Update: to celebrate the Day Against DRM I am buying the DRM free games at http://www.wolfire.com/humble and donating the money to the EFF.

I’ve created a team with Chester and, after some brainstorming, we’ve decided to create a mash up between SlideShare and Yahoo! Meme, that we’ve called SlideMeme. Chester gave more details about the implementation on his blog, but here I’d like to write about my findings when I’ve started analyzing all the licenses involved.

Basically, our hack involved putting together several pieces of code:

• an algorithm to extract the individual slides of the presentation as swf files;
• a library to convert swf to gif;
• a software to create animated gifs; and
• a way to post to Meme

The first piece, which came from a blog post, had no license whatsoever*. On the other hand, the author called himself open source enthusiast and made it implicit that he was posting the code so that other people could take advantage of it, so we’ve assumed we could copy and paste it to start our hack.

So the next step was to find something to convert the swf to gif. The most server-friendly thing that we found was an ActiveX library. The site had typos and the “More Info” link was broken, but we’ve decided to download it anyway, since at least it said it was freeware. When installing the library, the license was available, but it was kinda messy. There were four clauses (1, 2, 3 and 5 – they skipped 4). It said the copy had to be used by a single developer (I guess we almost infringed that one by pair programming, but Chester wrote the code to call the library alone) and there were tons of restrictions on the purpose of the software when redistributing the library. But apparently running it on our server was fine.

My last hope of a decent license was on ImageMagick. It is a well known free software included on almost all Linux distributions, so they had to be more aware of the licensing issues. And indeed they had a link to a page which included the license and several explanations about it. They had their own license, which doesn’t exactly make life easy for someone who wants to use their software, but after reading it I’ve realized it was pretty much a copy of Apache License with the two sentences that made it incompatible with GPL 2.0 removed. Therefore, no problems about using it on our hack either, even more considering we were just making an external call to the program.

Of course we didn’t have time to think about all these licenses before presenting the hack, and that makes me a little bit nostalgic about the old times when people could share their programs freely on the Internet without worrying about all the copyright and licensing issues. The copyright laws weren’t written with the digital age in mind, and sometimes I think it would be best for everyone if they didn’t try to fit the square peg in the round hole as they are doing here. Because big companies are afraid of loosing their intellectual property, they are using the old laws to raise giant barriers against sharing on the Internet. And now being able to find the solution to develop a new software is one step away from creating value for a large number of people.

* and as I write this, I’ve realized that after I migrated my blog from Blogger to WordPress I lost the license information because I can’t edit the layout here. It is CC-by-sa and I’ll figure out a way to make it easily known by everyone who visits the site.

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.

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.