NPR:Weekend Edition
China Dawn
"Scott Simon talks with writer David Sheff about his new book, China Dawn. Mr. Sheff writes about dot-com entrepreneurs and the rise of the internet in China. He says the internet is a threat to authorities and a catalyst for change in China. (8:30)"
3:01 PMredux [04.16.02]
"A decade or so ago, it was all clear: the Internet was believed to be such a revolutionary new medium, so inherently empowering and democratizing, that old authoritarian regimes would crumble before it. What we've learned in the intervening years is that the Internet does not inevitably lead to democracy any more than it inevitably leads to great wealth.
The idea that the Internet itself is a threat to authoritarian regimes was a bit of delusional post-Cold War optimism."
redux [03.21.02]
"Mao once said, "Political power grows from the barrel of a gun." The entrepreneurs in China Dawn seem to want to change the last phrase to "ISP access."
But their enthusiasm betrays a streak of naiveté. As Tiananmen so amply demonstrated, in China today, political power still grows from the barrel of a gun. And the prediction that the rise of the Internet will liberate Chinese from authoritarian rule is far from certain."
"One notable loophole in the content watch list are weblogs. Weblogs are content websites maintained by ordinary users that can act as introspective online diaries, soapboxes to rant opinions, and a vehicle guide the horde of Internet users to swarm to other obscure links to be found on the net. They are easy to update, cheap to maintain, and difficult to block because so many new ones appear each day. They utilize a client relationship with a server and can be updated with a simple browser."
The bureaucrats and censors in China who block and monitor websites will be hard pressed to try and control the future flow of weblogs both in and out of China due to the number and diversity of this new information platform. Having met actual Internet content censors from China, they are decent people but come from a different time and different place in terms of technology. They don’t really get it yet since weblogs remain a concept difficult for them to understand for now."
redux [08.08.01]
"It is widely believed that the Internet poses an insurmountable threat to authoritarian rule. But political science scholarship has provided little support for this conventional wisdom, and a number of case studies from around the world show that authoritarian regimes are finding ways to control and counter the political impact of Internet use. While the long-term political impact of the Internet remains an open question, we argue that these strategies for control may continue to be viable in the short to medium term."
"In this paper we illustrate how two authoritarian regimes, China and Cuba, are maintainng control over the Internet's political impact through different combinations of reactive and proactive strategies. These cases illustrate that, contrary to assumptions, different types of authoritarian regimes may be able to control and profit from the Internet. Examining the experiences of these two countries may help to shed light on other authoritarian regimes' strategies for Internet development, as well as help to develop generalizable conclusions about the impact of the Internet on authoritarian rule."
redux [06.19.01]
"Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister has warned the internet threatens democracy and people's sense of patriotism.
Lee Hsien Loong says governments must find new ways to build a consensus on national issues and strengthen national identities."
"The internet "opens up societies and helps individuals link up with like-minded souls anywhere in cyberspace," he said.
But it "may weaken the bonds of place and circumstance that have always tied citizens to their home and nation," he added."
redux [10.26.00]
"The world is changing fundamentally. Images and information respect neither time nor borders. Hierarchy is giving way to networking. Openness is crowding out secrecy and exclusivity. Ideas and capital move swiftly and unimpeded across a global network of governments, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations. In this world of instantaneous information, traditional diplomacy struggles to sustain its relevance."
"Nations once connected by foreign ministries and traders are now linked through millions of individuals by fiber optics, satellite, wireless, and cable in a complex network without central control. The Internet, with 100 million users today, will reach one billion people by 2005 and will be available to half the world's population by 2010. The network will become the central nervous system of international relations."
redux [10.10.00]
"Metaphors, symbols and sayings are mighty mind-setters. They captivate our minds and focus our attention to one main point, effectively excluding others. Putin used the burning of the Ostankino television tower, once hailed as a symbol of Soviet supremacy, as a metaphor for the desperate economic need of Russia. The global media played along with this tune, once again showcasing images of Russia's decay. But there is another largely untold story to be extracted from Putin's metaphor: TV towers are more than symbols - indeed they are very concrete centers of mind control, distributing the flow of information and entertainment."
"Who chose the crumbling Berlin Wall as the icon and metaphor for the breakdown of communism and the end of the Cold War? Wouldn't a TV tower in flames be more accurate? It wasn't about the free flow of capital. It was about the free flow of information."
BusinessWeek
Giant Steps for a Software Upstart
"A lot has changed for Linux in the past two years. True, the basic tenets of the rebellious open-source software-development movement popularized by coder Linus Torvalds remain largely intact. Loosely organized collectives, often from competing companies, collaborate to build software products that no one owns, with source code that anyone can view and alter. Any changes in the code are held by the community at large.
While such idealism worked fine in academia and among uber-geeks, it wasn't immune to market economics as the movement matured."
9:09 AMredux [12.09.01]
"The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this trend undermines cultural arguments about "hacker ethics" and "post-scarcity" gift economies. It suggests that classical economic theory offers a more succinct explanation for the peculiar international distribution of open source development: hacking rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost. This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them."
redux [12.03.01]
"How will IBM make money on free software? The idea is to use Linux to not only sell expensive computers but also high-margin software and big-ticket support and consulting services. Because nearly 60% of IBM's revenue comes from software and services, Linux plays into IBM's business model better than any other computer maker's. IBM believes the new sales will greatly exceed any revenue loss incurred from giving away the Linux operating system. Consider MDS Proteomics, a Toronto-based drug-research company. MDS bought a Linux supercomputer from IBM to do complex chemical calculations. MDS CEO Frank Gleeson says 50% of its multimillion dollar deal with IBM went toward consulting services and software, while the rest was spent on hardware and a joint-development effort with IBM researchers."
"Turning to the subject of Ximian Connector, I asked if Ximian expected flamage from the community for selling a proprietary software package. He replied, "We expect less than we would have expected awhile ago. I think that people understand that businesses have to survive. And the people know that the bloody carcasses of Open Source companies line the horizon right now.""
redux [11.21.00]
"The ideological purity of the open-source software business is being diluted by a new era of pragmatism as start-ups adjust to the economic slump."
"Where is our business model if everyone else can copy it?" asked Holger Dyroff, former CEO and now director of sales for Linux software seller SuSE. "The question is where we can make money now. Nobody cared about profitability two years ago."
"The new thinking often involves a proprietary product that has been built on top of an open-source foundation--a situation that could be considered the best, or worst, of both worlds."
"How to make money with the GPL. How to promote and spread free software. How open source's experience advantage with developers gives companies a competitive edge. Sleepycat President and CEO Michael Olson shows us what happens when free software meets intelligent business strategy."
"I love open source. I love what it stands for and I love the fact that as a connected society we've perfected the concepts surrounding 'division of labor' to such a degree that we're now afforded both the luxuries and opportunity to do what we want for the sheer enjoyment of it, even if that means coding into the wee hours of the night! I love business, I love creating them and working with people to run and fine-tune them. I especially love making money, whether it be for business, myself or others. Money has afforded me the freedom to pursue my other passions in life: travel, thinking, writing, creating and oh yea, partying! Most of all, I love it when I get to put all my loves together... all at the same time!
Must all mis amores live separate lives? Can't they just get along? I think they can. I think they will."
"Software pioneer and MIT research affiliate Richard M. Stallman has been named as a co-winner of the 2001 Takeda Award for Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement for Social/Economic Well-Being."
"Stallman has been recognized for his work leading the GNU operating system development project, and for starting the free software movement. GNU is an acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix,” a reference to the fact that the popular Linux operating systems actually operate off of GNU."
"Stallman hopes that software companies will eventually shift their source of income to custom software, support, and custom installations rather than proprietary software. “It is not impossible to make money from free software,” Stallman said."
"On November 5, 2001, IBM announced its donation of $40 million worth of tools to the Eclipse project. Eclipse, a fully functional software development environment that is written in Java, and that runs on both Linux and Windows, is intended to solve many of the problems of tool interoperability faced by developers of conventional tools."
"As analysts from the Hurwitz Group concluded, the move is consistent with IBM's commitment to Linux and growing tradition of incorporating open source code into its product lines: "With its experience with the open source application server Apache, and the Linux operating system, it makes sense that IBM would now move to provide the developer community with an open source development platform. The challenge for IBM and the Eclipse organization will be to draw strong and broad tool-vendor support to advance the platform, and to demonstrate that it is truly an open platform that enables straightforward tool integration to make it worthwhile for organizations to adopt. In addition, Eclipse needs to capture and enlist the efforts of the developer community at large, to test and refine the platform and add their innovation."
"This paper analyzes the evolving economic substrate of the open-source phenomenon. We first explode some prevalent myths about the funding of program development and the price structure of software. We present a game-theory analysis of the stability of open-source cooperation. We present nine models for sustainable funding of open-source development; two non-profit, seven for-profit. We continue to develop a qualitative theory of when it is economically rational to be closed. We then examine some novel additional mechanisms the market is now inventing to fund for-profit open-source development, including the reinvention of the patronage system and task markets. We conclude with some tentative predictions of the future."
redux [04.02.00]
" Open source is good for business. Now I should add that open source is not for everything in software. We have a very large and successful software business, and we're going to retain that. But open source is great for infrastructure code. The reason is that to make open source work, there has to be an overlap between the people who care about the software and the people who make the software better. As you get further up the application stack, those two groups become disjointed...so the software that checks you into a hospital will never be open source because the people who care about that can't write software."
MIT Technology Review
The Rules of Innovation
"The management of innovation today is where the Quality Movement was 20 years ago, in that many believe the outcomes of innovation efforts are unpredictable. The raison d’être of the venture capital industry is belief in the unpredictability of new businesses. A few ventures will succeed; most won’t, the VCs say. They therefore place a portfolio of bets, extracting premium prices for their capital in order to earn the high return required to compensate for the risk that unpredictability imposes. I believe, however, that innovation isn’t random. Every undesired outcome has a cause. Those outcomes appear to be random when we don’t understand all the factors that affect successful innovation. If we could understand and manage these variables, innovation wouldn’t be nearly as risky as it appears.
The good news is that recent years have seen considerable progress in identifying important variables that affect the probability of success in innovation."
10:00 PMredux [02.07.02]
"The whole story is about motivation. The leaders in every industry have vast resources at their disposal. If I try to grab a piece of real estate that the established leaders want, where the customers are attractive and the business is attractive, the evidence is overwhelming that the leaders will win. So what I want to do is to craft a strategy that takes advantage of what I would call asymmetry of motivation. That is, a situation where I'm motivated to go after the business of the market leaders, but the piece of their business that I can most naturally go after is the one that they're the least motivated to defend.
Remember that when a new idea emerges in an established company, it needs to get funded. And the only ideas that get funded are those that help the established company make more money. That process favors the ideas that create improved products for existing customers, and tends to reject more innovative, or disruptive, ideas. That is what creates disruptive entrepreneurial opportunities."
redux [01.21.02]
"The path to success involves staying a little ahead of the competition but close enough that customers can still understand your product and incorporate it into their lives and businesses. I recently conducted a survey of 785 tech company executives to find out why some succeeded and others did not. I found that newer companies (started after 1980) were much more likely than larger, established companies to cite marketplace barriers -- with customers that were not receptive or ready -- as a primary obstacle. Human behavior is much slower to change than technology.
Years of research shows that the innovations most likely to take hold are those that don't demand excessive change from the customer. Incrementalism -- represented by the following eight characteristics -- is key."
redux [01.08.01]
"The problem isn’t figuring out how to get people to become more “innovative”; it’s figuring out how to get people to accept and apply innovations more productively. The glut of new ideas has paradoxically created a critical shortage of the human ingredients that determine just how quickly and cost effectively they get used.
So instead of celebrating the “heroic brilliance” of innovators, this column will explore innovation from a different and more important perspective. After all, it is customers and clients—not innovators—who determine how great ideas become successful innovations."
redux [10.25.01]
"Everybody thinks that it's the market pioneers who have the best name recognition, the highest market share, and the most enduring market leadership....Right?"
"Our discoveries may surprise the business community. After exposing the limitations of prior studies that extolled the success of pioneers, we find that pioneers mostly fail, have low market share, and are rarely enduring market leaders. In addition, we found that the current trend of staking everything on getting there first all-too-often leads companies to embrace a disastrous strategy of rushing to market with incomplete, inferior, and flawed products."
redux [05.03.01]
"In many ways, the Smartphone's evolution is a classic story of high-tech innovation within a big company. It starts with a small team of engineers at Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego, who were given a hazy but intriguing mandate. Gradually, they came to believe that they could produce a breakthrough product -- even if outsiders were dubious. Repeated crises erupted along the way, including a near-death experience in February 2000 when their division was sold to the San Diego subsidiary of Japan's Kyocera International Inc. For a while, it appeared that no one wanted the Smartphone project to continue. Yet the engineers pressed on in skunk-works fashion, improvising solutions as needed, until they emerged with a product that attracted enthusiastic mobs at trade shows, media events -- and even the passenger lounge at Chicago's O'Hare airport."
"Does history repeat itself when companies seek ways to innovate? Are there patterns among the business strategies chosen by successful companies from one decade to the next?
To find out, we studied nearly 200 business strategies, most from the past 20 years, but some from a century ago. From this research we identified 10 essential “innovation themes,” which are repeated and proven over time."
redux [03.06.01]
"A whole literature has grown up around the apparently intractable hostility between innovation and bureaucracy, between those who create and those who control. Smart and speedy start-ups blindside mature companies with their inventiveness then grow up into mature companies and are outsmarted in their turn. The only way for innovation to survive in mature companies is to isolate the creators from the managers in protected enclaves. If this is true, it means that it is virtually impossible for sustained innovation to be built into the everyday operation of mature companies; it can only ever be an intermittent aberration."
redux [11.07.00]
"This chapter summarizes the history of the disk drive industry in all its complexity. Some readers will be interested in it for the sake of history itself. But the value of understanding this history is that out of its complexity emerge a few stunningly simple and consistent factors that have repeatedly determined the success and failure of the industry's best firms. Simply put, when the best firms succeeded, they did so because they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. But, paradoxically, when the best firms subsequently failed, it was for the same reasons--they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.
The history of the disk drive industry provides a framework for understanding when "keeping close to your customers" is good advice--and when it is not."
Ananova
Researchers to study how children interact with their Aibos
"Washington University professors Batya Friedman and Peter Kahn fear children may establish friendships that robots can't live up to.
The husband and wife team say early tests show while most children are aware robots aren't actually alive, others do not.
Some reason they must be living because they are able to learn how to respond to limited commands and move apparently independently."
7:45 PMredux [03.20.02]
""While children often form emotional attachments to teddy bears, stuffed animals, blankets and other objects, senior citizens generally do not."
But Matsushita said residents have no problem interacting with the pets. Women who participated in a trial wanted to keep their newfound friends, Kadota said.
"I see no reason why, with the appropriate feedback, that reasonable bonding could not be achieved between a robot pet and its human owner," said Martin King, a research fellow at the University of Salford's Center for Robotics and Automation. The center is currently designing a robotic gorilla to interact with children."
redux [02.04.02]
[requires 'free' registration]
""A game it might have been, but if you'll forgive the staggering lack of modesty this implies, Creatures was probably the closest thing there has been to a new form of life on this planet in four billion years," Mr. Grand writes. "These creatures probably still represent the state of the art in synthetic life forms.""
""Steve Grand is the creator of what I think is the nearest approach to artificial life so far," Mr. Dawkins has said. Speaking of Mr. Grand's latest endeavor, what is known as the Lucy project, he told The Sunday Times: "With his record, if anyone could pull off such a spectacular coup, it would be him.""
redux [11.07.01]
"A.I. is of course fantasy, but Japan today is testing the plotline for real. Using interactive toys programmed to behave as obsequiously as the average lapdog, health care workers are trying to add companionship and emotional sustenance that may be missing from the lives of hospitalized children and elderly shut-ins. Researchers hope that one day, armies of sharing, caring machines will shore up a medical system that is hard-pressed to meet the demands of a rapidly aging society. Robots might even serve as surrogate family members, providing contact and affection for patients who have no immediate relatives nearby."
redux [08.01.01]
"A new toy doll which it makers claim has realistic skin, senses and reflexes has gone on sale in the UK.
Miracle Baby smiles when she's fed, frowns when she's tired and develops her own feeding, playing and sleeping patterns over time.
Her makers, Mattel, have used similar technology to that used by the manufacturers of robot dogs which led to a worldwide craze for the artificial pets."
redux [05.11.01]
"Robert Siegel talks with Sherry Turkle, professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Turkle has studied people's relationships with computational objects for the past 20 years. She says recently some computers have been designed to ask humans to "nurture" them and humans respond. Turkle says that the attachment of AIBO owners to their robot dogs raises questions about what it means to love an object that doesn't know you're there."
redux [05.25.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"What do children think about what it means to be alive? And at what ages can children distinguish mechanical objects from real animals or people? Research into these questions is still in its earliest stages. There was a flurry of interest in children's reactions when Tamagotchis, virtual pets from Japan, first appeared a few years ago and then started dying on their young owners. But the topic is attracting more attention now as seemingly intelligent toys and other robots appear on the market in increasing variety and numbers. "
"Again and again... researchers have asked the children: "Is it alive? Is it like a real pet? Does it know you?"
"Strikingly," Ms. Audley said, "often the answer they settled on was, "It's not alive in a human or animal kind of way, but in a Furby kind of way.""
redux [04.21.00]
"I have studied the effects of computational objects on human developmental psychology for over twenty years, documenting the ways that computation and its metaphors have influenced our thinking about such matters as how the mind works, what it means to be intelligent, and what is special about being human. Now, I believe that a new kind of computational object - the relational artifact - is provoking striking new changes in the narrative of human development, especially in the way people think about life, and about what kind of relationships it is appropriate to have with a machine. Relational artifacts are computational objects designed to recognize and respond to the affective states of human beings - and indeed, to present themselves as having "affective" states of their own. They include children's playthings (such as Furbies and Tamagotchis), digital dolls that double as health monitoring systems for the homebound elderly (Matsushita's forthcoming Tama), sentient robots whose knowledge and personalities change through their interactions with humans, as well as software that responds to its users' emotional states and responds with "emotional states" of their own."
"By accepting a new category of relationship, with entities that they recognize as "sort-of-alive", or "alive in a different, but legitimate way," today's children will redefine the scope and shape of the playing field for social relations in the future."
redux [09.88.00]
""When kids play, they create an entire world that's alive, and it never objects to them. A kid's imagination is a completely open architecture, and there are no bounds to what a toy can do," he explains.
"That's the future of toys. Technology's role is to become transparent. If you give the cues of autonomy, the imagination fills in the blanks, because that's what it's meant to do."
As processing power and sensors improve, the difference between simulated autonomy and actual autonomy will blur. Already it's difficult to relate to these new technological creatures without imputing to them the sorts of feelings we routinely discover in, say, our pets. And when you throw in realistic human behavior, not to mention silky skin, things become rather surreal.
"These are not toys anymore," says Chung as the screwy signal scrambles his face again. "These are way beyond toys."
"So what are they?" I ask. For once, Chung pauses. "They are the next iteration of our attempt to re-create life.""
SiliconValley.Com
Teleconferencing, videoconferencing settle back to normal levels
"Videoconferencing peaked in the two months after Sept. 11 as all travel -- especially airline travel -- was curtailed, said AT&T spokeswoman Jean Hurt. "Now it has settled back to normal growth trajectory," she said."
""Usage remained high until around Dec. 18, and then it crashed and burned,"' Gold said."
10:01 PMredux [03.07.02]
"Analyst Phil Leigh said that after Sept. 11, business users are more inclined to try Web conferencing technology than face the added ordeals of a business trip.
"It's still a new thing and it's still not as easy as picking up the telephone," said Leigh, vice president of technology research at Raymond James & Associates.
"Some resistance to change is endemic to all of us," Leigh said. "You can't shake hands across the Web. But in terms of personal productivity, I can do more with WebEx -- I can reach out to more people in the same fixed amount of time.""
redux [10.29.01]
[requires 'free' registration]""Corporate America is developing a different strategy of place," said Charles Grantham, chief scientist of the Institute for the Study of Distributed Work. "The bottom line is a hard-core business logic — you're better positioned for business continuity if you're distributed. But Sept. 11 also crystallized for a lot of people that they want a better balance between their personal and professional life, and managers are going to have to confront that in the coming year."
Such revolutionary zeal may be premature. After all, the longstanding conviction that a centralized workplace is essential to enforcing corporate culture, loyalty and hard work has been behind big real estate investments in corporate campuses and towering headquarters buildings. Those expenditures can make it prohibitively expensive to switch to a distributed workplace."
redux [09.20.01]
"The economy and corporate budgets are in sharp decline, new safety checks have made moving through airports slower than ever, and there's a general reluctance to travel in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks.
If corporate America is to attempt some semblance of normality, there must be meetings with customers, suppliers, far-flung co-workers, bankers, lawyers and distributors.
To keep things going, many companies are turning to videoconferencing, the technology touted years ago as the movement that would end corporate travel. It never did and it never will. But videoconferencing is on the rise, and experts said last week's events will further accelerate its use."
redux [07.11.01]
"While researchers tap Internet2 to extend collaboration between universities and push the limits of new Internet technologies, another group of social scientists is looking at how Internet2 is affecting those who use it - in effect, researching the researchers."
"Still, human beings clearly prefer working face to face. Teasley says that although scientists at each CFAR site can meet and examine data from their own PCs, they still tend to cluster around a single computer. "Their biggest complaint was that it was too hard to see that small screen," says Teasley. "I told them they should buy a projector. That was my high-level PhD advice.""
"Beyond Being There was a research project at Bell Communications Research in 1991 and 1992. Its key insight was that computer and communications technology cannot in the foreseeable future achieve the same quality of human interaction as that afforded by PPR (physically proximate reality - our somewhat obscure term for meeting in person). Thus, while most other projects aimed at every-higher communication bandwidths and higher-fidelity video, we aimed at making computers help people communicate in ways that cannot be done in PPR (for example, anonymous interactions). In other words, we wanted to be better than reality and move beyond being there!"
"Hollan and Stornetta effectively argue that the pursuit of face-to-face is a) often inappropriate, and b) destined to fail. The premise behind this assumption is that a media attempting to imitate face-to-face fails when communities only use that media when f-to-f is not available. When this happens, electronic communication is at a disadvantage relative to f-to-f. They argue that "In telecommunications research perhaps we have been building crutches rather than shoes;" we only use the crutch when our fully functional leg is not available. The authors suggest that researchers should instead begin building shoes, which augment our legs, and we use them even when they are fully functional. They astutely argue that there are potential advantages to electronic communication that are not present in f-to-f. "For example, three significant features of the new medium are its ability to support asynchronous communication, anonymous communication, and to automatically archive communication.""
The New York Times
A New Direction for Intellectual Property
[requires 'free' registration]
"Perceiving an overly zealous culture of copyright protection, a group of law and technology scholars are setting up Creative Commons, a nonprofit company that will develop ways for artists, writers and others to easily designate their work as freely shareable.
Creative Commons, which is to be officially announced this week at a technology conference in Santa Clara, Calif., has nearly a million dollars in start-up money. The firm's founders argue that the expansion of legal protection for intellectual property, like a 1998 law extending the term of copyright by 20 years, could inhibit creativity and innovation."
8:55 AM
"A new politics of intellectual property is needed to counteract the content industry's drive toward ever stronger rights. More importantly, a broader awareness is needed that copyright deeply affects the information environment for us all. The digital networked environment has surely changed the economics of production of intellectual property (e.g., the marginal cost of copying is effectively zero), the economics of distribution (e.g., the cost of transmission via the Internet is also effectively zero), and the economics of publication (e.g., posting information on the web is also radically cheaper than in the print environment). This means, among other things, that the actions of individuals can have the same potential market-destructive impact as those of commercial counterfeiters in the olden days. This helps to explain why the content industries have been so anxious about computers and why they favor moving to a pay-per-use or mandated trusted system policy for all commercially valuable information in digital form. Without imaginative proposals for more balanced solutions and without a political movement to support and sustain such proposalsÑin other words, without a new politics of intellectual propertyÑthere will be little to stop the current politics from having its high protectionist way."
redux [04.08.02]
"Nearly a century ago, the music industry argued that its future was threatened by a new method of creating and distributing multiple copies of a performed song.
The new technology? The player piano roll."
"Throughout history, new technologies -- from the Gutenberg printing press to Napster -- have posed a threat to the owners and creators of music, movies, books and other artistic works. Those publishers, writers, artists and other owners of copyrighted work have always responded with lawsuits and calls for stronger laws."
redux [03.12.02]
"Copyright was invented by and for early capitalism, and its importance to that system has grown ever since. To oppose copyright is to oppose capitalism. Thus, Marxism is a natural starting point when challenging copyright. Marx's concept of a 'general intellect', suggesting that at some point a collective learning process will surpass physical labour as a productive force, offers a promising backdrop to understand the accomplishments of the free software community. Furthermore, the chief concerns of hacker philosophy, creativity and technological empowerment, closely correspond to key Marxist concepts of alienation, the division of labour, deskilling, and commodification. At the end of my inquiry, I will suggest that the development of free software provides an early model of the contradictions inherent to information capitalism, and that free software development has a wider relevance to all future production of information."
redux [12.21.01]
"If intellectual "property" were morally indistinguishable from tangible property--as copyright holders suggest when they equate infringement with theft--there would be nothing wrong with a perpetual copyright. We take it for granted that ownership of a house or a diamond ring does not simply expire after a set number of years and that such assets can be passed on to descendants indefinitely.
A song, a movie, or a book is not quite the same, as the very existence of the Copyright Clause suggests. The Framers did not give Congress the power to grant people rights to their homes, farms, or personal possessions because such rights already existed."
"Copyrights, by contrast, were understood to be a legal invention, and the justification for them was utilitarian: to promote progress and enrich the culture by giving authors an additional incentive to create. But the Framers recognized that copyrights could also impede progress and impoverish the culture by preventing people from building on the work of others."
redux [10.15.01]
""Content": in the modern lexicon, the term denotes everything from the information delivered daily to our doors on newsprint to the multimedia clips streamed over the Internet; from the music carried on the airwaves to the interactive software on CD-ROMs. This so-called content is produced by an increasingly broad and diverse segment of the economy, including not just writers and artists, but also software programmers and other high-tech researchers who create new intellectual property.
And here's the most interesting part. Time and again, the distributors - such as publishers, broadcasters and record labels - recoil in the face of technological advances that could diminish their role."
redux [08.03.01]
"Many of the voices in online debates around IP fall into one of two camps. I won't take the time to do more than very briefly summarize these two positions, because we're all familiar with them by now. The first is the "information wants to be free" camp, which advocates the free and communal sharing of information and rejects any notion that products of the intellect can or should be understood, legally or philosophically, as property. At the other extreme is a camp that is comfortable drawing direct, strong analogies between concepts of ownership of physical property and concepts of ownership of intellectual property. Furthermore, this camp is intent on letting the "free" market determine a value for information, much as it determines a value for more traditional types of property. This second camp usually feels that the anti-IP rhetoric coming from the first camp is merely a rationale for piracy, while the first camp feels that members of the second are mindless shills for the corporate machine.
Somewhere in between these two extremes lies a large majority who find both extremes attractive for different reasons, but who can't in good conscience commit to one stance or the other."
redux [07.13.00]
"The struggle over monetizing the digital economy is now a war, if we follow the rhetoric of its leaders. The battle over music and movies is inspiring Charlton Heston-like images, most recently from Edgar Bronfman, head of Universal Studios (whose last widely distributed quote came years ago when he declared the Internet the "CB radio of the "90s"), in a speech at Real Conference 2000 in May."
""I am warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose," Bronfman said. "I have moved these lawyers - not to attack the Internet and its culture, but for its benefit and to protect it."
Bronfman justified his fight as defense of his "intellectual property rights," and those of creators everywhere. "You own a home. You own a car. They're yours - they belong to you. Well, your ideas belong to you, too. And "intellectual property" is property, period." In pursuit of pirates, he said, "we must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide."
"The semantics of the issues intrigue me, and came to my attention through Richard Stallman, who suggests that terminology is a foundation for our ideas, and that words such as consumer, protection, piracy, and intellectual property reinforce faulty premises."
redux [02.05.00]
"There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you've written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision... On one hand, as information has grown more valuable, copyright and trademark law has become increasingly restrictive. At the same time, there has been, in the words of MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, an "explosion of grassroots, participatory culture," a new high-tech folkway that not only draws on pop culture but appropriates from it more easily than ever before, and disseminates itself on a wider scale."
redux [09.04.01]
"In this paper, the author reviews the history and application of copyright and concludes that, although promoted as being in the interests of authors, it is designed in such a way as to be primarily a right which benefits distributors and publishers. The author identifies a number of difficulties faced by distributors and publishers in enforcing their rights in an age where the various sources of "friction" which once limited infringement are being constantly reduced. In particular, in the emerging frictionless world the typical targets of the holder of a copyright monopoly (distributors pirating for profit) are being overtaken by a new breed of target (individuals with a cost reduction motive) and it is uneconomical for a holder of a copyright monopoly to pursue this new breed. The author argues that recent extensions to copyright monopolies add little to the illegality of the infringing acts nor any stigma to the performance of those acts. Instead, they exacerbate one of the main causes of infringement - consumer cynicism as to the benefits to society of the copyright monopoly. The author argues further that, rather than driving further cynicism through more expansive rhetoric relating to rights, holders of a copyright monopoly should instead seek to mollify consumer sentiment and encourage compliance by emphasizing a rhetoric of responsibility in the exercise of those rights. The author proposes three possible principles of responsibility that copyright monopoly holders might evaluate and endorse."
redux [06.08.01]
"Interestingly, with the onslaught of technology and promises of greater opportunity to share and communicate, copyright is now a hindrance to these ideals, serving only the moneyed interests of owners."
"Historically, copyright protections were afforded to promote expressive discourse fundamental to a democratic society. Today, the very notion of intellectual property serves to commoditize expressive ideas, rather than fostering their dissemination. Whereas initially the provision of an economic benefit was secondary to the promotion of original works, modern copyright inverts this ideal in a continuing effort to establish a marketplace for ideas."
redux [01.23.01]
"Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task. Such a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the entire world economy, making billions of new winners and new losers. We will be extremely lucky if by 2030 we are prepared to end scarcity without massive social turmoil, including riots, civil unrest, and world war. If we are to find a peaceful path to an era of plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW, transforming the industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text, audio, and video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be replaced by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models and expertise for other industries, which will need to change when their own inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication ten or fifteen years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would send us in exactly the wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that the law and some fancy footwork with industrial cartels can maintain our current economic structures, in the face of a hurricane of positive technological change that is picking them up and sending them whirling like so many autumn leaves."
redux [12.17.00]
"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."
“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"
Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.
...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”
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