all those other arguments about software raging in nerd-land? Well, because I think some of the most interesting discussions about IP—intellectual property—that is, one's creations are taking place there.
Programmers (hackers being the term for really good ones) find themselves in a slightly different situation than the average author or artist, who can make a complete work on her own: as with film, in order to produce anything worthwhile, one must work as part of a team.
All creators build on prior effort, and we take this “commons” of accumulated creative material—intellectual wealth, if you will—almost for granted.
One of the (many) ways I've been procrastinating is by bringing myself up to speed on the SCO vs.~IBM/Redhat mess, which makes for slightly less frustrating conversation when the wizard and I were taking evening walks. And what does this have to do with the APA?
(And why am I wasting my time writing this crap, instead of mailing the apa out right now)? I'll get to the first part in a minute, but the second's easy: I've never really learned how to use our color printer. And, being cheap, it's cranky, and unless babied, wastes a lot of very expensive ink and paper (I think the current batch of these items alone represent some 20% of the total cost of the machine—not at all unusual). The wizard printed out about a third of the covers last night, and will continue tonight, but in the meantime, I'm in a wait state. Thought I might as well make as interesting as possible (remember that desire to end on an even page?)
Well,... S&S is a creative endeavor, and thus its components are the intellectual property (validated by that little copyright symbol) of its contributors. Our shift from a manufacturing to information society has meant though the entertainment industries (as represented by organizations like the RIAA) have certainly been the most raucous about defending their IP rights, I think the most interesting debates about this topic are taking place in the software industry.
First, some boring history.
Computer programmers have a venerable history of sharing code; after all, it's the ultimate ‘have your cake and eat it too’ situation: even though you give your code to someone else, you still have it, because it's digital; in the end, it's all 1s and 0s, and thus not ‘lossy’, because perfect, indistinguishable copies can be made. And, back in the early days of UNIX, this is exactly what early hackers did, because as any of you who've ever collaborated, or even just participated in a studio, or writer's group (such as this apa) knows, sharing is fun.
The more computer-literate members will have spotted an oversimplification in the prior paragraph, though: what the programmers actually shared was the cryptic, almost poetry-like “human-readable” (by hackers, anyway) code. This was fed into a machine, run through another program (the compiler) and then turned into the infamous 1s and 0s. And, Matrix aside, no-one, not even wizards, can read that. In order to sell their hardware, companies threw the code in—specifically the operating system, required to turn a computer into something more useful than simply a very expensive, room-sized space heater—to sell the hardware.
But then the businesses hit upon a clever money making scheme: keep the source for themselves, sell the compiled code—plus services to maintain or change it—to their customers and make a lot of money. And they did. This is one reason you're not running UNIX on your desktop today—those corporate giants saw no future in “little” computers, and certainly weren't going to license their OS at a price an individual could afford.
There aren't a lot of good analogies—the best I can think of is house decor: supposing you could never change your furniture or paint or carpeting, supposing you couldn't even re-arrange your furniture, let alone switch from carpeting to hardwood floors. Further suppose that all houses, when you bought them, looked exactly alike: 3 bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, 1 bath, a kitchen; and all had white walls, brown shag carpet, textured ceilings and 2.1 recepticles per room. Your only option, to change even the slightest feature, would be to go to an interior decorator—whom you could hire to do all of these things—but only paying an annual contract, that cost about $50,000 a year.
That, more or less, rapidly became the situation with mainframes, which is why only large corporations and governments could afford them, even though early ones scarcely did more than your pocket calculator. Even so, some the UNIX was published, and released into the public domain. Meanwhile computers shrank into mini-computers (auto sized) and finally into microcomputers, the forerunner of “personal computer” —which has since differentiated into desktops, laptops, servers, and so on. (Interestingly enough, some companies put a dozens or hundreds of them together into racks, effectively becoming mini-sized again.)
But the early hackers mourned the free and heady exchange of the early days; one of them, Richard Stallman, (rms) decided to do something about it. For nearly two decades the co-founder of Free Software Foundate struggled to make software for which the source—the poetry, if you will—was available to all. Freely available to change, fix, whatever. (Not necessarily free of charge, mind you—and this ambiguity has caused a lot of headaches for the open source movement.) But the same passion and drive to achieve on a shoestring what only large corporations could afford also meant that FSF was always something of a fringe element.
Computer hackers and writers aren't the only ones who like to share their work; so do physicists—and some from CERN effectively invented the www to do just that. A personable young college student posted his little noodling—a playful exercise—on a newsgroup, encouraging people to improve the tiny glimmer of an operating system. They did with a vengeance, now having the communication tools to exchange ideas easily and cheaply, their efforts effectively multiplied by incorporating the years’ worth of work done by the FSF. Though no doubt galling for Stallman and his efforts to be absorbed into Linux, there is one extremely important component that undeniably is associated with him: the Gnu Public License, the contract under which the use of Linux (and most of its associated programs, and there are hundreds of them) is governed.
GPL has some interesting components. You can copy source code that has been gpl'ed. You can change it. You can sell it. But—and here is the kicker—you must share it. If you let your changes out into the wide world (e.g.~sell them), you must publish the original code and your changes. And if your customer who bought it from you for $50 or $500 or even $50,000 decides to post the entire thing on her website for free—she can. And she can change your code—as long as she publishes any public changes. Hackers love “getting under the hood” and changing things. (In fact, the wizard did a lot of auto tinkering in his abbreviated [hobby-level] stock car racing career.)
Okay. Now you know why I'm using that weird operating system and may have a glimmering why its quality is generally held to be high—after all, if you're doing something for love and passion, you want it to be your best work, right? (and if it's so great, why am I having all these problems? Well, she said, not even linux can fix plugged ink nozzles and broken printheads. Yet.) But the original question—why do we care about IBM's battle with SCO?
We're getting there, ever so slowly. SCO sold linux solutions, but not very successfully. (It's done a lot of things, not very successfully, it seems. I admit to wondering how they ever managed to become a multinational corp.~in the first place.) A new batch of owners came in, scratching their heads as to how they were going to become profitable, and came up with that uniquely American business model: sue someone with money. Even if they lost the suit, if they could generate enough smoke and noise, their stock price would go up, and the honchos (paid almost exclusively in stock) could ‘pump and dump’.
IBM has lots of money (but what does this have to do with art you say? We're almost there. Really.) and has contributing to Linux—cheaper than maintaining their inhouse code from scratch. SCO, at some point in its past purchased UNIX—the name, and some code (but not all code—some earlier version escaped into the public domain, remember; and there are hundreds of flavors of unices, owned by various companies, whose code diverged once it became proprietary.)
SCO has accused IBM of putting SCO's code into Linux without SCO's permission, a violation of a non-disclosure agreement, and also, of course, a copyright infringement. So far, SCO has refused to identify any of this code (except in the vaguest of terms—somewhere in Linux—not terribly helpful, as we're talking millions of lines of code here) in court, and their infamous slide demo only proved either a) both SCO and Linux have some Public Domain UNIX in them and/or b) SCO swiped some OpenBSD code, and removed the authorship/license info (the BSD license is similar to, but not the same as, the GPL.)
Before very long, it became to clear to the SCO lawyers that the GPL was going to be a major thorn in their side—not least which because in a prior incarnation, they'd freely distributed the code their “intellectual property” (under the gpl) they were now accusing IBM of improperly incorporating into linux. Hence their efforts to discredit it. (Good luck, fellas. It was written pro bono for FSF by a Harvard law professor.)
As I write this, IBM is scheduled in December to chew SCO and spit it out in the courts; though the honchos, as long as they make their stock profits and don't actually get thrown in jail, won't care about that. Of course the company's peons will all suffer when their slowly dying business gets hammered, but who cares about them? And in the meantime, any number of nerds (such as the wizard) have been following the news on a blog called groklaw.
Groklaw was created by a paralegal, Pamela Jones, who'd by default taken over the sysadmin tasks at a law office, and discovered she liked computers, which in turn eventually led her to linux, and finally to trying out a weblog, so she could telecommute with a lawyer. She'd wanted to contribute to the Open Source community, which had freely given her all these tools, but didn't know how—she's not a programmer. But just as she created the blog, the SCO vs. IBM mess (most people are not dignifying it with the term ‘suit’) began.
Ah, she thought. This is what I do for a living—researching (via Google, for example) for legal cases. She didn't really think it would make much a difference, but figured the IBM paralegals would eventually find the site, and, perhaps, something useful to their case. This would defend linux and the GPL, a good thing. And, no doubt, IBM has found her site—their latest offering was offered to the court in a table format, a practice groklaw has been using for some time to compare IBM and SCO's interrogatories and (non) replies.
But the hacker community found the site, too. Someone who could translate the mess in plain english! Properly define legal terms! Explain the process! In effect, assemble the available info and put into context. And, being a blog, the hackers could release their frustrations, funny bones and everything in between to their heart's content. And they did. The site was so popular it had to be rehosted twice. One of those avidly following the case was the wizard; and sick with a cold (instead of doing mentally demanding work, like figuring out how to import images and make them “drawing-ish” in GIMP) ye olde editor started reading the site.
Not till I'd read some two-thirds or so of it did I really start to appreciate IBM's actual legal documents, as opposed to the plain-english explanations and various comments (SCO's remains obfuscated gibberish, as far as I can tell), and though it's interesting, it's not the reason for this essay; a little icon at the bottom of the page ‘some rights reserved/CREATIVE COMMONS’ and eventually, from sheer boredom, I clicked on it.
By now, of course, you're practically screaming with boredom, and wondering whether I'll ever get to the point. My point is this: the Open Source Community, which is now facing its first serious challange to its intellectual model (and thank goodness models can't be copyrighted—yet) has pioneered an approach by which people may collectively pool their intellectual efforts and yet retain a certain measure of control over their hard work (or hard play). I've long wanted to share the contents of my website, which is supposedly is primarily educational in its thrust, without releasing it completely in the public domain, but I never got around to gpl'ing it. Now I have a better tool.
As an author of stories or artist working with traditional paper and some tool to make marks on same, you can and probably have produced most of your works yourself, and maybe haven't thought too much about the benefits of collaborative efforts—which software, by its nature, must be—useful programs are simply too large to be made by one person, and the nature of the beast demands a lot of code reuse.
But just about everyone has heard stories of plagerism, and though the boundaries are (fairly) clearly defined for fiction, they get somewhat murkier with art—particularly in the media I use, such as glass beadmaking and bead-stringing and bead-weaving. At what point does particular way of laying down a bunch of dots, or sequencing certain kinds of beads, become a violation of someone else's copyright? Beadmakers and beadweavers spend a lot of time flaming each other on these very topics, (boy, do they ever) and my occasional dipping into other media would seem to be rife with these, ahem, discussions as well.
The issues are hardly cut and dried. Aside from attempting to delineate when a dot bead (these have been in production for thousands of years) becomes Christina Logan's or Larry Scott's or Dan Adam's dot bead, there are all those issues around teaching. Beads, like a lot of time-consuming craft, are difficult to sell for adequately high prices to support the creator, so many bead artists supplement their income by teaching. Thus the proliferation of instructions when taking or even signing up for a class such as ‘you may not copy class instructions or patterns’ or ‘you may only make this product for your personal use’. Some even prohibit the sale of the project made in class, and some do not even wish their students to teach anyone else their methods, a restriction I find particularly galling. Does it sound familiar?
It should: many of these restrictions are remarkably analogous to proprietary software licenses. The difference is that the teachers don't have the financial wherewithal to prosecute legally, and M$ and its cohorts do.
At which point does a project become different enough to qualify as new, rather than derivative work? (I've never seen any guidelines I'd call definitive.) If the instructor isn't selling the product herself (most don't sell finished pieces, though a few do), why should she limit her students from doing so? If the teacher bars her students from passing on the information, doesn't that violate the spirit of all those people from whom she learned?
The GPL is the dominant Open Source license today, which is a good thing, because unless carefully written, open licensing can cause the very sorts of conflicts—the inability to work together—it's designed to avoid. Now other individuals creating IP are exploring ways to share, yet retain some measure of control of their work. Some want credit; some do not want their work changed; others don't mind derivation, but want the changes marked, so they're neither credited nor faulted unfairly for them; some don't want their work sold; some don't want to license the work to people with ‘different philosophical beliefs’(!); many want the work and any derivations released under the same rules as they themselves released it. This latter requirement is the heart and soul of the GPL.
Codifying these variations and permutations into a license, or contract between the creator and consumer (or perhaps user) is the self-appointed task of the Creative Commons. Right now we're in a struggle to define new boundaries for creative endeavor—between the public domain and the individual maker. Copyrights are well and good, but when the Sunny Bono act extended Dizzy's protection on Winnie-the-Pooh (far and away their most profitable franchise) it also screwed a lot of genealogists and historians who were waiting for old county lists and histories to enter the public domain. Now they must wait another 20–50 years. Combined with the fact that copyrighted works are no long required to be marked, how do you tell when a copyright expires?
Up till now, the big money, like the rodent and the riaa, have been dominating this debate. This has resulted in heinous laws, such as DMCA, which, taken to its extremes, could mean someday that you would pay every time you opened a book to read it; that you could not sell your book to a used bookstore, nor loan it to your friends. We're not to the point yet, but just in the last five years, digital cameras have surpassed film ones. Just how much further behind do you really think ebooks are? Our lifetime? Our students’? Our children's?
Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org) is just starting out, and still ironing out a lot of bugs in the process. Licenses are like any other human endeavor—none are perfect, but some can be great. I urge you to check the site out sometime, because I feel it affects all of us, and I think we should be a part of this debate, rather than ignoring it (or making bootleg copies) and hoping somehow it will all come out right.
That url again is http://www.creativecommons.org, and this is enough of a soapbox. Take care, and see you in about six weeks.
updated 12jul2021—added a summary
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
