In the 1994 interview clip below where he discusses the Macintosh, Steve Jobs quotes the line from Picasso where he says "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Jobs then goes on to say, that "we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
As I said in a previous post about Jobs being one of the great leaders of our time, virtually none of the great products of his career were done first by Apple or Pixar or Next. Jobs just applied his sense of style to edit and refine.
Apparently Jobs only believed that permission to steal ideas applied to him. In a widely reported quote from the authorized Walter Isaacson biography that will be released on Monday, Jobs lays into Android
"“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
The iPhone is a great product but it's not perfect and Jobs attitude toward Android is deplorable. We can only hope that Tim Cook sees the stupidity in this approach and finally backs down on this ridiculous patent war.
In the days before the G8 summit in France last week, French president Nicolas Sarkozy decided to invite influential people from the technology and content fields to discuss the role of the internet in society in a forum dubbed eG8. Unfortunately what Sarkozy had in mind was less of an open discussion on modern communications and more of a rubber stamp on his intention to increase control over content and copyright. Sarkozy has been a strong proponent of so-called “three strikes” rules that would ban people from using the net if they are accused of copyright infringement three times.
Note that was accused not convicted. Major media companies have shown no aversion over the past decade to accuse people of theft and infringement often in cases where the appearance of a piece of media was merely incidental such as a radio playing a song in the background of a video on youtube. Companies like Viacom have gone further by suing Youtube for serving up infringing material that in many cases has been posted by agents of Viacom itself for promotional purposes.
The major media companies clearly have no credibility in this game, nor does Sarkozy.
“Now that the Internet is an integral part of most people’s live, it would be contradictory to exclude governments from this huge forum,” said Sarkozy. “Nobody could nor should forget that these governments are the only legitimate representatives of the will of the people in our democracies. To forget this is to take the risk of democratic chaos and hence anarchy.”
Here Sarkozy couldn’t be more wrong. Even in a democracy – or especially in a democracy – government is NOT the sole legitimate representative of the people. The people themselves in a modern country can be a far better representative of their own will than a government that is typically more beholden to huge corporate donors than to its own constituents. To imply otherwise indicates that control is far more important that freedom. Freedom is messy and people like Sarkozy and the heads of big business need to learn to deal with that.
Thankfully not everyone on hand was simply a lacky for Sarkozy and the entrenched incumbents. Among the luminaries participating in eG8 were the great prof. Lawrence Lessig and musician/writer/activist John Perry Barlow. Lessig’s comments about the importance of taking a more hands-off approach to copyright and the internet are in the video at the top of this post.
Barlow was on panel with the French culture minister and the heads of 20th Century Fox, Universal Music France, Bertelsmann, and a French publisher. Those other participants defended the need to protect the works they own, as opposed to created, since none of them are actual creators of anything. They are merely salespeople. After hearing everyone else speak Barlow summed up with the fundamental truth that IDEAS ARE NOT PROPERTY
I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call “intellectual property.” I don’t regard my expression as a form of property. Property is something that can be taken from me. If I don’t have it, somebody else does.
Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the Internet, which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost.
This is a concept that Lessig has also been expressing for many years and it’s one of the driving forces behind creative commons. Unlike tangible property, when someone else uses or expresses your idea, it doesn’t preclude you from using it yourself. What makes it special is what you do with it.
This week’s edition of On the Media features a segment discussing the concept of the “the uncanny valley.” The idea is that if you have a representation of a human that is 50, 60 or even 95 percent correct, people will have no problem recognizing that image as non-human and accepting it.
However, as you get closer to 100 percent, the brain crosses a threshold where the image suddenly shifts from being a representation to something akin to a human with something wrong with it. This is most commonly manifested in modern computer generated graphics. That’s why you can watch something like Avatar, Shreck or Up with no problem. The alien or cartoonish characters are clearly not human. However, when you look at Polar Express, the characters look downright creepy with their dead eyes. This is a movie that falls into the valley.
Most people think about the uncanny valley in terms of technology and how to avoid it. However, it says much more about the human brain and how we perceive the visual inputs that we get. We see something and process it and if it doesn’t meet our expectations we recoil from it. Is this what drives racism? Do we see someone with a slightly different skin tone or nose shape or height and think that they are “broken”? Obviously we can tell that these people are alive and yet it seems that the way we respond is not so very different from the way we recoil in fear or disgust from the artificial characters in video games or movies.
Is it possible that the solution to problem of the uncanny valley is not and should not be with changing technology but rather with understanding ourselves and making changes within?
One of the highlights at the Maker Faire Detroit this past weekend was the life-size mousetrap. Mark Perez spent 15 years building this 50 ton life-size version of the board game. It’s a classic Rube Goldberg device on a huge scale. Check out the video.
Along with the Daily Show and Colbert Report, the Onion is perhaps the best source of political news in America today. The unfortunate irony is that none of the three are actual news sources. While all three are brilliantly funny, the truths that they tell wrapped in satire reveal the true decay of the mainstream media. With the media asking ridiculous questions about Obama’s choices regarding lapel decorations instead of discussing the travesty that is the FISA bill (giving retroactive immunity to phone companies for warrantless wiretaps), we must count on the Onion to reveal the truth about the disaster that has been the shrub presidency. It’s still not to late to impeach!
One of the greatest truth-tellers of the 20th century died last night when George Carlin succumbed to heart failure. Carlin was perhaps of the funniest humorist of our time but he was much more than a comic. He held up a mirror to the world to expose the hypocracy and absurdity of modern life. While some criticised Carlin for the coarse language he often used, it was in fact a tool in his verbal arsenal. One of the long standing topics of his monologues was the euphamism. Carlin was an advocate of calling a spade a spade, not softening shell-shock to battle fatigue and then PTSD. He used language to describe everything from the horror of war, to silliness of the hippy-dippy weatherman, to consumerism, to germs. Carlin has inspired the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The world needs more people willing to stand up speak truth to power in such an eloquent manner.
What do you suppose the chances are that the media will celebrate this truth teller in the way they fawned over Tim Russert last week. Unfortunately that won’t happen even though it should. Carlin provided us with far more reality than Russert ever did. We’ll miss you George.
Do you have too many books laying around that you have already read? Then go check out BookMooch. It is a site created by John Buckman, the founder of MaganTune. It is an online book swap site. You log on create an account and enter a list of books that you want to get rid of. Once you provide your list, you can search for books you want. When you find something, you mooch it. Your name and address is sent to the person who has the book and they send it to you. When someone mooches one of your books you get their name and address and you send the book to them. For each book you send out you get 1 point for domestic shipment or 3 points for overseas. Each point entitles you to mooch a book. There are a few more details and you get points for adding to your inventory. All the details about the points are here. The service is completely free, you just pay the postage to send out your books. There is no charge to receive books. I heard about this on the Inside the Net podcast a couple of weeks ago when they interviewed Buckman. Jules and Sofia immediately signed up and have already mooched and sent several books. This is definitely a very cool service, and a great demonstration of the kind of community that can be created on the net.
There was a time not so long ago when if someone produced a creative work such as a book, movie, a piece of music or any number of other types, they were able to register a copyright on that work and have a monopoly on profiting from that work for a limited number of years. This concept was set down in the US Constitution. This was a good idea, because it encouraged creators to produce new works. They could make a living by producing and selling new works without having to find a patron to support them like artists did prior to that time. By limiting the time of the copyright they were also encouraged to produce new works, because they couldn’t live off the old ones forever. Once the copyright expired, the work would become part of the public domain and anyone could copy it and produce derivative works without seeking permission. This is all perfectly reasonable. However, over the last half century more and more of the creative works have come to be owned and controlled by an increasingly small number of increasingly large companies. Because of their size these companies such as Sony, TimeWarner, Disney, NewsCorp and others have the resources to fund political campaigns and lobbyists. In the last three decades this has resulted in the gradual strangulation of the media commons and the public domain.
They have gotten the copyright laws changed from and opt-in regime to an opt-out regime. Previously a work was public domain unless the creator registered a copyright. Now a work is automatically copyrighted unless the creator puts it into the public domain. The terms of copyrights are now extended beyond all reason as well. At one time, a copyright owned by a company would last for 14 years. The most recent extension in the late ninties has brought that up to 95 years. Individual authors have their lifetime plus 70 years. Coincidentally the last two extensions have occured just as the Disney copyright on Mickey Mouse was about to expire and only after intense lobbying by Disney in congress. These extensions mean that few of the works created in the past century are moving into the public domain. Disney has spent enormous sums of money to strangle the public domain while profiting handsomely from it. Animated movies such as the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Treasure planet are based on stories that are in the public domain.
In an attempt to reverse this trend a few years ago Stanford University Law professor Lawrence Lessig came up with the concept of the creative commons license. A copyright holder has the right to license their works to others while they still control the copyright. What Creative Commons does is provide a series of graduated licenses with various restrictions that creators can use and apply to their works. If someone creates a song or short film, they can apply a creative commons license to it and give it away or sell or do whatever they want. For example you can use the non-commercial, share-alike, attribution license. In this case other people can share your work but they can’t sell or use it for commercial purpose without permission, and they have to provide attribution to where it came from. They can also create derivative works without permission but under the same set of restrictions. If you release a song under this license someone else can remix and share it under the same license but they have to provide attribution to the original creator. There is also a no derivative license, or you can skip the share-alike which allows others to re-distribute derivatives under a different license and so on.
There is one common element to all the creative commons licenses though. If you are redistributing someone else’s work, you cannot add any copy restrictions that weren’t originally there without the creators permission. That means you cannot take a band’s creative commons licensed song and add DRM without asking. This is where the Microsoft Zune that I wrote about the other day comes in. The song sharing feature that will be the main selling point of the Zune explicitly violates the creative commons license. When one Zune owner sends a song to another Zune, a new layer of DRM automatically added to the file before it is sent. This is what prevents the recipient from listening to the song more than three times or for more than three days. It doesn’t matter what the source of the original song was, this DRM layer is added. If I send a song from the band Lorenzo’s Music to another Zune player, DRM is added. About a year ago, the band decided to license all of their music under Creative Commons and make MP3s available for download from their site. It is a violation of their license to added DRM before sharing their music. Of course the RIAA doesn’t care if you violate someone else’s license as long as you don’t even think about violating theirs.
A lot of bands have decided give away their music for free under creative commons because they have realized they can get more fans and exposure and ultimately make more money if more people hear their music. I urge you to find creative commons music and other works and support these artists, and don’t give your money to Microsoft.
There have been some interesting comments on my previous post on Arab Jews. I am by no means a scholar on Middle Eastern history and never meant to imply that. Having said that I think that my knowledge of the region, it’s people and culture surpasses that of most Americans. My post was not meant to be a definitive answer on the subject in any way. In fact it was a fairly simplistic response to a very complex question. I think it was generally accurate as far as it went, but it was definitely not comprehensive. Rather than continuing to pursue the original question, I want to attack it from a different direction.
Why do humans insist on categorizing and dividing everyone? When humans had to catch their food in order to survive and they were under constant threat of either starving or being eaten, it may have made sense to to divide the world in to things that were good to eat and things that you want to avoid. But in the 21st century, it is no longer necessary. We need to stop putting labels on everyone and dividing people into “US” and “THEM”. We are all humans. We all need to learn to live together and stop finding ways to divide ourselves. The reason the original question was so difficult to answer was because with 6.5 billion people on the planet, and endless variations of religions and cultures, you could divide the population into as many categories as there are people. But all this does is drive us all apart instead of pulling us together. In order for our species to survive beyond the next few decades, we need to work together to find solutions to our problems.
Instead of trying to define everyone with labels, we need to move beyond labels. We need to stop being black, white, muslim, jew, christian, hindu and countless other labels. We need to become just humans. We need to stop killing each other because we have different beliefs. Rather the day to day survival of each person as an individual, we face the threat of making this planet uninhabitable to all of us as a species. We potentially face our extinction. In light of some of the things that humans have done in the past, it might be debatable whether we even should survive. But if we are going to survive we need to refocus, and start thinking of ourselves as part of the human family. We are all individuals and we all have our unique personalities. This is a good thing. However, we also all have a lot in common. Let’s forget the labels. It doesn’t matter any more.
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