Mike Linksvayer

Ethan Zuckerman writes:

Under US law, pretty much anything you write down is copyrighted. Scrawl an original note on a napkin and it’s protected until 70 years after your death.

Note: None of this post should be taken as criticism of Zuckerman. I’m just using his sentence as a foil. He is a great blogger, the above is a great post of his, which furthermore talks about the great work of some of my colleagues…

In what sense is the hypothetical scrawl above “protected” by copyright? A scrawl might be protected by a glass case or digitization, or even (somewhat remotely) by secure property rights in napkins, glass cases, and computers.

No, copyright restricts the ability of others to use representations of the scrawl legally, without obtaining permission from the scrawler or a party the scrawler has transferred this right to censor to.

Which brings us to another inaccurate phrasing, which has many variations, all along the lines of “copyright is the right to … a copyrighted work” where the ellipsis are filled by words like “publish”, “distribute”, or “perform”. Not true! Copyright is not required to have the right to publish a work, or public domain works would be illegal to publish. Instead, copyright is the right to legally restrict others from publishing, distributing, performing works.

So use of the term ‘copyright protection’ (2,930,000 Google hits) instead of ‘copyright restriction’ (19,300 Google hits) is a peeve of mine and seeing copyright equated with censorship a small joy.

Autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services launched today.

I’ve written about the subject of this group and statement a number of times on this blog, starting with Constitutionally Open Services two years ago. I think that post holds up pretty well. Here were my tentative recommendations:

So what can be done to make the web application dominated future open source in spirit, for lack of a better term?

First, web applications should be super easy to manage (install, upgrade, customize, secure, backup) so that running your own is a real option. Applications like WordPress and MediaWiki have made large strides, especially in the installation department, but still require a lot of work and knowledge to run effectively.

There are some applications that centralizaton makes tractable or at least easier and better, e.g., web scale search, social aggregation — which basically come down to high bandwidth, low latency data transfer. Various P2P technologies (much to learn from, field wide open) can help somewhat, but the pull of centralization is very strong.

In cases were one accepts a centralized web application, should one demand that application be somehow constitutionally open? Some possible criteria:

• All source code for the running service should be published under an open source license and developer source control available for public viewing.
• All private data available for on-demand export in standard formats.
• All collaboratively created data available under an open license (e.g., one from Creative Commons), again in standard formats.
• In some cases, I am not sure how rare, the final mission of the organization running the service should be to provide the service rather than to make a financial profit, i.e., beholden to users and volunteers, not investors and employees. Maybe. Would I be less sanguine about the long term prospects of Wikipedia if it were for-profit? I don’t know of evidence for or against this feeling.

Consider all of this ignorant speculation. Yes, I’m just angling for more freedom lunches.

I was honored to participate in a summit called by the Free Software Foundation to discuss these issues March of this year, along with far greater thinkers and doers. Autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement (named for the FSF’s office address) are the result of continued work among the summit participants, not yet endorsed by the FSF (nor by any other organization). Essentially everything I conjectured above made it into the statement (not due to me, they are fairly obvious points, at least as of 2008, and others made them long before) with the exception of making deployment easier, which is mundane, and service governance issues, which the group did discuss, but inconclusively.

There’s much more to say about this, but for now (and likely for some time, at the rate I write, though this activity did directly inspire me to propose speaking at an upcoming P2P industry summit, which I will early next month–I’m also speaking tomorrow at BALUG and will mention autonomo.us briefly–see info on both engagements) I wanted to address two immediate and fairly obvious critiques.

Brian Rowe wrote:

“Where it is possible, they should use Free Software equivalents that run on their own computer.” This is near Luddite talk… It is almost always possible to use an app on your own comp, but it is so inefficient. Networked online apps are not inherently evil, should you back up your work
offline, yes. Should you have alternative options and data portability, yes. You should fight to impove them. But you should not avoid them like the plauge.

The statement doesn’t advocate avoiding network services–see “Where it is possible”, and most of the statement concerns how network services can be free. However, it is easy to read the sentence Rowe quoted and see Luddism. I hope that to some it instead serves as a challenge, for:

• Applications that run on your own computer can be networked, i.e., P2P.
• Your own computer does not only include your laptop and home server, but any hardware you control, and I think that should often include virtual hardware.

Wes Felter wrote:

I see a lot about software licensing and not much about identity and privacy. I guess when all you have is the AGPL everything looks like a licensing problem.

True enough, but lots of people are working on identity and privacy. If the FSF doesn’t work on addressing the threats to freedom as in free software posed by network services, it isn’t clear who would. And I’d suggest that any success free software has in the network services world will have beneficial effects on identity and privacy for users–unless you think these are best served by identity silos and security through obscurity.

Finally, the FSF is an explicitly ideological organization (I believe mostly for the greater good), so the statement (although not yet endorsed by the FSF, I believe all participants are probably FSF members, staff, or directors) language reflect that. However, I suspect by far the most important work to be done to maintain software freedom is technical and pragmatic, for example writing P2P applications, making sharing modified source of network applications a natural part of deployment (greatly eased by the rise of distributed version control), and convincing users and service providers that it is in their interest to expect and provide free/open network services.

I suggest going on to read Evan Prodromou (the doer above) on autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement and Rufus Pollock on the Open Software Service Definition, which more or less says the same thing as the FSS in the language of a definition (and using the word open), coordinated to launch at the same time.

See Evan Prodromou’s post on launching identi.ca, good background reading on open services.

I love the name of Prodromou’s company, Control Yourself. Presumably it is a reference to discussions of user autonomy as a better frame than freedom or openness … for discussions of concerns addressed by free/open source software and its ilk.

You can follow Evan’s microblogging at identi.ca/evan.

I’ve only used Twitter for an ongoing joke that probably nobody gets, but for now I’ll be trying to honestly microblog at identi.ca/mlinksva.

A few observations and things learned from the last eight days.

Go to a page with a table, for example this one (sorry, semi-nsfw). Hold down the control key and select cells. How could I not have known about this!? Unfortunately, copy & paste seems to produce tab separated values in a single row even when pasting from mutliple rows in the HTML table (tried with Firefox and Epiphany). Still really useful when you only want to copy one column of a table, but if you want all of the columns, don’t hold down the control key and row boundaries get newlines as they should rather than tabs. (Thanks Asheesh.)

I feel really stupid about this one. I’ve assumed that a (US) Health Savings Account was a spend within the year or lose your contributions arrangement, but that’s what a Flexible Spending Account is (I have no predictable medical expenses, so such an account makes no sense for me). A HSA is an investment account much like an IRA, except you can spend from it without penalty upon incurring medical expenses rather than old age. You can only contribute to a HSA while enrolled in a high deductible health insurance plan, which I’ll try to switch to next year. (Thanks Ahrash.)

I saw a few presentations at LugRadio Live USA, in addition to giving one. Miguel de Icaza’s on Mono (content roughly corresponding to this post) and Ian Murdock’s on OpenSolaris were both in part about software packaging. Taken together, they make a good case for open source facilitating cross polination of ideas and code across operating system platforms.

Aaron Bockover and Gabriel Burt did a presentation/demo on Banshee, showing off some cool track selection/playlist features and talking about more coming. I may have to try switching back to Banshee as my main audio player (from Rhythmbox, with occasional use of Songbird for web-heavy listening or checking on how the program is coming along). Banshee runs on Mono, and both are funded by Novell, which also (though I don’t know how their overall investment compares) has an enterprise desktop linux product.

John Buckman gave an entertaining talk on open source and open content (including the slide at right). My talk probably was not entertaining at all, but used the question ‘how far behind [free/open source software] is free/open culture?’ to string together selected observations about the field.

Benjamin Mako Hill did a presentation on Revealing Errors (meant both ways). I found myself wanting to be skeptical of the power of technical errors to expose political/power relationships, but I imagine the concept could use a little hype — there’s definitely something there. The talk made me more sensitive to errors in any case. For example, when I transferred funds from a money market account to checking to pay taxes, an email notice included this (emphasis in original):

Your confirmation number is 0.

Zero? Really? The transaction did go through.

Tuesday I attended the Media Web Meetup V: The Gulf Between NorCal and SoCal, is it so big?, the idea being (in this context pushed by Songbird founder Rob Lord; I presented at the first Media Web Meetup and have attended a few others) that in Northern California entrepreneurs are trying to build new services around music, nearly all stymied by protectionist copyright holders in Southern California. I really did not need to listen to yet another panel asking how the heck is the music recording distribution industry going to use technology to make money, but this was a pretty good one as those go. One of the panelists kept urging technologists to “fix [music] metadata” as if doing so were the key to enabling profit from digital music. I suppressed the urge to sound a skeptical note, as investing more in metadata is one of the least harmful things the industry might do. Not that I don’t think metadata is great or anything.

Wendy Seltzer / CC BY

Thursday evening I was on a ‘Copyright 2.0′ panel put on by the American Society of Media Photographers Northern California. I thought my photo selection for my first slide was pretty clever. No, copyright expansion is not always good for the interests of professional photographers. The other panelists and the audience were actually more open minded (both meanings) than I expected, and certainly realistic. The photographer on the panel even stated the obvious (my paraphrase from memory): new technology has allowed lots of people to explore their photographry talents who would otherwise have been unable to, and maybe some professional photographers just aren’t that good and should find other work. My main takeway from the panel is that it is very difficult for an independent photographer to successfully pursue unauthorized users in court. With the sometime exception of one, the other panelists all strongly advised photographers to avoid going to court except as a last resort, and even then, first doing a rational calculation of what the effort is likely to cost and gain. The best advice was probably to try to turn unauthorized users into clients.

Friday evening I went to San Jose to be on a panel about New Media Artists and the Law. Unlike Thursday’s panel, this one was mostly about how to use and re-use rather than how to prevent use. This (and some nostalgia) made me miss living in Silicon Valley — I lived in Sunnyvale two years (2003-2005) and San Jose (2005-2006) before moving back to San Francisco. Nothing really new came up, but I did enjoy the enthusiasm of the other panelists and the audience (as I did the previous day).

Staturday I went to Ubuntu Restaurant in Napa, which apparently does vegetable cuisine but does not market itself as vegetarian. I think that’s a good idea. The food was pretty good.

I’ve been listening to Hazard Records 59 and 60: Calida Construccio by various and Unhazardous Songs by Xmarx. Lovely Hell (mp3) from the latter is rather poppy.

LugRadio Live comes to San Francisco this weekend. Only $10, has something for anyone interested in open source, open content, open media, etc., Saturday evening drinks on Google. I’m speaking Sunday.

Next Thursday evening I’ll be speaking to presumably a very different audience at the American Society of Media Photographers Northern California on Copyright in a Hyper Digital Age: Copyrights? Copyleft? What rights are left?, also open to the public and cheap.

Next month, should anyone in Boston read this, I’ll be at Berkman@10.

In July I’ll literally be speaking at a Linux User Group meeting — BALUG, free or cheap with Chinese food. The amusing thing about this is that their lineup for the rest of the year is a who’s who list of open source — mine is the only name that requires any affiliation.

In lieu of going to SXSW this year, I recommend you check out the best session from SXSWi 2007.

If you are at SXSW this year, see (other) Creative Commons people at the tradeshow, parties, and panels.

The $300 “ultra deluxe edition” of Nine Inch Nails‘ Ghosts I-IV, limited to 2500 copies, sold out in a couple days (I believe released Sunday, no longer available this morning). There are some manufacturing costs, but they don’t appear to be using any precious materials. So if an artist typically makes $1.60 on a $15.99 CD sale, profit from sales of the limited edition already matches profit from a CD selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

Then there are non-limited sales of a $75 merely “deluxe edition”, $10 CD, and $5 download, and whatever other products NIN comes up with around Ghosts.

The ultra deluxe success seems to me to validate the encouragement by some to pursue large revenue from rabid fans and collectors willing and able to pay for personalization, authenticity, embodiment, etc., rather than attempting to suppress zero cost distribution to the masses.

Speaking of distribution, click on the magnet to search for a fully legal P2P download of Ghosts, assuming you have the right filesharing software installed.

nin_ghosts_I-IV_mp3.zip (283.7 MB)

I’ve written about Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking twice. Watch a five minute video illustrating his ideas.

Side notes possibly only of interest to me: The interviewer is Mark Gorton, founder of LimeWire, and the video is under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.

Unlike recorded music, parking is a rivalrous good. At first approximation, recorded music should be free and parking very expensive. Of course policy is typically backwards.

Via Urban Planning Research.

The Wikimedia Foundation board has passed a resolution that is a step toward Wikipedia migrating to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. I have an uninteresting interest in this due to working at Creative Commons (I do not represent them on this blog), but as someone who wants to see free knowledge “win” and achieve revolutionary impact, I declare this an important step forward. The current fragmentation of the universe of free content along the lines of legally incompatible but similar in spirit copyleft licenses delays and endangers the point at which that universe reaches critical mass — when any given project decides to use a copyleft license merely because then being able to include content from the free copyleft universe makes that decision make sense. This has worked fairly well in the software world with the GPL as the copyleft license.

Copyleft was and is a great hack, and useful in many cases. But practically it is a major barrier to collaboration in some contexts and politically it is still based on censorship. So I’m always extremely pleased by any expansion of the public domain. There could hardly be a more welcome expansion than Daniel J. Bernstein’s release of his code (most notably qmail) into the public domain. Most of the practical benefit (including his code in free software distributions) could have been achieved by released under any free software license, including the GPL. But politically, check out this two minute video of Bernstein pointing out some of the problems of copyright and announcing that his code is in the public domain.

Bernstein (usually referred to as ‘djb’) also recently doubled the reward for finding a security hole in qmail to US$1,000. I highly recommend his Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0, also available as something approximating slides (also see an interesting discussion of the paper on cap-talk).

Last month another site for aggregating donation pledges to open source software projects launched.

I’m not sure there’s anything significant that sets Cofundos apart from microPledge featurewise. Possibly a step where bidders (pledgers) vote on which developer bid to accept. However I’m not certain how a developer is chosen on microPledge — their FAQ says “A quote will be chosen that delivers the finished and paid product to the pledgers most quickly based on their current pledging rate (not necessarily the shortest quote).” microPledge’s scheme for in progress payments may set it apart.

In terms of marketing and associations, Cofundos comes from the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web research group at the University of Leipzig, producers of DBpedia, about which I’ve written. Many of the early proposed projects are directly related to AKSW research. Their copyright policy is appreciated.

microPledge is produced by three Christian siblings who don’t push their religion.

Cofundos lists 61 proposed projects after one month, microPledge lists about 160 after about three and a half months. I don’t see any great successes on either site, but both are young, and perhaps I’m not looking hard enough.

Cofundos and microPledge are both welcome experiments, though I don’t expect either to become huge. On the other hand, even modest success would set a valuable precedent. In that vein I’ve been pretty skeptical about the chances of Fundable, they seem to have attracted a steady stream of users. Although most projects seem to be uninteresting (pledges for bulk purchases, group trips, donations to an individual’s college fund, etc), some production of public goods does seem to being funded, including several film projects in the small thousands of dollars range. Indeed, “My short film” is the default project name in their form for starting a project.

It seems to me that creating requirements and getting in front of interested potential donors are the main challenges for sites focused on funding open source software like Cofundos and microPledge (both say they are only starting with software). Requirements are just hard, and there’s little incentive for anyone to visit an aggregator who hasn’t aggregated anything of interest.

I wonder if integrating financial donations into project bug tracking systems would address both challenges? Of course doing so would have risks, both of increasing bureaucracy around processing bugs and feature requests, necessity of implementing new features (and bugs) in the relevant bug tracking software, and altering the incentives of volunteer contributors.

Via Open Knowledge Foundation Blog.

The World Wide Web Consortium and particularly its Semantic Web efforts do great, valuable work. I have one massive complaint, particularly about the latter: they ignore the Web at their peril. Yes, it’s true, as far as I can tell (but mind that I’m one or two steps removed from actually working on the problems), that the W3C and Semantic Web activities do not appreciate the importance of nor dedicate appropriate resources to the Web. Not just the theoretical Web of URIs, but the Web that billions of people use and see.

I’m reminded of this by Ian Davis’ post Is the Semantic Web Destined to be a Shadow?:

My belief is that trust must be considered far earlier and that it largely comes from usage and the wisdom of the crowds, not from technology. Trust is a social problem and the best solution is one that involves people making informed judgements on the metadata they encounter. To make an effective evaluation they need to have the ability to view and explore metadata with as few barriers as possible. In practice this means that the web of data needs to be as accessible and visible as the web of documents is today and it needs to interweave transparently. A separate, dry, web of data is unlikely to attract meaningful attention, whereas one that is a full part of the visible and interactive web that the majority of the population enjoys is far more likely to undergo scrutiny and analysis. This means that HTML and RDF need to be much more connected than many people expect. In fact I think that the two should never be separate and it’s not enough that you can publish RDF documents, you need to publish visible, browseable and engaging RDF that is meaningful to people. Tabular views are a weak substitute for a rich, readable description.

Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency from the Mercatus Center looks like a reasonable exhortation for the U.S. jurisdiction government to publish data in open formats so that government activities may be more easily scrutinized. The paper’s first paragraph:

The federal government makes an overwhelming amount of data publicly available each year. Laws ranging from the Administrative Procedure Act to the Paperwork Reduction Act require these disclosures in the name of transparency and accountability. However, the data are often only nominally publicly available. First, this is the case because it is not available online or even in electronic format. Second, the data that can be found online is often not available in an easily accessible or searchable format. If government information was made public online and in standard open formats, the online masses could be leveraged to help ensure the transparency and accountability that is the reason for making information public in the first place.

That’s great. But if peer produced (a more general and less inflammatory term than crowdsourced; I recommend it) scrutiny of government is great, why not of think tanks? Let’s rewrite that paragraph:

Think tanks produce an overwhelming number of analyses and policy recommendations each year. It is in the interest of the public and the think thanks that these recommendations be of high quality. However, the the data and methodology used to produce these positions are often not publicly available. First, this is the case because the data is not available online or even in electronic format. Second, the analysis that can be found online is often not available in an easily accessible or searchable format. Third, nearly everything published by think tanks is copyrighted. If think tank data and analysis was made public online in standard open formats and under open licenses, the online masses could be leveraged to help ensure the quality and public benefit of the policy recommendations that are the think tanks’ reason for existing in the first place.

Think tanks should lead by example, and improve their product to boot. Note the third point above: unlike U.S. government produced works, the output of think tanks (and everyone else) is restricted by copyright. So think tanks need to take an extra step to ensure openness.

(Actually think tanks only need to lead in their domain of political economy — by following the trails blazed by the Open Access movement in scientific publishing.)

This is only the beginning of leading by example for think tanks. When has a pro-market think tank ever subjected its policy recommendations to market evaluation?

Via Reason.

Two points riffing off Paul Graham’s Why to Move to a Startup Hub (alternate titles: Why to Move to the Startup Hub or Why to Move to Silicon Valley). Probably more obvious, but it’s a theme of this blog:

Immigration difficulties might be another reason to stay put. Dealing with immigration problems is like raising money: for some reason it seems to consume all your attention. A startup can’t afford much of that. One Canadian startup we funded spent about 6 months working on moving to the US. Eventually they just gave up, because they couldn’t afford to take so much time away from working on their software.

(If another country wanted to establish a rival to Silicon Valley, the single best thing they could do might be to create a special visa for startup founders. US immigration policy is one of Silicon Valley’s biggest weaknesses.)

I suspect a jurisdiction would have to include far more than just startup founders in such a program to have any noticeable impact. But it’s not a bad sentiment. Even on purely nationalistic grounds, any jurisdiction (and especially large ones like China, India, Brazil, and Russia) ought to allow unlimited skilled immigration, preferably permanent, including citizenship.

Graham also points out the importance of specialized knowledge, emphasis added:

Boston investors will admit they’re more conservative. Some want to believe this comes from the city’s prudent Yankee character. But Occam’s razor suggests the truth is less flattering. Boston investors are probably more conservative than Silicon Valley investors for the same reason Chicago investors are more conservative than Boston ones. They don’t understand startups as well.

West coast investors aren’t bolder because they’re irresponsible cowboys, or because the good weather makes them optimistic. They’re bolder because they know what they’re doing. They’re the skiers who ski on the diamond slopes. Boldness is the essence of venture investing. The way you get big returns is not by trying to avoid losses, but by trying to ensure you get some of the big hits. And the big hits often look risky at first.

I’ve been meaning to do a post on the below for awhile but don’t have a whole lot to say, so I’ll use this tangent: New business practices and models have a whole lot going against them, even if superior to existing practices in theory — nobody has experience making them work. I suspect this applies to peer production in spades. Building up a critical mass of knowledge about how open source works has been slow going and still has a long way to go, and I’m fond of speculating that open content/free culture is a decade or two behind free software. Prediction markets are obviously in the same boat, and futarchy is far out to sea.

And so is every useful business, social, political, or other change (but keep in mind that some things don’t work, even in theory).

By the way, a startup considering a move to Silicon Valley should make the decision with the aid of prediction markets.

Via Tim O’Reilly.

As usual, I don’t speak for Creative Commons nor any other organization here, not even remotely. Follow the links if you want officialdom.

CC recently launched its fall campaign fundraising campaign (that time of year again) and site revamp. Boing Boing picked it up and noted one of the best bits:

Creative Commons has launched a site redesign to go with its fall fundraising campaign, featuring a new emphasis on the work being done by CC teams globally, backed by sweet open source code, including OpenLayers mapping and Semantic MediaWiki. For bloggers there are new map-themed “Support CC” buttons to help spread the word.

Yes, CC is finally using what I called the most important software project (to a much greater extent on the intranet; and not mentioned, other semantic technologies I’ve blogged about here), ironically now that I’m no longer CTO. Nathan Yergler has been doing a great job in that role, and 2007 will probably as much visible progress on CC technology fronts as the previous four years.

The CC Salon in San Francisco this Wednesday evening should be excellent, featuring researcher Giorgos Cheliotis (on counting CC licensed works–actually more than that, but the description works with this post’s title) and some very positive announcements, while Jon Phillips will be giving a brief talk on CC at the EFF Bootcamp during the day in Mountain View.

It took a long time to hire a new General Counsel, in no small part because Mia Garlick, the previous GC, set the bar very high.

And CC is hiring an accountant, full time in San Francisco.

A few weeks ago I moderated a panel on DRM at a “music technology” conference. I wrote it up on the Creative Commons blog. Short version is a consensus from non-activists that music DRM is on its way out.

But what I want to complain about here is the use of “music industry” understood to mean the recording distribution industry and “music technology” understood to refer to use of the net by the same industry. Similarly, “future of music” understood to refer to the development or protection of recording distribution industry business models in the face of digital networks. Each of these gets under my skin.

My contention is that the future of music is determined by changes in music making technology and culture. The recording distribution industry has just about nothing to do with it. It seems that every new genre from ancient history to present has sprung from the latest in music making technology and cultural antecedents, and developed its essential forms before the recording distribution industry got a clue (or recently, started to sue).

I may be overstating my case, especially with regards to rock, but fuck rock stars.

If you’re interested in the actual future of music and want to look for it in an industry more narrow than “information technology”, it’s the musical instruments industry that you want.

Before this year’s SXSW (which I blogged rather cynically, last post in series, go back from there) I spent a couple days in Houston and one in San Antonio. I was reminded to blog about this side trip yesterday when I got a note from Schmap Guides that a couple of my photos had been used in the Schmap Houston Guide: Hobbit Cafe and Rothko Chapel. Schmap has been using Creative Commons licensed photos to illustrate its guides for over a year, though this one is nice, as my photos are generally mediocre to awful.

Overall I loved Houston, perhaps in part as a reaction to all those who told me I would hate it. Yes, it has massive highways with continuous feeder side roads, but they seem to work pretty well. Other things being equal, I’d like to see cities become more extreme versions of themselves, and thus more highly differentiated. Light rail is a travesty in Houston and San Francisco should become Sanhattan.

For a more sterotypically urbane feel, the Upper Kirby neighborhood is nice. Hobbit Cafe, which I highly recommend, is located there. Montrose, where the Rothko Chapel is located, is even nicer. I was not overly impressed with the chapel, but the nearby Menil is very nice. I felt the building suited very well to being a museum, unlike many museum buildings. I loved the temporary Robert Rauschenberg cardboards exhibit.

Sugar Land seems like an excellent place to tour a wealthy but inexpensive suburb, but don’t order a five pepper dish from Thai Cottage II, for it is artless and not very spicy either.

The Houston Chronicle has one of the best newspaper web sites, which is to say it isn’t awful.

I look forward to visiting Houston again, having not even scratched its surface.

Killing bad products is essential to the health of a product line. “Bad” might mean defective, poor fit, or even merely unpopular.

So I’m happy that Creative Commons is retiring two little used licenses.

If working for a new project of a startup-like nonprofit in San Francisco involving [open] education, [copyright] law, and [semantic web] technology, perhaps you should look into applying for Executive Director of CC Learn. I could imagine an education, legal, or technology person with some expertise and much passion for the other two working out.

Student programmers, Creative Commons is participating in Google Summer of Code as a mentoring organization.

It is too late to apply for a summer technology or “free culture” internship, but keep CC in mind for next summer and (possibly) this fall.

Update 20070409: There are three open positions in addition to CC Learn ED above:

• General Counsel
• Web Engineer
• Administrative Assistant

I missed Tuesday morning’s Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present and Future Battlefields for sleep and the Creative Commons moderated Open Knowledge vs. Controlled Knowledge, but noticed two very interesting items from Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich’s blog post:

I am pushing to make add-on installation not require a restart in Firefox 3, and I intend to help improve and promote GreaseMonkey security in the Firefox 3 timeframe too.

Please do! Drop all other Firefox 3 features if necessary.

And from Eich’s sixth slide:

Working with Opera via WHATWG on <video>

• Unencumbered Ogg Theora decoder in all browsers
• Ogg Vorbis for <audio>
• Other formats possible
• DHTML player controls

I’ve barely thought about <audio> and <video> but if their presence could encourage non-obfuscated media URLs I’m predisposed in their favor, but universal deployment of unencumbered audio and video decoders via browsers would be excellent.

I attended Perspectives on Designing for Global Audiences because the topic is important for Creative Commons — parts of the CC site are translated into many languages, there are many jurisdicton affiliates, some of which run their own sites. I want to do much more and better.

The panel’s focus seemed to be on big budget projects — their advice could be summed up as “hire locally and do lots of research.” This mindset caused them to take an audience question about asking users to help with localization as merely being about how to conduct user research.

One panelist claimed that communication is the first use of the net, then ecommerce, and finally entertainment, where the net is well developed. This sounds to me like a simple extrapolation from development in wealthy regions — I wouldn’t be suprised if entertainment arrives before ecommerce in some places.

Practical tips were interspersed. I’ll assume there’s some truth to these, which included:

• Chinese don’t like whitespace, pack a page with information.
• In Latin America “rich media” is hated more than spam. Yay, another argument against Flash.
• Many audiences don’t like scrolling. Too bad, I don’t like clicking and prefer long pages.