Slashdot Mirror
James Boyle's New Book Under CC License
An anonymous reader writes "James Boyle has released his new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press) under a Creative Commons License. It can be downloaded free or read online. There are chapters on Thomas Jefferson's views of IP, musical borrowing and the birth of soul, free software, and synthetic biology. Lessig is impressed. Doctorow says he is a law prof who writes like a comedian (is this a good thing?), and credits Boyle's first book for getting him involved in online rights."
Philosophically Jefferson opposed slavery too ... but his slaves would tell you a different story.
*DrugCheese rants*
a law prof who writes like a comedian (is this a good thing?)
I think so. The world of law is rich with ironies and absurdities. Unfortunately the people on the giving end are too invested in the system to see it, and the people on the receiving end are usually having a bad time, so the humor is rarely appreciated.
Yale University Prses? are all /.'s editors lacking in both mechanical spellchecking and literacy simultaneously?
Tagged "oheditors."
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
I've never heard of this guy. Never would have bothered to buy his book. But now that I read it online (for free). If it is engrossing enough, I would like to buy a hard copy, or anything tangible if its available in my country.
I would also tell my friends about this book and they would do the same, at least some of them would. PROFIT !!!
Doctorow says he is a law prof who writes like a comedian(Is that a good thing?)
No, it's a meaningless thing given that Doctorow has little to no education, and is an author who has never been of sufficient caliber to get the attention of a publisher (and no, I do not count a company that publishes Halo fanfiction "books" to be a publisher.)
He's also a hypocritical little shit; we never did see him press charges against the SFWA for filing illegal DMCA notices, now did we? Funny how he didn't get all up in their grill, but he's happy to incite riots among his BoingBoing readers when it doesn't involve him?
It's absolutely fascinating that both he and his wife have managed to attain positions in academia despite having no fucking education. Seriously- she's a WoW player/Quake gamer, and USC calls her a "fellow"? What the FUCK? What drugs did she put in their water?
Please help metamoderate.
Can't he get a Quantum of Solace? After all, he's Boyle. James Boyle.
once it is on the internet it is difficult to have artistic control, however the producer has the rights to be credited for its creation. The one that is not responsible for the creation of the product that is put up on the internet is the thief if it is put up there without the creator's permission.
Taking an idea from someone else and giving it away is thievery, but once an idea has been sold it is no longer under the control if its author.
All of academia and our modern society is based on both the right of ideas to be free and for idea creators to sell their ideas.
So: no matter how the idea is distributed we should all have the right, and certainly do have the responsibility, to pay the originator of the idea for his material.
Distribution rights are unconstitutional immoral and antithetical to a free and prosperous society. Intellectual property rights are, on the other hand, the exact opposite.
That doesn't tell us much really... At least in the blurb. Not all the CC licenses share the same goal, of freedom.
Doctorow says he is a law prof who writes like a comedian (is this a good thing?)
Yes. Comedians are more thoughtful than is often apparent. They are logical and intelligent and perceptive. You can't be dumb and (deliberately) funny. It actually takes intelligence and a great deal of work to be as (deliberately) funny as Dan Quayle for example. Comedians often derive their humour from pointing out the incongruities that most other people overlook. If all of us could be comedians then the world would be a far more intelligent (and funnier) place to live.
We shouldn't celebrate mediocrity just because it offers some sound bites for our use, but all too often in the Slashdot community we either do that, or elevate people like Lessig who, in fact, pursue goals different from what we'd like to see. Would that there were more critical voices of this Slashdot establishment figures.
Has this guy actually done anything much, other than be an opinonated internet celebrity whose views tend to correlate with those of ./ readers with respect to IP issues, to warrant constant random references in stories on this site?
I find him slightly preachy and less well-informed than he makes himself out to be, personally.
About the PDF format.
hint: Acrobat Reader on Windows sucks, get a better PDF reader or switch to Mac which handles PDF files natively.
The idealism of copyright is that people want stuff that is non-rivalrous (you can copy it, I can copy it, so apparently no-one will ever pay for more than one copy). To encourage "artists" to create the stuff that people want, you give them exclusive rights to make copies, and magically the non-rivalrous good becomes a rivalrous good and now the market system works and the people get what they want.
The thing is, people don't know what they want. If we're talking about the market for potatoes, sure, we all know a good potato from a bad one, but we're not. We're talking about "artistic" goods. If the people knew what they wanted, they'd just make it themselves. So how do they decide what is "art" and what is not? Why, marketing of course. The "artists" just pump out crap and the people consume.
Compare this to the old patronage system. You go to an artist, you say "I want X" and when they make Y you say, "no, I want X" and you keep saying it until you get X. If the artist can't give you X, you go find an artist who can. That is a market.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Boyle gave a lunchtime lecture, those are open to everyone, a few weeks ago on musical borrowing and the birth of soul. Duke makes those lectures available online.
His lectures are as amusing as his writings.
The first thing that pops up on my computer is a licensing agreement for the Adobe PDF reader. If they really wanted to it to be free, they should have released it in an ASCII text format (or is there a patent on that now?).
Specifically, the license is the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Noncommercial mean it is not entirely free, but it is still one of the more free cc licenses. Just saying that something is cc-licenses means almost nothing, there are cc licenses that give very little freedom.
An unexpected development! A Creative Commons -licensed book about copyright and licensing! I would have never expected them to- ... okay, I expected them to do this.
Just a small suggestion to people: Creative Commons was founded in 2001, and as such, there's been just a little bit of discussion about copyright and licensing (and consequently why CC rocks) since then. Can we finally move away from meta-stuff and start to celebrate the real-world use of Creative Commons licenses? Please???
I'd really love it if Slashdot would post more about Creative Commons -licensed (and other free-culture) stuff that interests geeks, but I'd also love it if we would step away from discussion about copyrights and licensing in itself and touting CC as the main selling point. Can we get away from the mechanism and move on to the substance?
The way this is set up, you can either download the file for free, or buy the book (hardcover). I don't want a book, I want a file -- but I also want to financially support the author and his publisher.
How about a "download with donation" option, with a 50/50 split to the author and the publisher? (For those who might object to giving the publisher anything, just ask any author how much work goes into getting a book ready for publication. Splitting the donation is plenty fair, I can assure you.)
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
And the one this one is under doesn't have that goal.
"Creative Commons License The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License."
Please people, unless you are trying to cause confusion and trouble, when you mention that something us under a cc license, tell us which one.
Oh, and MOD PARENT UP please. This is an important point.
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
A couple of years back I downloaded a novel published under Creative Commons from a respected writer (excellent book, BTW.) The site included a PayPal "tip jar", so I put in five bucks. The writer wrote me soon afterward and kindly offered to send me a paperback copy of the book, as, after a few thousand downloads, I was the very first person to use the tip jar.
Not to knock Creative Commons, but our society may still need some rewiring to make it profitable profitable.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
That is fantastic. It almost makes me wish I could go to law school and have a professor like him. I just don't want to deal with the crippling debt.
I don't have time to read much more than that - my own work and the grad student shuffle have demands on my time I can't ignore - but I do have some comments on the first chapter of the book.
First of all, having tried to read Lessig's Free Culture at least twice, and having been stopped by some massive and often bizarre leaps of logic, I was very happy to see no such thing so far in this book. Boyle manages to make his argument without any strange leaps of logic, and he backs up what he says. I think he doesn't give enough weight to certain things, but he may cover that later in the book anyway.
There are some things in his introductory chapter that I wish he had gone into greater detail on, or that he missed outright. Like Lessig, he treats American copyright so far as though it exists in a vacuum, which isn't true. The international dimension is an important one, and has a tremendous impact. To give an example, copyright in the United States would have stayed at lifetime + 50 years if Europe hadn't moved to lifetime +70, and declared that it would use the laws of the country of origin to determine when a work goes into the public domain - so there is a strong foreign policy component of what actually goes onto the law books.
(As a further example, would the DMCA have ever been written if it wasn't for the WIPO agreements?)
I also hope that the economy of supply and demand is gone into in greater depth, as well as the interaction between it and copyright. In the first chapter, Boyle touches on it, but the economics of whether people are buying a product has more impact on whether that product survives the test of time than any copyright law. That's something worth a great deal of examination, and I hope Boyle does that in later chapters.
On a final note, I hope Boyle discusses means of dealing with "orphaned works" - I know that Canada has a mechanism for moving an orphaned work into the public domain if the copyright holder can't be tracked down, but is there such a mechanism in the United States? What about Great Britain or Europe?
One thing that I hope Boyle will avoid is confusing plagiarism with creativity - they are not the same thing, and it's a mistake that Lessig fell into (to the point that one reviewer argued that Lessig was trying to fight for the right to plagiarize instead of the right to create). If Boyle is as good as he seems to be, he'll explore the difference, and what it means to copyright law.
So, this book is off to a vastly superior start to Lessig's Free Culture, and I hope that it proves to keep that quality when I finally have time to read the rest of it.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
PDF is great an all but he should really put it into a variety of eBook formats... even just a plain text file would be better than a PDF... though I suppose you'd lose the "typesetting" and "formatting" of the printed material.
And no I don't think an HTML version would be any better than PDF. Possibly for google searches, otherwise no.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Oops, I forgot already!
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I don't know what formal credentials Doctorow has. When he held a seminar with graduate students at my university he was anything but uneducated. Reading his popular arguments online you wouldn't know he can back them up with philosophy and theory. He can.
I have some ability to judge this. I just completed an MA in Communication, with a focus on the commons of ideas (and copyright). But it's not the letters in front of your name that make you educated: It's the reading and thinking, the talking and writing, that do. Obviously Doctorow has been doing some of those. Anyone who argues with a person's credentials instead of their ideas obviously hasn't done enough.
But of course authority (and credentialism) is what much of what the current battles over the control of knowledge, culture and ideas are about.
And that is why we don't live the way Jefferson ran his plantation, but rather more like the way he ran his philosophy.
It's not like Jefferson was magic or something. He was just a brilliant person in a time of fundamental crisis, who came up with a lot of ways out of that crisis. A fundamental crisis that awaits whenever we ignore or abuse his contributions. One of which contributions was that ideas and laws, not the people who make them, are the standards according to which we should live our lives.
--
make install -not war
Doctorow's the most overrated "sci-fi" writer of the last few years. He's been riding the BB wave to boost his writing "career". I can hardly read three sentences into his text without puking.
There is a lot of humor in law, especially the parts that are interwoven with human experioence. Law like science is an effort to explain and order the world, though without any promise of ultimate truth. The best teachers in law school used a lot of humor, at least in first year, as a way of sustaining attention and perhaps befriending the audience (it's soft Socratic, not like The Paper Chase any more).
Humor in the hands of the brilliant is the perception of and pointing out the truth of a situation in a way that almost forces understanding and agreement. Once the person laughs, they're in on the conspiracy, perhaps even with appreciation for the release of tension; and the point is made almost indelibly.