This is my second report on last week’s Creative Commons conference. Lessig’s closing lecture was given in the Banco court of the Queensland Supreme Court (very plush - those lawyers don’t stint themselves) and was focused on traditional copyright issues . For Brisbane readers, an interesting titbit was that we haven’t seen OUTFOXED: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism because neither the Courier-Mail nor the national daily, the Australian, (both Murdoch-owned) would carry more than minimal ads for it. One of the costs of being in a one-newspaper town.
The main point of the lecture was a historical survey of the relentless extension of copyright, along with some discussions of a failed attempt to stop this in the case of Eldred vs Ashcroft. This case is notable for the fact that, as has happened before, the economics profession almost unanimously supported the losing side. As Lessig argued, copyright has been extended in length, scope and force to the extent that nowadays virtually everything is copyright, virtually forever.
Given that the defenders of unlimited copyright are interested mainly in protecting the merchandise markets for Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh, it’s often struck me that the sensible political resolution would be to concede defeat on this point, and seek to liberalise copyright for the 99 per cent of literary and artistic output that doesn’t have such huge monopoly value. One step in this direction, which Lessig discussed in his talk, is the case of Kahle v. Ashcroft which challenges changes to U.S. copyright law that have created a large class of âorphan works.â Orphan works are books, films, music, and other creative works which are out of print and no longer commercially available, but which are still regulated by copyright.
As I’ve said previously, in the end, I don’t think either law or technology will be decisive here. Rather it’s that the value of being freely connected to a huge network will exceed any benefits that can be obtained by gating off a particular part of the network and demanding payment for access. After all, the reason we have an open Internet is that it drove proprietary networks out of business or else absorbed them. Attempts to create âwalled gardensâ within the Internet haven’t been abandoned entirely, but they haven’t prospered either.
In this context, the most exciting feature of the conference was the launch of the Australian version of the Creative Commons licence. Widespread voluntary adoption of this kind of license will render measures like the extension of copyright irrelevant. In this context, the version of the license I particularly like the âShare Alikeâ version, which resembles the GNU public licence in requiring derivative users to adopt a similarly open licence. The greater the volume of material with this kind of licence that is out there, the greater the incentive to make use of it, even at the cost of forgoing commercial copyrights. Since most commercial culture depends ultimately on unpaid appropriation of older material, the effects will be cumulative (or, in today’s popular jargon, ‘viral’)1.
As I mentioned, I was struck by the quality of Lessig’s presentation. He’s a great speaker and I was so struck by the elegance of his minimalist Powerpoint presentations that I got him to send them to me . He mostly uses a white typewriter font on black background with just one or a few words per slide. In the spirit of remix, I plan to see how much of this look and feel I can appropriate for my own work2.
update By coincidence, just after I finished this the latest London Review of Books arrived, complete with a lengthy article on the monopolistic practices of the London booksellers in the 18th century, a point also addressed by Lessig. Unfortunately, the article itself is subscriber-only
1 This reminds me that my CC licence got lost in the shift from Movable Type. Another job to be done.
2 I’ve just decided to make the shift from Powerpoint to Keynote and Lessig mentioned he was doing the same. I’ll be trawling the web for examples.
Earlier this week, I attended a Creative Commons conference at QUT in Brisbane, including the launch of the Creative Commons licence for Australia. The main speaker was Larry Lessig, who gave two papers and joined a panel discussion as well. Lessig is a great speaker with really effective presentations, a point on which I hope to post more later. There was a lot of food for thought, and I’ll start with the opening presentations.
In this talk, the central idea was remix, taking bits and pieces from the existing culture and recombining them to produce something new. My summary of the core argument
As I’ve argued for some years, the first claim doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The Internet is an essentially text-based network and has promoted a resurgence of text, relative to video and audio, reversing the trends that prevailed for most of the 20th century. But, I think, this part of the argument isn’t central; it provides a rhetorical sense of urgency, but the rest of the argument stands or falls without it.
On the second point, it’s important to notice that the availability of remix differs a lot within the text culture. Remix is far more restricted for fiction than for non-fiction. I can’t, for example, legally publish a novel about Harry Potter goes to Australia,and those who’ve tried something similar have been sued.
The whole culture of fan fiction (including slash fiction) exists in the legal shadows, subject to the will of the original creator. As this story shows, copyright law on fan fiction can create big problems for authors, giving them good reason to refuse permission for the use of their characters and settings.
The paradigm example of remixable text has historically been the academic world, which is, not surprisingly, Lessig’s starting point, and mine. As a general rule, academics adhere to the standard Creative Commons licence: free permission (in fact keen encouragement) to copy, with a strictly enforced demand for acknowledgement of the source. This has worked marvellously well in promoting the growth of knowledge, and it’s no wonder that academics want to promote this model1.
But the blog world goes far beyond academia in these respects. Blogs havepushed the concept of fair use to the limit, most obviously in the case of ‘fisking’, that is, complete republication of an article interspersed with critical comments. Except in rare cases, this isn’t an exceptionally useful thing to do and the practice has largely died out. But the point remains that, in blogging, fair use extends to complete reproduction. Even if a copyright holder could limit an individual blogger to a couple of sentences, it would be possible for the entire article to be reproduced in separate, but linked, blogs, each commenting on a small part of the original.
Conversely, bloggers are even more particular than academics about credit. Links and trackbacks are the currency of the blogosphere, and when republishing material standard etiquette requires not only acknowledgement of the source but a âhat-tipâ to any other blogger whose earlier links were used in locating the material.
On the third point, Lessig made a convincing case that the task of obtaining the rights necessary for reasonable use of audio and video material, and the riskiness of the fair use defence compared to the case of text create a highly burdensome environment for remix. I agree with his conclusion that we need to extend some of the freedoms historically associated with text to the world of audio and video.
There are, however, issues here that are largely orthogonal to the concerns about intellectually property and digitally encoded restrictions on use raised by Lessig. There are some very strong views in the visual arts regarding the integrity of work as a whole, which is antithetical to remix, and much more of a 19th century view of the relationship between the creator and the work. It was striking to listen to the views of a progressive filmmaker who wanted to ensure that he could control the way his work was used, for example to stop segments with negative images of indigenous people being used by racists. When pressed he said that to protect his rights, he would support the rights of Fox to suppress a film like Outfoxed, which uses segments of Fox footage as a central element in its critique.
Intellectual property issues are only tangentially related to this question, which is more concerned with the view that there are inalienable moral rights associated with the act of creation. Once you have sold your copyright (and this is more or less inevitable in most of the activities concerned) you’ve usually licensed a huge range of remixes by the new owner, while still precluding the public in general from engaging in any such activity.
Coming back to the question of text and image, it strikes me that a focus on text leads to a quite optimistic view of the way the issues of intellectual property and intellectual freedom are going. Attempts to cordon off substantial bodies of content as the basis of a âwalled gardenâ have generally failed. A striking instance is the willingness of the NY Times to allow bloggers full access to its archives through RSS feeds, thereby mitigating the problem of linkrot
The NYT is still selling archived stories to those who reach them using its search engine, but it gives them away to bloggers, partly because they can reproduce so much of it while sticking to fair use, and partly because links are valuable to newspapers as well as to bloggers.
Only financial papers like the Wall St Journal and the Australian Financial Review (for which I write) have stuck rigorously to a subscription model. One consequence, I think is a decline in influence for the opinion pages, which don’t benefit from crosslinks.
By contrast with all this, a focus on audio and video yields the kind of negative picture noted by Lessig. Every year, some new acronymic assault on free information seems to arrive, from TRIPS to DMCA to FTA, backed up by the lobbying power and extremist ideology of the RIAA and MPAA. I’ll talk a bit more about this when I cover Lessig’s second talk.
fn1. Of course, as was pointed out with some vigour, we don’t rely on publication sales for our income. We’re in the same position as a band that uses recordings to promote its live gigs, rather than vice versa
Jacob Heilbrunn has a conversation with Daniel Bell in the LA Times, about the problems that both parties have with imposing any sorts of cultural limits on the free markets.
Few things infuriate him more than the GOP’s moral contradictions, as its concerns over cultural decay bump against the needs of big business. For instance, Bush sponsors a sexual abstinence program for teens while gliding over the fact that his biggest media booster, the Fox network, airs such titillating shows as “The O.C.”
…
And what about the Democrats? They claim to do a better job in holding corporations and Wall Street accountable, but their rights-based platform has made them loathe to back societal limits on much of anything. Even now, as the Democratic Leadership Council pushes a moral values agenda, the backlash against it is mounting.
This identifies a fundamental dilemma of conservatism - if you’re a cardcarrying cultural conservative, you should have a problem with the tendency of free markets to throw up porn, gambling, lickerish behaviour etc. But it also speaks to some interesting political possibilities for the left. Duncan Black spoke a month or so ago about how the left should be creating an alliance with the libertarians in the IP wars - “Give people their porn, their Napster, and their unfettered Tivo.” But there’s even more scope for an alliance on IP and DRM between the left and conservatives who want to protect their families from the excesses of popular culture. Give them their family-friendly entertainment, their ClearPlay and their ability to remix popular culture so as to make sure that their kids aren’t exposed to material that they don’t want them to see. This is an agenda that leftists should be able to buy into. As Harry put it a while ago.
I do want to prompt a discussion about one thing — the exposure of young children to commercial culture. Evangelical Christians in the US seem to have developed a kind of counter-culture for kids which shields them from the worst aspects of commercial culture (as well as some of the better aspects of secular liberalism, no doubt). But I’m amazed at the scorn that secular leftist pour on them for this. It seems to me that they are doing what any sensible person would do (and I try to do with my daughters). Popular culture is infused with values that nobody would deliberately teach their children. It just isn’t good to spend your life trying to make lots of money; to use your sexuality for personal gain, to idolize sports stars, celebrities, the rich, or to indulge one’s desires without judgment or self-restraint. Like the evangelical Christians, secular leftists hold contrary values; and like the evangelical Christians they want their children (and all children) to learn a different set of values than those which corporate America has a material interest in spreading. In fact all (or almost all) parents, in fact, resent the efforts of large corporations to manipulate their children into bugging them for more toys, more fast food, more candy, more, more, more.
Many of the new disruptive technologies that IP holders are trying to gut are precisely capable of allowing people to decide which parts of popular culture they want to accept, and which they want to reject. They empower minorities who aren’t in tune with the wider culture (lefties, conservatives) by allowing them to ‘remix’ bits of our culture so as to filter out the parts that they don’t agree with. It’s something that leftists and conservatives should be able to find common ground on - both of them dissent from many aspects of popular culture as it exists today.
If we blue-sky a bit, we could even imagine how technologies of this sort could take much of the heat out of the culture wars - if people are able to retreat from the common culture and create their own private cultural enclaves, they’ll be less inclined to fight wars that they don’t need to fight. Not that there wouldn’t be downsides - and battles over the aspects of culture that continued to be shared. Should atheists be required to recite the Pledge? Should fundamentalist Christians be taught Darwinian theory? Still, I suspect that the dispute would lose much of its bitterness. After all, if Godfrey Hodgson is to be believed, the culture wars were in large part started by secularists trying to crash in on conservative cultural enclaves (by undermining home-schooling) in the first place.
Another new blog that deserves some attention - IP-Watch, monitoring “the behind the scenes dynamics” of intellectual property. The politics of intellectual property is exceptionally murky and non-transparent - dubious deals done at the international level which are then presented as faits accomplis to national publics. IP-Watch starts with a particularly good account of the shenanigans over the recent broadcasting negotiations. One worth visiting regularly.
Update: via BoingBoing, Jamie Boyle has written a nice polemic for the FT on how intellectual property policy is made.
Joi Ito links approvingly to a short essay by Adina Levin, criticizing the Dan Hunter article on open source and Marxism that I discussed last week. Ms. Levin says that open source is not, in fact Marxist, a claim which may or may not be true, but which would be better supported if she knew more about what Marxism actually says.
First, she claims that Marxism argues for a form of “collective production where production is organized and rewards are distributed fairly through central planning.” Not true - Marx himself had almost nothing to say about what form the state or alternative distributional mechanism would take in a socialist or communist society. While one can reasonably contend that some later Marxists have believed in central planning, this is, for obvious reasons, a minority opinion among Marxists these days. Nor does it flow in any logical or necessary way from Marx’s basic ideas, which, as far as I can tell are just as compatible with decentralized distribution as with centralized distribution - “collective ownership” can take a variety of forms. Given all this, the identification of Marxism with “collective farming” is a bit of a straw man. Second, Levin seems to think that Marxists believe in “mandatory equality” and would be opposed to open source’s “meritocratic culture with dramatic inequality, where founding leaders and high-value contributors have greater prestige, influence, and sometimes financial reward.” Perhaps wisely, she doesn’t try to provide any empirical evidence or backing from Marx’s writings, or from the writings of prominent Marxists, to try to support this claim. As far as I know, there is no intellectually reputable strain of Marxist thought which suggests that “high-value contributors” shouldn’t receive greater prestige and influence as a point of principle. Simply put, this is not the sort of thing that serious Marxists are bothered with - they’re concerned with inequalities in the ownership of the means of production, not with the distribution of social brownie points. Finally, Levin is half right when she says that Marxists (or, to be more precise, the early Marx) are opposed to the money economy. But as she more-or-less admits, strictly money-based explanations of open source software don’t do a very good job at explaining open source programmers’ motivations - at most, the open source economy is complementary to the money economy.
None of this is to say that mainstream Marxism provides a good explanation of open source. Indeed, as I suggested in my earlier post, the open source movement has at least as much to teach lefties (including Marxists) as vice versa. Still, the degree of ignorance of Marxism among those who purport to criticize it is sometimes a little astonishing.
Update: In an earlier post, Levin says
For example, “a commons of any sort is inherently Marxian, even if other types of private property rights still operate within the commons.” Nope. Marxism argues that all property is theft, and all property is to be held in common. And “Marxism isn’t about society against the individual, but seeks to put the individual first, allowing him or her access to the aspects of life that make them complete.” Don’t think so. Marxism is collectivist, requiring individuals to give up personal ownership and personal benefit for the advantage of the group.
She simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about - not only does she hopelessly confuse Marx and Proudhon, but Marxism is emphatically about individual benefit. You may disagree with Marx’s ideas of what will benefit the individual, let alone how he suggests that you get there - but Hunter is right on this, and Levin is plain confused.
Dan Hunter at the Wharton School has written a quite interesting paper arguing that the open source movement’s battle with various bits of the software and entertainment industry is a 21st century version of the Marxian revolution. There’s a lot to argue with in the piece - Hunter’s account of Marxist theory is sometimes a little more metaphoric than precise, and he perhaps overestimates the extent to which a nineteenth century thinker’s insights provide an accurate description of what is happening in open source today. But it’s nonetheless smart, funny in places (talking about the key role of “Marxist-Lessigist theory”), and valuable as an opening move in what I think is a quite important debate. Ever since listening to Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Cory Doctorow hash out the politics of the information age over breakfast this spring (I, a mere political scientist, didn’t feel qualified to intervene), I’ve been convinced that there is something really really important for leftists in the open source movement, and the free culture crowd more generally. The arguments which they are developing about how collective resources provide a basis for individual creativity, and, in an important sense, individual freedom could serve as the seed of a very interesting political program. The left really needs to start paying attention to this stuff, and thinking its implications through.
Via BoingBoing.
James Boyle in the Financial Times on Apple’s claim that Real “broke into” the iPod:
How exactly had Real “broken into” the iPod? It hadn’t broken into my iPod, which is after all my iPod. If I want to use Real’s service to download music to my own device, where’s the breaking and entering? What Real had done was make the iPod “interoperable” with another format. If Boyle’s word processing program can convert Microsoft Word files into Boyle’s format, allowing Word users to switch programs, am I “breaking into Word”? Well, Microsoft might think so, but most of us do not. So leaving aside the legal claim for a moment, where is the ethical foul? Apple was saying (and apparently believed) that Real had broken into something different from my iPod or your iPod. They had broken into the idea of an iPod. (I imagine a small, Platonic white rectangle, presumably imbued with the spirit of Steve Jobs.)
He also ponders whether what Real have done is any different from blade manufacturers making blades that fit branded razors.
My preferred cure for jetlag is to arrive in the morning and spend a fair part of the day outside, resetting my body clock, then have as normal an evening as possible, before going to bed about 10pm. In most respects, my schedule fitted this plan perfectly. Leaving Paris on Monday evening, I got into Brisbane this morning (Wednesday) and the day was suitably sunny. With the State of Origin1 starting soon, there’ll be no problem about staying up2 .
The only unusual feature is that my normal Wednesday includes karate training. I can now report that this is a complete, if problematic, cure for jet lag. Whatever term might describe my post-training condition, it is not “jet-lagged.”
1 The high point of the Australian rugby league calendar, this is a three-game series between Queensland and New South Wales in which, as the name implies, players line up for their state of origin, rather than of current residence. The deciding match is being played tonight.
2 Wrong! The game was such a depressing walkover that I gave up and went to bed early.
In keeping with the CT tradition of bringing you tomorrow’s talking points today, I thought I’d look a bit further than the current election campaign and consider the implications of a Bush victory. On past form, there’s no reason to suppose that a second term will lead Bush to abandon his tax cuts, or to propose any significant net reduction in expenditure. At least not when there’s an obvious alternative, that only a few shrill Democrat economists and some incredibly out-of-date Republicans would ever object to. The US government has at its disposal and endless source of costless wealth - the printing press that turns out US dollars. Hence there’s no need to do anything tough like raising taxes or cutting Socil Security benefits. The only problem is that, according to some economists, reliance on the printing press as a source of government finance is likely to cause inflation.
As a first line of defence, the views of these economists can be criticised. There are plenty of Keynesian critics of monetarism who’ve pointed out that there’s no simple or automatic relationship between the money supply and the rate of inflation, and probably there are some who’ve been incautious enough to deny that there is any relationship at all. In any case, in the new era, the dynamism of the US economy is such that everyone wants to buy US dollars as fast as the Treasury can print them (ignore any recent observations on currency markets that might suggest otherwise).
Still, these are only delaying tactics. What will really be needed is a set of talking points showing that inflation (properly referred to as price appreciation or something similarly positive) is actually a good thing. In the hope of bringing the debate forward a bit, I’ve advanced a few.
1 I’m not making this one up. As Brad de Long pointed out a while ago, Stephen Moore has actually defended the record of US capitalism on the basis of figures for the number of millionaires, unadjusted for inflation.
Ahead of next week’s federal election in Canada, Michael Geist has a revealing piece in today’s Toronto Star that compares the positions on Internet/technology issues of the main Canadian parties. The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa and Digital Copyright Canada surveyed the Liberals, NDP, Conservatives and Greens on their views on IP protection, file-sharing, open source, identity cards and use of Internet materials in education. The results are not what a classic right-left divide might predict.
The parties in the middle (Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois) firmly favour rightsholders’ interests over those of users and service providers when it comes to IP, and the Conservatives and Greens support a much less heavy-handed approach.
Several explanations come instantly to mind:
(1) Most political parties don’t understand technology issues well enough to figure out where they really stand on them, so ideology isn’t a good predictor of policy in this area. Secondary point; tech issues are too minority to really matter in a general election.
(2) IP/open source issues typically pit homogeneous, well organised, connected and funded user groups against heterogeneous, poor and largely latent user groups, meaning government policies benefit the well-organised few at the expense of the mostly apathetic many. These results may tell us more about who the rightsholders bothered to lobby, rather than what the parties themselves might think.
(3) Centre-right parties are unpredictable on tech issues, depending on whether their libertarian or authoritarian streaks are in the know or the ascendent. Social democrats can be fooled into thinking any policy with technology in it is a good thing, especially if it ‘encourages innovation’.
(4) My understanding of the Canadian left-right divide may be less than comprehensive….
Full responses to the CIPPIC questionaire and links to other organisations’ responses are available at http://www.cippic.ca/election2004.
If you’ve spent any time around the blogosphere, or looking at thinktank websites, you’ll be aware that the following opinions tend to go together:
There’s not too much mystery about this. The kinds of characteristics that would encourage the adoption of any one of these beliefs (make your own list) obviously encourage the others. What’s surprising to me is how frequently, at least among thinktanks, these opinions are correlated with support for Microsoft, and, more particularly, denunciation of open-source software.
This thought struck me in relation to the much-denounced study of Linux being peddled by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute. As Tim Lambert shows with chapter and verse, “ADTI are anti-Linux, pro-tobacco and anti-global warming shills.” ADTi doesn’t appear to have weighed in on gun laws (yet), but Flack Central Station hits the quadrella, as you would expect. In Australia, our own offshoot, the Institute of Public Affairs manages a similar feat, toeing the party line on tobacco, guns and global warming and also being a strong supporter of unfettered monopoly rights for owners of “intellectual property”.
The question that puzzles me is, why does Microsoft find itself in this kind of company? Of course, all the groups I’ve mentioned are pro-corporate, but plenty of other corporations manage to advance their interests without descending to this level. And, while I don’t like either Microsoft’s products or its attitude to intellectual property, I’m obviously in the minority on the first point at least. Again, while I don’t warm to Bill Gates at a personal level, he’s certainly shown more interest in putting his wealth to good use than the average billionaire. I find it hard to believe that he really wants to subsidise the general activities of groups like those I’ve mentioned.
On the whole, I incline to the view that Microsoft, as a corporation, has got beyond the point where even its founder can control it. But I’d be interested to hear other theories.
Just a note that anyone interested in the issues of intellectual property and the Internet could usefully look at JSTOR: A history by Roger Schonfeld. JSTOR was the first big attempt to put complete series of academic journals (including back issues) online and free1. Despite a lot of missteps, JSTOR survived and prospered while well-funded commercial ventures failed. I’m pleased to say the economics profession played a prominent role, with the American Economic Review, Econometrica and others being among the early participants.
The success of JSTOR is an illustration of the proposition, put forward most clearly by Clay Shirky that the economics of the Internet favour the free provision of content by those seeking fame (taken generally to include anyone who has something to say and wants others to read it) over fee-based content created by those seeking fortune.
1 Quite a few commentators have pointed out that JSTOR isn’t free or easily accessible to individuals, though it is non-profit and the charges for library subscriptions are modest - less than a single commercial journal in many cases.
Does anybody have experience altering copyright forms? I recall someone once mentioning that they usually change part of the text to say that they retain rights to make available a copy of their article on their Web site.
The copyright form I am looking at right now says that “[p]ermission is also granted for you to make available electronically the abstract and up to 50% of the published text on the World Wide Web…”. But what if I want to make available 100%?
I am in the interesting position of having to sign this form after the piece has already been published. So it is unclear to me whether I even have to sign it and if I do sign it, it seems I would have the leverage to change some of the text. After all, what can the publisher do at this point? Am I missing something?
In a disproportionate and heavy-handed response to a specific problem, the University of Birmingham (UK) has banned staff from hosting personal web pages (including blogs) on their systems. The Guardian has the story . And staff at Birmingham have a campaign to defend their right to host personal material.
If you want to see what’s wrong with copyright and the concept of intellectual property, it’s hard to go past the obstacles being put up by James Joyce’s grandson Stephen to recitations of Ulysses on the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday (June 16 2004) in Dublin. Thanks to the extension of copyright to 70 years beyond the author’s death by the European Union in 1995, Joyce has absolute control over his grandfather’s work until 2011. It’s hard to imagine any moral sense in which Ulysses belongs more to an obstreporous descendant of the author than to the city that inspired it.
The issues are completely obscured by the use of the term ‘intellectual property’ which makes it appear that ideas belong to an owner in the same way that a car or a block of land does. This term, enshrined in mountains of legislation and treaties, deserves about the same amount of respect as the contrary slogan ‘information wants to be free’ (if anything less so, since the latter is at least a half-truth)
In economic terms, the idea of copyright is to balance the interests of the public in the free dissemination of what is, once it is produced, a naturally public good (and therefore ‘wants to be free’), with the need to encourage authors to create works in the first place. The example of Ulysses shows how far we have got the balance wrong. Does anyone seriously believe that Joyce was motivated, even in the slightest, by the prospect of enriching a grandchild who hadn’t even been born at the time. (Of course, he would have needed extraordinary foresight to predict the successive extensions of copyright that would make this possible).
Even taking a forward-looking view, what kind of benefit do authors today get from the sale of copyrights extending up to a century after their death? For a publisher evaluating commercial investments of this kind, a 10 per cent discount rate would be on the low side, but this would be enough to ensure that royalties received 70 years in the future would be discounted by a factor of 1000. From the social viewpoint, on the other hand, the future costs of restricted access to copyrighted works should be discounted at a much lower rate, perhaps 3 per cent, which would imply that costs incurred 70 years in the future should be discounted by a factor of around 8.
All of this is particularly relevant to Australians, as we are one of the few countries still enjoying the benefits of the ‘life + 50 years’ rule, and have therefore been of particular value to public-domain exercises like the Gutenberg project.. Our government has just signed a so-called Free Trade Agreement with the United States. It does little or nothing to free trade, but a lot to protect monopoly rights, including an extension of copyright to life +70 years. Fortunately this needs legislation, which may be rejected. Given that the Irish have signed away their public domain rights, and we are still clinging to ours, the Bloomsday centenary would be an appropriate occasion for celebrating them.
The story of the true origins of Monopoly, which I covered here the other day, gets recounted in today’s Guardian in the course of an article on the highly dubious game “Ghettopoly” of which the object is “to become the richest playa through stealing, cheating and fencing stolen properties.” Hasbro, the current owners (or should that be “owners”?) of the rights to Monopoly are threatening legal action.
I’m just back from the Oxford Political Thought Conference — and great fun it was too. One of the things I managed to do in Oxford was to meet up with Chris Brooke of the Virtual Stoa in his palatial college rooms. Just over a year ago Chris and about the board games: me about playing Monopoly in the old GDR and he about Bertell Ollman’s game Class Struggle . I was fortunate enough to find myself sitting next to Professor Ollman at lunch today and asked him about the game, and one of the things he told me was the Monopoly itself was originally conceived as an anti-capitalist game by a follower of Henry George. The story of the game’s invention and its subsequent appropriation by Parker Brothers is here (scroll down to list of articles) and here .
I am about to hire a programmer to write some code for me that will help collect data for my research. It suddenly occured to me that there will be a final product here and I have no idea who would have ownership of that product. I’m not trying to complicate things, I am just wondering. My preference would be to make the program available free of charge to other researchers who could benefit from such a product. But will I have the right to do that? What kind of agreement would I have to have with the programmer up front? Is she automatically the owner of the program? If I pay for all the time she spends on creating it and the program specifics came from me would it be mine to distribute freely? I suspect some of this might depend on what kind of agreement we come to ahead of time. Could I ask her to create the program under a Creative Commons license, for example Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0? I realize I can certainly ask her and she could say no, but I’m wondering if that sounds like a reasonable approach.
À Gauche
Jeremy Alder
Amaravati
Anggarrgoon
Audhumlan Conspiracy
H.E. Baber
Philip Blosser
Paul Broderick
Matt Brown
Diana Buccafurni
Brandon Butler
Keith Burgess-Jackson
Certain Doubts
David Chalmers
Noam Chomsky
The Conservative Philosopher
Desert Landscapes
Denis Dutton
David Efird
Karl Elliott
David Estlund
Experimental Philosophy
Fake Barn County
Kai von Fintel
Russell Arben Fox
Garden of Forking Paths
Roger Gathman
Michael Green
Scott Hagaman
Helen Habermann
David Hildebrand
John Holbo
Christopher Grau
Jonathan Ichikawa
Tom Irish
Michelle Jenkins
Adam Kotsko
Barry Lam
Language Hat
Language Log
Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
Stephen Lenhart
Clayton Littlejohn
Roderick T. Long
Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
Jonathan Martin
Matthew McGrattan
Marc Moffett
Geoffrey Nunberg
Orange Philosophy
Philosophy Carnival
Philosophy, et cetera
Philosophy of Art
Douglas Portmore
Philosophy from the 617 (moribund)
Jeremy Pierce
Punishment Theory
Geoff Pynn
Timothy Quigley (moribund?)
Conor Roddy
Sappho's Breathing
Anders Schoubye
Wolfgang Schwartz
Scribo
Michael Sevel
Tom Stoneham (moribund)
Adam Swenson
Peter Suber
Eddie Thomas
Joe Ulatowski
Bruce Umbaugh
What is the name ...
Matt Weiner
Will Wilkinson
Jessica Wilson
Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
Psychology
Donyell Coleman
Deborah Frisch
Milt Rosenberg
Tom Stafford
Law
Ann Althouse
Stephen Bainbridge
Jack Balkin
Douglass A. Berman
Francesca Bignami
BlunkettWatch
Jack Bogdanski
Paul L. Caron
Conglomerate
Jeff Cooper
Disability Law
Displacement of Concepts
Wayne Eastman
Eric Fink
Victor Fleischer (on hiatus)
Peter Friedman
Michael Froomkin
Bernard Hibbitts
Walter Hutchens
InstaPundit
Andis Kaulins
Lawmeme
Edward Lee
Karl-Friedrich Lenz
Larry Lessig
Mirror of Justice
Eric Muller
Nathan Oman
Opinio Juris
John Palfrey
Ken Parish
Punishment Theory
Larry Ribstein
The Right Coast
D. Gordon Smith
Lawrence Solum
Peter Tillers
Transatlantic Assembly
Lawrence Velvel
David Wagner
Kim Weatherall
Yale Constitution Society
Tun Yin
History
Blogenspiel
Timothy Burke
Rebunk
Naomi Chana
Chapati Mystery
Cliopatria
Juan Cole
Cranky Professor
Greg Daly
James Davila
Sherman Dorn
Michael Drout
Frog in a Well
Frogs and Ravens
Early Modern Notes
Evan Garcia
George Mason History bloggers
Ghost in the Machine
Rebecca Goetz
Invisible Adjunct (inactive)
Jason Kuznicki
Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Danny Loss
Liberty and Power
Danny Loss
Ether MacAllum Stewart
Pam Mack
Heather Mathews
James Meadway
Medieval Studies
H.D. Miller
Caleb McDaniel
Marc Mulholland
Received Ideas
Renaissance Weblog
Nathaniel Robinson
Jacob Remes (moribund?)
Christopher Sheil
Red Ted
Time Travelling Is Easy
Brian Ulrich
Shana Worthen
Computers/media/communication
Lauren Andreacchi (moribund)
Eric Behrens
Joseph Bosco
Danah Boyd
David Brake
Collin Brooke
Maximilian Dornseif (moribund)
Jeff Erickson
Ed Felten
Lance Fortnow
Louise Ferguson
Anne Galloway
Jason Gallo
Josh Greenberg
Alex Halavais
Sariel Har-Peled
Tracy Kennedy
Tim Lambert
Liz Lawley
Michael O'Foghlu
Jose Luis Orihuela (moribund)
Alex Pang
Sebastian Paquet
Fernando Pereira
Pink Bunny of Battle
Ranting Professors
Jay Rosen
Ken Rufo
Douglas Rushkoff
Vika Safrin
Rob Schaap (Blogorrhoea)
Frank Schaap
Robert A. Stewart
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Ray Trygstad
Jill Walker
Phil Windley
Siva Vaidahyanathan
Anthropology
Kerim Friedman
Alex Golub
Martijn de Koning
Nicholas Packwood
Geography
Stentor Danielson
Benjamin Heumann
Scott Whitlock
Education
Edward Bilodeau
Jenny D.
Richard Kahn
Progressive Teachers
Kelvin Thompson (defunct?)
Mark Byron
Business administration
Michael Watkins (moribund)
Literature, language, culture
Mike Arnzen
Brandon Barr
Michael Berube
The Blogora
Colin Brayton
John Bruce
Miriam Burstein
Chris Cagle
Jean Chu
Hans Coppens
Tyler Curtain
Cultural Revolution
Terry Dean
Joseph Duemer
Flaschenpost
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Goodwin
Rachael Groner
Alison Hale
Household Opera
Dennis Jerz
Jason Jones
Miriam Jones
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Steven Krause
Lilliputian Lilith
Catherine Liu
John Lovas
Gerald Lucas
Making Contact
Barry Mauer
Erin O'Connor
Print Culture
Clancy Ratcliff
Matthias Rip
A.G. Rud
Amardeep Singh
Steve Shaviro
Thanks ... Zombie
Vera Tobin
Chuck Tryon
University Diaries
Classics
Michael Hendry
David Meadows
Religion
AKM Adam
Ryan Overbey
Telford Work (moribund)
Library Science
Norma Bruce
Music
Kyle Gann
ionarts
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Greg Sandow
Scott Spiegelberg
Biology/Medicine
Pradeep Atluri
Bloviator
Anthony Cox
Susan Ferrari (moribund)
Amy Greenwood
La Di Da
John M. Lynch
Charles Murtaugh (moribund)
Paul Z. Myers
Respectful of Otters
Josh Rosenau
Universal Acid
Amity Wilczek (moribund)
Theodore Wong (moribund)
Physics/Applied Physics
Trish Amuntrud
Sean Carroll
Jacques Distler
Stephen Hsu
Irascible Professor
Andrew Jaffe
Michael Nielsen
Chad Orzel
String Coffee Table
Math/Statistics
Dead Parrots
Andrew Gelman
Christopher Genovese
Moment, Linger on
Jason Rosenhouse
Vlorbik
Peter Woit
Complex Systems
Petter Holme
Luis Rocha
Cosma Shalizi
Bill Tozier
Chemistry
"Keneth Miles"
Engineering
Zack Amjal
Chris Hall
University Administration
Frank Admissions (moribund?)
Architecture/Urban development
City Comforts (urban planning)
Unfolio
Panchromatica
Earth Sciences
Our Take
Who Knows?
Bitch Ph.D.
Just Tenured
Playing School
Professor Goose
This Academic Life
Other sources of information
Arts and Letters Daily
Boston Review
Imprints
Political Theory Daily Review
Science and Technology Daily Review