Fri, 21 Mar 2008

The ninth graders

On Thursday, March 6, I spoke to a room full of ninth graders at the French-American International High School in San Francisco.

Two months ago, some faculty there emailed the San Francisco Linux Users Group (really, they emailed Jim Stockford, who passed it along). They explained that they were having a full day off classes for students on what they termed "Internet Day," bringing in outside speakers to talk about issues related to computer technology.

One of the most interesting things is that the event was organized by a remarkable high school senior, Joseph Harder. But long story short, I emailed them saying with my background and said I could talk, and they invited me.

So two Thursdays ago, I woke up at 8:30 a.m. and thought, "Man, I should make a presentation for these guys. I have to be a lunch at 11:30 to meet the other presenters." Then I thought better of it. "I'll go to sleep for another half hour."

Now fully prepared (at least as fully as I was going to be), I arrived at lunch only a few minutes late. I met some other presenters: Craig Newmark (famous for his List), a Google laywer, and a Boalt Hall faculty member, to name a few. I felt pretty clearly outclassed, but I figured if I didn't let them know how outclassed I was then at least I could have a normal conversation with them.

My presentation was to (I think) all the ninth graders in the school. There were between 60 and 80 of them in the room, I'd guess. I was co-presenting with Christian Einfeldt, Producer of the Digital Tipping Point film about Free and Open Source Software. Through the Socratic method, he spoke about "ownership," explaining to the students that when you run proprietary software, you are not in control of your computer.

I then spoke about copyright law and what Creative Commons is. I began by giving props to Christian, pointing out that the same Richard Stallman Christan referred to had signed my laptop. (It does turn out that my involvement in Free Software goes deeper than that, but it didn't seem important to list all of my million hats.)

I gave what looks like a very Larry-inspired presentation - sparse slides, and alignment tricks to make my points clearer. It was a total blast. To name only one difference between this presentation and a real presentation by Larry, I treated the slides and my presentation as one half of a conversation; Larry's rock-star Free Culture talks have him whip through things so fast you're mesmerized, but there's no time for questions in the middle. I let the kids ask me questions all through the talk, which was oodles of fun.

You can see the slides here, but the real joy of the event was in the interaction between me and the students. Some highlights:

A beginning

I began by pointing out:

• Copyright is Federal law
• Copyright is international law
• Copyright is not necessarily a system of morals

It's just the way the law is written right now.

• I asked, "How did we end up in this terrible mess of copyright law?"
  • I then flipped right through the words "disney + world" on their own slide, and switched to a picture of the Magic Kingdom at Disneyworld.
  • The kids are oohing and aahing and cheering, "Disney, yay!". I know I won't have their attention until they get this out of their systems, so I just stand around smiling for twenty seconds or so.
  • Then, naturally, I explain how Disney movies are largely fairy tales retold, and that Disney lobbies Congress to make sure no one can do to them what they did to to the Brothers Grimm. (A total Larry line, but it's a good one.)

• Kids in the audience actually remembered the original Napster. They must have been in second grade!
  • One asked, "Is that the cat?"
  • (I said, I guess it's a cat....)
  • And many of them actually said they used it, which I found amazing.

• Somewhere toward the middle of the presentation, just as I was finishing explaining how copyright was "worthless" to people who wanted to use and reuse (and participate in!) culture, a staff member whose name sadly escapes me asked me the obvious question: How will people make money?
  • I told her I'd get to her question toward the end, when I covered Nine Inch Nails. Turns out that while I said they made $750K of revenue, they actually made 1.6 million dollars in the first week.

A conclusion

• The way I explained Creative Commons was through the comparison of Metallica and Nine Inch Nails.
  • Metallica sued Napster, whereas Nine Inch Nails just released a full album (or four, depending how you see it) under a Creative Commons license.

I explained the exact license NiN chose with the CC symbols. As I finished up, I summarized this as:

Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I­IV
promises not to sue you
for making a music video and
putting it on YouTube.

One kid asked me, "Is that a legal promise?" This question reaches to the heart of what Creative Commons tries to do - decrease uncertainty about using other people's work when they don't mind. I answered, "Yes," and explained a little of the history of CC.

My last few slides were:

Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I­IV
respects you.

Which was followed by:

Metallica
does not.

So I got some great applause at the end, which felt marvelous, and then we had about five minutes more for questions. Two questions took up three minutes, and I realized I had forgotten to ask them this question that occurred to me earlier in the morning. So I said:

"Will the people follow the law, or will the law follow the people?"

I tried to get them to take some charge in changing laws that do them more harm than good. Some copyright may be useful, but it's hard to argue we haven't gone too far.

I got just about the same thunder of applause, and then they

Epilogue

As literary convention would have it, this story has an epilogue. I had some good conversations at the end, including discussing Free Software with one Mac user student who pretty clearly knew what he was talking about. Christian spent quite some time talking about his Digital Tipping Point film with the staff member whose name I have still, sadly, forgotten.

I also received an email that looked like this:

Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 05:55:24 +0000 (GMT)
From: Student <something@yahoo.fr>
To: asheesh@creativecommons.org
Subject: tech seminar at ihs

hey i rly enjoyed your talk today and i did wat u said and got the NIN
cds... there rly good and i just wanna say thank u a lot and i hope ull be
at the next seminar

Well, that was nice. I'm left with warm fuzzies and the desire to do something like this again.

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Mon, 10 Dec 2007

Refuting trademarks, Slashdot style

There's a new Free math package called Sage. However, some Slashdotters fear impending trademark problems.

Luckily, all is well:

no worries, an herb has prior art on the name.

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Copyright © Asheesh Laroia. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Open Hatch is my current project.