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| Thursday, May 16, 2002 |
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Blog safely 
I gotta drive back home. It's a good five hours, so I'd bettter get going. I'll proofread the stuff below (my longest blog ever, I'm sure) ASAP tomorrow. See ya then.
Innerstructure vs. Infrastructure
Want to know why technologists haven't succeeded with lawmakers and Hollywood yet? One answer is here, where I make a distinction between what we call "infrastructure" and something else we don't have a name for yet, but need. I call it innerstructure. Both are products of civilization, the layers of which are helpfully sorted out in a drawing I've borrowed from the Long Now Foundation:
(The diagrams here annotate the case I make below.)
In realspace, Infrastructure is what you get where commerce and government meet. It's sandwiched between the two (see the top two drawings at the link above). In cyberspace, it's what you get when innovative companies like Google create works we all use that sit on top of the deeper stuff that the Net's made of. Yes, we all depend on it; but it's not part of the Net.
Innerstructure is that deeper stuff on which infrastructure depends. In realspace the highways and power distribution systems depend on the innerstructure we call geology. In cyberspace the infrastructures of computing depend on the innerstructure of he Internet.
When Larry Lessig says "code is the law of cyberspace," he's making an assertion about the innerstructural nature of code — and the unseen dependency of computing's infrastructures on the deeper innerstructural nature of that code.
The protocols that make the Net possible — HTTP, SMTP, LDAP and so on — are all innerstructure. Like the depths of the Earth, they are stuff nobody can own and everybody can use. Together they create and support a commons on which all kinds of activities can take place, and on which all kinds of stuff can be built. Innerstructure is not just something that occurs in nature; it literally is nature. The fact that cyberspace's innerstructure is a human creation does not make it any less natural. As Craig Burton has put it, the Net is the first whole world made by human beings, and we have only begun to terraform it.
Conversations about innerstructure are founded on an understanding of the nature of innerstructural code. They also include an understanding of the culture that produces innerstructural code. Above that they also include governance and infrastructure. (Witness the endless arguments about software licenses, the deeper points of which are almost entierely lost on those whose concerns are confined to fashion and commerce.) When we talk about innerstructure, we're down in the bottom four layers of the diagram above.
Meanwhile, when government and commerce talk infrastructure, they confine their concerns to the infrastructure itself, and each other. In other words, they involve just the governance and commerce layers, and the infrastructure layer sandwiched between them. They exclude the nature of innerstructural code and the culture that produces it. And because they exclude those concerns, they cannot distinguish between infrastructural stuff like Outlook Express and innerstructural stuff like POP3, IMAP and SMTP. They also can't distinguish between the categorical "market" for e-commerce software and the real marketplaces for goods and services that grow naturally on the Internet's commons. If they did understand the dependence of marketplaces on innerstructure, they might not be so quick to outlaw the innovation that naturally produces that innerstructure — including the plentiful commercial innovation that contributes to innerstructure. (Protocols like SOAP, UDDI and other "Web services" foundations are innerstructure produced largely by commercial software developers.)
What we need, to follow on what Larry and the others on the "Commons law" panel below are calling for, is to make the nature of innerstructure clear to the people who are building infrastructure on top of it. Toward that end, the Creative Commons project for the first time takes the licensing conversations that were once confined almost exclusively to the free software and open source communities, and makes their fruits available to the creative professionals who are busy making civilization in their own ways.
More public notes...
Just finished hanging out with Justin Chapweske of OnionNetworks and Open Content Nework. He's doing extremely interesting shit (follow the links) that has had huge buzz here. I'm sitting talking to him right now. One quotable line: "We should make it a mandate of the IETF to remove control points from protocols. The review process should remove the control points from the protocol, or at least make them explicit."
Commons law
Larry Lessig is up. More note-taking time. "Some people write books because they hae something to say. I write bgooks to figure out what I think."
It's great to see how much Larry has grown as a speaker. He gets stronger every time I see him. Today he's got a hip look too. All black. Several days' growth of beard. His talk:
| | It's improtant to fight to defend the architecture of the architect. The essence is, what wins is what people want, not what the network chooses. What peole choose, not what the content owners decide. The ends, not the people in the middle. The network embraced the founding notion that they didn't know how it would develop.
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| | The content providers launched a war against the potential of the net. So far it has succeeded. Judicial and legislative... these guys have gotten the feds to shut down innovation. Now the choice is property vs. anarchy. Freedom and wht property suggests and a free system where people don't get paid. So far our side of the debate has not succeeded.
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| | Why is one part of this campaign unconstional. Extending copyrights, eleven times in the last 40 years. The framers gave 15 years... now it's up to ... (look it up).
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| | Terms must be limited because the framers wanted to fuel the devleopment of the public domain so others can build on top of it the same way disney took the works of the Brothers Grimm an dbuilt on it. They could draw upon the material in the public domain.
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| | He thinks this will prevail in the supreme court. The extremism that congress has expreesed has gone too far. This latest extension cover works from 23 on. There were 3.5 million cpyrights issued. Only 400k had thiers renewed. of those the proportion that had value is only about 50k. Only that many are used by commercial producers in ways that suggest extension. Because of those 50K, congress blocks the remaining 3 million. They give those 50k another 20 yuears of protection. Just because in this respect as in so many, congress is bought by those who want monop9oly protection.
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| | The firsdt step of the campqaign is to argue the above in front of the Supremes. The second stage is the Creative Commons. this content that the law says is mine I should be able to make available on my own terms. We need machine readable expressions of the author's intentions about the nature of the content. The world shouldl not be divided between those who believe in cvontrol and those who believe in access. Those who want both, on an individual level, should be able to compromise.
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| | Most people dont distinguish between perfect and no control. We need to facilitate... Need an organization that stands for the space between the extremes. The commons.
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| | We will never succeed in advocating the importance of this space until ordinary people get it. And they won't until technologists begin to express to politicians how imporatant that these values that they built into technology are to freedom and creativity. Every creator must have the space and the platform to create and spread that crfeativity;.
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| | We should not put control in the law as a mandate for the future. Artists need a platform open to them, not so they can give works awy, but so they can chooose to express the freedom for which the commons nd this platform, was built.
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| | Talking to these people (politicians) are clueless. They' fail to see that the net is built on the same architecyure for freedom as the countryu itself.
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| | Freedom is an important value. Record companies don't see the world as a place that needs freedom. Jack VAnelti calls this a terrorist war against the most important industry in america. I thinkn he's r9ight in the rhetoric and wrong in the target. In fact, echnology is the most important industry. Technologists need to play a role.
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Now the panel. David P. Reed. Tim O'Reilly...
| | Originally the FCC was put in charge of the spectrum for the public good. Over the years it has been compromised. The regime under which we've been operating is a legal metaphor that does not correspond to physical reality. The physical reality of radio is that waves pass through each other and don't damage each other. Interference, for example, says that the receiver is confused. In the earliest days this was a severe problem. But once we had a network of receivers, in principle the capacity of a certain amount of spectrum increases with the number of transcievers involved. That is completely counterintuitivel The FCC regulates as if the capacity varies with bandwidth.
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| | Even though free speech is in the first amendment, we need to allocate who gets to speak in the spectrum. But in fact Shannon decoupled bits from speech. We should have launched a competitive regime. But in the meantime we have given away all the spectrum to a few interests. We're doing it again.
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| | Keys: collaboration among radios, and software defined radio.
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| | If we don't do anything about this now, there will be no economic icentive to do it. There will be no specturm to run it on and no way to make money. We need the spectrum to try out these new technologies, these new ideas, and to make money. We don't need a priori regulation that decides purpose in advance of experience with it. We need to do for specttrum what the internet did for network. Find ways to allocate more effectively. We should not auction off spectrum, which is not capacity, to monompoly owners. Or to otherwise continue to support ancient entrenched positions.
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| | Carl Malamud is talking now. "What we look for is what Dan Gillmor calls choke points."
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| | The gateway between you and the media has turned into private property. Over 300 patents involved. We're looking for ways to invalidate those patents. Do they violate my first amendment rights? Does it violate the useful rights (?) clause?
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| | We should be picking problems why this is important. we need to demonstrate to policymakers why these things need to be in place. Simple demonstrations. Technology won't solve every problem, but there is huge flexibility in the Net as it's built today. We need to use it.
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| | Copyrights are moral rights, by the way. They won't go away.
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| | Now David Henkel-Wallace, a founder of Cygnus. Been thinking about social structures. What that means for copyright and industry.
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| | We need to walk our talk. What we've discussed has focused on the producer. Little on what's valuable to the end user? Copyright as we know it is dead. It may take ten or 30 years to die. Enforcing it is impossible. Wh;at does theh post copyright world look like? How do we get there? As the laws get more draconian, how do we put up with it?
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| | We're going to build a culture of lawless ness and complete disregard for restrictions built in by the creator.
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| | Lawlessness spreads. If everybody believes a Britney Spears CD should be copyable, then a culture of lawlessness will prevail, regardless of what Creative Commons does.
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| | In the long run creators of content and lawmakers will discover that they don't have control.
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| | We'll have a back to the future development. We we'll have Budweiser pay a band to make a cool tune. Gunmakers will pay Schwartzeneggar to make a good movie.
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| | How will the money actually flow? The movie industry fought the VCR. Once they lost, muchmore money was provided. It just didn't go to exaclty the same players. There are are a large number of users subject to a monopsony (sic) cartel. What we have an opportunity for is more differnent kinds of distro models. More riches. A much more uniform and interesting spectum of creators. The chokeholders will be hurt the hardest. The studios, the distributors. There will be no culture of respecting the GPL, either.
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| | The founders thought of copyrights as monopolies. But that didn't grand guys like Valenti the right todemand the same knd of protgectoin for intellectual property as he gets for physical property. That mentality, however, has captured people's view.
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| | Thre are ways to combat this. For example, property is what people pay taxes on.When was the lasst time Disney paid taxes on their intellectual property?
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| | Until we can separate out their abiltiy to get money for sale of copies from my freedom to use their copies, we'll be stuck.
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| | When I go to the web and copy something, am I a consumer or producer?
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| | Controlling production and controlling use are different.
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| | [Aside: I got an email today from another conference where no visitors are granted permission to report on what's said there. They want me to sign an NDA before I even show up. Pretty self-limiting, no?]
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| | Total control is a red herring. People will obey stated rights. The creative commons is a fantastic idea because it makes the gray explicit. We live in a black and white world rightnow. IN the creative commons, an artist says "I am making a specific choice..."
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| | Now Tim's talking about Cory Doctorow's concept of whuffie: a commoditized form of reputation you possess in a manner aking to a battery charge. Cory coincidentally is at the audience mike...
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| | Today the senate judiciary committee posted an MPAA thing requiring a watermark in everything. How do we get the producers involved. We don't have Apple, IBM, Intel, Fujitsu... Apple is on the wrong side of this thing. Intel runs the committee...
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| | Later, Cory said Apple is also "our best friend." There's banter between Cory and the panel going on here, and I can't cover all of it. (By the way, by my count, over half the laptops here are Apples.)
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| | We shouldn't be black and white about companies here. We can't come in saying this company or that one is bad, or that an extreme position is the only one to take.
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| | You're saying how do you get companies to do the right thing. But companies only know what benefits them. The lawmakers bring these clueless ceos in to talk, as if they have an idea what they're talking about. I agree with David that we need to approach these companies as organizations that are trying to figure this out, which they are.
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| | Work to get congress to look to more than these big companies to come in and represent a whole industry.
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| | I remember when Lexus-Nexis told congress there was no way this content could ever be exposed on networks (words to that effect).
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| | Think of C-SPAN. When these guys saw themselves on TV they knew cable was important.
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| | The commons serves a role to serve a role that solves one problem. About patents, it make rational sense to patent everything you can, even while we have an obscenely irrational regime
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| | There is no good evidence that patents are inspiting innovation.
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| | If we do a patent search, and find 100 patents, and spend 10k$ dealing with every one of them, and we're looking at $1 million just to decide if you want to introduce a product. Companies like Hewlett-Packard can do that. You can't.
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| | Congress doesn't get the fact that patents are screwing up innovation. If people said "this is destroying opportunity for innovation," sooner or later they might hear.
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| | I am a big believer in the rights of creators to set the terms, and also of finding the limits for those rights. We have overreaching on the one hand and a lack of clarity on the other. We are shifting the regime to destroy the public domain. For some people it is extremely valuable to push their (unambiguous) rights. All of you guys writing weblogs can go sue someone because they've used your property. That's what the law says right now. We need to say this (creative work) has explicit limits.
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| | Will fair use ever be simple again?
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| | Great line: Britney Spears is lame. It's bell curve. Note the neuter pronoun. Heh.
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| | With the amici brief to be filed Monday is an economist brief that will be signed by Milton Friedman, among others... Milton said he would only sign it if it had the expression "no brainer" in the document. It's not about lefties versus righties. It's about future vs. past. The truth is that politicians on the left and right won't hel pus out . the dems have sold out to hollywood. the republicans have sold out to big business.
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| | What's the simplest thing we can do tomorrow morning?
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| | Read The Mystery of Capital. It will change your life. Look forhow to change thingws for the better in the intellectual property world.
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| | Write something. Not code. that's your day job. Write a letter or a check. Write it to an org that will do it for you.
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| | Take the control out of control. And remember that the biggest problem with rhetoric is that the people who recieve this rhetoric (FCC?) don't know it's false.
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| | Pick some congressperson and make an example of them.
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| | Larry (now at the press conference):
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| | This is a problem created by the Internet. Think of books before the Internet. Because of a limitation in copyright law called First Sale, whnich says the copyuright holder can't impose conditions after the sale. So a book is available for copying, for use free of copyright regulation.
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| | After the Net, by an accident of technology, everything I do n cyberspace involves a copy, so it invokes the law of copyright. That doesn't necessarily happen in realspace.
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| | This is what creative cCommons is responding to.
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| | Things you do in realspace don't have the same consequences. A media bot in cyberspace will find your fan club. It won't in realspace. the point is, not everyhthing is regulated in realspace. Everything is regulated in cyberspace.
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| | In what context of life does perfect control exist? Nobody has any concept of what technology will be like in five years.
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| | There is immense waste in realspace. When a book is no longer available, it's lost. Wasted. Incredible waste goes on. We sometimes can't find the rightsholder to some works. So the fact that nothing goes into the public domain now is a concern to me. An old product is not an inexhaustable resource. Do I not have a moral obligation to make that available to people? My belief is that at some leven when I am no longer making use of something I have a moral obligation to make it available.
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| | The numbers are in. Napster drove record sales. Price fixing pushed sales down.
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| | Congress has the power to grant monopolies for limited times. If congress has the power to endless ley extend copyrights, they are in violation of the constitution.
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| | The court has a recent eagerness to take seriously the restrictions built into the constitution. The constitution plainly envision s a limit to congress' power. The copyright clause, which I call theh progress clause, has the longest history of any clause... (shit, which I could keep up).
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| | We're only saying that this is a limited power for congress, and makes sense as a limited power.
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| | A good first step should be awareness of the nature of code (as the law of cyberspace), esspecially in the context of copyright. Code will be a much better enforcer of copyright than the law. We should wait to see how technologists develop technology for governing content.
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| | "The cartel of intellectual copyright" is a phrase from the Wall Street Journal, not some leftie. If the Journal gets it, how hard can it be?
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| | We're intellectual commons protection. Not copy protection.
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| | Can you imagine a civil rights leader walking around talking about a "civil rights managment problem?" It sucks the life out of the whole thing. DRM is about intermediaries, not artists.
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| | We're getting slogans from the other side. When a guy from Turner says avoiding commercials is theft, that's a gift for us.
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Blogging the commons
I'm taking notes on the Creative Commons talk.. .I'll clean up the typos later. Molly Shaffer Van Houweling is pounding throught these slides a bit too fast for me to transcribe. But I am listening today. And connectivity is good.
Problem:
| | - Copyright is broad, growing, and applies automatically.
- This default protection doesn't always match creators' intenions.
- Transcactions costs make it difficult to chang edevault.
- Creative defaults are underused.
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Purpose is to restore the balance between public and proprietary.
| | - Help people deicate work to the public commons or disclaim some rights. (Who:Scholars, artists, musicians, film makers. Why? fame forturne, freedom... How? Public domain licensing...)
- Help communicate intentions to others. (Example: commons deed.)
- Make it easy to identify and locate works and the ways they may be used (creative commons logos, licensing metadata, search interface, third party ineroperbility)
- Increase the store of raw matrerial. They need collaborators. (Hmm. GeekPAC, for sure would be good.)
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| | - Web based app.
- Generates public domain dedicaations, creative commons custom licenses and easy to understand common deeds . Logos and metadata associate works.. APIs...
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| | - Free as air to common use
- Default has shifted away from theh public domain
- Copyright holder must perform an overt act to establish public domain status....missed the rest of it.
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| | - Not public domain, but more generous than copyright default.
- Inspired by the GPL, but for non-software options.
- Possible options: attribution, noncommercial, no derivative works, non pubic, copyleft.
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Now Lisa Rein is showing how it works. A form-based way to enter a work into the public domain. I'm thinking "RightsForge," as with SourceForge.
Now there's a question from the audience about identity. "On the net it notoriously sucks." No disagreement from the stage. "From a lawyer's perspective, the most difficult part of the project." They're working on it. I think they need to work with PingID on this. I see Bryan Field-Elliot is here. They should be talking.
www.anita.stiffdrink.org/andanother/andstillanother/andevenonemore/...
Getting a lot of visits from URLizer, which sources a piece I wrote. Neat service: it turns long ugly URLs into "something reasonable." Doesn't work on framed sites, though.
How can I be in two places at once when I'm not everywhere at all?
I missed Dan's talk on Journalism 3.0 yesterday (not sure why... something was fucking up, or I was busy writing). That was a bummer. Now this morning I'm faced with two huge conflicts, here at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference. I really want to see both Clay Shirky's XML, Web Services and the Semantic Wipe-Out, and Dave Winer's Distributed Content Management. Right now I'm at Dave's session, because there are fewer people there.
Right now Dave is talking about point of view. One person says "this is the way the world works," and another disagrees. What comes out the other end isn't right or wrong answers, or even consensus. Just different points of view.
Reminds me of what Larry Josephson, the best morning radio guy who ever lived (my point of view) once told me about his philosophy of radio: "It's personal. That's the whole thing. It's personal." Ironically, most radio isn't. Not any more. Meanwhile, nearly all weblogging is.
Next up are Creative Commons: Using and Sharing Emerging Technologies to Enrich the Public Domain, and Tim Pozar on FCC's Rules and Regulatons on 802.11. All while I'm also writing my editorial for the August issue of Linux Journal. (Actualllly, I'm writing a new one, since I lost the one I wrote yesterday.)
Create freely
Hey! Creative Commons is up! Very cool. What a rich trove of Good Stuff — about the commons, the public domain, copyright... and new concepts like open content.
It's being rolled out today, here, as this press release explains.
Aside: what's the opposite of the "tragedgy of the commons"? "Comedy of the commons?" Doesn't seem right.
Or maybe it does. (We're having a fun time at Dave's session right now.)
Beyond the hyperusual
Here's Jonathon Mays on how jargon is white noise.
Not that white noise can't be funny. Witness Dack's Web Economy Bullshit Generator and BuzzPhraser.
Toward a schema of infinite yet productive distraction
Hanan points to a couple of pointer-rich posts about blogs at Free Pint #111 and Free Pint #112.
Dos Bloggers
Eric Olson: President Signs Blog Bill.
Unrelated (or, actually, maybe not): Up Yours - And More Helpful Tips, by the very direct Dawn Olson.
Are either related to Steve? Just wondering.
Bad bait
I'm sitting in the press room. PR folks have come and gone, dropping off and checking on the stacks of press kits. Writers have come and gone, too. I haven't seen one of them pick up a press kit.
Okay, one: me. I like to use the white and light-colored press kit folders as business card stock. I cut them down to 8.5 x 11 inch sheets and print business cards on them. It usually works well. Those PR folks tend to use real nice paper stock.
Getting it write
Bruce Baugh has been writing about the evolution of Weblogs.
Not exactly related, but I've been thinking about the expression "trial and error." Much more useful than "trial and success," no? Reminds me of a Garrison Keillor line from one of his Prairie Home Companions of many years ago. Addressing his talk to graduating high school seniors, he wished them failure. "Success doesn't teach anything," he said. Failure does.
My question/whatever-it-was at Steven Johnson's keynote on Weblogs yesterday was pretty much a failure. I'd be surprised if it made even partial sense, beyond one good laugh line.
Steven had some provocative and interesting things to say. Yes, some of those things were academic, but they meant something, because people were talking about them later. And I didn't know enough of what they were talking about because during Steven's talk I was busier blogging and coping with technology than I was with listening to him. Usually blogging a talk makes me listen more closely, but in this case it didn't happen. It showed when I went up to the microphone.
I had another experience like that, just before I drove up here. In excpetionalhaste* (even for me, an exceptionally hasty guy) about something Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times. The post was full of both factual and copy-editing mistakes. Friedman responded by email (through an intermediary), saying I had read him wrong, which was partly true. I also thought he had read me wrong. But what he read wasn't what I really wanted to write in the first place. I also didn't have time to correct, explain or banter about it (which would have been terrific, since that was the original idea behind the post). So I took the post down, and an opportunity had to be tabled, if it wasn't lost altogether.
By the way, here's Steven in Salon on blogs.
Bruce writes,
| | It is indeed early days in this, and we are all collectively figuring what the heck it is we want to do with this stuff. Some people have a very strong, clear sense of what they want logs for and how they want to go about it. Others are noodging.
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I think we're all noodging, no matter how clear we are about what we're noodging toward.
Hey, just 'cuz we're walkin' toward land doesn't mean we aren't still breathing with gills.
*Cory writes, "exceptionalhaste" should totally be one word!"
The day that was
Still at the O'Reilly thing. Spent a lot of yesterday writing and then recovering from losing the main thing I had been working on. Got some terrific help from Rael on the matter, but to no avail. Files I know I modified during the day didn't show up anywhere. I didn't finish rewriting the main piece until a few minutes ago, and I'm wasted.
While I crash for a few hours, dig how Rob Flickenger made montages out images culled from everybody else's Web traffic, without their knowledge. Brilliant and scary. The software involved was EtherPEG.
This montage should warm Locke's & Weinberger's hearts.
discuss
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