Singularity University Open Source Panel
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Transcript of Singularity University Open Source Panel
Singularity UniversityPanel on Open Source2009-07-28
The Commons as a collective intelligence meta-innovation
Mike LinksvayerCreative Commons
Photo by asadal Licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 http://flickr.com/photos/68242677@N00/2117153416/
Creative Commons .ORG
Nonprofit organization, launched to public December 2002
HQ and ccLearn in San Francisco
Science Commons division at MIT
~70 international jurisdiction projects, coordinated from Berlin
Foundation, corporate, and individual funding
Born at Stanford, supported by Silicon Valley
Enabling Reasonable Copyright
Space between ignoring copyright and ignoring fair use & public good
Legal and technical tools enabling a Some Rights Reserved model
Like free software or open source for content/mediaBut with more restrictive options
Media is more diverse and at least a decade(?) behind software
Six Mainstream Licenses
Lawyer Readable
Human Readable
Machine Readable
Machine Readable (Work)
My Book by
My Name
is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at
example.com.
DRMfree
DRM Voodoby psd licensed under CC BY 2.0http://flickr.com/photos/psd/1806247462/
Software/Culture (i)
Utilitarian/obvious but narrow reuse vs non-utilitarian but universal reuse possibleGecko in Firefox, Thunderbird, Songbird... = Obvious
Device driver code in web application = Huh?
Cat photos and heavy metal = music video
Software/Culture (ii)
Maintenance necessary vs rareNon-maintained software = dead
Maintained cultural work = pretty special
(Wikis are somewhat like software in this respect)
Software/Culture (iii)
Roughly all or nothing modifiable form vs varied and degradable formsYou have the source code or you dont
Text w/markup > PDF > Bitmap scan
Multitracks > High bitrate > Low bitrate
Software/Culture (iv)
Construction is identical to creating modifiable form vs. iteratively leaving materials on the cutting room floor
Software/Culture (v)
Why NoDerivatives and NonCommercial?Legal sharing of verbatim works made interesting by filesharing wars
Maybe less emphasis on maintenance meansRestrictions on field of use less impactful
Free commercial use more impactful on existing business models
Sofware/Culture (vi)
Commercial anticommonsWhen distributed maintenance is important, NC is unusable for business (one explanation of why free software open source)
Maybe some artists want a commercial anticommons: nobody can be exploited ... but most want to exploit commerce. NC maybe does both.
History (i)
Some evocative dates for software ...1983: Launch of GNU Project
1989: GPLv1
1991: Linux kernel, GPLv2
1993: Debian
1996: Apache
1998: Mozilla, open source, IBM
History (ii)
... evocative dates for software1999: crazine$$
2004: Firefox 1.0
2007: [AL]GPLv3
????: World Domination
History (iii)
Open content licenses (some of them Free):1998: Open Content License
1999: Open Publication License
2000: GFDL, Free Art License
2001: EFF Open Audio License
History (iv)
Other early 2000s open content licenses (some of them Free):Design Science License, Ethymonics Free Music Public License, Open Music Green/Yellow/Red/Rainbow Licenses, Open Source Music License, No Type License, Public Library of Science Open Access License, Electrohippie Collective's Ethical Open Documentation License
History (v)
Versioning of Creative Commons licenses (some of them Free):2002: 1.0
2004: 2.0
2005: 2.5
2007: 3.0
History (vi)
Anti-proliferation?2003: author of Open Content/Publication licenses recommends CC instead and PLoS adopts CC BY2004: EFF OAL 2.0 declares CC BY-SA 2.0 its next versionNo significant new culture licenses since 20022008+: Possible Wikipedia migration to CC BY-SA
Indicators (community)
1993: Debian :: 2001 : Wikipedia8 years
Wikipedias success came faster and more visibly
Does Wikipedia even need an Ubuntu (2004)?
But how typical is Wikipedia of free culture?
Indicators (business)
1989: Cygnus Solutions :: 2003 : Magnatune14 years
Cygnus acquired by Red Hat (1999); Magnatunes long term impact TBD
Magnatune may not be Free enough for some, but it seems like the best analogy for now
Indicators (big business)
1998: IBM :: ???? : ?No analogous investments have been made in free culture. Most large computer companies have now made large investments in free/open source software
1998: Microsoft :: 2008 : Big MediaCould Microsofts attitude toward openness a decade ago be analogous to big medias today?
Indicators (Wikitravel)
Very cool round-trip story:2003: Launch, CC BY-SA
2006: Acquired by Internet Brands
2008: First Wikitravel Press paper titles
Community is the new IP?
Indicators (NIN)
Ghosts I-IV released 2008 under CC BY-NC-SA:$1.6m gross in first week
$750k in two days from limited edition ultra deluxe edition
This while available legally and easily, gratis.
NC doesnt seem important in this story ... yet
Indicators (Summary Guesses)
Free culture is at least a decade behind free softwareExcept where it has mass collaboration/maintenance aspects of software, where it may rocket ahead (Wikipedia)Generally culture is much more varied than software; success will be spikey
In Innovation, Meta is Max
The max net-impact innovations, by far, have been meta-innovations, i.e., innovations that changed how fast other innovations accumulated.
Robin Hanson (Economist)http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/meta-is-max---i.html
Collective Intelligence
Meta innovation?
Commons
Meta innovation for Collective Intelligence?
$2.2 trillion
Value of fair use in the U.S. Economy
http://www.ccianet.org/artmanager/publish/news/First-Ever_Economic_Study_Calculates_Dollar_Value_of.shtml also see http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7643
Cyber terrorism(Cyber terror war on)
Privacy breaches
Loss ofGenerativity
Lock-in
Surveillance
DRM
Censorship
Suppressionof innovation
Electoral fraud
Luddism
Threat categories
Legitimate security issues
Protectionism
Politics and power
Security theater and fear-based responses (driven by all of above, not just legitimate security issues)
What digital freedoms needed for beneficial collective intelligence?
Keep same rights online/digitally that we (should anyway) have offline/IRL
Permit innovation and participation enabled by digital world even if not possible before (probably follows from above)
How building the commons (free software, free culture, and friends) helps
Security
Data shows FLOSS is more secure
Security through obscurity doesnt work
FLOSS encourages a heterogeneous computing environment
Free software and free culture both allergic to DRM and other mechanisms that sacrifice security to other goals
Protectionism
Peer production undermines policy arguments for protecting knowledge industries
Free software and free culture both allergic to DRM
Politics and power
Free software and culture improve transparency
... and the ability of all to participate
Peer production works against concentrated power doesnt require concentrated production structures and lowers barriers to entry
Security theater and fear
Access to facts mitigates fear and allows rational evaluation of responses
Commons work against three previous threats that drive security theater and fear
Can the success of the (digital) commons alter how we view freedom and power generally?
The gate that has held the movements for equalization of human beings strictly in a dilemma between ineffectiveness and violence has now been opened. The reason is that we have shifted to a zero marginal cost world. As steel is replaced by software, more and more of the value in society becomes non-rivalrous: it can be held by many without costing anybody more than if it is held by a few.
Eben Moglen
If we dont want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes. We must start sending the message that a good citizen is one who cooperates when appropriate, not one who is successful at taking from others.
Richard Stallman
i.e., we can form collective intelligences instead of forced collectives ... and still change the world
Building the commons is key to achieving a good future
Politicians and corporations are unimaginative ... they need to see solutions, or they react in fear
A dominant commons makes many collective stupidity scenarios much less likely
Beneficial collective intelligence needs universal access to culture, educational resources, research ... in machine-readable form
Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
AttributionAuthor: Mike Linksvayer
Link: http://creativecommons.org
Detail of image by psd Licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 http://flickr.com/photos/psd/1805374441