Post Intellectual Protectionism

25 years of GNU

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

The turns 25 on September 27. Not much to add beyond what I wrote on the Creative Commons blog. Watch the Freedom Fry video.

I do have some meta commentary…

The video, featuring British humorist , is very British. That is, Americans might wonder if there is any humor in it at all. I’m fine with that.

It’s great that the video is posted in Ogg Theora format and works seamlessly in my browser via Cortado, and download links are provided. However, HTML to copy & paste for direct inclusion in a blog post or other web page should also be provided, as is typical for sharing video. I haven’t tried making such yet, though I should and might.

Finally, there’s a hidden jab at some in the free software movement in my CC blog post:

One of the movements and projects directly inspired by GNU is Creative Commons. We’re still learning from the free software movement. On a practical level, all servers run by Creative Commons are powered by GNU/Linux and all of the software we develop is free software.

So please join us in wishing the GNU project a happy 25th birthday by spreading a happy birthday video from comedian Stephen Fry. The video, Freedom Fry, is released under a CC Attribution-NoDerivatives license.

Emphasis added. The free culture/open content world lags the free software/open source world in many respects, one of those being an understanding of what freedoms are necessary. Some from the free software world have pushed Creative Commons to recognize that in many cases culture requires freedoms equivalent to those expected for free software/open source (that’s the first bolded link above), while some in the free software world (not necessarily the exact same people, but at least people associated with the same organizations) publish documents and videos under terms that do not grant those same freedoms (that’s the second bolded link above).

The Free Software Foundation has probably published documents under terms roughly equivalent to CC BY-ND probably before CC existed. Currently the footer of fsf.org says:

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Does the FSF really want to reserve the right to use copyright to censor people who might publish derived versions of their texts? They probably are concerned that someone will alter their message so as to be misleading. Perhaps there was some rationale for this pre-web and pre-CC, but now there is not:

  • People can easily see canonical versions by going to fsf.org. (DNS also should obsolete much of trademark as well, but that’s for another post.)
  • CC licenses that permit derivatives include the following (see 3(b), 4(a), 4(b), and 4(c) for the actual language):
    • Licensor can specify a link to provide for attribution
    • Derivative works must state how they are altered
    • Licensor can demand that credit be removed from the derivative
    • Unfortunately, in some jurisdictions licensor could press “moral rights” to censor a derivative considered derogatory

So one can pre-clear the right to make adaptations and retain some legal mechanisms to club creators of adaptations (ordered from best practice to distasteful, according to me).

The Software Freedom Law Center does worse, publishing its website (also, see the SFLC post on 25 years of GNU) under CC BY-NC-ND. Do they really want to prohibit commercial use? SFLC (a super excellent organization, as is the FSF!) is dedicated to software freedom, but still it seems silly for them to publish non-software works under terms antithetical to the spirit of free software.

On a brighter note, the FSF is publishing promotional images for Freedom Fry under a free as in free software as applied to cultural works license (CC BY-SA), one of which has already been taken under those terms for use on Stephen Fry’s Wikipedia article. Ah, the power of free cultural works. :)

Do wish GNU a happy 25th birtday — watch and spread the video!

Posted in Creative Commons, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Peeves, Wikipedia | 12 Comments »

Does copyright incentivize creativity?

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Andrew Dubber has a much linked-to post recently in which he declares that music copyright should last for five years, renewable on the condition of commercial availability. That would make a gigantic improvement over the current effectively perpetual (50-70 years depending on jurisdiction, retroactively extended as necessary). Not as gigantic, but much more tenable than the one year usufruct proposal I noted a few years ago.

It’s great to see someone who appears to be well respected in the recorded music industry providing such a radical and rational (in today’s context) proposal, but the key insight has nothing to do with the specifics of his proposal. Dubber writes (emphasis added):

Current blanket copyright terms ‘protect’ (I use that term in the sense of ‘racket’) copyright owners so that they can continue to be paid over and over again for work they did years ago. It prevents anyone else from making money out of works that have been shelved.

It does not, in any real sense, ‘incentivise creativity’.

So obvious, so completely ignored by policy.

Via Techdirt.

Posted in Intellectual Protectionism, Music | 3 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 »

Free (and gratis) software vs. 25,000 cops

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

I’ve mentioned before that free software and its ilk decreases opportunity for taxation and regulation. Tim Lee wrote on the same topic a couple months ago. So I’m slightly pleased to see the argument endorsed by the Business Software Alliance, as told by Russell McOrmond (emphasis added to all quotes below):

The claims in the recent press release included the following:

Software piracy also has ripple effects in local communities.  The lost revenues to the wider group of software distributors and service providers ($11.4 billion) would have been enough to hire 54,000 high tech industry workers, while the lost state and local tax revenues ($1.7 billion) would have been enough to build 100 middle schools or 10,800 affordable housing units, or hire nearly 25,000 experienced police officers.

Of course the BSA’s concern for tax revenues is disingenuous, in a totally unsurprising fashion:

I guess any money not paid to BSA members just disappears and is not spent on other things in the economy that also involve jobs and taxes. In the real world we know that money not spent on software will more likely be spent on other things which are taxed the same — or even higher, given how BSA likes to also lobby to get software taxed at a lower rate than other products or services.

McOrmond also makes a slightly surprising claim about the BSA’s studies that I’d love to have verification of:

I know that people choosing legally lower cost software such as FLOSS are included as “piracy” in these studies. I guess my supporting FLOSS (both commercially and as an individual) could be blamed for their not being enough money to adequately equip the Canadian military in Afghanistan. I guess this makes me a terrorist sympathizer, by the BSA “logic”.

Regardless of whether FLOSS is counted as “piracy” in studies, the logic that it doesn’t directly facilitate the collection of taxes to fund military (or state schools, housing, or police) is pretty unassailable. Of course it could reduce costs and increase quality for each of these functions, as for anyone else.

Posted in Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Politics | 3 Comments »

Fooled by common interest

Friday, June 6th, 2008

Lew McCreary, writing on the Harvard Business Review Editors’ Blog, covers two of my favorite topics (prediction markets and nipping stupidity in the bud) with How to Kill Bad Projects:

Project owners creatively spun results for political reasons—mainly to prevent funding from being yanked. Consequently, there was a gaping disconnect between the project people down at ground level and the business leaders farther up the food chain when it came to understanding how projects were actually progressing. The leaders tended to think things were going much better than they actually were.

The problem of corrupted information flows stayed with Siegel and ultimately led him to found his current company, Inkling Markets, a software-as-service venture aimed at helping companies conduct successful prediction markets. What does a prediction market have to do with eliminating spin? Siegel sees an opportunity to produce higher quality decision support in businesses by tapping anonymous input “from people who aren’t normally asked their opinions, in samples large enough to filter out individual agendas.”

In the case of an internal prediction market, employees might be asked to weigh in anonymously (wagering a sum of token currency) on a statement like this: “The Voldemort Project will meet all of its defined performance targets by the end of 2008.”

Unfortunately, the post includes just a bit of its own stupidity (emphasis added):

While many are naturally captivated by the black-swan-finding potential of prediction markets, another sweet spot may be their use as a form of institutional lie detection—guaranteeing the integrity of internal reporting and keeping the progress of business initiatives transparent.

What the heck is he talking about? I have never heard of anyone claiming that a prediction market could find — to the contrary, a black swan is almost by definition something a prediction market will fail to signal — the knowledge does not exist to be aggregated. Chris Masse quoting Nassim Taleb:

If, as Niall Ferguson showed, war bonds did not forecast the great war, it was a Black Swan

Now prediction markets and black swans both have something to do with prediction and probability, but they’re otherwise ships passing not in the night, but on opposite sides of the globe — with one in the night.

DRM strikes me as another example of people fooled by common interest, in this case of cryptography and censorshipcopyright enforcement. Both have something to do with preventing someone from getting access to information. That doesn’t make one a tool for the other (in either direction). Of course that knowledge was distributed, but apparently not visibly in the right places, resulting in lots of bad projects.

Via Inkling.

Posted in DRM, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Prediction Markets | 4 Comments »

Table selection, HSA, LugRadio, Music, Photographers, New Media

Monday, April 21st, 2008

A few observations and things learned from the last eight days.

Go to a page with a table, for example this one (sorry, semi-nsfw). Hold down the control key and select cells. How could I not have known about this!? Unfortunately, copy & paste seems to produce tab separated values in a single row even when pasting from mutliple rows in the HTML table (tried with Firefox and Epiphany). Still really useful when you only want to copy one column of a table, but if you want all of the columns, don’t hold down the control key and row boundaries get newlines as they should rather than tabs. (Thanks Asheesh.)

I feel really stupid about this one. I’ve assumed that a (US) was a spend within the year or lose your contributions arrangement, but that’s what a Flexible Spending Account is (I have no predictable medical expenses, so such an account makes no sense for me). A HSA is an investment account much like an IRA, except you can spend from it without penalty upon incurring medical expenses rather than old age. You can only contribute to a HSA while enrolled in a high deductible health insurance plan, which I’ll try to switch to next year. (Thanks Ahrash.)

I saw a few presentations at LugRadio Live USA, in addition to giving one. Miguel de Icaza’s on (content roughly corresponding to this post) and Ian Murdock’s on were both in part about software packaging. Taken together, they make a good case for open source facilitating cross polination of ideas and code across operating system platforms.

Aaron Bockover and Gabriel Burt did a presentation/demo on , showing off some cool track selection/playlist features and talking about more coming. I may have to try switching back to Banshee as my main audio player (from Rhythmbox, with occasional use of Songbird for web-heavy listening or checking on how the program is coming along). Banshee runs on Mono, and both are funded by Novell, which also (though I don’t know how their overall investment compares) has an .

John Buckman gave an entertaining talk on open source and open content (including the slide at right). My talk probably was not entertaining at all, but used the question ‘how far behind [free/open source software] is free/open culture?’ to string together selected observations about the field.

Benjamin Mako Hill did a presentation on Revealing Errors (meant both ways). I found myself wanting to be skeptical of the power of technical errors to expose political/power relationships, but I imagine the concept could use a little hype — there’s definitely something there. The talk made me more sensitive to errors in any case. For example, when I transferred funds from a money market account to checking to pay taxes, an email notice included this (emphasis in original):

Your confirmation number is 0.

Zero? Really? The transaction did go through.

Tuesday I attended the Media Web Meetup V: The Gulf Between NorCal and SoCal, is it so big?, the idea being (in this context pushed by Songbird founder Rob Lord; I presented at the first Media Web Meetup and have attended a few others) that in Northern California entrepreneurs are trying to build new services around music, nearly all stymied by protectionist copyright holders in Southern California. I really did not need to listen to yet another panel asking how the heck is the music recording distribution industry going to use technology to make money, but this was a pretty good one as those go. One of the panelists kept urging technologists to “fix [music] metadata” as if doing so were the key to enabling profit from digital music. I suppressed the urge to sound a skeptical note, as investing more in metadata is one of the least harmful things the industry might do. Not that I don’t think metadata is great or anything.

Thursday evening I was on a ‘Copyright 2.0’ panel put on by the American Society of Media Photographers Northern California. I thought my photo selection for my first slide was pretty clever. No, copyright expansion is not always good for the interests of professional photographers. The other panelists and the audience were actually more open minded (both meanings) than I expected, and certainly realistic. The photographer on the panel even stated the obvious (my paraphrase from memory): new technology has allowed lots of people to explore their photographry talents who would otherwise have been unable to, and maybe some professional photographers just aren’t that good and should find other work. My main takeway from the panel is that it is very difficult for an independent photographer to successfully pursue unauthorized users in court. With the sometime exception of one, the other panelists all strongly advised photographers to avoid going to court except as a last resort, and even then, first doing a rational calculation of what the effort is likely to cost and gain. The best advice was probably to try to turn unauthorized users into clients.

Friday evening I went to San Jose to be on a panel about New Media Artists and the Law. Unlike Thursday’s panel, this one was mostly about how to use and re-use rather than how to prevent use. This (and some nostalgia) made me miss living in Silicon Valley — I lived in Sunnyvale two years (2003-2005) and San Jose (2005-2006) before moving back to San Francisco. Nothing really new came up, but I did enjoy the enthusiasm of the other panelists and the audience (as I did the previous day).

Staturday I went to Ubuntu Restaurant in Napa, which apparently does vegetable cuisine but does not market itself as vegetarian. I think that’s a good idea. The food was pretty good.

I’ve been listening to Hazard Records 59 and 60: Calida Construccio by various and Unhazardous Songs by Xmarx. Lovely Hell (mp3) from the latter is rather poppy.

Posted in Creative Commons, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, Open Source, P2P, Peeves, Prediction Markets, Semantic Web | 5 Comments »

Free speech vs. at least one patent (and copyright)

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

The ACLU has filed a brief (pdf) in the U.S. patent case called Bilski (a case I understand the End Software Patents project is watching closely) making a free speech argument against the patent in question.

I’m especially pleased that the ACLU brief makes two obvious but rarely stated points. One:

At the most basic level, it is apparent that because the First Amendment post-dates the patent clause in Article I, it modifies the patent clause.

Patents and copyright are covered in a , which for reference says “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

Two:

Thus, the definition of “useful arts” clearly excludes music, art, and literature, all of which represent unpatentable matter clearly also protected by the First Amendment.

Unpatentable, but why not uncopyrightable too?

Via Gavin Baker.

Posted in Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Patents, Peeves | 1 Comment »

End Software Patents

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

I strongly prefer voluntary action. However, software patents are not amenable to workaround and so must be attacked directly through less savory legal, legislative, and electoral routes (though if software patents are toxic to free software, the opposite is also true, so simply creating and using free software is a voluntary if indirect attack on software patents).

Software patents are the major reason multimedia on the web (and on computers generally) is so messed up — few multimedia formats may be implemented without obtaining many patent licenses, and amazingly, this is sometimes impossible:

[The framework] is so patent-encumbered that today no one really knows who has “rights” to it. Indeed, right now, no new MPEG-4 licenses are even being issued.

As the End Software Patents site emphasizes, software patents negatively impact every sector now that everything uses software.

My only problem with the ESP site (and many others, this is just a general peeve of mine) is that it does not even link to similar resources with a non-U.S. jurisdiction focus. For example, the What Can I Do? page might state that if one is reading the page but not in the U.S. (because that never happens), please check out FFII (EU) and similar.

In any case, please join the effort of ESP and others to eradicate software patentsweapons of mass destruction. Ars Technica has a good introductory article on ESP.

Posted in Computers, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Open Standards, Patents, Peeves, Politics | 2 Comments »

SanFran MusicTech Summit

Monday, February 25th, 2008

At today’s very well produced SanFran MusicTech Summit on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage” said that the existence of a recording industry protected by copyright is a very recent phenomenon and conjectured that one could take the position that all of the music created to this point is enough. I don’t recall whether he spelled it out, but the implication being that all music should be available for free and we shouldn’t worry about the creation of more music.

This really upset someone in the audience who identified themselves as representing songwriters for decades. This person righteously stipulated that music has value, musicians must be paid, and that if recording copyright is recent, so was the abolition of slavery. It is really he didn’t make reference to Nazis instead of slavery. Hmm, they did use slave labor.

Unfortunately Godwin said he did not agree with the conjecture and agreed with the vacuous statement that music has value (duh, consumers spend valuable time listening to music). But if the conjecture is not plainly correct, it is at least extremely weighty. Given that a vast amount of music exists and much more will be created regardless of protection, any harms done (e.g. to free speech and innovation) in the name of incentivizing marginal additions to this vast supply must be viewed with extreme skepticism.

There are basically two perspectives in the ‘Music and Technology‘ conversation. One’s priority is to ensure copyright holders are paid, with a strong preference for protecting existing revenue streams, and the other’s priority is to build cool stuff with new technology. Both were present in every part of this conference that I saw.

Probably the most significant example of the latter present was Lucas Gonze demoing the Yahoo! Media Player, which does a great job of playing media linked on a web page, with nice affordances for that environment.

Posted in Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, Peeves, Politics | 3 Comments »

Copypop

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Three times I’ve linked to the 2005 column If pirating grows, it may not be the end of music world about the music industry in China.

1: Witness massive production of art where expected profit from sales of copies and licensing is nil, both outside the content industry and where restrictions on copying are not enforced.

2: There is some very imperfect evidence from China that without copyright mass culture will still be star-driven and repulsive.

3: But we can also look to markets that started from a very different place, e.g., China.

A new BBC story, ‘Chaos’ of China’s music industry also says that pop stars earn through sponsorship:

The singer made about $2000 (£1,000) a month from music royalties and live shows with her band Mika Bomb when she lived in London.

But in China, her band Long Kuan Jiu Duan can almost double that by singing just one song at a commercial gig.

At these gigs, artists get paid a set amount by companies or promoters regardless of how many tickets they sell.

I assume a “commercial gig” is some kind of promotional event, but I’d like to read a more in depth look at the economics of pop music in China. (I have little doubt that the economics of music worth listening to is little different than in the U.S. — made for love at a financial loss or sometimes subsidized by grants or academic employment.)

This post is also an excuse to link to Let’s Do Like Them, which expresses one of my top peeves.

Posted in Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, Peeves, Politics | 2 Comments »

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