If you don’t feel like seeing a play in San Francisco, I recommend Jacob Appelbaum’s talk on surveillance, the security state, and free software at linux.conf.au 2012. It contains everything important Little Brother does and more, and isn’t fiction:

I also just watched Karen Sandler’s LCA talk, which I can’t recommend highly enough. It is more expansive than a short talk she gave last year at OSCON based on her paper Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices.

I frequently complain that free/libre/open software and nearby aren’t taken seriously as being important to a free and otherwise good society and that advocates have completely failed to demonstrate this importance. Well, much more is needed, but the above talks give me hope, and getting Appelbaum and Sandler in front of as many people as possible would be great progress.

1. To the extent “corporate pushers have made us addicts”:
   1. As a letter-to-the-editor from Michael Slembrouck says “You can ask your dealer to stop selling you dope because you have a problem, but if you keep giving him money he’s going to keep giving you the same dope.”
   2. It seems to me that being able to ignore/forgo potentially addictive messages/products is an important survival skill.
2. More [free] speech (broadly speaking) is the answer:
   1. What is the hidden role of patent and trademark? In other words, what is the role of lack of cheap copies? Cheap copies would reduce incentive to advertise in the first place, and also reduce “the dreary feeling many get from walking by store windows knowing society offers no legal path for them to ever possess what is inside.” Is bad behavior supposedly related to lack of access to fashionable items reduced where counterfeit goods are plentiful? That’s a serious question, though of course answers will largely be swamped by cross cultural confounders.
   2. Regarding addiction and other adverse things characterized as such, I still think one of the best messages trusted figures (friends, ministers, the famous, etc) can convey is how totally unacceptable it is to follow spam — and I consider advertising to include a continuum from spam to useful information, with that critiqued as solely “manufacturing desire” tending toward the spam end.
   3. If advertising is so powerful, why not use it more for counter-addiction-and-other-adverse-messages? In the link above, I wished for the Ad Council to run a don’t-click-on-spam campaign. Maybe too close to its membership for comfort. Fortunately, access to media has improved greatly, including access to organizing for access to media. Hopefully things like LoudSauce (crowdfunded advertising) will help make that happen.

As indicated by the title, I mostly blogged this for 2(a). I think the contribution of intellectual protectionism to inequality is woefully underexplored and underexploited. I made a new category on this blog, Inequality Promotion, to remind me to attempt further exploration and exploitation.

Another, much bigger, tiresome rearguard action. I’m impressed by protesters’ nearly universal and exclusive focus on encouraging readers to contact U.S. Congresspeople. I hope it works. SOPA and PIPA really, really deserve to die.

But the protest also bums me out.

1) Self-censorship (in the case of sites completely blacked out, as opposed to those prominently displaying anti-SOPA messages) is not the Internet at its best. If that claim weren’t totally ridiculous, the net wouldn’t be worth defending. It isn’t even the net at its political best — that would be creating systems which disrupt and obviate power — long term offensives, not short-term defenses.

2) Near exclusive focus on supplication before 535 [Update: 536] ultra-powerful individuals is kinda disgusting. But it needs to be done, as effectively as possible.

3) I haven’t looked at a huge number of sites, but I haven’t seen much creativity in the protest. Next time it would be fun to see an appropriate site (Wikipedia? Internet Archive?) take what Flickr has done and add bidding for the “right” to darken particular articles or media as a fundraiser. Art would be nice too — I’d love to hear about anything really great (and preferably libre) from this round.

4) While some prominent bloggers have made the point that “piracy” is not a legitimate problem, overwhelmingly the protest has stuck to defense — SOPA and PIPA would do bad things to the net, and wouldn’t “work” anyway. Google goes much further, saying “End Piracy, Not Liberty” and “Fighting online piracy is important.” Not possible, wrong, and gives away the farm.

5) Nobody making the point that everyone can help with long-term offensives which will ultimately stop ratcheting protectionism, if it is to be stopped. Well, this nobody has attempted:

[I]magine a world in which most software and culture are free as in freedom. Software, culture, and innovation would be abundant, there would be plenty of money in it (just not based on threat of censorship), and there would be no constituency for attacking the Internet. (Well, apart from dictatorships and militarized law enforcement of supposed democracies; that’s a fight intertwined with SOPA, but those aren’t the primary constituencies for the bill.) Now, world dominationliberation by free software and culture isn’t feasible now. But every little bit helps reduce the constituency that wishes to attack the Internet to possibly protect their censorship-based revenue streams, and to increase the constituency whose desire to protect the Internet is perfectly aligned with their business interests and personal expression.
…
I’d hope that at least some messages tested convey not only the threat SOPA poses to Wikimedia, but the long-term threat the Wikimedia movement poses to censorship.

Also:

Bad legislation needs to be stopped now, but over the long term, we won’t stop getting new bad legislation until policymakers see broad support and amazing results from culture and other forms of knowledge that work with the Internet, rather than against it. Each work or project released under a CC license signals such support, and is an input for such results.

And:

Finally, remember that CC is crucial to keeping the Internet non-broken in the long term. The more free culture is, the less culture has an allergy to and deathwish for the Internet.

…

Of the five items I list above, the first three are admittedly peevish. Four and five represent not so much problems with the current protest as they do severe deficiencies in movements for intellectual freedom. Actually they are flipsides of the same deficiency: lack of compelling explanation that intellectual freedom, however constructed and protected, really matters, really works, and is really for the good. If such were well enough researched and explained so as to become conventional wisdom, rather than contentious and seemingly radical, net freedom activists could act much more proactively, provocatively, and powerfully, rather than as they do today: with supplication and genuflection.

I am not at all well read, but my weak understanding is that the withdrawal of economists from studying intellectual protectionism in the late 1800s was a great tragedy. To begin the encourage rectification of that century plus of relative neglect, today is a good day to start reading Against Intellectual Monopoly.

In the meantime, the actual and optimal counterfactual drift further apart, without any help from SOPA and PIPA.

People have noted for years that the King estate does their best to lock up and profit from his works. I even had a post that touched on this indirectly in 2004 (it appears that since then Eyes on the Prize has been re-aired and DVDs sold, result of an $850,000 grant to acquire the necessary licenses). But the King estate is simply doing what most heirs would do with an uninsured creative legacy. If societal governance of the knowledge commons were anything close to reasonable, all King’s works would now be in the public domain.

Perhaps ironically (but only if one cannot distinguish between King and his estate, and between citation and copyright restrictions), in his academic writing King was a very poor provider of intellectual provenance — in that context, he plagiarized:

I might conclude that none of this was fatal for King’s career as a preacher and powerful public speaker. Had he pursued an academic career, his heavy reliance on the authorities, often without citing them, could have been fatal. But in preaching, perhaps even in most public speech, genuine originality is more often fatal. A congregation, even a public audience, expects to hear and responds to the word once delivered to the fathers [and mothers]. It is the familiar that resonates with us. The original sounds alien and tends to alienate. The familiar, especially the familiar that appeals to the best in us, is what we long to hear. So,”I Have A Dream” was no new vision; it was a recension, quite literally, of his own “An American Dream.” And that dream, as we know, already had a long history. King’s vision was, perhaps, more inclusive than earlier dreams, but it appealed to us because we already believed it.

Indeed, far more interesting is the ubiquity of borrowing in King’s profession. On preachers borrowing liberally from each other and any other available source, listen to this week’s installment of WYNC On the Media, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Public Imagination (about 15 minutes).

I did not know this about sermons, but upon hearing, it is completely unsurprising. But now I have questions:

• Do preachers now continue to borrow as heavily and as liberally as they did in King’s day and before? What about public speakers generally?
• Should preaching be added to magic, fashion, food, and comedy as examples of professions relying heavily on borrowing, and not so much on censorship?
• The development of King’s speeches, and of preacher’s sermons^* generally, highlight that in some contexts borrowing without citation is valuable, nevermind that it would be called plagiarism in other contexts. Should schools teach how to be a great artist in some classes? Doing so might help their anti-plagiarism rhetoric sink in better, as it would then appear contextually appropriate, rather than fanatic.

^* Daniel Dennet approvingly says that TED talks are secular sermons, pinpointing another reason I find them annoying (for being sermons, not for being secular). But I don’t want to censor any sermons.

2. The Center for the Study of the Public Domain provides another counterfactual, imagining policy not pre-1998, but pre-1976 (act; effective 1978), which at the top states (repeated at Boing Boing, which inspired this post’s title) works from 1955 or before would be free of copyright restrictions.

3. But as the CSPD page points out further down (see “the public domain snatchers”), the pre-1976 policy also would’ve meant many works from 1983 or before would now be free of copyright restrictions, as the policy allowed for 28 years of restriction, with an optional renewal of 28 years. Historically copyright holders did not bother renewing 85% of works.

4. The aforementioned CSPD page doesn’t note, but their FAQ does, that prior to 1989 a copyright notice was required in order for a work to be restricted. The FAQ says “By some estimates, 90% of works did not include this copyright notice and immediately entered the public domain.” A counterfactual taking this into account would have not only a robust January 1, but every day would be public domain day.

(Of course as I noted last year, every day is public domain day to the extent you make it so, no counterfactual required. But defaults really matter.)

5. Any of the above counterfactuals would be tremendous improvements over society’s current malgovernance of the intellectual commons. But they’re all boring. They are much more difficult to conceive, but the counterfactuals I’d prefer to look are not ones with recent rent seeking undone, but ones attempting to characterize worlds with optimal copyright restriction, which is itself under-explored: no extensions? 15 years? 1 year? Maybe 0? The thing about this sort of counterfactual is not the precise duration, nature, or existence of restriction, but in changing how we think about the public domain — not some old works that it is cool that we can now cooperate around to preserve and breathe new life into without legal threat (or uncool if we can’t) — but about how the world would be changed in a dynamic way with much better policy. I bet we wouldn’t even miss that 9-figure Hollywood dreck if such disappeared (I really doubt it would, but here’s to hoping) that most writers in this field must genuflect to and that are used as the excuse to destroy, because whatever would exist would be our culture, and everyone loves their culture (which of course may be subculture built on superficial or even real rejection of such, etc). It would just also be our culture in another way as well, one compatible with free speech and more equal distribution of wealth, in addition to practical things like a non-broken Internet.

Go Daddy’s^* pro-SOPA marketing failures made Namecheap’s action straightforward relative to companies not directly competing with Go Daddy. However, there are lots of other domain name registrars, none of which has done anything with Namecheap’s marketing savvy. Another registrar, Gandi (which I’ve used and recommended for some time, and has supported Creative Commons and other good causes), like Namecheap is donating a portion of domain transfers to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but doesn’t seem to be making a big deal of it, and their anti-SOPA blog post is rather tepid. Compare to Namecheap’s anti-SOPA blog post, which isn’t all that much stronger in terms of substance (contains genuflection to “intellectual property”), it is much more strongly worded and simply more effectively written.

One other company has a support-EFF-against-SOPA tie-in. That company, Zopim, provides website chat services, and doesn’t seem to compete with Go Daddy at all. I’m not interested, but never would have heard of them otherwise. Any company could do that.

(I see that sometime today two other small domain registrars have added support-EFF-against-SOPA deals. Good for Suspicious Networks and Centuric.)

What inspired to me write this post is that Namecheap isn’t only taking gratis publicity. They’re also running presumably paid ads as part of their anti-SOPA marketing campaign:

While trying to get the above ad to load again (noticed out of the corner of my eye but didn’t register until sometime after — I’m oddly trying to recover from ad blindness), I noticed another Namecheap ad, which if you’re already really tuned in, illustrates nicely the imperfect options available from a software freedom perspective for domain registration and other nearly commodity services.

Check out more anti-SOPA and pro-freedom actions.

^*Isn’t the name “Go Daddy” ridiculous? That, coupled with a super cheesy website and company logo led me to disregard them long before they started shooting sexy elephants at gladiator events, or whatever got people upset before they supported SOPA.

Action #12 is long-term: contribute financially to the EFF so they can continue “leading the fight to defend civil liberties online, so that future generations will enjoy an Internet free of censorship.” Indeed, please do this too. I’ve recommended becoming an EFF member in the past, and will continue to do so. Actually I’m even more enthusiastic about donating to the EFF in 2011 than I was in 2005. In addition to playing an absolutely critical role in fighting SOPA, PIPA, and their ilk, the EFF’s small technical staff is working on some of the most important technical challenges to keeping the Internet open and secure. They are awesome!

There’s one more item that needs to be in every responsible digital freedom activist’s toolkit: the digital commons, meaning free and open source software and their analogues in culture, knowledge, and beyond. Using and consuming free software and culture is crucial to maintaining a free society. There are many reasons, some of which I mentioned recently at OWF, and with a bit more focus in a FSCONS 2008 presentation (slideshare, .pdf, .odp), but here’s one: imagine a world in which most software and culture are free as in freedom. Software, culture, and innovation would be abundant, there would be plenty of money in it (just not based on threat of censorship), and there would be no constituency for attacking the Internet. (Well, apart from dictatorships and militarized law enforcement of supposed democracies; that’s a fight intertwined with SOPA, but those aren’t the primary constituencies for the bill.) Now, world dominationliberation by free software and culture isn’t feasible now. But every little bit helps reduce the constituency that wishes to attack the Internet to possibly protect their censorship-based revenue streams, and to increase the constituency whose desire to protect the Internet is perfectly aligned with their business interests and personal expression.

Am I crazy? Seriously, I’d like to make the case for the commons as crucial to the future of free society more compellingly. Or, if I’m wrong, stop making it. Feedback wanted.

…

Relatedly, the English Wikipedia community is considering a blackout to protest SOPA. Here’s the comment I left at the request for comment:

Support doing something powerful. I blackout would be that. I do have some reticence though. Making the knowledge in English Wikipedia and maybe other sites inaccessible feels a bit like protestors who destroy their own neighborhood. Sometimes necessary to gain attention and perhaps justice in the long run, but always painful and with collateral victims. Sure, visitors to Wikipedia sites can come back later or find a mirror, but just as surely, the neighborhood will recover. Maybe. Admittedly the analogy is far from perfect, but I wish there were something the Wikimedia movement could do that would have power analogous to a mass physical action, but avoid costs analogous to the same. Long term, I think fulfilling the Wikimedia vision is exactly that. In the short term, maybe a total blackout is necessary, though if there’s a a way to equally powerfully present to viewers what SOPA means, then let them access the knowledge, I’d prefer that. UI challenge? Surely some A:B testing is in order for this important action. I’d hope that at least some messages tested convey not only the threat SOPA poses to Wikimedia, but the long-term threat the Wikimedia movement poses to censorship.

We’re developing a free open-source video editor with a unique distributed design:

• Distributed workflow – collaboratively edit video with other artists over the Internet
• Distributed storage – seamlessly store and synchronize video files across multiple computers and the cloud
• Distributed rendering – seamlessly spread rendering and encoding across multiple computers and the cloud

I didn’t investigate whether Novacut had a feasible plan. My pledge was an expressive vote for the concept of new tools for distributed collaboration.

Novacut is making another go of it at Kickstarter, and it looks like they’ll succeed. I just pledged again.

However, I’m saddened by how much of philanthropy is not also carefully instrumental. The only low barrier way to move in this direction (I’d prefer futarchist charity) that I know of is criticism, so hats off to Danny Piccirillo for his criticism of Novacut fundraising. I’m further saddened that such criticism is not welcomed. I would be honored that someone found a project I am involved in or a fan of worth the time to criticize and thankful for the free publicity.

Now, I’m looking forward to see what Novacut delivers, and/or what Novacut ideas other video editor projects implement.

Speaking of delivery, I noticed today a new crowdfunding site targeting free software and Brazil, makeITopen. According to a writeup, it appears to have a couple interesting twists. Projects that do not reach their thresholds have donations not fully returned to donors, but only as credits within the system (unlike Kickstarter and others, where pledges are not collected until a project has reached its threshold). More interestingly, there is a process for donors to approve (or not) the software delivered by the project. This sort of thing is probably hard to get right, and I fully expect makeITopen to fail, but I hope it is hugely successful, and think that getting approval right could be very useful. At least for donors who wish to be instrumental.

Addendum 20110730: The best two comments on the Novacut criticism kerfuffle: Jono Bacon saying be calm, but onus is on Novacut to explain, and Jason Gerard DeRose (Novacut lead), explaining how Novacut’s intended high-end userbase demands a different program than do casual video editors, and that there’s plenty of scope for cooperation on underlying components. Congratulations to Novacut for meeting its Kickstarter threshold, and good luck to Novacut, PiTiVi (the working editor many critics advocated directing resources toward), and GStreamer and Gnonlin (two underlying components in common). Onward to killing King Kong with FLOSS.

Gulliver and the Liliputans, trade card for J. & P. Coats spool cotton, late 19th c by Donaldson Brothers, Five Points, N.Y. / Public Domain.

Critiques of Digital Restrictions Management fall into about 10 categories:

1. DRM causes various product defects
2. DRM usurps people’s control of devices they own
3. DRM discourages tinkering and understanding technology
4. DRM discourages sharing
5. DRM curtails various freedoms people would otherwise enjoy
6. DRM encourages hostile behavior toward consumers
7. DRM encourages monopoly
8. DRM is technical voodoo
9. DRM is business voodoo
10. DRM presages more forms of attempted control, each with additional properties similar to those above, increasing the probability of a dystopian future.

Eventually I may link the above bullets to the relevant posts on DRM I’ve made over the years.

Defective By Design, a project of the Free Software Foundation, coordinates the Day Against DRM and various other anti-DRM actions. It is pretty clear that several of the problems with DRM listed above, particularly 2-5, are inimical to the FSF’s values. I sometimes think the linkage to core values of software freedom could be made stronger in anti-DRM campaigns, but these are not easily packaged messages. I also think there’s usually a missed opportunity in anti-DRM campaigns to present free software (and maybe free culture) as the only systemic alternative to creeping anti-freedom technologies such as DRM.

I began writing a post for Day Against DRM because I wanted to pose a question concerning DRM’s competitive threat to free software: how significant is it in today’s circumstances, and how significant in theory?

In today’s circumstances, the use of DRM that does not support free software platforms by popular media services (currently Netflix is probably most significant; DVDs with DRM have always been a problem) seems like a major barrier to more people using free software.

In theory, it isn’t clear to me that DRM must be a competitive threat to free software adoption (though it would remain a threat to software freedom and nearby). If a mostly free software platform were popular enough, DRM implementations will follow — most obviously Android.

However, I would also hope the dominance of free software would create conditions in which DRM is less pertinent. I would love to see enumerated and explored the current and in-theory competitive threats to free software posed by DRM, and vice versa.