The Right Thing

When it comes to leadership, I’ve tended to go along with Max De Pree’s definition, paraphrased here. A leader’s first job is to provide vision and strategy; his next is to say thank you. In between those two a leader is a servant and a debtor. So yes, I guess you could say I believe in soft-hands leadership.

From an enterprise perspective, I’ve always felt that true leadership is about Doing The Right Thing, and that the role of control functions is to make sure that Things Are Done The Right Way. Choosing the Right Thing is therefore of fundamental importance, and is often to do with principles and values rather than metrics and measurements. When you start thinking about being 57% right, that’s when you land up in Another Fine Mess.

Which is one of the reasons I was so glad to see this yesterday:

At that point it didn’t look like India had enough runs on the board, and Dhoni was the last recognised batsman. And the captain. Victory was not assured, and he could have stayed on. But he Does The Right Thing. He walks.

And talking about doing the right thing, I was glad to see that the ICC reversed its decision and awarded England the “Darrell Hair” match, as was the case originally. There were no grounds to call it a draw; worse, it was a very dangerous precedent to set. So I am glad to see that the original decision has been reinstated.

Why did it take this long? How come it happened at all? Or, as friend and erstwhile colleague Dom Sayers suggested, is this the last step in the rehabilitation of Hair? And the answer to all those questions is “I don’t know”.

What I do know is this. Doing the right thing is important. And doing the right thing is a key facet of leadership. So well done Dhoni.

More on reverse search

Some time ago I wrote about TinEye, a very useful little program that “reverse searches” the web for images. Particularly useful for two things: One, when you want to find the source of an image you’ve found and want to use, so as to obtain the right permission. Two, when you have a “free-to-air” image, but would like it in a higher resolution. [A third use has been suggested, where the input image is of you or someone you are close to, and the object is to see who else is using that image and in what context. I’m not the paranoid type, so that use hadn’t occurred to me.]

When it comes to music, Shazam has been doing something similar for many years now, and, if reports are to be believed, is poised to become one of the iPhone’s most popular apps. Shazam is also really good.

As far as text was concerned, I thought that Google was enough. Then someone sent me a link to CopyGator, and I’m still playing with it. Figuring out what I get that I don’t get from Google. My jury’s out at present. CopyGator can and will get better, but there’s bound to be competition. Watch this space.

[Incidentally, I still don’t understand why Google Search is separate from Google Blog Search. Do people really think the blogosphere is distinct and separate from the Web? I can understand if Blog Search is a narrow and specific search, say like Twitter Search. But I would still expect blog search results to be included in the main search.]

As Kevin Kelly put it, the internet is a great big copy machine, enabling the persistence of information. When you add search to persistence, it becomes very powerful. When you add reverse search, it becomes even more powerful. [Incidentally, this is why I argue that the Dunbar Number has increased. First we had oral communication. Then we had written communication. Then we had print. And then the internet. But we have gone beyond persistence into searchable retrievable archived communications, and this makes a big difference. Not everyone agrees, many have written in to point out that the number is calculated on physical neurocranial volume or some such. What I remember of the research suggests that the evolution of communication also played a part.]

My last post, about Joi Ito’s session at DLD, elicited a number of comments, including some from Joi himself. Joi visualises a world where every digital object attached to the web is associated with information about its formation and ownership. It is only a matter of time before we have powerful reverse search engines that seek out copies of digital objects as a means of rights enforcement. That is fine. What is not fine is when the search engines become judge and jury as to whether a work is derivative or not. If we allow that to happen, then it’s a case of Diabolus Ex Machina.

A simple desultory philippic about copyright

[Update: Joi has clarified what he meant, both in the comments here as well as on his blog. Do make sure you read the comments and his post. We learn through openness and transparency in our dialogues.]

I’m a fan of Joi Ito. I’m a fan of Creative Commons.

But I am not a fan of DRM. I think path pollution is a very big mistake, that it is next-generation EAI, that it is about as necessary and about as useful as region coding on a DVD.

So I had mixed feelings last night when I watched Joi speak at DLD09, as he talked about Creative Commons and RDFa and HTML5. Feelings so mixed that I decided to sleep on them rather than burst into words. [I wasn’t actually in Munich this time. The videos were uploaded in record time, and I found out about Joi’s talk via Glyn Moody, who tweeted briefly about it and linked to his blog.]

Joi’s a great guy and a great speaker. Three of the points he made really spoke to me:

  • that the old media model was about broadcast and consumption, while the new media model needs to be about participation and expression
  • that a critical part of the old value chain was about distribution, while the equivalent in the new value chain is about discovery
  • that we need to focus on where the money has moved, where people are spending the money

All this is great. But then, when he laid out this grand plan where every digital object on the web is associated with embedded digital rights, I began to wonder. A plan where the software becomes Big Brother and Nanny State and a few other things rolled into one, where the software within the browser tells you what you can do and what you can’t.

Creating artificial scarcity can never be the answer. [I’ve been Norman Mailered, Maxwell Taylored, Doc Searlsed and Bob Frankstoned, I’ve been Rolling Stoned and Beatled till I’m blind. And I’ve heard the truth from Lenny Bruce….] with apologies to Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.

You see, I’m of the belief that every artificial scarcity will be met with an equal and opposite artificial abundance.

As I’ve written before, there’s a big Because Effect coming for music. Where musicians make money because of their music rather than with their music. When transmission and delivery costs drop to nothing, music becomes abundant. Abundant things are easy to find, so discovery is also easy. So why try and solve a problem which doesn’t exist? Why try and make something abundant scarce, so that discovery becomes an issue again?

When things are made artificially scarce, they get hacked. When movies are DRMed, the DRM gets stripped. When there is an attempt to block or shape BitTorrent, BitTorrent responds in kind. One could argue that piracy in films is largely caused by the stupidity of having different release windows for films in different countries. A separation in time that is no longer necessary and often insulting. At least now we don’t have DRM in music any more.

Any attempt to pre-criminalise large swathes of people is bound to end in tears. Nobody wants to steal money from the mouths of artists, particularly struggling artists. But we don’t need Mickey Mouse Acts either.

Okay, enough desultory philippic. Why am I concerned about what Joi said? Simple. You cannot legislate for culture, particularly for satire and humour.

Joi showed a simplified “open model” stack, consisting of Ethernet, TCP/IP, World Wide Web and Creative Commons. Creative Commons was to represent the cultural aspect of the stack. And this is, for me at least, part of where the problem lies.

If we do what Joi suggests, would Marcel Duchamp have been able to moustachio the Mona Lisa? I suspect not. Would Lewis Carroll have been able to parody Robert Southey, or Ogden Nash Joyce Kilmer? I suspect not.

If you leave it to the author of the piece, whatever the piece is, the chances are that no parodies are possible. That goes further when it comes to creating something new as a remix and sample of other things. Life is complicated enough right now, when it comes to determining what is a reasonable derivative work and what is not. I can only assume it will get a whole lot more complicated when the judge of derivative works and acceptable use is a piece of software.

I know it sounds extreme, but the vision suggested by Joi really worries me. Software in a browser telling me whether something is fair use or not. To me this is the equivalent of a hob in a kitchen telling me what I can or can’t put in to the mix when making a ragu sauce.

The “default public” approach in stuff like Flickr has produced magical results, with a great deal of sharing, so I can see where the Creative Commons people are going. With the right defaults, a lot of stuff that is currently complicated will become less so. That I agree. And the principle of seeking to reduce friction in the process of creating digital objects is a good one, something to be lauded. But the process suggested, where software acts as judge and jury, that I am not happy with. And one part of the process, where the author can make sure that satire or parody is impossible, that part really worries me. Not just for creative artists, but as much for social and political protest.

I could be wrong. I am happy to learn. Do comment and help me learn. All I have done is lay out something about what concerns me and why.

As I said, I am a fan of Joi Ito. I am a fan of Creative Commons. I am just not a fan of what has been suggested. Intuitively and instinctively not a fan.

Looking for Mr Goodbar?

I had an unusual experience with Google today. Maybe it’s been happening for a while, and maybe I’ve never noticed it before.

I was in Google, and wanted to know what had happened at the FBR Open last night (I was too tired to stay up and watch). And rather than enter www.pgatour.com into my address bar, I did the lazy thing and entered “pgatour” into the Google search box. And this is what I got in return:

When I saw the “This site may harm your computer” warning for the main PGA site I was bemused, but vaguely prepared to believe that something was up. The site could have been infected with malware, and I guess I should have been grateful that Google was warning me. But I wasn’t convinced, since I wasn’t intending to download anything. So I went ahead and clicked on the link. And this is what I got:

Okay, they did warn me, and when I didn’t heed their warning, they warned me again. Now I was really confused. For those who are interested, this is the url that was showing at the time:

http://www.google.co.uk/interstitial?url=http://www.pgatour.com/

At that point I stopped. Went back to the search results. Looked down the list, beyond all the sites clearly linked with pgatour, and found the Wikipedia entry for the PGA Tour also tarnished with the warning.

I find it implausible that Google should declare so many sites as risky. I find it implausible that just going to that site will ‘harm my computer”. But what do I know?

Views?

Worth a look

Melih Bilgil, who’s been working on the PICOL project, released a new video earlier this month. PICOL is “a project for providing free and open icons for electronic devices. The aim is to find a common pictorial language for electronic communication.”

The wonders of the internet. You’re about to watch a film made by a Turk in Germany linked to by an Indian in the UK. And you are what and where?

Which brings me to the real reason for this post. “History of the Internet.”. Click here to watch.