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Notice an important new feature in the world of YouTube -- a "Click to download" link. YouTube is rolling this out slowly, initially with content that aspires to be consistent with principles of open government. I'm told it will be offered more generally. In any case, it is an important development. There have always been hacks for slurping down YouTube videos. But it is a valuable step that YouTube encourage and support this sharing.
Rick Boucher is taking over the Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet (renamed Telecommunications Subcommittee). This is great news. Boucher is an inspiration in the House. This is a critical committee for change.
From the op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal by IBM chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano, "Let's Spend on Broadband and the Power Grid":
We shouldn't undertake projects simply for the sake of creating economic activity. Rather than just stimulate, we should transform.The point could be made more strongly: If we're lucky, we get the chance for this kind of transformation once a generation. It would be a scandal on the scale of the last 8 years to fritter it away.
Ok, San Francisco, sadly, I report: the final REMIX reading will be Wednesday, 14 January, at 7:30pm, at Booksmith - 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA 94117 (map). And as I've got no more books coming out before the summer, that means this will be the final book reading in San Francisco as well.
To celebrate the sadness, I'll be giving away the swag I got at the Colbert Report. Plus 10 (fake) Colbert campaign posters that I tried to ambush Colbert with.
So come. Bring your office. And your grandmother. And anyone else you find on the street.
So here's an update on the Remix COLBERT/lessig project.
As I first reported, after the event, I was sent some very cool remixes. They're available in my first blog entry about the show.
Then ccMixter -- Creative Commons fantastic remix site, that allows you to track who remixed what -- launched a remix thread. You can see those here.
Then this morning I saw the link to the IndabaMusic site, which is running a contest around the clip. There are now about 20 remixes available, and more than 100 in the works. You can see those here.
All of the remixes in the ccMixter/IndabaMusic domains are CC licensed. The source, again, is my segment (the portion of the Colbert Report in which I am a joint copyright owner.) As that is CC-BY, anyone is free for any purpose (save endorsement purposes) to use it as you wish.
UPDATE
Here's the original segment.
Sam did the first remix of my Colbert appearance.
Jim Vanaria did another.
This is the first video remix I've seen.
Here's a remix from the Eclectic Method Mix.
And the audio to the show is available to be remixed on ccMixter here.
Colbert says (or more accurately, "says") you can't remix this. I say please do.
Tomorrow, Change Congress is launching a funders' strike. We pledge NOT to give to any candidate who doesn't support Citizens' Funded Elections. Join us at change-congress.org or strike4change.org.
Now that she won't be my Dean, I am free to say the following. And I am inspired to say the following by my sense that there's a misperception among some about exactly why Elena Kagan's appointment is so important.
Everyone knows the Solicitor General is the government's path to the Supreme Court. But some write as if the job is about arguing in the Supreme Court. That's a mistake. No doubt, that's a part, though historically the SG has argued a small percentage of the cases (sometimes as low as 1 or 2 a term).
Much more important is the policymaking function of the office. The SG must decide on the strategy for interacting with the Supreme Court. He or she must decide which issues to push, which to hold back, how to frame the issues, and how best to maintain the (deserved) reputation of the office as a principled expositor of the (administration's view of the) law.
Having known Elena since I began teaching (she and I started together at Chicago), I can say that I can't imagine a better choice for this job. Granted, she is not an oral advocate -- though again, that's not the job, and having seen her teach (always at the very top at Harvard and Chicago), I have no doubt she'll be superb as an oral advocate.
But she knows the administration cold (after years in the Clinton administration, and many more years studying and teaching administrative law), and, more importantly (and extremely rare for an academic), she has an extraordinary ability to productively engage disagreement. That's the real success from her time at Harvard (I used to think it was impossible to be loved as Dean of Harvard; Elena is loved by everyone). She is a straight talking, brilliant strategist and strong negotiator, who holds herself to insanely high standards. People see that and respect that -- one bit to the key of her success.
As one reflects upon the fact that the most entrenched disagreements the Obama administration will face over the next 8 years will be with a conservative Court that doesn't need to be reelected, it is quickly apparent that the role of the SG is going to be critical. On a list of many (if not all) fantastic appointments by Obama, this one is brilliant. Everyone is saying as much, but few, I think, recognize just how brilliant this is.
Beautifully put by Fred Benenson:
NIN's CC-Licensed Best-Selling MP3 AlbumFred Benenson, January 5th, 2009
NIN's Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV has been making lots of headlines these days.
First, there's the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work's strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard's Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.
Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon's MP3 store.
Take a moment and think about that.
NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? One explanation is the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon's MP3 stores. But another is that fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked.
The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.
Citizens' Funding of the Nation's Elections made it into round #2 at Change.org. Here's 7 minutes about why it needs to be in the final list as well. Voting runs from today till January 15. Vote here.
Robert Sand wrote this thesis as an undergraduate at Brown (he is now a law student). Roughly put, it models the effect that the view that "money buys results" has on political participation. The idea he wanted to test is this: that the more you think "money buys results," the less effective you think your own participation in the political process is, and thus, you participate less. And, by contrast, the less you think "money buys results," (for example, because of citizen funding of elections), the more effective you think your own participation is, and thus you participate more.
He's got an enormous range of data for this, and he finds statistically significant results supporting the thesis.
Sand wants to work on this more and eventually publish it. He has included his email address if you'd like to see the data. Obviously, there's tons more work to be done here to verify and understand the model better. But I wanted to share this here (with his permission) because it is precisely the dynamic at the core of the concern that I am talking about: The expectation of illicit influence drives people to disengage -- even if there isn't any such influence.
If this model stands up, it will be an important contribution to this debate. Whether it does or not, quite a contribution from an undergraduate.
Meanwhile, less than 12 hours to vote on the Citizens' Funded Elections proposal at change.org. At this moment, we need 6 votes to get into the second round.
While most companies have cut back on their support for the Commons, wonderfully and amazingly, the most constant and forceful support continues -- Sun ($50k). We're now within $12k of making our goal -- something that seemed impossible just 2 weeks ago. Massive increase in small time contributors. Thank you to all. And please help put us over the top.
Type "Apple Store Chestnut Hill" on your iPhone in Boston, and you get the map on the left. Follow the directions and you end up on a back alley -- about a mile from the Apple Store in Chestnut Hill. Frustrated. And cold. And no longer in the holiday spirit.
We're in the top 3, but there's still over a week of voting. Consider this carefully, and then register and vote.
Joi Ito's new book is now available, Free Souls. The book is an amazingly beautiful (since Joi's the artist) and smart (since Joi knows the subjects) collection of photographs of many souls in the worlds Joi knows. All of the images are freely licensed (CC-BY) and all have signed model releases. So these are souls Joi has set free. As Joi's site puts it, "A celebration of all the people who are willing to share."
Still time to order for Christmas...
According to the Wall Street Journal, the RIAA has declared peace in the "copyright wars," and will stop its suits against individual fileshares. This is important progress.
Above, the latest (and among the last) remixes of this story about Remix, emphasizing especially the call for peace, now.
Here's the latest argument for CHANGE (v2). It makes a strong push for "Citizens' funding of the Nation's elections." The idea is being discussed and voted on at change.org.
Please support the idea there if you can. I need about 500 279 179 votes to get the idea into round two.
Fred Benenson's got a nice piece about the WSJ piece. The most depressing part of this whole cycle was the news that the WSJ was sticking by the story.
On what basis, precisely? The charge that Obama was shifting policy was, and is, completely baseless. The charge that I had "shifted" my position was, and is, completely unsupported (and false). And the charge that Google was violating network neutrality principles has been shown (concisely by David Isenberg, one of the originals in this debate) to be just wrong -- no one who understands what "network neutrality" (or what we used to call this before it was smartly marketed, "end-to-end") is could believe that edge caching services, living in a competitive market, could raise NN concerns.
So they're sticking by a story that's baseless, unsupported and wrong. Sounds like we know where the Bushies have gone to work now that they've left the White House.
Update: So I've just had an email exchange with Christopher Rhodes, one of the authors of the piece. What surprised me most about the piece was that he was such a careful interviewer when we spoke, but that we didn't really speak about the issue they charged me with -- shifting -- and I was surprised he didn't ask or followup on that. Turns out he tried, writing to my assistant, but that I didn't speak with him. My assistant didn't know the context of our conversation, so her translation of the question didn't flag it. My apologies to Rhodes. Had we connected, the story would have been different. The mistake in not connecting was mine, no doubt. And the mistake convinces me that at least with respect to me, the story is a misunderstanding (and not, as suggested, bad faith). Important lesson for me, no doubt. But for others: Please send emails for me to me. I read and respond to every email I get (save the spam-ish sorts). And while I can be behind, if you don't get a response, I didn't get it.
I got off the plane from Boston to find my inbox filled with anger about an article in the Wall Street Journal. To those who were angry, I hope you will direct any anger at the Wall Street Journal after you read what follows.
The article is an indirect effort to gin up a drama about a drama about an alleged shift in Obama's policies about network neutrality. What's the evidence for the shift? That Google allegedly is negotiating for faster service on some network pipes. And that "prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject."
Who are these "Internet scholars"? Me. And of course, because I have "softened" my views about network neutrality, and because I advised the Obama campaign about technology issues during the primary, it follows (and obviously so) that Obama too must be going soft on network neutrality.
I don't know what Google is doing, though if they are trying to negotiate exclusive deals for privileged access, that shows exactly why we need network neutrality regulation. (Though note, the article doesn't say the deal Google was striking was exclusive).
And I've not seen anything during the Obama campaign or from the transition to indicate it has shifted its view about network neutrality at all.
But I do know something about my own views, and what the Journal has done here is really extraordinary.
It is true, as the Journal reports, that I have stated that network providers should be free to charge different rates for different service -- "so long," the Journal quotes, "as the faster service at a higher price is available to anyone willing to pay it."
But the whole punch of the story comes from the suggestion that my position is something new. As the Journal states,
Lawrence Lessig, an Internet law professor at Stanford University and an influential proponent of network neutrality, recently shifted gears by saying at a conference that content providers should be able to pay for faster service.And:
Stanford's Mr. Lessig, for one, has softened his opposition to variable service tiers.
Missing from the article, however, is the evidence that my view is a "shift" or "soften[ing]" of earlier views. That's because there isn't any such evidence. My view is the view I have always had -- whether or not it is the view of others in this debate.
For example, in April, 2008, I testified before the Senate Commerce Committee. This is what I said:
As I testified in 2006, in my view that minimal strategy right now marries the basic principles of “Internet Freedom” first outlined by Chairman Michael Powell, and modified more recently by the FCC, to one additional requirement — a ban on discriminatory access tiering. While broadband providers should be free, in my view, to price consumer access to the Internet differently — setting a higher price, for example, for faster or greater access — they should not be free to apply discriminatory surcharges to those who make content or applications available on the Internet. As I testified, in my view, such “access tiering” risks creating a strong incentive among Internet providers to favor some companies over others; that incentive in turn tends to support business models that exploit scarcity rather than abundance. If Google, for example, knew it could buy a kind of access for its video content that iFilm couldn’t, then it could exploit its advantage to create an even greater disadvantage for its competitors; network providers in turn could deliver on that disadvantage only if the non-privileged service was inferior to the privileged service.
That's the same thing I said to the FCC in its hearing at Stanford. You can hear what I said beginning at minute 18:20 here. There I distinguish between "zero price regulations" (such as Markey's bill (which I say I am against)) and what I called "zero discriminatory surcharge rules" (which I say I am for). The zero discriminatory surcharge rules are just that -- rules against discriminatory surcharges -- charging Google something different from what a network charges iFilm. The regulation I call for is a "MFN" requirement -- that everyone has the right to the rates of the most favored nation.
This is precisely the position that the Journal breathlessly attributes to me today. It represents no change -- no "softening" no "shift" in my views.
Now no doubt my position might be wrong. Some friends in the network neutrality movement as well as some scholars believe it is wrong -- that it doesn't go far enough. But the suggestion that the position is "recent" is baseless. If I'm wrong, I've always been wrong.
Andy Oram has a fantastically compelling piece about why it is important to support Creative Commons.
Let's keep the momentum going, and [make] sure they can continue to lay the groundwork for a public domain that becomes increasingly important for innovation in a tight economy and for political engagement in a newly aroused community-minded public.
The United States Congress is toying with setting the wages of UAW workers.
This fact apparently surprises some (including Michael Moore). And the fact that I oppose the bailout surprises some (except those convinced I've been recaptured by my teenage (and Republican) self).
But the statistic most significant to me is as MAPLight.org nicely reports, "House members voting 'yes' on auto industry bailout received, on average, 65% more from auto industry interests than those voting 'no.'"
Take the money out of politics (and here's a specific proposal for doing that), and then come back to me to talk about the good, public regarding reasons why Congress is stepping in to "save the auto industry."
It is with a complicated mix of excitement and sadness that I make the following announcement.
As some of you remember, just over a year ago I reported that I was shifting my academic (and activist) work from free culture related issues to (what I called) "corruption." At Stanford, a year ago, I outlined what this work would be: To focus on the many institutions in public life that depend upon trust to succeed, but which are jeopardizing that trust through an improper dependence on money. Read the New York Times Editorial of last week. Or think of medical researchers receiving money from drug companies whose drugs they review; legal academics receiving money to provide public policy advice from the very institutions affected by that advice; or Congress filled with Members focused obsessively on how to raise money to secure their (or their party's) tenure. In all these cases, dependency on money in these ways tends to weaken public trust. Or so was my hypothesis when I launched on this project.
But how I would pursue this work has been a constant challenge. I started immediately to devour the books recommended to me by colleagues and on my wiki. I attended conferences and gave talks about the subject. I began a series of interviews with insiders. And with the help of Joe Trippi, I launched Change Congress, which was designed to focus these issues in the context of American politics.
Throughout this process, however, I have felt that the work would require something more. That the project I had described was bigger than a project that I, one academic, could pursue effectively. This wasn't an issue that would be fixed with a book. Or even with five books. It is instead a problem that required a new focus by many people, across disciplines, learning or relearning something important about how trust was built.
About six months ago, I was asked to consider locating this research at a very well established ethics center at Harvard University. Launched more than two decades ago, the Safra Center was first committed to building a program on ethics that would inspire similar programs at universities across the country. But the suggestion was made that after more than two decades of enormous success, it may make sense for the Center to consider focusing at least part of its work on a single problem. No one was certain this made sense, but I was asked to sketch a proposal that wouldn’t necessarily displace the current work of the Center, but which would become a primary focus of the Center, and complement its mission.
I did that, mapping a five year project that would draw together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to focus on this increasingly important problem of improper dependence. Harvard liked the proposal. In November, the Provost of Harvard University invited me to become the director of the Safra Center. Last week, I accepted the offer. In the summer, I will begin an appointment at the Harvard Law School, while directing the Safra Center.
This was a very difficult decision to make. Stanford is an extraordinary law school, and I have loved my time here. The students are brilliant, yet balanced. The faculty is brilliant, yet surprisingly humble. The Dean has an amazing vision of the future of legal education, and is redefining the law school in ways that I completely support. I am endlessly proud of the Center for Internet and Society and the Fair Use Project. I have the very best assistant in the world (and she promised at least 5 more years if I stayed). I have written four of my five books while here. I'm almost finished with my 6th, the book I am sure I will be most proud of. This is a place that has given an enormous amount to me, and from which I have benefited greatly.
On a personal level, too, this was a difficult decision. California has become our home. My wife is strongly attached to everything Californian; we both have very close friends here; I hadn't ever imagined raising my kids in anything but the social and political environment of San Francisco. I still find it hard to imagine that I won't, if not now, sometime. And the enormous beauty of the environment here still takes my breath away. A year into my time at Stanford, I was certain I would never leave. After a blissful weekend with my family last week, it still hasn't registered that I will be leaving.
But in the end, it was impossible for me to be committed to the project while turning down this opportunity. It is not just the institution, nor the (partial) freedom from teaching. It is the chance to frame a large-scale project devoted to a large, important and complex problem. Once we saw it like this, my wife and I decided that returning to this old home was the right thing to do. And so in June, we will pack up the car for a cross country trek, back to Harvard.
Of course, I have no objective cause to complain. Harvard too is an extraordinary law school. As anyone who knows me knows, some of my closest friends in the world are at Harvard, including the Dean (or at least until Obama steals them all away). Harvard has grown and changed in wonderful ways over the past eight years. It will be an enormously exciting place to teach and learn.
But I regret deeply doing anything that is hurtful to those I respect and like. Worse, I hate doing anything that can be misunderstood. When Dean Sullivan recruited me, she said Stanford was paradise. I thought that was just a slogan. It isn't. I consider the 8 years I have had here to be the most important and invigorating in my career. And I will miss everything about this place.
Some things won't change. I will continue to work with Joe Trippi to build Change Congress. And I will continue to explore how best to incorporate this space (the Net) into this research. But I will do all of this, and my work, in the context of Harvard's Safra Center and its Law School, and of old friendships, revived.
My site was hacked by evil gambling spammers. I removed the code Google pointed to, and informed Google. I'm still invisible.
I'm working on a presentation that could really use a Simpsons-esque like section. I emailed Matt Groening, but he didn't respond (no, I didn't really email Matt Groening). Anyway, if any of you are the next Matt Groening, and want to work on a short cartoon segment for a global warming/corruption related preso (all to be ccFree), email me at lessig at pobox dot com? It wouldn't be long, and it is easy to describe. Thanks in advance.
Update: Thanks for the responses so far. Two important clarifications -- I don't actually need a cartoon that looks like the Simpsons. I mean only something that could be used in the wonderfully ambiguous way that the Simpsons is used to be serious and not in the same spin. Also, the critical thing here is animation -- I need an animated cartoon to make the point I'm trying to make. Thanks again.
These bailouts are an awful idea -- the worst of K St. capitalism (== kapitalism) inviting an insanely bad future for the industries affected. If there's one thing worse than Detroit managed by the managers who have been driving the American auto industry into the ground for the past three decades, it is Detroit managed by politicians.
I'm not against all bailouts. I think it was appropriate to save the airline industry after 9/11, for example: That was an unexpected shock that produced a failure not directly related to the bad management of the airlines.
But these bailouts are not that. Both the auto industry and the banking industry are insanely inefficient. They have been for decades. And rather than being saved from a shock, both need a significant shock to management to radically change how they do business.
Perhaps the shock to banking would be too great just now. I'm willing to be persuaded that intervention is necessary there. But the more I read about the auto industry, the less I am convinced.
People speak about this as if not bailing out Detroit means automobile production in America ends. That's not what failing to bailout Detroit means. Not intervening now would mean these automakers would enter bankruptcy. And bankruptcy means the assets of these dinosaurs get reorganized: Someone else buys these companies, at a price the market sets, and runs them profitably, because of the price the market set.
Obviously, that change would not be painless. And I'm all for minimizing the pain where the pain is doing no good -- with workers, or others depending upon these industries. But I'm against interventions designed to minimize the pain where the pain would do good -- by radically changing how that industry is managed. The whole justification for insanely high executive compensation is, in part, so they can weather such storms. I don't see why the government should be in the business of building safety nets for the (relatively) well off.
"But what if foreign car companies buy American car companies?"
So what. I just don't get this fear. We live in a global economy. If you want to own Toyota, buy Toyota stock. In the vast majority of cases (meaning there are exceptions I'd be willing to consider), the place of incorporation of a company should mean squat little to these sorts of issues. Or better, the ability of the company to build and manage production should matter much more.
This is very cool functionality, building nicely on the free (culture) web.
xkcd's (brilliant) work is licensed under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial license.
The toughest gig when releasing a book is bookstore events. At least when you're no one, no one is ever there. So if ANYONE here is near the Barnes & Noble in Hillsdale (here's a map) Thursday at 7pm, can you please please please come? Or send your Mom? Or younger brother? Or younger brother's math class?
And if you can't do that, but have read the book, then can you at least write a review of the book at Amazon? Two people have written. One decent enough (though he didn't like the book). The second who gave the book one star because he didn't like me on Charlie Rose (I kid you not.)
This story is absurd. The message here is that Governor Rendell somehow screwed up because he said something not intended for broadcast near an open mic. But wait a minute: Who did the wrong here? It is plain from the context that Rendell did not intend his comments for public consumption. Yet intentionally or not, ever-more-invasive technologies captured what he said. So why isn't the outrageous behavior here broadcasting what he plainly intended to be a private conversation, rather than, as this commentator makes it seem, the fact that he was having a private conversation at the mic?
Or again: To be sure, Rendell would be wise to remember that there are a million privacy invading technologies surrounding us, and that he, like a citizen in the former Soviet Republic, needs to make sure that whatever he says isn't been snooped. But whether Rendell was wise or not (and I certainly have criticized him for not being wise), why isn't the outrageous behavior taking what he plainly didn't intend to be public and broadcasting it on a world-wide network?
Just because you can see, doesn't mean you should look. And just because you looked, doesn't mean you should broadcast what you saw to the whole world. I know a little titillation is good for ratings; I hadn't known CNN had begun to stoop to such lows.
From the Creative Commons blog:
As previously announced, we’re running a questionnaire on understanding “NonCommercial” use. The questionnaire runs through December 7. It takes 15-25 minutes to complete.Click here to start the questionnaire.
Your input is greatly appreciated. CC CEO Joi Ito explains:
“The study has direct relevance to Creative Commons’ mission of providing free, flexible copyright licenses that are easy to understand and simple to use,” said Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito. “The NC term is a popular option for creators choosing a Creative Commons license, and that tells us the term meets a need. However, as exponentially increasing numbers of works are made available under CC licenses, we want to provide additional information for creators about the contexts in which the NC term may further or impede their intentions with respect to the works they choose to share, and we want to make sure that users clearly understand those intentions. We expect the study findings will help us do a better job of explaining the licenses and to improve them, where possible. We also hope the findings, which will be made publicly available, will contribute to better understanding of some of the complexities of digital distribution of content.”
You can also help by sending your friends and colleagues to the questionnaire.
As I indicated yesterday, I was very encouraged by the decision by the Obama transition team to freely license change.gov (not actually a .gov entity, so not exempt from the rights of copyright).
But over the weekend, a bunch of us got together to begin (actually, continue) the process of framing "open government principles." The first round is described at Politico by Ben Smith.
You can read the rationale for the principles at open-government.us. Put briefly, the three principles are:
1. No Legal Barrier to Sharing (law (copyright law) should not block sharing);2. No Technological Barrier to Sharing (code (limitations on downloads, for example) should not block sharing;
3. Free competition (no alliances should favor one commercial entity over another, or commercial over noncommercial entities).
Some have framed these as "demands" made of the administration. That's like saying the mouse can make demands of the lion. We're not making demands; we're describing good policy. Or at least, good policy as we see it.
Consistent with the values of any "open government," and with his strong leadership on "free debates" from the very start, the Obama team has modified the copyright notice on change.gov to embrace the freest CC license.
This is great news about a subject that's harder than it seems. One might well ask why is this an issue at all? The one thing copyright law is pretty good at is exempting works of the government from copyright protection. Why should the published work of a transition, or a President, be any different?
I don't think it should be, but I get why this is a hard issue. Whether or not one was free to republish works printed by the GPO, the freedom that digital technologies enables here is certainly enough to give one pause. I'm fine with the pause; I'd be happy to defend the freedom explicitly. But it is understandable that this is something that any administration would have to think through.
I'm glad the thought in this administration led to the right conclusion, so quickly, and in the midst of so much else going on.
Jamie Boyle's fantastic new book is out. And he has beat me in getting it out with a CC license (soon, not soon enough, but soon). Download it for free here. Buy copies for all your friends (and 5 of your enemies) here.
And congratulations to Jamie. It was Boyle's first book more than any work of scholarship that got me into this movement. It it wonderful to see the godfather return to print.
Chris' post says:
For Obama media to be offered under a CC license (with the licensed embedded in the media itself) would signal his seriousness about embracing openness, transparency and the nature of discourse on the web. It would also signify a shift towards the type of collaboration typified by Web 2.0 social sites, enabling a modern dialectic relationship between the citizenry and its government.
Note the "seriousness" of Obama's commitment here might well be wondered about. Note the tag line on "change.gov": "CONTENT COPYRIGHT © 2008. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED." Talk about "change" -- an effectively governmental website claiming "all rights reserved."
Chris Messina's got a fantastic post about YouTube and Creative Commons. As it is CC licensed, I've reproduced it here:
Why YouTube should support Creative Commons now
I was in Miami last week to meet with my fellow screeners from the Knight News Challenge and Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson, two vlogger friends whom I met through coworking, started talking about content licensing, specifically as related to President-Elect Barack Obama’s weekly address, which, if things go according to plan, will continue to be broadcast on YouTube.
The question came up: what license should Barack Obama use for his content? This, in turn, revealed a more fundamental question: why doesn’t YouTube let you pick a license for the work that you upload (and must, given the terms of the site, own the rights to in the first place)? And if this omission isn’t intentional (that is, no one decided against such a feature, it just hasn’t bubbled up in the priority queue yet), then what can be done to facilitate the adoption of Creative Commons on the site?
To date, few video sharing sites, save Blip.tv and Flickr (even if they only deal with long photos), have actually embraced Creative Commons to any appreciable degree. Ironically, of all sites, YouTube seems the most likely candidate to adopt Creative Commons, given its rampant remix and republish culture (a culture which continues to vex major movie studies and other fastidious copyright owners).
One might make the argument that, considering the history of illegally shared copyrighted material on YouTube, enabling Creative Commons would simply lead to people mislicensing work that they don’t own… but I think that’s a strawman argument that falls down in practice for a number of reasons:
- First of all, all sites that enable the use of CC licenses offer the scheme as opt-in, defaulting to the traditional all rights reserved use of copyright. Enabling the choice of Creative Commons wouldn’t necessarily affect this default.
- Second, unauthorized sharing of content or digital media under any license is still illegal, whether the relicensed work is licensed under Creative Commons or copyright.
- Third, YouTube, and any other media sharing site, bears some responsibility for the content published on their site, and, regardless of license, reserves the right to remove any material that fails to comply completely with its Terms of Service.
- Fourth, the choice of a Creative Commons license is usually a deliberate act (going back to my first point) intended to convey an intention. The value of this intention — specifically, to enable the lawful reuse and republishing of content or media by others without prior per-instance consent — is a net positive to the health of a social ecosystem insomuch as this choice enables a specific form of freedom: that is, the freedom to give away one’s work under certain, less-restrictive stipulations than the law allows, to aid in establishing a positive culture of sharing and creativity (as we’ve seen on Flickr, SoundCloud and CC Mixter).
Preventing people from choosing a more liberal license conceivably restricts expression, insomuch as it restricts an “efficient, content-enriching value chain” from forming within a legal framework. Or, because all material is currently licensed under the most restrictive regime on YouTube, every re-use of a portion of media must therefore be licensed on a per-instance basis, considerably impeding the legal reuse of other people’s work.
Now, I want to point out something interesting here… as specifically related to both this moment in time and about government ownership of media. A recently released report from the GAO on Energy Efficiency carried with it the following statement on copyright:
This is a work of the U.S. government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States. The published product may be reproduced and distributed in its entirety without further permission from GAO. However, because this work may contain copyrighted images or other material, permission from the copyright holder may be necessary if you wish to reproduce this material separately.Though it can’t simply put this work into the public domain because of the potential copyrighted materials embedded therein, this statement is about as close as you can get for an assembled work produced by the government.
Now consider that Obama’s weekly “radio address” is self-contained media, not contingent upon the use or reuse of any other copyrighted work. It bears considering what license (if any) should apply (keeping in mind that the government is funded by tax-payer dollars). If not the public domain, under what license should Obama’s weekly addresses be shared? Certainly not all rights reserved! — unfortunately, YouTube offers no other option and thus, regardless of what Obama or the Change.gov folks would prefer, they’re stuck with a single, monolithic licensing scheme.
Interestingly, Google, YouTube’s owner, has supported Creative Commons in the past, notably with their collaboration with Radiohead on the House of Cards open source initiative and with the licensing of the Summer of Code documentation (Yahoo has a similar project with Flickr’s hosting of the Library of Congress’ photo archive under a liberal license).
I think that it’s critical for YouTube to adopt the Creative Commons licensing scheme now, as Barack Obama begins to use the site for his weekly address, because of the powerful signal it would send, in the context of what I imagine will be a steady increase and importance of the use of social media and web video by government agencies.
Don Norman recently wrote an essay on the importance of social signifiers, and I think it underscores my point as to why this issue is pressing now. In contrast to the popular concept of “affordances” in design and design thinking, Norman writes:
A “signifier” is some sort of indicator, some signal in the physical or social world that can be interpreted meaningfully. Signifiers signify critical information, even if the signifier itself is an accidental byproduct of the world. Social signifiers are those that are relevant to social usages. Some social indicators simply are the unintended but informative result of the behavior of others. . . . I call any physically perceivable cue a signifier, whether it is incidental or deliberate. A social signifier is one that is either created or interpreted by people or society, signifying social activity or appropriate social behavior.The “appropriate social behavior”, or behavior that I think Obama should model in his weekly podcasts is that of open and free licensing, introducing the world of YouTube viewers to an alternative form of licensing, that would enable them to better understand and signal to others their intent and desire to share, and to have their creative works reused, without the need to ask for permission first.
For Obama media to be offered under a CC license (with the licensed embedded in the media itself) would signal his seriousness about embracing openness, transparency and the nature of discourse on the web. It would also signify a shift towards the type of collaboration typified by Web 2.0 social sites, enabling a modern dialectic relationship between the citizenry and its government.
I believe that now is the time for this change to happen, and for YouTube to prioritize the choice of Creative Commons licensing for the entire YouTube community.
From the CC Blog:
The ever innovative Brooklyn-based singer songwriter Jonathan Coulton has teamed up with Creative Commons to release his greatest hits compilation “JoCo Looks Back” on a 1gb custom Creative Commons jump drive to help support our 2008 campaign. If that weren’t enough, JoCo and CC have also included all of the unmixed audio tracks for every song on the drive. That’s over 700mb of JoCo thing-a-week goodness. Since all of JoCo’s music is released under our Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, this is an incredible opportunity for the public to remix and reuse his fantastic music. Song files are in 320kbps MP3 and unmixed audio tracks are in 256 VBR MP3.
We’ll be offering the drives exclusively at our $50 dollar donation level (and above) until December 31st. Also included are a CreativeCommons.net account, an OpenID identity, and a 2008 campaign sticker.
Jonathan also wrote a wonderful commoner letter speaking on how he, as a musician, uses Creative Commons to support himself and his career. Read it here.
The letter is just about the most moving CC writing I've seen.
A Change Congress supporter writes:
"I am a supporter of your Change Congress movement and have followed your work for a long time. I am also an Obama supporter. I am writing to urge you to share your thoughts with your blog readers about what an Obama administration might entail for the Change Congress movement, and whether you think Obama is committed to government reform...."
Great question. I think many of us are so used to disappointment, we're looking for it, and so not even a week after that extraordinary night, many are beginning to wonder what "change" here will really mean?
But I think we need a certain kind of understanding, or patience here. Imagine, by analogy, a loved one has cancer. She decides to get chemo-therapy to deal with the cancer. But on the way to the hospital, imagine she gets hit with a bullet from a drive-by shooting. (Dark, ok, but you'll see the meaning here in a second). Now an ambulance comes and races this gun-shot victim with cancer to the emergency room.
This sad story is a picture of us just now. The "change Washington" rhetoric of this campaign is the analog to the cancer. The financial collapse is the analog of the shooting. And just as with the cancer patient, the collapse is an urgent, immediate problem that must be solved before the more fundamental, long term problem can be addressed.
This means we have to be a bit patient before the more fundamental issue gets addressed. Not that one shouldn't be critical of decisions that will make it more difficult to cure the cancer. But that the lack of an immediate push on that problem is not inconsistent with the design to cure it.
I only hope they recognize that as with the gun-shot, cancer victim, there needs to be essentially two teams thinking about these two different kinds of problems. One focusing immediately on stabilizing the patient. The second on how the stable patient can be treated for the cancer. The skills of the former team are not necessarily the skills of the latter. And if Obama is to be the transformational president he can be, building a strategy around that transformation will be essential.
Update: A good sign: Podesta:
“I’ve heard the complaint [that] we’re leaving all this expertise on the side, because we’re leaving all the people who know everything out in the cold. And so be it. This is a commitment that the American public expects, and it’s one that we intend to enforce during the transition.”
So a new President means (the chance of a) new Chairman of the FCC. Before he passes, it is timely to begin to reflect a bit upon the chairmanship of the current chairman, Kevin Martin.
A clue that this is an interesting and important chairman is the fact that he's an equal opportunity anger-er -- the left has loved and hated him, the right has loved and hated him. I'm an increasingly strong admirer. His contribution to sensible thinking about infrastructures was established with his taking the lead in imposing network-neutrality-like rules on Comcast. But it is the unanimous decision freeing "white space" spectrum that will, I think, ultimately be the most important. The decision is not only right. It shows a liberation from a rigid and flawed understanding of the best way to maximize the economic value of "spectrum." This clear thinking needs to expand beyond these bands. But it is an important start.
This is a democracy. We win when we persuade people of our ideals. I believe strongly that Proposition 8 is against our ideals. I have so argued. But we have failed to convince the other members of this democracy.
We need to try again. Let us launch, now, a new petition movement. Let us spend a year talking to people who disagree with us. Let us win this battle by persuading the other side. I volunteer to do whatever would help, including traveling to every church or community in this state to make the case for equality. But please, let's not try to win this battle by summoning the Supremes. Even if it is right that this Amendment is contrary to the best interpretation of Equal Protection, let us bring the ideals of Equal Protection to life, by getting people to support them.
From the CC site:
Pop star Gwen Stefani and her husband, rocker Gavin Rossdale recently welcomed a baby, Zuma Nesta Rock Rossdale, into the world. Many celebrities contract with a magazine to arrange an exclusive photo session that debuts mother with newborn. But Stefani and Rossdale took a different approach and hired their own photographer and put the photo online for the public under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, along with some additional terms that allow all print magazines, newspapers, and blogs to use the photo - even commercially, with some restrictions. You can download a high-res version of the photo (and check out the additional terms the photo is available under) at Stefani’s site.
I awoke in New Zealand today to an article in the New Zealand Herald, and I had a strange sense of deja vu. It is still Monday in America. And like the Monday before the 2004 election, and the Monday before the 2000 election, there is enormous confidence among Democrats that we are going to win this.
But as with 2000, and 2004, I have become a bit terrified about where we’ll be Tuesday. For as presented by the New Zealand Herald, however optimistic the static view of the swing states is, the dynamic view — what is the trend — is sobering, to say the least. As this graph shows, only Florida is trending in the right direction. Every other critical state is trending away from Obama.
Now of course, maybe not quickly enough. Of course, the advantages are significant, especially relative to 2004. And of course, McCain would have to move mountains to overcome the enormous machine that the Obama campaign has built.
But here’s the weird deja vu I feel. In 2004, I got on a plane Tuesday to fly to London. When I got on the plane, I watched every pundit, as well as Kerry’s daughter, speak about how all the polls were with Kerry. The “exit polls” indicated a clear Kerry victory. But then when I landed, I sat it utter disbelief in the United lounge at Heathrow, watching the Ohio numbers go against us, and therefore, delivering 4 more years to Bush.
We Democrats have trouble closing the deal. We have trouble continuing the push to the very last moment. We have repeatedly been blindsided by the fact that the other side votes regardless of the expected result, while we’re more contingent — making the effort if it seems necessary, relaxing when it doesn’t.
Please, don’t let this happen again. Please, if you’re an Obama supporter, do absolutely everything you can in the next 24 hours to make sure every single possible Obama vote turns out to vote. Volunteer for a phone bank, or use my.barackobama.com to phone bank from home. And beyond this, do the sort of things that too few of us ever have the courage to do: Express to your friends, and anyone you know, why you want them to support your candidate. Send an email with a personal story, or an argument important to you, to as many people as you can. Apologize for the intrusion, but intrude nonetheless. (How weird is it that engaging people about democratic issues in a democracy is generally viewed as inappropriate). And don’t let up until 8pm Pacific time.
I’m doing this. I’m exhorting you. I’m writing to everyone on my twitter/facebook/indenti.ca/flickr lists. If I can find an smtp server that will let me, I’ll dump an email to as many of my friends as I can telling them they this is so important. And when my plane lands in the US Tuesday morning, I will join my wife (who is running a phone bank in San Francisco), spending the day on the phone). I will mark myself as weird in doing all this, no doubt. But we can all afford this, if only just once in our life.
I understand the other side has their reasons. I respect them, even if I disagree with them. But I am genuinely afraid about what happens to our side if we let this slip away. There is enormous energy and passion among young people for Obama. There is a passion and hope that makes me cry each time I think about it among African Americans, and those who think about and live the discrimination of our past, and present. There is an energy I have never imagined could be behind any politician. I have known for more than a decade that this man is the real deal. And it gives me enormous hope for this democracy that we are about to vote to make him President.
Unless we don’t. Unless we let this slip by, again. Unless we sit in our comfortable cubicle, and let politics be run by the other side.
Don’t do this. Do something this time. Please at least help spread this message. Make sure everyone who could matter here knows what you believe. And don’t stop until the clock runs out.
The Free Software Foundation has released the GNU Free Document License version 1.3. Section 11 of that license now (essentially) permits certain wikis to be relicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (v3.0) license, so long as the relicensing is completed by August 1, 2009. That means, the Wikipedia community now has the choice to relicense Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license. (Here's the FAQ for the amendment.)
It would be hard to overstate the importance of this change to the Free Culture community. A fundamental flaw in the Free Culture Movement to date is that its most important element -- Wikipedia -- is licensed in a way that makes it incompatible with an enormous range of other content in the Free Culture Movement. One solution to this, of course, would be for everything to move to the FDL. But that license was crafted initially for manuals, and there were a number of technical reasons why it would not work well (and in some cases, at all) for certain important kinds of culture.
This change would now permit interoperability among Free Culture projects, just as the dominance of the GNU GPL enables interoperability among Free Software projects. It thus eliminates an unnecessary and unproductive hinderance to the spread and growth of Free Culture.
Richard Stallman deserves enormous credit for enabling this change to occur. There were some who said RMS would never permit Wikipedia to be relicensed, as it is one of the crown jewels in his movement for freedom. And so it is: like the GNU/Linux operation system, which his movement made possible, Wikipedia was made possible by the architecture of freedom the FDL enabled. One could well understand a lesser man finding any number of excuses for blocking the change.
But here's what Richard said in 2002 in a different context:
"If we don’t want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes. We must start sending the message that a good citizen is one who cooperates when appropriate...."
Add "good citizen" to the list of praise for this founder of contemporary freedom.
Lessig Blog by Lawrence Lessig is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
