The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler

In The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler discusses his vision of the role of technology in social change. He rejects an overly deterministic vision of technology (which he connects with Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan), but also rejects a view of technology as immaterial to a society’s direction:

A view of technologies as “tools that happen, more or less, to be there, and are employed in any given society in a pattern that depends only on what that society and culture makes of them is too constrained. A society that has no wheel and no writing has certain limits on what it can do.” (17)

Instead, he adopts a “simple” idea that is “distinct from a naive determinism”:

Different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform. All other things being equal, things that are easier to do are more likely to be done, and things that are harder to do are less likely to be done. All other things are never equal. That is why technological determinism in the strict sense–if you have technology “t,” you should expect social structure or relation “s” to emerge–is false. (17)

To illustrate the point, he describes the different impacts that new ocean-going technologies had on Spain or Portugal (their land ambitions were curtailed by strong neighbors) and China (which focused inland). He also notes how the printing press impacted Protestant countries (where individual reading of the Bible was encouraged) differently than Catholic countries (where “where religion discouraged individual, unmediated interaction with texts, like France and Spain”).

He summarizes his position by saying the following:

Neither deterministic nor wholly malleable, technology sets some parameters of individual and social action. It can make some actions, relationships, organizations, and institutions easier to pursue, and others harder. (17)

In regards to modern networking technologies (like the Internet), he warns:

The same technologies of networked computers can be adopted in very different patterns. There is no guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements in innovation, freedom, and justice that I suggest are possible. (18)

Now the Obama Administration (specifically, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP) is considering extending the policy to other federal agencies that fund academic research.

via Putting the “Public” In Publicly-Funded Research | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I am a big supporter of open access to research. I think it provides a large public benefit at a minimal cost to anyone, even private publishers (who, I think, can and do make most of their profit on rapid dissemination of new materials to those who want them now, not six months or more later). Yes, publishers add some value through editorial management and processing, but most authors aren’t compensated, and many publishers are making large profits without adding enough value to justify the cost.

Image by ramesh.rasaiyan via Flickr

Techdirt discusses why you shouldn’t be concerned if someone “steals” your work and sells it, noting that “it’s not necessarily a bad thing”:

If someone actually figures out something that works well, then that’s useful info to us, and would allow us to then incorporate those findings into our own offering. That’s actually good for everyone…

via Is It Really Such A Problem If People Sell Your Works? Or Is It Just Free Market Research? | Techdirt.

I don’t disagree with this reasoning, at least in the case of the professional production of intellectual property (not necessarily for profit), and most especially when the producer continues to produce content. Thus, this idea makes perfect sense in the case of Techdirt (or most media companies, Twitterers, blogs, newspapers, and so on), since their real value is not in any one particular story, but rather in the relationship between readers/consumers and producers/innovators.

I do worry about “one-off” artists — painters, designers, novelists, musicians — anyone who may invest countless hours in the production of a single item that can then be easily reproduced at virtually zero cost. (Note that my above points would apply to a music label, perhaps, or even a movie studio, since they produce a constant stream of content which can create relationships.) How do we encourage the small-time innovator who may not produce more than a few works? How do we keep free-riders (I might include music labels and publishers in this list…) from discouraging true, one-off innovations by people who may not be interested in innovating in business as well?

I do not have a good answer to this, but I think it’s an important question. (I also think this possibility is used by media companies to “hide the ball” when it comes to their desire to hold onto profitable IP.) If we don’t find some way to resolve it, I suspect we may never have proper IP reform that works for the “little guy.”

It could mark one of the biggest changes for lawyers joining the profession since the first U.S. bar exam was given in Delaware in 1763 — a single bar exam aimed at standardizing attorney credentials nationwide.

via Law.com — Uniform Bar Exam Drawing Closer to Reality.

Law is slow to develop, so this will take a while — but it’s a step in the right direction.

Image via Wikipedia

Cory Doctorow points out that the first 80% of creating a media center is easy: a decent computer (I used an old Pentium III and an old PowerBook, but you can use newer tech if you’re not a poor student), video out (S-Video to an old-school TV, VGA or HDMI to a new HDTV), big hard drives, maybe network sharing (I used an Airport Extreme I inherited) so you can access media from multiple rooms. But what about content — “the other 20 percent”?

Now, onto the other 20 percent: the hard stuff. Recording digital TV off-air is trivial, but for cable and satellite, you’ve got to suck up to the copy-protection companies whose business-model stands between you and entertainment nirvana. They don’t want any “user-modifiable” stuff in their device chain, which destroys the elegant commodity solution and leaves nothing behind but a bunch of disposable, crufty, encumbered set-top “appliances” that have a thick crust of business model between you and the TV you’re paying for. These devices want to firewall off your personal media and the media you rip from the precious cable/satellite feeds, and maintain a locked-down path between those stored programs and your other devices. They want to pretend that a media server is a magical device, not a gigantic hard-disk with a couple AV connectors on the side.

via What’s Easy, What’s Hard | Share Life & Smile with the Kodak Theatre HD Player.

Doctorow points out that getting media content is not a technical challenge. One can pull it through Bittorrent, RapidShare, or similar gray services; backup DVDs (purchased or rented); use Amazon or iTunes; or record shows off the air (TiVo like). This is all pretty easy, technically. But extending this to a larger scale?

That stuff is hard because it’s not technical, it’s social and legal. It requires a massive change in the thinking of entrenched execs who are betting they can fight the future until retirement and leave it all to be someone else’s problem.

I believe we’re currently in transition, and old systems are fighting hard to hold on to what they have via legal and social means, such as extending copyright and suing file sharers. The technical innovation exists despite (not because of this); when will the social, legal, or business innovation permit this innovation to grow and prosper? Or will the true innovation actually come when we integrate current socio-legal models with the new technology?

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• Media centers: the exciting, the boring; the solved, the unsolved (boingboing.net)

I’m excited to announce that starting today, Google Books will offer free downloads of these and more than one million more public domain books in an additional format, EPUB. By adding support for EPUB downloads, we’re hoping to make these books more accessible by helping people around the world to find and read them in more places. More people are turning to new reading devices to access digital books, and many such phones, netbooks, and e-ink readers have smaller screens that don’t readily render image-based PDF versions of the books we’ve scanned. EPUB is a lightweight text-based digital book format that allows the text to automatically conform (or “reflow”) to these smaller screens. And because EPUB is a free, open standard supported by a growing ecosystem of digital reading devices, works you download from Google Books as EPUBs won’t be tied to or locked into a particular device.

via Inside Google Books: Download Over a Million Public Domain Books from Google Books in the Open EPUB Format.

This kind of access shows some of the potential of the public domain to allow for innovation and reuse. Thank Google — and Google advertisers, of course — for making it free. (They could legally sell public-domain works — there is no legal requirement that such access be free and open.)

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• Does Copyright Foster or Hinder Innovation? (inpropriapersona.com)
• What does it mean to be in the public domain? Thoughts about the AP licensing scheme. (inpropriapersona.com)
• Google Opens Up Its EPUB Archive: Download 1 Million Books for Free (readwriteweb.com)

What does it mean to our culture that we have imposed the most draconian restrictions on the reuse of intellectual creations than at any other time?

1. We are the first generation to deny our own culture to ourselves.

2. No work created during your lifetime will, without conscious action by its creator, become available for you to build upon.

via The Public Domain in 2 Twitter sized bits.. | The Public Domain.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt adds to this:

For people who don’t recognize the importance of the public domain and the nature of creativity, perhaps this seems like no big deal. But if you look back through history, you realize what an incredibly big deal it is — and how immensely stifling this is on our culture. And then you realize this is all done under a law whose sole purpose is to “promote the progress” and you begin to wonder how this happened.

via Copyright Length And The Life Of Mickey Mouse | Techdirt.

The changes and restrictions of copyright are unprecedented. Yet our technological progress — and cultural output, at least — has grown exponentially over time, even as our IP restrictions have increased. Is there a correlation or connection?

I believe over-restrictive copyright hampers innovation, but I also believe it’s not a simple equation. It’s about balance, and I’m looking for evidence to find the “sweet spot” that balances the rights of creators with the utility to end-users.

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• Current themes evident in copyright arguments from 100 years ago (inpropriapersona.com)
• Copyright Length And The Life Of Mickey Mouse (techdirt.com)
• Does Copyright Foster or Hinder Innovation? (inpropriapersona.com)
• What does it mean to be in the public domain? Thoughts about the AP licensing scheme. (inpropriapersona.com)

Speaking in the context of technology, Michael Crandell at GigaOM writes:

Take yourself back for a moment to 1990, to the era of dueling operating systems: OS/2 and Windows. At the time, many people still used MS-DOS, and Windows was new (and klunky). Microsoft had cooperated with IBM to create OS/2 to overcome the limitations of DOS by adding multitasking, protected mode, and enhanced video APIs. OS/2, they both trumpeted, was a revolutionary computing platform.

Oops. Guess what? Turns out no one wanted revolutionary. We all wanted those improvements, to be sure, but we wanted them delivered in a way that didn’t require redesigning and rewriting our applications, or limiting the devices we could use. Voila! Windows 3.0 brought us evolutionary OS advances, and we all know who won.

Michael applies this lesson to “cloud computing,” a (some say) revolutionary approach to technology infrastructure that places data and applications in remote data centers accessible via the Internet:

What does this have to do with cloud computing? Well, the same principle applies to cloud offerings today. The easier a platform or service is to adopt for existing applications and uses, the more popular it’s going to be, whereas the more it breaks with current practice, the less widespread its appeal.

But the lesson here is broader than the application to cloud computing or even technology. People generally are resistant to change, especially when it means throwing out work they’ve already invested in. This goes for changes in regulatory schemes, legal standards, APIs, user interfaces, and business models. If there can be this much resistance to a new approach that allows for cheaper, more flexible, and more rapid application development, should it be any wonder that music labels or Hollywood so rabidly seek greater protections to preserve the business approach they’ve been using successfully for so long? (Or that the electoral college still exists?)

This is a fundamental lesson that can be applied at many levels. It can mean branding a revolutionary change as evolutionary. It can also mean providing a clear transition to those impacted that protects previous investments.

But the preference for evolution, for protecting prior investments, does not translate to requiring timid technological, legal or social development. It merely means softening the sense of change by giving users, customers, or citizens something to hold onto that provides a familiar interface (in tech terms) to the new way.

A good lesson to remember whatever your field.

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Mike Masnick responds to the complaint of some people that providing “free” information, tools, and so on (open source, for example) is not a sustainable business model going forward because “everything is free” cannot work:

No one is suggesting any business model where “everything is free.” Everyone’s been focusing on ways to take some stuff as being free and use it to make other stuff more valuable and worth paying for. And it’s working. So why is Baptiste pretending that people are pushing “everything is free”? It’s because the new business models upset the apple cart for an organization like CISAC, which wants to create a big collective licensing deal (collective licensing is easy, compared to actually giving people a reason to buy).

His real fear isn’t that “everything is free,” because that’s not happening at all. His real fear is that the new business models don’t require groups like CISAC.

via Dear Free Haters: No One Has Said ‘Everything’ Is Free | Techdirt.

This is a typical sort of argument I hear from entrenched business interests who have a model of operation that has worked (music, Hollywood, newspapers) appears threatened. Instead of adapting, these interests attempt to legislate greater legal protection (extending copyright as long as possible, for example) and set up “straw-man” arguments like “everything is free can’t work” to justify these protectionist approaches (generally termed “rent seeking” in economics).

I am sympathetic to some level of protection through copyright for example, but not to protecting a business model simply because it worked before. Innovation requires adapting, and as we’ve seen with GM and Chrysler, a changing world will eventually catch up to your business, and the result isn’t pretty.

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• Free Does Not Mean No Business Model (techdirt.com)
• Apparently, Providing Derrida’s Works For Free Harms The Diffusion Of His Thoughts (downes.ca)
• Does Copyright Foster or Hinder Innovation? (inpropriapersona.com)
• Saving Newspapers by Changing the Law (inpropriapersona.com)