The Boy Who Could Change the World Page 3

  Well, for most of these programmers UI is hard, because they don’t understand it. They see things textually, not visually. The free software culture comes very much from the Unix culture, and Unix is very much expert-oriented. Experts don’t need “good UI”—they know exactly what to do already and they just want to be able to do it as fast as they can.

  This is related to the other problem, which is that free software programmers code mostly for themselves. And since they completely and intuitively understand the software, it doesn’t seem like the UI is bad to them—to them, it makes perfect sense. There are certainly attempts to fix this—GNOME has been great about running UI contests and doing usability tests and writing guidelines—but it’s an uphill battle because of these cultural things.

  What is the worst feature of the web?

  Another tough one—I like so much about the web!

  I guess I’d prefer if it protected privacy better. Between cookies and IP addresses, it’s too easy to track what someone is reading or saying.

  Also, I think it’s rather disgraceful how browser makers have hobbled the web by making it essentially read-only. Tim Berners-Lee’s original plan was to let the web be a collaborative space for people to work together to do great things, and web pages would be the trails left behind by their activities. Web browsers would have an edit button that you could click and modify or annotate any page; it would then upload your changes to the server if you had access, or add them to your personal annotation server if you didn’t. Creating a web page would be as easy as using a word processor, and it would all be built in to every web browser.

  While wikis have achieved some of this, there’s still a lot to be done. Tim calls them the “poor man’s” equivalent. For example, wikis aren’t WYSIWYG and make it too difficult to use links and other advanced features. And you can’t just see a typo and correct it in situ; you have to find the edit link, then find the typo again, then correct it, then find the save button. You can’t use images or spreadsheets or any of the things that have been common in word processors forever.

  And, as a result, the web is still limited in terms of who can publish their works and who can make a decent-looking and useful site. It doesn’t need to be that way.

  What would you like to say to all the people out there?

  Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.

  Jefferson: Nature Wants Information to Be Free

  http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001115

  January 12, 2004

  Age 17

  Since many have said that my view of copyright and patent law is childish and held merely because I grew up with Napster and do not write for a living, I thought I’d investigate some more respectable views on the subject. And who better than those of our thoughtful third president, Thomas Jefferson?

  Judging from his letter to Isaac McPherson, Jefferson’s thoughts are thus:

  No one seriously disputes that property is a good idea, but it’s bizarre to suggest that ideas should be property. Nature clearly wants ideas to be free! While you can keep an idea to yourself, as soon as you share it anyone can have it. And once they do, it’s difficult for them to get rid of it, even if they wanted to. Like air, ideas are incapable of being locked up and hoarded.

  And no matter how many people share it, the idea is not diminished. When I hear your idea, I gain knowledge without diminishing anything of yours. In the same way, if you use your candle to light mine, I get light without darkening you. Like fire, ideas can encompass the globe without lessening their density.

  Thus, inventions cannot be property. Sure, we can give inventors an exclusive right to profit, perhaps to encourage them to invent new useful things, but this is our choice. If we decide not to, nobody can object.

  Accordingly, England was the only country with such a law until the United States copied her. In other countries, monopolies may be granted occasionally by special act, but there is no general system. And this doesn’t seem to have hurt them any—those countries seem just as inventive as ours.

  (I am not directly quoting Jefferson here, I am translating what he said to modern English and omitting a bit, but I have not put any words in his mouth—Jefferson said all these things.)

  The first thing to note is that Jefferson may have been the first to say, in essence, “Information wants to be free!” (Jefferson attributed this will to nature, not information, but the sentiment was the same.) Thus, all those people who dismiss this claim as absurd have some explaining to do.

  The second is that while Jefferson repeatedly says “idea,” his logic applies equally to, say, a catchy tune or phrase and thus pretty much everything we commonly call “intellectual property law” (mostly copyright, trademarks, and patents).

  The third is that, surprisingly (especially to me!), Jefferson is just as crazy as I am:

  •By their very nature, ideas cannot be property.

  •The government has no duty to make laws about them.

  •The laws we do make aren’t all that successful.

  If Jefferson wasn’t happy with the comparatively modest laws of 1813, can anyone seriously suggest that he wouldn’t be furious with the expansionist laws of today? Forget the Free Software Foundation and the Creative Commons; Jefferson would be out there advocating armed resistance and impeaching the justices that voted against Eldred! (OK, maybe not, but he’d certainly do more than write copyright licenses.)

  It’s true that in Jefferson’s day there were no movies or networks, but there were certainly books and inventions. People made their livelihoods as writers or inventors. It’s difficult to argue that Jefferson would change his mind now on economic grounds—if anything, I suspect that upon seeing the ease of sharing ideas over the Internet, he would argue for less restrictive laws, not more.

  Jefferson thought these laws were contrary to human nature when they only affected people with large workshops or commercial printing presses—imagine how angry he would be when he saw that these laws restricted practically everyone, even doing perfectly unobjectionable things (like teaching your AIBO to dance or making a documentary).

  Now perhaps folks will find Jefferson as easy an argument for ad hominem attack as they found me. And just because Jefferson said it doesn’t make it true—obviously his views were even the subject of some discussion at the time. But when the suggestions of our third president are called “a ball of self-justification,” “bullshit,” “the far left,” “selfishness,” “shallow,” those of a “moron,” “disgusting,” a “misunderstanding” of the law (!), and “immoral”, you sort of have to stop and wonder: what in the world is going on?

  Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

  July 2008, Eremo, Italy

  Age 21

  The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto was written at a 2008 meeting of librarians in Italy. Aaron published it on his blog but later removed it. The manifesto played an important role in Aaron’s prosecution: the government intended to use it at trial to establish Aaron’s motive for downloading JSTOR articles, arguing that he had intended to release the articles to the public. Although it was widely attributed to him, Aaron’s role in the manifesto’s creation—and whether it reflected his later views—was a contentious issue in the course of the legal proceedings. —Benjamin Mako Hill and Seth Schoen

  Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

  There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instea
d ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

  That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

  “I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal—there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

  Those with access to these resources—students, librarians, scientists—you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not—indeed, morally, you cannot—keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

  Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

  But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral—it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

  Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it—their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

  There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

  We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

  With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge—we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

  The Fruits of Mass Collaboration

  http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/masscollab

  July 18, 2006

  Age 19

  I often think that the world needs to be a lot more organized. Lots of people write reviews of television shows, but nobody seems to collect and organize them all. Good introductory guides to subjects are essential for learning, yet I only stumble upon them by chance. The cumulative knowledge of science is one of our most valuable cultural products, yet it can only be found scattered across thousands of short articles in hundreds of different journals.

  I suspect the same thoughts occur to many of a similar cast of mind, since there’s so much effort put into discouraging them. The arbiters of respectable opinion are frequently found to mock such grand projects or point out deficiencies in them. And a friend of mine explained to me that soon out of school he nearly killed himself by trying to embark on such a grand project and now tries to prevent his friends from making the same mistake.

  One can, of course, make the reverse argument: since there is so much need for such organization projects, they must be pretty impossible. But upon closer inspection, that isn’t true. Is there a project more grand than an encyclopedia or a dictionary? Who dares to compress all human knowledge or an entire language into a single book? And yet, there’s not just one but several brands of each!

  It seems that when the audience is large enough (and just about everyone has use for encyclopedias and dictionaries), it is possible to take on grand projects. This suggests that the holdup is not practical, but economic. The funding simply isn’t there to do the same for other things.

  But all this is only true for the era of the book, where such a project means gathering together a group of experts and having them work full-time to build a reference work which can be published and sold expensively to libraries. I tend to avoid net triumphalism, but the Internet, it would seem, changes that. Wikipedia was created not by dedicated experts but by random strangers, and while we can complain about its deficiencies, all admit that it’s a useful service.

  The Internet is the first medium to make such projects of mass collaboration possible. Certainly numerous people send quotes to Oxford for compilation in the Oxford English Dictionary, but a full-time staff is necessary to sort and edit these notes to build the actual book (not to mention all the other work that must be done). On the Internet, however, the entire job—collection, summarization, organization, and editing—can be done in spare time by mutual strangers.

  An even more striking, but less remarked-upon, example is Napster. Within only months, almost as a by-product, the world created the most complete library of music and music catalog data ever seen. The contributors to this project didn’t even realize they were doing this! They all thought they were simply grabbing music for their own personal use. Yet the outcome far surpassed anything consciously attempted.

  The Internet fundamentally changes the practicalities of large organization projects. Things that previously seemed silly and impossible, like building a detailed guide to every television show, are now being done as a matter of course. It seems like we’re in for an explosion of such modern reference works, perhaps with new experiments into tools for making them.

  The Techniques of Mass Collaboration: A Third Way Out

  http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/masscollab2

  July 19, 2006

  Age 19

  I’m not the first to suggest that the Internet could be used for bringing users together to build grand databases. The most famous example is the Semantic Web project (where, in full disclosure, I worked for several years). The project, spearheaded by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, proposed to extend the working model of the web to more structured data, so that instead of simply publishing text web pages, users could publish their own databases, which could be aggregated by search engines like Google into major resources.

  The Semantic Web project has received an enormous amount of criticism, much (in my view) rooted in misunderstandings, but much legitimate as well. In the news today is just the most recent example, in which famed computer scientist turned Google executive Peter Norvig challenged Tim Berners-Lee on the subject at a conference.

  The confrontation symbolizes the (at least imagined) standard debate on the subject, which Mark Pilgrim termed million-dollar markup versus million-dollar code. Berners-Lee’s W3C, the supposed proponent of million-dollar markup, argues that users should publish documents that state in special languages that computers can process exactly what they want to say. Meanwhile Google, the supposed proponent of million-dollar code, thinks this is an impractical fantasy, and that the only way forward is to write more advanced software to try to extract the meaning from the messes that users will inevitably create.*

  I say supposed because although this is typically how the debate is seen, I don’t think either the W3C or Google actually hold the strict positions on the subject typically ascribed to them. Nonetheless, the question is real and it’s convenient to consider the strongest forms of the positions.

  But yesterday I suggested what might be thought of as a third way out, one Pilgrim might call million-dollar users. Both the code and the markup positions make the assumption that users will be publishing their own work on their own websites and thus we’ll need some way
of reconciling it. But Wikipedia points to a different model, where all the users come to one website, where the interface for inputting data in the proper format is clear and unambiguous, and the users can work together to resolve any conflicts that may come up.

  Indeed, this method strikes me as so superior that I’m surprised I don’t see it discussed in this context more often. Ignorance doesn’t seem plausible; even if Wikipedia was a latecomer, sites like ChefMoz and MusicBrainz followed this model and were Semantic Web case studies. (Full disclosure: I worked on the Semantic Web portions of MusicBrainz.) Perhaps the reason is simply that both sides—W3C and Google—have the existing web as the foundation for their work, so it’s not surprising that they assume future work will follow from the same basic model.

  One possible criticism of the million-dollar-users proposal is that it’s somehow less free than the individualist approach. One site will end up being in charge of all the data and thus will be able to control its formation. This is perhaps not ideal, certainly, but if the data is made available under a free license it’s no worse than things are now with free software. Those angry with the policies can always exercise their right to “fork” the project if they don’t like the direction things are going. Not ideal, certainly, but we can try to dampen such problems by making sure the central sites are run as democratically as possible.

  Another argument is that innovation will be hampered: under the individualist model, any person can start doing a new thing with their data, and hope that others will pick up the technique. In the centralized model, users are limited by the functionality of the centralized site. This too can be ameliorated by making the centralized site as open to innovation as possible, but even if it’s closed, other people can still do new things by downloading the data and building additional services on top of it (as indeed many have done with Wikipedia).