Lessig

More from Eric @ CC:

There are two CC Salon events happening this week. One in San Francisco -- which will double as the launch party for Creative Commons' annual fundraising campaign -- and one in New York.

CC Salon, San Francisco will take place on Wednesday, October 11, from 6-9pm at Shine (1337 Mission Street, between 9th and 10th Streets). It will feature presentations by David Pescovitz (MAKE, Boing Boing, Institute for the Future), Micki Krimmel (Revver), and Ryan Junell (Webzine, Sagan, SLOMO Video), as well as music by Evolution Control Committee. This event marks the beginning of Creative Commons' annual fundraising campaign, so don't hesitate to bring your checkbook (or PayPal login info -- we'll have laptops on hand) to show your support for the work we do. This is your chance to donate a few bucks and be the first person on your block to get the brand new CC t-shirt design.

CC Salon, New York will take place on Friday, October 13, from 8-10pm at Nublu (162 Ave. C, between 4th and 5th Streets). It will feature presentations by Marisa Olson (Rhizome.org) and Paul Slocum (Tree Wave).

About CC Salon: CC Salon is a series of free events focused on conversation, presentations, and performances from people or groups who are developing projects that relate to open content and/or software. Please invite your friends, colleagues, and anyone you know who might be interested in drinks and discussion. There are now CC Salons happening in San Francisco, Toronto, Berlin, Beijing, Warsaw, Seoul, Johannesburg, and New York.

I'm just ending the last insane 3 week period in and for a long time (round the world, and almost back to Berlin), and I'll be writing more about this early next week when I get a chance to breathe, but this week Creative Commons launches its second annual fundraising campaign. More soon about why we might merit your support, but for those ready to help without the pitch, here's the code:

<a href="http://creativecommons.org/support/">
<img src="http://creativecommons.org/images/support/2006/spread-3.gif" border="0"/></a>

TechWorld (a UK publication) has an article about a "leaked" letter from the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC) (apparently MSFT funded) about, as the article puts it, the "potentially dire effects if too much encouragement was given to open source software development."

Nothing weird there. What is weird is, first, that such a letter has to be "leaked" (aren't submissions to the EC a matter of public record?), and, second, the way in which the letter is made available on the TechWorld website. TechWorld gives you a link to the letter. The link states: "You can view the entire letter here." And indeed, the link means what it says. You can ONLY view the letter. The PDF is locked so that it can't be printed.

Is it really the case that copyright law would forbid a letter written to a government agency from being printed on a users computer?

Note, this is a simple restriction to get around (but is that legal?): If you've got access to Acrobat Professional, you can save a version and turn off the password security (apparently without the password, as I did).

(Thanks, Marten!)

FreeCulture.org (the student movement pushing free culture issues) ran a "Down With DRM" video contest. Winners are here. These are extremely clever.

Tim Wu and Stuart Sierra have built "Project Posner" -- a free database of all of Judge Posner's opinions. There isn't a federal judge I respect more, both as a judge and person, and while I clerked for him, I can claim credit for only one thing that he's done: The Posner-Becker Blog.

At the top of favorite articles about CC, this one by Mark Glaser.

I wrote this piece for the FT, arguing the phenomenal success of YouTube is yet another argument for Network Neutrality. The data in the piece comes from this great report, Broadband Reality Check.

One point the compactness of 800 words didn't let me make fully: Obviously, everyone spends tons of money to make their content flow more quickly than the competitor. But the question is whether the market in which they spend that money is, in a word, healthy. If there's lots of competition, then that expenditure is efficient. If there's not, then it is a barrier. Or that, at least, is the argument.

So there's an important distinction developing among "user generated content" sites -- the distinction between sites that permit "true sharing" and those that permit only what I'll call "fake sharing."

A "true sharing" site doesn't try to exercise ultimate control over the content it serves. It permits, in other words, content to move as users choose.

A "fake sharing" site, by contrast, gives you tools to make seem as if there's sharing, but in fact, all the tools drive traffic and control back to a single site.

In this sense, YouTube is a fake sharing site, while Flickr, (parts of) Google, blip.tv, Revver and EyeSpot are true sharing sites.

Fake Sharing Sites

YouTube gives users very cool code to either "embed" content on other sites, or to effectively send links of content to other sites. But never does the system give users an easy way to actually get the content someone else has uploaded. Of course, many have begun building hacks to suck content off of the YouTube site. (On the Mac, I've used TubeSock to do that). But this functionality — critical to true sharing -- is not built into the YouTube system.

True Sharing Sites

By contrast, ever other major Web 2.0 company does expressly enable true sharing.

• Flickr, for example, makes it simple to download Flickr images. (See, e.g., here.)
• blip.tv explicitly offers links to download various formats of the videos it shares. (See, e.g., here.)
• EyeSpot (a fantastic new site to enable web based remixing of video and audio) permits the download of the source and product files. (See, e.g., here.)
• Revver (the site that enables an ad-bug to be added to a video so the creator gets paid when each video is played) builds its whole business model on the idea that content can flow freely on the Net. (See, e.g., here.)
• And even Google increasingly enables access to the content it creates and collects. Its fantastic Book Search project enables people to download (funnily formatted) PDFs of public domain books. (I know this link used to work, but now that I'm in Germany, Google is obviously not permitting me access to the work because it is so insanely hard to know whether it is in the public domain anywhere else.) And I am told (though I've not yet seen how to do it), Google Videos can be download to a machine.

If YouTube is a trend, this is a depressing turn. No doubt, that amazing company has a billion things to think through (including what to do with more than a billion dollars). But one thing it really needs to keep in focus is a very important part of its success: That it was seen to respect the ethics of the web. Why post on YouTube rather Google Video? At least some did so because YouTube was "cooler." Whether it continues to be as cool depends critically on the values it practices.

UPDATE: Joi has a fantastically thoughtful followup on this.

So in the comments to my post about the piece in the FT, John Earnhardt, an author on Cisco's (read: the company that will sell the technology to end network neutrality) "High Tech Policy Blog," complains about "the rhetoric [I] have used." In his blog post, titled "How can you tell if a lawyer is lying?" (talk about helpful rhetoric), he writes:

In the FT piece he writes: "Network owners now want to...charg(e) companies different rates to get access to a "premium" internet. YouTube, or blip.tv, would have to pay a special fee for their content to flow efficiently to customers. If they do not pay this special fee, their content would be relegated to the "public" internet a slower and less reliable network. The network owners would begin to pick which content (and, in principle, applications) would flow quickly and which would not." This is sheer fiction and he knows it. The truth of the matter is that YouTube and Google, the companies he holds up at stalwarts of fair play, apple pie, motherhood and whiskers on kittens actually charge companies to get premium placement on their websites. What's this you say? Those who own a website or service are allowed to charge money to allow an advertiser to get top placement on their website? I'm shocked and appalled and will be submitted an op-ed to the FT stating the same. What is the difference of a service provider (in his terminology, a "network owner") of charging a service to get premium placement on their "owned" network? They are not degrading the services of others, but enhancing the service of those who choose to pay for the premium placement.

His second strike is even better:

Here's another anology: We're in the throes of campaign season here in the ol' US of A and television and radio ads play a large role in electing or defeating a candidate. Those candidates who have more money can buy more ads on radio and TV. They can buy them during the most popular shows so that the most amount of voters can see them. If the other candidate has no money and cannot afford to place an ad on television or radio I can only assume that Larry Lessig will offer to pay their way in the name of net neutrality. Why? Because, in his mind, the playing field should be equal for all candidates.

So again, no, whether candidates have money or not is not my concern. They are (in the analogy) at the edge of the network. But let me turn the analogy around. Imagine there are only two television stations in a particular democracy. They both begin to "access tier" -- charging different rates to different political candidates. So Dems get a rate 1/2 the rate charged to the GOP; or major parties get a rate that is 1/3 the rate charged to Independents. Does that begin to trouble you?

Now again, as I said in the blog post about the piece, everything here hangs upon market power. So in a truly competitive market for last mile broadband, I wouldn't care as much (Barbara van Schewick says there's still a reason to care). But in a world of limited competition, the games the networks can play will both stifle innovation at the edge, and reduce the incentive network owners have to increase performance for all.

In Free Culture, chapter 9, I wrote the following:

In addition to the Internet Archive, Kahle has been constructing theTelevision Archive. Television, it turns out, is even more ephemeral than the Internet. While much of twentieth- century culture was constructed through television, only a tiny proportion of that culture is available for anyone to see today. Three hours of news are recorded each evening by Vanderbilt University - thanks to a specific exemption in the copyright law. That content is indexed, and is available to scholars for a very low fee. "But other than that, [television] is almost unavailable," Kahle told me. "If you were Barbara Walters you could get access to [the archives], but if you are just a graduate student?"

As Kahle put it,"Do you remember when Dan Quayle was interacting with Murphy Brown? Remember that back and forth surreal experience of a politician interacting with a fictional television character? If you were a graduate student wanting to study that, and you wanted to get those original back and forth exchanges between the two, the 60 Minutes episode that came out after it ... it would be almost impossible. ... Those materials are almost unfindable. ..."

Jeff Ubois has just published a paper about his effort to find out whether Brewster was right. His conclusion: Brewster's right. As he writes:

I searched for footage of the Quayle/Brown interaction with an eye towards making some general assessments of the accessibility of historic broadcasts, and detailed the results in a paper called Finding Murphy Brown: How Accessible are Historic Television Broadcasts? It's finally out this week in the peer reviewed Journal of Digital Information....

Copyright restrictions ultimately made it impossible to get the original Dan Quayle speech, or the Murphy Brown episodes in question. In an odd coda to this project, one digital library journal (from which I withdrew this paper) insisted that the correspondence detailing refusals by various organizations to allow access to or use of the Quayle/Brown footage was itself copyrighted, and therefore unsuitable for publication. Those excerpts are included in the current piece. It was disturbing how one effect of copyright law is to chill academic discussions of copyright law.

You can read the paper by linking from the blog entry.

(Thanks, Jeff!)

HOTI points to Scott Cleland of the respected "The Precursor Blog" who has posted a reply to my FT article. My "thin rule," Cleland says, is just "thin gruel" (by which I take it he means he doesn't like my rule; I personally find the best gruel to be thin gruel, and in fact, in the increasingly cold Berlin mornings, I think gruel is a very good start to the day. I wish people would stop picking on gruel, thin or fat.)

The thrust of Cleland's one pager is that I've been "loose with the facts." Let's review the charges: (Cleland's words are bolded below):

Loose Fact #1:

Lessig asserts: "In the U.S. at least, broadband competition is dying."
Anybody who cares to check, will find that broadband prices are falling, broadband speeds are increasing, consumer choices are increasing steadily, broadband investment and deployment are strong, and innovation is vibrant.

This is Dick Cheney on the war. (Indeed, let's give it a name: to Chenify): Put the prices issue aside till the next sentence: Are you kidding, Scott? Relative to every nation who should be considered to be competitive to us in this, we are worse off today than we were four years ago. When Bush said "10th is 10 spots too low" he was right (well, sort of. It's actually 9 spots too low), and yet now the US is 16th in broadband deployment. The worse things go, the more a certain set simply denies reality.

Why can't an anti-neutrality advocate begin with what everyone knows is true: US broadband sucks -- it is too slow, it is too expensive, and it is too unavailable. The only question is what we are going to do about it.

For those who care to go more in depth on this subject, I have produced two useful one pagers to prove this point: "Debunking the Broadband Market Failure Myth" and "Debunking the Broadband Competition Can't Work Myth."

So here's where I was worried. Though this is an issue I've been studying "in depth," I hadn't read Cleland's "one-pagers" before. (I hate the word "debunking". Sounds way too Marxist for my taste). So I took a deep breath and clicked on the one pagers, expecting to find a refutation of the data upon which I had based my understanding that in fact, prices have not fallen.

That data, again summarized well in Broadband Reality Check, suggests that first, cable prices have increased slightly, and second, while NOMINAL DSL prices have fallen, the $/MB has gone up, since the speed of the offering for the cheapy deals is significantly slower.

Here's Cleland's "debunking":

Real DSL prices have fallen ~50% as speeds have roughly doubled over the last 2 years; introductory DSL prices have fallen ~70%in ~3 years; average monthly DSL prices fell ~15% from 2004-2005.

Every fact stated here could be consistent with the conclusion that the $/MB has gone up. (Well, almost: You'd have to be a bit charitable in interpreting "as speeds have roughly doubled over the last 2 years" -- that's plainly not true, as the "introductory" packages he points to offer less than 1 MB speeds). So where's the beef, Scott? Where is the data to debunk "Broadband Reality Check"? I'd be happy (in the academic sense of that term) to be proven wrong about relying upon the data I relied upon. I'd be even really happy to learn that average $/MB prices for DSL have gone down. But notice the critical fact Cleland didn't try to "debunk": That prices in the US range from 6x (France) to 12x (Japan) the $/MB of the US. But don't worry, every-thing's great. The war's great. Broadband in the US is great. The deficit is great. It's just the best of all possible worlds...

For those who want to get the FCC's analysis of broadband competition click here; or for the FCC's analysis of Wireless competition click here.

I love the way anti-regulation types hate everything the government does, except data that supports their argument. Talk about "debunking": The FCC's analysis has been the subject of extensive criticism, including by the GAO. The problem is the FCC's method for counting penetration with in a zip-code: They conclude that if 1 person within the zipcode has a broadband choice, the whole zip-code has broadband choice. As the GAO concluded about this obvious fudge: "the number of providers reported in the ZIP code overstates the level of competition to individual households."

For those who don't want to be bothered with facts and analysis, but just want anti-business assertions about what imminent peril our way of life faces from continued free and open competition on the Internet click here for SavetheInternet.com, of which Professor Lessig is a Charter Member.

This is the part of this debate that drives me nuts: As if this is a battle between "anti-business" sorts, and pro-business sorts. I understand how it's easy to believe that if you spend your life thinking about other things, and spend 30 seconds thinking about this issue. But for anyone inside this debate, this claim is the most bogus sort of rhetoric there is.

This is not a pro vs. anti-business debate at all. The whole point of the Network Neutrality argument I've advanced (for almost 8 years now) is about what conditions produce the greatest growth in applications and content. The aim is to maximize wealth for the economy as a whole, and not just for the network owners. The whole argument is that a neutral network incentivizes more competition in applications and content than a network controlled by network owners. Think the cell phone network vs the Internet: This is not a battle between pro and anti-business sorts, it is a battle between cell-heads and net-heads.

There are those who continue to function normally in the world who believe, all facts to the contrary, that this is a debate about regulation vs. no regulation. I've spilled too many bits over that canard to believe wasting more space here makes any sense. But I wish those anti-regulation sorts would spend some of their effort getting the FCC out of the business of regulating (through property) spectrum.

Loose Fact #2

Professor Lessig asserts: "There are fewer competitors offering broadband connectivity today than there were just six years ago. The median consumer has a choice between just two broadband providers. Four companies account for a majority of all consumer broadband; 10 companies account for 83 percent of the market."
What Professor Lessig fails to explain was that six years ago we basically had NO broadband competition, because we had a de facto monopoly for wholesale Internet access called dialup, which had lots of resellers of the underlying monopoly service, which Mr. Lessig likes to call competitors.

Yea, I'm old enough to remember those days. Many many businesses would try to get me to switch to their service by offering me lower prices and higher quality. I confess, I call that competition. But whatever you call it, we need more of it today.

Over the last six plus years, the free and open Internet that has been unfettered by regulation has created a steady increase in real inter-modal broadband competitors/choices for consumers.
What Mr. Lessig really laments is the decrease in the faux/artificial regulatory-favored Internet Access resellers that basically competed on brand; and the increase in REAL inter-modal competitors that can truly compete on price, speed, innovative features, and mobility among other differentiators that consumers value about competition.

What I "lament" is that the speed of broadband sucks in the US, and the prices are too high. Again, if the policies of the last 6 years had really produced the kind of prices and quality that other competitive nations around the world have, I'd be the first to admit I was wrong. But if you turn off the Cheney channel, and looks at the sorry (and increasingly sorry) state of broadband in the US, at some point someone has got to ask whether this policy is a mistake? Call me a cut-and-runner, Scott. Because I definitely want to cut-and-run from the FCC's policy.

What Mr. Lessig conveniently omits from his assertion that "broadband competition is dying" is the pesky little truth that real broadband prices have fallen by over half over the last three years and that competitive supply is vibrantly increasing.

But then again, there's the problem of those "pesky" data necessary to support the ultimate claim that needs to be made: That the DSL $/MB have fallen "by 50%." Show me the data, Scott, not the made-for-TV-soundbites.

Maybe Professor Lessig should take some more classes in economics and antitrust to bone up on the fact that competitiveness of markets are truly measured by effective pricing, by the trend of competitive entry and by the amount of innovation. Only undergrad courses covering antitrust would consider it sufficient to count the number of competitors in a market and then declare a market not competitive. Responsible scholars of competition understand that the competitive facts can vary widely in various markets, and that the number of competitors alone is insufficient data to determine the competiveness of a market. I am sure there are any number of attorneys with "real world" experience in analyzing competition at the DOJ Antitrust Division or at the FTC who would be happy to give Professor Lessig a little tutorial on this before he opines on this topic again on the world stage.

This is no doubt true. A submission to the FCC or to a court about market power with the substance of an 800 word op-ed would be absurd. And indeed, to show fully whether competition is improving or getting worse, you would need to go much more "in depth" than even Cleland's nippy one-pagers. But really, Scott. This is an op-ed. They don't allow footnotes.

Loose Fact #3:

Lessig said: "Network owners now want to change this by charging companies different rates to get access to a 'premium Internet.'" [bold added for emphasis]
This is the way the Internet has operated since it was commercialized in 1995. There have long been been three Internet backbone tiers of service. And companies have long paid for a "premium" Internet since they upgraded from dialup to broadband!

So at a debate with George Gilder, Peter Huber made this same move. Look, no one is arguing about the backbone. No one is arguing for regulation of the backbone. This is a debate about last mile broadband, and the effect certain business models for the last mile will have on competition.

What planet has Mr. Lessig been on that he didn't notice that companies pay for a "premium" Internet every day? Has he ever heard of the Akamai "premium" service which has been used by most all the biggest online companies to get "premium" Internet service?

And of course this is exactly the criticism I was trying to preempt by my original post on this matter. Obviously, companies do whatever they can to make their content on the net run well as it can. Google must spend millions around the world on caching servers. Everyone spends what they can to get the fastest servers they can.

But again, this is exactly the sort of competition we should celebrate -- businesses spending money to add real capacity and functionality to the network, by going to a (relatively) competitive market to add that capacity.

My complaint is not against that. My complaint is about (relatively) uncompetitive markets, and about the consequence of them exercising power over the next YouTubes of the world. No doubt, as they extract rents from these businesses, they make Wall Street happier about them. But as my focus is not the net wealth of a handful of companies, but instead, the wealth of the economy as a whole, what's good for them is not the end of the matter.

Indeed, this is exactly why my position on Network Neutrality is not as extreme as some. As I testified, for example, I'm all for "consumer tiering" by network providers -- where network providers offer higher quality to consumers for more money. That again is the sort of business model that creates an incentive to increase capacity.

"Access tiering" doesn't. Or at least, I'm looking for the economic analysis to show it does. What I've seen so far is that in an relative uncompetitive market, "access tiering" creates an obvious (and perverse) incentive: with relatively limited competition, if you can charge a premium for a "fast internet," you don't have much incentive to make the rest of the Internet very fast at all.

BrianWill has a nice post about the electricity analogy in the Network Neutrality debate. The meme: "what the telecoms are threatening to do is to charge a premium for how the utility is used, not for how much of it is used."

Former FCC Chairman William Kennard published an op-ed in the New York Times Saturday. The main point of the piece is to lament the truly awful state of broadband access for the poor in the United States. One statistic (not mentioned by Kennard) says it all: As the OECD reported, the United States has the 4th highest level of students (by 15 years old) who have never used a computer -- worse than Greece, Poland, Portugal, and the Czech Republic.

What I found extraordinary about the piece, however, was its slam of "network neutrality" legislation. As he wrote:

Unfortunately, the current debate in Washington is over “net neutrality” — that is, should network providers be able to charge some companies special fees for faster bandwidth. This is essentially a battle between the extremely wealthy (Google, Amazon and other high-tech giants, which oppose such a move) and the merely rich (the telephone and cable industries). In the past year, collectively they have spent $50 million on lobbying and advertising, effectively preventing Congress and the public from dealing with more pressing issues.

So let's get this straight:

After 8 years of deregulating broadband in America (begun by Kennard, completed by Martin), both DSL and cable are free of any real obligation to protect the original neutrality of the Internet. Once some rules imposed in merger agreements expire, last-mile broadband providers will be free to pick and choose the content and applications they want the network to carry. They will use this power, as at&t Chairman Ed Whitacre explained, to tax the most successful content and application providers on the net. That tax, as I and many have argued, will effectively block the next generation greats.

Over these same 8 years, following this policy of deregulation, we've gone from 1st in the world to rivaling, as Kennard puts it, Slovenia. Broadband on average is slower in the US, and more expensive. In France, a triple play "Internet, Telephone, and TV" package is $32. Comcast offers less for $150.

At some point, you might think some would begin to worry about whether the US strategy makes sense. (compare: State of Denial). Forget the theory, forget the hand-waiving by academics and ideologues: Just ask one simple question -- is the policy working as well as the (different) policies of our competitors?

I. and many, have concluded it is not. I take it, that is the view of the more than a million who have written to policy-makers arguing for network neutrality legislation. These people want policy that will finally push broadband providers to provide at least the quality and price of broadband in France. The online campaign to get Congress to do something here has been amazing, rivaling only the campaign to stop the FCC from passing rules that would permit even more concentration in media ownership.

But now comes Kennard to belittle this extraordinary online movement. It's not a battle, he tells us, about whether competition in applications and content, ultimately driving penetration, will continue. It is instead a battle about whether the "extremely rich" will prevail over the "merely rich." Nothing important in that battle, he tells us (except perhaps to these various flavors of the rich); Congress should therefore move on from this agenda for billionaires, and take up the real challenge of serving the poor.

It's funny, I hadn't realized I was a Google tool. I had thought we were pushing to reverse a failed policy because we wanted to enable the next Google (that was my point about YouTube). I thought we were angry because the "merely rich" had yet to provide broadband as broadly as in other comparable nations. And I thought we were fighting the efforts of the "merely rich" to further reduce competition, either by buying up spectrum that would enable real wireless competition, or by getting state laws passed to make muni-competition illegal. I had thought these were important issues for the new economy -- keeping the platform as competitive as possible, to keep prices and quality moving in the direction they move in the rest of the developed world.

Now that Kennard has set us straight, however, I'm relieved to know we can finally move onto other, more important issues. Global warming is at the top of my list. Maybe you have other priorities.

But before we move on, let's not forget:

Even if America's broadband strategy doesn't make sense for America, it makes lots of sense for certain companies. Kennard knows this well, because he sits on the board of many of those who benefit most from this deregulation. His op-ed acknowledges his work with the Carlyle Group. He is also on the board of Sprint Nextel Corporation, Hawaiian Telcom and Insight Communications (a cable provider). These companies will benefit directly if Kennard succeeds in getting Congress to forget Network Neutrality. They will become "merely richer" at the expense, I believe, not of Google or eBay, but of the next gang of kids with the next great idea that Google, and eBay (and Comcast and at&t) just don't get.

I don't know Kennard personally. People who do tell me he's an extremely bright, ethical man. I'm sure that's right. But there's something unseemly to me when an FCC Chairman moves to the boards of the companies he used to regulate, and then uses the op-ed page of a paper on whose board he now sits, to argue for the poor by pushing the agenda of the "merely rich." (How can a paper that obsesses to pretend its most brilliant writers have no opinion of their own not wonder about the weirdness here?)

They say Washington has to be like this. You could never get great people into government if they couldn't cash-out once they left. But I bet if the next President demanded of nominees to the FCC that they promise not to take jobs in the industries they regulated for some "limited time" (let's say, the life of a copyright), the President would find lots of qualified nominees. Maybe then it would be easier to hear the pleas for the poor, without the echo of the interests of the "merely rich" confusing the message.

So Nick Carr charges me with launching the Cultural Revolution, in a post dripping with references to the evils of communism, and with a triumphant close: "The Cultural Revolution is over. It ended before it even began, The victors are the counterrevolutionaries. And they have $1.65 billion to prove it."

Wow.

The point of my Web 2.0 post is probably clearer to anyone who read my earlier post about the three economies of the Internet -- commercial, sharing, and hybrid. As that post suggested, in my view, the really critical question for the Internet economy is how well companies negotiate the hybrid economy. In my view, those who follow Web 2.0 values are likely to profit most; those who don't, won't. Thus, when David Bowie tries to jump into the mashup/remix world by offering prizes for the best remix of his content, but demanding the rights to all the creativity produced by the remixers, he's violating a Web 2.0 principle, and by doing so, weakening the extraordinary potential his effort could have. Put differently, sharecropping is no better a strategy for the virtual world than it was in the physical world.

Yet if you don't see that there are different economies, then of course if follows that any effort to argue in favor of less control sounds just like communism. (Not technically, of course, because the control under all the communism we've seen was shifted to the state, it wasn't eliminated. But this is a detail red-baiters often overlook). If there is just the commercial economy, then an argument in favor of exercising less control over content sounds just stupid -- like arguing to GM that it should give every 5th car away for free.

But if you really don't see that there are different economies, then I suggest you spend sometime reading the very best scholarship about what's new about the Internet. Benkler, Weber, and von Hippel are my favorite examples; though not directly on point, much in Chris Anderson's The Long Tail points in the same direction.

And if you don't have time to read, then ask yourself a simple question: Is Jimmy Wales a communist? (Anyone who knows him knows how absurd the question is, but even if you don't know him, you can figure it out.) There is no better, more effective advocate for the sharing economy. The project he's helped steward -- Wikipedia -- is perhaps the sharing economy's prize. But when he advises companies, and others trying to use the net, how best to build upon the value of the Internet, is he just doing Chairman Mao's work?

I hope YouTube is an extraordinary success -- much bigger than it has been so far. (Carr says YouTube is my "villain." I must really be confused, because in the very same week, YouTube was my hero). It will be so, I believe, if it plays by the rules of the hybrid economy. A hybrid neither gives away everything, nor does it keep everything. And I'd suggest we'll find that golden mean more quickly if we left the red-baiting to the 20th century.

There's a great line in Gore's movie about how he thinks about the process of making presentations. Each time, he says, he goes through the presentation "removing blocks" -- trying to understand where people aren't understanding what he's saying, and changing it so there is understanding. Sometimes it's not possible, of course -- sometimes there's just disagreement. But sometime disagreement is just misunderstanding.

As I read some of the responses to my post about Web 2.0, I'm beginning to have a Gore moment. I used the word "ethics"; that word is creating a block. Many read that word (reasonably, of course) to suggest I'm trying to impose a moral code on the the Web; distinguish good from bad, right from wrong; a kind of PCism for PCs.

That's a totally reasonably way to read what I wrote. It's not, however, the point of the post. I don't have a moral code to impose on the Web. I was instead describing the elements, as I see them, of a successful Web 2.0 business. My argument is not "do X because it is good"; my post was "do X to keep and spread the success you've had." My claim is not that walled gardens never prosper (see, e.g., AOL). It is that walled gardens wither (see, e.g., AOL), at least in the environment of Web 2.0.

It was clumsy to try to frame that point as a point about ethics. I realize in reading the responses, I hang the normative within "morals"; ethics, in my (private?) language, is about how we (differing depending upon the group) behave. So in that sense, it was how Web 2.0 companies behave, not because god told them to (remember: amoral), but because they believe this is how best to behave.

But there's another set of responses I don't think there's a simple way to answer. There's a certain mindset out there that thinks the way the world was cut up in college is the way the world is. So whatever set of texts you read as a sophomore, somehow they define the nature of world forever. Seared in your brain is the excitement of figuring out the difference between Capitalism and Marxism, or communitarianism vs. libertarianism. And so significant was this moment of education that everything else in life must be ordered according to these sophomore frames.

I don't know the best way to respond to this sort of soul. Obama apparently addresses it in the context of politics, when he comments that the last 3 presidential elections have all been framed in terms of the debates of the 1960s (Vietnam, the sexual revolution, etc.), and the best response to this framing is just to move on.

That's what I wish would happen here. Put your college philosophy books away, and start reading research about what's happening now. Understand it first, then craft the label. Because when you understand what, say, von Hippel is writing about, it has absolutely nothing to do with communism/communalism/communitarianism/commuwhatever-you-want. It's all about how business prosper in a new technological environment. There's a good argument (indeed, great books) skeptical about whether there is a new technological environment. Fair enough. But there are also businesses "democratizing innovation" (free PDF here) not because they're a bunch of communapinkos, and not because they miss the Cultural Revolution.

I'm sorry I lost the blog for about 12 hours.

With the launch of the second Creative Commons fundraiser, I have begun again a series of letters about Creative Commons.

The first letter is here. (Spanish -- thanks to Maria Cristinia Alvite)

The second is here.

The archive of letters (including last year's) is here.

You can subscribe to them here.

Or you can just donate $300,000 here and we can call the whole thing off.

Joi Ito and Paul Twomey meet Ivailo Kalfin, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bulgaria. The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry then announces that all its published content is licensed under a CC-BY license, as is the Minister's blog.

Read all about it: from Veni Markovski; from Joi.

There's a storm raging about NBC's refusal to run ads for the Dixie Chicks' new movie, Shut Up and Sing. As the Washington Post reports, NBC told the ad agency, the network would not run the ads because "they are disparaging of President Bush."

This is nothing new for NBC. In August, 2004, I wrote about an attempt by filmmaker Robert Greenwald to license a 1 minute clip from Meet the Press, in which the President explained his reasons for going to war. Greenwald was denied the permission, his agent told they could not use it because the clip was "not very flattering to the president."

At that time, a lawyer from NBC protested to me that what I had written was not true. I asked how he knew that. I had interviewed the woman who had spoken to the NBC permissions person. I had known her independently of this incident. I knew her to be an honest person. So how did he know she was lying?

Because she must be lying, I was told. NBC would never do anything like this.

Right. Never. Except at least twice.

So I decided this year I would respond personally to everyone who has donated to CC. Each Paypal donation sends a copy to me, and I write a note in response. (An official tax-ready thank you gets generated by some machine later, but I wanted the first cut at the thanks).

It is an amazing process. I had expected I would know most who would donate; I know practically no one. They come from across the world, in every amount, some sometimes give twice.

I can't express adequately how grateful I am to those who support us. Partly that's the technology -- most imagine the emails must be machine-generated; partly that's the limits to language -- we practice overusing "thank you"; how can we mean it when we really do?

Anyway, thank you again. (And I apologize if I'm a bit behind. I'll get through all of them.)

So as noted here before, Britain is considering extending its copyright term for recordings from 50 years to 95 years -- including both existing recordings and recordings in the future. (Remember, we increased our copyright term to "harmonize" with the Europeans; now the Europeans are increasing their copyright terms to "harmonize" with the US. Will this cycle end? Of course not.)

The ippr just released a very smart report about IP issues generally. It identifies well the errors in this pattern of extension. (The report is not free for downloading (a problem it didn't note), but an executive summary is here.) And a new activist group in Britain, the UK Open Rights Group will soon release a short policy paper.

But the real problem with this debate is that the proponents for term extension are (1) sexy media figures who (2) only discuss the issue in well choreographed events that allow no real opposition to their views to be heard, while (3) the press never adequately covers events where the issue is properly, and adequately, addressed.

Exhibit one in support of the above: This piece by a favorite of this page, Andy Orlowski (remember his really nasty piece about my representing Hardwicke in the boychoir case, ending with: "Lessig has shown an ability to clutch defeat from the jaws of victory before." No followup by Andy after the verdict.) Orlowski usually gets media issues right. But this piece is full of the most obvious errors. (E.g., he refers to "the estimates of economic Armageddon that term extenders propose - which may be £143m over 10 years, according to PriceWaterhouseCooper," never pausing to actually analyze what this "Armageddon" is: The argument is that Britain hurts because a £143m tax is not imposed on the British people in order to benefit the likes of Sir Cliff. Talk about trickle down economics.)

But reporters just to report what they see. So I take it Orlowski didn't see the full story. No surprise, since as he mentioned, the "panel discussing the issue was loaded with advocates for extending copyright terms, and only one dissenter." Ah yes, Soviet style public policy discussion, again itself not remarked in Orlowski's article.

The sexy will never stoop to debate this issue in a fair and balanced context so long as they get away with "debating" it in the sort of contexts they do. And they get away with it only so long as the press and politicians permit them to. So let's let this permitting stop: Britain should demand a debate about these issues in a context in which both sides get a real and balanced opportunity to present the views.

(Meanwhile, don't miss Jonathan Zittrain's presentation at the Open Rights Group "Release the Music" event on November 13. Details here and here.)

I'm eager that an alternative get pushed into this debate. As mentioned before, MP Don Foster has suggested terms should be extended only for those who ask. For works whose copyright owners don't ask, the copyright would pass into the public domain. I made a similar proposal to the Gowers Commission. It would be fantastic if Britain took the lead in this obvious compromise to an obviously mistaken policy -- term extension for existing works.

Meanwhile, as a demonstration of the value of the public domain, if you're not in the US, you can get access to this fantastic collection of 1500 LPs of classical music, in the public domain in Europe, but not in the US, digitized and made available by the EuropeanArchive. Don't count on access to this anytime soon, United States: Nothing published will enter the public domain in the US through the expiration of a copyright term until 2019.