Does this mean Intelligent Designers and Creationists can challenge the patents on the basis of Prior Art? Interesting court case as to who can prove what. 
Glad I’m not a lawyer.
“IMHO jp seems as vacuous as all the other emergent group intelligence everything should be free and we’ll figure out how to pay for it later blog-hippy nonesenseâ€
I’ve heard people talk that way before, they genuinely believe that challenging DRM is a political stance and unsustainable in our kind of society. So let me try and explain my position.
1. Nobody I know wants to prevent creators getting paid for their creation. There is a lot of research on alternative compensation models as people try to figure out how to exchange value with creators without making a set of bad laws worse. Try reading William (Terry) Fisher’s work on this subject, it will give you an idea. Excerpts can be found at http://www.tfisher.org/PTK.htm
2. Much of where we are going is “co-creation†of value, and we are going to find it harder and harder to make the laws of prior paradigms work. Try reading Rishab Aiyer Ghosh’s Cooking Pot theory and you may get an understanding. This is true for East and West, the web does not know borders. Not even in China
3. Some societies have been co-creating value for a very long time now, and as we seek to globalise the old-paradigm law, it keeps failing. You could do worse than read CODE edited by Mr Ghosh to get a broad-based view on the issues this creates.
4. There is growing evidence that by trying to treat intellectual property as analogous to physical property, we are creating unsustainable complexity in the law-base, to the point where it is collapsing. In simple terms, you cannot draw the boundaries of the digital property well enough to make the law work. Again, if you are interested, read James Bessen’s works on the subject. He has gathered empirical evidence that such patents actually decrease the incentive to invest in innovation.
5. Some of the ways in which IPR is being protected is downright insane. I have yet to have a single person explain to me how Region Coding on a DVD helps creators or consumers. Talking about region coding, there is a (possibly apocryphal) story going around. Major Hollywood studio wants to enter large-budget blockbuster film for the BAFTA awards. Get advised by consultants and legal eagles that they should take extreme steps to protect against piracy. So they build a single-use DVD player which destroys the DVD if tampered with. 5000 of these get stuck in UK customs. “You are importing these, what’s the commercial value, the retail price?†“None, not for saleâ€. “In that case, how much did they cost to make?†“Gazillionsâ€. Customs agents rub hands with glee. Long negotiations, fruitless. Hollywood studio refuses to pay the duty. Running out of time, goes to Plan B. Sends 5000 copy-protected DVDs by courier to the homes of the judges. Judges can’t view the film. Time runs out. The DVDs were all Region One. Even if this is a complete fiction, I think it makes a point.
6. If I look at what happens in large institutions in terms of yanking out info from proprietary systems and trying to move the info around to share and enrich it, we appear to build walled gardens there as well. By our own accident. And then spend piles of money trying to knit the broken pieces together. Our own info. Our own infrastructure. Walled gardens of our own making.
7. I come from a school of thought that says Jerry Garcia had the right idea when apparently deciding that anyone could record their live concerts and do what they like with the product. There’s a deep and wide market for Bootleg Dead. And a deep and wide market for physical and digital Dead as well. In fact I like Garcia ties as well, and love Cherry Garcia. The Arctic Monkeys appeared to learn from all this. Great.
8. Every time there’s been an advance in reproduction technology someone has come along and tried to tax the copier. Xerox, tape, CD, even radio. And I cannot, just cannot, understand why. Let me give an offbeat example. Libraries in the UK buy lots of books which then get borrowed by people. And it could be argued that authors get paid less for this and should be compensated. And so they should be. And so they are. Public funds are set aside to compensate the authors for this. And guess what? When I last looked there was a cap of £6000 per annum per author, so that the fund pays out to as many authors as possible. The alternative compensation models made possible by digital technology can be much fairer than that.
9. We are underestimating the ways people get motivated to do things. Maslow was a long time ago. Since then, Nohria and Lawrence have done some great work which can be found in Driven. Crude summary. Four drivers. Drive to acquire, to bond, to learn and to defend. Operating in parallel but with varying intensity. We are underestimating the value of peer recognition and feedback loops, something the opensource movement and the youth of today find easy to accept and trade on. And anyway, opensource is free as in freedom not free as in gratis. And (at least in the UK) kids will pay five bucks for a ringtone download yet dither at paying ten bucks for a CD. Different values. Not an urge to steal.
I will elaborate on all this some other time. But those who are interested should check out what is happening, not just with the references above but also Larry Lessig, the Creative Commons, Eric von Hippel, Cory Doctorow, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Yochai Benkler, James Love’s Consumer Project on Technology. This is no tree-hugger movement, the trees are banyans and giant redwoods out in the open and not in walled gardens.
The cost of reproducing information is dropping. The value of information shared increases in the main. There are issues related to current patent and intellectual property and copyright law that, if handled correctly, will not just enrich life but, in medical contexts, will even save lives.
Nobody wants to avoid rendering unto Caesar what is due to Caesar. But we run the risk of old bad law doing new bad things, and we owe it to ourselves to prevent this happening.
As I said, more later. Apologies for a long post. I will also try and touch on how identity and authentication and permissioning need to get with the program.
They are the future. In fact, the way consumerisation’s moving, they are the present. Mobility and wireless, virtualisation and service orientation, Moore, Metcalfe and Gilder, the opensource gang, Jerry Garcia and Arctic Monkeys, and Steve Jobs. They help define the environment.
Some time ago I started working on a four-pillar model for enterprise architecture, in the belief that everything we do will be classified into one of the following:
Syndication: We will subscribe to stuff yanked out of humongous content publishers and consume them via a syndication, alert and aggregation facility. RSS gone ballistic. SAP and Oracle Financials meet Wall Street Journal Europe and Reuters. All stored somewhere both within the firewall as well as without. Text and voice and video.
Search: We will do some ad-hoc yanking ourselves, getting used to a Google-meets-StumbleUpon world where collaborative filtering of role and context helps relevance go up, and there are simple yet powerful heuristic tools because we can tag things and vote on them for future reference. Again from storage within and without.
Fulfilment: There’ll be a bunch of things where we need to discover what’s out there by syndication, search and learning. Refine what we discover to a set of things we’re interested in. Check out captive and brokered and otherwise made-accessible inventory. Discover price and select item. Provide shipping instructions or logistical information. Identify our right and authority to exchange value. Exchange that value via card or account or wampum. Be fulfilled. Flights, hotels, stocks, consultants, books, music, food. All fulfilled.
Conversation: Another bunch of things gluing all this together. Voice. Video. E-mail (though it will decay into pretend-snail-mail and die, I hope). Blogs and wikis. IM. Texting. Whatever. Ways of discovering, co-creating and enriching the value in information. Information that you need to fulfil things you have to do.
None of this will work if the information we need to get pushed to us or get pulled down by us is hidden behind walled gardens. Walls made of weird DRM constructs like Region codes on DVDs. Walls that hold our information and make it harder for us to rip it and mash it and make something useful out of it.
And DRM is a cater-cousin of identity and authentication and permissioning. All blessed by the grand panjandrums of information security, or escapees from the Y2K-marries-Basle-II-and-then-leaves-her-for-Sarbanes-Oxley-while-no-one’s-watching zoo.
But there’s good stuff too. NAND RAM may make our boot-up times easier. Consumer boradband wireless may well be reality soon, and the 20-year threat of telephony becoming software is finally happening. Opensource keeps redrawing the lines for the desktop and for core productivity tools. Apple goes Intel. It’s a good time.
I want to be able to come in to work. Get instant karma at my desk, with whatever passes for a desktop and whatever passes for a connect. Don’t care. Identify myself with whichever two factors are in vogue that day, provided they leave my cells intact and my privacy unflustered.
Then I take a look at what’s come in via my aggregator. Roll with it while I StumbleUpon the web. Stimulated by what I see in the aggregator or the web, I start pulling things down from the great data warehouse in the sky, preparing to create value by fulfilling something or the other. And all the time I’m talking to people and sharing metaphorical coffee and and and.
It’s happening now. So I think it’s time to keep elaborating on the four pillars, have them shot down and rebuilt as many times as possible. Egoless.
So this is what I’ll do in this part of the blog.
Talking about pillars. Christopher Wren designed the Guildhall where I live. 17th century wonderful support-free curved roof. They had town planners then. “Your edifice won’t stand up, you need more pillars in the middleâ€. “Says who? I’m the architect hereâ€. “Says we, and you don’t get to build your beautiful building unless you do what we say. Four more pillars pleaseâ€.
Dejected, he built them. In the central area. Just as they asked.
Six inches short.
And detective fiction.
Rex Stout is probably my number one author in this expansive genre. There are many others. KC Constantine. Michael Pearce. Ed McBain. Tony Hillerman. Jim Thompson. Robert Parker. Jerome Charyn. Kinky Friedman. GK Chesterton. And of course Conan Doyle. Christie did nothing for me.
Over the last thirty years I’ve probably moved gently to the edges of detective fiction, enjoying the classic hardboiled as well as the caper, particularly those that did not need gratuitous language or sex to sell their stories.
And Donald Westlake in all his guises has kept me happy and sated, from Dortmunder through to Parker.
There’s a new kid in town, and you must read him. Jeffrey Cohen and his Aaron Tucker series. Brilliant. Unputdownable. Outrageous.
Visit http://www.aarontucker.com/. And prepare to be delighted. If you like mystery and you like caper, and your taste buds run to literature rather than pap.
And he even reads his mail and replies. Thank you Jeffrey. I now have your first two books as well, and am looking forward to a great weekend.
Is the customer ready for this?
This is not a trivial point. The social and cultural aspects of such a move need to be thought out and prepared for, one of the reasons why this hasn’t happened as yet. So let’s take a look at what has been happening, but perhaps with a slightly sideways perspective.
One. We have started the process of giving the customer control of transaction execution. Any purchase/fulfilment on the web, even checking in for a flight. We have started the process of providing the customer transparency of the transaction’s status. Fedex. UPS. Amazon. eBay. Everyone’s got it. We have started the process of providing the customer transparency of information held about the customer, in terms of Freedom of Information or Data Protection or whatever. Now all we are talking about is transferring the responsibility of looking after the customer’s own relatively static information to the customer. How different is this from my being in control of my preferences for Amazon or eBay or the Wall Street Journal online. Establish who I am. Indicate what I am interested in, and not interested in. Go through some process of validating my financial status formally; an example would be getting “verified†status on PayPal. And bingo, there I am.
From a consumerisation perspective we have already taken step one of “giving the customer’s information back to the customerâ€. What consumer product/service providers have not yet done is step two, allowing the customer to share information about vendor A-related activity with vendor B. And this will happen. Despite the wholly predictable pushback from the product/service vendors, who lose a layer of lock-in as a result.
From an institutional perspective there is much to do, given where we are now. The vendor-lock-in argument is even more compelling here, with institutions largely unable to accept or sometimes even comprehend the implications of such a move, that of allowing the customer to share “your†activity information with a competitor. But it will happen. Only a matter of time.
Before we even go into the nature of the technology underpinning all this, in terms of identity formats and microformats, public and private keys, the nature of the encryption, the federated versus centralised models, how trust is conferred and authenticated, what kind of 1000lb gorillas are needed, the role of biometrics, the need for multifactor authentication processes, transaction guarantees and the process involved in guaranteeing, privacy protection, appropriateness of solutions for anti-money-laundering and identity theft protection and the economics of large scale provision of related infrastructure, we need to get the first question answered. Is the customer ready for this?
I can only speak for myself. Would I like to share my eBay activity with Christies or Bonhams or Sothebys? Would I like to share my British Airways activity with Lufthansa and United and Virgin? My hotel and car activity? My books and music activity? Yes yes yes.
I get to control my core “static†information. Who else knows this as well as I do? I get it verified by an independent arbiter, much like I need a birth certificate to get a passport. I choose whom I share what with.
I choose. I look after. I am the beneficiary.
That’s the key.
Then I can get all the downstream benefits of collaborative filtering and recommendations. Then my marketplaces get all the benefits of democratised reputation and rating and profiling and prediction.
A lot has to change. And will change. Provided the plan is: I choose. I look after. I am the beneficiary.