In my latest Internet Evolution column, “Digital Licensing: Do It Yourself,” I propose a new kind of self-serve, lightweight “commercial commons” that would allow makers to do small-scale commercial manufacturing of goods that remix copyrights and trademarks, with no upfront payments, and a fixed royalty rate that lets the makerverse operate as a giant, well-compensated R&D lab for products you should be selling:

From edge to edge, the Net is filled with creators of every imaginable tchotchke – and quite a lot of them are for sale.

And quite a lot of that is illegal.

That’s because culture isn’t always non-commercial. All around the physical world, you can find markets where craftspeople turn familiar items from one realm of commerce into handicrafts sold in another realm.

I have a carved wooden Coke bottle from Uganda, a Mickey Mouse kite from Chile, a set of hand-painted KISS matrioshkes from Russia. This, too, is a legitimate form of commerce, and the fact that the villager who carved my Coke bottle was impedance-mismatched with Coke and didn’t send a lawyer to Atlanta to get a license before he started carving isn’t a problem for him, because Coke can’t and won’t enforce against carvers in small stalls in marketplaces in war-torn African nations.

If only this were true for crafters on the Net. Though they deploy the same cultural vocabulary as their developing-world counterparts for much the same reason (it’s the same reason Warhol used Campbell’s soup cans), they don’t have obscurity on their side. They live by the double-edged sword of the search-engine: The same tool that enables their customers to find them also enables rights-holders to discover them and shut them down.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Digital Licensing: Do It Yourself

My latest Guardian column, “Transparency means nothing without justice,” is up. I wrote this before the G20 debacle (it was delayed due to an administrative problem at the Guardian), but all the points are just as relevant to the G20’s climate camp as they are to last summer’s version of it.

And here’s where transparency breaks down. We’ve known about all this since last August – seven months and more. It was on national news. It was on the web. Anyone who cared about the issue knew everything they needed to know about it. And everyone had the opportunity to find out about it: remember, it was included in national news broadcasts, covered in the major papers – it was everywhere.

And yet … nothing much has happened in the intervening eight months. Simply knowing that the police misbehaved does nothing to bring them to account.

Transparency means nothing unless it is accompanied by the rule of law. It means nothing unless it is set in a system of good and responsible government, of oversight of authority that expeditiously and effectively handles citizen complaints. Transparency means nothing without justice.

Transparency means nothing without justice

The Locus Award shortlist has been posted — this is the list of the best science fiction books and stories of the year, as chosen by the general public. I’m immensely gratified to say that I’m on the list three times, for my young adult novel Little Brother, my collaborative novella True Names (with Ben Rosenbaum), and my novelette The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away.

The whole list is a great jumping-off point for exploring the best written sf and fantasy of 2008!

2009 Locus Award Finalists