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

[Thomas Beckett <thomas AT tbeckett.com>]

I think this discussion has reached the point where it needs to be
conducted over a few beers.  However, I'm really enjoying the level of
thought and quality of expression that has characterized the "debate"
online.  Which is one of the great things about list discussions as
opposed to barroom debate:  you don't miss any juicy parts even if you
have to get up to go to the bathroom.  

TaB

"j. alfred prufrock" wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
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