Laurence emailed me a few weeks ago to let me know that Arefatica is featured in the Fall 2009 issue of Maisonneuve. I knew it was going to be published, but had forgotten all about it. It’s a nice piece. Wish I could edit it a bit just to adjust the way I said some stuff and to add what I’ve figured out since Sarah and I spoke. But, well, so be it. Sarah was already a champ — letting me see the piece before it went to print. It starts off like this…

Having spent years working in communications for international development projects, Christine Prefontaine had long suspected that there was more to be gained than lost from sharing ideas, or even from having them stolen. Not only did sharing seem to solve problems more quickly, but it also raised the profile of the idea’s originator. And it wasn’t ideas that ensured success, she reasoned, but the ability to come up with them — something nobody could steal.

Kinda like how it connects my work work with Artefatica, my just-for-love project. Nice to get feedback and attention!

… anyone with an internet connection can make their creations available to the public, unmediated by the old gatekeepers of mass media. The result has been an unprecedented outpouring of creative works. As of early June, for instance, more than 3.6 billion photographs had been uploaded to Flickr alone. As the best of those works are now making their way into the broader cultural landscape, they’re breaking mass media’s stranglehold on the ownership of meaningful content.

… The internet’s vast, instantly accessible mountains of individually created text, images and sounds are examples of what economist Nicholas Gruen describes as “emergent public goods” — things that simply amass themselves into existence and serve the public interest.

… There’s also a whole new category of “works” that has evolved with blog posts and online photo galleries: public commentary. If a MetaFilter post or YouTube video attracts 100 comments, every one of those comments — insightful or inane — is just as much part of the public cultural record as the creation that inspired it, and just as much a gift to the collective body of human knowledge.

So much stuff to curate and create.

Both Filmaster’s code and its content are open. 

As Filmaster is both free as in beer (you don’t have to pay for it) and as in freedom (all content is licensed on Creative Commons, all code is free software) we have a growing community of developers that join us and implement new features for the project. If you know Python/django or want to help translating Filmaster into your language and perhaps run a localized version of the website, please head to Filmaster.org — our community website and read about what you can help with. Everyone is invited!

Again… more content for my newspaper idea. Exciting :)

(Thanks to @karlpro for the tip.) 

We have a newsroom of 32 working journalists, all of them dedicated to investigative reporting on stories with significant potential for major impact.

Each story we publish is distributed in a manner designed to maximize its impact. Many of our “deep dive” stories are offered exclusively to a traditional news organization, free of charge, for publication or broadcast. (After an appropriate period of exclusivity, each story is also published on this site. This site also features outstanding investigative reporting produced by others, sometimes with our annotation and follow-up, thus making our site both more of a destination and a tool to promote more good work in this field.)

We support each story we publish with an active and aggressive communications effort of our own, including regularly contacting reporters, editors and bloggers, encouraging them to follow-up on our reporting, and to link to our site and our work. 

But the news that caught my attention — they want us to steal their stories:

Steal Our Stories

You can republish our articles and graphics for free, so long as you credit us, link to us, and don’t edit our material or sell it separately.

We’re licensed under Creative Commons, which provides the legal details. (The license says “no commercial use.” We’re fine with ads appearing on the same page as republished stories, but you can’t resell the stories or sell ads specifically targeted to them.)

Hmmmmm. I’d prefer a more open license, but may be a good source for my newspaper idea.

(Thanks to Simon Law for the tip.)

Akester concludes that while “the nightmarish vision of digital lock up has not materialised … significant problems do exist, and others can readily be foreseen.” She found that the “evidence shows that some beneficiaries of privileged exceptions are being adversely affected by the use of DRM and practical solutions are required.” 

Areas of “privileged exception” include libraries, professors, students, and researchers. Users who are allowed by British law to access and copy content, but are stymied by DRM. These copyright exceptions are connected to core freedoms. 

I only had time to skim it (over 100 pages long) and it’s quite technical — but here are the parts that stuck out for me. 

The British Library’s biggest concern is digital preservation. There are preservation concerns in relation to access to works and duplication of works – both activities being essential for preservation purposes.

The first preservation concern pertains to the fact that where DRM (applied to works in digital format or to ancillary software used to access those works) becomes obsolete and the relevant manufacturers are not willing to provide updates or have gone out of business, the British Library could find itself with digital content that it can no longer have access to and unable, by law, to circumvent. The obsolescence of a DRM could render an item hosted by the British Library inaccessible.

The second preservation concern is that, presently, where a DRM prevents copying (and the British Library is unable, by law, to circumvent) reproduction of a work for preservation purposes is impossible. 

It’s no surprise, of course, that some British students are frustrated, and others break the law to do their work. Can you blame them? Some quotes:

“Most media students are aware of bypass measures because they are essential in this field of study”  

 “I download software to break encryption”

“I can’t rip clips legally, even if I use a DVD from the library”

 “I wouldn’t think twice about ripping something illegally in order to have it for study” 

 “Restrictions on DVDs encourage me to download illegal versions”

Apparently the US has done a better job. The law still protects DRM, “but in order to ensure that the public keeps the ability to engage in non-infringing uses of works, Congress [has] set out safe harbour provisions”.

I’m new to the whole DRM issue. But what I understand is this: it extends copyright into places it was never supposed to go. Think about that book you just bought. You can read it as many times as you want, lend it to a friend, give it away, archive it. But a DRM-protected video? Forget it.

…a delusion that lasts for decades is not a delusion. It’s an institution. And these, our institutions, are what now fail us.

…

2. Intellectual property. More specifically, the fiat declaration that properties that are easy to reproduce shouldn’t be reproduced.

Declaring that “information wants to be free” is an ideological stance. A real-world situation where information can’t be anything but free, where digital information cannot be monetized, is bizarre and deeply scary. No banker or economist anywhere has the ghost of clue what to do under such conditions.

Intellectual property made sense and used to work rather well when conditions of production favored it. Now they don’t. If it’s simple to copy just one single movie, some gray area of fair use can be tolerated. If it becomes easy to copy a million movies with one single button-push, this vast economic superstructure is reduced to rags. Our belief in this kind of “property” becomes absurd.

To imagine that real estate is worthless is strange, though we’ve somehow managed to do that. But our society is also built on the supposed monetary worth of unreal estate. In fact, the planet’s most advanced economies are optimized to create pretty much nothing else. The ultimate global consequences of this situation’s abject failure would rank with the collapse of Communism.

Thanks to Mike for sending this my way :)

I told Bruno about this idea today and he sent me this and this. Exactly what I’m thinking.

Ben Terrett: Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008

I want this to be Artefatica Project Two. An ongoing project. We have such amazing thinkers here. It’s a vibrant, exciting community. We are creating and I want it in print. And face it: Nothing beats sitting across from your lover in the morning drinking coffee, each quietly reading your own thing, no need to talk. The whole breakfast-lover thing just doesn’t work with a laptop. Oh yeah — and there’s also getting great writing to all of our non-techy neighbors and the serendipity offered by a newspaper’s physicality. What’s that written there? Under your puppy and wet with pee? Wrapped around a wineglass from your last move? But enough: I’m sticking with the lover image ;)

The only thing stopping me? Cash money. Yep. So… if you are an innovative Montreal business and want your brand associated with leading thinkers and good design get in touch and we can work out the numbers. (Think BMW supporting TED.) It would be a labour of love: Aretefatica will contribute the time to manage production, a talented designer will get an awesome gig, a local printer will get new business, coffeshop owners will experience an increase in sales, bloggers will get published, you’ll hear people in the streets talking about real stuff happening in our community. Everyone wins. What say you?

UPDATE, FEBRUARY 6, 2009
Holy shit, look at this: Pie Paper
From New Zealand. Beautiful.

UPDATE, MARCH 6, 2009
Getting organized. Starting to collect blogs. Thinking now will combine local, national, international.

One of the important ideas behind LibriVox was this: a vibrant public domain is essential for a healthy society, and is essential for innovation — which I think can also be expressed as: “finding solutions to problems.” Having a wide and vibrant public domain — of ideas, texts, learning, science, open source code, audio recordings, art, etc. — means that as we face problems of one kind or another, we have at our disposal a whole host of tools and information and building blocks that will help us find solutions. We’ve seen in the past few decades, however, a move against this idea of public intellectual space — broadly the the movement towards protection of “intellectual property.” We’ve seen this across all sectors of society, from how universities treat their scientific research, to patenting of life, patents on processes, the abusive and self-destructive suing of fans by music companies and Hollywood. I oppose much of this stuff on a number of grounds: one is a moral objection to the greed of companies who wish to extend their ownership beyond where it had ever been imagined previously. The other objection is more pragmatic: that allowing companies to do this will stifle innovation, and in the long run will be very damaging to our societies.

So LibriVox — besides being a project about making audiobooks — was originally conceived of as a small bulwark in a larger moral, intellectual and political battle around the value of the “public domain” broadly defined. And part of that defense is this idea that people can and will and should build on the public domain to make new things and provide new more innovative solutions to problems. LibriVox would make the audio recordings, make them available, and the hope has always been that others would find great things to do with them.

…

So the question around licensing became this: do we want to limit how people use LibriVox recordings? What is *wrong* with commercial uses? As long as the audio remains accessible, and free for all to use forever, then I saw no reason why we should limit anything — limiting would just mean that in the scheme of things, fewer people would listen to the recordings we have made. And in my calculus of the universe, that’s a bad thing: I think the universe will be a better place the more people listen to LibriVox recordings.

Are you paying attention? Because here’s where it gets really good:

But beyond that sort of pragmatic thinking, there is a wider philosophical question about ownership, control, and the act of truly giving something away. I think Creative Commons is a wonderful tool, and it changed the way I thought about art. But it maintains this idea: I own this work and you may do with it just what I say you may do. Now that’s fine: I license, for instance, my personal blog writing like this. But LibriVox is more radical. LibriVox says: we make these recordings, and we give them away, no strings attached. Use them as you like: you don’t have to ask permission or tell us about it, or do anything, just use them as you like. They are yours as much as they are ours now. We have gifted them to the universe.

That’s a pretty radical idea, far more radical than CC which says: here are the terms under which I allow you to use my work.

It’s radical and it’s liberating as well, because in some sense one’s ownership of things is a two way street, and the things you own in some sense own you too – ownership means you have certain responsibilities to that thing, including monitoring how other people use it. Breaking that ownership bond is a powerful sort of experiment.

Of course, it just keeps getting better. The final point: the shrinking public domain.

There is one final very important point, which I had not really thought about until Michael Hart of Gutenberg told me about it recently. US copyright law has extended and extended again the term of copyright, currently 95 years after publication date. This means that nothing has gone into the public in a very long time. And if copyright law-making continues on like this, there will be another extension when the next batch of public domain stuff is currently scheduled to click over. So, possibly, nothing new will ever go into the public domain again.

In the old days, there was about a 50-50 split: 50% of texts were in the public domain, 50% under copyright. Every year more and more texts came into being, but a whole swath of things went into the public domain, and the ratio kept more or less the same. That was a healthy for society because people had much easier access to those texts that went into the public domain.

That’s not happening anymore. So the public domain is shrinking as a ratio of available knowledge.

Which brings another point: Creative Commons does not, in fact, make any contribution to the public domain, because the term of Creative Commons licenses is the same as for copyright (i think, that is: 95 years after publication). So Creative Commons in fact does NOTHING to protect or enhance the public domain — it only creates a new class of copyright protection that is much more liberal than previous incarnations.

So LibriVox is a small beacon of light in this policy question, slowly adding to the public domain while all around the public domain is shrinking. This is important in some broad sense beyond anything particular we do at LibriVox. At least I think it is.

Yeah. I know. More than a few bits. I almost cut and pasted the whole thing. I couldn’t stop. Hugh, you write think so good. Gentle readers, do yourselves a favor: read the full post. Or better yet, check out Librivox ;)

Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. Visit his website. Read more on Wikipedia.

Download (PDF) Benkler’s seminal paper, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” in the Yale Law Journal, 369:1-79, 2002.

Français

Artefatica’s first project is a collaboration with Montreal artist Emily-Rose Michaud. We’re producing a book, website, and some wonderful swag to celebrate Emily’s work in the Maguire Meadow, document the many community uses of this wild urban space (a terrain vague), and provide activists and the city with materials and ideas as they plan its future.  The team (more on them to come) is in place and we’ve been hard at work, meeting weekly, planning, pulling together content. We’ve developed the outline for the book:

• The Roerich Garden project: Summary
• This is a living community space: Writing, photos, video, drawings, and archival materials that show all the ways the community uses this space
• Us in the world: Similar initiatives locally, nationally, globally
• A vision for the future: What are the possibilities for this space? Preservation? Development?

Do you have content you’d like to submit? If so, please send it to Emily. All content and outputs will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, allowing subsequent creators to remix and build on it.

Would you like to receive updates on the book? Subscribe below and we’ll keep you posted. We’re hoping to launch the first edition in August 2009.

Note to self: It takes waaaay longer than this to create a book in your non-working time that gathers submissions from over 50 people! Read the next update.

….

Photo of Emily on home page by Kevin Brown.
Photo above of Roerich Garden by Melissa Campbell.