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Billion dollar open source organizations

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012

Brian Proffitt looks for the next $1 billion open source company. This year Red Hat recently surpassed US$1 billion annual revenues (and also $10 billion market capitalization).

One can debate what counts as an “open source company” (presumably something like “[almost] all software developed and distributed is open source”), but Red Hat is relatively uncontroversial; less so than the companies Proffitt lists as possibly next: EnterpriseDB, , and Eucalyptus. I might have included Canonical Ltd among those, but I didn’t look closely for indicators of whether any could reasonably become $1 billion annual revenue companies, or reach an easier $billion milestone, valuation — Proffitt notes that MySQL AB was acquired for approximately $1 billion in 2008.

An even more obvious addition to the watchlist ought be Mozilla, which should have annual revenues exceeding $300 million. Mozilla is least problematic on the “open source” front, though the for-profit corporation is wholly owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which could lead one to overlook it as a “company”. This also means it won’t have a traditional company valuation (acquisition price or market capitalization), but it’d be clearly over $1 billion.

There’s one other open source organization that, if it pursued huge revenues and were for-profit (both requiring many counterfactuals that may well have destroyed the project; I advocate neither, though I have advocated huge revenues in the past) would be a billion dollar company by valuation and perhaps revenue as well — Wikimedia. I wonder, given that it forgoes huge revenue from advertising, and most people claim to dislike and find little or no utility in online advertising, what we can conclude about the consumer surplus generated by Wikimedia?

As hugely problematic as they are, huge organizations (most obviously governments and corporations) outcompete smaller arrangements in many aspects of human society. If software freedom and the like is important, advocates ought to be rooting for (and criticizing) huge “open source” institutions. And should also be looking for (admittedly difficult) characterizations of consumer surplus and other “billion dollar” metrics in addition to firm revenue and valuation of future profits.

Posted in Advertising, Economics, Open Source, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 5 Comments »

Open Data nuance

Sunday, October 7th, 2012

I’m very mildly annoyed with some discussion of “open data”, in part where it is an amorphous thing for which expectations must be managed, value found and sustainable business models, perhaps marketplaces, invented, all with an abstract and tangential relationship to software, or “IT”.

All of this was evident at a recent Open Knowledge Foundation meetup at the Wikimedia Foundation offices — but perhaps only evident to me, and I do not really intend to criticize anyone there. Their projects are all great. Nonetheless, I think very general discussion about open data tends to be very suboptimal, even among experts. Perhaps this just means general discussion is suboptimal, except as an excuse for socializing. But I am more comfortable enumerating peeves than I am socializing:

“Open” and “data” should sometimes be considered separately. “Open” (as in anyone can use for any purpose, as opposed to facing possible legal threat from copyright, database, patent and other “owners”, even their own governments, and their enforcement apparatuses) is only an expensive policy choice if pursued at too low a level, where rational ignorance and a desire to maintain every form of control and conceivable revenue stream rule. Regardless of “open” policy, or lack thereof, any particular dataset might be worthwhile, or not. But this is the most minor of my annoyances. It is even counterproductive to consider, most of the time — due to the expense of overcoming rational ignorance about “open” policy, and of evaluating any particular dataset, it probably makes a lot of sense to bundle “open data” and agitate for as much data to be made available under as good of practices as possible, and manage expectations when necessary.
To minimize the need to make expensive evaluations and compromises, open data needs to be cheap, preferably a side-effect of business as usual. Cheapness requires automation requires software requires open source software, otherwise “open data” institutions are themselves not transparent, are hostage to “enterprise software” companies, and are severely constrained in their ability to help each other, and to be helped by their publics. I don’t think an agitation approach is optimal (I recently attended an OpenOakland meeting, and one of the leaders said something like “we don’t hate proprietary software, but we do love open source”, which seems reasonable) but I am annoyed nevertheless by the lack of priority and acknowledgement given to software by “open data” (and even moreso, open access/content/education/etc) folk in general, strategic discussions (but, in action the Open Knowledge Foundation is better, having hatched valuable open source projects needed for open data). Computation rules all!
A “data marketplace” should not be the first suggestion, or even metaphor, for how to realize value from open data — especially not in the offices of the Wikimedia Foundation. Instead, mass collaboration.
Open data is neither necessary nor sufficient for better governance. Human institutions (inclusive of “public”, “private”, or any other categorization you like) have been well governed and atrociously governed throughout recorded history. Open data is just another mechanism that in some cases might make a bit of a difference. Another tool. But speaking of managing expectations, one should expect and demand good governance, or at least less atrocity, from our institutions, completely independent of open data!

“Nuance” is a vague joke in lieu of a useful title.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Oakland, Open Access, Open Source, Peeves, Politics, Wikipedia | 4 Comments »

Wikitravels

Monday, September 10th, 2012

The morbidity of Wikitravel (owned by Internet Brands) and possible consolidation of ex-Wikitravel communities in a new Wikimedia project (I support the latter and have no opinion on squabbles somewhere in between) makes this a good time to revisit themes of three old blog posts.

In 2004 I wrote about copying text across World66 and Wikitravel, two then-independent sites, quasi-wiki and wiki respectively, under then-compatible licenses. I already gave this post its 8 year refutation, noting that I didn’t fully comply with the licenses and people don’t care about licenses anyway.

If people did care, it would be worth noting that the two are no longer under compatible licenses. World66 has stayed at Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 which had overlooked compatibility with future versions, while Wikitravel migrated to Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (a process I cheered) Curiously the Wikitravel license upgrade page claims World66 used Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0, which was never the case. The morbidity of World66 (another data point: I seem to have made the last edit to the World66 article on Austin, in 2004) since and maybe prior to its Internet Brands acquisition perhaps says something about IB management, but first, the acquisition.

World66 and Wikitravel were both announced to have been acquired by IB in 2006 (document below says the acquisition happened in 2005). I don’t know that the terms for either were disclosed, despite a joking request to add them to a wiki page. But now one figure is included in an IB legal document (backstory on that document): $1.7m for Wikitravel.

Later in 2006 I claimed that community is the new IP (yes I hate the term IP when expanded to “Intellectual Property” too, but I didn’t expand it; in any case I meant that a community and its location/identifier is a barrier to competitive entrants, which is also one effect of copyright, patent, trademark, etc.) and cited the acquisitions of Wikitravel and YouTube (for almost 1000x as much — that is not to denigrate Wikitravel — $1.7m may be wholly uninteresting to venture investors, but sounds very nice for what I imagine required very little capital other than sweat). The idea that a large community, or “community”, or loyal userbase, or at least lots of users that would find it difficult to move, is valuable, has been shown many times subsequently (e.g., Facebook and Twitter valuations) and isn’t even interesting. My ulterior motive in claiming that “community is the new IP” was to say that copyright in particular is irrelevant for web startups and that as such these should allow users to contribute such that all have equal rights. Well, copyright probably is mostly irrelevant (consider Twitter and Facebook; though a few people have gotten worked up over whether one could “copyright a tweet”, legal risk from copying tweets must be far down any list of Twitter lock-in mechanisms; same for Facebook, even moreso, as much of the stuff people visit that site for is never public, and use of many of the photos would run into personality/privacy/publicity rights even if copyright did not exist), but so it would seem are equal copyright permissions for users — precious few startups have offered such and I don’t know of any that are huge successes.

Wikitravel co-founder Evan Prodromou’s current StatusNet is one of those, but that’s another story which I hope will be huge one day. Pre-StatusNet, Prodromou was working on additional commercial wikis, and in 2007 I was impressed with his guidelines for such. From a business perspective community may be an excludable resource, but like any advantage a business might have, it can be squandered. I’d love it if someone more knowledgeable about IB and Wikitravel over the past few years could say whether Prodromou’s guidelines capture what IB hasn’t done right — and whether the guidelines could be usefully amended and expanded based on several more years of commercial wikis, not only those run by IB.

IB’s current troubles with Wikitravel will probably serve as a minor negative case for future statups, but in which sense? To avoid free licensing altogether, in order to make it more difficult for users to leave in the event of your mismanagement? Or to follow something like Prodromou’s guidelines in spirit and practice for a healthy, happy community and long-term business success? And will a more substantial proportion of users ever care?

All of the above aside, I still find Wikitravel one of the ever better stories for free public licenses, the travel guide materials having now been hosted by a small startup, acquired by IB, forked to community sites (Wikivoyage), small bits copied into Wikipedia articles, and perhaps soon, some form of mass copying into a new Wikimedia-hosted travel project, all with no copyright barriers.

Finally, it has been noted that with volunteer administrators gone, Wikitravel is being buried in spam. This (and general frustration with spam on small wikis and nearby over the years) is what prompted me last week to microblog that archeologists of the future will dig through layers of spam as contemporary ones dig through layers of dirt. 10 years (did anyone note it?) must be far beyond the half-life of websites.

Posted in Creative Commons, Intellectual Protectionism, Wikipedia | No Comments »

For the accumulated knowledge of the human race to become the common property of every person

Thursday, July 19th, 2012

Last week Wikimania included a reception in an impressive hall at the Library of Congress. But far more impressive than the hall was the Gutenberg Bible on display, apparently one of a few complete vellum copies, and one of a few dozen known copies of any sort. I don’t recall ever feeling stunned to be in the presence of an artifact before.

After standing before the display case speechless for a bit, I read some explanatory text nearby:

Gutenberg’s invention of the mechanical printing press made it possible for the accumulated knowledge of the human race to become the common property of every person who knew how to read—an immense forward step in the emancipation of the human mind.

I can’t find a source for that text, but it has been on display for at least four years. It was incredibly apt for Wikimania, as it reads very much like the Wikimedia Foundation’s vision:

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

Wikimania provided plenty of evidence both for how rapidly Wikimedia projects are progressing (in particular technology projects that seemed fantasies a few years ago, such as Wikidata and a visual editor, will be deployed over the next year) but also how far away humanity is from the potentials expressed above — particularly driven by bad policy, which in turn impoverishes practice — resulting in Wikipedia being unique, when instead all knowledge of all forms could be subject to mass curation and sharing.

In case I do not blog further about Wikimania: I enjoyed helping Asheesh Laroia with the pre-conference hackathon, Mayo Fuster Morell with a BoF-style meetup on digital commons, and tons of great conversations. Thanks to the organizers, all attendees, and all Wikimedians for such a great conference and movement!

…

Perhaps someday I will stand in the presence of the Dunhuang Diamond Sutra, the oldest printed book with a date (868CE), held in the British Library. I don’t know whether it would stun me, but I have noted a statement in its colophon:

Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong.

Posted in Books, Intellectual Protectionism, Wikipedia | 2 Comments »

Future of Copyright

Monday, April 30th, 2012

“Copyright” (henceforth, copyrestriction) is merely a current manifestation of humanity’s malgovernance of information, of commons, of information commons (the combination being the most pertinent here). Copyrestriction was born of royal censorship and monopoly grants. It has acquired an immense retinue of administrators, advocates, bureaucrats, goons, publicists, scholars, and more. Its details have changed and especially proliferated. But its concept and impact are intact: grab whatever revenue and control you can, given your power, and call your grabbing a “right” and necessary for progress. As a policy, copyrestriction is far from unique in exhibiting these qualities. It is only particularly interesting because it, or more broadly, information governance, is getting more important as everything becomes information intensive, increasingly via computation suffusing everything. Before returning to the present and future, note that copyrestriction is also not temporally unique among information policies. Restriction of information for the purposes of control and revenue has probably existed since the dawn of agriculture, if not longer, e.g., cults and guilds.

Copyrestriciton is not at all a right to copy a work, but a right to persecute others who distribute, perform, etc, a work. Although it is often said that a work is protected by copyrestriction, this is strictly not true. A work is protected through the existence of lots of copies and lots of curators. The same is true for information about a work, i.e., metadata, e.g., provenance. Copyrestriction is an attack on the safety of a work. Instead, copyrestriction protects the revenue and control of whoever holds copyrestriction on a work. In some cases, some elements of control remain with a work’s immediate author, even if they no longer hold copyrestriction: so-called moral rights.

Copyrestriction has become inexorably more restrictive. Technology has made it increasingly difficult for copyrestriction holders and their agents to actually restrict others’ copying and related activity. Neither trend has to give. Neither abolition nor police state in service of copyrestriction scenarios are likely in the near future. Nor is the strength of copyrestricition the only dimension to consider.

Free and open source software has demonstrated the ethical and practical value of the opposite of copyrestriction, which is not its absence, but regulation mandating the sharing of copies, specifically in forms suitable for inspection and improvement. This regulation most famously occurs in the form of source-requiring copyleft, e.g., the GNU General Public License (GPL), which allows copyrestriction holders to use copyrestriction to force others to share works based on GPL’d works in their preferred form for modification, e.g., source code for software. However, this regulation occurs through other means as well, e.g., communities and projects refusing to curate and distribute works not available in source form, funders mandating source release, and consumers refusing to buy works not available in source form. Pro-sharing regulation (using the term “regulation” maximally broadly to include government, market, and others; some will disbelieve in the efficacy or ethics of one or more, but realistically a mix will occur) could become part of many policies. If it does not, society will be put at great risk by relying in security through obscurity, and lose many opportunities to scrutinize, learn about, and improve society’s digital infrastructure and the computing devices individuals rely on to live their lives, and to live, period.

Information sharing, and regulation promoting and protecting the same, also ought play a large role in the future of science. Science, as well as required information disclosure in many contexts, long precedes free and open source software. The last has only put a finer point on pro-sharing regulation in relation to copyrestriction, since the most relevant works (mainly software) are directly subject to both. But the extent to which pro-sharing regulation becomes a prominent feature of information governance, and more narrowly, the extent to which people have software freedom, will depend mostly on the competitive success of projects that reveal or mandate revelation of source, the success of pro-sharing advocates in making the case that pro-sharing regulation is socially desirable, and their success in getting pro-sharing regulation enacted and enforced (again, whether in customer and funding agreements, government regulation, community constitutions, or other) much more so than copyrestriction-based enforcement of the GPL and similar. But it is possible that the GPL is setting an important precedent for pro-sharing regulation, even though the pro-sharing outcome is conceptually orthogonal to copyrestriction.

Returning to copyrestriction itself, if neither abolition nor totalism are imminent, will humanity muddle through? How? What might be done to reduce the harm of copyrestriction? This requires a brief review of the forces that have resulted in the current muddle, and whether we should expect any to change significantly, or foresee any new forces that will significantly impact copyrestriction.

Technology (itself, not the industry as an interest group) is often assumed to be making copyrestriction enforcement harder and driving demands for for harsher restrictions. In detail, that’s certainly true, but for centuries copyrestriciton has been resilient to technical changes that make copying ever easier. Copying will continue to get easier. In particular the “all culture on a thumb drive” (for some very limited definition of “all”) approaches, or is here if you only care about a few hundred feature length films, or are willing to use portable hard drive and only care about a few thousand films (or much larger numbers of books and songs). But steadily more efficient copying isn’t going to destroy copyrestriction sector revenue. More efficient copying may be necessary to maintain current levels of unauthorized sharing, given steady improvement in authorized availability of content industry controlled works, and little effort to make unauthorized sharing easy and worthwhile for most people (thanks largely to suppression of anyone who tries, and media management not being an easy problem). Also, most collection from businesses and other organizations has not and will probably not become much more difficult due to easier copying.

National governments are the most powerful entities in this list, and the biggest wildcards. Although most of the time they act roughly as administrators or follow the cue of more powerful national governments, copyrestriction laws and enforcement are ultimately in their courts. As industries that could gain from copyrestriction grow in developing nations, those national governments could take on leadership of increasing restriction and enforcement, and with less concern for civil liberties, could have few barriers. At the same time, some developing nations could decide they’ve had enough of copyrestriction’s inequality promotion. Wealthy national governments could react to these developments in any number of ways. Trade wars seem very plausible, actual war prompted by a copyrestriction or related dispute not unimaginable. Nations have fought stupid wars over many perceived economic threats.

The traditional copyrestriction industry is tiny relative to the global economy, and even the U.S. economy, but its concentration and cachet make it a very powerful lobbyist. It will grab all of the revenue and control it possibly can, and it isn’t fading away. As alluded to above, it could become much more powerful in currently developing nations. Generational change within the content industry should lead to companies in that industry better serving customers in a digital environment, including conceivably attenuating persecution of fans. But it is hard to see any internal change resulting in support for positive legal changes.

Artists have always served as exhibit one for the content industry, and have mostly served as willing exhibitions. This has been highly effective, and every category genuflects to the need for artists to be paid, and generally assumes that copyrestriction is mandatory to achieve this. Artists could cause problems for copyrestriction-based businesses and other organizations by demanding better treatment under the current system, but that would only effect the details of copyrestriction. Artists could significantly help reform if more were convinced of the goodness of reform and usefulness of speaking up. Neither seems very likely.

Other businesses, web companies most recently, oppose copyrestriction directions that would negatively impact their businesses in the short term. Their goal is not fundamental reform, but continuing whatever their current business is, preferably with increasing profits. Just the same as content industries. A fundamental feature of muddling through will be tests of various industries and companies to carve out and protect exceptions. And exploit copyrestriction whenever it suits them.

Administrators, ranging from lawyers to WIPO, though they work constantly to improve or exploit copyrestriciton, will not be the source of significant change.

Free and open source software and other constructed commons have already disrupted a number of categories, including server software and encyclopedias. This is highly significant for the future of copyrestriction, and more broadly, information governance, and a wildcard. Successful commons demonstrate feasibility and desirability of policy other than copyrestriction, help create a constituency for reducing copyrestriction and increasing pro-sharing policies, and diminish the constituency for copyrestriction by reducing the revenues and cultural centrality of restricted works and their controlling entities. How many additional sectors will opt-in freedom disrupt? How much and for how long will the cultural centrality of existing restricted works retard policy changes flowing from such disruptions?

Cultural change will affect the future of copyrestriction, but probably in detail only. As with technology change, copyrestriction has been incredibly resilient to tremendous cultural change over the last centuries.

Copyrestriction reformers (which includes people who would merely prevent additional restrictions, abolitionists, and those between and beyond, with a huge range of motivations and strategies among them) will certainly affect the future of copyrestriction. Will they only mitigate dystopian scenarios, or cause positive change? So far they have mostly failed, as the political economy of diffuse versus concentrated interests would predict. Whether reformers succeed going forward will depend on how central and compelling they can make their socio-political cause, and thus swell their numbers and change society’s narrative around information governance — a wildcard.

Scholars contribute powerfully to society’s narrative over the long term, and constitute a separate wildcard. Much scholarship has moved from a property- and rights-based frame to a public policy frame, but this shift as yet is very shallow, and will remain so until a property- and rights-basis assumption is cut out from under today’s public policy veneer, and social scientists rather than lawyers dominate the conversation. This has occurred before. Over a century ago economists were deeply engaged in similar policy debates (mostly regarding patents, mostly contra). Battles were lost, and tragically economists lost interest, leaving the last century’s policy to be dominated by grabbers exploiting a narrative of rights, property, and intuitive theory about incentives as cover, with little exploration and explanation of public welfare to pierce that cover.

Each of the above determinants of the future of copyrestriction largely hinge on changing (beginning with engaging, in many cases) people’s minds, with partial exceptions for disruptive constructed commons and largely exogenous technology and culture change (partial as how these develop will be affected by copyrestriction policy and debate to some extent). Even those who cannot be expected to effect more than details as a class are worth engaging — much social welfare will be determined by details, under the safe assumption that society will muddle through rather than make fundamental changes.

I don’t know how to change or engage anyone’s mind, but close with considerations for those who might want to try:

Make copyrestriction’s effect on wealth, income, and power inequality, across and within geographies, a central part of the debate.
Investigate assumptions of beneficent origins of copyrestriction.
Tolerate no infringement of intellectual freedom, nor that of any civil liberty, for the sake of copyrestriction.
Do not assume optimality means “balance” nor that copyrestriction maximalism and public domain maximalism are the poles.
Make pro-sharing, pro-transparency, pro-competition and anti-monopoly policies orthogonal to above dimension part of the debate.
Investigate and celebrate the long-term policy impact of constructed commons such as free and open source software.
Take into account market size, oversupply, network effects, non-pecuniary motivations, and the harmful effects of pecuniary motivations on creative work, when considering supply and quality of works.
Do not grant that copyrestriction-based revenues are or have ever been the primary means of supporting creative work.
Do not grant big budget movies as failsafe argument for copyrestriction; wonderful films will be produced without, and even if not, we will love whatever cultural forms exist and should be ashamed to accept any reduction of freedom for want of spectacle.
Words are interesting and important but trivial next to substance. Replace all occurrences of “copyrestriction” with “copyright” as you see fit. There is no illusion concerning our referent.

This work takes part in the Future of Copyright Contest and is published under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Free Speech, Inequality Promotion, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Patents, Peeves, Politics, Public Domain, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 27 Comments »

no copyright law in the universe is going to stop me [from demanding compliance with various UN human rights and cultural diversity declarations]

Saturday, March 3rd, 2012

Currently the first autocompletion result upon typing “no copyright” into YouTube’s search is “no copyright law in the universe is going to stop me”, which is apparently a string used in the description of 108 videos on YouTube, and the title of at least one. It seems this phrase is primarily an anti-SOPA expression rather than an admonition to not take down whatever video is described.

Andy Baio pointed out late last year that disclaimers of intent to infringe others’ copyrights and claims of fair use frequently appear in the descriptions of videos on YouTube. He noted 489,000 and 664,000 results for the queries "no copyright" and "copyright" "section 107". Those numbers may have grown significantly in the last nearly 3 months, but should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Yesterday for me, “no copyright” obtained 906,000, while today YouTube has said both 972,000 and 3,850,000 to the same query. For “copyright” “section 107”, yesterday 771,000, today 418,000. I don’t know how many videos were on YouTube 3 months ago, but yesterday an empty query claimed 567,000,000; today I’ve seen 537,000,000 and 550,000,000 — maybe on the order of 1% of videos have some sort of copyright disclaimer. But there are variations that might not be picked up by the queries Baio used, including for example two of the descriptions I posted a few days ago.

Although they’re probably completely useless in preventing automated takedowns and in court (though it’s not entirely clear they ought be useless in either case), as expression they’re at the very least interesting, and perhaps more. Though they can be seen as “voodoo charms”, so can the ubiquitous “all rights reserved”, and even meaningful public copyright licenses can be seen as such to the extent they are misunderstood or totemic. My main objection to the disclaimers Baio brought attention to is that they’re clutter to the extent they crowd out writing or reading other information about works; and just about anything else is more useful, from provenance to expressions of appreciation, eg “In my opinion, one of the greatest songs of the ’80s.”

But my first reaction to such disclaimers is the wish that they would be more expressive, even substantial. Regarding the latter, in many cases the uploader has added something to or rearranged the work in question — e.g., where the work is a song, the addition of images, or the performance of a cover. How often does the uploader grant permissions to use whatever expression they’ve added? (I don’t know; one aggregate tool for exploring such might be the addition of &creativecommons=1 to the aforementioned queries, which will limit results to those marked as CC-BY.) One fairly well known case of something like this is Girl Talk’s All Day:

All Day by Girl Talk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. The CC license does not interfere with the rights you have under the fair use doctrine, which gives you permission to make certain uses of the work even for commercial purposes. Also, the CC license does not grant rights to non-transformative use of the source material Girl Talk used to make the album.

Too bad with the NonCommercial condition, and I really don’t like Girl Talk’s music (for something kind of similar that I prefer aesthetically and in terms of permissions granted, check out xmarx), but otherwise that’s a great statement.

Over the past few months someone or some people have made me aware of another example, one that replaces disclaimers with demands. You can see some of this on my English Wikipedia user talk page (start at “Common IP” — unfortunately webcitation.org doesn’t pass through internal links, so you’ll have to scroll down). It may appear that my correspondent is religious and communicating poorly through automated translation between Russian and English, but there’s a kernel of something interesting there. If I understand correctly, they think that without listening to the Beatles, one cannot develop morally (that comes from elsewhere, not on my talk page) and that per a variety of United Nations declarations concerning human rights and especially cultural diversity, anyone has the legal right and moral duty to share Beatles material. As far as I know they started this campaign at beatles1.ru and moved on to other sites, including Wikipedia. It is pretty clear that they’re not looking for links to beatles1.ru or some other site they control — I think they’re sincerely promoting something they believe in, not a money-making scam.

The flaws in their campaign are legion, not least of which is that there could hardly be a worse body of work than that of the Beatles around which to plead for rights to share in the name of cultural diversity. As the Beatles are one of if not the most popular acts ever, the most obvious conclusion is that more Beatles exposure must lower global cultural diversity. On the related issue of cultural preservation, super-famous material like that of the Beatles is going to survive for a long time in spite of copyright restrictions, even vigorously enforced (see James Joyce).

As to their persistent requests for some kind of permission from me to proceed with their campaign, I say two things:

As far as the copyright regime is concerned, the permissions I have to grant to you are nil.
As far as demands made in the name of human rights, no human requires permission from any other to pursue those. Godspeed to you, or perhaps I should say, Beatlespeed!

I want to thank my correspondent for causing me to look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent documents. The way they address “intellectual property”, to the extent that they do, is more curious than I would’ve thought. I leave that to a future post.

p.s. My favorite Beatles.

Posted in Creative Commons, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, Politics, Public Domain, Wikipedia | 19 Comments »

5 years of version 3.0 of Creative Commons licenses

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

Version 3.0 of the main Creative Commons licenses were released 2007-02-23, that is 5 years and 2 days ago, remaining current much longer than previous versions^* (1.0: 17 months, 2.0: 12 months; 2.5: 20 months). Hopefully the eventual version 4.0 licenses will remain current much longer still.

Probably the most important developments that 3.0 contributed to were the adoption of CC-BY-SA as the primary license used by Wikimedia projects and the use of various CC licenses (most often CC-BY) by governments and other policy-making entities. 3.0 was probably not absolutely necessary and certainly only a small part of these developments, but it surely helped, e.g., by addressing some of the Debian community’s concerns (which overlap with the views of many Wikimedians) and through further internationalization.

Congratulations to everyone who worked on 3.0 5-6 years ago, especially CC’s General Counsel at the time, Mia Garlick, CC affiliates, and especially (and with some overlap) people who participated in public discussions!

^* A further bit of trivia: depending on how one ‘counts’ (eg, not if one counts each edit on Wikipedias!), version 2.0 licenses probably remains the most used, as those are baked into Flickr. During 4.0’s long tenure, I very much hope to see new tools and forms which make it the most used CC license version, even if Flickr does not change at all and continues to grow.

Posted in Creative Commons, Wikipedia | 7 Comments »

SOPA/PIPA protests on-message or artless?

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Go Internet! Instantly message the U.S. Congress! (Tell them to kill the so-called Research Works Act too!)

Another, much bigger, tiresome rearguard action. I’m impressed by protesters’ nearly universal and exclusive focus on encouraging readers to contact U.S. Congresspeople. I hope it works. SOPA and PIPA really, really deserve to die.

But the protest also bums me out.

1) Self-censorship (in the case of sites completely blacked out, as opposed to those prominently displaying anti-SOPA messages) is not the Internet at its best. If that claim weren’t totally ridiculous, the net wouldn’t be worth defending. It isn’t even the net at its political best — that would be creating systems which disrupt and obviate power — long term offensives, not short-term defenses.

2) Near exclusive focus on supplication before 535 [Update: 536] ultra-powerful individuals is kinda disgusting. But it needs to be done, as effectively as possible.

3) I haven’t looked at a huge number of sites, but I haven’t seen much creativity in the protest. Next time it would be fun to see an appropriate site (Wikipedia? Internet Archive?) take what Flickr has done and add bidding for the “right” to darken particular articles or media as a fundraiser. Art would be nice too — I’d love to hear about anything really great (and preferably libre) from this round.

4) While some prominent bloggers have made the point that “piracy” is not a legitimate problem, overwhelmingly the protest has stuck to defense — SOPA and PIPA would do bad things to the net, and wouldn’t “work” anyway. Google goes much further, saying “End Piracy, Not Liberty” and “Fighting online piracy is important.” Not possible, wrong, and gives away the farm.

5) Nobody making the point that everyone can help with long-term offensives which will ultimately stop ratcheting protectionism, if it is to be stopped. Well, this nobody has attempted:

[I]magine a world in which most software and culture are free as in freedom. Software, culture, and innovation would be abundant, there would be plenty of money in it (just not based on threat of censorship), and there would be no constituency for attacking the Internet. (Well, apart from dictatorships and militarized law enforcement of supposed democracies; that’s a fight intertwined with SOPA, but those aren’t the primary constituencies for the bill.) Now, world ~~domination~~liberation by free software and culture isn’t feasible now. But every little bit helps reduce the constituency that wishes to attack the Internet to possibly protect their censorship-based revenue streams, and to increase the constituency whose desire to protect the Internet is perfectly aligned with their business interests and personal expression.
…
I’d hope that at least some messages tested convey not only the threat SOPA poses to Wikimedia, but the long-term threat the Wikimedia movement poses to censorship.

Also:

Bad legislation needs to be stopped now, but over the long term, we won’t stop getting new bad legislation until policymakers see broad support and amazing results from culture and other forms of knowledge that work with the Internet, rather than against it. Each work or project released under a CC license signals such support, and is an input for such results.

And:

Finally, remember that CC is crucial to keeping the Internet non-broken in the long term. The more free culture is, the less culture has an allergy to and deathwish for the Internet.

…

Of the five items I list above, the first three are admittedly peevish. Four and five represent not so much problems with the current protest as they do severe deficiencies in movements for intellectual freedom. Actually they are flipsides of the same deficiency: lack of compelling explanation that intellectual freedom, however constructed and protected, really matters, really works, and is really for the good. If such were well enough researched and explained so as to become conventional wisdom, rather than contentious and seemingly radical, net freedom activists could act much more proactively, provocatively, and powerfully, rather than as they do today: with supplication and genuflection.

I am not at all well read, but my weak understanding is that the withdrawal of economists from studying intellectual protectionism in the late 1800s was a great tragedy. To begin the encourage rectification of that century plus of relative neglect, today is a good day to start reading Against Intellectual Monopoly.

In the meantime, the actual and optimal counterfactual drift further apart, without any help from SOPA and PIPA.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Peeves, Politics, Public Domain, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 6 Comments »

Namecheap’s savvy anti-SOPA marketing

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

I’m impressed by how much gratis publicity and advertising Namecheap has gotten via its anti-SOPA marketing (including the Wikipedia article I linked to; it didn’t exist 3 days ago), and completely unimpressed by the failure of approximately every other company to take advantage of the opportunity, which strikes me as easy social media gold. Communications department heads ought roll.

Go Daddy’s^* pro-SOPA marketing failures made Namecheap’s action straightforward relative to companies not directly competing with Go Daddy. However, there are lots of other domain name registrars, none of which has done anything with Namecheap’s marketing savvy. Another registrar, Gandi (which I’ve used and recommended for some time, and has supported Creative Commons and other good causes), like Namecheap is donating a portion of domain transfers to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but doesn’t seem to be making a big deal of it, and their anti-SOPA blog post is rather tepid. Compare to Namecheap’s anti-SOPA blog post, which isn’t all that much stronger in terms of substance (contains genuflection to “intellectual property”), it is much more strongly worded and simply more effectively written.

One other company has a support-EFF-against-SOPA tie-in. That company, Zopim, provides website chat services, and doesn’t seem to compete with Go Daddy at all. I’m not interested, but never would have heard of them otherwise. Any company could do that.

(I see that sometime today two other small domain registrars have added support-EFF-against-SOPA deals. Good for Suspicious Networks and Centuric.)

What inspired to me write this post is that Namecheap isn’t only taking gratis publicity. They’re also running presumably paid ads as part of their anti-SOPA marketing campaign:

While trying to get the above ad to load again (noticed out of the corner of my eye but didn’t register until sometime after — I’m oddly trying to recover from ad blindness), I noticed another Namecheap ad, which if you’re already really tuned in, illustrates nicely the imperfect options available from a software freedom perspective for domain registration and other nearly commodity services.

Check out more anti-SOPA and pro-freedom actions.

^*Isn’t the name “Go Daddy” ridiculous? That, coupled with a super cheesy website and company logo led me to disregard them long before they started shooting sexy elephants at gladiator events, or whatever got people upset before they supported SOPA.

Posted in Advertising, Creative Commons, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Services, Open Source, Peeves, Politics, Wikipedia | 3 Comments »

Mozilla $300m/year for freedom

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

More Mozilla ads by Henrik Moltke / CC BY

Congratulations to Mozilla on their $300m/year deal with Google, which will more than double current annual revenue. I’ve always thought people predicting doom for Mozilla if Google failed to renew were all wrong — others would be happy to pay for the default search position; probably less since Microsoft, Yahoo, and others make less than Google per ad view, but it’d still be a very substantial amount — and the link article hints that a Microsoft bid drove the price up.

There’s always a risk that Mozilla won’t spend the money well, but I’m pretty confident that they will. Firefox is excellent, and in 2011 has gotten more excellent, faster, and I think many of the other projects they’re doing are really important, and on the right track (insofar as I’m qualified to discern, which is not much), for example BrowserID. Even in small and hopelessly annoying things, like licensing, I think Mozilla is doing good. (Bias: Mozilla has donated to my employer.)

I’m no longer enthused about the possibility of huge resources for progress toward Wikimedia’s vision from advertising on Wikipedia. Since I was last on that bandwagon, it has become even less of a possibility in anything but the distant future: Wikimedia’s donation campaigns have gone very well, adequately funding its operating mission, and lack of advertising has become even more part of Wikimedia’s messaging; I’ve also become more concerned (not in particular to Wikimedia) about the institutional corruption risks previously blogged by Peter McCluskey and Timothy B. Lee. (Note these objections don’t apply to Mozilla: its significant revenue has always been advertising-based; very roughly its revenues are already 10x those of Wikimedia’s; and it is also building up an individual donor program, which I agree is often the healthiest revenue for a nonprofit.)

But I still very much think freedom needs massive, ongoing resource infusions, in the right institutional framework. I celebrate the tremendous benefits of the FLOSS community achieves without massive, concentrated, ongoing resource infusions, but I also admit that the web likely would be much worse, much less webby, and much less free without concentrated resources at Mozilla over the last several years.

Thank you Mozillians, and congratulations. I have very high expectations for your contributions over the next years to the web and society, in particular where more freedom and security are obviously needed such as mobile and software services. Such would be just a start. As computation permeates everything, and digital freedom becomes the most important political issue, the resources of many Mozillas are needed. More on that, soon.

Posted in Advertising, Creative Commons, Economics, Open Services, Open Source, Programming, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 4 Comments »