Internet and Responsibility: A New-ish Moral Conundrum

With the passing of Hurricane Sandy, both in real life and online, a new problem rears its ugly head: the lies spread by anonymous people, and the lifting of their anonymity.

In other words, some jerk maliciously spread lies during the hurricane, thinking he would remain anonymous behind his Twitter handle, @ComfortablySmug.  But someone discovered his real name and wrote about it.  Now the man has quit his job as the campaign manager for a New York congressional candidate and apologized online for his behavior.

Some people think ComfortablySmug should be protected by the First Amendment, and that no one should have outed his name.  Other people want to know why (a reasonable question, in my opinion), and think that ComfortablySmug should be charged for any damage he did.  Either way, the question remains - how do free speech, anonymity  and the Internet go together these days?

I don't have a definite answer to this question.  I know that in some countries, people need anonymity to protect themselves, because their government would arrest or persecute them for dissenting beliefs, thoughts, or ideas.  Even in the U.S., a person who lives outside the societal norm might want or need anonymity to protect their job or reputation.

For instance, ViolentAcrez was a Reddit user who likes looking at very young woman (16 or 17), likes incest,  promotes violence against women, and made a name for himself as a creepy old man Internet troll.  A journalist for Gawker figured out that ViolentAcrez is really Michael Brutsch, a 49-year-old software programmer in Texas with kids.  Since being outed, Mr. Brutsch lost his job.

Now, I personally think that Michael Brutsch deserves whatever he gets, because he spent a lot of time combing through Facebook and other places to find pictures of teenage girls and then repost them without getting permission.  He also started a subreddits called Rapebait, Choke a Bitch, Rape Jokes, and Pics of Dead Kids.

But after Gawker outed Brutsch, several Reddit users called foul, claiming that somehow Brutsch's activities fell under Free Speech.  Well, if Brutsch is covered by Free Speech, so is the article outing him.

Yet, ViolentAcrez and ComfortablySmug are the extreme cases of a person using the anonymity provided by the Internet in a way to do harm.  What about the moderate cases?  What if someone wants to complain about a boss at work, but doesn't want to get fired?  What is a student doesn't like a teacher, but feels scared to air his or her feelings?

When does being anonymous help a person and/or society, and when does it allow for criminals and miscreants to do harm?

(BTW, you can watch CNN interview Michael Brutsch here.)

Free Ranging and the Internet: Boy, Do We Have It Wrong

Every week or so, I read another article on the Internet for parents, explaining how to spy on their kids through technology and justifying the behavior with stories of bullied children or teenagers gone wild.

To all of those article writers, parenting "experts", and helicopter-enablers:  I call bullshit.

We, as parents, spend time every day teaching our kids what we consider right and wrong from the moment they are born.  Unless you are in the military and have been deployed the entire time your child has lived, you have role-modeled appropriate behavior for your kids, from putting away your shoes to how you use the Internet.  If you play video games, I guarantee that your kids will love video games.  If you read book, your child will most likely be a book lover.  And I must admit, I love how much my kids want to spend time together talking about life, playing card games, and going on walks.

But at some point, you need to let go.  That means trusting in your own parenting skills and trusting your child.

Trust means that you don't install apps on their computer, tablet, cell phone, or smart phone to track your kid's movements both on line and in real life.  Trust means that you don't read your kid's Facebook page, blog, or other online persona unless you are willingly invited to.  Even then, I would decline the invitation to show that you know your child can handle himself or herself.  Trust means you don't look through the web browser's history to see what web pages your child visited.

Otherwise, you are NOT trusting your child.

In fact, if you look over your child's shoulder in any of these ways, you are telling your child that you do not think he or she is trustworthy.

Period.

Trust is binary - either you trust your kid or you don't trust your kid.  There is no middle ground, no "well, maybe..." in this equation.  Once your kid is old enough - around the age of 10-13 - you have the choice to either reinforced your kid's self-confidence by trusting her, or the choice to treat her as a sneaky, no-good, low-down, dirty liar who simultaneously will break every rule ever given her while forgetting how to protect herself to become an instant victim.

Do you really think that way about your own child?

If you do, then I suggest therapy, for both you and your family.  If you don't, then think about the message you send when you install iGuardian Teen, an instant spy tool for the discerning parent.  The message is "I have no trust that you will obey traffic laws, so I must be aware of every move you make so that I can criticize correct how you drive."

Or the message you send when you install MinorMonitor.  "Personally, I think I did a poor job of raising you to handle the real world.  You clearly will never notice when you get bullied, and if you did notice you would never tell me since I close down lines of communication every chance I get.  So I am monitoring your Twitter and Facebook pages to keep you safe, since you are unequipped and unable to do that yourself."

If you worry about your child's online safety, might I suggest the radical idea of talking to your child about your fears and then listening to him respond to your fears.  Maybe your child already has a strategy to handle online bullies.  Maybe she knows how to distinguish a pervert from a nice person.  And if your kid does not have these skills, then chances are neither do you and the two of you can learn them together.

Before anyone gets upset and starts down the "but I know my kid will see porn/violence/bad stuff", I am not saying that your kids won't see what you consider inappropriate images or "bad stuff".   In fact, finding such bad stuff is a way for your kid to internally begin the emotional break from childhood to adult. Looking at nude people or violence might even help your kid define her own definition of "bad stuff".

So suck it up.  If you ever want your kid to grow into a functioning, healthy adult, you need to act like an adult now and let go.

Pirates and LendInk and Lies, Oh, My!!

The Dreaded Scourge of the Internet

Pirates and piracy periodically dominate the headlines, as the government attempts to pass new laws supposedly to protect the consumer, as the RIAA takes a teenager with clueless parents to court over alleged file sharing for outrageously large amounts of money, or most recently as a bunch of idiots decide a legitimate business is secretly a pirate site.

Last week, someone in the publishing industry noticed a website called LendInk.com.  This little business venture hooked up people willing to lend out their e-books with people who wanted to borrow e-books.  Started by a disabled vet, Dale Porter, LendInk only handled the initial exchange, sending both parties to the appropriate vendor - either Amazon or Barnes and Noble - to do the actual lending of the e-book.

It seems that the notion that a person can lend an e-book to another person, in a manner similar to the public library lending a book to a patron, is too radical, too new, and too close to piracy for a lot of authors out there.  What began as a misunderstanding on one person's part turned into several cease and desist notices to the website host and several lawsuits threats.  By August 8th, the website disappeared from the cloud.

Now, of course, comes the backlash from the rest of the world.  Indie authors who support LendInk cry foul at those who brought the website down, since people who borrow books tend to buy the ones that they like.  Readers wanting to try out new authors and authors trying to attract new readers - both groups lost out here.

But as people focus on this event, I think we need to step back and take a good look at Internet piracy.

First, let's use some common sense.  Some people will steal creative works (regardless of form factor), no matter what.  No law will stop them, nor will threat of prosecution.  It's a fact of life.  But the vast majority of people will pay money for creative works, be it books, movies, music, or art.

There is a catch though, and the catch for electronic purchases includes the following conditions:

• The item needs a reasonable price point.
• The buyer has the right to move the purchase from one digital device to another without hassle.
• The buyer can lend or give the item to a friend without jumping through hoops.
• The distributor needs to treat the buyer with respect, and not assume the person is a thief (see the image below).

There's a story among game developers about a man who purposefully did not stop pirates from getting free copies of his games.  Why?  Because the pirates wrote reviews and discussed the games that they liked online, generating more than enough revenue for the man to balance out what was lost to the pirates.

Neil Gaiman released his book, American Gods, online for free back in 2008 with no DRM.  All of his print book sales went up.  All. Of. Them.

In 2009, Wil Wheaton published a DRM-free pdf of his book, Sunken Treasure, on Amazon for $5.  Not only did sales of this electronic book explode, but the print version also began to sell again, as well as some of his other books.

There are more stories out there of people who reject DRM and trust people to be nice and who made money doing so; there is even a grassroots movement called Defective by Design that aims to rid the world of DRM.

So why are we so worried about pirates and piracy that a group of misanthropes shut down a legitimate business because of a supposed piratical threat?  Especially since pirates actually help sales and therefore the bottom line?