A week ago, I finally finished Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. Everybody should read it. In the meantime, everybody should read these passages I’ve excerpted—bold emphasis mine—courtesy of the book’s Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

From pages 249-250:

Technology, tied to law, now promises almost perfect control over content and its distribution. And it is this perfect control that threatens to undermine the potential for innovation that the Internet promises.

To resist this threat, we need specific changes to reestablish a balance between control and creativity. Our aim should be a system of sufficient control to give artists enough incentive to produce, while leaving free as much as we can for others to build upon and create.

In setting this balance, there are a few ideas to keep in mind. First, we live in a world with “free” content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We refer to plots in movies to tell jokes without the permission of the director. We read books to our children borrowed from a library without any payment for performance rights to the original copyright holder. The fact that content at any particular time is free tells us nothing about whether using that content is “theft.” Similarly, an argument for increasing control by content owners needs more than “they didn’t pay for this use” to back it up.

Second, and related, the reason perfect control is not our aim is that creation is always the building upon something else. There is no art that doesn’t reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the earlier appropriator. Monopoly controls have been the exception in free society; they have been the rule in closed societies.

Finally, while control is needed, and perfectly justifiable, our bias should be clear up front: Monopolies are not justified by theory; they should be permitted only when justified by facts. If there is no solid basis for extending a certain monopoly protection, then we should not extend that protection… Before the monopoly should be permitted, there should be reason to believe it will do some good—for society, and not just for monopoly holders.

And from page 265:

The law is the instrument through which a technological revolution is undone. And since we barely understand how the technologists built this revolution, we don’t even see when the lawyers take it away. As activist and technologist John Gilmore has put it, in a line that captures the puzzle of this book: “[W]e have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity. . . . I think,” Gilmore continues, “we should embrace the era of plenty, and work out how to mutually live in it.”

Finally, this last paragraph of the book is compelling:

We move through this moment of an architecture of innovation to, once again, embrace an architecture of control—without noticing, without resistance, without so much as a question. Those threatened by this technology of freedom have learned how to turn the technology off. The switch is now being thrown. We are doing nothing about it.

Time to begin Free Culture.

There seems to be a lack of information out there on IRC clients for Mac OS X. On Windows, my choice is pretty clear; I use mIRC with NoNameScript, and for running an fserve bot, the script of choice is SysReset.

So, briefly, what’s usable (and totally free!) on a Mac these days?

Colloquy

Colloquy was the IRC client I started using when I first got my MacBook. Importantly, it makes every attempt to conform to the Mac Human Interface Guidelines. It seems decent, but to an mIRC user like me the interface can actually end up slightly frustrating. A possibly more major problem I had was that it would randomly run up the CPU usage really high once in a while, causing the CPU fan to turn on. I’d then have to close the program and start it up again. I’m not sure if it’s been fixed by now, but I’m sure they’ve made some progress overall since then, at least. In any case, Colloquy has a few problems, but it’s certainly usable; I just don’t prefer it.

X-Chat Aqua

Until yesterday, for about a year, I used X-Chat Aqua. In terms of configurability, X-Chat Aqua is pretty good. It has rather extensive options, just as an mIRC user (or an X-Chat user…) would expect to have, and, similarly, the interface is okay but definitely could be better. It’s not out of Alpha yet (and development seems to have stalled a bit) but still seems stable enough.

However, there are some problems with it common to other ports from Windows/Linux (e.g. MS Office); assigning a Space to it in Spaces preferences does nothing. But I would still say that, overall, X-Chat Aqua really isn’t bad. (X-Chat Aqua may be comparable to an older and shareware—but still maintained—Mac IRC client called Snak. I also tried it and don’t think Snak is really worth the bother since X-Chat Aqua does pretty much a similar job.)

LimeChat

I’m glad I found LimeChat the other day. Relatively new and under development, it has some of the mIRC familiarity just as in X-Chat Aqua but with an arguably better interface and easier setup. It’s functional, yet certainly lightweight, and it doesn’t look bad, as far as IRC clients go, at all. I’ve yet to run into any real problems with it, except I almost just kept using X-Chat Aqua until I found the LimeChat keyboard shortcuts to switch between channels easily (cmd + up/down). They definitely should have shown how to do that in the program itself instead of just on the website/documentation.

Anyway, I’d really currently recommend LimeChat for any OS X IRC user. If I find any problems, I’ll update this, and if anyone has further comments, please do make them!

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving! I did. We can’t ignore, though, the bad things that have happened over the course of the holiday break—first, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and second, the deaths of a few people the morning of Black Friday.

Mostly everyone condemns terrorism and has a multitude of problems with it by now, so I want to turn the American consumer’s attention to the Black Friday incident at a Long Island Walmart. As he was opening the doors, a man died as he was trampled on by people rushing into the store.

It’s not inherently bad to want to get some better deals on a Friday morning. (I actually really enjoy Black Friday.) But what’s bad is selfishness to the point of totally ignoring everybody around you and even stepping on someone in order to achieve a goal. If you’re a friend of mine reading my blog, you wouldn’t do this, but even so, it’s really sad to hear that something like this happened. I mean, this guy was a temporary worker there that morning just trying to earn some money and get his job done, and terrible, unreasonable things happen to him. Obviously he wasn’t murdered, but he was killed by the ignorance and selfishness of others. Don’t let this happen around you. They should have just done the whole lining up deal like we have around here to prevent such inane tragedies.