Post Public Domain

Peer producing think tank transparency

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Via Reason.

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

Embrace the public domain

Sunday, November 26th, 2006

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support Creative Commons

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friends don’t let friends click spam

Thursday, September 7th, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creative legacy insurance

Thursday, June 1st, 2006

Aaron Swartz has a provocative post on creating a legacy. I think it almost impossible to leave a real (by Swartz’s test — leaving the world in a significantly different state than if you had not acted) and good legacy.

Swartz cites simultaneous discovery as evidence that Darwin did not leave an impactful legacy. I think this vastly understates the value of multiple confirmations of a discovery and of arriving at a discovery sooner rather than later. Consider discoveries made or nearly made once, but not widely known nor used for many years. If more people had been working in the relevant fields perhaps the knowledge would not have languished and the world would, right now, be a different place, even if only shifted forward in time. (So perhaps I should not continue to say it is almost imposible to leave a good legacy.)

I do not have a compelling example right now, but countering Swartz’s argument is not even why I’m making this post…

Rather, having been spurred to think about legacy, another reason to add one’s creative output to the commons (e.g., by releasing it under a Creative Commons license) occurs to me: one’s creative legacy.

If you were to die tomorrow your heirs would own exclusive rights to your creative works, possibly forever. If not immediately (likely), then sooner or later your heirs will be unreachable or disagree over the disposition of your copyrights, annihilating your creative legacy. For without permission, your works may not be legally displayed, performed, reproduced, distributed, translated, repurposed, or otherwise used (excepting narrow and increasingly constrained fair use).

Due to unknown or recalcitrant owners your work will go to the grave with you like so much rotting celluloid … unless you choose to give the public permission in advance to use your work, now.

Posted in Creative Commons, Intellectual Protectionism, Public Domain | 3 Comments »

CCSSF2 with Gonze & Ostertag

Tuesday, April 11th, 2006

The first Creative Commons Salon San Francisco was good, tomorrow’s should be great. Bob Ostertag and Lucas Gonze (who I’ve cited many times) are presenting. I could hardly ask for a better lineup.

Event details.

Update 20060417: Followup post on the CC blog.

It was a pleasure talking to Ostertag before the presentations got underway. Among other things I learned that Pantychrist vocalist Justin Bond has become extremely sucessful. During the presentation he said he had wanted to put his recordings in the public domain but Creative Commons seemed like a good thing to support, so he chose a license rather arbitrarily. Argh! (CC does offer a public domain dedication.) Ostertag pushed the idea that thinking in terms of “copies” is completely obsolete and more or less encouraged “piracy” — in response to a naive questioner asking if streaming and DRM together could stop copying (smiles all around). It was evident during Q&A that he had much more to say coming from a number of different angles. I look forward to reading more of his thoughts.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lucas Gonze’s presentation, though it may have been too much too fast for some people. I found the things he left out of a talk about how the net is changing music notable — nothing about DRM, streaming, P2P, music stores, or podcasting. Hear, hear!

Posted in Creative Commons, DRM, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, P2P, Public Domain | No Comments »

Premium Society

Monday, October 17th, 2005

The Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property, released a few days ago, looks like a fairly reasonable set of guidelines for thinking about innovation policy. Their one pager (PDF).

I found the history of the Royal Society for the Arts (sponsor of Adelphi) far more interesting than the charter itself. An excerpt:

The original name of the Society was Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. However, an alternative name quickly emerged – the “Premium Society”. Until the mid 19th century, the Society offered cash premiums to inventors and artists as a means of encouraging new and progressive works. This means of supporting innovation often meant hostility towards patents. The reasons for the conflict are complex.

Read the rest.

Posted in Intellectual Protectionism, Patents, Public Domain, Public Goods | No Comments »

Natural copyright?

Friday, September 30th, 2005

In Copyright Natural Law Russ Nelson quickly explains “” (not a particularly useful concept in my opinion, but that’s irrelevant here), then proceeds to make the following bizarre statement:

The natural copyright law is a bargain between the publishers of copyrighted works and the recipients of copyrighted works. The publishers promise to eventually put the work into the public domain, and the recipients promise not to copy.

What in the world makes a limited duration state granted monopoly “natural law”? Is Russ conflating “natural law” with “whatever laws the first U.S. Congress made”?

Wikipedia on the :

The origins of copyright systems are generally placed in the practice of various monarchs in granting “letters patent”, arbitrary grants of monopoly over a particular practice or trade.

That sounds like the very opposite of Russ’s non-legislated (and non-decreed by Kings) “natural law” as do the legislative that created limited duration copyright and have since made it quasi-perpetual.

Russ’s conclusion that current copyright policy breeds disrespect for and disobediance of the law is correct, though I wouldn’t put it in terms of natural law, and suspect that the costs and benefits of use and enforcement given technology are far more relevant than any broken bargain for limited duration copyright, “natural” or not.

Posted in Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Public Domain | 1 Comment »

Perpetual copyright ends, 1774

Sunday, September 18th, 2005

Tyler Cowen writes:

I am learning just how much early British copyright law kept the price of literature high, and kept books out of public hands.

The curious story of how perpetual copyright survived until 1774, 64 years after the Statute of Anne limited the duration of monopoly publishing rights to 14 years with one optional renewal is told in chapter 6, “Founders” of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture. (Failing to obtain legislative copyright extension, publishers argued that common law copyright was perpetual, obviating the statute.)

Modern U.S. publishers, since at least 1976 succeeded politically where their English predecessors failed, obtaining effectively perpetual protection through legislation, obviating the U.S. constitution’s “limited time” clause (nevermind the redefinition of “science and useful arts“). Should publishers fail to obtain another extension by 2019, what alternative methods for controlling pre-1923 works will publishers pursue?

Posted in Intellectual Protectionism, Public Domain | 2 Comments »

Predict what will be free

Thursday, August 4th, 2005

Jimmy Wales, guest blogging at Lessig’s, has started what promises to be an interesting series of posts on ten things that will be free (as in free software):

[T]his is not a dream list of things which I hope through some magic to become free, but a list of things which I believe are solvable in reality, things that will be free. Anyone whose business model for the next 100 years depends on these things remaining proprietary better watch out: free culture is coming to get you.
…

For each of the ten, I will try to give some basic (and hopefully not too ambiguous) definitions for what it will mean for each of them to be “solved”, and we can all check back for the next 25 or 50 years to see how we are doing.

In a subsequent post Wales is even more explicit:

[T]he point of naming the list “will be free” rather than “should be free” or “must be free” is that I am making concrete predictions rather than listing a pie in the sky list of things I wish to see.

I’d love to see similar (but shorter term and more thoroughly specified) predictions as claims on a prediction market. With the right set of claims we can more easily talk about, and plan for, which things are more likely to be free, and when.

Thus far Wales has predicted encyclopedias and curricula will be free. I can’t think of any segments that I am fairly certain will be free, are associated with large businesses, and have not already been alluded to in the comments on his first post.

However, regarding widely deployed software (e.g., operating systems, productivity applications) I have a theory explaining why it will be free: Microsoft Windows and Office have a half life–eventually a release of each will be a failure, at which point the only viable alternaives will be free, and any non-free alternaitves will face slow death–think commercial Unixes in the face of Linux. I’m not going to stand by this theory–it probably assumes too little change, of any sort.

Posted in Open Source, Prediction Markets, Public Domain, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 4 Comments »

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