Copyrighteous

On Wednesday, I walked into a tree branch. In what is apparently not an unusual turn of events, I ended up with a corneal abrasion (i.e., a laceration on my eyeball). It has hurt my ability to do work because it hurts intensely when I try to, well, look at things.

My friend asked me what kind of tree it was. Interestingly, while my eyes (or my right eye at the very least) was open when I ran into the tree, I don't recall getting a good look at it.

Recently, I had an opportunity to publicly discuss my projects around definitions of freedom for creative work with Lawrence Lessig at a workshop at Wizards of OS. In particular, we talked about my article Toward a Standard of Freedom in which I advance a call for a list of essential freedoms, a definition of free culture or content, and a goal around which a social movement for free creative works can be based.

At WOS, Lessig and I agreed that its likely that, eventually, some standard (or standards) of freedom will take hold. Like me, Lessig seems to think that this is a good thing. We both agree that there will be, and should be, competing definitions of freedom, competing social movements, and a long conversation about what essential freedom really to creative works is before we get there.

Our most fundamental differences seem to stem from a disagreement about who gets to define freedom or, perhaps more precisely, who the communities of producers should listen to in order to find out what essential freedoms in the domain of different types of creative works are.

Lessig is extremely reticent to make any claims about what essential freedoms might be: he does not want to speak for creative communities that he does not intimately understand. While he seems to be suspect of any project making normative claims in this regard, he disagrees most strongly with projects like mine that offer definitions of free content and expressions that are intended to be applied broadly and outside of the explicit domain of the definition's initiators recognized experience (in our case, online encyclopedias and software).

Lessig explained that he trusts musicians -- and in particular, Gilberto Gil, the progenitor of the CC Sampling license -- when it comes to defining essential freedoms for music. Similarly, he trusts programmers -- and in particular, Richard Stallman -- when it comes to defining essential freedom for software. Since Richard and I are less accomplished, less well known, and less experienced musicians, Lessig feels most comfortable erring in favor of Gil where there's a disagreement between us about the scope of essential freedom for music. While his is a convincing argument, I disagree with Lessig's position for a series of reasons I'll try to discuss here.

First, it is important to remember that Gilberto Gil does not represent all musicians. There are many artists and musicians who support my definition. There are many (and probably more if the CC license usage statistics are any indication) who support Gil's lower base-line. It's worth remembering that, even though we disagree, both Gil and I are offering controversial and extreme positions. Today, most creators think that giving away their work at no cost, even non-commercially and barring derivatives, is crazy.

To illustrate why this is not a problem, we can look again to free software. In the free software community, we see that Richard Stallman does not speak for the programming community at large when it comes to defining essential freedoms to code. In the mid-eighties, Stallman spoke for himself and a tiny handful of like-minded others. Today he speaks for many more but it's still a tiny fraction of all programmers. It's hard to remember when you're down in the trenches but the idea that software should be free remains a marginal and kooky idea to this day. Due to the hard work of the free software movement, many people have adopted Stallman's definition of essential freedom for software and many more will. But it is not mainstream and it didn't get here by being so.

Setting an ethical standard and a goal for a social movement should not be about being popular. It should be about describing an ideal. It should be about standing up to injustice. It should be about answering the question, "what sort of world do I want to live in?" Not only is this process not a popularity contest, it will, in all likelihood, stand to make one very unpopular.

Being respected or seen as an expert within a field will help with the adoption of one's ideal. Programmers trusted Richards Stallman because he'd written large parts of the very popular programming tools like GNU Emacs and GCC. However, it wasn't from his experience in programming that this insight into the importance of software freedom stemmed. It was from his desire to be a good, ethical, neighbor and member of a technical community. To this day, most great programmers continue to disagree with Richard.

Second, I'm interested not only in talking about the ability of authors to choose how their works are used but in the rights of readers. You don't need to have a platinum album under your belt to have an informed and important opinion about how music should be heard, experienced and distributed. Lessig's current push for a "Read-Write Culture" is very fixated on creators and re-mixers. That's only one important piece of the community that frames and deals with this problem.

Third, while I agree with Lessig that discussions around definitions of free culture must happen separately in each separate artist community, I see several compelling reasons why a single definition of freedom may be a very good idea both tactically and philosophically. For example, it provides a common rallying cry around which different creative groups can collaborate and it mirrors the common treatment of different types of works in current IP systems. More importantly, there are fundamental similarities between information goods and the way they are created, distributed, and consumed on computers and in digital networks. I've highlighted this before in quoting Eben Moglen on the ethics of creating artificial scarcity in goods with zero marginal cost.

As a final note, it's worth stating that one doesn't need to feel that all works should be free to support a definition of freedom. Richard Stallman provides a great example of this. Stallman doesn't think that works of opinion or works that are designed primarily to entertain need to be free. However, he does believe that the term "free" should refer to a fixed set of freedoms so that he can take such a position. Without a definition of "free," a position on what should or should not be "free" is impossible.

I believe that freedom to distribute and produce information goods like art and content and software are embedded in a set of freedoms and rights for both the producers and consumers. I think that to some degree (and quite probably a less extensive degree), Lessig agrees with this. Unlike Lessig, I don't believe that one needs extensive expertise in the creation of a particular type of creative good to make true statements about what is ethical or unethical in the production, distribution, and control of it. To use admittedly extreme analogies, you don't need to be a slave owner (or slave for that matter) to say that slavery is wrong. You don't need to be a farmer to make arguments against or in favor of vegetarianism or in favor of free range animals. I don't believe you have to be a technologist to claim that certain freedoms to technology are essential. I don't believe that you need to be an musician (successful or not) to make claims about essential rights to music.

I welcomed the conversations and challenges that Lessig offered and it was encouraging to see agreement on the process of discussion and debate going forward. After the workshop, Lessig suggested that we continue the conversation. I look forward to doing just this in other venues and in other ways.

My joint workshop with Lawrence Lessig at Wizards of OS went, in my opinion, extremely well. The worst hitch was an unfortunate series of events that conspired to keep Vera Franz from attending and moderating the session as planned. Paul Keller, who was supposed to participate in the panel, graciously (and capably) moderated in her place.

The panel allowed Lessig and I to talk openly and publicly about about our disagreements for the first time while also highlighting the many places where we speak with one voice. The conversation managed to be both positive and productive without papering over issues.

I usually like to post talk notes and slides after each speaking engagement. However, our WOS meeting was a "workshop" so I have nothing prepared to present here. I have, however, seen two write-ups in the press:

• This article in IP Watch
• This piece in Heise (German)

If someone has a recording, tell me how I might get a copy.

One small note: I am quoted in IP watch as saying that most CC works are under the most restrictive licenses and that there has been no shift toward less restrictive licenses with time. Mia Garlick has pointed out that the latest license usage statistics, based on admittedly imprecise linkback data, show a several percentage point decrease in the usage of licenses that block commercial use and derivatives -- when expressed as a fraction of the total number of works under CC licenses. The restrictive licenses are still the most popular but it was incorrect to say that there is no evidence of any progress whatsoever toward more free licenses.

Tomorrow, I will post a summary and response to one of the points that Lessig and I talked most about.

Over the past few months, I've dealt with something of a blog spam nightmare on Copyrighteous: my blog running the PyBlosxom weblog software.

Wiser and less stubborn individuals might given up on either PyBlosxom or the ability to receive public comments. However, I find PyBlosxom unique in its flexibility and great ReStructured Text support and am always frustrated with others' blogs that don't accept comments. At the end of the day, I couldn't bring myself to part with either.

Historically, my blogspam protection has been to use a simple weak CAPTCHA and to have my blog software email me each time a comment is successfully submitted so that I can (with a built-in macro in mutt) delete each spam comment that slips in. This has worked well for the last couple years.

This summer, Mika pointed out that my blog was full of Chinese link spam that I had not noticed or been notified about. Around the same time, I realized that my website had been dealt a massive spam penalty by Google and was basically not showing up in any search results.

I have spent a significant amount of time over the last month repairing the damage and working to prevent it from reoccuring. I'm documenting this process here in the hopes that it might save other time and energy.

Upon reflection, the situation could have been prevented the in three relatively easy ways -- all of which I have now implemented.

• Had the PyBlosxom comment.py plugin's mail function been working properly, I would have known that I was being spammed.
• Had PyBlosxom been configured to only make blog entries (and not comments) indexable by search engines, Google and others never would have seen the link spam.
• Had I installed a stronger CAPTCHA, I might have blocked the spam from being submitted in the first place (although at the expense of the participation in comments by visually impaired users).

A month or so, hours of work, and a Google reinclusion request later, my website is beginning to show up in search entries again. Hopefully this message will help save others from a similar fate.

Fixing PyBlosxom's Comment Notification

The most critical problem was a bug in PyBlosxom's contributed comment.py plugin and its comment notification system. In short, the email based comment notification system failed silently if the body of the email -- which included the full text of the comment -- included any non-ASCII UTF-8 encoded text.

I've filed a bug against PyBlosxom and included a patch that fixes this issue. However, since this is a rather critical problem and because PyBlosxom releases tend to be few and far between, it might be worth patching your system now. My patch is against version 1.3 but can easily be modified and applied to version 1.2.

Hiding Comments from Search Engines

The major reason that the successful spam became a problem was that it triggered Google's abuse detector, resulted in a spam penalty, and made all of the (non-spam) material on my website more difficult for others to find. A simple way to prevent this is to hide all comments from the search engines.

I've done this by creating a new PyBlosxom flavor that shows comments (and allows them to be input) which is not indexed by search Engines and to remove comments altogether from the default indexable flavors.

To do this, I removed all of the comment-* templates from html flavor and created a new flavor called comment.flav that included the comment templates. I also had to make the comment submit action point to the new flavor and to change the "Comments: N" link to point instead to .comment flavor rather than the .html. The rest of the template is simply symbolic links to the the HTML template.

The next step is to ensure that the comment flavor is not indexed by search engines. I found two ways of doing this and did both. The first was to add a "no index" meta tag to the header of each .comment page. It looked like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

This is necessary because the robots.txt standard, the normal way to tell search engines not to index a page, does not support wildcards.

Luckily, Google (and others I imagine) do support an extension to Robots.txt that allows you to use wildcards. To take advantage of this, I created a robots.txt for mako.cc that blocks indexing all of the comment flavor. The following robot.txt did the trick for me:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /copyrighteous/*.comment$

An Improved CAPTCHA

Ultimately, the best solution would be to keep the spam from showing up on the blog at all.

The only decent PyBlosxom CAPTCHA is the "nospam" plugin by Steven Armstrong. It is a simple image-based CAPTCHA and I was running it when I was spammed. It uses PIL but generates purely number-based strings and does some minimum obfuscation. Basically, spambots were able to break the CAPTCHA and toward the end, I was receiving thousands of pieces of a blog spam a day.

I've incorporated the PIL image generation code from Mediawiki's ConfirmEdit/FancyCaptcha extension into nospam.py with this patch which I have also sent to Steven Armstrong -- nospam.py's original author. It's much stronger.

Apologies, of course, go to all of my vision impaired users. Image-based CAPTCHAs really are evil. In this situation though with many thousands of attempts of a day, the alternative is that I will turn off comments altogether -- the standard (and poor) lesser of two evils argument.

Ultimately, I will write a python implementation of a new strong text-based CAPTCHA I've invented that uses commonsense knowledge and pulls off some cool data acquisition in the process. I presented this project at the Wikimania Hacking Days and at a Media Lab open house for AAAI 2006 where I got universally positive and useful feedback. CAPTCHA inventor and recent genius-grantee Luis von Ahn seemed to like the idea too. I'll write more about this on another day though.

Could Debian developer and Catalan free software translator Jordi Mallach be living a secret life as champion Russian figure-skater Evgeny Plushenko?

Recent photographic evidence uncovered by Mika seems to support such a theory. Decide for yourself:

I'm in Berlin for just over 48 hours to give a workshop at Wizards of OS 4.

The workshop is Free Content Licensing: Success, Challenges and the Way Forward and will be a conversation between myself, Lawrence Lessig, and Paul Keller from Waag Society and Creative Commons Netherlands.

When I first published Toward a Standard of Freedom (my first article that was critical of Creative Commons) a couple years ago, I received an email from someone at Creative Commons within two hours of posting the note. The email pointed out that I had incorrectly licensed my work as the CC license I applied to my essay had the old mailing address for CC. I thanked the mail's author for pointing out my mistake but asked if, perhaps, she or someone else at CC had anything to say about the content of the article itself which was, after all, about her organization's work. I never received a reply.

To date, I have not been able to engage in meaningful public discussion of my criticism of CC with CC, although I have tried several times.

I'm thrilled that Volker Grassmuck and the Wizards of OS organizers have been able to put together this opportunity to start what I hope will be a longer conversation with people at CC about some of what some of us perceive as tactical shortcomings of the CC approach. It can only make our movements stronger.

My philosopher Mika says:

These are robots that can walk through crowds without bumping into people. I almost feel that humans need to develop that skill rather than robots.

But nonetheless, it may someday become useful to have such robots.

I've upgraded Planet (the software that runs Planet Debian) to version 2.0. It's been a while since I touched the planet software so many issues that had annoyed users of planet should now be remedied by this upgrade. I think people will very happy with the upgrade.

In the process, I really screwed up planet for the moment. New posts from the last day or so may not be showing up. Other people may appear to have flooded planet when in fact they've done nothing at all. This is not their fault but I've had a hard time going through and picking up the pieces left by the upgrade. Please just bear with me.

If you notice a little bit of funkiness in Planet Debian in the next day or so, please wait a day or two (or a post or two) before contacting me to debug the problem. Thanks for your patience everyone.

If you have questions, don't hesitate to get in contact with me.