Reflecting on the Definition of Definition

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.

2 Replies to “Reflecting on the Definition of Definition”

  1. Mako, your ideas are good enough without needing to overtly situate them in the negative space of Lessig’s crusade.

    I was at this talk and you, or your words on the matter, didn’t come up as a point of contention or overt difference either directly or indirectly. Put simply, you were far being from on Lessig’s radar.

    It was a general talk to an audience of a thousand largely German hackers with a similarly largely self-professed ignorance about the intricacies of licensing cultural content outside of the scope of computer programs. The want to draw relations, analogous and legal, between the fields of code and art, framed the basis of his talk.

    Lessig talked about the relative “freeness” of culture, covering various open-source licenses as the context for a comparitive discussion. He thinks we need to move beyond the the current
    copyright diametric of either 95 Years restrictive remix-unfriendly copyright or giving away work wholesale. To remedy this he said he’s produced a licensing infrastructure which priviledges the current needs of creation and distribution, particularly where digital production is concerned.

    To make his point clear he drew a comparison of open computer source-code licenses: those of the BSD, MIT, Apache licenses and the GNU GPL. He talked about the relative need for a license that has similar objectives to the GPL, but covered music/text/images; a license that comes with a social contract: modify, distribute, resell as long as the copyright license itself is distributed with the work and that the work is, in turn, shared on under the same terms. This, he said, is vital if cultural production is to discourage “freeloading”; if the work was to be released under a ‘truly free’ license equivocal to the BSD or moreso, the Apache 2.0 license (no restrictions on use or distribution at all other than the license remains intact), others (he used Sony in analogy) could take the work and release it without further making it available and even distributing the work under a new license altogether. This, he said, would give artists little motivation to create – in the sense of contributing to culture – and so
    traditionally restrictive licensing models like those that dominate cultural production presently, would continue to throttle cultural production.

    He pointed out that 80% of all opensource software is released under a GPL license and that this is proof that a ‘share-alike’ approach to licensing works; both in that it protects creator copyright while encouraging contribution to culture more broadly.

  2. Julian, I also watched the entire talk. While he did not mention me by name, the last quarter of the talk he talked about how “some people offer definitions of freedom” and how we did not need these definition. Erik Moeller and myself are the some people that he was talking about.

    Lessig and I had a “debate” at the WoS conference in September. With his comment that, “we do not need definitions of freedom” Lessig was very implicitly responding to me. The first question by Aaron Swartz did mention me by name.

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