Over the past year, I’ve been privileged to participate in the Royal Society for the Arts’ Adelphi Project, through which a drafting committee worked to create a a charter of public rights in copyright, patent, trademark and related rights.

The Charter is intended to be used as a litmus test by governments that are considering new exclusive rights over knowledge goods. These rights are usually granted without any evidence of their promised benefits. As my fellow drafter Jamie Boyle says, “it’s as if the FDA made drug approvals by relying on speeches by pharmaceutical companies and looking at tarot cards.”

The Adelphi Charter marks the first-ever set of empirical principles for evaluating newe xclusive rights proposals. For the first time, we have a test we can hold our lawmakers accountable to. I’m very proud to have been a part of it:

We call upon governments and the international community to adopt these principles.

1. Laws regulating intellectual property must serve as means of achieving creative, social and economic ends and not as ends in themselves.

2. These laws and regulations must serve, and never overturn, the basic human rights to health, education, employment and cultural life.

3. The public interest requires a balance between the public domain and private rights. It also requires a balance between the free competition that is essential for economic vitality and the monopoly rights granted by intellectual property laws.

4. Intellectual property protection must not be extended to abstract ideas, facts or data.

5. Patents must not be extended over mathematical models, scientific theories, computer code, methods for teaching, business processes, methods of medical diagnosis, therapy or surgery.

6. Copyright and patents must be limited in time and their terms must not extend beyond what is proportionate and necessary.

7. Government must facilitate a wide range of policies to stimulate access and innovation, including non-proprietary models such as open source software licensing and open access to scientific literature.

8. Intellectual property laws must take account of developing countries’ social and economic circumstances.

9. In making decisions about intellectual property law, governments should adhere to these rules:

* There must be an automatic presumption against creating new areas of intellectual property protection, extending existing privileges or extending the duration of rights.

* The burden of proof in such cases must lie on the advocates of change.

* Change must be allowed only if a rigorous analysis clearly demonstrates that it will promote people’s basic rights and economic well-being.

* Throughout, there should be wide public consultation and a comprehensive, objective and transparent assessment of public benefits and detriments.

Salon’s just published part six of my novel-in-progress, Themepunks. In this installment, Tjan — the business manager — takes a job at a rival company and Andrea gets slimed by a dirty journo:

Andrea’s PDA vibrated whenever the number of news stories appearing online mentioning her or Kodacell or Kettlewell increased or decreased sharply. She used to try to read everything, but it was impossible to keep up — now all she wanted was to keep track of whether the interestingness-index was on the uptick or downtick.

It had started to buzz that morning and the pitch had increased steadily until it was actually uncomfortable in her pocket. Irritated, she yanked it out and was about to switch it off when the lead article caught her eye.

KODACELL LOSES TJAN TO WESTINGHOUSE

The byline was rat-toothed Freddy. Feeling like a character in a horror movie who can’t resist the compulsion to look under the bed, Andrea thumbed the PDA’s wheel and brought up the whole article.

Kodacell business-manager Tjan Lee Tang, whose adventures we’ve followed through Andrea Fleeks’s gushing, besotted “blog” posts…

She looked away and reflexively reached toward the delete button. The innuendo that she was romantically involved with one or more of the guys had circulated on her blog’s message boards and around the slashdots ever since she’d started writing about them. No woman could possibly be writing about this stuff because it was important — she had to be “with the band,” a groupie or a whore.

(Previous installments)

Mark Forman is the podcaster who’s been serializing my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom read aloud, one chapter at a time, with backing from great, Creative Commons-licensed music. Today he concluded the reading with chapters nine and ten in one installment. Now he’s embarked upon his next project, reading Lessig’s magnificent Free Culture.

(Thanks, Mark!)

My story Truncat (a sequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) has been translated into German by Magnus Wurzer. The translation is called Schnipsel and it’s licensed under a Creative Commons license.

I’ve got a story in Future Washington, an anthology that just came out. As the title implies, the anthology collects stories about the future of Washington DC, and in my case, the future of regulation, too. I’ve read about half the stories in the anthology since my contributor’s copy arrived in the mail yesterday and I’ve yet to come up with a dud. Not surprising, given the contributions of writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, Joe Haldeman, Brenda Clough and many others.

My story is a novella called “Human Readable,” and of all my short fiction, it is the story I’m most proud of. It’s the tale of a world that’s been upended by hyper-efficient planning algorithms based on ant-colony optimizations, so that Los Angeles has the best traffic in the world. However, when these networks crash, they really crash — cars, surfboards, and many other common conveyances end up catastrophically failing, with concomitant loss of life.

Human Readable is the story of a couple who break up over their relation to the ant-networks. Reiner is a hacker who works on improving the networks. Trish is an activist lawyer who wants to see them regulated. Their irreconcilable differences turn them from being lovers into being political opponents.

“We, as a society, make trade-offs all the time,” Rainer said. He was wearing a different suit this evening, something that Trish had to admit looked damned good on the studio monitors (better than her frumpy blouse and wool winter-weight trousers). “We trade a little bit of privacy for a little bit of security when we show identification before going into a federal building –”

The ewok held up his paw. “But how much should we be willing to trade, Ms. McCavity?”

She looked into the camera, keeping her eyes still, the way she’d been told to if she didn’t want to appear tourettic. “Wickett, when Franklin said, ‘Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty,’ he wasn’t spouting empty rhetoric, he was laying the groundwork for this enduring democratic experiment that we all love. Look, we’re not opposed to the use of autonomous networks for *some* applications, even *most* applications, with appropriate safeguards and checks and balances. No nation on earth has the reliance that we do on these networks. Are they an appropriate way of advising you on the best way to get to the mall on a busy Saturday? Absolutely, provided that everyone gets the best advice the system can give, regardless of economic status or influence. But should they be used to figure out whom the FBI should open an investigation into? Absolutely not. We use judges and grand juries and evidence to establish the sufficiency of a request to investigate a private citizen who is considered innocent until proven guilty. We learned that lesson the hard way, during the War on Terrorism and the Ashcroft witch-hunts. Should we trade grand juries and judges for ant-colonies? Do you want the warrant for your wiretap issued by an accountable human being or by a simulated ant-hill?”

The ewok turned to the camera. “Both sides make a compelling case. What do you think? When we come back, we’ll take your calls and questions.” The lights dimmed and it adjusted its collar and cracked its hairy knuckles on the table before it. Ever since it had made the move to a pbs, it had been grooming its fur ever-more conservatively and trying out a series of waistcoats and short pants. It turned to her and stared at her with its saucer-sized black button eyes. “You know, I just wanted to say thanks — I had self-identified as an ewok since I was five years old, but Lucasfilm just wouldn’t license the surgery, so I went through every day feeling like a stranger in my body. It wasn’t until your law got enacted that I was able to find a doctor who’d do it without permission.”

Part five of Themepunks (earlier installments), my novel-in-progress, is up on Salon this morning. Themepunks is the story of a tech-boom driven by commodity hardware, three-d printers, and leftover geek talent going begging after the dotcom bust. Part five tells the story of Lester and Perry’s next invention, and of Andrea’s miserable homecoming to Northern California:

“Resource contention readily decomposes into a bunch of smaller problems, with distinctive solutions. Take dishes: every dishwasher should be designed with a ‘clean’ and a ‘dirty’ compartment — basically, two logical dishwashers. You take clean dishes out of the clean side, use them, and put them into the dirty side. When the dirty side is full, the clean side is empty, so you cycle the dishwasher and the clean side becomes dirty and vice-versa. I had some sketches for designs that would make this happen, but it didn’t feel right: making dishwashers is too industrial for us. I either like making big chunks of art or little silver things you can carry in your pocket.”

She smiled despite herself. She was drawing a half-million readers a day by doing near-to-nothing besides repeating the mind-blowing conversations around her. It had taken her a month to consider putting ads on the site — lots of feelers from blog “micro-labels” who’d wanted to get her under management and into their banner networks, and she broke down when one of them showed her a little spreadsheet detailing the kind of long green she could expect to bring in from a couple of little banners, with her getting the right to personally approve every advertiser in the network. The first month, she’d made more money than all but the most senior writers on the Merc. The next month, she’d outstripped her own old salary. She supposed it meant that she should make it official and phone in a resignation to Jimmy, but they’d left it pretty ambiguous as to whether she was retiring or taking a leave of absence and she was reluctant to collapse that waveform into the certainty of saying goodbye to her old life.

“So I got to thinking about snitch-tags, radio frequency ID gizmos. Remember those? When we started talking about them a decade ago, all the privacy people went crazy, totally sure that these things would be bad news. The geeks dismissed them as not understanding the technology. Supposedly, an RFID can only be read from a couple inches away — if someone wanted to find out what RFIDs you had on your person, they’d have to wand you, and you’d know about it.”

“Yeah, that was bull,” Perry said. “I mean, sure you can’t read an RFID unless it’s been excited with electromagnetic radiation, and sure you can’t do that from a hundred yards without frying everything between you and the target. But if you had a subway turnstile with an exciter built into it, you could snipe all the tag numbers from a distant roof with a directional antenna. If those things had caught on, there’d be exciters everywhere and you’d be able to track anyone you wanted — christ, they even put RFIDs in the hundred-dollar bill for a while! Pickpockets could have figured out whose purse was worth snatching from half a mile a way!”

I’m speaking at the O’Reilly European Open Source conference in Amsterdam next week. I’m at a standards body meeting for the first couple days of the conference, but I get in Wednesday night and give a talk on the European Broadcast Flag on Thursday morning. Hope to see you there!

EuroOSCON targets the specific needs of European developers, programmers, strategists, entrepreneurs, and technologists, helping them to deliver the benefits of open source technology to their companies and organizations. Tutorials, sessions, panel discussions, and on-stage conversations focus on all aspects of building applications, services, and systems with an emphasis on practical skills.

Last Sunday I was a guest on the This Week in Tech podcast, recorded live at the Gallery Cafe in San Francisco. This is the podcast that a lot of the old TechTV/screensavers people migrated to — I had a TON of fun. Audio’s live!

Update: There’s video, too! (Thanks, Costoa!)