Branko's Weblog

“Is it a gift?,” the woman behind the counter asked me. The friend who is going to be on the receiving end of the book I was buying tends to bristle at the Dutch way of dancing around the real question. I presume a North-American would ask straight away if I wanted the book wrapped.

Yes, it’s a gift, I confirmed. I like the dancing around.

Before, the woman had been staring out the window with her back to the counter. Outside, the tiniest touch of blue in the sky suggesting that twilight wasn’t officially over yet, a long file of horse-drawn buggies was rolling by. I remembered a similar procession the year before, and how long it had taken to pass. The lady behind me and I both wished silently that the sales woman would get over her amazement. Then I realized she wasn’t looking at the carts and horses, but at the store’s security guard who was pushing up the sun shields. She turned around, and, startled to see me, apologised for keeping me waiting.

First, she removed the price sticker. It wouldn’t go off completely. Then, she took a cloth and something that looked like a bottle of cough syrup. Being someone who competes in jumping at conclusions on an Olympic level, I figured she had spilt the cough syrup and was going to clean the counter with the rag before wrapping my book on it. As it turned out, the bottle contained some kind of solvent to loosen the sticker’s glue. Still, things took quite some time. The lady behind me had switched queues, and the American who took her place came forward to see and inquire in his best Dutch what was going on. “What gebujt ej hiej allemahl?,” he asked with a friendly smile.

The sales woman took her time to get it right. The book was beautifully wrapped, and I felt guilty; yes, it’s a gift, I had said. I had bought it, because I seemed to remember I had not given my friend a gift for her birthday. I wasn’t sure about that, though, and so the ‘gift’ may end up on my own bookshelves.

Bits of Freedom will be organising a symposium on copyright reform in the beautiful Berlage Exchange in Amsterdam on October 15, 2004. Entrance is free, but unfortunately there are no more seats left. Perhaps if I had known about it sooner I would have been able to go, but it seems BoF had their plans “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of The Leopard’“.

Speakers, amongst others, are the copyright lawyers Christiaan Alberdink Thijm (he of Kazaa and Zoekmp3.nl fame, whose book on copyright for the digital age seems to be sold out), and Bernt Hugenholz, co-author of the Dutch Creative Commons licenses.

If all these Dutch copyfighters manage to buy books before I can get to them, and snatch tickets to copyright reform congresses away before me, how come I cannot find these people on the web?

In defense of a reform of software copyright to get to a Free Software type situation (programs that are not custom-built should be free to use, copy and modify), proponents often point out that programmers can still make money. It is estimated that about 90% of the software in the world is custom made. They also point out that if you still want to make money in the commodity software world (typically games, operating systems, office software et cetera), you can do so by providing art (still to be copyrighted) or services. For instance, a GNU/Linux distributor can supply support for his product.

The problem with that is that it does not really help the geeks, does it? For services, unlike programming, you need people skills. That is something that a lot of geeks lack.

Today, singer André Hazes died. He was someone who never seemed to grasp in time when people were being sarcastic, but his naïvety sometimes paid off. Someone would joke that he should sing rock ‘n’ roll, and he would, and not that bad either. Huge swaths of the population took to him, and of the rest many liked him because they thought him camp. Like a Liberace, always hovering between cool and uncool, to the point that even the discerning part of the audience never quite knew how to pigeonhole him.

Sarcasm, irony, cynicism; what were the differences again? An unsettling bit of irony (or is it really cynicism?): Amsterdam TV channel AT5 published the news of Hazes’ death, and put an ad for a music festival beneath it that everyone immediately associates with the sort of music Andr� Hazes used to sing. Irony, but then the eye gets caught by the ad to the left, that claims that a company called Ad’sense can connect any bit of advertising with any bit of content. Let’s hope that that is not what has happened here, or AT5’s management should crawl in a hole and stay there till the shame has passed.

Screenshot from AT5.nl, cropped.

David Weinberger is struggling with the same copyright questions that I do, but he’s going to do it while facing what he presumes is the enemy.

Teleread has a short bit about the Fiction Bitch, an author who will critique your purply prose in no uncertain terms (I wonder what this sentence would net me) out of hatred for bad and mediocre writing.

When I was about twenty I had a pen friend who was nuts about so-called ’student’ magazine Propria Cures. PC, as it is generally abbreviated, is a satirical magazine. Supposedly written and edited by students, it often has staff that would have been kicked out of university decades ago.

Not sure if I remember this correctly: but apparently, my friend and her friends thought it way cool if you got a mention in the magazine. The editors used the letters page to bitch about bad prose, and sometimes praise good writing.

I had as few illusions about the quality of my writing then as I have now; in order to be printed, thus to be cool, I had to write something that would strike the right level of badness.

I managed to craft a song, a cheerless little ditty about ‘the environment’, of which they printed the refrain. I cannot remember it all, but it went something like: “De bomen gaan dood / De bomen gaan dood / Milieuproblematiek / Groot is de nood”. (The trees are dying / The trees are dying / Environmental problems / Large is the distress. It rhymes in Dutch. Honest, it does!)

Their comment: “Our waste-paper basket shares your pain.”

I wish I could say that I am not a fan; fans are people who are irrational when it comes to the object of their admiration. But I would be lying: I am a great fan of the works of Hergé, the creator of Tintin. I have at least half of the Tintin albums twice, sometimes even three times: some in the old Dutch translation, some French versions and two Spanish. I bought a collection of the complete Hergé. I have spent hundreds of euros on crappy biographies. I am a fan.

What I like so much about the man’s work is, of course, hard to say. The Tintin books are part of my consciousness. Sometimes I dream unwritten Tintin stories. Many pictures of the albums are like icons of the 20th century. With Franquin and the Goscinny/Uderzo team, Hergé was one of the pillars of the European humorous adventure comic in the last century. This may not mean much to people outside western Europe, but these comics were a part of growing up.

Tintin is also connected by many tendrils to the current main topic of this blog, copyright law. The strip started shortly after the ideas generated by the Berne convention had established themselves, and the author died shortly before digital copying became ubiquitous. After his death, Hergé’s widow Fanny married Nick Rodwell, as bereft as her of any talent but that of greed. Together they maximized the profits created by somebody else’s hard work, vigorously attacking anybody who used a Tintin drawing for whatever purpose.

There is a scene in The Calculus Affair where Captain Haddock tries to get rid of a piece of band-aid. It is stuck to his hand, and Haddock is waving furiously to rid himself of this meddlesome piece. He succeeds, but through a hilareous series of events the band-aid keeps coming back to him.

Art is like that too. What’s more, anything that is copyrighted is like that piece of band-aid. Once you have learned of its existence, and the idea it encapsulates, you cannot get rid of it.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), our minds are not DRMed computers. We do not always know which ideas are ours and which are those of others. I used to write comics with a bunch of guys in Nijmegen, the town of my alma mater. The process was not necessarily productive, but it was fun; we would sit around the table and keep spewing forth jokes and ideas, until we thought we had some useful ones. We would often hit a corny mood in which everything was funny and nothing was useful.

Then, the next day, one of us, appointed by the others, would sit down and write out a funny story we could sell. (Yes, it’s true, I have worked for the Evil Empire. What’s worse, I would do it again.)

Within days I would have forgotten who thought of what. It was not that the truly brilliant ideas did not originate in any one person, but because the others immediately started building on it, or used an idea as the starting point for a new line of thought, it was hard to identify afterwards who had thought of what.

And once an idea is out in the open, who is to stop it? You can call it plagiarism or infringement, I call it human nature. There is a fine line between what should be allowed and what not, but I trust most people know where to draw it. The law, unfortunately, has not caught up yet.

The thing that perhaps irritated me the most during the otherwise excellent debates at the Copy=Right festival my provider XS4All (Echelon keyword bingo!) organised last year, is that of the many stakeholders mentioned, the citizens were neglected. Now that’s funny, because the state that ordains the law we’re discussing, supposedly does so in name of and for the ultimate benefit of citizens.

It’s not just the Copy=Right? Festival where this disdain for the citizen was shown, it was just so noticeable there, because many stakeholders were present. Author, publisher, reader: in the end these are just roles that citizens take on, and most if not all citizens have performed each role many times in their lives.

Copyright law was introduced to protect citizens that write from citizens that publish.

Now it could be argued that times have changed and that nowadays citizens that write are much more threatened by citizens that read; but how has that changed the position of citizens that publish? How and when did they turn from a lot so immoral that a special law had to be written against them, to the guardians of the citizens that write? Who, to borrow a phrase, appointed the fox to guard the henhouse?

In my opinion, there is no evidence that publishers have stopped being the enemy. Any politician who lets the fox into the henhouse should seriously reconsider if he’s fit for representing citizens. Not because citizens that publish wouldn’t deserve the same protections as other citizens, but because citizens that publish still have enough rotten apples among them to be eyed with supreme suspicion.

There’s another thing: all citizens that read are winners. Not all citizens that write are, nor are all citizens that publish.* There’s a reason for this: a lot more people are capable of appreciating the fruits of good authorship then of creating these fruits. The law should reflect this, and does (did) with the copyright lottery, which says that good writers (and publishers) have a higher chance of getting money than bad writers. Some citizens that publish and some that write want to skew this state. Perhaps that is fine, but why should that be done in such a way that those who read, lose? In the balance, the publishers are a minority that already has gotten much more than they have a claim to.

*) I tend to believe that an activity can be its own reward, but not everybody shares that belief.

I was developing copyright tunnel vision: as I explained in a comment to a Lessig blog entry about Open Source in the UK government, copyfight discussion on the web seems to be taking place mainly in the USA. That country has a copyright system that sometimes differs quite a lot from the European systems. So the following development came as a nice surprise.

According to Webwereld, starting September 6 Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm will publish a book about how law is dealing with the internet age. Thijm is known for succesfully representing Kazaa all the way to the Dutch supreme court (Hooggerechtshof) in its legal battle against collection agency Buma/Stemra. The latter claimed that Kazaa facilitated copyright infringement, a notion that the court dismissed with a bow to the US Supreme Court’s famous Betamax decision.

Thijm also won a case for Zoekmp3.nl against Brein, the Dutch RIAA/MPAA wannabe.

The book is called ‘Het Nieuwe Informatierecht‘ (The New Information Law). A preview of the book, the chapter about copyright and P2P, can be downloaded from the Webwereld site. The book tries to outline the areas where existing law is a mismatch with new technologies, and covers topics such as spam, hyperlinking, p2p, domain names, et cetera.

When I was about ten or twelve, I still did not know how to swim. How undutch. Swimming lessons were a part of my elementary school curriculum, but at one point my knees started touching the bottom of the instruction pool and I gave up.

That the instruction pool had become too shallow (or rather, that I had outgrown the instruction pool) did not matter much to me; however, at the real pool (the one near my uncle’s house that we snuck into) I was only allowed in the shallow end, and that was getting a bit ridiculous. I wanted to feel the water flow over my shoulders.

Let me first show you how the pool looked like:

As you can see, the pool was L-shaped. The shallow end (represented by light colours) was separated from the deep end (dark) by a low bridge that allowed the life guards to patrol and to get to spots of trouble quicker.

Now pool guards are busy people, and they cannot keep track of everyone. So from time to time, I snuck under the bridge into the deep end. As you can also tell from the picture, the transition to the deep end on the left hand side was minimal; one day I found out that the right hand side was different.

I decided to take a short cut, and went under the bridge at the deep end of the deep end. There was a steep slope there: I slipped, lost control, skidded into the deep deep end, and suddenly found myself sitting at the bottom of the pool, with what felt like a lot of water over me.

I pushed myself upwards, but since I could not swim, I sank immediately. I kept propelling myself from the floor of the pool, broke surface, took a quick breath, and sank to the bottom again.

This could not last for ever, of course. I had oxygen, but was also getting tired and pannicky. First, I tried to shout when I got above the water. That strategy proved pretty disastrous: instead of being able to shout “help”, I could just utter “he” and swallow water and chlorine. So instead of drawing attention, I just robbed myself of air.

The weird thing about the whole situation was that I had now been busy drowning without really drowning for about half a minute, in a pool full of people, and nobody even seemed to notice. However, several people had bumped into me and that gave me an idea. I decided to latch onto the next person that would swim by, and not let go until we were out of the water.

That idea may have saved my life then and there (or so I think). I grabbed hold of the first person that bumped into me swimming by. A struggle ensued; the person tried to get rid of me, but I would not let go. The person swam to the shallow end, after which I disengaged. It turned out I had grabbed a girl not much older than me (oh Google, what will ye bring me now), who was of course furious. I tried to stumble an apology and an explanation and a thanks, but I don’t think she believed me, because she was still looking angry when I walked slowly out of the pool to find a place to rest.