Over on his personal blog, my buddy Peter Bihr has come to the defense of that most reviled breed of start-up — the German copycat. And while the whole thing’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, he’s actually right about some of the benefits that so-called “copycats” offer; they are in a position to make marginal changes and improvements that “original” start-ups might be hesitant about, from small feature improvements to big things like internationalization.
In the last year in Berlin, the tone used to discuss copycats has become too aggressive. I’m all for celebrating creativity and innovation, but it shouldn’t take the form of denigrating the “copycats”. It doesn’t make sense to dismiss a company, or a whole swath of companies, because their influences are showing.
That said, there is a “right way” to incorporate those influences, and there’s a way that people think is sleazy. Peter is one of the founders of Cognitive Cities, a beautifully orchestrated and executed set of events celebrating the emergent intelligence in cities, which recently had its name and logo copied wholesale by an American/Swiss research project.
Acknowledging the ideas of others in the field, incorporating and building upon them, should not be discouraged. But implying an endorsement, or hoping to create and cash in on confusion of users is a different thing. It’s a good idea to recognize that difference.
Because of the title, I had hoped that the book would spend some time addressing the common conflation of copyright free riding with other kinds of infringement. One element of that conflation is combining “creative-” and “consumptive infringement”; those terms were coined in a paper by Christopher Jon Sprigman, and actually do appear on a single page of Levine’s book, with a reference to the excellent Copyhype post on the topic.
Splitting up infringement into creative and consumptive varieties is useful, but doesn’t go far enough. Any book with the ambitious scope of “Free Ride” needs to acknowledge that there are at least a handful of different behavioral patterns that include “infringement” in some form, but which have completely distinct motivations and explanations. I propose the following list of four. It’s not totally exhaustive, but to my mind is a good start.
Free riders represent most “leeching” users of a peer-to-peer network, or downloaders on the big file-hosting sites. These are the individuals that the RIAA and the MPAA have spent the years after the Napster and Grokster cases suing. The four different types of “piracy” that Lawrence Lessig describes in chapter 5 of Free Culture are performed mostly by people in this group.
Commercial pirates engage in behavior that is pretty widely rejected, and are often the rhetorical target of media groups, and the reason for penalties that are overly harsh and ridiculous when applied outside of this group. Theater “camming” laws were aimed at commercial pirates, but caught 19-year-old Jhannet Sejas. The DeCSS trial in Norway was purported to be about commercial piracy, but concerned decryption technology that isn’t required for commercial duplication.
The Scene is one of the more enigmatic groups, and I’ll admit that their motivation is far less straightforward than “getting free music” or “making money”. Members of the Scene (or the Warez Scene) belong to different groups that compete to release popular content as quickly and in as high quality as possible. These same kinds of individuals spend long hours and sometimes serious money creating complete databases of content and coding private trackers, and often describe their work as being driven by a commitment to free speech or to sharing art.
Remix culture is the only strictly “creative infringement” category on this list. Individuals making transformative uses of copyrighted works have stayed out of the media companies legal sights, for the most part, but artists like Girl Talk have still become the poster children for this kind of “illegal art”. The occasional lawsuits around these uses have carried potential damages that, driven up by laws targeting commercial pirates, are so ruinously high that it can make sense to settle even if you believe you’re in the legal clear.
As I’ve said, this list isn’t exhaustive, but I hope that I’ve demonstrated why it’s necessary, say, to draw a distinction between the penalties assigned to commercial pirates and free riders, or to consider the motivations of remixers separately from those of The Scene. If you have or want more information about these categories, sound off in the comments.
Since it was introduced, the SoundCloud Record button has been hard to get to work in Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux distributions. Fortunately, my buddy Omid, who is a SoundCloud developer, has found a solution.
It turns out the problem is caused by a “Linux-specific security feature” (read: bug [login required]) that prevents a Flash settings dialogue from appearing when wmode=opaque is used. In any case, there are a few easy workarounds.
If you’ve got the flash-player-properties package installed (which, at least on Ubuntu, ships separately from the flash-plugin, but is available in the standard repositories), you can add “a1.sndcdn.com” to the allowed sites under the “Camera & Mic” tab of that program.
Otherwise, if you’ve unsuccessfully attempted to record at least once on the SoundCloud upload page, you can add a1.sndcdn.com from the Flash player’s web settings panel. While you’re there, check your security settings!
Hope this is helpful to other SoundCloud users on Linux who haven’t quite been able to get recording working.
NPR Berlin reported today that Berlin’s public transportation authority, the BVG, launched the Touch&Travel program [de] earlier this month, which allows Vodafone and Telekom customers to use an Android phone or an iPhone to pay for their transport tickets. Participants “check in” while boarding, and confirm their location either through continuous GPS data directly from their phones, or by scanning a QR code at the end points of their trip.
From a privacy perspective, this system stands in stark contrast to the current standard procedure in Berlin. As with nearly all German municipal rail, Berlin subways and buses operate on a proof-of-payment system: tickets are required while on board, but are only very occasionally checked.
Apparently, such proof-of-payment systems rose to popularity because of German labor shortages in the 1960s, but they also happen to be extremely respectful of rider privacy.1 Because travel and location data is never even collected, there’s no chance of it being cross-referenced against other data sets, given to the government, or sold to corporations. Though tickets may be traced to a buyer’s credit card, their actual use is not tracked, and riders may also pay cash with no penalty, preserving anonymity.
Berlin’s recently launched pilot program has none of these advantages. First, there’s the issue of anonymity: even taking the BVG and Deutsche Bahn at face value that the user data will be “scrubbed” and saved anonymously for only six months — a dubious proposition given the tempting law enforcement and ridership research opportunities of slipping from that stance — there is a huge and growing body of scholarship covering the possibilities of de-anonymizing large data sets. AOL search queries, Netflix movie ratings, even US Census data have effectively received the de-anonymization treatment.
Obviously that convenience is nice, and you only need to experience once the feeling of seeing your train pull away while you’re waiting for your ticket to print to understand the temptation of such a trade. And it’s true that there are occasionally positive outcomes of large-scale surveillance programs — New York City’s MetroCard data has been used in both legitimate alibis and criminal convictions, and even critics acknowledge that there are a small number of crimes that London’s CCTV system has helped solve. I won’t argue that there are no advantages to such a system, but that they’re outweighed by more subtle and incremental disadvantages. The loss of privacy and anonymity carries a real cost, even if it’s not one that’s immediately tangible.
Berlin’s public transportation system is currently one of the best imaginable in terms of privacy, and implementing a system that strips those benefits away is irresponsible and short-sighted. Further, privacy is a hard thing to introduce into a developed system; Berlin should reject any new solution that doesn’t make adequate consideration of privacy in its basic design, even if it’s a promised eventual addition.
Being mindful of privacy doesn’t require foregoing an update to ticket-buying infrastructure, either. There are cryptographic techniques for validating credentials anonymously that, while complex and occasionally difficult to understand, can be used to address the current pain points while still preserving privacy and anonymity. A system built with those techniques might not be as straightforward to develop and deploy, but would be invaluable to the people living in and visiting Berlin, and as a model to transportation agencies all over the world.
You can imagine that the labor shortages, and the subsequent manpower restrictions might have served as a constraint that influenced the design of public transportation systems in the same way that Jonathan Zittrain says a lack of financial resources influenced the early design of the Internet (See him explain that at Harvard) ↩
My friend Patrick Hammer sent around a video of Rebecca MacKinnon’s TED talk about the need for users to take back the Internet. It’s a great talk, and it reminded me of how effective the TED talk format can be at communicating complex ideas to people who don’t want to dive into a monograph or two.
I decided to put together some of the best TED talks I’ve seen that address, somehow, the concept of free culture. Obviously there’s some subjective selection here, and I’m taking submissions, but I think this playlist is a good start.
I’d like to include Lawrence Lessig’s talk on “How creativity is being strangled by the law“, but wouldn’t you know it, the video’s blocked by GEMA in Germany and I can’t add it to a playlist. You can’t make this stuff up.