Post Intellectual Protectionism
Saturday, February 2nd, 2008
Kevin Kelly on Eight Generatives Better Than Free (i.e., 8 post-copyright business models) with a factoid:
For many years the paper publication TV Guide made more money than all of the 3 major TV networks it “guided” combined.
I haven’t bothered to verify this, but it doesn’t seem impossible.
As a kid in the late 70s I used the presence of TV Guide in a home as a bozo indicator for the residents, conveniently allowing me to feel superior to nearly everyone. Including my parents, who I felt did not subscribe due to cheapness and religiosity rather than not having poor taste.
Posted in Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves | No Comments »
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
A year ago I mentioned Wikileaks, with some skepticism:
Wikileaks, currently vapor, may be a joke. If Wikileaks is not a joke and if it successfully exposes a large number of secrets, I’d find it hilarious to see this happening on a public website and without financial incentives. P2P, digital cash, information markets, and crypto anarchy? Nope, just a wiki and a communinty.
With each new item I read about Wikileaks, usually via Slashdot, my skepticism wanes and hilarity waxes. Bully for Wikileaks, the Wikileaks community, dissidents and transparency worldwide.
Read the Wikileaks article on Wikipedia and Wikileaks:About on Wikileaks, available securely and via many front domains.
Of course Wikileaks is blocked in China, which gives them some cred in my opinion (but note the measurement described in that post doesn’t seem to work anymore — from within the U.S. it appears google.com and google.cn now give identical results).
In one recent item cited on Slashdot, a copyright claim is being used to attempt to censor Wikileaks. How unsurprising.
Posted in Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, P2P, Wikipedia | No Comments »
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
Copyright is and enables censorship. Lack of copyright enforcement enables free speech. Philip J. Cunningham writes:
I was browsing for DVDs on a cold winter afternoon in one of Beijing’s finer bootleg shops when I came upon three boxed sets of DVDs critical of communism. One of the pirated sets, produced by Turkish presenter Harun Yahya, promised to detail the horrors of communism from an Islamic perspective, another by an American producer chronicled the uncomfortably bloody rise of modern China and the third contained Tiananmen footage from BBC TV News. Presumably the DVD pirates were in it for the money, but were they also unwittingly making China a freer place?
The underground network and commercial resourcefulness of the pirates makes it technically possible for startling and truthful images to be sold more or less in the open in a less-than-open-society. In that sense, lax enforcement of intellectual copyright may inadvertently engender a kind of information freedom and even allow for the infiltration of revolutionary ideas.
If so, then the copyright zealots, mostly big US companies, with profit first and foremost on the mind, come down firmly on the side of information control and in that sense side firmly with the Beijing authorities. Subversive access of the sort I had just tapped into would dry up if US anti-piracy efforts were successful.
Read all of Banned and Bootlegged in Beijing.
This is why intellectual freedom is a crucial part of constructive engagement.
Via Against Monopoly.
Posted in Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Politics | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, December 25th, 2007
Patri Friedman just posted a nice essay concerning his basic views on copyright and patents, which I’ll summarize as “Policy should aim for economic efficiency …”:
So an economically optimal regime would have different rules for different industries, protecting some but not others, based on their exactly supply/demand curves.
“… but don’t forget about enforcement costs.”:
But really, it doesn’t matter. There is just no fucking way that IP protection is worth the police state it would take to enforce it. And unenforced/unenforceable laws poison society by teaching people not to respect the law.
This leads more or less to my understanding of the Pirate Party sentiment, something like “There’s nothing wrong with copyright per se, but any civil liberties infringement in the name of copyright protection is totally unacceptable.”
I recommend Friedman’s essay, but of course the reason I write is to complain … about the second half of the essay’s last sentence:
Therefore I favor accepting the inevitable as soon as possible, so that we can find new ways to compensate content producers.
This closing both gives comfort to producerists (but in the beginning of the essay Friedman says that people love to create — I agree, see paying to create — and Tom W. Bell has a separate argument that should result in less concern for producers that I’ve been meaning to blog about, but should be obvious from the title — Outgrowing Copyright: The Effect of Market Size on Copyright Policy) and is a stretch — copyright might make alternatives less pressing and interesting, but it certainly does not prevent experimentation.
While I’m complaining, enforcement costs aren’t the only often forgotten problem.
Posted in Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Patents, Peeves, Public Goods | 1 Comment »
Saturday, December 22nd, 2007
The dispute between the U.S. and Antigua jurisdictions over the former’s stupid campaign against online gambling is one of the most interesting happenings of the past few years. I’ve been meaning to write about it for about that long but haven’t had much more to say than what you see in the post title. Antigua correctly sees the U.S. as restraining trade and has obtained favorable rulings at the World Trade Organization.
Antigua (actually the jurisdiction of Antigua and Barbuda) is seeking the right to suspend enforcement of U.S. copyrights as an alternative remedy. Unfortunately this sounds way more interesting than it is, except possibly for its precedent. The latest ruling only allows the suspension of US$21 million worth of intellectual protectionist obligations, a trivial amount that will itself be subject to radically different interpretations considering how difficult and arbitrary the valuation of nonrival goods can be (the RIAA’s ridiculous valuation of shared audio files is exactly a case in point). Even had Antigua’s request for US$3.44 billion not been cut down by about 99.4% the result would have been largely academic.
I have sub-golf level interest in horse racing, poker, or other gaming-oriented gambling activities. So why is this case so interesting? There is The Mouse That Roared or David vs. Goliath aspect, but mostly I really want to see U.S. gambling prohibitions go down in flames, both because they are a tool for arbitrary censorship and control in much the same way copyright is and because they are a barrier to use of prediction markets.
The world will route around this U.S. stupidity, but at great loss, not least to Americans.
Posted in Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
The incredibly productive Kragen Sitaker, in Exegesis of “Re: [FoRK] Calling [redacted] and all the ships at sea.”:
The major political issue of today [0] is that music distribution companies based on obsolete physical-media-distribution models (“record labels”) are trying to force owners of new distribution mechanisms, mostly built on the internet, to pay them for the privilege of competing with them; the musical group “The Grateful Dead” used to permit their fans to distribute their music by making copies of taped performances, and most of the money the Dead made came from these performances; it is traditional for performances not to send any revenue to the record label. Long compares the record labels to buggy-whip manufacturers, who are the standard historical symbol for companies who went out of business because of technological change.
This clearly relates to the passage the footnote is attached to, which is about the parallel between Adam Smith’s economic “invisible hand” and the somewhat more visible hand that wrote the king’s doom on the wall in Daniel; in this case, the invisible hand has written the doom of the record companies on the wall, and their tears will not wash out a word of it. What this has to do with Huckleberry Finn’s prohibition on seeking symbolism or morals in the book, I don’t know, although clearly Huckleberry Finn’s prohibition relates to mortals hiding messages in texts.
[0] Yes, this means I think this is more important than the struggle over energy, or the International Criminal Court, or global warming, or nuclear proliferation — the issue is whether people should be permitted to control the machines they use to communicate with one another, in short, whether private ownership of 21st-century printing presses should be permitted. (Sorry my politics intrude into this message, but I thought “the major political issue of today” required some justification, but needs to be there to explain the context to people reading this message who don’t know about it.)
That will probably seem a pretty incredible claim, but I often agree, and think Sitaker understates the case. Music distribution companies are only one of the forces for control and censorship. The long term issue is bigger than whether private ownership of 21st-century printing presses should be permitted. The issue is whether individuals of the later 21st-century will have self-ownership.
Posted in Computers, Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, P2P, Politics | 7 Comments »
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 copyleft 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 Daniel J. Bernstein‘s release of his code (most notably qmail) 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 | 6 Comments »
Monday, November 26th, 2007
New York Magazine cites an interview with Universal Music CEO Doug Morris from the WIRED December issue (not yet online) that supposedly shows that Morris and his industry are utterly clueless. The excerpt from NYMag, emphasis added:
“There’s no one in the record industry that’s a technologist,” Morris explains. “That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?”
Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn’t an option. “We didn’t know who to hire,” he says, becoming more agitated. “I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me.”
Actually, knowing your limitations is pretty smart. Too bad the industry did not stick to the strategy of not hiring technology people. Music startups would’ve flourished, and the industry could have snapped up the obvious winners. Instead, Morris and friends eventually fell for a complete bullshit story — DRM — that killed nascent startups and paved the way for Apple’s much-hated dominance.
Copyright turns even really smart technologists into disingenuous and even dangerous technology idiots (including me on occasion — the claims I dismissed in that last link, while overblown, may have some substance), so non-technologists should be really wary, and consistently so.
Update 20071128: The WIRED article is now online. Despite its sneering tone, I think Morris comes off as a shrewd businessperson.
Posted in DRM, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, Peeves | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency from the Mercatus Center looks like a reasonable exhortation for the U.S. jurisdiction government to publish data in open formats 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 U.S. government produced works, the output of think tanks (and everyone else) is restricted by copyright. So think tanks need to take an extra step to ensure openness.
(Actually think tanks only need to lead in their domain of political economy — by following the trails blazed by the Open Access 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 Access, Open Source, Open Standards, Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets, Public Domain, Semantic Web | 3 Comments »