mandarine

The wealth of the world does not come from our material labour. This is becoming more and more obvious each day. Look around and count how much of your stuff is more than thirty years old: you will agree that what really matters is not the accumulation of material wealth from the commercial labour of past generations, but the legacy of intellectual riches from the volunteer contribution of our elders.

Let us pick a few examples from the public domain:

• washing one’s hands (the biggest life-saving practice of all times)
• quantum physics (which made the internet revolution possible)
• democracy (Athenian, American, French, …)
• crumpets, muffins, pancakes
• soccer, football, baseball, basketball, golf,…
• the English language

In fact, as soon as we are considering ideas, concepts, inventions, or intellectual production at large (except books, songs and movies), it is actually harder to find something that is not in the public domain than something that is.

However, I am worried. The public domain has seldom had powerful advocates. For the past couple of centuries, works have generally ‘fallen’ into the public domain inadvertently, instead of being given as offerings to the world. And the insane divergence of recent capitalistic greed in staking claims over things which should (and used to) belong to the common good (molecules, genes, seeds, theorems) is ominous. In my nightmares, I see large auctions in which Universal buys exclusive rights for Elizabethan theater, Monsanto buys corn (any variety), Apple buys Beethoven, Intel buys quantum physics and HSBC mathematics, and so forth, so that everything is now owned, making things so much simpler…

Meanwhile (from a very-well researched economics paper on the value of the public domain):

Older [copyrighted] works gathering dust in vaults or even rotting away (as has occurred with a large amount of early film in the United States (Lutzker et al 2002)) generate no revenue or value for society, and represent a tragedy for any nation’s cultural heritage.

On the other hand, there are also encouraging signs that mentalities may be changing. The internet is an ideal medium in which the public domain can thrive, as it considerably reduces the cost of exchanging and duplicating intellectual production. The uptake of Linux and open-source software, the growing number of GPL or other Creative-Commons-licenced content on the web, the rise of wikibooks and other books directly published in the public domain are unprecedented phenomena. My belief is that if we lean to the right side, we can sway the balance in favor of the public domain, and private owership of ideas will nicely return to its original minority niche.

If, like many, your are making a list of resolutions for the new year, let me suggest you added a line for one thing you could contribute to the public domain. The good thing about contributions to the public domain is that you never have to keep up. The cumulative nature of intellectual production is such that what is done will never have to be done again. Whereas reducing chocolate intake in the new year is an everyday’s endeavour, if you give something to the public domain just once, it will be forever: what you give will be available for people all around the world and in all future generations.

Below is a list of activities that everyone should contemplate at least once in a lifetime:

• Proofreading public-domain e-books for Project Gutenberg
• Creating, editing, completing, commenting Wikipedia articles or any wikibook
• Recording, proof-listening, editing public-domain audio-books for LibriVox
• Contributing to open-source software projects (code, documentation, support forums)
• Uploading your pictures to flickr and specifying ‘no rights reserved’
• Collecting copyrighted material for the time it goes out of copyright (be a library/vault)
• Recording public-domain music and uploading it to musopen.org
• Dropping the copyright notice on your blog
• Exchanging seeds
• Publishing and exchanging cooking recipes
• Inventing something and just publishing it instead of filing a patent
• Writing a novel and publishing it over the internet instead of running the obstacle course of finding a publisher and then having your book out of print after one year and until 70 years after your death
• Bookmooching and bookcrossing (from Dew)
• Writing quality content and making it available (if not necessarily public-domain) on a website or blog (from Dew)

If you have other suggestions, please leave a comment: I’d like this list to grow to outrageous proportions to show just how much anyone can do.

You may by now know that I am very fond of audio-books in general, and of free audio-books in particular. Among those, I have a clear preference towards the public-domain audio-books which the LibriVox volunteers offer as unconditional gifts to the whole world and all future generations.

What you do not know is that I have come to worship one specific LibriVox voice. Warm and crystalline at the same time, this voice is the ideal bedside storytelling mother’s. If I’d been born to an English-speaking family, my dreams of being read Peter Pan, Narnia or Harry Potter to would feature that very voice.

My greatest luck is that I have had the privilege to edit some of the recordings in which this dream voice had been preciously collected, for subsequent release on LibriVox. Even if it was easy work (there are hardly any bits that need to be edited out), I am proud to have contributed to these priceless presents for humanity.

Dear Cori, I am in love with your voice.

A useful digression

I have recently heard of a psychology experiment about altruistic behaviour in chimpanzees. Every chimp could pull one of two ropes. If they chose the left one, they got a banana. If they chose the right one, they got a banana too, but another chimpanzee got one as well.
The experiment shows that [more]

I am on vacation. This time I decided I would not take books along with me: just audio-books in my mp3 player. Although I had already relied on audio-books for my bicycle commuting time, I had never taken them seriously enough to bring them as my only holiday reading. This week, I have ‘read’ Michael Connelly’s ‘The Lincoln Lawyer‘, which is a 21st century version of Roman Noir à la LA Confidential. Next week’s read: I am downloading Huckleberry Finn while I am writing this.

I will tell you more when I come back, but this one week was a revelation of sorts. Audio-books are a completely new reading experience:

• It is easier to enjoy the language
• The pace is much slower: it is like walking instead of flying
• I cannot read faster when there is more suspense
• I can read in many circumstances where a book is inappropriate: on a bus inching up its way up a mountain on a winding road, I can read without feeling nausea, and I can still watch the landscape; at night in a sleeping-car, I can read while lying awake, without bothering fellow travelers with the light; on a beach, when the sun makes it impossible to read from white paper, etc…
• I can still read while doing something else (something that does not require too much concentration): cooking, packing, waiting for other family members to be ready for whatever we will be doing today, …

Today, I found LibriVox, and I am really contemplating volunteering as a reader to contribute. If you know some French, you might be able to hear me read a book to you in a near future.

Update: everything is back to normal. If you want to have a feeling of how things looked like on April 5th, try to disable the stylesheet from your browser (I know at least Firefox can do it: view/page style/no style).

No, your browser has not gone berzerk. No, reloading will not change the result. Today is CSS naked day. I have turned the stylesheet off. It will be back tomorrow (if I do not mess it up in the process).

I am learning CSS at the moment, so I can tweak my theme (or maybe build a new one from scratch) without the dreadful consequences of ignorant tampering, and I really must aknowledge how powerful it is.

CSS naked day is a way to pay tribute to web standards.

I am stalled about halfway through ‘Night and Day’. I’ve been painfully trudging along for a month now, and I still have not found anything special to keep me going except the beautiful language and my stubborn pride. To start with, I was under the impression that the first pages had been torn, or that I was reading a second episode before having read the first one. I was missing context for every sentence. This meant I had to store each bit of information, not knowing whether the color of the teacups, the mood of the weather, or the shape of the gas light on the pavement would be of any use for further understanding as the plot and characters slowly gathered more flesh. This requires considerable effort, all the more so because I also need context to help me with vocabulary.

After fifteen chapters, [more]

Piracy is theft: now and then, when I watch a DVD, instead of the typical legal warning text, I have to watch a complete video sequence involving people stealing cars, purses, and other objects, and the ending shot is someone downloading something from the internet, with a vibrating slogan in large red letters: Piracy is Theft. I say no. Piracy is piracy, theft is theft, and it is not up to Sony Music or Warner Home Video to brainwash me into redefining what theft is.

What is theft?

I believe that ever since the concept of property has germinated inside the narrow conscience of a pervert Homo not-so-Sapiens (germination accurately captured by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes), theft has always been two inseparable things: the victim is deprived of something he/she has worked for, while the thief obtains something without having worked for it. Prejudice for the victim, benefit for the thief. Which one is more important?

I frankly doubt we would consider theft the same way today if historically it had not deprived the victims of their property. If people could still use their stuff after it had been stolen, I doubt they would even contemplate filing a complaint with the police.

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I write long posts. When I want to make a difficult point, I often need to walk the reader down a long path. Sometimes, the proof could be written with fewer words, but it would be inedible dehydrated logic. Naked skeletons of ideas are more appealing if I can put some flesh around them.

Yet long posts take a long time to read, and this can deter readers. I resent this, but I am myself the perfect example: I seldom have more than half an hour before me when I want to keep up with blogs I like, and I systematically put aside posts I think will take me too much time to read. [more]

Even though I had informally decided not to mention new year’s resolutions under any shape or flavour, Lorelle chose otherwise with yet another compelling challenge. Below the picture are ten goals for the mandarine blog in 2007.

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I once heard actress Jodie Foster on a french radio show: her French was absolutely fluent, her accent was flawless, and yet I could tell right away that French was not her first language. [more]