I found this photograph hauntingly beautiful. Maybe it’s the jet lag. But I loved it. Thank you Steingrimur.
How the ash came about
Wondering why there’s flight disruption in the UK and Scandinavia? Here’s why.
What intrigues me is that the photographs were uploaded nearly a week ago. What happened in between? Do volcanic eruptions of this sort sometimes decide “No, we won’t spew forth any ash”?
I felt certain that flickr would have photographs of the event. The world of Now is not just about Twitter. It’s about the web. About all of us.
Thank you Steingrimur.
The Silent Spring of the Internet: Part II: Understanding “unpaid”
Yesterday I spent some time thinking about what Rachel Carson experienced in the period leading up to her writing The Sea Around Us, and following that up a decade or so later with Silent Spring. How we can learn from those experiences as we hurtle towards wholesale destruction of the internet and all it stands for, particularly with phenomena like the Digital Economy Act, the DMCA, Hadopi and the most appalling of them all, ACTA. I shared some of those thoughts with you here.
Today I want to spend a little more time on the same subject, but from a different perspective. Let me explain why.
Ever since I got visibly involved in the Digital Economy Bill debate, I have been dismayed by the number of people who spend time accusing me of complete naivete when it comes to the download and fileshare debate. The accusations usually begin with an assumption (on the part of the accusers) that I (and people like me) do not want to see “creators” properly rewarded for their work; this is then extrapolated into further accusations that classify unpaid digital downloading as theft, somehow taking the civil offence of copyright infringement and converting it into a criminal offence, despite the “owner” of the asset continuing to have complete and unfettered access to the asset, despite the extreme nonrival nature of the asset.
When I’ve tried to debate with the accusers, their usual stance has been “don’t talk to me about the need to change intellectual property law, don’t talk to me about how badly broken copyright law is, don’t talk to me about downloaders being the primary buyers, don’t talk to me about fair use and free speech and all that jazz. What you’re talking about is theft, pure and simple. Don’t come back until you’ve got sensible proposals for how creative people get paid for their work.”
So that’s where I want to begin.
Making sure creative people get proper payment for their work.
You see, where I come from, software is a creative business. Software is a creative industry… it must be: after all, the fancy figures for illegal downloads include the “lost revenue” for pirated software. [I am now trying desperately not to give in to the temptation to make up sentences that have words like “hoist” and “with” and “own” and “petard”. After all, this is a smelly enough business as it is].
Where was I? Oh yes. Creative people getting paid for their work.
Yup.
Let’s start with Linux. 60% of all web servers run Linux. “It would take $10.8 billion dollars to build the Fedora 9 distribution in today’s dollars“. Just one distribution.
Or let’s look at the Apache HTTP Server, which went past the 100 million web sites landmark a year or two ago.
Or let’s look at the volunteers who keep the Internet Storm Center manned and productive.
Or let’s go back in time and look at the volunteers who wrote RFC 675, without which there would be no internet.
Or let’s look at the people who work for and with industry bodies like ICANN and W3C and IETF and, more recently, the Web Science Trust.
All possible because of volunteers. Yes the volunteers may get paid by organisations that can perceive the value generated by such voluntary activity; but this form of payment is closer to patronage than anything else.
Volunteers.
I could go on and on, but I won’t. I hope I’ve made the point already. The point is that for the internet to exist, many things have to be in place. There have to be people willing to invest in stuff; people willing to connect the stuff up; people willing to run the many-headed beast that emerges as a result of connecting the stuff up; people willing to protect the beast as it mutates organically, naturally; people willing to keep trying to find faster, cheaper, better ways of doing things.
It all begins with a state of mind. A willingness to share. A focus on being open, a focus on enabling people at the edge to do things they would otherwise not be able to do.
Without that state of mind there are no volunteers, there is no set of standards and protocols, there is no process, cumbersome or otherwise, to let the internet evolve: there is no internet.
Without that internet there is no goldmine for “rightsholders” to strip of all value. Without that internet artists will get paid even less than they do currently, however unlikely that sounds.
Incidentally, here’s a very instructive method of visualising what musicians get paid: [My thanks to @gapingvoid and to @psfk for sharing it with me].
[Also incidentally, Hugh is a good friend, I love the way he thinks, and I really like his recent passion “Remember Who You Are”. He’s got some really great posts together under that banner. Which is why it was a privilege for me to be able to contribute this post over at Gapingvoid.]
Which brings me to the end of this particular post.
We need to remember who we are. Stewards of the internet. The internet, a concept, a state of mind, a set of values, a network of networks of people, things and infrastructure. Where people live and work and learn and read and create. Oh yes, and where people occasionally listen to music or watch videos.
I’m going to continue to think about the internet, particularly in the context of writings like Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet; Eben Moglen’s recent speech on Freedom In The Cloud and David Gelernter’s Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously
The internet was built for sharing. The internet relies on people who share their time freely and passionately.
There is a catch, however. These people expect something in return for the investment they made, the investment they make, the investment they are prepared to continue to make. And that something is this: a free, unfettered internet.
So when the talk in cafes and dinner tables turns to creative people and the need to make sure creative people get paid properly, do make sure you include all creative people and all modes of payment.
The silent spring of the internet: cyberspace needs its stewards
Maybe it’s because of the events leading up to the Digital Economy Bill becoming an Act here in the UK. It’s been a bit like Chinese water torture for many months; then, more recently, as the BPI saw their chance to corrupt parliamentary process and took it, it felt more like being waterboarded. I have had it up to here with people who think the internet was built to become a distribution mechanism for Hollywood and Universal Music and David Geffen.
My first objection to the Digital Economy Bill was to do with technical difficulties in proving who downloaded what: the complexity and inefficacy of technical solutions, the guaranteed waste of time and money, the likelihood of erroneous accusations, the unwanted consequence of driving dissent underground. My second objection was to do with the nature of the punishment, completely out of proportion with the crime, possibly illegal in human rights terms and with definite and unnecessary collateral damage on non-participants. My third objection was to do with the manipulation of data, the extrapolation of questionable samples into WMD-like justifications, but then I have to accept that statistics and lies have been kissing cousins for many years now. My fourth objection was to to with the corruption of process, the way the Bill was timed, how debate was avoided, how all parties achieved nothing but grubbiness in the process. And my final objection was to do with the people involved, the vestedness of their interests.
Many of us who opposed the Bill vehemently were quite happy to see legitimate and proportionate action taken against thieves. Legitimate. Proportionate. Against thieves. Sadly the Bill had nothing to do with words like those.
The industry lobby did their work well. Now we have to get used to a world where filesharing and downloading are both wrongly equated with theft, where damaging action can be taken on mere suspicion, and where dictatorial powers may be assumed almost at will. All to try and hold on to a dying business model. There will be consequences, unexpected consequences. [For those of you who are interested, I wrote about the data here, here and here, about the Bill’s inappropriateness of punishment here, about the unreasonable bias here and about the core issues related to the Bill here and here. And if you want to understand how retrograde all this is, read this. ]
What’s done is done. And we will live with the consequences. And learn from them, and maybe even change as a result. The Digital Economy Bill was a skirmish, maybe even a battle, but it wasn’t the war.
The War is about the internet: what it is, what it means, what it stands for, how it works, who it works for, and many such related questions.
It’s been an interesting week or so in this context.
Apple and their SDK terms; Twitter and Tweetie; the Appeals Court and their ruling on the FCC and Net Neutrality; Microsoft and Kin. European telcos catching the Ed Whitacre disease. All this in an environment that has Google and China, Android, the Droid and the Nexus One, all apparently living in perfect harmony.
By the pricking of my thumbs…..
I think we’re heading towards the cyber equivalent of what Rachel Carson saw and understood when she wrote Silent Spring nearly 50 years ago, having established her reputation with The Sea Around Us.
- The internet is a sea around us, and we’re polluting it. We’re polluting it for short-term gain, we’re polluting it without really understanding the ecosystem that has evolved around it, the creatures that live in it.
- The internet is an ocean around us, still somewhat unknown, still being mapped. It is capable of nourishing and sustaining us, capable of supporting and encouraging trade and commerce, capable of giving us incredible enjoyment, helping keep us clean and healthy.
- The internet is all the rivers around us, capable of being dammed and isolated, capable of being corrupted and polluted at industrial levels, capable of being poisoned, capable of drying up, capable of killing us.
[And yes, the internet is capable of supporting piracy as well. But let us first understand what extreme nonrival goods are, how copyright infringements are different from theft. If Labour use unlicensed images in a campaign advertisement, is it called theft? When John Fogarty can be accused of plagiarising himself, is it called theft?]
We will soon begin to understand what the internet is. What identity means in an internet context. What intellectual property means in an internet context. The establishment of a Web Science Trust may well accelerate all this.
When we do learn about all this, we will begin to enact laws. Laws that protect the internet. Laws that make criminals of people who damage the internet.
Rachel Carson may have helped us with an understanding of what it is to become stewards of physical space. We now need to become stewards of cyberspace as well.
In that sense, the Digital Economy Bill may actually be a godsend, bringing together disparate groups of people with common, passionately held aims.
The Digital Economy Bill: Thinking further about copyright
Image courtesy of Drew Douglas duly attributed here
The photograph above was taken at a rugby league game in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, in September 2008. In it you can see young children and older youths watching the game from rooftops adjacent to the stadium.
Tho photograph below, nearly a hundred years earlier, shows fans watching a 1914 World Series game in Shibe Park. My thanks to explorePAhistory for sharing the photo.
Two photographs. Nearly a century apart. Of people watching a sports game without paying.
The question is, were they stealing? Would you call it stealing? I wouldn’t. But I know some people who would.
People involved in the distribution of published material have tried their best to call such actions “stealing” since the beginnings of copyright. If you really want to understand what copyright is about, what its origins were, then please go and read this excellent piece. It tells you why copyright had everything to do with distributors, distribution and central control and very little to do with authors, musicians and artists. Why it had everything to do with censorship and exclusivity and very little to do with creativity and free expression. In fact, if you get the chance, spend time at questioncopyright.org; there’s some very useful material there, including this video, Copying is Not Theft.
After 9/11, there were people who tried very hard to conflate “Muslims” with “terrorists”. I have many Muslim friends, and none of them is a terrorist.
During Katrina, there were people who tried very hard to conflate “citizen” with “refugee”. Citizens have rights; refugees rely on the generosity of others. The rights of New Orleans citizens were sought to be weakened by the conflation, a technique that George Lakoff wrote about quite eloquently.
So it is with copying in a digital world. People are trying to make you believe it is stealing. To understand what’s happening, let’s look at the ticketless folk watching the rugby and the baseball from the rooftops.
What are they stealing?
In the same photograph, you can see folks who paid for the tickets watching the game. They’ve paid for the right, and they’re watching the game. The people who sold the tickets make their money, related to the seating capacity of the stadium and the number of tickets sold.
Economists call such “goods” nonrival, to the extent that one person enjoying the good does not detract from the ability of others to enjoy the same good. The people who promoted the games did not incur any costs related to the people on the rooftops. If you can make a copy of something without in any way affecting the ability of others to enjoy that something, economists call such goods extreme nonrival goods. Sunsets and panoramas and views are examples of extreme nonrival goods, as are openair concerts and street theatre.
All these openair events share something in common. They’re in the open. Repeat that. They’re in the open.
People who promote sports events and street entertainment and openair concerts understand this. They know that as a direct result of their actions, others will be able to enjoy what’s happening. For free.
They can stop this. Very easily. By not using open spaces to do this. If they moved openair concerts to closed venues, the possibility of others freeloading diminishes. This open-to-closed spectrum is a continuum rather than a set of discrete outcomes. So, for example, you can build walls around openair venues, as happens with Kenwood. I have paid for, and enjoyed, many concerts at Kenwood, in the wet and in the dry. This summer my children will be going to concerts in Reading, and they will have paid for the tickets. Passers-by will be able to hear the music, but nowhere near as well as people sitting in the roped-off areas.
Shibe Park, in Philadelphia, decided to do something about the onlookers. So they built a bloody great wall around the stadium. Shame, but that is how some people think.
This summer, there are a few concerts taking place around Hyde Park, with tickets and with reserved areas. Can you imagine how it would be if the promoters managed to convince the Crown that a 16ft wall should be erected all around the park, just so passers-by won’t be able to catch glimpses of the concerts?
In a way, that’s what music and film distributors want to do with the internet. Like Hyde Park, the internet is a commons, something that has been designed with openness and sharing in mind, something that can be enjoyed by people without detracting from the enjoyment of others.
But only if we stop people from erecting hideous walls around the commons.
The Digital Economy Bill seeks to do this. And it’s worse than that. Because it seeks to protect and enhance distributor rights while actually damaging the rights of consumers and creators in many walks of life. Photographers, for example, are heavily affected. Just read Kevin Marks here and Simon Phipps here, or go to Open Rights Group to find out more about what you’re about to lose.
Think about this. If internet copying was really stealing, then there would be an active disincentive to produce digital works. Yet, in the apparent heyday of internet copying, every form of digital publishing is on the rise. There are more books being written and published, more films made, more albums released. Why would this be? Looking for that answer, I spent some time with Paulo Coelho some years ago:
I wanted to talk to Paulo for one simple reason: I’d heard rumours that the biggest pirate site for Paulo Coelho books, Pirate Coelho, was actually paid for by Paulo Coelho. In fact that has since changed: Paulo now hosts them in a subdirectory of his own blog, here. An author who pays others to rip him off? I needed to talk to him.
His answer is best understood in this statement from Wikipedia: In total, Coelho has sold more than 100 million books in over 150 countries worldwide, and his works have been translated into 67 languages. As an author, he wanted to reach as many people as possible, particularly in different cultures and geographies. His publishers had their way of doing this. His fans had a better way.
The internet, with its extremely low cost of copying and distributing things digital, transforms the access and distribution landscape for many industries. Its effect is felt most painfully in the publishing industries: music, film, journalism, books. The pain is at its most intense for those whose function with the industry was centralised control of distribution.
I work for a telco. Before that, I worked for an investment bank. Some time before that, I worked for hardware manufacturers with proprietary operating systems. All my life I’ve been working in industries where the core monopoly rights of the industry have been taken away by technological advance, often aided and abetted by regulation.
Regulation is first and foremost meant to protect customers, to protect the consumer. It does this in many ways, at least one of which is in preventing monopolies and reducing any significant market power.
When it comes to music, film, books and journalism, things become very complex. It’s like having a fire in the fire alarm system. The very people charged with telling you the truth about what’s happening are themselves affected by what’s happening. Which means that with a few exceptions, mainstream media have not woken up to the wholesale damage being planned by the Digital Economy Bill.
Let me end with this. Copying per se is not stealing. After Michael Jackson did his moonwalk, children the world over copied him. They were not stealing. Digital forms of music, film, book and newspapers are cheap to copy and to distribute, because of the internet. The internet is a commons, specifically designed for doing this. For copying and distributing. Throwing that away just to protect the “rightsholders” is questionable in the extreme. Digital assets are nonrival goods, shareable without affecting the rights of anyone else to enjoy the same thing.
- Distributors of digital content are feeling the pressure, and some are using questionable techniques to lobby Government into acting.
- The data on illegal downloaders is suspect, as is the claimed revenue losses. Price elasticity of demand is not adequately allowed for. It’s like saying kids on the rooftop would otherwise have paid for tickets to watch the rugby. Just not true.
- The people involved in the process are suspect, largely unelected, and with clear bias supporting the very industries under threat. [This is a bit like placing an investment banker at the head of Treasury and asking him to solve the woes of financial markets. Oops.].
- The democratic process itself is being subverted, lobbyists are seeking to ensure that the Bill is not properly debated in Parliament before being passed. To me this is more criminal than anything the Bill seeks to prevent.
- The punishments suggested are technically complex, expensive, time-consuming and guaranteed to fail. They will waste a lot of time and expense, your time, your expense. Our time, our expense.
We have very little time to act. So please please get going, write to your MP, call her up, meet him, do something. Start off with reading this, make sure your voice is heard.