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Friday, March 9, 2007
How about DIAs: Disclosure Insistence Agreements? 
| | Mike Taht wonders if there are any open source-compatible employment boilerplate and/or non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) out there. It's a good question. (Meaning, I don't have an answer.) But it does bring up an old beef I've had about all these kinds of agreements: they are terribly one-sided, as a matter of course. And they have unintended subsequences. Here's Mike: |
| | Many companies are getting more and more interested by the day in Linux, but they are limited in their own legal resources. Often - they are open to releasing their specification to a designated person - but not to the world - AND they are open to and buy into the logic of - releasing the software produced from the specification as open source. |
| | But - as soon as you try to do something out of the ordinary (e.g. open source), they get bogged down in detail. Usually all rights to all the information need remain proprietary according to the language. A single word change to the NDA or contract can take weeks to approve - or worse, kill the deal. |
| | If there was, somewhere out on the net, a set of standard boilerplate NDAs and employment contracts that clearly gave the lee-way in IP management required for a firm and employee/contractor to successfully navigate the open source waters... vast floodgates of specifications might be made available for new devices - and it would be a better world for everyone. |
| | Aformentioned boilerplate coule vary. For example there could be a BSD-like NDA boilerplate, a GPL-like NDA boilerplate - a dual licensed GPL-like NDA boilerplate... etc. |
| | Nothing has to be as sweet as the ideal SFWA author's contract (although that would be nice as an example!) |
| | It would be a relief to find some legally blessed agreements for open source work, somewhere, on the web. |
You pick your fights
| | RIAA's idiocy really doesn't matter in the long run to anyone other than online broadcasters. People are going to listen to music on the internet. If it comes from outside the US or from non-RIAA acts, it just makes RIAA bleed faster. |
| | Multicasting never took off because ISPs couldn't agree on how/where to support it. But peercasting is still around, and is vastly more elegant in resource usage than streaming. |
| | Any $9/month server can run icecast and if their shows are good support tens of thousands of listeners. |
| | Folks, we're ON THE INTERNET here. What happens when a network goes down? You route around it. If the big music licensing conglomerates can't understand the market, route around them. This could be the best thing to ever happen to Internet Radio, and music in general, a new marketplace and new systems will form in the wake of the dying beast(s). A fallen tree may support more life than a living one. |
| | Independent and forward-thinking artists have an enormous opportunity now to get in front of listeners. Online stations have a chance to become next generation leaders, to provide rich new music, and most importantly to engage the listeners with them in their battle to find new sources of content. |
| | Please, people, stand up and do the right thing, MOVE ON. |
| | I'm thinking "First they came for..." |
| | Then I'm thinking that, while Internet radio isn't Jonathan's or Jeremie's ox, it's still being gored. |
| | Clearly this isn't their fight. But it is mine. And I'm not alone. |
| | Even if we lose, there are still lessons here. The biggest is about unintended consequences. Who among the legislators who voted for the DMCA in 1998, thinking they were protecting the rights of recording artists, knew that the law they were making would outlaw a business that cares even more about artists than the lobbyists behind the laws ever did? |
Toward a bigger, better zero
| | The original "Giant Zero" idea came from Craig Burton, who said that the best geometric representation of the Net's end-to-end architecture is a hollow sphere comprised of everything and everybody (i.e. every end) on it. Since the Net wants to put every point at virtually zero distance from every other point, one can conceive of this hollow sphere as a "giant zero". |
| | So the metaphor applied to network architecture. |
| | Yet it didn't get much mojo until the other day, when a snowball started rolling from a post titled Giant Zero Journalism, which re-stated for journalists what I stated in my closing remarks to public broadcasters at the IMA: that zero distance is what disintermediation is all about. |
| | Amy Graham in Poynter picked up on it. So did Dan Blank, John Naughton, Francis Pisani, Susan Mernit, binary law, J.D. Lasica, Tom Honig, Jens Ulrick, Ted Shelton, O Escudo, Brian Chin, Berkman Buzz, Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen, John Murrell and others. Nearly everybody liked the idea. The only negative remark was Amy's. She said, |
| | ...OK, I don't agree 100 percent with everything Searls asserts in this piece, but it did lead me to think hard. A key issue I think he ignored is credibility -- people really do want to know what information and which sources they should trust. I don't think it's realistic to expect most people to continue to place blind faith in established "news brands." But I also don't think it's realistic to expect that living in a "giant zero" information/conversation environment means that credibility no longer matters. If anything, it matters more. |
| | A small correction there. I didn't ignore credibility, nor did I say it no longer matters. What I said was this: |
| | It's not what happens with blogging, or with citizen journalism. Here it's all about contribution, participation. It involves conversation, but it goes beyond that into relationship — with readers, with viewers, with the larger ecosystem by which we all inform each other. |
| | As I've said before (and I said it again at the conference), we don't just "deliver information" like it's a Fedex package. We inform each other. That is, we literally form what other people know. If you tell me something I didn't know before, I'm changed by that. I am not merely in receipt of a box of facts. I am enlarged by knowing more than I did before. Enlarging each other is the deepest calling of journalism, whether it's done by bloggers, anchors or editors. |
| | We are all authors of each other. What we call authority is the right we give others to author us, to make us who we are. That right is one we no longer give only to our newspapers, our magazines, our TV and radio stations. We give it to anybody who helps us learn and understand What's Going On in the world. In that world the number of amateur informants goes up while the number of editors on newspaper staffs goes down. Between these two facts are many opportunities for symbiosis. |
| | You can substiture credibility for authority in that last paragraph and find nearly the same meaning. They're pretty much the same thing. What matters most when informing people is credibility (or authority). Not popularity. |
| | Which brings me to an interesting point. The number of unique visitors to this blog on Tuesday, when the Giant Zero Journalism post ran, was pretty low at the time — less than a thousand. Now it's up to 3579, which is maybe a little higher than normal. Daily visit counts at this blog have been flat in the high-hundreds to low (four, tops) thousands since not long after the blog went up in late 1999. |
| | Traffic matters, but not as much as you'd think. According to my stats page, 38 visitors in the last 24 hours came from Amy's piece in Poynter. Meanwhile, 681 came from Netvibes, and 188 from my.yahoo.com. Most of the rest came from google searches, incuding a remarkable (maybe even a majority) percentage from searches for images. |
| | Anyway, the response to the piece has made me re-think what I'm going to do with The Giant Zero, which has been the working title of a book I've been writing as my project as a CITS research fellow at UCSB. I've been struggling with the concept as a network metaphor. But now I think I have a much better angle on it as a media metaphor. |
| | Look for more at giantzero.net one of these days. |
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