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| Wednesday, July 24, 2002 |
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Live from OSCon 
| | Larry Lessig is giving his keynote. (Dan's blogging it too.) Says it's he's done a hundred and this is his last. Wonder if he's serious. He continues: |
| | Disney Inc. could borrow and build upon the works of the Brothers Grimm and many others to create Snow White, Pinnochio and other derivative works, because the originals were in the Commons — a lawyer-free zone. |
| | Today no one can do to Disney, Inc. what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm (borrow their work): that's the law behind the eleven extensions of the copyright duration over the years since Disney's lawyers have gained control, ownership, over culture. |
| | We (geeks, technologists) remind the world of what the world was like when we all added to common knowledge. |
| | The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it. |
| | Free code threatens, and the threats turn against free code. |
| | What GPL does is protect builders from others coming in and damaging the common code base. |
| | The patent field has been dominated by apologists for the status quo. |
| | Copyright wars are a homeric tragedy. Hollywood's insane copyright rules are expanding to the whole world. |
| | Take the broadcast flag. Before tech touches DTV, it must be rebuilt to make sure copyright is protected by a police state in every computer, and digital vigilantes to launch attacks on P2P machines. Approved by congress. It's a terrorist war by the Jack Valentis to "stop the harm" caused by their own customers. Do they have grounds to stand on for a terrorist war on an industry? Does anybody think about the decline in the tech industry, caused by this terrorist war launched by Hollywood? |
| | It's insane, extreme, has no justification, and we've done nothing about it. We're bigger than they are. We have rights on our side. We've let them control this debate. |
| | Ours is lesss and less a free society because we've done nothing to stop it. |
| | JC Watts, resigning congress, said "If you're explaining, you're losing." |
| | Six years after this battle began, we're still explaining, and losing. |
| | They've launched a massive campaign to extend copyrights indefinitely, stealing from our common culture. |
| | We have a tradition that speaks of freedom, and their controls take it away. |
| | Yes, we have sites and blogs and Slashdot stories. But nothning in Washington. If you don't do something now, this freedom will be taken away — either by those who see you as a threat and invoke the system of law they call patents, or through copyright enforcement. If you can't fight for your freedom, you don't deserve it. But you've done nothing. (He says to the crowd, which he addresses in the second person plural.) |
| | How many have given more to the EFF than they've given their local telecom company for shitty DSL service? |
| | This isn't about left and right, it's from right and wrong. Your freedom is being taken away by those who see the future is against them.. |
| | There are the sources and places to go. EFF.org, for example. |
| | There needs to be a million bit march on Washington. |
| | It's not enough that the constitution is on our side. We need politicians on our side. |
| | He got a standing ovation. Well deserved. Now Q&A... |
| | You could stop the insanity overnight if you did something about it. |
| | We're exporting this problem to the rest of the world, and they're buying it as fast as we can sell it. Nobody is saying "your extreme vision of intellectual property is too far." We are causing a huge part of this problem." We should be standing for the commons, not the extreme... |
| | We are using the law to pervert creativity and freedom. |
| | Next up: Richard Stallman. Shorter (but not short) hair. |
| | Unlike some of you, I'm not an open source developer. I am an activist in the free software movment. I have been an advocate of the freedom to use software... freedoms that are essential to participate in a community. Without them you are divided and kept helpless... |
| | It's not enough just to have some free software on your computer.... we need to chase all of the proprietary software out of your computer... |
| | We need to teach users to value freedom, so they'll use it. |
| | People thought Linux had no purpose other than success. |
| | The "world domination" goal made it hard to spread the philosophy of world liberation. |
| | The open source movement does ntot say that you are morally entitled to freedom... |
| | I wouldn't call open source a bad thing, but the philosophical gulf is tremendous. They're saying (proprietary software is okay) because free software developers wouldn't be able to do it on our own. |
| | When someone is attacking our freedom, it's time to fight. And we have to fight. |
| | To say something is wrong is not permissible in our society (if certain businesses are opposed to it). People in America have been taught that speaking out against businesses is unthinkable. We have to learn to say no to what businesses want. |
| | Now they're passing laws (that outlaw free software). |
| | We're going to have to activate thousands or millions of users for purposes (of political activism). We have to opppose Sen. Feinstein, co-author of the Consume But Don't Try Programming Act. |
| | Geeks like to avoid politics. You can leave politics alone, but it's not going to leave you alone. Join organizations. |
| | DRM is Digital Restrictions Management. Digital Rights Management is their propaganda term. |
| | We're have to stop abandoning the first vital battle to the enemy. We have to reject the goal that they set, to make sure nobody can ever share with his neighbor. |
| | Copyright was understood to be an industrial regulation on business. it's an artifical system of incentives. Supporting a few books and movies is enough. We have to reject the basic assumption, which they use to justify all these different plans, that copyright exists so they can always get paid whenever they think they should get paid. |
| | We have to stand up and give voice to the view that it's okay to share a file with a neighbor. |
| | Arguments against laws like the DMCA have always been based on tangential. They never said DRM is stealing our computers from us, our freedom. |
| | He'll sign books about him (that he says contain inaccuracies) for people who pay $10 to the Free Software Foundation. |
| | He is now St. IGNUtius of the Church of EMACS. Many saints, no gods. "There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels." |
| | Our church does not require celibacy. |
| | Richard got a standing O too. |
| | Press conference afterwards. (No wi-fi. Bummer.) |
| | There's never been a worldwide empire before. |
| | It's important to communicate the real meaning of the CBDTPA. (Senate 2048.) Bradley Kuhn is giving the background. "The purpose is to provide a leakproof pipe from their servers to your eyeballs." This isn't just a theoretical problem. GNU radio is existing free software that wouldl retroactively become illegal. |
| | They talk about the 'analog hole'. It's not just digital. |
| | PCs will be made illegal. |
| | Government of the people, by the flukies, for the corporations. |
| | There is not an intellectual property regime. But there is a mindset attached to the use of the term. We need to be able to talk intellegently about copyright, patents and other issues. The effects of copyright and patents on software |
| | There was a decisikon made in architecting the browser to expose the source code. People learned HTML by looking at that source, and later buying Tim's books. |
| | The FSF has been doing good work forever in the area of software. We're taking it into music and film and so on. The first stage is to develop metadata that lets people express their desire to make their work available in the public domain under conditions of their choosing, including copyleft provisions. We want the Web to express this meaning of freedom. Google should be able to show all pictures of the Empire State Building available for noncommercial use. |
| | The conservancy isn't getting into software, though. |
| | If we win the Eldred case, there will be tax incentives for people to put stuff in the public domain first. |
| | There is no connection between "getting it" and doing something about it. |
| | The old has found a very big club to harm the new. |
| | The rise of anti-circumvention provisions is the really scary stuff. They don't only want you not to do X, but to make it illegal to provide the means for doing X. They're ramping up the regime quite a bit. |
| | The idea behind land conservancy is to get property into the public domain. The idea behind one for intellectual property is about the same. |
On the other AND
No, over here
| | Euan Semple's The Obvious? has a new URL. I'm still bummed that I missed him in London last month. |
Scott (Not!) vs. Scott
| | Okay, so how do I unfuck this one? I wrote everything below thinking the author of the piece in question was Scott Rosenberg, when in fact it was (as Scott points out) by Michael Thomas. I don't know how the byline swap got into my brain, but it did. People have pointed at the piece, so I don't want to kill it off. Instead I'll just do a public post hoc edit job on the thing and hope whatever damage I may have done to Scott Rosenberg's rep doesn't exceed my own embarrassment about this thing. |
| | Oh great: the strike tag doesn't work. Well, at least the intention is clear. I'm going to bed.. |
| | I am no longer close enough to the business to know where Sun's products rank against the competition. |
| | But the Scott McNealys of the world, considered generically, have for at least a decade thrived as heads of a fool's paradise, installing regimes of benign neglect in which ignorance and self-delusion regarding the quality of their products has often gone hand in hand with the inflation of earnings via accounting chicanery. |
| | At the moment getting a handle on both sorts of corporate self-deception is not only "in the shareholders' interest"; it's arguably also the most important function a CEO can perform for the stockholders. |
| | McNealy, it appears, sees it differently. He told the Times that "many of the executives he talked with are equally concerned about the trend toward what they regarded as ill-considered regulation and a rising anti-business attitude. But few of them have said so publicly." |
| | "My fellow CEOs are rolling over, paws-up, on this," McNealy lamented to the reporter. "And I think that is a mistake." |
| | He can probably, out there on the road, sell that to many of his fellow CEOs. |
| | I like Scott. And the other Scott too. A lot. They are both wise men, and extremely good at what they do. (Except that Scott R didn't write the thing, so the whole Scott theme kinda falls down.) |
| | But I gotta tell ya, <strike>Scott Rosenberg</strike> Michael Thomas is way off on this one. |
| | First he says he doesn't know where Sun ranks against competition, and then, on the basis of approximately no evidence, he makes Sun's CEO a one-man representative — no, worse, a TYPE: the Scott McNealys of the world... — standing for All That Went Wrong In Those Awful Nineties. |
| | Well, here's what went right: the Net grew like an Andromeda Strain, without a single company ending up controlling a damn thing (except maybe AOL with instant messaging, but that won't last and nobody cares). Lots of good companies doing excellent work contributed immeasurably to the Net's growth, functionality and reliability. And if we ever get around to running the corporate credits, there's no way we can't list Sun at or near the top of the list. Frankly, I can't think of a company that has done more. |
| | The pendulum of punditry fashion swings like a wrecking ball, and right now it's crashing into a lot of companies that don't deserve it, just because they happened to share the Big Board with Enron and Worldcom. Scott McNealy is damn right to stand up against it. He's fists-out instead of paws-up, and I say bravo. Well done, dude. |
| | Say what you like about Sun and its products: they're overpriced, threatened by cheap (and free) competitors, built around doomed chip designs, whatever. People have been trashing the company and its strategies for two decades and it's still going strong. More importantly, it's stayed interesting, due in no small part to top brass that knows how to have fun and be creative while they're busy doing good work. |
| | And while we're at it, let's put in a good word for another over-trashed profession: venture capitalists — John Doerr in particular. I probably wouldn't be getting 3MB+ of broadband pouring into all the computers in my home, for a whopping $38 per month, if John Doerr hadn't talked Milo Medin into leading development of the technology that made my broadband possible. I don't care what the hell else he did; I wanna give him a big high five for that one. |
| | Yes, a lot of insane things happened in the 90s, and the Scott McNealys and John Doerrs "of the world" (whatever that means — I hate that fucking expression) may have committed more than a few wacky mistakes. But you know what? They were creative and original, and they deserve a little credit for that. |
| | And you know what else? Insane stuff is happening again (it never stops). One example is elevating the value of accounting over every other corporate discipline. Want to see where pure bean-counting gets you? Look at commercial broadcasting, where creative babies got thrown out with overhead bathwater two decades ago, and where deregulation for its own sake (another insanity) allowed the most aggressive and bean-hearted companies to buy up the whole damn industry. |
| | Technology and journalism have something important in common: both make great companies when native professionals are in charge. Technology and publishing (or broadcasting) companies start to suck as soon as accountants, marketers, lawyers or sales people take over. The main exceptions to those rules are inspired founders that happen to be born marketers (like Steve Jobs), born sales people (like Scott McNealy) or born whatevers. If they successfully lead and inspire, year after year, they're making their own rules anyway. They cannot possibly be So-and-Sos of the world. |
| | The best companies, like the best professionals at any business, are deeply and profoundly original. There's nothing else like them. Which makes trashing them for typicalities a rather risky business. |
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