16may2002

Lessig's ideas keynote


books: code and cyberspace, the future of ideas

some priciple of the internet, essence of the design: the guarantee of a certain kind of freedom of competition and creativity. what wins is not what the content owners decide; what the edge of the network says, not what the centre said. [this is a secret property of the network, of maybe even something lower than that. this architecture is part of the environment.]

but: this is a threat to the world before, where people could own content?

congress keeps on extending copyright terms. used to be 14 [or some] years, now is life of author plus 70 years. but this is unconstitutional.

currently arguing this case: lessig reckons that this extension will be ruled as unreasonable by the supreme court.

he put his lectures up on a morpheus server in his office! and he got shut down by his IT department, even though he was just distributing his lecture notes.

most people don't distinguish between perfect control and no control. but nobody understands the space in between, and the battle won't be won until ordinary people understand. but they won't until the toolmakers acknowledge this space.

[it's weird. there are all these geeks here, and these people like lessig come here and flatter the crowd. they're like people who Get It from our terms and are therefore allowed to be around, lawyers and journlists and the such]

oreilly going to put books under the founders copyright. (old founder's of the us copyright was limited to 14 years)

interesting metaphor about radio: it's done by dividing up the spectrum. but really that's not right: the amount of radio room available is spectrum multiplied by volume of where you're trasmitting to. more transceivers means more capacity. so he's saying for spectrum there needs to be a new technical architecture to share it, and not allocate it a priori:
http://www.reed.com/dprframeweb/dprframe.asp?section=openspec [his site]

guy speaking now is
http://www.media.org/carl.html

he's putting government data online, then telling people to email the representatives and say "the government should be doing this"

there's a problem with patents and copyrights apparently. [this is confusing me. how does copyright etc tie into emerging tech? and this is a social issue: why is this kind of thing being debated in a technical forum? is it that the tools being built here are the things pushing the edge, or is it that this is a group that has self selected to just happen to be liberal and anti-copyright [in present form], and so these kind of things become really important when everyone is together?]

[the irc conversation is quite informative in this. i'll append it at the end of the talk.]

"monopsony"?

man now saying we need new distribution models that act against superstars. 

[LOOK: i just said something I THINK IS IMPORTANT ABOUT CHANGING SYSTEMS]
[what property of the system is it that acts to create superstars? how can something be added to the system to create incentive fields to push people towards a system that doesn't have superstars. i should clarify here that i believe the system consists of incentive vector fields to move people into different behaviours, but there's feedback because the positions of people within the field change the incentive points and system itself. therefore by playing yourself in the system in a particular place or niche, you can change the incentive field in such a way that the system can change [the incentive points can move] dramatically. another clarification: stable systems ensure that the incentive flow points away from places where someone operating there would change the system, otherwise it wouldn't be there (obviously). so: putting yourself in this niche would be unusual to being with, and it will entail analysis of the construction of the system, but if you can identify that point you can change it.]

cory: talks about ownership. [hey, that's a problem with web services and recombination: what about the secret property of ownership? you can't label something that gets recombined.]

people inside apple, intel, fujitsu needs the *right words to say* in order to fight back against nonsense IPR laws. [and i think that's fair! somebody pointed out how REST was articulated and then just *clicked*, and now people know how to articulate that argument and even how to think about it.]


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snipped conversation on #etcon:

[the conversation here was *really* good, but i don't really want to put
an unedited version online]