a whole minute

I have uploaded my thesis for my Master of Communication degree, A Community-Based Model for the Production of Ideas. I argue that treating ideas as the products of communities, rather than the exclusive property of individuals, resolves a number of significant flaws with copyright. More importantly, community-based production promotes communities and aids the self-development of individuals. Since community and self-development are desirable in and of themselves, they provide both a motivation for community production and a moral argument in favor of it.

The Canadian government has indicated that it intends to push ahead and change copyright law – without consulting with ordinary Canadians who will be affected in their everyday lives. But the issues remain unclear to many citizens and journalists. I have put together the faircopy site to help explain what this is about, how it affects all Canadians, and what we can do about it. This is intended to put together a clear overview, augmenting existing efforts like the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group.

In order to stop ordinary people from violating copyright, companies have encoded content (particularly music and film) so that it requires special software to access. The software embeds rules determining what access is permitted and what access is not. Unlike copyright, which is interpreted by human beings, these rules are enforced by a machine. This law makes it illegal to circumvent the machine’s determination.

But the machine is inflexible. It doesn’t know whether it’s ok for a student to copy a journal article, for a researcher to look for security or privacy flaws, for a Microsoft customer to play music on an iPod. So the software prevents activities which are otherwise perfectly legitimate and legal. Where copyright grants control over some uses of a work, this technology (DRM) grants control over all uses. And the U.S. version of this law, the DMCA, by banning all circumvention regardless of the purpose, makes that control inviolable.

That’s the first problem.

The second problem is that to decode the content, this software must be present in every device that plays it back. It’s in your cell phone. It’s in your DVD player. It’s in your computer. In order for the law to be effective, it forbids you to interfere with the operation of the devices you own. It becomes illegal to unlock your cell phone to use it with a different wireless provider. It becomes illegal to play DVDs on operating systems other than those made by Apple and Microsoft. The only one who can determine what your devices can and can’t do is someone else. You lose control of your own property.

But that’s not all.

Access must only be given to the right people (companies that make the technology – DVD players, operating systems, etc.) but not to the wrong people (you and me). Who decides? The answer must be a single company or organization. They make the rules about who can play back content – and who can encode content too. You can’t publish protected music for the iPod without Apple’s permission. You can’t make a device to play it back without Apple’s permission either. These companies and organizations have tremendous monopoly power. Control of the content requires control of the technology (and of our property), which becomes control of the market.

That control does not lie with artists, authors or musicians. In fact, because the technology is primarily American, it doesn’t lie with Canadians at all. This law would place Canadian innovation and Canadian culture in a position of dependency relative to the United States.

That’s only the part of the law we know about. There will be more.

Oh yes, I should mention – the copy prevention mechanisms don’t work. They might stop you and me from making legitimate use of material, but they don’t stop the serious pirates from profiting off someone else’s work – after which ordinary folks can use those pirated copies, which, because they are digital, are perfect. This raises the question: are these technologies and laws really meant to stop piracy – are they really meant to benefit creators – or are they intended to consolidate the power of the monopoly and cartel positions of certain publishers and technology companies?

Canada faces a copyright disaster. Next week, Canada’s Industry Minister is set to introduce a revision of the Copyright Act. A similar revision in the United States produced the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which has hobbled innovation and produced lawsuits against ordinary people while failing in its aim to stop piracy. The government has not consulted with Canadians, but by all accounts the Canadian law has been written in close consultation with American interests. Over the past few days thousands of angry Canadians have joined the Fair Copyright for Canada group on Facebook to work to stop this law. There isn’t much time. Canadians who want Canadian culture and innovation to maintain vibrant and independent should join us by writing to their newspapers and members of Parliament (scroll down for contact information) immediately to stop this disaster from becoming law.

Last Friday I attended “The Age of Immersion”, a talk about cinema by two famous names in Hollywood – Walter Murch and Matthew Robbins, moderated by Professor Andrew Feenberg. And I thought, these moviemakers are on one side of an issue, and I am on another. The nature of authorship and authority is changing. Their belief in their authority as creators lies so deep in their souls that they do not even realize it is challenged.

This is perhaps understandable. It was clear that these two men love movies. Robbins spoke of losing himself in a favorite film clip despite watching it on the tiny screen of an iPod. But then he is self-selected – he chose film, he made films and became them, he devoted his life to them. He isn’t just immersed in a video clip; he is enveloped in a culture and in his own life. It means more to him than it does to me or to most people – and it should.

As I said, the talk was about immersion. These men, Murch and Robbins, are so close to it – so immersed in it – that they do not see the outside. When they talked about immersion, it was a technical problem of realism and simulation. They spoke of the control offered by digital media, and about some of the costs of that control. The discussion revolved around computer effects, animation, how these things are done and how they are perceived. Script wasn’t mentioned. Symbolism wasn’t mentioned. Character appeared only as the features and mannerisms of animated characters. The audience was barely discussed.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

In the nearly twenty years since I first heard those lines (from a teacher who dismissed them) the image has never left my head. The words aren’t realistic. They need no technology. They need only an author – and me, the audience, to imagine my personal vision.

Someone asked about the Internet and the proliferation of amateur movies. Robbins was dismissive of the tremendous quantity of poor attempts online, alleviated only by the tiny fraction of one percent who might become brilliant filmmakers. Murch responded that in attempting to make films, amateurs could learn about the challenge of filmmaking and better appreciate quality. It took Professor Feenberg to point out that participation can have its own rewards.

Robbins and Murch are so secure in their belief in the division between audience and creators that for them the freedom brought by low-cost production is the freedom of an audience to experience their films, the freedom to see their films. They couldn’t see the forest for the trees: that hundreds of thousands of amateurs are making movies because they want to create. They want to express themselves. Whether their efforts are objectively bad is largely beside the point.

What is the noblest achievement of film – or of any creative product? Is it entertainment? Expression? Truth? Immersion? Does it matter whether there’s a product at all? I realized afterward the question I should have asked:

Is it more immersive to watch a film – or to make it?

I want to apologize for all the people who ever took the time to comment on my blog. I just approved your comments – because I just discovered they existed. I somehow assumed my blog software would magically notify me when I received comments. Of course it never did. I figured either a) it’s really really hard to attract comments, or b) my software is broken somehow. So if you’re wondering why I’m such a jerk, I’m sorry.

While I haven’t posted about Marginalia in a long time, I have been making significant enhancements. These were prompted mainly by work on integration with and features for the Bungeni system for parliamentary information systems. Downloads for Moodle and Open Journal Systems are available on the Code site, along with full current source code in the repository (follow the link from the Download page).

Among the new features:

• some very important bug fixes
• a multi-user interface for displaying public annotations by multiple users at once on a per-paragraph basis (in OJS, Bungeni, and the demo)
• users can edit personal lists of keywords (this version of keywords is only currently used by Moodle; OJS still uses a static keyword list)
• Marginalia can be used as a kind of track changes feature, in which highlights indicate insert, edit, and delete actions (used in Bungeni)

The Moodle version adds further enhancements:

• keywords, as in OJS, which each user can customize (called “tags”)
• a search and replace feature for margin notes
• the summary page can display all annotations for a given forum (in addition to the existing per discussion and per course display)
• online help
• splash text to introduce users to Marginalia

The following improvements are relevant to developers:

• the Bungeni portal project is maintaining a Plone implementation of the Marginalia service
• a modified database format to allow Marginalia to determine overlapping highlight regions without looking at the annotated document
• most of the PHP code necessary for a Marginalia server implementation is provided in a library
• applications can override Marginalia’s default margin note display and editor functions (Bungeni does this extensively)
• there’s a mechanism for preventing cross-site request forgery of annotation actions (keywords and preferences are not yet protected, however)
• Marginalia is easier to configure, so that different applications can easily determine which features to support (e.g. track changes in Bungeni, per-user keywords in Moodle)
• integrating Marginalia with host applications is more straightforward, and it’s easier to upgrade to new versions of Marginalia without touching the rest of your application code
• improved regression tests for highlighting (the code had been out of date for some time)
• the Atom format for annotations is easier to read and more informative as a syndication feed

I have uploaded the text of a speech I gave about the relationship between commons and community. I presented this a few days ago on a panel at the Union for Democratic Communications conference “Enclosure, Emancipatory Communication and the Global City”, held in Vancouver, B.C.

The Internet and the technical community are host to a toxic culture. This culture allows and even encourages personal attacks, threats, and misogyny. This week, Kathy Sierra’s experience with death threats forced it into the public discourse. There is of course no excuse for the behavior of the individuals who harrassed and threatened her. Yet they are only part of the problem. The solution rests not in finding, stopping, and punishing them (or helping them, for surely they are sad or sick) – although that is to be hoped for, it may be unlikely here and certainly is for the majority of such cases. It rests with others who give permission to such behavior – permission to hate.

I encountered this story via Tim Bray and others, but I’m going to concentrate on Slashdot. I pick Slashdot because it is a technical community, because I often find the discussion valuable, and because I don’t frequent the other places online that I understand are far worse. So it is on Slashdot that I have encountered a pattern of public permission for hatred. On one singular topic the community consistently breaks down and reveals its ugly side; that topic is women. The comments about women on Slashdot, the reactions of readers, and indeed my own behavior (or lack thereof) illustrate what I believe are several flawed attitudes which grant permission for bad behavior.

That’s Just How It Is

The Slashdot reaction to the Kathy Sierra story captures the problem attitudes¹. There’s an acceptance – even a satisfaction – that this is “just how the Internet is”. It’s a “byproduct of the culture of the Internet . . . this sort of thing happens. . . . let’s try not to make more of it than it is.” This narrative of powerlessness in the face of human nature or technology is present even among those posters who support Kathy. One such poster encourages her not to allow unpleasantness to stop her from blogging, yet repeats the same story:

While I respect anyone in the public limelight, I think Kathy is being a tad bit naive. . . . Part of being a celebrity on any level for any topic means accepting that you gain both fame and infamy in parts.

If we simply accept bad behavior as inevitable, then we will do little or nothing to prevent it. Whether this is part of an statement of support or a criticism (see “Grow a Spine or Go Away” below), the perpetrators are given implicit permisson for their actions.

The argument itself – that this kind of behavior is natural or inevitable – is demonstrably wrong. As several posters noted, and as I recall from my experiences online in the early 1990s, the degree of aggression used to be much less. It is possible to construct more civil online communities (never mind ones without death threats) – even anonymous ones. Furthermore, as I will detail when I argue about the practical implications, the Internet will change, and the reaction to this kind of abuse will influence whether that change is for the better.

Grow a Spine or Go Away

This is the most toxic attitude of the lot, perhaps best captured by one poster concludes the following:

People are dicks. Life is hard. A lot of people say a lot of shit and don’t follow through. Either grow a spine or go away. There’s no sense being a big baby about it because someone hates you.

The individual who wrote this reports having been threatened in the past. I believe this is key: coping with abuse thus becomes a sort of hazing ritual required of those who participate online. The measure of an individual is the ability to withstand the pressure; one who fails – and apparently taking action against the abuse is a form of failure – is a “baby”.

This appears to be a particularly masculine approach (though I’m sure there are women who take this attitude, just as many or most men do not). Buried within it is a sort of misogyny, for it measures everyone by their ability to live up to a standard of toughness. In practice, women may be less likely to achieve that standard (because they are targetted more, because they complain) or to be excluded because they chose not to participate in a hateful or aggressive environment².

The argument cloaks itself in a kind of claim to objectivity – the standard is fair because it’s the same for everyone. Yet this is clearly a lie, for the effect is to exclude people, like Kathy, whose participation is valuable. A common follow-on argument is that the alternative is distasteful censorship³. In the case of death threats this should be irrelevant. It’s also a red herring for other destructive (but legal) speech: cultural norms can be just as or more effective. The argument rejects not only the censorship but any more moderate form of social influence.

Practical Considerations

I mentioned that online aggression excludes people. This is particularly relevant for women because they are targets of sexual language, and I understand of more frequent attacks in general. This is tremendously damaging to the technical community, as many within that community have been complaining for years. To give one simple illustration, many among the Slashdot community are ardent supporters of the Linux operating system: they would like to see Linux in general use. I can’t imagine this happening if half the population is alienated like this. The same applies to other technical, political, and social concerns – if the technical community wants to be listened to, it can not afford to abuse people in general or women in particular.

The assumption that bad behavior is a fact of online life has a further implication. Those who hold it exclude themselves from processes of technical and social change. The current state of the Internet strikes a particular balance between freedom of speech and civility, between anonymity and responsibility, and so on. It is obvious to me from Kathy’s case that this balance must change. It will change: legislatures are already banning schools and children from using social networking sites. A variety of proposals aim to curb spam by eliminating anonymity. Some of these have been criticized for centralizing power and granting control to certain powerful players. If the Internet doesn’t clean up its act, someone else will. Those who pretend nothing can change because “that’s just how it is” will have no part in influencing how that happens.

The Rest of Us

The barbarians on the wire are a small minority. Some of them may sad or sick and immune to social pressure, but I suspect the majority act as they do because the social environment of the Internet gives them permission to hate. The rest of us, when we are silent, grant that permission. Saying “no” is hard – it takes time, it takes effort, it’s hard to do well. It needs saying. Those like myself who haven’t said it before or enough need to say it more often⁴. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s the responsibility we need to take for our Internet and our society.

Notes

¹ I want this to be about ideas, not an attack on individuals, so I’m not linking to specific comments. If you really need context, you can search for the comments in the article.

² I myself have often chosen to “go away”. As a geek, I find this aggression particularly distasteful as I have been a target in the past. I hate to see my tribe inflicting its hurts on others. Unfortunately the technical culture has long shared a similar tendency to reject those who faill or choose not to cope with complexity or perversity. For example, when the complexity of certain software is criticized, there are those who reject any attempt to make it easier to use on the basis that smart people wil learn it, and the stupid or unworthy will keep away. Such aggression ghettoizes the community.

³ One thoughtful poster contrasted the need for political freedom with the prospect of censorship. By the terms of the argument, I believe it’s correct – but I don’t accept the binary choice s/he presents:

[The Internet has] ALWAYS been a war zone. . . . Anyone who thinks it used to be all nice and safe is either delusional or wasn’t paying attention. If you have a forum where governments can’t track down and kill political opponents, you have a forum where nice people can’t track down and hold liable nogoodniks who froth hate. That sucks for the nice people, but I think our need for widespread, anonymous communication outweighs their discomfort.

⁴ There are many issues I consider writing about. Only a few make it to the screen. It’s easy to think a thing; hard to put it into words I won’t regret. I doubt I’ll post much more about this topic, but I hope I in future that I will at least say something when it’s obvious something needs to be said.

David Simon, writer and producer of TV show The Wire, gave a powerful speech at Loyola College about institutional failure and social fragmentation in America’s cities. I highly recommend watching The End of the American Empire. Here’s an excerpt from the second segment (with 3:10 remaining):

What’s left for people is what? What are they supposed to say “yes” to? . . . Ultimately, what we’re looking at is somebody who’s been told, just say “no” to what is the only viable economic engine in your neighborhood. . . . The one thing that it solves is, again, the existential crisis . . . Every drug addict knows the moment he wakes up in the morning what his job is. What his essence is. He’s solved his existential crisis. . . . “Just say no.” Why – why should I say no? What should I say yes too? And we don’t have an answer for that last part.