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Copyright and sharing

Give it away now

RHCP

Some thoughts from other people about this as a start. Thanks to DB for the prompt!

From Seth Godin

How to protect your ideas in the digital age

So, how to protect your ideas in a world where ideas spread?

Don’t.

Instead, spread them. Build a reputation as someone who creates great ideas, sometimes on demand. Or as someone who can manipulate or build on your ideas better than a copycat can. Or use your ideas to earn a permission asset so you can build a relationship with people who are interested. Focus on being the best tailor with the sharpest scissors, not the litigant who sues any tailor who deigns to use a pair of scissors.

Please don’t buy this book

This an interesting case of tragedy and solution in the creative commons.

Simple thoughts about fair use

Copyright is not an absolute. Potato chips are absolute.

Andy Baio on Fair Use

In his influential paper on fair use, Judge Pierre N. Leval wrote, “Factor One is the soul of fair use.” Stanford’s Fair Use Center asks, “Has the material you have taken from the original work been transformed by adding new expression or meaning? Was value added to the original by creating new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings?”

Andy Baio – Waxy.org

Tim O’Reilly

Piracy is progressive taxation, and other thoughts on the evolution of online distribution

Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy…

SOPA and PIPA are bad industrial policy

At O’Reilly, we have published ebooks DRM-free for the better part of two decades. We’ve watched the growth of this market from its halting early stages to its robust growth today. More than half of our ebook sales now come from overseas, in markets we were completely unable to serve in print. While our books appear widely on unauthorized download sites, our legitimate sales are exploding. The greatest force in reporting unauthorized copies to us is our customers, who value what we do and want us to succeed. Yes, there is piracy, but our embrace of the internet’s unparalleled ability to reach new customers “though it may not be perfect still secures to authors more money than any other system that can be devised.”

Kevin Kelly

Better than Free

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.

…

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Others

Further reading at techdirt. 

*I’ll add to this list periodically.

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Top posts from Seth Godin

This is a list I’ll update from time to time

The digital divide is being flipped

About inequality at the foundations of education in the 21st century.

Non-profit overhead

What matters is your impact. Hugely relevant to anyone building an organisation that raises money.

Social media is a symptom, not a tactic

The Mona Lisa has a huge social media presence.

…
The narrative of social media grooming is a seductive one, but it’s as much of a dead end as spending an extra hour picking out which tie to wear before giving a speech.

Seth Godin

Quality and Effort

A post about the importance of building systems to improve quality – he’s not as far from Michael Gerber as he thinks he is  : )

Updated 08/12/2018 with these:

Bear shaving

Brilliance on not solving the real problem.

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GNU-GPL – a base of code

Richard Stallman famously wrote the GNU GPL, which is a license based on copy-left, not copyright. His position is the freedom to work with computers and work with software and work with software is hindered by copyright.

That in fact these are useful tools, and there are people who want to make useful tools and remix the useful tools of people who came before. Everything you use in the internet – that website that you visited that’s running on Apache, that email protocol, you’re able to do it because so many other entities were able to share these ideas.

So the way copy-left works is that if you use software that has a GPL license to make your software work better, it infects your software, and you also have to use the GPL license.

So if it works right, it will eat the world. So as the core of software in GNU gets bigger and deeper, it becomes more and more irresistible to use it. But as you use it the software you add to it also becomes part of that corpus.

And if enough people contribute to it, what we’ll end up with is an open, inspectable, improvable base of code that gives us a toolset for weaving together the culture we want to be part of.

Seth Godin – Akimbo, November 21 2018 – Intellectual Property

An open, inspectable, improvable base of code.

For software.

For tools for making software.

How about for educational outcomes? For assessments?

For a set of tools and resources for running an organisation?

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A downhill slope (find others)

If you’re in a book group, social pressure is going to get you to read that book. The act of joining the book group is the hard part. Once you’re in the book group, the books are going to get read, because now you’re playing a game. It’s a game you’re enrolled in, it’s one you want to move forward.

…

The easiest way to start creating this game dynamic is to form a group. To find others, to find others and challenge those others to play the game with you. Because we all know that solitaire might be a little fun, but solitaire isn’t the kind of game we dream of when we dream of games.

We do better when we do it together.

Seth Godin – Akimbo – The Wedding Industrial Complex

.

Make it happen. Find others. Say the words.

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Today’s status quo

On the other hand, doing something a particular way because that’s what everyone else does – or because it’s how it’s always been done – is a recipe for stagnation and frustration.

And if you’re doing it for a place in today’s status quo, you might be heading for disappointment: tomorrow, the status quo will have moved on, and what you did might not mean what you thought it did.

Here’s Seth Godin:

Are you making these choices simply because of today’s status quo, knowing that tomorrow the status quo won’t even be what it is today?

Seth Godin – Akimbo – The Wedding Industrial Complex
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When to decide

Decide before it happens. Ahead of time, when it’s easy to decide, when you can plan a strategy – set up a game – that will make it easier for you to do what you want to do when the rubber hits the road.

If, for example, you want to be a runner, the time to decide whether or not you’re going to go for a run today is not in the morning when it’s cold and dark, ten minutes before your run.

You can gameify it. You can make a deal with yourself that you’re allowed stop running, but first you have to make it to the mailbox. You have to put on your shoes and your running clothes, and go out the door and run to the mailbox and then you’re allowed to make a decision that you’re too busy, or too tired to run.

Seth Godin – Akimbo – The Wedding Industrial Complex

.

Seth is spot on. I’d add a couple of things:

  • Make it as easy as possible for yourself – put your alarm out of reach so you have to get out of bed, have a cup of coffee or a drink in the fridge, find those socks, put out your shoes the night before. Get the thin end of the wedge** on your side.
  • Running clothes first. Shoes second.

**Apparently I’ve never posted on this – coming soon…

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Datapoints

What the wizards at the various casinos have figured out how to do is wire up the slot machines so that they’re constantly playing with your need to feel lucky.

The slots don’t work the way they used to. First of all, the slot machine knows who you are, and what your history is. They’ve given you this card that promises all sorts of bonuses and prizes, but really it’s designed to allow the slot machine to play you like a violin.

Seth Godin – Akimbo – Games Matter

Data can be a powerful tool. Don’t use it like that.

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Bootstrapping the non-profit organisation – Playlist

This is the final post in a series applying Seth Godin’s rules of bootstrapping (see also here) to building a non-profit organisation.

It’d be tempting to say ‘it’s finished’, but I know I’ll be coming back to these.

For now though, here are the 20 installments of Bootstrapping the Non-Profit:

Rule 1: Real work for Real Clients First

Rule 2: Do it Now

Rule 3: Serve Clients Eager to Pay for What You Do (part 1)
[Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4]

Rule 4: Resist the Urge to do Average Work for Average People

Rule 5: Own Your Own Assets

Rule 6: Scale Carefully and Find the Right Size for You
[Part 2] [Part 3]

Rule 7: Charge the Amount that Works (and be worth more than you charge)
[Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4]

Rule 8: Create Boundaries for Yourself
[Part 2] [Part 3] [Bonus Episode]

Rule 9: Become ever more Professional

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Bootstrapping the non-profit organisation Rule 9

This is the ninth post in a series applying Seth Godin’s rules of bootstrapping (see also here) to building a non-profit organisation.

Rule 9: Become ever more professional

Professionals do it right, they make it work, and they don’t take it personally.

Seth Godin

Of course your non-profit organisation should be professional.

You need to: 

  • Show up – be there for the people you seek to serve
  • Show up – it takes time to get good at what you do
  • Show up – you need to go deep in the context that you’re serving, know your clients and their context really, really well. Few people do this
  • Show up – for your clients and your team, especially when you don’t feel like it today
  • Keep your promises
  • Do good work that no-one else can do (if only because no-one else will)
  • Make it work – which might mean going beyond your technical contribution and paying attention to the necessary ‘wrapper‘
  • Understand the full stack of skills that make your organisation’s work possible, and get a working knowledge of as many of them as you can
  • Specialise
  • Find partners, colleagues, friends who complement your skills and personality
  • Learn to get help, delegate
  • Do you work in the right way – find lasting solutions that don’t sacrifice things that are important to you on the way
  • Stay client-focused – there might be a ‘show’, and you might even have a big role, but it isn’t about you
  • Stay honest – the professional pushes back against donors with ideas that won’t work, or won’t help even if they do work, or that aren’t really about the clients (see Rule 1)
  • Stay honest – be clear about what you do and don’t, explain what’s not working, own your mistakes
  • Find the right price for your work – a price that enables you to do it sustainably and with space for human connection, ensuring of course that your work is worth more than people pay for it
  • Create more value than you capture
  • Communicate clearly – you have to take responsibility for knowing your audience, for being clear and convincing, for stopping from time to time to make sure you’re being understood
  • Build assets – deliberately do things that will make it easier tomorrow
  • Be there early
  • Start on time
  • Stop on time
  • Stopping on time means, with enough time to talk to people afterwards
  • Create boundaries that allow you to do good work, and to be generous
  • Be committed – overcome The Resistance (ala Pressfield)
  • Read and learn – all the time
  • Read within your field
  • Read outside your field
  • Read fiction, poetry – they’ll enrich what you do
  • Apply what you learn – try new things
  • Understand how new technologies have and are changing your work
  • Try to see the future
  • Think about what you do
  • Write about what you do
  • Connect with others that do what you do, or things like it
  • Be generous – share what you know

I’m stopping writing now, so that I can go and show up for some people by making pancakes.