Andromeda Yelton

I completely loved Mita Williams’ recent talk on the future of libraries and her style of blogging about it, and the second I read it wanted to do the same kind of post myself. And, lucky me! I was one of the speakers at yesterday’s Law Librarians of New England Fall Meeting, so now I have this talk to blog! (Side note: if you ever have the chance to meet Harvard law librarian, gentleman farmer, and bon vivant Kyle Courtney, or to hear him speak, do that.)

Kyle handed me this fantastic theme to riff off of. And he arranged the six speakers in three themed pairs that had a lovely arc to them: how to make ebooks; cool things we can do with them right now; and then my pair, “ebooks, licensing, and the future”. Well. I do like an invitation to make my own fun.

The talk

What’s the future of ebooks? Well…

…we’re all doomed.

Why are we doomed?

Over the last two-hundred-some years the scope of copyright protection has steadily increased, and the space left for fair use has shrunk. Originally copyright adhered to only few types of works, registration was required, and the term of protection was 14 years; the result was that the vast majority of works were public domain from their inception, and the rest entered the public domain not long thereafter.

Since then, legislative acts and judicial decisions have extended copyright to more types of works, dropped the registration requirement, and extended the term of protection by many decades.

In addition, with some types of works — ebooks, software — you don’t even get first sale rights because they’re typically not sold; they’re licensed. Contract law, not just copyright law, applies.

And there’s not an incentive for it to get better. Public choice theory tells us that, when a concentrated group of actors stands to benefit from some policy and a large, diffuse group stands to lose, the concentrated group has an advantage even when the total costs outweigh the total benefits. It’s simply easier for them to coordinate. The internet lowers the coordination costs for diffuse groups, as the SOPA protests demonstrated, but concentrated interests still have an advantage.

Public choice theory also says there’s a free-rider problem when you’re doing work for the public good: anyone in the diffuse group has an incentive to stand back and wait for someone else to do the hard work, since everyone reaps the benefits. But then no one does the work, and no one benefits.

It’s also a fact about human psychology that we tend to be more motivated by fear of loss than by hope of gain. Major media interests are very clear on what they stand to lose if their properties enter the public domain and they can no longer exclusively monetize them. Society at large stands to benefit from increased consumption, remixing, sharing, creation — but that’s just not as motivational as fear of loss.

And we know that these concentrated interests have the upper hand, and the government won’t magically make copyright better, because here’s Derek Khanna. A few weeks ago he wrote a memo for the Republican Study Committee on three myths of copyright and how to fix them. He pointed out that copyright laws are not only in conflict with social norms around digital media, but also with principles the Republican Party professes, like limited government and free markets. The memo was buried inside of 24 hours.

And it gets worse. Because even where we have legal rights to use content, our technical and distribution infrastructures don’t protect them.

This is a screenshot of the first unglued ebook, in the New York Public Library ebooks catalog. It’s offered under a CC BY license…or not. Because there are zero copies available, with one patron on the waiting list, and the DRM info tab says “file sharing or redistribution is prohibited”.

This is a lie.

Open content is an edge case that our systems aren’t engineered for.

And I don’t mean to pick on just library ebook vendors. I can pick on Google Books, too. Here’s Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, offered under a CC BY-NC license…or not. Because Google Books will sell it to you, but you can’t download it. You can preview it, but only in limited preview. The system simply doesn’t know how to protect those rights.

So we’re all doomed.

Unless…

It’s appropriate that the event poster was based on Marianne, an allegory of liberty and reason, leading a French revolution. Not the French Revolution but another, several decades later: the July Revolution. In it the people rose up to depose the traditional monarchy that had been reinstated after the Revolution, after Napoleon, and to replace it with a limited, constitutional monarchy. The replacement of hereditary right with popular sovereignty. A grassroots revolution.

And it’s even more appropriate, because one of the major precipitating events for the July Revolution was that the king revoked freedom of the press. And the newspapers said exactly what they thought about that. And the people rallied in defense of their right to freedom of speech and access to information.

No one’s going to fix this for us. We need a grassroots copyright revolution. What would that look like?

We saw one example in the second panel: the Berkman Center’s H2O Project, which incentivizes professors to freely distribute their work and provides a technical infrastructure that safeguards open licensing.

Creators have many incentives to create. For some, it’s their livelihood, and traditional copyright and monetization work well. Others create because they want to educate or advocate, because they’re driven to make art or because they want their voice to be heard in the cacophony of culture. For some, impact is the greatest incentive.

If we can get to creators early enough and educate them about their options, and provide an infrastructure to protect those options, we can have content which never enters the copyright trap, which is always available for readers and libraries.

For content that’s already been produced, we need a grassroots revolution to make it free, in a way that respects authors’ and publishers’ incentives. Enter Unglue.it.

How it works: rights holders set a price that makes it worth their while to reissue their already-published works under a Creative Commons license.

They may choose that price to cover potential future lost sales, or to protect the value of a brand, or to cover conversion costs if there isn’t already an ebook edition — whatever makes sense to them.

One of our current campaigns is for So You Want To Be a Librarian, by Lauren Pressley, published by Library Juice Press. If it raises $9000 by December 31, it’ll be unglued.

Lots of people are supporting the campaign. They pledge whatever amount they want, and are only charged if the campaign meets its goal by its deadline. Maybe you’ll join them?

If the campaign succeeds, the book is released under a Creative Commons license of the rights holder’s choice — in this case, BY-SA — and it goes forth into the world to be read, copied, remixed, shared, and maybe even updated as times change.

So those are the two types of grassroots copyright revolution we need: one to protect reusability from content’s creation, and one to get content out later. Born-free and made-free.

Why have we not yet stormed the barricades?

Well. We’re really busy. Solo librarians, libraries with just two or three staffers, underfunded nonprofits…we’re really busy.

And it’s human to put the urgent ahead of the important. Sometimes the urgent is the important. And it makes sense that we subcontract the creation of our workflows to vendors. It’s easier to sign on the dotted line, let someone else invent how we do things and then devote our energies to serving those workflows that someone else has created.

We have this urgent need to provide access today. But we also need to provide access to patrons tomorrow, and to patrons with disabilities. And to preserve content for the future. And to protect sharing. And privacy.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is Google’s 20% time. Engineers at Google get to spend 20% of their time scratching whatever itch motivates them. The results are Google’s intellectual property and have ended up as core product lines, like Gmail.

I’ve understood this as a way to attract and retain the kind of creative, driven people you want if you’re Google. And it is. But I’ve realized it’s more.

Because if 100% of your time is devoted to maintaining the status quo, when do you invent the future?

I leave it to the lawyers in the audience to decide if this quote is fair use, and to all your moral intuitions to decide if it should be.

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

You say you want a revolution.

Let’s go.

Yesterday I posted about reasons why tech is hard to get involved in. And honestly I’ve been surprised how hard it is — not necessarily because of the tech itself (okay sometimes that too) but in terms of emotion and identity and diversity. I’ve spent a lot of my life (happily, by choice) in male-dominated environments. I usually try to avoid having impostor syndrome. And yet, there it is.

I don’t want, however, to give the impression that all of tech is an uphill fight or that there aren’t fantastic fun reasons why, if you’re interested in technology, you should do more of that. So let me tell you about those! I’m going to talk from a vocabulary of code, because that’s what I do, but I think this is equally applicable to hardware hacking or game design or whatever triggers your “ooh, shiny” reaction; swap in the nouns that work better for you.

Why tech is awesome and you should do it:

• Without minimizing or discounting at all the negative experiences that many have had, or the fact that it can be really hard to be in a minority, I’ve found nearly everyone I’ve interacted with in tech, particularly library tech, to be friendly, accepting, fun, smart, creative: good mentors, co-conspirators, idea generators, conversationalists, partners in crime.
• Code lets you see. Learning code means software stops being magic, it stops being an immutable fact of the status quo, and it stops victimizing you. You can learn which changes are hard to make, and which aren’t. You can see where problems that aren’t being solved by software could be. You can see things you hadn’t even realized were undermining you.
• And then you can change them.
• Seriously, people, you get to take raw noosphere and extrude it into real things that people can interact with. You get to take a nothing and turn it into a something. Basically you get to be the demigod of your own pocket universes. How is this not great?
• You get to solve problems. And sometimes they’re really hard and frustrating and impenetrable but if you stick with them for long enough, if you deal with the frustration and read the docs and ask questions and try stuff and break it and hit it with rocks and unbreak it and try again, then it works. And you know more for next time. And you get to feel the way people feel when they surmount real challenges. Unstoppable.

There’s whole universes out there. Let’s go.

Watching the #1reasonwhy hashtag on Twitter, all about reasons why there aren’t more female game developers. Both depressing and inspiring. And also watching the Code4Lib community discuss an anti-harassment policy, which is inspiring, full stop. (Good people. Glad I spend time around them.)

Which means I’m thinking even more than usual about these issues today. This in particular: I feel like every time discussions about gender diversity in tech come up, someone (invariably white, male, young or young-ish) says something along the lines of, why can’t they just do what I did? Take the steps I took to get into the industry or community. (Instead of whining about it. Instead of needing things to be handed to them. Instead of…something.)

Well. Here are some things that I, as a woman increasingly-in-tech, do, that I do not think men in tech do:

• Be the only person of their gender on a project, or in a room.
• Run across continual reminders that the category of “geek” implicitly doesn’t include themselves. Any joke or reference that takes for granted it’s really hard for geeks to get girlfriends? Is one that assumes I (and gay men) aren’t geeks, and moreover everybody assumes as much.
• Be nervous about the prospect of going to tech conferences, because of the possibility that a large fraction of the people of their gender represented will be there solely for their sexuality, not their competence (booth babes, naked women on presentation slides), and the corresponding possibility that people will assume they don’t have competence to contribute.
• Note that other-gendered (straight) techies get eye candy at events and in games and so forth as a matter of course, but their own gender rarely does, and it’s not as if said gender does not also appreciate eye candy, thankyouverymuch.
• Hang back from going to conferences or working on projects or joining IRC channels or what-have-you because they don’t know until they’ve tried it if this is going to be one of the cultures that’s intolerable to people of their gender. Spend the first hours or days or months they venture into a new venue waiting for the trolls to jump out from under the bridge.
• Be concerned that, if they advocate for people of their gender to get opportunities, others will assume that those people are there only to check off a checkbox and are less capable than other-gender candidates. Be concerned that the candidates themselves will wonder if this is true. Assume that some people look at them and believe they don’t have technical skills because of their gender — and the more public and successful they are in their advocacy, the more often this will happen.
• Assume that blogging about tech issues means they’re eventually going to get troglodyte harassment at best, and ultimately rape threats or death threats or both. Devote actual neurons to planning for how they’ll do the IP logging and which friends they’ll ask to moderate comments. Assume that the IP logging will be meaningless because law enforcement won’t care, but plan for it anyway.

So why can’t I just RTFM and submit a pull request and show up and start talking? Because I can’t. Because there is no path open to me that starts outside of tech and ends up in it and does not route through all this other stuff. Mind you, I have RTFMed (occasionally I’ve written TFM) and submitted pull requests and shown up and talked, but I have never just done that and I cannot just do that.

I would love to just do that.

Over at In the Library with the Lead Pipe, the ever-brilliant Brett Bonfield, speculating on the library in a hundred years, asks:

Think about the area where you live. There’s probably an area nearby with really pretty, really old houses? About how old are those houses?

Well, as it happens, my house was built in 1900, and it is still a perfectly good house. Indeed, circa 1900 I think they built this house, once, and then copy/pasted it a few thousand times to make Somerville, and in the intervening years they’ve been widely renovated but rarely torn down. It’s a good house. Why is it a good house?

I think it comes down to what Stewart Brand said in How Buildings Learn (if you have not read that go do so posthaste). It is a good, solid, low-road building. It’s made of simple rectangles, nothing optimized or purpose-built: blank stages that can fit just about anything people want to put into them as they live their human-scale lives, even as the details of those lives change (sometimes radically) with time. It’s got some space rattling about in the walls — unused, un-optimized, corners unaccounted-for — so that when the residents of 2012 need to fish an extra circuit up from the basement to power the window air conditioners that didn’t exist in 1900, we can repurpose some space and do that. The basement doesn’t leak. A simple, solid, non-prescriptive house.

Even more: the layers are separated. Brand talks about the shearing layers of buildings, moving smoothly past one another on the time axis: site, structure, skin, services, space plan, stuff. There are two key things about these layers. One, they move on different timescales — in our non-disaster-prone area, the geography underneath the house doesn’t change fast, but decor can change in an instant. Two, faster layers are well-separated from slower ones. I can’t change the slower ones without enormous implications for everything built on top — major structural renovations affect plumbing and decoration — but I can hang a new painting on the walls without implications for the pipes or structural integrity or landscape. (In fact, the alternative is horrifying.)

Which gets me thinking, how does this apply to organizations and institutions? How should it?

I think institutions have layers that move at different speeds. The parts of ALA working on the budget are generally contemplating different time scales than the interest groups, say. And clearly the fast-moving interest groups depend on the more deliberate strategic planning and budget work. But proper shearing layers need to avoid too many kinds of dependencies — to hang a painting I need to have a wall, but I shouldn’t have to change the wall, or even think too much about it. The layers need to have obvious affordances at their interfaces — which, in turn, means having interfaces at all. I don’t understand ALA well enough to flesh out this metaphor (comments welcome!), but my intuition is that the interfaces are often not well-defined, and the affordances not at all obvious; the picture-hangers too often have to change the wall. What would it look like if they didn’t?

I think, in the case of a library, at least, it would look a bit like the 4th floor of the Chattanooga Public Library. For thirty years it was nothing but the oubliette for unused things. Now it’s a gigantic windowless room with most (not all) of the unused things moved out, no carpet, indifferent paint, occasional furniture, and new assistant director Nate Hill (about whom enough good things cannot be said) gets to fill it with…whatever. Which is apparently the local Linux users’ group, and DPLA’s Appfest (I got to go!), and a pitch day for local startups (with crazy awesome lighting. and fish).

In other words, because the room is so blank, so underutilized, so still-waiting-to-learn-what-it-can-become, it can be filled with anything. And he’s filling it with community and creativity and energy and partnerships, and seeing what happens.

it turns out that a library space without books is an awesome idea. 4thfloor.chattlibrary.org hosting the #DPLA appfest

— Matthew Battles (@MatthewBattles) November 8, 2012