Economics

Future of Intellectual Protectionism and not much Innovation Policy

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

I read all of the pieces selected for a „Future of copyright” anthology resulting from a contest run by the Modern Poland Foundation (apparently the winner of a small cash prize will be announced tomorrow; I highly recommend all of the pieces below and commend the judges for their selections):

7 are fiction (the 3 exceptions are me, Spitzlinger, and Togi). 5 of these are dystopian (exceptions: Binns, Mansoux), 4 of which (exception: Żyła) involve some kind of fundamental loss of personal control as a result of intellectual protectionism (even more fundamental than drug war style enforcement involves, which Żyła’s does concern). 3 of these (exception: Eddie) involve extrapolations of DRM, 2 of which (exception: Melin) involve DRM implants.

I’d like to see versions of the dystopian stories written as IP propaganda, e.g., recast as RIAA/MPAA pieces from the future (several of the stories have funnily named future enforcement organizations in that vein). Such could be written as satire, apology, or even IP totalist advocacy (utopian rather than dystopian).

Of the dystopian stories, Solís is probably most dystopian, Eddie most humorous, and Betteridge overall best executed. Żyła needs a bit of development — the trend posited is incongruous and unexplained — but maybe due to an unknown factor to be suggested by fictional future freakonomics, or perhaps I just missed it. Melin ends with some hope, but annoys me for contemporary reasons — why would the recipient of a body part artificially grown with “open” methods be constrained in the disposition of that part by a “Creative Commons license” on those methods? Another reason to discourage use of CC licenses for hardware design.

The two non-dystopian stories take the form of a “letter from the future” in which various “open” movements and “models” win (Binns; if I had to bet on a winner of the contest, I’d put my money on this one) and an allegory for the history and projected future of copyright (Mansoux; probably the piece I enjoyed reading most).

Of the 3 non-fiction pieces, Togi is most non-standard — a rant in the form of lemmas — and fun, though briefly goes off the rails in asserting that “those entities which represent the greatest tax gain will be preferred by government.” If that were the case, all that is prohibited would instead be taxed. Statements about “revenue” leave little wiggle room, but I suppose a charitable interpretation would include in “tax gain” all rents to those influencing power, be they bootleggers, baptists, or those directly obtaining tax revenue. Spitzlinger accepts the stories my piece rejects and suggests something like the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license be the default for new works, with the possibility of additional temporary restriction (a one-year usufruct, perhaps?).

All of the pieces evince unhappiness with the current direction of information governance. Of those that reveal anything about where they stand on the reform spectrum (admitting that one dimension makes for an impoverished description of reform possibilities; that’s one of the points I hoped to communicate in my piece) I’d place Binns, Melin, and Spitzlinger away from abolition, and me, Mansoux, and Togi toward abolition.

I expect the contest and anthology to be criticized for only representing reform viewpoints. Sadly, no maximalist pieces were submitted. The most moderate reform submission didn’t follow contest rules (not a new piece, no license offered). More than alternate perspective versions of IP dystopias, I’d like to see attempts to imagine future systems which increase private returns to innovation, perhaps looking nothing like today’s copyright, patent, etc., and increase overall social welfare — I’m dubious, but please try.

Update 20120524: The two most fun and non-standard entries won — Mansoux, with an honorable mention to Togi. I now must also congratulate the judges on their good taste. Read those two, or the whole anthology (pdf).

Posted in Books, Creative Commons, DRM, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Politics | No Comments »

The world has summarily discarded vast systems of restrictions on the labor mobility of medieval serfs, slaves, women, South African blacks, indigenous Australians, and a long list of others.

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

I highly recommend the paper Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? (pdf, summary) by Michael Clemens as well as a companion materials (mp3 interview).

Clemens surveys the small (four studies; I think I’d only heard of one of them) literature that has estimated the gains from removing all barriers to international migration. The estimates range from 67% to 147% of global product! Compare with summing high and low estimates for removing all barriers to international trade and investment: between 0.4% and 5.8% of global product. Yet the amount of attention given to these topics by economists is the inverse, and mostly from the immigration, rather than emigration side of the coin. At best a case of chasing easy precision over oomph (Clemens speculates lack of study could be due to obviousness, mercantilist/nationalist tradition, and lack of data).

I was happy to see mention of historical examples:

Of course, these elasticities could be different at much higher levels of emigration. The literature gives no clear support for such a pattern, however, even under greatly increased migration. In historical cases of large reductions in barriers to labor mobility between high-income and low-income populations or regions, those with high wages have not experienced a large decline. For example, wages of whites in South Africa have not shown important declines since the end of the apartheid regime (Leibbrandt and Levinsohn, 2011), despite the total removal of very large barriers to the physical movement and occupational choice of a poor population that outnumbered the rich population six to one. The recent advent of unlimited labor mobility between some Eastern European countries and Great Britain, though accompanied by large and sudden migration flows, has not caused important declines in British wages (Blanchflower and Shadforth, 2009).

“Brain drain” used an excuse for apartheid (it’s good for them!) makes me sad, but gladly the literature does not offer support for the effect, as I suspected. There’s a passing mention in the paper, and a bit more in the interview, concerning emigration from Sweden — Clemens says 1/3rd of the population left. The two citations in the linked Wikipedia article claim 20% and 33%, but probably cover different time periods. I’d like to see a comparison of annual emigration rates for various geographies at various times. Clemens also says that one can read anti-immigrant statements in U.S. newspapers a 100+ years ago that mirror those of today.

A couple other quotes from the paper:

economists should be open to the possibility that dramatic changes in what is practical can happen over several decades. After all, changes in geographic labor mobility that were unthinkable only a few decades ago have come to pass. Through the 1980s, a Polish national attempting to emigrate to West Germany could be shot by soldiers sealing the Inner German border from the east. Today, Polish jobseekers may move freely throughout Germany. The world has summarily discarded vast systems of restrictions on the labor mobility of medieval serfs, slaves, women, South African blacks, indigenous Australians, and a long list of others.

[...]

These initial results accord well with an entirely separate macroeconomic literature (for example, Hall and Jones 1999) which finds that most of the productivity gap between rich and poor countries is accounted for by place-specific total factor productivity, not by productivity differences inherent to workers. Large differences in location-specific total factor productivity mean that free movement of goods and capital cannot by themselves achieve the global equalization of wages, as they can in the most abstract trade models (O’Rourke and Sinott, 2004; Freeman, 2006, Kremer, 2006).

Place-specific total factor productivity can increase, and people in all places should strive to do so (best autonomously) — that’s approximately what “development” is about — results are very, very mixed. I wonder if various “open” things can’t help more than they do now, and will write about such eventually, but it’d be on the margin. And international apartheid is an abomination that should be eliminated immediately regardless of the long-term substitutability of development and migration.

The economics profession of the 20th century has taken a pass on migration, as they have on IP, with even more tragic results. Please change that! As his interviewer says, Clemens’ paper sketches a research program good for many Ph.D. theses.

Posted in Apartheid, Economics, Politics | No Comments »

Future of Copyright

Monday, April 30th, 2012

“Copyright” (henceforth, copyrestriction) is merely a current manifestation of humanity’s malgovernance of information, of commons, of information commons (the combination being the most pertinent here). Copyrestriction was born of royal censorship and monopoly grants. It has acquired an immense retinue of administrators, advocates, bureaucrats, goons, publicists, scholars, and more. Its details have changed and especially proliferated. But its concept and impact are intact: grab whatever revenue and control you can, given your power, and call your grabbing a “right” and necessary for progress. As a policy, copyrestriction is far from unique in exhibiting these qualities. It is only particularly interesting because it, or more broadly, information governance, is getting more important as everything becomes information intensive, increasingly via computation suffusing everything. Before returning to the present and future, note that copyrestriction is also not temporally unique among information policies. Restriction of information for the purposes of control and revenue has probably existed since the dawn of agriculture, if not longer, e.g., cults and guilds.

Copyrestriciton is not at all a right to copy a work, but a right to persecute others who distribute, perform, etc, a work. Although it is often said that a work is protected by copyrestriction, this is strictly not true. A work is protected through the existence of lots of copies and lots of curators. The same is true for information about a work, i.e., metadata, e.g., provenance. Copyrestriction is an attack on the safety of a work. Instead, copyrestriction protects the revenue and control of whoever holds copyrestriction on a work. In some cases, some elements of control remain with a work’s immediate author, even if they no longer hold copyrestriction: so-called moral rights.

Copyrestriction has become inexorably more restrictive. Technology has made it increasingly difficult for copyrestriction holders and their agents to actually restrict others’ copying and related activity. Neither trend has to give. Neither abolition nor police state in service of copyrestriction scenarios are likely in the near future. Nor is the strength of copyrestricition the only dimension to consider.

Free and open source software has demonstrated the ethical and practical value of the opposite of copyrestriction, which is not its absence, but regulation mandating the sharing of copies, specifically in forms suitable for inspection and improvement. This regulation most famously occurs in the form of source-requiring copyleft, e.g., the GNU General Public License (GPL), which allows copyrestriction holders to use copyrestriction to force others to share works based on GPL’d works in their preferred form for modification, e.g., source code for software. However, this regulation occurs through other means as well, e.g., communities and projects refusing to curate and distribute works not available in source form, funders mandating source release, and consumers refusing to buy works not available in source form. Pro-sharing regulation (using the term “regulation” maximally broadly to include government, market, and others; some will disbelieve in the efficacy or ethics of one or more, but realistically a mix will occur) could become part of many policies. If it does not, society will be put at great risk by relying in security through obscurity, and lose many opportunities to scrutinize, learn about, and improve society’s digital infrastructure and the computing devices individuals rely on to live their lives, and to live, period.

Information sharing, and regulation promoting and protecting the same, also ought play a large role in the future of science. Science, as well as required information disclosure in many contexts, long precedes free and open source software. The last has only put a finer point on pro-sharing regulation in relation to copyrestriction, since the most relevant works (mainly software) are directly subject to both. But the extent to which pro-sharing regulation becomes a prominent feature of information governance, and more narrowly, the extent to which people have software freedom, will depend mostly on the competitive success of projects that reveal or mandate revelation of source, the success of pro-sharing advocates in making the case that pro-sharing regulation is socially desirable, and their success in getting pro-sharing regulation enacted and enforced (again, whether in customer and funding agreements, government regulation, community constitutions, or other) much more so than copyrestriction-based enforcement of the GPL and similar. But it is possible that the GPL is setting an important precedent for pro-sharing regulation, even though the pro-sharing outcome is conceptually orthogonal to copyrestriction.

Returning to copyrestriction itself, if neither abolition nor totalism are imminent, will humanity muddle through? How? What might be done to reduce the harm of copyrestriction? This requires a brief review of the forces that have resulted in the current muddle, and whether we should expect any to change significantly, or foresee any new forces that will significantly impact copyrestriction.

Technology (itself, not the industry as an iterest group) is often assumed to be making copyrestriction enforcement harder and driving demands for for harsher restrictions. In detail, that’s certainly true, but for centuries copyrestriciton has been resilient to technical changes that make copying ever easier. Copying will continue to get easier. In particular the “all culture on a thumb drive” (for some very limited definition of “all”) approaches, or is here if you only care about a few hundred feature length films, or are willing to use portable hard drive and only care about a few thousand films (or much larger numbers of books and songs). But steadily more efficient copying isn’t going to destroy copyrestriction sector revenue. More efficient copying may be necessary to maintain current levels of unauthorized sharing, given steady improvement in authorized availability of content industry controlled works, and little effort to make unauthorized sharing easy and worthwhile for most people (thanks largely to suppression of anyone who tries, and media management not being an easy problem). Also, most collection from businesses and other organizations has not and will probably not become much more difficult due to easier copying.

National governments are the most powerful entities in this list, and the biggest wildcards. Although most of the time they act roughly as administrators or follow the cue of more powerful national governments, copyrestriction laws and enforcement are ultimately in their courts. As industries that could gain from copyrestriction grow in developing nations, those national governments could take on leadership of increasing restriction and enforcement, and with less concern for civil liberties, could have few barriers. At the same time, some developing nations could decide they’ve had enough of copyrestriction’s inequality promotion. Wealthy national governments could react to these developments in any number of ways. Trade wars seem very plausible, actual war prompted by a copyrestriction or related dispute not unimaginable. Nations have fought stupid wars over many perceived economic threats.

The traditional copyrestriction industry is tiny relative to the global economy, and even the U.S. economy, but its concentration and cachet make it a very powerful lobbyist. It will grab all of the revenue and control it possibly can, and it isn’t fading away. As alluded to above, it could become much more powerful in currently developing nations. Generational change within the content industry should lead to companies in that industry better serving customers in a digital environment, including conceivably attenuating persecution of fans. But it is hard to see any internal change resulting in support for positive legal changes.

Artists have always served as exhibit one for the content industry, and have mostly served as willing exhibitions. This has been highly effective, and every category genuflects to the need for artists to be paid, and generally assumes that copyrestriction is mandatory to achieve this. Artists could cause problems for copyrestriction-based businesses and other organizations by demanding better treatment under the current system, but that would only effect the details of copyrestriction. Artists could significantly help reform if more were convinced of the goodness of reform and usefulness of speaking up. Neither seems very likely.

Other businesses, web companies most recently, oppose copyrestriction directions that would negatively impact their businesses in the short term. Their goal is not fundamental reform, but continuing whatever their current business is, preferably with increasing profits. Just the same as content industries. A fundamental feature of muddling through will be tests of various industries and companies to carve out and protect exceptions. And exploit copyrestriction whenever it suits them.

Administrators, ranging from lawyers to WIPO, though they work constantly to improve or exploit copyrestriciton, will not be the source of significant change.

Free and open source software and other constructed commons have already disrupted a number of categories, including server software and encyclopedias. This is highly significant for the future of copyrestriction, and more broadly, information governance, and a wildcard. Successful commons demonstrate feasibility and desirability of policy other than copyrestriction, help create a constituency for reducing copyrestriction and increasing pro-sharing policies, and diminish the constituency for copyrestriction by reducing the revenues and cultural centrality of restricted works and their controlling entities. How many additional sectors will opt-in freedom disrupt? How much and for how long will the cultural centrality of existing restricted works retard policy changes flowing from such disruptions?

Cultural change will affect the future of copyrestriction, but probably in detail only. As with technology change, copyrestriction has been incredibly resilient to tremendous cultural change over the last centuries.

Copyrestriction reformers (which includes people who would merely prevent additional restrictions, abolitionists, and those between and beyond, with a huge range of motivations and strategies among them) will certainly affect the future of copyrestriction. Will they only mitigate dystopian scenarios, or cause positive change? So far they have mostly failed, as the political economy of diffuse versus concentrated interests would predict. Whether reformers succeed going forward will depend on how central and compelling they can make their socio-political cause, and thus swell their numbers and change society’s narrative around information governance — a wildcard.

Scholars contribute powerfully to society’s narrative over the long term, and constitute a separate wildcard. Much scholarship has moved from a property- and rights-based frame to a public policy frame, but this shift as yet is very shallow, and will remain so until a property- and rights-basis assumption is cut out from under today’s public policy veneer, and social scientists rather than lawyers dominate the conversation. This has occurred before. Over a century ago economists were deeply engaged in similar policy debates (mostly regarding patents, mostly contra). Battles were lost, and tragically economists lost interest, leaving the last century’s policy to be dominated by grabbers exploiting a narrative of rights, property, and intuitive theory about incentives as cover, with little exploration and explanation of public welfare to pierce that cover.

Each of the above determinants of the future of copyrestriction largely hinge on changing (beginning with engaging, in many cases) people’s minds, with partial exceptions for disruptive constructed commons and largely exogenous technology and culture change (partial as how these develop will be affected by copyrestriction policy and debate to some extent). Even those who cannot be expected to effect more than details as a class are worth engaging — much social welfare will be determined by details, under the safe assumption that society will muddle through rather than make fundamental changes.

I don’t know how to change or engage anyone’s mind, but close with considerations for those who might want to try:

  • Make copyrestriction’s effect on wealth, income, and power inequality, across and within geographies, a central part of the debate.
  • Investigate assumptions of beneficent origins of copyrestriction.
  • Tolerate no infringement of intellectual freedom, nor that of any civil liberty, for the sake of copyrestriction.
  • Do not assume optimality means “balance” nor that copyrestriction maximalism and public domain maximalism are the poles.
  • Make pro-sharing, pro-transparency, pro-competition and anti-monopoly policies orthogonal to above dimension part of the debate.
  • Investigate and celebrate the long-term policy impact of constructed commons such as free and open source software.
  • Take into account market size, oversupply, network effects, non-pecuniary motivations, and the harmful effects of pecuniary motivations on creative work, when considering supply and quality of works.
  • Do not grant that copyrestriction-based revenues are or have ever been the primary means of supporting creative work.
  • Do not grant big budget movies as failsafe argument for copyrestriction; wonderful films will be produced without, and even if not, we will love whatever cultural forms exist and should be ashamed to accept any reduction of freedom for want of spectacle.
  • Words are interesting and important but trivial next to substance. Replace all occurrences of “copyrestriction” with “copyright” as you see fit. There is no illusion concerning our referent.

This work takes part in the and is published under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

dsc02482.jpg

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Free Speech, Inequality Promotion, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Peeves, Politics, Public Domain, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 4 Comments »

Intellectual Protectionism’s regressive double taxation of the real economy

Sunday, April 29th, 2012

How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes:

Almost every major corporation tries to minimize its taxes, of course. For Apple, the savings are especially alluring because the company’s profits are so high. Wall Street analysts predict Apple could earn up to $45.6 billion in its current fiscal year — which would be a record for any American business.

For anyone slightly concerned about inequality, this record ought to raise another red flag concerning the effect of copyright and patent monopolies. (Similarly, review a list of the wealthiest individuals.)

Apple serves as a window on how technology giants have taken advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill suited to today’s digital economy. Some profits at companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft derive not from physical goods but from royalties on intellectual property, like the patents on software that makes devices work. Other times, the products themselves are digital, like downloaded songs. It is much easier for businesses with royalties and digital products to move profits to low-tax countries than it is, say, for grocery stores or automakers. A downloaded application, unlike a car, can be sold from anywhere.

The growing digital economy presents a conundrum for lawmakers overseeing corporate taxation: although technology is now one of the nation’s largest and most valued industries, many tech companies are among the least taxed, according to government and corporate data. Over the last two years, the 71 technology companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index — including Apple, Google, Yahoo and Dell — reported paying worldwide cash taxes at a rate that, on average, was a third less than other S.& P. companies’. (Cash taxes may include payments for multiple years.)

First tax: monopoly pricing. Second tax: burden shifted to entities less able to move profits. Remove monopolies for much good, then resume debate about all aspects of taxation per usual, as you wish.

Caveats:

  • Real economy usually refers to non-financial sector. Suggestions welcome for non-IP sector.
  • I may be double counting: without copyright and patent, “real” economy share of profits would increase, tax burden concomitantly.
  • Not all profits that are easy to move result from copyright and patent, e.g., I suspect a small proportion of Google’s profits are even indirectly resulting from such.
  • There are more non-IP than IP-related entities on record wealth and profit lists, in particular natural resource entities. I don’t claim IP is the dominant source of inequality — but surely an increasing one — and more easily mitigated than natural resource entities, or for that matter, dictators and other state entities, which I wish were included on rich lists.

Posted in Economics, Inequality Promotion, Intellectual Protectionism, Politics | No Comments »

Ban* human drivers somewhere by 2020

Saturday, April 28th, 2012

Read Brad Templeton’s latest post on self-driving cars, which has a number of updates. They’re coming fast, but how fast we drastically reduce transportation deaths, give people back a huge amount of time, reduce stress, and greatly reduce space and other resources dedicated to transportation, and how secure new systems are, is undetermined. Of course there are many reasons to be skeptical — the transition will probably be much slower and more problematic than needed, but in a few decades will still seem a major triumph. But I don’t want the hidden trillions of dollars, hours, lives, carbon emissions, malfunctions, etc. that could be saved sooner to be wasted.

Regarding security, malfunctions, etc., we need to demand use of proven secure protocols and source open to inspection, i.e, not play security through obscurity. Regarding space, planning for urbanity remade (largely, recovered) through autonomous vehicles needs to be the top urban planning priority.

The benefits will be so great that we should also think about how to speed adoption — the only disheartening news in Templeton’s post concerns a survey in which only 20% of car buyers would pay an additional $3,000 for a fully (if I understand correctly) self-driving car. How little respondents value their own time and lives, let alone others’! It’s time to start agitating for road owners to ban human drivers. Most road owners are governments, but not all — consider as an issue of public policy or consumer demand as you wish.

Won’t banning human drivers disadvantage poor people who can’t afford a self-driving car? Possibly very briefly, but on net I expect self-driving cars to have an egalitarian effect — they’ll make owning a vehicle at all unnecessary (a rental can be summoned on demand), reduce housing costs (of which parking is a big part), and allow the recovery of areas walled off and drowned out by highways.

Let’s ban human drivers from at least some roads by 2020. I suggest starting with San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, Emeryville, and Berkeley — because I live close to it! Admittedly a downtown area or certain lanes of a highway might be an easier start.

*In theory it is usually preferable to increase prices rather than ban altogether. In this case, obvious mechanisms would include drastically increasing driver license fees and tolls for vehicles with human drivers. In practice, a ban may be more feasible.

Posted in Economics, Oakland, Open Source, Politics | 3 Comments »

Announcing RichClowd: crowdfunding with a $tatus check

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

RichClowd

Oakland, California, USA — 2012 April 1

Today, RichClowd pre-announces the launch of RichClowd.com, an exclusive “crowdfunding” service for the wealthy. Mass crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter have demonstrated a business model, but are held back by the high transaction costs of small funds and non-audacious projects proposed by under-capitalized creators. RichClowd will be open exclusively to funders and creators with already substantial access to capital.

The wealthy can fund and create audacious projects without joining together, but mass crowdfunding points to creative, marketing, networking, and status benefits to joint funding. So far mass crowdfunding has improved the marketplace for small projects and trinkets. The wealthy constitute a different strata of the marketplace — in the clouds, relatively — and RichClowd exists to improve the marketplace for monuments, public and personal, and other monumental projects.

“Through exclusivity RichClowd will enable projects with higher class, bigger vision, and that ultimately long-lasting contributions to society”, said RichClowd founder Mike Linksvayer, who continued: “Throughout human history great people have amassed and created the infrastructure, artifacts and knowledge that survives and is celebrated. As the Medicis were to the renaissance, RichClowders will be to the next stage of global society.”

RichClowd will initially have a membership fee of $100,000, which may be applied to project funding pledges. To ensure well-capitalized projects, RichClowd will implement a system called Dominant Assurance Contracts, which align the interests of funders and creators via a refund above the pledged amount for unsuccessful projects. This system will require creators to deposit the potential additional refund amount prior to launching a RichClowd project.

For the intellectual products of RichClowd projects, use of a forthcoming RichClowd Club License (RCCL) will be encouraged, making outputs maximally useful to funders, while maintaining exclusivity. Egalitarian projects will have the option of using a free public license.

The technology powering RichClowd.com will be developed openly and available under an AGPL open source badgeware intellectual property license. “RichClowd believes in public works. In addition to the many that will be created via the RichClowd service, open development of the RichClowd.com technology is the company’s own direct contribution to the extraordinary public work that is the Internet”, said Linksvayer.

About RichClowd

RichClowd is a pre-launch exclusive crowdfunding service with a mission of increasing the efficiency of bringing together great wealth and great projects to make an amazing world. Based in Oakland, California, a city with a reputation for poverty and agitation, RichClowd additionally takes on the local civic duty of pointing out Oakland’s incredible wealth and wealthy residents: to begin with, look up at the hills.

Contact

Mike Linksvayer, Founder
biginfo@richclowd.com

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Oakland, Open Services, Open Source, Public Goods | 1 Comment »

altmetrics moneyball

Sunday, March 4th, 2012

I read in 2004 and recall two things: a baseball team used statistics about individual contribution to team winning to build a winning team on the cheap (other teams at the time were selecting players based on gut feel and statistics not well correlated to team success; players that looked good in person to baseball insiders or looked good on paper to a naive analysis were overpaid) and some trivia about fan gathered versus team or league controlled game data.

The key thing for this post is that it was a team that was able to exploit better metrics, and profit (or at least win).

Just as many baseball enthusiasts were dissatisfied with simple player metrics like home runs and steals, and searched for metrics better correlated with team success (), many academia enthusiasts are dissatisfied with simple academic metrics like (actually all based upon) number of citations to journal articles, and are looking for metrics better correlated with an academic’s contribution to knowledge (altmetrics).

Among other things, altmetrics could lead researchers to spend time doing things that might be more useful than publishing journal articles, bring people into research who are good at doing these other things (creation of useful datasets is often given as an example) but not writing journal articles, and help break the lockin and extraordinary profits enjoyed by a few legacy publishers. Without altmetrics, these things are happening only very slowly as career advancement in academia is currently highly dependent on journal article citation metrics.

As far as I can tell, altmetrics are in their infancy at best: nobody knows how to measure contribution to knowledge, let alone innovation, and baseball enthusiasts faced a much, much more constrained problem: contribution to winning baseball games. But, given that so little is known, and current metrics so obviously inadequate and adhered to, some academics who do well on journal article citation metrics are vastly over-recruited and overpaid, while many academics and would-be-academics who don’t, aren’t. This ought mean there could be big wins from relatively crude improvements.

Who should gamble on potential crude improvements over journal article citation metrics? Entities that hire academics, in particular universities, perhaps even more particularly ones that are in the “big leagues” (considered a research university?) but nowhere near the top, and without cash to recruit superstars per gut feel or journal article citation metrics. I vaguely understand that universities make huge, conscious, expensive efforts to create superstar departments. Nearly all universities aren’t Columbia hoping to spend their way to recruiting superstars from Harvard and Princeton. Instead, why not make a long-term gamble on some plausible altmetric? At best, such a university or department will greatly outperform over the next decade and get credit beyond that for pioneering new practices that everyone copies. At worst, such a university or department will remain mediocre and perhaps slip a bit over the next decade, and get a bit of skeptical press about the effort (if made public). The benefits to society from such experimentation could be large.

Are there universities or departments pursuing such a strategy? I am in no position to know. I did search a bit and came up with What do the social sciences have in common with baseball? The story of Moneyball, academic impact, and quantitative methods. I’m pretty sure the author is writing about hiring social scientists who specialize in quantitative methods, not hiring social scientists based on speculative quantitative methods. What about universities outside wealthy jurisdictions?

…

Speaking of baseball players and academics, just yesterday I realized that academics have the equivalent of player statistics pages when I discovered my brother’s (my only close relative in academia, as far as I know) via his new site. I’ll have to ask him how he feels about giving such a public performance performance. My first reaction is that it is good for society. Such would be good for more professions — for most we have not conventional metrics like home runs or citations, needing improvement, but zero metrics, only gut feel or worse. Lots of fields, employment and otherwise, are ripe for disruption.

Addendum: Another view is that metrics lead to bad outcomes and that rather than using more sophisticated metrics, academia should become more like most employment and shun metrics altogether, hiring purely based on gut feel, and that other fields should continue as before, and fight any encroachment of metrics. Of course these theories may also be experimented with on a team-by-university-by-organization basis.

Posted in Economics | 2 Comments »

How many people can Sanhattan hold?

Saturday, March 3rd, 2012

There’s a medium length but not very informative article today titled Everybody Inhale: How Many People Can Manhattan Hold? Very speculatively, if Manhattan remains one of the premier cities in the world into the post-human future, perhaps trillions.

But I mostly use this as an excuse to harp on an old point, closer to home. How many people can San Francisco hold? Oakland? Currently these places are horribly underpopulated, semi-rural outposts, with populations of 805,235 (6,632.9/km2) and 390,724 (2,704.2/km2) respectively. At current Manhattan (27,394/km2) and Brooklyn (14,037/km2) densities respectively, San Francisco’s population would be 3,325,635 and Oakland’s 2,028,175.

That’s right, Brooklyn is twice as dense as San Francisco: this isn’t about skyscrapers.

Considering the immense benefits of density for both creativity and energy efficiency, it is a horrible shame that there does not exist a reasonably dense city in the U.S. outside of New York. Autonomous vehicles will be the next chance to significantly reconfigure cities, not least by vastly reducing the amount of space needed for cars. There are a couple obvious ways to get started in that direction now. Whether a city makes good on this opportunity for reconfiguration will globally be the most significant determinant of success or failure in the coming decades. Pity it is getting zero attention relative to circuses.

Posted in Economics, Oakland, Peeves | 6 Comments »

Black March→Freedom March

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

ASCAP/BMI

In 1939 and 1940, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) greatly increased its licensing fees. Broadcasters for a time played only music in the public domain and that licensed from Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), a competitor to ASCAP they set up. ASCAP’s monopoly was broken, some genres that had been ignored obtained airplay. I’ve also seen this described as a failed ASCAP boycott of the broadcasters. I have not read beyond sketches to know the best characterization, but there were a small enough number of entities on both sides that either or both could hold out, and effectively “boycott” for a higher or lower price.

Open Access

A new pledge to not do one or more of publishing in, reviewing for, or doing editorial work for journals published by Elsevier has gotten a fair amount of notice. 7,671 researchers have signed, which has probably already led to some Elsevier concessions and a drop in their share price.

Academics are not nearly as concentrated as U.S. radio broadcasting in 1940, but hopefully, and just possibly this boycott will lead to lasting change (the share analyst quoted in link above does not think so). But pledges to not contribute to non-Open Access journals are nothing new — 34,000 scientists (pdf; has anyone counted how many have stuck with the publication part of the pledge?) signed one in 2001…

but the publishing landscape remained largely unchanged until PLoS became a publisher itself to affect change. PLoS therefore reinvented itself as a publisher in 2003 to show how open access publishing could work.

Black March

Copied from black-march.com, but of unknown provenance/Anonymous:

With the continuing campaigns for Internet-censoring litigation such as SOPA and PIPA, and the closure of sites such as Megaupload under allegations of ‘piracy’ and ‘conspiracy’, the time has come to take a stand against music, film and media companies’ lobbyists.

The only way to hit them where it truly hurts… Their profit margins.

Do not buy a single record. Do not download a single song, legally or illegally. Do not go to see a single film in cinemas, or download a copy. Do not buy a DVD in the stores. Do not buy a videogame. Do not buy a single book or magazine.

Wait the 4 weeks to buy them in April, see the film later, etc. Holding out for just 4 weeks will lave a gaping hole in the media and entertainment companies’ profits for the 1st quarter. An economic hit which will in turn be observed by governments worldwide as stocks and shares will blip from a large enough loss of incomes.

This action can give a statement of intent:
“We will not tolerate the Media Industries’ lobbying for legislation which will censor the internet.”

Nice sentiment. Not purely a tiresome rearguard action. But I don’t see how it can conceivably make a noticeable impact on copyright industry profit margins. Getting a fair number of people to contact their elected representative is noticeable, as usually few do it. A significant proportion of the world’s population pays something to the copyright industries. To make the stated difference, a much larger number of people would have to participate than have in SOPA and ACTA protests, and the participation would require a relatively sustained behavior change, not a few clicks.

Still, perhaps “Black March” will be useful as a consciousness-raising exercise; but of what?

Freedom March

I’ve seen some suggest (especially in Spanish, as the linked post is [Update 20120304: English translation]) that the “what” needs to include making, using, and sharing free works. I agree.

Posted in Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Politics, Public Goods | 6 Comments »

Copyleft regulates

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Copyleft as a pro-software-freedom regulatory mechanism, of which more are needed.

Existing copyleft licenses include conditions that would not exist (unless otherwise implemented) if copyright were abolished. In other words, copyleft does not merely neutralize copyright. But I occasionally1 see claims that copyleft merely neutralizes copyright.

A copyleft license which only neutralized copyright would remove all copyright restrictions on only one condition: that works building upon a copyleft licensed work (usually as “adaptations” or “derivative works”, though other scopes are possible) be released under terms granting the same freedoms. Existing copyleft licenses have additional conditions. Here is a summary of some of those added by the most important (and some not so important) copyleft licenses:

License Provide modifiable form2 Limit DRM Attribution Notify upstream3
BY-SA y y
FDL y y y
EPL y y
EUPL y y
GPL (including LGPL and AGPL) y y
LAL y
MPL (and derivatives) y y
ODbL y y y
OFL y
OSL y y
OHL y y y

I’ve read each of the above licenses at some point, but could easily misremember or misunderstand; please correct me.

There’s a lot more variation among them than is captured above, including how each condition is implemented. But my point is just that these coarse conditions would not be present in a purely copyright neutralizing license. To answer two obvious objections: “attribution”4 in each license above goes beyond the bare minimum license notice that would be required to satisfy the condition of releasing under sufficient terms, and “limit DRM” refers only to conditions prohibiting DRM or requiring parallel distribution (which all of those requiring modifiable form do in a way, indirectly; I’ve only called out those that explicitly mention DRM), not permissions5 granted to circumvent.

I’m not sure there’s a source for the idea that copyleft only neutralizes copyright. Probably it is just an intuitive reading of the term that has been arrived at independently many times. The English Wikipedia article on copyleft doesn’t mention it, and probably more to the point, none of the main FSF articles on copyleft do either. The last includes the following:

Proprietary software developers use copyright to take away the users’ freedom; we use copyright to guarantee their freedom. That’s why we reverse the name, changing “copyright” into “copyleft.”

Copyleft is a way of using of the copyright on the program. It doesn’t mean abandoning the copyright; in fact, doing so would make copyleft impossible. The “left” in “copyleft” is not a reference to the verb “to leave”—only to the direction which is the inverse of “right”.

Copyleft is a general concept, and you can’t use a general concept directly; you can only use a specific implementation of the concept.

This is very clear — the point of copyleft is to promote and protect (“guarantee” is an exaggeration) users’ freedom, and that includes their access to source. The major reason I like to frame copyleft as regulation6 is that if access to source is important to software freedom (or otherwise socially valuable), it probably makes sense to look for additional regulatory mechanisms which might (and appreciate ones that do) contribute to promoting and protecting access to source, as well as other aspects of software freedom. Such mechanisms mostly aren’t/wouldn’t be “copyleft” (though at this point, some of them would simply mandate a copyleft license), but the point is not a relationship with copyright, but promoting and protecting software freedom.

If software freedom is important, surely it makes sense to look for additional mechanisms to promote and protect it. As others have said, licenses are difficult to enforce and/or few people are interested in doing it, and copyleft can be made irrelevant through independent non-copyleft implementation, given enough desire and resources (which the largest corporations have), not to mention the vast universe of cases in which there is no free software alternative, copyleft or not. I leave description and speculation about such mechanisms for a future post.

1For example, yesterday Rob Myers wrote:

Copyleft is a general neutralization of copyright (rather than a local neutralization, like permissive licences). Nothing more.

Only slightly more ambiguously, late last year Jason Self wrote:

Copyright gives power to restrict what other people can do with their own copies of things. Copyleft is about restoring those rights: It takes this oppressive law, which normally restricts people and takes their rights away, and make those rights inalienable.

Well said…but not exactly. I point these out merely as examples, not to make fun of Myers, who is one of the sharpest libre thinkers there is, or Self, who as far as I can tell is an excellent free software advocate.

2Note it is possible to have copyleft that doesn’t require source. As far as I know, such only exists in licenses not intended for software. But I think source for non-software is very interesting. The other obvious permutations — a copyleft license for software that does not include a source requirement, and a non-copyleft license that does include a source requirement, are curiosities that do not seem to exist at all — probably for the better, although one can imagine questionable use cases (e.g., self-modifying object code and transparency as only objective).

3As I’ve mentioned previously, requiring upstream notification likely makes the TAPR OHL non-free/open. But I list the license and condition here because it is an interesting regulation.

4One could further object that one ought to consider so-called “economic” and “moral” aspects of copyright separately, and only neutralize the former; attribution perhaps being the best known and least problematic of the former.

5Although existing copyleft licenses don’t only neutralize restrictions (one that did would be another curiosity; perhaps the License Art Libre/Free Art License currently comes closest), it is important that copyright and other restrictions are adequately neutralized — in particular modern public software licenses include patent grants, and GPLv3 permits DRM circumvention (made illegal by some copyright-related legislation such as the DMCA), while version 4.0 of CC licenses will probably grant permissions around “sui generis” restrictions on databases. Such neutralization is only counter-regulatory (if one sees copyright as a regulation), not pro-regulatory, as are source and other conditions discussed above.

6Regulation in the broadest sense, including at a minimum typical “government” and “market” regulation, as I’ve said before. By the way, it could be said that those who advocate only permissive licenses are anti-regulatory, and I imagine that if lots of people thought about copyleft as regulation, this claim would be made — but it would be a problematic claim, as permissive licenses don’t do much (or only do so “locally”, as Myers obliquely put it in the quote above) against the background regulation of copyright restrictions.

Posted in Creative Commons, DRM, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Peeves, Politics | 3 Comments »

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