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authorRalph Amissah <ralph@amissah.com>2010-08-23 23:15:26 -0400
committerRalph Amissah <ralph@amissah.com>2010-08-24 11:54:50 -0400
commit7879124b732e6a4bb287ab2946e42b75826c7819 (patch)
treee7bb8dae60c322662e7b328136d9dae37874e282 /data/v2
parentmarkup samples, adds text "Viral Spiral" David Bollier (diff)
markup sample, viral sprial, many url fixes
* incorrect line-breaking issues with urls occurred in conversion from pdf to text, reviewed
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@@ -103,7 +103,7 @@ It is perilous to generalize about a movement that has so many disparate parts p
Yet the people who are inventing new commons have some deeper aspirations and allegiances. They glimpse the liberating potential of the Internet, and they worry about the totalizing inclinations of large corporations and the state, especially their tendency to standardize and coerce behavior. They object as well to processes that are not transparent. They dislike the impediments to direct access and participation, the limitations of credentialed expertise and arbitrary curbs on people’s freedom.
-One of the first major gatherings of international commoners occurred in June 2006, when several hundred people from fifty nations converged on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the iCommons Summit. The people of this multinational, eclectic vanguard blend the sophistication of the establishment in matters of power and politics with the bravado and playfulness of Beat poets. There were indie musicians who can deconstruct the terms of a record company licensing agreement with Talmudic precision. There were Web designers who understand the political implications of arcane rules made by the World Wide Web Consortium, a technical standards body. The lawyers and law professors who discourse about Section 114 of the Copyright Act are likely to groove on the remix career of Danger Mouse and the appropriationist antics of Negativland, a sound-collage band. James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, two law scholars at Duke Law School, even published a superhero comic book, /{Down by Law!}/, which demystifies the vagaries of the “fair use doctrine” through a filmmaker character resembling video game heroine Lara Croft.~{Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins, /{Down by Law!}/ at http://www .duke.edu/cspd/comics.}~ (Fair use is a provision of copyright law that makes it legal to excerpt portions of a copyrighted work for noncommercial, educational, and personal purposes.)
+One of the first major gatherings of international commoners occurred in June 2006, when several hundred people from fifty nations converged on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the iCommons Summit. The people of this multinational, eclectic vanguard blend the sophistication of the establishment in matters of power and politics with the bravado and playfulness of Beat poets. There were indie musicians who can deconstruct the terms of a record company licensing agreement with Talmudic precision. There were Web designers who understand the political implications of arcane rules made by the World Wide Web Consortium, a technical standards body. The lawyers and law professors who discourse about Section 114 of the Copyright Act are likely to groove on the remix career of Danger Mouse and the appropriationist antics of Negativland, a sound-collage band. James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, two law scholars at Duke Law School, even published a superhero comic book, /{Down by Law!}/, which demystifies the vagaries of the “fair use doctrine” through a filmmaker character resembling video game heroine Lara Croft.~{Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins, /{Down by Law!}/ at http://www.duke.edu/cspd/comics. }~ (Fair use is a provision of copyright law that makes it legal to excerpt portions of a copyrighted work for noncommercial, educational, and personal purposes.)
={commoners:gatherings of}
2~ The Rise of Socially Created Value
@@ -117,10 +117,10 @@ This is why so many ordinary people — without necessarily having degrees, inst
Hugh McGuire, a Montreal-based writer and Web designer, is one. In 2005, he started LibriVox, a digital library of free public-domain audio books that are read and recorded by volunteers. More than ten thousand people a day visit the Web site to download audio files of Twain, Kafka, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and others, in nearly a dozen languages.~{ http://www.librivox.org. }~ The Faulkes Telescope Project in Australia lets high school students connect with other students, and with professional astronomers, to scan the skies with robotic, online telescopes.~{ http://faulkes-telescope.com. }~ In a similar type of learning commons, the Bugscope project in the United States enables students to operate a scanning electronic microscope in real time, using a simple Web browser on a classroom computer connected to the Internet.~{ http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu. }~
={Bugscope;LibriVox;McGuire, Hugh;Faulkes Telescope Project}
-Thousands of individual authors, musicians, and filmmakers are using Web tools and Creative Commons licenses to transform markets for creative works — or, more accurately, to blend the market and commons into integrated hybrids. A nonprofit humanitarian group dedicated to doing reconstructive surgery for children in poor countries, Interplast, produced an Oscar-winning film, /{A Story of Healing}/, in 1997. Ten years later, it released the film under a Creative Commons license as a way to publicize Interplast’s work while retaining ownership of the film: a benefit for both film buffs and Interplast.~{ http://www.interplast.org and http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/ 2007/04/%E2%80%9Ca-story-of-healing%E2%80%9D-becomes-first-acad emy-award%C2%AE-winning-film-released-under-a-creative-commons-li cense. }~
+Thousands of individual authors, musicians, and filmmakers are using Web tools and Creative Commons licenses to transform markets for creative works — or, more accurately, to blend the market and commons into integrated hybrids. A nonprofit humanitarian group dedicated to doing reconstructive surgery for children in poor countries, Interplast, produced an Oscar-winning film, /{A Story of Healing}/, in 1997. Ten years later, it released the film under a Creative Commons license as a way to publicize Interplast’s work while retaining ownership of the film: a benefit for both film buffs and Interplast.~{ http://www.interplast.org and http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/2007/04/%E2%80%9Ca-story-of-healing%E2%80%9D-becomes-first-acad emy-award%C2%AE-winning-film-released-under-a-creative-commons-li cense. }~
={Interplast}
-Scoopt, a Glasgow, Scotland–based photography agency, acts as a broker to help bloggers and amateurs sell newsworthy photos and videos to the commercial media.~{ http://www.scoopt.com. }~ The Boston band Two Ton Shoe released its music on the Web for free to market its concerts. Out of the blue, a South Korean record label called one day to say it loved the band and could it come over to Seoul, all expenses paid, to perform four concerts? Each one sold out.~{ http://www.twotonshoe.com/news.html. }~ Boing Boing blogger and cyber-activist Cory Doctorow released his 2003 science-fiction novel, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, under a CC license, reaping a whirlwind of worldwide exposure.~{ See Doctorow’s preface to the second release of the book, February 12, 2004, Tor Books. See also his blog Craphound.com, September 9, 2006, at http:// www.craphound.com/?=p=1681. }~
+Scoopt, a Glasgow, Scotland–based photography agency, acts as a broker to help bloggers and amateurs sell newsworthy photos and videos to the commercial media.~{ http://www.scoopt.com. }~ The Boston band Two Ton Shoe released its music on the Web for free to market its concerts. Out of the blue, a South Korean record label called one day to say it loved the band and could it come over to Seoul, all expenses paid, to perform four concerts? Each one sold out.~{ http://www.twotonshoe.com/news.html. }~ Boing Boing blogger and cyber-activist Cory Doctorow released his 2003 science-fiction novel, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, under a CC license, reaping a whirlwind of worldwide exposure.~{ See Doctorow’s preface to the second release of the book, February 12, 2004, Tor Books. See also his blog Craphound.com, September 9, 2006, at http://www.craphound.com/?=p=1681. }~
={Doctorow, Cory;Scoopt}
2~ The Commoners Build a Digital Republic of Their Own
@@ -134,7 +134,7 @@ The commoners differ from most of their corporate brethren in their enthusiasm f
It is all very well to spout such lofty goals. But how to actualize them? That is the story that the following pages recount. It has been the work of a generation, some visionary leaders, and countless individuals to articulate a loosely shared vision, build the infrastructure, and develop the social practices and norms. This project has not been animated by a grand political ideology, but rather is the result of countless initiatives, grand and incremental, of an extended global family of hackers, lawyers, bloggers, artists, and other supporters of free culture.
={commons:political implications of+3}
-And yet, despite its focus on culture and its aversion to conventional politics, the growth of this movement is starting to have political implications. In an influential 2003 essay, James F. Moore announced the arrival of “an emerging second superpower.”~{ James F. Moore, “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head,” March 31, 2003, available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/second superpower.html. }~ It was not a nation, but the coalescence of people from around the world who were asserting common values, and forming new public identities, via online networks. The people of this emerging “superpower,” Moore said, are concerned with improving the environment, public health, human rights, and social development. He cited as early examples the international campaign to ban land mines and the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. The power and legitimacy of this “second superpower” do not derive from the constitutional framework of a nation-state, but from its ability to capture and project people’s everyday feelings, social values, and creativity onto the world stage. Never in history has the individual had such cheap, unfettered access to global audiences, big and small.
+And yet, despite its focus on culture and its aversion to conventional politics, the growth of this movement is starting to have political implications. In an influential 2003 essay, James F. Moore announced the arrival of “an emerging second superpower.”~{ James F. Moore, “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head,” March 31, 2003, available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html. }~ It was not a nation, but the coalescence of people from around the world who were asserting common values, and forming new public identities, via online networks. The people of this emerging “superpower,” Moore said, are concerned with improving the environment, public health, human rights, and social development. He cited as early examples the international campaign to ban land mines and the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. The power and legitimacy of this “second superpower” do not derive from the constitutional framework of a nation-state, but from its ability to capture and project people’s everyday feelings, social values, and creativity onto the world stage. Never in history has the individual had such cheap, unfettered access to global audiences, big and small.
={Moore, James}
The awakening superpower described in /{Viral Spiral}/ is not a conventional political or ideological movement that focuses on legislation and a clutch of “issues.” While commoners do not dismiss these activities as unimportant, most are focused on the freedom of their peer communities to create, communicate, and share. When defending these freedoms requires wading into conventional politics and law, they are prepared to go there. But otherwise, the commoners are more intent on building a kind of parallel social order, inscribed within the regnant political economy but animated by their own values. Even now, the political/cultural sensibilities of this order are only vaguely understood by governments, politicians, and corporate leaders. The idea of “freedom without anarchy, control without government, consensus without power” — as Lawrence Lessig put it in 1999~{ Lawrence Lessig, /{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/ (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 4. }~ —is just too counterintuitive for the conventionally minded to take seriously.
@@ -151,7 +151,7 @@ The various industries that rely on copyrights have welcomed this development be
The Internet has profoundly disrupted this model of market production, however. The Internet is a distributed media system of low-cost capital (your personal computer) strung together with inexpensive transmission and software. Instead of being run by a centralized corporation that relies upon professionals and experts above all else, the Internet is a noncommercial infrastructure that empowers amateurs, citizens, and ordinary individuals in all their quirky, authentic variety. The mass media have long regarded people as a commodifiable audience to be sold to advertisers in tidy demographic units.
={Internet:empowerment by+2}
-Now, thanks to the Internet, “the people formerly known as the audience” (in Jay Rosen’s wonderful phrase) are morphing into a differentiated organism of flesh-and-blood, idiosyncratic individuals, as if awakening from a spell. Newly empowered to speak as they wish, in their own distinctive, personal voices to a global public of whoever cares to listen, people are creating their own transnational tribes. They are reclaiming culture from the tyranny of mass-media economics and national boundaries. In Lessig’s words, Internet users are overthrowing the “read only” culture that characterized the “weirdly totalitarian” communications of the twentieth century. In its place they are installing the “read/write” culture that invites everyone to be a creator, as well as a consumer and sharer, of culture.~{ Lawrence Lessig, “The Read-Write Society,” delivered at the Wizards of OS4 conference in Berlin, Germany, on September 5, 2006. Available at http:// www.wizards-of-os.org/programm/panels/authorship_amp_culture/keynote _the_read_write_society/the_read_write_society.html. }~ A new online citizenry is arising, one that regards its socially negotiated rules and norms as at least as legitimate as those established by conventional law.
+Now, thanks to the Internet, “the people formerly known as the audience” (in Jay Rosen’s wonderful phrase) are morphing into a differentiated organism of flesh-and-blood, idiosyncratic individuals, as if awakening from a spell. Newly empowered to speak as they wish, in their own distinctive, personal voices to a global public of whoever cares to listen, people are creating their own transnational tribes. They are reclaiming culture from the tyranny of mass-media economics and national boundaries. In Lessig’s words, Internet users are overthrowing the “read only” culture that characterized the “weirdly totalitarian” communications of the twentieth century. In its place they are installing the “read/write” culture that invites everyone to be a creator, as well as a consumer and sharer, of culture.~{ Lawrence Lessig, “The Read-Write Society,” delivered at the Wizards of OS4 conference in Berlin, Germany, on September 5, 2006. Available at http://www.wizards-of-os.org/programm/panels/authorship_amp_culture/keynote_the_read_write_society/the_read_write_society.html. }~ A new online citizenry is arising, one that regards its socially negotiated rules and norms as at least as legitimate as those established by conventional law.
={Rosen, Jay}
Two profoundly incommensurate media systems are locked in a struggle for survival or supremacy, depending upon your perspective or, perhaps, mutual accommodation. For the moment, we live in a confusing interregnum — a transition that pits the dwindling power and often desperate strategies of Centralized Media against the callow, experimental vigor of Internet-based media. This much is clear, however: a world organized around centralized control, strict intellectual property rights, and hierarchies of credentialed experts is under siege. A radically different order of society based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing is ascendant. Or to put it more precisely, we are stumbling into a strange hybrid order that combines both worlds — mass media and online networks — on terms that have yet to be negotiated.
@@ -197,12 +197,12 @@ In the video world, too, the remix impulse has found expression in its own form
The key insight about many open-platform businesses is that they no longer look to copyright or patent law as tools to assert market control. Their goal is not to exclude others, but to amass large communities. Open businesses understand that exclusive property rights can stifle the value creation that comes with mass participation, and so they strive to find ways to “honor the commons” while making money in socially acceptable forms of advertising, subscriptions, or consulting services. The brave new economics of “peer production” is enabling forward-thinking businesses to use social collaboration among thousands, or even millions, of people to create social communities that are the foundation for significant profits. /{BusinessWeek}/ heralded this development in a major cover story in 2005, “The Power of Us,” and called sharing “the net’s next disruption.”~{ Robert D. Hof, “The Power of Us: Mass Collaboration on the Internet Is Shaking Up Business,” /{BusinessWeek}/, June 20, 2005, pp. 73–82. }~
-!{/{Science}/}! as a commons. The world of scientific research has long depended on open sharing and collaboration. But increasingly, copyrights, patents, and university rules are limiting the flow of scientific knowledge. The resulting gridlock of rights in knowledge is impeding new discoveries and innovation. Because of copyright restrictions and software incompatibilities, scientists studying genetics, proteins, and marine biology often cannot access databases containing vital research. Or they cannot easily share physical samples of lab samples. When the maker of Golden Rice, a vitamin-enhanced bioengineered rice, tried to distribute its seeds to millions of people in poor countries, it first had to get permissions from seventy patent holders and obtain six Material Transfer Agreements (which govern the sharing of biomedical research substances).~{ Interview with John Wilbanks, “Science Commons Makes Sharing Easier,” /{Open Access Now}/, December 20, 2004, available at http://www.biomedcen tral.com/openaccess/archive/?page=features&issue=23.}~
+!{/{Science}/}! as a commons. The world of scientific research has long depended on open sharing and collaboration. But increasingly, copyrights, patents, and university rules are limiting the flow of scientific knowledge. The resulting gridlock of rights in knowledge is impeding new discoveries and innovation. Because of copyright restrictions and software incompatibilities, scientists studying genetics, proteins, and marine biology often cannot access databases containing vital research. Or they cannot easily share physical samples of lab samples. When the maker of Golden Rice, a vitamin-enhanced bioengineered rice, tried to distribute its seeds to millions of people in poor countries, it first had to get permissions from seventy patent holders and obtain six Material Transfer Agreements (which govern the sharing of biomedical research substances).~{ Interview with John Wilbanks, “Science Commons Makes Sharing Easier,” /{Open Access Now}/, December 20, 2004, available at http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/archive/?page=features&issue=23. }~
={Wilbanks, John+1;Science Commons:CC Commons spinoff, and+1}
The problem of acquiring, organizing, and sharing scientific knowledge is becoming more acute, paradoxically enough, as more scientific disciplines become dependent on computers and the networked sharing of data. To help deal with some of these issues, the Creative Commons in 2005 launched a new project known as the Science Commons to try to redesign the information infrastructure for scientific research. The basic idea is to “break down barriers to sharing that are hindering innovation in the sciences,” says John Wilbanks, executive director of Science Commons. Working with the National Academy of Sciences and other research bodies, Wilbanks is collaborating with astronomers, archaeologists, microbiologists, and medical researchers to develop better ways to make vast scientific literatures more computer-friendly, and databases technically compatible, so that they can be searched, organized, and used more effectively.
-!{/{Open education and learning.}/}! A new class of knowledge commons is poised to join free and open-source software, the Creative Commons and Wikipedia as a coherent social movement. The new groundswell goes by the awkward name “Open Educational Resources,” or OER.~{ See, e.g., Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, “A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges and New Opportunities,” February 2007, available at http://www .oerderves.org/?p=23.}~ One of the earlier pioneers of the movement was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which has put virtually all of its course materials on the Web, for free, through its OpenCourseWare initiative. The practice has now spread to scores of colleges and universities around the world, and inspired a broader set of OER initiatives: digital repositories for articles, reports, and data; open-access scholarly journals that bypass expensive commercial publishers; and collaborative Web sites for developing teaching materials. There are wikis for students and scholars working together, sites to share multimedia presentations, and much more.
+!{/{Open education and learning.}/}! A new class of knowledge commons is poised to join free and open-source software, the Creative Commons and Wikipedia as a coherent social movement. The new groundswell goes by the awkward name “Open Educational Resources,” or OER.~{ See, e.g., Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, “A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges and New Opportunities,” February 2007, available at http://www.oerderves.org/?p=23. }~ One of the earlier pioneers of the movement was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which has put virtually all of its course materials on the Web, for free, through its OpenCourseWare initiative. The practice has now spread to scores of colleges and universities around the world, and inspired a broader set of OER initiatives: digital repositories for articles, reports, and data; open-access scholarly journals that bypass expensive commercial publishers; and collaborative Web sites for developing teaching materials. There are wikis for students and scholars working together, sites to share multimedia presentations, and much more.
={education:OER movement+1;pen Educational Resources (OER) movement+1;Wikipedia:social movement, as+1;Creative Commons (CC):social movement, as+1}
The OER movement has particular importance for people who want to learn but don’t have the money or resources — scholars in developing countries, students struggling to pay for their educations, people in remote or rural locations, people with specialized learning needs. OER is based on the proposition that it will not only be cheaper or perhaps free if teachers and students can share their materials through the Web, it will also enable more effective types of learning. So the OER movement is dedicated to making learning tools cheaper and more accessible. The revolutionary idea behind OER is to transform traditional education — teachers imparting information to passive students — into a more learnerdriven process facilitated by teachers. Self-directed, socially driven learning supplants formal, hierarchical modes of teaching.
@@ -326,13 +326,13 @@ _1 Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor;
_1 Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (Access to the source code is a precondition for this.)
={authorship:community access}
-Stallman has become an evangelist for the idea of freedom embodied in all the GNU programs. He refuses to use any software programs that are not “free,” and he has refused to allow his appearances to be Webcast if the software being used was not “free.” “If I am to be an honest advocate for free software,” said Stallman, “I can hardly go around giving speeches, then put pressure on people to use nonfree software. I’d be undermining my own cause. And if I don’t show that I take my principles seriously, I can’t expect anybody else to take them seriously.”~{ Stallman at MIT forum, “Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks,” April 19, 2001, available at http://media-in-transition.mit .edu/forums/copyright/transcript.html. }~
+Stallman has become an evangelist for the idea of freedom embodied in all the GNU programs. He refuses to use any software programs that are not “free,” and he has refused to allow his appearances to be Webcast if the software being used was not “free.” “If I am to be an honest advocate for free software,” said Stallman, “I can hardly go around giving speeches, then put pressure on people to use nonfree software. I’d be undermining my own cause. And if I don’t show that I take my principles seriously, I can’t expect anybody else to take them seriously.”~{ Stallman at MIT forum, “Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks,” April 19, 2001, available at http://media-in-transition.mit.edu/forums/copyright/transcript.html. }~
={Stallman, Richard:free software, and+2}
Stallman has no problems with people making money off software. He just wants to guarantee that a person can legally use, copy, modify, and distribute the source code. There is thus an important distinction between software that is commercial (possibly free) and software that is proprietary (never free). Stallman tries to explain the distinction in a catchphrase that has become something of a mantra in free software circles: /{“free as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer.’”}/ The point is that code must be freely accessible, not that it should be free of charge. (This is why “freeware” is not the same as free software. Freeware may be free of charge, but it does not necessarily make its source code accessible.)
={freeware vs. free software;software:proprietary|source code for}
-Eben Moglen, a professor of law at Columbia University and general counsel for the Free Software Foundation since 1994, calls the provisions of the GPL “elegant and simple. They respond to the proposition that when the marginal cost of goods is zero, any nonzero cost of barbed wire is too high. That’s a fact about the twentyfirst century, and everybody had better get used to it. Yet as you know, there are enormous cultural enterprises profoundly committed to the proposition that more and more barbed wire is necessary. And their basic strategy is to get that barbed wire paid for by the public everywhere.”~{ Eben Moglen, “Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture,” June 29, 2003, available at http://emoglen.law/columbia.edu/publi cations/maine-speech.html. }~
+Eben Moglen, a professor of law at Columbia University and general counsel for the Free Software Foundation since 1994, calls the provisions of the GPL “elegant and simple. They respond to the proposition that when the marginal cost of goods is zero, any nonzero cost of barbed wire is too high. That’s a fact about the twentyfirst century, and everybody had better get used to it. Yet as you know, there are enormous cultural enterprises profoundly committed to the proposition that more and more barbed wire is necessary. And their basic strategy is to get that barbed wire paid for by the public everywhere.”~{ Eben Moglen, “Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture,” June 29, 2003, available at http://emoglen.law/columbia.edu/publications/maine-speech.html. }~
={Moglen, Eben;Free Software Foundation}
The GPL truly was something new under the sun: a legally enforceable tool to vouchsafe a commons of software code. The license is based on copyright law yet it cleverly turns copyright law against itself, limiting its reach and carving out a legally protected zone to build and protect the public domain. In the larger scheme of things, the GPL was an outgrowth of the “gift economy” ethic that has governed academic life for centuries and computer science for decades. What made the GPL different from these (abridgeable) social norms was its legal enforceability.
@@ -355,7 +355,7 @@ The Linux kernel, when combined with the GNU programs developed by Stallman and
The real innovation of Linux, writes Eric S. Raymond, a leading analyst of the technology, was “not technical, but sociological”:
={Linux:sociological effect of+1}
-_1 Linux was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet. Quality was maintained not by rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from hundreds of users within days, creating a sort of rapid Darwinian selection on the mutations introduced by developers. To the amazement of almost everyone, this worked quite well.~{ Eric S. Raymond, “A Brief History of Hackerdom,” http://www.catb.org/ ~est/writings/cathedral-bazaar/hacker-history/ar01s06.html.}~
+_1 Linux was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet. Quality was maintained not by rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from hundreds of users within days, creating a sort of rapid Darwinian selection on the mutations introduced by developers. To the amazement of almost everyone, this worked quite well.~{ Eric S. Raymond, “A Brief History of Hackerdom,” http://www.catb.org/~est/writings/cathedral-bazaar/hacker-history/ar01s06.html. }~
The Free Software Foundation had a nominal project to develop a kernel, but it was not progressing very quickly. The Linux kernel, while primitive, “was running and ready for experimentation,” writes Steven Weber in his book /{The Success of Open Source}/: “Its crude functionality was interesting enough to make people believe that it could, with work, evolve into something important. That promise was critical and drove the broader development process from early on.”~{ Steven Weber, /{The Success of Open Source}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 100. }~
={Weber, Steven:The Success of Open Source;Free Software Foundation}
@@ -395,7 +395,7 @@ The philosophical rift between free software and open-source software amounts to
={FOSS/FLOSS+3;free software:FOSS/FLOSS+3;Raymond, Eric S.+1;Linux:sociological effect of+1}
-_1 The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a selfcorrecting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. . . . The utility function Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers.~{ Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” available at http://www .catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html.}~
+_1 The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a selfcorrecting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. . . . The utility function Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers.~{ Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” available at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html. }~
It turns out that an accessible collaborative process, FOSS, can elicit passions and creativity that entrenched markets often cannot. In this respect, FOSS is more than a type of freely usable software; it reunites two vectors of human behavior that economists have long considered separate, and points to the need for new, more integrated theories of economic and social behavior.
={free software:economic effects of+1}
@@ -406,7 +406,7 @@ FOSS represents a new breed of “social production,” one that draws upon soci
Red Hat, a company founded in 1993 by Robert Young, was the first to recognize the potential of selling a custom version (or “distribution”) of GNU/Linux as a branded product, along with technical support. A few years later, IBM became one of the first large corporations to recognize the social realities of GNU/Linux and its larger strategic and competitive implications in the networked environment. In 1998 IBM presciently saw that the new software development ecosystem was becoming far too variegated and robust for any single company to dominate. It understood that its proprietary mainframe software could not dominate the burgeoning, diversified Internet-driven marketplace, and so the company adopted the open-source Apache Web server program in its new line of WebSphere business software.
={Red Hat;Young, Robert;GNU/Linux:IBM, and+1|Red Hat, and;IBM:GNU/Linux, and+1;Apache Web server;open source software:functions of+2}
-It was a daring move that began to bring the corporate and open-source worlds closer together. Two years later, in 2000, IBM announced that it would spend $1 billion to help develop GNU/Linux for its customer base. IBM shrewdly realized that its customers wanted to slash costs, overcome system incompatibilities, and avoid expensive technology “lock-ins” to single vendors. GNU/Linux filled this need well. IBM also realized that GNU/Linux could help it compete against Microsoft. By assigning its property rights to the commons, IBM could eliminate expensive property rights litigation, entice other companies to help it improve the code (they could be confident that IBM could not take the code private), and unleash a worldwide torrent of creative energy focused on GNU/Linux. Way ahead of the curve, IBM decided to reposition itself for the emerging networked marketplace by making money through tech service and support, rather than through proprietary software alone.~{ Andrew Leonard, “How Big Blue Fell for Linux,” Salon.com, September 12, 2000, available at http://www.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/09/12/chapter_7_ part_one.print.html. The competitive logic behind IBM’s moves are explored in Pamela Samuelson, “IBM’s Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source,” /{Communications of the ACM}/ 49, no. 21 (October 2006), and Robert P. Merges, “A New Dynamism in the Public Domain,” /{University of Chicago Law Review}/ 71, no. 183 (Winter 2004). }~
+It was a daring move that began to bring the corporate and open-source worlds closer together. Two years later, in 2000, IBM announced that it would spend $1 billion to help develop GNU/Linux for its customer base. IBM shrewdly realized that its customers wanted to slash costs, overcome system incompatibilities, and avoid expensive technology “lock-ins” to single vendors. GNU/Linux filled this need well. IBM also realized that GNU/Linux could help it compete against Microsoft. By assigning its property rights to the commons, IBM could eliminate expensive property rights litigation, entice other companies to help it improve the code (they could be confident that IBM could not take the code private), and unleash a worldwide torrent of creative energy focused on GNU/Linux. Way ahead of the curve, IBM decided to reposition itself for the emerging networked marketplace by making money through tech service and support, rather than through proprietary software alone.~{ Andrew Leonard, “How Big Blue Fell for Linux,” Salon.com, September 12, 2000, available at http://www.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/09/12/chapter_7_part_one.print.html. The competitive logic behind IBM’s moves are explored in Pamela Samuelson, “IBM’s Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source,” /{Communications of the ACM}/ 49, no. 21 (October 2006), and Robert P. Merges, “A New Dynamism in the Public Domain,” /{University of Chicago Law Review}/ 71, no. 183 (Winter 2004). }~
={Microsoft:competition against}
It was not long before other large tech companies realized the benefits of going open source. Amazon and eBay both saw that they could not affordably expand their large computer infrastructures without converting to GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is now used in everything from Motorola cell phones to NASA supercomputers to laptop computers. In 2005, /{BusinessWeek}/ magazine wrote, “Linux may bring about the greatest power shift in the computer industry since the birth of the PC, because it lets companies replace expensive proprietary systems with cheap commodity servers.”~{ Steve Hamm, “Linux Inc.,” /{BusinessWeek}/, January 31, 2005. }~ As many as one-third of the programmers working on open-source projects are corporate employees, according to a 2002 survey.~{ Cited by Elliot Maxwell in “Open Standards Open Source and Open Innovation,” note 80, Berlecon Research, /{Free/Libre Open Source Software: Survey and Study — Firms’ Open Source Activities: Motivations and Policy Implications}/, FLOSS Final Report, Part 2, at www.berlecon.de/studien/downloads/200207FLOSS _Activities.pdf. }~
@@ -418,7 +418,7 @@ With faster computing speeds and cost savings of 50 percent or more on hardware
But how does open source work without a conventional market apparatus? The past few years have seen a proliferation of sociological and economic theories about how open-source communities create value. One formulation, by Rishab Ghosh, compares free software development to a “cooking pot,” in which you can give a little to the pot yet take a lot — with no one else being the poorer. “Value” is not measured economically at the point of transaction, as in a market, but in the nonmonetary /{flow}/ of value that a project elicits (via volunteers) and generates (through shared software).~{ Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, “Cooking Pot Markets and Balanced Value Flows,” in Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, ed., /{CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy}/ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 153–68. }~ Another important formulation, which we will revisit later, comes from Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, who has written that the Internet makes it cheap and easy to access expertise anywhere on the network, rendering conventional forms of corporate organization costly and cumbersome for many functions. Communities based on social trust and reciprocity are capable of mobilizing creativity and commitment in ways that market incentives often cannot — and this can have profound economic implications.~{ See, e.g., Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” /{Yale Law Journal}/ 112, no. 369 (2002); Benkler, “ ‘Sharing Nicely’: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production,” Yale Law Journal 114, no. 273 (2004).}~ Benkler’s analysis helps explain how a global corps of volunteers could create an operating system that, in many respects, outperforms software created by a well-paid army of Microsoft employees.
={Benkler, Yochai:open networks, on;FOSS/FLOSS;free software:FOSS/FLOSS;Ghosh, Rishab;open source software:economic implications of|uses of term+4}
-A funny thing happened to free and open-source software as it matured. It became hip. It acquired a cultural cachet that extends well beyond the cloistered precincts of computing. “Open source” has become a universal signifier for any activity that is participatory, collaborative, democratic, and accountable. Innovators within filmmaking, politics, education, biological research, and drug development, among other fields, have embraced the term to describe their own attempts to transform hidebound, hierarchical systems into open, accessible, and distributed meritocracies. Open source has become so much of a cultural meme — a self-replicating symbol and idea — that when the Bikram yoga franchise sought to shut down unlicensed uses of its yoga techniques, dissident yoga teachers organized themselves into a nonprofit that they called Open Source Yoga Unity. To tweak the supremacy of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, culture jammers even developed nonproprietary recipes for a cola drink and beer called “open source cola” and “open source beer.”~{ Open Source Yoga Unity, http://www.yogaunity.org; open-source cola, http://alfredo.octavio.net/soft_drink_formula.pdf; open-source beer, Vores OI (Danish for “Our Beer”), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vores_%C3%981 . See also http://freebeer.org/blog and http://www.project21.ch/freebeer. }~
+A funny thing happened to free and open-source software as it matured. It became hip. It acquired a cultural cachet that extends well beyond the cloistered precincts of computing. “Open source” has become a universal signifier for any activity that is participatory, collaborative, democratic, and accountable. Innovators within filmmaking, politics, education, biological research, and drug development, among other fields, have embraced the term to describe their own attempts to transform hidebound, hierarchical systems into open, accessible, and distributed meritocracies. Open source has become so much of a cultural meme — a self-replicating symbol and idea — that when the Bikram yoga franchise sought to shut down unlicensed uses of its yoga techniques, dissident yoga teachers organized themselves into a nonprofit that they called Open Source Yoga Unity. To tweak the supremacy of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, culture jammers even developed nonproprietary recipes for a cola drink and beer called “open source cola” and “open source beer.”~{ Open Source Yoga Unity, http://www.yogaunity.org; open-source cola, http://alfredo.octavio.net/soft_drink_formula.pdf; open-source beer, Vores OI (Danish for “Our Beer”), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vores_%C3%981. See also http://freebeer.org/blog and http://www.project21.ch/freebeer. }~
={free software:uses of term+5}
Stallman’s radical acts of dissent in the 1980s, regarded with bemusement and incredulity at the time, have become, twenty-five years later, a widely embraced ideal. Small-/{d}/ democrats everywhere invoke open source to lambaste closed and corrupt political systems and to express their aspirations for political transcendence. People invoke open source to express a vision of life free from overcommercialization and corporate manipulation. The term enables one to champion bracing democratic ideals without seeming naïve or flaky because, after all, free software is solid stuff. Moreover, despite its image as the software of choice for granola-loving hippies, free and open-source software is entirely compatible with the commercial marketplace. How suspect can open source be when it has been embraced by the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems?
@@ -441,7 +441,7 @@ Fortunately, a small but fierce and keenly intelligent corps of progressive copy
For decades, the public domain was regarded as something of a wasteland, a place where old books, faded posters, loopy music from the early twentieth century, and boring government reports go to die. It was a dump on the outskirts of respectable culture. If anything in the public domain had any value, someone would sell it for money. Or so goes the customary conception of the public domain.
-Jack Valenti, the longtime head of the Motion Picture Association of America, once put it this way: “A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. Who, then, will invest the funds to renovate and nourish its future life when no one owns it?”~{ Jack Valenti, “A Plea for Keeping Alive the U.S. Film Industry’s Competitive Energy, ” testimony on behalf of the Motion Picture Association of America to extend the term of copyright protection, Senate Judiciary Committee, September 20, 1995, at http://instructors.cwrl.utexas.edu/~martin/Valenti .pdf. }~ (Valenti was arguing that longer copyright terms would give film studios the incentive to digitize old celluloid films that would otherwise enter the public domain and physically disintegrate.)
+Jack Valenti, the longtime head of the Motion Picture Association of America, once put it this way: “A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. Who, then, will invest the funds to renovate and nourish its future life when no one owns it?”~{ Jack Valenti, “A Plea for Keeping Alive the U.S. Film Industry’s Competitive Energy, ” testimony on behalf of the Motion Picture Association of America to extend the term of copyright protection, Senate Judiciary Committee, September 20, 1995, at http://instructors.cwrl.utexas.edu/~martin/Valenti.pdf. }~ (Valenti was arguing that longer copyright terms would give film studios the incentive to digitize old celluloid films that would otherwise enter the public domain and physically disintegrate.)
={Valenti, Jack}
One of the great, unexplained mysteries of copyright law is how a raffish beggar grew up to be King Midas. How did a virtually ignored realm of culture — little studied and undertheorized— become a subject of intense scholarly interest and great practical importance to commoners and businesses alike? How did the actual value of the public domain become known? The idea that the public domain might be valuable in its own right — and therefore be worth protecting — was a fringe idea in the 1990s and before. So how did a transformation of legal and cultural meaning occur?
@@ -505,7 +505,7 @@ Yet rather than negotiate a new copyright bargain to take account of the public
Most content industries, then and now, do not see any “imbalance” in copyright law; they prefer to talk in different terms entirely. They liken copyrighted works to personal property or real estate, as in “and you wouldn’t steal a CD or use my house without permission, would you?” A copyrighted work is analogized to a finite physical object, But the essential point about works in the digital age is that they can’t be “used up” in the same way that physical objects can. They are “nondepletable” and “nonrival,” as economists put it. A digital work can be reproduced and shared for virtually nothing, without depriving another person of it.
={property rights:copyright law, and+1;copyright law:property rights, and}
-Nonetheless, a new narrative was being launched — copyrighted works as property. The idea of copyright law reflecting a policy bargain between the public and authors/corporations was being supplanted by a new story that casts copyright as property that is nearly absolute in scope and virtually perpetual in term. In hindsight, for those scholars who cared enough to see, a disquieting number of federal court cases were strengthening the hand of copyright holders at the expense of the public. James Boyle, in a much-cited essay, called this the “second enclosure movement” — the first one, of course, being the English enclosure movement of common lands in medieval times and into the nineteenth century.~{ James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain,” /{Law and Contemporary Problems}/ 66 (Winter–Spring 2003), pp. 33–74, at http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?66+Law+&+Contemp.+ Probs.+ 33+ (WinterSpring+2003). }~
+Nonetheless, a new narrative was being launched — copyrighted works as property. The idea of copyright law reflecting a policy bargain between the public and authors/corporations was being supplanted by a new story that casts copyright as property that is nearly absolute in scope and virtually perpetual in term. In hindsight, for those scholars who cared enough to see, a disquieting number of federal court cases were strengthening the hand of copyright holders at the expense of the public. James Boyle, in a much-cited essay, called this the “second enclosure movement” — the first one, of course, being the English enclosure movement of common lands in medieval times and into the nineteenth century.~{ James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain,” /{Law and Contemporary Problems}/ 66 (Winter–Spring 2003), pp. 33–74, at http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?66+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+33+ (WinterSpring+2003). }~
={Boyle, James:enclosure movement, on;commons:enclosure of+1;enclosure movement+1;copyright law:enclosure movement, and+1}
Enclosure took many forms. Copyright scholar Peter Jaszi recalls, “Sometime in the mid-1980s, the professoriate started getting worried about software copyright.”~{ Interview with Peter Jaszi, October 17, 2007. }~ It feared that copyrights for software would squelch competition and prevent others from using existing code to innovate. This battle was lost, however. Several years later, the battle entered round two as copyright scholars and programmers sought to protect reverse-engineering as fair use. This time, they won.~{ /{Sega Enterprises v. Accolade}/, 977 F.2d 1510 (9th Cir. 1993). }~
@@ -553,7 +553,7 @@ Critics also argue that the DMCA gives large corporations a powerful legal tool
In her excellent history of the political run-up to the DMCA, Litman notes, “There is no overarching vision of the public interest animating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. None. Instead, what we have is what a variety of different private parties were able to extract from each other in the course of an incredibly complicated four-year multiparty negotiation.”~{ Litman, /{Digital Copyright}/, pp. 144–45. }~ The DMCA represents a new frontier of proprietarian control — the sanctioning of technological locks that can unilaterally override the copyright bargain. Companies asked themselves, Why rely on copyrights alone when technology can embed even stricter controls into the very design of products?
={Litman, Jessica}
-The year 1998 was an especially bad year for the public domain. Besides enacting the trademark dilution bill and DMCA, the Walt Disney Company and other large media corporations succeeded in their six-year campaign to enact the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.~{ See Wikipedia entry for the Copyright Term Extension Act, at http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act. See also /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), F. 3d 849 (2001). }~ The legislation, named after the late House legislator and former husband of the singer Cher, retroactively extended the terms of existing copyrights by twenty years. As we will see in chapter 3, this law became the improbable catalyst for a new commons movement.
+The year 1998 was an especially bad year for the public domain. Besides enacting the trademark dilution bill and DMCA, the Walt Disney Company and other large media corporations succeeded in their six-year campaign to enact the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.~{ See Wikipedia entry for the Copyright Term Extension Act, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act. See also /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), F. 3d 849 (2001). }~ The legislation, named after the late House legislator and former husband of the singer Cher, retroactively extended the terms of existing copyrights by twenty years. As we will see in chapter 3, this law became the improbable catalyst for a new commons movement.
={trademarks:dilution of;Walt Disney Company;Copyright Term Extension Act}
2~ Confronting the Proprietarian Juggernaut
@@ -574,7 +574,7 @@ A number of activist voices were also coming forward at this time to challenge t
The organization was oriented to hackers and cyberlibertarians, who increasingly realized that they needed an organized presence to defend citizen freedoms in cyberspace. (Barlow adapted the term /{cyberspace}/ from science-fiction writer William Gibson in 1990 and applied it to the then-unnamed cultural life on the Internet.) Initially, the EFF was concerned with hacker freedom, individual privacy, and Internet censorship. It later went through some growing pains as it moved offices, changed directors, and sought to develop a strategic focus for its advocacy and litigation. In more recent years, EFF, now based in San Francisco, has become the leading litigator of copyright, trademark, and Internet free expression issues. It also has more than ten thousand members and spirited outreach programs to the press and public.
={Gibson, William;cyberspace:use of term}
-John Perry Barlow was an important visionary and populizer of the time. His March 1994 article “The Economy of Ideas” is one of the most prophetic yet accessible accounts of how the Internet was changing the economics of information. He astutely realized that information is not a “product” like most physical property, but rather a social experience or form of life unto itself. “Information is a verb, not a noun,” he wrote. “Freed of its containers, information obviously is not a thing. In fact, it is something that happens in the field of interaction between minds or objects or other pieces of information. . . . Sharks are said to die of suffocation if they stop swimming, and the same is nearly true of information.”~{22. John Perry Barlow, “The Economy of Ideas,” /{Wired}/, March 1994, at http:// www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas.html.}~
+John Perry Barlow was an important visionary and populizer of the time. His March 1994 article “The Economy of Ideas” is one of the most prophetic yet accessible accounts of how the Internet was changing the economics of information. He astutely realized that information is not a “product” like most physical property, but rather a social experience or form of life unto itself. “Information is a verb, not a noun,” he wrote. “Freed of its containers, information obviously is not a thing. In fact, it is something that happens in the field of interaction between minds or objects or other pieces of information. . . . Sharks are said to die of suffocation if they stop swimming, and the same is nearly true of information.”~{22. John Perry Barlow, “The Economy of Ideas,” /{Wired}/, March 1994, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas.html. }~
Instead of the sober polemics of law professors, Barlow — a retired Wyoming cattle rancher who improbably doubled as a tech intellectual and rock hipster — spiced his analysis of information with colorful metaphors and poetic aphorisms. Comparing information to DNA helices, Barlow wrote, “Information replicates into the cracks of possibility, always seeking new opportunities for /{Lebensraum}/.” Digital information, he said, “is a continuing process more like the metaphorphosing tales of prehistory than anything that will fit in shrink-wrap.”
@@ -640,7 +640,7 @@ As Litman unpacked the realities of “authorship,” she showed how the idea of
English professor Martha Woodmansee and law professor Peter Jaszi helped expose many of the half-truths about “authorship” and “originality.” Their 1994 anthology of essays, /{The Construction of Authorship}/, showed how social context is an indispensable element of “authorship,” one that copyright law essentially ignores.~{ Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, eds., /{The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature}/ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). }~ Thus, even though indigenous cultures collectively create stories, music, and designs, and folk cultures generate works in a collaborative fashion, copyright law simply does not recognize such acts of collective authorship. And so they go unprotected. They are vulnerable to private appropriation and enclosure, much as Stallman’s hacker community at MIT saw its commons of code destroyed by enclosure.
={Jaszi, Peter;Woodmansee, Martha;commons:enclosure of;enclosure movement}
-Before the Internet, the collaborative dimensions of creativity were hardly given much thought. An “author” was self-evidently an individual endowed with unusual creative skills. As the World Wide Web and digital technologies have proliferated, however, copyright’s traditional notions of “authorship” and “originality” have come to seem terribly crude and limited. The individual creator still matters and deserves protection, of course. But when dozens of people contribute to a single entry of Wikipedia, or thousands contribute to an open-source software program, how then shall we determine who is the “author”?~{ Henry Miller writes: “We carry within us so many entities, so many voices, that rare indeed is the man who can say he speaks with his own voice. In the final analysis, is that iota of uniqueness which we boast of as ‘ours’ really ours? Whatever real or unique contribution we make stems from the same inscrutable source whence everything derives. We contribute nothing but our understanding, which is a way of saying — our acceptance.” Miller, /{The Books in My Life}/ (New York: New Directions), p. 198. }~ By the lights of copyright law, how shall the value of the public domain, reconstituted as a commons, be assessed?~{ Rufus Pollock, “The Value of the Public Domain,” report for Institute for Public Policy Research, London, July 2006, at http://www.rufuspollock.org/ economics/papers/value_of_public_domain.ippr.pdf. }~
+Before the Internet, the collaborative dimensions of creativity were hardly given much thought. An “author” was self-evidently an individual endowed with unusual creative skills. As the World Wide Web and digital technologies have proliferated, however, copyright’s traditional notions of “authorship” and “originality” have come to seem terribly crude and limited. The individual creator still matters and deserves protection, of course. But when dozens of people contribute to a single entry of Wikipedia, or thousands contribute to an open-source software program, how then shall we determine who is the “author”?~{ Henry Miller writes: “We carry within us so many entities, so many voices, that rare indeed is the man who can say he speaks with his own voice. In the final analysis, is that iota of uniqueness which we boast of as ‘ours’ really ours? Whatever real or unique contribution we make stems from the same inscrutable source whence everything derives. We contribute nothing but our understanding, which is a way of saying — our acceptance.” Miller, /{The Books in My Life}/ (New York: New Directions), p. 198. }~ By the lights of copyright law, how shall the value of the public domain, reconstituted as a commons, be assessed?~{ Rufus Pollock, “The Value of the Public Domain,” report for Institute for Public Policy Research, London, July 2006, at http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/value_of_public_domain.ippr.pdf. }~
={World Wide Web:collective authorship, and;creativity:collaborative}
The Bellagio Declaration, the outgrowth of a conference organized by Woodmansee and Jaszi in 1993, called attention to the sweeping deficiencies of copyright law as applied. One key point stated, “In general, systems built around the author paradigm tend to obscure or undervalue the importance of the ‘public domain,’ the intellectual and cultural commons from which future works will be constructed. Each intellectual property right, in effect, fences off some portion of the public domain, making it unavailable to future creators.”~{ See James Boyle, /{Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society}/ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 192. }~
@@ -659,7 +659,7 @@ But as the millennium drew near, the tech-minded legal community — and law-min
That task was made easier by the intensifying cultural squeeze. The proprietarian lockdown was starting to annoy and anger people in their everyday use of music, software, DVDs, and the Web. And the property claims were growing more extreme. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers had demanded that Girl Scout camps pay a public performance license for singing around the campfire. Ralph Lauren challenged the U.S. Polo Association for ownership of the word /{polo}/. McDonald’s succeeded in controlling the Scottish prefix Mc as applied to restaurants and motels, such as “McVegan” and “McSleep.”~{ These examples can be found in Bollier, /{Brand Name Bullies}/. }~
={Lauren, Ralph}
-The mounting sense of frustration fueled a series of conferences between 1999 and 2001 that helped crystallize the disparate energies of legal scholarship into something resembling an intellectual movement. “A number of us [legal scholars] were still doing our own thing, but we were beginning to get a sense of something,” recalls Yochai Benkler, “It was no longer Becky Eisenberg working on DNA sequences and Pamela Samuelson on computer programs and Jamie Boyle on ‘environmentalism for the ’Net’ and me working on spectrum on First Amendment issues,” said Benkler. “There was a sense of movement.”~{ Interview with Yochai Benkler, February 7, 2006.}~ (“Environmentalism for the ’Net” was an influential piece that Boyle wrote in 1998, calling for the equivalent of an environmental movement to protect the openness and freedom of the Internet.)~{ James Boyle, “A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net,” /{Duke Law Journal}/ 47, no. 1 (October 1997), pp. 87–116, at http://www .law.duke.edu/boylesite/Intprop.htm. }~
+The mounting sense of frustration fueled a series of conferences between 1999 and 2001 that helped crystallize the disparate energies of legal scholarship into something resembling an intellectual movement. “A number of us [legal scholars] were still doing our own thing, but we were beginning to get a sense of something,” recalls Yochai Benkler, “It was no longer Becky Eisenberg working on DNA sequences and Pamela Samuelson on computer programs and Jamie Boyle on ‘environmentalism for the ’Net’ and me working on spectrum on First Amendment issues,” said Benkler. “There was a sense of movement.”~{ Interview with Yochai Benkler, February 7, 2006.}~ (“Environmentalism for the ’Net” was an influential piece that Boyle wrote in 1998, calling for the equivalent of an environmental movement to protect the openness and freedom of the Internet.)~{ James Boyle, “A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net,” /{Duke Law Journal}/ 47, no. 1 (October 1997), pp. 87–116, at http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/Intprop.htm. }~
={Boyle, James+1;Benkler, Yochai+1;Eisenberg, Rebecca;Samuelson, Pamela}
“The place where things started to get even crisper,” said Benkler, “was a conference at Yale that Jamie Boyle organized in April 1999, which was already planned as a movement-building event.” That conference, Private Censorship/Perfect Choice, looked at the threats to free speech on the Web and how the public might resist. It took inspiration from John Perry Barlow’s 1996 manifesto “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” It is worth quoting at length from Barlow’s lyrical cri de coeur — first published in /{Wired}/ and widely cited — because it expresses the growing sense of thwarted idealism among Internet users, and a yearning for greater self-determination and self-governance among commoners. Barlow wrote:
@@ -698,7 +698,7 @@ In the course of his frequent travels, he had a particularly significant rendezv
Eldred was a book enthusiast and computer programmer who had reached the end of his rope. Three years earlier, in 1995, he had launched a simple but brilliant project: a free online archive of classic American literature. Using his PC and a server in his home in New Hampshire, Eldred posted the books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and dozens of other great authors whose works were in the public domain. Eldred figured it would be a great service to humanity to post the texts on the World Wide Web, which was just beginning to go mainstream.
-Eldred had previously worked for Apollo Computer and Hewlett-Packard and was experienced in many aspects of computers and software. In the late 1980s, in fact, he had developed a system that enabled users to post electronic text files and then browse and print them on demand. When the World Wide Web arrived, Eldred was understandably excited. “It seemed to me that there was a possibility of having a system for electronic books that was similar to what I had done before. I was interested in experimenting with this to see if it was possible.”~{ Interview with Eric Eldred, August 1, 2006; Daren Fonda, “Copyright Crusader,” /{Boston Globe Magazine}/, August 29, 1999, available at http://www .boston.com/globe/magazine/8-29/featurestory1.shtml; and Eric Eldred, “Battle of the Books: The Ebook vs. the Antibook,” November 15, 1998, at http://www.eldritchpress.org/battle.html. }~
+Eldred had previously worked for Apollo Computer and Hewlett-Packard and was experienced in many aspects of computers and software. In the late 1980s, in fact, he had developed a system that enabled users to post electronic text files and then browse and print them on demand. When the World Wide Web arrived, Eldred was understandably excited. “It seemed to me that there was a possibility of having a system for electronic books that was similar to what I had done before. I was interested in experimenting with this to see if it was possible.”~{ Interview with Eric Eldred, August 1, 2006; Daren Fonda, “Copyright Crusader,” /{Boston Globe Magazine}/, August 29, 1999, available at http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/8-29/featurestory1.shtml; and Eric Eldred, “Battle of the Books: The Ebook vs. the Antibook,” November 15, 1998, at http://www.eldritchpress.org/battle.html. }~
So Eldred set out to build his own archive of public-domain books: “I got books from the library or wherever, and I learned how to do copyright research and how to scan books, do OCR [opticalcharacter recognition] and mark them up as HTML [the programming language used on the Web],” he said. “I just wanted to make books more accessible to readers.”~{ Interview with Eric Eldred, August 1, 2006. }~
@@ -730,7 +730,7 @@ At a more basic level, the copyright term extension showed contempt for the very
The copyright term extension act privatized so many of the public domain books on the Eldritch Press Web site, and so offended Eldred’s sense of justice, that in November 1998 he decided to close his site in protest. The new law meant that he would not be able to add any works published since 1923 to his Web site until 2019. “I can no longer accomplish what I set out to do,” said Eldred.~{ Ibid. }~
={Eldred, Eric:public domain, and|Lessig, and+3;Lessig, Lawrence+3:Eldred, and+3}
-As luck had it, Larry Lessig was looking for an Everyman of the Internet. Lessig, then a thirty-seven-year-old professor at Harvard Law School, was looking for a suitable plaintiff for his envisioned constitutional test case. He had initially approached Michael S. Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free electronic books. At the time, the project had nearly six thousand public-domain books available online. (It now has twenty thousand books; about 3 million books are downloaded every month.) Hart was receptive to the case but had his own ideas about how the case should be argued. He wanted the legal complaint to include a stirring populist manifesto railing against rapacious copyright holders. Lessig demurred and went in search of another plaintiff.~{ Richard Poynder interview with Lawrence Lessig, “The Basement Interviews: Free Culture,” April 7, 2006, p. 26, available at http://poynder.blogspot.com/ 2006/03/basement-interviews.html. See also Steven Levy, “Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme Showdown,” /{Wired}/, October 2002, pp. 140–45, 154–56, available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/lessig.html. Project Gutenberg is at http://wwwgutenberg.org. }~
+As luck had it, Larry Lessig was looking for an Everyman of the Internet. Lessig, then a thirty-seven-year-old professor at Harvard Law School, was looking for a suitable plaintiff for his envisioned constitutional test case. He had initially approached Michael S. Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free electronic books. At the time, the project had nearly six thousand public-domain books available online. (It now has twenty thousand books; about 3 million books are downloaded every month.) Hart was receptive to the case but had his own ideas about how the case should be argued. He wanted the legal complaint to include a stirring populist manifesto railing against rapacious copyright holders. Lessig demurred and went in search of another plaintiff.~{ Richard Poynder interview with Lawrence Lessig, “The Basement Interviews: Free Culture,” April 7, 2006, p. 26, available at http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/03/basement-interviews.html. See also Steven Levy, “Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme Showdown,” /{Wired}/, October 2002, pp. 140–45, 154–56, available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/lessig.html. Project Gutenberg is at http://wwwgutenberg.org. }~
={Hart, Michael S.;Project Gutenberg}
After reading about Eldred’s protests in the /{Boston Globe}/, and meeting with him over coffee, Lessig asked Eldred if he would be willing to be the plaintiff in his envisioned case. Eldred readily agreed. As a conscientious objector and draft resister during the Vietnam War, he was ready to go to great lengths to fight the Sonny Bono Act. “Initially, I volunteered to violate the law if necessary and get arrested and go to jail,” Eldred said. “But Larry told me that was not necessary.” A good thing, because under the No Electronic Theft Act, passed in 1997, Eldred could be charged with a felony. “I could face jail, fines, seizure of my computer, termination of my Internet service without notice — and so all the e-books on the Web site could be instantly lost,” he said.
@@ -771,7 +771,7 @@ For Lessig, the LambdaMOO “rape” had an obvious resonance with Catherine Mac
To explore the issues further, Lessig developed one of the first courses on the law of cyberspace. He taught it in the spring semester of 1995 at Yale Law School, where he was a visiting professor, and later at the University of Chicago and Harvard law schools. During the Yale class, an exchange with a student, Andrew Shapiro, jarred his thinking in a new direction: “I was constantly thinking about the way that changing suppositions of constitutional eras had to be accounted for in the interpretation of the Constitution across time. Andrew made this point about how there’s an equivalent in the technical infrastructure [of the Internet] that you have to think about. And then I began to think about how there were norms and law and infrastructure — and then I eventually added markets into this — which combine to frame what policymaking is in any particular context.”~{ Ibid. }~
={Shapiro, Andrew}
-This line of analysis became a central theme of Lessig’s startling first book, /{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/, published in 1999.~{ Lessig, /{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/ (New York: Basic Books, 1999). }~ /{Code}/ took on widespread assumptions that the Internet would usher in a new libertarian, free-market utopia. Cyberlibertarian futurists such as Alvin Toffler, Esther Dyson, George Gilder, and John Gilmore had routinely invoked cyberspace as a revolutionary force that would render government, regulation, and social welfare programs obsolete and unleash the transformative power of free markets.~{ Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” Progress and Freedom Foundation, August 1994, available at http://www.pff .org/issues-pubs/futureinsights/fil.2magnacarta.html. }~ In the libertarian scenario, individual freedom can flourish only if government gets the hell out of the way and lets individuals create, consume, and interact as they see fit, without any paternalistic or tyrannical constraints. Prosperity can prevail and scarcity disappear only if meddling bureaucrats and politicians leave the citizens of the Internet to their own devices. As Louis Rossetto, the founder and publisher of /{Wired}/, bluntly put it: “The idea that we need to worry about anyone being ‘left out’ is entirely atavistic to me, a product of that old economics of scarcity and the 19th century social thinking that grew out of it.”~{ David Hudson, interview with Louis Rossetto, “What Kind of Libertarian,” /{Rewired}/ (Macmillan, 1997), p. 255. }~
+This line of analysis became a central theme of Lessig’s startling first book, /{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/, published in 1999.~{ Lessig, /{Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace}/ (New York: Basic Books, 1999). }~ /{Code}/ took on widespread assumptions that the Internet would usher in a new libertarian, free-market utopia. Cyberlibertarian futurists such as Alvin Toffler, Esther Dyson, George Gilder, and John Gilmore had routinely invoked cyberspace as a revolutionary force that would render government, regulation, and social welfare programs obsolete and unleash the transformative power of free markets.~{ Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” Progress and Freedom Foundation, August 1994, available at http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/futureinsights/fil.2magnacarta.html. }~ In the libertarian scenario, individual freedom can flourish only if government gets the hell out of the way and lets individuals create, consume, and interact as they see fit, without any paternalistic or tyrannical constraints. Prosperity can prevail and scarcity disappear only if meddling bureaucrats and politicians leave the citizens of the Internet to their own devices. As Louis Rossetto, the founder and publisher of /{Wired}/, bluntly put it: “The idea that we need to worry about anyone being ‘left out’ is entirely atavistic to me, a product of that old economics of scarcity and the 19th century social thinking that grew out of it.”~{ David Hudson, interview with Louis Rossetto, “What Kind of Libertarian,” /{Rewired}/ (Macmillan, 1997), p. 255. }~
={code:law, as+4;law:code as+4;Lessig, Lawrence:Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace+4;Dyson, Esther;Gilder, George;Gilmore, John;Rossetto, Louis;Toffler, Alvin;Internet:architecture of+2|freedom of+1;cyberspace: economic effects of}
Lessig was more wary. In /{Code}/, he constructed a sweeping theoretical framework to show how freedom on the Internet must be actively, deliberately constructed; it won’t simply happen on its own. Inspired by conversations with computer programmer Mitch Kapor, who declared that “architecture is politics” in 1991, Lessig’s book showed how software code was supplanting the regulatory powers previously enjoyed by sovereign nation-states and governments. The design of the Internet and software applications was becoming more influential than conventional sources of policymaking — Congress, the courts, federal agencies. /{Code is law}/, as Lessig famously put it.
@@ -799,7 +799,7 @@ Back at the Berkman Center, however, there were plenty of opportunities to influ
While nourished by the work of his academic colleagues, Lessig was determined to come up with ingenious ways to /{do something}/ about the distressing drift of copyright law. It was important to take the offensive. Notwithstanding the pessimism of /{Code}/, Lessig’s decidedly optimistic answer was to gin up a constitutional challenge to copyright law. Many legal experts and even sympathetic colleagues were skeptical. Peter Jaszi, a leading intellectual law professor at American University, told a reporter at the time, “It’s not so much that we thought it was a terrible idea but that it was just unprecedented. Congress has been extending copyright for 180 years, and this is the first time someone said it violated the Constitution.”~{ David Streitfeld, “The Cultural Anarchist vs. the Hollywood Police State,” /{Los Angeles Times Magazine}/, September 22, 2002, p. 32. }~ Others worried that an adverse ruling could set back the larger cause of copyright reform.
={Jaszi, Peter;Lessig, Lawrence:Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace;law:social change, and+3;copyright law:expansion of}
-In the spirit of the commons, Lessig and his Berkman Center colleagues decided that the very process for mounting the /{Eldred}/ lawsuit would be different: “Rather than the secret battles of lawyers going to war, we will argue this case in the open. This is a case about the commons; we will litigate it in the commons. Our arguments and strategy will be developed online, in a space called ‘openlaw.org.’ Key briefs will be drafted online, with participants given the opportunity to criticize the briefs and suggest other arguments. . . . Building on the model of open source software, we are working from the hypothesis that an open development process best harnesses the distributed resources of the Internet community. By using the Internet, we hope to enable the public interest to speak as loudly as the interests of corporations.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, “Commons Law,” June 24, 1999, posted on www.intellectu alcapital.com/issues/issue251/item5505.asp, and Open Law archive at http:// cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw. }~
+In the spirit of the commons, Lessig and his Berkman Center colleagues decided that the very process for mounting the /{Eldred}/ lawsuit would be different: “Rather than the secret battles of lawyers going to war, we will argue this case in the open. This is a case about the commons; we will litigate it in the commons. Our arguments and strategy will be developed online, in a space called ‘openlaw.org.’ Key briefs will be drafted online, with participants given the opportunity to criticize the briefs and suggest other arguments. . . . Building on the model of open source software, we are working from the hypothesis that an open development process best harnesses the distributed resources of the Internet community. By using the Internet, we hope to enable the public interest to speak as loudly as the interests of corporations.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, “Commons Law,” June 24, 1999, posted on www.intellectu alcapital.com/issues/issue251/item5505.asp, and Open Law archive at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw. }~
={Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft+28;Lessig, Lawrence:Eldred v. Reno, and+28|law in contemporary context, and+1}
Emulating the open-source development model was a nice touch, and perhaps useful; dozens of people around the world registered at the Openlaw site and posted suggestions. Some of the examples and legal critiques were used in developing the case, and the model was later used by lawyers in the so-called DeCSS case, in which a hacker broke the encryption of a DVD. But it turns out that open, distributed creativity has its limits in the baroque dance of litigation; it can’t work when secrecy and confidentiality are important, for example.
@@ -816,18 +816,18 @@ Normally, this would have been the end of the road for a case. Very few appeals
At this point, Lessig realized he needed the advice and support of some experienced Supreme Court litigators. He enlisted help from additional lawyers at Jones, Day; Alan Morrison of Public Citizen Litigation Group; Kathleen Sullivan, the dean of Stanford Law School; and Charles Fried, a former solicitor general under President Reagan. Professor Peter Jaszi and the students of his law clinic drafted an amicus brief.
={orrison, Alan;Fried, Charles;Jaszi, Peter;Sullivan, Kathleen}
-A key concern was how to frame the arguments. Attorney Don Ayer of Jones, Day repeatedly urged Lessig to stress the dramatic harm that the Bono Act was inflicting on free speech and free culture. But as Lessig later confessed, “I hate this view of the law. . . . I was not persuaded that we had to sell our case like soap.”~{ Lessig, “How I Lost the Big One,” /{Legal Affairs}/, March/April 2004, available at http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marap r04.msp. }~ Lessig was convinced that the only way /{Eldred}/ could prevail at the Supreme Court would be to win over the conservative justices with a matter of principle. To Lessig, the harm was obvious; what needed emphasis was how the Sonny Bono Act violated “originalist” principles of jurisprudence. (Originalist judges claim to interpret the Constitution based on its “original” meanings in 1791, which includes a belief that Congress has strictly enumerated powers, not broad legislative discretion.)
+A key concern was how to frame the arguments. Attorney Don Ayer of Jones, Day repeatedly urged Lessig to stress the dramatic harm that the Bono Act was inflicting on free speech and free culture. But as Lessig later confessed, “I hate this view of the law. . . . I was not persuaded that we had to sell our case like soap.”~{ Lessig, “How I Lost the Big One,” /{Legal Affairs}/, March/April 2004, available at http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp. }~ Lessig was convinced that the only way /{Eldred}/ could prevail at the Supreme Court would be to win over the conservative justices with a matter of principle. To Lessig, the harm was obvious; what needed emphasis was how the Sonny Bono Act violated “originalist” principles of jurisprudence. (Originalist judges claim to interpret the Constitution based on its “original” meanings in 1791, which includes a belief that Congress has strictly enumerated powers, not broad legislative discretion.)
={Ayer, Don;law:originalist principles of+2}
“We tried to make an argument that if you were an originalist— in the way these conservative judges said they were in many other cases — then you should look to the original values in the Copyright Clause,” said Lessig. “And we argued that if you did that then you had to conclude that Congress had wildly overstepped its constitutional authority, and so the law should be struck down.”~{ Lessig interview with Richard Poynder, April 7, 2006, p. 25. }~ Flaunting the harm caused by the copyright term extension struck Lessig as showy and gratuitous; he considered the harm more or less selfevident. In the aftermath of a public debate that Lessig once had with Jack Valenti, a questioner on Slashdot, a hacker Web site, suggested that Lessig would be more persuasive if he asserted “a clear conception of direct harm . . . than the secondary harm of the copyright holders getting a really sweet deal.” Lessig conceded that such a focus “has been a weakness of mine for a long time. In my way of looking at the world, the point is a matter of principle, not pragmatics. . . . There are many others who are better at this pragmatism stuff. To me, it just feels insulting.”~{ “Lawrence Lessig Answers Your Questions,” Slashdot.org, December 21, 2001, Question 1, “The question of harm,” posted by “caduguid,” with Lessig response, available at http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/21/155221. }~
={copyright law:expansion of;Copyright Clause, U.S. Constitution;Valenti, Jack}
-And so, despite warnings to the contrary, Lessig’s legal strategy relied on a call to uphold originalist principles. Having clerked for Justice Scalia and Judge Posner, Lessig felt that he understood the mind-set and sympathies of the conservative jurists. “If we get to the Supreme Court,” Lessig told Slashdot readers in December 2001, “I am certain that we will win. This is not a left/right issue. The conservatives on the Court will look at the framers’ Constitution— which requires that copyrights be granted for ‘limited times’ — and see that the current practice of Congress . . . makes a mockery of the framers’ plan. And the liberals will look at the effect of these never-ending copyrights on free speech, and conclude that Congress is not justified in this regulation of speech. The Supreme Court doesn’t give a hoot about Hollywood; they will follow the law.”~{ Lessig response to question 11, Slashdot.org, “Will the extension of copyright continue?” posed by “Artifice_Eternity,” available at http://interviews.slash dot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/21/155221. }~
+And so, despite warnings to the contrary, Lessig’s legal strategy relied on a call to uphold originalist principles. Having clerked for Justice Scalia and Judge Posner, Lessig felt that he understood the mind-set and sympathies of the conservative jurists. “If we get to the Supreme Court,” Lessig told Slashdot readers in December 2001, “I am certain that we will win. This is not a left/right issue. The conservatives on the Court will look at the framers’ Constitution— which requires that copyrights be granted for ‘limited times’ — and see that the current practice of Congress . . . makes a mockery of the framers’ plan. And the liberals will look at the effect of these never-ending copyrights on free speech, and conclude that Congress is not justified in this regulation of speech. The Supreme Court doesn’t give a hoot about Hollywood; they will follow the law.”~{ Lessig response to question 11, Slashdot.org, “Will the extension of copyright continue?” posed by “Artifice_Eternity,” available at http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/21/155221. }~
={Posner, Richard;Scalia, Antonin;Copyright Clause, U.S. Constitution;copyright law:expansion of+5;Copyright Term Extension Act+5}
Lessig took pride in the fact that thirty-eight amicus briefs were filed on behalf of /{Eldred}/. They included a wide range of authors, computer and consumer electronics companies, and organizations devoted to arts, culture, education, and journalism. Besides the usual suspects like the Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge, supporting briefs were filed by fifteen economists including Kenneth Arrow and Milton Friedman, Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum, and the Intel Corporation.
-At oral arguments, Lessig immediately confronted a skeptical bench. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor worried about overturning years of previous copyright term extensions. Justice William Rehnquist proposed. “You want the right to copy verbatim other people’s books, don’t you?” And when Justice Anthony Kennedy invited Lessig to expound upon the great harm that the law was inflicting on free speech and culture, Lessig declined the opportunity. He instead restated his core constitutional argument, that copyright terms cannot be perpetual. “This was a correct answer, but it wasn’t the right answer,” Lessig later confessed in a candid postmortem of the case. “The right answer was to say that there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of briefs had been written about it. Kennedy wanted to hear it. And here was where Don Ayer’s advice should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer was a swing and a miss.”~{ See http://www.supremecourtus.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/ 01-618.pdf. See also Lessig, “How I Lost the Big One,” and Linda Greenhouse, “Justices Hear Arguments in Challenge to Copyrights,” /{New York Times}/, October 10, 2002. A number of Supreme Court opinions in the /{Eldred}/ case can be found at the Openlaw archive at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/ eldredvreno. The /{Loyola Los Angeles Law Review}/ held a symposium on /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/, available at http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v36-issue1. }~ No justices spoke in defense of the Sonny Bono Act.
+At oral arguments, Lessig immediately confronted a skeptical bench. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor worried about overturning years of previous copyright term extensions. Justice William Rehnquist proposed. “You want the right to copy verbatim other people’s books, don’t you?” And when Justice Anthony Kennedy invited Lessig to expound upon the great harm that the law was inflicting on free speech and culture, Lessig declined the opportunity. He instead restated his core constitutional argument, that copyright terms cannot be perpetual. “This was a correct answer, but it wasn’t the right answer,” Lessig later confessed in a candid postmortem of the case. “The right answer was to say that there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of briefs had been written about it. Kennedy wanted to hear it. And here was where Don Ayer’s advice should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer was a swing and a miss.”~{ See http://www.supremecourtus.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/01-618.pdf. See also Lessig, “How I Lost the Big One,” and Linda Greenhouse, “Justices Hear Arguments in Challenge to Copyrights,” /{New York Times}/, October 10, 2002. A number of Supreme Court opinions in the /{Eldred}/ case can be found at the Openlaw archive at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvreno. The /{Loyola Los Angeles Law Review}/ held a symposium on /{Eldred v. Ashcroft}/, available at http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v36-issue1. }~ No justices spoke in defense of the Sonny Bono Act.
={Ayer, Don;Kennedy, Anthony;O’Connor, Sandra Day;Rehnquist, William}
Yet they had clear reservations about the Supreme Court’s authority to dictate the length of copyright terms.
@@ -841,7 +841,7 @@ Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens accepted Lessig’s arguments, and
In assessing the broad impact of the /{Eldred}/ ruling, copyright scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan cited law professor Shubha Ghosh’s observation that the /{Eldred}/ ruling had effectively “deconstitutionalized” copyright law. /{Eldred}/ pushed copyright law
={Ghosh, Shubha;Vaidhyanathan, Siva+1}
-_1 farther into the realm of policy and power battles and away from principles that have anchored the system for two centuries. That means public interest advocates and activists must take their battles to the public sphere and the halls of Congress. We can’t appeal to the Founders’ wishes or republican ideals. We will have to make pragmatic arguments in clear language about the effects of excessive copyright on research, teaching, art and journalism. And we will have to make naked mass power arguments with echoes of “we want our MP3” and “it takes an industry of billions to hold us back.”~{ Siva Vaidhyanathan, “After the Copyright Smackdown: What Next?” /{Salon}/, January 17, 2003, at http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/01/17/copy right.print.html. }~
+_1 farther into the realm of policy and power battles and away from principles that have anchored the system for two centuries. That means public interest advocates and activists must take their battles to the public sphere and the halls of Congress. We can’t appeal to the Founders’ wishes or republican ideals. We will have to make pragmatic arguments in clear language about the effects of excessive copyright on research, teaching, art and journalism. And we will have to make naked mass power arguments with echoes of “we want our MP3” and “it takes an industry of billions to hold us back.”~{ Siva Vaidhyanathan, “After the Copyright Smackdown: What Next?” /{Salon}/, January 17, 2003, at http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/01/17/copyright.print.html. }~
={copyright law:balance of public and private rights}
2~ A Movement Is Born
@@ -854,7 +854,7 @@ After four years of relentless work, Lessig was frustrated and dejected. “I ha
Yet Lessig had certainly been correct that /{Eldred}/ would not succeed unless it convinced the Court’s conservative majority. The fact that the originalist gambit failed was perhaps the strongest message of all: /{nothing}/ would convince this Court to rein in the excesses of copyright law.
-Even before the Supreme Court had delivered its ruling, Lessig admitted his misgivings about the power of law to solve copyright’s failings: “The more I’m in this battle, the less I believe that constitutional law on its own can solve the problem. If Americans can’t see the value of freedom without the help of lawyers, then we don’t deserve freedom.”~{ Lessig response to Question 11, “Cyberspace Amendment,” posed by “kzinti,” in Slashdot, available at http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/ 21/155221. }~ Yet mobilizing freedom-loving Americans to seek redress from Congress was also likely to be doomed. Hollywood film studios and record companies had showered some $16.6 million and $1.8 million, respectively, on federal candidates and parties in 1998. Legislators know who butters their bread, and the public was not an organized influence on this issue. No wonder a progressive copyright reform agenda was going nowhere.
+Even before the Supreme Court had delivered its ruling, Lessig admitted his misgivings about the power of law to solve copyright’s failings: “The more I’m in this battle, the less I believe that constitutional law on its own can solve the problem. If Americans can’t see the value of freedom without the help of lawyers, then we don’t deserve freedom.”~{ Lessig response to Question 11, “Cyberspace Amendment,” posed by “kzinti,” in Slashdot, available at http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/21/155221. }~ Yet mobilizing freedom-loving Americans to seek redress from Congress was also likely to be doomed. Hollywood film studios and record companies had showered some $16.6 million and $1.8 million, respectively, on federal candidates and parties in 1998. Legislators know who butters their bread, and the public was not an organized influence on this issue. No wonder a progressive copyright reform agenda was going nowhere.
={Copyright Term Extension Act+1;Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft:Supreme Court, and;law:limited power of;copyright law:expansion of+1}
Four years after the /{Eldred}/ ruling, Lessig had some second thoughts about the “Mickey Mouse” messaging strategy. Opponents of the copyright term extension, including Lessig, had often flaunted Mickey motifs in their dealings with the press and railed at the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.” Yet in 2006, Lessig lamented to one interviewer that “the case got framed as one about Mickey Mouse. Whereas the reality is, who gives a damn about Mickey Mouse? The really destructive feature of the Sonny Bono law is the way it locks up culture that has no continuing commercial value at all. It orphaned culture. So by focusing on Mickey Mouse, the Court thought this was an issue of whether you believed in property or not. If, however, we had focused people on all the culture that is being lost because it is locked up by copyright, we might have succeeded.”~{ Interview with Poynder, April 7, 2006, pp. 26–27. }~
@@ -862,7 +862,7 @@ Four years after the /{Eldred}/ ruling, Lessig had some second thoughts about th
The lasting impact of the /{Eldred}/ case, ironically, may have less to do with the law than with the cultural movement it engendered. The lawsuit provided a powerful platform for educating the American people about copyright law. A subject long regarded as arcane and complicated was now the subject of prominent articles in the /{New York Times}/, /{Salon}/, computer magazines, wire services, and countless other publications and Web sites. A cover story for the /{Los Angeles Times}/'s Sunday magazine explained how the case could “change the way Hollywood makes money — and the way we experience art.” /{Wired}/ magazine headlined its profile of Lessig “The Great Liberator.” Lessig himself barnstormed the country giving dozens of presentations to librarians, technologists, computer programmers, filmmakers, college students, and many others. Even Lessig’s adversary at the district court level, Arthur R. Miller, a Harvard Law School professor, agreed, “The case has sparked a public discussion that wasn’t happening before.”
={Miller, Arthur R.}
-Lessig’s orations often provoked the fervor of a revival meeting — and led to more than a few conversions. This may appear surprising because Lessig, with his receding hairline and wireframe glasses, strikes an unprepossessing pose. In the professorial tradition, he can sometimes be didactic and patronizing. But on the stage, Lessig is stylish, poised, and mesmerizing. His carefully crafted talks are intellectual but entertaining, sophisticated but plainspoken— and always simmering with moral passion. He typically uses a customized version of Keynote, a Macintosh-based program similar to PowerPoint, to punctuate his dramatic delivery with witty visuals and quick flashes of words. (Experts in professional presentations have dubbed this style the “Lessig Method,” and likened it to the Takahashi Method in Japan because slides often use a single word, short quote, or photo.)~{ Garr Reynolds’s blog on professional presentation design, “The ‘Lessig Method’ of Presentation,” October 5, 2005, available at http://presentationzen .blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/10/the_lessig_meth.html. }~
+Lessig’s orations often provoked the fervor of a revival meeting — and led to more than a few conversions. This may appear surprising because Lessig, with his receding hairline and wireframe glasses, strikes an unprepossessing pose. In the professorial tradition, he can sometimes be didactic and patronizing. But on the stage, Lessig is stylish, poised, and mesmerizing. His carefully crafted talks are intellectual but entertaining, sophisticated but plainspoken— and always simmering with moral passion. He typically uses a customized version of Keynote, a Macintosh-based program similar to PowerPoint, to punctuate his dramatic delivery with witty visuals and quick flashes of words. (Experts in professional presentations have dubbed this style the “Lessig Method,” and likened it to the Takahashi Method in Japan because slides often use a single word, short quote, or photo.)~{ Garr Reynolds’s blog on professional presentation design, “The ‘Lessig Method’ of Presentation,” October 5, 2005, available at http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/10/the_lessig_meth.html. }~
More than a sidebar, Lessig’s public speaking has been an important aspect of his leadership in building a commons movement. His talks have helped some fairly sequestered constituencies in technical fields — computer programming, library science, Internet policy, copyright law — understand the larger political and cultural significance of their work. The results have sometimes been galvanizing. As one veteran hacker told me in 2006, “There’s a whole connoisseurship of Lessig talks. He’s a little past his peak right now — but there was a period where, like when he gave the lecture at OSCON [a conference of open-source programmers], when he was done, they wanted to start a riot. People were literally milling around, looking for things to smash. He was saying to these people who worked on open source, ‘There’s a larger world context to your work. The government is doing things — and you can stop them!’ ”~{ Interview with Aaron Swartz, October 10, 2006. }~
={Lessig, Lawrence:public speaker, as}
@@ -916,7 +916,7 @@ Lessig told me that when he recognized Eldred’s Web site as a new type of soci
It helps to remember that in 1998 and the following years, the legality of sharing online works and downloading them was highly ambiguous. Prevailing legal discourse set forth a rather stark, dualistic world: either a work is copyrighted with “all rights reserved,” or a work is in the public domain, available to anyone without restriction. The mental categories of the time offered no room for a “constituency of the reasonable,” in Lessig’s words.
={copyright law:public domain vs.;public domain:copyright law, and}
-Copyright law made nominal provisions for a middle ground in the form of the fair use doctrine and the public domain. But Lessig realized that fair use was “just a terrible structure on which to build freedom. There are basically no bright lines; everything is a constant debate. Of course, we don’t want to erase or compromise or weaken [these doctrines] in any sense. But it’s very important to build an infrastructure that doesn’t depend upon four years of litigation.” Or as Lessig was wont to put it in his impassioned performances on the stump: “Fuck fair use.”~{ Robert S. Boynton, “Righting Copyright: Fair Use and Digital Environmentalism,” /{Bookforum}/, February/March 2005, available at http://www.robert boynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=1. }~
+Copyright law made nominal provisions for a middle ground in the form of the fair use doctrine and the public domain. But Lessig realized that fair use was “just a terrible structure on which to build freedom. There are basically no bright lines; everything is a constant debate. Of course, we don’t want to erase or compromise or weaken [these doctrines] in any sense. But it’s very important to build an infrastructure that doesn’t depend upon four years of litigation.” Or as Lessig was wont to put it in his impassioned performances on the stump: “Fuck fair use.”~{ Robert S. Boynton, “Righting Copyright: Fair Use and Digital Environmentalism,” /{Bookforum}/, February/March 2005, available at http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=1. }~
={copyright law:fair use doctrine, and+2;fair use doctrine:copyright law, and+2;Lessig, Lawrence:fair use, on+2}
This was a theatrical flourish, of course. Back in Palo Alto, Lessig in 2001 had launched the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School, which actively takes on lawsuits seeking to vindicate the public’s fair use rights, among other things. One notable case was against Stephen Joyce, the grandson of novelist James Joyce. As executor of the Joyce literary estate, Stephen Joyce steadfastly prevented dozens of scholars from quoting from the great writer’s archive of unpublished letters.~{ See, e.g., D. T. Max, “The Injustice Collector,” /{New Yorker}/, June 19, 2006, pp. 34ff. }~ (After losing a key court ruling in February 2007, the Joyce estate settled the case on terms favorable to a scholar who had been denied access to the Joyce papers.)
@@ -991,7 +991,7 @@ What ensued was a lengthy and irregular series of e-mail conversations and socia
A digital archive for donated and public-domain works had great appeal. Just as land trusts acted as trustees of donated plots of land, so the Copyright’s Commons (as Lessig proposed that it be named) would be a “conservancy” for film, books, music, and other works that were either in the public domain or donated. Six weeks after Abelson’s original suggestion, Lessig produced a “Proposal for an Intellectual Property Conservancy” for discussion purposes.~{ Lawrence Lessig, “Proposal for the Intellectual Property Conservancy,” e-mail to ipcommons group, November 12, 2000. }~ He now called the concept “an IP commons” — “the establishment of an intellectual property conservancy to facilitate the collection and distribution under a GPL-like license of all forms of intellectual property.” As elaborated by two Harvard Law School students, Chris Babbitt and Claire Prestel, “The conservancy will attempt to bridge the gap between authors, corporate copyright holders and public domain advocates by providing a repository of donated works which we believe will create a more perfect ‘market’ for intellectual property.”~{ Chris Babbitt and Claire Prestel, “Memorandum to Michael Carroll, Wilmer Cutler Pickering, ‘IP Conservancy,’ ” October 24, 2000. }~
={belson, Hal:copyright conservancy idea, and+2;Babbitt, Chris;Prestel, Claire;Copyright’s Commons+27;Creative Commons (CC):Copyright’s Commons, as+27;IP Commons+27;Lessig, Lawrence:Copyright’s Commons, and+27}
-Friendly critiques started arriving immediately. Stallman considered the proposal a “good idea overall,” but as usual he objected to the words, such as “intellectual property” and “copyright protection,” which he considered “propaganda for the other side.”~{ E-mail from Richard Stallman to Lessig, September 11, 2000. See also http:// www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html. Stallman suggested calling the project the “Copyright and Patent Conservancy.” }~ Abelson, a friend and colleague of Stallman’s at MIT, was not finicky about word choices, but he did believe that software donations should be directed to the Free Software Foundation, not to the envisioned project. FSF already existed, for one thing, but in addition, said Abelson, “It may be detrimental to have people initially associate this [new project] too closely with the FSF. . . . We need to craft a public position that will unify people. An FSF-style ‘let’s undo the effects of all those evil people licensing software’ is not what we want here.”~{ E-mail from Hal Abelson to Lessig, September 12, 2000. }~ Some people suggested attracting people to the conservancy by having “jewels” such as material from the estates of deceased artists. Another suggested hosting special licenses, such as the Open Audio License, a license issued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2001 that lets musicians authorize the copying and reuse of their songs so long as credit is given and derivative songs can be shared.
+Friendly critiques started arriving immediately. Stallman considered the proposal a “good idea overall,” but as usual he objected to the words, such as “intellectual property” and “copyright protection,” which he considered “propaganda for the other side.”~{ E-mail from Richard Stallman to Lessig, September 11, 2000. See also http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html. Stallman suggested calling the project the “Copyright and Patent Conservancy.” }~ Abelson, a friend and colleague of Stallman’s at MIT, was not finicky about word choices, but he did believe that software donations should be directed to the Free Software Foundation, not to the envisioned project. FSF already existed, for one thing, but in addition, said Abelson, “It may be detrimental to have people initially associate this [new project] too closely with the FSF. . . . We need to craft a public position that will unify people. An FSF-style ‘let’s undo the effects of all those evil people licensing software’ is not what we want here.”~{ E-mail from Hal Abelson to Lessig, September 12, 2000. }~ Some people suggested attracting people to the conservancy by having “jewels” such as material from the estates of deceased artists. Another suggested hosting special licenses, such as the Open Audio License, a license issued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2001 that lets musicians authorize the copying and reuse of their songs so long as credit is given and derivative songs can be shared.
={Stallman, Richard:Copyright’s Commons, and;Abelson, Hal:Free Software Foundation, and+1;Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF);Free Software Foundation}
The most difficult issue, said Abelson, was the economics of the project. The care and maintenance of donations, such as the master version of films, could be potentially huge expenses. Digitizing donated works could also be expensive. Finally, there were questions about the economic incentives to potential donors. Would people really wish to donate works that have significant cash value?
@@ -1042,7 +1042,7 @@ Viewpoints quickly diverged on how a commons ought to be structured and what met
For the next nine months, the group intensified its debate about how to build the envisioned conservancy. After law student Dotan Oliar sketched out possible “business models,” Saltzman persuaded a friend at McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, to provide a pro bono assessment.~{ Dotan Oliar, “Memo on Creative Commons — Towards Formulating a Business Plan,” March 19, 2001. }~ “The McKinsey folks were very skeptical and, I think, had a hard time fitting this into their [business] framework,” recalled one student at the meeting, Chris Babbitt. After the meeting, he was convinced that Creative Commons could not possibly host a content commons: “It would just be huge amounts of material, huge costs, and we didn’t have the money for that.” ~{ Interview with Chris Babbitt, September 14, 2006. }~
={Babbitt, Chris+1;McKinsey & Company;Oliar, Dotan}
-Feeling the need to force some concrete decisions, Saltzman and Lessig convened twenty-eight people for an all-day meeting in Hauser Hall at Harvard Law School, on May 11, 2001, to hash out plans. “What we’re trying to do here is /{brand the public domain}/,” Lessig said. A briefing book prepared by Chris Babbitt posed a pivotal question to the group: Should Creative Commons be structured as a centralized Web site or as an distributed, open-source licensing protocol that would allow content to be spread across cyberspace? The centralized model could be “an eBay for opensource IP” or a more niche-based commons for out-of-print books, film, or poetry. A mock Web site was actually prepared to illustrate the scenario. The home page read: “The member sites listed on the CommonExchange have been certified by Creative Commons to offer high-quality, non-infringing content on an unrestricted basis. Please feel free to use and pass these works along to others. We invite you to donate works of your own to help maintain the digital Commons.”~{ The mock-up can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/creativecom mons/site.htm. }~
+Feeling the need to force some concrete decisions, Saltzman and Lessig convened twenty-eight people for an all-day meeting in Hauser Hall at Harvard Law School, on May 11, 2001, to hash out plans. “What we’re trying to do here is /{brand the public domain}/,” Lessig said. A briefing book prepared by Chris Babbitt posed a pivotal question to the group: Should Creative Commons be structured as a centralized Web site or as an distributed, open-source licensing protocol that would allow content to be spread across cyberspace? The centralized model could be “an eBay for opensource IP” or a more niche-based commons for out-of-print books, film, or poetry. A mock Web site was actually prepared to illustrate the scenario. The home page read: “The member sites listed on the CommonExchange have been certified by Creative Commons to offer high-quality, non-infringing content on an unrestricted basis. Please feel free to use and pass these works along to others. We invite you to donate works of your own to help maintain the digital Commons.”~{ The mock-up can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/creativecommons/site.htm. }~
={public domain:branding of}
The distributed commons model would resemble the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the New York Stock Exchange — “a trusted matchmaker to facilitate the transaction of securing rights,” according to the briefing book. “Just as corporations or commodities producers must meet certain criteria before they are listed on the Exchange, we could condition ‘listing’ in the Commons on similar criteria, albeit reflecting open source rather than financial values.”~{ “Briefing Book for Creative Commons Inaugural Meeting,” May 7,2001, p.10. }~ The virtue of the distributed model was that it would shift costs, quality control, and digitization to users. Creative Commons would serve mostly as a credentialing service and facilitator. On the other hand, giving up control would be fraught with peril — and what if Creative Commons’ intentions were ignored?
@@ -1074,7 +1074,7 @@ A classical composer said he “loved the idea of a Nigerian high school chamber
In short, there was no stampede for starting a public-domain conservancy or a set of licenses. Some worried that the CC licenses would be a “case of innovation where’s there’s no current demand.” Another person pointed out, more hopefully, that it could be a case of “changing the market demand with a new model.”~{ Oren Bracha and Dotan Oliar, “Memo: May 7th Consensus Regarding the Creative Commons Project,” August 20, 2001, p. 3, note 9. }~
-The Lessig caucus was clearly struggling with how best to engage with the networked environment. Napster had demonstrated that, in the dawning Internet age, creativity would increasingly be born, distributed, and viewed on the Web; print and mass media would be secondary venues. For a society still deeply rooted in print and mass media, this was a difficult concept to grasp. But Michael Carroll, the Washington lawyer who had earlier vetted the conservancy’s liability issues, shrewdly saw network dynamics as a potentially powerful tool for building new types of digital commons. In 2001, he had noticed how a bit of Internet folk art had become an overnight sensation. Mike Collins, an amateur cartoonist from Elmira, New York, had posted the cartoon below on Taterbrains, a Web site.~{ http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/funnypictures/ig/100-Funny-Pictures/ Confusing-Florida-Ballot.htm. }~ The image suddenly rocketed throughout the cyberlandscape. Everyone was copying it and sharing it with friends.
+The Lessig caucus was clearly struggling with how best to engage with the networked environment. Napster had demonstrated that, in the dawning Internet age, creativity would increasingly be born, distributed, and viewed on the Web; print and mass media would be secondary venues. For a society still deeply rooted in print and mass media, this was a difficult concept to grasp. But Michael Carroll, the Washington lawyer who had earlier vetted the conservancy’s liability issues, shrewdly saw network dynamics as a potentially powerful tool for building new types of digital commons. In 2001, he had noticed how a bit of Internet folk art had become an overnight sensation. Mike Collins, an amateur cartoonist from Elmira, New York, had posted the cartoon below on Taterbrains, a Web site.~{ http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/funnypictures/ig/100-Funny-Pictures/Confusing-Florida-Ballot.htm. }~ The image suddenly rocketed throughout the cyberlandscape. Everyone was copying it and sharing it with friends.
={Carroll, Michael W.+4;Collins, Mike+4;Napster}
{ vs_db_1.png }http://viralspiral.cc/
@@ -1119,7 +1119,7 @@ As the lawyers brooded and debated the licensing terms, another complicated deba
At this time, in 2001, the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, and others at the World Wide Web Consortium, based at MIT, were trying to conceptualize the protocols for a new “logical layer” of code on top of the World Wide Web. They called it the Semantic Web. The idea is to enable people to identify and retrieve information that is strewn across the Internet but not readily located through conventional computer searches. Through a software format known as RDF/XML,~[* RDF, or Resource Description Framework, is a way to make a statement about content in a digital artifact. XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a way to write a specialized document format to send across the Web, in which certain content can be marked up, or emphasized, so that other computers can “read” it.]~ digital content could be tagged with machine-readable statements that would in effect say, “This database contains information about x and y.” Through Semantic Web protocols and metatags on content, it would be possible to conduct searches across many types of digital content — Web pages, databases, software programs, even digital sensors — that could yield highly specific and useful results.
={Berners-Lee, Tim;Semantic Web+6;World Wide Web:Semantic Web+6|protocols for+6;RDF/XML}
-Unfortunately, progress in developing the Semantic Web has been bogged down in years of technical disagreement and indifference among the larger Web community. Some critics argue that the project has stalled because it was being driven by a small corps of elite software theorists focused on databases, and not by a wider pool of decentralized Web practitioners. In any case, the Creative Commons became one of the first test cases of trying to implement RDF/XML for the Semantic Web.~{ For background, see “The Semantic Web: An Introduction,” at http://in fomesh.net/2001/swintro; Aaron Swartz and James Hendler, “The Semantic Web: A Network of Content for the Digital City,” at http://blogspace.com/ rdf/SwartzHendler; and John Markoff, “Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense,” /{New York Times}/, November 12, 2006. }~ The project was led initially by Lisa Rein, a thirty-three-year-old data modeler who met Lessig at an O’Reilly open-source software conference. Lessig hired her as CC’s first technical director in late 2001 to embed the CC legal licenses in machine-readable formats.
+Unfortunately, progress in developing the Semantic Web has been bogged down in years of technical disagreement and indifference among the larger Web community. Some critics argue that the project has stalled because it was being driven by a small corps of elite software theorists focused on databases, and not by a wider pool of decentralized Web practitioners. In any case, the Creative Commons became one of the first test cases of trying to implement RDF/XML for the Semantic Web.~{ For background, see “The Semantic Web: An Introduction,” at http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro; Aaron Swartz and James Hendler, “The Semantic Web: A Network of Content for the Digital City,” at http://blogspace.com/rdf/SwartzHendler; and John Markoff, “Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense,” /{New York Times}/, November 12, 2006. }~ The project was led initially by Lisa Rein, a thirty-three-year-old data modeler who met Lessig at an O’Reilly open-source software conference. Lessig hired her as CC’s first technical director in late 2001 to embed the CC legal licenses in machine-readable formats.
={Rein, Lisa+2;Swartz, Aaron;Lessig, Lawrence:CC licenses, and}
Writing the XML code was not so difficult, said Rein; the real challenge was “deciding what needed to be included and how you represent the licenses as simply as possible.”~{ Interview with Lisa Rein, December 20, 2006. }~ This required the lawyers and the techies to have intense dialogues about how the law should be faithfully translated into software code, and vice versa. Once again, there were complicated problems to sort through: Should there be a central database of CC-licensed content? How could machine-readable code be adapted if the legal licenses were later modified?
@@ -1213,7 +1213,7 @@ It soon became clear that very few people were choosing any of the five licenses
Still another choice was offered to copyright holders, a “public domain dedication,” which is not a license so much as “an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity” of any rights in the work. The public domain dedication places no restrictions whatsoever on subsequent reuses of the work.
={public domain dedication}
-To the first-time user, the licenses may seem a little daunting.~{ A FAQ at the Creative Commons Web site answers the most frequent user questions about the licenses. It is available at http://wiki.creativecommons .org/. }~ The full implications of using one or another license are not immediately obvious. The tagline for the licenses, “Some Rights Reserved,” while catchy, was not really self-explanatory. This became the next big challenge to Creative Commons, as we see in chapter 6: how to educate creators about a solution when they may not have realized they even had a problem.
+To the first-time user, the licenses may seem a little daunting.~{ A FAQ at the Creative Commons Web site answers the most frequent user questions about the licenses. It is available at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/. }~ The full implications of using one or another license are not immediately obvious. The tagline for the licenses, “Some Rights Reserved,” while catchy, was not really self-explanatory. This became the next big challenge to Creative Commons, as we see in chapter 6: how to educate creators about a solution when they may not have realized they even had a problem.
By December 2002, the three levels of code — legal, digital, and human — had been coordinated and finalized as version 1.0. The organization was set to go public, which it did at a splashy coming-out party in San Francisco. The gala featured appearances by the likes of rapper DJ Spooky (an ardent advocate for remix culture) and a London multimedia jam group, People Like Us. Lessig proudly introduced the licenses as “delivering on our vision of promoting the innovative reuse of all types of intellectual works, unlocking the potential of sharing and transforming others’ work.”~{ http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/3476. }~
={DJ Spooky;People Like Us;code:levels of;Lessig, Lawrence:CC licenses, and+2}
@@ -1261,7 +1261,7 @@ Junell designed the now-familiar CC logo as a deliberate counterpoint to the cop
In promoting its licenses, Creative Commons fashioned itself as a neutral, respectable defender of individual choice. “Our tools are just that — tools,” said Haughey, who was then developing the CC Web site. “Our model intentionally depends on copyright holders to take responsibility for how they use those tools. Or how they don’t use them: If you’re unsure and want to keep your full copyright, fine. If you choose to allow others to re-use your work, great.”~{ Matthew Haughey, “Blogging in the Public Domain,” Creative Commons blog post, February 5, 2003, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/3601. }~ While many CC users were enthusiastically bashing copyright law, Lessig and the CC staff made it a point to defend the basic principles of copyright law — while extolling the value of collaborative creativity and sharing under CC licenses.
={Haughey, Matt}
-Despite praise by the heads of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, the licenses nonetheless did attract critics. Some in the music industry regarded the licenses as a Trojan horse that would dupe unsuspecting artists. David Israelite, president and CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association, told /{Billboard}/, “My concern is that many who support Creative Commons also support a point of view that would take away people’s choices about what to do with their own property.”~{ Susan Butler, “Movement to Share Creative Works Raises Concerns in Music Circles,” /{Billboard}/, May 28, 2005.}~ /{Billboard}/ went on to cite the cautionary tale of a songwriter who was being kept alive by his AIDS medications, thanks to the royalties from a highly successful song. “No one should let artists give up their rights,” said Andy Fraser of the rock group Free. Other critics, such as John Dvorak of /{PC Magazine}/, called the CC licenses “humbug” and accused them of adding “some artificial paperwork and complexity to the mechanism [of copyright],” while weakening the rights that an author would otherwise enjoy.~{ John C. Dvorak, “Creative Commons Humbug: This Scheme Doesn’t Seem to Benefit the Public,” PC Magazine, July 28, 2005. }~ Still others had cultural scores to settle and criticized “anything advocated by clever, sleek young lawyers.”~{ Researchers at the Economic Observatory of the University of Openness, “Commercial Commons,” on the online journal /{Metamute}/, at http://www .metamute.org/?q=en/Commercial-Commons. }~
+Despite praise by the heads of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, the licenses nonetheless did attract critics. Some in the music industry regarded the licenses as a Trojan horse that would dupe unsuspecting artists. David Israelite, president and CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association, told /{Billboard}/, “My concern is that many who support Creative Commons also support a point of view that would take away people’s choices about what to do with their own property.”~{ Susan Butler, “Movement to Share Creative Works Raises Concerns in Music Circles,” /{Billboard}/, May 28, 2005.}~ /{Billboard}/ went on to cite the cautionary tale of a songwriter who was being kept alive by his AIDS medications, thanks to the royalties from a highly successful song. “No one should let artists give up their rights,” said Andy Fraser of the rock group Free. Other critics, such as John Dvorak of /{PC Magazine}/, called the CC licenses “humbug” and accused them of adding “some artificial paperwork and complexity to the mechanism [of copyright],” while weakening the rights that an author would otherwise enjoy.~{ John C. Dvorak, “Creative Commons Humbug: This Scheme Doesn’t Seem to Benefit the Public,” PC Magazine, July 28, 2005. }~ Still others had cultural scores to settle and criticized “anything advocated by clever, sleek young lawyers.”~{ Researchers at the Economic Observatory of the University of Openness, “Commercial Commons,” on the online journal /{Metamute}/, at http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/Commercial-Commons. }~
={Creative Commons (CC) licenses:critics of;sraelite, David;Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA);Dvorak, John;Fraser, Andy}
Putting aside such quibbles and prejudices, the CC licenses seemed a benign enough idea. Given its reliance on copyright law, how could any entertainment lawyer object? Yet the real significance of the licenses was only appreciated by those who realized that a Great Value Shift was kicking in. For them, the licenses were a useful legal tool and cultural flag for building a new sharing economy.
@@ -1272,7 +1272,7 @@ Putting aside such quibbles and prejudices, the CC licenses seemed a benign enou
In retrospect, the CC licenses could not have been launched at a more propitious moment. Networked culture was exploding in 2003. Broadband was rapidly supplanting dial-up Internet access, enabling users to navigate the Web and share information at much faster speeds. Prices for personal computers were dropping even as computing speeds and memory capacity were soaring. Sophisticated new software applications were enabling users to collaborate in more powerful, user-friendly ways. The infrastructure for sharing was reaching a flashpoint.
-Put another way, the original promise of the Internet as a gift economy was coming into its own. Originally built as a platform for efficient sharing among academic researchers, the Internet by 2003 was being used by some 600 million people worldwide.~{ Nielsen/Net Ratings estimated 585 million Internet users in 2002; the International Telecommunications Union estimated 665 million. See http://www2 .sims.berkeley.edu/research/proiects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm. }~ The open framework for sharing was no longer just a plaything of technophiles and academics; it was now insinuated into most significant corners of the economy and social life. As it scaled and grew new muscles and limbs, the Internet began to radically change the ways in which wealth is generated and allocated.
+Put another way, the original promise of the Internet as a gift economy was coming into its own. Originally built as a platform for efficient sharing among academic researchers, the Internet by 2003 was being used by some 600 million people worldwide.~{ Nielsen/Net Ratings estimated 585 million Internet users in 2002; the International Telecommunications Union estimated 665 million. See http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/proiects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm. }~ The open framework for sharing was no longer just a plaything of technophiles and academics; it was now insinuated into most significant corners of the economy and social life. As it scaled and grew new muscles and limbs, the Internet began to radically change the ways in which wealth is generated and allocated.
={Internet:gift economy of+1}
I call this the Great Value Shift — a deep structural change in how valuable things are created for commerce and culture. The shift is not only a fundamental shift in business strategy and organizational behavior, but in the very definition of wealth. On the Internet, wealth is not just financial wealth, nor is it necessarily privately held. Wealth generated through open platforms is often /{socially created value}/ that is shared, evolving, and nonmonetized. It hovers in the air, so to speak, accessible to everyone.
@@ -1398,13 +1398,13 @@ The Web 2.0 environment was quite hospitable for the spread of the CC licenses.
While technology and economics have been driving forces in shaping the new participatory platforms, much of their appeal has been frankly cultural. Amateur content on the Net may be raw and irregular, but it also tends to be more interesting and authentic than the highly produced, homogenized fare of commercial media. Some of it vastly outshines the lowest common denominator of mass media. Again, the cheap connectivity of the Internet has been key. It has made it possible for people with incredibly specialized interests to find one another and organize themselves into niche communities. For closeted homosexuals in repressive countries or isolated fans of the actor Wallace Beery, the Internet has enabled them to find one another and mutually feed their narrow interests. You name it, there are sites for it: the fans of obscure musicians, the collectors of beer cans, Iranian exiles, kite flyers. Freed of the economic imperative of attracting huge audiences with broad fare, niche-driven Internet content is able to connect with people’s personal passions and interests: a powerful foundation not just for social communities, but for durable markets.
={Internet:communication system, as+1}
-This, truly, is one of the more profound effects of networking technologies: the subversion of the “blockbuster” economics of the mass media. It is becoming harder and more expensive for film studios and broadcast networks to amass the huge, cross-demographic audiences that they once could. In the networked environment, it turns out that a diversified set of niche markets can be eminently profitable with lower-volume sales. While Centralized Media require a supply-side “push” of content, the Internet enables a demand-side “pull” of content by users. This radically reduces transaction costs and enhances the economic appeal of niche production. It is easier and cheaper for a company (or single creator) to “pull” niche audiences through word of mouth than it is to pay for expensive “push” advertising campaigns. Specialty interests and products that once were dismissed as too marginal or idiosyncratic to be profitable can now flourish in small but robust “pull markets.”~{ David Bollier, “When Push Comes to Pull: The New Economy and Culture of Networking Technology” (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 2006), at http://www.aspeninstitute.org/atf/cf/%7BDEB6F227-659B-4EC8-8F84-8 DF23CA704F5%7D/2005InfoTechText.pdf. }~
+This, truly, is one of the more profound effects of networking technologies: the subversion of the “blockbuster” economics of the mass media. It is becoming harder and more expensive for film studios and broadcast networks to amass the huge, cross-demographic audiences that they once could. In the networked environment, it turns out that a diversified set of niche markets can be eminently profitable with lower-volume sales. While Centralized Media require a supply-side “push” of content, the Internet enables a demand-side “pull” of content by users. This radically reduces transaction costs and enhances the economic appeal of niche production. It is easier and cheaper for a company (or single creator) to “pull” niche audiences through word of mouth than it is to pay for expensive “push” advertising campaigns. Specialty interests and products that once were dismissed as too marginal or idiosyncratic to be profitable can now flourish in small but robust “pull markets.”~{ David Bollier, “When Push Comes to Pull: The New Economy and Culture of Networking Technology” (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 2006), at http://www.aspeninstitute.org/atf/cf/%7BDEB6F227-659B-4EC8-8F84-8DF23CA704F5%7D/2005InfoTechText.pdf. }~
={Centralized Media:Internet vs.;Internet:Centralized Media vs.}
The term associated with this phenomenon is the “Long Tail” — the title of a much-cited article by Chris Anderson in the October 2004 issue of /{Wired}/ magazine, later expanded into a book. Anderson explained the “grand transition” now under way:
={Anderson, Chris+2;Long Tail+3}
-_1 For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowestcommon-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching — a market response to inefficient distribution. . . . Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. . . .~{ Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” /{Wired}/, October 2004, at http://www.wired .com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html. }~
+_1 For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowestcommon-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching — a market response to inefficient distribution. . . . Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. . . .~{ Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” /{Wired}/, October 2004, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html. }~
The “Long Tail” refers to the huge potential markets that can be created for low-volume niche books, CD, DVDs, and other products. More than half of Amazon’s book sales, for example, come from books that rank below its top 130,000 titles. The implication is that “the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are,” writes Anderson. “In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity.”
={Amazon}
@@ -1469,11 +1469,11 @@ In January 2003, a month after the CC licenses were released, Doctorow published
_1 Well, it’s a long story, but to shorten it up: first-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don’t have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word-of-mouth. I’m not bad at word-of-mouth. I have a blog, Boing Boing (http://boingboingnet), where I do a /{lot}/ of word-ofmouthing. I compulsively tell friends and strangers about things I like. And telling people about stuff is /{way, way}/ easier if I can just send it to ’em. Way easier.~{ Cory Doctorow, “A Note About This Book,” February 12, 2004, and “A Note About This Book,” January 9, 2003, in /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/, available at http://www.craphound.com/down. }~
-A year later, Doctorow announced that his “grand experiment” was a success; in fact, he said, “my career is turning over like a goddamned locomotive engine.” More than thirty thousand people had downloaded the book within a day of its posting. He proceeded to release a collection of short stories and a second novel under a CC license. He also rereleased /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/ under a less restrictive CC license — an Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA), which allows readers to make their own translations, radio and film adaptations, sequels, and other remixes of the novel, so long as they are made available on the same terms.~{ Anna Weinberg,“Buying the Cow, Though the Milk Is Free: Why Some Publishers are Digitizing Themselves,” June 24, 2005, /{Book Standard}/, June 24, 2005, available at http://www.thebookstandard.com/bookstandard/news/publisher/ article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000968186.}~
+A year later, Doctorow announced that his “grand experiment” was a success; in fact, he said, “my career is turning over like a goddamned locomotive engine.” More than thirty thousand people had downloaded the book within a day of its posting. He proceeded to release a collection of short stories and a second novel under a CC license. He also rereleased /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/ under a less restrictive CC license — an Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA), which allows readers to make their own translations, radio and film adaptations, sequels, and other remixes of the novel, so long as they are made available on the same terms.~{ Anna Weinberg,“Buying the Cow, Though the Milk Is Free: Why Some Publishers are Digitizing Themselves,” June 24, 2005, /{Book Standard}/, June 24, 2005, available at http://www.thebookstandard.com/bookstandard/news/publisher/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000968186. }~
With some sheepish candor, Doctorow conceded: “I wanted to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their peers that maximal copyright is the only thing that stands between us and penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I had the intellectual intuition that a ‘some rights reserved’ regime would serve me well, I still couldn’t shake the atavistic fear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed.”
-By June 2006, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/ had been downloaded more than seven hundred thousand times. It had gone through six printings, many foreign translations, and two competing online audio adaptations made by fans. “Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it,” Doctorow conceded, “but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales. I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treats the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book — those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treats the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.”~{ Cory Doctorow, “Giving it Away,” Forbes.com, December 1, 2006, available at http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-tech-media _cz_cd_books06_1201doctorow.html. }~ In 2008, Doctorow’s marketing strategy of giving away online books to stimulate sales of physical books paid off in an even bigger way. His novel for teenagers, /{Little Brother}/, about a youthful hacker who takes on the U.S. government after it becomes a police state, spent weeks on the /{New York Times}/ bestseller list for children’s books.
+By June 2006, /{Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom}/ had been downloaded more than seven hundred thousand times. It had gone through six printings, many foreign translations, and two competing online audio adaptations made by fans. “Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it,” Doctorow conceded, “but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales. I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treats the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book — those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treats the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.”~{ Cory Doctorow, “Giving it Away,” Forbes.com, December 1, 2006, available at http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-tech-media_cz_cd_books06_1201doctorow.html. }~ In 2008, Doctorow’s marketing strategy of giving away online books to stimulate sales of physical books paid off in an even bigger way. His novel for teenagers, /{Little Brother}/, about a youthful hacker who takes on the U.S. government after it becomes a police state, spent weeks on the /{New York Times}/ bestseller list for children’s books.
It is perhaps easier for a sci-fi futurist like Doctorow than a publishing business to take such a wild leap into the unknown. But that, too, is an important insight: artists are more likely to lead the way into the sharing economy than entrenched industries. “I’d rather stake my future on a literature that people care about enough to steal,” said Doctorow, “than devote my life to a form that has no home in the dominant medium of the century.” Book lovers and authors will pioneer the future; corporate publishing will grudgingly follow, or be left behind.
@@ -1491,10 +1491,10 @@ Free culture publishing models are popping up in many unusual quarters these day
Founder Hugh McGuire said the inspiration for LibriVox was a distributed recording of Lessig’s book /{Free Culture}/ read by bloggers and podcasters, chapter by chapter. “After listening to that, it took me a while to figure out how to record things on my computer (which I finally did, thanks to free software Audacity). Brewster Kahle’s call for ‘Universal Access to all human knowledge’ was another inspiration, and the free hosting provided by archive.org and ibiblio.org meant that LibriVox was possible: there was no worry about bandwidth and storage. So the project was started with an investment of $0, which continues to be our global budget.” LibriVox’s mission, said McGuire, is the “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.”
={Kahle, Brewster;LibriVox;McGuire, Hugh;bloging}
-Several publishing businesses now revolve around CC licenses. Wikitravel is a collaborative Web site that amasses content about cities and regions around the world; content is licensed under the CC Attribution, ShareAlike license (BY-SA).~{ “Wikitravel Press launches,” Creative Commons blog, August 3, 2007, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7596. See also Mia Garlick, “Wikitravel,” Creative Commons blog, June 20, 2006, at http://creativecom mons.org/text/wikitravel. }~ In 2007, its founder joined with a travel writer to start Wikitravel Press, which now publishes travel books in a number of languages. Like the Wikitravel Web pages, the text in the books can be freely copied and reused.
+Several publishing businesses now revolve around CC licenses. Wikitravel is a collaborative Web site that amasses content about cities and regions around the world; content is licensed under the CC Attribution, ShareAlike license (BY-SA).~{ “Wikitravel Press launches,” Creative Commons blog, August 3, 2007, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7596. See also Mia Garlick, “Wikitravel,” Creative Commons blog, June 20, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/text/wikitravel. }~ In 2007, its founder joined with a travel writer to start Wikitravel Press, which now publishes travel books in a number of languages. Like the Wikitravel Web pages, the text in the books can be freely copied and reused.
={Wikitravel Press}
-Another new business using CC licenses is Lulu, a technology company started by Robert Young, the founder of the Linux vendor Red Hat and benefactor for the Center for the Public Domain.Lulu lets individuals publish and distribute their own books, which can be printed on demand or downloaded. Lulu handles all the details of the publishing process but lets people control their content and rights. Hundreds of people have licensed their works under the CC ShareAlike license and Public Domain Dedication, and under the GNU Project’s Free Documentation License.~{ Mia Garlick, “Lulu,” Creative Commons blog, May 17, 2006, at http://creative commons.org/text/lulu. }~
+Another new business using CC licenses is Lulu, a technology company started by Robert Young, the founder of the Linux vendor Red Hat and benefactor for the Center for the Public Domain.Lulu lets individuals publish and distribute their own books, which can be printed on demand or downloaded. Lulu handles all the details of the publishing process but lets people control their content and rights. Hundreds of people have licensed their works under the CC ShareAlike license and Public Domain Dedication, and under the GNU Project’s Free Documentation License.~{ Mia Garlick, “Lulu,” Creative Commons blog, May 17, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/text/lulu. }~
={Lulu;Red Hat;Young, Robert;Center for the Public Domain;GNU Project:GNU FDL;public domain:Center for Public Domain}
As more of culture and commerce move to the Internet, the question facing the book industry now is whether the text of a book is more valuable as a physical object (a codex) or as a digital file (intangible bits that can circulate freely), or some combination of the two. Kevin Kelly, the former editor of /{Wired}/ magazine, once explained: “In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies lose value. They are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer and engage a work.”~{ Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book!” /{New York Times Magazine}/, May 14, 2006, p. 43. }~
@@ -1505,7 +1505,7 @@ What this means in practice, Kelly has pointed out, is that books become more va
Needless to say, most book publishers and authors’ organizations are not yet prepared to embrace this newfangled value proposition. It seems way too iffy. A “sharing” business model would seemingly cannibalize their current revenues and copyright control with little guarantee of doing better in an open, online milieu. The bigger problem may be the cultural prejudice that an absolute right of control over any possible uses of a book is the best way to make money.
={open business models}
-In general, the publishing trade remains skeptical of the Internet, clueless about how to harness its marketing power, and strangers to CC licenses. And it could be years before mainstream publishing accepts some of the counterintuitive notions that special-interest Internet communities will drive publishing in the future. In a presentation that caused a stir in the book industry, futurist Mike Shatzkin said in May 2007 that this is already happening in general trade publishing: “We’re close to a tipping point, or maybe we’re past it . . . where Web-based branding will have more credibility than print, because print, needing more horizontal reach to be viable, won’t deliver the attention of the real experts and megaphones in each field.”~{ Mike Shatzkin, “The End of General Trade Publishing Houses: Death or Rebirth in a Niche-by-Niche World,” presented to the Book Expo America, New York, May 31, 2007, available at http://www.idealog.com/speeches/ endoftrade.htm. }~
+In general, the publishing trade remains skeptical of the Internet, clueless about how to harness its marketing power, and strangers to CC licenses. And it could be years before mainstream publishing accepts some of the counterintuitive notions that special-interest Internet communities will drive publishing in the future. In a presentation that caused a stir in the book industry, futurist Mike Shatzkin said in May 2007 that this is already happening in general trade publishing: “We’re close to a tipping point, or maybe we’re past it . . . where Web-based branding will have more credibility than print, because print, needing more horizontal reach to be viable, won’t deliver the attention of the real experts and megaphones in each field.”~{ Mike Shatzkin, “The End of General Trade Publishing Houses: Death or Rebirth in a Niche-by-Niche World,” presented to the Book Expo America, New York, May 31, 2007, available at http://www.idealog.com/speeches/endoftrade.htm. }~
={Shatzkin, Mike}
2~ DIY Videos and Film
@@ -1534,7 +1534,7 @@ One of the more daring experiments in film production is being pioneered by the
Ton Roosendaal, who directs the Blender Institute, is trying to demonstrate that a small studio can develop a virtuous cycle of economically sustainable creativity using open-source software, Creative Commons licenses, and talented programmers and artists from around the world. “We give programmers the freedom to do their best, and what they want to do is improve the technology,” he said. “The market is too hyper-rational and nailed down and filled with limits,” he argues, referring to his peers at major animation studios. “Open source is free of most of these constraints.”~{ Ton Roosendaal remarks at conference, “Economies of the Commons,” De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam, April 10–12, 2008. }~
={Roosendaal, Ton}
-In April 2008, the Blender Institute released a ten-minute animated short, /{Big Buck Bunny}/, which features a kind-hearted, fat white bunny who endures the abuse of three stone-throwing rodents until they smash a beautiful butterfly with a rock — at which point the bunny rallies to teach the bullies a lesson.~{ The film can be downloaded at http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/ download. }~ The film uses cutting-edge computer-generated animation techniques that rival anything produced by Pixar, the Hollywood studio responsible for /{Toy Story}/, /{Cars}/, and /{Ratatouille}/. /{Big Buck Bunny}/ is licensed under a CC Attribution license, which means the digital content can be used by anyone for any purpose so long as credit is given to the Blender Institute.
+In April 2008, the Blender Institute released a ten-minute animated short, /{Big Buck Bunny}/, which features a kind-hearted, fat white bunny who endures the abuse of three stone-throwing rodents until they smash a beautiful butterfly with a rock — at which point the bunny rallies to teach the bullies a lesson.~{ The film can be downloaded at http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download. }~ The film uses cutting-edge computer-generated animation techniques that rival anything produced by Pixar, the Hollywood studio responsible for /{Toy Story}/, /{Cars}/, and /{Ratatouille}/. /{Big Buck Bunny}/ is licensed under a CC Attribution license, which means the digital content can be used by anyone for any purpose so long as credit is given to the Blender Institute.
={Big Buck Bunny (animated short)+1}
/{Big Buck Bunny}/ was initially distributed to upfront investors as a DVD set that includes extras such as interviews, outtakes, deleted scenes, and the entire database used in making the film. Then, to pique wider interest in sales of the DVD set, priced at thirty-four euros, a trailer was released on the Internet. This resulted in extensive international press coverage and blog exposure. Early signs are promising that Blender will be able to continue to make highquality animation on a fairly modest budget without worries about illegal downloads or a digital rights management system. The Blender production model also has the virtue of enabling access to top creative talent and cutting-edge animation technologies as well as efficient distribution to paying audiences on a global scale.
@@ -1554,7 +1554,7 @@ Media reform activist Harold Feld offers a succinct overview of why creativity i
_1 The 1990s saw a number of factors that allowed the major labels to push out independents and dominate the market with their own outrageously priced and poorly produced products: consolidation in the music industry, the whole “studio system” of pumping a few big stars to the exclusion of others, the consolidation in music outlets from mom-andpop record stores to chains like Tower Records and retail giants like Wal-Mart that exclude indies and push the recordings promoted by major labels, and the consolidation of radio — which further killed indie exposure and allowed the labels to artificially pump their selected “hits” through payola. All this created a cozy cartel that enjoyed monopoly profits.
={music:music industry+1}
-_1 As a result, the major labels, the mainstream retailers, and the radio broadcasters grew increasingly out of touch with what listeners actually wanted. But as long as the music cartel controlled what the vast majority of people got to hear, it didn’t matter . . . The music cartel remained the de facto only game in town.~{ Harold Feld, “CD Sales Dead? Not for Indies!” blog post on Public Knowledge Web site, March 27, 2007, at http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/ 890. }~
+_1 As a result, the major labels, the mainstream retailers, and the radio broadcasters grew increasingly out of touch with what listeners actually wanted. But as long as the music cartel controlled what the vast majority of people got to hear, it didn’t matter . . . The music cartel remained the de facto only game in town.~{ Harold Feld, “CD Sales Dead? Not for Indies!” blog post on Public Knowledge Web site, March 27, 2007, at http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/890. }~
Changing the music industry is obviously a major challenge that is not going to be solved overnight. Still, there is a growing effort led by indie musicians, small record labels, Internet music entrepreneurs, and advocacy groups such as the Future of Music Coalition to address these problems. Creative Commons is clearly sympathetic, but has largely focused on a more modest agenda — enabling a new universe of shareable music to arise. Its chief tools for this mission, beyond the CC licenses, are new software platforms for legal music remixes, online commons that legally share music, and new business models that respect the interests of both fans and artists. Ultimately, it is hoped that a global oeuvre of shareable music will emerge. Once this body of music matures, attracting more artists and fans in a self-sustaining viral spiral, the record industry may be forced to give up its dreams of perfect control of how music may circulate and adopt fan-friendly business practices.
={Future of Music Coalition}
@@ -1562,7 +1562,7 @@ Changing the music industry is obviously a major challenge that is not going to
This, at least, is the theory, as Lessig explains it. He calls it the “BMI strategy,” a reference to the strategy that broadcasters and musicians used to fight ASCAP’s monopoly control over radio music in the early 1940s. ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, is a nonprofit organization that collects royalties for musical performances. At the time, ASCAP required artists to have five hits before it would serve as a collection agency for them, a rule that privileged the playing of pop music on the radio at the expense of rhythm and blues, jazz, hillbilly, and ethnic music. Then, over the course of eight years, ASCAP raised its rates by 450 percent between 1931 and 1939 — at which point, ASCAP then proposed /{doubling}/ its rates for 1940. In protest, many radio stations refused to play ASCAP-licensed music. They formed a new performance-rights body, BMI, or Broadcast Music, Inc., which sought to break the ASCAP monopoly by offering free arrangements of public-domain music to radio stations. They also charged lower rates than ASCAP for licensing music and offered better contracts for artists.~{ Donald Clarke, /{The Rise and Fall of Popular Music}/, chapter 11. }~
={ASCAP+1;BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.)+3;music:ASCAP+l;Lessig, Lawrence:CC licenses, and+2|music, and+2}
-“The Internet is today’s broadcasters,” said Lessig in a 2006 speech. “They are facing the same struggle.”~{ Lessig explained his BMI strategy at a speech, “On Free, and the Differences Between Culture and Code,” at the 23d Chaos Communications Conference (23C3) in Berlin, Germany, December 30, 2006; video can be watched at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7661663613180520595&q= 23c3. }~ Just as ASCAP used its monopoly power to control what music could be heard and at what prices, he said, so today’s media corporations want to leverage their control over content to gain control of the business models and technologies of digital environments. When Google bought YouTube, one-third of the purchase price of $1.65 billion was allegedly a financial reserve to deal with any copyright litigation, said Lessig. This is how the incumbent media world is trying to stifle the emergence of free culture.
+“The Internet is today’s broadcasters,” said Lessig in a 2006 speech. “They are facing the same struggle.”~{ Lessig explained his BMI strategy at a speech, “On Free, and the Differences Between Culture and Code,” at the 23d Chaos Communications Conference (23C3) in Berlin, Germany, December 30, 2006; video can be watched at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7661663613180520595&q=23c3. }~ Just as ASCAP used its monopoly power to control what music could be heard and at what prices, he said, so today’s media corporations want to leverage their control over content to gain control of the business models and technologies of digital environments. When Google bought YouTube, one-third of the purchase price of $1.65 billion was allegedly a financial reserve to deal with any copyright litigation, said Lessig. This is how the incumbent media world is trying to stifle the emergence of free culture.
={Google;YouTube}
The same questions that once confronted broadcasters are now facing Internet innovators, Lessig argues: “How do we free the future from the dead hand of the past? What do we do to make it so they can’t control how technology evolves?” With copyright terms lasting so long, it is not really feasible to try to use public-domain materials to compete with a commercial cartel. Lessig’s answer is a BMI-inspired solution that uses the CC licenses to create a new body of “free” works that, over time, can begin to compete with popular works. The legendary record producer Jerry Wexler recalled how ASCAP marginalized R & B, country, folk, and ethnic music, but “once the lid was lifted — which happened when BMI entered the picture — the vacuum was filled by all these archetypal musics. BMI turned out to be the mechanism that released all those primal American forms of music that fused and became rock-androll.”~{ From BMI, Inc., Web site, at http://www.bmi.com/genres/entry/533380. }~ Lessig clearly has similar ambitions for Creative Commons.
@@ -1574,7 +1574,7 @@ For now, the subculture of CC-licensed music remains something of a fringe movem
Creative Commons’s primary task is practical — to help musicians reach audiences directly and reap more of the financial rewards of their music. So far, a wide range of indie bands, hip-hop artists, and bohemian experimentalists of all stripes have used the licenses. One of the most popular is the Attribution, NonCommercial license, which lets artists share their works while getting credit and retaining commercial rights. A number of marquee songwriters and performers — David Byrne, Gilberto Gil, the Beastie Boys, Chuck D — have also used CC licenses as a gesture of solidarity with free culture artists and as an enlightened marketing strategy. Inviting people to remix your songs is a great way to engage your fan base and sell more records. And tagging your music with a CC license, at least for now, wraps an artist in a mantle of tech sophistication and artistic integrity.
={Beastie Boys;Byrne, David;Chuck D;Gil, Gilberto}
-Guitarist Jake Shapiro was one of the first musicians to show the marketing potential of unleashing free music on the Internet. In 1995, Shapiro put MP3 files of music by his band, Two Ton Shoe, on the group’s Web site. Within a few years, Two Ton Shoe was one of the most-downloaded bands on the Internet, developing fan bases in Italy, Brazil, Russia, and South Korea. One day Shapiro received a phone call out of the blue from a South Korean concert promoter. He wanted to know if the band would fly over to Seoul to perform four concerts. It turned out that fans in South Korea, where fast broadband connections are the norm, had discovered Two Ton Shoe through file sharing. A local CD retailer kept getting requests for the band’s music, which led him to contact a concert promoter. In August 2005, Shapiro and his buddies arrived in Seoul as conquering rock stars, selling out all four of their concerts. “The kids who showed up knew all the words to the songs,” Shapiro recalled. A year later, the band signed a deal to distribute a double CD to East Asia.~{ Shapiro described his experiences at the “Identity Mashup Conference,” June 19–21, 2006, hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2006/ 06/28/id-mashup-2006-day-two-the-commons-open-apis-meshups-andmashups. His band’s Web site is at http://www.twotonshoe.com. }~
+Guitarist Jake Shapiro was one of the first musicians to show the marketing potential of unleashing free music on the Internet. In 1995, Shapiro put MP3 files of music by his band, Two Ton Shoe, on the group’s Web site. Within a few years, Two Ton Shoe was one of the most-downloaded bands on the Internet, developing fan bases in Italy, Brazil, Russia, and South Korea. One day Shapiro received a phone call out of the blue from a South Korean concert promoter. He wanted to know if the band would fly over to Seoul to perform four concerts. It turned out that fans in South Korea, where fast broadband connections are the norm, had discovered Two Ton Shoe through file sharing. A local CD retailer kept getting requests for the band’s music, which led him to contact a concert promoter. In August 2005, Shapiro and his buddies arrived in Seoul as conquering rock stars, selling out all four of their concerts. “The kids who showed up knew all the words to the songs,” Shapiro recalled. A year later, the band signed a deal to distribute a double CD to East Asia.~{ Shapiro described his experiences at the “Identity Mashup Conference,” June 19–21, 2006, hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2006/06/28/id-mashup-2006-day-two-the-commons-open-apis-meshups-and-mashups. His band’s Web site is at http://www.twotonshoe.com. }~
={Shapiro, Jake;Two Ton Shoe}
While such stories of viral marketing success are not common, neither are they rare. Lots of bands now promote themselves, and find admiring (paying) fans, by posting their music, for free, on Web sites and file-sharing sites. Perhaps the most scrutinized example was Radiohead’s decision to release its album /{In Rainbows}/ for free online, while inviting fans to pay whatever they wanted. (The band did not release any numbers, but considered the move a success. They later released the album through conventional distribution channels as well.)~{ Jon Pareles, “Pay What You Want for This Article,” /{New York Times}/, December 9, 2007. }~
@@ -1586,7 +1586,7 @@ Just as previous generations of fans came together around FM radio or live perfo
It is also why the Creative Commons licenses have acquired such cachet. They have come to be associated with musicians who honor the integrity of music making. They symbolize the collective nature of creativity and the importance of communing freely with one’s fans. Nimrod Lev, a prominent Israeli musician and supporter of the CC licenses, received considerable press coverage in his country for a speech that lamented the “cunning arrangement” (in Israeli slang, /{combina}/) by which the music industry has betrayed people’s love of music, making it “only a matter of business and commerce.” Said Lev:
={music:music industry+1;Lev, Nimrod+2}
-_1 The music industry treats its consumer as a consumer of sex, not of love, the love of music. Just like everything else: a vacuum without values or meaning. But it is still love that everyone wants and seeks. . . . The music vendors knew then [a generation ago] what they have forgotten today, namely that we must have cultural heroes: artists that are not cloned in a manner out to get our money. There was an added value with a meaning: someone who spoke to our hearts in difficult moments, and with that someone, we would walk hand in hand for a while. We had loyalty and love, and it all meant something.~{ Nimrod Lev, “The Combina Industry,” November 16, 2004, at http://law .haifa.ac.il/techlaw/new/try/eng/nimrod.htm. }~
+_1 The music industry treats its consumer as a consumer of sex, not of love, the love of music. Just like everything else: a vacuum without values or meaning. But it is still love that everyone wants and seeks. . . . The music vendors knew then [a generation ago] what they have forgotten today, namely that we must have cultural heroes: artists that are not cloned in a manner out to get our money. There was an added value with a meaning: someone who spoke to our hearts in difficult moments, and with that someone, we would walk hand in hand for a while. We had loyalty and love, and it all meant something.~{ Nimrod Lev, “The Combina Industry,” November 16, 2004, at http://law.haifa.ac.il/techlaw/new/try/eng/nimrod.htm. }~
At the risk of sounding naïve, Lev said he wanted to stand up for the importance of “authenticity and empathy and my own truth” in making music. It is a complaint that echoes throughout the artistic community globally. A few years ago, Patti Smith, the punk rocker renowned for her artistic integrity, decried the “loss of our cultural voice” as the radio industry consolidated and as music television became a dominant force. She grieved for the scarcity of places for her to “feel connected” to a larger musical community of artists and fans.~{ Patti Smith at a panel at the National Conference for Media Reform, St. Louis, sponsored by Free Press, May 14, 2005. }~
={Smith, Patti}
@@ -1614,7 +1614,7 @@ The impetus for a solution to the sampling problem started with Negativland, an
As an experienced sampler of music, Negativland and collagist People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) asked Creative Commons if it would develop and offer a music sampling license. Don Joyce of Negativland explained:
={Joyce, Don}
-_1 This would be legally acknowledging the now obvious state of modern audio/visual creativity in which quoting, sampling, direct referencing, copying and collaging have become a major part of modern inspiration. [A sampling option would] stop legally suppressing it and start culturally encouraging it — because it’s here to stay. That’s our idea for encouraging a more democratic media for all of us, from corporations to the individual.~{ Glenn Otis Brown, “Mmm . . . Free Samples (Innovation la),” Creative Commons blog, March 11, 2003, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/ 3631. }~
+_1 This would be legally acknowledging the now obvious state of modern audio/visual creativity in which quoting, sampling, direct referencing, copying and collaging have become a major part of modern inspiration. [A sampling option would] stop legally suppressing it and start culturally encouraging it — because it’s here to stay. That’s our idea for encouraging a more democratic media for all of us, from corporations to the individual.~{ Glenn Otis Brown, “Mmm . . . Free Samples (Innovation la),” Creative Commons blog, March 11, 2003, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/3631. }~
With legal help from Cooley Godward Kronish and Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, Creative Commons did just that. During its consultations with the remix community, Creative Commons learned that Gilberto Gil, the renowned /{tropicalismo}/ musician and at the time the Brazilian minister of culture, had been thinking along similar lines, and so it received valuable suggestions and support from him.
={Cooley Godward Kronish;Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati;Gil, Gilberto}
@@ -1624,26 +1624,26 @@ In 2005, Creative Commons issued the Sampling license as a way to let people tak
The CC Sampling license only whetted the imagination of people who wanted to find new ways to sample, share, and transform music. Neeru Paharia, then the assistant director of the Creative Commons, came up with the idea of developing ccMixter, a software platform for remixing music on the Web.~{ See http://wiki.creativecommons.org/ccMixter. Interview with Mike Linksvayer, February 7, 2007, and Neeru Paharia, April 13, 2007. }~ Paharia realized one day that “this whole remixing and sharing ecology is about getting feedback on who’s using your work and how it’s evolving. That’s almost half the pleasure.”~{ Interview with Neeru Paharia, April 13, 2007. }~ So the organization developed a Web site that would allow people to upload music that could be sampled and remixed. The site has about five thousand registered users, which is not terribly large, but it is an enthusiastic and active community of remix artists that acts as a great proof of concept while promoting the CC licenses. There are other, much larger remix sites on the Internet, such as Sony’s ACIDplanet, but such sites are faux commons. They retain ownership in the sounds and remixes that users make, and no derivative or commercial versions are allowed.
={Paharia, Neeru}
-One feature of viral spirals is their propensity to call forth a jumble of new projects and unexpected partners. The CC licenses have done just that for music. ccMixter has joined with Opsound to offer a joint “sound pool” of clips licensed under an Attribution ShareAlike license. It also supports Freesound, a repository of more than twenty thousand CC-licensed samples ranging from waterfalls to crickets to music.~{ Neeru Paharia, “Opsound’s Sal Randolph,” Creative Commons blog, October 1, 2005, at http://creativecommons.org/audio/opsound; Mike Linksvayer, “Freesound,” Creative Commons blog, October 1, 2005, at http://creative commons.org/audio/freesound; Matt Haughey, “Free Online Music Booms as SoundClick Offers Creative Commons Licenses,” Creative Commons blog, August 11, 2004. }~
+One feature of viral spirals is their propensity to call forth a jumble of new projects and unexpected partners. The CC licenses have done just that for music. ccMixter has joined with Opsound to offer a joint “sound pool” of clips licensed under an Attribution ShareAlike license. It also supports Freesound, a repository of more than twenty thousand CC-licensed samples ranging from waterfalls to crickets to music.~{ Neeru Paharia, “Opsound’s Sal Randolph,” Creative Commons blog, October 1, 2005, at http://creativecommons.org/audio/opsound; Mike Linksvayer, “Freesound,” Creative Commons blog, October 1, 2005, at http://creativecommons.org/audio/freesound; Matt Haughey, “Free Online Music Booms as SoundClick Offers Creative Commons Licenses,” Creative Commons blog, August 11, 2004. }~
Runoff Records, Inc., a record label, discovered a remix artist who teaches physics and calculus and goes by the name of Minus Kelvin. Runoff heard a podcast of Kelvin’s CC-licensed music, and signed him up, along with another ccMixter contributor, to do music for three seasons of the television show /{America’s Next Top Model}/.~{ Neeru Paharia, “Minus Kelvin Discovered on ccMixter,” Creative Commons blog, May 17, 2005, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/archive/2005/5. }~ A few months later, two ccMixter fans based in Poland and Holland started an online record label, DiSfish, that gives 5 percent of all sale proceeds to CC, another 5 percent to charity, with the remainder split between the label and the artist. All music on the label is licensed under CC.~{ Cezary Ostrowski from Poland and Marco Raaphorst from Holland met online at ccMixter and decided to go into business together. They started an online label called DiSfish. }~
-The CC licenses are not just the province of daring remix artists and other experimentalists. Disappointed by its CD sales through traditional channels, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra released its performance of Handel’s 1736 opera, /{Atalanta}/, exclusively through the online record label Magnatune, using a CC license. Conductor Nicholas McGegan said the Internet “has potentially given the industry a tremendous shot in the arm,” letting orchestras reach “new audiences, including ones that are unlikely to hear you in person.”~{ Mia Garlick, “Classical Music Goes Digital (& CC),” May 3, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5883. }~ A company that specializes in Catalan music collaborated with the Catalonian government to release two CDs full of CC-licensed music.~{ The Enderrock Group, a company that specializes in Catalan music and publishes three popular music magazines, released the two CDs, /{Música Lliure and Música Lliure II}/, free within the page of its magazines. See Margot Kaminski, “Enderrock,” Creative Commons Web site, January 17, 2007, at http://cre ativecommons.org/audio/enderrock. }~ A group of Gamelan musicians from central Java who perform in North Carolina decided to release their recordings under a CC license.~{ The group, Gamelan Nyai Saraswait, was blogged about by Matt Haughey on February 1, 2003, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/3599. }~
+The CC licenses are not just the province of daring remix artists and other experimentalists. Disappointed by its CD sales through traditional channels, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra released its performance of Handel’s 1736 opera, /{Atalanta}/, exclusively through the online record label Magnatune, using a CC license. Conductor Nicholas McGegan said the Internet “has potentially given the industry a tremendous shot in the arm,” letting orchestras reach “new audiences, including ones that are unlikely to hear you in person.”~{ Mia Garlick, “Classical Music Goes Digital (& CC),” May 3, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5883. }~ A company that specializes in Catalan music collaborated with the Catalonian government to release two CDs full of CC-licensed music.~{ The Enderrock Group, a company that specializes in Catalan music and publishes three popular music magazines, released the two CDs, /{Música Lliure and Música Lliure II}/, free within the page of its magazines. See Margot Kaminski, “Enderrock,” Creative Commons Web site, January 17, 2007, at http://creativecommons.org/audio/enderrock. }~ A group of Gamelan musicians from central Java who perform in North Carolina decided to release their recordings under a CC license.~{ The group, Gamelan Nyai Saraswait, was blogged about by Matt Haughey on February 1, 2003, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/3599. }~
={McGegan, Nicholas}
Big-name artists have gotten into the licenses as well. DJ Vadim created a splash when he released all the original solo, individual instrumental, and a cappella studio tracks of his album /{The Sound Catcher}/ under an Attribution, NonCommercial license, so that remixers could have at it.~{ Victor Stone, “DJ Vadim Releases Album Tracks Under CC,” August 20, 2007, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7619. }~ In 2004, /{Wired}/ magazine released a CD with sixteen tracks by the likes of David Byrne, Gilberto Gil, and the Beastie Boys. “By contributing a track to /{The Wired CD}/., these musicians acknowledge that for an art form to thrive, it needs to be open, fluid and alive,” wrote /{Wired}/. “These artists — and soon, perhaps, many more like them — would rather have people share their work than steal it.”~{ Thomas Goetz, “Sample the Future,” /{Wired}/, November 2004, pp. 181–83. }~
={Byrne, David;Gil, Gilberto+1;DJ Vadim;Beastie Boys}
-Soon thereafter, Byrne and Gil went so far as to host a gala benefit concert for Creative Commons in New York City. In a fitting fusion of styles, Gil sang a Brazilian arrangement of Cole Porter’s cowboy song, “Don’t Fence Me In.” The crowd of 1,500 was high on the transcultural symbolism, said Glenn Brown: “Musical superstars from North and South, jamming together, building earlier works into new creations, in real time. Lawyers on the sidelines and in the audience, where they belong. The big Creative Commons logo smiling overhead.”~{ Glenn Otis Brown, “WIRED Concert and CD: A Study in Collaboration,” September 24, 2004, available at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/ 4415. }~ The description captures the CC enterprise to a fault: the fusion of some clap-your-hands populism and hardheaded legal tools, inflected with an idealistic call to action to build a better world.
+Soon thereafter, Byrne and Gil went so far as to host a gala benefit concert for Creative Commons in New York City. In a fitting fusion of styles, Gil sang a Brazilian arrangement of Cole Porter’s cowboy song, “Don’t Fence Me In.” The crowd of 1,500 was high on the transcultural symbolism, said Glenn Brown: “Musical superstars from North and South, jamming together, building earlier works into new creations, in real time. Lawyers on the sidelines and in the audience, where they belong. The big Creative Commons logo smiling overhead.”~{ Glenn Otis Brown, “WIRED Concert and CD: A Study in Collaboration,” September 24, 2004, available at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4415. }~ The description captures the CC enterprise to a fault: the fusion of some clap-your-hands populism and hardheaded legal tools, inflected with an idealistic call to action to build a better world.
={Brown, Glenn Otis;Porter, Cole}
-By 2008 the power of open networks had persuaded the major record labels to abandon digital rights management of music CDs, and more major artists were beginning to venture forth with their own direct distribution plans, bypassing the standard record label deals. Prince, Madonna, and others found it more lucrative to run their own business affairs and deal with concert venues and merchandisers. In a major experiment that suggests a new business model for major music acts, Nine Inch Nails released its album /{Ghosts I-IV}/ under a Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike license, and posted audio files of the album on its official Web site, inviting free downloads. It did not do advertising or promotion. Despite the free distribution — or because of it — the group made money by selling 2,500 copies of an “Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition” of the album for $300; the edition sold out in less than three days. There were also nonlimited sales of a “deluxe edition” for $75 and a $10 CD. The scheme showed how free access to the music can be used to drive sales for something that remains scarce, such as a “special edition” CD or a live performance. One week after the album’s release, the Nine Inch Nails’ Web site reported that the group had made over $1.6 million from over 750,000 purchase and download transactions. Considering that an artist generally makes only $1.60 on the sale of a $15.99 CD, Nine Inch Nails made a great deal more money from a “free” album distribution than it otherwise would have made through a standard record deal.~{ See, e.g., Wikipedia entry, “Ghosts I-IV,” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Ghosts_I-IV. }~
+By 2008 the power of open networks had persuaded the major record labels to abandon digital rights management of music CDs, and more major artists were beginning to venture forth with their own direct distribution plans, bypassing the standard record label deals. Prince, Madonna, and others found it more lucrative to run their own business affairs and deal with concert venues and merchandisers. In a major experiment that suggests a new business model for major music acts, Nine Inch Nails released its album /{Ghosts I-IV}/ under a Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike license, and posted audio files of the album on its official Web site, inviting free downloads. It did not do advertising or promotion. Despite the free distribution — or because of it — the group made money by selling 2,500 copies of an “Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition” of the album for $300; the edition sold out in less than three days. There were also nonlimited sales of a “deluxe edition” for $75 and a $10 CD. The scheme showed how free access to the music can be used to drive sales for something that remains scarce, such as a “special edition” CD or a live performance. One week after the album’s release, the Nine Inch Nails’ Web site reported that the group had made over $1.6 million from over 750,000 purchase and download transactions. Considering that an artist generally makes only $1.60 on the sale of a $15.99 CD, Nine Inch Nails made a great deal more money from a “free” album distribution than it otherwise would have made through a standard record deal.~{ See, e.g., Wikipedia entry, “Ghosts I-IV,” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_I-IV. }~
={Nine Inch Nails}
It is too early to know if Lessig’s “BMI strategy” will in fact catalyze a structural transformation in the entertainment industries. But Lessig apparently feels that it is the only feasible strategy. As he said in a 2006 speech, intensified hacking to break systems of proprietary control will not work; new campaigns to win progressive legislation won’t succeed within the next twenty years; and litigation is “a long-term losing strategy,” as the /{Eldred}/ case demonstrated. For Lessig and much of the free culture community, the long-term project of building one’s own open, commons-friendly infrastructure is the only enduring solution.
={BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.);Eldred v. Reno/Eldred v. Ashcroft:effects of;Lessig, Lawrence:Eldred v. Reno, and|music, and+1}
-In the music industry, the early signs seem to support this approach. When digital guru Don Tapscott surveyed the events of 2006, he concluded that “the losers built digital music stores and the winners built vibrant communities based on music. The losers built walled gardens while the winners built public squares. The losers were busy guarding their intellectual property while the winners were busy getting everyone’s attention.” In a penetrating analysis in 2007, music industry blogger Gerd Leonhard wrote: “In music, it’s always been about interaction, about sharing, about engaging — not Sell-Sell-Sell right from the start. Stop the sharing and you kill the music business — it’s that simple. When the fan/user/listener stops engaging with the music, it’s all over.”~{ Gerd Leonhard, “Open Letter to the Independent Music Industry: Music 2.0 and the Future of Music,” July 1, 2007, at http://www.gerdleonhard.net/ 2007/07/gerd-leonhards.html. }~
+In the music industry, the early signs seem to support this approach. When digital guru Don Tapscott surveyed the events of 2006, he concluded that “the losers built digital music stores and the winners built vibrant communities based on music. The losers built walled gardens while the winners built public squares. The losers were busy guarding their intellectual property while the winners were busy getting everyone’s attention.” In a penetrating analysis in 2007, music industry blogger Gerd Leonhard wrote: “In music, it’s always been about interaction, about sharing, about engaging — not Sell-Sell-Sell right from the start. Stop the sharing and you kill the music business — it’s that simple. When the fan/user/listener stops engaging with the music, it’s all over.”~{ Gerd Leonhard, “Open Letter to the Independent Music Industry: Music 2.0 and the Future of Music,” July 1, 2007, at http://www.gerdleonhard.net/2007/07/gerd-leonhards.html. }~
={Leonhard, Gerd;Tapscott, Don}
Serious change is in the air when the producer/consumer dichotomy is no longer the only paradigm, and a vast network of ordinary people and talented creators are becoming active participants in making their own culture. They are sharing and co-creating. Markets are no longer so separate from social communities; indeed, the two are blurring into each other. Although we may live in a complicated interregnum between Centralized Media and distributed media, the future is likely to favor those creators and businesses who build on open platforms. As Dan Hunter and F. Gregory Lastowka write: “It is clear that two parallel spheres of information production exist today. One is a traditional, copyright-based and profit-driven model that is struggling with technological change. The second is a newly enabled, decentralized amateur production sphere, in which individual authors or small groups freely release their work.”~{ Dan Hunter and F. Gregory Lastowka, “Amateur-to-Amateur,” /{William and Mary Law Review}/ 46, no. 951 (December 2004), pp. 1029–30. }~
@@ -1674,7 +1674,7 @@ Even as the machine was getting built, Lessig was taking steps to stoke up a mov
Although /{Free Culture}/ repeats many of the fundamental arguments made in his earlier books, Lessig’s arguments this time did not sound like a law professor’s or academic’s, but more like an activist trying to rally a social movement. “This movement must begin in the streets,” he writes. “It must recruit a significant number of parents, teachers, librarians, creators, authors, musicians, filmmakers, scientists — all to tell their story in their own words, and to tell their neighbors why this battle is so important. . . . We will not reclaim a free culture by individual action alone. It will take important reforms of laws. We have a long way to go before the politicians will listen to these ideas and implement these reforms. But that also means that we have time to build awareness around the changes that we need.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, /{Free Culture}/ (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 275, 287. }~ The preeminent challenge for this would-be movement, Lessig wrote, is “rebuilding freedoms previously presumed” and “rebuilding free culture.”
-Lessig had reason to think that his analysis and exhortations would find receptive ears. He was now a leading voice on copyright and Internet issues, and well known through his earlier books, public speaking, and /{Eldred}/ advocacy. The launch of the Creative Commons was thrusting him into the spotlight again. Adoption of the CC licenses was steadily growing in 2003 and 2004 based on the most comprehensive sources at the time, search engines. Yahoo was reporting in September 2004 that there were 4.7 million links to CC licenses on the Web. This number shot up to 14 million only six months later, and by August 2005 it had grown to 53 million.~{ CC license statistics, on CC wiki page, at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/ License_statistics. }~ These numbers offer only a crude estimate of actual license usage, but they nonetheless indicated a consistent trend. Usage was also being propelled by new types of Web 2.0 sites featuring usergenerated content. For example, Flickr, the photo-sharing site, had 4.1 million photos tagged with CC licenses at the end of 2004, a number that has soared to an estimated 75 million by 2008.
+Lessig had reason to think that his analysis and exhortations would find receptive ears. He was now a leading voice on copyright and Internet issues, and well known through his earlier books, public speaking, and /{Eldred}/ advocacy. The launch of the Creative Commons was thrusting him into the spotlight again. Adoption of the CC licenses was steadily growing in 2003 and 2004 based on the most comprehensive sources at the time, search engines. Yahoo was reporting in September 2004 that there were 4.7 million links to CC licenses on the Web. This number shot up to 14 million only six months later, and by August 2005 it had grown to 53 million.~{ CC license statistics, on CC wiki page, at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/License_statistics. }~ These numbers offer only a crude estimate of actual license usage, but they nonetheless indicated a consistent trend. Usage was also being propelled by new types of Web 2.0 sites featuring usergenerated content. For example, Flickr, the photo-sharing site, had 4.1 million photos tagged with CC licenses at the end of 2004, a number that has soared to an estimated 75 million by 2008.
={Lessig, Lawrence:CC licenses, and;Yahoo;Web 2.0:CC licenses, and;Creative Commons (CC) licenses:Web 2.0 environment, and}
The decisive choice, four years earlier, to build a suite of licenses that could propagate themselves via open networks was bearing fruit.
@@ -1724,7 +1724,7 @@ Perhaps the neatest self-promotional trick that the Creative Commons has devised
Infrastructure grows old and occasionally needs to be updated and improved. The CC licenses have been no exception. As users have incorporated them into one medium after another, the unwitting omissions and infelicitous legal language of some parts of the licenses needed revisiting. After many months of discussions with many parts of the CC world, the Creative Commons issued a new set of 2.0 licenses in May 2004.~{ Glenn Otis Brown, “Announcing (and explaining) our new 2.0 licenses,” CC blog, May 25, 2004, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4216. }~ They did not differ substantially from the original ones, and in fact the changes would probably bore most nonlawyers. For example, version 2.0 included a provision that allows a licensor to require licensees to provide a link back to the licensor’s work. The 2.0 licenses also clarify many complicated license options affecting music rights, and make clear that licensors make no warranties of title, merchantability, or fitness for use. Perhaps the biggest change in version 2.0 was the elimination of the choice of Attribution licenses. Since nearly 98 percent of all licensors chose Attribution, the Creative Commons decided to drop licenses without the Attribution requirement, thereby reducing the number of CC licenses from eleven to six.
={Creative Commons (CC) licenses:version 2.0 of}
-Another set of major revisions to the licenses was taken up for discussion in 2006, and agreed upon in February 2007.~{ 7. Mia Garlick, “Version 3.0 Launched,” CC blog, http://creativecommons.org/ weblog/entry/7249. }~ Once again, the layperson would care little for the debates leading to the changes, but considerable, sometimes heated discussion went into the revisions. In general, the 3.0 tweaks sought to make the licenses clearer, more useful, and more enforceable. The issue of “moral rights” under copyright law — an issue in many European countries — is explicitly addressed, as are the complications of the CC licenses and collecting societies. New legal language was introduced to ensure that people who remix works under other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), would be able to also use CC-licensed materials in the same work — an important provision for preventing free culture from devolving into “autistic islands” of legally incomptabile material. Besides helping align the CC world with Wikipedia (which uses the GNU FDL license), the 3.0 revisions also made harmonizing legal changes to take account of MIT and the Debian software development community.
+Another set of major revisions to the licenses was taken up for discussion in 2006, and agreed upon in February 2007.~{ 7. Mia Garlick, “Version 3.0 Launched,” CC blog, http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7249. }~ Once again, the layperson would care little for the debates leading to the changes, but considerable, sometimes heated discussion went into the revisions. In general, the 3.0 tweaks sought to make the licenses clearer, more useful, and more enforceable. The issue of “moral rights” under copyright law — an issue in many European countries — is explicitly addressed, as are the complications of the CC licenses and collecting societies. New legal language was introduced to ensure that people who remix works under other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), would be able to also use CC-licensed materials in the same work — an important provision for preventing free culture from devolving into “autistic islands” of legally incomptabile material. Besides helping align the CC world with Wikipedia (which uses the GNU FDL license), the 3.0 revisions also made harmonizing legal changes to take account of MIT and the Debian software development community.
={GNU Project:GNU FDL;copyright law:moral rights, and;Creative Commons (CC) licenses:version 3.0 of}
By getting the CC licenses integrated into so many types of software and Web services, and even leveraging market players to embrace the sharing ethic, Creative Commons has managed to kill at least three birds with one stone. It has enlarged the universe of shareable Internet content. It has educated people to consider how copyright law affects them personally. And it has given visibility to its larger vision of free culture.
@@ -1763,7 +1763,7 @@ In a pre-Internet context, the whole idea of a creating a new international lice
Going international with the licenses offered an appealing way to grow both simultaneously without forcing unpleasant trade-offs between the two, at least initially. Drafting the licenses for a country, for example, helps convene top lawyers committed to the idea of legal sharing and collaboration while also mobilizing diverse constituencies who are the potential leaders of a movement.
-According to Jonathan Zittrain, an early collaborator on the project and a board member, Creative Commons at the international level is more of a “persuasive, communicative enterprise than a legal licensing one.”~{ Interview with Jonathan Zittrain, September 28, 2006. }~ It is a vehicle for starting a process for engaging public-spirited lawyers, law scholars, and all manner of creators. The licenses do have specific legal meanings in their respective legal jurisdictions, of course, or are believed to have legal application. (Only three courts, in the Netherlands and Spain, have ever ruled on the legal status of the CC licenses. In two instances the courts enforced the licenses; in the other case, in which the defendant lost, the validity of the licenses was not at issue.)~{ The most famous court case involving the CC licenses is /{A. Curry v. Audax/Weekend}/, in which Adam Curry sued the publishers of a Dutch tabloid magazine and two senior editors for using four photos of his family on his Flickr account that had been licensed under a BY-NC-SA license. See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5944 and http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5823. A District Court of Amsterdam upheld Curry’s usage of the CC licenses in a March 9, 2006, decision; see http://mir rors.creativecommons.org/judgements/Curry-Audax-English.pdf. There have been two Spanish cases involving CC licenses. In both cases, a collecting society, the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE), sued cafés for playing “free music” licensed under CC licenses; SGAE claimed that it was owed royalties for the public performance of music because artists cannot legally apply a CC license to their work (or even release it online) without the consent of their collecting society. In both instances, the cases turned on evidentiary issues, not on the enforceability of CC licenses. See http:// creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5830 and http://creativecommons.org/ weblog/entry/7228. }~ Apart from their legal meaning, the licenses’ most important function may be as a social signaling device. They let people announce, “I participate in and celebrate the sharing economy.” The internationalization of the CC licenses has also been a way of “localizing” the free culture movement.
+According to Jonathan Zittrain, an early collaborator on the project and a board member, Creative Commons at the international level is more of a “persuasive, communicative enterprise than a legal licensing one.”~{ Interview with Jonathan Zittrain, September 28, 2006. }~ It is a vehicle for starting a process for engaging public-spirited lawyers, law scholars, and all manner of creators. The licenses do have specific legal meanings in their respective legal jurisdictions, of course, or are believed to have legal application. (Only three courts, in the Netherlands and Spain, have ever ruled on the legal status of the CC licenses. In two instances the courts enforced the licenses; in the other case, in which the defendant lost, the validity of the licenses was not at issue.)~{ The most famous court case involving the CC licenses is /{A. Curry v. Audax/Weekend}/, in which Adam Curry sued the publishers of a Dutch tabloid magazine and two senior editors for using four photos of his family on his Flickr account that had been licensed under a BY-NC-SA license. See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5944 and http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5823. A District Court of Amsterdam upheld Curry’s usage of the CC licenses in a March 9, 2006, decision; see http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/judgements/Curry-Audax-English.pdf. There have been two Spanish cases involving CC licenses. In both cases, a collecting society, the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE), sued cafés for playing “free music” licensed under CC licenses; SGAE claimed that it was owed royalties for the public performance of music because artists cannot legally apply a CC license to their work (or even release it online) without the consent of their collecting society. In both instances, the cases turned on evidentiary issues, not on the enforceability of CC licenses. See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5830 and http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7228. }~ Apart from their legal meaning, the licenses’ most important function may be as a social signaling device. They let people announce, “I participate in and celebrate the sharing economy.” The internationalization of the CC licenses has also been a way of “localizing” the free culture movement.
={Zittrain, Jonathan}
The first nation to port the CC licenses was Japan. This was partly an outgrowth of a five-month sabbatical that Lessig had spent in Tokyo, from late 2002 through early 2003. There were already stirrings of dissatisfaction with copyright law in Japan. Koichiro Hayashi, a professor who had once worked for the telecom giant NTT, had once proposed a so-called d-mark system to allow copyright owners to forfeit the statutory term of copyright protection and voluntarily declare a shorter term for their works. In the spring of 2003, a team of Japanese lawyers associated with a technology research institute, the Global Communications Center (GLOCOM), working with CC International in Berlin, set about porting the licenses to Japanese law.
@@ -1786,7 +1786,7 @@ As each jurisdiction introduces its licenses, it typically hosts a gala public e
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had just been elected president of Brazil, and he was eager to stake out a new set of development policies to allow his nation to plot its own economic and cultural future. His government, reflecting his electoral mandate, resented the coercive effects of international copyright law and patent law. To tackle some of these issues on the copyright front, President Lula appointed Gilberto Gil, the renowned singer-songwriter, as his minister of culture.
={Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio;Gil, Gilberto+11}
-Gil became a revered cultural figure when he helped launch a new musical style, /{tropicalismo}/, in the late 1960s, giving Brazil a fresh, international cachet. The music blended national styles of music with pop culture and was inflected with political and moral themes. As one commentator put it, /{tropicalismo}/ was “a very ’60s attempt to capture the chaotic, swirling feel of Brazil’s perennially uneven modernization, its jumble of wealth and poverty, of rural and urban, of local and global. . . . They cut and pasted styles with an abandon that, amid today’s sample-happy music scene, sounds up-to-theminute.”~{ Wikipedia entry, “Tropicalismo,” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical ismo. }~ The military dictatorship then running the government considered /{tropicalismo}/ sufficiently threatening that it imprisoned Gil for several months before forcing him into exile, in London. Gil continued writing and recording music, however, and eventually returned to Brazil.~{ For a history of Gil, see his personal Web site at http://www.gilbertogil .com.br/index.php?language=en; the Wikipedia entry on him at http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilberto_Gil; and Larry Rohter, “Gilberto Gil Hears the Future, Some Rights Reserved,” /{New York Times}/, March 11, 2007. }~
+Gil became a revered cultural figure when he helped launch a new musical style, /{tropicalismo}/, in the late 1960s, giving Brazil a fresh, international cachet. The music blended national styles of music with pop culture and was inflected with political and moral themes. As one commentator put it, /{tropicalismo}/ was “a very ’60s attempt to capture the chaotic, swirling feel of Brazil’s perennially uneven modernization, its jumble of wealth and poverty, of rural and urban, of local and global. . . . They cut and pasted styles with an abandon that, amid today’s sample-happy music scene, sounds up-to-theminute.”~{ Wikipedia entry, “Tropicalismo,” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropicalismo. }~ The military dictatorship then running the government considered /{tropicalismo}/ sufficiently threatening that it imprisoned Gil for several months before forcing him into exile, in London. Gil continued writing and recording music, however, and eventually returned to Brazil.~{ For a history of Gil, see his personal Web site at http://www.gilbertogil.com.br/index.php?language=en; the Wikipedia entry on him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilberto_Gil; and Larry Rohter, “Gilberto Gil Hears the Future, Some Rights Reserved,” /{New York Times}/, March 11, 2007. }~
This history matters, because when Gil was appointed culture minister, he brought with him a rare political sophistication and public veneration. His moral stature and joyous humanity allowed him to transcend politics as conventionally practiced. “Gil wears shoulder-length dreadlocks and is apt to show up at his ministerial offices dressed in the simple white linens that identify him as a follower of the Afro-Brazilian religion /{candomblé}/,” wrote American journalist Julian Dibbell in 2004. “Slouching in and out of the elegant Barcelona chairs that furnish his office, taking the occasional sip from a cup of pinkish herbal tea, he looks — and talks — less like an elder statesman than the posthippie, multiculturalist, Taoist intellectual he is.”~{ Julian Dibbell, “We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin,” /{Wired}/, November 2004, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/linux_pr.html. }~
={Dibbell, Julian+1}
@@ -1806,10 +1806,10 @@ This alignment of intellectual firepower, artistic authority, and political clou
One of the first collaborations between Creative Commons and the Brazilian government involved the release of a special CC-GPL license in December 2003.~{ Creative Commons press release, “Brazilian Government First to Adopt New ‘CC-GPL,’ ” December 2, 2003. }~ This license adapted the General Public License for software by translating it into Portuguese and putting it into the CC’s customary “three layers” — a plain-language version, a lawyers’ version compatible with the national copyright law, and a machine-readable metadata expression of the license. The CC-GPL license, released in conjunction with the Free Software Foundation, was an important international event because it gave the imprimatur of a major world government to free software and the social ethic of sharing and reuse. Brazil has since become a champion of GNU/Linux and free software in government agencies and the judiciary. It regards free software and open standards as part of a larger fight for a “development agenda” at the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization. In a related vein, Brazil has famously challenged patent and trade policies that made HIV/AIDS drugs prohibitively expensive for thousands of sick Brazilians.
={free software:international licensing, and+1;GNU/Linux:Brazil, in;World Trade Organization;World Intellectual Property Organization;open networks:international}
-When the full set of CC Brazil licenses was finally launched— at the Fifth International Free Software Forum, in Port Alegre on June 4, 2004 — it was a major national event. Brazilian celebrities, government officials, and an enthusiastic crowd of nearly two thousand people showed up. Gil, flying in from a cabinet meeting in Brasília, arrived late. When he walked into the auditorium, the panel discussion under way immediately stopped, and there was a spontaneous standing ovation.~{ A ten-minute video of the CC Brazil opening can be seen at http:// support.creativecommons.org/videos#brasil. }~ “It was like a boxer entering the arena for a heavyweight match,” recalled Glenn Otis Brown. “He had security guards on both sides of him as he walked up the middle aisle. There were flashbulbs, and admirers trailing him, and this wave of people in the audience cresting as he walked by.”~{ Interview with Glenn Otis Brown, August 10, 2006. }~
+When the full set of CC Brazil licenses was finally launched— at the Fifth International Free Software Forum, in Port Alegre on June 4, 2004 — it was a major national event. Brazilian celebrities, government officials, and an enthusiastic crowd of nearly two thousand people showed up. Gil, flying in from a cabinet meeting in Brasília, arrived late. When he walked into the auditorium, the panel discussion under way immediately stopped, and there was a spontaneous standing ovation.~{ A ten-minute video of the CC Brazil opening can be seen at http://support.creativecommons.org/videos#brasil. }~ “It was like a boxer entering the arena for a heavyweight match,” recalled Glenn Otis Brown. “He had security guards on both sides of him as he walked up the middle aisle. There were flashbulbs, and admirers trailing him, and this wave of people in the audience cresting as he walked by.”~{ Interview with Glenn Otis Brown, August 10, 2006. }~
={Brown, Glenn Otis, CC International, and+1}
-Gil originally planned to release three of his songs under the new CC Sampling license — dubbed the “Recombo” license — but his record label, Warner Bros., balked. He eventually released one song, “Oslodum,” that he had recorded for an indie label. “One way to think about it,” said Brown, “is that now, anybody in the world can jam with Gilberto Gil.”~{ Film about CC Brazil launch, at http://support.creativecommons.org/ videos#brasil. }~
+Gil originally planned to release three of his songs under the new CC Sampling license — dubbed the “Recombo” license — but his record label, Warner Bros., balked. He eventually released one song, “Oslodum,” that he had recorded for an indie label. “One way to think about it,” said Brown, “is that now, anybody in the world can jam with Gilberto Gil.”~{ Film about CC Brazil launch, at http://support.creativecommons.org/videos#brasil. }~
As culture minister, Gil released all materials from his agency under a CC license, and persuaded the Ministry of Education as well as Radiobrás, the government media agency, to do the same. He also initiated the Cultural Points (Pontos de Cultura) program, which has given small grants to scores of community centers in poor neighborhoods so that residents can learn how to produce their own music and video works. Since industry concentration and payola make it virtually impossible for newcomers to get radio play and commercially distribute their CDs, according to many observers, the project has been valuable in allowing a fresh wave of grassroots music to “go public” and reach new audiences.
@@ -1822,7 +1822,7 @@ Since its launch in June 2004, Lemos and the CC Brazil office have instigated a
In Brazil, there are open-publishing projects for scientific journals;~{ http://www.scielo.br. }~ a Web site that brings together a repository of short films;~{ http://www.portacurtas.comb.br. }~ and Overmundo,a popular site for cultural commentary by Internet users.~{ http://www.overmundo.com.br }~ TramaVirtual, an open-platform record label that lets musicians upload their music and fans download it for free, now features more than thirty-five thousand artists.~{ http://tramavirtual.uol.com.br. }~ (By contrast, the largest commercial label in Brazil, Sony-BMG, released only twelve CDs of Brazilian music in 2006, according to Lemos.)
-“Cultural production is becoming increasingly disconnected from traditional media forms,” said Lemos, because mass media institutions “are failing to provide the adequate incentives for culture to be produced and circulated. . . . Cultural production is migrating to civil society and/or the peripheries, which more or less already operate in a ‘social commons’ environment, and do not depend on intellectual property within their business models.”~{ Ronaldo Lemos, “From Legal Commons to Social Commons: Developing Countries and the Cultural Industry in the 21st Century,” http://icommons .org/banco/from-legal-commons-to-social-commons-brazil-and-the-culturalindustry-1. }~
+“Cultural production is becoming increasingly disconnected from traditional media forms,” said Lemos, because mass media institutions “are failing to provide the adequate incentives for culture to be produced and circulated. . . . Cultural production is migrating to civil society and/or the peripheries, which more or less already operate in a ‘social commons’ environment, and do not depend on intellectual property within their business models.”~{ Ronaldo Lemos, “From Legal Commons to Social Commons: Developing Countries and the Cultural Industry in the 21st Century,” http://icommons.org/banco/from-legal-commons-to-social-commons-brazil-and-the-culturalindustry-1. }~
As more people have adopted legal modes of copying and sharing under CC licenses, it is changing the social and political climate for copyright reform. Now that CC Brazil can cite all sorts of successful free culture ventures, it can more persuasively advocate for a Brazilian version of the fair use doctrine and press for greater photocopying privileges in educational settings (which are legally quite restrictive).
={free culture:international+2}
@@ -1832,7 +1832,7 @@ Although the CC licenses are now familiar to many Brazilians, they have encounte
As a unique global ambassador of creative sharing, Gilberto Gil did a lot to take the CC licenses to other nations and international forums such as the World Intellectual Property Organization. The day before his 2004 benefit concert for the Creative Commons in New York City with David Byrne, Gil delivered a powerful speech explaining the political implications of free culture:
={Byrne, David;Gil, Gilberto+3;World Intellectual Property Organization}
-_1 A global movement has risen up in affirmation of digital culture. This movement bears the banners of free software and digital inclusion, as well as the banner of the endless expansion of the circulation of information and creation, and it is the perfect model for a Latin-American developmental cultural policy (other developments are possible) of the most anti-xenophobic, anti-authoritarian, anti-bureaucratizing, anti-centralizing, and for the very reason, profoundly democratic and transformative sort.~{ Gil remarks at New York University, September 19, 2004, at http://www .nyu.edu/fas/NewsEvents/Events/Minister_Gil_speech.pdf. }~
+_1 A global movement has risen up in affirmation of digital culture. This movement bears the banners of free software and digital inclusion, as well as the banner of the endless expansion of the circulation of information and creation, and it is the perfect model for a Latin-American developmental cultural policy (other developments are possible) of the most anti-xenophobic, anti-authoritarian, anti-bureaucratizing, anti-centralizing, and for the very reason, profoundly democratic and transformative sort.~{ Gil remarks at New York University, September 19, 2004, at http://www.nyu.edu/fas/NewsEvents/Events/Minister_Gil_speech.pdf. }~
The Brazilian government was making digital culture “one of its strategic public policies,” Gil said, because “the most important political battle that is being fought today in the technological, economic, social and cultural fields has to do with free software and with the method digital freedom has put in place for the production of shared knowledge. This battle may even signify a change in subjectivity, with critical consequences for the very concept of civilization we shall be using in the near future.”~{ Ibid. }~
@@ -1856,7 +1856,7 @@ In Scotland, government and other public-sector institutions have been huge fans
The BBC was a pioneer in making its archived television and radio programs available to the public for free. In 2003, inspired by the CC licenses, the BBC drafted its own “Creative Archive” license as a way to open up its vast collection of taxpayer-financed television and radio programs.~{ See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/4527506.stm, and interview with Paula Le Dieu, joint director of the BBC Creative Archive project, May 28, 2004, at http://digital-lifestyles.info/2004/05/28/exclusive-providing-the-fuel-fora-creative-nation-an-interview-with-paula-le-dieu-joint-director-on-the-bbccreative-archive. }~ The license was later adopted by Channel 4, the Open University, the British Film Institute, and the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council. Although the Creative Archive license has similar goals as the CC licenses, it contains several significant differences: it restricts use of video programs to United Kingdom citizens only, and it prohibits use of materials for political or charitable campaigns and for any derogatory purposes.
={BBC}
-The CC licenses have proven useful, also, to the British Museum and National Archives. In 2004, these and other British educational institutions were pondering how they should make their publicly funded digital resources available for reuse. A special government panel, the Common Information Environment, recommended usage of the CC licenses because they were already international in scope. The panel liked that the licenses allow Web links in licensed materials, which could help users avoid the complications of formal registration. The panel also cited the virtues of “human readable deeds” and machine-readable metadata.~{ Intrallect Ltd and AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law, University of Edinburgh, “The Common Information Environment and Creative Commons,” October 10, 2005, at http://www .intrallect.com/index.php/intrallect/content/download/632/2631/file/CIE _CC_Final_Report.pdf. }~
+The CC licenses have proven useful, also, to the British Museum and National Archives. In 2004, these and other British educational institutions were pondering how they should make their publicly funded digital resources available for reuse. A special government panel, the Common Information Environment, recommended usage of the CC licenses because they were already international in scope. The panel liked that the licenses allow Web links in licensed materials, which could help users avoid the complications of formal registration. The panel also cited the virtues of “human readable deeds” and machine-readable metadata.~{ Intrallect Ltd and AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law, University of Edinburgh, “The Common Information Environment and Creative Commons,” October 10, 2005, at http://www.intrallect.com/index.php/intrallect/content/download/632/2631/file/CIE _CC_Final_Report.pdf. }~
As it happened, a team of Scottish legal scholars led by a private attorney, Jonathan Mitchell, successfully ported the licenses and released them a few months later, in December 2005. The Scottish effort had been initiated a year earlier when Mitchell and his colleagues objected that the U.K. CC licenses then being drafted were too rooted in English law and not sufficiently attuned to Scottish law. Since the introduction of the CC Scotland licenses, publicsector institutions have enthusiastically embraced them. Museums use the licenses on MP3 files that contain audio tours, for example, as well as on Web pages, exhibition materials, and photographs of artworks. Interestingly, in England and Wales, individual artists and creative communities seem to be more active than public-sector institutions in using the licenses.
={Scotland:CC licenses in;Creative Commons International:Scotland;Mitchell, Jonathan}
@@ -1864,7 +1864,7 @@ As it happened, a team of Scottish legal scholars led by a private attorney, Jon
The use of CC licenses for government information and publicly funded materials is inspiring similar efforts in other countries. Governments are coming to realize that they are one of the primary stewards of intellectual property, and that the wide dissemination of their work — statistics, research, reports, legislation, judicial decisions — can stimulate economic innovation, scientific progress, education, and cultural development. Unfortunately, as Anne Fitzgerald, Brian Fitzgerald, and Jessica Coates of Australia have pointed out, “putting all such material into the public domain runs the risk that material which is essentially a public and national asset will be appropriated by the private sector, without any benefit to either the government or the taxpayers.”~{ iCommons annual report, 2007, http://www.icommons.org/annual07. }~ For example, the private sector may incorporate the public-domain material into a value-added proprietary model and find other means to take the information private. The classic instance of this is West Publishing’s dominance in the republishing of U.S. federal court decisions. Open-content licenses offer a solution by ensuring that taxpayerfinanced works will be available to and benefit the general public.
={Coates, Jessica;Fitzgerald, Anne;Fitzgerald, Brian;West Publishing}
-In the United States, the National Institutes of Health has pursued a version of this policy by requiring that federally funded research be placed in an open-access archive or journal within twelve months of its commercial publication. The European Commission announced in 2007 that it plans to build a major open-access digital repository for publicly funded research.~{ Michael Geist, “Push for Open Access to Research, BBC News, February 28, 2007, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/~/2/hi/technology/6404429. }~ In Mexico, the Sistema Internet de la Presidencia, or Presidency Internet System (SIP), decided in 2006 to adopt CC licenses for all content generated by the Mexican presidency on the Internet — chiefly the president’s various Web sites, Internet radio station, and documents.~{ Creative Commons blog, Alex Roberts, March 8, 2006, at http://creative commons.org/text/sip. }~ In Italy, CC Italy is exploring legislation to open up national and local government archives. It also wants new contract terms for those who develop publicly funded information so that it will automatically be available in the future.~{ Interview with Juan Carlos de Martin, CC Italy, July 17, 2007. }~
+In the United States, the National Institutes of Health has pursued a version of this policy by requiring that federally funded research be placed in an open-access archive or journal within twelve months of its commercial publication. The European Commission announced in 2007 that it plans to build a major open-access digital repository for publicly funded research.~{ Michael Geist, “Push for Open Access to Research, BBC News, February 28, 2007, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/~/2/hi/technology/6404429. }~ In Mexico, the Sistema Internet de la Presidencia, or Presidency Internet System (SIP), decided in 2006 to adopt CC licenses for all content generated by the Mexican presidency on the Internet — chiefly the president’s various Web sites, Internet radio station, and documents.~{ Creative Commons blog, Alex Roberts, March 8, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/text/sip. }~ In Italy, CC Italy is exploring legislation to open up national and local government archives. It also wants new contract terms for those who develop publicly funded information so that it will automatically be available in the future.~{ Interview with Juan Carlos de Martin, CC Italy, July 17, 2007. }~
={Creative Commons International:Italy|Mexico;Italy:CC licenses in;Mexico:CC licenses in}
2~ Laboratories of Free Culture
@@ -1881,7 +1881,7 @@ Not surprisingly, the American CC licenses — a version of which was spun off a
As a fledgling network, the international CC community is a rudimentary platform for change. Its members are still groping toward a shared understanding of their work and devising new systems of communication and collaboration. But a great deal of cross-border collaboration is occurring. A variety of free culture advocates have constituted themselves as the Asia Commons and met in Bangkok to collaborate on issues of free software, citizen access to government information, and industry antipiracy propaganda. CC Italy has invited leaders of neighboring countries— France, Switzerland, Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia — to share their experiences and work together. A CC Latin America project started /{Scripta}/, a new Spanish-language journal based in Ecuador, to discuss free software and free culture issues affecting the continent.
={Creative Commons International:cross-border collaboration+1}
-CC leaders in Finland, France, and Australia have published books about their licensing projects.~{ The French book is Danièle Bourcier and Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, eds., /{International Commons at the Digital Age}/ (Paris: Romillat, 2004), at http://fr.creativecommons.org/icommons_book.htm. The Finnish book is Herkko Hietanen et al., /{Community Created Content: Law, Business and Policy}/ (Turre Publishing, 2007), at http://www.turre.com/images/stories/books/webkirja_koko_ optimoitu2.pdf. The Australian book is Brian Fitzgerald, /{Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons}/ (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2007). }~ CC Brazil and CC South Africa have collaborated on a project about copyright and developing nations. CC Canada is working with partners to develop an online, globally searchable database of Canadian works in the Canadian public domain. CC Salons have been held in Amsterdam, Toronto, Berlin, Beijing, London, Warsaw, Seoul, Taipei, and Johannesburg.
+CC leaders in Finland, France, and Australia have published books about their licensing projects.~{ The French book is Danièle Bourcier and Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, eds., /{International Commons at the Digital Age}/ (Paris: Romillat, 2004), at http://fr.creativecommons.org/icommons_book.htm. The Finnish book is Herkko Hietanen et al., /{Community Created Content: Law, Business and Policy}/ (Turre Publishing, 2007), at http://www.turre.com/images/stories/books/webkirja_koko_optimoitu2.pdf. The Australian book is Brian Fitzgerald, /{Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons}/ (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2007). }~ CC Brazil and CC South Africa have collaborated on a project about copyright and developing nations. CC Canada is working with partners to develop an online, globally searchable database of Canadian works in the Canadian public domain. CC Salons have been held in Amsterdam, Toronto, Berlin, Beijing, London, Warsaw, Seoul, Taipei, and Johannesburg.
In the Netherlands, CC project lead Paul Keller engineered a breakthrough that may overcome the persistent objections of European collecting societies to CC-licensed content. Collecting societies in Europe generally insist that any musician that they represent transfer all of their copyrights to the collective. This means that professional musicians cannot distribute their works under a CC license. Artists who are already using CC licenses cannot join the collecting societies in order to receive royalties for commercial uses of their works. In this manner, collecting societies in many European nations have effectively prevented many musicians from using the CC licenses.
={Keller, Paul;collecting societies+1:see also ASCAP}
@@ -1899,7 +1899,7 @@ Love was trying to do for books and journal articles what is already possible fo
In the end, Creative Commons offered the Developing Nations license as a separate license, not a rider. It had simple terms: “You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)” — and the license was valid only in non–high income nations, as determined by United Nations’ statistics. Although the release of the license got considerable press coverage, actual usage of the license was extremely small. The most prominent use was totally unexpected — for architectural designs. Architecture for Humanity, a California nonprofit, used the license for its designs of low-cost housing and health centers. The organization wanted to give away its architectural plans to poor countries while not letting its competitors in the U.S. use them for free.~{ Creative Commons blog, Kathryn Frankel, “Commoners: Architecture for Humanity,” June 30, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/education/architecture. }~
={United Nations}
-The expected uses of the Developing Nations license never materialized. In 2006, Love said, “The license is there, but people who might be willing to use it are not really aware of it.” He worried that the license “hasn’t really been explained in a way that would be obvious to them,” and ventured that there may be “a need for a re-marketing campaign.” By this time, however, the license had attracted the ire of Richard Stallman for its limitations on “freedom.”~{ See Lessig on Creative Commons blog, December 7, 2005, at http://cre ativecommons.org/weblog/archive/2005/12/page/3. }~ It prohibited copying of a work in certain circumstances (in high-income countries) even for noncommercial purposes, and so authorized only a partial grant of freedom, not a universal one. “Well, the whole point was /{not}/ to be universal,” said Love. “The license is for people that are unwilling to share with high-income countries, but are willing to share with developing countries. So it actually expands the commons, but only in developing countries.”~{ Interview with James Love, June 13, 2006. }~
+The expected uses of the Developing Nations license never materialized. In 2006, Love said, “The license is there, but people who might be willing to use it are not really aware of it.” He worried that the license “hasn’t really been explained in a way that would be obvious to them,” and ventured that there may be “a need for a re-marketing campaign.” By this time, however, the license had attracted the ire of Richard Stallman for its limitations on “freedom.”~{ See Lessig on Creative Commons blog, December 7, 2005, at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/archive/2005/12/page/3. }~ It prohibited copying of a work in certain circumstances (in high-income countries) even for noncommercial purposes, and so authorized only a partial grant of freedom, not a universal one. “Well, the whole point was /{not}/ to be universal,” said Love. “The license is for people that are unwilling to share with high-income countries, but are willing to share with developing countries. So it actually expands the commons, but only in developing countries.”~{ Interview with James Love, June 13, 2006. }~
={Lessig, Lawrence:CC International, and+1;Stallman, Richard:freedom, and+2}
The controversy that grew up around the Developing Nations license illuminates the different approaches to movement building that Lessig and Stallman represent. Lessig’s advocacy for free culture has been an exploratory journey in pragmatic idealism; Stallman’s advocacy for free software has been more of a crusade of true believers in a core philosophy. For Stallman, the principles of “freedom” are unitary and clear, and so the path forward is fairly self-evident and unassailable. For Lessig, the principles of freedom are more situational and evolving and subject to the consensus of key creative communities. The flexibility has enabled a broad-spectrum movement to emerge, but it does not have the ideological coherence of, say, the free software movement.
@@ -1911,7 +1911,7 @@ Several factors converged to make it attractive for Creative Commons to revoke t
Finally, many CC staff members regarded the Developing Nations and Sampling licenses as misbegotten experiments. Fewer than 0.01 percent of uses of CC licenses at the time involved the Developing Nations license, and the Sampling license was used by a relatively small community of remix artists and musicians. If eliminating two little-used niche licenses could neutralize objections from the open access and free software movements and achieve a greater philosophical and political solidarity in the “free world,” many CC partisans regarded a rescission of the licenses as a modest sacrifice, if not a net gain.
={remix works+1;music:remixes;Creative Commons (CC) licenses:music, for}
-In June 2007, Creative Commons announced that it was officially retiring the two licenses.~{ Creative Commons “retired licenses page,” at http://creativecommons.org/ retiredlicenses. }~ In a formal statement, Lessig explained, “These licenses do not meet the minimum standards of the Open Access movement. Because this movement is so important to the spread of science and knowledge, we no longer believe it correct to promote a standalone version of this license.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, “Retiring standalone DevNations and One Sampling License,” message to CC International listserv, June 4, 2007. }~ The Creative Commons also revoked the Sampling license because it “only permits the remix of the licensed work, not the freedom to share it.” (Two other sampling licenses that permit noncommercial sharing— SamplingPlus and NonCommercial SamplingPlus — were retained.)
+In June 2007, Creative Commons announced that it was officially retiring the two licenses.~{ Creative Commons “retired licenses page,” at http://creativecommons.org/retiredlicenses. }~ In a formal statement, Lessig explained, “These licenses do not meet the minimum standards of the Open Access movement. Because this movement is so important to the spread of science and knowledge, we no longer believe it correct to promote a standalone version of this license.”~{ Lawrence Lessig, “Retiring standalone DevNations and One Sampling License,” message to CC International listserv, June 4, 2007. }~ The Creative Commons also revoked the Sampling license because it “only permits the remix of the licensed work, not the freedom to share it.” (Two other sampling licenses that permit noncommercial sharing— SamplingPlus and NonCommercial SamplingPlus — were retained.)
={Lessig, Lawrence:CC International, and}
Anyone could still use the Sampling or Developing Nations license if they wished; they still exist, after all. It’s just that the Creative Commons no longer supports them. While the actual impact of the license revocations was minor, it did have major symbolic and political significance in the commons world. It signaled that the Creative Commons was capitulating to objections by free software advocates and the concerns of open access publishing activists.
@@ -2011,7 +2011,7 @@ Ironically, the Creative Commons is not itself a commons, nor do its licenses ne
Is one type of commons superior to the others? Does one offer a superior vision of “freedom”? This philosophical issue has been a recurrent source of tension between the Free Software Foundation, the steward of the GPL, and the Creative Commons, whose licenses cater to individual choice.
-Strictly speaking, a commons essentially offers a binary choice, explained Benkler: “You’re in the commons or you’re out of the commons.” By broadening that binary choice, the CC licenses make the commons a more complicated and ambiguous enterprise. This is precisely what some critics like Stallman have found objectionable about certain CC licenses. They don’t necessarily help forge a community of shared values and commitments. Or as two British critics, David Berry and Giles Moss, have put it, the CC licenses create “commons without commonality.”~{ David Berry and Giles Moss, “On the ‘Creative Commons’: A Critique of the Commons without Commonality,” Free Software Magazine, July 15, 2005, at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/commons_without_com monality. }~
+Strictly speaking, a commons essentially offers a binary choice, explained Benkler: “You’re in the commons or you’re out of the commons.” By broadening that binary choice, the CC licenses make the commons a more complicated and ambiguous enterprise. This is precisely what some critics like Stallman have found objectionable about certain CC licenses. They don’t necessarily help forge a community of shared values and commitments. Or as two British critics, David Berry and Giles Moss, have put it, the CC licenses create “commons without commonality.”~{ David Berry and Giles Moss, “On the ‘Creative Commons’: A Critique of the Commons without Commonality,” Free Software Magazine, July 15, 2005, at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/commons_without_commonality. }~
={Benkler, Yochai:social movements, on;Berry, David;Moss, Giles;Stallman, Richard:criticisms by}
Inviting authors to choose how their work may circulate can result in different types of “commons economies” that may or may not be interoperable. ShareAlike content is isolated from NoDerivatives content; NonCommercial content cannot be used for commercial purposes without explicit permission; and so on. CC-licensed works may themselves be incompatible with content licensed under other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License.
@@ -2030,7 +2030,7 @@ These are pivotal questions. The answers point toward different visions of free
Some critics accuse Creative Commons of betraying the full potential of the commons because its licenses empower individual authors to decide how “shareable” their works can be. The licenses do not place the needs of the general culture or the commons first, as a matter of universal policy, and some licenses restrict how a work may be used. The lamentable result, say critics like Niva Elkin-Koren, is a segmented body of culture that encourages people to think of cultural works as property. People internalize the norms, such as “This is /{my work}/ and /{I’ll}/ decide how it shall be used by others.”
={Elkin-Koren, Niva;commoners:sharing by+1;Creative Commons (CC) licenses:critics of+2}
-This can be seen in the actual choices that CC licensors tend to use. Some 67 percent of CC-licensed works do not allow commercial usage.~{ Based on Yahoo queries, June 13, 2006, at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/ License_Statistics. }~ Arguments go back and forth about whether the NC restriction enhances or shrinks freedom. Many musicians and writers want to promote their works on the Internet while retaining the possibility of commercial gain, however remote; this would seem a strike for freedom. Yet critics note that the NC license is often used indiscriminately, even when commercial sales are a remote possibility. This precludes even modest commercial reuses of a work, such as reposting of content on a blog with advertising.~{ Eric Muller, “The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons–NC License,” at http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC. }~
+This can be seen in the actual choices that CC licensors tend to use. Some 67 percent of CC-licensed works do not allow commercial usage.~{ Based on Yahoo queries, June 13, 2006, at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/License_Statistics. }~ Arguments go back and forth about whether the NC restriction enhances or shrinks freedom. Many musicians and writers want to promote their works on the Internet while retaining the possibility of commercial gain, however remote; this would seem a strike for freedom. Yet critics note that the NC license is often used indiscriminately, even when commercial sales are a remote possibility. This precludes even modest commercial reuses of a work, such as reposting of content on a blog with advertising.~{ Eric Muller, “The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons–NC License,” at http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC. }~
The larger point of criticism is that the Creative Commons licenses do not “draw a line in the sand” about what types of freedoms are inherent to the commons. In the interest of building a broad movement, Creative Commons does not insist upon a clear standard of freedom or prescribe how a commons should be structured.
@@ -2051,9 +2051,9 @@ At one point, the philosophical disagreements between the Creative Commons and i
Stallman objected to the Sampling license because, while it allowed a remix of a licensed work, it did not allow the freedom to share it. The Developing Nations license was objectionable because its freedoms to copy are limited to people in the developing world, and do not extend to everyone. Stallman also disliked the fact that the CC tag that licensors affix to their works did not specify /{which}/ license they were using. With no clear standard of “freedom” and now a mix of licenses that included two “non-free” licenses, Stallman regarded the CC tag as meaningless and the organization itself problematic.
-“I used to support Creative Commons,” said Stallman on his blog in July 2005, “but then it adopted some additional licenses which do not give everyone that minimum freedom, and now I no longer endorse it as an activity. I agree with Mako Hill that they are taking the wrong approach by not insisting on any specific freedoms for the public.”~{ Richard Stallman, “Fireworks in Montreal,” at http://www.fsf.org/blogs/ rms/entry-20050920.html. }~
+“I used to support Creative Commons,” said Stallman on his blog in July 2005, “but then it adopted some additional licenses which do not give everyone that minimum freedom, and now I no longer endorse it as an activity. I agree with Mako Hill that they are taking the wrong approach by not insisting on any specific freedoms for the public.”~{ Richard Stallman, “Fireworks in Montreal,” at http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/entry-20050920.html. }~
-Mako Hill is a brilliant young hacker and Stallman acolyte who wrote a 2005 essay, “Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement,”~{ Benjamin Mako Hill, “Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement,” /{Advogato}/, July 29, 2005, at http://www .advogato.org/article/851.html. }~ a piece that shares Elkin-Koren’s complaint about the CC’s “ideological fuzziness.” Then enrolled in a graduate program at the MIT Media Lab, Hill has written a number of essays on the philosophy and social values of free software. (When he was an undergraduate at Hampshire College, I was an outside advisor for his senior thesis and remain friends with him.)
+Mako Hill is a brilliant young hacker and Stallman acolyte who wrote a 2005 essay, “Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement,”~{ Benjamin Mako Hill, “Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement,” /{Advogato}/, July 29, 2005, at http://www.advogato.org/article/851.html. }~ a piece that shares Elkin-Koren’s complaint about the CC’s “ideological fuzziness.” Then enrolled in a graduate program at the MIT Media Lab, Hill has written a number of essays on the philosophy and social values of free software. (When he was an undergraduate at Hampshire College, I was an outside advisor for his senior thesis and remain friends with him.)
={Elkin-Koren, Niva;Hill, Benjamin Mako+2;free culture:differing visions of+31;free software:social movement, as+31}
In his “Freedom’s Standard” essay, Hill wrote: “[D]espite CC’s stated desire to learn from and build upon the example of the free software movement, CC sets no defined limits and promises no freedoms, no rights, and no fixed qualities. Free software’s success is built on an ethical position. CC sets no such standard.” While CC prides itself on its more open-minded “some rights reserved” standard, Hill says that a real movement for freedom must make a bolder commitment to the rights of the audience and other creators— namely, that “essential rights are unreservable.”~{ Interview with Benjamin Mako Hill, June 1, 2007. }~
@@ -2069,7 +2069,7 @@ Lessig has argued many times that, just as the free software community decided f
Elkin-Koren is not so sure we can segment the world according to creative sectors and let each determine how works shall circulate. “I don’t think we can separate the different sectors, as if we work in different sectors,” she told me. “We all work in the production of information. My ideas on copyright are really affected by the art that I use and the music that I listen to. . . . Information is essential not only for creating something functional or for selling a work of art, but for our citizenship and for our ability to participate in society. So it’s not as if we can say, ‘Well, this sector can decide for themselves.’”~{ Interview with Niva Elkin-Koren, January 30, 2007. }~
={Elkin-Koren, Niva}
-As Wikipedia began to take off in popularity, what might have been an unpleasant philosophical rift grew into a more serious fissure with potentially significant consequences. All Wikipedia content is licensed under the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Free Documentation License, or FDL,~{ Wikipedia entry on GNU Free Documentation license, at http://en.wiki pedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License. }~ largely because the CC licenses did not exist when Wikipedia was launched in 2001. The FDL, originally intended for the documentation manuals that explicate software applications, is essentially the same as the CC ShareAlike license (any derivative works must also be released under the same license granting the freedom to share). But using the FDL can get cumbersome, especially as more video, audio, and photos are incorporated into a text; each artifact would require that the license be posted on it. As more content is shared, the potential for misuse of the content, and lawsuits over violations of licensing agreements, would grow.~{ Michael Fitzgerald, “Copyleft Hits a Snag,” /{Technology Review}/, December 21, 2005. }~
+As Wikipedia began to take off in popularity, what might have been an unpleasant philosophical rift grew into a more serious fissure with potentially significant consequences. All Wikipedia content is licensed under the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Free Documentation License, or FDL,~{ Wikipedia entry on GNU Free Documentation license, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License. }~ largely because the CC licenses did not exist when Wikipedia was launched in 2001. The FDL, originally intended for the documentation manuals that explicate software applications, is essentially the same as the CC ShareAlike license (any derivative works must also be released under the same license granting the freedom to share). But using the FDL can get cumbersome, especially as more video, audio, and photos are incorporated into a text; each artifact would require that the license be posted on it. As more content is shared, the potential for misuse of the content, and lawsuits over violations of licensing agreements, would grow.~{ Michael Fitzgerald, “Copyleft Hits a Snag,” /{Technology Review}/, December 21, 2005. }~
={Free Documentation License+10;GNU Project+10;Wikipedia:GNU FDL, and+10|CC licenses, and+10}
Unfortunately, as a legal matter, the FDL is incompatible with the CC licenses. This means that all content on Wikipedia and its sister Wikimedia projects (Wikispecies, Wikiquote, Wikinews, among other projects) cannot legally be combined with works licensed under CC licenses. Angered by the two “non-free” CC licenses, Stallman dug in his heels and defended Wikipedia’s use of the FDL. He also made it clear that he would remain a critic of Creative Commons unless it revoked or changed its licenses to conform with the Free Software Foundation’s standards of “freedom.”
@@ -2103,7 +2103,7 @@ By May 2008 the details of the agreement to make Wikipedia’s entries, licensed
As the Creative Commons has grown in popularity, a longer line has formed to take issue with some of its fundamental strategies. One line of criticism comes from anticapitalist ideologues, another from scholars of the underdeveloped nations of the South.
-British academics Berry and Moss apparently hanker for a more bracing revolution in culture;they object to the commodification of culture in any form and to the role that copyright law plays in this drama. To them, Lessig is distressingly centrist. He is “always very keen to disassociate himself and the Creative Commons from the (diabolical) insinuation that he is (God forbid!) anti-market, anticapitalist, or communist,” Berry and Moss complain.~{ David Berry and Giles Moss, “On the ‘Creative Commons’: A Critique of the Commons Without Commonality,” /{Free Software Magazine}/, July 15, 2005, at http://www.freesoftwaremagagine.com/articles/commons_without_com monality }~ The gist of their objection: Why is Lessig collaborating with media corporations and neoclassical economists when there is a larger, more profound revolution that needs to be fought? A new social ethic and political struggle are needed, they write, “not lawyers exercising their legal vernacular and skills on complicated licenses, court cases and precedents.”
+British academics Berry and Moss apparently hanker for a more bracing revolution in culture;they object to the commodification of culture in any form and to the role that copyright law plays in this drama. To them, Lessig is distressingly centrist. He is “always very keen to disassociate himself and the Creative Commons from the (diabolical) insinuation that he is (God forbid!) anti-market, anticapitalist, or communist,” Berry and Moss complain.~{ David Berry and Giles Moss, “On the ‘Creative Commons’: A Critique of the Commons Without Commonality,” /{Free Software Magazine}/, July 15, 2005, at http://www.freesoftwaremagagine.com/articles/commons_without_commonality }~ The gist of their objection: Why is Lessig collaborating with media corporations and neoclassical economists when there is a larger, more profound revolution that needs to be fought? A new social ethic and political struggle are needed, they write, “not lawyers exercising their legal vernacular and skills on complicated licenses, court cases and precedents.”
={Berry, David;Moss, Giles;Lessig, Lawrence:CC licenses, and}
Dense diatribes against the antirevolutionary character of Creative Commons can be heard in various hacker venues and cultural blogs and Web sites. The argument tends to go along the lines sketched here by Anna Nimus of Berlin, Germany:
@@ -2131,7 +2131,7 @@ A more radical and profound critique of the commons came in an open letter to
_1 We appreciate and admire the determination with which you nurture your garden of licenses. The proliferation and variety of flowering contracts and clauses in your hothouses is astounding. But we find the paradox of a space that is called a commons and yet so fenced in, and in so many ways, somewhat intriguing. The number of times we had to ask for permission, and the number of security check posts we had to negotiate to enter even a corner of your commons was impressive. . . . Sometimes we found that when people spoke of “Common Property” it was hard to know where the commons ended and where property began . . .
-_1 Strangely, the capacity to name something as “mine,” even if in order to “share” it, requires a degree of attainments that is not in itself evenly distributed. Not everyone comes into the world with the confidence that anything is “theirs” to share. This means that the “commons,” in your parlance, consists of an arrangement wherein only those who are in the magic circle of confident owners effectively get a share in that which is essentially, still a configuration of different bits of fenced in property. What they do is basically effect a series of swaps, based on a mutual understanding of their exclusive property rights. So I give you something of what I own, in exchange for which, I get something of what you own. The good or item in question never exits the circuit of property, even, paradoxically, when it is shared. Goods that are not owned, or those that have been taken outside the circuit of ownership, effectively cannot be shared, or even circulated.~{ “A Letter to the Commons, from the participants of the ‘Shades of the Commons Workshop,’ ” in /{In the Shade of the Commons:Towards a Culture of Open Networks}/ (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Waag Society, 2006), at http://www3 .fis.utoronto.ca/research/iprp/cracin/publications/pdfs/final/werbin_InThe Shade.pdf. }~
+_1 Strangely, the capacity to name something as “mine,” even if in order to “share” it, requires a degree of attainments that is not in itself evenly distributed. Not everyone comes into the world with the confidence that anything is “theirs” to share. This means that the “commons,” in your parlance, consists of an arrangement wherein only those who are in the magic circle of confident owners effectively get a share in that which is essentially, still a configuration of different bits of fenced in property. What they do is basically effect a series of swaps, based on a mutual understanding of their exclusive property rights. So I give you something of what I own, in exchange for which, I get something of what you own. The good or item in question never exits the circuit of property, even, paradoxically, when it is shared. Goods that are not owned, or those that have been taken outside the circuit of ownership, effectively cannot be shared, or even circulated.~{ “A Letter to the Commons, from the participants of the ‘Shades of the Commons Workshop,’ ” in /{In the Shade of the Commons:Towards a Culture of Open Networks}/ (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Waag Society, 2006), at http://www3.fis.utoronto.ca/research/iprp/cracin/publications/pdfs/final/werbin_InThe Shade.pdf. }~
The letter invites a deeper consideration of how humans form commons. However ingenious and useful the jerry-rigged legal mechanisms of the GPL and Creative Commons, the disembodied voice of the Non Legal Commons speaks, as if through the sewer grate, to remind us that the commons is about much more than law and civil society. It is part of the human condition. Yet the chaotic Asiatic street is not likely to yield conventional economic development without the rule of law, civil institutions, and some forms of legal property. The question posed by the informal commons remains a necessary one to ponder: What balance of commons and property rights, and in what forms, is best for a society?
@@ -2143,10 +2143,10 @@ Walk through the blossoming schools of commons thought and it quickly becomes cl
It is a compelling argument, but in fact only an indirect criticism of Creative Commons. For filmmakers who need to use film clips from existing films and musicians who want to use a riff from another performer, the fair use doctrine is indeed more important than any CC license. Peter Jaszi, the law professor at American University’s Washington School of Law, believes that even with growing bodies of CC-licensed content, “teachers, filmmakers, editors, freelance critics and others need to do things with proprietary content.” As a practical matter, they need a strong, clear set of fair use guidelines.
={Jaszi, Peter+2}
-Jaszi and his colleague Pat Aufderheide, a communications professor who runs the Center for Social Media at American University, have dedicated themselves to clarifying the scope and certainty of fair use. They have launched a major fair use project to get specific creative communities to define their “best practices in fair use.” If filmmakers, for example, can articulate their own artistic needs and professional interests in copying and sharing, then the courts are more likely to take those standards into consideration when they rule what is protected under the fair use doctrine.~{ Center for Social Media, at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse. See also Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, “Fair Use and Best Practices: Surprising Success,” /{Intellectual Property Today}/, October 2007, at http://www.iptoday .com/articles/2007-10-aufderheide.asp; and Peter Jaszi, “Copyright, Fair Use and Motion Pictures,” /{Utah Law Review}/ 3, no. 715 (2007), and which also appeared in R. Kolker, ed., /{Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies}/ (2007), at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/files/pdf/fairuse_motionpictures.pdf. }~ A set of respectable standards for a given field can help stabilize and expand the application of fair use.
+Jaszi and his colleague Pat Aufderheide, a communications professor who runs the Center for Social Media at American University, have dedicated themselves to clarifying the scope and certainty of fair use. They have launched a major fair use project to get specific creative communities to define their “best practices in fair use.” If filmmakers, for example, can articulate their own artistic needs and professional interests in copying and sharing, then the courts are more likely to take those standards into consideration when they rule what is protected under the fair use doctrine.~{ Center for Social Media, at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse. See also Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, “Fair Use and Best Practices: Surprising Success,” /{Intellectual Property Today}/, October 2007, at http://www.iptoday.com/articles/2007-10-aufderheide.asp; and Peter Jaszi, “Copyright, Fair Use and Motion Pictures,” /{Utah Law Review}/ 3, no. 715 (2007), and which also appeared in R. Kolker, ed., /{Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies}/ (2007), at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/files/pdf/fairuse_motionpictures.pdf. }~ A set of respectable standards for a given field can help stabilize and expand the application of fair use.
={Aufderheide, Pat+1}
-Inspired in part by a professional code developed by news broadcasters, some of the nation’s most respected filmmakers prepared the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, which was released in November 2005. The guidelines have since been embraced by the film industry, television programmers, and insurance companies (who insure against copyright violations) as a default definition about what constitutes fair use in documentary filmmaking.~{ Aufderheide and Jaszi, /{Intellectual Property Today}/, October 2007, at http:// www.iptoday.com/articles/2007-10-aufderheide.asp. }~ Aufderheide and Jaszi are currently exploring fair use projects for other fields, such as teaching, as a way to make fair use a more reliable legal tool for sharing and reuse of works.
+Inspired in part by a professional code developed by news broadcasters, some of the nation’s most respected filmmakers prepared the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, which was released in November 2005. The guidelines have since been embraced by the film industry, television programmers, and insurance companies (who insure against copyright violations) as a default definition about what constitutes fair use in documentary filmmaking.~{ Aufderheide and Jaszi, /{Intellectual Property Today}/, October 2007, at http://www.iptoday.com/articles/2007-10-aufderheide.asp. }~ Aufderheide and Jaszi are currently exploring fair use projects for other fields, such as teaching, as a way to make fair use a more reliable legal tool for sharing and reuse of works.
Lessig has been highly supportive of the fair use project and, indeed, he oversees his own fair use law clinic at Stanford Law School, which litigates cases frequently. “It’s not as if I don’t think fair use is important,” said Lessig, “but I do think that if the movement focuses on fair use, we don’t attract the people we need. . . . From my perspective, long-term success in changing the fundamental perspectives around copyright depends on something like Creative Commons as opposed to legal action, and even quasi-legal action, like the Fair Use Project.”
={Lessig, Lawrence:fair use, on+5}
@@ -2205,11 +2205,11 @@ For the short term, the fledgling models in these fields are likely to be seen a
Entrepreneur John Buckman concedes that his Internet record label, Magnatune, amounts to “building a business model on top of chaos.”~{ John Buckman presentation at iCommons Summit, Dubrovnik, Croatia, June 15, 2007. }~ That is to say, he makes money by honoring open networks and people’s natural social inclinations. The company rejects the proprietary muscle games used by its mainstream rivals, and instead holds itself to an ethical standard that verges on the sanctimonious: “We are not evil.” In the music industry these days, a straight shooter apparently has to be that blunt.
={Buckman, John+4;Magnatune+8;music:CC licenses for+8;Creative Commons (CC) licenses:music, for+8}
-Magnatune is a four-person enterprise based in Berkeley, California, that since 2003 has been pioneering a new open business model for identifying and distributing high-quality new music. It does not lock up the music with anticopying technology or digital rights management. It does not exploit its artists with coercive, unfair contracts. It does not harass its customers for making unauthorized copies. Internet users can in fact listen to all of Magnatune’s music for free (not just music snippets) via online streaming.~{ John Buckman entry in Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_ Buckman. }~
+Magnatune is a four-person enterprise based in Berkeley, California, that since 2003 has been pioneering a new open business model for identifying and distributing high-quality new music. It does not lock up the music with anticopying technology or digital rights management. It does not exploit its artists with coercive, unfair contracts. It does not harass its customers for making unauthorized copies. Internet users can in fact listen to all of Magnatune’s music for free (not just music snippets) via online streaming.~{ John Buckman entry in Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Buckman. }~
-Buckman, a former software programmer turned entrepreneur in his thirties, previously founded and ran Lyris Technologies, an e-mail list management company that he sold in 2005. In deciding to start Magnatune, he took note of the obvious realities that the music industry has tried to ignore: radio is boring, CDs cost too much, record labels exploit their artists, file sharing is not going to go away, people love to share music, and listening to music on the Internet is too much work. “I thought, why not make a record label that has a clue?” said Buckman.~{ John Buckman at Magnatune home page, at http://www.magnatune.com/ info/why. }~
+Buckman, a former software programmer turned entrepreneur in his thirties, previously founded and ran Lyris Technologies, an e-mail list management company that he sold in 2005. In deciding to start Magnatune, he took note of the obvious realities that the music industry has tried to ignore: radio is boring, CDs cost too much, record labels exploit their artists, file sharing is not going to go away, people love to share music, and listening to music on the Internet is too much work. “I thought, why not make a record label that has a clue?” said Buckman.~{ John Buckman at Magnatune home page, at http://www.magnatune.com/info/why. }~
-Well before the band Radiohead released its In /{Rainbows}/ album with a “pay what you want” experiment, Magnatune was inviting its customers to choose the amount they would be willing to pay, from $5 to $18, for any of Magnatune’s 547 albums. Buckman explains that the arrangement signals a respect for customers who, after all, have lots of free music choices. It also gives them a chance to express their appreciation for artists, who receive 50 percent of the sales price. “It turns out that people are quite generous and they pay on average about $8.40, and they really don’t get anything more for paying more other than feeling like they’re doing the right thing,” said Buckman.~{ John Buckman, interview with Matthew Magee of Out-Law.com, radio podcast, September 13, 2007, at http://www.out-law.com/page-8468. }~ About 20 percent pay more than $12.~{ John Buckman at iCommons, June 15, 2007. For an extensive profile of Buckman and Magnatune, see http://www.openrightsgroup.org/creative business/index.php/John_Buckman:_Magnatune. }~
+Well before the band Radiohead released its In /{Rainbows}/ album with a “pay what you want” experiment, Magnatune was inviting its customers to choose the amount they would be willing to pay, from $5 to $18, for any of Magnatune’s 547 albums. Buckman explains that the arrangement signals a respect for customers who, after all, have lots of free music choices. It also gives them a chance to express their appreciation for artists, who receive 50 percent of the sales price. “It turns out that people are quite generous and they pay on average about $8.40, and they really don’t get anything more for paying more other than feeling like they’re doing the right thing,” said Buckman.~{ John Buckman, interview with Matthew Magee of Out-Law.com, radio podcast, September 13, 2007, at http://www.out-law.com/page-8468. }~ About 20 percent pay more than $12.~{ John Buckman at iCommons, June 15, 2007. For an extensive profile of Buckman and Magnatune, see http://www.openrightsgroup.org/creativebusiness/index.php/John_Buckman:_Magnatune. }~
={Radiohead}
“The reality is today nobody really needs to pay for music at all,” he acknowledges. “If you choose to hit the ‘buy’ button at Magnatune then you’re one of the people who has decided to actually pay for music. Shouldn’t we reflect that honest behavior back and say, well, if you’re one of the honest people how much do you want to pay?”~{ John Buckman, interview with Matthew Magee, September 13, 2007. }~ The set-your-own-price approach is part of Magnatune’s larger strategy of building the business by cultivating open, interactive relationships with its customers and artists. “If you set up a trusting world,” explains Buckman, “you can be rewarded.”
@@ -2237,16 +2237,16 @@ Even as broadcast networks decry the posting of copyrighted television programs
Why this inexorable trend toward openness? Because on open networks, excessive control can be counterproductive. The overall value that can be created through interoperability is usually greater than the value that any single player may reap from maintaining its own “walled network.”~{ See Elliot E. Maxwell, “Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness,” /{Innovations:Technology, Governance, Globalization}/ 1, no. 3 (Summer 2006), at http://www.emaxwell.net. }~ For a company to reap value from interoperability, however, it must be willing to compete on an open platform and it must be willing to share technical standards, infrastructure, or content with others. Once this occurs, proprietary gains come from competing to find more sophisticated ways to add value in the production chain, rather than fighting to monopolize basic resources. Advantage also accrues to the company that develops trusting relationships with a community of customers.
={open business models:value created in+9;value:creation of+9}
-Free software was one of the earliest demonstrations of the power of online commons as a way to create value. In his classic 1997 essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” hacker Eric S. Raymond provided a seminal analysis explaining how open networks make software development more cost-effective and innovative than software developed by a single firm.~{ Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” May 1997, at http:// www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar. The essay has been translated into nineteen languages to date. }~ A wide-open “bazaar” such as the global Linux community can construct a more versatile operating system than one designed by a closed “cathedral” such as Microsoft. “With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow,” Raymond famously declared. Yochai Benkler gave a more formal economic reckoning of the value proposition of open networks in his pioneering 2002 essay “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm.”~{ Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” /{Yale Law Journal}/ 112, no. 369 (2002), at http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPen guin.html. }~ The title is a puckish commentary on how GNU/Linux, whose mascot is a penguin, poses an empirical challenge to economist Ronald Coase’s celebrated “transaction cost” theory of the firm. In 1937, Coase stated that the economic rationale for forming a business enterprise is its ability to assert clear property rights and manage employees and production more efficiently than contracting out to the marketplace.
+Free software was one of the earliest demonstrations of the power of online commons as a way to create value. In his classic 1997 essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” hacker Eric S. Raymond provided a seminal analysis explaining how open networks make software development more cost-effective and innovative than software developed by a single firm.~{ Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” May 1997, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar. The essay has been translated into nineteen languages to date. }~ A wide-open “bazaar” such as the global Linux community can construct a more versatile operating system than one designed by a closed “cathedral” such as Microsoft. “With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow,” Raymond famously declared. Yochai Benkler gave a more formal economic reckoning of the value proposition of open networks in his pioneering 2002 essay “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm.”~{ Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” /{Yale Law Journal}/ 112, no. 369 (2002), at http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html. }~ The title is a puckish commentary on how GNU/Linux, whose mascot is a penguin, poses an empirical challenge to economist Ronald Coase’s celebrated “transaction cost” theory of the firm. In 1937, Coase stated that the economic rationale for forming a business enterprise is its ability to assert clear property rights and manage employees and production more efficiently than contracting out to the marketplace.
={Benkler, Yochai:open networks, on+3;Raymond, Eric S.:“The Cathedral and the Bazaar”;free software:creation of value, and;Linux:open business models, and;Microsoft:competition against;Coase, Ronald;GNU/Linux:open business models, and;transaction costs:theory of;open business models:“transaction cost” theory, and}
What is remarkable about peer production on open networks, said Benkler, is that it undercuts the economic rationale for the firm; commons-based peer production can perform certain tasks more efficiently than a corporation. Those tasks must be modular and divisible into small components and capable of being efficiently integrated, Benkler stipulated. The larger point is that value is created on open networks in very different ways than in conventional markets. Asserting proprietary control on network platforms may prevent huge numbers of people from giving your work (free) social visibility, contributing new value to it, or remixing it. “The only thing worse than being sampled on the Internet,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, with apologies to Oscar Wilde, “is not being sampled on the Internet.”
={Vaidhyanathan, Siva}
-The /{New York Times}/'s experience with its paid subscription service, TimesSelect, offers a great example. The /{Times}/ once charged about fifty dollars a year for online access to its premier columnists and news archives. Despite attracting more than 227,000 subscribers and generating about $10 million a year in revenue, the /{Times}/ discontinued the service in 2007.~{ Richard Pérez-Peña, “Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site,” /{New York Times}/, September 18, 2007. }~ A /{Times}/ executive explained that lost subscription revenues would be more than offset by advertising to a much larger online readership with free access. The /{Financial Times}/ and the /{Economist}/ have dropped their paywalls, and the /{Wall Street Journal}/ in effect has done so by allowing free access via search engines and link sites. From some leading citadels of capitalism, a rough consensus had emerged: exclusivity can /{decrease}/ the value of online content.~{ Frank Ahrens, “Web Sites, Tear Down That Wall,” /{Washington Post}/, November 16, 2007, p. D1. See also Farhad Manjoo, “The Wall Street Journal’s Website Is Already (Secretly) Free,” /{Salon}/, March 21, 2008, at http://machinist.salon .com/blog/2008/03/21/wsj/index.html. }~
+The /{New York Times}/'s experience with its paid subscription service, TimesSelect, offers a great example. The /{Times}/ once charged about fifty dollars a year for online access to its premier columnists and news archives. Despite attracting more than 227,000 subscribers and generating about $10 million a year in revenue, the /{Times}/ discontinued the service in 2007.~{ Richard Pérez-Peña, “Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site,” /{New York Times}/, September 18, 2007. }~ A /{Times}/ executive explained that lost subscription revenues would be more than offset by advertising to a much larger online readership with free access. The /{Financial Times}/ and the /{Economist}/ have dropped their paywalls, and the /{Wall Street Journal}/ in effect has done so by allowing free access via search engines and link sites. From some leading citadels of capitalism, a rough consensus had emerged: exclusivity can /{decrease}/ the value of online content.~{ Frank Ahrens, “Web Sites, Tear Down That Wall,” /{Washington Post}/, November 16, 2007, p. D1. See also Farhad Manjoo, “The Wall Street Journal’s Website Is Already (Secretly) Free,” /{Salon}/, March 21, 2008, at http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/03/21/wsj/index.html. }~
={New York Times}
-While enormous value can be created on open networks, it can take different forms, notes David P. Reed, who studies information architectures.~{ David P. Reed, “The Sneaky Exponential — Beyond Metcalfe’s Law to the Power of Community Building,” at http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/ reedslaw.html. }~ One of the most powerful types of network value is what Reed calls “Group-Forming Networks,” or GFNs — or what Benkler might call commons-based peer production and I would call, less precisely, the commons. Reed talks about “scale-driven value shifts” that occur as a network grows in size. Greater value is created as a network moves from a broadcast model (where “content is king”) to peer production (where transactions dominate) and finally, to a group-forming network or commons (where jointly constructed value is produced and shared).
+While enormous value can be created on open networks, it can take different forms, notes David P. Reed, who studies information architectures.~{ David P. Reed, “The Sneaky Exponential — Beyond Metcalfe’s Law to the Power of Community Building,” at http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.html. }~ One of the most powerful types of network value is what Reed calls “Group-Forming Networks,” or GFNs — or what Benkler might call commons-based peer production and I would call, less precisely, the commons. Reed talks about “scale-driven value shifts” that occur as a network grows in size. Greater value is created as a network moves from a broadcast model (where “content is king”) to peer production (where transactions dominate) and finally, to a group-forming network or commons (where jointly constructed value is produced and shared).
={Reed, David P.;Benkler, Yochai:The Wealth of Networks;commons-based peer production+3;group-forming networks (GFNs)}
It is unclear, as a theoretical matter, how to characterize the size and behavior of various “value networks” on the Web today. For simplicity’s stake — and because Web platforms are evolving so rapidly — I refer to two general value propositions, Web 2.0 and the commons. Web 2.0 is about creating new types of value through participation in distributed open networks; the commons is a subset of Web 2.0 that describes fairly distinct, self-governed communities that focus on their own interests, which usually do not involve moneymaking.
@@ -2282,7 +2282,7 @@ Netscape was one of the first to demonstrate the power of this model with its re
Today, sharing and openness are key to many business strategies. “Open Source: Now It’s an Ecosystem,” wrote /{BusinessWeek}/ in 2005, describing the “gold rush” of venture capital firms investing in startups with open-source products. Most of them planned to give away their software via the Web and charge for premium versions or for training, maintenance, and support.~{ “Open Source: Now It’s an Ecosystem,” BusinessWeek Online, October 3, 2005. }~
-The pioneers in using open platforms to develop commercial ecosystems on the Internet are Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and eBay. Each has devised systems that let third-party software developers and businesses extend their platform with new applications and business synergies. Each uses systems that dynamically leverage users’ social behaviors and so stimulate business — for example, customer recommendations about books, search algorithms that identify the most popular Web sites, and reputation systems that enhance consumer confidence in sellers. Even Microsoft, eager to expand the ecology of developers using its products, has released 150 of its source code distributions under three “Shared Source” licenses, two of which meet the Free Software Foundation’s definition of “free.”~{ Microsoft’s Shared Source Licenses, at http://www.microsoft.com/resources/ sharedsource/licensingbasics/sharedsourcelicenses.mspx; see also Lessig blog, “Microsoft Releases Under ShareAlike,” June 24, 2005, at http://lessig .org/blog/2005/06/microsoft_releases_under_share.html. }~
+The pioneers in using open platforms to develop commercial ecosystems on the Internet are Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and eBay. Each has devised systems that let third-party software developers and businesses extend their platform with new applications and business synergies. Each uses systems that dynamically leverage users’ social behaviors and so stimulate business — for example, customer recommendations about books, search algorithms that identify the most popular Web sites, and reputation systems that enhance consumer confidence in sellers. Even Microsoft, eager to expand the ecology of developers using its products, has released 150 of its source code distributions under three “Shared Source” licenses, two of which meet the Free Software Foundation’s definition of “free.”~{ Microsoft’s Shared Source Licenses, at http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/licensingbasics/sharedsourcelicenses.mspx; see also Lessig blog, “Microsoft Releases Under ShareAlike,” June 24, 2005, at http://lessig.org/blog/2005/06/microsoft_releases_under_share.html. }~
={Amazon;eBay;Microsoft:“Shared Source” licenses of;Yahoo;Google;World Wide Web:social activity on}
More recently, Facebook has used its phenomenal reach — more than 80 million active users worldwide — as a platform for growing a diversified ecology of applications. The company allows software developers to create custom software programs that do such things as let users share reviews of favorite books, play Scrabble or poker with others online, or send virtual gifts to friends. Some apps are just for fun; others are the infrastructure for independent businesses that sell products and services or advertise. In September 2007, Facebook had more than two thousand software applications being used by at least one hundred people.~{ Vauhini Vara, “Facebook Gets Help from Its Friends,” Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2007. See also Riva Richmond, “Why So Many Want to Create Facebook Applications,” /{Wall Street Journal}/, September 4, 2007. }~
@@ -2313,10 +2313,10 @@ The rise of CC+ and associated companies brings to mind Niva Elkin-Koren’s war
Revver is another company that has developed an ingenious way to promote the sharing of content, yet still monetize it based on the scale of its circulation. Revver is a Los Angeles–based startup that hosts user-generated video. All videos are embedded with a special tracking tag that displays an ad at the end. Like Google’s AdWords system, which charges advertisers for user “click-throughs” on ad links adjacent to Web content, Revver charges advertisers for every time a viewer clicks on an ad. The number of ad views can be tabulated, and Revver splits ad revenues 50-50 with video creators. Key to the whole business model is the use of the CC AttributionNonCommercial-No Derivatives license. The license allows the videos to be legally shared, but prohibits anyone from modifying them or using them for commercial purposes.
={Revver+2;Google;videos and film+2;Internet:videos and films on+2;World Wide Web:videos and film on+2}
-One of the most-viewed videos on Revver sparked a minor pop trend. It showed kids dropping Mentos candies into bottles of CocaCola, which produces an explosive chemical reaction. The video is said to have generated around $30,000.~{ Revver entry at Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revver. }~ So is new media going to feature silly cat videos and stupid stunts? Steven Starr, a co-founder of Revver, concedes the ubiquity of such videos, but is quick to point to “budding auteurs like Goodnight Burbank, Happy Slip, Studio8 and LoadingReadyRun, all building audiences.” He also notes that online, creators “can take incredible risks with format and genre, can grow their own audience at a fraction of network costs, can enjoy free syndication, hosting, audience-building and ad services at their disposal.”~{ Interview with Steven Starr, “Is Web TV a Threat to TV?” Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2007, at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118530221391976425 .html. }~
+One of the most-viewed videos on Revver sparked a minor pop trend. It showed kids dropping Mentos candies into bottles of CocaCola, which produces an explosive chemical reaction. The video is said to have generated around $30,000.~{ Revver entry at Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revver. }~ So is new media going to feature silly cat videos and stupid stunts? Steven Starr, a co-founder of Revver, concedes the ubiquity of such videos, but is quick to point to “budding auteurs like Goodnight Burbank, Happy Slip, Studio8 and LoadingReadyRun, all building audiences.” He also notes that online, creators “can take incredible risks with format and genre, can grow their own audience at a fraction of network costs, can enjoy free syndication, hosting, audience-building and ad services at their disposal.”~{ Interview with Steven Starr, “Is Web TV a Threat to TV?” Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2007, at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118530221391976425.html. }~
={Starr, Steven}
-Blip.tv is another video content-sharing Web site that splits ad revenues with video creators (although it is not automatic; users must “opt in”). Unlike many videos on YouTube and Revver, blip.tv tends to feature more professional-quality productions and serialized episodes, in part because its founders grew out of the “videoblogging” community. Blip.tv espouses an open business ethic, with shout-outs to “democratization, openness, and sustainability.” While there is a tradition for companies to spout their high-minded principles, blip.tv puts some bite into this claim by offering an open platform that supports many video formats and open metadata standards. And it allows content to be downloaded and shared on other sites. Users can also apply Creative Commons licenses to their videos, which can then be identified by CC-friendly search engines. For all these reasons, Lessig has singled out blip.tv as a “true sharing site,” in contrast to YouTube, which he calls a “faking sharing site” that “gives you tools to /{make}/ it seem as if there’s sharing, but in fact, all the tools drive traffic and control back to a single site.”~{ Lessig blog post, “The Ethics of Web 2.0,” October 20, 2006, at http:// www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003570.shtml. }~
+Blip.tv is another video content-sharing Web site that splits ad revenues with video creators (although it is not automatic; users must “opt in”). Unlike many videos on YouTube and Revver, blip.tv tends to feature more professional-quality productions and serialized episodes, in part because its founders grew out of the “videoblogging” community. Blip.tv espouses an open business ethic, with shout-outs to “democratization, openness, and sustainability.” While there is a tradition for companies to spout their high-minded principles, blip.tv puts some bite into this claim by offering an open platform that supports many video formats and open metadata standards. And it allows content to be downloaded and shared on other sites. Users can also apply Creative Commons licenses to their videos, which can then be identified by CC-friendly search engines. For all these reasons, Lessig has singled out blip.tv as a “true sharing site,” in contrast to YouTube, which he calls a “faking sharing site” that “gives you tools to /{make}/ it seem as if there’s sharing, but in fact, all the tools drive traffic and control back to a single site.”~{ Lessig blog post, “The Ethics of Web 2.0,” October 20, 2006, at http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003570.shtml. }~
={blip.tv+1;YouTube+1;Web 2.0:open business, and+3;open business models:open networks and;Lessig, Lawrence:open business sites, and+4}
Lessig’s blog post on blip.tv provoked a heated response from blogger Nicholas Carr, a former executive editor of the /{Harvard Business Review}/. The contretemps is worth a close look because it illuminates the tensions between Web 2.0 as a business platform and Web 2.0 as a commons platform. In castigating YouTube as a “fake sharing site,” Carr accused Lessig of sounding like Chairman Mao trying to root out counterrevolutionary forces (that is, capitalism) with “the ideology of digital communalism.”
@@ -2324,7 +2324,7 @@ Lessig’s blog post on blip.tv provoked a heated response from blogger Nicholas
_1 Like Mao, Lessig and his comrades are not only on the wrong side of human nature and the wrong side of culture; they’re also on the wrong side of history. They fooled themselves into believing that Web 2.0 was introducing a new economic system — a system of “social production” — that would serve as the foundation of a democratic, utopian model of culture creation. They were wrong. Web 2.0’s economic system has turned out to be, in effect if not intent, a system of exploitation rather than a system of emancipation. By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, Web 2.0 provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very, very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very, very few.
-_1 The Cultural Revolution is over. It ended before it even began. The victors are the counterrevolutionaries. And they have $1.65 billion [a reference to the sale price of YouTube to Google] to prove it.~{ Nicholas G. Carr, “Web 2.0lier than Thou,” Rough Type blog, October 23, 2006. Joichi Ito has a thoughtful response in his blog, “Is YouTube Web 2.0?” October 22, 2006, at http://joi.ito.com/archives/2006/10/22/is_youtube _web_20.html; and Lessig responded to Carr in his blog, at http://lessig .org/blog/2006/10/stuck_in_the_20th_century_or_t.html. The “communism discourse” persists, and not just among critics of free culture. Lawrence Liang of CC India used this epigraph in a book on open-content licenses: “There is a specter haunting cultural production, the specter of open content licensing.” which he attributes to “Karl Marx (reworked for the digital era).” From Liang, /{Guide to Open Content Licenses}/ (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Piet Zwart Institute, Institute for Postgraduate Studies and Research, Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool, 2004). }~
+_1 The Cultural Revolution is over. It ended before it even began. The victors are the counterrevolutionaries. And they have $1.65 billion [a reference to the sale price of YouTube to Google] to prove it.~{ Nicholas G. Carr, “Web 2.0lier than Thou,” Rough Type blog, October 23, 2006. Joichi Ito has a thoughtful response in his blog, “Is YouTube Web 2.0?” October 22, 2006, at http://joi.ito.com/archives/2006/10/22/is_youtube_web_20.html; and Lessig responded to Carr in his blog, at http://lessig.org/blog/2006/10/stuck_in_the_20th_century_or_t.html. The “communism discourse” persists, and not just among critics of free culture. Lawrence Liang of CC India used this epigraph in a book on open-content licenses: “There is a specter haunting cultural production, the specter of open content licensing.” which he attributes to “Karl Marx (reworked for the digital era).” From Liang, /{Guide to Open Content Licenses}/ (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Piet Zwart Institute, Institute for Postgraduate Studies and Research, Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool, 2004). }~
Lessig’s response, a warm-up for a new book, /{Remix}/, released in late 2008, pointed out that there are really /{three}/ different economies on the Internet — commercial, sharing, and hybrid. The hybrid economy now emerging is difficult to understand, he suggested, because it “neither gives away everything, nor does it keep everything.” The challenge of open business models, Lessig argues, is to discover the “golden mean.”
={Lessig, Lawrence:Remix;Internet:hybrid economy enabled by+1|sharing economy of+1|commercial economy of+1}
@@ -2342,7 +2342,7 @@ The Brazilian /{tecnobrega}/ music scene discussed briefly in chapter 7 is anoth
Artists make most of their money from these live performances, not from CDs, said Lemos. Bands earn an average of $1,100 per solo performance at these events, and $700 when playing with other bands — this, in a region where the average monthly income is $350. Altogether, Lemos estimates that the sound system parties as a business sector earn $1.5 million per month, on fixed assets of $8 million.
-“The band Calypso has been approached several times by traditional record labels,” said Lemos, “but they turned down all the offers. The reason is that they make more money by means of the existing business model. In an interview with the largest Brazilian newspaper, the singer of the band said, ‘We do not fight the pirates. We have become big /{because}/ of piracy, which has taken our music to cities where they would never have been.’ ” Calypso has sold more than 5 million albums in Brazil and is known for attracting as many as fifty thousand people to its concerts, Lemos said.~{ Ronaldo Lemos, “From Legal Commons to Social Commons: Developing Countries and the Cultural Industry in the 21st Century,” 2006, at http://www.icommons.org/resources/from-legal-commons-to-social-comm ons-brazil-and-the-cultural-industry-1. See Paula Martini post on iCommons blog, “Over the Top: The New (and Bigger) Cultural Industry in Brazil,” September 28, 2007, at http://www.icommons.org/articles/over-the-top-thenew-and-bigger-cultural-industry-in-brazil. }~
+“The band Calypso has been approached several times by traditional record labels,” said Lemos, “but they turned down all the offers. The reason is that they make more money by means of the existing business model. In an interview with the largest Brazilian newspaper, the singer of the band said, ‘We do not fight the pirates. We have become big /{because}/ of piracy, which has taken our music to cities where they would never have been.’ ” Calypso has sold more than 5 million albums in Brazil and is known for attracting as many as fifty thousand people to its concerts, Lemos said.~{ Ronaldo Lemos, “From Legal Commons to Social Commons: Developing Countries and the Cultural Industry in the 21st Century,” 2006, at http://www.icommons.org/resources/from-legal-commons-to-social-commons-brazil-and-the-cultural-industry-1. See Paula Martini post on iCommons blog, “Over the Top: The New (and Bigger) Cultural Industry in Brazil,” September 28, 2007, at http://www.icommons.org/articles/over-the-top-thenew-and-bigger-cultural-industry-in-brazil. }~
={piracy}
Another highly successful open business model in the Brazilian music scene is TramaVirtual, an open platform on which more than 15,000 musicians have uploaded some 35,000 albums. Fans can then download the music for free. While this does not sound like a promising business proposition, it makes a lot of sense in the context of Brazil’s music marketplace. Major record labels release a minuscule number of new Brazilian music CDs each year, and they sell for about $10 to $15.~{ Ibid. }~ Only the cultured elite can afford music CDs, and the native musical talent — which is plentiful in Brazil — has no place to go. With such a constricted marketplace, TramaVirtual has become hugely popular by showcasing new and interesting music.
@@ -2369,7 +2369,7 @@ Virtually all the albums on Jamendo use one or more of the six basic CC licenses
For businesses operating on open networks, it is a mistake to regard people merely as customers; they are collaborators and even coinvestors. As more companies learn to interact closely with their customers, it is only natural that conversations about the product or service become more intimate and collaborative. The roles of the “consumer” and “producer” are starting to blur, leading to what some business analysts call the “prosumer”~{ Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, /{Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything}/ (New York Portfolio, 2006), chapter 5, “The Prosumers.” }~ and the “decentralized co-creation of value.”~{ David Bollier, /{The Rise of Collective Intelligence: Decentralized Co-creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture}/ (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, 2008).}~ The basic idea is that online social communities are becoming staging areas for the advancement of business objectives. Businesses see these communities as cost-effective ways to identify promising innovations, commercialize them more rapidly, tap into more reliable market intelligence, and nurture customer goodwill.
-Amateurs who share with one another through a loose social commons have always been a source of fresh ideas. Tech analyst Elliot Maxwell (citing Lessig) notes how volunteers helped compile the /{Oxford English Dictionary}/ by contributing examples of vernacular usage; how the Homebrew Computer Club in the San Francisco Bay area developed many elements of the first successful personal computer; and how sharing among auto enthusiasts helped generate many of the most important early automotive innovations.~{ Elliot Maxwell, “Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness,” /{Innovations:Technology, Governance, Globalization}/ 1, no. 3 (Summer 2006), at http://www.emaxwell.net, p. 150. }~ In our time, hackers were the ones who developed ingenious ways to use unlicensed electromagnetic spectrum as a commons, which we now know as Wi-Fi. They tinkered with the iPod to come up with podcasts, a new genre of broadcasting that commercial broadcasters now emulate.~{ Elliot E. Maxwell drew my attention to these examples in his excellent essay “Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation.” }~ Numerous self-organized commons have incubated profitable businesses. Two movie buffs created the Internet Movie Database as separate Usenet newsgroups in 1989; six years later they had grown so large that they had merged and converted into a business that was later sold to Amazon.~{ Wikipedia entry, IMDB, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Movie _Database. }~ The Compact Disc Database was a free database of software applications that looks up information about audio CDs via the Internet. It was originally developed by a community of music fans as a shared database, but in 2000 it had grown big enough that it was sold and renamed Gracenote.~{ Wikipedia entry, CDDB, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB. }~
+Amateurs who share with one another through a loose social commons have always been a source of fresh ideas. Tech analyst Elliot Maxwell (citing Lessig) notes how volunteers helped compile the /{Oxford English Dictionary}/ by contributing examples of vernacular usage; how the Homebrew Computer Club in the San Francisco Bay area developed many elements of the first successful personal computer; and how sharing among auto enthusiasts helped generate many of the most important early automotive innovations.~{ Elliot Maxwell, “Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness,” /{Innovations:Technology, Governance, Globalization}/ 1, no. 3 (Summer 2006), at http://www.emaxwell.net, p. 150. }~ In our time, hackers were the ones who developed ingenious ways to use unlicensed electromagnetic spectrum as a commons, which we now know as Wi-Fi. They tinkered with the iPod to come up with podcasts, a new genre of broadcasting that commercial broadcasters now emulate.~{ Elliot E. Maxwell drew my attention to these examples in his excellent essay “Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation.” }~ Numerous self-organized commons have incubated profitable businesses. Two movie buffs created the Internet Movie Database as separate Usenet newsgroups in 1989; six years later they had grown so large that they had merged and converted into a business that was later sold to Amazon.~{ Wikipedia entry, IMDB, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Movie_Database. }~ The Compact Disc Database was a free database of software applications that looks up information about audio CDs via the Internet. It was originally developed by a community of music fans as a shared database, but in 2000 it had grown big enough that it was sold and renamed Gracenote.~{ Wikipedia entry, CDDB, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB. }~
={Amazon;Gracenote;Homebrew Computer Club;iPod;Maxwell, Elliot;Oxford English Dictionary;Wi-Fi;hackers:community of;commons:sources of new ideas, as+11}
A commons can be highly generative because its participants are tinkering and innovating for their own sake — for fun, to meet a challenge, to help someone out. Amateurs are not constrained by conventional business ideas about what may be marketable and profitable. They do not have to meet the investment expectations of venture capitalists and Wall Street. Yet once promising new ideas do surface in the commons, market players can play a useful role in supplying capital and management expertise to develop, improve, and commercialize an invention.
@@ -2389,7 +2389,7 @@ Lego decided to write a “right to hack” provision into the Mindstorms softwa
Another improbable success in distributed, user-driven innovation is Threadless, a Chicago-based t-shirt company. Threadless sells hundreds of original t-shirt designs, each of which is selected by the user community from among more than eight hundred designs submitted every week. The proposed designs are rated on a scale of one to five by the Web site’s more than 600,000 active users. Winners receive cash awards, recognition on the Web site, and their names on the t-shirt label. Every week, Threadless offers six to ten new t-shirts featuring the winning designs.
={Threadless+1}
-In 2006, the company sold more than 1.5 million t-shirts without any traditional kind of marketing. Its business model is so rooted in the user community that Threadless co-founders Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart have declined offers to sell their t-shirts through conventional, big-name retailers. Threadless’s business model has helped it overcome two major challenges in the apparel industry, write Harvard Business School professor Karim R. Lakhani and consultant Jill A. Panetta — the ability “to attract the right design talent at the right time to create recurring fashion hits,” and the ability “to forecast sales so as to be better able to match production cycles with demand cycles.”~{ Karim R. Lakhani and Jill A. Panetta, “The Principles of Distributed Innovation,” Research Publication No. 2007-7, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School, October 2007, at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract _id=1021034. See also Darren Dahl, “Nice Threads,” /{Southwest Airlines Spirit}/, December 2006. }~
+In 2006, the company sold more than 1.5 million t-shirts without any traditional kind of marketing. Its business model is so rooted in the user community that Threadless co-founders Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart have declined offers to sell their t-shirts through conventional, big-name retailers. Threadless’s business model has helped it overcome two major challenges in the apparel industry, write Harvard Business School professor Karim R. Lakhani and consultant Jill A. Panetta — the ability “to attract the right design talent at the right time to create recurring fashion hits,” and the ability “to forecast sales so as to be better able to match production cycles with demand cycles.”~{ Karim R. Lakhani and Jill A. Panetta, “The Principles of Distributed Innovation,” Research Publication No. 2007-7, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School, October 2007, at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract_id=1021034. See also Darren Dahl, “Nice Threads,” /{Southwest Airlines Spirit}/, December 2006. }~
={DeHart, Jacob;Nickell, Jake;Lakhani, Karim R.;Panetta, Jill A.}
A number of companies have started successful enterprises based on the use of wikis, the open Web platforms that allow anyone to contribute and edit content and collaborate. Evan Prodromou, the founder of Wikitravel, a free set of worldwide travel guides, has identified four major types of wiki businesses: service providers who sell access to wikis (Wikispace, wetpaint, PBwiki); content hosters of wikis (wikiHow, Wikitravel, Wikia); consultants who advise companies how to run their own wikis (Socialtext); and content developers (WikiBiz, an offshoot of Wikipedia).
@@ -2418,7 +2418,7 @@ What has changed in recent years is our perceptions. The actual role of the comm
/{Web 2.0 tools, open access, and CC licenses are helping to accelerate scientific discovery.}/
-It was one of those embarrassing episodes in science: Two sets of researchers published papers in a German organic chemistry journal, /{Angewandte Chemie}/, announcing that they had synthesized a strange new substance with “12-membered rings.” Then, as blogger and chemist Derek Lowe tells the story, “Professor Manfred Cristl of Wurzburg, who apparently knows his pyridinium chemistry pretty well, recognized this as an old way to make further pyridinium salts, not funky twelve-membered rings. He recounts how over the last couple of months he exchanged awkward emails with the two sets of authors, pointing out that they seem to have rediscovered a 100-year-old reaction. . . .”~{ Derek Lowe, “Neat! Wish It Were True!” /{In the Pipeline}/ [blog], November 29, 2007, at http://pipeline.corante.com. See also, Donna Wentworth, “Why We Need to Figure Out What We Already Know,” Science Commons blog, January 4, 2008, at http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/01/04/ why-we-need-to-figure-out-what-we-already-know. }~
+It was one of those embarrassing episodes in science: Two sets of researchers published papers in a German organic chemistry journal, /{Angewandte Chemie}/, announcing that they had synthesized a strange new substance with “12-membered rings.” Then, as blogger and chemist Derek Lowe tells the story, “Professor Manfred Cristl of Wurzburg, who apparently knows his pyridinium chemistry pretty well, recognized this as an old way to make further pyridinium salts, not funky twelve-membered rings. He recounts how over the last couple of months he exchanged awkward emails with the two sets of authors, pointing out that they seem to have rediscovered a 100-year-old reaction. . . .”~{ Derek Lowe, “Neat! Wish It Were True!” /{In the Pipeline}/ [blog], November 29, 2007, at http://pipeline.corante.com. See also, Donna Wentworth, “Why We Need to Figure Out What We Already Know,” Science Commons blog, January 4, 2008, at http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/01/04/why-we-need-to-figure-out-what-we-already-know. }~
={Lowe, Derek}
In the Internet age, people generally assume that these kinds of things can’t happen. All you have to do is run a Web search for “pyridinium,” right? But as scientists in every field are discovering, the existence of some shard of highly specialized knowledge does not necessarily mean that it can be located or understood. After all, a Google search for “pyridinium” turns up 393,000 results. And even peer reviewers for journals (who may have been partly at fault in this instance) have the same problem as any researcher: the unfathomable vastness of the scientific and technical literature makes it difficult to know what humankind has already discovered.
@@ -2444,12 +2444,12 @@ Perhaps the most salient example of the power of open science was the Human Geno
A 2008 report by the Committee for Economic Development identified a number of other notable open research projects.~{ Committee for Economic Development, /{Harnessing Openness to Transform American Health Care}/ (Washington, DC: CED, 2008). }~ There is the PubChem database, which amasses data on chemical genomics from a network of researchers; the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, a network of several dozen cancer research centers and other organizations that shares data, research tools, and software applications; and TDR Targets a Web clearinghouse sponsored by the World Health Organization that lets researchers share genetic data on neglected diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness. It is telling that Bill Gates, who in his commercial life is a staunch advocate of proprietary control of information, has been a leader, through his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in requiring research grantees to share their data.
={Gates, Bill}
-There has even been the emergence of open-source biotechnology, which is applying the principles of free software development to agricultural biotech and pharmaceutical development.~{ See, e.g., Rockefeller Foundation, “2005 Bellagio Meeting on Open Source Models of Collaborative Innovation in the Life Sciences” [report], Bellagio, Italy, September 2005. See also Janet Elizabeth Hope, “Open Source Biotechnology,” Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, December 2004. }~ Richard Jefferson, the founder of Cambia, a nonprofit research institute in Australia, launched the “kernel” of what he calls the first opensource biotech toolkit. It includes patented technologies such as TransBacter, which is a method for transferring genes to plants, and GUSPlus, which is a tool for visualizing genes and understanding their functions.~{ Interview with Richard Jefferson, September 7, 2006. See also http://www .cambia.org. }~ By licensing these patented research tools for open use, Jefferson hopes to enable researchers anywhere in the world— not just at large biotech companies or universities — to develop their own crop improvement technologies.
+There has even been the emergence of open-source biotechnology, which is applying the principles of free software development to agricultural biotech and pharmaceutical development.~{ See, e.g., Rockefeller Foundation, “2005 Bellagio Meeting on Open Source Models of Collaborative Innovation in the Life Sciences” [report], Bellagio, Italy, September 2005. See also Janet Elizabeth Hope, “Open Source Biotechnology,” Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, December 2004. }~ Richard Jefferson, the founder of Cambia, a nonprofit research institute in Australia, launched the “kernel” of what he calls the first opensource biotech toolkit. It includes patented technologies such as TransBacter, which is a method for transferring genes to plants, and GUSPlus, which is a tool for visualizing genes and understanding their functions.~{ Interview with Richard Jefferson, September 7, 2006. See also http://www.cambia.org. }~ By licensing these patented research tools for open use, Jefferson hopes to enable researchers anywhere in the world— not just at large biotech companies or universities — to develop their own crop improvement technologies.
={Jefferson, Richard}
2~ The Viral Spiral in Science
-Sociologist Robert Merton is often credited with identifying the social values and norms that make science such a creative, productive enterprise. In a notable 1942 essay, Merton described scientific knowledge as “common property” that depends critically upon an open, ethical, peer-driven process.~{ Robert Merton, “Science and Democratic Social Structure,” in /{Social Theory and Social Structure}/, 3d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 604–15. }~ Science is an engine of discovery precisely because research is available for all to see and replicate. It has historically tried to keep some distance from the marketplace for fear that corporate copyrights, patents, or contractual agreements will lock up knowledge that should be available to everyone, especially future scientists.~{ Richard R. Nelson, “The Market Economy and the Scientific Commons,” /{Research Policy}/ 33, no. 3 (April 2004), pp. 455–71. See also Karim R. Lakhani et al., “The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving,” Harvard Business School Working Paper 07-050, January 2007, at http://www.hbs.edu/ research/pdf/07-050.pdf. }~ Secrecy can also make it difficult for the scientific community to verify research results.
+Sociologist Robert Merton is often credited with identifying the social values and norms that make science such a creative, productive enterprise. In a notable 1942 essay, Merton described scientific knowledge as “common property” that depends critically upon an open, ethical, peer-driven process.~{ Robert Merton, “Science and Democratic Social Structure,” in /{Social Theory and Social Structure}/, 3d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 604–15. }~ Science is an engine of discovery precisely because research is available for all to see and replicate. It has historically tried to keep some distance from the marketplace for fear that corporate copyrights, patents, or contractual agreements will lock up knowledge that should be available to everyone, especially future scientists.~{ Richard R. Nelson, “The Market Economy and the Scientific Commons,” /{Research Policy}/ 33, no. 3 (April 2004), pp. 455–71. See also Karim R. Lakhani et al., “The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving,” Harvard Business School Working Paper 07-050, January 2007, at http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-050.pdf. }~ Secrecy can also make it difficult for the scientific community to verify research results.
={Merton, Robert;science:cientific knowledge+2}
Although scientific knowledge eventually becomes publicly available, it usually flows in semi-restricted ways, at least initially, because scientists usually like to claim personal credit for their discoveries. They may refuse to share their latest research lest a rival team of scientists gain a competitive advantage. They may wish to claim patent rights in their discoveries.
@@ -2457,13 +2457,13 @@ Although scientific knowledge eventually becomes publicly available, it usually
So scientific knowledge is not born into the public sphere, but there is a strong presumption that it ought to be treated as a shared resource as quickly as possible. As law scholar Robert Merges noted in 1996, “Science is not so much given freely to the public as shared under a largely implicit code of conduct among a more or less well identified circle of similarly situated scientists. In other words . . . science is more like a limited-access commons than a truly open public domain.”~{ Robert Merges, “Property Rights Theory and the Commons: The Case of Scientific Research,” /{Social Philosophy and Policy}/ 13, no. 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 145–61. }~ In certain disciplines, especially those involving large capital equipment such as telescopes and particle accelerators, the sharing of research is regarded as a kind of membership rule for belonging to a club.
={Merges, Robert}
-As Web 2.0 innovations have demonstrated the power of the Great Value Shift, the convergence of open source, open access, and open science has steadily gained momentum.~{ John Willinsky, “The Unacknowledged Convergence of Open Source, Open Access and Open Science,” /{First Monday}/ 10, no. 8 (August 2005), at http:// firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_8/willinsky/index.html. }~ Creative Commons was mindful of this convergence from its beginnings, but it faced formidable practical challenges in doing anything about it. “From the very first meetings of Creative Commons,” recalled law professor James Boyle, a CC board member, “we thought that science could be the killer app. We thought that science could be the place where Creative Commons could really make a difference, save lives, and have a dramatic impact on the world. There is massive, unnecessary friction in science and we think we can deal with it. Plus, there’s the Mertonian ideal of science, with which Creative Commons couldn’t fit more perfectly.”~{ Interview with James Boyle, August 15, 2006. }~
+As Web 2.0 innovations have demonstrated the power of the Great Value Shift, the convergence of open source, open access, and open science has steadily gained momentum.~{ John Willinsky, “The Unacknowledged Convergence of Open Source, Open Access and Open Science,” /{First Monday}/ 10, no. 8 (August 2005), at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_8/willinsky/index.html. }~ Creative Commons was mindful of this convergence from its beginnings, but it faced formidable practical challenges in doing anything about it. “From the very first meetings of Creative Commons,” recalled law professor James Boyle, a CC board member, “we thought that science could be the killer app. We thought that science could be the place where Creative Commons could really make a difference, save lives, and have a dramatic impact on the world. There is massive, unnecessary friction in science and we think we can deal with it. Plus, there’s the Mertonian ideal of science, with which Creative Commons couldn’t fit more perfectly.”~{ Interview with James Boyle, August 15, 2006. }~
={Merton, Robert;Boyle, James:Science Commons, and+1;Great Value Shift;Web 2.0:Great Value Shift, and}
But despite its early interest in making the Web more research-friendly, Creative Commons realized that science is a special culture unto itself, one that has so many major players and niche variations that it would be foolhardy for an upstart nonprofit to try to engage with it. So in 2002 Creative Commons shelved its ambitions to grapple with science as a commons, and focused instead on artistic and cultural sectors. By January 2005, however, the success of the CC licenses emboldened the organization to revisit its initial idea. As a result of deep personal engagement by several Creative Commons board members — computer scientist Hal Abelson, law professors James Boyle and Michael Carroll, and film producer Eric Saltzman — Creative Commons decided to launch a spin-off project, Science Commons. The new initiative would work closely with scientific disciplines and organizations to try to build what it now calls “the Research Web.”
={Abelson, Hall:CC board, on;Carroll, Michael W.;Saltzman, Eric;Science Commons:CC Commons spinoff, and+5}
-Science Commons aims to redesign the “information space” — the technologies, legal rules, institutional practices, and social norms — so that researchers can more easily share their articles, datasets, and other resources. The idea is to reimagine and reinvent the “cognitive infrastructures” that are so critical to scientific inquiry. Dismayed by the pressures exerted by commercial journal publishers, open-access publishing advocate Jean-Claude Guédon has called on librarians to become “epistemological engineers.”~{ Jean-Claude Guédon, “In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers and the Control of Scientific Publishing,” at http:// www.arl.org/resources/pubs/mmproceedings/138guedon.shtml. }~ They need to design better systems (technical, institutional, legal, and social) for identifying, organizing, and using knowledge. The payoff? Speedier research and greater scientific discovery and innovation. It turns out that every scientific discipline has its own special set of impediments to address. The recurring problem is massive, unnecessary transaction costs. There is an enormous waste of time, expense, bureaucracy, and logistics in acquiring journal articles, datasets, presentations, and physical specimens.
+Science Commons aims to redesign the “information space” — the technologies, legal rules, institutional practices, and social norms — so that researchers can more easily share their articles, datasets, and other resources. The idea is to reimagine and reinvent the “cognitive infrastructures” that are so critical to scientific inquiry. Dismayed by the pressures exerted by commercial journal publishers, open-access publishing advocate Jean-Claude Guédon has called on librarians to become “epistemological engineers.”~{ Jean-Claude Guédon, “In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers and the Control of Scientific Publishing,” at http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/mmproceedings/138guedon.shtml. }~ They need to design better systems (technical, institutional, legal, and social) for identifying, organizing, and using knowledge. The payoff? Speedier research and greater scientific discovery and innovation. It turns out that every scientific discipline has its own special set of impediments to address. The recurring problem is massive, unnecessary transaction costs. There is an enormous waste of time, expense, bureaucracy, and logistics in acquiring journal articles, datasets, presentations, and physical specimens.
={Science Commons:libraries, and+5;science:transaction costs in+1;transaction costs:in science+1;libraries:Science Commons, and}
If transaction costs could be overcome, scientists could vastly accelerate their research cycles. They could seek answers in unfamiliar bodies of research literature. They could avoid duplicating other people’s flawed research strategies. They could formulate more imaginative hypotheses and test them more rapidly. They could benefit from a broader, more robust conversation (as in free software — “with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow”) and use computer networks to augment and accelerate the entire scientific process.
@@ -2511,7 +2511,7 @@ Not surprisingly, many commercial publishers regard OA publishing as a disruptiv
It remains an open question whether the OA business model will work in fields where little research is directly funded (and thus upfront payments are not easily made). As Suber reports, “There are hundreds of OA journals in the humanities, but very, very few of them charge a fee on the author’s side; most of them have institutional subsidies from a university say, or a learned society.”~{ Interview with Peter Suber, June 28, 2006. }~ Yet such subsidies, in the overall scheme of things, may be more attractive to universities or learned societies than paying high subscription fees for journals or online access.
={Suber, Peter+1}
-The tension between commercial publishers and academic authors has intensified over the past decade, fueling interest in OA alternatives. The most salient point of tension is the so-called “serials crisis.” From 1986 to 2006, libraries that belong to the Association of Research Libraries saw the cost of serial journals rise 321 percent, or about 7.5 percent a year for twenty consecutive years.~{ Association of Research Libraries, /{ARL Statistics}/ 2005–06, at http://www.arl .org/stats/annualsurveys/ar/stats/arlstats06.shtml. }~ This rate is four times higher than the inflation rate for those years. Some commercial journal publishers reap profits of nearly 40 percent a year.~{ Peter Suber, “Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access,” in Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, eds., /{Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice}/ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 175. }~ By 2000 subscription rates were so crushing that the Association of American Universities and the Association of Research Libraries issued a joint statement that warned, “The current system of scholarly publishing has become too costly for the academic community to sustain.”~{ Association of Research Libraries, “Tempe Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing,” May 10, 2000, at http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/ tempe/index.shtml. }~ Three years later, the high price of journals prompted Harvard, the University of California, Cornell, MIT, Duke, and other elite research universities to cancel hundreds of journal subscriptions — a conspicuous act of rebellion by the library community.
+The tension between commercial publishers and academic authors has intensified over the past decade, fueling interest in OA alternatives. The most salient point of tension is the so-called “serials crisis.” From 1986 to 2006, libraries that belong to the Association of Research Libraries saw the cost of serial journals rise 321 percent, or about 7.5 percent a year for twenty consecutive years.~{ Association of Research Libraries, /{ARL Statistics}/ 2005–06, at http://www.arl.org/stats/annualsurveys/ar/stats/arlstats06.shtml. }~ This rate is four times higher than the inflation rate for those years. Some commercial journal publishers reap profits of nearly 40 percent a year.~{ Peter Suber, “Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access,” in Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, eds., /{Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice}/ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 175. }~ By 2000 subscription rates were so crushing that the Association of American Universities and the Association of Research Libraries issued a joint statement that warned, “The current system of scholarly publishing has become too costly for the academic community to sustain.”~{ Association of Research Libraries, “Tempe Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing,” May 10, 2000, at http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/tempe/index.shtml. }~ Three years later, the high price of journals prompted Harvard, the University of California, Cornell, MIT, Duke, and other elite research universities to cancel hundreds of journal subscriptions — a conspicuous act of rebellion by the library community.
={libraries:“serials crisis”, and|Science Commons, and;Science Commons:libraries, and}
As journal prices have risen, the appeal of OA publishing has only intensified. Unfortunately, migrating to OA journals is not simply an economic issue. Within academia, the reputation of a journal is deeply entwined with promotion and tenure decisions. A scientist who publishes an article in /{Cell}/ or /{Nature}/ earns far more prestige than she might for publishing in a little-known OA journal.
@@ -2522,14 +2522,14 @@ So while publishing in OA journals may be economically attractive, it flouts the
One of the first major salvos of the movement came in 2000, when biomedical scientists Harold E. Varmus, Patrick O. Brown, and Michael B. Eisen called on scientific publishers to make their literature available through free online public archives such as the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central. Despite garnering support from nearly 34,000 scientists in 180 countries, the measure did not stimulate the change sought. It did alert the scientific world, governments, and publishers about the virtues of OA publishing, however, and galvanized scientists to explore next steps.
={Brown, Patrick O.;Varmus, Harold E.}
-At the time, a number of free, online peer-reviewed journals and free online archives were under way.~{ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm. }~ But much of the momentum for organized OA movement began in 2001, when the Open Society Institute convened a group of leading librarians, scientists, and other academics in Hungary. In February 2002 the group released the Budapest Open Access Initiative, a statement that formally describes “open access” as the freedom of users to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full texts of . . . articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself.”~{ The Budapest Open Access Initiative can be found at http://www.soros.org/ openaccess. }~ Two subsequent statements, the Bethesda Declaration and the Berlin Declaration, in June 2003 and October 2003, respectively, expanded upon the definitions of open access and gave the idea new prominence. (Suber calls the three documents the “BBB definition” of open access.)~{ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm. }~
+At the time, a number of free, online peer-reviewed journals and free online archives were under way.~{ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm. }~ But much of the momentum for organized OA movement began in 2001, when the Open Society Institute convened a group of leading librarians, scientists, and other academics in Hungary. In February 2002 the group released the Budapest Open Access Initiative, a statement that formally describes “open access” as the freedom of users to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full texts of . . . articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself.”~{ The Budapest Open Access Initiative can be found at http://www.soros.org/openaccess. }~ Two subsequent statements, the Bethesda Declaration and the Berlin Declaration, in June 2003 and October 2003, respectively, expanded upon the definitions of open access and gave the idea new prominence. (Suber calls the three documents the “BBB definition” of open access.)~{ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm. }~
={Suber, Peter;Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002);libraries:open access movement, and}
Creative Commons licenses have been critical tools in the evolution of OA publishing because they enable scientists and scholars to authorize in advance the sharing, copying, and reuse of their work, compatible with the BBB definition. The Attribution (BY) and Attribution-Non-Commercial (BY-NC) licenses are frequently used; many OA advocates regard the Attribution license as the preferred choice. The protocols for “metadata harvesting” issued by the Open Archives Initiative are another useful set of tools in OA publishing. When adopted by an OA journal, these standardized protocols help users more easily find research materials without knowing in advance which archives they reside in, or what they contain.
There is no question that OA is transforming the market for scholarly publishing, especially as pioneering models develop. The Public Library of Science announced its first two open-access journals in December 2002. The journals represented a bold, high-profile challenge by highly respected scientists to the subscription-based model that has long dominated scientific publishing. Although Elsevier and other publishers scoffed at the economic model, the project has expanded and now publishes seven OA journals, for biology, computational biology, genetics, pathogens, and neglected tropical diseases, among others.
-OA received another big boost in 2004 when the National Institutes for Health proposed that all NIH-funded research be made available for free one year after its publication in a commercial journal. The $28 billion that the NIH spends on research each year (more than the domestic budget of 142 nations!) results in about 65,000 peer-reviewed articles, or 178 every day. Unfortunately, commercial journal publishers succeeded in making the proposed OA policy voluntary. The battle continued in Congress, but it became clear that the voluntary approach was not working. Only 4 percent of researchers published their work under OA standards, largely because busy, working scientists did not consider it a priority and their publishers were not especially eager to help. So Congress in December 2007 required NIH to mandate open access for its research within a year of publication.~{ Peter Suber has an excellent account of the final OA legislation in /{SPARC Open Access Newsletter}/, no. 17, January 2, 2008, at http://www.earlham.edu/ ~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-08.htm. }~
+OA received another big boost in 2004 when the National Institutes for Health proposed that all NIH-funded research be made available for free one year after its publication in a commercial journal. The $28 billion that the NIH spends on research each year (more than the domestic budget of 142 nations!) results in about 65,000 peer-reviewed articles, or 178 every day. Unfortunately, commercial journal publishers succeeded in making the proposed OA policy voluntary. The battle continued in Congress, but it became clear that the voluntary approach was not working. Only 4 percent of researchers published their work under OA standards, largely because busy, working scientists did not consider it a priority and their publishers were not especially eager to help. So Congress in December 2007 required NIH to mandate open access for its research within a year of publication.~{ Peter Suber has an excellent account of the final OA legislation in /{SPARC Open Access Newsletter}/, no. 17, January 2, 2008, at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-08.htm. }~
={National Institutes for Health (NIH)}
What may sound like an arcane policy battle in fact has serious implications for ordinary Americans. The breast cancer patient seeking the best peer-reviewed articles online, or the family of a person with Huntington’s disease, can clearly benefit if they can acquire, for free, the latest medical research. Scientists, journalists, health-care workers, physicians, patients, and many others cannot access the vast literature of publicly funded scientific knowledge because of high subscription rates or per-article fees. A freely available body of online literature is the best, most efficient way to help science generate more reliable answers, new discoveries, and commercial innovations.
@@ -2593,7 +2593,7 @@ It is still too early to judge how well the CC0 program is working, but initial
2~ The Neurocommons
-Every day there is so much new scientific literature generated that it would take a single person 106 years to read it all.~{ Brian Athey, University of Michigan, presentation at Commons of Science conference, National Academy of Science, Washington, DC, October 3, 2006. }~ In a single year, over twenty-four thousand peer-reviewed journals publish about 2.5 million research articles.~{ Stevan Harnad, “Maximizing Research Impact Through Institutional and National Open-Access Self-Archiving Mandates,” /{Electronics & Computer Science E-Prints Repository}/, May 2006, available at http://eprints.ecs.soron.ac.uk/ 12093/02/harnad-crisrey.pdf. }~ Our ability to generate content has far outstripped our ability to comprehend it. We are suffering from a cognitive overload — one that can only be addressed by using software and computer networks in innovative ways to organize, search, and access information. For many years, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the celebrated inventor of the World Wide Web, and his colleagues at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based at MIT, have been trying to solve the problem of information overload by developing a “new layer” of code for the Web.
+Every day there is so much new scientific literature generated that it would take a single person 106 years to read it all.~{ Brian Athey, University of Michigan, presentation at Commons of Science conference, National Academy of Science, Washington, DC, October 3, 2006. }~ In a single year, over twenty-four thousand peer-reviewed journals publish about 2.5 million research articles.~{ Stevan Harnad, “Maximizing Research Impact Through Institutional and National Open-Access Self-Archiving Mandates,” /{Electronics & Computer Science E-Prints Repository}/, May 2006, available at http://eprints.ecs.soron.ac.uk/12093/02/harnad-crisrey.pdf. }~ Our ability to generate content has far outstripped our ability to comprehend it. We are suffering from a cognitive overload — one that can only be addressed by using software and computer networks in innovative ways to organize, search, and access information. For many years, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the celebrated inventor of the World Wide Web, and his colleagues at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based at MIT, have been trying to solve the problem of information overload by developing a “new layer” of code for the Web.
={Berners-Lee, Tim;World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)}
This visionary project, the so-called Semantic Web, aspires to develop a framework for integrating a variety of systems, so they can communicate with one another, machine to machine. The goal is to enable computers to identify and capture information from anywhere on the Web, and then organize the results in sophisticated and customized ways. “If you search for ‘signal transduction genes in parameter neurons,’ ” said John Wilbanks of Science Commons, “Google sucks. It will get you 190,000 Web pages.” The goal of the Semantic Web is to deliver a far more targeted and useful body of specialized information.
@@ -2629,7 +2629,7 @@ The problem with a field like neuroscience, which has so many exploding frontier
Science is not just about text and data, of course. It also involves lots of tangible /{stuff}/ needed to conduct experiments. Typical materials include cell lines, monoclonal antibodies, reagents, animal models, synthetic materials, nano-materials, clones, laboratory equipment, and much else. Here, too, sharing and collaboration are important to the advance of science. But unlike digital bits, which are highly malleable, the physical materials needed for experiments have to be located, approved for use, and shipped. Therein lies another tale of high transaction costs impeding the progress of science. As Thinh Nguyen, counsel for Science Commons, describes the problem:
={Nguyen, Thinh+1}
-_1 The ability to locate materials based on their descriptions in journal articles is often limited by lack of sufficient information about origin and availability, and there is no standard citation for such materials. In addition, the process of legal negotiation that may follow can be lengthy and unpredictable. This can have important implications for science policy, especially when delays or inability to obtain research materials result in lost time, productivity and research opportunities.~{ Thinh Nguyen, “Science Commons: Material Transfer Agreement Project,” /{Innovations}/, Summer 2007, pp. 137–43, at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/ doi/pdf/10.1162/itgg.2007.2.3.137. }~
+_1 The ability to locate materials based on their descriptions in journal articles is often limited by lack of sufficient information about origin and availability, and there is no standard citation for such materials. In addition, the process of legal negotiation that may follow can be lengthy and unpredictable. This can have important implications for science policy, especially when delays or inability to obtain research materials result in lost time, productivity and research opportunities.~{ Thinh Nguyen, “Science Commons: Material Transfer Agreement Project,” /{Innovations}/, Summer 2007, pp. 137–43, at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/itgg.2007.2.3.137. }~
To the nonscientist, this transactional subculture is largely invisible. But to scientists whose lab work requires access to certain physical materials, the uncertainties, variations, and delays can be crippling. Normally, the transfer of materials from one scientist to another occurs through a Material Transfer Agreement, or MTA. The technology transfer office at one research university will grant, or not grant, an MTA so that a cell line or tissue specimen can be shipped to a researcher at another university. Typically, permission must be granted for the researcher to publish, disseminate, or use research results, and to license their use for commercialization.
={Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs)+7;science:Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs)+7}
@@ -2712,7 +2712,7 @@ MIT also realized the dangers of propertizing college courses and teaching mater
School officials stressed that using MIT courseware on the Web is not the same as an MIT education. Indeed, the free materials underscore the fact that what really distinguishes an MIT education is one’s participation in a learning community. Unlike the Connexions content, MIT’s OpenCourseWare is a fairly static set of course materials; they are not modular or constantly updated. In addition, they are licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA (AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike.) license. While this prevents businesses from profiting from MIT course materials, it also prevents other educational institutions from remixing them into new courses or textbooks.
={communities:learning;education:learning community, in a}
-Despite these limitations, MIT’s OCW materials have been profoundly influential. The course Laboratory in Software Engineering, for example, has been used by students in Karachi, Pakistan; the island of Mauritius; Vienna, Austria; and Kansas City, Missouri, among scores of other places around the world.~{ David Diamond, “MIT Everyware,” /{Wired}/, September 2003. }~ Ten of the leading Chinese universities now use hundreds of MIT courses, leading three noted OER experts, Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, to conclude that MIT’s OCW “has had a major impact on Chinese education.”~{ Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, “A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges and New Opportunities,” February 2007, at http://www.oerderves .org/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/a-review-of-the-open-educational-re sources-oer-movement_final.pdf, p. 23. }~ Noting the life-changing impact that OCW has had on students in rural villages in China and West Africa, Atkins and his co-authors cite “the power of the OCW as a means for cross-cultural engagement.” Over the course of four years, from October 2003 through 2007, the OCW site received nearly 16 million visits; half were newcomers and half were repeat visits.
+Despite these limitations, MIT’s OCW materials have been profoundly influential. The course Laboratory in Software Engineering, for example, has been used by students in Karachi, Pakistan; the island of Mauritius; Vienna, Austria; and Kansas City, Missouri, among scores of other places around the world.~{ David Diamond, “MIT Everyware,” /{Wired}/, September 2003. }~ Ten of the leading Chinese universities now use hundreds of MIT courses, leading three noted OER experts, Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, to conclude that MIT’s OCW “has had a major impact on Chinese education.”~{ Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, “A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges and New Opportunities,” February 2007, at http://www.oerderves.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/a-review-of-the-open-educational-re sources-oer-movement_final.pdf, p. 23. }~ Noting the life-changing impact that OCW has had on students in rural villages in China and West Africa, Atkins and his co-authors cite “the power of the OCW as a means for cross-cultural engagement.” Over the course of four years, from October 2003 through 2007, the OCW site received nearly 16 million visits; half were newcomers and half were repeat visits.
={Atkins, Daniel E.;Brown, John Seely;Hammond, Allen L.;education:OER movement;Open Educational Resources (OER) movement}
OCW is becoming a more pervasive international ethic now that more than 120 educational institutions in twenty nations have banded together to form the OpenCourseWare Consortium. Its goal is to create “a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.”~{ OpenCourseWare Consortium, at http://www.ocwconsortium.org. }~ Although plenty of universities are still trying to make money from distance education courses, a growing number of colleges and universities realize that OCW helps faculty connect with other interested faculty around the world, build a college’s public recognition and recruitment, and advance knowledge as a public good.
@@ -2757,7 +2757,7 @@ Next, Delia Browne of the National Education Access Licence for Schools, or NEAL
/{Tweet! Tweet!}/ Neeru Paharia, a former executive director of the Creative Commons, introduced her fledgling project, AcaWiki. Paharia is concerned that too many academic articles are locked behind paywalls and are not readily accessible to everyone. AcaWiki plans to recruit graduate students, academics, and citizens to write summaries of academic papers. Since many grad students make abstracts as part of their routine research, it would not be difficult to pool thousands of summaries into a highly useful, searchable Web collection.
={Paharia, Neeru}
-The speed geekers in Dubrovnik were sweaty and overstimulated at the end, but gratified to learn that there are a great many OER projects under way throughout the world; they just aren’t very well known or coordinated with one another. Two of the participants — J. Philipp Schmidt of the University of the Western Cape and Mark Surman of the Shuttleworth Foundation, both of South Africa — conceded that “there is still a great deal of fuzziness about what this movement includes,” and that “we don’t yet have a good ‘map’ of open education.” But the significance of grassroots initiatives is unmistakable. “There is a movement afoot here,” they concluded, “and it is movement with an aim no less than making learning accessible and adaptable for all.”~{ J. Philipp Schmidt and Mark Surman, “Open Sourcing Education: Learning and Wisdom from the iSummit 2007,” September 2, 2007, at http://icommons .org/download_banco/open-sourcing-education-learning-and-wisdom-from -isummit-2007. }~ “Education,” another participant predicted, “will drive the future of the Commons movement.”
+The speed geekers in Dubrovnik were sweaty and overstimulated at the end, but gratified to learn that there are a great many OER projects under way throughout the world; they just aren’t very well known or coordinated with one another. Two of the participants — J. Philipp Schmidt of the University of the Western Cape and Mark Surman of the Shuttleworth Foundation, both of South Africa — conceded that “there is still a great deal of fuzziness about what this movement includes,” and that “we don’t yet have a good ‘map’ of open education.” But the significance of grassroots initiatives is unmistakable. “There is a movement afoot here,” they concluded, “and it is movement with an aim no less than making learning accessible and adaptable for all.”~{ J. Philipp Schmidt and Mark Surman, “Open Sourcing Education: Learning and Wisdom from the iSummit 2007,” September 2, 2007, at http://icommons.org/download_banco/open-sourcing-education-learning-and-wisdom-from-isummit-2007. }~ “Education,” another participant predicted, “will drive the future of the Commons movement.”
={Schmidt, J. Philipp;Surman, Mark}
In a sign that the OER movement is getting serious as a movement, thirty of its leaders met in Cape Town, South Africa, and in January 2008 issued the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.~{ http://www.capetowndeclaration.org. Schmidt and Surman, “Open Sourcing Education.” }~ The declaration is a call to make learning materials more freely available online, and to improve education and learning by making them more collaborative, flexible, and locally relevant. The declaration outlines the challenge: “Many educators remain unaware of the growing pool of open educational resources. Many governments and educational institutions are either unaware or unconvinced of the benefits of open education. Differences among licensing schemes for open resources create confusion and incompatibility. And, of course, the majority of the world does not have access to the computers and networks that are integral to most current open education efforts.”
@@ -2835,15 +2835,15 @@ I call the new sorts of citizen behaviors “history-making” because ordinary
These behaviors exist in some measure in offline realms, of course, but they are a growing norm in the digital republic. A few examples will suffice to make the point. The Web helped create and propel a handful of cause-oriented candidacies — Howard Dean, Ron Paul, Ned Lamont~[* Lamont was an insurgent candidate for U.S. Senate from Connecticut challenging Senator Joseph Lieberman in a campaign that helped culturally validate opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq.]~ — who rapidly raised enormous sums of money, galvanized large numbers of passionate supporters, and altered mainstream political discourse. Although none prevailed in their races, Barack Obama made a quantum leap in online organizing in 2008, raising $50 million in a single month from supporters via the Internet. Obama’s candidacy was buoyed by the rise of the “netroots” — Web activists with a progressive political agenda— whose size and credibility enable them to sway votes in Congress, raise significant amounts of campaign funds, and influence local activism. The stories are now legion about blogs affecting political life — from the resignation of Senate majority leader Trent Lott after he praised the racist past of Senator Strom Thurmond at his hundredth birthday party, to the electoral defeat of Senate candidate George Allen after his uttering of an ethnic slur, /{macaca}/, was posted on YouTube.
={Dean, Howard;Lamont, Ned;Obama, Barack;Paul, Ron;Internet:political campaigns on;Allen, George;Lott, Trent;YouTube}
-Citizens are now able to initiate their own policy initiatives without first persuading the mainstream media or political parties to validate them as worthy. For example, a handful of citizens troubled by evidence of “hackable” electronic voting machines exposed the defects of the Diebold machines and the company’s efforts to thwart public scrutiny and reforms.~{ See, e.g.,Yochai Benkler, /{The Wealth of Networks}/, pp. 225–32. }~ (The effort has led to a nationwide citizen effort, www.blackboxvoting.org, to expose security problems with voting machines and vote counting.) An ad hoc group of activists, lawyers, academics, and journalists spontaneously formed around a public wiki dealing with the lethal side effects of a bestselling antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, and the manufacturer’s allegedly illegal conduct in suppressing evidence of the drug’s risks. (Prosecutors later sought a $1 billion fine against Eli Lilly.)~{ Jonah Bossewitch, “The Zyprexa Kills Campaign: Peer Production and the Frontiers of Radical Pedagogy,” /{Re-public}/, at http://www.re-public.gr/en/ ?p=144. }~
+Citizens are now able to initiate their own policy initiatives without first persuading the mainstream media or political parties to validate them as worthy. For example, a handful of citizens troubled by evidence of “hackable” electronic voting machines exposed the defects of the Diebold machines and the company’s efforts to thwart public scrutiny and reforms.~{ See, e.g.,Yochai Benkler, /{The Wealth of Networks}/, pp. 225–32. }~ (The effort has led to a nationwide citizen effort, www.blackboxvoting.org, to expose security problems with voting machines and vote counting.) An ad hoc group of activists, lawyers, academics, and journalists spontaneously formed around a public wiki dealing with the lethal side effects of a bestselling antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, and the manufacturer’s allegedly illegal conduct in suppressing evidence of the drug’s risks. (Prosecutors later sought a $1 billion fine against Eli Lilly.)~{ Jonah Bossewitch, “The Zyprexa Kills Campaign: Peer Production and the Frontiers of Radical Pedagogy,” /{Re-public}/, at http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=144. }~
The Web is giving individuals extra-institutional public platforms for articulating their own facts and interpretations of culture. It is enabling them to go far beyond voting and citizen vigilance, to mount citizen-led interventions in politics and governance. History-making citizens can compete with the mass media as an arbiter of cultural and political reality. They can expose the factual errors and lack of independence of /{New York Times}/ reporters; reveal the editorial biases of the “MSM” — mainstream media — by offering their own videotape snippets on YouTube; they can even be pacesetters for the MSM, as the blog Firedoglake did in its relentless reporting of the “Scooter” Libby trial (Libby, one of Vice President Cheney’s top aides, was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with press leaks about CIA agent Valerie Plame.) Citizen-journalists, amateur videographers, genuine experts who have created their own Web platforms, parodists, dirty tricksters, and countless others are challenging elite control of the news agenda. It is no wonder that commercial journalism is suffering an identity crisis. Institutional authority is being trumped by the “social warranting” of online communities, many of which function as a kind of participatory meritocracy.
={Libby, “Scooter”;YouTube}
-History-making citizenship is not without its deficiencies. Rumors, misinformation, and polarized debate are common in this more open, unmediated environment. Its crowning virtue is its potential ability to mobilize the energies and creativity of huge numbers of people. GNU/Linux improbably drew upon the talents of tens of thousands of programmers; certainly our contemporary world with its countless problems could use some of this elixir— platforms that can elicit distributed creativity, specialized talent, passionate commitment, and social legitimacy. In 2005 Joi Ito, then chairman of the board of the Creative Commons, wrote: “Traditional forms of representative democracy can barely manage the scale, complexity and speed of the issues in the world today. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are limited in their ability to solve global issues. The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach informed, viable consensus.”~{ Joichi Ito, “Emergent Democracy,” chapter 1 in John Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe, eds., /{Extreme Democracy}/ (Durham, NC: Lulu.com, 2005), at http:// extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20One-Ito.pdf. }~ Ito concluded that a new, not-yetunderstood model of “emergent democracy” is likely to materialize as the digital revolution proceeds. A civic order consisting of “intentional blog communities, ad hoc advocacy coalitions and activist networks” could begin to tackle many urgent problems.
+History-making citizenship is not without its deficiencies. Rumors, misinformation, and polarized debate are common in this more open, unmediated environment. Its crowning virtue is its potential ability to mobilize the energies and creativity of huge numbers of people. GNU/Linux improbably drew upon the talents of tens of thousands of programmers; certainly our contemporary world with its countless problems could use some of this elixir— platforms that can elicit distributed creativity, specialized talent, passionate commitment, and social legitimacy. In 2005 Joi Ito, then chairman of the board of the Creative Commons, wrote: “Traditional forms of representative democracy can barely manage the scale, complexity and speed of the issues in the world today. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are limited in their ability to solve global issues. The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach informed, viable consensus.”~{ Joichi Ito, “Emergent Democracy,” chapter 1 in John Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe, eds., /{Extreme Democracy}/ (Durham, NC: Lulu.com, 2005), at http://extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20One-Ito.pdf. }~ Ito concluded that a new, not-yetunderstood model of “emergent democracy” is likely to materialize as the digital revolution proceeds. A civic order consisting of “intentional blog communities, ad hoc advocacy coalitions and activist networks” could begin to tackle many urgent problems.
={Ito, Joichi;NU/Linux;democracy:emergent+1|traditional forms of+5}
-Clearly, the first imperative in developing a new framework to host representative democracy is to ensure that the electronic commons be allowed to exist in the first place. Without net neutrality, citizens could very well be stifled in their ability to participate on their own terms, in their own voices. If proprietary policies or technologies are allowed to override citizen interests (Verizon Wireless in 2007 prevented the transmission of abortion rights messages on its text-messaging system, for example~{ Adam Liptak, “Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Messages,” /{New York Times}/, September 27, 2007, at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/busi ness/27cnd-verizon.html. }~), then any hope for historymaking citizenship will be stillborn.
+Clearly, the first imperative in developing a new framework to host representative democracy is to ensure that the electronic commons be allowed to exist in the first place. Without net neutrality, citizens could very well be stifled in their ability to participate on their own terms, in their own voices. If proprietary policies or technologies are allowed to override citizen interests (Verizon Wireless in 2007 prevented the transmission of abortion rights messages on its text-messaging system, for example~{ Adam Liptak, “Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Messages,” /{New York Times}/, September 27, 2007, at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/business/27cnd-verizon.html. }~), then any hope for historymaking citizenship will be stillborn.
Beyond such near-term concerns, however, the emerging digital republic is embroiled in a much larger structural tension with –terrestrial “real world” governments. The commoner is likely to regard the rules forged in online commons as more legitimate and appropriate than those mandated by government. Again, David R. Johnson:
={Johnson, David R.}
@@ -2868,7 +2868,7 @@ If Lessig is going to succeed in using the tools of the digital republic to refo
It is hard to get a fix on this long-term transformation because the struggles to actualize an emergent democracy, as envisioned by Ito, are strangely apolitical and intensely political at the same time. They are apolitical in the sense that commoners are chiefly focused on the pragmatic technical challenges of their individual projects; they are not usually involved in official policymaking in legislatures or before courts and government agencies. Yet free software and free culture projects are highly political in the sense that commons projects, taken together over time, represent a profound challenge to the conventional market order and political culture. For example, Wikitravel, Jamendo, and open-access journals arguably provide better value than the commercial alternatives. The success of free software punctures the foundational assumptions of copyright law, making it easier to challenge new expansions of copyright law. Participatory commons are diverting viewer “eyeballs” away from commercial media and its genres of culture, spurring the growth of new hybrid forms of user-generated content. These kinds of effects, which advance project by project, month by month, are likely to have a longterm transformational impact. A new social ethic is taking root.
={Ito, Joichi;free software:FOSS/FLOSS+2;FOSS/FLOSS+2;copyright law:assumptions of;democracy:emergent}
-Free culture, though culturally progressive, is fairly nonjudgmental about ideological politics. When American conservatives decided they wanted to start Conservapedia because they found Wikipedia too liberal, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was happy to bless it: “Free culture knows no bounds . . . We welcome the reuse of our work to build variants. That’s directly in line with our mission.”~{ Robert Mackey, “Conservapedia: The Word Says it All,” /{New York Times}/, March 8, 2007, at http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/conserva pedia-the-word-says-it-all/?scp=1&sq=wales+conservapedia. }~ Anthropology professor E. Gabriella Coleman has found a similar ecumenicism in the free software movement, which is agnostic about conventional politics but adamant about its own polity of freedom.~{ E. Gabriella Coleman, “The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast,” /{Anthropology Quarterly}/ 77, no. 3 (Summer 2004), pp. 507–19. See also her Ph.D. dissertation, “The Social Construction of Freedom in Free and Open Source Software: Hackers, Ethics and the Liberal Tradition,” abstract at http://healthhacker.org/biella/cole man-abstract.pdf. }~ Thus, the FOSS movement has no position with respect to social justice or globalization issues, but it does demand a strict commitment to the “four freedoms” of software development. Johan Söderberg makes much the same case in his book /{Hacking Capitalism}/.~{ Johan Söderberg, /{Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement}/ (New York: Routledge, 2007). }~
+Free culture, though culturally progressive, is fairly nonjudgmental about ideological politics. When American conservatives decided they wanted to start Conservapedia because they found Wikipedia too liberal, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was happy to bless it: “Free culture knows no bounds . . . We welcome the reuse of our work to build variants. That’s directly in line with our mission.”~{ Robert Mackey, “Conservapedia: The Word Says it All,” /{New York Times}/, March 8, 2007, at http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/conservapedia-the-word-says-it-all/?scp=1&sq=wales+conservapedia. }~ Anthropology professor E. Gabriella Coleman has found a similar ecumenicism in the free software movement, which is agnostic about conventional politics but adamant about its own polity of freedom.~{ E. Gabriella Coleman, “The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast,” /{Anthropology Quarterly}/ 77, no. 3 (Summer 2004), pp. 507–19. See also her Ph.D. dissertation, “The Social Construction of Freedom in Free and Open Source Software: Hackers, Ethics and the Liberal Tradition,” abstract at http://healthhacker.org/biella/coleman-abstract.pdf. }~ Thus, the FOSS movement has no position with respect to social justice or globalization issues, but it does demand a strict commitment to the “four freedoms” of software development. Johan Söderberg makes much the same case in his book /{Hacking Capitalism}/.~{ Johan Söderberg, /{Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement}/ (New York: Routledge, 2007). }~
={Coleman, E. Gabriella;Wales, Jimmy;Söderberg, Johan}
As projects like GNU/Linux, Wikipedia, open courseware, open-access journals, open databases, municipal Wi-Fi, collections of CC-licensed content, and other commons begin to cross-link and coalesce, the commons paradigm is migrating from the margins of culture to the center. The viral spiral, after years of building its infrastructure and social networks, may be approaching a Cambrian explosion, an evolutionary leap.
@@ -2898,7 +2898,7 @@ The GPL and the CC licenses are ingenious hacks because they navigate this indet
The beauty of this “ideological straddle” is that it enables a diverse array of players into the same tent without inciting sectarian acrimony. (There is some, of course, but mostly at the margins.) Ecumenical tolerance is the norm because orthodoxies cannot take root at the periphery where innovation is constantly being incubated. In any case, there is a widespread realization in the networked world that shared goals are likely to require variable implementations, depending on specific needs and contexts.
-It may appear that the free software hacker, blogger, tech entrepreneur, celebrity musician, college professor, and biological researcher have nothing in common. In truth, each is participating in social practices that are incrementally and collectively bringing into being a new sort of democratic polity. French sociologist Bruno Latour calls it the “pixellation of politics,”~{ Bruno Latour, “We Are All Reactionaries Today,” Re-public, at http://www .republic.gr/en/?p=129. }~ which conjures up a pointillist painting slowly materializing. The new polity is more open, participatory, dynamically responsive, and morally respected by “the governed” than the nominal democracies of nation-states. The bureaucratic state tends to be too large and remote to be responsive to local circumstances and complex issues; it is ridiculed and endured. But who dares to aspire to transcend it?
+It may appear that the free software hacker, blogger, tech entrepreneur, celebrity musician, college professor, and biological researcher have nothing in common. In truth, each is participating in social practices that are incrementally and collectively bringing into being a new sort of democratic polity. French sociologist Bruno Latour calls it the “pixellation of politics,”~{ Bruno Latour, “We Are All Reactionaries Today,” Re-public, at http://www.republic.gr/en/?p=129. }~ which conjures up a pointillist painting slowly materializing. The new polity is more open, participatory, dynamically responsive, and morally respected by “the governed” than the nominal democracies of nation-states. The bureaucratic state tends to be too large and remote to be responsive to local circumstances and complex issues; it is ridiculed and endured. But who dares to aspire to transcend it?
={Latour, Bruno}
Sooner or later, history-making citizenship is likely to take up such a challenge. It already has. What is the digital republic, after all, but a federation of self-organized communities, each seeking to fulfill its members’ dreams by developing its own indigenous set of tools, rules, and ethics? The power of the commons stems from its role as an organizing template, and not an ideology. Because it is able to host a diverse and robust ecosystem of talent without squeezing it into an ideological straitjacket, the commons is flexible and resilient. It is based on people’s sincerest passions, not on remote institutional imperatives or ideological shibboleths. It therefore has a foundational support and energy that can outperform “mainstream” institutions.