Public Domain

Retaining the right to censor is an act of hate

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

Nina Paley (I highly recommend all her animations and appreciate her free culture activism) has an idea called the copyheart:

Use it wherever you would use the ©copyright symbol. Instead of

© Copyright 2010 by Author/Artist. All Rights Reserved.

you could write

♡2010 by Author/Artist. Copying is an act of love. Please copy.

I love the sentiment. Mike Masnick thinks the copyheart is cool. Unsurprising, since he doesn’t appreciate public copyright tools. That’s a problem, since cool without the aid of rigorous public copyright tools fails to build a commons that everyone can use. We don’t need help with materials that can be used by those with a low level of legal exposure: that’s everything that isn’t held in secret.

Expanding on the problem: unfortunately one automatically obtains copyright the moment one produces an original expression in a fixed form (e.g., this blog post). Copyright is a poor name, for it isn’t the right to copy; rather it is the exclusive right to restrict others from making copies (including altered copies, performances, and an ever-growing list of nearby uses, essentially forever). Copyrestriction would be better. However, others aren’t restricted automagically (and when attempts are made to do so, restrictions are usually massively over-applied); the copyright holder must take action, must play the role of the censor. Censorright would be even more apt. Not granting rights to the public in advance means one is retaining the right to censor.

Why would Paley want something that grants the public no rights in advance, while complaining loudly about some Creative Commons licenses for not granting enough rights in advance? Probably because she’s skeptical of public licenses, period, claiming they legitimize copyright. I almost completely disagree: copyright exists, is automatic, and is ever-increasing in scope and restrictiveness; public copyright tools are just a reality-based response that allow opting out of some or all of one’s right to censor, can offer limited protection (in the case of copyleft) from downstream censors, and also signal that some or all of a censor’s right is not desired, and most importantly help build substantial projects and bodies of work that do not rely on censorship (eventually evidence has to matter).

Now Paley is well aware of these arguments, and addresses some of them in the Copyheart Manifesto (which is more like a FAQ) and elsewhere. She says that free licenses “aren’t solving the problems of copyright restrictions.” That’s something that needs debate. I’d argue they’re one of the few rays of light against censorship, and they are creating space for “solutions” to be developed (see “most importantly” previous paragraph). She even almost directly addresses the problem that copyheart-like mechanisms (Kopimi is very similar; “all rights reversed” is more opaque simple statement that has been used occasionally for decades that Paley notes):

Q.Is the ♡Copyheart legally binding?

A. Probably not, although you could test it:

Mark your work with the ♡Copyheart message.
Sue someone for copying it.
See what the judge says.

We really don’t think laws and “imaginary property” have any place in peoples’ love or cultural relations. Creating more legally binding licenses and contracts just perpetuates the problem of law – a.k.a. state force – intruding where it doesn’t belong. That ♡copyheart isn’t a legally binding license is not a bug – it’s a feature!

Sadly, when the right to censor is the automatic default, it is not using a legally binding license that perpetuates the problem, but I repeat myself. I appreciate offering the test above, but it is far too easy a test (though I don’t know how it would turn out). Takedown notices, other chilling effects, and just plain avoidance, are far more common than actual suits. A better test would be this:

  1. Mark your work with the ♡Copyheart message.
  2. Have someone else upload the work to Wikimedia Commons, not mentioning that you asked them to.
  3. See if the Wikimedia Commons community is willing to rely on your copyheart message to make and keep available your work.

One reason the work probably won’t remain on Wikimedia Commons (note I’d be very happy to be proved wrong) is that copyheart doesn’t clearly say that altering the copyhearted work is ok with the copyhearter. Permitting adaptation is a requirement for free culture; Paley agrees.

The situation may not be totally hopeless for copyheart. Kopimi started as an equally simple exhortation to copy. There are some works on Wikimedia Commons labeled as Kopimi (though I’m not sure how many if any are only relying on Kopimi; many works on Wikimedia Commons are multi-licensed), though the template used for Kopimi uploads on Wikimedia Commons goes beyond simple exhortation to copy:

This work is labeled as Kopimi, meaning that the copyright holder of this work does not only release it, but specifically requests that this work be used and copied for any purpose, including unlimited commercial use and redistribution. It is believed in good faith that a work classified as Kopimi is free to use in any way, including modification and the creation of derivative works.

Now it would be possible to take copyheart in this direction, say:

♡2010 by Author/Artist. Copying and adaptation are acts of love. Please copy and adapt for any purposes.

One may as well finish the job and back this sentiment with a rigorous legal tool that takes every step possible to rid oneself of the right to censor, worldwide:

♡2010 by Author/Artist. Copying and adaptation are acts of love. Please copy and adapt for any purposes without any restrictions whatsoever.

The link is to the backing legally rigorous tool, CC0.

…

Speaking of censorship, the EFF has been doing a fantastic job in fighting many of its forms. Please join them in saying no to censorship.

Not only does EFF fight censorship, they also retain almost no right to censor works they produce. They use a Creative Commons Attribution license, which only requires giving credit to make any use (well, any use that doesn’t imply endorsement). You should also join them is saying no to censorship in this way — no to your own ability to be a censor.

You should also make annual donations of $ to both CC and EFF, and send ♡.

Posted in Creative Commons, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Public Domain | 14 Comments »

CC6+

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

December 16 marked six years since the release of the first Creative Commons licenses. Most of the celebrations around the world have already taken place or are going on right now, though San Francisco’s is on December 18. (For CC history before 2002-12-16, see video of a panel recorded a few days ago featuring two of CC’s founding board members and first executive director or read the book Viral Spiral, available early next year, though my favorite is this email.)

I’ve worked for CC since April, 2003, though as I say in the header of this blog, I don’t represent any organization here. However, I will use this space to ask for your support of my and others’ work at CC. We’re nearing the end of our fourth annual fall public fundraising campaign and about halfway to our goal of raising US$500,000. We really need your support — past campaigns have closed out with large corporate contributions, though one has to be less optimistic about those given the financial meltdown and widespread cutbacks. Over the longer term we need to steadily decrease reliance on large grants from visionary foundations, which still contribute the majority of our funding.

Sadly I have nothing to satisfy a futarchist donor, but take my sticking around as a small indicator that investing in Creative Commons is a highly leveraged way to create a good future. A few concrete examples follow.

became a W3C Recommendation on October 14, the culmination of a 4+ year effort to integrate the Semantic Web and the Web that everyone uses. There were several important contributors, but I’m certain that it would have taken much longer (possibly never) or produced a much less useful result without CC’s leadership (our motivation was first to describe CC-licensed works on the web, but we’re also now using RDFa as infrastructure for building decoupled web applications and as part of a strategy to make all scientific research available and queryable as a giant database). For a pop version (barely mentioning any specific technology) of why making the web semantic is significant, watch Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web.

Wikipedia seems to be on a path to migrating to using the CC BY-SA license, clearing up a major legal interoperability problem resulting from Wikipedia starting before CC launched, when there was no really appropriate license for the project. The GNU FDL, which is now Wikipedia’s (and most other Wikimedia Foundation Projects’) primary license, and CC BY-SA are both copyleft licenses (altered works must be published under the same copyleft license, except when not restricted by copyright), and incompatible widely used copyleft licenses are kryptonite to the efficacy of copyleft. If this migration happens, it will increase the impact of Wikipedia, Creative Commons, free culture, and the larger movement for free-as-in-freedom on the world and on each other, all for the good. While this has basically been a six year effort on the part of CC, FSF, and the Wikimedia Foundation, there’s a good chance that without CC, a worse (fragmented, at least) copyleft landscape for creative works would result. Perhaps not so coincidentally, I like to point out that since CC launched, there has been negative in the creative works space, the opposite of the case in the software world.

Retroactive copyright extension cripples the public domain, but there are relatively unexplored options for increasing the effective size of the public domain — instruments to increase certainty and findability of works in the public domain, to enable works not in the public domain to be effectively as close as possible, and to keep facts in the public domain. CC is pursuing all three projects, worldwide. I don’t think any other organization is placed to tackle all of these thorny problems comprehensively. The public domain is not only tremendously important for culture and science, but the only aesthetically pleasing concept in the realm of intellectual protectionism (because it isn’t) — sorry, copyleft and other public licensing concepts are just necessary hacks. (I already said I’m giving my opinion here, right?)

CC is doing much more, but the above are a few examples where it is fairly easy to see its delta. CC’s Science Commons and ccLearn divisions provide several more.

I would see CC as a wild success if all it ever accomplished was to provide a counterexample to be used by those who fight against efforts to cripple digital technologies in the interest of protecting ice delivery jobs, because such crippling harms science and education (against these massive drivers of human improvement, it’s hard to care about marginal cultural production at all), but I think we’re on the way to accomplishing much more, which is rather amazing.

More abstractly, I think the role of creating “commons” (what CC does and free/open source software are examples) in nudging the future in a good direction (both discouraging bad outcomes and encouraging good ones) is horribly underappreciated. There are a bunch of angles to explore this from, a few of which I’ve sketched.

While CC has some pretty compelling and visible accomplishments, my guess is that most of the direct benefits of its projects (legal, technical, and otherwise) may be thought of in terms of lowering transaction costs. My guess is those benefits are huge, but almost never perceived. So it would be smart and good to engage in a visible transaction — contribute to CC’s annual fundraising campaign.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Politics, Prediction Markets, Public Domain, Public Goods, Semantic Web, Wikipedia | 10 Comments »

October and beyond

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Friday (tomorrow) I’m attending the first Seasteading conference in Burlingame. I blogged about seasteading four years ago. Although the originators of the seastead idea are politically motivated, I’d assign a very low probability to them becoming significantly more politically impactful than some of their inspirations (e.g., micronations and offshore pirate radio, i.e., very marginal). To begin with, the seasteading concept has huge engineering and business hurdles to clear before it could make any impact whatsoever. If the efforts of would be seasteaders lead to the creation of lots more wealth (or even just a new weird culture), any marginal political impact is just gravy. In other words, seasteading is another example of political desires sublimated into useful creation. That’s a very good thing, and I expect the conference to be interesting and fun.

Saturday I’ll be at the Students for Free Culture Conference in Berkeley. You don’t have to be a student to attend. Free culture is a somewhat amorphous concept, but I think an important one. I suspect debates about what free culture means and how to develop and exploit it will be evident at the conference. Some of those are in part about the extent to which political desires should be sublimated into useful creation (I should expand on that in a future post).

October 20-26 I’ll participate in three free culture related conferences back to back.

First in Amsterdam for 3rd COMMUNIA Workshop (Marking the public domain: relinquishment & certification), where I’ll be helping talk about some of Creative Commons’ (I work for, do not represent here, etc.) public domain and related initiatives.

Second in Stockholm for the Nordic Cultural Commons Conference, where I’ll give a talk free culture and the future of cultural production.

Finally in Gothenburg for FSCONS, where I’ll give an updated version of a talk on where free culture stands relative to free software.

In December at MIT, Creative Commons will hold its second technology summit. Nathan Yergler and colleagues have been making the semantic rubber hit the web road pretty hard lately, and will have lots to show. If you’re doing interesting [S|s]emantic Web or open content related development (even better, both), take a look at the CFP.

More than likely I’ll identicate rather than blog all of these.

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Open Source, Politics, Prediction Markets, Public Domain, Semantic Web | 2 Comments »

Copyright restriction

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

Ethan Zuckerman writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Public Domain | 13 Comments »

No Law (celebrate!)

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008

I just learned that today is — but unfortunately that Wikipedia link merely redirects to the article.

I have little to offer but past postings on the public domain.

Here’s to expanding the size and scope of the realm beyond lawsuit, regulation, and taxation!

Posted in Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Politics, Public Domain | 1 Comment »

Steps toward better software and content

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

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

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

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

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

Peer producing think tank transparency

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Via Reason.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets, Public Domain, Semantic Web | 3 Comments »

Embrace the public domain

Sunday, November 26th, 2006

Peter Saint-André published his promised essay Who’s Afraid of the Public Domain?. It’s fairly short and covers a fair amount of ground. I highly recommend it. Two of my favorite paragraphs:

Yet the public domain is nothing to fear. The works of Homer, Sophocles, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, Galileo, Newton, Bach, Beethoven, and other creative giants are all in the public domain. Their works are revered, not reviled. Sure, the fact that the Fifth Symphony is in the public domain enabled Chuck Berry to write “Roll Over Beethoven”; but far from defiling Beethoven’s good name, Berry’s song indicates the level of respect that we still have for Beethoven’s works. I bet you’d love it for your works to be similarly known and respected two hundred years from now (what creative individual wouldn’t?).

…

Because of that corporate influence over the copyright laws (at least in America), you face a choice: accept that your works will never pass into the public domain, or willingly place them there. You can place your works into the public domain immediately (as I have done) or specify in your will that your works shall pass into the public domain upon your death. I find it simpler to place my works in the public domain as soon as I publish them, but only you can decide the best course of action for your own works.

I would add that if you don’t make an effort to free your works, they will disappear, and your creative legacy with them.

One item of fear, uncertainty and doubt spread about the public domain (that would have been out of scope for Saint-André’s essay to address) is that it may not be possible legally to affirmatively place a work into the public domain (see Wikipedia:Granting work into the public domain for some discussion), especially outside the U.S. jurisdiction.

I believe wikipedians attempt to work around this with statements like the one currently in Template:Userpd (emphasis added):

I, the author, hereby agree to waive all claim of copyright (economic and moral) in all content contributed by me, the user, and immediately place any and all contributions by me into the public domain; I grant anyone the right to use my work for any purpose, without any conditions, to be changed or destroyed in any manner whatsoever without any attribution or notice to the creator.

Or one of many specialized “public domain or release all rights legally possible” templates like this one:

This image really is in the Public domain as its author has released it into the public domain. If this is not possible, the author grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

I have no idea what a court would make of these, but presumably someone has or will inform the Wikipedia community if they are bogus.

If you aren’t ready to fully embrace the public domain, Creative Commons offers several gradations of partial measures (as well as a form to help you dedicate work to the public domain).

Check out all of Saint-André’s posts about the public domain and digg his essay.

Posted in Creative Commons, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Public Domain, Wikipedia | 2 Comments »

Support Creative Commons

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

has begun its annual fall fundraiser. Donate if you can or buy a t-shirt in support of your favorite licensethe public domain.

If you’re completely clueless about restrictive copyright and the net, you’re probably in the wrong place. Before you scurry off, watch Get Creative, which introduced Creative Commons nearly four years ago and provides some of the background story.

Otherwise, check out the brand new Wanna Work Together?, which explains Creative Commons more succinctly and features music by , who has the awesomest home page ever.

is forgoing its usual fifty percent take on ad clickthroughs for these videos through the end of the year (there’s a static ad at the end of each video).

Please contribute and spread these videos to help ensure a future with plenty of freedom lunches for all.

I currently work for Creative Commons, but heed this blog’s current tagline: My opinions only. I do not represent any organization in this publication.

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Public Domain | 4 Comments »

Friends don’t let friends click spam

Thursday, September 7th, 2006

Doc Searls unfortunately decided the other day that offering his blog under a relatively restrictive Creative Commons NonCommercial license instead of placing its contents in the public domain is chemo for splogs (spam blogs). I doubt that, strongly. Spam bloggers don’t care about copyright. They’ll take “all rights reserved” material, that which only limits commercial use, and stuff in the public domain equally. Often they combine tiny snippets from many sources, probably triggering copyright for none of them.

A couple examples found while looking at people who had mentioned Searls’ post: all rights reserved material splogged, commenter here says “My blog has been licensed with the CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 for a while now, and sploggers repost my content all the time.” A couple anecdotes prove nothing, but I’d be surprised to find that sploggers are, for example, using CC-enabled search to find content they can legally re-splog. I hope someone tries to figure out what characteristics make blog content more likely to be used in splogs and whether licensing is one of them. I’d get some satisfaction from either answer.

Though Searls’ license change was motived by a desire “to come up with new forms of treatment. Ones that don’t just come from Google and Yahoo. Ones that come from us” I do think blog spam is primarily the search engines’ problem to solve. Search results that don’t contain splogs are more valuable to searchers than spam-ridden results. Sites that cannot be found through search effectively don’t exist. That’s almost all there is to it.

Google in particular may have mixed incentives (they want people to click on their syndicated ads wherever the ads appear), but others don’t (Technorati, Microsoft, Ask, etc. — Yahoo! wishes it had Google’s mixed incentives). At least once where spam content seriously impacted the quality of search results Google seems to have solved the problem — at some point in the last year or so I stopped seeing Wikipedia content reposted with ads (an entirely legal practice) in Google search results.

What can people outside the search engines do to fight blog and other spam? Don’t click on it. It seems crazy, but clickfraud aside, real live idiots clicking on and even buying stuff via spam is what keeps spammers in business. Your uncle is probably buying pills from a spammer right now. Educate him.

On a broader scale, why isn’t the , or the blogger equivalent, running an educational campaign teaching people to avoid spam and malware? Some public figure should throw in “dag gammit, don’t click on spam” along with “don’t do drugs.” Ministers too.

Finally, if spam is so easy for (aware) humans to detect (I certainly have a second sense about it), why isn’t human-augmented computation being leveraged? Opportunities abound…

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Economics, Peeves, Public Domain, Wikipedia | 3 Comments »

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