RConversation

The Web's Benevolent Dictators

Jeffrey Rosen has a great article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend titled Google's Gatekeepers. In it he deals with the question of whether we are becoming too overly dependent on a few big web companies like Google - and whether it's wise over the long run for us to trust their team of (currently) very nice, well-meaning people who are trying hard to do the right thing when faced with government censorship demands and surveillance pressures. He writes:

Today the Web might seem like a free-speech panacea: it has given anyone with Internet access the potential to reach a global audience. But though technology enthusiasts often celebrate the raucous explosion of Web speech, there is less focus on how the Internet is actually regulated, and by whom. As more and more speech migrates online, to blogs and social-networking sites and the like, the ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even eBay.

He quotes Columbia Law professor Tim Wu who says: "To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king...One reason they’re good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it’s over for them.”

Tim is not the first person to make this point. Danny O'Brien at EFF wrote and spoke about this issue at great length over the summer. I re-quote:

It’s like if I was to concede that a benevolent dictatorship is a far more effective model for a political system than a liberal democracy. The problems you hit in that context is when the dictatorship slides from benevolence (or effectiveness), or you need a new dictator in a hurry. I love having Steve Jobs at Apple: I just can’t quite believe the odds that the next Steve Jobs will be at Apple too, and the one after that. I want to move my data seamlessly where the best ideas and implementation move.

One effort to place collective limits on the absolute power of the web giants, and to create a framework for greater transparency and accountability, is the Global Network Initiative, with which both Danny and I have been involved. But the GNI is just one step. Danny also advocates a more grassroots solution if people want the same independence online as they have in the physical world (or at least in democracies):

If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we've come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC3 that can live with us on the edge, not be run by third parties.

I've been writing, speaking and attempting to think about these issues as well, in particular, what are the implications when you go beyond the democracies of North America and Western Europe? What are the concrete implications in the Middle East? In China? At the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit last month, I tried to provoke my web industry audience to rethink common American assumptions that the internet plus capitalism will inevitably equal democracy, without too much need to worry about the details. Here's the video of my talk, with slides overlaid:

   

Isaac Mao came right after me, talking about his idea of "sharism." Unfortunately he was asked to shorten his talk because the conference was running behind schedule and Al Gore had to catch a flight:

   

How do we create viable grassroots, distributed alternatives to Google and Twitter so that if they get shut down, or turn evil, we're not left in the lurch - or in jail?  At the iCommons Summit in Sapporo in August, I gave a longer version of the my O'Reilly talk, and called on the global free culture community to work together to make sure that there are enough grassroots, distributed, non-proprietary spaces for people to communicate and express themselves so that we won't be so dependent on the web's benevolent dictators.

The question I have not yet managed to answer is: how do we succeed in breaking our dependence on the benevolent dictators? Or how can we help at least some of our web and telecoms dictators evolve from being monarchies to something more accountable, transparent, and participatory? Figuring out the answer should, it seems to me, be a major priority of free speech activism in the 21st century, and thus a major priority for the foundations and governments who fund them.

Creative Commons gets star power in Hong Kong

Creative Commons is getting hip in Hong Kong: Cantopop starlet and actress Ella Koon has released her photo gallery and desktop/mobile wallpaper under a Creative Commons Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Ella Koon has parked her website at a ".asia" domain. Edmon Chung, DotAsia's CEO, has been encouraging ".asia" clients to use Creative Commons licenses whenever it makes sense to do so. For Ella Koon, it makes a great deal of sense to release photos with "some rights reserved" instead of "all rights reserved" so that her fans can legally share her pictures and create fan art with them, as long as they attribute the original source. Since she has used a non-commercial license, that means for-profit media can't freely use the photos without permission or (if she demands it) payment, just as in the traditional "all rights reserved." But fans are free to use them as they wish, as long as they don't try to sell them and adhere to the "share alike" requirement and share any new works under the same kind of CC license.

Until now, though, Hong Kong users haven't been able to use CC licenses localized under Hong Kong law. On Saturday that will change with the launch of CC Hong Kong. With licenses adapted by Hong Kong IP lawyers to stand up in Hong Kong court, web businesses like the Hong Kong-based blogging portal MySinablog are getting ready to make them available as a publishing option for their users.

If you'd like to learn more about how you can use Creative Commons or just want to know what's been keeping me so busy over the past few months, please join us for our launch ceremony and festival celebration on Saturday at the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity, 135 Junction Road, Kowloon.

Or perhaps a stronger incentive might be a chance to meet CC founder Lawrence Lessig and CC's current CEO Joi Ito?  Nutshell schedule:

Main Programme, Inauguration with special guests (2:00 - 3:30pm)

• Professor Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School, Founder of Creative Commons
• Mr. Joichi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons
• Panel discussion with Pindar Wong (Chairman of CCHK's Preparatory Executive Committee), Charles Mok (Hong Kong Internet Society), and Edmon Chung of DotAsia

Festival activities (noon-2 p.m and 3:30-6pm)

• OpenCourseWare Presentation
• Photographs Exhibit (Hong Kong Flickr Groups)
• Script reading of “An Instant Patriot” - a play by Mrs. Elizabeth Wong
• Live Music ( Snoblind )
• The Making of CC Documentaries ( v-artivist and inmedia)
• Hong Kong Bloggers workshop (Panelists: Jacky See, Poon Wing Hang, Jeff Au Yeung)

Full program with a lot more details can be downloaded here (PDF). Maps, directions, and online registration here.

And that's not all: On Friday from 5-6:30pm come hear Prof. Lessig give a public lecture titled: "Free Culture and Free Society: Can the West Love Both?" Lessig has just come out with a new book, Remix.

Another exciting development: DotAsia has just announced a new partnership with Creative Commons to help promote the use of CC licenses in Asia, and to help facilitate more active collaboration between CC-user communities in different Asian countries. A new website, creativecommons.asia, has just been set up. The plan is for the new CC Asia site to serve as a hub and platform for Asia-wide creative collaboration.

Still not entirely sure what CC is all about? Here's a gorgeous new video, "A shared culture" in which CC's founders and key community members talk about the philosophy behind it:

Creative Commons Hong Kong to launch next month!

After much work by many people over the past year, Creative Commons Hong Kong will officially launch on October 25th, with CEO Joi Ito and Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig as very special guests. The ceremony and "festival" will feature speeches by both distinguished guests, a panel discussion in Cantonese, musical and theatrical performances, open courseware demonstrations, and blogger workshops - all aimed to demonstrate how Creative Commons' more flexible approach to copyright can facilitate creativity, innovation, and strengthen young people's understanding of copyright.

The evening before we'll have another treat: Lessig will give a public lecture at Hong Kong University, titled: “Free Culture and Free Society: Can the West Love Both?” I expect his talk will generate some lively discussion.

See the Creative Commons Hong Kong website for more details and to register for both events.

For readers who don't know what I'm talking about:

Creative Commons (CC) is a copyright license that defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright (all rights reserved) and the public domain (no rights reserved). Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work. In other words, it is a “some rights reserved” copyright.

We have localized the Creative Commons copyright licenses, in compliance with Hong Kong’s Copyright Ordinance, in order to make them easier for Hong Kong people to use.

Want to know more? Here is a podcast with me and other members of Creative Commons Hong Kong speaking at this month's Web Wednesday event, and here is a video:

What is "Asia" and what is "Commons" anyway??

(Photo: Originally uploaded to Flickr by BobChao.)

For me, the two most thought-provoking sessions at the Workshop on Asia and Commons last weekend were a panel on Saturday afternoon called "Commons: Cultural Perspectives from Asia" and Sunday's final brainstorm discussion. The Creative Commons blog has a good summary of the entire conference, and somebody thankfully wikified the notes from the final brainstorm.

Here's the thing. Creative Commons has become a global movement, with the licenses localized all over the world. But as an organization founded in the U.S., with its international arm based in Europe, the language and approach of "Commons" tends to be heavily legalistic and discussed mainly from the standpoint of Western legal and philosophical frameworks.  Many people attending the meeting in Taipei wondered whether Creative Commons in Asia is likely to be more successful as a social movement than as a set of copyright licenses (as Peter Yu has pointed out in the past). There was also a feeling that in order to be truly relevant to the globe, the CC movement's central message needs to undergo a shift that would incorporate more non-Western approaches to the idea of "commons," content creation, and sharing.

Historian Jo-shui Chen was invited to comment on the idea of "commons" in the Chinse cultural context. How should we frame our discussion of "commons" in a predominantly Chinese society in order to increase the chances that Creative Commons will be accepted?  Prof. Chen has researched the Chinese concept of "gong" which he describes as "the Chinese notion closest to the Western idea of 'public'."  In his abstract he writes:

“Gong” is not a single idea; it is rather a complex of ideas with a history of almost three thousand years. Two fundamental meanings of “Gong” are “government” and “general” or “universal” with the implication of equality. A less prominent meaning of “gong,” which is quite late in origins, is “common” or “shared”.

Chen believes that both "gong" and "si" (meaning "private") are "more about state of mind than separation of spheres," which makes it easier for a person to be both at once in ways that would be confusing or contradictory to Westerners. Also, culturally, he said that "it is difficult for most Chinese to associate themselves with public affairs because they are considered the business of government." He argues that the idea of "public domain" as Westerners would view it is not consistent with traditional Chinese ways of thinking - and that it would be viewed more as a "wilderness" with no inherent order, while at the same time people have a "strong sense of entitlement to resources in this wilderness." He finds that in traditional Chinese social-political consciousness, people perceive public order is as the domain of government. Social activities are organized by gentry, but there is no general idea of public order which is not directly under the control of government.

Given this cultural context, Chen argues that the best way to articulate Creative Commons in Chinese communities is as a kind of public order: "a kinder gentler public order that is good for all...not based upon absolute individual rights, but rather a system that seeks to promote public order and public interest."  He concludes that unless CC is framed in this way, "many people with resort to traditional thinking and view the internet as free for all." He also points out that "Individual rights may have been enshrined in law under Western influence, but this idea is very far away from people's real life."

Lawrence Liang, a lawyer of Chinese descent from Bangalore, gave a brilliant talk (I'm told all his talks are brilliant - this was the first time I've heard him speak) titled "How Does An Asian Commons Mean." No, that's not a typo. He points out that "the metaphor of the commons as it is used in debates on information emerges from a specific history of the enclosures movement in Europe." The task of articulating an Asian Commons requires more than merely translating existing initiatives such as Creative Commons, but rather "to answer larger questions of what it means to provide an epistemological account of the commons in Asia." This is especially challenging because the idea that one can consider oneself "Asian" and that such a label has real cultural or social meaning "is a "diplomatic fiction... neither Asia nor commons has any substantive content."

Liang rightly points out that if the "Asian Commons" is merely viewed as a geographical extension of the existing Creative Commons movement, then it has no meaningful role to play because it is pretty much content-free: it merely describes a diverse range of people who happen to be labeled "Asian." The idea of "Asian Commons" only has meaning if it has a substantive global impact on the  "idea of the commons." He believes that in discussing Asian perspectives on the commons, we have valuable "opportunities to remove beyond romantic ideals of the commons...move beyond the binary of the debate."

The idea of Asia, Liang also points out, "has often been described in terms or a lack, or a derivative, or of a copy, mimicry... the idea that Asian countries are pirate nations... recycled  modern." It's time to move away from this framing.

Furthermore, just as maps don't represent human realities, he argues, nor do legal licenses. "There is a problem with fetishization of licenses" in the Creative Commons movement, he believes. He points to the traditional Indian concept of generosity, which does not involve contracts and precise definitions of property ownership and challenges us to go beyond Western legalistic approaches to consider how the Creative Commons movement can best serve its ultimate goals: maximizing social creativity and learning for the sake of the greater good.

During Sunday's discussion, Isaac Mao raised his idea of "sharism" as a framework for promoting the goals of Creative Commons that is more likely to gain widespread acceptance in Asia, in contrast to Lessig-esque terrms like "free culture." The problem, as Liang pointed out, is that the words "free" and "freedom" have been irreparably polluted by American geopolitics and tainted by perceived agendas of regime change, making anything labeled with those words a hard sell in the developing world. Riffing off the expression "free as in beer," he remarked: "free as in America is unhelpful." There was a widespread sense among people in the room that an emphasis on "public good" and "sharing" will enable the movement to have a much deeper impact, ultimately.

Another thread that came out of the final discussion was that Creative Commons - especially when one emphasizes the movement  - provides an opportunity for people in this region to develop and assert alternatives to the copyright regime that the U.S. seeks to jam down everybody's throats. Rather than apologize for being "pirates," and accept the U.S. trade negotiator's premise of "Asia as lacking," why not work to build a model that promotes innovation and shared learning in new, forward-looking ways that will help Asian societies come out ahead in the global knowledge economy?

Why Hong Kong needs Creative Commons

Joi Ito - who is among other things Chairman of the Board of Creative Commons - passed through Hong Kong this week. Yusuf Goolamabbas over at Outblaze did a quick interview with Joi and Pindar Wong (the guy who brought the Internet to Hong Kong) about why Hong Kong needs Creative Commons. He mentioned our efforts to create a local Hong Kong version of the "some rights reserved" licenses and that we are seeking community feedback on the license draft. If all goes well, we hope to launch the CC-HK license officially in mid-June. Want more information or want to get involved? Click here.

Some quotes from Joi and Pindar:

PINDAR:

 

Weve built the number two, number three infrastructure in the world over the last ten years. So what are we going to do with it? Now, if we're going to have a not very forward-looking copyright regime that binds us, shackles us, it's quite clear that the creative community in Hong Kong - music, film, the arts - their ability to mix, mash, be creative is somehow not factored in to the current view of the law. So all we're trying to do is say, look. It's not necessarily "all rights reserved," it's also "some rights reserved." Lets try and use the existing copyright regime and make licensing - look at the licensing aspect. Not everyone by nature wants to fall foul of copyright law, but give us some options. It's not that we don't want to obey the law, its that we do want to have a license, but make it easier for us to get a license. Furthermore, give us some choices as far as the types of license we can get. Therefore Creative Commons has been around, weve looked at it we all know it. Many of us who are involved in the industry worldwide have said "hey look its quite strange we don't have Creative Commons in Hong Kong." Why not? Why don't we go and do it? So that's what we've done."

...Hong Kong is one of the freest economies in the world. So let the market decide. The Creative Commons license should be there by default. Once it's there then we can start doing things that are very interesting... This is a starting point not an ending point.

JOI:

...The problem is that the mass production and delivery of content is the main model that people want to use the internet for, but then you might as well use cable. That's fine for broadcast thats not a bad architecture... but the internet is really for peer to peer communication. And the problem is that if you don't create a legal regime that allows you to do it, people will do it anyway but it will be illegal. And so by causing people to do illegal things, its also one of these thing where people figure well, if I'm breaking the law anyway.. I might as well go all the way. So the minute you make people into pirates, you call them criminals and terrorists like they did in the United States, then theyre going to come back at you, they're going to attack you, they're going to treat  you like the man. So what Creative Commons is trying to do is get everybody to the table, get everybody to follow the rule of law, respect each other's needs, and say everyone has the right to have a choice.

...What you're fighting for right now is the attention of a person.

...Whats really a pity is that this Hollywood regime is infecting other governments into thinking that by having a strong copyright regime they will encourage the content business. When in fact by encouraging the amateur business they may sell more video cameras and televisions and network connections and bandwith, and we would probably make a lot more money supporting the sharing economy in asia than we would trying to build a hollywood inside Hong Kong.

Here's the video:

Unfamiliar with Creative Commons? Watch this then:

To learn more, and perhaps even get involved, visit the Hong Kong Fans of Creative Commons wiki.

Asia Commons Meeting Kicks Off

The International Workshop for Asia and Commons  has had a successful first day. To get a sense of the variety of projects and commercial enterprises using Creative Commons licenses and/or open source software around Asia, check out the very useful case study booklet compiled by Creative Commons Australia, downloadable here (PDF).

There are quite a lot of tech startups around the region using open source software and/or Creative Commons licensing, a few of whom are here at the conference. Ellis Wang showed us his EeePC, pictured on the right, a subnotebook computer running on a Linux-based operating system (WSJ has a review of it here). Sean Moss-Pultz discussed OpenMoko, which he describes as the world's first "totally open phone." (Recently Gizmodo wondered whether the iPhone developers borrowed some of their ideas.) We also heard from Takeshi Homma from Sony, who runs eyeVio, a kind of youtube-like video sharing service which uses Creative Commons licenses for user-generated content (see an English-language article about it here).

On Friday night we heard from some independent artists, photographers, and filmmakers who are licensing their works under creative commons and finding it a useful way to get their works seen and known. We'll get a concert later tonight featuring musicians who use CC for at least some of their work. I will continue posting photos to my Flickr account.



The opening keynote was by Terry Fisher of Harvard's Berkman Center, who discussed his proposed solution to the world's copyright problems, which involves his new company, Noank Media. The company is mainly working in Canada and China right now. More info on how it works here. In China they're working with a company called Felio run by CERNET (the China Education and Research Network), to deploy a legal file-sharing service in Chinese universities. The idea is to act as a broker between producers of creative content and people who want to consume it, compensating producers according to how many people are using their works. I asked Terry how Noank is going to deal with user privacy issues as well as government censorship requirements in China. Regarding privacy, he said "there is no one participant" along the chain of distribution, service providing, and downloading "who simultaneously knows what has been consumed and who has consumed it."  Which should protect users from dossiers being kept on them about what films or movies they're watching and listening to. When it comes to censorship, he said that so far they haven't encountered any problems because for now they've only been dealing with music and that censorship questions have not come up. He said he wasn't sure how they will deal with censorship requests if they receive them in the future. But he also said that based on his interactions with Chinese officials, he thinks that there is probably more acceptance in the Chinese government apparatus about the inevitability of open flows of information than one would assume based on current censorship behavior and policy.  I'll be following up on that thought in my brief talk tomorrow morning.

Creative Commons - Draft Hong Kong license seeks feedback

Creative Commons licenses are coming to Hong Kong - most likely this year!

Since August, a committed group of people have been working to localize Creative Commons licenses and educate the community about why this alternative approach to copyright will be good for Hong Kong. Check out the video, pictures and notes from our November workshop.

While many people and businesses will always choose to protect their works under traditional "all rights reserved" copyright, many people here in the community are eager to share their creative and intellectual works more broadly in a way that the Creative Commons "some rights reserved" licenses make possible.

Thanks to the hard work of Professors Yahong Li and Alice Lee at the University of Hong Kong law faculty, we now have a draft of the Creative Commons license converted into language that will hopefully hold up under Hong Kong IP law. It has been posted here on the Creative Commons website. We are seeking feedback from the community - particularly from those who understand Hong Kong IP law. If you have questions, criticisms, or comments, please click on the "post a message" link and join the discussion.

As I've mentioned in the past, Hong Kong is behind Mainland China and Taiwan when it comes to Creative Commons and the free culture movement. We're hoping to catch up. I'm pretty optimistic that we will, given that we've got some awesome people committed to the project. One in particular is Ben Cheng who works with me at Hong Kong U. An open source programmer, wikipedian, and dedicated free culture advocate with strong community connections, his work so far has been critical in keeping things going.

In Mainland China, where CC-China Mainland officially launched last year, some scholars are hoping to use CC and the free culture movement as a way to help empower underprivileged groups. Prof. Wang Jing of MIT recently wrote a paper about some of those projects, which can be downloaded here (PDF). My good friend Isaac Mao is also one of the people who first brought the Creative Commons movement to the mainland Chinese web community several years ago.

The Taiwan CC folks are organizing a great meeting for next weekend in Taipei called the International Workshop on Asia and Commons in the Information Age. I'll be giving a talk on Sunday about why free speech needs free culture. I'm looking forward to learning a lot from the other presenters about what's happening around the region, and how our group in Hong Kong can collaborate with people around Asia to promote free culture.

Joi Ito: Sharing & Happiness

Joi Ito was the first blogger I ever met  - at least knowingly. He is also one of several people who inspired me to leave TV journalism and get involved with the web, free culture, and online citizen media.

Joi's keynote speech on the final day of Wikimania was not about wikis or Wikipedia specifically - but about the core set of beliefs underpinning this community: free culture and what Joi calls the "sharing economy."

Joi (who has been reading the Dalai Lama recently) points out that there is a difference between "happiness" and "pleasure."  Pleasure can be obtained with money. Happiness cannot be.

"We make decisions every day without thinking about the difference between pleasure and happiness," he says. "We need to think about this more."

He's right. People who work on any of the Wikimedia projects are certainly not motivated by money: Nobody who creates any of the content gets paid a cent. (The funds raised are spent on computer server space, administrative and technical staff needed to keep things running, legal counsel, etc.) The Wikipedians I've been hanging out with over the past several days derive happiness and feelings of self-worth and belonging by being active participants in a global community. People gain lasting and deep friendships - and sometimes even fall in love - while spending hours every week working to build a free body of knowledge online.

Journalists and other media professionals I know tend to be perplexed as to why people would spend so much time writing and editing articles for free. A friend who works for a major web company recently expressed shock that the Wikipedians hold their conference over a weekend when they could be home with their families. Of course since most Wikipedians have other jobs, weekends are the only time many can make a conference. But more importantly, the people attending Wikimania are here because it contributes to their happiness.

Joi spent a lot of his talk discussing Creative Commons (click here and here for more about CC as an alternative form of copyright that encourages sharing).  Beyond the legal issues of intellectual property law, Joi's larger point is that people will be happier, more innovative (which is good economically in the long run) and more free if we focus less on the money we think we will make from our creations in the short term, and more on how our work will contribute to well being and happiness of others.