DISQUS

What copyright regime would best deal with the problem of transaction costs, while ensuring sufficient incentives to create?

One that paid attention to the much less defined "sufficient" part of the question.

BY is upward compatible with BY-NC-SA -- if you want to combine works under BY and BY-NC-SA, you unambiguously can, and the new work has to be under BY-NC-SA.

There is always a tension between offering more licenses that could address more users and keeping the whole system simple and interoperable.

If there really is a huge missed opportunity in not offering a transformational use only license we should think about recreating such a thing in a way that would be unambiguously compatible in the same way BY is.

I would not want to encourage use of the sampling+ licenses. They confuse many people and may be subtly incompatible with the main CC licenses, see http://ccmixter.org/thread/1574#44530 for one discussion of this.

One place, in reply to one of your posts.

Richard, that sure would be a chuckle, but awfully hard to accomplish -- gifts with individual recipients aren't much like free software.

Congratulations! I hope you'll still be able to blog on these topics at increasingly high traffic sites. :)

Tim is right. People from across the political spectrum are involved in the free culture and related movements, but whatever their beliefs about the role of the state, they're doing the work of libertarian activists -- making production less amenable to regulation and taxation -- and moving the understanding of democracy and equality away from the tyranny of the majority and coercive redistribution and toward openness to participation and access to nonrivalrous goods. This largely explains why I, a libertarian for around 20 years, have been involved in some way in these movements for around 15 and have worked for Creative Commons for nearly 5.

Importantly, content controls can be broadly defined to not only include the regulation of “objectionable” content (whatever that might include), but also the promotion of so-called “public interest” content or other media quality objectives.

Presumably content controls aimed at limiting use of copyrighted material fall under "other media quality objectives" and will suffer the same fate as other controls described here.

It would be ok if it said .msi rather than .exe.

It's unfortunate developers are still shipping executable installers.

Citizendium's point is quite clear to me and Shirky explains it well if unflatteringly. I'm pretty skeptical of CZ's point, but I wouldn't say it's a solution in search of a problem -- although Wikipedia works great, 100x better than one who had never encountered similar would intuit -- it is not without problems. I doubt CZ's approach will constitute an improvement, but it is well worth trying out, and cheap to do so. Even total failures provide useful lessons, and I doubt CZ will be an utter failure, except when held up against Wikipedia.

Another public source of website ranking and traffic data: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wikipedia.org+citizendium.org/?metric=uv

Tim's reply says it all, but "alternative business models" is a pet peeve of mine, so...

That is the failure of “alternatives business models” to emerge except as experiments or exceptions.

Most touted "alternative business models" are irrelevant -- they attempt to figure out how to still directly pay creators for their copyable creations. In some cases looking for business models is wrongheaded -- many will create for zero financial gain or even pay to create. In others the "business model" is not "alternative" at all, it just doesn't involve paying for copies. Personal appearance payments have, are, and will constitute the primary earnings of many artists, including in some of the countries mentioned.

I haven't watched either of these but from the description the PFF event is not about peer production. Note "Posted" rather than "Generated".

Tim, you're completely right, I misread. The outside version need not even be private, just stale, which is the case with many distros. It's great that Ubuntu is trying to avoid this problem, though I wonder how they'll do so with their "long term support" versions.

That quote sounds archaic. The norm is for the public to have (read) access to the same revision control system developers use. I can't think of a significant free software project that only occasionally releases a tarball off the top of my head.

I did listen to some of the video and found a couple things interesting:

* Focus on preinstallation (very welcome), but only outside the U.S. Shuttleworth claimed that in the U.S. PC market margins are too tight to support anything other than Windows installation (one person who complains after mistakenly ordering Linux eats up the margin from 10 customers he said). This sounds bogus to me. a) are margins really thinner in the U.S. PC market than elsewhere? b) it would seem easy to segreate linux orders, e.g., only available through linux.dell.com (which does exist, but only leads to a few (desktop) systems available with Linux, or at least without Windows).

* Claim toward the end that once open source reaches feature parity with proprietary software, the former's superior innovativeness becomes readily apparent, and the Linux desktop is reaching that stage.

Vista ... supports a wider range of hardware

You mean 2006 vintage x86 hardware.

Not that it changes your point, which I wholly agree with.

SCO is dying a slow death, but I don't know that the open source community had much of anything to do with it. Certainly it was up in arms, but I doubt SCO's strategy of selling a dead end product and suing IBM would've worked out anyway. I'd love to be wrong.

I also don't really understand how the community can effectively go on strike against Novell. How much of an impact has the community had on SCO? Microsoft is the one who should fear the community in this case. If they push too hard there will be a reinvigorated campaign to replace Windows and Office anywhere and everywhere, and this time the free software stack is ready.

However, I think Braden misses the crucial sentence in Marti's post:

In the eyes of both legal scholars and informants, the GPL's strength stems not necessarily from its legality, but from the public collective opinion of community members.

I suspect "collective opinion of community members" is a woeful understatement. That, and many multi-billion $ businesses built with the assumption that the GPL, Linux and other GPL'd software are legally sound.

Lewis, I don't know about CD ripping specifically, but an open ended extension mechanism does have the advantage of allowing extension creators to add features the company could not, e.g., circumventing DRM or other lock-in.

David, Songbird may compete with the iTunes player directly, but it is the web that competes with the iTunes store. It is the web that I'm betting on. Songbird simply takes advantage of the web as no other media player does. Perhaps that will remain a geek-only thing forever, I am hardly one to judge.

"Skins" and MySpace also send chills down my spine, but apparently the general population likes them. :)

My main disappointment with Benkler's book (unjustified, I simply want a different book than the one he wrote) is that it isn't much about the economics of peer production. The subject badly needs treatment from economists in addition to legal scholars, ideology aside.

Venezuelans do live in the U.S. and must abide by U.S. laws (unless perhaps they're diplomats). I intended "(almost) that easy" somewhat wryly, in lieu of an earnest, incompetent and irrelevant exposition of polycentric law.

I'm really sorry to see the credibility of everything posted here (much of which is excellent) diminished through association with a Discovery Institute employee.

I will certainly think several times before referring anyone to TLF again for the sake of the credibility of whatever information I would like to use TLF posts to buttress and my own.

I make both panels autohide, though Don Marti's solution sounds pretty good too.

Perfect right up to the word 'Ronald' who was for limited government and free markets in just the way the copyright cartel is -- superficial rhetoric only.

I think the main opportunity is not for left-leaning copyright reformers to make inroads with free marketeers but for some of the latter to be entrepreneurs, loosely speaking, in opening up the ripe field of IP critique and reform from a free-market perspective.

In other words, clone yourself. :)

I haven't seen the movie yet though I did see Gore's lecture early this year.

Gore's tactic is bait and switch. He sells the fact of anthropogenic global warming but tries to get you to buy imminent global catastrophe.

Bailey is right about global warming skeptics having credibility problems. It pains me to see people like Arnold Kling clinging (no pun intended) to the skeptic line.

Spelling: excuse.

Clearly what you call media deconsolidation is actually a sign of increasing media consolidation. The broadcast group will be bought by a potential broadcast monopolist (anyone). Yes, the sky is still falling!

:)

Don Marti, he's off by a large number. There are many DRM-free music stores, not counting many labels and artists selling only their music DRM free.

Technically Pakman's comment should be qualified with "having non-neglible market share" or similar, but this does not detract at all from his point.