Technology Blog

Willem got a brother yesterday. Mother is amazing. Father is amazed.

source: more sometime but

So Code v2 is officially launched today. Some may remember Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, published in 1999. Code v2 is a revision to that book — not so much a new book, as a translation of (in Internet time) a very old book. Part of the update was done on a Wiki. The Wiki was governed by a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. So too is Code v2.

Thus, at http://codev2.cc, you can download the book. Soon, you can update it further (we’re still moving it into a new wiki). You can also learn a bit more about the history of the book, and aim of the revision. And finally, there are links to buy the book — more cheaply than you likely can print it yourself.

Most important, however, as we come to the $185,000 mark of the CC fundraiser: All royalties from Code v2 go to Creative Commons, in recognition of the work done by those who helped with the wiki version of Code v1.

source: Code v2 launches

I’m sorry I lost the blog for about 12 hours.

source: page down

There’s a great line in Gore’s movie about how he thinks about the process of making presentations. Each time, he says, he goes through the presentation “removing blocks” — trying to understand where people aren’t understanding what he’s saying, and changing it so there is understanding. Sometimes it’s not possible, of course — sometimes there’s just disagreement. But sometime disagreement is just misunderstanding.

As I read some of the responses to my post about Web 2.0, I’m beginning to have a Gore moment. I used the word “ethics”; that word is creating a block. Many read that word (reasonably, of course) to suggest I’m trying to impose a moral code on the the Web; distinguish good from bad, right from wrong; a kind of PCism for PCs.

That’s a totally reasonably way to read what I wrote. It’s not, however, the point of the post. I don’t have a moral code to impose on the Web. I was instead describing the elements, as I see them, of a successful Web 2.0 business. My argument is not “do X because it is good”; my post was “do X to keep and spread the success you’ve had.” My claim is not that walled gardens never prosper (see, e.g., AOL). It is that walled gardens wither (see, e.g., AOL), at least in the environment of Web 2.0.

It was clumsy to try to frame that point as a point about ethics. I realize in reading the responses, I hang the normative within “morals”; ethics, in my (private?) language, is about how we (differing depending upon the group) behave. So in that sense, it was how Web 2.0 companies behave, not because god told them to (remember: amoral), but because they believe this is how best to behave.

But there’s another set of responses I don’t think there’s a simple way to answer. There’s a certain mindset out there that thinks the way the world was cut up in college is the way the world is. So whatever set of texts you read as a sophomore, somehow they define the nature of world forever. Seared in your brain is the excitement of figuring out the difference between Capitalism and Marxism, or communitarianism vs. libertarianism. And so significant was this moment of education that everything else in life must be ordered according to these sophomore frames.

I don’t know the best way to respond to this sort of soul. Obama apparently addresses it in the context of politics, when he comments that the last 3 presidential elections have all been framed in terms of the debates of the 1960s (Vietnam, the sexual revolution, etc.), and the best response to this framing is just to move on.

That’s what I wish would happen here. Put your college philosophy books away, and start reading research about what’s happening now. Understand it first, then craft the label. Because when you understand what, say, von Hippel is writing about, it has absolutely nothing to do with communism/communalism/communitarianism/commuwhatever-you-want. It’s all about how business prosper in a new technological environment. There’s a good argument (indeed, great books) skeptical about whether there is a new technological environment. Fair enough. But there are also businesses “democratizing innovation” (free PDF here) not because they’re a bunch of communapinkos, and not because they miss the Cultural Revolution.

source: removing blocks

So my family and I have arrived at the American Academy in Berlin where I’ll be spending the year writing and hiding (mainly). (More on the hiding part later). My 3 year old (as of Thursday!) seems not to have as flexible an internal clock as his dad. This is the first morning he’s slept past 2am. I should have polled for tricks for dealing with this in advance.

source: Early mornings in Berlin

Since my kid was born, we’ve tried to have a month alone off the grid. That starts this year in 6 hours. I have not asked anyone to guest blog while I’m gone, so this space will be quiet. There are a couple times when I might make a surprise return (they’re all preprogrammed). But my apologies for the silence otherwise. This year has been an especially burdensome year. We really need this time alone.

source: Off the grid

I’ve created a wiki for work critical of my own work. The aim is to build a text that would complement my own work. I’d be grateful for any help people could provide. Think of the entries as essentially “But see” c/sites.

The wiki is here.

source: The Anti-Lessig Reader Wiki

So it has been more than a year since the argument in Hardwicke. John Hardwicke continues to work extremely hard to get New Jersey to protect its children. He’s asked people to write the New Jersey legislature to get them to consider one important bit of progress, Assembly Bill 2512.

E-mail the General Assembly

source: a year later

I’ve gotten a bunch of emails recently from people asking whether the NJ Supreme Court has ruled in the Boychoir case. (See Living with Ghosts). The matter has now returned to the blogosphere in an extensive piece by a sympathetic writer.

The answer is no. Though we argued the case almost a year ago (11/29), there’s no word from the Court. I am very surprised at the delay — indeed, a bit worried the delay is in part because of the New York Magazine article. I feel so stupid that I didn’t get a commitment from them not to publish the article before the case was decided. When they told me when they expected it would run, it was months beyond the normal time it take the NJ Supreme Court to decide cases. Anyway, bottom line — no word yet.

source: residual ghosts

So the year resumes. Thanks to the guest bloggers — Cass Sunstein, the Free Culture Movement, Jimmy Wales, and Hilary Rosen. And thanks to all who’ve written worried about my silence, or asking for my return. I hadn’t realized how long it would take to dig out from my time away. I’m almost there.

I am home after just about a month on the road, and about to leave to pick my family up at the airport. Realizing last month that this would be a time when I would spend little time here, I asked two friends who are publishing a new book to guest blog for the first week of June. Starting tomorrow, Ian Ayres and Jennifer Brown will be discussing their book, Straightforward : How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights. I’ve not read the book, but I’ve been talking to both of them about these issues since I was a visiting professor at Yale. These are two extraordinary authors, and the debate is certain to be more interesting than the usual stuff on this blog. (Yet another opportunity to see a surprisingly refreshing facet of the three blind mice).

So excuse my absence. I’ll be back on the 8th.

source: home again

The comments to Living With Ghosts have done more for me than anything could. “Thank you” is too weak, but thank you.

Many have written asking, “What can I do?” Here’s a map for anyone interested.

As the story recounts, we’re waiting for a decision from the New Jersey Supreme Court about whether New Jersey’s law, which immunizes charities from “negligence,” is subject, as the trial court said, to a “judicial gloss,” making the statute “absolute,” and therefore excusing the organization:

“from liability for any degree of tortuous conduct, no matter how flagrant that conduct may be. Accordingly, plaintiffs’ contentions that employees and agents of the American Boychoir School acted willfully, wantonly, recklessly, indifferently – even criminally – do not eviscerate the School’s legal protections.”

There is — and there should be — nothing that can be done about that case while the Court is considering it.

But New Jersey has a legislature as well as a Supreme Court. And the real hero in this case — John Hardwicke, who has given everything he has not just to his case, but to changing the law in New Jersey — has, with others, started a movement to get New Jersey to FixTheLaw in a part that is unrelated to the case before the Supreme Court.

Even if we win our case, the law in New Jersey would still immunize a charitable institution from “negligence” in the hiring of a teacher. That means if a school hires a teacher without taking any steps to verify the teacher’s past — for example, asking why the teacher was fired from his last job — the school is immune from liability.

Assemblymen Cohen, Chiappone, and Bateman have introduced a bill to remove that immunity, so that a school would have the same duty that all of us have — to take reasonable steps to avoid foreseeable harm, at least if that harm is sex abuse. Yet this bill has been stalled by the very powerful lobbying of some — actually, primarily, one:

Leaders from the Catholic Church have opposed the change. Some of the same leaders, representing the “Catholic Conference of Bishops,” also filed a brief in our case asking the Court to affirm the “absolute” immunity — even for intentional acts — that the trial court had found.

It is completely beyond me why the Church spends its resources to make children less safe. No doubt, the Church has its own issues about liability. But is money really a church’s only concern? Do its values really say that it is more important to avoid its own liability than to protect children in the future? Or more accurately — that it is right to protect its assets by making children in the future less safe?

In any case, there are more voices in New Jersey than this one. I’ve hesitated before about the appropriateness of noncitizens addressing New Jersey’s issues, but that may just be prudishness. And anyway, I assume the “Catholic Conference of Bishops” is not located in Trenton.

So: Hardwicke has a comprehensive site with links to contact legislators, and to contribute. If you are looking for something to do, I’d be grateful if you followed those leads. Or if you would lead others to them. Or, if you’re a Catholic, I’d be grateful if you would follow your own leads to the conscience of your church.

source: “What can I do?”

To everyone who has written about my ghosts, thank you. I am always stunned by the warmth of this community (though of course, stunned sometimes by the opposite as well). I had promised myself I would not read the piece, but the comments have forced me to break that promise. John is an amazing writer, and the piece has a rawness that is hard, but perhaps appropriate. (E.g., I rarely swear, though you wouldn’t get that impression from the piece.). Three comments below, but first a plea: that we drop the H-word, and B-word from commentary about this. This is an important social issue because of how ordinary it is in fact; and we need it to be understood to be ordinary, so as to respond in ways that can check, and prevent it.

Update: hero, brave

{Update II: Please see this follow-up.

(more below)

(1) Even I have been surprised by the extraordinary number who have written to share their own experiences. Many had never acknowledged it before. Many are struggling with how. We all need a better way to record this, so we can remark progress in its passing away.

(2) I regret the way the piece characterizes my view of the school today. I am not in this case to destroy a school — especially not this one which I believe can do extraordinary good in a kid’s life. The quote that suggests the contrary reflected growing anger at the behavior of the lawyers on the other side in this case. It is perhaps the one clear Scalia-like bit to my character: I believe in taking responsibility, yet this school is being held hostage by a very different ideal. At the point I said what was quoted, my thought was essentially this: if this is really how these people think this issue should be dealt with, then perhaps they are not reformed in the way I had thought they were reformed.

(3) My biggest regret, however, is the place my parents have in the piece. I can’t know this with certainty, but I don’t feel the blame that John saw in my words. At the time when it mattered, none in my family knew. Should they have known? In the world of 1972, from 250 miles away, it was easy to miss.

source: living with ghosts

My son has an imagination. At 20 months, he spent an hour playing a game in which his stuffed boxer (as in the dog) played with his plastic spider. The spider would ride the dog. The dog would sniff the spider. And all the time my son was split with laughter. (more in the extended entry below)

I don’t know whether he was supposed to have this sort of imagination before 20 months, or after. I don’t care. It’s the weird thing about watching a kid grow up that each new capacity is celebrated as if it had been in doubt. Of course, I had no doubt my kid would laugh at his dreams, as I had no doubt he would walk, or learn to say “daddy.” But the absence of doubt doesn’t make the experience any less extraordinary. Watching it happen is the amazing part. And hearing about it happening is pretty amazing as well.

Hearing about it, of course, is how I experienced it. My wife described it to me last week — me in Bulgaria, she about to go to bed in San Francisco, us talking as we increasingly do, on iChat. I didn’t see my kid enact his play with dog and spider because I’m on the road again, this time for just about a month — a month in which I will yearn for fast broadband in Australia, Germany, Bulgaria, Norway, and South Africa. A year ago I would have said I had no hobbies. Now my single hobby is making iSight movies — stringing together clips of images captured what iChatting, sometimes funny, sometimes beautiful just because of the pixilation.

I can’t adequately describe the depression of this sort of travel. I won’t pollute this blog by trying. Suffice it that I am away — as no doubt many are — way too much. In the last year and a half, I have spent 170 nights in a hotel; 300 thousand miles in the air. This year promises even more. Most of the travel is Creative Commons related, though a good deal is just me asked to speak to some conference, convention, or collection of souls.

This trip is fairly representative. I went to Australia to deliver an Alfred Deakin Lecture on Innovation. While there, I also spoke at a “Future Summit,” and met with some Creative Commons activists. In Berlin, I gave a public lecture at the German Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. I was also able to meet with some young German academics, and academics wanna-bes, as well as with the iCommons staff (which lives in Berlin). Bulgaria was the launch of Creative Commons-Bulgaria — three lectures in one day, a day of meetings with the lawyers who had ported the licenses, and with the press that was trying to understand them. Norway is a lecture which I will comment on in another post, and then a few days in South Africa to launch CC-SA, at what promises to be an extraordinary conference (”Commons Sense” which is the title I wanted for the book that became “The Future of Ideas”). I was meant to go to India but the logistics of the trip became too difficult and expensive, so I’ll return on Memorial Day, after almost 29 days on the road straight.

I enjoy these lectures; I believe in the cause. If you’ve seen me talk, you know I’ve developed a particular style. I’m a teacher: it is a style designed to explain. I am just beginning to feel like it works; just beginning to feel that I’m explaining my ideas in a way any intelligent sort could understand. It has taken a very long time, and my mind is filled with memories of the worst examples of me trying to explain. They haunt me like broken promises. They push me to make myself understandable. Each speech builds on the last. Each is changed by what happened in the last.

I’m not great at this. My ideas are still too confused; my arguments are still incomplete; I recognize every time I speak where I’ve not been understood; there is literally one time in the last 5 years when I went to bed feeling that I had done really well.

Yet though I’m not great, as I get better , there are interesting, sometimes frustrating, effects. First, people can’t really believe I’ve prepared the lecture they hear just for them. This, for example, happened in Melbourne. I am wildly too thin-skinned, so I make it a rule never to Technorat what people say about my lectures. But someone who worried that I didn’t doubt myself enough sent me this link to a comment about my “rhetoric” and “stump speeches.” The writer, decently, and with balance and perspective, criticized my failure to prepare a special talk for the Deakin lectures.

It was in fact a liberating criticism. First, in fact, I always change my talks. I am obsessed with the fear of repeating a talk. I therefore spend an unbelievable amount of time reworking what I have done to make it make more sense, or more sense of an audience. That was true in Melbourne, as it has been true everywhere. Of course, there are chunks I remix — usually the parts that work best. But if you followed me around for months at a time, you’d be less bored than if you followed, say, John Edwards, and not because I’m a better speaker than John Edwards (I certainly am not).

But second, the criticism made me realize how absurd it is for me to feel this obligation to say something new or different at each event. My life has been filled with absurd rules I’ve imposed upon myself, which later I can’t begin to understand. This now strikes me as another example of such an absurd rule. It’s not as if I speak to crowds of 10,000 at a time. I don’t give lectures on national television. It’s not as if the message I’m trying to convey is the subject of national advertising campaigns, or political movements. And so I don’t know why my talks have to be more original each time than, say, a candidate for political office. I have a set of views I’m trying to persuade people of. Why must I do that in different words?

(The best example of this stupidity is the first talk I did that got translated to Flash!. This was a keynote I gave at OSCON in 2002. I had prepared it for OSCON. When Leonard Lin prepared this version of it, I told myself I could never give the talk again. And so I haven’t. Not because this presentation of this message was particularly good. Not because I couldn’t improve it. But just because I was haunted by this rule — don’t repeat a talk — the origin of which I can’t now fathom.)

Berlin also produced its own interesting criticism. One of the questioners — a friendly, and supportive questioner — criticized me for the “strength” of my rhetoric. While he appreciated how “understandable” I had made the arguments, and he regretted that professors in his own country seemed focused exclusively on making their points incomprehensible, he worried that I presented the argument too strongly. “Too persuasively.” It was “rhetoric” he suggested. A woman sitting next to a friend called it “propaganda.”

This is a fascinating criticism, because it wasn’t motivated by disagreement as much as by a difference in cultural style. Peter Baldwin, from UCLA, gave a talk responding to mine. His was perfect from the perspective of this style — advancing a point, but then insisting he didn’t necessarily believe the point he was advancing; never quite committing, yet conveying a great deal of truth on the way. I regretted not getting a chance directly to discuss this point in the question session that followed. No doubt the reaction was partly a function of me, and partly a function of the audience. I was extremely keen to understand the latter. One person I asked afterwards said, “We’ve been seduced by rhetoric once. We don’t trust it anymore.” That was an astonishing thought, but again, I can’t quite resolve whether it reflected well the reasons for the reaction. There is much more to learn here than I had time to reckon.

But my purpose in writing this particular missive is not to report on my travels. Nor is it to respond to critics. It is instead to resolve, here, in public, something important about commitments and value.

I want to do this less. I need to do it less. I want to know my boy through his hugs, and tears, not through the smiles he gives me on an iSight camera. I want to relieve my extraordinary wife from the burden of single-parent parenting. I want a week when I don’t remove my shoes for kindly folks called the TSA. I want more nights when I don’t struggle to decide whether to spend $5 to drink a bottle of water.

And so I am resolving to do this less. Less. Not never again, but less — if I just add up my commitments already made, my life will still be insanely busy. (In my OSCON speech, I said I was giving up giving lectures. That was a misstatement. What I meant was I was giving them up while I prepared for the argument in the Eldred case. I hadn’t at that point resolved to retire).

But now I have resolved that I need energy elsewhere. This movement is important and critical. And you can’t begin to imagine the reward in watching it flourish around the world — especially in places like Bulgaria. A wide range of extraordinary souls are succeeding in getting others to understand. That is something I never would have predicted five years ago, and it is reason for this to go on.

Yet it needs to go own with others. Or with less of me. Or at least, less of me in person. I’m happy to help that change occur. I am severely restricting the invitations I will accept, and I am in the process of wrapping every presentation I have made in a form that can be shared. I hope to put them all at the site, OurMedia, in a context in which anyone can do with it what he or she wants. Remix it. Replay it. Criticize it. Synchronize the slides with the audio (where I’ve been able to locate the audio.) Port it to Flash! Or to some free software equivalent. Copy the message; ridicule the message. Whatever. I’m quite sure people could do better with this than I have. I am asking that they do. Take it and make it better. Or take it and twist it to make it worse. Free culture needs both. And it needs me less.

This is exhaustion, no doubt. I responded to that at first by resolving to be stronger. Then it was homesickness, plain and simple. Something I’ve not known for 30 years. But whatever it is, or will become, we each must draw lines that respects those things most important. And I want more time to explore with my kid the many possible toys for a boxer.

source: Priorities