Lessig

Are we facing a digital Renaissance, where patronage is the key economic driver? Or should we support governmental regulation of ideas in order to prop up what would essentially be a “psuedo-economy” whose sustainability is questionable at best?

jason, the only form of patronage which is compatible with a liberal, democratic, republican form of government is called free market capitalism.

he said, “If they can’t find some way to lock up music, music is going to end. Eventually, there will be no professional musicians, because there’s no way to make money, and we’re left with a world full of amateurs.”

Humbug. What we'd be left with is a world full of working musicians. The concept of musicians spending a few hours in a recording studio then sitting back and collecting money for years is a very recent one. Before that, musicians worked for a living like everyone else (and some still do, in orchestras and such). Is that such an unfair situation?

dave - it's one thing if a group of people - motivated by whatever motivates them - want to work for free to develop a "free" on-line dictionary.

but it is another thing altogether that they may register as a charitable organisation, be given tax free status by the government, and ask for donations to support their efforts.

this distorts the otherwise level playing field essential to well functioning, free market dynamics.

a charity is an institution, organisation, or fund intended to help those in need. charities do the work which for-profit organisations do not do because there is little profit in so doing. the red cross comes to mind, bravekids from the phil goldman link is another good example.

we mice would wager that most of the users of wikipedia do not qualify as charity cases. we are aware that there are for-profit business, such as the OED online which already provide this service. thus, we are hard-pressed to see the need for charity in this case. moreover, we believe this is harmful to businesses like the OED who pay their employees and pay taxes.

we three mice do have an ideology, but it is unfair to say that we are blinded by it. we see the other arguments, but we tend to dismiss them as founded in an economic theory which has been discarded by nearly every country in the world, save cuba and north korea.

there is no need to re-invent the economic wheel; the need is to apply what we know already works to the realm of cyberspace and to avoid that which does not work.

the problem with “the internet” is that it seems to be controlled by a counter-culture of people hostile to the concepts of private property and free market capitalistism which the majority of humanity, after many years of struggle and failure, has selected as best suited to the needs of man.

and when people like jason start suggesting medieval patronage as a financing model for cyberspace, we can only shake our three heads in despair - and amusement.

keep trying friends.

dear sir, we believe you missith our point.

there is nothing wrong with people volunteering their time and energy to causes which they believe to be worthy. indeed, this has been the pastime of men of leisure for centuries.

what the mice find pernicious is the exploitation of this organized free labor to undermine the labor of men and women who cannot afford such a life of leisurely pursuit. such exploitation is only made worse when the government becomes its accomplice.

charity should not put men and women out of gainful employment, or reduce the value of their labor. charity should rather fill voids which working men cannot afford to fill.

in this regard, the appropriate comparasion between the wikipedia and the OED online, is not the creation of the OED, but rather its more recent translation to the internet.

"How do you take a multi-volume, century-old, print-based reference work and turn it into a machine-readable resource? By spending $13.5 million over five years in the most adventurous computerization project seen in the publishing industry at that time. Bespoke computer systems were built for both pre-processing the text and editing it in electronic form; text was marked up in the (then) novel SGML encoding scheme; the pages of the old edition and the Supplement were typed again by 120 keyboarders; and more than 50 proofreaders checked the results of their work."

we think it is improper, indeed immoral, to offer tax free status to an organisation which provides no compensation to its contributors and seeks to undermine the results of the labor of the men and women who were employed to place the OED online.

perhaps it is we mice who, at the end of the day, are the true communists. we understand, however, that capitalism, underwritten by a firm commitment to private property, is the best and surest way to provide the benefits to workers which marx's ideas failed to deliver.

we can afford our subscription to the OED and thus have no use for the wikipedia. moreover we would find it morally uncomfortable to contribute $1 to an organisation to assuage the guilt on our conscience for using the labor of others without paying them a fair value for what their efforts are worth.

and now we return to our own labors.

Looks like they made their goal, dude.

Thanks for the pointers, Professor Lessig. My neverending reading list just increased by two which, to me, is a good thing as I dread the day that it equals zero.

To the author(s) behind the psuedonym of "three blind mice": I enjoy your posts, however much I might disagree with them. Your eloquence and vocabulary are refreshing after an hour of moderating slashdot with -1 filter. :)

That being said, I do wonder how you reconcile your ideology given your statements in this thread:

"we three mice do have an ideology, but it is unfair to say that we are blinded by it. we see the other arguments, but we tend to dismiss them as founded in an economic theory which has been discarded by nearly every country in the world, save cuba and north korea...there is no need to re-invent the economic wheel; the need is to apply what we know already works to the realm of cyberspace and to avoid that which does not work. "

Followed closely by another post where you stated:

"there is nothing wrong with people volunteering their time and energy to causes which they believe to be worthy. indeed, this has been the pastime of men of leisure for centuries."

Please correct me if I'm mistaken in believing that you fail to understand the mechanisms involved in physical property rights versus those currently be used (in your view, perhaps, abused?) online.

This statement is especially confusing to me:

"we can afford our subscription to the OED and thus have no use for the wikipedia. moreover we would find it morally uncomfortable to contribute $1 to an organisation to assuage the guilt on our conscience for using the labor of others without paying them a fair value for what their efforts are worth."

What if I simply donate my talent and efforts to the public without regard for compensation in a capitalistic society? Am I then stealing from another that charges for the same services?

I will agree that labor deserves compensation. What we seem to disagree about is what exactly constitutes labor.

I look forward to your reply,
--Jason

Thank you for the reply, TBM.

"in a free society (free as in free will) you should be allowed to do whatever you want (subject to the rules of law). the question for us is one of moral purpose. we are simply uncomfortable with the concept of promoting the application of free labor towards pursuits which undermine the labors of others who cannot work for free."

"if you will excuse this gross simplification, every student that contributes free code to the wikipedia, takes food out of the mouth of a paid programmer who works on the OED. assuming that this student looks forward to a good paying job when she graduates, this sort of activity also appears self-defeating. "

It's quite the dichotomy isn't it? I believe that history would bear out one simple fact: When presented with a revolutionary disruptive technology, it is best to avoid governmental intervention until such time that the benefits versus harms to society can be adequately measured and weighed.

I wish the best to all three of your tails, livers, and families in this new year and look forward to more interesting and enlightening debate in 2004.

--Jason

My thanks to the mice for their reply. Hope you enjoyed the cheese. :)

let the free market decide. /jingoism

our basic argument in this thread has been that the tax free status granted wikipedia is a harmful, market distorting intervention of government which should not exist.

I apologize in advance if my question is trivial, but isn't the levying of taxes a function of government? And if so, wouldn't the absence of taxes be an example of the lack of governmental intervention? Or is it your position that governmental intervention via the levying of taxes is necessary to regulate disruptive technologies?

although it is clear from how we framed this argument that it rests atop an unstable trap of moral relativism

I believe that moral relativism is the basis of any society. The USA has historically done a pretty good job of striking a balance between all concerned parties. Our debate is simply another tiny rung in the ladder that will, hopefully, lead to a compromise between your morals and mine.

To sum up, here's the ultimate piece of cheese (and these are honest questions, not traps, so the mice need not fear for the well-being of their tails): Is it your position that Wikipedia (an institution that is completely virtual) should be subjected to the same amount of governmental control and regulation that its brick-and-mortar peers (which publish and distribute physical volumes) are currently subjected to? And if so, why? Should we charge a tax on every post in this forum because it is editorial and thus somehow deprives newspapers of profit?

The very best cheese can be found on the slippery slopes of the mountains of Intellectual Property. ;)

--Jason

Unfortunately, the many people who contribute writings, volunteer time, and money to the GFDL text corpus (NOT the same thing as "the Wikipedia" although entries via that interface dominate that corpus at present) may be donating into a black hole, and encouraging some dubious processes.

Not only does their disclaimer say that they claim the right to make and publish libelous statements, and that somehow the right to recourse for this magically disappears just by seeing their disclaimer (Lawrence, what's your opinion of *that*?) - along with many much more reasonable things like that you have the right to read this stuff thanks to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (nice touch), BUT... they have resisted putting an INDEPENDENT BOARD in place for years.

EVERY nonprofit project worthy of a donation NEEDS such a board. NO serious nonprofit can be audited and trusted without it. NO ONE SHOULD DONATE to projects without this in place - it simply encourages a clique to abuse the funds.

There are also serious problems with "the Wikipedia" (a user interface, NOT a body of text) not actually living up to the terms of the GFDL - these problems are often noted and nothing is ever done about them. For instance, retrieval of the source text is conditional on some social and technological factors (IP bans in place, access and skill with MySQL) that are NOT mentioned in the GFDL and NOT ACCEPTABLE as barriers to accessing the source text as the GFDL specifies.

Beyond that, many of their "sysops" engage in what can only be called "sysop vandalism" - degrading the quality of GFDL text corpus by deleting articles, reverting obvious corrections, etc., often due to who wrote something or who they suspect wrote it. This is a minority of individuals, but they include a few of the code developers, which according to Lawrence are the most likely people to abuse their power. So it is with the Wikipedia. They also include personal friends of Jim Wales, who amazingly have the power to discern reliably, as in any police state, "who wrote that", sometimes within seconds of seeing it. They have persecuted and attacked quite a few people who innocently share IP ranges or writing styles with those they hate. Until these people are eliminated from the project, and many of them operate under pseudonyms, the donors to the "online encyclopedia" are being misled: it is NOT the quality of edits for encyclopedic purposes that is the arbiter of "what stands" there, but the specific and political popularity of the author or suspected author of the text. It is systemic bias on one level, that being, who has sysop powers, and deliberate political bias on others. There is not even a different policy for dealing with minor neutrality issues (like use of an adjective) versus major political disputes (that no one in the real world has yet proven able to settle). The Wikipedia sysops feel themselves empowered and skilled to settle both the same way: with their own personal judgement and IP blocks. In fact, they are well known for being so bad at this editorial function that MeatballWiki, a relatively well known commentary on the wiki process, has a special page called "WikipediaIsNotTypical" just to deny that Wikipedia is in any way representative of the treatment wiki donors expect.

So, this project is extremely questionable, and in the case of some of its components, like Simple English Wikipedia, not even rational - this project claims to be intersted in the needs of non-english-speaking users, but it refuses to define any way of assessing those needs other than sysop editorial instincts, and has chosen a vocabulary unsuitable for avowed purposes like translation, and suitable only for children who are English-speaking to begin with. This is just not tenable - and not credible.

There is not even a full text search capability given the useless "mediawiki" software that the developers insist on using, which simply can't hold up to the load that it gets - due in part to its bad choice of MySQL, in part to just bad coding and bad planning. It just isn't a fully functional encyclopedia.

Likewise, the "Wiktionary" project is a joke when compared to the much more serious competitor nonprofits like the Rosetta Project run by the much more credible LongNow Foundation - http://longnow.org

Please, Lawrence, look into the details of the foundations and institutions you are promoting. Now that Wales has managed to keep his project limping along, it'll be another few years before he is forced to consider an independent board again, and, people will continue to erroneously assume that the GFDL text corpus is equated with low integrity "Wikipedians", and defined by them. This is very sad for open documentation, as Wikipedia is so poorly run as to be a travesty, a joke, and a dirty shame for all those who believe in open documentation.

(name withheld as it is a habit of the "Wikipedia mailing list" and the "Wikimedia foundation" to openly libel people they dislike, or who criticize them on any grounds whatsoever)

Great Website... great Content.. i like it very much .===============