We can now reveal for the first time the location of a complete online copy of the original data set. As we anticipate attempts to prevent the distribution of this information we encourage supporters of democracy to make copies of these files and to make them available on websites and file sharing networks: http://users.actrix.co.nz/dolly/. As many of the files are zip password protected you may need some assistance in opening them, we have found that the utility available at _{[pg 228]} the following URL works well: http://www.lostpassword.com. Finally some of the zip files are partially damaged, but these too can be read by using the utility at: http://www.zip-repair.com/. At this stage in this inquiry we do not believe that we have come even remotely close to investigating all aspects of this data; i.e., there is no reason to believe that the security flaws discovered so far are the only ones. Therefore we expect many more discoveries to be made. We want the assistance of the online computing community in this enterprise and we encourage you to file your findings at the forum HERE [providing link to forum].

A number of characteristics of this call to arms would have been simply infeasible in the mass-media environment. They represent a genuinely different mind-set about how news and analysis are produced and how censorship and power are circumvented. First, the ubiquity of storage and communications capacity means that public discourse can rely on “see for yourself” rather than on “trust me.” The first move, then, is to make the raw materials available for all to see. Second, the editors anticipated that the company would try to suppress the information. Their response was not to use a counterweight of the economic and public muscle of a big media corporation to protect use of the materials. Instead, it was widespread distribution of information--about where the files could be found, and about where tools to crack the passwords and repair bad files could be found-- matched with a call for action: get these files, copy them, and store them in many places so they cannot be squelched. Third, the editors did not rely on large sums of money flowing from being a big media organization to hire experts and interns to scour the files. Instead, they posed a challenge to whoever was interested--there are more scoops to be found, this is important for democracy, good hunting!! Finally, they offered a platform for integration of the insights on their own forum. This short paragraph outlines a mechanism for radically distributed storage, distribution, analysis, and reporting on the Diebold files.

The social-economic critique has been enmeshed, as a political matter, with environmental, health, and consumer-oriented critiques as well. The environmental critiques focus on describing the products of science as monocultures, which, lacking the genetic diversity of locally used varieties, are more susceptible to catastrophic failure. Critics also fear contamination of existing varieties, unpredictable interactions with pests, and negative effects on indigenous species. The health effects concern focused initially on how breeding for yield may have decreased nutritional content, and in the more recent GM food debates, the concern that genetically altered foods will have some unanticipated negative health reactions that would only become apparent many years from now. The consumer concerns have to do with quality and an aesthetic attraction to artisan-mode agricultural products and aversion to eating industrial outputs. These social-economic and environmental-health-consumer concerns tend also to be aligned with protectionist lobbies, not only for economic purposes, but also reflecting a strong cultural attachment to the farming landscape and human ecology, particularly in Europe.

Notes: a. Large ambiguity results because technology transfer office reports increased revenues for yearend 2003 as $178M without reporting expenses; University Annual Report reports licensing revenue with all "revenue from other educational and research activities," and reports a 10 percent decline in this category, “reflecting an anticipated decline in royalty and license income” from the $133M for the previous year-end, 2002. The table reflects an assumed net contribution to university revenues between $100-120M (the entire decline in the category due to royalty/royalties decreased proportionately with the category). b. University of California Annual Report of the Office of Technology Transfer is more transparent than most in providing expenses--both net legal expenses and tech transfer direct operating expenses, which allows a clear separation of net revenues from technology transfer activities. c. Minus direct expenses, not including expenses for unlicensed inventions. d. Federal- and nonfederal-sponsored research. e. Almost half of this amount is in income from a single Initial Public Offering, and therefore does not represent a recurring source of licensing revenue. f. Technology transfer gross revenue minus the one-time event of an initial public offering of LiquidMetal Technologies.

At the other end of the spectrum of social ties, we see new platforms emerging to generate the kinds of bridging relations that were so central to the identification of “weak ties” in social capital literature. Weak ties are described in the social capital literature as allowing people to transmit information across social networks about available opportunities and resources, as well as provide at least a limited form of vouching for others--as one introduces a friend to a friend of a friend. What we are seeing on the Net is an increase in the platforms developed to allow people to create these kinds of weak ties based on an interest or practice. Perhaps clearest of these is Meetup.com. Meetup is a Web site that allows users to search for others who share an interest and who are locally available to meet face-to-face. The search results show users what meetings are occurring within their requested area and interest. The groups then meet periodically, and those who sign up for them also are able to provide a profile and photo of themselves, to facilitate and sustain the real-world group meetings. The power of this platform is that it is not intended as a replacement for real-space meetings. It is intended as a replacement for the happenstance of social networks as they transmit information about opportunities for interest- and practice-based social relations. The vouching function, on the other hand, seems to have more mixed efficacy, as Dana Boyd's ethnography of Friendster suggests. ¹⁴⁹ Friendster was started as a dating Web site. It was built on the assumption that dating a friend of a friend of a friend is safer and more likely to be successful than dating someone based on a similar profile, located on a general dating site like match.com--in other words, that vouching as friends provides valuable information. As Boyd shows, however, the attempt of Friendster to articulate and render transparent the social networks of its users met with less than perfect success. The platform only permits users to designate friend/not friend, without the finer granularity enabled by a face-toface conversation about someone, where one can answer or anticipate the question, “just how well do you know this person?” with a variety of means, from tone to express reservations. On Friendster, it seems that people cast broader networks, and for fear of offending or alienating others, include many more “friendsters” than they actually have “friends.” The result is a weak platform for mapping general connections, rather than a genuine articulation _{[pg 369]} of vouching through social networks. Nonetheless, it does provide a visible rendering of at least the thinnest of weak ties, and strengthens their effect in this regard. It enables very weak ties to perform some of the roles of real-world weak social ties.

^149.Dana M. Boyd, “Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networking,” Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems (CHI 2004) (Vienna: ACM, April 24-29, 2004).

The incumbent broadband providers have not taken kindly to the municipal assault on their monopoly (or oligopoly) profits. When the city of Abilene, Texas, tried to offer municipal broadband service in the late-1990s, Southwestern Bell (SBC) persuaded the Texas legislature to pass a law that prohibited local governments from providing high-speed Internet access. The town appealed to the FCC and the Federal Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. Both bodies held that when Congress passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and said that, “no state . . . regulation . . . may prohibit . . . the ability of any entity to provide . . . telecommunications service,” municipalities were not included in the term “any entity.” As the D.C. Circuit put it, “any” might have some significance “depending on the speaker's tone of voice,” but here it did not really mean “any entity,” only some. And states could certainly regulate the actions of municipalities, which are treated in U.S. law as merely their subdivisions or organs. ¹⁶⁶ Bristol, Virginia, had to fight off similar efforts to prohibit its plans through state law before it was able to roll out its network. In early 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court was presented with the practice of state preemption of municipal broadband efforts and chose to leave the municipalities to fend for themselves. A coalition of Missouri municipalities challenged a Missouri law that, like the Texas law, prohibited them from stepping in to offer their citizens broadband service. The Court of the Appeals for the Eighth Circuit agreed with the municipalities. The 1996 Act, after all, was intended precisely to allow anyone to compete with the incumbents. The section that prohibited states from regulating the ability of “any entity” to enter the telecommunications service market precisely anticipated that the local incumbents would use their clout in state legislatures to thwart the federal policy of introducing competition into the local loop. Here, the incumbents were doing just that, but the Supreme Court reversed the Eighth Circuit decision. Without dwelling too much on the wisdom of allowing citizens of municipalities to decide for themselves whether they want a municipal system, the court issued an opinion that was technically defensible in terms of statutory interpretation, but effectively invited the incumbent broadband providers to put their lobbying efforts into persuading state legislators to prohibit municipal efforts. ¹⁶⁷ After _{[pg 408]} Philadelphia rolled out its wireless plan, it was not long before the Pennsylvania legislature passed a similar law prohibiting municipalities from offering broadband. While Philadelphia's plan itself was grandfathered, future expansion from a series of wireless “hot spots” in open area to a genuine municipal network will likely be challenged under the new state law. Other municipalities in Pennsylvania are entirely foreclosed from pursuing this option. In this domain, at least as of 2005, the incumbents seem to have had some substantial success in containing the emergence of municipal broadband networks as a significant approach to eliminating the bottleneck in local network infrastructure.

^166.City of Abilene, Texas v. Federal Communications Commission, 164 F3d 49 (1999).

^167.Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, 541 U.S. 125 (2004).

As we will see in chapter 1, Richard Stallman, the legendary hacker, played an indispensable first-mover role by creating a sovereign domain from which to negotiate with commercial players: free software. The software commons and later digital commons inspired by it owe an incalculable debt to Stallman’s ingenious legal innovation, the General Public License, or GPL, launched in 1989. The GPL is a license for authorizing anyone to use a copyrighted software program so long as any copies or derivative versions are also made available on the same terms. This fairly simple license enables programmers to contribute code to a common pool without fear that someone might privatize and destroy the commons.

The struggle to imagine and invent the software commons, which later set in motion a viral spiral now known as free culture, began with Richard Stallman, a brilliant, eccentric MIT computer programmer. Stallman’s history as a hacker and legal innovator has by now become the stuff of legend. As one of the first people to confront the deep tensions between proprietary control and the public domain in software development, Stallman has achieved that rare pinnacle in the high-tech world, the status of celebrity geek. Besides his programming prowess, he is renowned for devising the GNU General Public License, more commonly known as the GPL, an ingenious legal mechanism to protect shared software code.

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.” ²¹³ Lessig clearly has similar ambitions for Creative Commons.

^213.From BMI, Inc., Web site, at http://www.bmi.com/genres/entry/533380.

Legend has it that, upon leaving Independence Hall on the final day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was approached by a woman, who asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a Republic or a Monarchy?” Franklin famously replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” The American colonies had imagined and engineered a new constitutional order, but its survival would depend on countless new struggles and innovations. An American civic culture had to be invented.

A sealed crustless sandwich for providing a convenient sandwich without an outer crust which can be stored for long periods of time without a central filling from leaking outwardly. The sandwich includes a lower bread portion, an upper bread portion, an upper filling and a lower filling between the lower and upper bread portions, a center filling sealed between the upper and lower fillings, and a crimped edge along an outer perimeter of the bread portions for sealing the fillings there between. The upper and lower fillings are preferably comprised of peanut butter and the center filling is comprised of at least jelly. The center filling is prevented from radiating outwardly into and through the bread portions from the surrounding peanut butter. ⁵

^5.U.S. Patent No. 6,004,596 (filed Dec. 21, 1999), available at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm (search “6,004,596”). As is required, the patent refers extensively to the “prior art”—in this case prior art in sealing sandwiches. It also refers to the classic scientific reference work “50 Great Sandwiches by Carole Handslip 81–84, 86, 95, 1994.” Is this patent ridiculous? Yes, clearly so. But not so ridiculous that its eventual owner, Smucker’s, refrained from sending out cease and desist letters to competing sandwich manufacturers, and, when one of those competitors successfully requested the Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine the patent, from appealing the resulting rejection all the way through the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The judges there were less than sympathetic at oral argument. “Judge Arthur Gajarsa noted that his wife often squeezes together the sides of their child’s peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to keep the filling from oozing out. ‘I’m afraid she might be infringing on your patent!’ he said.” The court found that the PTO got it right the second time around and agreed with the Board of Patent Appeals in rejecting the patent. Portfolio Media, “Peanut Butter and Jelly Case Reaches Federal Circuit,” IPLaw360 (April 7, 2005), available at http://www.iplawbulletin.com. For the Board of Patent Appeals’s learned discussion of whether the patent was anticipated by such devices as the “Tartmaster,” complete with disputes over expert testimony on the subjects of cutting, crimping, and “leaking outwardly” and painstaking inquiries about what would seem obvious to a “person having ordinary skill in the art of sandwich making,” see http://des.uspto.gov/Foia/ReterivePdf?system=BPAI&flNm=fd031754 and http://des.uspto.gov/Foia/ReterivePdf?system=BPAI&flNm=fd031775. One could conclude from this case that the system works (eventually). Or one could ask who cares about silly patents like this—even if they are used in an attempt to undermine competition? The larger point, however, is that an initial process of examination that finds a crimped peanut butter and jelly sandwich is “novel and nonobvious” is hardly going to do better when more complex technologies are at stake. I take that point up in Chapter 2 with reference to Thomas Jefferson’s discussion of patents and in Chapter 7 on synthetic biology. For a more general discussion of the flaws of the patent system see Adam B. Jaffe and Josh Lerner, Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System Is Endangering Innovation, and Progress and What To Do About It (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).

In Houston, Micah Nickerson and Damien Randle were volunteering to help New Orleans evacuees at the Astrodome and Houston Convention Center during the weekend of September 3. They, too, were incensed both by the slowness of the federal response to the disaster and by the portrayal of the evacuees in the media. But Mr. Nickerson and Mr. Randle were not just volunteers, they were also a hip-hop duo called “The Legendary K.O.” What better way to express their outrage than through their art? An article in the New York Times described their response.

“When they got to Houston, people were just seeing for the first time how they were portrayed in the media,” said Damien Randle, 31, a financial adviser and one half of the Legendary K.O. “It was so upsetting for them to be up on a roof for two days, with their kids in soiled diapers, and then see themselves portrayed as looters.” In response, Mr. Randle and his partner, Micah Nickerson, wrote a rap based on the stories of the people they were helping. On Sept. 6, Mr. Nickerson sent Mr. Randle an instant message containing a music file and one verse, recorded on his home computer. Mr. Randle recorded an additional verse and sent it back, and 15 minutes later it was up on their Web site: www.k-otix.com. ¹⁷⁹

^179.John Leland, “Art Born of Outrage in the Internet Age,” New York Times (September 25, 2005), D3.

The song was called “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” (also referred to as “George Bush Doesn’t Like Black People”). Appropriately, given that Mr. West was the one to come up with the phrase, the song was built around Mr. West’s “Gold Digger.” Much of the melody was sampled directly from the recording of that song. Yet the words were very different. Where “Gold Digger” is about a predatory, sensual, and materialist woman who “take[s] my money when I’m in need” and is a “triflin’ friend indeed,” The Legendary K.O.’s song is a lyrical and profane condemnation of the response to Katrina by both the government and the media. Here is a sample:

Suppose that Mr. Charles has complied with all the formalities. The words and music were published with a copyright notice. A copyright registration was filed and renewed. Does Mr. West infringe this copyright? That is where the discovery of the Bailey Gospel Singers recording is potentially so important. Charles only gets a copyright in his original creation. Those elements taken from the public domain (if “I’ve Got a Savior” was indeed in the public domain) or from other copyrighted songs do not count. The irony here is that the elements that Kanye West borrows from Ray Charles are almost exactly the same ones Ray Charles borrows from the Bailey Gospel Singers. “I’ve got a savior, Oh what a savior” becomes “I got a woman, way over town” becomes “There’s a Gold Digger, way over town.” And of course, the music behind those words is even more similar. When The Legendary K.O. reached for Kanye West’s song in order to criticize Mr. Bush, they found themselves sampling Jamie Foxx, who was copying Ray Charles, who was copying the Bailey Gospel Singers, who themselves may have borrowed their theme from an older spiritual.

“George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People,” The Legendary K.O.

Mr. Nickerson’s and Mr. Randle’s song started with Kanye West’s words—taken from the fundraiser with Mike Myers. “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” From there it launched into the song. The background melody comes almost entirely from a looped, or infinitely repeated, version of the hook that Kanye West and Jamie Foxx had in turn taken from Ray Charles: “She gimme money, when I’m in need. I gotta leave.” Against that background, The Legendary K.O. provide their profane and angry commentary, part of which is excerpted above, with a chorus of “George Bush don’t like black people,” in case anyone had missed the point.

Mr. Lopez’s video obviously tries to use The Legendary K.O.’s song to make larger political arguments about the country. For example, it asserts that “in 2004 Bush diverted most of the funds for the levees to the war in Iraq.” Scenes reminiscent of a Michael Moore documentary are shown. There are pictures of the Iraq war, Halliburton signs, and shots of the president with a member of the Saudi royal family. The captions accuse the president of showing insensitivity and disdain to racial minorities. One summarizes the general theme: “Since he was elected president, George Bush’s policies have been less than kind toward Africans and Hispanics.” Issues ranging from the response to the Darfur massacres, No Child Left Behind, and the attempted privatization of Social Security also make their appearance. The video concludes by giving the donation information for the Red Cross and saying that we are “onto” Bush. A picture of a Klansman removing his hood is shown, with the image manipulated so that the face revealed is Mr. Bush’s.

Let us begin with the music. Unlike the other songs I have discussed here, with the possible exception of Mr. West’s, “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” makes use of digital samples of the work of others. In other words, this is not merely about copying the tune or the lyrics. The reason that Mr. Nickerson and Mr. Randle could make and distribute this song so fast (and so cheaply) is that they took fragments from the recording of “Gold Digger” and looped them to form the background to their own rap. That was also part of the reason for the positive public reaction. Kanye West (and Ray Charles and Clara Ward) are very talented musicians. West’s song was already all over the airwaves. The Legendary K.O. capitalized on that, just as Benjamin Franklin capitalized on the familiarity of the songs he reworded. But where Franklin could only take the tune, The Legendary K.O. could take the actual ones and zeros of the digital sound file.

The court in Bridgeport does see copyright as a balance. It does understand the need for future creators to build on the past, but it also shows that a simple willingness to look upon intellectual property protections in a utilitarian way does not solve all problems. It certainly does not proceed from Jefferson’s presumption that intellectual property protections should be interpreted narrowly. Though it claims to have a “literal” reading of the statute, the real driving force in the analysis is an unconsummated desire for bright-line rules and a belief that the market will solve these problems by itself. The court also suggests that “[i]f this is not what Congress intended or is not what they would intend now, it is easy enough for the record industry, as they have done in the past, to go back to Congress for a clarification or change in the law.” Note the assumption that “the record industry” is the most reliable guide to Congress’s intentions or that it is the only entity affected by such a rule. This is truly the image of copyright law as a contract among affected industries. Of course, digital artists such as The Legendary K.O. hardly fit within such a model.

Does “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” fit that model? The Legendary K.O. were not “taking aim” at “Gold Digger.” True, they quoted West’s actual words from the television broadcast (also copyrighted). They even used them as their title. But they were not taking aim at his song. (Ironically, Kanye West has a better claim that he was taking aim at Ray Charles’s picture of womanhood, in just the way described in the 2 Live Crew case.) Rather, The Legendary K.O. were using the sample of the song as the backing to an entirely different rap that expressed, in familiar and popular musical form, a more expansive version of his condemnation of both press and president. That does not end the inquiry. Parody is not the only form of protected criticism or commentary. But it makes it much harder for them to succeed, particularly in light of the hostility toward sampling betrayed by both Grand Upright and Bridgeport.

The Legendary K.O. samples Kanye West, who uses a fragment from Ray Charles, who may have taken material from Will Lamartine Thompson or, more likely, from Clara Ward (who herself borrowed from a gospel standard). The chain of borrowing I describe here has one end in the hymns and spirituals of the early 1900s and the other in the twenty-first century’s chaotic stew of digital sampling, remix, and mashup. Along the way, we have the synthesis of old and the invention of new musical genres—often against the wishes of those whose work is serving as the raw material. One way of viewing this story is that each of these musicians (except for some imaginary original artist, the musical source of the Nile) is a plagiarist and a pirate. If they are licensing their material or getting it from the public domain, then they may not be lawbreakers but they are still unoriginal slavish imitators. If one’s image of creativity is that of the romantic, iconoclastic creator who invents the world anew with each creation, those conclusions seem entirely appropriate. The borrowing here is rampant. Far from building everything anew, these musicians seem quite deliberately to base their work on fragments taken from others.

Yet the chain of borrowing that links The Legendary K.O., Kanye West, Ray Charles, and the Bailey Gospel Singers is of a different kind. This borrowing involves taking chunks of prior musicians’ melodies, their words, their lyrical patterns. This is not just copying the genre. It is copying the lines of the song within the genre. This is the kind of stuff copyright is supposed to regulate even when it is working well. And yet, listening to the sequence, it is hard to deny that at each stage something artistic and innovative, something remarkable, has been created. In fact, the story of this song is the striking ability of each set of artists to impose their own sound, temperament, spirituality, humor, vision of women, or, in the case of The Legendary K.O., their intense and profane political anger, onto the musical phrases they have in common.

An Internet optimist would tell us that is precisely the point. True, because of the errors described in the chapter on the Jefferson Warning, and the mistakes catalogued in the chapters on the Internet Threat and the Farmers’ Tale, we have dramatically expanded the scope, length, and power of the rights that are supposed to shape our creative culture. But technology cures all. Look at The Legendary K.O., The Black Lantern, or Franklin Lopez. They are all probably breaking the law as it is currently interpreted by the courts. But their work can be created for pennies and distributed to millions. The technology allows people to circumvent the law. Admittedly, some of the copyright holders will police their rights assiduously—think of JibJab’s newfound dislike of fair use and their power to alter The Black Lantern’s video. But others either cannot or will not. Kanye West’s representatives in particular are unlikely to be stupid enough to sue The Legendary K.O. in the first place. Internet distribution becomes a demimonde in which the rules of the rest of the society either cannot or will not be enforced. Art gets its breathing room, not from legal exceptions, but from technological enforcement difficulties. Finally, as more and more people can create and distribute digital culture, they are less likely to understand, believe in, or accept rules that are strongly at variance with their aesthetic and moral assumptions.

Despite all this, I am uncomfortable with the argument “do not worry, technology will allow us to evade the rules where they are stupid.” A system that can only function well through repeated lawbreaking is an unstable and dangerous one. It breeds a lack of respect for the law in those who should be its greatest supporters and beneficiaries. It blurs civil disobedience and plain old lawbreaking. Sitting in on the segregated lunch counter and being willing to face the consequences is very different from parking in the disabled space and hoping you can get away with it. It also blurs our judgment of conduct. Whatever one thinks of them, The Legendary K.O. are doing something very different than a college student who just does not want to pay for music and downloads thousands of tracks for free from file sharing networks.

The main source of information on The Legendary K.O.—a name they now use intermittently—is their website is www.k-otix.com. (I am grateful to Mr. Nickerson and Mr. Randle for confirming additional portions of the story by e-mail.) The song “George Bush Doesn’t Like Black People” is no longer available on their website, however an audio version of it is currently available at http://www.ourmedia.org/node/53964. The Black Lantern’s video can be found at http://www.theblacklantern.com/george.html. Franklin Lopez’s video can currently be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGRcEXtLpTo. Whether any of those sites will be available in a year’s time is hard to tell. Those who plan to listen or view are reminded that the lyrics are ‘explicit.’

The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological changes in information display, reproduction, and distribution. The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive style of the novel.

Such experts don't come cheap, which means that you can anticipate a terrible denuding of the fertile jungle of internet hosting companies that are primary means by which tens of millions of creative people share the fruits of their labor with their fans and colleagues.

To call this a moral failing -- and a new moral failing at that! -- is to turn your back on millions of years of human history. It's no failing that we internalize the stories we love, that we rework them to suit our minds better. The Pygmalion story didn't start with Shaw or the Greeks, nor did it end with My Fair Lady. Pygmalion is at least thousands of years old -- think of Moses passing for the Pharaoh's son! -- and has been reworked in a billion bedtime stories, novels, D&D games, movies, fanfic stories, songs, and legends.

Click “publish” and bam, the page is live. The word “OtherWikis” will be underlined, having automatically been turned into a link to a blank page titled “OtherWikis” (Wiki software recognizes words with capital letters in the middle of them as links to other pages. Wiki people call this “camel-case,” because the capital letters in the middle of words make them look like humped camels.) At the bottom of it appears this legend: “Edit this page.”

Spurred on by this exchange, many of Wikipedia's supporters decided to empirically investigate the accuracy and resilience of the system. Alex Halavais made changes to 13 different pages, ranging from obvious to subtle. Every single change was found and corrected within hours. [fn: see http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=794 for more] Then legendary Princeton engineer Ed Felten ran side-by-side comparisons of Wikipedia entries on areas in which he had deep expertise with their counterparts in the current electronic edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His conclusion? “Wikipedia's advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren't for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica's advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries.” [fn: see http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000675.html for more] Not a complete win for Wikipedia, but hardly “outrageous,” “repugnant” and “dangerous.” (Poor Fasoldt -- his idiotic hyperbole will surely haunt him through the whole of his career -- I mean, “repugnant?!”)

Indeed, it seems that every square centimeter of the Portrait Gallery is under some form of copyright. I wasn't even allowed to photograph the NO PHOTOGRAPHS sign. A museum staffer explained that she'd been told that the typography and layout of the NO PHOTOGRAPHS legend was, itself, copyrighted. If this is true, then presumably, the same rules would prevent anyone from taking any pictures in any public place -- unless you could somehow contrive to get a shot of Leicester Square without any writing, logos, architectural facades, or images in it. I doubt Warhol could have done it.

Matthew had heard this story so many times growing up that he could recite it word-for-word with his father. It was more than a story: it was the family legend, more important than any of the history he'd learned in school. As stories went, it was a good one, but Matthew was determined that his own life would have an even better story still. Matthew would not be the second Master Fong. He would be Boss Fong, the first -- a man with his own factory, his own fortune.

Mr Wing had quickly noticed Matthew's talent. Mr Wing didn't like games, didn't care about the legends of Iceland or England or India or Japan. But Mr Wing understood how to make boys work. He displayed their day's take on big boards at both ends of his factory, treated the top performers to lavish meals and baijiu parties in private rooms at his karaoke club where there were beautiful girls. Matthew remembered these evenings through a bleary haze: a girl on either side of him on a sofa, pressed against him, their perfume in his nose, refilling his glass as Mr Wing toasted him for a hero, extolling his achievements. The girls oohed and aahed and pressed harder against him. Mr Wing always laughed at him the next day, because he'd pass out before he could go with one of the girls into an even more private room.

This scene is dedicated to Powell's Books, the legendary “City of Books” in Portland, Oregon. Powell's is the largest bookstore in the world, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery smells and towering shelves. They stock new and used books on the same shelves -- something I've always loved -- and every time I've stopped in, they've had a veritable mountain of my books, and they've been incredibly gracious about asking me to sign the store-stock. The clerks are friendly, the stock is fabulous, and there's even a Powell's at the Portland airport, making it just about the best airport bookstore in the world for my money!

This scene is dedicated to Anderson's Bookshops, Chicago's legendary kids' bookstore. Anderson's is an old, old family-run business, which started out as an old-timey drug-store selling some books on the side. Today, it's a booming, multi-location kids' book empire, with some incredibly innovative bookselling practices that get books and kids together in really exciting ways. The best of these is the store's mobile book-fairs, in which they ship huge, rolling bookcases, already stocked with excellent kids' books, direct to schools on trucks -- voila, instant book-fair!

He thought he'd lie down for just the briefest of naps, but by the time he got up and gathered a few things into a duffel-bag and got back on his bike, not bothering to lock the door of his apartment behind him, the train station was barricaded, and there was a long line of refugees slogging down the road to Shenzhen, two days' walk away at least. He was glad he'd taken the bicycle then. Later, he found a working ATM and drew out some cash, which was more reassuring than he'd anticipated. For a while there, it had seemed like the world had come to an end. It was a relief to find out that it was just his little corner.

Yasmin doubted that Mrs Dibyendu had anticipated the effect that the Army's departure would have on her little shop, though. Once the Army had gone, every kid in Dharavi had moved with them -- no one under the age of 30 would set foot in the cafe. No one except Yasmin, who now sat there all day long, fighting for the workers.

“A tank!” She giggled. "That's just perfect. Oh, sisters, if only you could see this big, muscled tank I have sitting here in my studio. Let me tell you about Tank. I was watching a little video this afternoon, and like many of you, I found myself watching something amazing: dozens of boys, lined up outside an Internet cafe, blinking and pale as newborn mice in the daylight. It seemed that they were a different kind of factory boy, the legendary gold farmers of Shenzhen, and they were demanding a better job, better pay, better conditions, and an end to their vicious, greedy bosses. Does that sound familiar, sisters?

This scene is dedicated to the MIT Press Bookshop, a store I've visited on every single trip to Boston over the past ten years. MIT, of course, is one of the legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture, and the campus bookstore lives up to the incredible expectations I had when I first set foot in it. In addition to the wonderful titles published by the MIT press, the bookshop is a tour through the most exciting high-tech publications in the world, from hacker zines like 2600 to fat academic anthologies on video-game design. This is one of those stores where I have to ask them to ship my purchases home because they don't fit in my suitcase.

This scene is dedicated to The Tattered Cover, Denver's legendary independent bookstore. I happened upon The Tattered Cover quite by accident: Alice and I had just landed in Denver, coming in from London, and it was early and cold and we needed coffee. We drove in aimless rental-car circles, and that's when I spotted it, the Tattered Cover's sign. Something about it tingled in my hindbrain -- I knew I'd heard of this place. We pulled in (got a coffee) and stepped into the store -- a wonderland of dark wood, homey reading nooks, and miles and miles of bookshelves.

The inside of the shipping container was a lot worse than Wei-Dong had anticipated. When he'd decided to smuggle himself into China, he'd done a lot of reading on the subject, starting with searches on human trafficking -- which was all horror stories about 130 degree noontimes in a roasting box, crammed in with thirty others -- and then into the sustainable housing movement, where architects were vying to outdo one another in their simple and elegant retrofits of containers into cute little apartments.

And then he got Fenrir's Tooth. It was the rarest and most legendary drop in all of Svartalfaheim Warriors, a powerful talisman that would turn any wolf-pack or enthral them to the Tooth's holder. The message boards had been full of talk about it, and several times there'd been fraudulent auctions for it, but no one had ever seen it before.

Command Central seemed to recede, as if the room was rushing away from him. Distantly, he heard the game runners hiss explanations to one another, explaining the magnitude of his all-encompassing legendary world-beating FAIL.

Connor swallowed. This was the one thing he hadn't anticipated: that his life might come back and suck him into it again. “What the hell are you talking about?”

When my dad was a young university student in the 1960s, he was one of the few “counterculture” people who thought computers were a good thing. For most young people, computers represented the de-humanization of society. University students were reduced to numbers on a punchcard, each bearing the legend “DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE,” prompting some of the students to wear pins that said, “I AM A STUDENT: DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE ME.” Computers were seen as a means to increase the ability of the authorities to regiment people and bend them to their will.

I wish I could say that I'd anticipated this possibility in advance and created a fake password that unlocked a completely innocuous partition on my phone, but I wasn't nearly that paranoid/clever.

We were north of Chinatown, at the part where it starts to become North Beach, a neighborhood with a bunch of neon strip clubs and the legendary City Lights counterculture bookstore, where the Beat poetry movement had been founded back in the 1950s.

[This chapter is dedicated to Powell's Books, ⁶ the legendary “City of Books” in Portland, Oregon. Powell's is the largest bookstore in the world, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery smells and towering shelves. They stock new and used books on the same shelves -- something I've always loved -- and every time I've stopped in, they've had a veritable mountain of my books, and they've been incredibly gracious about asking me to sign the store-stock. The clerks are friendly, the stock is fabulous, and there's even a Powell's at the Portland airport, making it just about the best airport bookstore in the world for my money!

^6.Powell's Books: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn=9780765319852 1005 W Burnside, Portland, OR 97209 USA +1 800 878 7323

“An overhaul of the indienet code has been on my plate for months now,” Jolu said. “The original programs were written really fast and dirty and they could be made a lot more efficient with a little work. But I just haven't had the time. One of the high-marked to-do items has been to encrypt the connections, just because Trudy likes it that way.” Trudy Doo was the founder of Pigspleen. She was an old time San Francisco punk legend, the singer/front-woman of the anarcho-feminist band Speedwhores, and she was crazy about privacy. I could totally believe that she'd want her music service encrypted on general principles.

[This chapter is dedicated to Anderson's Bookshops, ¹⁰ Chicago's legendary kids' bookstore. Anderson's is an old, old family-run business, which started out as an old-timey drug-store selling some books on the side. Today, it's a booming, multi-location kids' book empire, with some incredibly innovative bookselling practices that get books and kids together in really exciting ways. The best of these is the store's mobile book-fairs, in which they ship huge, rolling bookcases, already stocked with excellent kids' books, direct to schools on trucks -- voila, instant book-fair!]

^10.Anderson's Bookshops http://www.andersonsbookshop.com/search.php?qkey2=doctorow+little+brother&sid=5156&imageField.x=0&imageField.y=0 123 West Jefferson, Naperville, IL 60540 USA +1 630 355 2665

[This chapter is dedicated to the MIT Press Bookshop, ¹⁹ a store I've visited on every single trip to Boston over the past ten years. MIT, of course, is one of the legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture, and the campus bookstore lives up to the incredible expectations I had when I first set foot in it. In addition to the wonderful titles published by the MIT press, the bookshop is a tour through the most exciting high-tech publications in the world, from hacker zines like 2600 to fat academic anthologies on video-game design. This is one of those stores where I have to ask them to ship my purchases home because they don't fit in my suitcase.]

^19.MIT Press Bookstore http://web.mit.edu/bookstore/www/ Building E38, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA USA 02139-4307 +1 617 253 5249

[This chapter is dedicated to The Tattered Cover, ²⁰ Denver's legendary independent bookstore. I happened upon The Tattered Cover quite by accident: Alice and I had just landed in Denver, coming in from London, and it was early and cold and we needed coffee. We drove in aimless rental-car circles, and that's when I spotted it, the Tattered Cover's sign. Something about it tingled in my hindbrain -- I knew I'd heard of this place. We pulled in (got a coffee) and stepped into the store -- a wonderland of dark wood, homey reading nooks, and miles and miles of bookshelves.]

^20.The Tattered Cover http://www.tatteredcover.com/NASApp/store/Product?s=showproduct&isbn=9780765319852 1628 16th St., Denver, CO USA 80202 +1 303 436 1070

But there was another way to look at it. Zeb had showed me a secret, something I hadn't anticipated: there was a whole hidden world out there, a way of getting by without participating in the system.

I got to feeling like I was someone special—not everyone had a chum as exotic as Keep-A-Movin' Dan, the legendary missionary who visited the only places left that were closed to the Bitchun Society. I can't say for sure why he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice that he'd liked my symphonies, and he'd read my Ergonomics thesis on applying theme-park crowd-control techniques in urban settings, and liked what I had to say there. But I think it came down to us having a good time needling each other.

I stood and stalked out of the theater, out into Liberty Square and the Park. It had cooled down without drying out, and there was a damp chill that crawled up my back and made my breath stick in my throat. I turned to contemplate the Hall of Presidents, staid and solid as it had been since my boyhood and before, a monument to the Imagineers who anticipated the Bitchun Society, inspired it.

My systems came back online sometime that day, and I hardly noticed, I was so preoccupied with the new Mansion. Holy shit, was it ever audacious: since the first Mansion opened in California in 1969, no one had ever had the guts to seriously fuxor with it. Oh, sure, the Paris version, Phantom Manor, had a slightly different storyline, but it was just a minor bit of tweakage to satisfy the European market at the time. No one wanted to screw up the legend.

You'd have thought that we'd have followed it up with an act of our own, and truth be told, that was certainly my expectation when we started the game I came to think of as the steeplechase, but we never did. Halfway through, I'd lose track of carnal urges and return to a state of childlike innocence, living only for the thrill of the chase and the giggly feeling I got whenever she found some new, even-more-outrageous corner to turn. I think we became legendary on the station, that crazy pair that's always zipping in and zipping away, like having your party crashed by two naked, coed Marx Brothers.

Social imaginaries are an extension of “background” in the philosophical sense: “a wider grasp of our whole predicament.” ³⁸ The example Taylor uses is that of marching in a demonstration: the action is in our imaginative repertory and has a meaning that cannot be reduced to the local context: “We know how to assemble, pick up banners and march. . . . [W]e understand the ritual. . . . [T]he immediate sense of what we are doing, getting the message to our government and our fellow citizens that the cuts must stop, say, makes sense in a wider context, in which we see ourselves standing in a continuing relation with others, in which it is appropriate to address them in this manner.” ³⁹ But we also stand “internationally” and “in history” against a background of stories, images, legends, symbols, and theories. “The background that makes sense of any given act is wide and deep. It doesn’t include everything in our world, but the relevant sense-giving features can’t be circumscribed. . . . [It] draws on our whole world, that is, our sense of our whole predicament in time and space, among others and in history.” ⁴⁰

^38.Ibid., 25.

^39.Ibid., 26-27.

^40.Ibid., 28.

We anticipate that the phrase “as appropriate to the medium, genre, and market niche” might prompt some anxiety, as it leaves things relatively undefined. But there’s more method here than you might expect: The definition of “sampling” or “collage” varies across different media. Rather than try to define all possible scenarios (including ones that haven’t happened yet)—which would have the effect of restricting the types of re-uses to a limited set—we took the more laissez faire approach.

A January 1909 deadline was set for all companies to comply with the license. By February, unlicensed outlaws, who referred to themselves as independents protested the trust and carried on business without submitting to the Edison monopoly. In the summer of 1909 the independent movement was in full-swing, with producers and theater owners using illegal equipment and imported film stock to create their own underground market.

With the country experiencing a tremendous expansion in the number of nickelodeons, the Patents Company reacted to the independent movement by forming a strong-arm subsidiary known as the General Film Company to block the entry of non-licensed independents. With coercive tactics that have become legendary, General Film confiscated unlicensed equipment, discontinued product supply to theaters which showed unlicensed films, and effectively monopolized distribution with the acquisition of all U.S. film exchanges, except for the one owned by the independent William Fox who defied the Trust even after his license was revoked.“【52 J. A. Aberdeen, Hollywood Renegades: The Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers (Cobblestone Entertainment, 2000) and expanded texts posted at ”The Edison Movie Monopoly: The Motion Picture Patents Company vs. the Independent Outlaws,“ available at link #11. For a discussion of the economic motive behind both these limits and the limits imposed by Victor on phonographs, see Randal C. Picker, ”From Edison to the Broadcast Flag: Mechanisms of Consent and Refusal and the Propertization of Copyright" (September 2002), University of Chicago Law School, James M. Olin Program in Law and Economics, Working Paper No. 159. 】

AI systems work within the parameters set by designers of the systems. The “creativity” in AI systems lies in their limitless possibilities of expanding into empty mathematical spaces on a map where training images occupy latent spaces. A latent space is a mathematical representation that maps what a neural network has learned from a training image. As training images are represented as latent spaces on a map, unoccupied spaces are where novel images can be generated. As mathematical space can have multiple dimensions and be extended infinitely, the unoccupied spaces for creating novel images for AI artworks are endless. The unoccupied spaces with various combinations of dimensions represent AI art's potential creativity. One could say that once AI designers set up the dimensions in the mathematical space and provide the training dataset to take up latent spaces in the mathematical space, all empty spaces, i.e., all potential new images, are anticipated. In other words, the AI systems simply render images that the designers anticipate. The anticipated images will change when the designers adjust the dimensions or provide different training images. In this sense, the designers of the AI systems are the ones who exercise creativity on the images.

The designers of an AI system can provide intentionality for some AI art, e.g., an image of the dog painted in Kandinsky's style. Other times, AI art's intentionality has to be interpreted. Some AI art cannot be appreciated and is mere nonsense until intentionality is interpreted by human artists or art critics. Our analysis in the last section indicates that AI systems merely render images anticipated by designers, even if the designers cannot predict the presentations of the images. Thus, we can agree with Danto and others that AI art should be understood as works by human artists, mediated by machines, and not by machines as artists. But in addition to that, with the need for human artists to identify AI art's intentionality for AI art to be appreciated, such AI art should be further viewed as requiring ingenuity from human artists. Thus, while the production of traditional art relies on the genius of artists, the identification of some AI art as artworks relies on the taste of artists.

Further, the interpretation that chance events are for the sake of their originally expected result does not seem to express Aristotle’s recognition under his teleology that an event must be recognized as being meaningful for it to be a chance event. ⁸ In Aristotle’s teleological context, man’s purpose is to strive to exist in the best possible condition and only ascribes meaning to events relevant to such purpose. ⁹ In this context, a chance event needs to either contribute to or subtract from the achievement of a goal. The number of meaningless events, expected or unexpected, is unlimited. Yet very few are meaningful enough to be recognized as chance. As legend has it, Isaac Newtown saw an apple fall while contemplating the forces of nature, leading him to discover the laws of gravity. Suppose Newton was not there to see the chance fall of the apple. Even if the unobserved apple fell in a rather particular and unexpected way, e.g. hit a rock and then jumped an exotic loop, the fall of the apple would be meaningless and would not be a chance event. Because the fall of the apple is not expected to be unobserved and observing the fall is not expected to inspire anyone to discover the laws of gravity, stating that chance events are for the sake of their originally expected result would in this case be saying that the fall of the apple is for the sake of nothing meaningful. ¹⁰ Thus, the current interpretation renders a description showing chance events as being meaningless, which both fails to distinguish chance events from meaningless events in addition to taking chance out of the teleological context.

^8.John Dudley, Aristotle’s Concept of Chance, SUNY Press 2012, 24, “One of Aristotle’s most profound observations is that intelligibility and purpose go together. He states e.g. that if someone said that he had washed himself in vain because the sun did not go into eclipse, he would be ridiculous. Solar eclipses are not what washing is for.”

^9.Lindsay Judson, Chance and ‘Always or For the Most Part’ in Aristotle, 92: “Our aim of understanding the world about us – of making sense of the operations of nature and the strategies of rational agents – requires us to distinguishes pieces of behavior which are reliably connected with those operations and strategies from those which, even if there appear to be, are not.”

^10.The falling apple’s achieved result is “being observed and subsequently inspiring Newton to discover the laws of gravity.” Therefore, the originally expected result is “falling without being observed.”

Once you have your live system with cryptsetup, you basically only need to create a new partition, encrypt it and boot with the persistence and persistence-encryption=luks parameters. We could have already anticipated this step and added the boot parameters following the usual procedure:

First, --architectures i386 ensures that on our amd64 build system, we build a 32-bit version suitable for use on most machines. Second, we use --linux-flavours 686-pae because we don't anticipate using this image on much older systems. Third, we have chosen the lxde task metapackage to give us a minimal desktop. And finally, we have added two initial favourite packages: iceweasel and xchat.

Once you have your live system with cryptsetup, you basically only need to create a new partition, encrypt it and boot with the persistence and persistence-encryption=luks parameters. We could have already anticipated this step and added the boot parameters following the usual procedure:

Once you have your live system with cryptsetup, you basically only need to create a new partition, encrypt it and boot with the persistence and persistence-encryption=luks parameters. We could have already anticipated this step and added the boot parameters following the usual procedure:

First, --architectures i386 ensures that on our amd64 build system, we build a 32-bit version suitable for use on most machines. Second, we use --linux-flavours 686-pae because we don't anticipate using this image on much older systems. Third, we have chosen the lxde task metapackage to give us a minimal desktop. And finally, we have added two initial favourite packages: iceweasel and xchat.

Once you have your live system with cryptsetup, you basically only need to create a new partition, encrypt it and boot with the persistence and persistence-encryption=luks parameters. We could have already anticipated this step and added the boot parameters following the usual procedure:

First, --architectures i386 ensures that on our amd64 build system, we build a 32-bit version suitable for use on most machines. Second, we use --linux-flavours 686-pae because we don't anticipate using this image on much older systems. Third, we have chosen the lxde task metapackage to give us a minimal desktop. And finally, we have added two initial favourite packages: iceweasel and xchat.

The most important of these, the Ohio State Emacs Lisp archive, anticipated the spirit and many of the features of today's big Linux archives. But few of us really thought very hard about what we were doing, or about what the very existence of that archive suggested about problems in the FSF's cathedral-building development model. I made one serious attempt around 1992 to get a lot of the Ohio code formally merged into the official Emacs Lisp library. I ran into political trouble and was largely unsuccessful.

Another important change demanded by my beta-testers was support for 8-bit MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) operation. This was pretty easy to do, because I had been careful to keep the code 8-bit clean (that is, to not press the 8th bit, unused in the ASCII character set, into service to carry information within the program). Not because I anticipated the demand for this feature, but rather in obedience to another rule:

Before cheap Internet, there were some geographically compact communities where the culture encouraged Weinberg's “egoless” programming, and a developer could easily attract a lot of skilled kibitzers and co-developers. Bell Labs, the MIT AI and LCS labs, UC Berkeley—these became the home of innovations that are legendary and still potent.

In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He's the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain - not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he's the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.

“Correct.” Gianni smiles thinly. “Two years before the central committee denounced computers as bourgeois deviationist pseudoscience intended to dehumanize the proletarian. They recognized the power of robots even then. A shame they did not anticipate the compiler or the Net.”

It's crude moral blackmail, transparent as glass and manipulative as hell, but Amber's corpus logica flags it with a heavy emotional sprite miming the likelihood of physical discipline if she rises to the bait: Mom is agitated, nostrils slightly flared, ventilation rate up, some vasodilatation visible in her cheeks. Amber - in combination with her skullset and the metacortex of distributed agents it supports - is mature enough at eight years to model, anticipate, and avoid corporal punishment. But her stature and lack of physical maturity conspire to put her at a disadvantage when negotiating with adults who matured in a simpler age. She sighs, then puts on a pout to let Mom know she's still reluctant, but obedient. “O-kay. If you say so.”

“A trade delegation,” says Amber. “I should have anticipated. I mean, we were going to go through the router ourselves, weren't we?”

“Now, consciousness. That's a fun thing, isn't it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you'll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse - an internal simulation of the mouse's likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator's actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling - so the tribe could work collectively - and then reflexively, to simulate the individual's own inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you've got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus - signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as 'predator here' or 'food there.'”

But I shall not anticipate the reader with further descriptions of this kind, because I reserve them for a greater work, which is now almost ready for the press; containing a general description of this empire, from its first erection, through along series of princes; with a particular account of their wars and politics, laws, learning, and religion; their plants and animals; their peculiar manners and customs, with other matters very curious and useful; my chief design at present being only to relate such events and transactions as happened to the public or to myself during a residence of about nine months in that empire.

Rostov anticipated his horse's movements and became more and more elated. He had noticed a solitary tree ahead of him. This tree had been in the middle of the line that had seemed so terrible- and now he had crossed that line and not only was there nothing terrible, but everything was becoming more and more happy and animated. “Oh, how I will slash at him!” thought Rostov, gripping the hilt of his saber.

Despite this destitution, the soldiers and officers went on living just as usual. Despite their pale swollen faces and tattered uniforms, the hussars formed line for roll call, kept things in order, groomed their horses, polished their arms, brought in straw from the thatched roofs in place of fodder, and sat down to dine round the caldrons from which they rose up hungry, joking about their nasty food and their hunger. As usual, in their spare time, they lit bonfires, steamed themselves before them naked; smoked, picked out and baked sprouting rotten potatoes, told and listened to stories of Potemkin's and Suvorov's campaigns, or to legends of Alesha the Sly, or the priest's laborer Mikolka.

The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labor- idleness- was a condition of the first man's blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the conditions of man's primitive blessedness. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class- the military. The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.

Prince Andrew reached the general headquarters of the army at the end of June. The first army, with which was the Emperor, occupied the fortified camp at Drissa; the second army was retreating, trying to effect a junction with the first one from which it was said to be cut off by large French forces. Everyone was dissatisfied with the general course of affairs in the Russian army, but no one anticipated any danger of invasion of the Russian provinces, and no one thought the war would extend farther than the western, the Polish, provinces.

And while he was doing M. de Beausset the honor of breakfasting with him, they heard, as Napoleon had anticipated, the rapturous cries of the officers and men of the Old Guard who had run up to see the portrait.

“That's how everything is done with us, all topsy-turvy!” said the Russian officers and generals after the Tarutino battle, letting it be understood that some fool there is doing things all wrong but that we ourselves should not have done so, just as people speak today. But people who talk like that either do not know what they are talking about or deliberately deceive themselves. No battle- Tarutino, Borodino, or Austerlitz- takes place as those who planned it anticipated. That is an essential condition.

His activity in Moscow was as amazing and as full of genius as elsewhere. Order after order order and plan after plan were issued by him from the time he entered Moscow till the time he left it. The absence of citizens and of a deputation, and even the burning of Moscow, did not disconcert him. He did not lose sight either of the welfare of his army or of the doings of the enemy, or of the welfare of the people of Russia, or of the direction of affairs in Paris, or of diplomatic considerations concerning the terms of the anticipated peace.

But the smooth sea again suddenly becomes disturbed. The diplomatists think that their disagreements are the cause of this fresh pressure of natural forces; they anticipate war between their sovereigns; the position seems to them insoluble. But the wave they feel to be rising does not come from the quarter they expect. It rises again from the same point as before- Paris. The last backwash of the movement from the west occurs: a backwash which serves to solve the apparently insuperable diplomatic difficulties and ends the military movement of that period of history.

Still less did she understand why he, kindhearted and always ready to anticipate her wishes, should become almost desperate when she brought him a petition from some peasant men or women who had appealed to her to be excused some work; why he, that kind Nicholas, should obstinately refuse her, angrily asking her not to interfere in what was not her business. She felt he had a world apart, which he loved passionately and which had laws she had not fathomed.

A second major finding of empirical research into innovation by users is that most user-developed products and product modifications (and the most commercially attractive ones) are developed by users with “lead user” characteristics. Recall from chapter 1 that lead users are defined as members of a user population having two distinguishing characteristics: (1) They are at the leading edge of an important market trend(s), and so are currently experiencing needs that will later be experienced by many users in that market. (2) They anticipate relatively high benefits from obtaining a solution to their needs, and so may innovate.

Porter also argues that early domestic demand is also important: “Provided it anticipates buyer needs in other nations, early local demand for a product or service in a nation helps local firms to move sooner than foreign rivals to become established in an industry. They get the jump in building large-scale facilities and accumulating experience. . . . Only if home demand is anticipatory of international need will home demand contribute to advantage.” (ibid., p. 95)

Sharing software had already been endorsed by Richard Stallman, a legendary programmer from MIT who believed that keeping source code private was a sin and a crime against humanity. A programmer who shares the source code lets others learn, and those others can contribute their ideas back into the mix. Closed source code leaves users frustrated because they can't learn about the software or fix any bugs. Stallman broke away from MIT in 1984 when he founded the Free Software Foundation. This became the organization that sponsored Stallman's grand project to free source code, a project he called GNU. In the 1980s, Stallman created very advanced tools like the GNU Emacs text editor, which people could use to write programs and articles. Others donated their work and the GNU project soon included a wide range of tools, utilities, and games. All of them were distributed for free.

The fights and flamefests of the Internet are legendary, and the open source world is one of the most contentious corners of the Net. People frequently use strong words like “brain dead,” “loser,” “lame,” “gross,” and “stoooopid” to describe one another's ideas. If words are the only way to communicate, then the battle for mindshare means that those who wield the best words win.

This disorder is changing a bit now that serious companies like Red Hat and VA Linux are entering the arena. These companies pay fulltime programmers to ensure that their products are bug free and easy to use. If their management does a good job, the open source software world may grow more ordered and actually anticipate more problems instead of waiting for the right person to come along with the time and the inclination to solve them.

Once inside the auditorium, a visitor finds the person who has forced this temporary shutdown of building security procedures. The person is Richard M. Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, original president of the Free Software Foundation, winner of the 1990 MacArthur Fellowship, winner of the Association of Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award (also in 1990), co-recipient of the Takeda Foundation's 2001 Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, and former AI Lab hacker. As announced over a host of hacker-related web sites, including the GNU Project's own http://www.gnu.org site, Stallman is in Manhattan, his former hometown, to deliver a much anticipated speech in rebuttal to the Microsoft Corporation's recent campaign against the GNU General Public License.

“The laughter gives way to applause. The room is stocked with Stallman partisans, people who know of his reputation for verbal exactitude, not to mention his much publicized 1998 falling out with the open source software proponents. Most have come to anticipate such outbursts the same way radio fans once waited for Jack Benny's trademark, ”Now cut that out!" phrase during each radio program.

Richard Matthew Stallman's rise from frustrated academic to political leader over the last 20 years speaks to many things. It speaks to Stallman's stubborn nature and prodigious will. It speaks to the clearly articulated vision and values of the free software movement Stallman helped build. It speaks to the high-quality software programs Stallman has built, programs that have cemented Stallman's reputation as a programming legend. It speaks to the growing momentum of the GPL, a legal innovation that many Stallman observers see as his most momentous accomplishment.

To ease the transition, Stallman fell back on his strengths: math and science. Like most members of the Science Honors Program, Stallman breezed through the qualifying exam for Math 55, the legendary “boot camp” class for freshman mathematics “concentrators” at Harvard. Within the class, members of the Science Honors Program formed a durable unit. “We were the math mafia,” says Chess with a laugh. “Harvard was nothing, at least compared with the SHP.”

Although perceived as a first-rank mathematician and first-rate in-formal debater, Stallman shied away from clear-cut competitive events that might have sealed his brilliant reputation. Near the end of fresh-man year at Harvard, Breidbart recalls how Stallman conspicuously ducked the Putnam exam, a prestigious test open to math students throughout the U.S. and Canada. In addition to giving students ac hance to measure their knowledge in relation to their peers, the Putnam served as a chief recruiting tool for academic math departments. According to campus legend, the top scorer automatically qualified for a graduate fellowship at any school of his choice, including Harvard.

Stallman quickly learned that the AI Lab's first-come, first-served policy owed much to the efforts of a vigilant few. Many were holdovers from the days of Project MAC, the Department of Defense-funded re-search program that had given birth to the first time-share operating systems. A few were already legends in the computing world. There was Richard Greenblatt, the lab's in-house Lisp expert and author of MacHack, the computer chess program that had once humbled AI critic Hubert Dreyfus. There was Gerald Sussman, original author of the robotic block-stacking program HACKER. And there was Bill Gosper, the in-house math whiz already in the midst of an 18-month hacking bender triggered by the philosophical implications of the computer game LIFE. ²²

^22.See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 144. Levy devotes about five pages to describing Gosper's fascination with LIFE, a math-based software game first created by British mathematician John Conway. I heartily recommend this book as a supplement, perhaps even a prerequisite, to this one.

Nowhere was this tinkering impulse better reflected than in the operating system that powered the lab's central PDP-10 computer. Dubbed ITS, short for the Incompatible Time Sharing system, the operating system incorporated the hacking ethic into its very design. Hackers had built it as a protest to Project MAC's original operating system, the Compatible Time Sharing System, CTSS, and named it accordingly. At the time, hackers felt the CTSS design too restrictive, limiting programmers' power to modify and improve the program's own internal architecture if needed. According to one legend passed down by hackers, the decision to build ITS had political overtones as well. Unlike CTSS, which had been designed for the IBM 7094, ITS was built specifically for the PDP-6. In letting hackers write the system themselves, AI Lab administrators guaranteed that only hackers would feel comfortable using the PDP-6. In the feudal world of academic research, the gambit worked. Although the PDP-6 was co-owned in conjunction with other departments, AI researchers soon had it to themselves. Using ITS and the PDP-6 as a foundation, the Lab had been able to declare independence from Project MAC shortly before Stallman's arrival. ²⁴

^24.Ibid.

My own first encounter with the legendary Stallman gaze dates back to the March, 1999, LinuxWorld Convention and Expo in San Jose, California. Billed as a “coming out party” for the “Linux” software community, the convention also stands out as the event that reintroduced Stallman to the technology media. Determined to push for his proper share of credit, Stallman used the event to instruct spectators and reporters alike on the history of the GNU Project and the project's overt political objectives.

The machine that ran the Twenex/TOPS-20 system had its own derisive nickname: Oz. According to one hacker legend, the machine got its nickname because it required a smaller PDP-11 machine to power its terminal. One hacker, upon viewing the KL-10-PDP-11setup for the first time, likened it to the wizard's bombastic on screen introduction in the Wizard of Oz. “I am the great and powerful Oz,” the hacker intoned. “Pay no attention to the PDP-11 behind that console.” ⁶⁴

^64.See http://www.as.cmu.edu/~geek/humor/See_Figure_1.txt.

It also guaranteed Stallman's legendary status within the hacker community. Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman's ability to match the output of an entire team of Symbolics programmers - a team that included more than a few legendary hackers itself - still stands as one of the major human accomplishments of the Information Age, or of any age for that matter. Dubbing it a “master hack” and Stallman himself a “virtual John Henry of computer code,” author Steven Levy notes that many of his Symbolics-employed rivals had no choice but to pay their idealistic former comrade grudging respect. Levy quotes Bill Gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work for Symbolics in the company's Palo Alto office, expressing amazement over Stallman's output during this period:

As Stallman putters around the front of the room, a few audience members wearing T-shirts with the logo of the Maui FreeBSD Users Group (MFUG) race to set up camera and audio equipment. FreeBSD, a free software offshoot of the Berkeley Software Distribution, the venerable 1970s academic version of Unix, is technically a competitor to the GNU/Linux operating system. Still, in the hacking world, Stallman speeches are documented with a fervor reminiscent of the Grateful Dead and its legendary army of amateur archivists. As the local free software heads, it's up to the MFUG members to make sure fellow programmers in Hamburg, Mumbai, and Novosibirsk don't miss out on the latest pearls of RMS wisdom.

Nevertheless, as GNU tools made their mark in the late 1980s, Stallman's AI Lab-honed reputation for design fastidiousness soon became legendary throughout the entire software-development community.

My idea drew inspiration from Project Xanadu (http://www.xanadu.com), the legendary software concept originally conceived by Ted Nelson in 1960. During the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in 1999, I had seen the first demonstration of the project's [free] offshoot Udanax and had been wowed by the result. In one demonstration sequence, Udanax displayed a parent document and a derivative work in a similar two-column, plain-text format. With a click of the button, the program introduced lines linking each sentence in the parent to its conceptual offshoot in the derivative. An e-book biography of Richard M. Stallman didn't have to be Udanax-enabled, but given such technological possibilities, why not give users a chance to play around? ¹⁴²

^142.Anybody willing to “port” this book over to Udanax, the free software version of Xanadu, will receive enthusiastic support from me. To find out more about this intriguing technology,
visit http://www.udanax.com.