I’ll be speaking in Silicon Valley next month at Business of Software 2007. They’ve got a really cool line-up, including the legendary Guy Kawasaki, and Eric Sink, one of the original architects of Internet Explorer. I’ll be talking about the pirate’s dilemma in the context of the software business, and what can be done about it. It takes place on the 29th and 30th of October, and there are still some tickets available here.

Over the last week, Prince and The Nine Inch Nails have both come out with some more strong opinions about the pirate’s dilemma the music industry is facing.

According to The Nine Inch Nails Hotline, The Nails were back in Australia over the weekend and lead singer Trent Reznor had this to say:

“Last time I was here, I was doing a lot of complaining about the ridiculous prices of CDs down here. And that story got picked up and got carried all around the world and now my record label all around the world hates me, because I yelled at them, I called them out for being greedy fucking assholes. I didn’t get a chance to check, has the price come down at all? I see a no, a no, a no… Has anyone seen the price come down? Okay, well, you know what that means – STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal nad steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin’. Because one way or another these motherfuckers will get it through their head that they’re ripping people off and that that’s not right.”

Meanwhile Prince, who recently gave away his latest album, “Planet Earth”, in the UK free with The Mail on Sunday, came out fighting from the other corner this time, sicking his lawyers on YouTube and eBay.

“YouTube … are clearly able (to) filter porn and pedophile material but appear to choose not to filter out the unauthorized music and film content which is core to their business success,” said Prince’s lawyers. “Prince strongly believes artists as the creators and owners of their music need to reclaim their art.”

My brilliant editor at Penguin in London, Helen Conford, also edited Naomi Klien’s latest book The Shock Doctrine. I was lucky enough to see Naomi Klein speak in London last night about this, and it was fascinating. Almost as good as the idea behind the book is the short film made by Alfonso Cuaron (who directed Childeren of Men) to go with it, which you can view above. I haven’t had a chance to read the book yet, but it sounds like a really interesting, and refreshingly optimistic take on an otherwise very gloomy geopolitical situation. Make it a priority.

According to a report out this week, fair use exceptions to copyright law are worth more than $4.5 trillion in the US alone. Which makes me wonder, how much will fair use be worth when ideas like Creative Commons really take hold?

Postmen: Not network neutral.

Yesterday the fight for Net Neutrality took a turn for the worse, when the Department of Justice announced they were against the the idea that all Internet sites should be equally accessible by any user, which is the idea that makes the Internet such a great idea in the first place.

“The agency said providing different levels of service is common, efficient and could satisfy consumers” reported The Associated Press. “As an example, it cited that the U.S. Postal Service charges customers different guarantees and speeds for package delivery, ranging from bulk mail to overnight delivery.”

Does anyone really want the Internet to become more like our decrepid postal systems? I for one can live without the Web becoming artificially clogged up during the holidays because too many people are using it to send prioritized e-cards.

The DoJ didn’t mention that the Internet actually works much more like a telephone system, not a postal system, which is network neutral, and doesn’t charge customers different guarantees and speeds for package delivery. Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, summed up how the phone system might work if it wasn’t bult this way:

“Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That’s not fair, right? You called Joe’s and want some Joe’s pizza. Well, that’s how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others.”

The end of Net Neutrality would create an artificial barrier to entry online which would stop small businesses from competing on a level playing field. It is protectionism of the worst kind, but the DoJ sees it differently. “Whether or not the same type of differentiated products and services will develop on the Internet should be determined by market forces, not regulatory intervention,” the agency said in its filing. But this isn’t really about market forces – which often work better on the Internet than they do in the real world. The end of Net Neutrality would also mean the telcos would have control of what you see and hear online, not you. But they wouldn’t abuse this kind of power, right?

I’ve been in London the last few days, been really busy and neglecting the blog. I just got a chance to catch up and was put on to this incredible Danish documentary Good Copy Bad Copy. If you haven’t seen it already, take an hour and watch it. This is the best doc I’ve seen yet on the copyright and culture wars currently raging, and the Pirate’s Dilemma the entertainment industries are facing. You can download it free, but if you like it and want to support the film makers who produced it, click here.

Thanks to Chris Byrne for recommending it.

Forty years ago this year, in a recording studio above a liquor store in Kingston, Jamaica, a sound engineer accidentally recorded an instrumental version of a record onto an acetate disc, also known as a dubplate. A DJ named Ruddy Redwood took that disc to a soundclash that evening, and mixed the instrumental version of the record (On The Beach, by The Paragons) together with the original vocal version. That night the crowd made him play it so many times, by the time the sun came up, the record was worn out. This is how the remix was born.

Forty years later the idea behind the remix, the idea of fair use, is all pervasive. We understand it implicitly, and expect to be able to use certain things a certain way. We understand that fair use is good, helps us learn and build on what came before us. Or at least, most of us do.

Increasingly the concept of fair use is coming under fire from some big businesses. Brands are worth more than the physical items they are placed on (which is why the world’s largest sneaker manufacturers don’t own any sneaker factories), physical capital has lost weight in the information age, ideas and content are more important. As fast as new ways develop for us to share information, a noose is also tightening around it.

Last weekend the NFL broadcast this message before a football game:

This statement essentially prohibits you from talking about the game with a friend. The first rule of the NFL is you do not talk about the NFL. The second rule of the NFL is YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE NFL!!!

This was the same week that commercial science publishers launched a non-profit organization called Prism to take down the open access science movement. Prism makes the bizarre claim that giving people free access to publicly-funded science research is the same as “government censorship”. Orwell couldn’t write this stuff. The best part of this story is that Prism were then busted by bloggers for allegedly “borrowing” the stock photos on their website from Getty Images.

Meanwhile Monsanto moved a step closer to patenting the pig, Amazon, Yahoo, Google and others were sued for using automated email responses, which have been patented in East Texas, and The Red Cross is getting sued for using the red cross as a logo by Johnson & Johnson.

If J&J win, Wal-Mart will probably soon try and copyright the smiley face, (wait, they already did) Urban Outfitters may trademark the face of Che Guevara and Reddit will sue this weird fish for looking like their alien.

The world is going mad. Fair use helps us create value and generate new ideas, locking ideas and information up behind unreasonable restrictions and artificial boundaries stifles it. It’s time to defend fair use for what it’s really worth. Luckily, the Computer & Communications Industry Association is fighting back.

“We filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in which we asked the governments foremost enforcer of consumer rights to stop big media from making these ridiculous claims. Now, we want you to add your voice.

Their answer? Threats and exaggerations that misrepresent your rights. Your rights include the right to make Fair Use. But some of the Big Content companies don’t like the idea that the law limits their control over how you use what you’ve legally acquired. These companies know that, by law, anyone can quote, excerpt and even copy their works for things like journalism, homework and research and discussion of all sorts. Big media companies are turning increasingly aggressive in their efforts to discourage people from doing what they have always done with the media they bought and programs they have recorded in their own homes.”

http://www.defendfairuse.org

In The Pirate’s Dilemma I talk a lot about how people use the pirate mentality to create new spaces in markets, and bring new ideas into the public consciousness. If they are adding value to society, the actions of pirates often create debates and dilemmas. Sometimes, by pirating something, pirates expose flaws in an original design or business model, and the very fact that those pirate copies are there means the original business model changes. A good example of this is how the music business was forced to legitimize downloading (something it still hasn’t quite got the hang of completely), but one of the most unorthodox uses of the pirate mentality yet has got to be the bootlegging of religion.

When heated debate began in the U.S. about intelligent design being taught in science classrooms as an alternative to evolution, it quickly became a hot-button issue nationally. Whether or not intelligent design is “creationism in a cheap tuxedo” is a matter I won’t get into here, except to say that it is. But what is also interesting about the intelligent design debate is how it came to be one in the first place.

It didn’t happen because new evidence refuting Darwin’s theory of evolution had come to light. The vast majority of scientists, including many men and women of faith, believe the controversial theory has less to do with science and more to do with political polemics, so chose to ignore it when it reared its head back in the late 1980s. The scientific community (not to mention more than 38 Nobel Laureates) wouldn’t give the theory the time of day, but some far-right politicians would. Instead of fighting science and the scientific method, which has proved to be a losing battle, proponents of intelligent design took the fight somewhere else.

Several individuals and organizations with creationist leanings lobbied school boards in Kansas, Pennsylvania, Ohio and elsewhere to have intelligent design taught next to evolution, arguing that these “competing theories” must be given space in the classroom. Before you could say ‘separation of church and state’, the media, a gaggle of sound-bite hungry Senators and the President waded into the squabble.

Scientists gave intelligent design lobbyists the silent treatment, but the lobbyists could make a lot of noise on their own. Creationists couldn’t pick a fight with science, but politicians and the media proved to be much softer targets. But by creating this space for new theories, they also accidentally created a monster. A Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Bobby Henderson, a 25 year-old unemployed physics graduate from Oregon, was one of many people annoyed about intelligent design posing as science. But he saw a way of creating a pirate copy of a religion, which would highlight how ridiculous the whole debate was, and hopefully debunk the whole thing. In an open letter the Kansas Board of Education in the summer of 2005, he argued that intelligent design relied on the existence of a god, but it didn’t specify which one.

“We can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them” he wrote. “I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster… I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.” He threw the letter up on his website accompanied by a doodle of his noodly deity creating a mountain, trees and a midget.

Henderson intended his satirical letter to be nothing more. But within a few months, he was receiving oodles of email (95% of which was not death threats), his website was getting over two million hits a day, a host of other spaghetti monster sites depicting the carbohydrate-based creator had appeared and the ‘pastafarian’ movement the monster had spawned was hailed by the London Telegraph in 2005 as “the world’s fastest growing religion.”

“I don’t have any problem with religion, but it is not science,” Henderson told USA Today. “I don’t know if (the FSM parody) makes a difference… People who really need to get it aren’t probably listening. But if anything, it might bring some awareness to undecided people out there.’

As it turned out, the pasta-based parody made a big difference. Many academics taking the debate seriously got behind his noodliness, including members of the Kansas School Board in opposition to intelligent design, and Richard Dawkins. Soon school boards in Arkansas voted against teaching intelligent design in science classes, and U.S. District Judge John E. Jones, a Republican churchgoer, ruled the theory could not be taught in public school science classes in the state of Pennsylvania. The intelligent design supporters successfully hijacked the debate from the realm of science, pirate-style. But by relying on unsubstantiated faith-based claims, they took that debate into far more hostile waters. On this new battlefield, Henderson and his band of 10 million (and counting) pirates were able to take apart intelligent design with propaganda, parody, and cheap imitation, all low blows science wouldn’t resort to.

The spaghetti monster still has a lot of work to do. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, about 43% of Americans believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” However that number has fallen 3% since 2006, not bad for a bowl of pasta. Meanwhile pastafarianism has taken on a life of its own. Henderson landed an $80,000 book deal to write The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and sales of monster merch are bringing in a steady stream of revenue. Not that it really helps my argument, but the pastafarians haven’t just embraced the pirate mentality, they are also inexplicably obsessed with actual pirates. Arguing pirates are divine beings, they claim the Flying Spaghetti Monster wants everyone to dress like pirates and that global warming, hurricanes and other natural disasters are punishments for the declining number of buccaneers currently roaming the high seas (Henderson has even started a fund to build a pastafarian pirate ship, which he claims has received over $100,000 in donations). Piracy isn’t just good at creating innovation and improving society, it’s also a great antidote to a load of old bolognaise like creationism.

I just heard I’ll be speaking at this year’s BIF, the collaborative innovation summit held every year by the Business Innovation Factory, a very cool organization that does some great work. This year they have some truly remarkable speakers, including Clayton Christensen, Mark Cuban, Dan Heath and many others, so it was a real honor to be included in the line-up.

It’s happening in Providence’s Trinity Rep, Rhode Island on October 10-11, with Wall Street Journalist Walt Mossberg and Mavericks at Work author Bill Taylor hosting the event. Find out more here.