Consider a typical case where somebody downloads a Hollywood movie to watch, without paying for it. Taking this movie wasn’t authorized by the copyright holders. But the copyright holders still own it. They still have all their copies, and they are still free to make more. They can distribute and license it as they wish. They can make sequels and spin-offs and t-shirts and bobble-heads.

What would you call that? I would call it copyright infringement, but I wouldn’t call it theft.

Now imagine a different scenario. A work you have is taken from you. And once it’s been taken, you can no longer make copies. In fact, you have to get rid of all the copies you have. When it was yours, you could make copies, send them to your friends, make derivitives, use it as a jumping off point for new works. You could do with it as you pleased. Now, you can’t do any of that without the permission of the person who took it from you.

Would you call that theft?

I would call it Golan v. Holder. Wikimedians are having to get rid of thousands of public domain works from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons that used to be public domain in the U.S.—used to belong to the public, to use and copy and build from—which were put back into copyright by Congress. And the Supreme Court just decided that in fact, that’s just fine.

Related posts:

1. Can you copyright a bonsai?
2. The most insane bit of U.S. copyright law?
3. Self-preservation and the National Portrait Gallery’s dispute with the Wikimedia community

• Blog more, especially about kid-oriented media and culture. There’s a big lack of free culture when it comes to kids stories and media. I want to try to catalyze some kind of free culture project for an audience of kids.
• Do better in the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction class than I did in Introduction to Databases last year. (I learned a lot, but didn’t end up finishing because the final was scheduled for right when Everly was born, so I didn’t take it.) These Stanford online classes are awesome.
• Get involved with local politics. Somebody’s got to do it.
• Make a functional web app. I’m going to try to learn Python and Django web development by trying to build an open reviews site, where anyone can review anything. In 2012, I want to at least build a very basic site, whether or not it goes somewhere.

Related posts:

1. The Two Cultures, 50 years later
2. What will Wikipedia be like 5 years from now?
3. Wikipedia blog posts I want to write

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1. Back to the barter system

John Lasseter, director of Toy Story, has a great story about how, five days after the movie came out and audiences started falling in love with it, he

realized that Woody, Buzz Lightyear, all the Toy Story characters… they didn’t belong to us at Pixar anymore,

but to the people who had made those characters a part of their own lives.

Of course, the lawyers at Pixar will tell you a very different story.

No related posts.

Aaron Swartz, free knowledge hacker

Last week was the beginning of something that might end up pretty huge in the world of free culture, copyright and open access activism. Aaron Swartz, a free knowledge activist hacker with ties to the Wikipedia community, was indicted by the federal government for allegedly downloading millions of files from JSTOR (an academic journal database) with the intent to distribute them on P2P networks. The actual charges aren’t for copyright infringement or anything directly related, however. They are for wire fraud, computer fraud and related offenses based on the way he allegedly obtained the files, by connecting to the MIT computer network and setting up scripts that downloaded files and dodged attempts to cut off access.  (SJ Klein has a great overview of the charges and context.)  Aaron never released this trove of files, and has reportedly turned them over to JSTOR.

He may have been planning to, however. You can get some insight into his thinking from the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, which essentially advocates widespread and systematic sharing of restricted scholarship.

(The original is offline, but an apparently complete version that may or may not be authentic showed up on pastebin recently.)

In response to Swartz’s arrest, Wikimedian and free software developer Greg Maxwell actually did release a trove of JSTOR files: the complete archive of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (the longest-running scientific journal, started in 1665) through 1922. These have all entered the public domain in the legal sense, but not the practical sense. You can only get them under restrictive terms and/or for high prices (either through JSTOR or from the Royal Society).

You should read Greg’s whole essay. Here’s the conclusion:

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding, then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified — it will be one less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers a crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous charges. This didn’t sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

A lot of free culture and open access advocates draw a line between Aaron and Greg. Greg is praised for taking his stand, but few are endorsing Aaron’s alleged actions, only condemning the gross disparity between the charges and the alleged actions — while ignoring or opposing the argument of the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. (That line between them is copyright law.)

Me, I’m not so sure. I’m not sure copyright law has enough moral force to be a meaningful distinction. I’m certainly not convinced terms of use have enough moral force to matter here. The bottom line is, the world of academic publishing and distribution is changing… but painfully slowly. Academic publishing isn’t cheap, professional-grade digitization of old journals isn’t cheap, and there’s no single fix for keeping everything people like about academic publishing and archiving (like peer review and professional editing and easily searchable databases) while getting rid of what we don’t like (like paywalls), without totally upending the industry. Greg-ites — who liberate public domain material — and Aaron-ites — who want to liberate all scholarship, copyright be damned — both have the same practical consequences: to push paywalls and organizations that rely on them closer to irrelevance, and to place the burden of organizing and indexing and providing access onto open knowledge communities and organizations (and big data companies like Google).

I lean toward thinking that’s a good thing.

Related posts:

1. Access to Knowledge, academics, and IP
2. HSS meeting in Vancouver, open journals, Wikipedia evangelism
3. Can you copyright a bonsai?

Bob, Rosta, and Piotr working the Wikipedia booth

I spent the last several days in D.C. at the annual convention of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), along with Wikipedian Piotrus and Wikipedia researchers Rosta Farzan and Bob Kraut, talking to psychology researchers about Wikipedia. We probably talked with 200 people, and almost everyone we talked with was supportive of–if not downright enthusiastic about–trying to improve Wikipedia’s psychology coverage.

Several months ago, with the vocal support of APS President Mahzarin Banaji, the APS launched their “Wikipedia Initiative” to get psychologists into editing Wikipedia. So far, the main thrust has been their APS-WI portal, which aims to give newcomers a clear way into Wikipedia and point them toward articles in their area of interest that need work–and at the same time, systematically test different approaches to getting people involved.

Before the convention, the APS Wikipedia Initiative had recruited 263 psychologists.  68 of them had started editing, with over 400 different articles edited among them. (Now 13 more have signed up, and 10 more have started editing.)

I had the opportunity to give a short presentation to the APS board before their convention started, in which I shared a bit of what we know about the barriers to expert participation in Wikipedia more broadly and then gave an overview of the Wikipedia Ambassador Program for helping professors run Wikipedia editing assignments in their classes.  The reaction among board members was really encouraging… and that evening, Professor Banaji spent a few minutes at the beginning of the official opening of the convention exhorting APS members to get involved with Wikipedia. (She even mentioned me!)

Mahzarin Banaji at the crowded opening of the APS convention

Banaji’s enthusiasm for Wikipedia comes across clearly in a recent podcast about the APS Wikipedia Initiative. For the two main days of the convention, that enthusiasm seemed to carry over to the many psychologists who stopped by the lavish Wikipedia booth APS had set up.  We also did five Wikipedia demos–often with conversations about Wikipedia going on at the same time with whoever stayed behind at the booth.  I came back with a list of 42 instructors potentially interested in working with the ambassador program and doing Wikipedia assignments.  That, of course, has been my focus for the last year… until now, limited mainly to supporting classes on public policy. Our Education Portal is active now, with a broad range of support materials and advice for anyone assigning Wikipedia to their students.  (The sample syllabus, in particular, is something the psychology professors responded very positively to.)

It seems that Wikipedia in the classroom is where APS is converging now, too. The Wikipedia Initiative team will soon be working with an intern assigned to develop tools to help instructors evaluate their students’ contributions, which will hopefully produce something broadly useful for anyone running Wikipedia assignments.

I’m optimistic that we’ll see a wave of additional professional societies getting behind Wikipedia, especially if as many psychologists set their students on Wikipedia as I now expect. You can’t buy the kind of improvement in public representations of psychology that 50 classes of students editing Wikipedia would bring.

Related posts:

1. Superb Wikipedia podcast; Ideas for Wikipedia to steal
2. Wikipedia as a source
3. Wikipedia blogging outside the Wiki Planet orbit

Then I used their wizard to send out a letter to the editor to a bevy of newspapers.  Here’s the letter I wrote:

It’s deeply disappointing, but not surprising, that when budget cut time comes around, the small bit of funding for public access to government data is the first on the chopping block. We made real progress in recent years with data.gov and other programs that let people actually *see* how their government spends their money.

Of course the special interests–which benefited for so long from the lack of public information about government spending–want to go back to the bad old days. But cutting transparency in the name of the budget crunch is a false promise. The proposed 2011 budget would cut the Electronic Government Fund from $34 million down to $2 million, forcing the shutdown of data.gov and other key transparency and accountability programs–which have already saved us not millions but billions. The only reason to cut the transparency budget is for the sake of the special interests and corruption that thrive in the darkness.

If you live in the U.S., you should sign the open letter and write your own letter to the editors as well.

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1. If all content is just data, what does that mean for quality television?
2. The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, then and now
3. Creative Commons on whitehouse.gov

This TED talk, by the guy behind Khan Academy, is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while.  The basic concept is just educational videos… over 2,000 short lectures, all done in smooth but DIY style by Salman Khan.  His non-profit is now going from videos to an educational system built around videos.

That by itself is nothing revolutionary, but what’s inspiring is all the little things they get right.  The result is what seems to me like the first credible implementation for computers and the web really fundamentally changing the way we do primary and secondary education.

One of the big ideas is to flip the classroom/homework dynamic: students watch lectures at home, at their own pace, and spend class-time working problems and discussing the curriculum with peers and the teacher.  As Khan puts it, the basic lecture concept is “a fundamentally dehumanizing experience: thirty kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other”.  And ironically, replacing live lectures with videos has the potential to humanize the educational system.

What’s really exciting, though, is the non-video components that Khan Academy is developing right now.  The curriculum is based on proving your proficiency in elementary topics before moving on to advanced ones that depend on what you already know.  And they are doing great things with video game mechanics: skill tree (similar to the tech trees of strategy games like Civilization; it hooked me right away), badges, tracking tools for teachers.

In short, I see a lot of inspiration for how Wikimedia projects should do things with video and interactive content.  Khan Academy has made a compelling system in a short time with just a handful of programmers, showing pretty clearly that great things along these lines could be within Wikimedia’s reach as well.  Sadly, what Khan’s team is designing isn’t open source, and the videos are CC-BY-NY-SA, a license incompatible with Wikimedia projects.

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2. video games, culture, and addiction

But now, there’s a brilliant [Citation Needed] podcast.  It’s basically sketch comedy riffing off of particular bad Wikipedia entries.  Go have a listen!

Related posts:

1. Digital Campus podcast: "Wikipedia: Friend or Foe"
2. Superb Wikipedia podcast; Ideas for Wikipedia to steal
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For me, for a long while now, the Wikimedians are the reason I love the project (and love working for WMF these last six months). They are the people who answer ‘yes’ to that question. Some are literally taking a pay cut, like Brandon and most of the Wikimedia tech staff, who could be making a lot more money working elsewhere. Thousands more make similar decisions, devoting major chunks of their lives to volunteering for The Mission. From the web designer who spends dozens of hours a week getting to the bottom of disputes and helping Wikipedia newbies on IRC, to the history student who organizes photo scavenger hunts and meetups, to the software developer who sorts through copyright issues on Commons every day, to the engineer who curates lists of the works of great artists, to biochemisty professor who makes videos and gives presentations about how to edit. And these are just a handful of the ones I’ve actually met.

That’s what drew me to The Wikipedia Signpost soon after I became a Wikipedian–I wanted to serve those people, to support our fragile community. That’s why I fill up my camera every time I go to a meetup. And that’s what makes my job—lolcat herder online facilitator—so rad. Wikimedians are weird, and they aren’t always easy to talk to or get along with. But they are also wonderful—generous, idealistic, kind-hearted, fierce.

For the 10th birthday in Pittsburgh, Wikipedians and Wikipedia fans fought their way through the teeming throngs of Steelers faithful during a playoff game, just to celebrate and be together. We walked through the crowd telling people about the Wikipedia celebration and giving away stickers and pins. The spontaneous reactions people had when Wikipedia was brought up were amazing. I’ve never been flirted with so much in my life. Talking about Wikipedia with people who don’t contribute just emphasizes how awesome the people who do are.

The Mission is still a long way off. But what keeps me going is the people working toward it along with me.

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1. Self-preservation and the National Portrait Gallery’s dispute with the Wikimedia community