Mike Linksvayer

I’ve been wanting to blog that phrase since reading the Communities as the new IPR? thread on the Free Software Business list. That thread lost coherence and died quickly but I think the most important idea is hinted at by Susan Wu:

There are two elements of discussion here - a singular community, which is a unique entity; and the community constructs (procedure, policy, infrastructure, governance), which are more readily replicated.

Not said but obvious: a singular community is not easily copied.

Now Tim Lee writes about GooTube (emphasis added):

YouTube is an innovative company that secured several millions of dollars in venture capital and used it to create a billion-dollar company in less than a year. Yet as far as I know, strong IP rights have not been an important part of YouTube’s strategy. They don’t appear to have received any patents, and their software interface has been widely copied. Indeed, Google has been in the video-download business longer than YouTube, and their engineers could easily have replicated any YouTube functionality they felt was superior to Google’s own product.
…
Like all businesses, most of the value in technology startups lies in strong relationships among people, not from technology, as such. Technological change renders new technologies obsolete very quickly. But a brilliant team of engineers, visionary management, and a loyal base of users are assets that will pay dividends for years to come. That’s why Google was willing to pay a billion bucks for YouTube.

Loyal base of users does not do justice to the YouTube community. I was not aware of YouTube’s social features nor how critical they are until I read the NYT story on electric guitar performances of Pachelbel’s Canon being posted to YouTube (I commented on the story at the Creative Commons weblog). Some of these videos have been rated by tens of thousands of users and commented on by thousands. “Video responses” are a means for YouTube users to have a conversation solely through posting videos.

Google Video could have duplicated these social features trivially. I’m surprised but not stunned that Google thinks the YouTube community is worth in excess of $1.65 billion.

On a much smaller scale the acquisition of Wikitravel and World66 earlier this year is an example of the value of hard to duplicate communities. The entire contents of these sites could be legally duplicated for commercial use, yet Internet Brands paid (unfortunately an undisclosed amount) to acquire them, presumably because copies on new sites with zero community would be worthless.

There’s lots more to say about community as a business strategy for less obvious cases than websites, but I don’t have the ability, time, and links to say it right now. The FSB thread above hints at this in the context of software development communities.

And of course community participants may want to consider what allowances they require from a community owner, e.g., open licenses, data, and formats so that at a minimum a participant can retrieve and republish elsewhere her contributions if the owner does a bad job.

Today is Defective by Design’s “day against DRM.” Defectivebydesign.org says:

There is no more important cause for electronic freedoms and privacy than the call for action to stop DRM from crippling our digital future. The time is now.

The first bit is hyperbole, but you could cover fighting DRM and several related causes by taking the opportunity to join the EFF or FSF.

I don’t have anything new to say about DRM, so see Digital Rent-a-Center Management from June.

Download DRM-free music.

Tim Lee has a wonderful take on Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. The punchline, in my estimation:

When supply exceeds demand, as it seems to for both music and punditry, the equilibrium price is zero.

I think to be technically correct “at p=0″ needs to be inserted before the first comma, but nevermind, read the whole thing.

Brief thoughts on last week’s LinuxWorld Conference and Expo San Francisco.

Lawrence Lessig’s opening keynote pleased the crowd and me. A few points fof interest:

• Free speech is a strong aspect of free culture and at least implicitly pushed for a liberal interpretation of fair use, saying that the ability to understand, reintepret and remake video and other multimedia is “the new literacy” and important to the flourishing of democracy.
• The “read/write Internet”, if allowed to flourish, is a much bigger market than the “read only Internet.”
• Support free standards and free software for media, including Ogg and Gnash.
• In 1995 only crazies thought it possible to build a viable free software operating system (exaggeration from this writer’s perspective), now only crazies think wireless can solve the last mile competition problem. Go build free wireless networks and prove the telcos and pro-regulation lawyers (including the speaker) wrong.
• One of the silly video mashups Lessig played was Jesus Will Survive, featuring an adult Jesus in diapers hit by a bus. A few people left the auditorium at this point.

I’ve at least visited the exhibition space of almost every LWCE SF (the first one, actually in San Jose, was the most fun — Linus was a rock star and revolution was in the air) seemed bigger and more diverse, with most vendors pushing business “solutions” as opposed to hardware.

By far the most interesting exhibition booth to me was Cleversafe, an open source dispersed storage project that announced a Linux filesystem interface at the conference and was written up in today’s New York Times and Slashdot. I’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time, particularly since Allmydata is not open source and does not support Linux.

Also, Creative Commons won a silly “Best Open Source Solution” show award.

Addendum 20080422: If you’re arriving from an unhinged RedState blog post, see Lessig’s response.

Tim Lee responds to my AOLternative history. I agree with the gist of almost everything he says with a few quibbles, for example:

Likely, something akin to a robots.txt file would have been invented that would provide electronic evidence of permission to link, and it would have been bundled by default into Apache. Sure, some commercial web sites would have refused to allow linking, but that would have simply lowered their profile within the web community, the same way the NYT’s columnists have become less prominent post-paywall.

In a fairly bad scenario it doesn’t matter what Apache does, as the web is a backwater, or Apache never happens. And in a fairly bad scenario lower profile in the web community hardly matters — all the exciting stuff would be behind AOL and similar subscription network walls. But I agree that workarounds and an eventually thriving web would probably have occurred. Perhaps lawyers did not really notice search engines and linking until after the web had already reached critical mass. Clearly they’re trying to avoid making that mistake again.

Lee’s closing:

So I stand by the words “relentless” and “inevitable” to describe the triumph of open over closed systems. I’ll add the concession that the process sometimes takes a while (and obviously, this makes my claim non-falsifiable, since I can always say it hasn’t happened yet), but I think legal restrictions just slow down the growth of open platforms, they don’t change the ultimate outcome.

Slowing down progress is pretty important, in a bad way. Furthermore, I’d make a wild guess that the future is highly dependent on initial conditions, no outcomes are inevitable by a long shot, and there is no such thing as an ultimate outcome, only a new set of initial conditions.

That’s my peeve for the day.

Grandiose example: did Communism just delay the relentless march of Russian society toward freedom and wealth?

Tim Lee¹ (emphasis added):

The relentless march of open standards online continues, as AOL effectively abandons its paid, premium offerings in favor of a free, advertising-supported model.

I’m happy to see open standards win and happy to acknowledge good news — I am, for the most part, an optimist, so good news feels validating.

Time Lee, closing his post (my emphasis again):

Fundamentally, centrally planned content and services couldn’t keep up with the dynamism of the decentralized Internet, where anyone could publish new content or launch a new service for very low cost.

But just how hard is it to imagine a world in which closed services like AOL remain competitive, or even dominant, leaving the open web to hobbyists and researchers?

One or two copyright-related alternative outcomes could have put open networks at a serious disadvantage.

First, it could have been decided that indexing the web (which requires making and storing copies of content) requires explicit permission. This may have stunted web search, which is critical for using the open web. Many sites would not have granted permission to index if explicit permission were required. Their lawyers would have advised them to not give away valuable intellectual property. A search engine may have had to negotiate deals with hundreds, then thousands (I doubt in this scenario there would ever be millions) of websites, constituting a huge barrier to entry. Google? Never happened. You’re stuck with Lycos.

Second, linking policies could have been held to legally constrain linking, or worse, linking could have been held to require explicit permission. Metcalfe’s law? Never mentioned in the context of the (stunted) web.

In the case of either or both of these alternative outcomes the advantage tilts toward closed systems that offer large collections “exclusive” content and services, which was exactly the strategy pursued by AOL and similar for years. Finding stuff amongst AOL’s exclusive library of millions of items may have been considered the best search experience available (in this reality Google and near peers index billions of web pages).

Some of the phenomena we observe on the web would have occurred anyway in stunted form, e.g., blogging and social networking — even now services like LiveJournal and MySpace feel like worlds unto themselves although they are not technically closed and services like FaceBook are closed. Journaling and networking on AOL would have been hot (but pale in comparison to the real blogosphere or even real closed systems, which face serious competition). It is hard to see how something like Wikipedia could have developed in AOLternative reality.

Fortunately aggressive copyright was not allowed to kill the web.² As a result the march of open standards appears relentless. I’d prefer an even more relentless march, even if it means diminishing copyright (and patents).

1. I’m just using Tim Lee’s post as a jumping off point for an editorial I’ve been meaning to write, no criticism intended.

2. What is aggressive intellectual protectionism being allowed to kill or stunt? Online music is obvious.

The story of The Pig and the Box touches on many near and dear themes:

• The children’s fable is about DRM and digital copying, without mentioning either.
• The author is raising money through Fundable, pledging to release the work under a more liberal license if $2000 is raised.
• The author was dissuaded from using the sampling licnese (a very narrow peeve of mine, please ignore).
• I don’t know if the author intended, but anyone inclined to science fiction or nanotech will see a cartoon assembler.
• The last page of the story is Hansonian.

Read it.

This was dugg and Boing Boing’d though I’m slow and only noticed on Crosbie Fitch’s low-volume blog. None of the many commentators noted the sf/nano/upload angle as far as I can tell.

I make a brief appearance in a DRM protest video noted by Boing Boing today.

Kent Bye did a good job turning his footage into two minutes of watchable video. At least I don’t look or sound as stupid as I could or should have and his choice of backing music is good and appropriate.

One of the opposing comments on Bye’s blog:

As a consumer you have a choice of who to purchase from; and you must abide by the rules set by who you buy from. If you don’t like those rules don’t buy.

In my view the protest was about informing consumers of reasons they may want to exercise their choice to not purchase DRM content. I don’t think anyone was calling for making DRM illegal.

A brief quote about the inability to transfer rights to DRM content was also misunderstood by come commenters. The point I wanted to make is that consumers are getting a substantially different deal with DRM media than they have gotten in the past, indeed a substantially worse deal.

Only desperate or stupid consumers would lease a home theater from Rent-a-Center. DRM media should be seen in the same light.
Valleywag weighs in (flyweight!) with a sarcastic comment:

With all the hoopla in the tech world over trivia like censorship or the turning of political dissidents over to oppressive foreign governments, it’s good to know that this weekend, brave protesters picketed the San Francisco Apple store for that most basic of human rights — the right to play all kinds of music on the iPod.

Yes, plenty of room to talk with recent posts entitled ‘Google bachelor watch: Larry and Lucy “kissy-faced” in Maui’ and ‘Girl sues MySpace because boys are too hot’ … regardless, Valleywag critically misses the point that DRM and more generally copyright are free speech issues. I find the U.S. policy of encouraging intellectual protectionism abroad appalling. If you don’t think such will be used to further censorship in oppressive states (and supposedly non-oppressive ones) you are sorely lacking in the cynicism department. Go read the recent Bruce Perens essay Is DRM Just a Consumer Rights Issue?. I’ll also repeat two of my favorite sentences in the history of this blog under the subheading What Would Brezhnev Do?:

The Soviet Union took information control to extremes, including prohibiting use of photocopiers by scientists. I suspect that had the USSR survived to this day, the KGB would now be furiously trying to make Digital Restrictions Management work so as to gain access to a few of the wonders of computing without permitting open communication.

I could go on for awhile about why DRM is a bad thing, but in addition to the above I must briefly mention that DRM is deadly for long term data preservation, stifles innovation, is a security threat and doesn’t even prevent copying, the fantasy that it could with just the right legal backing leading to regulatory ratchet.

On the specifics of the Apple protest, see Seth Schoen’s writeup.

In closing, another zinger from Tim Lee:

I think the fundamental disagreement here is one about technology, not philosophy. Attaway believes that the flaws and restrictions imposed by DRM are temporary—kinks that will be worked out as more sophisticated technology is developed. If that were true, Attaway’s argument would have some merit. But the reality is just the opposite: as the media world becomes more complex, the flaws of DRM will only become more glaring. DRM is technological central planning. Centrally planned economies become less efficient as they grow more complex. For precisely the same reasons, centrally planned technologies perform worse as they become more complex.

Well over a year ago Sameer Parekh called out an obvious flaw in my argument:

I find it funny when I read technologists arguing that downloads of movies aren’t a problem because they’re slow. When do technologists talk about how technology sucks and isn’t going to improve? When the improvement of that technology hurts their public relations effort!

I noticed Parekh’s blog again recently, which reminded me to respond. I find it interesting (but somewhat tangential) that in the interim centralized web-based video “sharing” (YouTube and many similar sites) has taken off while decentralized P2P filesharing has languished.

Anyhow, I do not argue that P2P filesharing is a waste of time merely because it takes a really long time to download a movie. Even if downloads were instantaneous the experience would be trying. Making it easy and certain for an average user to find a complete copy and find and install the video codecs to be able to watch the copy is not something that improved bandwidth will fix automatically. They are social and software problems, which tend to not improve at the rate bandwidth and similar increase.

In the future when today’s huge downloads are (nearly) instantaneous, they’ll be nearly instantaneous via underground P2P or via centralized download services. The only people who will struggle with the former are the very poor, those who enjoy fighting with their computers, and those who seriously miscalculate the value of their time. Unless the latter are encumbered with DRM so frustrating that there is no convenience advantage to using a centralized service.

By that time I expect most entertainment to be some combination of supercheap, server-mediated and advertising.

Aaron Swartz has a provocative post on creating a legacy. I think it almost impossible to leave a real (by Swartz’s test — leaving the world in a significantly different state than if you had not acted) and good legacy.

Swartz cites simultaneous discovery as evidence that Darwin did not leave an impactful legacy. I think this vastly understates the value of multiple confirmations of a discovery and of arriving at a discovery sooner rather than later. Consider discoveries made or nearly made once, but not widely known nor used for many years. If more people had been working in the relevant fields perhaps the knowledge would not have languished and the world would, right now, be a different place, even if only shifted forward in time. (So perhaps I should not continue to say it is almost imposible to leave a good legacy.)

I do not have a compelling example right now, but countering Swartz’s argument is not even why I’m making this post…

Rather, having been spurred to think about legacy, another reason to add one’s creative output to the commons (e.g., by releasing it under a Creative Commons license) occurs to me: one’s creative legacy.

If you were to die tomorrow your heirs would own exclusive rights to your creative works, possibly forever. If not immediately (likely), then sooner or later your heirs will be unreachable or disagree over the disposition of your copyrights, annihilating your creative legacy. For without permission, your works may not be legally displayed, performed, reproduced, distributed, translated, repurposed, or otherwise used (excepting narrow and increasingly constrained fair use).

Due to unknown or recalcitrant owners your work will go to the grave with you like so much rotting celluloid … unless you choose to give the public permission in advance to use your work, now.

David Friedman’s post on The Death of Copyright, New Art Forms, and World of Warcraft:

As increasing bandwidth makes it more and more difficult to protect movies by either legal or technological means, I expect that we will see more and more of a shift away from conventional movies towards substitutes that, like games, are different each time you play them.

There is, however, a countervailing effect. As it becomes easier and easier to replace actors with computer generated images, the cost of making movies, even quite elaborate movies, will fall. For the net result, stay tuned—for the next decade or so.

Nothing new for anyone paying attention, but a nice summary of where content production is headed — server-mediated or supercheap.

Protection of old business models presumably slows the transition of capital and talent into the service of the new, perhaps lowering the probability Hollywood will be a dominant center of cultural production in the long term. Or perhaps the additional wealth afforded by protection now puts Hollywood in a better position for the future. Regardless of impact on Hollywood’s prospects, protection now would seem to retard the future.

The first Creative Commons Salon San Francisco was good, tomorrow’s should be great. Bob Ostertag and Lucas Gonze (who I’ve cited many times) are presenting. I could hardly ask for a better lineup.

Event details.

Update 20060417: Followup post on the CC blog.

It was a pleasure talking to Ostertag before the presentations got underway. Among other things I learned that Pantychrist vocalist Justin Bond has become extremely sucessful. During the presentation he said he had wanted to put his recordings in the public domain but Creative Commons seemed like a good thing to support, so he chose a license rather arbitrarily. Argh! (CC does offer a public domain dedication.) Ostertag pushed the idea that thinking in terms of “copies” is completely obsolete and more or less encouraged “piracy” — in response to a naive questioner asking if streaming and DRM together could stop copying (smiles all around). It was evident during Q&A that he had much more to say coming from a number of different angles. I look forward to reading more of his thoughts.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lucas Gonze’s presentation, though it may have been too much too fast for some people. I found the things he left out of a talk about how the net is changing music notable — nothing about DRM, streaming, P2P, music stores, or podcasting. Hear, hear!

Brad Tempelton explains why a censor should want an imperfect filter — it should be good enough to keep verboten information from most users, but easy enough to circumvent to tempt dissidents, so they can be tracked and when desired, put away.

In the second half of the post, Tempelton suggests some anti-censor techniques: ubiquitous SSL and steganography. Fortunately he says these are “far off” and “does not scale”, respectively. To say the least, I’d add.

Cyber-activists have long dreamed that strong encryption would thwart censorship. Freenet is an example of a project that uses this as its raison d’être. While I’m a huge fan of ubiquitous encryption and decentralization (please install OTR, now!), these seem like terribly roundabout, demand-side means of fighting censorship — the price of obtaining information, which includes the chance of being caught, is lowered. But someone has to seek out or have the information pushed to them in the first place. If information is only available via hidden channels, how many people will encounter it regardless of lower risk?

An alternative, perhaps less sexy because it involves no technology adoption, is supply-side anti-censorship: make verboten information ubiquitous. Anyone upset about google.cn should publish information the Communist Party wants censored (my example is pathetic, need to work on that). This is of course not mutually exclusive with continuing to carp and dream of techno-liberation.

I guess I’m calling for Spread Free Speech projects. Or one of those chain letters (e.g, “four things”) that plagues the blogosphere.

I occasionally run into people who think users should download content (e.g., music or video) packaged in an executable file, usually for the purpose of wrapping the content with DRM where the content format does not directly support DRM (or the proponent’s particular DRM scheme). Nevermind the general badness of Digital Restrictions Management, requiring users to run a new executable for each content file is evil.

Most importantly, every executable is a potential malware vector. There is no good excuse for exposing users to this risk. Even if your executable content contains no malware and your servers are absolutely impenetrable such that your content can never be replaced with malware, you are teaching users to download and run executables. Bad, bad, bad!

Another problem is that executables are usually platform-specific and buggy. Users have enough problem having the correct codec installed. Why take a chance that they might not run Windows (and the specific versions and configurations you have tested, sure to not exist in a decade or much less)?

I wouldn’t bother to mention this elementary topic at all, but very recently I ran into someone well intentioned who wants users to download content wrapped in jar files, if I understand correctly for the purposes of ensuring users can obtain content metadata (most media players do a poor job of exposing content metadata and some file formats do a poor job of supporting embedded metadata, not that hardly anyone cares — this is tilting at windmills) and so that content publishers can track use (this is highly questionable), all from a pretty cross platform GUI. A jar file is an executable Java package, so the platform downside is different (Windows is not required, but a Java installation, of some range of versions and configurations, is), but it is still an executable that can do whatever it wants with the computer it is running on. Bad, bad, bad!

The proponent of this scheme said that it was ok, the jar file could be digitally signed. This is no help at all. Anyone can create a certificate and sign jar files. Even if a creator did have to have their certificate signed by an established authority it would be of little help, as malware purveyors have plenty of resources that certificate authorities are happy to take. The downsides are many: users get a security prompt (”this content signed by…”) for content, which is annoying, misleading as described above and conditions the user to not pay attention when they install things that really do need to be executable, and a barrier is raised for small content producers.

If you really want to package arbitrary file formats with metadta, put everything in a zip file and include your UI in the zip as HTML. This is exactly what P2P vendor LimeWire’s Packaged Media File format is. You could also make your program (which users download only once) look for specific files within the zip to build a content-specific (and safe) interface within your program. I believe this describes Kazaa’s Kapsules, though I can’t find any technical information.

Better yet put your content on the web, where users can find and view it (in the web design of your choice), you get reasonable statistics, and the zombies don’t get fed. You can even push this 80/20 solution to 81/19 by including minimal but accurate embedded metadata in your files if they support it — a name users can search for or a URL for your page related to the content.

Most of the pushers of executable content I encounter when faced with security concerns say it is an “interersting and hard problem.” No, it is a stupid and impossible problem. In contrast to web, executable content is a 5/95/-1000 solution — that last number is a negative externality.

If you really want an interesting and hard problem, executable content security is the wrong level. Go work on platform security. We can now run sophisticated applications within a web browser with some degree of safety (due to Java applet and Flash sandboxes, JavaScript security). Similar could be pushed down to the desktop, so that executables by default have no more rights to tamper with your system than do web pages. Capability-based security is an aggressive approach to this problem. If that sounds too hard and not interesting enough (you really wanted to distribute “media”), go the web way as above — it is subsuming the desktop anyhow.

That’s the Net Prophet, a new four-character, blasphemous emoticon invented by Sandy Sandfort:

Please note the turban and matted beard. Net Prophet is suitable for e-mail, websites and graffiti. And I think it’s a lot btter symbol for free speech than some stupid ribbon.

Not to mention better than flying the flag of a jurisdiction. The beauty of the Net Prophet is that it is not merely a symbol for free speech, it is free speech (where “free speech” is communication that someone wants to forcefully suppress).

Why “support” free speech when you can engage in it? There may be no other issue where direct action is so easy, so do it!

The first thing to note about the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons is their timidity.

The timidity of the selection turns out to have been pure genius (mine would have aimed for maximum depravity) as it highlights just how bizarre the reaction has been.

Many have expressed disappointment in the tepid support for free speech from many western governments. I am completely unsurprised. The U.S. government and its allies have taken on around 25 million Muslims as constituents. The government of Denmark has more freedom to do the Wright thing.

As I am on a very minor photo remix kick, here is my contribution to the universe of images of Mohammed:

Muhammad licking a camel’s asshole under orders from Allah.
Original photo by Saffanna licensed under cc-by-2.0.

I believe this image complies with putative prohibitions of the depiction of Muhammad, though some may claim they see him in the camel’s face. (Yes, this is a remix with zero diff.)

How do I know Muhammad and not Jesus is with the lucky camel? Because a camel couldn’t feel an imaginary person’s licks.

This cries out for a photo mashup, so here it is:

That’s the first photo mashup I’ve ever done, so it’s very simple. I opened the protester facing a column of tanks photo in the GIMP, opened the pretty Tiananmen Building photo in a second layer, then searched for filters that would allow me to combine them — Layer|Transparency|Color to Alpha accomplished exactly what I wanted.

I thought this JPEG export at zero quality looks kind of neat.

NB I don’t think Google has done anything wrong google.cn. The appropriate response is not anger with Google, but action to spread the information the Communist Party of China wants to suppress.

Fred Stutzman points out that for the query site:ibiblio.org google.com estimates 7,640,000 hits while google.cn estimates 1,610,000, perhaps explained in part by ibliblio’s support of freedom in Tibet.

That’s an impressive ratio of 4.75 pages findable in the relatively free world to 1 page findable in China, call it a domain FCR of 4.75.

The domain FCR of a few sites I’m involved with:

bitzi.com: 635,000/210,000 = 3.02
creativecommons.org: 213,000/112,000 = 1.90
gondwanaland.com: 514/540 = 0.95

Five other sites of interest:

archive.org: 5,900,000/427,000 = 13.82
blogspot.com: 24,300,000/15,400,000 = 1.58
ibiblio.org: 5,260,000/ 1,270,000 = 4.14
typepad.com: 13,100,000 /2,850,000 = 4.60
wikipedia.org: 156,000,000/17,000,000 = 9.18

If you are cool your FCR will be very high. The third site above is my personal domain. I am obviously very uncool and so loved by the Communist Party of China that they have twisted Google’s arm to make more of my blog posts available in China than are available elsewhere.

The Internet Archive is obviously the coolest site by far amongst those surveyed above, followed by Wikipedia. Very curious that Google apparently blocks a far higher percentage of pages at the blog service TypePad than of those at Google property Blogspot.

It must be noted that the number of hits any web scale search engine claims are only estimates and these can vary considerably. Presumably Stutzman and I were hitting different Google servers, or perhaps his preferences are set slightly differently (I do have “safe search” off and accept results in any language — the obvious variables). However, the FCR from our results for site:ibiblio.org roughly agree.

Here’s a feeble attempt to draw the ire of PRC censors and increase my FCR:

Bryan Caplan’s Museum of Communism
Human Rights in China
Tiananmen Square Massacre
Government of Tibet in Exile
Tibet Online
民主進步黨 (Taiwan Democratic Progressive Party)

Note that I don’t really care about which jurisdiction or jurisdictions Taiwan, Tibet, the Spratly Islands or elsewhere fall under. One jurisdiction, n systems would be preferable to the current arrangement, if the former led to more freedom, which it plausibly could. I post some independence-oriented links simply because I know that questions of territorial control matter deeply to states and my goal here is to increase my FCR.

You should attempt to increase your FCR, too. No doubt you can find better links than I did. If enough people try, the Google.cn index will become less interesting, though by one global method of guestimation, it is already seriously lacking. Add claimed hits for queries for html and -html to get a total index size.

google.com: 4,290,000,000 + 6,010,000,000 = 10,300,000,000
google.cn: 2,370,000,000 + 3,540,000,000 = 5,910,000,000

So the global FCR is 10,300,000,000/5,910,000,000 = 1.74

Although my domain FCR is lame, my name FCR is not bad (query for linksvayer) — 98,200/21,500 = 4.57.

Give me ∞ or give me the death of censorship!

(I eagerly await evidence that my methodology and assumptions are completely wrong.)

I’m out of the loop. Until very recently (upon reading former Creative Commons intern Will Frank’s writeup of a brief hotlink war) I thought ‘hotlink‘ was an anachronistic way to say ‘link’ used back when the mere fact that links led to a new document, perhaps on another server, was exciting. It turns out ‘hotlink’ is now vernacular for inline linking — displaying or playing an image, audio file, video, or other media from another website.

Lucas Gonze, who has lots of experience dealing with hotlink complaints due to running Webjay, has a new post on problems with complaint forms as a solution to hotlinks. One thing missing from the post is a distinction between two completely different sets of complainers who will have different sets of solutions beyond complaining.

One sort of complainer wants a link to a third party site to go away. I suspect the complainer usually really wants the content on the third party site to go away (typically claiming the third party site has no right to distribute the content in question). Removing a link to that content from a link site works as a partial solution by making the third party hosted content more obscure. A solution in this case is to tell the complainer that the link will go away when it no longer works — in effect, the linking site ignore complaints and it is the responsibility of the complainer to directly pursue the third party site via takedown notices and other threats. This allows the linking site to completely automate the removal of links — those removed as a result of threatened or actual legal action look exactly the same as any other link gone bad and can be tested for and culled using the same methods. Presumably such a hands-off policy only pisses off complainers to the extent that they become more than a minor nuisance, at least on a Webjay-like site, though it must be an option for some.

Creative Commons has guidelines very similar to this policy concerning how to consider license information in files distributed off the web — don’t believe it unless a web page (which can be taken down) has matching license information concerning the file in question.

Another sort of complainer wants a link to content on their own site to go away, generally for one or two reasons. The first reason is that hotlinking uses bandwidth and other resources on the hotlinked site which the site owner may not be able to afford. The second reason, often coupled with the first, is that the site owner does not want their content to be available outside of the context of their own site (i.e., they want viewers to have to come to the source site to view the content).

With a bit of technical savvy the complainer who wants a link to their own site removed has several options for self help. Those merely concerned with cost could redirect requests without the relevant referrer (from their own site) or maybe cookie (e.g., for a logged in user) to the free Coral content distribution network or similar, which should drastically reduce originating site bandwidth, if hotlinks are actually generating many requests (if they are not there is no problem).

A complainer who does not want their content appearing in third party sites can return a small “visit my site if you want to view this content” image, audio file, or video as appropriate in the abscense of the desired referrer or cookie. Hotlinking sites become not an annoyance, but free advertising. Many sites take this strategy already.
Presumably many publishers do not have any technical savvy, so some Webjay-like sites find it easier to honor their complaints than to ignore them.

There is a potential for technical means of saying “don’t link to me” that could be easily implemented by publishers and link sites with any technical savvy. One is to interpret robots.txt exclusions to mean “don’t link to me” as well as “don’t crawl and index me.” This has the nice effect that those stupid enough to not want to be linked to also become invisible to search engines.

Another solution is to imitate rel=nofollow — perhaps rel=nolink, though the attribute would need to be availalable on img, object, and other elements in addtion to a, or simply apply rel=nofollow to those additional elements a la the broader interpretation of robots.txt above.

I don’t care for rel=nolink as it might seem to give some legitimacy to brutally bogus link policies (without the benefit of search invisibility), but it is an obvious option.

The upshot of all this is that if a link site operator is not as polite as Lucas Gonze there are plenty of ways to ignore complainers. I suppose it largely comes down to customer service, where purely technical solutions may not work as well as social solutions. Community sites with forums have similar problems. Apparently Craig Newmark spends much of his time tending to customer service, which I suspect has contributed greatly to making Craigslist such a success. However, a key difference, I suspect, is that hotlink complainers are not “customers” of the linking site, while most people who complain about behavior on Craigslist are “customers” — participants in the Craigslist community.

Giving and asking for recommendations for worthy charitable donations seems to be popular this time of year, so I’ll do both, following my earlier unsolicited financial advice.

Excepting the very laws of nature (see arch anarchy), aging and its resulting suffering and death is the greatest oppressor of humanity. As far as I know Aubrey de Grey’s Methuselah Mouse Prize/Foundation is the only organization making a direct assault on aging, so I advise giving generously. Fight Aging! is the place to watch for new anti-aging philanthropy.

The most important human-on-human oppression to end, in the U.S. at least, is the drug war (which directly causes oppression in other jurisdictions as well). I’ve only mentioned this in passing here. There’s too much to say. The Drug Reform Coordination Network is saying some of it. The Marijuana Policy Project seems to be spearheading state level liberalization initiatives. See MPP’s 2006 plan. I met MPP founder Rob Kampia a year or so ago and was left with a good impression of the organization.

Wikipedia is the current exemplar of the anti-authoritarian age and I love their transparency.

Finally, you could help pay my salary at Creative Commons, more in these letters.

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I’d really prefer to give entirely outside the U.S. and other wealthy jurisdictions. However, I’m not interested in any organization that gives direct aid (reactionary, low long term impact), supports education (feel good, low long term impact), exhibits economic neanderthalism, has religious or social conservative ties, or is a shill for U.S. foreign policy in the areas of drugs, terror, or intellectual property. I am looking for organizations that support autonomous liberalization or any of the goals exemplified by the organizations I already support above. Suggestions?

I suppose supporting prizes is one means of donating without respect to jurisdiction. In cases were low cost is important, researchers in cheap areas will tend to win.

I’d also prefer to give via some innovative mechanism. We’ll see what the new year brings.

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Wikipedia chief considers taking ads (via Boing Boing) says that at current traffic levels, Wikipedia could generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year by running ads. There are strong objections to running ads from the community, but that is a staggering number for a tiny nonprofit, an annual amount that would be surpassed only by the wealthiest foundations. It could fund a staggering Wikimedia Foundation bureaucracy, or it could fund additional free knowledge projects. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has asked what will be free. Would an annual hundred million dollar budget increase the odds of those predictions? One way to find out before actually trying.

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Of course I expect all of my donations to have imperceptible impact, almost as imperceptible as voting. But it’s all about expression. I’ve increased my expressive value by including a donor comment — “in loving memory of Άναξιμένης” — with my Wikipedia donation. I got an expressive boost when my comment was chosen for highlighting.

(Anaximenes of Miletus was a pupil or contemporary of Thales and has a cooler sounding name. As a kid I’d dedicate donations to Alexander the Great, but I now know better.)