Post Public Domain

Economics and the Commons Conference [knowledge stream] report

Wednesday, October 30th, 2013

Economics and the Common(s): From Seed Form to Core Paradigm. A report on an international conference on the future of the commons (pdf) by David Bollier. Section on the knowledge stream (which I coordinated; pre-conference post) copied below, followed by an addendum with thanks and vague promises. First, video of the stream keynote (slides) by Carolina Botero (introduced by me; archive.org copy).

III. “Treating Knowledge, Culture and Science as Commons”

Science, and recently, free software, are paradigmatic knowledge commons; copyright and patent paradigmatic enclosures. But our vision may be constrained by the power of paradigmatic examples. Re-conceptualization may help us understand what might be achieved by moving most provisioning of knowledge to the commons; help us critically evaluate our commoning; and help us understand that all commons are knowledge commons. Let us consider, what if:

  • Copyright and patent are not the first knowledge enclosures, but only “modern” enforcement of inequalities in what may be known and communicated?
  • Copyright and patent reform and licensing are merely small parts of a universe of knowledge commoning, including transparency, privacy, collaboration, all of science and culture and social knowledge?
  • Our strategy puts commons values first, and views narrow incentives with skepticism?
  • We articulate the value of knowledge commons – qualitative, quantitative, ethical, practical, other – such that knowledge commons can be embraced and challenged in mainstream discourse?

These were the general questions that the Knowledge, Culture and Science Stream addressed.

Knowledge Stream Keynote Summary

Carolina Botero Cabrera, a free culture activist, consultant and lawyer from Colombia, delivered a plenary keynote for the Knowledge Stream entitled, “What If Fear Changes Sides?” As an author and lecturer on free access, free culture and authors’ rights, Botero focused on the role of information and knowledge in creating unequal power relationships, and how knowledge and cultural commons can rectify such problems.

“If we assume that information is power and acknowledge the power of knowledge, we can start by saying that controlling information and knowledge means power. Why does this matter?” she asked. “Because the control of information and knowledge can change sides. The power relationship can be changed.”

One of the primary motives of contemporary enclosures of information and knowledge, said Botero, is to instill fear in people – fear of violating copyright law, fear of the penalties for doing so. This inhibits natural tendencies to share and re-use information. So the challenge facing us is to imagine if fear could change sides. Can we imagine a switch in power relationships over the control of knowledge – how we produce, distribute and use knowledge? Botero said we should focus on the question: “How can we switch the tendency of knowledge regulation away from enclosure, so that commons can become the rule and not the exception?”

“There are still many ways to produce things, to gain knowledge,” said Botero, who noted that those who use the word “commons” [in the context of knowledge production] are lucky because it helps name these non-market forms of sharing knowledge. “In Colombia, we don’t even have that word,” she said.

To illustrate how customary knowledge has been enclosed in Colombia, Botero told the story of parteras, midwives, who have been shunted aside by doctors, mostly men, who then asserted control over women’s bodies and childbirth, and marginalized the parteras and their rich knowledge of childbirth. This knowledge is especially important to those communities in remote areas of Colombia that do not have access to doctors. There is currently a huge movement of parteras in Colombia who are fighting for the recognition of their knowledge and for the legal right to act as midwives.

Botero also told about how copyright laws have made it illegal to reproduce sheet music for songs written in 18th and 19th century Colombia. In those times, people simply shared the music among each other; there was no market for it. But with the rise of the music industry in the 20th century, especially in the North, it is either impossible or unaffordable to get this sheet music because most of it is copyrighted. So most written music in Colombia consists of illegally photocopied versions. Market logic has criminalized the music that was once natural and freely flowing in Colombian culture. Botero noted that this has increased inequality and diminished public culture.

She showed a global map illustrating which nations received royalties and fees from copyrights and patents in 2002; the United States receives more than half of all global revenues, while Latin America, Africa, India and other countries of the South receive virtually nothing. This is the “power relationships” that Botero was pointing to.

Botero warned, “We have trouble imagining how to provision and govern resources, even knowledge, without exclusivity and control.” Part of the problem is the difficulty of measuring commons values. Economists are not interested, she said, which makes it difficult to go to politicians and persuade them why libraries matter.

Another barrier is our reliance on individual incentives as core value in the system for regulating knowledge, Botero said. “Legal systems of ‘intellectual property’ place individual financial incentives at the center for knowledge regulation, which marginalizes commons values.” Our challenge is to find ways to switch from market logics by showing that there are other logics.

One reason that it is difficult to displace market logics is because we are reluctant or unable to “introduce the commons discourse from the front door instead of through the back door,” said Botero. She confessed that she herself has this problem because most public debate on this topic “is based on the premise that knowledge requires enclosure.” It is difficult to displace this premise by talking about the commons. But it is becoming increasingly necessary to do so as new policy regimes, such as the Transpacific Trade (TPP) Agreement, seek to intensify enclosures. The TPP, for example, seeks to raise minimum levels of copyright restriction, extend the terms of copyrights, and increase the prison terms for copyright violations.

One way to reframe debate, suggested Botero, is to see the commons “not as the absence of exclusivity, but the presence of non-exclusivity. Th is is a slight but important difference,” she said, “that helps us see the plenitude of non-exclusivity” – an idea developed by Séverine Dussolier, professor and director of the Revue Droit des Technologies de l’Information (RDTI, France). This shift “helps us to shift the discussion from the problems with the individual property and market-driven perspective, to a framework and society that – as a norm – wants its institutions to be generative of sharing, cooperation and equality.”

Ultimately, what is needed are more “efficient and effective ways to protect the ethic and practice of sharing,” or as she put it, “better commoning.” Reforming “intellectual property” is only one small part of the universe of knowledge commoning, Botero stressed. It also includes movements for “transparency, privacy, collaboration, and potentially all of science and culture.”

“When and how did we accept that the autonomy of all is subservient to control of knowledge by the few?” asked Botero. “Most important, can we stop this? Can we change it? Is the current tragedy our lack of knowledge of the commons?” Rediscovering the commons is an important challenge to be faced “if fear is going to change sides.”

An Account of the Knowledge, Culture and Science Stream’s Deliberations

There were no presentations in the Knowledge Stream breakout sessions, but rather a series of brief provocations. These were intended to spur a lively discussion and to go beyond the usual debates heard at free and open software/free culture/open science conferences. A primary goal of the breakout discussions was to consider what it means to regard knowledge as a commons, rather than as a “carve-out” exception from a private property regime. The group was also asked to consider how shared knowledge is crucial to all commoning activity. Notes from the Knowledge Stream breakout sessions were compiled through a participatory titanpad, from which this account is adapted.

The Knowledge Stream focused on two overarching themes, each taking advantage of the unique context of the conference:

  1. Why should commoners of all fields care about knowledge commons?
  2. If we consider knowledge first as commons, can we be more visionary, more inclusive, more effective in commoning software, science, culture, seeds … and much more?

The idea of the breakout session was to contextualize knowledge as a commons, first and foremost: knowledge as a subset of the larger paradigm of commons and commoning, as something far more than domain-specific categories such as software, scientific publication and educational materials.

An overarching premise of the Knowledge Stream was the point made by Silke Helfrich in her keynote, that all commons are knowledge commons and all commons are material commons. Saving seeds in the Svalbaard Seedbank are of no use if we forget how to cultivate them, for example, and various digital commons are ultimately grounded in the material reality of computers, electricity infrastructures and the food that computer users need to eat.

There is a “knowledge commons” at the center of each commons. This means that interest in a “knowledge commons” isn’t confined to those people who only care about software, scientific publication, and so on. It also means that we should refrain from classifying commons into categories such as “natural resources” and “digital,” and begin to make the process of commoning itself the focal point.

Of course, one must immediately acknowledge that digital resources do differ in fundamental ways from finite natural resources, and therefore the commons management strategies will differ. Knowledge commons can make cheap or virtually free copies of intangible information and creative works, and this knowledge production is often distributed at very small scales. For cultural commons, noted Philippe Aigrain, a French analyst of knowledge governance and CEO of Sopinspace, a maker for free software for collaboration and participatory democracy, “the key challenge is that average attention becomes scarcer in a world of abundant production.” This means that more attention must be paid on “mediating functions” – curating – and “revising our cultural expectations about ‘audiences’.”

It is helpful to see the historical roots of Internet-enabled knowledge commons, said Hilary Wainwright, the editor behind the UK political magazine Red Pepper and a research at the Transnational Institute. The Internet escalated the practice of sharing knowledge that began with the feminist movement’s recognition of a “plurality of sources.” It also facilitated the socialization of knowledge as a kind of collective action.

That these roots are not widely appreciated points to the limited vision of many knowledge commons, which tend to rely on a “deeply individualistic ethical ontology,” said Talha Syed, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. This worldview usually leads commoners to focus on coercion – enclosures of knowledge commons – as the problem, he said. But “markets are problematic even if there is no monopoly,” he noted, because “we need to express both threats and positive aspirations in a substantive way. Freedom is more than people not coercing us.”

Shun-Ling Chen, a Taiwanese professor of law at the University of Arizona, noted that even free, mass-collaboration projects such as Wikipedia tend to fall back on western, individualistic conceptions of authorship and authority. This obscures the significance of traditional knowledge and history from the perspective of indigenous peoples, where less knowledge is recorded by “reliable sources.”

As the Stream recorded in its notes, knowledge commons are not just about individual freedoms, but about “marginalized people and social justice.” “The case for knowledge commons as necessary for social justice is an undeveloped theme,” the group concluded. But commons of traditional knowledge may require different sorts of legal strategies than those that are used to protect the collective knowledge embodied in free software or open access journal. The latter are both based on copyright law and its premises of individual rights, whereas traditional knowledge is not recognized as the sum of individual creations, but as a collective inheritance and resource.

This discussion raised the question whether provisioning knowledge through commons can produce different sorts of “products” as those produced by corporate enclosures, or whether they will simply create similar products with less inequality. Big budget movies and pharmaceuticals are often posited as impossibilities for commons provision (wrongly, by the way). But should these industries be seen as the ‘commanding heights’ of culture and medicine, or would a commons-based society create different commanding heights?”

One hint at an answer comes from seeing informality as a kind of knowledge commons. “Constructed commons” that rely upon copyright licenses (the GPL for software, Creative Commons licenses for other content) and upon policy reforms, are generally seen as the most significant, reputable knowledge commons. But just as many medieval commons relied upon informal community cooperation such as “beating the bounds” to defend themselves, so many contemporary knowledge commons are powerful because they are based on informal social practice and even illegality.

Alan Toner of Ireland noted that commoners who resist enclosures often “start from a position of illegality” (a point made by Ugo Mattei in his keynote talk). It may be better to frankly acknowledge this reality, he said. After all, remix culture would be impossible without civil disobedience to various copyright laws that prohibit copying, sharing and re-use – even if free culture people sometimes have a problem with such disrespectful or illegal resistance. “Piracy” is often a precursor to new social standards and even ne w legal rules. “What is legal is continent,” said Toner, because practices we spread now set traditions and norms for the future. We therefore must be conscious about the traditions we are creating. “The law is gray, so we must push new practices and organizations need to take greater risks,” eschewing the impulse to be “respectable” in order to become a “guiding star.”

Felix Stalder, a professor of digital culture at Zurich University of the Arts, agreed that civil disobedience and piracy are often precisely what is needed to create a “new normal,” which is what existing law is explicitly designed to prevent. “Piracy is building a de facto commons,” he added, “even if it is unaware of this fact. It is a laboratory of the new that can enrich our understanding of the commons.”

One way to secure the commons for the future, said Philippe Aigrain of Sopinspace, is to look at the specific challenges facing the commons rather than idealizing them or over-relying on existing precedents. As the Stream discussion notes concluded, “Given a new knowledge commons problem X, someone will state that we need a ‘copyleft for X.’ But is copyleft really effective at promoting and protecting the commons of software? What if we were to re-conceptualize copyleft as a prototype for effective, pro-commons regulation, rather than a hack on enclosure?”

Mike Linksvayer, the former chief technology officer of Creative Commons and the coordinator of the Knowledge Stream, noted that copyleft should be considered as “one way to “force sharing of information, i.e., of ensuring that knowledge is in the commons. But there may be more effective and more appropriate regulatory mechanisms that could be used and demanded to protect the commons.”

One provocative speculation was that there is a greater threat to the commons than enclosure – and that is obscurity. Perhaps new forms of promotion are needed to protect the commons from irrelevance. It may also be that excluding knowledge that doesn’t really contribute to a commons is a good way to protect a commons. For example, projects like Wikipedia and Debian mandate that only free knowledge and software be used within their spaces.


Addendum

Thanks to everyone who participated in the knowledge stream. All who prepared and delivered deep and critical provocations in the very brief time allotted:
Bodó Balázs
Shun-Ling Chen
Rick Falkvinge
Marco Fioretti
Charlotte Hess
Gaëlle Krikorian
Glyn Moody
Mayo Fuster Morrell
Prabir Purkayastha
Felix Stalder
Talha Syed
Wouter Tebbens
Alan Toner
Chris Watkins

Also thanks to Mayo Fuster Morrell and Petros for helping coordinate during the stream, and though neither could attend, Tal Niv and Leonhard Dobusch for helpful conversations about the stream and its goals. I enjoyed working with and learned much from the other stream coordinators: Saki Bailey (nature), Heike Löschmann (labor & care), Ludwig Schuster (money), and especially Miguel Said Vieira (infrastructure; early collaboration kept both infrastructure and knowledge streams relatively focused); and stream keynote speaker Carolina Botero; and conference organizers/Commons Strategy Group members: David Bollier, Michel Bauwens, and Silke Helfrich (watch their post-conference interview).

See the conference wiki for much more documentation on each of the streams, the overall conference, and related resources.

If a much more academic and apolitical approach is of interest, note the International Association for the Study of the Commons held its 2013 conference about 10 days after ECC. I believe there was not much overlap among attendees, one exception being Charlotte Hess (who also chaired a session on Governance of the Knowledge and Information Commons at the IASC conference).

ECC only strengthened my feeling (but, of course I designed the knowledge stream to confirm my biases…) that a much more bold, deep, inclusive (domains and methods of commoning, including informality, and populations), critical (including self-critical; a theme broached by several of the people thanked above), and competitive (product: displacing enclosure; policy: putting equality & freedom first) knowledge commons movement, or vanguard of those movements. Or as Carolina Botero put it in the stream keynote: bring the commons in through the front door. I promise to contribute to this project.

ECC also made me reflect much more on commons and commoning as a “core paradigm” for understanding and participating in the arrangements studied by social scientists. My thoughts are half baked at best, but that will not stop me from making pronouncements, time willing.

NFL IP

Sunday, October 6th, 2013

How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers by Gregg Easterbrook is a fine article, adding to the not nearly large enough pile of articles criticizing the U.S. professional sports civic extortion racket. With a bonus explicit connection with copy regulation. I’ll quote just the directly relevant paragraphs:

Too often, NFL owners can, in fact, get away with anything. In financial terms, the most important way they do so is by creating game images in publicly funded stadiums, broadcasting the images over public airwaves, and then keeping all the money they receive as a result. Football fans know the warning intoned during each NFL contest: that use of the game’s images “without the NFL’s consent” is prohibited. Under copyright law, entertainment created in publicly funded stadiums is private property.

When, for example, Fox broadcasts a Tampa Bay Buccaneers game from Raymond James Stadium, built entirely at the public’s expense, it has purchased the right to do so from the NFL. In a typical arrangement, taxpayers provide most or all of the funds to build an NFL stadium. The team pays the local stadium authority a modest rent, retaining the exclusive right to license images on game days. The team then sells the right to air the games. Finally, the NFL asserts a copyright over what is broadcast. No federal or state law prevents images generated in facilities built at public expense from being privatized in this manner.

Baseball, basketball, ice hockey, and other sports also benefit from this same process. But the fact that others take advantage of the public too is no justification. The NFL’s sweetheart deal is by far the most valuable: This year, CBS, DirecTV, ESPN, Fox, NBC, and Verizon will pay the NFL about $4 billion for the rights to broadcast its games. Next year, that figure will rise to more than $6 billion. Because football is so popular, its broadcast fees would be high no matter how the financial details were structured. The fact that game images created in places built and operated at public expense can be privatized by the NFL inflates the amounts kept by NFL owners, executives, coaches, and players, while driving up the cable fees paid by people who may not even care to watch the games.

Easterbrook’s idea for reform also involves copy regulation (emphasis added):

The NFL’s nonprofit status should be revoked. And lawmakers—ideally in Congress, to level the national playing field, as it were—should require that television images created in publicly funded sports facilities cannot be privatized. The devil would be in the details of any such action. But Congress regulates health care, airspace, and other far-more-complex aspects of contemporary life; it can crack the whip on the NFL.

If football images created in places funded by taxpayers became public domain, the league would respond by paying the true cost of future stadiums—while negotiating to repay construction subsidies already received. To do otherwise would mean the loss of billions in television-rights fees. Pro football would remain just as exciting and popular, but would no longer take advantage of average people.

This idea would have many loopholes (team owners are excellent at extracting public subsidies even for “privately financed” stadiums), but would be a step forward. It is good to see the principle of public funding means public domain applied in new domains (it is as yet a mostly unrealized, but accepted by many activists, goal for domains such as public sector information, cultural heritage, and academic publication).

While on the topic, another mostly good recent article is Death of a sports town: What does a city lose when its pro teams leave? Oakland just might find out. Two caveats. A questionable story about a kid who sees a football player turned police officer as a role model. Any reliance on such a coincidence for role models shows just how badly Oakland and many other cities are policed — residents should be demanding performance and compliance from police such that most officers are obvious role models for youth. The article also repeats the specious claim that “pro sports are the city’s plumb line, cutting across class and race and elevation.”

While on that claim, Doug Whitfield republished my article, (original) with commentary on top:

I’m going to try something new today. Over at his blog, Mike Linksvayer dedicates his posts to the public domain. That means I don’t have to give attribution to his work, but obviously I’m doing so. I think he’s wrong that art brings all classes and cultures together. How many “red necks” or “thugs” do you see at the opera? How many women wearing Prada do you see enjoying the finer arts of graffiti or break-dancing? I also think he’s wrong about groceries. There are plenty of people that can’t afford to shop at Whole Foods (or choose not to because of their anti-union policies).

But that’s not the point. The point is that we as sports-enthusiasts need to highlight amateur athletics and player-owned and supporter-owned clubs to combat these stereotypes about athletics. Not all athletics are bad.

It is worth thinking about how sports can destroy communities and relationships though, even if you don’t think it’s happening in your life or even if the positives outweigh the negatives. Either way, please enjoy what is probably a different view than your own.

Whitfield is wrong about art and groceries. Yes, various forms and genres have fans concentrated with various demographics. But there are also huge and increasing crossovers, especially when it comes to popular art. It’s acceptable and unsurpriing for anyone to be a fan of anything. With regard to groceries, I know plenty of wealthy people who shop at Wal-Mart (or locally, Grocery Outlet) and plenty of poor people who shop at Whole Foods (or Berkeley Bowl), and even more who shop at all. Note the trend in both culture and shopping is exactly the opposite of stadium attendance — increased mixing vs increased stratification.

Whitfield is right about the point. Athletics is good. How can arrangements which do not destroy communities and increase inequality compete with the extortion racket?

Whitfield also republished a shorter article on pro sports civic extortion (original) of mine, and on another of his blogs, on post on the federated social web (original). I appreciate the experiment, which the latter is tiny bit relevant to, mentioning that blog technology (and culture) failed to compete with “social” silos, or failed to form the basis of the “social web”, depending on whether your glass is 90% empty or 10% full. One of the things blogs generally failed to compete on is “sharing” links, sometimes with brief commentary. One can do that with a blog of course, and people do, but it isn’t central to blogging.

Public copyright license readability metrics

Sunday, September 22nd, 2013

Promised boring topic blog post in form of README snapshot.

The README with tables removed has a Flesch Readability Ease score of 48.5, slightly worse than the average license text. I did not try to write intelligibly, though I should. The topic may have subconsciously restrained parenthetical discursiveness.


Automated readability metrics for public copyright licenses. Give style a list of plain license texts, generate HTML table containing metrics.

In Debian, style is available in the diction package.

License texts are referenced from the SPDX licenses list. Other license curiosities are included in licenses-other.

sh license-readability-html-table.sh licenses-spdx/*.txt licenses-other/*.txt

Background

Part of one of the goals of the Creative Commons (CC) licenses version 4.0 effort is to make the licenses "readily understood". One way to test that is with automated readability metrics, on which CC licenses version 3.0 score poorly (previous versions scored much better). I checked an early version 4.0 draft, and scored much better, more or less back to version 2.5 scores, quite an accomplishment given it is a more sophisticated license in many ways. I did not check again until the near-final 4th draft was published. Its score is not as good as early drafts, probably to be expected as details were settled, but still a big improvement over 3.0. I intended to blog the early 4.0 draft improvement at that time but didn’t get around to it.

In the meantime I’d peeked at the readability metrics for various free/open source software licenses, in part to see if copyleft-next scored better than comparable licenses (probably, though comparability is problematic). With the CC 4.0 licenses nearly final, I started a blog post about readability of various licenses, and ended up with this README and associated files.

See Caveats and Output below for readability metrics for about 228 licenses. There probably will not be any big surprises awaiting anyone familiar with the usual relatively popular licenses. A small selection of licenses not in the SPDX licenses list (including CC 4.0 drafts and copyleft-next versions) are at the end.

Next

Drafters understandably try hardest to "get the legal details right". But if "licenses are the constitutions of software communities"12, even a little bit (I think a casual reading of that quote makes licenses far more central than they are, or implies impoverished communities, but will take its repetition as an indicator of licenses’ social importance), perhaps yet more effort ought be put into making licenses more understandable.

  • There is probably a large literature on readability and understandability of contracts, legislation, regulation, and other legal texts, which ought be digested for lessons for the public copyright licensing community. Apparently many jurisdictions have "plain language" requirements for contracts. Some U.S. states require insurance forms to have a minimum Flesch Reading Ease score. Is this an indicator that readability metrics are useless, or should free/libre/open/software/knowledge communities be embarrassed that they have failed to self-regulate to this level?
  • Cloze testing and subjective evaluation (both requiring humans) and natural language processing/machine learning based metrics are suggested by a readability tools site in addition to simple automated readability metrics. The site, by Michael Curtotti, is presumably discussed in his forthcoming paper The Right to Access Implies a Right to Know: An Open Online Research Platform for Assessing the Readability of Law. Could some of these tools be useful for evaluating licenses? Barriers would include lack of interest needed to pay for human testing, and a relatively small corpus of license texts. Hopefully the source code for this platform will be made available.
  • Attempts to increase readability and understandability outside of changing the words in a license text could be evaluated, including summaries, FAQs, choosers, and typography and other design elements around web publication of the license text itself.
  • There are many additional obscure licenses intended for "content", "data", "government", and "hardware designs" not included in the SPDX license list that could be analyzed.
  • Non-English license texts could be analyzed with language-appropriate metrics. In addition to the few CECILL licenses included in the SPDX licenses list, targets could include the many official language versions of EUPL versions, unofficial translations of GPL versions, License Art Libre, various public sector-focused licenses, and hundreds of CC license "jurisdiction ports".
  • To what extent is understanding of licenses social, gained via hearsay, not based on reading license texts at all? If social learning currently predominates, does this indicate that license readability and understandability are unimportant? Or that their lack constitutes an obscurantist barrier to participation by people not socially connected to existing communities, and increase other risks, such as non-compliance through ignorance, and being ignored by policymakers?
  • Would it be valuable to use readability metrics to test other texts important to free/libre/open communities, e.g., documentation, codes of conduct, contributor agreements?

Caveats

General, with respect to the metrics:

  • Metric explanations are available in the style man page. All are problematic.
  • Lower numbers indicate better readability for all metrics except Flesch.
  • None of the metrics incorporate text length, so correlations with character count ought indicate that longer texts tend to use more or less readable language. But 3 of the metrics positively correlate readability with longer texts, and 4 negatively, which might indicate no overall correlation (taking the numbers at face value, with no further validation).
  • Not sure why Coleman-Liau’s correlations with other metrics are much weaker than among others; at a glance the formula is measuring the same types of things.
  • Arbitrarily choosing to focus on Flesch, as it seems widely used, and its more is better makes for an easier combination with text length, "Chars/(Flesch>=1)", to indicate how painful reading an entire license might be.
  • Flesch can be negative, so a minimum value of 1 is used for the pain calculation. This is arbitrary too.

The following tables are calculated in scratch.ods.

Readability metric correlations: nothing really surprising, no gross errors?
Kincaid ARI Coleman-Liau Fog Lix SMOG Flesch Chars/(Flesch>=1)
Characters 0.12 -0.10 -0.27 0.13 -0.15 0.25 -0.25 0.96
Kincaid 0.89 0.04 0.99 0.81 0.90 -0.91 0.32
ARI 0.30 0.89 0.97 0.70 -0.67 0.10
Coleman-Liau 0.07 0.41 0.11 -0.09 -0.20
Fog 0.82 0.93 -0.90 0.33
Lix 0.63 -0.59 0.04
SMOG -0.95 0.43
Flesch -0.43
Aggregate metrics: compare your favorite license to the masses and outliers.
Characters Kincaid ARI Coleman-Liau Fog Lix SMOG Flesch Chars/(Flesch>=1)
average 8318.7 12.8 16.0 14.5 16.1 59.1 13.4 50.7 177
median 7321.5 12.6 15.4 14.4 15.9 57.9 13.2 50.4 160
stdev 6864.8 2.9 3.5 1.4 3.1 7.4 1.8 11.1 152
min 209 4.5 8.2 10.3 7.0 42.5 7.6 -25.8 2
max 36285 37.0 45.7 18.0 40.3 116.8 24.9 83.3 806

With respect to particular licenses:

  • The CECILL licenses, except 1.1, are in French. These readability metrics may not be tuned for French, though the results do not look weird.
  • The CC by-nc-sa-4.0-drafts are drafts. Every other license analyzed is "released".
  • GPL-[version]-with-[exception name]-exception are not complete licenses, should be appended to the relevant GPL-[version]. However, standalone (as provided by the SPDX licenses list) provides an idea of how readable each exception is.
  • LGPL-3.0[+] incorporates GPL-3.0 by reference, so it is not directly comparable to GPL-with-exceptions above, nor with other licenses.
  • Some licenses (most notably [A]GPL and FDL) have a preamble or addendum which explain the license’s purpose and how to use the license. This makes such a license longer, but arguably increases understandability in a way not captured by an automated readability metric.
  • The only license with a negative Flesch score is the Historic Permission Notice and Disclaimer (HPND), which is deprecated. It deserves the score, basically being a template with many optional and fill-in parts.
  • The longest and also most "painful" to read license, the Adaptive Public License (APL), is also basically a template with options and fill-in parts.
  • The shortest and also least "painful" to read license, the Fair License might require too much imagination about what "usage" means to actually be easily understandable.

Output

SHA1 License Characters Kincaid ARI Coleman-Liau Fog Lix SMOG Flesch Chars/(Flesch>=1)
f53aa44a98a67f79d79bb061a39ac0694c017d88 AAL 2347 14.7 20.8 16.1 17.9 69.6 13.7 49.4 47
b26853ef3e258172c7bc9e7a69e9582d651c0269 AFL-1.1 3827 11.1 15.9 15.3 15.1 59.6 12.8 59.7 64
54f83bc9e70424af32e5a133c47e76698086369c AFL-1.2 4059 13.7 15.8 15.2 18.3 58.8 15.4 41.1 98
735e1f8b4613292d7d80e51e5a586e34ac852a74 AFL-2.0 7105 12.8 14.4 14.7 17.0 56.5 14.6 44.1 161
fedb7d79211a6e58a65b46985f47fa834b00ee6f AFL-2.1 7103 12.8 14.4 14.8 17.0 56.4 14.6 44.0 161
5b400f7a1518b5e43a913085fa338e3df1e9e241 AFL-3.0 8314 13.8 15.6 14.4 17.8 58.2 15.0 42.2 197
ecf6b4a3803b9706a0c38d30b0d07b0c624001ed AGPL-1.0 12578 19.0 23.4 12.5 21.9 71.9 14.8 38.0 331
c34c24e89e6c26506a4aa9535425afe6af4ab700 AGPL-3.0 27208 14.4 16.8 13.4 17.5 59.1 14.2 44.8 607
2b6ca3805481833fddead9c45f92fe4c81d4017d Aladdin 9270 13.6 16.9 13.2 17.0 60.1 13.5 51.6 179
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License

Original files in this project are disjunctively licensed under all licenses in the SPDX licenses list 1.19 (215) and those included in licenses-other (13). Take your pick of any or all.

License texts purport to be under various terms; see each individual license text.

Abolish Foreignness

Saturday, September 21st, 2013

Searching for background info for a forthcoming post on a boring topic that should be forgotten, I found the research of Michael Curtotti, and was tickled to find he also has papers on human rights and freedom of movement, and runs a website called abolishforeignness.org.

I’ve only read the oldest (2002) paper so far, Barriers to International Freedom of Movement: A Lacuna in International Human Rights Law?, and recommend it. The gap is real, and huge. A large proportion of humanity is excluded from escaping poverty and oppression. Curtotti quotes a book on my to-read list, Closed Borders: The Contemporary Assault on Freedom of Movement:

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represent the closest approximation to an open world in modern times. … With immigration restrictions at a minimum, real freedom of international movement was a fact. The right of personal self-determination was reasonably secure for residents of Europe and the Americas, if not for other peoples ruled by them. Passports, which had fallen into disuse in much of the West, were required only in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Romania, Bulgaria and Bosnia/Herzegovina.

Why were borders then closed? In part Curtotti writes:

The growing influence on public policy of racist ideologies seeking to promote racially segregated national communities – including by excluding all regarded as incompatible with the prevailing racially defined national character.

All the more ironic:

We may note also further explicit and implicit reservation of state freedom in regard of freedom of movement and citizenship. The International Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination provides that the Convention does not prohibit discrimination between citizens and non-citizens. Further matters of citizenship, nationalisation or naturalisation remain at the free discretion of the state (subject to the requirement of non-discrimination between non-citizens) (art 1.2, 1.3). This is of course an extraordinary provision in such a Convention. It suggests that a state has virtually no obligations of “non-discrimination” to persons outside the legal and geographical boundaries of the state – notwithstanding the correlation between race and nationality, the fact that historically many states have racially discriminated to influence their ethnic composition and that the very idea of the nation-state is strongly linked to the idea of race and ethnicity. The explicit inclusion of such exemptions of course merely serves to underline that the drafters were well aware of the correlation between race and citizenship. Discrimination against foreigners is given international legal sanction by this Convention.

Curtotti concludes noting the tension between state prerogative and the universality of human rights, and that discussion, then recognition of freedom of movement as a fundamental human right, rather than an glaring exception, can be the beginning of a very long process of rights implementation.

I hope to soon read and review the rest of Curtotti’s papers, and everything on abolishforeignness.org. As noted a few months ago, I also want to read and review all of openborders.info. It appears these two group sites come from different perspectives: Open Borders, libertarian/negative rights/economics; Abolish Foreignness, progressive/positive rights/humanitarian. That’s good: all sorts of arguments are needed to abolish the monster of international apartheid.

Speaking of which, I am mildly tickled to see that the authors of the Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid use the CC0 public domain dedication.

Flow ∨ incentive 2013 anthology winner

Thursday, August 29th, 2013
Anthology Future of Copyright 2.0 cover

The Futureof Copyright 2.0 contest has a winner, published with 8 other top entries. Read the anthology PDF/EPUB/MOBI ebook, listen to an audiobook version created by me reading each entry (for the purposes of judging) on sight aloud, or individual entries linked below in my review.

A Penny for Your Thoughts by Talllama is the winner, unanimously selected by the jury. It’s a fun transposition of exactly today’s copyright and debates (including wild mischaracterization) into a future with mind uploading. Quotes:

“My mom and dad would get upset at me.” He sent her a copy of his anxiety.
“Well my dad says copyright is stupid,” Helen said, sending back an emotion that was pitying yet vaguely contemptuous. “He says anyone who won’t pirate is a dummy.”
Timothy scowled at her. “My dad says that piracy is stealing.”
“My dad and I have trillions of books and thoughts, so we know better than you,” Helen said.

“You see, Timothy,” his father continued, “If people didn’t have an incentive to think or dream, they wouldn’t. And then no one would have any new thoughts. Everyone would stop thinking because there wouldn’t be any money in it.”
“But you said people had thoughts in 1920 even though there was no copyright.”
“Yes, you’re right. What I mean is that there were no professional thinkers in those days.”
“It would be bad if people stopped thinking,” Timothy said.

Lucy’s Irrevocable, Colossal, Terrible Mistake by Chris Sakkas tells a story in which releasing stuff under a free license has amazing results. Unfortunately free licenses aren’t magic, and it isn’t clear to me what the story says about the future of copyright. Quote:

An alternative bookshop in Sussex, on the other side of the world to Lucy, created a video ad with her favourite song as its backing track. The ad ended with a thanks to Lucy for releasing her music under a free, libre and open licence and a hyperlink. Hundreds more people visited her site, the passive consumers of big business! They used the donate button on her site to spray her with filthy lucre.

Perfect Memory by Jacinto Dávila describes a world of 2089 mediated by perfect memory of all non-intimate events and voting for assignment of credit; copyright plays what role in such future? Quote:

[Socio-mathematics] was also the source of an unprecedented and fundamental agreement. All the stakeholders of the world came, after many unfortunate and even bloody events, to negotiate a new framework for producing and sharing common knowledge. And the basis they found was that to preserve freedom, but also the health of the whole planet and its species, that knowledge had to be shared, easily and readily, among all the stakeholders.

That led to a rebuttal of so-called intellectual property and copyright laws and their replacement with a body of global law acknowledging our common heritage, codependent future and the fundamental right of knowledge everyone has.

Copyrights in Chopin’s future by Krzysztof Blachnicki (English translation by Wojciech PÄ™dzich) has Chopin resurrected in 2015 through unspecified but expensive means, then exploited by and escaping from the current recording industry. A fun idea, but ultimately a stereotypical anti-recording-industry rant. Quote:

I hope that more people will have their own opinions instead of listening to the hissing of those snakes, sucking money out of artists to pay off their new automobiles. Wake up, folks, a good musician will earn his daily bread even if he decides to let his music go for free, for all to share. A poor man will be able to listen to real music, while a wealthy man will make the artist’s effort worthwhile. Isn’t it all about just that? Each may benefit, except the music companies which become redundant, so they turn to lies in order to keep themselves afloat.

What is an author? by refined quotes is a story in which all legal ideas are closely regulated and bland, “old art” outlawed so people consume new, legal stuff, the good stuff and real artists are underground, and with an additional twist that ideas take animal form. Quote:

You see? An artist is a little like an art producer. But he deals with the genuine ideas, as you see. He doesn’t buy them, like the law says he should. He just comes to places like this and spends his time with them. It’s a slow process. No one knows why precisely, but this crazy little ideas are in love with him, well, with all the artists.

The Ambiguous Future of Copyright by HOT TOCO is a snarky take on where copyright and computing are headed, presumably meaning to project ambiguous reception of Ubuntu/Canonical ten years into the future. Quote:

Friend2: “If I can extract info from this rant, I think Commonible, Ltd, is saying they’ve perfected trusted computing, fully protecting you from hacking and making ALL media available, fully compensating all value chains.”

Friend3 (quiet one): “I read about sth like this, Project Xanaxu. Real old stuff. The inventor thought the Web failed to transclude micropayments.”

500 Years of Copyright Law by Holovision embeds current copyright factoids in description of future eras. I can’t tell what its “Copynorm Exchange Decentralization Entente (CEDE)” regime consists of, but maybe that is also a current copyright factoid: someone reading a pamphlet describing copyright and mentioning a few acronyms (eg TRIPs) would not have much sense of the regime. Quote:

Attempts to put digital rights management into 3D printers were sooner or later unsuccessful against hardware hackers. There were open sourced 3D printers but many perceived them to be inferior to the commercially patented ones. When the commercial 3D printers were used to make other printers most companies left the marketplace. This left many still infringing the 3D printers with the excuse that the printers became “abandonware”.

Copyright Protest Song by Tom Konecki doesn’t seem to say anything about the future, but does capture various bits of complaint about the current regime. Quote:

Everybody wants only money and success
And none remembers the idea of open-access
To acquire knowledge and gather information
That is now the object of companies’ manipulation.

Copyright – Real Vision or fantastic vision? by Arkadiusz Janusz (English translation by Kuba Kwiatkowski) contains a proposal of the type “metadata and tracking will get everyone paid” explained in a parent-child lecture. Quote:

The file doesn’t contain a price, only points. In other words, the price is quoted in points. A point has a different monetary value for every country. Here, the minimum wage is about 1000 dollars. We divide the minimum wage by one thousand and receive the amount value of 1 point. If you download a movie, the server checks in which country you are, and converts the points into the appropriate price.

That’s why in our times, pirates are at on the verge of extinction. Most frequently, they’re maniacs or followers of some strange ideologies.

You can also read my review of last year’s future of copyright contest anthology, which links to each selection. This year’s selections are notably less dystopian and take less of a position on what the future of copyright ought be.

I enjoyed judging this year’s contest, and hope it and any future iterations achieve much greater visibility. Current copyright debates seem to me to have an incredibly short-term focus, which can’t be for the good when changes which have supposedly produced the current debate are only speeding up. Additionally, and my one complaint about the contest other than lack of fame, is that “copyright” is a deeply suboptimal frame for thinking about its, and our, future. I will try to address this point directly soon, but some of it can be read from my contest entry of last year (other forms of info regulation with different policy goals being much more pertinent than quibbling over the appropriateness of the word “copyright”).

You may see an embedded player for the audiobook version read by me below. Some of the durations shown may be incorrect; the winner, A Penny for Your Thoughts, is actually slightly less than 15 minutes long. Sadly the player obscures the browser context menu and doesn’t provide a way to increase playback rate, so first, a default HTML5 player loaded with only the winner:

“Admit it! You’re freaked out by my robot hand!”

Thursday, June 6th, 2013

The Open Hand Project looks like a good idea, and realistic — I couldn’t discern the latter at a glance, but it seems several projects to greatly decrease the cost and enhance the functionality of prosthetic hands through use of 3D printing exist (e.g., another advanced project and a mechanical-only one).

Via and because Chris Webber’s film reference needs highlighting.

How many widely shared cultural references spring from recent free cultural works, apart from [citation needed]? Zero? If anyone was to pursue a kill hollyweb project as I sketched out, manufacturing many — and reviving more found in old public domain works — would be part of the plan.

I’ve mentioned in writing peer production of (free) cultural relevance a few times over the past couple years, and probably will more soon. I think it may be a major missing tool holding back freedom. Clearly most knowledge goods can be created without exclusivity (and if we can’t build or perform the knowledge equivalents of pyramids or mass games without, consider what we gain instead), but creation is not primarily what proprietary vendors offer — rather promotion and distribution is. Isn’t it time to compete directly?

Futures of Copyrestriction 2.0

Saturday, June 1st, 2013

Last year I was impressed with Modern Poland Foundation’s crowdfunded (the prize set by donations) Future of Copyright contest — my entry and review of the winners/contest anthology. I’m honored to be on the jury for this year’s contest. Please donate (deadline July 7) to support the prize, enter your text or audiovisual work (less than 15,000 characters or 10 minutes; deadline July>August 1), and spread the word.

I really encourage reading last year’s anthology (each entry linked from my review, or all as a pdf) and note how broadly and provocatively “future of copyright” might be construed. Also, all entries are BY-SA licensed; some may be useful as remix material.

Previously I noted Modern Poland Foundation’s excellent Right to Culture campaign; also tangentially I recommend Usta (archive.org), the music of MPF president/contest juror/poet JarosÅ‚aw Lipszyc, and Circulations of Culture, a report on informal sharing by another Polish NGO.

Addendum 20130706: The deadline for entering a work in the contest has been moved to August 1. The deadline for donating to support the prize is still the end of July 7, pacific time: 35 hours from the time I write this. Rules and donation info both on the same page, http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/future-of-copyright-contest-2-0

The nominal goal of US$500 has been met, but more support is welcome. If you’re into patron rewards, the $50 level is probably worthwhile — good for a printed book of the top entries. Last year I donated at a similar level and was surprised to receive a thin large format volume in hard binding, scanned above. (But I have no idea what the organizers have planned this year.)

I’m looking forward to selecting the best of this year’s entries with my fellow jurors Beatriz Busaniche, Shun-Ling Chen, JarosÅ‚aw Lipszyc, Joe McNamee, and Jérémie Zimmermann. Maybe yours?

List of Wikimania 2013 Submissions of Interest

Saturday, May 4th, 2013

Unlikely I’ll attend Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong (I did last year in DC). In lieu of marking myself as an interested attendee of proposed sessions, my list of 32 particularly interesting-to-me proposals follows. I chose by opening the proposal page for each of the 331 submissions that looked interesting at first glance (about 50) and weeded out some of those.

I suspect many of these proposals might be interesting reading for anyone generally curious about possible futures of Wikipedia and related, similar, and complementary projects, but not following any of these things closely.

A “kill hollyweb” plan

Friday, May 3rd, 2013
May 3 is the Day Against DRM (Digital Restrictions Management). Please sign the petition against DRM in the HTML5 standard. Then come back and read this post.

Recently I wrote in Why DRM in HTML5 and what to do about it:

Long term, the only way the DRM threat is going to be put to rest is for free cultural works to become culturally relevant.

I’ve complained many a time that rearguard clicktivism against bad policy is not a winning strategy — especially when such campaigns don’t also promote free-as-in-freedom software and cultural works — because as I put it one of those times:

In a world in which most software and culture are free as in freedom there would be no constituency for attacking the Internet (apart from dictatorships and militarized law enforcement of supposed democracies)

But I’m at fault too for not laying out a specific plan for making some free works culturally relevant, let alone carrying out such a plan.

OK, here’s one plan I recently mentioned offhandedly:

‘free-as-in-freedom ~netflix’
  • crowdfund minimum number of subscriptions needed to begin
  • subscriptions used to really nicely package/stream and promote free as in freedom video
  • start with 1 feature-length video selection each month (perhaps even quarter during a beta phase)
  • mix of contemporary (of which there isn’t much yet) and older public domain movies
  • limited, promoted releases concentrate subscription audience: focused increase of cultural relevance, one work at a time
  • given enough subscriptions, start funding new free videos
  • obviously videos would be DRM-free, in free formats, all software used free software, and all ancillary material also free-as-in-freedom

Good idea? Run with it, or if you’d like to subscribe or otherwise help create it in any way, fill out this 3 question survey. Bad idea, but still care? Let me know via the survey. Or mail ml@gondwanaland.com or contact user mlinksva on some other usual channel.



“Kill Hollyweb” is in part a reference to the Y Combinator Request For Startups 9: Kill Hollywood. The plan above isn’t really a Kill Hollywood plan as it isn’t about replacing movies with some other form of entertainment.

Best Creative Commons infographic ever

Tuesday, April 16th, 2013

Best Creative Commons inforaphic ever

By Falkvinge on Infopolicy columnist Zacqary Adam Green (also creator of the excellent Your Face Is A Saxophone cartoon).

Already used in my presentation today at the Linux Collaboration Summit, (pdf, odp, slideshare).