Copyrighteous

A number of people in the Open Access movement are up in arms because a large publishing group just hired Eric Dezenhall, a man known as "the pit bull of PR," to tackle the "threat" posed by OA.

One might wonder how a nominally talented PR agent would end with such a horrible reputation. Additionally, since Dezenhall hasn't actually done anything for the publishers yet, one might conclude that the act of hiring "the pit bull of PR" might have been a bad PR move in and of itself.

One of my pet peeves is people telling a non-native speaker of a language that they have no accent.

Saying that a person has no accent is like saying that they have no temperature. Annoyingly, people frequently say that also.

The solution to a crypto puzzle I helped solve during the MIT Mystery Hunt was "ALMOST PLAGIARIZE DAN BROWN WORK." Seth Schoen did this beautifully with an extremely humorous parody of Dan Brown's Digital Fortress.

His story, Digital Citadel is extremely funny if you are marginally familiar with Dan Brown and his writing style -- and probably even if you are not.

I have not seen a copy of the prize winning entry in the hunt -- a story called The Ikea Code -- but the excerpt I heard was also hilarious.

Yesterday, I received many requests to post pictures of my rather inaccurate globe. I'm pleased to oblige. Please read the summary I posted yesterday for a list of some of the errors you should have little trouble picking out.

You can click on each cropped thumbnail to see much larger, higher resolution versions of the area and the surrounding continent or region.

Enrico suggested that if the globe was manufactutered in China, Taiwan would be the same color as China and Taipei would be marked as a provincial, rather than national capital. Sure enough, I now have both a good idea of the globe's origin plus an idea of how to spell Taipei with an o.

I gave a talk at a the Boston Ruby group last Wednesday. The meeting was generously hosted by the Boston start-up Back Channel Media. On the way out, BCM offered attendees schwag in the form of branded inflatable globes and Slinkies. On Thursday, I suggested to SJ Klein and Seth Schoen that we might be able to use the globe as a research aid during the MIT Mystery Hunt. That seemed like a good idea until they pointed out that there were a few inaccuracies on the map.

Sure enough, a quick glance revealed that:

• Burkino Faso is marked as Upper Volta (it's only been 22 years) with a capital as Duagadougou.
• Rwanda seems to be a small horizontal bar across a country marked both as Ucanda and Buhuno.
• Zimbabn is labeled clearly while Morocco, clearly divided into two countries, is not marked in either of the resulting (and differently colored) states.
• A missing border and a color identical to the ocean (!) renders Egypt completely underwater. Yemen, Iraq, Thailand, Romania, Austria, Croatia, Finland, (whose name is missing), and the eastern quarter of India are better off in that they blend into the ocean but have river colored borders demarcating them from the rest of the sea.
• The Arabian peninsula is host to Qatah, the United Arab Emiraies, and the Saudi capital of Rivaiih.
• A bit to the north, Jurdan borders Irae and Lebanaw.
• The countries Czek and Slovak seem to be located just above Czechoslovakia which, in turn, is just above Huudatn.
• A similar situation happens in Yugoslavia which seems to be next to Monienegro and other more familiar Slavic states.
• Amstercam is right next to the the German city of Roro.
• Swirzerlano sits in the middle of Europe.
• England's Lworpool and Rirmingham are clearly, and clearly incorrectly, marked.
• Both Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States are clearly marked while China, despite having dozens of its cities labeled, is not.
• St. Petersburg seems a full 1000+ kilometers from any body of water and closer to Bellarussian than to a port.
• Lapan shows many cities including Tokya, Kyole, and others -- while most seem to be located somewhere off the coast of Lapan in the Pacific ocean.
• The Korean peninsula contains N. Korea and S. Aurla.
• Myanmar is marked as Burma (although I might forgive that one if I had reason to believe it was intentional).
• Malaysia is labeled Malaskia.
• The continent at the South Pole is proudly marked Tarctica.

Of course, this list is extremely incomplete. I've barely looked at cities, rivers, and even some country names and I've barely looked at the degree to which the cities and labels are correct but incorrectly placed. The full list of errata would, in a manner reminscent of English As She Is Spoke, be very, very, long.

While the globe does not bear any markings of a producer (I wouldn't want to take credit for it either), a group of us suspected that we might be able to find the country of origin by locating the one country that was represented completely accurately.

We couldn't find a single one.

I competed in the MIT Mystery Hunt again this year for Codex (this year, we were Codex Ixtlilxochitl). Codex has improved in the rankings every year. This time, we came in second place solving 106 of 108 puzzles in 40 hours -- only 90 minutes behind Palindrome (this year, they were Dr. Awkward). I'm very much looking forward to helping Codex improve again next year.

Our team has an interesting mix of free software advocates (e.g., myself, Seth Schoen, Don Armstrong, Dave Turner) and a very large contingent from Microsoft. The effect is pretty impressive. I'm looking forward to the days when we work together on much more than just puzzles.

I noticed recently that often had trouble remembering mnemonics. To help remember them, I've started a list of mnemonics that I have trouble remembering on my Wikipedia user page. If there are mnemonics you have trouble remembering, you should leave a comment on my blog or a message on my Wikipedia talk page because it's possible I have trouble with them as well. If I do, I'll add them to my list. If they are not even in Wikipedia's List of mnemonics I can add them so others who forget them also might be able to recall them as well.

One thing I noticed when making the list was that in some situations (e.g., the lists of planets or the hierarchy of the taxonomy in biology), I have no problem remembering the thing that the mnemonics in question are referring to but can't remember the mnemonic itself. Of course, I can sometimes use the referent as a mnemonic for the mnemonic.

Also, since my list is hosted in my user page on Wikipedia, I should also urge you to considering donating to the Wikimedia Foundation to help support the great work they and to insure that they can purchase the bandwidth and servers necessary to keep Wikipedia going.

The previous year saw far too much fighting over who gets to define and control the term free culture. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that these fights conflate a very important discussion about the goals of a set of nascent social movements -- or the lack thereof -- with much less important issues of semantics, definitions, and control over terms. The term is being used in a way that describes a whole lot of projects I support and participate in fully -- and a few I don't. And I think that's OK.

When Erik Möller and I launched the Free Cultural Works Definition (at the time, the Free Content and Expression Definition), we struggled to find a good term for the works that we wanted to liberate. We thought about using the terms content, expression, knowledge, information, art, data and communication but each word seemed to exclude an important body of works or producers. Few musicians we knew thought of their productions as "content" while few encyclopedia writers did not.

The term we liked most was culture: it defines a very broad set of practice and has very positive connotations. Of course, others had already been using the term free culture so we spent some reading up on the term and talking to the people most closely associated with it. Originally, the term seems to have its roots in the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I reread the book to get an idea for exactly what Lessig meant when he used the term but, upon reaching the end, I found myself without a good answer. The book's index included a promising entry for "Free culture, defined" which pointed to a short section in the preface:

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here.

Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. (emphasis mine)

Framed by a negative definition of what free culture is not, Lessig's definition describes the broad space between two unattainable extremes. This resulting ambiguity is fully intended: Lessig has not only spoken out against my particular suggestion but against any definition and the process of offering ex cathedra definitions or goals altogether [1].

In personal conversations about our definition, Lessig was initially very supportive. In fact, it was Lessig who introduced Erik and I to each other and suggested that we work together. What Lessig did disagree with us on however, was calling the definition the Free Culture Definition. I think that Lessig felt some sense of ownership of the term and felt that he and others had defined it and been using it in a way that was broader and incompatible with the definition we were proposing and with any definition of the type of we were suggesting.

Early on, Lessig blessed a group of students to create a Free Culture student movement. Most active now in Harvard Free Culture and Free Culture NYU and but in a handful of other places as well, these groups have been involved in everything from the promotion of transgressive approaches to IP, to speech bubbles, to anti-DRM work, to protecting the right of cereal restaurants to operate. When Erik and I suggested to this group that they might benefit from adopting the Free Cultural Works Definition as a set of explicit ideals or goals for their movement, the larger part of the coalition soundly rejected the idea. Like Lessig, they wanted free culture to refer to wide variety of projects and did not feel good about describing any work by sympathetic parties as "non-ideal."

Erik and I were faced with two choices: we could call our definition the Free Culture Definition and in effect engage in a power struggle with Lessig and with some portion of the free culture student movement or we could pick another term. While we don't like the alternatives as much as free culture, we didn't have a lot of trouble deciding that going with a term like free cultural work or free content and expression was the better choice.

This is why I am a little worried about the recently announced UK-based Free Culture Foundation. I have nothing but respect for the founders (Matt Lee, Tom Chance, and Rob Myers) and trust them to create the type of free culture organization that I would like to see. I am very much looking forward to working closely with them on this project in the future. They seem likely to choose a set of goals and adopt a set of strategies in line with the ones I've argued for. But in that my goals and strategies have run into opposition among many of the most visible people using the term free culture in the past, that's also why I'm a little worried.

SJ Klein and I were recently saying that its time to start naming organizations and projects in this area using only words in dead languages. That way, we can side-step the (unimportant) semantic arguments over who gets to control existing terms and focus on the real goal of building stronger social movements, setting goals that sound as unthreatening to each other as they actually are, and building better tools. Without semantic arguments in our way, we'll be able stronger to build coalitions and work together in all the ways we should be.

In his latest talk Lawrence Lessig spends time defending the use of non-commericial use clauses and goes into detail about how the free culture movement does not need and should not have definitions of freedom. In doing so, he was referring to a public discussion the two of us had most recently in September. While my name was not mentioned until the questions, he implicitly criticized both my freedom definition and my call for any definition at all. As usual, his criticism has made me think a lot about what it is that I'm trying to do.

I've been thinking about a conversation I had with Aaron Swartz recently where he was also criticizing me for focusing too much on definitions. He was skeptical about my assertion that social movements and freedom movements needed "definitions." I thought about it and told him then that I thought I'd been making a mistake by saying I want free culture movements to have definitions. More accurately, what I want are goals, standards, or ideals. I want to be able to say, "music when will be free when every producer can do A, B, and C and every listener can do X, Y, and Z." I want the possibility of a shared utopianism.

I want these kinds of goals because I believe that these images of what what things might be like if we win is what motivates us to win in the first place. I believe that the idea that, "things might be better" is simply never as powerful as a strong, perhaps even unattainable, ideal that challenges people and gives them something to strive for. The leaders of other successful social movements I know can tell you exactly what they are trying to achieve -- although few of them ever will realize it completely. No free culture movement leader can do this with any authority. For reasons I've talked about in the past, I think that fact may ultimately make us less successful.

In the free software movement, our most important goal (free software itself) is documented in the Free Software Definition. Even the most ethically motivated among us aren't perfect -- most of us use some proprietary software -- but we have an ideal to hold our behavior up to and a method by which we can always improve. Inspired by free software, I unimaginatively said that I thought free culture needed a "definition." I probably could have found a better way to describe what I wanted and I'll do so in the future. I suppose I should have thought a little more about the definition of definition.