But rather than reserving his comments to places where he has Lessig dead to rights, Dave lashes out wildly, without (I hesitate to say) making a whole lot of sense. As Alex pointed out that Lessig’s rhetoric wasn’t advancing his cause, so I suggest here that Dave’ reasoning doesn’t show him putting his best foot forward.
Lessig isn’t saying that no one should enjoy copyright protection, ever; he’s saying that our age has knocked the social equilibrium of copyright protection far from the “common good” arm of the balance to an extreme at the “private benefit” end.
Does it seem odd to anyone that people are protesting ten years’ protection on software source code? That would mean that software current in 1992 would now be entering the public domain (actually, I think that Lessig allows for a single extension—I’m not at his book right now, so let’s pretend he says no extensions). Much of the code released in 1991 will hardly run on the most recent PCs, and if there’s some precious algorithm hidden somewhere in those Windows 3.1 programs, those Mac OS 7.1 applications, then coders in 2002 would all be that much better off. And just who is making just how much money from apps they sold in 1992? (No doubt some folks who write for mainframes are, but I wonder whether they’re the ones making the biggest fuss. If I’m wrong, though, I’m ready to stand corrected—without calling people “communists,” a move whose convincing impact I thought had dissipated along with the last whiffs of tear gas from the Justice Department in 1969.)
Moreover, Winer’s objection to Lessig’s comparison with Hemingway verges on the unhinged. Lessig’s point is that if I want to learn from Hemingway how to write a sentence, I can do it; I can look at how the words are arranged, compare his sentences with the ways I’d write the same one, I can even quote him for short duration without legal problems. But compiled code is something different; I can’t figure out how to make presentation software by imitating Microsoft’s algorithms, anbd I certainly can’t quote from them (though that would make a fascinating argument: “Your Honor, I wasn’t infringing on Microsoft’s trade secrets, I was alluding to them in a pastiche of code styles. I was sampling them”). I believe Dave when he says he gives a lot of information about his products away for developers to make use of in new and unforeseen ways; but it’s still him deciding what’s good for the public and what they should have to pay for. He’ a swell guy, I’m sure (bit of a temper, but I can get pretty riled up sometimes myself), and I’m glad he shares as generously as he says he does. But Lessig’s argument is that we all benefit from a constantly turned, fresh compost heap of cultural information, where new ideas aren’t choked out by monopoly ownership of cultural resources.
One powerful element of Lessig’s argument comes to this: You don’t own your creativity except as a limited monopoly granted by government, and that the government has misguidedly prolonged that monopoly in recent decisions. The goverenment isn’t infringing on anyone’s rights if it rolls back the duration of copyright protection to a more reasonable limit, in the interest of the common good. Especially when the extremely few people who benefit from such changes are not usually themselves the producers of copyrighted materials, but the packagers and marketers of those materials.
If Lessig wins his struggle—all of our struggle, as he would say and as I agree—Dave threatens to take up pottery. I hope that he’s as great a potter as he is a software pioneer, and I hope we get to see this other side of his creativity soon—but if were to change his mind and decided that limited-term copyright protection sufficed for him, I’d be plenty happy were he to stay in the software business.
DRMA: To be honest, I haven’t been listening to much music lately; as part of a secret plot to get my beautiful daughter Pippa reading bigger books, I have been playing recordings of the Harry Potter books as I typed, and then yesterday afternoon I stopped right in the middle of one of the books. She looked very put out at me, then went off to the basement to find the family copy (that’s right, we’re ignoring the End-User License that says we have to pay extra for any individual family member who reads the book). Ten points for the devious parent! But now I have to keep listening to the story so I can remember how it turned out. Margaret says that if she were Headmaster of that school, there’d be a whole lot less misbehaving. I wouldn’t dare contradict her.
Regarding your premise number one, that’s what I was talking about several months ago when, in the course of our discussion of Clay Shirky’s column, I suggested that the Web made it possible for us to elude “the tyranny of the aggregate.” I don’t have anything new to say about it, but I like the phrase so much that I wanted to take advantage of opportunity to say it again. Same thing when I drive through Wisconsin, and I note that we’re near Waukesha or Oconomowoc. Admit it: you wish you lived near places with cool names like Oconomowoc. I’ll bet that’s the real reason Frank (whose epic interview with Mike Golby spans five posts so far) and the Salos live in a state with place names like Wauwatosa.
[Later. . . ] Well, I, A. K. M. Adam, hypermediatric detective, tracked down the cause of the disruption. Somehow my directory on the Seabury server has gotten locked up. At this writing, Karl is trying to fix up the server.
[Still later. . . ]As the Text Artisan said, “Woot!” Now I’m a big CSSy.
David is right that Ha doesn’t make the determinist point, and I wouldn’t ascribe that to him, nor would I substitute a straw adversary for him. I do encounter the unsatisfactory, very-nearly-deterministic version of this cultural meme fairly often, and that’s what I do want to rebut. And it sounds as though David opposes that non-Ha version, as well.
So David presses onward to the question, “Are there things that can be said in Chinese that simply cannot be said in English, and vice versa?” And again I agree; the question is totally screwed up (though something in this area teases us with an elusive truth that entices people to take the easy, unfortunate way out by affirming the oversimplified version). But we can pursue this anon.
[Hyperlinks added later, after Shelley’s post reminded me that I’d inadvertantly forgotten to.
Since Jonathon entitled his remarks “The art(?) of loving” (in keeping with ancient tradition), Margaret wondered whether “art” was the correct term. Is love an “art,” or a “craft,” or a job of work? The theological tradition defines “love” as one of the theological virtues (the most important virtue, without which one cannot truly be said to partake of any of the virtues)—though this is clearly a different use of the word. And “love” ought not simply be conflated with “being part of a vividly positive binary relationship, as we know marvelously loving single people (some deliberately celibate, others just not involved with another at the time). Our experience suggests that loving relationship involves hard and deep work, remarkable joys, and unending horizons of unexpected challenges, often as not unwelcome ones, and occasionally diamond-brilliant revelations of how things are and may be. Those characteristics, so far as I can tell, avail to anyone who seeks them, in pairs or alone or in crowds.
Among those challenges and truths comes Mark Pilgrim’s heartfelt testimony to the hypothetical experience of his own wedding reception as an alcoholic. When someone tells the truth so barely and beautifully, what is left but respectful quiet?
[Hyperlinks added and citational inaccuracies emended in response to Shelley’s post on the topic. And now Mike Golby has topped it all, bless his heart.]
[Added later: I love Doc Searls’s summary: “We're not just doing grass roots shit here. We're moving the geology under the grass. Political tectonics.”]
Yesterday he blogged prize-winning author Ha Jin’s comments about the differences between Chinese and English. Ha concludes his remarks by saying, “Obviously, English is a more speculative language, whereas Chinese is more earthly, closer to things.”
Maybe I’ve worked too long in biblical studies, a field where interpreters treat words and languages almost as animate entities with occult powers to cloud the mind, but I have little patience (too little patience, considering Ha Jin’s eminence as a writer) for the attitude that cultural groups have intellectual or spiritual tendencies that can be read off the vocabulary or syntax of their languages. I’ve heard more sermons and lectures on “the Hebrew mind” versus “the Greek mind,” than I can tolerate any longer, and have marvelled that the hoary myth of “numerous Eskimo words for ‘snow’ ” just won’t die (concealed Steve DeRose link).
I don’t expect that either the estimable Chinese writer or my esteemed blogfather propound the most tedious versions of linguistic determinism. I agree that social life, thought, and language are closely related , and that they affect one another. Yet I balk at the proposition I quoted from Ha earlier in this post; earthy English-speakers manage to express themselves quite well and comfortably despite their being stuck with a more “speculative” language, and even my rudimentary studies of Chinese Intellectual History (with Pof. John Langlois, Fall of 1978: “There’s a lot of reading for this course; we’ll have a dynasty a day, and books for breakfast!”) acquainted me with prominent, profound speculative Chinese writers. I just don’t see it.
Word: we need developers working hard at what they do best and care ardently about, some of whom (by working on open-source projects) contribute a wonderful benefit to the common good (and others, working on proprietary software, may well benefit the common in other ways). We need lawyers, clarifying the legal grounds for protecting the community against the exploitative proprietary interests of monopolies. These groups will predictably conflict where proprietary-software developers ask that the state allot them monopolies of longer duration for the production of their applications, while lawyers argue that the common good necessitates shorter duration for intellectual-property monopolies. That conflict, though, needs to take a back seat to the shared need to unhorse the Nazgul who presently demand the prerogative to ride roughshod on the Internet.
(“Nazgul” is plural, isn’t it?)
The offense that seems to have engendered this set-to (and a rather one-sided set-to it is, since Lessig has not, to my knowledge, taken a part in it) lay in Lessig’s apparently exculpating himself while accusing Open-Source developers in his remarkable lecture at OSCon last month. That and, it seems from Dave Winer’s recent blogs, not listening enough to developers like Dave.
Lessig probably would benefit from soime more conversation with some developers, but at what point would Dave allow that Lessig had listened enough? Dave says, “He’s not done anything yet. Perhaps his friends haven’t done anything yet. Does Dr Lessig understand technology any better than Rep Coble?” Dave’s even asking the question concerning technology tempts me to doubt that he has read either of Lessig’s pertinent books; perhaps he has read them, but forgotten how pervasively they reflect continued engagement with the ways technology and culture intersect and affect each other, or perhaps Dave means “Does Dr Lessig know about developing applications?” But suggesting that Lessig is Coble’s mirror-image doesn’t advance Dave’s own side of the argumen; the implied equation of the two reflects pporly on Dave’s judgment.
Lessig certainly picked the wrong people to chastise at OSCon; the open-source developers have done more for the creative commons than almost anyone else you could name, and they have contributed to the commons not merely with cheers or donations, but with their lives, the most precious and limited resource available. On the other hand, Lessig devotes tremendous amounts of time to raising public awareness of the legal dimensions of the present assault on the public’s common interest. Should anyone who cares about monopolistic control of the common cultural inheritance be dissing other folks who demonstrate the same concern?
We’ve seen these sorts of argument before. In my lifetime, the civil rights movement, the peace movement (that’s as in, “the peace movement, the one in the 60’s and 70’s), the women’s movement, the gay lib movement, the resurgent movement for racial equity, the anti-AIDS movement, and possibly every other movement for social change has seen one camp calling another to account for doing things differently, working on a different part of the equation. We need to take this critical kind of approach to keep one another honest, and we need to listen to one another to learn ways we might pursue common goals harmoniously and constructively. But we don’t need, on any side of any such issue, to throw around cheap accusations. Divisions among like-spirited resisters always benefit the status quo. And the way the status quo is going, we need all the cooperation among resisters that we can get. I’m not a developer nor a lawyer, but a theologian (hence, a cultural critic) who feels a closer kinship to Lessig’s angle of approaching the problem than to. . . I guess, to trying long-distance to get Tara Grubb elected (if North Carolina is now the way it was when I lived there, out-of-state money and support going to Green will only strengthen Coble’s kind of campaign). May we please encourage one another to press onward on every front, developers appreciating the work of resistant lawyers, and lawyers not discounting the work of those who write code, and perhaps not indulge the onlookers who want to see two underdogs fighting each other?
The [second] [okay, “the almost-kinda-practice-for-a-second”] honeymoon couple relished their four days on their own, and report to the world that they have only grown more deeply in love than ever. Speaking just for myself, I shall say that my fondness for, adoration of, attraction to, pride for, joy with, respect for, delight in, and passion for Margaret have grown hour by hour for nigh onto twenty-four years now. She’s just flat-out the greatest. Thanks, sweetheart.
He seems like a nice guy.
Has he written any books?
Would he come speak to us?
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