MC Weekly Issue #15, Thursday, April 6, 2006
“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”
Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.
Set me free.
The most profound impact of information technology has been to transfer the potential of the scientific method - the ever-expanding accumulation of knowledge - to the cultural sphere. Internet protocols allowed us to link any two computers, enabling an explosive global network of networks. Emerging grid protocols for distributed computing allow us to link everything else - data-bases, simulation and visualization tools, and the unused computing power of machines - generating a worldwide cultural accumulation beyond imagin-ation, available to anyone, anywhere.
Learning to share: To imagine that any one closed group could solve the complex problems we face today is folly. The free and open software movements promise to overcome our territorial attitudes and take advantage of our collective potential.
Information doesn’t want anything, but people want it to be free so that they can trust it. Hidden information always makes you wonder who’s hiding it and why.
- Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings
In his book Tomorrow Now, Bruce Sterling talks about information now seeming like everything to everybody. He writes, “Information is commerce, media, politics, science, art, education, military power, a good, a service, a dessert topping, a floor wax, porn…” We’re clearly soaking in it. Its abstract pervasiveness, though, should not make it any less important - in terms of scrutinizing its contents - than anything else. We ought to create enough of a critical distance from information that we can ask questions about the operating forces that bring it into being.
In a free society, all code should be liberated. We want to know the programming that sits behind the fancy package. But we don’t want it to get in the way of what we want it to do for us. We want it to be transparent. When it fails, we know it. And if we don’t have access to the code, we have no way of knowing how to fix it. When it fails, and the code is available to us - as with the open source and free software movements - then we can see where the bugs are and fix the problem. It really comes down to having access to the information - not that the majority of us will know what to technically do with code. But we need to begin caring about the significance of code and the importance of its effects. After all, as Mitch Kapor, designer of the hugely successful Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program and creator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - a public interest group working for the civil liberties of people in information technology - says, “Architecture is politics.” If we remain ignorant to code, we inadvertently remain ignorant to politics.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation deserves more consideration. The EFF is a non-profit advocacy and legal agency that is dedicated to preserving free speech rights such as those protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution in the context of today’s digital age. Its stated main goal is to educate the press, policymakers and the general public about civil liberties issues related to technology; and to act as a defender of those liberties. The EFF is a membership organisation supported by donations and is based in San Francisco, California, with staff members in Toronto, Ontario and London, UK. EFF has taken action in several ways:
- providing or funding legal defence in court
- defending the individual and new technologies from the chilling effects of baseless or misdirected legal threats
- providing guidance to the government and courts
- organizing political action and mass mailings
- supporting new technologies which it believes preserve personal freedoms
- maintaining a database and web sites of related news and information
- monitoring and challenging potential legislation that it believes would infringe on personal liberties and erode fair use
- soliciting a list of what it considers patent abuses with intentions to defeat those that it considers without merit
The EFF was founded in July 1990 by Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow, who met through the on-line community, The WELL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WELL ). They were motivated by the search and seizure on Steve Jackson Games by the United States Secret Service early in 1990. Similar but officially unconnected law-enforcement raids were being conducted across the United States at about that time as part of a state-federal task force called Operation Sundevil, but the Steve Jackson Games case, which became EFF’s first high-profile case, was the major rallying point when EFF began promoting computer- and Internet-related civil liberties. EFF’s second big case was Bernstein v. United States led by Cindy Cohn, where programmer and professor Daniel Bernstein sued the government for permission to publish his encryption software, Snuffle, and a paper describing it. More recently the organization has been involved in defending Edward Felten, Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov.
Lawrence Lessig’s considerable activities also deserve special singling out. Lessig is currently professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard ( http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/ ), as well as Stanford’s similar Center for the Internet and Society. He is widely known as a known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications.
In 2002, Lessig was awarded the FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software from the Free Software Foundation. Lessig is perhaps best known as a critic of copyright term extensions.
He proposed the concept of “Free Culture”, supports free software and open spectrum, and is the founder and chairman of the extraordinarily important Creative Commons and a board member of the aforementioned Electronic Frontier Foundation. At his “Free culture” keynote at OSCON 2002, half of his speech was also about software patents, which he views as a rising threat to both open source and innovation. Lessig is on the board of directors of Software Freedom Law Center, launched in February 2005.
The following interview first appeared on CIUT-FM and was developed by Jessica for the Massive Change radio projects. This transcript comes form Massive Change, the book, by Bruce Mau, with Jennifer Leonard and the Institute without Boundaries.
Lawrence Lessig on free culture
How are coders themselves increasingly becoming lawmakers?
In implementing and choosing the architectures that will define cyberspace, you’re implementing and choosing certain architectures to enable or disable values. So you’re making political choices. What’s troubling is when these political choices are made by entities that aren’t responsible publicly; we then begin to worry about the extent to which this kind of private lawmaking defeats public values.
How is commerce changing the character of the Internet?
The intended consequence of “cookies” is to deposit little markers on your hard drive so that the website “remembers” you and what you want to buy, which makes it easy to shop online. The unintended consequences include the fact that it’s now much easier to track people as they move around the Internet, and to target advertising or gather information from people. What are typically considered invisible markers are actually indelible markers. And as a result, it’s now very easy to monitor and chase all online transactions. Those in business are not paid to think about privacy and personal liberty. Businesses do what they’re paid to do: find ways to make it so they can sell stuff on the Internet. We need to think about the consequences of their techniques, and if those consequences corrode values that are important to us. If so, then we have to find ways to resist this.
What are the roots of intellectual copyright law?
People have an understandable view that the idea of copyright has been around for 200 years and that it has never changed. And so, when you see this explosion of peer-to-peer file sharing - which is said to violate copyright laws - most people’s natural response is to say, “Let’s stop the theft.” But in fact, there’s a long tradition to consider. There was once a powerful group in England called the Congor. They were a monopolist group that restricted the spread of knowledge by keeping prices of books high. Then along came the Statute of Anne, which was designed to promote education and learning by limiting copyright to 14 years. Its effect was to basically tell the Congor that their government-granted monopolies would be over, and they would have to compete in the marketplace if they wanted to continue to prosper. As a result of its implementation, for the first time in English history, the works of Shakespeare, for example, were no longer under the control of monopoly publishers. Works became free and the tradition of free culture was really born.
What do the open source and free software movements of today have in common with the Oxford English Dictionary?
The OED was the most explicitly open source publishing project that we had before the production of the Free Software Foundation’s new Linux operating system. It got born when there was an announcement in the newspapers around England that said, “We want to put together a people’s “dictionary” - an empirical dictionary. It wouldn’t try to tell people how they were supposed to speak; it would try to figure out how people were using the English language and catalog that so there would be a common reference point when people were trying to understand what the language was or how it had changed. So they sent out a request for volunteers and literally got thousands of volunteers across England to begin to produce little note cards of the usage of the English language. These notes were sent to an editor who went through them all and collated the work into what eventually became the OED. It’s an example of creativity that I think is not limited to software dictionaries but is common in many areas of creative life.
So your interest in copyright is not exclusive to cyberculture?
The war in cyberspace over copyright has increased the regulations of copyright, but the burden of those increased regulations is not just felt in cyberspace. Unfortunately, creators everywhere feel it. This is the aim of the free culture movement: to try to remove the unproductive, burdensome restrictions so that we can get back to a world where it’s easy for creators to create. Especially when technologies like the Internet enable a wide range of creators to create.
Was it Walt Disney who changed everything?
Walt Disney’s greatest work built on the public domain. Walt Disney took the stories of the Brothers Grimm and retold them in a warm and fuzzy way, and captured the imagination of many generations of Americans. He was free to take those stories and retell them in the way that he did because the Grimm fairy tales had passed into the public domain. This was Walt Disney’s technique - and it’s been the technique of the Disney Corporation all the way to the present. Because Disney has been so successful in extending the terms of copyright, nobody can do to Walt Disney what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. Nobody can build on top of Disney’s work in the way that Disney built on top of other peoples’ work. And that change in the basic bargain of copyright is what I think has been most destructive to the way in which free culture has evolved. Free culture has always depended upon the Walt Disneys of the world having the freedom to build without seeking permission upon our past. That freedom has now been removed by lobbyists, who convince Congress that a better way to have a culture is to require that you first get permission from corporate owners.
What do you mean when you say, “A time is marked by the ideas that are taken for granted”?
If you really want to understand a culture, don’t look to the things people argue about but, instead, try to understand the things they take for granted. I believe there’s an important role to be played by copyright, in creating incentives for a culture to be developed, but we have, almost subconsciously, adopted an extreme vision of copyright protection. The result is that we are destroying the very opportunities that copyright was originally intended to enable.
What are your thoughts on Copy Left?
Copy Left is the creation of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. They use the rules of copyright to not limit the spread of culture but guarantee that creative work is freely available for people to build upon.
How is Microsoft responding to this?
Microsoft, of course, is a company that was built entirely on proprietary software, not free software, and so it’s threatened by the extraordinary growth and employment of free software. Both by governments and commercial entities, who find, for example, the GNU/Linux operating system to be just as good and in many ways better - and certainly cheaper - than the Windows operating system. Microsoft has been very keen to drive governments away from the General Public License by, at various times, suggesting that it would destroy the country’s software industry and claiming that it was an unfair business practice for the government to prefer open source or free software versus proprietary software.
Your thoughts on the future?
I hope the future is one where people increasingly embrace the idea of making content available on freer terms than content is available now. I am the chairman of something called the Creative Commons, which enables people to mark their content with licences that signal freedoms associated with the content, just like the Free Software Foundation tried to do with software. My hope is that we get a much wider range of adopters to this model, so that the extremism of All Rights Reserved, which was Hollywood’s vision - versus No Rights Reserved, which is the kind of anarchist’s vision and is no longer what defines the debate - is replaced by something more moderate, something that enables artists to build and share content, but also compensates them for their creativity.
Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
