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 Sunday, May 18, 2003
Lessig's Call To Action: The Internet Is Under Attack. we need your help
About a month ago, I started sounding optimistic about getting a bill introduced into Congress to help right the wrong of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. I was optimistic because we had found a congressperson who was willing to introduce the bill. But after pressure from lobbyists, that is no longer clear. And so we need help to counter that pressure, and to find a sponsor.
The idea is a simple one: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner must pay a $1 maintanence fee. If the copyright owner pays the fee, then the copyright continues. If the owner fails to pay the fee, the work passes into the public domain. Based on historical precedent, we expect 98% of copyrighted works would pass into the public domain after just 50 years. They could keep Mickey for as long as Congress lets them. But we would get a public domain.
The need for even this tiny compromise is becoming clearer each day. Stanford’s library, for example, has announced a digitization project to digitize books. They have technology that can scan 1,000 pages an hour. They are chafing for the opportunity to scan books that are no longer commercially available, but that under current law remain under copyright. If this proposal passed, 98% of books just 50 years old could be scanned and posted for free on the Internet.
Stanford is not alone. This has long been a passion of Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive, as well as many others. Yet because of current copyright regulation, these projects — that would lower the cost of libraries dramatically, and spread knowledge broadly — cannot go forward. The costs of clearing the rights to makes these works available is extraordinarily high.
Yet the lobbyists are fighting even this tiny compromise. The public domain is competition for them. They will fight this competition. And so long as they have the lobbyists, and the rest of the world remains silent, they will win.
We need to your help to resist this now. At this stage, all that we need is one congressperson to introduce the proposal. Whether you call it the Copyright Term Deregulation Act, or the Public Domain Enhancement Act, doesn’t matter. What matters is finding a sponsor, so we can begin to show the world just how extreme this debate has become: They have already gotten a 20 year extension of all copyrights just so 2% can benefit; and now they object to paying just $1 for that benefit, so that no one else might compete with them.
If you believe this is wrong, here are two things you can do: (1) Write your Representative and Senator, and ask them to be the first to introduce this statute; point them to the website http://eldred.cc, and ask them to respond. And even more importantly, (2) blog this request, so that others who think about these issues can get involved in the conversation.
I have given this movement as much as I can over the past four years, and I will not stop until we have reclaimed the public domain. Stay tuned for more litigation, and more ideas from Creative Commons. But please take these two steps now.
[Smart Mobs]
A call to action for a plan that represents the BEST in American policies. It makes compromises that are not a burden to anyone but help the greatest number of peopl. I would be willing to let Eisner keep Mickey Mouse as long as possible if he would let us have all the other stuff. You would thinnk Disney would like this, since it would give them greater access to new public domain works to copy for their movies without having to pay anyone. 11:58:25 PM 
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Stowe Boyd on Social Software. Good, thoughtful Stowe Boyd piece on social software, taking on both the "What is it?" and "Why now?" questions: Social software is likely to come to mean the opposite of what groupware and other project- or organization-oriented collaboration tools were intended to be. Social software is based on supporting the desire of individuals to affiliate, their desire to be pulled into groups to achieve their personal goals. Contrast that with the groupware approach to things where people are placed into groups defined organizationally or functionally.
Worth a read. [Corante: Social Software]
I'll have to check this out tomorrow. Looks interesting. I do think that Holmes DID use deductive reasoning. He took general principles, such as clay of a certain type found in certain areas had certain properties and applied them to specific cases, allowing him to state that a specific person had been to the clay location. 11:46:26 PM
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My Impending Doom. Tim Oren points to an HP paper on information flow in social groups to predict my impending doom in the Mayfield-Shirky Cage Match. The paper studies email use by 30 clients inside the organization and 10 outside. However, the study combines both datasets to simulate a Power-law for the purpose of the study, information flow. The paper identifies that it does not capture the outbound email of the external dataset, skewing the distribution. I believe this was intentional to simulate the scale-free network characteristics that exist in large email networks, to allow detailed analysis down to individual messages.
I'll continue to assert that weak tie networks are scale-free while strong tie networks, segmented by the capacity constraints of people (12, 150) have a more even distribution of connections.
What the study does show is that social networks are not epidemic in distributing information. There is a low probability that a given message will be widely distributed even in a simulated scale-free network.
When people are nodes in a network, they are selective about what information they pass on. In contrast to embedded information, such as advertisements in Hotmail messages, every forwarding decision exists in social context constrained by the fitness of the message, norms and relational reciprocity.
Within formal groupings of the organization, information flow is dense and ties are strong, and the study implies great difficulty spreading information at epidemic porportions through weak ties. The stronger the tie the greater the information flow. [Corante: Social Software]
Ross may be in trouble but the article he mentions is very useful. I tend to believe that he is correct about strong tie networks and the amount of information flow they can generate. Blogs, wikis and other social software applications will generate different levels of information flow depending on the environment. Some will look like power logs and some will look more egalitarian, just as some human social constructs look like hierarchies and some look like communes. What will be important is how well information is moved through the system. It may be that one form develops when the information comes from widespread sources with a diffuse focus while the other develops from specific information emanating from a strongly tied network. In my view, it will much like a natural system (Funny. Coming from a biologist).
Like many human constructs, a specific message or bit of information may not be easily dispersed in any system. But, the functional ones will arrive at tipping points faster, points where a message becomes explosively dispersed. We can discuss how to make this a process, how to more easily make it happen but the best forms of social software will facillitate the tipping point. Using biological terms, they will reduce the activation energy. They will act as catalysts, taking a reaction that would take centuries to occur and permitting them to happen in seconds.
Social software that enhances our ability to take information and create knowledge, that can help us inter-convert tacit and explicit information, that can strengthen our social interactions will gain popularity. The organizations that can take the huge amount of information being generated and create useful knowledge will be successful. To me, it matters little whether the networks are power logs or not. They just need to lower the activation energy. Whatever works will survive. 11:43:36 PM
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Clay Shirky meantioned this at his Many-To-Many Weblog. It is actually interesting in a Monty Python sort of way. 11:26:33 PM
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Computers in the hands of partisans and their new-found ability to purge voter rolls at a whim is very disturbing. I also expect to see some real voter fraud issues with more computerized voting. The programs governing this are proprietary with little apparent oversight. If they are as buggy as MS software, everyone's right to vote could be in trouble. 10:04:21 PM
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The Tyrany of the C Drive. The Tyrany of the C Drive
I live in a land of vast computing resources. My graphics card is more powerful than my first five or ten computers combined. I have 384 megs of ram -- 20 times the size of my first 5 meg hard drive. And I have 221 gigabytes of storage online at all times. I live in the land of plenty. Or do I ?
I don't.
I live in the land of the C: drive. No matter how much storage I have, it is always somewhere other than my C: drive. My big hard drives are N: and E: -- my C: drive is a paltry 13 gigs -- and its always on the verge of fullness. I'm constantly moving crap off of C: and still running out of space. So I even change the Windows default temp setting from C: to N: where I have over a gig of space and I still run out.
Why Microsoft, Why? Why in this land of plenty does my C drive still rule all. There are way too many hard coded things that rely on C:. Why ? [The FuzzyBlog!]
One of the things about Windows that drives me crazy. I always like the look of amazement whenb I mention to someone that the Mac does not have this problem. Windows just has too many things that make me say "Why?". 9:59:42 PM
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Well, my son was in a soccer tournament from Friday to Saturday so I was incommunicado for a while. I missed the mention that Virginia Postrel made about me on her weblog. Maybe the NYT will continue to foster information flow rather than simply commodify it for its own benefit. 1:31:31 PM
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