Scene: A restaurant, interior, night.A man sits at a table, holding a menu.A waiter approaches.Man: Ah, waiter. I'm ready to order. I'll have the pate for starter, steak (rare, please) and fries with a side salad for main course, and the creme brulee for pudding. Can you recommend something to go with that?Waiter: Certainly, sir. If I might recommend the zinfandel this evening?Man: Yes I think I shall have a glass of that. Thank you, waiter.The waiter walks off.The man gazes off into the distance as he waits for his starter.After a few moments the waiter returns, pulling a ruminating cow behind him on a piece of rope.Sound effect: Moo!Waiter: Your steak sir.Man: What?!Waiter: Your steak, sir.Man: What?!The waiter holds up a chainsaw and pulls his goggles over his eyes. He pulls the starter cord on the chainsaw.Sound effect: Chainsaw petrol engine revving up.Man (shouting): Look I just want some steak, cooked rare, in its capacity as part of a satisfying meal of subtle and varied flavours!Waiter (revving down chainsaw): But sir, you ordered steak.Man: Yes, about twelve ounces of it, prepared in the kitchens, as part of the main course of a meal. With fries and a side salad. After a starter.Waiter (stopping chainsaw): But sir, surely if you want steak, you want more steak than you can possibly eat, steak to eleven as it were? Forget the rest of the meal, forget the subtle richness of the experience, don't you just want to go for the full-on core proposition of the meal qua meal, i.e. the hacked up dead cow?Man: What?Waiter: The full experience of everything that steak can possibly mean, an immersive sensurround of steak! The visceral experience of steak, the subtexts of steak desublimated and given full reign to finally realise what we all know steak to be, steak set free! Steeeeaaaaaakkkkk!Man: What?Waiter: You want a bloodbath of steak you tart, don't deny it!Man: I bloody well do deny it.Waiter (Pulling the starter on the chainsaw again): Ah, shut up you reactionary old square. You don't have the first clue what you're talking about. Steeeeaaaaaakkkkk! Steeeeaaaaaakkkkk!
Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial (BY-NC-SA, NC-SA for short) is not copyleft.This may seem counterintuitive. After all, ShareAlike is copyleft isn't it? Well, no it isn't.Copyleft is, as its name implies, a reversal of copyright. It restores and protects the rights that copyright removes and makes alienable. The rights, not some rights.ShareAlike takes a gift economy-style view of one of the effects of copyleft; the effect of quid pro quo. Copyleft has, as a side effect of its operation, the effect of requiring that people share their work in order to have access to other people's work. They have to share, and everyone has to share and share alike. Hence the name of the ShareAlike module of CC's licences.But we can share and share our work alike without maintaining people's rights. Linus's argument that Tivo should be able to share their source without respecting people's rights to actually be able to do anything with it illustrates this. For Linus, quid pro quo trumps people's rights. Quite how he could have developed Linux if everyone else had respected his rights so little is a mystery for another time.And we can use the legal mechanism that copyleft uses to protect people's rights, reciprocal licencing, without using that mechanism to protect people's rights. You could make a reciprocal EULA for a proprietary operating system that required you to charge anyone you give a copy to a hundred dollars and send ninety to the corporation that publishes that operating system. That would be reciprocal licensing, and you could share the software under the same terms your received it. So the corporation's marketing department could easily argue that this is ShareAlike as well as reciprocal licensing. It is obvious that this is not copyleft. It has neither the intent nor the effects of copyleft. It would be very useful for marketing and political reasons for people who don't actually want to respect the rights of others to be able to call this copyleft and gain kudos by association with actual copyleft, but very few people would be fooled.All this said, ShareAlike has most of the practical effects of copyleft. So it is probably a reasonable substitute for copyleft at the moment. It is only when confusing copyleft with some of its effects leads people to ignore what copyleft actually does that it becomes a problem.For example when people confuse reciprocal non-commerciality with copyleft.NC-SA is not copyleft because the presence of NonCommercial restrictions breaks copyleft. It removes rights, and even in the terminlogy of ShareAlike it does not Share Alike with the originally licencing author. Arguing that NonCommercial ShareAlike restores some rights, that copyleft is just reciprocal licencing, or that you are still sharing the work does cannot make NC-SA seem any more like copyleft. NC removes enough of copyleft from SA to no longer qualify as copyleft.Calling NC-SA copyleft is therefore a mistake. I am not saying that it is necessarily or always a malicious mistake. Far from it, it is a mistake that people seem to make from the best of intentions. But it is a mistake that people should avoid making and should explain when they come across others making it.
Scene: A bank boardroom somewhere in the North of England. Eight bored-looking old men are sat around an oval table.A sharply-dressed young MBA walks in, opens his laptop, and connects it to the video projector currently throwing a silent re-enactment of Derek Jarman's 'Blue' onto the wall. A powerpoint slide flickers into view.MBA: Right guys, so what we're looking at here is the increase in the bank's monetarizably leveragible resourcary instances this year. This is an annuitized fiscalistic product, a complex of offset and re-contextualized future elements with contingencies virtualized and re-incorporated. Now if you remember, my incentivisatory package stipulates that I will get a million pounds for every 100% increase in profits, so five million pounds are being wired to my account as we speak.Old Man 1: I didn't understand a word of that, so it must be good.Old Man 2: And of course we get bonuses based on this as well.Old Man 3: Wonderful. So let's see the projections for next year.MBA: The what?Old Man 3: The projections. For next year.MBA: Oh I see. Nope, I don't have any.Old Man 4: You don't have any idea how the business will increase next year?MBA: Look, you said to me "grow the revenue streams this year" and I have. It's a bit late to start worrying about what you are going to do next year now!Old Man 5: What do you mean?MBA: Well I've just lent seventy billion pounds worth of mortgages to idiots who couldn't afford to repay them if they sold their kidneys to Gordon Ramsey! How else do you think I got the arrangement fees so high!Old Man 6: Ohhhhh...MBA: Next year. Pffff.Old Man 7: So, young man, how did you get the money for these mortgages?MBA: Oh I borrowed it. Don't worry, it's only short-term loans so it won't show up on the books as a long-term commitment and depress the share price.Old Man 8: And what happens when these short-term loans expire?MBA: Well that doesn't happen until next year. So it really isn't part of my remit.Old Man 3: So what you are telling us is that you have caused this bank to take on a hundred and forty billion dollars of short term loans in order to get the arrangement fees from selling mortgages to people who cannot possibly afford to repay them?MBA: Absolutimondo.Old Man 3: And you did this because you would get a bonus based on poorly chosen short-term indicators?MBA: Booyakashan!Old Man 3: Without any consideration that this might destroy not just this company but the wider economy?MBA: Kapow!Old Man 3: You do know you shouldn't have done that...MBA: Pfff. Based on which principle of microeconomics?
This isn't a replacement for draw-something, which is inspired by AARON but very different both in terms of how it's programmed and the images it produces.
