Patent terms are somewhat human, at 20 years—things invented and patented in my lifetime have now fallen into the public domain. Copyright is so much longer (generally, the lifetime of the author plus 70 years) that generations can pass in between the original composition and the public domain. As a result, instead of having free access to works from my childhood, or even my father’s childhood, I have to go back to works that are older than my grandparents.
The East German patent story is interesting because it happens to couple term expiration with a real and memorable event. Of course, copyright expiration is often tied to a historical event: namely, the death of the author. In some cases, that date is especially significant. There has been some discussion about that the copyright on Mein Kampf is set to expire in 2015, 70 years after Hitler’s death, but I’ve never seen any discussion of the fact that between now and then, works by millions of people who were killed during World War II should also be entering the public domain.
The Free Culture Research Conference is happening right now at the Freie Universität in Berlin. I’m here and live-blogging it right today and tomorrow, and posting tweets and dents tagged #fcrc, and I’ll probably post some kind of wrap-up later.
Most interesting to me is when he compares Wesabe’s security practices to Mint, and describes how he believed that would be enough of a differentiating factor in the marketplace.
Everything I’ve mentioned — not being dependent on a single source provider, preserving users’ privacy, helping users actually make positive change in their financial lives — all of those things are great, rational reasons to pursue what we pursued. But none of them matter if the product is harder to use, since most people simply won’t care enough or get enough benefit from long-term features if a shorter-term alternative is available.
This kind of account is critically important for people starting companies that aim to clone other services, but with more privacy, security, freedom, or any other particular virtue. It’s possible to succeed with that sort of business model, but it’s something that has to be approached with care and humility. Hedlund’s post is a great guide of how not just the long-term, but also the short-term interests of the users are important for creating a successful service.
Nice catch by the NYTPicker, a blog devoted to “the goings-on inside the New York Times.” Professor Robert Thompson of Syracuse University has been quoted over 150 times in the paper by 78 different reporters, on about as many different topics.
To these 78 NYT reporters, Thompson has offered a convenient shortcut past that necessary evil of journalism: the expert quote. Thompson’s superior ability to deliver short, pithy comments on a wide spectrum of topics, on deadline — along with his handy “professor” title — has made him indispensable to the hordes of NYT reporters who’ve desperately dialed him for that all-important dollop of hot air.
That record, spanning over 20 years now, seems to make him the Greg Packer for the academic set.
The concept of “generativity,” defined and popularized by The Future of the Internet, has been crucial in advancing understanding of free culture and free software issues. It’s synthesized many of the preceding metaphors in a way that is clearer to understand and defend; where arguments for “net neutrality” to preserve an “end-to-end network” consistent with the “layered model” of the internet can be a bit overwhelming and unconvincing, explanations of generativity and how these ideas would preserve the generativity of the network are easier to grasp and rally behind.
As successful and important as Zittrain’s book was, it does tend to assume the generativity of any device, service, network, or protocol is a trivially knowable constant. In practice, the picture is a more complicated set of compromises on many different levels.
Grimmelmann and Ohm’s paper acknowledges the power and significance of Zittrain’s ideas, and then offers some clarification on how to better understand and gauge generativity. In their own words, Zittrain’s work:
on generativity is a milestone in Internet law scholarship. It’s the best descriptive and normative theory to date on what makes the Internet special. Zittrain’s analysis becomes muddled only when he tries to extract a prescriptive policy agenda from it.
By getting down to the brass tacks of what generativity means, Grimmelmann and Ohm do a service to the idea and make it more robust and complete. It’s also worth noting that, like the original book, their review is very funny, smart and thought-provoking reading. It jumps from placing generativity as a “Benthamite value, not a Kantian one,” to dropping the Strangelove references promised by the title.
The paper is positioned as a series of amendments to Zittrain’s original, which evoked an idea of it serving as the Bill of Rights to Zittrain’s Constitution. I still like the idea of including these ideas in future editions of the book, but after thinking on it for a few hours, I realize it’s more of a Constitution to Zittrain’s Declaration of Independence. They’ve taken the excellent theoretical work of Zittrain and created a set of practical steps to work towards it. Definitely worth a read!