John Palfrey says we don’t know how the Internet might affect democracy, but there lots of possibilities. He lays them out. [I’m typing quickly trying to capture the outline. As always, I’m missing stuff and getting it wrong.]

First, it might affect participatory democracy by providing open information enviornments, making new networks, enabling tools for individual activists, a productivity tool for campaigners, and attracting new participants. On the other hand, it might provide too much information, it can fragment us (“The Daily Me”), the participation can be watered down, it limits participation to those with access, some states are instituting censorship (cf. the ONI project), and maybe we should be jumping to “postdemocratic” order. So, maybe we’ll see refinements; the context matters a lot and it depends “a ton on what baseline you choose.” That is, if you’re only asking if participatory culture makes demcoracy better, that’s an easy bar. But maybe we should be aiming higher.

Second, acadmics says that the real story is about economic democracy and the emergence of a stronger middle class, and Doc Searls’ “Vendor Relationship Management.”

Third, academics also talk about semiotic democracy, e.g., control of cultural goods, with meaning created by many, not by the few. More YouTube and Second Life, less Disney. But (he asks), will people participate? Will we just create the old structures online? And won’t new intermediaries emerge to decide what we see?

John lists takeaways:

The Web is about creativity, innovation, and greater power at the edges.

This is a global phenomenon.

Big media companies generally have no idea how to deal with participatory democracy.

The legal and political battle over the future of the Internet is where a lot of this will play out. The outcome is not assured.

This conference is about where theory meets practice.

Q: First, participatory culture and democracy are non-partisan. Second, someone has to tell us what’s true or else we’re liable to end up with fascism, racism, anti-semitism, etc.
A: Something to talk about this afternoon. [Tags: beyondbroadcast07 john_palfrey media democracy politics berkman]

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No, it’s not a place where you can get free digital downloads. Rather, it’s software for creating your own storefront for selling your music, documents, used Powerpoints, whatever. It’s from the Web’s favorite musician, BradSucks, and uses Amazon’s incredibly cheap S3 storage service. BradSucks’ store is DRM-free, of course.

You can see it in action here. Or you can download BradSuck’s software here, so you can install it on your own site. (And while you’re checking out BradSucks’ store, you can listen to his music for free, and then go buy a copy of his album.) [Tags: bradsucks music drm retail amazon ecommerce everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Wendy Seltzer, law professor and Berkman Fellow, posted the snippet of the Superbowl where they warn viewers that it’s against the law to describe the game. Wendy posted this for her law class. And, yes, the NFL has sent a take-down notice to YouTube.

Wendy is a former EFF lawyer. She’s sending a counter-notification to YouTube.

(Note: This blog post is copyrighted. You may not reuse it, link to it, describe it, talk about it, think about it, or remember it without the explicit permission of the NFL Joho. Ok, Joho says you may.) [Tags: copyright nfl youtube wendy_seltzer superbowl irony berkman]

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Berkman Fellow (and MacArthur genius) Lewis Hyde is giving a Tuesday lunch talk on who owns creative content. [As always, I’m paraphrasing, typing quickly, getting things wrong, leaving things out.]

I.

He begins by quoting Goethe in the 1830s about his writings as “the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe” (quoting Goethe) vs. Emerson in “Self-Reliance” writing, “Insist on yourself; never imitate…” Lewis says our protocols around “intellectual property” side with Emerson. Defending “IP” against being enclosed can be seen, Lewis says, as defending a particular way of being human.

Science, he says, is collective. He cites Benjamin Franklin’s work on electrical theory. “None of what he did was the result of a solitary genius,” Lewis says. His equipment came from friends. He worked with three other folks in his lab. Franklin worked with Leyden jars (the first capacitors) which obviously were not invented by Franklin or they would have been called Franklin jars. Franklin also depended on Newton’s Optics, especially Query 21: “Aether (like our air) may contain particles which endeavor to recede from one another,” giving Franklin the idea that electricity was a fluid [Don’t trust my paraphrase here!]. Franklin also used Harvey’s work on the circulation of blood. “Finally, it was a culture that believed in open communication.” E.g., some German scientists published work on static electricity, which was published in France and translated into English. “This is how all scientists work: All collaborative and cumulative,” says Lewis.

Yet the image of Frankilin is that of a solitary genius with the mind of a “child of nature,” i.e., someone with an immediate relation to nature.

The 18th century idea of open communication arises from their view of the nature of truth. Franklin wrote to friends that his ideas are “crude and hasty,” but (Franklin wrote) communicating scientific ideas often improves them. “Collective inquiry is less prone to error than individual inquiry,” said Franklin. “The breeding ground of the truth lies in the breeding ground of conversation.” Franklin did not defend his ideas about electricity on the ground that “If they are right. Truth and Experience will support them. If worng they ought to be refuted and rejected,” he wrote. “Disputes are apt to sour one’s Temper.” The truth arises in conversation, not in solitude, reports Lewis.

This affected Franklin’s view of the ownership of ideas. He declined a patent on the wood stove (which is not known, one might add, as the Leydon stove) because inventions come out of a community. Private interests may prompt a person to defend his ideas whether right or wrong, Franklin thought, says Lewis.

Salston in The Common Thread about the Human Genome Project says that you have to have protocols of non-ownership if you want to do science. In this he is like Franklin.

Franklin’s work was the result of a collective being that bears the name Franklin, Lewis concludes.

II.

Franklin often published anonymously, which was a gesture to indicate that the author intended to write impartially, Lewis says, speaking for the public good, not private ends. Thomas Paine explained the anonymity of Common Sense:e “Who the author of this production is, is wholly unnecessary to the public, as the object for attention is the doctrine itself, not the man.”

It was believed that each individual has only a partial view: a part of the truth, and partial to one one’s own interests. Opinion (which we would call “belief” these days, says Lewis) existed between truth and falsity. It was assumed to belong to individuals. It wasn’t as certain as truth, of course. At the Constitutional Convention, Franklin gave a speech saying that he had doubts about the Constitution, but he had doubts about his doubts. “I consent…to this Constitution … The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good,” Franklin said. Each must doubt his own doubt for the sake of the public good. “He asks them to give up their partial views,” Lewis says. His speech itself modeled that.

“For the 18th C., self-sacrifice is constitutive of citizenship in the public sphere. The citizen cannot own his or her ideas.” Where writers claim their writing in their own distinctive voice, it will be harder to create a lively public sphere, Lewis says. [Or the character of that public sphere changes, and certainly how it supports truth. The Internet is a lively public sphere, but it is not a selfless distilling of truth. Truth is something else on the Net.]

“Can you come up with a case in which self-erasure in public utterance enables a valued way of being?” Lewis asks himself. He answers that when judges issue opinions, they frequently plagiarize the briefs from the attorneys. But, says Lewis, plagiarism is the wrong term. Legal writing tends to be written by communities, and you can’t claim it by copyright. Having your work cut and pasted without attribution into an opinion is a sign of success and honor.

A second example. The MLK “I have a Dream” speech copyright is owned by his estate and it charges for its use. Our practices around public discourse constitute who we are, says Lewis. The King estate has moved MLK from one category to another. “It is a type of patricide,” concludes Lewis.

Overall point: The choices we make about the commons is a choice about what type of being we are. Hollywood has one view. Franklin had another.

Q: (me) That was amazing. Just to pick up one point, the 18th C view of anonymity is so different from ours, from what you say. They were anonymous in order to present a non-partial, non-individual belief whereas we tend to use anonymity to enable us to be so partial and individual that we dare not sign our names. What does that tell us about who we are and our relation to truth?
A: I’ve hidden some trap doors in this talk. E.g., you had to be somebody before you could become the nobody of anonymity. Women and slaves didn’t have enough standing to be able to erase themselves through anonymous works. So, my response to your question is to complicate the 18th C view of anonymity.

[I missed the next question, but here’s Lewis’ answer.] A lot of this goes back to the myths of how authors make a living. The myth is that you make your living out of copyrights, which is true for only a tiny handful of writers.

The Spectator was in fact a persona, says Lewis. The Spectator was everywhere observing. This is like print itself, says Lewis. Franklin began his career by ripping off The Spectator. His brother was the first to publish a newspaper “without authority.” The self was shaped by the development of a free press.

Q: You over-emphasize the social side of self.
A: Because individualism is not in danger. I think Franklin’s solution to the circle of self and group was humor. “If I had become humble, I would have been proud of my humility,” Franklin said. He was incredibly vain and a dedicated humble servant, and he managed the interface with humor.

Q: (JP ) (i) When Franklin gave up patents, he was wealthy. (ii) Do you have a normative view about mashups?
A: (i) His wealth was another trapdoor I tried to hide. His wealth repositions his argument. I’ve searched his works for every remark on patent, and I’ve found one case where he argued for granting a patent to people who wanted to immigrate from the UK with a patent for a technique used in the UK…He was simultaneously for patent and for piracy of a British patent. (ii) We’re in transition. We need to preserve a balance. I do believe in one of the original arguments for patent: To establish people apart from patronage.

Q: (me) Are you saying we should go back to the 18th C sense of self? You seem to like it. [Hmm. It sounds hostile in print. It wasn’t in person. Not at all.]
A: I’m using history as a way of exploring the self. We can’t go back to the 18th C, but it provides one way of opening up the question. It’s not 18th C to say we’re collective beings, not just private individuals.

Q: (me) But at the next level of detail of how we’re social and private and our relation to truth, are we now different?
A: It’s going to be different because it’s not a print culture any more. It will have different self formations.

Q: (doc) Has the modern corporation affected the self?
A: Michael Sandel’s Democracy and Its Discontents. [Tags: lewis_hyde commons patents benjamin_franklin copyright copyleft anonymity ]

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The Chinese blogger Isaac Mao has a three-part proposal for Google to help it get right in China. In an open letter to Google’s founders he suggests: 1) Google set up a $1B venture fund to invest in leading edge companies in China. 2) “Develop anti-censorship tools and service for global Internet users.” 3) “Increase the incentive to Chinese Google Adsense users.”

When Google first announced that it would agree to censor certain search terms in China, I thought that it was a reasonable choice among only bad alternatives, given other steps Google took, such as hosting the Chinese service out of China so that the Chinese totalitarian government wouldn’t have access to its records. I wasn’t sure then, and I’m not more sure now, that Google made the right choice. Adopting Isaac’s proposals would help explain why Google being in China is overall a good thing. (Thanks to Rebecca MacKinnon for the link.) [Tags: china google search isaac_mao]

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Interesting stuff percolating around the question of how controlled content ought to be, where “ought” means morally, culturally, and for hard-nosed business reasons. Is the issue coming to a head?

We have Viacom sending 100,000 take-down notices to YouTube, including some videos Viacom is pulling out of the public domain without even having viewed them. Viacom’s shareholders ought to start up a suit right now. This is the stupidest marketing move in a long time. Jeff Jarvis puts it succinctly in a post that ends “Damned fools.” Terry Heaton also lays it down. And then we have Steve Jobs asking the music publishers to give up on DRM, although Job’s piece also has some special pleading that (imo) weakens it.

Could the content control bubble be about to burst?

[Tags: media viacom drm youtube everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Mitchell Baker has posted a draft of the Mozilla Manifesto. (There’s discussion of it here.) Here are the principles:

1. The Internet is an integral part of modern life — a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole.2. The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.3. The Internet should enrich the lives of individual human beings.

4. Individuals’ security on the Internet is fundamental and cannot be treated as optional.

5. Individuals must have the ability to shape their own experiences on the Internet.

6. The effectiveness of the Internet as a public resource depends upon technological interoperability, innovation and decentralized participation worldwide.7. Free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource.8. Transparent community-based development processes promote participation, accountability, and trust.9. Commercial involvement in the development of the Internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial goals and public benefit is critical.10. Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the Internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.

There isn’t a sentence in it with which I disagree. And that’s the problem. It’s not disagreeable enough. I can imagine all sorts of organizations that I think are doing harm to the Net signing onto the first five principles without even checking with marketing first. The only two that would give anyone pause are #6 and #7 (although the telcos would have to do claim that—as per #5—making international phone calls counts as “decentralized participation worldwide”). Even then, they could say they are happy to have other people doing open source work, because that’s part of the balance that #9 endorses.

So, I guess I’d be more enthusiastic about the principles if they had more bite. Name the threats to principles #1-5. Declare that its openness in process and standards should make open source software the first choice to be considered when organizations serving the public good are making software decisions. Denounce the use of software patents. I hate to be, well, disagreeable about a set of principles I agree with, produced by a group I admire and whose software I use and am grateful for every day, but imo the manifesto needs to be more than a pat on the back and a big group hug. [Tags: open_source mozilla digital_rights everything_is_miscellaneous]

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JP Rangaswami points to a Wired interview with Josh Madell of Other Music, a NYC music store’s site that’ll sell you songs without restrictions on how you use what you’ve bought. Josh says, for example,:

The nice thing about selling digitally is that the space limitations are much less restrictive than at the physical store, where we constantly have to delete items for space reasons, and also you are never out of stock of an MP3. The thing about iTunes, which is by far the most successful digital store so far, is that despite the cool factor they have been able to hold onto, they are really closer to Best Buy than Other Music in terms of the shopping experience. That’s great for some people, but we feel there is a real need for great indie download shops with a curated selection.

JP also points to a funny Other Music video that’s an ad in the sense of making Other Music look as over-the-top horrible as possible. It is, as RageBoy comments, durn gonzo. [Tags: music drm other_music jp_rangaswami josh_madell digital_rights itunes everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Susan Crawford blogs about Sen. Sununu’s legislation that would prevent the FCC from creating audio and video “broadcast flags” that would prevent digital recording devices from making copies of content that has a flag set by its owner. Susan quotes Sununu:

“The suggestion is that if we don’t do this, it will stifle creativity. Well…we have now an unprecedented wave of creativity and product and content development…new business models, and new methodologies for distributing this content. The history of government mandates is that it always restricts innovation…why would we think that this one special time, we’re going to impose a statutory government mandate on technology, and it will actually encourage innovation?”

Taken as an argument, this is fallacious, because maybe this is the exceptional case. But taken as a putting of the rhetorical ball in the court where it belongs, it’s right on…. [Tags: susan_crawford broadcast_flag fcc sununu politics digial_rights copyright ]

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John Mello has an article in TechNewsWorld on the Snowe-Dorgan Net neutrality bill. I only had one Aaarrrggghhh moment reading it, which is unusual for Net neutrality articles: When the spokesperson for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association said he’s against Net neutrality because “We continue to believe that regulation of the Internet is unnecessary and will only stifle the investment, innovation and creativity that has been the hallmark of today’s dynamic broadband marketplace.”

Net neutrality is not about regulating the Internet. It’s about regulating the carriers. We shouldn’t let the anti-Net neutrality folks get away with this particular semantic fiddle.

[Tags: net_neutrality digital_rights]

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