BookBlog

At SXSW, Larry Lessig gave a stirring and eloquent speech about copyright and the freedom to create culture. And he explained to an audience of designers and bloggers how using the Creative Commons license can help.
Congress keeps extending terms of copyright, far beyond the limited terms specified by the founders. Today, most content produced in the last century is locked up, even though it is out of print and inaccessible.
Disney, a company that has led the charge to extend copyright, created its own popular works — Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Little Mermaid, Aladdin — from works in the public domain. New culture depends on free content, and content isn’t free.
One of the most striking points in the talk was Lessig’s explanation that we have free speech in the realm of politics, but we don’t have free speech in the realm of culture, since corporations now own most cultural content.
Lessig tried to clear the copyright logjam, by taking the Eldred case up to the Supreme Court, and lost the case. Creative Commons is an alternate strategy that bypasses the current extreme copyright policy, by creating a realm of moderate copyright law. Instead of the standard copyright, with “all rights reserved”, an artist publishes work using a license holding “some rights reserved.” For example, there’s a new music licence that forbids copying the entire song, but permits “sampling.”
The Creative Commons project intends to create a new reality in which large quantities of content are protected by more moderate licenses. I think this is a great idea, and will look at Creative Commons license for this blog.
But it’s not enough. More on this in the next post.

As posted in comments to Joi Ito’s blog…
Much of our “electronic democracy” discussion focuses on processes of organizing, deliberation and decision-making.
However, in the US, an elected representative spends 80% of his or her time — not deliberating, or organizing, or making laws — but raising money.
Any proposal for new ways of doing things needs to take money into account.
Recently, I heard of a new system for online political organizing, which was essentially multi-level marketing. A central organization sends financial targets to regional organizations, which sends targets to local organizations, which raise money and feed the money back up the chain.
Are new proposed mechanisms of organizing cheaper that the methods we have now? If not then we’re stuck in the oligopoly trap.

Last week Thursday, I went to the State House to testify on a bill.
I’m on the board of Campaigns for People, a group that advocates for Campaign finance reform in Texas, and EFF-Austin, a group that advocates for civil liberties related to electronic technology.
There was a bill up for debate in the House to close a loophole in the law on electronic campaign filing.
In Texas, candidates with campaigns of more than $20,000 in contributions are expected to file electronically. But there’s a loophole — candidates can claim an exemption if they don’t use a computer.
The loophole is being abused badly. A candidate with a recent Harvard Law degree claimed the exemption. Several statewide campaigns with over $200,000 in contributions claimed the exemption.
They asked me to come testify at the elections committee hearing. I had never done this before. The hearing room was in the basement of the state house. The inside of the building is clean and looks newly and expensively renovated. There is a large, spiral staircase (in addition to the elevators), spacious halls, rooms with large wooden doors. The halls are full of people walking purposefully.
You show up at the hearing room. The committee is in a row of chairs at the front, with a court reporter taking notes (or whatever they do with current technology). The room is full of politicians, lobbyists, citizens on benches. Young aides flit up and back, carrying slips of paper to the representatives. The committee chair introduces the bill in a ritualistic monotone. Witnesses are called by name, come up to a witness podium and talk for 2-5 minutes. Some simply put down their name in favor or against the bill, but don’t talk. At times, the committee members ask questions of the witnesses.
At the end of the debate period, the committee members share some nearly-telepathic communication about what to do. They then vote to pass, defer consideration, or (what’s the opposite of pass?) the bill. The chair calls the role in ritual monotone. Most of the time, apparently, they hear testimony, defer to the next meeting, and vote at the next meeting.
I spoke after Fred Lewis, the Campaigns for People director. Fred gave many examples of how the loophole was being abused. I talked about how it was reasonable to expect candidates to have internet access; how important it was for citizens to have campaign contribution data to analyze before the election; and the value of bringing the Texas campaign system up to the high standard set by other state egovernment initiatives.
The bill that I testified for turned out to be the anticlimax of the day.
The previous bill on the schedule sparked a contentious debate, fueled by Dallas ethnic politics. That bill proposed that people who help voters fill out absentee ballots sign their names, and made it a misdemeanor or felony for various aspects of co-ercing someone to vote against their will.
The reason for the proposal was allegations of abuse, in which aggressive campaign workers would intimidate elderly and infirm voters. One of the members of the committee, an African American woman, had two staffers indicted for election fraud, for their assertive practices with absentee voting (the charges were dismissed).
The white legislator proposing the bill gave a folksy talk, quoting “the famous philosopher, Popeye”, and highlighting the penalties for the “four nasties”, like helping someone vote without their consent, and mailing the ballot without consent.
Two of the African American committee members gave impassioned speeches about the way that the black community cares for its elderly and sick members, unlike white folk. They linked the issue to the voting rights act, efforts to end the poll tax, and other struggles to get black people the right to vote. They noted that the election commission investigated allegations in the African American South Dallas community, and didn’t head up to North Dallas to investigate election practices among white people.
By the time Bill 999 came up, it was 5:30pm. Most of the people in the audience, including folks who came to testify on 999 had left. Fred Lewis talked, I talked, and a member of the Ethics commission talked briefly about the system. The bill was deferred for a vote next week. Fred believes it will pass.
The CFP folks are asking me back to testify for the Senate version of the bill next week.

Ross Mayfield has an intriguing blog post on the role of representation in “emergent democracy.”
The more technoutopian visionaries of “emergent democracy” imagine a world where representatives go away, and citizens vote on all of the business of government.
Ross is notes that any population significantly larger than 150 is going to have a variety of groups with disparate interests and opinions, and there will need to be intermediate layers to negotiate those differences.
The fascinating question is how that structure might be different than the current system of representation.
This discussion is similar, by the way, to the “disintermediation” conversation in the early days of the commercial internet. Visionaries speculated that the internet would disintermediate transactions; customers would buy everything directly from the manufacturer. Didn’t happen. The role of the intermediary changes, but there are still middlemen in the picture.

Excellent comment from Antoin O Lachtnain on Joi Ito’s blog.

IT allows information to spread and percolate much faster than was possible before. But good information is only half of good management and good leadership.
The other half is decisionmaking and execution, and this is where the problems arise. Just because there’s a mechanism in an organisation or group for collecting and disseminating information and opinions, it doesn’t mean that there’s a mechanism for making collective decisions and putting them into effect.

The emergent democracy discussion has attracted various criticisms and defenses.
Richard Bennett suggests that the discussion is pointless, because some of the arguments in favor of emergent democracy are fuzzy, and because politicians aren’t paying any attention.

So I’d like to suggest an exercise for our utopian technologists: show how your technology can affect the passage of a legislative bill on a measure close to your heart; then try to make it happen in real life, and analyze why your expected result didn’t materialize.

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Mitch Ratcliffe is encouraged by the focus on new tools, and believes that it is useful and important to discuss and experiment with new tools. His post includes very nice citations and analysis of the affect of new communications technologies throughout history.
These criticisms and defenses make the discussion sound more monolithic than it actually was.
My perception is that the “emergent democracy” discussions included a variety of opinions, including:

1. a preference to focus on new tools to facilitate internet discussion and organizing
2. a history of technology approach; identifying opportunities for new technologies to empower more people to influence and transform the political process
3. a techno-determinist faith that the internet, blogging, etc. will somehow cause the emergence of an artificial intelligence that will govern us better than a human system of communication, power, and compromise
4. a belief in the internet as a medium for direct democracy, which will replace and transcend representative democracy

Personally, I agree with the first two points, and disgree with the second two.
Even though I disagree with some of the more radical AI-inflected approaches, I agree strongly with Mitch that it’s valuable to discuss the concepts and experiment with the tools.
And I disagree strongly with Bennett, who argues that it’s pointless to experiment since politicians aren’t listening yet. If these processes aggregate votes and dollars, politicians will start paying attention.

Good article by Ross Mayfield on the emergent democracy discussion.
Ross envisions internet tools that decrease the cost of expressing opinions and building coalitions:

If simple tools could decrease the cost of organization as well as enable a transactional norm between organizations, a new form of pluralism could arise. Emergent Pluralism depicts a society whose members who have institutional loyalties to easily formed issue groups that have direct interaction their elected representatives and the media….
Emergent Pluralism arises when groups form at a low cost. MoveOn is an early example of an influencing group that leverages low cost communication and collaboration. As the cost for forming issue groups falls, expect similar groups and coalitions to form around otherwise less fundable issues. Issue groups will influence decision makers by voicing opinion (in blogspace, mass media, direct appeals, activism) and as constituencies (aggregated to lobby, mobilized to vote or petition).

Looking at it this way, the internet has the same effect on politics as Ebay has on the market for used chatchkes. Suddenly, it becomes easier and faster to find fellow supporters for political ideas, just as it becomes possible to find buyers for used lunchboxes. New leaders will emerge, just as new businesses and market segments form with Ebay as the backbone.
Ross makes a good point that political leaders will need change in order to garner support from these new kinds of groups.

Political leaders and lobbying organizations that develop interfaces to engage these issue groups and are responsive stand to benefit by being better informed than through pure polling and gaining constituents.

This suggests a need to educate politicians and non-profits about ways to benefit from these new citizen organizing tools. I’ve been getting more involved in several activist groups, and I’ve been pretty impressed with how elitist the groups are. Even nominally populist groups think of themselves as insiders whose main mission is to influence other insiders, and they’re rather suspicious of citizen input.
They will learn… politicians in democracies do catch on to new ways to attract voters and donations.