When intellectual property is the product as well as the raw material, and we are all creators

2012-01-17T17:57:56-05:00

Wikipedia is going black for a day on January 18, 2012. They state their reasons here.

The words that prompted this post follow:

But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.

But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.

Intellectual property law is entering a new phase. It's been around for years, but in the past, it was lawyers for big companies arguing with each other, for the most part.

But now, in this age of the democratization of the creative process, the processes associated with creation have changed. As always, we create on the shoulders of those that came before. We copy and borrow. The difference is that now -- you don't have to learn to paint like Rembrandt, you can actually start with Rembrandt and go from there. As I did, when I took the digital image from Wikipedia. And as Devorah Sperber did when creating the artwork depicted on the right, called After Rembrandt.

Piracy laws are intended to protect the creators and give them rights to earn from their creations. It's never been a straightforward process of course, but now it affects all of us more than ever. To participate fully in the digital world of social media we create culture by sharing and changing what we see around us.

I could still learn to play, let's say, a Lady Gaga tune on a piano. The piano cannot yet recognize that I have played copyright protected material. What happens when it can?

How do we protect the ability of creators to make a living from their creations, but avoid the continued creeping of corporate interests in the process of creation?

The wall of distraction: Three rules of communication that will help you get over

2011-12-20T17:12:49-05:00

This morning my workout buddy told me she was so distracted thinking about all the things she has to get done, that instead of gargling, she swallowed her mouthwash. Her explanation: "I have about 3,000 things on my mind right now. Do you ever have that problem?"

Oh yeah.

One recent morning, distracted with a dozen things and dabbing at the remains of the mascara from the day before, I noticed that the eye-makeup remover smelled odd. Odd, but familiar. Fortunately I noticed that it was actually nail polish remover before I actually got acetone in my eye. (Yikes!)

It's easy to find distracted and overwhelmed people -- just get into your car and go for a drive, they are everywhere.

I could have called it the wall of irritation, because there are so many little irritating things we all need to do ... follow complicated procedures, install things on our phones, reset passwords, find forms, meet deadlines, find answers in support forums, replace broken appliances, get new watch batteries. In the face of this, the world wonders why we aren't paying more attention to our health, spending more time with our families, and making good financial plans for the future.

There is now so much information available, that we can even feel guilty if we don't find the right answer to a great many things, like the best price on a car, or the most durable washer. The information has helped, but it has also added to the great wall.

We don't even have time to be good consumers. We don't read the fine print, we don't follow the instruction manual, and we click "agree" with abandon. Is it any wonder we re-use the same password over and over, even though we know this is not a good security plan?

Three ways to get over the wall

When I think about this in the context of my clients, I always come to the same conclusions:

Keep it short -- our attention span is shorter than ... sorry, wait, what was I saying?
Keep it simple -- none of us have time to sort out confusing messages
Keep it relevant -- your product/service is not the thing we are most worried about (-- unless of course, you have really made a hash of things)

Customer Experience Crossroads

When intellectual property is the product as well as the raw material, and we are all creators

The wall of distraction: Three rules of communication that will help you get over

Three ways to get over the wall