Perhaps some day before the case settles I’ll actually be able to read them all. In the meantime linking here so that I can find them all later.
licensing
3
Sep 08
creative commons picture script request?
I’m doing a lot of slide show work of late, so I was wondering if any of my readers knew of an in-image equivalent of the gfwa script I use on the blog? Basically, I’d love to know of (or have written?) a script that, given an image, a license, attribution strings, etc., would spit out the image plus an unobtrusive overlay containing the proper attribution information, so that I could put the image into the slide and preserve the requisite licensing information.
Something like adding the following in the lower righthand corner of this:
but less ugly (and more license-compliant; any CC-expert readers might want to weigh in in comments on the state of the art for citation in non-web-y formats like pictures/slide-decks.)
To be really kick-ass the script would probably need to take a font color and corner (upper left, upper-right, etc.) but I’ll settle for having that hard-coded for now.
Lessig handles this by including a list of attributions, links, etc., on the final slide, which may be appropriate for particularly image-dense presentations, but I’d like to experiment with this for now- it feels more appropriate anyway, especially if it can be done in a low impact, aesthetically pleasing way.
Thanks…
10
May 08
interesting research on ‘conditional cooperation’
Interspecies cooperation by Barry Rogge. License: 
For those interested in some of my previous writings on intrinsic motivation, this survey paper by Simon Gächter may be of interest.
Key sentence:
[W]e find strong evidence that many people’s attitude toward voluntary cooperation is conditional on other people’s cooperation… Moreover, the fact that many people contribute more the more others contribute also speaks against pure altruism explanations, because they predict that people reduce their own contributions when informed that others already contribute to the public good.
Basically, the paper argues (and justifies through a survey of experimental evidence) that a majority of people are ‘conditional cooperators’ who cooperate in community projects (voting, paying taxes, charity work, etc.) if and only if other people cooperate. If they think others are ‘defecting’ (i.e., not cooperating) then they will stop cooperating as well.
The paper also has some more detailed observations that come out of the experimental work; among them that voluntary cooperation is fragile; group composition matters (i.e., groups with more conditional cooperators will be healthier); and that ‘belief management’ maters- i.e., if people think that they are in a group with more conditional cooperators, that group will be more robust. None of these will come as a huge surprise to anyone who has been involved with volunteer communities, but still interesting to see it experimentally confirmed.
I’ve always suspected that something like this is the case, and that it explains in part why the GPL is so successful, since it uses copyright to force cooperation and penalize defection, and (importantly) makes a clear public statement that that is the case, which serves a signaling function (everyone in the community knows these are the ground rules) and a filtering function (people who aren’t interested in collaborating don’t join as much as they join other groups.)
The paper is only 25 pages and fairly readable; if you’re interested in the dynamics of volunteerism I recommend it.
Those of you who aren’t into economists and their fancy ‘measurements’ may also want to look at this related early paper, which is somewhat dated (the concept of low and high authoritarians is sort of discredited at this point) but still possibly of interest in explaining some of the psychological mechanisms at work here.
(Came to this by way of this paper on tax evasion, which looks to have many other interesting citations that I should investigate once exams are done. Only Telecoms left…)
2
Apr 08
openjdk trademark license
Sun has posted a new draft of their openjdk trademark license. If I read it correctly, it basically says you’re OK to use it as long as it is the ‘vast majority’ of the code is the same as the official codebase. The ‘vast majority’ language seems like a reasonable compromise, allowing the copyright license to have effect for the most common uses (small bug patching, build fixes, porting, etc.) while still preventing completely egregious uses of the mark.
[Was posted some weeks ago, but my brain has turned to mush, so I'm going through old email to pick off low-hanging fruit instead of doing the hard, important stuff, so here it is.]
27
Mar 08
brief “CC-licensed specification” rant
The next time I hear “we’ve licensed the specification under Creative Commons so anyone can implement the spec”, I’m going to scream at someone.1
To take a list from a Microsoft license I read yesterday, implementing a spec may require (among other things) licensing of “pending utility and design patent claims, copyrights, trade dress and trademark rights.” Putting a specification under a CC license gives you a copyright license to the text of the specification; it does not give license to the necessary trademarks, or to the patents, and depending on the license chosen, may not even give you the right to make a derivative work of the license (aka, the implementation.)
So, creative commons folks: could you please, please scream for me? Or better yet, work with SFLC to create a good license for specifications (since they aren’t happy with the OSP), and then ask people who’ve ‘cc licensed’ specifications to use that instead? KTHXBYE. :)
Clarification later:
I said, poorly: “Putting a specification under a CC license… depending on the license chosen, may not even give you the right to make a derivative work of the license (aka, the implementation.)” This was confusing, because I deliberately cut out (in order to be brief) any discussion of what a derivative of the CC-licensed work would be.
What I should have said was something like:
“CC licenses, used this way, definitely give you a right to edit and redistribute and change the text of the specification. However, probably 99 out of 100 lawyers would tell you that a CC license on the spec does not actually say anything at all about whether or not you can implement the specification. The remaining 1 out of 100 lawyers would say that the license gives you permission because the implementation is a derivative of the specification. If that is the case, and the implementation is a derivative, then the CC license gave you the permissions to implement- but they come with the standard CC restrictions as well! So either way the licensor probably doesn’t get what they really wanted.”
- Yes, someone from MS did it today, but I don’t blame them- this is all confusing and they were trying hard to do the right thing. [↩]
18
Mar 08
spring break link blogging
Several weeks of backlog from my feed reader:
- shakespeare on entrepreneurship: ‘Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might oft win, by fearing to attempt!’ So true. Via.
- I’m always on the lookout for examples that Hollywood is shooting itself in the foot, but I’m not sure this is one of them, since a non-neutral network is yet another way to lock out competitors.
- “White space activity today is sort of our last hope to get some good spectrum.” — Craig Mundie, Microsoft. Possibly very true, depending on what happens with the D block. I wish both Microsoft and Wu luck.
- ‘Active investors are silly people.‘ The interesting question, in my mind, is why so many people are so irrational. This is a gold mine for the behavioral economists, and a nice counter-argument for when someone tells you that better information creates more efficient markets. (See also and also, but I long for a Love-ian explanation of why this happens in theoretically rational markets with nearly perfect price information.)
- Colin, great post, thanks.
- I’m not sure I entirely agree with SFLC’s position on the MS Open Specification Promise, but anyone who is relying on the OSP should read this, one way or the other.
- I’m likely to be way more involved in my journal next year; Crooked Timber’s stimulating bits on the subject of free academic journals are therefore timely.
- This book looks fascinating for my next bout of free time: ‘Patent Failure.‘ via Patently-O.
- Next week I’ll be in Redmond for their Technology Summit; my hopes are similar to Matt’s for OSBC. But we’ll see.
- Felten doing interesting thinking on Privacy, and particularly why people say they want privacy and yet do so little to actually achieve it. He identifies legally binding commitments to privacy as part of the problem- everyone assumes that the companies they give their data to will be promiscuous with the data anyway (see, e.g., non-denial denials), so they don’t bother to discriminate between companies. Interesting idea; not sure if it is really that important in practice, though.
- Walt Mossberg dropped by my Telecoms class last week and gave an extended discourse on why he calls the telecoms Soviet ministries. Interestingly, Lessig apparently was saying things recently about blowing up the FCC as well.
- Mark Pilgrim asks an interesting question about iphone and GPL; I haven’t had time to think about an answer. (My immediate guess is that, possible tivoisation issues aside, GPL v3 is probably better than v2 on this account because of Section 6(d).)
- In case you’re a European and think software patents don’t apply to you, a friendly reminder that they do.
- I’ve wanted to do this to the Boston and NYC anti-terror posters for years; I hope they’ve actually been printed and put in trains.
Enough for today, I’m going out in the sunshine.
16
Feb 08
why the writers demands shares of revenues instead of profits
After I casually mentioned my support of the writer’s strike, a good friend told me that he thought that the strike was bad, in part because the writers should be getting a share of the profits and not of revenue (and since there were no profits in internet video yet, they should be getting nothing in the internet yet, hence, no good reason for the strike.)
The response to that, of course, is that you can’t trust the studios to report their profits at all accurately- even if they were going to be honest with their writers (unlikely), they have plenty of other incentives (including tax rules) that make them distort their profit reports. Revenues are much more easily auditable, so one of the things you get taught even in first year contracts is that rational participants in the process key their payments off revenue instead of profit.
Two reminders of this came across today that I thought might be instructive for people interested in the issue but unfamiliar with how Hollywood functions. In one, the folks who did the Lord of the Rings movies have been failing to pay the royalties owed to the Tolkien family. Oops. Six billion dollars in revenue, and apparently no payment to the writer. (Of course, they didn’t pay Peter Jackson either.) And it happens in lower profile cases too; the LA Times has a good writeup of ‘Hollywood accounting’ today too, completely outside of the high-profile Tolkien/Jackson cases.
Hopefully I’m not the only one who finds this fascinating ;)
3
Feb 08
“why should a customer care about IP assurance?”
Matt Asay asks “Why should a customer care about IP assurance?” He and Savio Rodrigues both make what appears to be the same error: comparing IP to “environmental rules or workplace safety regulations”. There is a critical difference, of course: if the EPA or comes after Microsoft, and I use Microsoft products, I can’t be sued. If a patent holder comes after Microsoft, and I use Microsoft products, I can be sued, since patent law allows penalties both for manufacture and use of infringing products. (Joe Shaw correctly cites the relevant law here.) That’s fundamentally different from most other forms of law, where customers typically aren’t liable for the sins of the vendor.
Is the risk of getting sued for use very small? Absolutely. Is that risk overblown by hostile organizations who have used it to scare customers away from competitors, or to ‘tax’ those competitors? Yup. (And in a world with a more competent antitrust enforcer, there would be antitrust concerns about this behavior.) But the risk to the customer, however small, is non-zero. So competent lawyers from large organizations must advise their clients that there is a risk, and most organizations are just too risk averse to ignore that. Hence, customers care.
Savio has another way to argue that the risk really is basically zero:
You know, I’d actually love to see Microsoft sue a customer because of IP issues. Exactly how much would they sue for to offset the millions of dollars worth of negative publicity and brand destruction?
I’d love to think that this can be used as a security blanket, but I’m not sure that’s actually the case. The damage could easily be small- just as a vast majority of Americans think ‘well, it’s OK that they tapped his phones without a warrant- he’s a criminal, and I’m not’ or, historically, have thought ‘it is OK that they restricted his first amendment rights, he’s a communist, and I’m not’, I have a nagging feeling that a majority of software buyers would think ‘it is OK that they went after him for patent violations- he’s a patent violator, and I’m not’. Never underestimate the ability of people to rationalize away those sorts of things when they think they don’t apply to them. And besides- what are they going to do if they are angry? Stop buying Exchange? Windows? Office? Seems unlikely. So I don’t think this particular security blanket works- organizations still have to assume that the risk is real, even if it is small and hence perhaps discountable.
[Edit later: Matt has a comment worth reading in response. I think he and I mostly agree on the causes of the problem; I did want to clarify, though, that patent law is substantively different from the other areas of law he and Savio cited, and think that was worth doing.]
14
Jan 08
wesabe ‘data bill of rights’
Wesabe’s Marc Hedlund is speaking at the Princeton Cloud Computing seminar I’m at. Their ‘data bill of rights’:
This Data Bill of Rights is our promise to you.
- You can export and/or delete your data from Wesabe whenever you want.
- Your data is your data, not ours. Our job is to help you understand and act on your data.
- We’ll keep all of your data online and accessible for as long as you have an account. No “archive access” charges.
- Any data you want us to keep private, we will.
- If a question comes up not covered by these rights, we will answer it remembering that your data belongs to you.
Interesting. My intuition is that this is a really good start in the right direction for web apps; he himself notes, though, that it isn’t legally binding. They are considering doing that- will be very interesting to see that if/when it happens.
5
Dec 07
the Live Journal sale as something more than corporate transaction
A former co-worker of mine writes about the Live Journal sale; in particular, she has raised concerns in the past about content censorship on LJ and the impact that has on LJ users as citizens. Worth noting (from the comments) that LJ is free software, but that that only partially protects anyone- my friend’s network of friends and content is still tied up in LJ.com.
Heated Debate, by MrIcon, used under the CC BY-SA license (found by a flickr search for “russia you”)
This is just another example of a recurrent theme from our future: what happens when essentially amoral corporations own, and can sell, what amounts to significant part of our identities? Say what you will about Microsoft, but they can’t sell Office to someone and then retroactively turn over all your documents to the new KGB. (Or at least, we don’t think they can ;)
In the very long term, the answer may well be transparent protocols and self-hosted services (like we can choose for email already), but in the medium-term, we’re going to have to figure out something which doesn’t require people to host their own services, but still protects their data and their identities.