The first week of the new year: time to make resolutions about the sort of person you want to be, and the sorts of behaviors you want to have. Go to the gym, blog more, that sort of thing.
Of course, these promises don’t usually pan out on the strength of the resolution alone; you need a bit of a carrot and/or a stick to make you stick to it.
In case you don’t know the rules of Iron Blogger: every participant must post something to her blog every week. If she fails, she owes the organizer $5. (That’s the stick.) Once enough money has been collected, everybody goes out and gets beer with it. (That’s the carrot.) I’ve gotten a group of friends together to start, and if you’re in San Francisco and interested in participating, let me know.
In the spirit of BoingBoing’s annual charitable giving guide, here’s a list of organizations that I’ve given to this year. As far as I can tell, these groups are each doing great work, and deserve every penny they can get.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
I’ve given to the EFF in the past, but in the past two months of working there, I’ve got an even deeper respect for the work they do. On so many fronts, the EFF has your back.
Free Software Foundation
I happily renewed my membership in the Free Software Foundation this year. Few organizations are as consistent and dedicated to their ideals as the FSF is to software freedom, and their licenses have been a de facto standard in the software world for decades now.
Creative Commons
The Creative Commons license suite is now nine years old, and the six core licenses have become part of the architecture of the web. The quantity of collaboration and creativity that this organization has enabled is staggering, and they’re doing good work now putting together the next major update to the licenses, version 4.0.
Mozilla
It’s easy to underestimate the impact Mozilla has had on the Web, especially now that Google Chrome has ensured they’re not the only high-quality free software browser around. It’s so important, though, that one of the major players in the browser space is run by a foundation that cares about users first. Top that off with the fact that Firefox is a great piece of software that keeps getting better, and these guys are a no-brainer.
The Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation does so much — a top 10 website, advancing free culture and the world’s knowledge to everybody with access to the web — with so little: fewer than 100 employees, 400 servers, and a budget that’s a blip on the radar of many large companies. I know the face of Jimbo Wales causes nightmares to some, but it’s good to support these guys.
Software Freedom Law Center
Free software licenses are a lot less effective if they don’t have any “bite”, but there aren’t many lawyers who really get the concept of software freedom. Enter the Software Freedom Law Center, run by the inimitable Eben Moglen, who consistently advance the free software cause by counseling on patents, trademarks, and copyright licenses.
ACLU
The ACLU understands the importance of civil liberties, and isn’t afraid to take unpopular positions supporting them. They’ve also been working hard to protect personal freedoms for over 90 years, and know what they’re doing.
National Lawyer’s Guild
Like the ACLU, the NLG provides legal support where civil liberties are in danger. NLG works particularly with progressive political movements, and have played an instrumental role in the Occupy movements. You can find people with NLG numbers sharpied onto their bodies at every Occupation.
Mother Jones
Mother Jones provides good long-form, timely, investigative journalism. And because they’re reader-supported, they can focus more on what people want to read, and less about what ads look good next to. Their coverage of Occupy has been excellent, and they’ve been one of my favorite examples of print publications working on the Web.
Southern California Public Radio
KPCC out of Pasadena is the station I grew up listening to. Next year I’m likely to give to my local station in San Francisco, but KPCC is a great public resource in Los Angeles, and one I’m proud to support.
Without a doubt, there are many deserving organizations that aren’t on this list, devoted to these issues and others, but each of us is only able to chip away at the block so much. If there are charitable organizations that you feel strongly about, please share with me!
I’ve been impressed with the quality of language used to describe the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill is a disaster for the internet, and its opponents are devising some pretty creative ways of expressing that. Two of my favorites:
This isn’t even throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This is bludgeoning the baby repeatedly with a sledgehammer and then throwing out the whole bathroom.
A third clause says the bill shouldn’t be construed in a way that would impair the security or integrity of the network—which is a bit like slapping a label on a cake stipulating that it shouldn’t be construed to make you fat.
SOPA in a nutshell: If a criminal hid counterfeit goods in a bank safe deposit box, SOPA would allow the legitimate IP owner to shut down the entire bank and all other branches without any notice, search warrant, or due process.
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.