Commentary, notes, quotes and links to coverage of the 2003 SouthBySouthwest convention. It seems that BruceSterling and CoryDoctorow were the big hits this year.

From: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/13/1952253

BruceSterling is the sort of writer who invites his audience to an open house with "anyone they'd like and anything they can carry." He's also busy in his non-writing life keeping up with the resurrection and commemoration of dead media and not-dead-yet online freedoms. Fellow online agitator and decorated science fiction writer CoryDoctorow seems more of an Ernster Mensch; Doctorow points out that he's a writer second, activist first. When these two started a freewheeling discussion ("intellectual cyber riffing," as Sterling described it) on "The Death of Scarcity" Tuesday afternoon, the quotable quotes were everywhere. Read on for the ones I jotted down, and a link to some more.

Within five minutes Doctorow was describing the common ground that economists of all stripes might find in a world of increasingly information flow and decentralization, and Sterling was questioning conventional wisdom on Google, file sharing, and other sacred cows of the techno-elite. This public conversation in a smallish but packed meeting room in Austin's Convention Center served as an endcap on the Interactive portion of this year's South by Southwest Interactive conference, and probably crystalized a lot of what conference attendees had on their mind between panel sessions and parties. Below are some of the thoughts that came out in the course of the Sterling & Doctorow Show. (And Sorry, but the open house is over now. Thanks, Bruce.)

The worth of Information:

Sterling: "All of this circles around the central declaration of S. Brand -- 'Information wants to be free.' Yet, Information also wants to be expensive. ... I have to wonder, what would happen if sheep actually did shit grass -- would mutton be free? ... Doesn't [widespread file trading] crowd out what was formerly a competitive menu of available choices? What if you just can't sell music any more? Nobody's going to go down to [Austin record store] Waterloo, nobody's going to hang out with them afterward. ..."

Doctorow: "Whether Kantian or Marxist, the most valuable stuff isnt the world is the stuff we want to concern ourselves with, because when stuff is really valuable, it becomes scarce. ... [by contrast], the Napster ethic is, 'Be as selfish as you possibly can -- the more crap you download, the more crap there is for everyone to download.' ... Code is a little like speech, a little like a tractor. Keynes and Marx both talked about speech [being different from] a tractor; Code is a little like speech, and a little like tractors. When you've got something that's both speech and a tractor, you've got something really interesting."

Napster, the RIAA and file trading:

Sterling: "[Napster is] a kind of profoundly undemocratic technical fait accompli. 'Look at this neat gizmo that we geeks built while you weren't working. We geeks accidentally ate your industry.' [This is a] techno-imperative market argument which I don't think really makes all that much sense in a stagnant monopoly ... where is the steamroller going, I don't see it going anywhere particular, it's just abolishing other people's money. Does Napster give anybody money for a reelection campaign? Do they have a friendly judge? Is there somebody to sue?"

"What would the music scene look like if the industry disappeared? I imagine things like the Royal family paying for the production of Handel's Water Music. "

Product Interfaces.

Doctorow: "[...] That's what why we have wrappers. If you have good stuff in a crappy interface, somebody will build a wrapper around it. ... This revolution is ongoing -- Travelocity may suck, but it's a lot better than SABRE. This process of wrapping is going on every day."

Sterling: "I think that the crappy interface is one of the reasons for the power of the computer revolution. People are trapped."

On Google

Sterling: "It's a beauty contest, not a credibility contest. ... How is [google's reference-count system] different from turning on TV and seeing Dean Kamen talking on 22 channels about this revolutionary scooter? What I want to see ... the kid in Left Elbow, Kazakhstan, you give him an 802.11 Linux box, running google [and left to play]. In 4 years, I want to see him matriculate. [Laughter]

"... Now if we had an idiosyncratic version of google, that was sort of a Bruce Sterling google ... 'Well, Bruce, here are the things you're going to find really great today!" you know. There are things they they always claim on Amazon. 'So you've bought this book, ok? You might want to try this CD.' I've never bought any CDs on Amazon, they always think I have the worst possible taste in music. No luck over there at all.

"People gather together in little tidepools and trust, otherwise there would be no limits [on stagnation]. You'd simply say 'Oh, what's everybody using? Oh, Apple IIe, OK, that's it, end problem, Apple IIe, boy, that's for me ... Macintosh? Never heard of it!"

Doctorow: "I think the problem is that, as a society we've consistently choose the crappier and more available thing over the more beautiful and less available thing."

The last 5 years:

Doctorow: "In the last 5 years, Linux became useable. In the last 5 years we finally got. In the last 5 years we got Tivo. In the last five years we got 802.11 widespread. I mean, my life has been changed."

Sterling: "You mean, 'that fantastic innovation we saw until about 5 years ago.' ... I think [Innovation has] slowed to a crawl, and moving in a slow reverse, you're not going to see a lot of major innovation, outside of Linux --which is in danger of being outlawed. The 802.11b [phenomenon], same thing -- there are people who sit around all day trying to demonize 802.11b users and say that they're stealing -- 'the Parasitic Grid.' It's a social hack, but because of that, they're very vulnerable to political counter-hacks. They're not the same as genuine technical innovation. That's a difficulty."

Cultural spread and cultural inertia:

Doctorow: "There's an amazing story about the day someone sent the first hotmail message with 'Get your free email account at hotmail.com' at the bottom to India. The traffic statistics the next morning, they quintupled overnight, on the strength of one email."

On Copy Protection, the RIAA/MPAA, et cetera:

Sterling: "When will the U.S. snap? What will it take to put the genie back in the bottle, how many times will the genie have to be hit on the back of the head? What if someone accidentally breaks the bottle with his baton? What are we going to be left with that commands value? What can't we copy?"

Doctorow: "By an amazing coincidence, last week Congress held hearings about [copy protection in hardware] I think it's actually possible, I think it's actually possible, but the social consequence is quite horrendous. When Turing machines are outlawed, when universal computers that can do anything are no longer allowed to exist, then that kind of thing, I think the innovation we've seen over the last 20 years [will end].

This being SXSW Interactive, quite a few people in the audience were taking notes. Krow put his on LiveJournal, and I hope others will link to theirs below.

From: http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=krow&itemid=46451

A bunch of quotes. Wrap your mind around this.

So, I am listening to BruceSterling giving his keynote talk (oh, and CoryDoctorow... oops). Highlights, and the quotes I remember.

He starts off by telling us "Hell yes I am having party, everyone is invited".

From: http://www.sxswblog.com/note.asp/17

Tech Trends: Panel: Tomorrow Now

BruceSterling and Woodgate, from a futurist company in Austin.

  1. OpenSpectrum

    • BS: It's coming out of left field. 2 years ago you didn't see anything about it.
    • You can let the geeks build a system, throw a bunch of money at it, and still loose a heap of money.
    • The problem with 802.11 is that it's a tiny bit of spectrum.
    • W: We're seeing the death of satellites.
  2. Where is the revenue? Where is the business model?
    • BS on Google/Blogger: Get me into the database now, and get these 100,000 hippies to help me.
    • Floods of Americans are reading British newspapers to find out what's happening in their own government.
  3. Ubiquitous Computation.
    • BS: Traffic monitoring. Cell phones/PDAs.
    • W: Visibility vs. Invisibility. Wearable, wirelessly connected computers.
    • BS: You gotta love wearware. A GPS could be wherewearware. Material Connection. (got foamed alluminum...smelled like the future.)
    • W: New materials are exciting. Technology has to be invisible. We're looking for things that do something for us.
    • BS: UBJunk. A buggy room. A buggy car that still thinks it's smarter than you. Bad maps put you over the cliff: "My data says it's heeeere!"
  4. Open Source, Distributed Production.
    • BS: What happens if people can build their own cars? [makes me think of open-source submarines.] How much would it really cost?
    • Suppose it cost $400 new. What would that do to the automotive industry? How do you fit it into the litigation structure?
    • What do we do when people are making physical stuff?
    • The terrorist spread for WMD, is the Linux model of weaponry. Small groups of networked activists.
    • We don't have methods to deal with this stuff. People's attitudes are polarized.
    • W: The whole issue of fabbing is intersting. Modeling allows simple things like toys.
    • Community structure--seeing a breakdown of tradition strucutres. Change the way companies are organized. Profit-making community of individuals.

    • A different attitude toward work & play: people are negotiating their own contracts on a different basis. Getting more days off. Plan for their future, having kids.

    • BS: How do you make those structures accountable?
  5. Biotech.
    • BS: Birth rates and life extension.
    • Health care problems. A revolt of health care workers refusing insurance companies.
    • We don't treat health as if we're not the same species.
    • Domesticating microbes. Microbe-sniffers built into water systems, on towers. Posting the data to the Web.
    • A new kind of non-commerical monitoring system.
    • Out of this crisis, better things will come. It would be better to scrap it, and start over with a new system. It's bad and it's killing us.
    • W: Interior air is worse than outside air.
    • BS: hacking the body. Measuring the calcium in my body. Make the scan your startup page. Open Source health model.

    • The mechanisms of decay aren't very numerous. We'll probably be able to beat one or two of them. Life extension in specific areas. Constantly patching/padding problems. "HolyFire" by Sterling.

    • "Never be an alpha-adapter of biotech." People will suffer.
  6. Globalization, Americanization, Anti-Americanization, The War.
    • W: Globalization to most people is perceived as Americanization. I can see where it will soon be the China-ization of the world.
    • BS: Don't worry too much, this too shall pass. Armageddon never lives up to its hype.

From: http://www.cardhouse.com/heath/2003_03_09_archive.html#90599497

Bruce Sterling and Derek Woodgate: Tomorrow Now

Introductions

Sterling: I'm an author. My most recent book is actually a futurist book. After I did this book, I got this really sweet gig writing for Wired, writing this monthly futurist column. That explains what the heck I'm doing here.

Derek and I are going to start ripping on six major league change drivers. Were just going to ping pong some things back and forth.

Woodgate: I'm principal of the futures lab here in Austin. We work with major corporations looking for what we call future potential for them. We really look to provide them with what a strategic plan or R&D company can't. I'm a political economist by profession.

Open Spectrum

Sterling: Topic No. 1: Open spectrum. This baby's come completely out of left field. People are suggesting that you could divvy up the spectrum and rain it down on people's homes. I've got it right here in my machine. I'm running off Cory Doctorow's groovy little 802.11 thing. This is just the baby verson. I'm interested in the struggle because it a microcosm of a bigger one. It's a struggle between the pigopolis and the pirates. Or law and order and the multitudes. In the world of open spectrum, it's very open. No one knows what its good for. The people who are in charge of the spectrum allocation are very worried about it. After the '90s it's very clear that you can bring a lot of capital to stuff, make it widely available, and still lose your ass. You can go down in flames by bringing people access to information.

Here we've got my favorite version, Motorola Canopy. What your talking about is a really big antenna, kind of a moonlight tower. Everyone pitches in a couple of bucks. It's no big deal. The thing is, this is just a small range of spectrum that’s good for microwaving chickens. If we can get just one tiny chunk of Clearchannel's empire, one wasted classic rock station, we could cover the country in 18 months. There would be no last mile problem.

Woodgate: We've been following the spectrum thing, too. We're looking for a tipping point, and I'm not really sure we're there. The car seems to be the tipping point. People much more believe in the local area network than in mesh. The thought is that putting these standards in cars by 2007 means that Ford and Daimler are all in this together. If it really gets commercialized in that way it’s a very consumer-oriented way. We've seen the death of satellites. Other than moving heavy data, where open spectrum's better, we're probably going to see more of the local area networks in the short term.

From a business pojnt of view it’s a little different.

Bubble Money

Sterling: Let's talk about the business side. That’s Topic No. 2: Where's the bubble money? Where's the economic activity? Where's the business model? So much glass was put in the ground and so much human energy was expended for something that doesn’t have a business model. The death of portals is a problem. The death of ISP's is a problem. If something like Canopy takes off, there go the ISP's. Its interesting to me that the biggest thing going right now is Google. Google isn't a portal. It's all about getting right into the database. Get me right into the database.

Who is this poor guy from Red Herring? I saw him on CNN this morning. He says, "I was googling it. I was bloggering it." I was blog dancing him. He says, "Yeah, the enthusiasts usually start it and then someone like me comes in to finance it." I was, like, "Where's your magazine dude?" How many times do these guys need to be punished? How much money do they need to lose? When will they learn that the Internet is a product of the sciences and the military. Those aren't profit-motive ventures.

CNN doesn't have any money to send anyone to Baghdad this time around. Fox lost heaps of money, enough money to build entire cities from the ground up. There's no money. There's no money in Blogger. There's no money in the corporate media. Money has to come from somewhere. Unless information wants to be worthless. Unless we just want to be worse informed from machines that work worse and worse. That’s the trend I'm looking at, and it's bugging me.

Woodgate: I agree with you, but I think there are some places where there is some bubble money. Don't throw it all out. If you look at the drivers, you can see some trends. Things like escapism and maximum pleasure are really quite important. In things like entertainment or really serious stuff, there may not be any money. But in things like experience collecting, cultural diffusion, there may be money.

We are seeing some real creepage in a whole host of environmental issues. Where there is going to be real money is in security and in self-preservation. As a futurist, I usually never try to guess where I should put my money, but security is one of those areas. In addition, I think we need to look at biotech. Another thing ubiquitous computing.

Ubiquitous Computing

Sterling: Let's move right into that. Topic No. 3: Ubicomp. You're beginning to see some of this popping up. When you start having these little gizmos, you know you're moving in the right direction from where it goes from hand waving to where it really hurts people. Ubiciomp bites man.

I think that the first area is traffic monitoring and traffic rings. The mayor of London OK'd the installation of traffic monitoring cameras that take snapshots of your license plate. You get a ticket. That's OK. We don’t want to run people down. But what worries me is ubicomp mission creep. Now you’ve got a database of everybody and her sister's license plate and what they're doing downtown. I don’t know if any of you Austinites have noticed the bloom of video cameras. What is our city doing with this video? How do you leave town without them knowing? How do you really know when you're driving across town to have a little rendezvous with your boyfriend that your husband wont call up and ask where did my wife's license plate go? It's a ubicomp problem. Its an Orwellian ubicomp problem.

It's sexy. The upcoming war between palm tops and cell phone gadgets will be interesting. It's weird. I'ts one of the most exciting places of concurrent technological development: Handhelds trying to become phones and phones trying to become palm tops.

Woodgate: Every project that we've been working on for the last 2-3 years, ubicomp has been a really critical aspect. There are two sides: the everywhere and the nowhere. The likely thing is that the suit is most likely going to be an office. Given heads-up displays, you can really customize them. Having personal wireless area networks is going to be pretty exciting. MIT is working on that. So are a lot of companies, particularly companies making wear ware.

Sterling: You’ve got to love a term like "wear ware." Then GPS can be where wear ware.

Woodgate: What we're seeing is a tremendous number of new polymers with circuitry embedded in them.

Sterling: I love Materials Connection. Their job is to go to Italy and buy all the weirdest shit. They put it in a cubby hole and people pay just to come and handle the stuff. I could make a fork out of this! It takes a while for new materials to become adopted. They’ve been at it for a long time. I ran into this one guy. And he gave me a chunk of foamed aluminum. It's froth. That stuff just smells like the future.

Woodgate: It's good from the sense that you can really understand how you can build anything. That’s important from a sensory perspective. It's really important that it felt good. The technology really has to be invisible. We're looking for, even with ubiquitous computing, things that really do something formless. One interesting point you made is about the handheld vs. the cell phone. I don’t see the future of the screen being between the handheld vs. the cell phone but a piece of plastic.

Sterling: One aspect of this that’s being underplayed is ubijunk. The first wave of ubicomp isnt going to work very well. Then you end up with stuff that's just waiting to be turned off or picked up or thrown out. What happens if you walk into a room that’s experienced the blue screen of death? What if there are buggy rooms? Who do you call? The difficulty of cars has always been the planned obsolescence of cars. What happens when you try to drive an obsolete smart vehicle? It still thinks it's smarter than you, and it's been in a couple of wrecks. Its GPS map is 18 months out of date and you drive right over the edge at 80 miles an hour. Bad maps cause you to blow up the Chinese embassy. What if it's in your clothes? I have an ID tag in my underwear, and I wash it one too many times. There's a whole Philip K. Dick world of hilarity here.

Industry

Sterling: Let's move onto Topic No. 4: Influence on industry. The thing that impressed me with the foamed aluminum wasn’t the thing itself but the amount of sensing. You almost need aluminum moussing. Just the right temperature. What happens when that crashes? What happens when it's no longer under the control of experts? What if I can go down to Kinko's and foam me some aluminum?

It’s the Linux model for physical objects. It's a really intriguing organizational problem that our society has that no else seems to have. What happens to General Motors if people can build cars? What if you could just download the stats to build a Model T? That can't be that hard. Henry Ford wasn't that big a guy. What if you built one out of foamed aluminum and chopped bamboo? How much would it really cost? Maybe a couple of million dollars? A Model T cost $400 bucks new. And there was no one in particular making them.

It's a Red Hat automobile. There's no digital rights management. When it wore out you'd just make another. How would we fit that into the litigation structure? Who do you sue? What are we going to do when kids are making stuff -- stuff -- not drivers, but actual stuff? We have a major military problem over it. The terrorist spread of mass destruction is basically a Linux model for nuclear weapons. That’s why were going to take out Iraq. It used to be that only governments could afford weapons of mass destruction. Now small groups of networked activists can get their hands on the stuff.

They're only weapons. And weapons have a manufacturing aspect. You just have to make the stuff. Aluminum stuff is suddenly contraband. Walk around downtown Austin and see how many aluminum tubes you find. It concerns me. We don’t really have methods to deal with this stuff. People's attitudes are becoming polarized. At the top end its becoming more and more ferocious, and at the bottom it's becoming more and more corrupt. We need a middle here.

Woodgate: We're seeing some of the modeling techniques that are allowing people to make things like little toys. But it's beyond us to work out the distribution problems,. Fabbing's going to be an important part of some community aspects. But the whole issue of community structures is part of society. If you look at the changing nature of work, we are seeing a real breakdown of traditional structures, particularly in knowledge work. There's no real need for these big organizations. You can come in and do what you need to do at any time.

We're starting to see what we call community companies. They're not just profit-making companies but communities of profitable individuals. In Europe, we're seeing already that people are negotiating their own contracts on a very different basis. They're looking for a retirement lifestyle all the way through their entire career. I'm also looking at that from the fabbing point of view.

Sterling: I wonder how you make those structures accountable. And how you can plan that lifestyle when you have no idea how long you're going to live.

Biotech

Sterling: Maybe we should move onto topic No. 5: Biotech. I'm concerned about the structure of the American healthcare system. There's a not so slow crisis brewing there. One of the worst aspects of this I've seen is a revolt on the part of healthcare workers on insurance rates. They're refusing to heal sick people because they can't afford the healthcare premiums. This is a sign of a breakdown in the social order. You can't maintain that drain on the insurance companies.

We've tried. The US has struggled with this for many years, to find a balance between socialized medicine and the high-tech treatment we’ve been aiming for. It doesn’t matter if you can get four heart transplants if the guy next to you at the bus station coughs antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis on you. I belong to the generation where it's sort of a given that healthcare will continue to improve and lifespans will continue to expand. But you see life expectancies crashing in large parts of the world. The World Health Organization used to think that the population was on it's way to 11 billion. Where is it now? 8.3 billion. Where'd all those people go? AIDS, mostly, actually. AIDS and a crashing birth rate. When people don't have sex carefully, we get AIDS. And when people have sex carefully, we get crashing birth rates. We don’t treat our public health as though we all share the same species. The low end and a certain number of people are going to die from this. It's not going to be pretty

Some things are pretty. We have a much better sense of cellular development at this point. I'd be pretty concerned about the degree of antibiotic resistance. We're going to be domesticating microbes, figuring out what they do and how they work. Whereas we used to have home pregnancy tests, we're going to have home everything tests. You're going to have microbe sniffers on towers. Bad cloud today. You're going to have microbe sniffers on every water faucet. There's a potential there for non-commercial health monitoring activity where we can actually see what's eating us. It's a no brainer for domestic offense because it's a bio-war defense. You can see this in elk wasting and West Nile virus. Out of this crisis better things will come.

Woodgate: Other than the UK, compared to other healthcare systems, yours is probably the worse. With new bio materials, tissues, and genetics, we're going to see massive growth in that area which will counterbalance what we see happening. Particularly with an aging population, the costs are up. All those things cost money, and it's going to be even more difficult to keep the system running.

We're going to see more prevention techniques. The air that’s inside your house is 2-3 times worse than the air outside your house. We're going to see a lot of things pumped into the air at home for therapy. Equally, were going to see new soaps and other materials.

Sterling: Instead of home fire things, why don’t we have home cold germs things? People are used to paying a lot of money for medicine, but prevention is more of a hobby. Why can't I see the inside of my head every morning? Why can't I scan my body head to toe and have that as my start page so I can see how much calcium I've lost in my spine? Why do I have to go to an expert and pay them to tell me?

The mechanisms of decay in the human body, there are probably eight or nine of them. We might beat one or two of them in pretty short order. You could have fresh dewy young skin but still be going blind or deaf. Life extension isn't going to be like this fountain of youth crap. You'll have life extension in your nose. You'll spend all your time patching things up while you're Chernobyling somewhere else. I think the first people to do it are going to really suffer. Don’t ever be the alpha test for a biotech upgrade. Let the junkies do it. Let RU Sirius do it. Let the extropians do it.

Globalization

Sterling: We're done to our last topic here: Globalizatioon, Americanization, anti-Americanization. The war. Movement in the street. NATO, the UN, the scene, baby!

Woodgate: Is globalization Americanization? It's really China-ization. The factory of the world is in China. The way globalization spreads is more about timing than anything else. It's perceived as Americanization because there's a complete gap between the ideology of America and the ideology of the rest of the world. In most of Europe and in Japan, you don't have ultra-capitalism like you have in the US. Look at what's important to people's lives. That makes it really different and difficult.

You have the same problem internally between states and federalization. States are going their own way. There's a massive change that’s going to go on. If it doesn’t, the US is going to go through a really difficult period. That might not be the end of the world. Go back 100 years and you have two world wars and tens of wars elsewhere. And we're still here. 10 years from now the US will be very different in its attitudes. It has to be if it's going to sustain any kind of growth.

Sterling: I think a lot of people mistook globalization for Americanization because for a long time Americans held the megaphone. During the '90s there was kind of a period of quiescence. People in the rest of the world expect Americans to behave the way the Washington Consensus would have us act. But now we've got more of a Serbian or South African-style regime in power that’s trying to shift foreign policy away from here. It's a large continental, militarized superpower with a population under surveillance and punishment.

That’s not the way America was when it was globalizing. Other countries are globalizing better now. ??? Al jazira ??? has the vitality of CNN during the first Gulf War. I would expect this second Gulf War to make them. They're a global newsmaking organization. They're breaking a lot of stories, people. The non-resident Indians have had a huge impact on their home country. Al Qaeda are globalized Arabs. They're guys with western educations and engineering degrees. They're globalized Arabs and they're angry about it.

I think it's about time the globe woke up that 4% of the people in the world can't do all the damn heavy lifting. If you're Brazil, you need your own damn government. The idea that the UN becomes irrelevant because the Bush administration says so is ridicuolous. It's not like the Chinese prime minister is going to stop talking to the Indian prime minister because they shut down a building in New York. The future is people in Belgrade talking to people in Latvia.

This too shall pass. The clock will not stop ticking. Armageddon never lives up to its hype. Things change and they change for the better, the worse, and the indifferent. Let's all go to my house and have a beer this evening.

From: http://www.cardhouse.com/heath/2003_03_09_archive.html#90599497

Lawrence Lessig: Add Sanity

Last month, in February, this man, Jack Valenti, appeared at the Duke Law School and gave a lecture. We could call it a sermon. In this lecture, Jack told students about morality. This is what he said

These values, Jack said, are corrupted. They are corrupted, he said, by the Enrons of society. Second, these values are being corrupted by "sharing." By "file-sharing." By the "terrorists." These are our children. These terrorists are sharing content on the Internet.

This, he said, much change, for "Man is the only animal

1998 was going to be a great year. Work from 1923 was going to enter the public domain 75 years after it was created. 75 years is an odd number because in 1923, copyright was for 56 years. 85% of copyright holders didn’t extend their copyrights.

Every time Congress extends public domain, it is in effect tolling the public. Of all the work produced in 1923, no more than 2% was commercially exploited. The rest of the works stay invisibly in that space because it wasn't commercially produced.

In 1930, 10,027 books were published. In 1998, 174 were still in print. That left 9,853 books out of print and invisible. The copyright system continued its control.

Between 1923 and 1946, 97.7% of books are no longer commercially availble. 93.2% of films are no longer commercially available. The commercial publishers basically give us 10% of what was produced.

1998 would change that. In 1998, that work would pass into the public domain and the situation would heal itself. Others could take it and build it by redistributing it or building on it with derivative works. [This would have affected] playwrights

A man named Eric Eldred. A man who, for the last few years, was developing works for his daughters who were bored with English. He began this career of building works on the Internet in the public domain, spreading knowledge. Works that were not easily available. They were building from the work in the public domain the way our framers intended it when they wrote that part of the Constitution that has now been erased.

This is nothing new. My favorite hero did this in 1928. My hero Walt created this heroic character Steamboat Willie. Steamboat Willie inspired Mickey Mouse. And from Mickey Mouse, we got the Disney empire.

Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., was explicitly ripped off by Walt when he created Steamboat Willie. This is creativity. It's a creativity we should embrace and praise. Walt Disney creativity takes and builds on what went before. It's a brilliant form of cultural expression. It was the birth of the cut and paste culture, the rip, mix, and burn culture that the Apple Corp. sells us.

More than parroting existing films, all of his works build on works that previously existed in the public domain. We should call this Walt Disney creativity We take and we express differently. This is the expression of what our culture is about. He had this freedom, and we don't.

In the next 20 years, 1 million patents will enter the public domain. Not one copyright will enter the public domain. We have 20 more years to wait to release this content that was built under the expectation that copyrights would expire.

They say something was stolen from them. They say that something was stolen from us. They say that in this bargain that was struck, this exchange of 75 years of protection, this promise has been broken because work that would have entered the public domain won't. Congress took this work and gave it to particular people who have green things that they give to campaigns.

Where was Jack when this theft happened? Where was Valenti when these values were stolen? Where were his ideals when money broke the promise? Where was Jack? Jack was on the hill arguing for the copyright extension act.

"It was our duty," he said, "to extend these copyrights." This is what he said

That wasn't their bargain. Their duty. What we struck was an exchange for a protection for a limited time. That deal has been taken from these creators.

Jack believes this is moral, this taking. Regardless of whether you believe this is moral for the 2%, I want you to consider the 98%. That 98% is locked up in copyright today with extraordinary cost to even identify the copyright holders for no productive reason at all just because this money bought an extension for 20 years for works that were supposed to be protected for a limited time.

Copyright law has been transformed to be an extreme. Originally intended to benefit authors, it no longer functions like this. It protects not authors, but publishers. It enables a control over the creative process that produces a homogenization of this culture.

This concentration is new. 80% of music is distributed by five companies. 80% of television comes from six firms. We have never had a history in our time when fewer interests created more of the creative process.

Does it make sense for creators?

Before the Internet, I don't think this change mattered much. What could you do except turn to commercial publishers? It didn't matter much to your production. After the Internet, this change matters lots. The kind of creativity enabled by the digital consumer is radically different. Millions now are in the position to be the creators and distributors of content. Before the Internet, this was simoly not possible.

What blocks this creativity is this kind of regulation. This digital creativity is Walt Disney creativity.

These guys are the beginning of what we'll be able to do. These guys are tiny. They don't have any money. In the world that we live in, in a world that's as defined by Disney and Coca-Cola as it is by George Bush, we have no freedom to take these expressions and ideas and build on them in the way that Walt could in 1928.

What explains removing those freedoms from us now? We can do it technically, but we can't do it legally. Why? We could do it legally if only we could get the law out of the way. We tried to get Congress to do something sensible, and that failed. I, the last naïve law professor in the country, went before the conservative Supreme Court. That ideal was given to us 210 years ago, and it was taken away from us today for no good reason at all.

It's time to try to do something new. Something new inspired by GNU. This is the space of the Creative Commons. There are three kinds of people out there. Some who believe that all of their rights need to be protected. Some who believe that none of their rights need to be protected. They just gave them away. And some who believe that some of their rights need to be protected -- but some can be given it away.

Most of the time, we look at the extremes. What I want is something in the middle. We need something here to get some sort of balance that leads the extremes back to the extremes. We need to stop solving for the extreme case and start building an architecture that recognizes the middle. That's the function of the Creative Commons.

The Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that will have thousands of ideas for how people can reasonably build on existing ideas.

I believe in something different than the extremes that Jack Valenti sings for. Here, some people talk about incentives. Here's one of my favorite guys who talks about incentives: Cory Doctorow. He sold many, many books in bookstores for a first novelist. But he had 70,000 people download his book from the Net.

The people who assume the law would be reasonable are people who don't know about the law. The layers that CC licenses enable are layers of expression. Tomorrow we're going to announce new versions of the license. One is a sampling license. One says explicitly that we don't want to oppose restrictions on people in developing nations. They don't even have money to buy things.

We've also talked about building more artists into this system. Davis Guggenheim has joined the board because he has a vision of how to best take film content that allows other to use content to build documentaries in the way that documentaries should be made.

Valenti is the third reason you should participate in this project. Whether you have a personal incentive, whether you want to enable innovation or not, in this world of extremists, we need a way to say "I believe in free." We need to express it so we can look out into this space and say that the world is not divided into those who believe in total control and those who believe in no control.

We can change the way this debate happens in Washington. We need to express the space in which creators operate. We need to enable other to build and mark a space in the middle. I feel an extraordinary frustration in my own world. The ideals that the legal tradition talks about in terms of balance have been exploited.

We can change that failure because we can succeed here. We can succeed in just the way Jack said. We are the animals that know the difference between the way things are and the way things ought to be.

Artists do not control. Artists are not free. Culture is not free. This is where we are. We could be back in a world where culture is free. Not free where artists don't get paid but free in the way that speech is free. The only thing that stands in the way is the people I make for a living.

Let me tell you about us. We believe in control. We create structures of control. It makes us feel good. This ideology of control now permeates the law. This control is our security.

This control is not the environment of creativity. You know that. This extreme of control is not the environment in which creativity can flourish. You know that. You need to stand up and push us out of the room. You need to reclaim this space for you. We don't believe in this space. Our laws enable the most powerful in a way that will stifle and kill diverse, decentralized creativity.

We have ideals, too. We believe in a democratic nation. We believe that greatness is earned through respect and criticism. We believe in a moral compact in which people are free to express criticism. We believe in a moral imperative and duty to build this freedom back into our culture. The honor of our nation has been the honor of free people who can speak about freedom without calling their lawyer -- who can speak about integrity and mean it.

That freedom is at our fingertips. But that freedom has to be fought for. 210 years ago they gave it to us. We have lost it. Only if we build the revolution they gave us 210 years ago, can we reclaim it.

From:

Josh Benton, Dan Gillmore, Matt Haughey, J.D. Lasica, and Evan Smith: Old Vs. New Journalism

Smith: This panel is misnamed. Blogs: Old Vs. New Journalism. I think we'll find that it's all journalism. I'm an editor for Texas Monthly. So I represent old media. What we're doing is nothing like what these four gentlemen are doing.

We're joined up here by four people. And rather than introduce them, I'll let them talk about their blogs, their philsophy of blogging, and how that reflects itself in their blogs, which might not be the same thing.

Down on the end is Josh Benton, who by day works for the Dallas Morning News. To his right is Dan Gillmore, who does a blog that's under the umbrella of the San Jose Mercury News. It's basically part of his work for the San Jose paper. To his right is J.D. Lasica, who writes for Online Journalism Review, but he does a blog that's independent of his work for the Online Journalism Review. Then there's Matt Haughey, who has no connection to traditional media.

Benton: I probably have the least connection between my blog and my day job, which is writing about education for the Dallas Morning News. Of the panelists, I might be the most pessimistic about the opportunities for news organizations have Web logs. When you think of Web logs as journalism, you probably think about the independent blogs online. I'm probably the least optimistic. I see the form of blogging as not being incredibly distinct about what journalism already does and has done for quite a long time. The old world of media is probably a lot more interactive than people give them credit for. When I write a story for the Dallas Morning News, I get a lot more feedback than I do when I write something for Crabwalk. The form of blogging is not really all that new.

Gillmor: I just came from a meeting of the East Coast Liberal Media Conspiracy, and I'm sorry you weren't invited. I love Web logs the way I loved talk radio when it started. I don't like a lot of what I hear on talk radio, and I don’t like a lot of what I read in Web logs. It's nice to have the Web log sponsored , bought, and paid for by my employer. I've been fortunate. People ask me what the business model for Web logs is, and I say it might be the same as community theater. There might not be one.

The most important thing about this is the transformation from the traditional lecture model in which someone is speaking to a group, and one in which people are talking to each other. In the end, we might end up with a better version of the truth. The collaborative filtering and conversational aspect is why I'm interested in this. My readers know more than I do. That's not a threat. That's an opportunity.

Lasica: [Walked into the audience to take a photo of Ben and Mena Trott, the creators of Moveable Type] The barrier between audience and panelists is really artificial. That's what's going on with old and new journalism. We're more part of a conversation, which is different than the traditional model of journalism, which is top down.

I do a blog called New Media Musings. I interviewed 30 people for an article about RSS feeds for Online Journalism Review, and I decided, why not publish the 30 transcripts in my blog?

How many bloggers are in the audience? How many are blogging right now? If you're doing something more than blogging transcripts, adding commentary or any kind of synthesis, you're engaged in a random act of journalism. I want to get away from the idea that there's a top-down approach that has to be done.

The folks up here are sort of concerned that blogging is journalism because there's so much bullshit out there. Not all bloggers are journalists. I don't even think some newspapers are journalism. You don't need to write for a professional publication to be a journalist. All you need to do is go out there and report something the best that you can, add some commentary and analysis, and you're a journalist.

Haughey: I'm Matt Haughey, and I do Metafilter. I never had any aspirations to do anything that was even remotely like journalism. New journalism and blogging tends to turn readers into writers. Old journalism is more like broadcast.

Metafilter has some journalistic tendencies. These are like story leads. People do research, domain experts might have something to say, but no one really gets around to writing an article and publishing. Old journalism is going to have to take on some of the qualities of new journalism.

Smith: Is this a case of new journalism becoming more like old journalism and old journalism becoming more like new journalism? You are setting the standards for some of the new sites that are out there. There are a lot of old media sites trying to add aspects of blogging. Even those extremely liberal democrats at the National Review [laughter] are starting to blog. Is the mountain coming to Mohammad or the reverse?

Lasica: I think it's both. In the next year or two, we're going to see an intersection of Web logs and old media. You've seen a little bit in terms of old media trying to co-opt the form, like Web blogs on MSNBC. It goes the other way, too. Web loggers who want to practice journalism can learn something from the old guard such as ethics and conflict of interest.

Haughey: You're starting to see Web loggers pick up the phone. They're trying to do their own kind of reporting. That's something we'll see more of.

Gillmore: Which has happened in one or two cases one or two years ago. One is the Casey Nicole story, which was the hoax of a young woman who died. Web loggers thought this seemed awfully strange and started doing reporting. One Web logger went to the county seat in Kansas. They ended up breaking a story that the mainstream media only picked up after the Web community had done all of the reporting.

You mentioned the National Review. The Right wing has been far ahead of the Left in terms of using technology as long as I've been using technology. They were the first on bulletin boards in the '80s. Talk radio is dominated by the Right. And most of the best political Web logs, in terms of quality and quantity, are on the Right. Web logs attract people who feel like outsiders even if they're not.

Smith: Do you consider Matt Drudge a Web logger?

Benton: I would say that Matt Drudge is a journalist, but I don't think he follows the Web log form. I would argue that he might not be a particularly good journalist, but he is a journalist. It's much easier for someone to do what a journalist does than it was 10 years ago. I get more than 100 emails every week from people who want to talk to me about what I do in journalism. You don't need a Web log to get that interactivity.

Smith: To what extent do you feel torn between the day job that pays your bills and the Web log that might claim your attention?

Benton: I've rethought the wisdom of attacking my employer. I'm supposed to be completely objective in what I do. I'm in a slightly different situation than Dan, who's a columnist. Whatever opinions I have I need to keep to myself. There was an error in a Dallas Morning News story that I posted something about, and an editor, who's an active reader of Crabwalk, scarily enough, emailed me saying there might be a better way to deal with this.

Gillmor: The reason that attacking a competitor is an issue is that journalism does a really lousy job covering journalism. Media doesn't do a very good job covering media. That's a shame.

It's true that I have a lot more freedom because I'm a columnist. I'm encouraged to say what I think. I have considerable leeway in what I write. Are there things that I won't do? Sure. While I have attacked my company in print on an issue that I thought raised serious ethical questions, there are things that I won't write about. It’s not that it's filthy laundry, but it just feels like it's not my place. If I saw something that made me feel sick to my stomach, I would either quit or do something different. I wouldn't work for an organization I considered unethical.

Haughey: In terms of these newspaper-attached blogs, there are definitely conflict of interest issues. There were two law suits this year that involved posts that were borderline libel or slander. On independent sites, you need to quiesion people's motivations for saying what they're saying and doing what they're doing. Is it self-promotion?

I always have to talk to the lawyer. There are no real laws. People are starting to work on blogging ethics, just throwing out ideas about we should do that we should do this. I've tried to pave the way by saying Yahoo message boards are just opinion. It's not speech that's actionable.

Lasica: I think a bigger issue is credibility. How do you know what to trust, what to believe online? A writer for the Washington Post said that people are never going to turn to blogs for news and information in great numbers because bloggers don't have the same standards and values. I think she's wrong about that. There are webs of trust. People build up brands just like a traditional news organization. All of our Web logs, if you visit long enough, you'll know what you can get.

Too many people believe what they read on a Web log. They're just not that skeptical. People believe what the believe. We just need to edit ourself.

Gillmore: When someone gets burned by what they read, there will be the same bullshit filters that we have with people that we meet. With some sites, there will be a confidence that a fair amount of time, effort, and money went into making something correct.

Smith: Is there a New York Times of blogs?

Gillmore: There are a number of blogs that I find credible within their realm. Glenn Fleischman writes a blog about 80211 wireless networking, and it's the best source to go to for information about that. They tend to be more niche. Nick Denton and his folks in New York are doing a lot f niched blogs like Gizmodo and Gawker.

Haughey: Web logs are transparent, I think. Especially when there are comments or a community, people will say what about these links that contradict what you say?

Lasica: There's not just one ultimate blog out there. All of us have our blog rolls. You can discover all these niche sites.

Benton: It seems in a way reflective of something that's happened in the broader journalism world. People are looking for sources of news that's more in line with what they already believe. That's a potential problem with Web logs. Anything that takes away editing, you can get caught in a world that just focuses on their side of their question. You can hear just your own voice.

Lasica: I don't think any of us are saying that Web logs should supplant other journalism. But if you're looking for news and information, the mainstream media isn't the only place for you to go.

Question: As media becomes bigger, it becomes more general because you can't piss off your advertisers. Web logs work well because they are small. Journalists have let us down because they've stopped covering niched things. They're not covering the library down the street.

Benton: I would disagree with that. There's a myth that there was a golden age of journalism. Go look at a newspaper from 30 years ago. Look at the archives. There was a lot of crap out there. I agree with you that it's great to have a granular voice. That's terriffic.

Smith: There are a lot of shitty Web logs with no ads. And there are a lot of shitty newspapers with ads. I don't think advertising is the problem.

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SouthBySouthwest2003 (last edited 2005-06-01 13:53:13 by 203)