The Pirate Party has hovered on the edge of politics for a while now, acting as a kind of gadfly to traditional parties - annoying but not able to inflict much damage. Its seats in the European Parliament have proved important in terms of raising issues and obtaining access to hitherto restricted information. But last week's events in Germany are perhaps even more significant:On Open Enterprise blog.
One of the frustrating things about being on the side of right, justice, logic and the rest is that all of these are trumped by naked insider power - just look at ACTA, which is a monument to closed-door deals that include rich and powerful industry groups, but expressly exclude the little people like you and me.
Against that background, it becomes easy to understand why Larry Lessig decided to move on from promoting copyright reform to tackling corruption in the US political machine. The rise of great sites like the Sunlight Foundation, whose tagline is "Making Government Transparent and Accountable" is further evidence of how much effort is going into this in the US.
The UK is lagging somewhat, despite the fact that in terms of pure open data from government sources, we're probably "ahead". But it's clear that more and more people are turning their thoughts to this area - not least because they have made the same mental journey as Lessig: we've got to do this if we are to counter the efforts of big business to get what they want regardless of whether it's right, fair or even sensible.
Here's a further sign of progress on this side of the pond:
We are excited to announce the Who’s Lobbying site launches today! The site opens with an analysis of ministerial meetings with outside interests, based on the reports released by UK government departments in October.
That analysis consists of treemaps - zoomable representations of how much time is spent with various organisations and their lobbyists:For example, the treemap shows about a quarter of the Department of Energy and Climate Change meetings are with power companies. Only a small fraction are with environmental or climate change organisations.
It's still a little clunky at the moment, but it gives a glimpse of what might be possible: a quick and effortless consolidated picture of who's getting chummy with whom. As the cliché has it, knowledge is power, and that's certainly the case here: the more we can point to facts about disproportionate time spent with those backing one side of arguments, the easier it will be to insist on an equal hearing. And once that happens, we will be halfway there; after all, we *do* have right on our side...
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Although I have a great deal of time (and respect) for Lawrence Lessig, I think his article "Against Transparency" is fundamentally misguided. And for the same reason I think these concerns are overblown, too:The coming wave of transparency could transform this in a hugely positive way, using open data on costs, opportunities and performance to become a much more creative, cost-effective and agile institution, mindful of the money it spends and the results it achieves, and ensuring individuals are accountable for their work.
But it might make things worse, frightening senior managers into becoming more guarded, taking fewer ‘risks’ with even small amounts of money, and focusing on the process to the detriment of the outcome. It may also make public service less attractive not only for those with something to hide, but for effective people who don’t want to spend their time fending off misinterpretations of their decisions and personal value for money in the media. And to mirror Lessig’s point, it may push confidence in public administration over a cliff, in revealing evidence of wrongdoing which in fact is nothing of the sort.
First of all, I think we already have a data point on such radical transparency. Open source is conducted totally in the open, with all decisions being subject to challenge and justification. That manifestly works, for all its "naked transparency".
Now, politics is plainly different in certain key respects, not least because hackers are different from politicians, and there has been a culture of *anti*-openness among the latter. But I think that is already changing, as David Cameron's latest billet doux to opening up indicates:
the release of the datasets specified in the Coalition Programme is just the beginning of the transparency process. In advance of introducing any necessary legislation to effect our Right to Data proposals, public requests to departments for the release of government datasets should be handled in line with the principles underpinning those proposals: a presumption in favour of transparency, with all published data licensed for free reuse.
Now, I am not so naive as to believe that all will be sweetness and light when it comes to opening up government; nor do I think that open goverment is "done": this is the beginning or the journey, not the end. But it is undeniable that a sea change has occurred: openness is (almost) the presumption. And the closer we move to that state, the more readily politicians will work within that context, and more natural transparency - even of the naked kind - will become.
Moreover, shying away from such full-throated openness because of concerns that it might frighten the horses is a sure way to ensure that we *don't* complete this journey. Which is why I think concerns about "naked transparency" are not just wrong, but dangerous, since they threaten to scupper the whole project by starting to carve out dangerous exceptions right at its heart.
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...surprises, that is:So my blog turns seven today. On August 20, 2002, while hiding north of San Francisco working on the Eldred appeal, I penned my first (wildly and embarrassingly defensive) missive to Dave. Some 1753 entries later, I'm letting the blog rest. This will be the last post in this frame. Who knows what the future will bring, but in the near term, it won't bring more in lessig.org/blog.
The main reason is that he's too damn busy with other projects, although I suspect the imminent arrival of his third child also was a big factor.
Lessig surprised me before by moving from CC work to his transparency gig. I thought he was bonkers then...and I was wrong, he was just - as usual - prescient. Maybe his move away from blogging is the same: but I hope not.... (Via John Naughton.)
One of the favourite passages invoked by people who believe that sharing does not diminish ideas (and by extension digital content) but enhances whatever it touches, is the following from Thomas Jefferson:He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Now Larry Lessig passes on the news that the idea goes back even further (no surprise there) to that fab bloke St. Augustine, who wrote the following poetic par:
The words I am uttering penetrate your senses, so that every hearer holds them, yet withholds them from no other. Not held, the words could not inform. Withheld, no other could share them. Though my talk is, admittedly, broken up into words and syllables, yet you do not take in this portion or that, as when picking at your food. All of you hear all of it, though each takes all individually. I have no worry that, by giving all to one, the others are deprived. I hope, instead, that everyone will consume everything; so that, denying no other ear or mind, you take all to yourselves, yet leave all to all others. But for individual failures of memory, everyone who came to hear what I say can take it all off, each on one's separate way.
Who could possibly gainsay that?
If you want to see how misguided the British publishing industry's attitudes are to copyright and its users, you could do worse than read what the outgoing president of the Publishers Association has to say on the subject....
On Open Enterprise blog.
Regular readers of this blog will have spotted that I've been posting more about transparency recently. Of course, it's a natural extension of openness, and can equally be thought of as open government. Whatever you call it, it's apparently problematic for some people:
In the run-up to the European elections, some websites are trying to monitor MEPs according to their attendance in plenary sessions and committee meetings. But in practice the task is proving extremely difficult. EurActiv France contributed to this report.
Last week, one such website, www.parlorama.eu, was forced to shut down after its initiator was flooded with complaints from MEPs.
Flavien Deltort, a former MEP's assistant from Italy, had attempted to rate parliamentarians according to their attendance in plenary sessions, committee meetings and broader participation in parliamentary life.
But only two days after launching his website last week, Deltort was forced to close it down "due to the overwhelming volume of complaints". Threatened with prosecution by many MEPs, he decided to temporary close the website.
Although some of that prickleness may have been justified, I think it also shows that here in Europe we have a long way to go before we achieve open government. The US is already ahead, with campaigners like Larry Lessig working hard to make things more transparent, as well as splendid organisations like the Sunlight Foundation:
Our goal through our grant-making, blogging, projects, and technical leadership, is to use the power of the Internet to shine a light on the interplay of money, lobbying, influence and government in Washington in ways never before possible.
We need something similar here in Europe, but it looks like it's going to be a struggle to achieve that.
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Is Joi Ito barking?In the future according to Ito: "Every object on the Internet will have a licence and copyright information and the author and the owner attached to the object, and if it's a derivative work, where it's a derivative work of." The licence Ito has in mind will be a Creative Commons one, but there seems no reason why other classes of licence couldn't use similar mechanisms.
And, "what will happen is, once we start building it into all the tools, into your camera, into Adobe Acrobat, into Google, you don't need DRM and watermarks. As long as it's built into the HTML, most of the people who matter will follow it."
In what way will they do this? "You downloaded some music, and say, 'I want to use this in my YouTube video,' it [the software] will say, 'Bap-bap! You can't do that because the copyright says you can't.'" Which does kind of look and feel like DRM, but as Ito says, it's not, it's a way to get away from DRM.
Great: we do away with DRM and end up with an even more intrusive and repressive system of total digital control for everything on- and off-line. That's what the Creative Commons is working towards? Where's Larry Lessig when you need him?
Update: Confused of Calcutta takes these ideas further in his great post "A simple desultory philippic about copyright".
I'd seen that Larry Lessig had written another fine rant about intellectual monopolies, this time in Newsweek. What I had missed in my cursory glance was something in the following paragraph:Since the birth of the Republic, the U.S. government has been in the business of handing out "exclusive rights" (a.k.a., monopolies) in order to "promote progress" or enable new markets of communication. Patents and copyrights accomplish the first goal; giving away slices of the airwaves serves the second. No one doubts that these monopolies are sometimes necessary to stimulate innovation. Hollywood could not survive without a copyright system; privately funded drug development won't happen without patents. But if history has taught us anything, it is that special interests—the Disneys and Pfizers of the world—have become very good at clambering for more and more monopoly rights. Copyrights last almost a century now, and patents regulate "anything under the sun that is made by man," as the Supreme Court has put it. This is the story of endless bloat, with each round of new monopolies met with a gluttonous demand for more.
All good stuff. But what struck me was the "clambering for more": this, surely, was meant to be "clamouring for more". I can't believe someone as eloquent and erudite as Lessig got this wrong, so I can only assume we're looking at a sub-editor attack.
I wonder if it qualifies as an eggcorn?
Talking of openness and Obama:President-elect Obama has made a clear commitment to changing the way government relates to the People. His campaign was a demonstration of the value in such change, and a glimpse of its potential. His transition team has now taken a crucial step in making the work of the transition legally shareable, demonstrating that the values Obama spoke of are values that will guide his administration.
To further support this commitment to change, and to help make it tangible, we offer three “open transition principles” to guide the transition in its use of the Internet to produce the very best in open government.
That openness meme is certainly getting popular.
There is an irony at the heart of the open content world: that the two biggest successes there – Wikipedia and the Creative Commons movement – cannot share content. This is because Wikipedia was created before CC came on the scene, and therefore – quite reasonably – used the best existing open content licence, the GNU Free Documentation Licence (FDL), which is not compatible with popular CC licences. As the man who did more than anyone to craft the latter, Larry Lessig, explains....
On Open Enterprise blog.
At 2pm on October 29th, 2008, ten years after the Archimedes Palimpsest was purchased by the present owner, the core data generated by the project to conserve, image and study the manuscript, will be released on the web. This will be the electronic product that Reviel Netz looked forward to, several years ago. Conceptually speaking, what we wanted to create then was a digital version of the Archimedes Palimpsest – and one that revealed the unique ancient texts in the manuscript that
were scraped off and overwritten with a prayer book by Johannes Myronas in 1229AD.
That's the good news. The even better news is this:1 Rights and Conditions of Use
The Archimedes Palimpsest data is released with license for use under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Access Rights. It is requested that copies of any published articles based on the information in this data set be sent to The Curator of Manuscripts, The Walters Art Museum, 600 North Charles Street, Baltimore MD 21201.
That's pretty incredible, and simply would not have been possible a few decades ago. Particular kudos goes to the present owner of the manuscript for making it available; for Larry Lessig and others for coming up with the Creative Commons licences; and for RMS for starting everything with his crazy GNU project.
Wow, outrageous:
Although it is unclear at this point who Senators Obama and McCain might choose, AAP believes it essential that key officials who will deal with intellectual property issues in a new administration have a full understanding of the importance of intellectual property rights for those who hold these rights and for broader U.S. economic and trade interests. AAP is concerned, for example, that based on their past academic relationship, Senator Obama might choose among his appointments a divisive figure such as Larry Lessig - a law professor and leading proponent of diminished copyright rights.
Lessig has done more for *extending* the usefulness of copyright than anyone. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) are simply beneath contempt. (Via Arbeit 2.0.)
I have a lot of time for Larry Lessig. He's a nice bloke, very bright but disarmingly modest. Nonetheless, when I heard about his plans to give up copyfighting and move on to tackling political corruption, I thought he'd lost it. However laudable, the whole project looked utterly hopeless. Much better, it seemed to me, to try to subvert the system indirectly, using technology - that is, the Internet in all its manifestations and ramifications - to peek and poke.
Well, it looks like Larry had the same idea:Beginning in April, we will launch a second stage to the site: in a Wikipedia-inspired manner, wiki-workers will track the reform-related positions of candidates who have not yet taken a pledge. If a candidate, for example, has endorsed Public Campaign's bill for public financing, we will record that fact on our site. The same with a pledge to forgo money from PACS or lobbyists, or any of the other planks in the Change Congress pledge. And once this wiki-army has tracked the positions of all Members of Congress, we will display a map of reform, circa 2008: Each Congressional district will be colored in either (1) dark red, or dark blue, reflecting Republicans or Democrats who have taken a pledge, (2) light red or light blue, tracking Republicans and Democrats who have not taken our pledge, but who have signaled support for planks in the Change-Congress platform, or (3) for those not taking the pledge and not signaling support for a platform of reform, varying shades of sludge, representing the percentage of the Member's campaign contributions that come from PACs or lobbyists.
What this map will reveal, we believe, is something that not many now actually realize: that the support for fundamental reform is broad and deep. That recognition in turn will encourage more to see both the need for reform, and the opportunity that this election gives us to achieve it. Apathy is driven by the feeling that nothing can be done. This Change Congress map will demonstrate that in fact, something substantial can be done. Now.
One of the most powerful aspects of openness in any field is that it lets people see what is really going on, so that they can make informed decisions. What Larry is trying to do is to open up the engine of Congress to scrutiny. I wish him every success.
Larry Lessig's The Future of Ideas is one of the key books of the open content world, so it's particularly appropriate that it should now be freely available as a download.
Read it. Now.
One of Larry Lessig's favourite concepts is that of the remix: taking pre-existing stuff and doing something new with it. Recently I came across one of the purest expressions of that remix idea in the shape of the Georg Baselitz exhibition at the Royal Academy.
After a series of rooms packed with often deeply disturbing images, the show culminated in one devoted entirely to the remix. More precisely, the pictures were remixes by Baselitz of his earlier works, which created a powerful double resonance. The ultimate remix, perhaps.
On Nov. 5, Google (GOOG) unveiled what many in the phone business had long awaited. CEO Eric Schmidt explained how the search giant was ready to create new software for mobile phones that would shake up the telecom status quo. A Google-led "Open Handset Alliance" would provide consumers an alternative to the big cellular carriers and give them new choices among mobile phones and the types of nifty services that run on them, from e-mail to Google Maps.
Google's brain trust was again trying to change the rules of the game. Behind the scenes, they owe a sizable debt to a man nearly unknown outside the geeky confines of cyberlaw. He is Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor who provided the intellectual framework that inspired Google's mobile phone strategy. One of the school's edgier profs, Wu attends the artfest Burning Man, and admits to having hacked his iPhone to make it work on the T-Mobile (DT) network.
And the ever-modest Larry throws in the following helpful signpost:
Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor who has been the leader in arguing for reduced restrictions on what can go up on the Internet, predicts that Wu will become even more influential than he himself has been: "The second generation always has a bigger impact than the first."
Clearly, a name to remember.
Although this article by Tim Wu came out a few days ago, I hadn't read it through until now; but I see that it's raising some fascinating questions about the *next* stage of the copyright battle, not least through Our Man in the Audience, Larry Lessig:This spring, at the Max-Planck Institute in Bonn, Germany, I gave a talk on the phenomenon of tolerated use, and in the audience was Stanford professor Larry Lessig, a Thomas Jefferson figure in the information revolution. "So here's what I want to know," he asked. "Why should we tolerate tolerated use?" His point: If you care about free expression and the core reasons for our copyright law—i.e., protecting the artists—why would you put up with a system that makes something like fan art illegal and then tries to ignore the problem? Surely the right answer is to fight for reform of the copyright law: Have the law declare clearly that most noncommercial activities, like fan sites and remixes, are simply beyond the reach of the law.
In a sense, it's simple: laws that are ignored by hundreds of millions of people are, by definition, bad laws.
Update: If you enjoy Tim Wu's article, as I'm sure you will, why not give this rather meatier paper a whirl: it's a fascinating alternative history of copyright, and its "role in the regulation of competing disseminators."
Nice little victory here for Larry Lessig and friends in their fight to defend the shrinking public domain in the US:The 10th Circuit decided our appeal in Golan v. Gonzales today. In a unanimous vote, the Court held that the "traditional contours of copyright protection" described in Eldred as the trigger for First Amendment review extend beyond the two "traditional First Amendment safeguards" mentioned by the Court in that case. It thus remanded the case to the District Court to evaluate section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (“URAA”) under the First Amendment, which removed material from the public domain.
This is a very big victory. The government had argued in this case, and in related cases, that the only First Amendment review of a copyright act possible was if Congress changed either fair use or erased the idea/expression dichotomy. We, by contrast, have argued consistently that in addition to those two, Eldred requires First Amendment review when Congress changes the "traditional contours of copyright protection." In Golan, the issue is a statute that removes work from the public domain. In a related case now on cert to the Supreme Court, Kahle v. Gonzales, the issue is Congress's change from an opt-in system of copyright to an opt-out system of copyright. That too, we have argued, is a change in a "traditional contour of copyright protection." Under the 10th Circuit's rule, it should merit 1st Amendment review as well.
Pebble on the cairn. Good luck with the next one.
"Crowdsharing" has become rather a modish term for what is, after all, an old concept: broad-based collaborative working. It's true that the Internet has made such collaboration far easier and more global, but the idea is fundamentally the same as the one that Richard Stallman had twenty years ago.
Nonetheless, Assignment Zero, a collection of short interviews that dance around the crowdsourcing theme, is well worth wandering through. As well as the big names like Lessig, there's a host of less well-known players who deserve wider recognition for their attempts at applying open source principles in fields beyond software.
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