Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["j. alfred prufrock" <ifoufo AT yahoo.com>]

despite the caveats about my analogies, or maybe in spite of them, i
don't know if i got across what i was trying to communicate or not,
which was, the street ethics of the net, as they are expressed socially,
and whether one agrees with them or not, do not jive with the notion of
intellectual property.

i placed warnings on my analogies, which may have been interpreted as my
opinions and i want to make it clear i don't have opinions that are
suggested by my analogies on this issue, because analogies are just
that, things with some passing resemblance to another, but never an
exact model of the referent, as i think we all can see.

my personal -feelings- are more towards wanting to get paid for my work
in proportion to its benefit to others, as long as i live in a society
of mercantilism, monetarism, and exchange. but that's an emotional and
moral issue. as a legal issue, one needs more objective criteria. one
must heed the force of social convention when addressing the law. as
long as machines serve files when asked, social convention on the net is
stacked against the concept of intellectual property. i have opinions
about what drives these social conventions, but i don't believe they are
germane to the issue at hand.

in looking over the responses to my analogies, i notice several things.

1) there seems to be some equating of pride and experience with talent.
i don't question that there are web designers with a lot of pride and
experience. but i'm not sure pride and experience are necessarily
proprietary. as for talent, that word is one philosophically charged hot
potato.

2) i could publish a harry potter book under my name and no one would
buy it because it would not be a harry potter book. harry potter is
famous because his books are distintive enough to be uncopyable without
recognition. harry potter, whatever subject of debate and doubt he is in
the literary world (and, thanks mostly to interest in potter, a whole
academic cottage industry has now sprung up around the criticism of
adolescent fiction), is far more original than even the greatest of web
designs.

3) there seems to be some equating of a positive feeling of creativity
with property. i don't question that there are web designers with
enthusiasm for their work, and employers who appreciate their
enthusiasm. but i'm not sure enthusiasm or appreciation is proprietary.

4) there seems to be some equating of intellectual property with honor,
faith, and honesty. that assumes a conclusion in order to support it.

5) there seems to be an equating of web development with individual
character. i think this is pride again. i don't question that there are
proud web developers.

6) my purpose in citing open source, or maybe i should have cited the
-free software- movement, was to show that there are things on the net
at least as difficult as web design, if not more so, for which there is
strong support in what is seen as intellectual 'freedom' vs property.
the net means you get respect if you give your efforts away, and less so
if you charge. i'm not endorsing this view. i'm stating that it's a
social fact of life.

7) my point has nothing to do with attribution. attribution is another
issue. if i copied your site and attributed you, i'd bet you'd still be
steamed. my question has to do with what -objective- reasoning do web
designers advance in defense of intellectual property, that is,
reasoning that is not founded on emotive premises such as pride and
enthusiasm for their work?

8) however one feels about them, plagiarists do build on the work of
others. 'theft' is an enterprise. for a possible foothold, could web
designers show how plagiarism of their effort results in more work, or a
real, rather than potential, devaluation of their work, without
resorting to conjecture?

9) i know the arts and crafts market well. i lived for two years as a
fine painter. i lived for two years as a graphic designer. i've owned a
gallery and run another. i have a six digit appraised folk art
collection. 98% of the arts and crafts world are people copying other
people and passing it off as their own. indeed, if you copy another
person's art or craft, you'd -better- pass it off as your own. i
actually thought of using this analogy first, but i didn't think anyone
would get it.

10) as an it consultant who's worked big projects at a half dozen
fortune 100 companies, i can attest that the majority of software in
used in corporate america is copied and unlicensed. i know that there
are places where this is not the case (to name one: sas; there's no
piracy at sas because anyone can get whatever they want there without a
bean counter screaming about it) and i also know those places are the
exceptions. i know of companies that head up industry anti-piracy task
forces, but for whom piracy is rampant within their own organizations.
most huge corporations got that way by -not- paying for what they use to
create their products whenever possible. they continue to get away with
it because they have more methods to create plausible deniability than
you can shake a stick at.

11) microsoft -has- released more than one os based on the work of other
companies, did not attribute it, and claimed it as their own. microsoft
is probably also the unpitied victim of more piracy than any other
company.

12) i know of plenty of people who had a hand in gnu who were not
attributed. i don't know about linux. linux seems like pretty much of a
gnu knock off, however much torvalds says otherwise in his many speaking
engagements as 'hobbyist'. but the early days of gnu development were
pretty free wheeling. if having some hand in the early phases of gnu
were like hiv, half of everyone who'd ever used fidonet would have aids.

13) i haven't seen that the la design firm is representing anything but
a lot of marketing mush. i don't see the wilmington company representing
anything at all. i see them hosting a knockoff site.

14) why is the cutting and pasting of javascripts any different from any
other facet of cutting and pasting of web designs? if i plagiarize
multiple sources rather than copying one, am i less culpable?

15) web sites are not women. copying is not rape. i don't want to
entertain that as an analogy.

16) the reaper has not anywhere nearly been paid for desert storm. over
1.6 million people have died as a result of sanctions. i don't want to
entertain that as an analogy. and trust me, you don't want to discuss it
with me.

17) i suppose i asked for it to see my hyperbole trumped with allusions
to rape and war.

18) i cite the cannibalism of previous projects in a company not to
establish a criterion for ownership, but to illustrate that profiting
off the work of others is de rigueur in networld.

19) i distinguish a pro by whether he codes by hand or not. that make
me an anachronim, like some guy in 1985 who says real programmers don't
use a mouse. i'm a network hardware systems management programmer who
web enables his offering as an asp. i don't use an ide in the
conventional sense (and as a result, reusable software doesn't mean
-beans- to me :-). when i create html, i use a text editor, not a
layout generator, albeit a very advanced text editor. but i use plenty
of image manipulation tools. i use them as creatively as they allow.
and i wind up with results that seem highly similar to stuff everywhere
because the range of what can be created with this junk is fairly
limited in relation to most other media. however original the creators
of the sites which were hijacked -feel-, please don't tell me the
sites are all that unique. i'm not -that- naive. only a little.

20) if you've looked at hundreds of sites to understand where to draw
the line in developing a site, you may understand that the tenets of
good web design are not a proprietary secret or a matter of 'talent'.

i'm not trying to insult us. i'm trying to understand through all the
smoke what our context is for insisting on web design as is stands today
as intellectual property. if our context is how proud we are of our
work, or how mad we are that someone else can appropriate it, then we
have no credibility. if we're to quantify our position of site-jacking
to be injury as taking the 'high road', then we'll need something more
than just a feeling of injury. we'll need to be able to demonstrate
actual damages. i haven't heard a convincing case for that yet. and i
have an interest in being convinced. what about folks who have no such
interest?

thank you for not killing me. i put your speed racers, what's left of
'em, back where i found 'em.

chris calloway