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By jdb, December 17, 2010

Henry George, an economist, said this a long long time ago:

“The copyright is not a right to the exclusive use of a fact, an idea, or a combination . . . . It does not prevent anyone from using for himself the facts, the knowledge, the laws or combinations for a similar production, but only using the identical form of a particular book.”

Copyright is, according to Henry George, “the natural, moral right of each one to enjoy the products of his own exertion, and involves no interference with the similar right of any one else to do likewise.”

But about patents, he had this to say:

“The patent, on the other hand, prohibits any one from doing a similar thing, and involves, usually for a specified time, an interference with the equal liberty on which the right of ownership rests . . . . It prohibits others from doing what has already been attempted.”

Food for thought.

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By jdb, December 12, 2010

Wikileaks is much ado about nothing, and in the end will harm the very cause that Assange claims to celebrate. The only thing Assange has accomplished with ‘Cablegate’ is to make the governments of the world hold their secrets closer to their chests. Those ‘classified’ documents were available to hundreds of thousands of people, not exactly top level secrets – but Assange wants the publicity for his ideological cause. In doing so, he has only empowered the right wing in his country and ours – people he should recognize as his enemy.

I don’t want to psychoanalyze the man himself too much because all I have to go on is interviews but he seems to me to have the kind of self centered importance and, really, paranoia that can come from viewing the world through the lens of a computer screen, and only a computer screen. Even if his heart is in the right place, if it can be separated out from his rapacious ego, in the end he’s no different than those on the right who can’t see farther than their own nose.  

I am intimately familiar with the hacking subculture from which he sprang and that ethos, while very exciting on the surface, leads nowhere. I’d say he’s a geek first, an anarchist as an afterthought, and I tend to put the whole ‘free the information’ crowd there because, I speak from experience, the tendency with technicians is to think that all problems can be solved with technology, specifically computers, and given that, there is a group of them who think their particular ideology is the technological solution to everything under the sun. That faith in technology has gotten really extreme as global culture abandons it, and certain groups hang on to it even more tightly. They are wrong – in terms of real political reform, you have to address people’s hierarchy of needs, and land and bread come before ‘information’, not the other way around. Ownership of information, like any property, is as much a tool in the hands of reformers as it is in the hands of the elite. Robbing the people of that tool leaves them even more vulnerable to exploitation. And in the very real sense, it doesn’t matter if someone in Congo can look at ‘Mickey Mouse’ on a cell phone when their life is at risk and the damn thing is in English anyway. Politically, Assange and the Pirate Party etc. are just a sideshow, a dead end, a symptom of hoarded wealth and not a solution to the problem it creates.

I really can’t say anything about the date rape thing. Like everyone else I’ll just have to wait and see what the court says. And guessing which if any government has something to do with it would be only a guess. It seems like a government would be more apt to downplay the whole thing than to keep it in the media with a court room drama.

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By jdb, September 3, 2010

MLK’s ‘Dream’ speech should not be in the public domain, no matter it’s historical significance. One man wrote that speech – Dr. Martin Luther King. There is no real reason for the state (the public) to seize that property. How is it in the public interest, how does it feed the public good? The speech is widely available in it’s original form and copyright protects it’s integrity. If it wasn’t copyrighted, Fox News could rearrange it at will and rewrite history in the minds of half the population. Pampers could make a video about having a dream about a dry butt. Want to see MLK selling Viagra? It would happen. Quickly the speech could lose meaning as it became not a product, but a thousand products. As it is, they would get sued. Which is in the public good.

Ever see a commercial feature a song that you know had meaning to tons of people, real meaning in their memories, and it’s altered and used to sell air fresheners or deodorant? In a lot of cases that’s because it’s owned by a group of people – a corporation. If the ‘public’, the biggest group of all, owns something, it really gets the treatment. It loses all meaning and before long nobody even knows what it is or where it came from. Think about all those old melodies from a hundred years ago that everyone has heard but nobody knows more than a snatch of, the public doesn’t know what it is, and they don’t care. The public domain is a graveyard. Copyright maintains the integrity and definition of works and keeps our cultural landscape from turning into a mess of nothing.

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By jdb, June 15, 2010

The conventional revisionist line that meanders around the Internet says that people started downloading free music from services on the internet as some kind of consumer rebellion against the price of CD’s. That may be true in a sense, because music did cost money that could be spent on something else, but anything not free would have been too much. In the 90′s everybody liked CD’s and bought them like hotcakes, but ‘free’ was more appealing. And the hard lesson that seems like it is taking forever to sink in is that you cannot compete with free based on price.

What about iTunes? Isn’t that profitable? Wasn’t that profitablility driven by price? Well, first of all, it’s mostly not profitable. It’s a convenient service for iPod users which is meant to drive the sales of iPods, not music. The iStore service competes on convenience, not on price. It’s right there, and it’s how you interface with your new gadget. The same is true for the Kindle store, for that matter – a painless, instant and safe transaction. The more inconvenient the other options are, the more appealing the iStore option becomes – to users who value what the iStore represents.

If iTunes had been selling albums for 5.99 when Napster hit, I don’t think most people would have cared so much for convenience and safety that it outweighed the appeal of free. Downloading was something that was ‘dangerous’, ‘rebellious’ and you had to learn some small thing to be able to do it – all things that appealed to the primary music buying demographic of young people over ‘convenient’ and ‘safe’, which is the iTunes model. At the same time people who appreciated the moral implications of piracy or saw no need for it, who I bet tended to be a little older and had money of their own, either payed the price as they always did or generally went without.

If someone has already accepted the free option as an alternative, then any price will be one hundred percent more than they want to pay. There was always a little grumbling about prices on CD’s, but on balance people often decided to buy one instead of a pizza, which cost the same. The free music option afforded people the ability to have both for the same price, where dinner costs what it costs, and the soundtrack is free. Regardless, they’ve been heavily discounted for decades and now with the global used market all but the most in demand cd’s can be had for little more than the cost of shipping.

I think people tend to forget that there’s a reason that LP’s took over the market, because people bought them instead of singles. The LP’s with their ‘unfair pricing’, seen as a value at the time, allowed an industry to support riskier artists, and for those artists to support themselves and make more out of popular music than ‘doo wop ditty’. In the end we get what we pay for, though. There is a similair dynamic in popular literature and it would be a shame to see that change.

Thankfully the publishing business isn’t making the same mistakes as the music business did and they are moving to protect the price of their books. Maybe they aren’t as awestruck by technology as we all were ten years ago, or maybe the people who are giving them advice learned a few things as well (the model where publishers set the price is the iStore model, whereas the self defeating practice of selling singles for a dollar originated with apple as well.) Regarding the resultant consumer rage about the price of books, I’d be very surprised if the average selling price, not the list, for a hardcover was higher than it was ten years ago, especially adjusted for inflation. In that context, still, ‘not free’ will always be unfair to people who have already accepted the free option as a possibility. Even though those people are not customers in any sense of the word, their voice is heard the loudest. Because honestly, no one else is complaining.

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By jdb, February 19, 2010

The final hearing on the Google Book Settlement was yesterday. In his defense of Google’s copyright infringement, professor Lateef Mtima makes an interesting claim:

“Copyright was intended to be an engine of cultural development, not a brake.”

Of course, this is the quote that technology reporter Cnet News chooses to run in boldface and one that all anti-author’s rights activists always make. While a literal interpretation of the constitution may or may not support their claim, an examination of the historical context that the constitution was written in opens the door for a different argument or at least a different framework.

Copyright in the US originated as a way to balance the rights of various printers – most of whom had no intention of compensating the creators of the books they printed. A small but growing group of printers wanted to make exclusive contracts with authors, and authors wanted to receive compensation for their books. Congress wanted to address these rights issues, but had to tread very lightly because they had to act within the framework of a free press, and some didn’t believe they should regulate the press at all. Thus, the argument still used that copyright only existed to promote a public good. The reality was that it was a compromise solution hacked together to reconcile competing financial interests.

Another, similair compromise involved representing slaves as a fraction of a person. Starting with the Statute of Anne, authorial rights have grown along with other labor, individual and human rights, and face the same challenges from vested interests. Rights issues ultimately don’t lend themselves to judicial or legislative balancing acts and I hope that Judge Chin recognizes that this case will have lasting effects on the rights of authors everywhere.

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By jdb, February 17, 2010

I’d like to say a little about Google’s preferred business model for the way in which people access music, movies and books. Google prefers and is planning for an ‘access model’ where content is streamed from a server to the user and advertising revenue replaces unit sales. Right now the financial failure ‘youtube’ is the only widespread implementation of this model.

A lot of people feel that the access model will address concerns about piracy and security while not curtailing the ability of people to share information. First of all, the access model does nothing to prevent the determined end user from getting a copy and sharing it on rapidshare and bittorrent. If I can strip the DRM from a file, I can also pull a file out of my browser’s cache.

The only way to stop that is to replace all computers with devices like iPads and phones based on Google Android, devices that are totally closed to end users. How does this model accomplish the goal so often cited by it’s pundits, how does it ‘liberate information’? In order for information and creative works to spread, people need to have a discrete copy of information source that they can loan, lose, give away, sell etc. just like more substantial ‘hard’ media.

The ‘access model’, like ‘cloud computing’, is just a new euphemism for old school client-server computing, and Google not only wants to put all media on a server where they can take it away from us at any time,  they want us to use applications hosted in their ‘cloud’ as well, using devices that we have no control over. People have tried this over and over in the last decade and a half, and not only has it always been a financial disaster, it has real implications for users and businesses that are then tied in to the ‘host’ company’s network in a far more intractable way than one is ever tied to a traditional app provider like Microsoft. Entrusting all our tools for learning and creating to a central source that we have no control over could have dire consequences for a free society.

And then, there’s the fact that in the final analysis, the ‘access model’ for media distribution simply does not work. In a multitude of experiments over the last decade it’s been shown that subscriptions are unpopular, and ad revenue doesn’t even pay the electricity bills once you introduce the concept of compensating the creators. The only time the ‘access model’ has worked is when the people who make the content go uncompensated while the distributor makes a small profit from ad revenue. Oh wait, isn’t that what Google keeps trying to do?

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By jdb, February 17, 2010

Tomorrow is the final fairness hearing on the settlement between the Author’s Guild and Google regarding the mass scanning and display of copyrighted works by Google. I’d like to reiterate just a few of the reasons why the any implementatuon of the settlement would be a disaster, not just for the writers in the settlement but for all writers and readers:

If it is within Google’s ability to find an author and send them a check after the fact, it is within their ability to find an author and ask their permission to display their works before they do it. The settlement legitimizes Google’s trampling on the rights of creative labor.

The Google book settlement is a blatant attempt by a corporation to privatize and undermine copyright on a global scale. It should be up to our elected representatives to determine the issues surrounding orphan works and Google can act within that framework.

The Author’s Guild, who incidentally only reperesent a very small minority of writers, had every legal advantage and when they hit the mat they rolled over immediately as if the outcome was inevitable, and accepted the favored scheme of technology pundits whose stated intention is to demolish copyright. They accepted the last ditch efforts of the music industry, the ‘access model’ where content is streamed from a server to the user and advertising revenue replaces unit sales, as a first line of defense for publishers and authors, without even examining what the music industry could have done differently over the past decade to avoid settling for the complete ghettoization and devaluation of works that the ‘access model’ embraced by the settlement represents. The publishing industry is not the music industry, the music business was in a different situation, the audience is different, and books are not music.

Even if that ‘access model’ is the only way forward in the face of end-user piracy, this settlement isn’t a good way to do it, and if it becomes some kind of precedent in law or the minds of the public, it has devastating implications that reach across industry boundaries to all content creators. Tomorrow, the Google Book Settlment needs to die the ignoble death it deserves.

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By jdb, November 26, 2009

In a bold and calculated publicity move, transparency activist site ‘Wikileaks’ has published the private messages of thousands of New Yorlers without their permission. Continue reading 'Wikileaks Stomps the Privacy Rights of New Yorkers'»

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By jdb, November 13, 2009

When a user puts information on the internet they have an understandable desire to conceal or control how that information is used. They want to own their information and have the same barriers around it that they have in their day to day lives, and having that control is demonstrably to the benefit of everyone in a society. People who create works of art and intellect have the same desire for control and in the world of bricks and mortar use the same mechanisms to control it that people use to protect their privacy – ownership of property, and the very ancient technology of walls, doors, and locks. These things protect our privacy as well as our property.

The protection of property is the protection of privacy, whether on the street or on a network, and the technical solution for protecting and controlling the information a user puts on the internet is the same no matter the type of information, whether that information is an address, a photograph, a song, or a book.

The first solutions to manage a users information rights and how their content can be displayed are coming from private networks, like Facebook or Google Books, but these are shown to be inadequate because those companies are primarily self interested. A network-wide solution is required, one that better reflects the ways that people are used to living and using information. A more intelligent network is needed that allows a user to set permissions without betraying his own identity or have knowledge of who the other users who view his information may be. It must be able to recognize and deal with discrete objects. An obstacle to this solution is the widespread perception amongst activist groups that they can achieve internet privacy while degrading property rights.

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By jdb, October 17, 2009

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/10/shepard-fairey-admits-to-wrongdoing-in-associated-press-lawsuit.html

All this loser had to do was change a picture a little bit… he can’t even accomplish that. The Obama campaign could have hired a guy with a Xerox machine. I guess we’re supposed to be impressed by how he made one side red and one side blue…. sort of like the flag behind Obama’s head. What a hack. Continue reading 'Obama Artist Plagiarizes Photograph'»