O O Ø O O O O
Gift Horse
I've been thinking about what it is that I do here.
Once every two weeks I get the opportunity to mouth off about something. Usually, until they graced these pages, these rants existed only as ephemeral arguments fodder, generally conceived, but having never been strung together in a cohesive fashion. Often, the conclusions themselves surprised even me. Does this seem odd? It shouldn't.
It occurs to me that, like Schrödinger's Favourite Pet, rants are quantum in nature, existing in all possible states simultaneously. Until you get a chance to voice them, all arguments are equally probable. It is only once the arguments are fixed in time, space, and ASCII, that they take some kind of cohesive form.
In fact, I don't want your children at all—unless they don't eat much and have a penchant for housecleaning.
Okay. That line of thought seems excessively academic. What I mean to say is that really, I sometimes don't know what I'm about to say until I'm done saying it. A proper rant is a clarifying exercise. Honestly, any topic that is truly rantworthy to begin with is by its very nature a difficult question. These require difficult answers, and difficult answers take work.
So I start this week's rant without a clue of where it will end up. In fact, I'm embarking on this rant precisely because I want to know where I stand on an issue. I want to know why I do this.
Every couple of weeks, I create another body of prose for the purposes of posting here. Some people call this Intellectual Property, some call it content. I often get by with referring to it as fodder. Regardless of nomenclature, the fact that I make this prose available to you, the teeming Internet masses, raises a few questions. Namely, what am I trying to accomplish here, and what can you do with it once I've posted it?
Evan's actually released most of his stuff under the terms of the GNUFDL. I have resisted, going as far as to introduce the KJPL in a fit of slobbering IProp-induced rage. Of course, this was largely sarcasm. In fact, I don't want your children at all—unless they don't eat much and have a penchant for housecleaning. What I do want is to write. To create something without all the strings that are increasingly attached to this ethereal entity of prose. I want to give something away, in hopes someone else out there is willing to do the same.
In short, I want to play in an IP gift culture.
A few short years ago, there wouldn't have been much question.
Posting something on a web site constituted a desire to share
what was posted. Asserting a copyright was enough. But today,
in the era of
shrink-wrap and click-through
licenses for everything including pets, copyrights
seem inexorably linked with licenses. Text cannot be free unless
it has an acceptable license.txt accompanying it. At least,
that's what they say.
Well, who am I to argue with them?
... in the era of the blog, there is too much content to go around. I'm gonna get buried in a sea of mediocrity.
This brings me to the question of this rant—my prose. What types of restrictions do I want to see on its redistribution? What about modification? What kind of rights do I want to assert as their author? Is anyone else fighting the good fight?
First, let me assert this. I'm not expecting to ever get paid for this, but I do intend to keep the copyright, if for no other reason, than I want the right to fix it, and evolve it with time.
Second, I have no illusions that anything I say here is particularly unique or earth-shattering. Oh sure, I amuse the hell out of myself, but in the era of the blog, there is too much content to go around. I'm gonna get buried in a sea of mediocrity. I want to get my content out there. I want people to read it. I can't make people like it, but if I can get my stuff in front of them, if I can build community goodwill by giving useful content to the community. And no, I'm not claiming that my commentary is necessarily useful to anyone, but some of the factual and archival content made available here might be.
As it turns out, my newfound world—that of Academia—is fighting this same battle as we speak. It seems that the traditional avenues of publication—the so-called scholarly journals—are no longer meeting the needs of those published within. It seems most journals require the author to hand over their copyright. In many cases, the authors aren't even allowed to post a copy of their work on their own web site. Peer review or not, locking information away in an ivory tower so expensive that even University Libraries are starting to turn you away is no way to get noticed when information is increasingly available for free. And really, your research means nothing if nobody reads it.
So Acadaemia is fighting back. The idea of a library is that I have access to all the information that I need. With generous application of a little Internet magic, we can have that library again. Of course, the ivory tower journals are scared, and with good reason We independent content producers are fighting to be heard, and I think we're going to win. Bring on the Content Gift Culture!
So now my decision is made. My opinion is known, and my quantum state has collapsed. I think to wrap this one up, I'll leave you in the hands of a fairly well known dead guy.
“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”
– Thomas Jefferson
Kjell Wooding
Tuesday, November 20, 2001
PD DXXII