Information Money and Gold as DRM

Something that has bothered me for some time has been the insistence on the gold standard by what I can only describe as the twin cults of Rothbard and Rand. This is just a rambling note of some of my thoughts on the matter – they are freely given and probably have the same value.

This gold standard cult became more apparant to me when I was rereading some of my cybernetics books by Norbert Wiener. Something that both Wiener and Friedrich Hayek were deeply sceptical of, was the use of mathematics in the social sciences. It was why Wiener refused to develop applications of his techniques to economics. This has been done today, to great distress for the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and the popular author and trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The Ax at the Root of Originality

I speak here with feeling which is more intense as far as concerns the scientific artist than the conventional artist, because it is in science that I have first chosen to say something. What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, whereever it may be seen. Moreover, I protest, not only as I have already done against the cutting off of intellectual originality by the difficulties of the means of communication in the modern world, but even more against the ax which has been put to the root of originality because the people who have elected communication as a career so often have nothing more to communicate.

– Norbert Wiener, from the Human Use of Human Beings

I feel like there is an ax at the root of originality in our world… and it grieves me deeply.

Then They Came…

They came first for the casinos,

and the gaming bootleggers cheered, as their biz had no competition.

Then they came for the dolls and child avatars,

and the bootlegging ageplayers cheered, as their biz had no competition.

Then they came for the ad farmers,

and the bootleggers cheered, as they continued to flood XStreet, SL groups and members with notecards and IMs full of copybotted merchandise.

Then they came for the Openspace owners,

and the bootleggers cheered, as customers got fleeced again by spurious grid operators running on Opensim.

Then they came for camping bots,

and the bootleggers cheered, for search was still gamed by camping chairs and copybot continued unrelenting,

Then they came for the adult business,

and the bootleggers cheered, as the small weapons dealers and other mature and adult business had to decide to close or move out of private rental estates or mainland malls to “Ursula” continent. (more)

Then the government regulators came for Second Life and other virtual worlds,

and by that time nobody was left to speak up in SL, as there were only bootleggers left.

The picture is the wall in Hamburg on Herbertstrasse in the Reeperbahn. It was erected by the Nazis in 1933, so that they could “protect” the public from deviant behaviour – prostitution.

As you can see, it is still there today. The prostitutes like the wall, and become quite aggressive when women pass the wall, or tourists without wanting to pay for sex enter the street and gawk. (Women aren’t actually banned, but the sign says so – the police discourage women entering) Let me also stress that there is far more prostitution outside this area – it has not kept it in at all.

Remember that, in Amsterdam as a contrast, there is no such wall in their redlight district, and tourists pass through it every day without issues. I’ve walked through it myself as a tourist, with no women throwing things at me.

Remember this when you support an adult continent in Second Life. Do we want that kind of society? Do we want to emulate that? Wasn’t Second Life about being a better world?

There is a better way.

Remixing my thoughts about Remix, the book

Remix is a deeply important work, but I feel in some aspects, it is also flawed. In the spirit of the “pros”, despite my being just an amateur, and in light of the current blogging over Lessig’s influence in the early days of Second Life, I’d prefer to write my original thoughts in response to this book rather than a boring review.

It works from the premise of some quotes of John Phillip Sousa.

“When I was a boy… in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cords will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of the man when he came from the ape.”

In todays digital culture, we don’t have “professionals” producing all the content. Some creators of original art are “pros”, yes.  Today’s world is no more short of singers or musicians than in Sousa’s day. They merely have gained access to a worldwide audience. Today we are better at recording our culture than ever before.

And all too often, those “pros” are trampled on by the big Middlemen, such as the record companies. It is getting harder and harder to tell the difference between a “professional” and an “amateur” in today’s market. A good deal of this has to do with the amateurs learning how to use the same tools as the pros, and the wide distribution of free software, giving inexpensive tools to creators.

We have these middlemen who claim to represent the interests of creators (they often, in fact frequently, don’t) and their legal organisations stomping their feet at the sharing communities, who are not all blameless either. Lessig is 100 percent correct to say that turning a child sharing art and music into a criminal is wrong. I think after that point, is where I stopped agreeing.

I think he missed the point that Sousa was trying to make. In Sousa’s world, people learned how to play musical instruments. Indeed, this revolution in music began before the invention of the record player. It started with the invention of the printing press. It gave us the book, and freed us from the tyranny of the scribe to pass our oral and written stories and histories down to us. Till we invented the publisher, anyway.

A second revolutionary invention in the arts was the invention of the camera, when artists started to believe that modernist dogma that there was no need to learn how to paint representational art anymore. The camera could do it all. How the 3d artist has turned that one on its head! We 3d artists use programs that simulate reality to create art. And these days, they are becoming affordable. We’ve turned the camera quite literally on its head and freed ourselves from the last restriction of the camera. Now we use cameras to create source material to feed into 3d programs. The real world is going into the digital paintbrush to become the paint. Not only that, mathematical algorithms can simulate much that is natural. Think fractals.

It is just as flawed to not teach your child how to play a musical instrument. It is just as flawed to not teach your child how to paint. It is terribly flawed to not teach your child how to sculpt. It matters not at all if your child never grows up to be another Leonardo da Vinci or a Michelangelo. What matters is that your child learned how to better use their senses to be more critically observant of the real world in all its un-Platonified messy fractal-patterned splendor. If that is the only lesson they came away with, that is enough.

I point out a most fantastic article about the arts and criticism on Ars Technica – Hypercritical. Read it. It’s important.

http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2009/05/hypercritical.ars

A very important quote from that article that struck me:

As far back as I can remember, I was told I would grow up to be an artist. By age six, my obsessively detailed renderings of Mechagodzilla, et al. were already drawing attention from adults. By the time I was eight years old, my parents had been persuaded by teachers and friends to enroll me in private art lessons.

I recall the informal “admissions test” with my first art instructor. A scale model of a bull was placed in front of me on a table and I was asked to draw it. The plastic bull was a faithful reproduction, full of muscles and knobby joints. It was an ugly, forlorn thing, far removed from my normal subject matter. After a few minutes, the resulting drawing was roughly in proportion, the details were well represented, and the perspective was pretty close. I was in.

Thus began eight years of regular art instruction. I progressed from pencils and pastels to watercolors and acrylics, and finally to oils. The content was mostly classical: lots of still lifes and landscapes. Meanwhile, back at home, I slowly covered my bedroom walls (and some of the ceiling) with colored-pencil and chalk-pastel recreations of Larry Elmore and Keith Parkinson book covers, fantasy calendar art, and as much imported Japanese animation as I could get my pre-Internet-suburban-child’s hands on.

I enjoyed both the process and the results. But long before my art lessons stopped around age sixteen, I knew I would never be a professional artist. Partly, this was just a milder incarnation of other children’s realizations that they would never be, say, Major League Baseball players. But the real turning point for me came with the onset of puberty and its accompanying compulsive self-analysis. I realized that I owed what success I had as an artist not to any specific art-related aptitude, but rather to a more general and completely orthogonal skill.

Drawing what you actually see—that is, drawing the plastic bull that’s in front of you rather than the simplified, idealized image of a bull that’s in your head—is something that does not come naturally to most people, let alone children. At its root, my gift was not the ability to draw what I saw. Rather, it was the ability to look at what I had drawn thus far and understand what was wrong with it.

Now I will start on the real boogeymen, the middlemen. After the cut…

Teaching to Fish vs. Taking the Fish

Most of the time I am a traditional copyright supporter, although not a zealous one. But I do not do it all the time.

I like to maintain flexibility on copyright. When I first released a set of UVmapped meshes for sculptie making in Wings, I was asked and asked if people can use my free meshes for making items. That touched me, but I knew they were the vanishing minority.

I put those items out as public domain. Yes, public domain! Not even a credit was due me. It was nice that so many thought of asking me, but I had my reasons for putting these items out as free.

They are part of what I call “methods and tools”. I have a strong feeling that the world is a better place if more people learn how to create art, and have easy access to simple tools in which to create with in order to learn the basics. These UVmapped meshes were part of the “tools” for people to do this.

Eventually once they outgrew the free programs, I would expect them to graduate to more powerful copyrighted software. But I feel strongly that people should support the independents, and not support the pirated software if one can avoid it. So my prims were OBJ files that were geared to use in Carrara and Wings. Carrara being an inexpensive 3d program, and Wings being outright free.

I could have used a Creative Commons license – but I felt that on something as basic as a uvmapped sphere, plane or torus, it was nothing that took me a long time to do. Less than a minute, actually. Slightly longer than rezzing a prim in Second Life. So I made them completely and utterly free.

Surprisingly not many people know how to make even the basic uvmapping for a sculpt, because they don’t know how to use 3d programs. UVMapping is not always an easy subject for people.

I consider giving away tools and methods as related to the ideas of memetics when Daniel Dennett says – Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. They are the infinitely copiable fishing rod.

Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain.

The profession of teaching passes on our tools and methods, keeping them alive long after us. While I also support the rights of those to get paid for teaching, and the right to get paid for your fishing rods, the basic methods need to be free for all to teach them to fish, to make the fishing rod.

So this is why I am pretty steadfastly opposed to things like software patents, because most of these are too basic to claim “creative property” in. Manufacturing I can understand, as it costs real effort to create something that is material – but for immaterial methods in the digital world, that argument gets a bit thin.

Copyright is a whole other ball of wax – it is the protection of creative works. Not methods. And as I hope to explain, conflating patent and copyright is a dangerous thing to do. Because, the fish and the fishing rod are similar in that they are both creative works, and belong under copyright. Copyright protects your creative works, patent tries to protect how you do the work.

A digital creative work is a fish, even if it is an infinitely copiable fish, or even if it is an infinitely copiable fishing rod.

A software patent is teaching someone how to fish or making a fishing rod, and you can teach as many people to catch that virtual fish as you have fish to catch. You can teach people how to make a fishing rod to infinity.

Software is a fishing rod, even if it is an infinitely copiable fishing rod, and it requires the methods to fish to be free to make these fishing rods. Even though you can teach someone how to fish infinitely, each fish took time to catch, each rod took time to make. I believe in the spread of good ideas – they can only help people to fish better.

Give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime. Confucius was a wise man.

Now on to the fish – my occasional freebie “fishes” – items I have given away for free in SL.

I have given away some freebies as a kind of advertising and to some extent for others to critique my work – such as my Minoan octopus flask which was a set of textures I made for a model when I was first learning 3d. It is still free in Second Life, however with no-mod and no-transfer permissions.

It is sometimes nice to make something for free, and give it to the world, and there is nothing wrong with this.

What is wrong though, is when people expect you to make all your creative work for free. They want all your fish, not only that – they never want to learn how to fish. Most of them don’t even want to take up learning how to use the fishing rods. They just take the fishing rods and resell them, too. And some come to SL thinking they can take all your fish and your fishing rods and resell them, like an infinite money machine of fishing.

This just isn’t sustainable. It is not fair to ask someone to do all your fishing for you for nothing. We artists have to eat and pay our tier – it may seem noble to some of you that we starve… but there’s no nobility in being poor. If you’ve ever been hungry and on the street (and its happened to me), I suppose maybe then people would understand the whole “indignity” of it all. Though, I doubt it.

I’ll continue to be perplexed how some people in Second Life think that content creators are somehow part of the “corporate menace” and they are justified in stealing their fish and their fishing rods, and reselling it. Especially those of us who mostly just work for our own pleasure so we can pay our tier, and many of us don’t even make enough to pay for that. I’m not making any big profit in Second Life, I usually have to pay tier every month because my sales don’t cover it.

And lately, I wonder more and more why I continue to. I adore Caledon, really if it weren’t for living in Caledon – I’d probably be long gone by now. By now, it’s just the people who make me stay in Second Life, and if the people move, so will I.