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:

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.

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.

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.

I repeat Evan as a reminder and apology. I’ve blogged many times about copyright licenses in the past, and will have a few detailed posts on the subject soon in preparation for a short talk at FOSDEM.

Given current malgovernance of the intellectual commons, public copyright licenses are important for freedom. They’re probably also important trials for post-copyright regulation (meant in the broadest sense, including at least “market” and “government” regulatory mechanisms), eg of ability to inspect and modify complete and corresponding source.

At the same time, the totemic and contentious role copyright licenses (and sometimes assignment or contributor agreements, and sometimes covering related wrongs and patents) play in free/libre/open works, projects, and communities often seems an unfortunate misdirection of energy at best, and probably looks utterly ridiculous to casual observers. I suspect copyright also takes at least some deserved limelight, and perhaps much more, from other aspects of governance, plain old getting things done, and activism around other issues (regarding the first, some good recent writings includes those by Simon Phipps and Bradley Kuhn, but the prominence of copyright arrangements therein reinforces my point). But this all amounts to an additional reason it is important to get the details of public copyright licenses right, in particular compatibility between them where it can be achieved — so as to minimize the amount of time and energy projects put into considering and arguing about the options.

Obviously the energy put into public licenses is utterly insignificant against that spent on other copyright/patent/trademark complex activities. But I’m not going to write about that in the near future, so it isn’t part of my apology and rationalization.

Someday I hope that knowing the ins and outs of both Internal Passports of the mind and international passports will be like knowing the rules of internal passports in Communist East Germany (presumably intricate; I did not look for details, but hopefully they exist not many hops from a Wikipedia article on Eastern Bloc emigration and defection).

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.

I think that if microformats.org and the RDFa effort continue moving forward without coordinating their effort, the future looks kind of bleak.

I blogged about this at the time (and forgot and reblogged five months later). I recalled this upon reading a draft HTML Data Guide announced today, and trying to think of a tl;dr summary to at least microblog.

That’s difficult. The guide is intended to help publishers and consumers of HTML data choose among three syntaxes (all mostly focused on annotating data inline with HTML meant for display) and a variety of vocabularies, with heavy dependencies between the two. Since 2006, people working on microformats and RDFa have done much to address the faults of those specifications — microformats-2 allows for generic (rather than per-format) parsing, and RDFa 1.1 made some changes to make namespaces less needed, less ugly when needed, and usable in HTML5, and specifies a lite subset. In 2009 a third syntax/model, microdata, was launched, and then in 2011 chosen as the syntax for schema.org (which subsequently announced it would also support RDFa 1.1 Lite).

I find the added existence of microdata and schema.org suboptimal (optimal might be something like microformats process for some super widely useful vocabularies, with a relatively simple syntax but permitting generic parsing and distributed extensibility; very much like what Prodromou wanted in 2006), but when is anything optimal? I also wonder how much credit microdata ought get for microformats-2 and RDFa 1.1, due to providing competitive pressure? And schema.org for invigorating metadata-enhanced web-scale search and vocabulary design (for example, the last related thing I was involved in, at the beginning anyway)?

Hope springs eternal for getting these different but overlapping technologies and communities to play well together. I haven’t followed closely in a long time, but I gather that Jeni Tennison is one of the main people working on that, and you should really subscribe to her blog if you care. That leaves us back at the HTML Data Guide, of which Tennison is the editor.

My not-really-a-summary:

1. Delay making any decisions about HTML data; you probably don’t want it anyway (metadata is usually a cost center), and things will probably be more clear when you’re forced to check back due to…
2. If someone wants data from you as annotated HTML, or you need data from someone, and this makes business sense, do whatever the other party has already decided on, or better yet implemented (assuming their decision isn’t nonsensical; but if so why are you doing business with them?)
3. Use a validator to test your data in whatever format. An earlier wiki version of some of the guide materials includes links to validators. In my book, Any23 is cute.

(Yes, CC REL needs updating to reflect some of these developments, RDFa 1.1 at the least. Some license vocabulary work done by SPDX should also be looked at.)

Yesterday the W3C’s Provenance Working Group posted a call for feedback on a family of documents members of that group have been working on. Provenance is an important issue for the info commons, as I’ve sketched elsewhere. I hope some people quickly flesh out examples of application of the draft ontology to practical use cases.

Intellectual Provenance

Apart from some degree of necessity for current functioning of some info commons (obviously where some certainty about freedoms from copyright restriction is needed, but conceivably even moreso to outgrow copyright industries), provenance can also play an important symbolic role. Unlike “intellectual property”, intellectual provenance is of keen interest to both readers and writers. Furthermore, copyright and other restrictions make provenance harder, in both practical (barriers to curation) and attitudinal — the primacy of “rights” (as in rents, and grab all that your power allows) deprecates the actual intellectual provenance of things.

Postmodern Provenance

The umbra of provenance seems infinite. As we preserve scratches of information (or not) incomparably vast amounts disappear. But why should we only care for what we can record that led to current configurations? Consider independent invention and convergent evolution. Who cares what configurations and events led to current configurations: what are the recorded configurations that could have led to the current configuration, what are all of the configurations that could have led to the current configuration; what configurations are most similar (including history, or not) to a configuration in question?

.prov

In order to highlight the exposure of provenance information on the internet and provide added impetus for organizations to expose provenance in a way that can efficiently be found and accessed, I am exploring the possibility of a .prov TLD.

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.

My employer’s office moved from San Francisco to Mountain View in April, contributing to a number of people leaving or transitioning out, which has been a bummer. I’ve been working exclusively from home since May. Still, there have been a number of good developments, which I won’t attempt to catalog here. My favorites include agreement with the Free Software Foundation regarding use of CC0 for public domain software, small improvements in the CC legal user interface, the return and great work of a previous colleague, retirement of two substandard licenses, research, and a global summit/launch of a process toward version 4.0 of the CC licenses, which I hope over the next year prove at least a little bit visionary, long-standing, and have some consideration for how they can make the world a better place.

Speaking of which, I’ve spent more time thinking about social science-y stuff in 2011 than I have in at least several years. I’ll probably have plenty to say regarding this on a range of topics next year, but for now I’ll state one narrow “professionally-related” conclusion: free/libre/open software/culture/etc advocates (me included) have done a wholly inadequate job of characterizing why our preferences matter, both to the general public and to specialists in every social science.

Apart from silly peeves, two moderate ideas unrelated to free/libre/open stuff that I first wrote about in 2011 and I expect I’ll continue to push for years to come: increasing the minimum age and education requirement for soldiers and tearing down highway 980.

I haven’t done much programming in several years, and not full time in about a decade. This has been making me feel like my brain is rotting, and contributes to my lack of prototyping various services that I want to exist. Though I’d been fiddling (that may be generous) with Scala for a couple years, I was never really super excited about tying myself to the JVM. I know and deeply respect lots of people who doing great things with Python, and I’ve occasionally used it for scripts over the past several years because of that, but it leaves me totally non-enthused. I’ve done enough programming in languages that are uglier but more or less the same, time for something new. For a couple months I’ve been learning Haskell and doing some prototyping using the Yesod web framework (apparently I had heard of Haskell in 2005 but I didn’t look at it closely until last year). I haven’t made as much progress as I’d like, mostly due to unrelated distractions. The biggest substantive hurdle has not been Haskell (and the concepts it stands for), but a lack of Yesod examples and documentation. This seems to be a common complaint. Yesod is rapidly moving to a 1.0 release, documentation is prioritized, and I expect to be really productive with it over the coming year. Thanks to the people who make Yesod and those who have been making Haskell for two decades.

This year I appreciated three music projects that I hadn’t paid much attention to before, much to my detriment: DNA, Moondog, and especially Harry Partch. I also listened a lot again to one of my favorite bands I discovered in college, Violence and the Sacred, which amazingly has released some of its catalog under the CC BY-SA license. Check them out!

Finally, in 2011 I had the pleasure of getting to know just a little bit some people working to make my neighborhood a better place, attending a conference with my sister, seeing one of my brothers start a new job and the other a new gallery, and with my wife of continuing to grow up (in that respect, the “better half” cliche definitely applies). Now for this world to end!

Oh yes, and let’s not forget gladiatorial matches:

Best from Jean Quan: Working to keep the Athletics, Warriors, and Raiders in the East Bay. For all the bad that comes from mega-sports teams, they are one of the few things that bring all the classes and cultures in a community together.

No, merely one of the stupidest things written in the East Bay Express (an excellent weekly, my favorite long before moving to the east bay) this year.

The more than a few items listed at the top are off the top of my head things that bring all classes and cultures together at least as much as do professional sports teams, and for the most part without the lies and direct transfer of wealth from the 99% to the 1%. The characterization of society as comprising those two groups popularized by the Occupy movement may or may not be generally useful, but regarding the relationship of the masses to professional sports team owners, could not be more accurate (except that a decimal point or two is probably called for). There is almost no U.S.-based big league professional sports team owner that is not extremely wealthy (exception is probably the Green Bay Packers, which have dispersed ownership) and no such team that does not transfer wealth from the masses to the team — even mostly privately funded facilities are tax subsidized through dedicated infrastructure improvements at a minimum.

For a supposedly progressive activist such as Oakland mayor Jean Quan to stake a political comeback on collaboration with wealthy team owners to extract wealth from the masses… shame! Perhaps she ought be recalled, after all (not really, such over the top hypocritical pandering is precisely in line with my expectations for mayoral behavior).

Also, what about this bringing classes and cultures together? There is a high price to attend professional sports events in the first place, and the overwhelming trend is for facilities to include skyboxes that completely isolate the wealthiest attendees from others. Not only are mega-sports teams not one of the “few” things that bring all classes and cultures together, mega-sports teams aren’t even one of such things at all.

Good riddance to the Athletics, Raiders, and Warriors and their anti-intellectual, pull-the-wool-over-our-own-eyes, violent, and bland scams. The only disappointing thing is that they all seem to be moving elsewhere in the Bay Area, as opposed to someplace more benighted, say Sacramento, or Las Vegas, or better yet, out of business entirely.

Addendum: Now you know why I didn’t include a stadium in my fanciful list of uses Oakland residents ought dream of for land recovered through demolishing highway 980.