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"Seems like no one wants to "sell" you anything anymore -- everything comes with a lame-ass "agreement" that you don't get to negotiate."
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"Mel Horan mock-up of a 'Free Culture' activity patch to be offered by the BSA in lieu of the current 'Respect Copyright' patch. Of course, it comes with a much more challenging set of requirements to earn it."
October 2006 Archives
The latest Debian updates to sid have fucked up my iBook. I can have it boot and not use the network, or not boot and presumably use the network. Which is a bit Schrodinger.
This has driven home how good Debian was precisely up to this moment. ;-)
Update: It tries to make the ramdisk but the boot process can't find the ramdisk?
E: linux-image-2.6.18-1-powerpc: subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2
E: linux-image-2.6-powerpc: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Post parameter wrong in script?
Anyone? :-)
First and Last and Always, Floodland and Vision Thing by The Sisters of Mercy have been reissued on Rhino Records. The albums all have additional tracks (b-sides, cover versions, and demos), new liner notes, and new typos on the covers. You can, and should, buy them from any online record store.
The stand out addition is the full version of "Never Land" on Floodland, a track that lead singer Andrew Eldritch has always denied the existence of. Their cover version of Hot Chocolate's "Emma" and the First & Last era B-Sides are welcome additions as well.
This is music as it should be. Wildly, vividly, stupidly brilliant. Ironic and cynical yet heartfelt and entertaining. Timeless yet possible at no other time. It has, it must be said, a good beat to it. Even Vision Thing sounds better second Bush round.
If any record companies have been considering paying Eldritch the large sums in unmarked notes he's demanding for another album, now would be a good time.
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"The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that artist Jeff Koons’ incorporation of a photograph into a collage painting was fair use."
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A show in Japan with new work by Harold Cohen and AARON. Via Kazushi Mukaiyama.
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"How could we operate if there wasn’t copyright? What’s the bare minimum we might exist with?"
This looks like it was an excellent debate.
Can copyright protect art from becoming a business activity. What I don’t mean is can certain individual artists use copyright to protect their works against business, but can copyright be used to protect the commons? Lots of contemporary artists have the primary concern of their resistance to business. Is copyright forcing people to be small commodity producers, when this is not what they want to be.
Historically, art is either a business activity or a distraction for the independently wealthy. It is as dangerous to see art as not being a business as to see it as only a market. The humorous description of art as "middle sized dry goods" serves as a useful illustration of what the extents to art's relation to the market should be, from both sides.
An essay in Art & Language New York's journal "The Fox" from the 1970s discusses the state-funded art of what was then Communist Yugoslavia and describes how the absence of any necessity to either the production or consumption of art created mediocrity through bureaucracy.
Bureaucratic attempts to induce and manage the creation of culture, to guarantee the creation of cultural value, whether state or corporate bureaucracy, destroy cultural value. This can be used both as an argument for markets and as an argument for art's autonomy. There is no contradiction, it is only when art has no necessity or becomes ideologically instrumentalized that there is a problem. Sadly both are the case in the contemporary art market.
All this said, in the UK some of the most successful artists and musicians of today started out being supported by the state, on unemployment benefits.
The answer is no. Introduced race relations act and sexual discrimination act in the late 60s, but things might not be worse but are not much better. Law is part of a social system and so reflect social values. What law tries to do is channel social and political conflict into what lawyers see as technical disputes. It’s interpretations of rules. To the extent that copyright is associated with two or three major cultural or philosophical ways in which the world has arranged itself in the last 300 years, of property, rights, these things are a part of a coherent development that’s lasted 100 years.
You are asking copyright law to do something revolutionary. People thought in the 60s that you pass a race relation act and racism goes away, and we’ve seen it doesn’t.
But it helps. The social change that those acts are a reflection of are protected by them.
If the property right is so over-valued and its transmission is like shares in a company instead of the rights of an individual creator then the kind of exploitation we’ve described becomes an easy shot. Can we minimise that?
The question was can we use copyright law to have a revolution, and the answer is no.
Exactly. Copyleft is reform. It is unlikely to bring about a revolution, but it can prevent a collapse. It can be disruptive, and this disruption may appear revolutionary. This disruption is more a restoration than the creation of anything new. Which is disappointing to radicals and to venture capitalists. But it is vitally important to artists.
"The Owls Map" by Belbury Poly is very good. It's the synth music you almost remember from your 1970s schooldays (even if you didn't have them) but with undercurrents of The Wicker Man. Tangerine Dream, Jarre, Kraftwerk, they're not English but they are from the same logical universe as Tomorrow's World and complement the incidental music-style warmth and whimsy of some of the other reference points of this sound. There's also hints of the evils of morris dancing and just a dash of real old folk sung by real old folk . The production is cleaner and less radiophonic workshop this time. I preferred the more analogue sound quality of "The Willows" but this is good stuff. Music with its own mythology and a rich, nuanced sound. Ghost Box are definitely onto something.
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"Last week I went to a series of sessions run by Birkbeck, the AHRC New Directions in Copyright Network, and the Public Programmes Department of the Tate Modern, entitled Roundtable Discussions on the Future of Copyright and the Regulation of Creativ
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""Art-O-Meter is a device that measures the quality of an art piece. It bases its evaluation on the amount of time that people spend in front of an artwork compared to the total time of exhibition. The measurements are graphically represented by comments
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/6118
This sharing economy is not meant to displace the commercial economy. Its purpose is not to force Madonna to sing for free.
Free Software is not meant to displace the commercial economy, which has benefited greatly from it. But this is not about displacing or working with commerce, it is about Freedom.
The next challenge is to figure out how this sharing economy interacts with a traditional commercial economy.
Freedom and commerce are not separate magisteria. This sharing economy interacts with commerce by commercial actors having Freedom and not denying it to individuals.
The Gift Economy, as it used to be known, is a reification of one of the possible products of Freedom. As its proponents argue it is a more efficient method of production. And this more efficient means of production can be applied to culture very successfully as Wikipedia shows. But it is important to not confuse this benefit with its causes and to try to substitute other causes such as money or politics.
Copyleft projects are just part of free culture. We need to defeat DRM, protect and extend Fair Use, ensure that consumer rights are not ignored, defend fair speech, oppose censorship, and ensure that the Internet is not over-regulated. Copyleft has a part to play in all this. Copyleft projects do not need walling off in the mysterious gardens of reputation or sharing. So we need more than CC for Free Culture, but we do not need CC to do less than copyleft.
CC will never become a part of that commercial economy. But it is important, I believe, that we play a role in enabling this crossover. The alternative is a world we're seeing too much of all ready: large entities that create sandboxes for "sharing," but then effectively claim ownership over everything built within that sandbox. This is, in my view, not a sharing economy. It is instead simple sharecropping.
And the greatest tool it has is the NC licence, which creates nothing if not an immense sandbox.
It is telling that Lessig regards the creators of a YouTube viral advertisement using NC music without observing the licence then paying the musician when they got caught as a success story. It is a success story for the New Permission Culture, not Free Culture.
http://icommons.org/2006/10/16/dinner-with-magnatunes-john-buckman/
In my perspective, Creative Commons is not about non-commercial use, but about open culture. I am trying to make Magnatune a good example of how the commons does not exclude commercial use. There needs to be incentives for artists and great people to share, and to use Creative Commons. It seems that CC is now battling to find the balance between what is ‘commercial’ and non-commercial’. But from Larry Lessig‘ book, Free Culture, I reckon that the controversy of ‘commercial versus non-commercial’ use, is actually the battle of ‘permission culture versus open culture’.
John is absolutely right about this, and it is immensely disheartening to see the mistakes that Lessig is currently making.
But Magnatune makes music available noncommercially for free. You have to ask permission to use it commercially. Magnatune therefore excludes commercial use from their 'commons', pushing it into a proprietary licence system. This is a permission culture.
If we believe, Lessig-style, that artists need financial incentives to produce work, this permission culture is actually a disincentive.
And there are so many problems with commercial ventures acting as a gatekeeper for permission. What happens in five years time when Magnatune shut down and I cannot get a proprietary licence with the same low overhead any more? What happens if I do not become a Magnatune artist and wish to pass on my freedom (sic) to a third party? What happens in seventy years time when the musicians are dead and my grandchildren wish to use the now orphan works? What happens if I am not a multimillionaire and all those thirty dollar economic permissions will stop me performing my "Endtroducing" or my "Paul's Boutique"?
The measures being proposed by Lessig are the very ones that killed sampling artistically in the 1990s. Incentivizing "producers" killed production.
Lessig is falling into the trap of trying to reproduce the supply-side
economics of big media. Middlemen need financial incentives. Artists need to make a living. There is an important difference there.
We need a distributed, rights based culture to protect the conversation of
culture when things go wrong. Not a centralized, permission based economy to
incentivize distributors when things are going right.
I have a very different definition of the ‘commons’ actually. The ‘commons’ is
a pool of culture, made available for you to reuse without needing to seek
permission from the original creators, at a reasonable price.
This is an unusual definition of a 'commons'. Although the "original creators"
cannot refuse artistic permission, the system can refuse economic permission.
This is an economic permission culture rather than an artistic one, but it is
still a permission culture.
I think it is all right to charge the price, as long as the price is not the
barrier to reusing it.
This is one of the foundations of Free Software. But Free Software gives freedom generally to paying users, whereas NC requires extra permission to charge the price that makes the work usable in an economic context (or for the artist to offset their costs).
If the work is NC, permission will always potentially be a barrier to use unless, like Lessig currently, we take a "let them eat cake" view of free culture as an economically inexplicable ghetto of reputational or gift economics.
If we are discussing a free culture or an open society, Lessig's New Permission
Culture simply doesn't fit. It is harder to get people to use street performer
protocol or whatever than to get them to add a cashback link to their NC work
that no-one will ever use and that won't work when they change hosts. But we
need to do the hard work of freedom rather than look for easy technological
fixes and close approximations.
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"a device that is capable of measuring the quality of an art piece, based on the amount of time that people spend in front of an artwork compared to the total time of exhibition."
The Affero clause feels right intuitively, but is it? What problem is it trying to address for software users? And in what way are we users of the software that it covers?
Matt Lee (CNUK) has argued that the Affero clause will burden end users of CRM software more than the likes of Google. And if I have to make all the code of my CRM installation available, what happens to my database_password.php file?
Crosbie Fitch (FCUK) has argued that the Affero clause confuses public and private use of software, making the GPL into a "gift economy" license rather than a rights-based license by emphasising sharing (distribution) over use.
These are persuasive arguments but they do not alter the fact that web-serivicization of Free Software looks and smells like Tivoization. In both cases the freedom to use (in the FSD sense of "use", what I call "Mere Use") software that was previously Free is denied to the user by measures not accounted for in GPL-2.
Web services use xml-rpc to firewall Free code inside the private space of an organization. AJAX is software executing half in your public web browser and half on a private server, again using xml-rpc or a similar method of remote procedure invocation as a firewall. And it is the fact that we are discussing method invocation that is the key. This is not a public/private or "sharing" issue. It is as an issue of how we conceive of "linking" and of "distribution" or of public use. Web services and AJAX count as providing software publicly for linking to or use by virtue of their technical construction. Their "semantics of communication", as the GPL FAQ puts it (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html).
Perhaps then we should not think of the Affero clause as a gift-economy clause bolted on to the GPL. Instead we should think of it as a special exception for those who wish to use Free Software without giving users the freedom to tinker with the running code that Free Software normally provides. In return for this, fairly massive, exception they only have to observe the terms of the GPL that they are still capable of observing. Such as the public disclosure term.
The Affero clause is therefore still about Freedom, not "sharing". It is the LGPL for the age of REST. If the circumstances you have created will deny me Freedom here, the Affero clause says, at least let me have it elsewhere.
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"Upgrading to Vista is the start of an abusive relationship that could last for years."
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"publishing isn't driven by bestsellers, but by "okaysellers,""
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Numly are UIDs, RegisteredCommons looks like a sequel to Common Content.
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A business based on making viral video less watchable.
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"77 MILLION PAINTINGS continues Brian Eno's exploration into the medium of light. Eno entitled his collection of audio-visual installations to depict the possible number of images that can be created from a huge number of combinations, a term he calls 'ge
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"The Boy Scouts of America will offer rewards to Scouts who absorb a brainwashing regime written by the MPAA."
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Lots of BY-SA and sampling plus stuff. Oh, however did fc.o incentivise them? /sarcasm.
" What about it, what about it, what about it ?
Oh, I'm pissing in a river. "
- Pissing in a river, Patti Smith.
" I'm gonna be somebody, I'm gonna get on that train, go to New York City,
I'm gonna be so bad I'm gonna be a big star and I will never return,
Never return, no, never return, to burn out in this piss factory
And I will travel light.
Oh, watch me now. "
- Piss Factory, Patti Smith.
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Insane licensing scheme for fabric that you have theoretically purchased.
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Brazilian press restrictions "due to copyright commitments with various international entities that contribute data and images used in Al Gore's presentation"
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Why even "limited" DRM limits you unacceptably. This is strongly relevent to YouTube's walled garden.
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"Here's a version of supposedly the same character from the 1980s. What's the difference? No form. No taste. Ugly, sloppy and wrinkly."
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"The notion that a track I buy in DRM is protected and one without DRM isn't is a fallacy."
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"Artists get paid, while fans can keep on sharing remixed tunes on the site and push the boundaries of user generated media even further." But see the Set Top Cop critique.
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"Just last week, I had to cancel a speaking engagement at Disney Studios, whose speaker agreement includes a clause in which you promise never to use the word Disney again in an article or story without their written permission (!)."
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"Criticizing religion, a favorite artistic gambit of the past 250 years, has become potentially lethal. If creative types are unwilling to pay the price, argument will be muffled at the point of a gun."
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"One of the side-effects of the entertainment industry's war on copying is that it's created a kind of folk-mythology about copyright being a kind of magic word you can invoke to put a fence around anything that you want to police."
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"The thing is - it’s impossible. Trust me on this. I’ve looked at every angle on media reuse, and unless the content owners (the copyright owners) declare this in the concept of a production so that all contributors to the production also offer their
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"Is it possible to see too much art in one day? Probably yes." Particularly if the art is at Frieze...
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"According to documents lodged with the trademarks registry in London, the multi-millionaire former Beatle has begun a process to trademark his name for use on goods as wide-ranging as pantihose, waistcoats and vegetarian food."
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"Legendary game designer Chris Crawford has disclosed some information about his next big project, an interactive storytelling platform called Storytron"
Free Software does not have or privilege a concept of "creativity". This is not to say that Free Software advocates are not creative (or "innovative"). Software must be written, and Hacking is generally regarded as creative. Free Software removes impediments to creativity, giving positive protection for it without explicitly mentioning it.
The concept that Free Software is based on is not creativity or Hacking but "Use". This is use of software on computer hardware. Free Software's "freedom of use" is reflexive, it guarantees only the freedom to use software. Some people misunderstand this and attempt to guarantee Free Software's use for social ends or as part of a more general conception of "freedom".
Free Software's Use is "Mere Use". It is not a guarantee of the usability of the products of a "gift economy" or a guarantee of social liberty. These are both downstream products of the freedoms of Mere Use, and trying to work them into definitions of Software Freedom can in fact work against it. Mere Use is a simple, minor and specific definition of freedom in a single context. It is basically not being hassled sitting at a teletype. Free Software is reform, and its Freedoms are those that restore the freedoms that users of software enjoyed historically as seen by Richard Stallman.
Cultural Freedom is historically the union of academic freedom, free speech, freedom of the press, Fair Use and consumer protection law. Culture in general may seem too broad to be a single context but our relation to it(s products) is in need of reform. "Fair Use" and use of culture in general have been undermined by IP Maximalism: expanding copyright and trademark law, media concentration, partisanship and censorship, and technological limitations on use of culture.
The equivalent reform in Free Software was effected by identifying the choke point for freedom in the relationship between individuals and software. This choke point was Use. Whether Use is a similar choke point for Culture, whether it is even coherent to speak of Use of Culture, is undecided. But it is a logical starting point.
Use of Culture would be Mere Use of Culture; Cultural Use. This is an alien concept, and culture is not normally regarded as something functional to be used in the same way that software is (or at all). But we do use books or CDs, or tape recorders and photocopiers, and the concept of "Fair Use" and the increasing representation of Cultural works as software makes this concept less alien than it might be.
Cultural Use may simply be the local freedom to read and write (or record and playback, or see and paint, or receive and copy, or ...), comparable to the local freedom to use a teletype. But in order for these freedoms not to be made hollow the other freedoms of Stallman's Four Freedoms are also necessary.
It is important not to privilege a concept of "creativity" in or over Cultural Use, or to mistake Cultural Use for a denigration of creativity. And Cultural Use must be seen to include production as well as consumption, we are talking of the machinery of production of culture, which includes its products. With these caveats in mind the simple, atomic freedom of Cultural Use implicitly protects global freedom and creativity in general. It is this that makes it a useful concept for reform and for the protection of Free Culture.
In my course I have known and, according to my measure, have co-operated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.
- Edmund Burke, quoted in the front matter of "The Open Society and Its Enemies Volume One".
So a while ago Newsgrist blogged this:
NEWSgrist - where spin is art: The "November" Matrix: Art, Theory, Criticism, Palaver
And I laughed and remembered A&L's 1970s call for the editors of October to be killed but I didn't think any more of it.
Then on Thursday I went to the Frieze Art Fair and Koenig Books had an actual print copy of November. I bought it and read it and it's very, very good. Like the best parodies it would be easy to confuse with its subject if it wasn't so funny. Some of the essays would have made for a nice Sokal hoax if they'd been submitted to October itself.
If you can find a copy do pick it up.
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"A Hungarian airport has been bilked into trying an insane scheme to RFID-track every passenger. This panopticon was invented by snake-oil salesmen from University College London. "
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"a collection of animals made up using tube lines, stations & junctions of the London Underground map."
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"You can go to animation school, spend a $100,000 and not learn a damn thing about the basics of good animation drawing- OR you can buy a Preston Blair book for $8 and learn it all in a couple months. You pick."
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PJ on an old Caldera lionization of Stallman, and why the "pragmatists" preaching corporate dogma are wrong.
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"...it's like Musique Concrete, which you could never do at this juncture in time because it's too expensive. It can't exist. You're losing a form of music."
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"Mexico's Teotihuacan, once the center of a sprawling pre-Hispanic empire, is set to become the launch pad for an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life."
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NC (sigh...) but still funny.
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Debian Legal show they understand trademark law even less than DRM. If that is possible
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"Megnut food blog points to a moral panic among chefs reacting to plagiarism of their recipes and presentation -- cooks who propose that they should be able to copyright food. Not that they should have a remedy for plagiarism, but that ways of preparing f
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A handheld inkhet printer mod. Very cool.
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"An award-winning Texas art teacher who was reprimanded after one of her fifth-grade students saw a nude sculpture during a trip to a museum has lost her job."
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"Our own defining view is what you might call the long zoom"
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"The music fan site that anyone can edit."
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"Now comes news from Disney-ABC that content producers have had a revelation: instead of simply trying to squash piracy, it might be more productive to understand and compete with it."
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"By including Macrovision with its products, TiVo is designing a product that is intended to control its owner and treat its owner (TiVo's customer) as an attacker."
37. His argument about the power of language is either self-refuting or it is untrue.
38. His "family resemblence" argument doesn't work. Try "Washington's Axe" or "The Ship Of Theseus" instead.
"What's your winning motto?" - Nicholas Parsons.
"Never ever bloody anything ever!" - Eddie.
"And that's it? That's your winning motto?" - Nicholas Parsons.
"Live my life by it, matey." - Eddie.
'Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door', The Comic Strip.
A glass and marble conference room with a view out over the docklands landscape. Jamie T walks through the door, glancing back at the PA who didn't offer him a coffee. A suit sits at the long oval table that fills most of the room, and Jamie reaches out to shake hands with him. The suit remains frozen. Jamie hesitantly withdraws his hand, then sits down awkwardly.
The suit raises an eyebrow. Jamie looks confused. The suit steeples his fingers and sends his eyebrow even further towards his weave. Jamie mouths a silent "oh!" and jerks up from the chair.
"Jamie!" ejaculates the suit. "You'll be glad to clear we have assigned you the mechanically reclaimed musical style that you'll be promoting for your brief stint in content."
"Don't you mean music?" asks Jamie.
The suit gives him a Look. Jamie shifts his weight to the other foot nervously.
"You know how Lily Allen is an unironic rehash of some of the most insipid dross of the 1970s?"
Jamie shrugs and nods at the same time. A shrod? A nug?
"Well, even the kids' parents don't remember the original. So we think the time is ripe for a male Lily Allen."
Jamie's face drops. "No! Please!"
The suit holds up a contract. Jamie recognises his signature. It's as if the compressor has been yanked from his spigot.
"Good lad." grins the suit.
(If anyone has a better explanation of how the current crop of pathetic untransformative strip-mined debasements of popular music history get the idea that their pitious aping of people with an idea, even a bad one, is something there is actually a demand for, do let me know. I like a laugh.)
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"Allerca, a company that is offering genetically modified cats at $4,000 each, makes you "agree" to a EULA before they sell you your puddy tat"
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"Of course, the reason SalonQuest is going after Olson isn't because they don't want her to take photos of the shampoo bottles. It's because they want to control the secondary sales market, and they are trying to use copyright law as an excuse."
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"Open Source Shorts is a screening of short films released under Creative Commons licences. I am currently seeking submissions. The criteria are straight forward. The film should be at most 10 minutes in duration, published with a ceative commons copyrig
In response to my rant on Lessig's blog comments pages (reproduced on this blog as "Fisking Lessig's New Permission Culture") M. David Peterson writes:
Only one economy? I’m sorry, but I disagree.
In the comments, piers writes:
[...] it seems the free (as-in-speech) economy is already inherent in the software development triangle of resources, time and money [...]
And Peterson agrees. And so do I. Which is why I argued that casting free (as-in-speech) as a separate "economy" from that economic "triangle" is a false dichotomy.
Peterson continues in an update to his post:
While I recognize that the Free Software Foundation has *ALWAYS* been about free-as-in-speech software, unfortunately there is a free-as-in-beer side effect that in many ways has pigeon-holed their efforts into a “free-as-in-everything� type-cast.
I agree. Eric Raymond's "gift economy" and the reification of "the commons" that Lessig and apparently Benkler write about are symptoms of this.
I will say it again: these are effects, not causes. Or side effects, as Peterson puts it. Crosbie Fitch also makes this point well with his idea of libertarian and gift-economy factions fighting to set the direction of the GPL 3 revision.
The problem with this, of course, is that you can’t exactly build a business model and an underlying business economy on top of a donation-based revenue stream.
This is the least effective way of making money from Free Software or Free Culture. If you remember "donationware" it's not a very good way of making money off proprietary software either.
I wrote an article some time ago on "how to make money from free culture". I'm going to update and expand it at some point.
Let me state this another way: If you want to build a healthy and strong foundation for any given cause, you don’t break the kneecaps of your primary source of revenue, even if you are of the belief that this same mentioned revenue source is the root of all evil.
Most software developers are employed creating and maintaining bespoke software. They can use and contribute to free software for precisely the benefits piers identifies.
Home users and other consumers don't sell software and so aren't really worried about software as a source of revenue for them.
This leaves the shrink-wrapped software economy. IBM and Apple's kneecaps seem very healthy despite their use of and contribution to Free Software.
I would use the phrase "false dichotomy", but I don't want to be accused of being a one-trick pony. Free != gratis. But Lessig's attempt at NC "freedom" makes precisely this mistake.
Given Peterson's impassioned plea for the religion of the market against the evidence of how software actually relates to society, I have to ask whether he is right to point the finger of faith at GNU's political position.
This political position is the one that makes the middle ground safe for the likes of Apache and MySQL. And it is GNU's commitment to freedom that made it possible for Linus to hack "just for fun".
The military are a massive source of funding for software in the US. They love freedom, but they aren't so keen on "openness". This makes the term "Open Source" a bit of an own-goal for those that came up with it to not scare off potential customers.
Moving this away from a religious focus (though I do believe that both the ideological, and in some cases, theological comparison is a fair one), it seems to me their are several *FANTASTIC* examples (though there are more than just these) of OSS “movements� in which have successfully bridged the gap between corporation and community, and in my own opinion, can be referenced as prime examples of how we can integrate the ideals of a Free Culture with the primary focus of Corporate America.
The projects that Peterson lists are not as popular as the GPL-based GNU/Linux system. But they are good examples of the kind of "pragmatism" that market idealists insist Free Software must display if it is to become as successful as, well, GNU/Linux. I would repeat that companies that have been "pragmatic" towards Free Software seem to have healthy kneecaps.
The point I obviously failed to make in "Fisking..." is that Wikipedia, GNU and other projects are not economic mysteries requiring economic creation after the fact if they are not to evaporate as suddenly as they sprung spontaneously into existence from the economic ether. They are a product of rights (or simulated rights, or whatever). Protect those rights and help people capitalise on their products. But do not try to strike a balance between the inconvenience of those rights and the rewards of the market.
A century ago, Henry Ford paid his workers well so they could afford to buy the cars he made. Google gives its workers a day to work on personal projects. Even Soros speaks of Free Societies as well as Free Markets, and he's nobody's fool. The idea is that screwing people out of every penny will not make you as rich as giving them a little freedom.
It is this idea that people who wish to repeat the success of Ford or Google need to work on, not how best to compromise people's rights in order to reclaim Free Culture for penny capitalism. I do not believe that everything should be only one colour, whether that colour is a dull grey or an enticing shade of green.
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"Reminds me of the Dover "copyright free images" books that contain a notice promising to sue you if you copy the book."
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"Eurotrash goes intergalactic tonight when two naked television presenters host the first programme conceived for aliens and broadcast to a star located in the Big Dipper, 45 light years away."
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"1 "Do this one cheap (or free) and we'll make it up on the next one.""
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"DOODLE is a work-in-progress exploring the possibilities of intuitive and direct drawing in 3D virtual space. Built to use a Flock of Birds (from Ascension Technologies), we have also made a (limited) demo using a conventional mouse. The 3D version allow
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Classic penguin book covers. Brilliant.
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"Physicists discover that the structure of a brain cell is the same as the entire universe."
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Excellent old images of, well, maidens and monsters.
You have to kill a lot of elephants to build an ivory tower.
Public good (German models of Wikipedia).
Human activity (culture).
Graft (in the sense of unpaid working and networking towards a paid goal).
Social capital (irreducible to markets).
Deontological realism (we are "tenants of culture").
A value spiral (build and cash out).
Any more?
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