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.
From the category archives:
Intellectual Property
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:
bq. 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 Origin[1] starting soon, there’ll be no problem about staying up[2] .
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.”
fn1. 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.
fn2. 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.
I can remember discovering, with something of a shock, that Armageddon was a real place (modern Megiddo). So, I shouldn’t have been too surprised to find out today that Gehenna is the name of a valley near Jerusalem, bearing no obvious marks of being on the road to eternal damnation. I also got to see Golgotha and Mount Zion – I don’t think my reading of Biblical allusions will be quite the same after this.
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.
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:
* widespread ownership of guns saves lives
* tobacco smoke is harmless (if not to smokers then to anyone who breathes it second-hand)
* global warming is a myth
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.
If you’ve spent any time around the blogosphere, or looking at thinktank websites, you’ll be aware that the following [professed] opinions tend to go together:
- widespread ownership of guns saves lives
- tobacco smoke is harmless (if not to smokers then to anyone who breathes it second-hand)
- global warming is a myth
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 these opinions are correlated with support for Microsoft, and, more particularly, denunciation of open-source software.
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 free[1]. 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.
fn1. 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 .