Blog: April 2005

But I'd been meaning to move Alpie.net off that server, so this provided a good kick in the pants, so now it's on the same server as Cosmopolity, Drinking Liberally, IPac, CopyNight, Jailed For A Song, and others.

For a diversion from all the geekery, there's this recent exchange overheard in New York:

Dumb teen: Hey, look at this! It says "Train for jobs in beeyotch."

Smarter teen: Fool! That word is biotech. Why you gotta be ignorant all your life?

--1 train

Overheard by: Manhattman

Yes, there's the wakeup call, but I've answered the phone and fallen asleep again in the past, so I want the extra alarm. But for some reason some hotels don't think it's important that they select an alarm clock that's easy to operate. The most common IQ test masquerading as alarm clock I've encountered is the Sony CD Dream Machine.

At the hotel where I stayed in San Francisco this past week, there was an even worse one, but magically they replaced it with something else during my stay! But this clock took me 10 minutes to figure out how to set the alarm, and then it never went off after all - even though it had gone off the previous day at 6 am when I *didn't* try to set it, it had no obvious indication of whether it was on or off.

Runner-up dishonorable mention for user experience of the day goes to Evite. When someone sends me an invite, I get a completely useless email whose only function is to get me to click to the Evite page so they can show me ads. It doesn't put any of the details of the party in the email, so in order to find the Evite later I can't search for the date or location or anything like that, only the first name of the person who sent me the invite (but not their email address, since Evite uses info@evite.com as its From address). And then Evite actually goes down from time to time, making it completely impossible to get any party details whatsoever. It seems like someone should be able to build a better invite system (it's not exactly complicated) and find a better way to pay for it.

I'm sure many of these volunteers were quite discouraged. But the grassroots groups that organized them aren't closing up and going home. They're fighting legislative battles like Social Security (and winning, so far, on that one) and girding for the next elections, nationally in 2006 and in many localities (including New York City) in 2005.

The proponents of what is often referred to as "Free Culture" are similarly discouraged by decades of bad laws coming out of Congress. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act passed virtually unanimously, as did the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It's easy for people to throw up their hands and say that we'll never be able to get reasonable legislation passed, that Congress is hopelessly in the pocket of the movie and recording industries. After all, the entertainment industry spends millions of dollars lobbying Congress, and we'll never be able to out-bribe them, right?

Back in the 80s and early 90s, a lot of geeks propounded a philosophy that the Internet was fundamentally unregulatable, beyond the reach of mere national governments. John Gilmore famously wrote that "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." But governments have shown a remarkable resistance to being rendered obsolete. Far from being unable to control the Internet, governments have even been able to reach across international boundaries in enforcing their laws. Multinational companies now have to cope with a patchwork of regulations around the world with which they must comply if they want to do business in each jurisdiction. And content owning companies have been able to get laws passed to give themselves more and more control over the ways citizens enjoy legally purchased entertainment content.

Like the famous five stages of coping with grief, one can identify a few distinct stages of coping with government. Most geeks have moved out of the Denial stage. For many, just as with grief, Anger is next - anger at the RIAA and MPAA for suing their customers, or at the Copyright Office for imposing the Broadcast Flag. And it's very natural to lapse into Depression, to believe that no matter what we do nothing will ever change.

But our movement is growing. Already in the last few years, many more people are aware of the problems out-of-control copyright poses to our society. College students have joined documentary filmmakers and software engineers as copyright's overreach has impacted them. These issues have already started to seep into the public consciousness, and over time, as more ridiculous lawsuits impact average citizens, the movement will only grow.

At the same time, we are learning how to deal with that strange beast called Congress. The DMCA and CTEA passed virtually unanimously because there was no organized opposition. But last session, the INDUCE act threatened to stifle technological innovation, and people spoke up. Groups like Downhill Battle created catchy campaigns and organized call-in days. And Senator Clinton, who cosponsored the act early on, received questions about it at virtually every college campus she visited. And so, whereas the DMCA passed despite some obvious glaring problems, the Senate quietly let INDUCE pass away into memory. A package of very dangerous copyright changes, the "IP Omnibus", was first shrunk down into a much more benign (though still suboptimal) "IP Minibus", and then died altogether as a result of a completely unrelated issue.

Now the content industry still has plenty of friends in Congress. Orrin Hatch, their number one friend, was appointed chair of an IP subcommittee. And measures similar to INDUCE or those in the IP Minibus are sure to be reintroduced. But we won one round, and we can win again. More legislators and their staffs realize that citizens care about these issues, and that there are two legitimate sides rather than the Good Old American Capitalism versus Evil Stealing Commie Pirates And Kiddie Porn Makers, which is the way the content industry portrays the issue.

Winning these battles doesn't require outspending the content industry. The American system does have checks and balances which make it difficult to get legislation passed. A few key allies can do a lot, at least to stop bad bills. Congresspeople definitely don't want to damage the economy, and so playing up the potential damage to Internet companies and electronics manufacturers is a potent argument. College students are the voters of the future, and when an elected official hears young people - who historically are very unengaged in the political process - express concern about an issue, they take note. Letter writing campaigns get noticed. Funny Web satire videos get noticed. And when individual citizens or small groups make a trip to meet with their Congressperson, they get listened to. More important than outbidding record companies in campaign contributions, money matters because organizations need paid staff in Washington educating legislators, need staff to organize the grass roots, and need to make some campaign contributions, even if they are relatively small, because even small contributions get noticed.

Ultimately, legislators in Congress really do want to do the Right Thing. It just happens that this isn't clear. As long as only one side is talking to them, it seems straightforward. If we decide that fighting these battles each year is too onerous or too impossible, then we'll certainly never win them. There's a famous maxim in poker that you can't win a pot if you don't play a hand. Politics is like this. You can't ignore the legislative process and expect that the right thing will magically happen. And if you haven't been talking to Congress, you shouldn't be surprised when the people who have been talking get what they asked for. The Founding Fathers never envisioned Congress as some kind of enlightened body that dispenses divine wisdom from atop its hill. Congress was always supposed to be a forum in which different points of view duke it out with bare knuckles, where the side that has the most energized and organized people, the best facts, and yes, some financial muscle comes out on top.

All political movements start out small. The conservative movement which is so dominant today started in an era when almost all Americans believed in the ideals of the New Deal, in the concept of the welfare state that uses social programs to help the least fortunate citizens. They talked about what they believed, they wrote articles, and they organized. They converted more and more people to the cause and formed organizations to wield the power that comes with their numbers. And they had money, which helped, but it helped first to start magazines and to pay staff to organize and recruit even more believers.

The conservative movement lost a lot of battles. They were wiped out in a landslide in the 1964 election. But they persevered, and even though it took another sixteen years to elect a President they liked, they did not give up. The religious right has been organizing in churches to get voters to the polls for decades; the Moral Majority was founded in 1979 and despite supporting Republican candidates almost exclusively and having a Republican president for the next twelve years, many would say that only with the election of George W. Bush in 2000 did the religious right get a truly sympathetic President. Yet that movement has still not realized most of its policy objectives. Still, they do not give up, do not take their ball and stomp home allowing civil libertarians to legislate government control out of the bedroom. They realize that no matter how many battles they win or lose, fighting every battle is always better for them than not fighting it.

It's true that the conservative movement has benefited from a few extremely wealthy benefactors. But Free Culture has a few rich adherents too, and a lot of well-off professional believers in areas like the software industry. Even movements far from flush with cash have been able to make significant gains. The environmental movement, nonexistent until the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, has been able to make many rivers once again safe to swim in, and consumer groups have successfully won requirements on seatbelts and airbags, child toy safety, food labeling, and many other important issues. Today the Bush Administration is trying to reverse many of these gains, but that doesn't mean environmentalists or consumer advocates should think it wasn't worth achieving them in the first place, and continue to fight to reinstate and expand what Bush reverses.

We in the Free Culture movement must realize the same. No matter what happens in the Grokster case recently heard by the Supreme Court, Congress will be asked to take up the issue of filesharing. The FCC's Broadcast Flag rule will take effect unless we can convince Congress to stop it. And long term, copyright term extension is sure to be an issue once again around 2018. We have to focus on building up a movement that can effectively fight these battles both short and long term. We need to develop potent arguments for our beliefs and advocate for them before Congress in every possible venue - from asking questions at speeches on campuses to participating in call-in days and visits to legislator's offices to writing books and creating documentaries.

Along the way, we will surely lose, just as the army of progressive volunteers lost to the Bush campaign in Ohio and Florida in 2004. And when that happens, many people will say that this is hopeless, that we can never beat the content industry with its armies of lobbyists and suitcases full of cash. But we can win, and we will - as long as we play the hand.

And I'm not the only one, just looking at the number of clever remixes people have created, like this display of Craigslist housing ads on a Google Maps interface. Or, for a different kind of cleverness, "What mere mortals see from the ground when people GoogleMap a spot nearby."

Update: this one of the view from ground level when someone makes a trip route with Googlemaps, by the same author, is even better.