On the Gripping Hand

I blame two brown people for this blog: Mike Brown of Webstock, and Russell Brown of Public Address. Mike and I were talking in Sydney, back in 2005 after the Web Essentials 05 conference, and one of our takeaways was that all god’s chillun got a blog. And a Flickr account. Mike went on to start Webstock, which I call the hard way to getting a blog, and we both got on Flickr, but I was unconvinced about this whole blogging thing. In one sense, it’s what we were doing back in the 90′s with personal homepages. But, I thought, most of them were lame and many of the blogs I’ve encountered are the same, filling your screen with the minutiae of the owner’s daily life. Did the world really need yet another technologist imparting the ultimate truth to an audience that consists of his mother and siblings? No, I thought, stay in the comments section and participate from there. But a seed was planted.

Russell Brown has been a media and ICT institution in NZ for forever. His early Hard News bulletins, broadcast on bFM, were syndicated in text through mailing lists and Usenet. Eventually, he set up Public Address as a host for a number of blogs, including Hard News. Initially it was one way traffic, with no comments, but he added the Public Address System 2 years ago and it’s now one of the best discussion places on the NZ web. I’ve been reading it for a while but only signed up to comment a little while ago. It’s addictive, especially when covering copyright issues. A week or so ago we were in the middle of a discussion and Russell said “Hmm, I should blog about that” to which I replied “I should set up a blog so I can blog about that”. To be fair to Russell, he tried to dissuade me, saying I should craft a guest post, but the seed had started to grow so I set about bringing this little entity to life.

So, why my own blog, when I could be guesting at PA? Because it offers me more freedom to develop themes, to explore possibilities, to boldly go where no blog – you get the picture.

So, here we are. I suspect most of this blog will be about copyright and IP, as there are major moves by governments around the world to tighten up this area, criminalizing infringers and generally pandering to the small percentage of copyright holders who make up the Industry (most of whom had little or no hand in the creation of the content to which their copyrights refer). There’s a thing called ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which is being negotiated by a number of governments, including NZ’s, which could seriously put a kink in the creation of a knowledge economy (and that’s a set of posts in itself!), but there’s also SECURE, Standards Employed by Customs for Uniform Rights Enforcement, which also targets IP and ‘piracy’.

What we’re seeing is a gradual enclosure of IP in the same way as land was enclosed in medieval times. When a commons disappears, the environment stultifies and becomes the perogative of the few. For this to happen to knowledge would be disastrous.

I was talking to a journalist recently about my fun with ACTA and he asked me “Why you? What’s your reason for doing this?” and I responded “Someone’s got to do it, and I have the skills and knowledge”.

We’ll see if that’s enough.