side of the line, but they're fine with that because it's easier, faster, and cheaper than dealing with people on a case-by-case basis.

Instead, we should take the time to define those qualities, explain why they're necessary for whatever rights we want to restrict, and devise tests that can be applied to individuals. If we can't come up with a definition or a test, we should take that as a sign that the quality doesn't really exist, and give the right to anyone who wants it.

2. I think the most fundamental YR beliefs are:

We should judge people by who they are as individuals, not by their ages. Therefore, laws should not discriminate by age, and ageism in business or private life should be treated the same way as sexism or racism.

Unfair discrimination does not become fair or acceptable merely because it only happens for a limited time, or because everyone has been the victim of it at some point, or because it's more convenient than the alternative for those who perpetuate it.

No matter what we might think we know about how someone's interests will change in the future, their interests today are what count. We should not prevent someone from making an informed choice merely because we think they'll regret it later.

Parents, teachers, and other adults who are responsible for the care of young people have their own interests which sometimes conflict with the interests of those they care for. Therefore, granting rights or political power to adult caretakers is not a substitute for granting it to young people.

Young people, especially teenagers, are usually better equipped to make decisions about their own lives than they're given credit for. Ageism has led to millions of young people being denied essential human rights based on false assumptions about their competence. This results in real suffering and loss of human potential that is not widely recognized.

The psychology and physiology of middle-aged adults should not be the standard by which everyone is judged. Younger (or older) people may have different priorities or show different patterns of brain activity, but unless their conclusions are objectively wrong, that is only evidence of a difference, not a flaw.

School uses student laptops to spy on students at home

Disturbing.

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

Good news on the strip-search front

The Supreme Court has overturned that 9th Circuit ruling, declaring it unconstitutional to strip search a 13 year old student suspected of distributing ibuprofen (or "Advil" as it's known on the street).

Writing as a post-copyright career

A MUD discussion last night got fairly heated and hectic, so I'm going to try this in a forum that allows for more length and less crosstalk...

We all know about the content industries' struggles with piracy. Music and movies have been most visible, and I myself have been thinking about this issue mostly with regard to the music industry, but piracy affects the written word too (especially as e-books become more popular). Over the past decade, copying has gotten easier to do and harder to stop or even detect: I believe this trend will continue, and that it's time to seriously look for a new business model that doesn't rely on the author or publisher being the sole source of copies.

I have such a model in mind, and there's already evidence that it can work for music and software. But I'd like to know more about how well it can work with other media, and for that I need your help.

So...

Imagine a world where copyright does not exist. Anything you publish can be freely, legally copied by anyone who has the resources to do it, as long as they don't lie about authorship: i.e. no one can take credit for your work or attribute their work to you).

I believe the best way for authors and artists to earn a living in this environment is to sell their labor -- something that can't be copied. You can copy an old book for free, but you can't make someone write you a new book unless you agree to his terms. Therefore, as long as the public is still hungry for new books, there will be demand for authors to write them, and that demand will put money in authors' pockets.

You may have heard of the Street Performer Protocol or "ransom model", in which you write a book, then announce "Here's a description of the book I've written. I will release this book once I've received X dollars." Your audience pools their money and pays you, and then you release the book. Presto: you've been paid for the time you spent writing, and your audience can now make all the copies they want without affecting your pocketbook.

But this still involves a good deal of risk for the author. What if you write a book and try to ransom it off, only to discover that you don't have the audience you thought, and you aren't able to collect the full amount you want? This model guarantees that no one will be able to read your work until you've been paid, but it doesn't save you from writing something for which you won't get paid, or won't get paid as much as you thought.

So here's a modified version of the ransom model. Instead of writing the book first and then posting an announcement, post the announcement first: "Here's a description of the book I'm planning to write. I will write this book once I've received X dollars, and release it for free."

If your audience pools their money and pays you, you write the book and release it, presto: you've been paid and the audience can make all the copies they want. On the other hand, if they don't pay you, you learn something about the true demand for your writing, and you have a choice: lower your asking price, change your proposal, or find something else to do with your time. You know ahead of time whether or not you'll be paid for your work, and you can decide whether you want to go through with it.

This model doesn't mean editors, agents, or publishers would go away, exactly. There's still value in improving works before they're released, connecting authors with the people who want to pay them, and distributing copies. But the relationships and transactions would change: editing would be a service provided to authors in order to make their writing more valuable (or to the audience in order to secure their investment), agents would be middlemen between authors and their audiences (handling the thousands of credit card transactions, etc.), and publishers would be able to compete with each other to sell copies of the same works (just like printing Bibles or any other public domain works today).

So let me pose some questions to you:

• What do you like and dislike about this model?


• What makes this model more or less likely to work for writing than for other industries that currently rely on copyright (music, software, etc.)?


• What risks do you think this model would add, and how do those compare to the risks it would alleviate?


• If you don't think this would work, how do you think writing would happen in the absence of copyright?


• Do you believe the current model is a fair balance between the needs of writers and the rights of readers? How could it be improved?


• How do you feel about the current model's prospect of making lots of money from a successful release (but with no guarantee that you'll make anything at all if it isn't successful) compared to this model's guarantee that you'll get paid an amount you deem fair (but with no possibility of getting rich from a runaway success)?
  

Again, I'm seeking enlightenment here. Some have suggested that my proposed model fails to address writers' concerns; I would like to understand those concerns, so please, explain or ask away.

Finally, I'll anticipate some questions you might have:

• How will new authors gain a foothold?


• What happens if the author never releases the work, or it isn't what the audience expected?

These, and any others, will be answered in a future post.

Article in MIT's Technology Review re: voting age

Worth reading. The author starts by citing a recent story about a girl being sentenced to three months for creating a MySpace page that made fun of her school's assistant principal, in what turned out to be a long-running kickback scheme whereby the operators of a private youth detention center paid a judge to send kids there.

The article expresses disapproval about the corruption of the judge and the severity of the sentence, but seems completely unfazed by the idea of an American citizen standing before a judge to answer for a satirical website. And this is actually understandable given the context. While children’s rights law is a notoriously murky area, it seems fair to say that children’s “individual rights” (free speech, due process, etc.) are generally thin to nonexistent, certainly in the US and probably elsewhere too. So for example, if Ms. Transue had been punished by her school rather than a court for setting up her website, it probably wouldn’t even have been news.

The law strikes me as inconsistent in its attitude toward minors: first it denies them individual rights, on the ground that they’re not yet capable of exercising moral judgment. But then it punishes them harshly for all sorts of offenses (in many cases more harshly than adults), thereby presupposing the moral responsibility they’re not yet supposed to have.

[...]

I think our culture’s insistence on treating children as children even after those children are ready to be treated as adults is

1. weird from the standpoint of anthropology and evolutionary psychology,
2. an excellent prescription for turning out adults who still think the way children are supposed to,
3. a useful tool for cracking down on unwanted precocity of all kinds, and
4. a terrific way to make up for the unfortunate encroachments these past few centuries of justice, civilized behavior, and protections for the nerdy and weak, by keeping human beings in such a savage environment for the first years of their lives that by the time they’re let out, the new Enlightenment nonsense has difficulty gaining a foothold.

Again, read the whole thing: he identifies several objections to lowering the voting age, and demolishes them one after another.

This time, an ageist bigot loses it

Come with me once more to the magical land of Slashdot, where user "c6gunner" reveals these startling facts:

• There's no difference between students who are legally required to attend school and employees who voluntarily attend a job.
  
• "Legality" and "laws" refer to school codes of conduct.
  
• The right to vote is unimportant as long as you can still stage protests and sign petitions.
  
• Students are actually free to choose any school they want. All the laws saying otherwise must be figments of my imagination.
  
• Adults who stay at their current job because they don't see any suitable alternatives are in the same situation as minors who attend their current school because they'll face fines, confinement, or other legal penalties if they refuse.
  
• Minors who are required to attend school are "outliers", not part of the "general trend".
  

Another copyright apologist loses it

Start here and read on. In this thread, we learn:

• Morality is the same as legality.


• Murder is morally equivalent to copyright infringement.


• People value "value", not property or the enjoyment they get from that property (utility), so causing the resale value of an item to fall is equivalent to stealing that item.


• Copying a file without permission is equivalent to keying someone's car and urinating on the seats.


• My work as a developer is a fantasy, and I have not yet reached puberty.