Smart Isenberg, Selectively Dumb Bush

David Isenberg's latest SMART letter (#81) is out, and it's another good 'un. The bulk of the issue talks about his recent trip to Middle Earth, um, New Zealand, a place that may be small enough to be smart enough to do the Right Thing about telecommunications. Unfortunately, he hasn't yet posted it on his website.

David includes a quotation from Mark Crispin Miller:

"[U.S. President George W. Bush] has no trouble speaking off the cuff when he's speaking punitively, when he's talking about violence, when he's talking about revenge. When he struts and thumps his chest, his syntax and grammar are fine. It's only when he leaps into the wild blue yonder of compassion, or idealism, or altruism, that he makes these hilarious mistakes."

Mark Crispin Miller author of The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder, quoted in "Bush Anything But Moronic," by Murray Whyte, Toronto Star, November 28, 2002.

Denise on Creative Commons

Denise at Bag 'n' Baggage describes her thought process in using a Creative Commons license. It's a helpful discussion by a bloggin' lawyer. She also answers reader's questions.

The Creative Commons has its own useful blog.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

Eric disagrees with my comments about why digital ID schemes need to be driven from the bottom up based on the real needs of the market. I'm just not sure he's disagreeing with what I'm actually saying.

I'm saying that I'm wary of digID schemes driven from the top down because they are not addressing the real needs of the market; those needs are already being addressed in a thousand different ways. Somehow this comes across as elitist in Eric's re-statement of it. Or maybe he's just teasing me. Anyway, the substance of Eric's reply is that, in caps, "IT'S ALREADY HERE." The Big Boys are already aggregating and blacklisting.

Eric's been doing us all a service by pointing this out. We should do what we can (i.e., precious little) to fight the Big Boys' plans. But rushing to support another top-down scheme, albeit one that is far better and far more focused on the rights of the individual, isn't necessarily the right way to counteract the predatory ID schemes already coming at us. Here are two reasons why not: First, if there's no market demand for such a system - and there isn't - it won't work. Second, even if there were, that wouldn't stop the anti-market Big Boys from imposing their will on us.

So, I can't get too het up about supporting a humane digital ID scheme that will bring with it -- necessarily, according to Bryan -- a DRM scenario that, IMO, is as close to a nightmare as we can dream.

Bottom-up DigID

Tig's Corner says what I've been trying to say about DigID: "... unless there are applications which use digital id, why will I want to use them?" Right on. We've got a bunch of digital id capabilities already, each solving some real problem such as: How can I trust that you've sent me money for the thing I sold you at eBay? How can I be sure that you have the right to change the way my daily email newsletter from Slate is delivered? How can I be sure that your company isn't a Nigerian scam? To each of these questions of authority and authorization, we have developed good enough answers. Imposing a top-down, infrastructure-wide solution - even one where we get to control our IDs, which is (as everyone in the thread agrees) an absolute requirement - will fail because there is no market demand for it. It will be over-engineered and will bring with it the known tendencies towards abuse in favor of benefits that the market hasn't asked for.

Keep Free Software Free

By Jay Sulzberger, of NY's Free Computing organization, forwarded by Seth Johnson:

Tuesday 31 December 2002: Deadline for Comments on W3C Patents Policy

In the past two years the Free Software Movement has moved W3C, the Official Standards Body of the World Wide Web, from a proposed patent policy, which would have, in future, denied us our present right to full and free use of free software to build the Web, to a policy intended to guarantee that free software may be used without fear of patent encumbrances. This move is an important victory for us. But the present proposed policy on patents has a bug that is worth fixing. The mechanism of the bug is non-obvious, except to people who have studied the GPL and certain other free software licenses. It is a bug that, if the proposal is made an official standard, would allow for patent encumbrances to be laid on certain free software in circumstances where today no encumbrance is allowed.

Here is what the Free Software Foundation says on its front page about this bug:

The W3C "Royalty-Free" patent policy proposal does not protect the rights of the Free Software community to full participation in the implementation and extension of web standards. Please read more on this issue and send a comment to the W3C.

Part of the effort that moved the W3C to its present position was a furious outpouring of comments in opposition to the original proposal of the Englobulators:

http://www.w3.org/2001/ppwg http://www.w3.org/2001/10/patent-response
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment/2001Oct/thread.html

The fix needed right now is a small fix. But the W3C must again be reminded with what jealous vigor we guard our right to build our Web the way we have built it down to this day, using free software.

The bug appears in Item 3 of Section 3, titled "W3C Royalty-Free (RF) Licensing Requirements", of the present proposal:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-patent-policy-20021114

This Item allows for a supposedly free grant to use a patent to be so restricted that a piece of Web infrastructure software might be encumbered if used for some non-Web use. Since the GPL does not allow such encumbrancing, GPL-ed Web software re-purposed for non-Web use could not be legally freely redistributed.

Please read the Free Software Foundation's page on this bug:

http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/w3c-patent.html

The text of the page is below.

Here is the official Last Call for Comments:

http://www.w3.org/2002/12/patent-policy-lastcall-info.html

If you write a comment in your own words, for repair of the bug, it will help.

Jay Sulzberger
Corresponding Secretary LXNY
LXNY is New York's Free Computing Organization.

Sad Perl

As I've been messing around with perl a little this morning, trying to learn it more systematically, I've been feeling gravity tugging on my eyes and hearing the morning quiet more acutely than usual.

It took me a few minutes to realize why a programming language is making me sad. I'm mourning Daniel Pearl.

An AI challenge

I just read a letter to the editor that listed as benefits of casino gambling what were actually disadvantages. It took me two sentences to suspect it was sarcastic and three to confirm it. In fact, the writer had to get all blatant about it: "Upticks in crime, problem gambling, and other harmful social consequences are things we all need." A subtler writer would have left the pejoratives out. We still would have recognized it as sarcasm if the claims were outrageous enough.

Here's my point: Sarcasm has to be a tough one for AI.

Ironically, Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program that responded as if it were a Rogerian psychologist was taken seriously by a surprising number of people although Weizenbaum intended its content to be a parody. (You can play it online here.)

Searching Kafka

This is how it happens. Pettiness is the most subversive enemy of freedom.

Wireless Manifesto

There's a manifesto proclaiming a "wireless commons" that has me just puzzled enough that I haven't signed it. It proclaims the virtues of wireless connectivity (using unlicensed spectrum, not Open Spectrum), and then commits the signatories to some type of support in the wireless build-out:

Becoming a part of the commons means being more than a consumer. By signing your name below, you become an active participant in a network that is far more than the sum of its users. You will strive to solve the social, political and technical challenges we face. You will provide the resources your community consumes by co-operating with total strangers to build the network that we all dream of.

I don't think I can live up to that demand, for I am primarily a bandwidth consumer; I do have have a wifi transmitter that my neighbors could use. Does that mean I can sign?

Anyway, a "wireless commons" is a phrase worth floating.

Mitch on Digital ID

Mitch Ratcliffe comments on the email thread about digital ID. Among other points:

... the basic problem with your debate [is] that it assumes the policy will be arrived at by companies bargaining with one another and, finally, once the dance of the giants is finished, offered to customers as a fait accompli. ... People own their identities and should continue to own them as they migrate into electronic environments

I don't think any of us disagree with Mitch that individuals should own their identity. I take that for granted. My concern has been more with: (1) The imposition of ID schemes top-down rather than continuing to grow bottom-up solutions to actual problems, and (2) What we would gain and lose with a strong digID system in place. The first concern sounds like it maps to Mitch's imperative ("Thou Shalt Own Thy Identity") but need not: it's conceptually possible to impose a top-down identity scheme that enables us to own our identities. It's just politically less likely since the people doing the imposing have an interest in taking custody of our IDs for us. How thoughtful of them.

Digital ID Thread

In response to Eric's musings, Doc, Bryan, AKMA, Kevin and I have been engaged in an email thread. With their permission, I've bundled together the messages, with some very minor cleanup (e.g., removing signoffs, etc.). You can read the loosely-raveled thread here.

The Daypop Effect

Much as I love DayPop, I can see that I'm contributing to its inaccuracy. If I see a link that's in the DayPop Top 40, I won't blog it unless I have something particular to say about it for I figure it's being blogged all over the place anyway.Thus, according to the Law of Inconspicuous Fame ("True fame extinguishes mentions"), height and persistence on the Top 40 tends to defeat itself.

Try out the Technorati Sidebar. Plunk in an URL and it will show you all the blogs that refer to it. (Well, all the blogs that Technorati tracks: 18,178 of 'em at last count.)

Imperfecting Life

On page one of the Boston Globe this morning is the announcement that a crackhead religious group claims to have cloned a human, perfectly and flawlessly reproducing someone's DNA. On page 9 of the Living/Arts section is an article by Randy Lewis that first appeared in the LA Times that says that Eminem, Toby Keith and the Transplants all have added analog-sounding crackles and pops to their CDs so that they'll sound as good as the old vinyl LPs.

For millennia, the distinction between human beings and God was that we're imperfect. In the age of digital machines, increasingly that's the line between being human and being technology.

Q: How many human institutions exist to deal with our imperfections?
A: All of them.
Each is informed by the fact that not only are the participants imperfect, but the system itself is fallible. No wonder we flounder with our own perfect inventions.

More from Eric

Eric paints a plausible scenario of what the Net will look like once strong digital IDs are in place, and then he scares the crap out of us by pointing to Verisign's new "consumer authentication system," currently being tested by eBay, that checks "50 best of breed data sources (personal, credit, demographic and black list information) to cross verify and risk rank consumers."

Blacklist???? Whose? How you get on? How do you get off? So, now Verisign's automated credit check will evaluate whether you have the standing to buy cotton doilies from eBay based on blacklists that come from unspecified somewheres. Anyone who's dealt with Verisign's ability to handle exceptions when it comes to domain names knows that Kafka was being optimistic.

This by itself should count as an argument against instituting "strong" digital IDs.

DigID and DRM

Lord bless Bryan Field-Elliot over at NetMeme. Bryan is a founder of PingID,

a member-owned, technology-neutral network that is facilitating the business framework necessary for the accelerated deployment of federated identity services.

He's also a straightforward guy. In response to Doc's call for "full-power" digital IDs in order to give power back to "consumers," Bryan writes:

There's an important relationship here with DRM (Digital Rights Management), which I think has been danced around quite enough, and should be brought into the spotlight. The relationship is, quite simply, that "Strong Identity" (what Doc calls "full power") is synomymous with Digital Rights Management. You can't have one without the other.

Why not? Bryan explains:

In both cases, one party (individual, or content megaconglomerate) produces digital content (personal info, or a $100mln movie), and makes it available for consumption by other parties, but only with some assurance that the information won't be copied or applied in undesired ways. The two problem patterns, and their range of solutions, appear pretty much identical to me.

...by the nature of information (which "wants to be free", it's said), we can never have Doc's "full power" identity infrastructure without some enforcement teeth.

As far as I can see, only hardware enforcement, or legal enforcement, will provide such a bite, and in both cases, likely to be circumventable by the sufficiently determined.

It's good to see the relationship of DRM and digID made explicit. Too often those pushing for digID avoid acknowleding the relationship.

So, let's get yet more clear about the relationship of DRM and digID. Bryan is not saying (I assume) that the two can't be distinguished the way you can't separate "automobile" from "car" or "wet" from "liquid water." Rather, he says, "you can't have one without the other."

And here I disagree. We could have digIDs that are used solely for enabling us prove we're the one that sent an email, to enable online voting, and to prove that we are the holder of the credit cards we use to buy stuff online. And, as Bryan acknowledges, we can have DRM without digID; DRM just wouldn't "have teeth."

But it all depends on what you mean by teeth. Bryan says he accepts "legal enforcement" as a type of tooth. You don't need digIDs to crack down on pirates who are taping movies on their first day of release and posting the files on the Net or to arrest the pirates who are mass producing bootleg CDs. You can even crack down on Kazaa "super nodes" or students at the Naval Academy who are downloading MP3s. You only need digIDs if you want to make it technologically nigh impossible to do what you want with the content you've downloaded. You only need digIDs if you want your ownership rights to be regulated at the bit level by the people from whom you've bought the content. You only need digIDs if your idea of DRM is CPPSROSE: "Content Providers' Post-Sale Rigid and One-Sided Enforcement." For more reasonable digital rights management we don't need digIDs.

So, it's good to surface the fact that when many people talk about digital IDs, they're often really talking about DRM. But, IMO we need to be damn sure not to define DRM solely as the right of content providers to prevent us from using the content we've bought in the ways we see fit within the bounds of law.

Now Bryan, who understands this stuff 100x better than I, can set me straight...

Bryan's posted a response. Here's what he says (from an email to me):

I think we disagree mostly because I didn't make clear enough in my original post, the difference between using DigID to "prove who you are" (what we do today), vs. using DigID to "control others' use of your personal info" (which we don't have today, and which Doc has variously named "Strong Identity" or "Sovereign Identity"). I believe, your response to me assumes I'm comparing the former to DRM, when actually I'm comparing the latter to DRM.

In his blog, Bryan says: "In classic security terms, we're talking about taking authentication as a given, and moving up the chain to a flexible authorization system for access to personal information." DRM gives the vendor the ability to authorize our use of the goods we buy, so I can see that formally digID and DRM are the same. Thanks for the clarification, Bryan (and did I get it right?).

Adapation Review

I've reviewed Adapation, the Charlie Kaufman comedy, over at Blogcritics.

(There's one howlingly incoherent sentence in the third paragraph where apparently I pressed the "Insert Gibberish" key instead of the "Delete" key. And since I'm temporarily locked out of the site, I can't fix it. Sorry.)

University of Phonyx

The University of Phoenix spams me about once a day. For example:

We are closer to you than you might think. Go to http://oz.valueclick.com/r/hs0243102/a0070077/0 to check the location nearest you. University of Phoenix is the nation’s largest private university.

—————————

You are receiving this email because you have opted-in to receive email from publisher: swelldeals. To unsubscribe, click below:http://u2.%host%/?z=95-2047662-ByRumS

Ah, yes, the mark of a truly excellent institute of higher education is that it gets its spam list from swelldeals.com. (No, I never "opted-in.") Well, that's what happens when you hire carney folk to administer your college.

The Net and Continuity Campaigns for ... Oops, Gotta Go Retch

Cory Treffiletti in Online Spin writes about the possibility that the Internet has become a mature enough medium that it can provide "continuity" with a company's mainstream broadcast campaign:

Maybe the Internet has actually become the best medium for running a continuity campaign, to sustain the message conveyed in Television and is clearly the second most important medium in conveying a message to the consumer?

After noting that 134M people in the US are online, he writes:

Given that the prices for Interactive media are so low, and that online ad spending has surpassed out-of-home and is quickly catching up on radio regardless of the cost cutting, it stands to reason that marketers are realizing this medium is indeed a great opportunity for reaching a mass audience effectively and generating a response.

You can't argue with that! Well, except maybe to say: Noooooooo! Online marketing is almost always like handing out business cards at a wedding.

Will someone just send Treffiletti a copy of Gonzo Marketing already?

I Am Not and Never Have Been a Hippie (Except 1968-1976 and weekends through the early '00s)

Eric's posted more in his on-line writing project. It's damn fun watching his essay evolve.

And now for my daily quibble with it. He writes that in our previous blog entries Akma and I point toward the inefficiency of the Net not being a bad thing." He replies: "I don't think it is either, from the humanities perspective." So let me be clearer: I am not presenting a hippie point of view when I say that the Net's inefficiency at the packet level is the source of its strength. It has nothing to do with "bits just wanna be free, man." It has everything to do with measurable, quantifiable decisions about how to build a network that is robust and insanely scalable. So don't go tarring me with that hippie brush, man. Now, where'd I put my bong?

And how does this apply to economics? I don't know nothing about economics, nevertheless the point I was trying to make was that the Internet's greatest economic strength - and its strength in building markets - has been in ventures that are bottom-up, do the job well enough, and are highly specific to a problem. Many of the attempts to impose digital IDs fail all three criteria.

I agree with that old hippie, Akma:

But this returns me to my perpetual refrain that we need a new business model, not a new way of enforcing the old. RIAA and Hollywood might like to use DigID to ensure that one and only one person has the right to listen to my copy of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—but if DigID is going to function as a weapon for enforcing the perpetuation of an obsolescent business model, than we’re much better off without it. Kevin knows this, and is touting Mediagora

And while I doth protest too much about not being a hippie, here's a comment from Aaron Kinney's year-end round-up of TV for Salon (for-pay edition).

... reminded us that television is the best medium for disseminating propaganda, as it served as the premiere for the Bush administration's ad campaign claiming that anyone who purchases marijuana may be financing terrorists. I humbly submit that, rather than shifting blame for mass killing and a national security fiasco onto recreational pot smokers, the administration should maybe shut the fuck up and think about tracking down Osama bin Laden.

Don't bogart that cultural revolution, muh friend.

More to and fro Norlin

Eric is continuing his experiment in thinking out loud. He's refined his original argument about the Net's effect on the economy. It's too rich a chunk to chew all at once, so I'll just nibble at it. (Even though I'm about to disagree with him, this isn't a "He's Wrong!" sort of disagreement but an attempt to understand better by pushing back a bit.)

Eric begins by saying that the Internet is inefficient when it comes to managing reputations. Maybe, but so what? The Net's strength is its inefficiency. A more efficient network would queue bits in order of importance, pre-compute routings, etc. So long as the bits are getting there, who cares if it's the most efficient route? I worry that strong digital ID systems over-build in the name of efficiency and completeness.

The fact is that the Net has actually done an impressive job of building reputation management systems where they're needed: eBay, Amazon, epinions all do a good enough job of it. Home pages and weblogs are another sort of reputation system. So, if there's a market waiting to happen if only we had a reputation system, then why hasn't someone already built one on the edge of the Net?

And the same goes for digital IDs themselves. If the need is that great, then why hasn't it been solved? (I don't mean this in a neener-neener way. I mean it as a real question.) Yes, we need strong digital IDs to enabling online voting. But I can already buy anything I want online by using my credit card. I have passwords at a zillion sites and a little password note pad that reminds me of what they are. My fear is that by trying to build systematic ID systems that don't spring from particular applications, we'll over-engineer a solution to a problem that doesn't need that much solving.

And since over-solving this problem would benefit powers that would recentralize the network, there are additional reasons to aim for inefficient, minimal digital IDs.

Also, Eric makes a passing reference to an idea that sounds fascinating: "... property rights exist (at some economic level) to simplify the exchange." He credits this to Frank Field. I hope Eric expands on it.

Doc is waxing wise in his response to Eric, although I think that in Doc's terms I don't want identity services to be "Net native." I want them on the edge. I suspect Doc does, too, and we're disagreeing only verbally.

Nova Matrullo

A hearty virtual hug to Tom and Wendy, and a gentle embrace for Sawyer James. Congratulations!

Impenetrable Interview with Me

I wax incomprehensible in an interview at the SXSW site. Jon Lebkowsky asked good questions. I drove down the road into thickets every time.

I'll be keynoting the SXSW Interactive conference in March. I'll be using PowerPoints because, as is well known, PowerPoint prevents presentations from wandering into the deep end of the pool. That's why we use 'em.

See you in Austin?

Free History of Telecom

Bruce Kushnick's book, "The Unauthorized Bio of the Baby Bells," is available as a free download via the Teletruth organization. I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Why, it even has an introduction by the redoubtable Bob Metcalfe!

The Closed Source of Open Source

Today's Boston Globe has a history of the Open Source movement by Laurence Schorsch that's quite positive, citing it as a threat "peering over the horizon ... that just might topple Microsoft." Appropriately, it begins with Richard Stallman's contribution. Yet, although Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond are interviewed, local-boy Stallman isn't. The second to last paragraph explains why:

(Stallman declined to be interviewed for this article unless we promised to call the operating system "GNU/Linux" instead of the more common "Linux.")

Every time Stallman interrupts a conversation to insist that people change the way they speak, the damage he does to the social values GNU was created to support are mitigated only by the impression that he's nuts.

Language: The ultimate open source project.

Norlin on Norlin

Eric gives a fast, breezy, and fascinating story of his life so far. and then responds to AKMA. Great framing of the current controversy Eric started by publishing the rough draft of his thoughts. Also, Eric makes the important point that as companies increasingly require us to have an in-house ID, we're getting used to the notion of having one out on the big bad Web.

I do take exception to his saying that I'm among those insisting that digital ID can't capture my soul, man. I've instead been insisting that the only thing "digital identity" has in common with "personal identity" is the use of the word "identity." The problems I have with digital ID have to do with its importance (Eric thinks it's the linchpin to the new economy), who will own it, and how easy it will be to abuse.

Two Towers, Much Fun

= saw "The Two Towers" yesterday with eight 12-year-olds who didn't get up once in the 3 hours to go to the bathroom.

What more could you want in this type of movie? Adventure, bravery, characters with inner struggles, lots of story line, astounding scenery, amazing graphics...

Well, now that you mention it: Since I don't care about fidelity to the source, I wish the movie were less sexist. And does it say anywhere in the books that the human characters are all white?

POMO Programming

Dethe has found a very funny ... well, here's the relevant excerpt from the email he sent me:

...there's a wonderful paper on Postmodern Programming. The authors presented this at OOPSLA last month, and it was one of the highlights of the conference for me. My favorite part is when they define the essence of the PoMo programming language: Languages get defined by the problems they solve. The first exercise for many programmers is to compute the first thousand prime numbers. Here's their solution:

http://www.google.com/search?q=first%20thousand%20primes

I thought you'd enjoy that, seeing as how it combines PoMo, Google, and a wickedly funny smack on the head in one go.

My friend Paul English, when asked if he knows someone's phone number, has been known to reply: "Yes. It's 411."

Prediction Marketing

Scott Kirsner's always readworthy column in the Boston Globe (here today, gone tomorrow) has a table with predictions by seven leading Boston tech analyst companies. I'm assuming that these predictions were volunteered by the analysts and thus should be counted as marketing tools.

Note: I have no predictions of my own to offer at this time. I wouldn't dare.

AKMA's ID

Akma, who is one of the funniest serious writers around, jumps into the Norlin Fray. He intuits, correctly in my view, that what's motivating Eric more than anything is his interest in digital IDs.

Akma ably worries about one side of digital IDs: our persistent reputation on the Internet. What happens, he wonders, when we systematize that? What do we gain and what do we lose? The other side of digital ID, however, is the one that authenticates me in my online transaction. There's little existential about such an ID. It's really just a way of assuring that the money that's about to transfer in fact comes from my real world wallet. Akma sees (or assumes?) a connection between these two:

If DigID is designed for users first, and only subsequently for commercial interests, then users won’t mind (much) sharing DigID with commerce. If DigID is designed for commerce first and thrust upon users, users will resist and evade.

I assume that these two IDs can be kept apart. But I wonder if I'm right.

Blogthread: These are the additional links Akma captures in the current Norlin blogthread: Doc Searls, Mitch Ratcliffe, Kevin Marks and me.

If it weren't for the possessive, I could have had an all-caps title for this blog entry. Damn!

Greater Democracy

I'm participating in a group blog about what the government of a connected people might look like. It's at GreaterDemocracy.org. For example, the latest entry is from Jon Lebkowsky:

Langdon Winner explores how the technological complexity of our infrastructures has made the U.S. (et al.) vulnerable to attack, and how, having seen a demonstration of that vulnerability in 9/11, we have hardened social and political systems and accepted a sacrifice of fundamental rights and freedoms that would have been unthinkable before the terrorist attack. Winner suggests better ways to deal with the perceived vulnerability. [Link]

Other members of the blog team include Jock Gill, Peter Kaminski and David Reed.

Adina blogs about why she's been blogging about politics more than she expected to:

My personal feelings about these issues come from the fact that my dad is a holocaust refugee...[O]ne of the questions that I had about approaching adulthood was -- if the place that I lived started sliding toward totalitarianism, would I be one of the people who spoke up, or would I be one of the people who kept silent until life became unbearable.

When the government rounds up immigrants on excuses of incorrect paperwork, and is able to detain them indefinitely without evidence or trial...

Every political decision says something about who we are but also about who we are becoming. And that's what's truly scary.

History of Copyright

Seth Johnson, in an email, points to a fascinating paper by David Walker called "Heirs of the Enlightenment: Copyright During the French Revolution and Information Revolution In Historical Perspective." From the introduction:

During the Enlightenment, two conflicting viewpoints on the nature of authorship, creativity, and copyright emerged. One view, proposed by the French thinker Denis Diderot, advanced the notion that literary works are unique creations of the individual mind, and thus should be protected as the most sacred form of property. The other view, advanced by the Marquis de Condorcet, saw literary works as the expression of ideas that already exist in nature, and thus belong to all and should be made available to all for the common good. Both viewpoints had a profound influence on the changing legal status of intellectual property during the French Revolution. Even more, this paper will argue that these two conflicting viewpoints, both of which were firmly grounded in Enlightenment thought, still continue to have an influence into the present, and the tension between the two continues to be played out in the arena of copyright in the United States in the year 2000.

Kevin Marks on Eric's Argument

Kevin's got some smart stuff to say about Eric's argument about the Net's economic value. Kevin even manages to explain what I put so fumblingly.

Kevin points to a NY Times article that concludes:

The same economic forces that lead to premium and discount sellers in the offline world are at work in the online world. But the differences in transaction costs make the price differences both more extreme and easier to observe,

This suggests that the Net is both commoditizing some businesses and leaving room for added-value providers.

Locke's Psychic 2:1 Stock Split

RageBoy now has two — count 'em, two! — blogs. His new one is at the Corante site and sounds a lot like the RB of Gonzo Marketing and Cluetrain, a voice I've missed. Here's a taste:

...We're making up stuff and feeding it to each other. Lies and fictions and contrafactual fabrications of the worst sort. Or the best sort. We think we're hiding behind all these random words we sling around. Then we're horrified to realize we've betrayed ourselves. Our masks have given us away.

Scary. And beautiful....

Meanwhile, over at his first blog, RB's monkey-boy is still pulling up the maenad's skirts, diddling with the guy's hammers, and engaging in various forms of satyre. It is what you might call a shadow site.

New issue of JOHO

I Love Ruairi Vol. I

Michael O'Connor Clarke writes tenderly about the new baby in his life. Congratulations to Michael and Leona.

Woohoo!

Norlin on the Internet as Economic Drain

Some Big Thinking in admirable rough draft form is goin' on over at Norlin's place. He's working through an argument that's important if right.

Point #6 is crucial: The Internet is economically destructive because it's hard to make money when so much stuff is entering the commons.

Eric gets there via a pivot point (#3) that he notes he needs to clarify: the lack of scarcity on the Net drives things towards the public domain. That seems intuitively right. But the question is: what on the Net is in such abundance that it drives goods thusly? It's not the abundance of goods but the abundance of access to goods: you don't need a lot of capital to create and/or distribute digital stuff. (BTW, in such an environment, what is the remaining virtue of capitalism?)

Then Eric raises a fascinating idea (#7): "Digital identity is a (somewhat subconscious attempt) to solve the lack of scarcity." How? "[Y]ou're able to rebuild some of the channels and points of distribution." That is, if you can be put in jail for getting a copy of Eminem's latest via Kazaa, then the recording industry can re-establish its chokehold. (My loaded language isn't Eric's.)

Why does Eric see "the lack of scarcity" as a problem to be "solved" (#7)? Because it drives down prices and thus drives businesses into the dirt. But there are at least two types of business here. There are those whose value has been nullified by the ease with which digits can be manufactured and distributed; there's no good economic reason to prop them up (sez I). Then, there are companies that provide real value in a digital world that may not be able to make enough money to survive if their products become free. In the first category is the recording industry. In the second are recording artists and newspapers. I don't know how the second category will survive, but I'd rather let the market innovate than impose artificial scarcity. We're still at the beginning of this journey. I hope and believe that the solution will not be to re-centralize control and introduce artificial chokepoints. That's not what drives an economy of abundance.

So, I don't yet agree with Eric when he says "the internet is *truly* economically destructive..." (#6). Destructive of what? Businesses that no longer provide value, sure. But even if bsinesses that do provide value make less money (assuming they make enough to survive, which I admit is still at issue) then we also have to factor in the enrichment those creative goods provide to you, me and everyone else in the market. Overall, the Internet could turn out to be tremendously economically constructive.

(Eric, thank you for having the guts to post your ideas in rough form so that we can all chew on them.)

PEETA

Ruth Lipman sends us to a site that she knows will raise the blood temperature of those of us who believe in animal rights. It's quite graphic so I urge you to shield the monitor from young and impressionable minds.

(BTW, I prefer to eat them head first.)

Guides and Misguides

Jonathan Peterson writes in response my request for some travel tips:

Check out virtualtourist, I used them a lot 2 years ago when we went to France. Very bloglike community with a lot of english content.

The navigation can be a bit confusing, as it mixes individual with commercial content. The best stuff is in people's travelogues, off the beaten path and restaurant reviews.

It's especially great when you get a local who has spent some time talking about their city

I'm amazed at how much more content there is than last time I looked. Viva la camera digita'l!

Yes, I'm a fan of VirtualTourist also.

Meanwhile, David Forrester of Molecular points to an article in NTK:

It's always good to see a thriving new community springing up in Usenet's barren wasteland - especially ones with interests as specific as those of "Richard Craft", "Kevin Steward", "Kyran Goring", "Danny Farrell", "Sean Rogers", "Mike Harding", "Oliver Hammond", "James Goodman", "Cameron Ellis" et al. Take it from us, these guys have a *lot* in common: they all post from a Mailbox Internet account, they all have Hotmail addresses, and the products they just can't help recommending to each other include student info-hub thesite.org, the musical output of Elvis Costello and Afroman, plus the Activision games Wreckless, Rally Fusion and Minority Report. All of which, any idiot with a search engine can see, are clients of new media marketing agency DIGITAL OUTLOOK, who define guerrilla marketing as "participating within a variety of carefully targeted online communities [...] and initiating 'unofficial' discussions about our clients' offering". They've yet to confirm or deny whether these individuals are Digital Outlook employees (or their aliases), and whether they have any kind of code of practice on the use of false identities for promotional purposes. Or maybe the company intranet was down, thus forcing the staff to communicate with each other via alt.internet.providers.uk.free? ...

The only good news is that bastards like these do eventually get found out. But the technique undoubtedly still "works" in some instances since more people will be fooled than angered.

See you in Hell.

Peer Speed

John Husband in an email points to an article in the NY Times yesterday:

New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online

A group of prominent scientists is challenging the leading scientific journals with the creation of two peer-reviewed online journals this week....

The way the Web has broken the lock between perfection and eternality is quite remarkable. We can go public with work in progress and not have to wait for the Wite-out to dry on our masterpiece before we acknowledge its existence.

And all of this is made possible through the magic of metadata: so long as we know that it's a draft, we're willing to make allowances and read it for what it is. (And the great virtue of blogs is that they're understood to be perpetual rough drafts.)

So, let's get syllogistical. Metadata allows for imperfection. Imperfection hastens time. Haste leaves little time to erect defenses. Therefore, metadata lets us be who we are. QED.

Paying for Archives

Scott Kirsner (columnist at the Boston Globe and contributing editor to Wired and FastCompany...the type of guy freelancers like me envy) responds in an email to my explanation of why I urge people to subscribe to Salon but bash the Globe for tucking their online articles away in a for-pay archive. He writes:

In my mind, if you want an organization to survive - whether it is a for-profit one like Salon or the Globe or a non-profit like the American Heart Association - it makes sense to financially support it.

The reason the Globe has been existent since 1872, supporting public discourse etc, is that it has figured out how to reliably make money over that period.

When we started the Web site in 1995, there was no government agency giving us a grant to put the Globe's material online, for free. One of the things that subsidizes the cost of putting the content online with no cost to readers - even if only for a few days - is the archives.

I promise you that it is not "almost free" to run vast databases of stories, with credit card verification, etc. (And to pay the technicians to make sure that the servers remain up and available.) You're right that the actual cost of delivering each story is probably not $2.95, but that cost does subsidize a lot of stuff that goes on line for free, even if only temporarily.

An interesting question to ask is what will happen to newspapers that perennially lose money on their Web operations. I don't think it would be such a wild prediction to say that they would either shut them down, or, if they didn't, see the losses from their Web operation begin to hurt the print operation - forcing them to fire reporters, editors, photographers, etc.

Given all the statistics about declines in newspaper readership by young people, the high cost of printing and delivering the things, and the revenue threat from online job sites, I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that newspapers like the Globe are institutions that will survive forever and ever regardless of whether their businesses are run intelligently.

I suspect I won't change your opinion on this, but just thought I would write and contribute to the conversation...

I know I'm never going to win an argument with Scott because he fights dirty by being right. Nevertheless...

Three principles here conflict for me. First, I believe in people making money on the Web. Second, newspapers have a special obligation to make their information widely available because that is good for our democracy. Third, if you make my web site look bad, your sites' servers should be terminally infected with head lice. So, how does the Globe policy stack up to these three Prime Directives? (Yeah, I know you can't really have three prime directives...)

First, the Globe should take in money on the Web. And it does. It runs ads. It markets itself. It lets people buy tickets from season ticket holders. Great! Do these defray the cost of the Web site? Scott's message implies not.

So, should the Globe now do whatever it has to in order to break even on the Web? Of course not. It wouldn't run a porn-for-pay service. The Second Principle (oh lordy, now I'm even capitalizing myself) suggests that the paper has a social responsibility to keep its content available to the citizenry. Having to pay to re-read the paper makes our democracy just a little bit worse. The Globe should make money using the well-known SOW technique: Some Other Way.

Third, putting up a link and then taking it down breaks the Web.

So, let's be positive. What would I suggest the Globe do in order to satisfy these contradictory principles? It's obvious: I dunno.

Or, possibly: Charge for complete online access to today's newspaper, but keep access to previous issues free. And have Scott become the editor of an online magazine called "The Boston Globe Presents THE HUB" that has added-value content you can't get anywhere else, including some kickass weblogs by Globe reporters. Like Salon. Yeah, easy for me to say. But I can't pretend to give the Globe a business plan; I don't know enough about their business. All I can do as a reader and citizen is thank them for the good they do and gripe if their values don't align with mine. And that's what I'm doing.

I understand that newspapers are in trouble. But of all the ways to subsidize their operations, putting a turnstile in front of the archives is among the worst.

And, I know I am a kook for believing this, but these problems are only temporary. As soon as $300 ebook hardware with high enough resolution becomes a standard part of every school kid's equipment, newspapers will start to jettison the mass distribution of their print versions. It's only a few years away. At that point, I will be delighted to subscribe to The Globe Online at the current print price. Without the cost of printing and delivering a forest of paper every day, I sincerely hope The Globe will be richer than Croesus.

I love the Globe. I read its inky pages every day. Long may they crinkle! And if I thought that the only way for the Globe to stay online was to charge $3.00 to read an article in their archive, I'd shut up about it. But we're looking at a balancing act and IMO the Globe has underestimated the importance of keeping our recent past present to us.

It is with only a trace of irony that I point out that Scott's columns, including the recent one on weblogs that started this back-and-forth, are archived for free at digitalmass.com, a boston.com site.

Getting Past our Missile Shield

I have come upon certain information about a hidden weakness of the 10-missile defense shield President Bush has decided to erect to protect our country. Although some may call me unpatriotic or even a traitor for telling our potential enemies how to defeat the shield, I prefer to think of myself as a whistle-blower.

So, here is the one can't-fail way to exploit the hidden weakness of our missle shield: Fire 11 missiles.

Cometa's Tale

Jane Black deconstructs the Cometa story for Businessweek. Cometa made a splash last week by announcing that AT&T, Intel and IBM had joined to provide nationwide wifi access. On a closer reading of the press materials (first suggested by Peter Kaminski), it turns out that the Big Three have very little skin in this game. Further, it's not clear that the game is about putting up 20,000 hotspots; it could just be an announcement that Cometa is available if you're a telco or an ISP looking to outsource your WiFi construction project. (Jane's take is more detailed and fact-based than mine.)

Jane also draws an interesting parallel to ZapMail, FedEx's plan to put them new-fangled fax machines in their offices so that they could fax business's documents. That way individual businesses wouldn't have to buy the expensive contraptions. But this centralized approach failed as prices dropped and every business installed its own. In the same way, centralized provisioning of WiFi may (should!) give way to the bottom-up installation of neighborhood networks. (

Do I sense Clay Shirky's hand in the inclusion of the ZapMail story? I know it's something he's interested in.)

Dehyphenated WiFi

I'm annoying Dewayne Hendricks — cited in Jane's article — by refusing to spell WiFi as "Wi-Fi," which is the official spelling. I figure I'm already too stiff in my spelling because I capitalilze the interior "F." Hell, I think it really ought to be spelled "wifi."

I also spell "e-mail" as "email."

Suppose I compromise by agreeing to put the hyphens I save into "co-operation" and "margin-of-error." Win-win!

Centralizing the Servers

Craig Allen writes in an email:

This may be common knowledge, but I learned from a brief article in Doctor Dobb's Journal (ya gotta pay on the web, I get the print edition free, how weird is that?) that way back when the Internet was being designed, AT&T somehow forced the design to rely on a relatively small number of central routers rather than a more distributed, decentralized approach. As a result, the net is more vulnerable to various kinds of Denial of Service attacks, various unplanned disasters, and (I'm not sure if this is an assumption on my part or the article said it) less throughput. AT&T's reason was that otherwise it would be too competitive with the phone network (most of which they owned at the time).

(Craig notes that he's summarizing from memory and thus may be off in some of the details.)

News to me. Sounds plausible. But everything sounds plausible to me.