These viewpoints are not entirely contradictory, at least to me. Weinberger agrees that copyright holders should be paid, and says that we should be very careful in passing legislation that affects the Internet. We shouldn't let the large companies convince us to pass laws that significantly affect the Internet simply because they (supposedly) are not making enough money selling their stuff. There may be good reasons to regulate the Internet (I suppose), but pure corporate profit is not one.
The TechCentral article focuses on the problems that P2P (which is what the Internet is) brings for people who create content that can be distributed digitally (which is just about everything these days). If I were Dave, a creator who wants to have perfect control over his creations, I'd be totally in favor of DRM, and legislation to let content creators disable software that people have illegally stored on their hard drives. And I'd also be in favor of Knight-Ridder locking down its web content and making people pay to link to it, or even to read it. That's just capitalism. No problem with capitalism, as far as I can tell. Dave works hard and he should make as much money as the system will lawfully allow him to make.
But neither article proposes how to solve the problem. Not really. And neither do I. I do make this small observation. It is not a good idea to allow legislation that affects the Internet to be primarily based on economic interests of people who make money off of content. The Internet is about more than making money; it is a communications network. Booksellers would make more money if libraries didn't exist, but we allow for libraries to exist. Why? Because sharing knowledge is perceived to be more important than money. I know. None of this makes any sense, does it?
10:57:18 AM
No full disclosure in art? That's what Dave says (see below)
Anyway, I don't trust people who tell me that Hemingway reveals all his source code when nothing could be further from the truth. A writer of prose reveals the final copy and nothing more. He doesn't reveal the life experiences that taught him the lessons that the book teaches. He doesn't tell you which ideas he stole from other books he read. He omits all the blind alleys and dead ends, the characters and plot ideas that didn't make the cut. The novelist omits the text of all previous books, and that's interesting because many if not all authors write the same book over and over, refinining it, narrowing the focus, taking stuff out, amplifying and discussing. Some of my favorite authors work that way. Bottom-line, despite what Lessig says, there's no full disclosure in art.
Sigh. Okay, let's see where to start? I studied Hemingway at Tulane one semester. The professor came in and talked about particular passages of the book. We discussed Hemingway's suicide, and how he was raised. We talked about the influences of the times that he lived in and what effect those might have had on his writings. All of that information was freely available. We know that Ezra Pound heavily edited The Wasteland, and in fact you can buy a copy of the work that shows what T.S. Eliot's poem looked like before Pound edited it. People debate which version is better. Of course, it's true that Pound and Eliot could have kept us from knowing the exact details by not publishing it, but they didn't.
Or let's talk about music. You've got a lot of 1-4-5 progressions out there in rock music. In jazz you've got modulations to new keys. You can read the exact score of a symphony and analyze it with colleagues. Do you see you that chord there is not really in the key of this piece? Why is that? Why does that sound pleasing to our ear? Do you see how the composer delayed the resolution back to the Tonic with that chord? Musicians talk about this stuff all the time and they are looking at the source code when they do it. They might have to pay for it, but that's okay. They get to see it. And that fosters learning. Anyone who says different is either foolish or not paying attention to what we are really talking about here.
10:43:17 AM
Stuart Buck's Law Review article - published in the Stanford Technology Law Review, his article is about spectrum regulation. It's lengthy, and so I haven't read it yet. Just skimmed it, but the ideas are worth thinking about.
8:32:37 AM
