Tollef Fog Heen's blog

When travelling back home yesterday, I was bored on the final leg from Amsterdam to Trondheim so I decided to read the KLM in-flight magazine (whatever it's called). This month's issue was about "Online", basically the Internet. A fairly good issue with a decent amount of mostly-correct historical material as well as interesting outlooks on what's to come.

In the good tradition of such articles, a wordlist was included. Among the words was the word "bitleg" used to describe what would usually be described as software piracy. The latter word gives connotations to murder and robbery. Bitlegging doesn't have nearly as negative connotations and describe the issue at hand a lot more calmly and better.

When I grew up, terrorism was hijacking planes, attacking civilians like the 1972 Olympics attack by Black September and stuff like that. The people of Vietnam weren't terrorists, they were freedom fighters or at least guerilla fighters fighting France, then the US. The mujahedin in Afghanistan likewise, except they were fighting the Soviets.

After 2001-11-09 that changed. The quintuple hijiack was more of a coordinated assault than a "regular" terrorist attack. A bit like high-tech one-shot guerilla warfare in somebody else's country. Even though it was "too big" to be labeled a terrorist attack, I don't have a problem with calling it that. In the aftermath however, more or less any disruptive activity is labelled terrorism.

Sharing movies and music with peer-to-peer technologies is now terrorism, demonstrating for or against something is terrorism. Open source is terrorism. The people in Iraq who are trying to eject the US armed forces from the country are all labeled terrorists, even though it's the US forces who invaded the country an instantiated a government fairly undemocratically. I'm not agreeing with them attacking the US forces in any way, but they are not terrorists. They might be insurgent or rebels, though.

This makes me sad, not only because people go about being scared about terrorism all the time, being blown to pieces, but also because it makes the word unusable for what it is meant to describe.

So, please don't use the word terrorism unless you actually mean terrorism.

I'm currently reading "Free Culture":http://free-culture.org/, by Lawrence Lessig (You can get it for free, as in beer, as a PDF and read it on the train, like I'm doing). I'm not through it, so forgive me if I'm just repeating what is said later in the book.

He talks a lot about not only the issue of copyright, but also of works disappearing because the only copy of them is the copy stored in the publisher's archival system. When the publishing company goes broke (which it most likely will, eventually), those copies disappear. The problem isn't particularly big for books and such, newspapers are often already archived, but it is a big problem for ephemeral media like TV and web sites. Nobody is allowed to make a copy (at least, that's how the US law works, it's a little different here in Norway) at all.

I don't think removing copyright altogether is a good idea at all, but in this case, we need to limit copyright in the interest of making works available to the public at large.

My idea, which erupted in my head just a few minutes ago and might therefore not be fully evolved is to only allow works to be copyrighted if they are being distributed. If you make a television show and don't make it available on DVD or VHS or the Internet afterwards (probably within some predefined time limit), distributing copies is allowed, basically making you lose your copyright. If you at first allow people to download the show off the Internet for free but later decide to release a DVD set, the people who have already downloaded a copy off your site retains all the rights to that, but they will not necessarily have the rights to redistribute. So, as long as you publish the works in some way, you retain copyright. If you fail to do that, well, then your work is in the public domain. (As it will be by today's laws about 70 years after your death, assuming the US Senate stops passing copyright extension laws at some point.)

This will make available a huge amount of works to draw from when making new works, and it will make it fairly easy for a publisher to retain rights for as long as she actually cares about the work. Stop caring and lose your rights, which in turn will hopefully stop people and companies hoarding copyrighted works just for the hoarding.

I've added a new category, called politicts, to my blog. I guess it could also be called "rants" or a whole lot of different things, and I'm not 100% sure how I want to use it, but I think it'll be used like most political blogs: comment on both on-going political happenings around the world, like the Israeli-Palestinian and American-Iraqi wars, but also various rants on free software and related issues. Hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I'll do writing it.