Nicholas Kristof claims that liberals are stingy, citing research showing that conservatives donate more to charities than liberals. But these findings do not surprise me at all. I am a liberal and favor broad government investment in public services (and not just for the needy, but for all of society). And I rarely contribute to charities. Why? Because the vast majority of charities are organized around narrow, single-issue agendas. By giving money to charities we encourage a piecemeal approach to solving problems that are better solved through an integrated approach. We also risk allocating funds on the basis of what issues arouse the most emotion rather than what projects could do the most good. Furthermore, charities are rarely transparent and tend to be run by people with specific ideological goals. I believe it is far better to take the money that would otherwise be spent on charity and give it to the government as taxes, and then to demand transparency and accountability from our elected officials to ensure that those taxes are being used in a way that realizes the kind of society we collectively envision. Social entrepreneurship is another non-charity option that may be more palatable to those who still believe the market knows best. I believe both approaches are probably needed, and both are preferable to the charity system which has failed to provide a social safety net despite conservative enthusiasm.

Wikia Search has launched. Wikia Search is Jimmy Wales’ new project, an effort to apply an “open” Wikipedia-style approach to the creation of a search engine. I haven’t been following the project closely, so I don’t know the details of how it works. But despite my reservations about the “open and transparent” Kool Aid that Wales and so many others are selling, I am glad to see such experimentation. I have been thinking a lot lately about the critical role of indexing and search infrastructure, and coming to the conclusion that there is too much research focused solely on the technological aspects of such infrastructure, and too little creative thinking about the social, economic, and political dimesions of how we provide it. Current orthodoxy seems to assume that such infrastructure should be completely provided by private companies who profit from advertising. This seems “obvious” given the success of Google, and the failure of non-commercial systems such as libraries to cope with the web. Yet I wonder if this story is too simple, and whether Google’s dominance, coupled with the radical hypercapitalist ideology that has held sway the past couple of decades, has blinded us to alternative approaches. Certainly the disadvantages of the completely privatized approach are beginning to become apparent in many areas: the troublesome co-dependence of contextual advertising and link spam, the disturbing implications of perfecting personalized search, and the temptations for private search providers to trade for their own account. Analogies between the web and the physical world are always questionable, but I wonder what the U.S. would be like if it had entrusted the construction of its transportation network, signage, maps, and such solely to private companies funded by advertisers? Would that have been the best way to support the people and companies who depend on that infrastructure to find and be found? I doubt it.

SCOTUSblog reported this morning that

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that developers of software violate federal copyright law when they provide computer users with the means to share music and movie files downloaded from the internet.

Um, not quite. Reading the actual decision, it seem that the Court held that

One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, going beyond mere distribution with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’’s lawful uses.

So, just distributing software that enables users to share music and movie files is not enough, and just distributing such software and knowing what people might do with it is not enough: to be violating copyright law, the developers have to actively promote the use of the software for violating copyright.

Of course, no one knows what exactly active promotion of copyright infringement is and isn’t. Arguably, Apple is actively promoting copyright infringement by selling iPods with so much space that you couldn’t possibly fill them with iTunes Music Store purchases alone. So, from now on, whenever a U.S. technology company invents a new product, it will sit on the shelf for years while lawyers debate whether it actively promotes infringement. Meanwhile Chinese and Korean companies will develop five generations of the same product and take the whole market before the U.S. product ever sees the light of day.

Bottom line: this decision won’t have a significant effect on file sharing. The number of file sharers will continue to grow, as will the total number of bits shared. What this decision (along with the Bush administration’s (lack of) broadband policy) will do is help ensure that in 25 years American teenagers will be feverishly studying Mandarin in the hopes that they can get into Peking University, so they can get a decent job in Beijing and send money home to their parents in New York.

Cool with me, I love Chinese food.

Ripley reacts to a depressing news item about legendary dub mixer Scientist losing his battle to get some $$$ from Greensleeves Records’ licensing of tracks from Scientist Rids The World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires to Rockstar Games for Grand Theft Auto 3. The story quotes a Greensleeves legal droid:

Basically, Scientist was claiming to own copyrights in songs and recordings as a result of being the mixing engineer. Although we always felt these claims were ridiculous, we had to defend ourselves all the way to trial and are delighted to have got the right result.

Yes, that’s right: It’s “ridiculous” that he might own copyright in songs from an album with his damn name in the title.

I’ve been reading Harold Becker’s Art Worlds recently, and it’s made me realize a key problem with copyright. An “art world” is a network of people who cooperate to produce a work of art. What Becker shows is that any work of art is cooperatively produced in this way, even supposed paradigms of solo genius like novels or poems. Yet (in Western art worlds at least) we feel compelled to single out one person in the network as “the artist” and to demote everyone else involved to the level of “support personnel.” If you work in an art form where the role of mixing engineer has been elevated from “support personnel” to “artist,” well, too bad, you’re screwed, because the law knows who the real artist is, and it ain’t you.

The real problem isn’t misidentification of the artist, it’s the failure to realize that “intellectual property” is produced by networks, not individuals.

Joe Hall comments on the battle to manage perceptions in the MGM v. Grokster case. This is a worry I’ve had for a while about the pro-P2P forces. On the one hand you have P2P vendors in a race to the bottom for the slimiest advertising, which as David Post points out will likely come back to haunt them, while on the other you have crusaders like Downhill Battle pitching P2P as a weapon in the fight against the corruption of a “pure” creative economy by money (for example the T-shirt slogan “Peer to Peer Kills Pay-For-Play”).

This latter strategy perpetuates the fantasy that creative production is at its best when unsullied by capitalist concerns. See Tyler Cowen’s In Praise of Commercial Culture for a nice evisceration of that notion. In fact, “payola” (pay-to-play) can be a powerful force for driving the development of new creative forms–see Cowen’s discussion of rock and roll and the payola scandals of the 1950s, engineered by record companies who feared the market power of the new music.

I suspect that successful P2P business models will rely heavily on various forms of “pay to play.” P2P advocates ought to be pushing the idea that the potential financial gains through new P2P-enabled business models are greater than the current ones, even without state-enforced IP monopolies, and thus provide better incentives for creative production, rather than suggesting creators don’t need incentives like icky money to create.

A friend asked me:

If the Supreme Court does away with the Sony doctrine for copyright infringement this year, with what should it replace it? What would be the best way to balance the interests of copyright owners with these emerging technologies?

I believe the best outcome would be for the Supreme Court to uphold the Sony doctrine. Any other outcome will postpone the eventual balancing of competing interests that I believe must come through new legislation.

Here’s why: making P2P services illegal will have no effect on their ubiquity. The technology is too basic and knowledge of the techniques is too widespread. Although specific services may be shut down, hundreds of clones with new security features will reappear in their place, as has happened each time popular P2P services have been shut down in the past.

So: P2P is a given. The question then becomes: how to compensate artists? I believe the best balance can be achieved through an alternative compensation system of the kind espoused by William Fisher. In fact, I believe such a system would compensate artists far better than what we have now.

Unfortunately, the current political climate makes it exceedingly unlikely that the required legislation will come to pass, just as I fear it will result in a neutered Sony doctrine this spring. So the current system will probably stick around for a while, slowly fading into irrelevance, and will eventually be eclipsed by new systems starting from scratch. As Lucas Gonze put it:

Can I just say this? Napster politics are brutally boring. The action right now is in making the music and video owned by the major labels and film studios archaic and unpopular. We’re going to do to those properties what talkies did to silent films, what political bloggers did to Dan Rather, what Elvis did to Mantovani. Our stuff is better, that’s how we’re going to win.