Blog * Bani

Writing without copyright

Bani — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:59:36 +0000

In a recent article, Gennady Stolyarov II explains how writers can prosper without intellectual property.

The idea behind the copyright law is that authors need patrimonial rights over their creations in order to incentive their work. Some people argue that it wouldn’t be possible to earn a living and create art if it were not for the intellectual proterty laws.

Gennady Stolyarov II provides an historical perspective on how artists used to prosper before the copyright law and presents several ideas for the writers of tomorrow to make money even if the protection of their work cease to exist. The ideas range from a new way to negotiate with traditional publishers to patronage and online advertisements.

As the article ends, we are left to reflect upon the necessity of copyright:

It is never necessary to cling to a single legal mechanism or institution as the sole path for any given peaceful and productive human activity. Human beings are much more inventive and resilient than the defenders of copyright would suggest.

Starting Small

Bani — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 05:51:22 +0000

Or why products are launched in private betas.
A few years ago Eric Raymond postulated the “Law of Linus”, which goes as:

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow

So why should a company limit the number of eyeballs allowed to interact with their new products? Clay Shirky gives us an important reason to start small and try to improve from there: community.
If you want to create a community from scratch, you can’t expect it to start big. Scale kills conversation, so you need to start small and not grow faster than the community can sustain. It is also important that the founders create a relationship with the first thousands of users, knowing them and being available for them. But they also have to keep in mind that the users won’t behave the way they want them to and limiting the way users can collaborate with each other is the worst way to lead a new product.

Ignite NYC Open Hack

Bani — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:46:16 +0000

One week ago I was at Open Hack NYC. The keynote by Clay Shirky was great and I plan to write a blog post about it soon. But today I’m here to share what I saw during the Ignite NYC presentation that happened that same night. There were many interesting 5 minutes talk on several subjects, and you can see them all in the video bellow:

Information in Bb

Bani — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:50:34 +0000

When Your Previous Thesis Interferes With Your Current Thesis

Bani — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:53:36 +0000

From: Ubersoft, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License

Programmer Day

Bani — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:59:44 +0000

Laws don’t replace skill or talent

Bani — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:11:06 +0000

People believe the laws should reflect the interests of the society. They argue that copyright laws is important to incentive private parties to produce new content so that in the long term everyone will have access to a richer culture.
Maybe that was the original intent, but today it mostly serves to protect the distributor assets. Writers and musicians sell their rights to the publisher, who profit from the exclusive rights to distribute the content. Only a small percentage of the profit goes back to the artist in the form of royalties.
For the sake of the argument, let’s suppose the artist was able to earn his/her living only from the royalties received, which is not true for most cases. Is it fair that the single owner of the rights profit from it for such an extended time as 70 years after the author’s death, when other people could be creating more interesting stuff based on this work to entertain the rest of us?
Super protective laws will only incentive the mediocrity. We have to settle for “good enough”, when we could have access to great, improved versions of a work.

Mozilla Service Week

Bani — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:38:19 +0000

Mozilla Service Week Countdown

Microblogging: is there an alternative to Twitter?

Bani — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 02:47:23 +0000

After the recent attacks that have caused a major downtime on Twitter, followed by many user accounts being compromised, I was wondering if there was a good alternative to Twitter.

In the past I had tried to use Jaiku, and I’ve considered it much better than Twitter feature-wise. Integration with IM and grouping of replies were the two main advantages of their system in my opinion. Channels are also a good idea, but they way it was implemented didn’t make it much better than the tag system used on Twitter. The one real drawback of Jaiku was that my most of my friends weren’t there. And they didn’t want to start using it because most of their friends (who are pretty much the same people) weren’t there. I’ve never been able to overcome this initial obstacle and get a critical mass of my friends in the system so that the others would also join. I was hoping that the Google acquisition would be more influential than I was, but when they released the news that they wouldn’t invest directly on the system, I gave up.

Now Meme. At first, it looks great, you don’t have the often annoying limit of 140 characters, and it is much easier to share pictures and videos. And then you are suddenly struck by the meaning of an image is worth a thousand words. Yes, they are. And when you have your timeline filled with them, there is no space left for anything else. Mere words just won’t draw your attention in the middle of them. It is overwhelming and people aren’t encouraged to contribute with something new because they are too busy consuming what is already there. With few exceptions, my friends can’t draw or make fancy videos. Most of those funny pics and videos I’ll forget moments after I see them. They aren’t personal and they won’t start an interesting conversation. Meme is a very interesting concept on its own, but it doesn’t serve the same purpose as Twitter. It is more like our generation’s replacement for those PowerPoints sent by e-mail.

So let’s get back to something in which the words matter. If you want to share a video, you just send a shortened URL with a brief description. Just like Twitter. But now I’m talking about Identi.ca. They take free software ideas seriously. They implement the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, their software is under AGPLv3 and content becomes Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. You can also post messages using a Jabber client. Apart from that, it is pretty much like Twitter. Unfortunately, that means it’d be hard to convince the average Twitter user that there is a reason to make the move. And without the right people, no reason is good enough to be there.

Where can we find the people, then? Well, when you are looking for something, Google can help! But this time we are not talking about the search engine, Google Reader is what we are interested in. What has started just as a RSS reader, today is much more than that. First you could share links, then links with your own comments, and now you can even add the comments without any link, just like in a microblog! You can share pages with images and videos, but the compact view makes it easy for people to scan through all the content and choose what they want to see. And there is the wonderful “Mark all as read” link that can save you a lot of time in the mornings. But although it has the features of a microblogging service, right now I don’t see people using it as such.

There is also Facebook, but the interface is so cluttered and clumsy that I don’t even think it is worth mentioning in a microblogging post. However, yesterday they brought FriendFeed, so we may have some interesting news coming up.

With that said, I leave the question to the reader*: is there an alternative to Twitter?

* (old trick learned from math books)