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Let’s start with the delightful video Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (10:48) that says that when performing mechanical tasks, an incentive such as money improves performance, but when the task is intellectual, it doesn’t!  In fact, it leads to lower performance.  Instead, the motivators are autonomy, mastery and purpose.

In the U.S., Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution allows government

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

In other words, “we’ll pay for your creativity”, but as the video shows, it doesn’t work that way.

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The second argument against copyright is its duration.  Early copyright acts typically granted 14 years with a possible 14-year extension.  It has been progressively extended to 42, 56, 74, 95 and 105 years, though the details vary by country and circumstance, e.g. in the U.S. it is the life of the author plus 70 years.

The idea that these extended terms are what motivates an author to write is preposterous.  “Only now that I know my grand-children will benefit from its success, will I write that block-buster novel.”  No, people write for many reasons: they want to communicate, they want to discover themselves, they want to change the world, and making money is simply one reason on this list.  (I use writing in this example, but the same arguments apply to music, photography, video and art.)

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The third weakness of copyright stems from the Berne Convention, which automatically grants copyright upon creation of the work.  (The U.S. came into line with this in 1988.)  This, like the copyright clause, may have had the laudatory aim of supporting artists, but its effect, in conjunction with the extended durations described above, is to lock up culture in a private zone for a hundred years.  No longer is it available for use or reuse.

Consequences

These three elements come together to create a de facto privatization of ideas.  The creative thoughts of all  — ideas, sayings, images, quotes — used to be part of the public commons by default, available for all to use, repeat and rework at will.

Now everything is potentially private.  By taking a photo of a building, you may infringe copyright.  You can’t sing “Happy Birthday” in public. Beware of background music in your video.

We are banning the use of ideas just as land use was stopped by the Enclosure Acts, and we are the poorer for it.  Yes, artists, writers and inventors need to be paid for their contributions, but the present system is badly distorted.  The actual creators are seldom the main beneficiaries; instead, corporations and patent trolls have separated the creativity from the reward by work-for-hire, buying IP or commandeering the majority of profit for themselves.  The boundary between public and private is also under continuing pressure, for example, the 1998 Act (pejoratively the Mickey Mouse Protection Act because of the lobbying efforts of the Walt Disney Company) that extended copyright by 20 years, or yesterday’s court ruling that privatizes formerly public domain works.

There are large and visible signs that the present system is out of line with public sentiment.  Most obvious is the widespread file-sharing of music and video.  Another is the increasing creation of expressly public works, defended by such licenses as GPL and Creative Commons.

Proposals

• We need shorter copyright terms; 14 years sound more than adequate to me.
• We need opt-in rather than opt-out for registration.  Opt-in was the status quo before the 1976 Act, requiring a notice of copyright to be affixed.  The act aligned the U.S. with the Berne Convention, giving de facto copyright to all works.   Opt-out will only worsen the problem of orphan works.
• We need fair use provisions to apply internationally.  While limited exemptions from copyright are allowed in the U.S., few other countries allow this.

From Tuesday’s NYT:

The defense sought to show that claims of bias against gay men and lesbians were overblown. In particular, Dr. Miller testified, gay men and lesbians in California could count on a deep and varied contingent of allies, including the Democratic Party, organized labor, corporations, newspapers, celebrities and some church groups. Some of these groups also contributed heavily to the “No on 8” campaign, Dr. Miller said, which spent $43 million.

In other words, Proposition 8 should stand because many people are opposed to it.

Emily Bazelon has an excellent post highlighting the contradictions in yesterday’s Supreme Court decision to block video streaming of the CA gay marriage trial, e.g.

The problem, the majority says, is that in his haste, Judge Walker changed a federal rule to allow for the broadcast, without giving sufficient notice to the parties and witnesses or enough opportunity for public comment….

Nobody knew to comment? Actually, the court received megabytes of comments! 138,542 pro and 32 con, to be precise.

In summary, the democratic process is badly broken in America.  A few more  events from the last decade:

• Vote mis-counting in Florida
• SCOTUS commandeering the electoral process in Bush v. Gore
• The disparity between the Electoral Vote and the popular vote
• The lack of a public option in health care reform despite popular support
• Lack of support for the war in Afghanistan

The Software Freedom Law Center has filed a Supreme Court brief re Bilski, and I loved this idea within it:

“The source code of a program which performs the steps described in a software patent is distinguishable from the literal patent only in that it expresses the same steps in a different language. Therefore, since anyone may copy or publish the actual patent without infringing, it must also be permissible to communicate its claims in source code form.”

Slate reports on the Senate Finance Committee’s vote against a public health option.

“Even among Republicans, opposition to the public option (42 percent) is outweighed by support (47 percent).”

In an Indirect Democracy, “The people elect government officials who then make decisions on their behalf” (wikipedia).  Clearly, it’s not happening.  We don’t live in a democracy, we live in a plutocracy (thank you, Michael) that appeases its citizens with the illusory trappings of democracy.

I see nothing in the current health care proposals that limit the premiums insurance companies can charge.  Yes, they may be subject to premium ratios, but their plaint will be that to cover the burden of insuring everyone, all premiums must rise.  Remember, too, paying these increased premiums will be mandatory.

Only a public option can save us from this scenario.

I believe that the average person has six original ideas in their lifetime.  By “original idea”, I mean a new view of how the world is or could be.  “Why don’t we go to Hawaii this summer?” or “”Let’s paint the hall fuchsia” don’t count; they’re statements about preferences.

Now six is just a number pulled out of thin air; for some people, it may be less, and for creative people, it may be way more.  I don’t know the exact number; the point is to realise that nearly everything we think comes from someone else.  Here’s the test: name 6 ideas you’ve had that clearly owe nothing to outside influence.  They don’t have to be original in the sense that no one else has ever thought them, only that you discovered them independently.

Some ideas of mine that qualify:

• This idea itself
• The major characteristic of conservatism is fear, and the primary fear is breaches in the barriers between self and other
• Time does not exist as popularly imagined; instead, time is change
• The ideal profile for a guitar fingerboard

The ultimate point of this is to realise that nearly all your ideas come from elsewhere.  Most of your speech is just parroting the ideas of other people.

Timothy Lee writes eloquently about the stupidity of a company that exists only to think up patents and use them to sue – no actual creation of product required.  How is this of the slightest benefit to society?

Firstly consider this quote (color emphasis added):

“Clearly, we’ve got to find Mohammed Omar, we’ve got to find Osama bin Laden, and we’ve got to find other key leaders of the al-Qaida network, or we will have failed. We’re not safe until we have broken the back of al-Qaida, and we haven’t done that yet. I think the jury is still out about future success.”

This was hardly insurrection, although you would not have guessed that from the Republican leadership backlash. The House whip, Tom DeLay, called it “disgusting”. The minority leader in the Senate, Trent Lott, issued an instant statement, saying: “How dare Senator Daschle criticise President Bush while we are fighting our war on terrorism.” (source)

Now consider that we are still at war, and people are praying for the death of the president.  Are these people bat-shit crazy?  Are they totally incapable of seeing the hypocrisy of the situation?  This shows a total lack of imagination, of being able to put oneself in another’s shoes, and reinforces my belief that, inter alia, one of the characteristics of the right is a sad lack of empathy.

I have an application with a main window.  It opens a find dialog that can remain open, i.e. it is not modal.  I mark it as STAY_ON_TOP so it does not disappear behind the application window.

The application pops up a message box to announce that the search term cannot be found, but it CANNOT BE SEEN because it is located behind the find dialog.  I can’t even move the find dialog out of the way because the message box is modal, so I cannot transfer focus to the find dialog.  The only way out of the dilemma is to blindly press a key – space bar, escape, etc. – that dismisses the message box.

So after more than 20 years of development, Windows is still too stupid to realise that it is presenting an invisible modal dialog to the user.