First off, I’m a supporter of Lessig, the Creative Commons and the general “copyleft” movement, and I’d like to point a few items that you seem to be overlooking. I hope you will give the points I raise some real consideration.

First, I want to point out that in all of my reading and listening to Lessig, he has advocated reforming copyright, not eliminating it. Until that reform happens, the CC licenses are a way to enable people who believe that their work should be Free will be Free in the current climate of effectively infinite copyright extension. While Bob’s Photography may theoretically benefit from copyright extensions, it’s doubtful that they do in practice. I would love to see some examples to the contrary, but with the rare exception of the work of truly noteworthy artists (Ansel Adams comes to mind) the commercial value of a photograph beyond 14 years after it was taken (the original period laid out in American copyright law) is going to be vanishingly small. As a result of this, I don’t see this “it helps small business” argument as a sound support for a law which also has the effect of locking up truly significant works of culture indefinitely so that they may only be built upon by the corporate entities which control them. This greatly decreases the value of those works to the society as a whole. An additional side effect of this is that any works for which the copyright status is unknown are, in the current climate, likely to stagnate and be forgotten to history if the authors or their heirs are unreachable to gain license from them. Would you rather that the brilliant work of some unknown artist be lost in the sands of time because the law frightened someone enough that they chose to leave it out of their project which would have preserved it? Or that the TV series you loved in your childhood is never released on DVD because licensing for the music it featured cannot be obtained?

Add to this the new abundance that Brandon mentions above, and you have the fact that each individual creative piece is worth less than it used to be. This is simply a fact that creators need to come to terms with. Ideally, they will not only come to terms with it, but learn how to exploit this new abundance, this new ease of distribution, to drive new revenue streams. You can see a number of articles about how this can be done at http://www.techdirt.com .

In this new sea of creative output, attention is worth more than any one individual work. Your name as a good artist has more value than any single image you can create. This is why I support the concept of CC-attribution licenses. When I create something I want as many eyes on it as possible so that my name will become recognized. I can then take that reputation and use it to leverage revenue from things that are actually scarce, like my time and talent, rather than try to force artificial scarcity on something that by nature is abundant. Obscurity is a bigger threat to you individual prosperity than the CC ever could be. Zach Arias is a great example of a photographer who has leveraged his reputation to create new revenue streams that have nothing to do with selling his photos. I have no idea what his opinions on IP law are. He has though, intentionally or not, learned how to leverage the value of “free” to create what seems to be a respectable income.

IP law is, and always has been, about creating an incentive to create and enrich society. In the past, creating was expensive proposition, with tremendous up front costs. The best way to encourage people to create despite these costs was to grant an artificial monopoly on the commercial exploitation of those creations. However, we’ve now begun to realize some (arguably) unintended consequences of those monopolies within the new context provided by modern technology. The biggest of these is that the system has been abused and modified over the years by monied non-natural legal entities who have the sole goal of extracting value from the creations they control indefinitely. As a result, these laws are no longer serving to enrich our culture, they serve primarily to enrich those entities instead. Unfortunately, this attitude of feeling like one is entitled to profit many times over for a single piece of work has become the norm in many industries. The music industry is the most absurd example, whose party line seems to be that they deserve to get paid for each and every play a of a song, regardless of the circumstance.

In the end, there are only two groups who truly benefit from IP law as it stands. The first are the corporations. There are examples all over chronicling how they have locked up cultural artifacts to the detriment of new creators. The second group are the lawyers, who are able to play both sides against each other and profit, while adding no value whatsoever.

I’ll leave the response to the anti-corruption bit for another post….

The EFF on Facebook’s privacy changes in December. I had always been a little skeptical of Facebook, but had previously decided it offered enough value for the potential reduction of privacy required to use it. This set of changes got me really wondering just how trustworthy they were. I’ve been slowly mulling that over since then.

Then Zuckerberg (Facebook’s head honcho) came out with this little gem. This made it clear that his (and by extension, Facebook’s) view of privacy is a far cry from my own. More fuel to the “can I trust them?” fire.

Finally this week, I found this Wired article and this really interesting visualization. The trends here are clear, and I agree with the Wired author Ryan Singel that there must be a better way to do the things that I use Facebook for, and that I’d rather be part of that movement than add to the inertia of the 1800-lb gorilla.

Anyway, that’s why I’m considering it. I probably won’t do it any time soon, but I expect it will happen.

In other news, it seems that it has become the fashion among OSS contributers / bloggers / fans whatever to get offended on the behalf of other people for things that are said in conference presentations. The latest was an apparently off-hand ( can’t say for sure, I wasn’t there ) comment made by Mark Shuttleworth at LinuxCon. Talking about how things in Linux need to be improved to make it easier for him “to explain things to girls”.

This is something that I find irritating. Seriously people. Has our society really gotten to the point that we can’t let people stand up for themselves, and we have to assume offense for them? I suppose it’s possible that these people are genuinely themselves offended, but I find that unlikely. In any case, there are better ways to deal with it than demanding apologies in public spaces. How self important, petulant, and egotistical is that? I would say more, but a very eloquent summary of my thoughts has already been written over here.

Apple products are cages. They are shiny, comfortable, generally well-appointed cages, but they are still cages.

EDIT: Turns out the chip isn’t all DRM-y and evil like it initially seemed. That’s good. I still think it’s a dubious design choice though…

“They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

Wow. Does he really not see the difference between a recording of a performance of a human being and a machine-generated synthesis based on a text that someone has already purchased the rights to? I mean, if that were really the case, why has this guy not spoken up against screen readers for the blind? Oh wait, I know. Because screen readers for the blind aren’t likely to be a threat to audiobook sales. Now that this feature is bundled into a device designed for the mass market consumer, it’s time to break out the Copyright Law Hammer so “he” (meaning the group he represents) can get a cut of revenue that he has no legitimate claim to.

UPDATE: Engadget did a little piece asking an actual lawyer about this. He comes to approximately the same conclusion I did: The only reason they are getting uppity about this now is because the Kindle2 is the first device that represents a plausible threat to audiobook revenue, never mind that they’ve ignored text to speech technology for what… 20 years?

To that end, there are a lot of industries that I believe should be socialized or forced to become non-profit ventures. At the very least, they need much tighter regulation. We have too much reliance on these industries as a society to allow “the market” to shape them. Examples of this are health care, insurance, banking, and communications. Our current economic situation is an example of a (hopefully) worst case scenario of what happens when these institutions are allowed to run amok. Now, the government is stepping in to “save the economy”, which in the end seems to mean rewarding the people running these industries for irresponsible behavior at the expense of the taxpayers.

As discussed today over at Techdirt , we have a chance to make some positive changes with the various “bailouts” that are happening, especially now that we’ve starting seeing just how ineffective the banking bailout from last year is proving to be. Every indication points to this bailout money ending up lining the pockets of the proven-to-be-irresponsible incumbents, with little attention paid to the long term effects of what we are doing or providing for real sustainability. Instead, we are foolishly focusing on short-term gains, perhaps ultimately doing more harm than good.

And maybe that’s part of why we are so unwilling to socialize, or partially socialize, these industries. It would be really hard. If we can’t even build an effective bailout, how can we expect to completely refactor an industry? There’s the old saw about “the American way” and “free markets” and whatnot too, but it seems like someone would be smart enough to break from that dogma. Maybe there are people in positions of power who see how that might solve some of our problems, but are too afraid to put their name on the line. Doing this well would be tremendously difficult, and we’re almost sure to get it wrong on the first try. In addition, wresting power like this from the people who currently have it would be another war in and of itself. Especially with as corrupt as the House and Senate have become. But ultimately, if we aren’t going to collapse under the weight of our own greed, something must be done to fundamentally change the system. We’ve been treating the symptoms for the last several decades. Where has that gotten us?

If these industries were under more social control, perhaps bailouts wouldn’t be necessary. Perhaps foreclosures wouldn’t be at an all time high. Maybe the economy wouldn’t be in the worst condition it has been since the 70′s (or by some measures, the Great Depression). The top 5% (1%?) also wouldn’t be quite as rich, but I bet the rest of us would be a lot better off. Is anyone going to step up and start making changes that actually change things for the better, or are we just going to keep the fiscal morphine flowing?

“With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested, we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back, nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.”

-President Barack Obama (January 20, 2009)

Here’s to the rebirth of America. Let’s make our country something that our founders could be proud of again!