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Re: Doc, please think a third time
Doc, Thank you for your thoughtful response. I'm glad you care! I think it's helpful to focus on the people who do care. So, for example, maybe I'm the only person who cares (well, I suppose the spammers do). But for eight years now I've made it a careful and explicit policy at our lab that letters sent are in the Public Domain except as noted. The result is that we have 15,000+ letters in the Public Domain, and they are accessible in various ways at http://www.ms.lt We draw on that for our wikis and there are a lot of ways that I'm thinking of building on them. And we also have a small culture of people who are appreciating the value of the Public Domain, both for sharing but also as a filter to make clear who truly wants to share. I agree with you that it's a matter of culture. I wish that this was at the forefront. Culture drives law and comes before it. Culture includes: * understanding the significance of "giving away" as "letting go of control" * realizing that I may let go and even so have a stake and state my wishes and work to see that they are respected, if not enforced * stating carefully my intentions and taking seriously other people's * addressing the root issues, so for example, how can we all help each other make a living, not just some 1% or less who could live off content. Specifically, how can we help each other have access to as much paid work as we could ever want, so we wouldn't have to waste ourselves looking for it? Some relevant solutions that I see: * Thanks to our exchange, I've set up an archive for letters that one wants to explicitly place in the Public Domain, you simply CC them to publicdomain@yahoogroups.com and then they are available on the web or through RSS feeds which is how they end up at http://www.ms.lt * We're building up "portfolios" through the letters (or posts) that people are contributing to our groups (or potentially to blogs, anything that has RSS). Here's, for example, Jeff Buderer of http://www.onevillagefoundation.org : http://www.ms.lt/?thinker=Jeff_Buderer This makes clear how actively people are contributing to the Public Domain. * The next step would be to focus on helping each other get paid work and resources for our projects. Thomas Kalka and I are starting work on a social ping system that would be driven by email. Every month you'd get a questionnaire and if you want you'd send it back with your answers about your availability, skills, interests, your feedback as a lurker on ongoing discussions. Or you could email the system at any time to prompt you to send one or more questionnaires. This way we'll have a system of people ready to respond to work opportunities. Wealth is relationships. The value of the open source community is not in the software produced, but in the teams of people who are thereby organized. Similarly, I think our culture of content should focus on the fact that we're attracting people with very special qualities: intent to give, self-directed, able to contribute. We're filtering out sharks, trolls, and all who can't let go of their self-interest. So we are left with a group of people who may be more or less competent but are all worth investing in. That is what makes the Public Domain, with it's unconditional giving, distinct from any form of legal license. For social networking purposes, such as accumulating and reassembling microcontent, there is no license that works. The reason is that every license needs to be acknowledged and tracked. But the overhead of tracking licenses is prohibitive. It would be like taxing individual packets each time they move along the Internet. Content is very different from code in this way. Code likes to clump, but content wants to crumble. Code tends towards a CD-ROM full of software which can be under a single license. Content wants to anneal, wants to have many contexts, wants to be free... of licenses. I wrote a bit starkly. But if our question is, Can we have free culture? there's a "yes or no" aspect to that. Some people are hedging that we can, and some that we can't. At that most basic level, that's the "human vs. demon" choice that I see. The more that I think about how corporations operate, with all the rights of humans but none of the moral responsibilities, the more I conclude they are demonic. They should be scoped by charter for definite purposes, not be open ended. They are the part of our society that is not accountable in the broadest sense. One way to get them under control would be to have patents which everybody can use without restriction except for corporations, which would be subject to the patent holders. Doc, it would be great to work with you to attract and acknowledge people who contribute to the Public Domain and make sure they are taken care of. One thing I think is fair is that every person who contributes to the Public Domain have as much part-time work available as they might ever need. I think that we can organize a community that makes it real. That is a key part of my business strategy for our Minciu Sodas lab.
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