Archive for 2014

Independence′ Day

Thursday, July 3rd, 2014

Whenever there’s a new disturbance in the former USSR territory that has people bringing down statues of Stalin, I’m mildly surprised that there are (or possibly were; I expect to be mildly surprised anew for a long time) still statues honoring Stalin in public. But my mild surprise at the continued honor of the quintessential 20th century Eurasian state tyrant always quickly gives way to mild lack of surprise that practitioners of the quintessential pre-20th century American private tyranny are not only still honored, but revered, their statues never toppled, and at worst their tyranny seen as blemishes on their records.

After 238 years, isn’t it about time to renew US Independence Day? I suggest terminating all honoring of slave owners, including the so-called discoverer of the Americas, all pre-Civil War presidents except John and John Quincy Adams, the first two post-Civil War presidents, the most famous non-president “founding father”, and a real estate entrepreneur whose name graces a commonwealth. Currency, the names of said commonwealth and one state, many counties and municipalities, thousands of streets, buildings and other public places, statues, and two faces on Mount Rushmore, all should change.

This change would be a bit annoying and expressive, but in that sense is traditional: US Independence Day firecrackers, parades, and speeches mark the height of mid-calendar year annoying expression.

(I’ve intended to post this on US Presidents’ Day since before I had a blog, and started several times, but each time lost focus through condemnation of almost every U.S. President for their public crimes. It occurred to me last year that July 4 would work, so long as I could suppress condemnation of the US War of Independence and all violent revolutions. Too big a topic for this parenthetical.)

Posted in Peeves, Politics | 6 Comments »

Open policy for a secure Internet-N-Life

Saturday, June 28th, 2014

(In)Security in Home Embedded Devices Jim Gettys says software needs to be maintained for decades considering where it is being deployed (e.g., embedded in products with multi-decade lifetimes, such as buildings) and the criticality of some of that software, an unpredictable attribute — a product might become unplanned “infrastructure” for example if it is widely deployed and other things come to depend on it. Without maintenance, including deployment of updates in the field, software (and thus systems it is embedded in) becomes increasingly insecure as vulnerabilities are discovered (cites a honeymoon period enjoyed by new systems).

This need for long-term maintenance and field deployment implies open source software and devices that users can upgrade — maintenance needs to continue beyond the expected life of any product or organization. “Upgrade” can also mean “replace” — perhaps some kinds of products should be more modular and with open designs so that parts that are themselves embedded systems can be swapped out. (Gettys didn’t mention, but replacement can be total. Perhaps “planned obsolescence” and “throwaway culture” have some security benefits. I suspect the response would be that many things continue to be used for a long time after they were planned to be obsolete and most of their production run siblings are discarded.)

But these practices are currently rare. Product developers do not demand source from chip and other hardware vendors and thus ship products with “binary blob” hardware drivers for Linux kernel which cannot be maintained, often based on kernel years out of date when product is shipped. Linux kernel near-monoculture for many embedded systems, increasing security threat. Many problems which do not depend on hardware vendor cooperation, ranging from unintentionally or lazily not providing source needed for rest of system, to intentionally shipping proprietary software, to intentionally locking down device to prevent user updates. Product customers do not demand long-term secure devices from product developers. There is little effort to fund commons-oriented embedded development (in contrast with Linux kernel and other systems development for servers, which many big companies fund).

Gettys is focused on embedded software in network devices (e.g., routers) as network access is critical infrastructure much else depends on, including the problem at hand: without network access, many other systems cannot be feasibly updated. He’s working on CeroWrt a cutting edge version of OpenWrt firmware, either of which is several years ahead of what typically ships on routers. A meme Gettys wishes to spread, the earliest instance of which I could find is on cerowrt-devel, a harsh example coming the next week:

Friends don’t let friends run factory firmware.

Cute. This reminds me of something a friend said in a group discussion that touched on security and embedded in body (or perhaps it was mind embedded in) systems, along the lines of “I wouldn’t run (on) an insecure system.” Or malware would give you a bad trip.

But I’m ambivalent. Most people, thus most friends, don’t know what factory firmware is. Systems need to be much more secure (for the long term, including all that implies) as shipped. Elite friend advice could help drive demand for better systems, but I doubt “just say no” will help much — its track records for altering mass outcomes, e.g., with respect to proprietary software or formats, seems very poor.

In Q&A someone asked about centralized cloud silos. Gettys doesn’t like them, but said without long-term secure alternatives that can be deployed and maintained by everyone there isn’t much hope. I agree.

You may recognize open source software and devices that users can upgrade above as roughly the conditions of GPL-3.0. Gettys mentioned this and noted:

  • It isn’t clear that copyright-based conditions are effective mechanism for enforcing these conditions. (One reason I say copyleft is a prototype for more appropriate regulation.)
  • Of “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness”, free software has emphasized the latter two, but nobody realized how important free software would be for living one’s life given the extent to which one interacts with and depends on (often embedded) software. In my experience people have realized this for many years, but it should indeed move to the fore.

Near the end Gettys asked what role industry and government should have in moving toward safer systems (and skip the “home” qualifier in the talk title; these considerations are at least as important for institutions and large-scale infrastructure). One answer might be in open policy. Public, publicly-interested, and otherwise coordinated funders and purchasers need to be convinced there is a problem and that it makes sense for them to demand their resources help shift the market. The Free Software Foundation’s Respects Your Freedom criteria (ignoring the “public relations” item) is a good start on what should be demanded for embedded systems.

Obviously there’s a role for developers too. Gettys asked how to get beyond the near Linux kernel monoculture, mentioning BSD. My ignorant wish is that developers wanting to break the monoculture instead try to build systems using better tools, at least better languages (not that any system will reduce the need for security in depth).

Here’s to a universal, secure, and resilient web and technium. Yes, these features cost. But I’m increasingly convinced that humans underinvest in security (not only computer, and at every level), especially in making sure investments aren’t theater or worse.

Posted in Commons, Computers, Economics, Open Hardware, Open Services, Open Source, Programming, Public Goods | 1 Comment »

“Open policy” is the most promising copyright reform

Thursday, June 26th, 2014

Only a few days (June 30 deadline) for applications to the first Institute for Open Leadership. I don’t know anything about it other than what’s at the link, but from what I gather it involves a week-long workshop in the San Francisco area on open policy and ongoing participation in an online community of people promoting open policies in their professional capacities, and is managed by an expert in the field, Timothy Vollmer. Read an interview with Vollmer (wayback link to spare you the annoying list-gathering clickthrough at the original site, not least because its newsletter is an offender).

The institute and its parent Open Policy Network define:

Open Policy = publicly funded resources are openly licensed resources.

(Openly licensed includes public domain.)

…

Now, why open policy is the most promising knowledge regulation reform (I wrote “copyright” in the title, but the concept is applicable to mitigating other IP regimes, e.g., patent, and pro-commons regulation not based on mitigating IP):

  • Most proposed reforms (formalities can serve as an example for each mention following) merely reduce inefficiencies and embarrassments of freedom infringing regimes in ways that don’t favor commons-based production, as is necessary for sustainable good policy. Even if not usually conceptualized as commons-favoring, open policy is strongly biased in that direction as its mechanism is mandate of the terms used for commons-based production: open licenses. Most proposed reforms could be reshaped to be commons-favoring and thinking of how to do so a useful exercise (watch this space) but making such reshaping gain traction, as a matter of discourse let alone implementation, is a very long-term project.
  • The concept of open policy is scalable. There’s no reason as it gains credence to push for its expansion to everything receiving public or publicly interested support, including high and very low culture subsidy. At the extreme, the only way to avoid being subject to some open policy mandate would be to create restricted works in an IPer colony, isolated from the rest of humanity.
  • In order to make open policy gain much more credence than it has now, its advocates will be forced to make increasingly sophisticated public policy arguments to support claims that open policy “maximizes public investment” or to shift the object of maximization to freedom and equality. Most proposed reforms, because they would only reduce inefficiency and embarrassment, do not force much sophistication, leaving knowledge regulation discourse rotting in a trough where economists abandoned it over a century ago.
  • Open policy implementation has the potential to destroy the rents of freedom infringing industries. For sustainable good policy it is necessary to both build up the commons as an interest group and diminish interest groups that depend or think they depend on infringing freedom. It is possible for open policy to be gamed (e.g., hybrid journal double dipping). As troubling as that is, it seems to me that open policy flips which side is left desperately clawing for loopholes contrary to the rationale of policy. Most reform proposals at least implicitly take it as a given that public interest is the desperate side.
  • Open policy does not require any fundamental changes to national law or international treaties, meaning it is feasible, now. Hopefully a few reformists have generally grasped the no-brainer concept that a benefit obtained today is more valuable than one obtained in the future, e.g., in 95 years. It also doesn’t mean that open policy is merely a “patch” in contrast the “fixes” of most proposed reforms — which aren’t fixes anyway, but rather mitigations of the worst inefficiencies and embarrassments of freedom infringing regimes. If open policy is a patch, it is a one that helps the body of knowledge regulation to heal, by the mechanisms above (promoting commons production and discourse, diminishing freedom infringing interests).

…

In my tradition of critical cheering, consider the following Open Policy Network statement:

We have observed that current open policy efforts are decentralized, uncoordinated and insular; there is poor and/or sporadic information sharing.

As illustrated by the lack of the Open Source Definition or any software-centric organizations on Open Policy Network lists of its guiding principles and member organizations. Fortunately software is mentioned several times, for example:

If we are going to unleash the power of hundreds of billions of dollars of publicly funded education, research, data, and software, we need broad adoption of open policies.

Hopefully if the Open Policy Network is to become an important venue for moving open policy forward, people who understand software will get involved (by the way, one of the ways “publicly funded” is scalable is that it properly includes procurement, not only wholly funded new resources), e.g., FSFE and April. I know talking about software is scary — because it is powerful and unavoidable. But this makes it a necessity to include in any serious project to reform the knowledge economy and policy. Before long, everything that is not software or suffused with software will be obsolete.

Posted in Commons, Creative Commons, Economics, Inequality Promotion, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Access, Open Source, Patents, Peeves, Politics, Public Domain | 9 Comments »

{ "title" : "API commons II" }

Tuesday, June 24th, 2014

API Voice:

Those two posts by API Evangelist (another of his sites) Kin Lane extract bits of my long post on these and related matters, as discussed at API Con. I’m happy that even one person obtained such clear takeaways from reading my post or attending the panel.

Quick followups on Lane’s posts:

  • I failed to mention that never requiring permission to implement an API must include not needing permission to reverse engineer or discover an undocumented API. I do not know whether this implies in the context of web service APIs has been thoroughly explored.
  • Lane mentions a layer that I missed: the data model or schema. Or models, including for inputs and outputs of the API, and of whatever underlying data it is providing access to. These may fall out of other layers, or may be specified independently.
  • I reiterate my recommendation of the Apache License 2.0 as currently the best license for API specifications. But I really don’t want to argue with pushing CC0, which has great expressive value even if it isn’t absolutely perfect for the purpose (explicit non-licensing of patents).

Posted in Creative Commons, Open Services, Open Standards, Public Domain | No Comments »

API commons

Thursday, May 29th, 2014

Notes for panel The API Copyright Emergency: What’s Next? today at API Con SF. The “emergency” is the recent decision in Oracle v. Google, which I don’t discuss directly below, though I did riff on the ongoing case last year.

I begin with and come back to a few times Creative Commons licenses as I was on the panel as a “senior fellow” for that organization, but apart from such emphasis and framing, this is more or less what I think. I got about 80% of the below in on the panel, but hopefully still worth reading even for attendees.

A few follow-up thoughts after the notes.

…

Creative Commons licenses, like other public licenses, grant permissions around copyright, but as CC’s statement on copyright reform concludes, licenses “are not a substitute for users’ rights, and CC supports ongoing efforts to reform copyright law to strengthen users’ rights and expand the public domain.” In the context of APIs, default policy should be that independent implementation of an API never require permission from the API’s designer, previous implementer, or other rightsholder.

Without such a default policy of permission-free innovation, interoperability and competition will suffer, and the API community invites late and messy regulation at other levels intending to protect consumers from resulting lock-in.

Practically, there are things API developers, service providers, and API consumers can do and demand of each other, both to protect the community from a bad turn in default policy, and to go further in creating a commons. But using tools such as those CC provides, and choosing the right tools, requires looking at what an API consists of, including:

  1. API specification
  2. API documentation
  3. API implementations, server
  4. API implementations, client
  5. Material (often “data”) made available via API
  6. API metadata (e.g, as part of API directory)

(depending on construction, these could all be generated from an annotated implementation, or could each be separate works)

and what restrictions can be pertinent:

  1. Copyright
  2. Patent

(many other issues can arise from providing an API as a service, e.g., privacy, though those are usually not in the range of public licenses and are orthogonal to API “IP”, so I’ll ignore them here)

1-4 are clearly works subject to copyright, while 5 and 6 may or may not be (e.g., hopefully not if purely factual data). Typically only 3 and 4 might be restricted by patents.

Standards bodies typically do their work primarily around 1. Relatively open ones, like the W3C, obtain agreement from all contributors to the standard to permit royalty-free implementation of the standard by anyone, typically including a patent license and permission to prepare and perform derivative works (i.e., copyright, to extent such permission is necessary). One option you have is to put your API through an existing standards organization. This may be too heavyweight, or may be appropriate yet if your API is really a multi-stakeholder thing with multiple peer implementations; the W3C now has a lightweight community group venue which might be appropriate. The Open Web Foundation’s agreements allow you to take this approach for your API without involvement of an existing standards body​. Lawrence Rosen has/will talk about this.

Another approach is to release your API specification (and necessarily 2-4 to the extent they comprise one work, ideally even if they are separate) under a public copyright license, such as one of the CC licenses, the CC0 public domain dedication, or an open source software license. Currently the most obvious choice is the Apache License 2.0, which grants copyright permission as well as including a patent peace clause. One or more of the CC licenses are sometimes suggested, perhaps because specification and documentation are often one work, and the latter seems like a “creative” work. But keep in mind that CC does not recommend using its licenses for software, and instead recommends using an open source software licenses (such as Apache): no CC license includes explicit patent permission, and depending on the specific CC license chosen, it may not be compatible with software licenses, contrary to goal of granting clear permission for independent API implementation, even in the face of a bad policy turn.

One way to go beyond mitigating “API copyrightability” is to publish open source implementations, preferably production, though reference implementations are better than nothing. These implementations would be covered by whatever copyright and patent permissions are granted by the license they are released under — again Apache 2.0 is a good choice, and for software implementation CC licenses should not be used; other software licenses such as [A]GPL might be pertinent depending on business and social goals.

Another way to create a “thick” API commons is to address material made available via APIs, and metadata about APIs. There, CC tools are likely pertinent, e.g., use CC0 for data and metadata to ensure that “facts are free”, as they ought be in spite of other bad policy turns.

To get even thicker, consider the architecture, for lack of a better term, around API development, services, and material accessed and updated via APIs. Just some keywords: Linked Open Data, P2P, federation, Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe, collaborative curation.

…

The other panelists were Pamela Samuelson, Lawrence Rosen, and Annette Hurst, moderated by David Berlind.

I’m fairly familiar with Samuelson’s and Rosen’s work and don’t have comments on what they said on the panel. If you want to read more, I recommend among Samuelson’s papers The Strange Odyssey of Software Interfaces and Intellectual Property Law which shows that the “API copyright emergency” of the panel title is recurrent and intertwined with patent, providing several decades of the pertinent history up to 2008. Contrary to my expectation in the notes above, Rosen didn’t get a chance to talk about the Open Web Foundation agreements, but you can read his 2010 article Implementing Open Standards in Open Source which covers OWF.

Hurst is a lawyer for Orrick representing Oracle in the Oracle v. Google case, so understandably advocated for API copyright, but in the process made several deeply flawed assertions could have consumed the entire duration of the panel, but Berlind did a good job of keeping the conversation moving forward. Still, I want to mention two high level ones here, my paraphrases and responses:

Without software copyright the software economy would go away. This is refuted by software development not for the purposes of selling licenses (which is the vast majority of it), especially free/open source software development, and services (e.g., API provision, the source of which is often never published, though it ought be, see “going beyond” recommendations above). Yes the software economy would change, with less winner-take-all monopoly and less employment for Intellectual Parasite lawyers. But the software economy would be huge and very competitive. Software is eating the world, remember? One way to make it help rather than pejoratively eat the world is to eject the parasites along for the ride.

Open source can’t work without software copyright. This is refuted by 1) software source sharing before software copyright; 2) preponderance of permissively licensed open source software, in which the terms do not allow suing downstream developers who do not share back; 3) the difficulty of enforcing copyleft licenses which do allow for suing downstream developers who do not share back; 4) the possibility of non-copyright regulation to force sharing of source (indeed I see the charitable understanding of copyleft as prototyping such regulation; for perspective on the Oracle v. Google case from someone with a more purely charitable understanding of copyleft, see Bradley Kuhn); and 5) demand and supply mechanisms for mandating sharing of source (e.g., procurement policies, distribution policies such as Debian’s).

These came up because Hurst seemed to really want the audience to conflate software copyright in general (not at issue in the case, settled in a bad place since the early 1980s) and API copyright specifically. Regarding the latter, another point which could have been made is the extent to which free/open source software has been built around providing alternatives to proprietary software, often API-compatible. If API copyright could prevent compatible implementation without permission of any sort, open source, competition, and innovation would all be severely hampered.

…

There is a recent site called API Commons, which seems to be an API directory (Programmable Web, which ran the conference, also has one). My general suggestion to both would be to implement and facilitate putting all elements of APIs listed above in my notes in the commons. For example, they could clarify that API metadata they collect is in the public domain, publish it as Linked Open Data, and encourage API developers and providers they catalog to freely license specifications, documentation, implementations, and data, and note such in the directories.

…

In order to get a flavor for the conference, I listened to yesterday morning’s keynotes, both of which made valiant attempts to connect big picture themes to day to day API development and provision. Allow me to try to make connections back to “API commons”.

Sarah Austin, representing the San Francisco YMCA, pointed out that the conference is near the Tenderloin neighborhood, the poorest in central San Francisco. Austin asked if kids from the Tenderloin would be able to find jobs in the “API economy” or would they be priced out of the area (many tech companies have moved nearby in the last years, Twitter perhaps the best known).

Keith Axline claimed The Universe Is Programmable. We Need an API for Everything, or to some extent, that learning about the universe and how to manipulate it is like programming. Axline’s talk seemed fairly philosophical, but could be made concrete with reference to the Internet of Things, programmable matter, robots, nanobots, software eating the world … much about the world will indeed soon be software (programmable) or obsolete.

Axline’s conclusion was in effect largely about knowledge policy, including mourning energy wasted on IP, and observing that we should figure out public support for science or risk a programmable world dominated by IP. That might be part of it, but keeps the focus on funding, which is just where IP advocates want it — IP is an off-the-balance-sheets, “free” taking. A more direct approach is needed — get the rules of knowledge policy right, put freedom and equality as its top goals, reject freedom infringing regimes, promote commons (but mandating all these as a condition of public and publicly interested funding is a reasonable starting place) — given these objectives and constraints, then argue about market, government, or other failure and funding.

Knowledge policy can’t directly address the Austin’s concerns in the Tenderloin, but it does indirectly affect them, and over the long term tremendously affect them, in the Tenderloin and many other places. As the world accelerates its transition from an industrial to a knowledge dominated economy, will that economy be dominated by monopoly and inequality or freedom and equality? Will the former concentrations continue to abet instances of what Jane Jacobs called “catastrophic money” rushing into ill-prepared neighborhoods, or will the latter tendencies spread the knowledge, wealth, and opportunity?

Posted in Commons, Creative Commons, Economics, Inequality Promotion, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Services, Open Source, Open Standards, P2P, Patents, Politics, Public Domain, Semantic Web | 3 Comments »

Robot Gang Memorial Day

Monday, May 26th, 2014

I find gang violence memorials tacky and sad (not all in this style are gang-related, but apparently the pictured one is), but a comprehensible form of mourning and remembrance.

Though with much higher status participants, and somewhat higher production values, today’s Memorial Day (US) commemorations are similarly tacky and sad. But these big scale gang memorials are far inferior to small scale gang memorials. The latter at least often include exhortations to “stop violence”, gang violence of their sort is universally viewed as illegal, and the participants are understood as rather pathetic victims and victimizers who really ought to have done something better with their lives, products of culture, economy, governance (take your pick) that is broken and clearly ought be fixed — all true also of big scale gang violence.

I suggest that we stop memorializing large scale gang members as heroes before they are fully replaced by robots.

One step forward might be to end U.S. (and elsewhere) exploitation of uneducated teenage soldiers. But perhaps something else would be more feasible or effective. If conflict reduction bonds existed and you held a large stake in them, what would you do?

Posted in Economics, Peeves, Politics | 2 Comments »

LWN.net original articles now BY-SA after a week

Thursday, May 1st, 2014

LWN.net started in 1998 as Linux Weekly News. Its coverage is broader now — Free/Open Source Software, and sometimes immediate neighbors, with in-depth coverage of Linux kernel and related system software development — and expert. It’s one of the few publications that I can read an article about a topic that I have in depth knowledge of and not then question whether all reporting on topics I don’t have in depth knowledge of is also that bad. Because LWN.net’s reporting is good (other readers I know seem to agree). LWN.net’s logo says “Linux info from the source”; I suspect the method implied (reading source, commits, mailing lists, talking to developers) explains the goodness.

I’ve poked fun at paywalls, but for a paywall, LWN.net’s is simple and well done: most new articles are subscriber-only for one week, and subscribers can generate a link to share a paywalled article with non-subscribers. The site does have ads, though disappointingly mostly Google AdSense. It is too bad such an in-depth industry publication doesn’t attract highly specific ads, like trade publications or even well done user group newsletters used to.

It seems that starting recently LWN.net releases its original articles under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license after one week. As of this writing a week old article, a current article, another of more general interest, archive of author guidelines timestamped February 10 mentioning “possibly under a free license”, and today mentioning CC-BY-SA-4.0. I imagine that given LWN.net’s in-depth reporting, especially on the Linux kernel, some articles might actually be usefully incorporated into educational material, documentation, Wikipedia articles.

Subscribe, or occasionally read articles older than one week. Either would probably be good for your information diet.

Update 20140507: The ‘current’ articles above are now a week old, and CC-BY-SA-4.0 licensed.

Posted in Advertising, Creative Commons, Economics, Open Source | No Comments »

Hyperlocal Optimum

Sunday, April 27th, 2014

I recently wanted to accuse some people of pursuing a hyperlocal optimum. In this case, a heightened perception of the strength of their position, sensed only by themselves. I thought better of it as there were more charitable interpretations of their actions, and a similar pejorative exists for this use case: reality distortion field.

But, I thought, what a great term! Google search/scholar/books shows it being used exactly once so far, 41 days ago by user pholling in a forum about Manchester, England (emphasis added):

To fix all of this is not a trivial bit of work, it will require that city regions and broader regions work together to aim for the overall optimum and not their hyperlocal optimum. London does this to a large extent, but no other place in the England does.

I have no assessment of the quote as I know next to nothing about urban policy in England, but urban policy is surely a field in which the term hyperlocal optimum could be heavily applied. I’m not going to claim any particular urban policy constitutes pursuit of hyperlocal optima (note locality geographic and temporal), and I’ll admit there exist charitable interpretations of many such unnamed policies. But consider that:

  • In the next few decades, over 2 billion more people will live in cities. Simple calculation based on projected ~2050 population (now: 7 billion, 2050: 9 billion) and urbanization (now: .5, 2050: .7) gives 2.8 billion more (now: 3.5 billion, 2050: 6.3 billion).
  • Robots (most obviously in transportation and construction) will reshape cities as profoundly this century as autos did in the last, beginning now.
  • There will be calamities. Hopefully fewer than in the last century, but planning ahead for cities’ role in preventing and surviving such is better than hoping.

Hyperlocal action is fine, but please think globally and long-term always, and modify actions accordingly to break out of pursuit of mere hyperlocal optima.

…

I’ve not explicitly defined what makes a local optimum a hyperlocal optimum. Perhaps the difficulty of doing so explains why they term has until now only been used once before in the subset of the universe Google has indexed. My first use above implies that “hyper” indicates the local optimum is perceived, but perhaps not really even the local optimum. My second use above implies “hyper” denotes something about either relative scale (the global optimum is much, much better) or qualitative difference (the global optimum considers totally different parameters from the ones considered for the hyperlocal optimum). Probably the term hyperlocal optimum has no good use. I may still use it again when I fail to avoid stooping to the pejorative.

…

Many problems of the dominant topic of this blog can be seen as ones of escaping local optima. Joining with the cities topic, individual cities and other entities’ ongoing lock-in to proprietary software is an example of a local optimum that might be escaped through coordination with other cities. I’m not sure when (assuming against the above, that the term has some value) to apply the hyper prefix to such situations (another such is library lock-in to proprietary journal subscription and groveling for proprietary book purchases). Suggestions?

…

I might avoid commenting on this years’ mayoral election for my locality, Oakland. If any of the candidates seriously talk about any of the above macro challenges and opportunities, I will be pleasantly surprised. I think that my handwaving predictions after the last (2011) election held up pretty well, mostly unfortunately.

Posted in Economics, Oakland, Open Access, Open Source, Peeves, Politics | No Comments »

Without Intellectual Property Day [edit]

Saturday, April 26th, 2014
Without Intellectual Property Day by Parker Higgins of the EFF is quite good, and released under CC-BY. Clearly deserving of adaptation. Mine below, followed by a diff.

April 26 is the day marked each year since 2000 by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) as “World Intellectual Property Day”, in which WIPO tries to associate its worldwide pushes for more enclosure with creativity.

Celebrating creativity is a good thing, but when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. For the World Intellectual Property Organization, it may seem like creativity and “intellectual property” are inextricably linked. That’s not the case. In the spirit of adding to the conversation, let’s honor all the creativity and industry that is happening without a dependence on a system intellectual property.

There’s an important reason to encourage and promote creativity outside the bounds of increasingly restrictive laws: to the extent such creativity succeeds, it helps us re-imagine the range of desirable policy and reduces the resources available to enclosure industries to lobby for protectionism — in sum shifting what is politically possible. It’s incumbent on all of us who want to encourage creativity to continue to explore and utilize structures that reward creators without also restricting speech.

Comedy, Fashion, Cooking, Magic, and More

In the areas in which intellectual freedom is not typically infringed, there is tremendous innovation and consistent creativity outside of the intellectual property system. Chefs create new dishes, designers imagine new styles, comedians write new jokes, all without a legal enforcement mechanism to restrict others from learning and building on them.

There may be informal systems that discourage copying—the comedy community, to take one example, will call out people who are deemed to be ripping off material—but for the most part these work without expensive litigation, threats of ruinous fines, and the creation of systems of surveillance and censorship.

Contributing to a Creative Commons

The free software movement pioneered the practice of creating digital media that can legally and freely be shared and expanded, building a commons. The digital commons idea is being pushed in more areas than ever before, including culture, education, government, hardware design, and research. There are some projects we’re all familiar with — Wikipedia is perhaps the most prominent, creating an expansive and continuously updated encyclopedia that is freely accessible under permissive terms to the entire world.

Focusing on this year’s World IP Day theme of movies, there have been some impressive contributions the commons over the years. Nina Paley’s feature animation Sita Sings The Blues, which she released into the public domain, has spread widely, inspired more work, and earned her money. The short films from the Blender Foundation have demonstrated cutting-edge computer graphics made with free software and, though they’ve sometimes been on the receiving end of bogus copyright takedowns, have been watched many millions of times.

Kickstarting and Threshold Pledges

Finally, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indie-Go-Go have made a major splash in the last few years as another fundraising model that can complement, or even replace, copyright exclusivity. These platforms build on theoretical framework laid out by scholars like John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier in the influential “Street Performer Protocol” paper, which set out to devise an alternative funding system for public domain works. But most crowdfunded works are not in the commons, indicating an need for better coordination of street patrons.

Looking at movies in particular: Kickstarter alone has enabled hundreds of millions of dollars of pledges, hundreds of theatrical releases, and seven Oscar-nominated films (including Inocente, winner of the Best Documentary Short category). Blender Foundation is currently crowdfunding its first feature length film, Gooseberry.

***

The conceit of copyright and other “intellectual property” systems is that they can be calibrated to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. But the reality of these systems is corruption and rent seeking, not calibration. The cost is not just less creativity and innovation, but less freedom and equality.

It’s clear from real world examples that other systems can achieve the goal of promoting creativity, progress, and innovation. We must continue to push for both practice and policy that favors these systems, ultimately rendering “intellectual property” a baffling anachronism. In a good future, a policy-oriented celebration of creativity and innovaion would be called World Intellectual Freedom Day.

wdiff -n eff-wipd.html eff-wipd-edit.html |colordiff |aha -w > eff-wipd-diff.html
[-<p>Today, April 26,-]{+<p>April 26+} is the day marked each year since 2000 [-as "Intellectual Property Day"-] by the <a href="https://www.eff.org/issues/wipo">World Intellectual Property Organization [-(WIPO)</a>. There are many areas where EFF has not historically agreed with WIPO,-] {+(WIPO)</a> as "World Intellectual Property Day", in+} which [-has traditionally pushed-] {+WIPO tries to associate its <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-agreements-worldwide">worldwide pushes+} for more [-restrictive agreements and served as a venue for <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-agreements-worldwide">domestic policy laundering</a>, but we agree that celebrating-] {+enclosure</a> with creativity.</p>+}
{+<p>Celebrating+} creativity is a good [-thing.</p>-]
[-<p>As the saying goes, though:-] {+thing, but+} when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. For the World Intellectual Property Organization, it may seem like creativity and <a href="https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/the-term">"intellectual property"</a> are inextricably linked. That's not the case. In the spirit of adding to the conversation, [-we'd like to-] {+let's+} honor all the creativity and industry that is happening <i>without</i> a dependence on a system intellectual property.</p>
<p>There's an important reason to encourage {+and promote+} creativity outside the bounds of increasingly restrictive [-laws, too. As Ninth Circuit Chief Justice Alex Kozinski eloquently explained in <a href="http://notabug.com/kozinski/whitedissent">a powerful dissent</a> some 20 years ago, pushing only for more IP restrictions tips a delicate balance against creativity:</p>-]
[-<blockquote><p>Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on-] {+laws: to+} the [-works-] {+extent such creativity succeeds, it helps us re-imagine the range+} of [-those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed-] {+desirable policy <i>and</i> reduces the resources available+} to [-nurture.</p></blockquote>-]
[-<p>It's-] {+enclosure industries to lobby for protectionism -- in sum shifting what is politically possible. It's+} incumbent on all of us who want to encourage creativity to continue to explore {+and utilize+} structures that reward creators without also restricting speech.</p>
<h3>Comedy, Fashion, Cooking, Magic, and More</h3>
<p>In the areas [-known as copyright's "negative spaces,"-] {+in which intellectual freedom is not typically infringed,+} there is tremendous innovation and consistent creativity outside of the intellectual property system. Chefs create new dishes, designers imagine new styles, comedians write new jokes, all without a legal enforcement mechanism to restrict others from learning and building on them.</p>
<p>There may be informal systems that discourage copying—the comedy community, to take one example, <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/features/2014/the_humor_code/joke_theft_can_a_comedian_sue_if_someone_steals_his_material.html">will call out people</a> who are deemed to be ripping off material—but for the most part these work without expensive litigation, threats of ruinous fines, and the creation of systems [-that can be abused to silence lawful non-infringing speech.</p>-] {+of surveillance and censorship.</p>+}
<h3>Contributing to a Creative Commons</h3>
<p>The free software movement [-may have popularized-] {+pioneered+} the [-idea-] {+practice+} of creating digital media that can legally and freely be shared and expanded, [-but the free culture movement has pushed the-] {+building a commons. The digital commons+} idea [-further-] {+is being pushed in more areas+} than ever [-before.-] {+before, including culture, education, government, hardware design, and research.+} There are some projects we're all familiar [-with—Wikipedia-] {+with -- Wikipedia+} is perhaps the most prominent, creating an expansive and continuously updated encyclopedia that is freely accessible under permissive terms to the entire world.</p>
<p>Focusing on this year's World IP Day theme of movies, there have been some impressive contributions the commons over the years. Nina Paley's feature animation <i><a href="http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/">Sita Sings The Blues</a></i>, which she released into the public domain, has spread widely, inspired more work, and earned her money. The <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101002/20174711259/open-source-animated-movie-shows-what-can-be-done-today.shtml">short films from the Blender Foundation</a> have demonstrated cutting-edge computer graphics made with free software and, though they've sometimes been on <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140406/07212626819/sony-youtube-take-down-sintel-blenders-open-source-creative-commons-crowdfunded-masterpiece.shtml">the receiving end of bogus copyright takedowns</a>, have been watched many millions of times.</p>
<h3>Kickstarting and Threshold Pledges</h3>
<p>Finally, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indie-Go-Go have made a major splash in the last few years as another fundraising model that can complement, or even replace, [-traditional-] copyright exclusivity. These platforms build on theoretical framework laid out by scholars like John Kelsey and [-EFF board member-] Bruce Schneier in <a href="https://www.schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html">the influential "Street Performer Protocol" paper</a>, which set out to devise an alternative funding system for public [-works.</p>-] {+domain works. But most crowdfunded works are not in the commons, indicating an need for better <a href="https://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2013/08/10/street-patrons-missing-coordination-protocol/">coordination of street patrons</a>.</p>+}
<p>Looking at movies in particular: Kickstarter alone has <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/a-big-day-for-film">enabled hundreds of millions of dollars of pledges</a>, hundreds of theatrical releases, and seven Oscar-nominated films (including <i>Inocente</i>, winner of the Best Documentary Short category). [-Along with other-] {+Blender Foundation is currently+} crowdfunding [-sites, it has allowed the development of niche projects that might never have been possible under the traditional copyright system.&nbsp;</p>-] {+its first feature length film, <em><a href="http://gooseberry.blender.org/">Gooseberry</a></em>.</p>+}
<h3>***</h3>
[-<p>As the Constitution tells us,-]
{+<p>The conceit of+} copyright and other "intellectual property" systems [-can, when-] {+is that they can be+} calibrated [-correctly,-] {+to+} promote the progress of science and the useful arts. [-We continue to work pushing for a balanced law that would better achieve that end.</p>-]
[-<p>But it's also-] {+But the reality of these systems is corruption and rent seeking, not calibration. The cost is not just less creativity and innovation, but less freedom and <a href="https://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2014/01/30/tech-wealth-ip/">equality</a>.</p>+}
{+<p>It's+} clear from [-these-] real world examples that other systems can achieve [-that-] {+the+} goal [-as well. Promoting-] {+of promoting+} creativity, progress, and [-innovation is an incredibly valuable mission—it's good to know that it doesn't have-] {+innovation. We must continue+} to [-come through systems-] {+push for both practice and <a href="https://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2014/02/09/freedoms-commons/#regulators">policy+} that [-can-] {+favors these systems</a>, ultimately rendering "intellectual property" a baffling anachronism. In a good future, a policy-oriented celebration of creativity and innovaion would+} be [-abused to stifle valuable speech.</p>-] {+called World Intellectual Freedom Day.</p>+}

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

Sum of all questions

Saturday, April 19th, 2014

I thoroughly enjoyed memesteader Gordon Mohr’s Quora & Wikipedia: Might one ever bail out the other? Futures of ‘Qworum’ or ‘WiQipedia’ which posits two futures in which the sites respectively decline mostly due to internal failure — essentially not adequately dealing with spam and unscrupulous behavior in both cases, though the spam and behavior is different for each.

Both futures seem plausible to me, inclusive of the decline and bail out in each. I also take the medium term absolute decline and death of Quora and steep relative decline of Wikimedia as likely. This relative assessment isn’t a knock on Quora — it and many others waiting in the wings can get big or fail — commons-based projects don’t have much experience in trying to do that (but need to, or find some other way to maintain long-term competitiveness).

Of course “waiting in the wings” is an understatement: I suspect the decline of both Quora and Wikimedia will be less due to internal failure than to being outcompeted by new entrants. Mohr has long been rumored to be working on one, but I imagine there must be many entrepreneurs dreaming of taking a chunk of Wikipedia traffic. I enjoy the Kill Hollywood request for startups, but Kill Wikipedia seems like a more plausible target for VC-term investment. (My preference is to target proprietary monopolies for destruction through competition, replacing them with commons; long ago I even imagined a financially leveraged/risk-seeking approach, but more feasible ones badly needed still.)

Go read and enjoy Mohr’s post, take it at least semi-seriously, and reflect on the future. Doing so makes me pine for something which does not yet exist: combinatorial prediction markets for everything.

…

I hadn’t looked at Quora in some time. I note that it still requires logging in to read, but has added Google — previously Facebook login (or not) was the only choice. There have been at least semi-serious explorations of a Wikimedia general Q&A sister project, but I’m not sure if any of them are listed in project proposals.

Posted in Advertising, Commons, Economics, Prediction Markets, Wikipedia | No Comments »

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