7 years ago on Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, I wrote this post about the ideas in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Today I went back to the letter and re-read it, and a different section stood out at me, one that is really profound well beyond the context of civil rights:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."

Dr. King was a brilliant communicator, able to distill deep, profound ideas into memorable phrases.

Today on MLK's birthday, I'm thinking about the overall lack of progress we have made as a society on the very issues he discussed in his letter, namely the structural segregation and dehumanization of black Americans and other marginalized groups. And also about the other issues facing the planet, like the climate crisis, that represent the same sense of mutuality.

My son played in a baseball tournament this weekend. His team did well, and finished as the runner-up.  The team that beat them in the finals played really well, but more importantly, it was obvious that they had a strong culture of success.

From the moment they walked on the field, they had a noticeable "bounce". - they were literally bouncing around with energy and excitement. When they started warming up, it wasn't haphazard and sloppy, but rather organized, energetic, and purposeful.   It was clear that they had a warm-up routine designed to instill focus.  It was led by the kids themselves.  They had a huddle before every inning at-bat ending with a cheer of "hit!" and boy did they hit the ball well (better than any team I've seen all season).  They cheered every kid on in a major way, and bounced in celebration when they scored.  When they won, they posed for a team photo and the coach said "ok, time for your first Legends' point" and they pointed to the camera in a victory celebration (the club was called the Legends) -- teaching the kids that not only were they part of a long-term culture of winning, but that this was just their first step on their path.  Even when they were sitting together before the game eating lunch, they had togetherness and winning baseball in their eyes.  They were having fun the whole time, and it was clear that at every step of the way, the club's culture was behind it.

I looked through at the club website, and it became clear that what I witnessed was not a one-off moment, but part of a bigger culture.  This club has a practice facility where they do game situation indoor practice all winter long  (with trophies conspicuously mounted).  I saw pictures on the website of older kids doing the same pre-game drills in that facility, with the same intensity.   They have camps, and dinners, and skills clinics.  I can just imagine the youngest members of the club (my son's age) watching the bigger kids do the drills, and the chants, and the movements & motions.  

Having coached baseball for 10 seasons now (5 years x 2 seasons per year), and having played high school ball on an pretty good team and little league ball on a very good travel team (1989 NYC Federal League champions, 46-5 record -- yes, I am still proud of that), I am particularly attuned to the dynamics of winning (and less winning) teams.  

And now, working in the startup / VC world, I see from the inside what winning (and less winning) teams look like.  USV has built a culture of success over the last 15 years, which I am hell bent on carrying forward to the next generation.  

Success is one part ability/skills and one part culture. The skills are the raw material and the culture is what makes it great. So what makes for a culture of success?

This is material for a series of posts rather than just one, but I'll focus on a few observations & memories here:

1/ Legend & lore -- winning begets winning, especially in generational enterprises like companies and sports clubs (just look at the Yankees, or Duke Basketball).  The younger generation needs to look up to the older one and learn what success looks like and how to model it. 

2/ Body language -- so much of success is about feeling poised and energized.  Think "power pose".  The team this weekend had it.

3/ Structure -- complex tasks like building a company or hitting a baseball need to be broken down into pieces so they can be understood and mastered. Figuring out how to do this in the right way is the magic of coaching, and it's not easy.  How can you take an amorphous goal and break it into understandable pieces, ideally explainable with metaphors, analogies, and anecdotes?

4/ Fun -- this seems silly but it's really important. Teams succeed when they are having fun, and they have fun when they succeed.  

That is it for now. I'm heading into my week energized and inspired.

Community is a funny thing. It can sound like a fluffy word or concept, but it's actually really powerful.  Maybe more powerful than many things.

Community is about helping people feel connected and aligned.  When people are connected, they feel warm and good, and part of something bigger than themselves.  When people are aligned, each of their individual efforts adds to the whole overall effort, so you have a lot of leverage.

There are so many examples of this.  Here's one: today is International Women's Day -- essentially an effort to get 1/2 half of humanity connected and aligned around a sense of community.  On a much smaller level (and as a part of that), some friends of ours own a restaurant near where we live.  As part of Women's Day, the restaurant hosted an event, and was bustling all day long with people from the neighborhood, all wearing purple and doing a variety of activities.  The restaurant itself is an important center of community where we live, and today it was plugging into an even bigger community movement.

Or, dating back to a past life where I helped create Streetsblog and Streetfilms: these were both community media efforts in the transportation policy space.  When these launched, back in 2006, there were already plenty of organizations doing good policy work in this area.  What Streetsblog and Streetfilms added were online places where this passionate community could come together, gain energy, and grow.  The streetsblog comments section was (and is, today) a hotbed of community, and the Streetfilms videos (nearly 1000 today) highlighted community stories and community members.  It was, and is today, a powerful force that has multiplied the effectiveness of people working on these issues.

Or let's look at examples from the cryptocurrency space, like Ethereum and Bitcoin.  Both of these (and other strong communities in the crypto space) have developed something bigger than a company ever could, in terms of the connection and alignment of the community.  These communities are wild and wooly, for sure, but they are broad and deep and powerful.  People who are deep into them feel like the are really part of something.

At USV, we invest quite a lot in community.  We have a network team whose mission it is to build community among our portfolio companies -- in this case charged with helping everyone become better at their jobs, and helping their companies succeed.  The USV Network started out as a pilot program led by Gary back in 2010, was then grown larger by Brittany, and is now a 4-person team, scaled up by Bethany, that's running over 150 events per year and managing a ~4,000 person online community.  

It can be hard to measure the impact of community, and this can make it hard to know how well you're doing when your job is to cultivate.  But sometimes you can just know it when you see it / feel it.  

I was at an event last night, where the moderator, Preeti Varathan from QZ observed that there seemed to be a lot of cynicism in the blockchain / crypto space -- in other words, that the whole thing was essentially premised on a distrust of existing systems (fiat currencies, large internet companies, etc). It's an interesting and I would say correct observation, but it's also not the whole story.  In addition to the distrust angle, there is also an innovation angle (though it is related to the distrust angle), which I'll get to at the end. But to focus on this question of distrust: a few weeks ago, I was in Amsterdam for the TNW conference, doing a number of things on their "hard fork" track for crypto/blockchain projects.  Two conversations stood out: First was David Schwartz from Ripple, who gave what I thought was a fantastic and clear introduction to cryptosystems -- David's main point was that cryptonetworks are about fairness.  You set the rules (in code) and once they are set, everyone plays by them on even footing.  No one has the ability to rig the system once it is up and running. If this sounds a lot like a description of democracy and the rule of law, I think that's intentional.  The framers of the United States had very similar goals -- escaping a system that felt "rigged" and set up a rules-based system that had decentralization (3 branches of government, federal vs states, house vs senate, etc) and checks and balances built in. So why is there a pressing need for fairness (in money, in tech platforms) today?  The original bitcoiners were escaping what they saw as unfair depreciation of fiat currency due to inflation -- they were digital gold bugs who wanted a real store of value.  Beyond that, there is a generation of application developers who don't trust the platforms they are building on -- developers have a keen appreciation of power dynamics and know when they are getting screwed.  And beyond that, there is an even larger macro distrust and erosion of institutions brewing -- for example I hope that the US can hold on to its own (relatively) fair, rules-based system of governance, but that seems as threatened as ever.  So there are plenty of reasons to be cynical and distrusting, both of traditional finance, technology and government. On to the second conversation was that same day, at dinner with a number of Dutch citizens.  One gentleman made the point that "life is pretty good here, and we like our centralized institutions".  Anyone who's been to Amsterdam can probably relate.  Here is a picture from near where we were staying:

It's ridiculously beautiful and every time I'm there I am struck by how happy the Dutch seem to be -- cruising canals by boat, riding bikes everywhere, healthy chubby babies in tow.  Even their teenagers are happy.  I am obviously being flip here, but the point is -- when things are good, or seem to be good, there's little perceived need to change the system. To the last point about innovation: the thing that I am most excited about here (and I think I speak for most of us at USV) is what a decentralized asset/contract/data layer means for innovation. Because cryptosystems are open source, extensible and forkable by default, and because they operate on rules-based systems without arbitrary centralized control, we now have a wide open environment for innovation, both at the infrastructure and the application layers.  We are still so early in seeing what that will actually mean in terms of services that business and consumers can actually use, but we are building a very exciting foundation.

If there's one thing I've learned throughout my years as a human, it's that life is hard and people need help in order to make things work. That help can come in many forms: family, friends, co-workers, teachers, unions, healthcare providers, agents, assistants, coaches, therapists, strangers on the internet, you name it.  Point is, we all need it, and good help can be hard to find (assuming we get over the first hump and even start to look). I've been spending a lot of time recently looking at this problem in a particular use case: the rise of the independent worker. As I mentioned in a post last year, I’ve been interviewed a lot about the emergence of the “sharing” or “on-demand” economy (Fastco, Wired, NY Times, PBS Newshour) and the question always comes up is: “aren’t all of these new independent workers missing out on the stability provided by full-time employment?”  Albert describes this as the unbundling of the job -- splitting apart the support systems that had traditionally been associated with full-time work (salary, benefits, community, training, etc) and leaving workers to fend for themselves. In the past few months, this issue has come to even more of a head, with the Lyft/Uber class action suits seeking W2 status for on-demand drivers, the California Labor Commission decision that (in a single case) an Uber driver could be considered a W2 employee and not an independent contractor, and moves by other on-demand platforms move some or all workers from a 1099 model to a W2 model, as Shyp and Instacart recently did. A year ago, when I started speaking to reporters about this, my consistent answer was that we hope to see a new layer of networked services emerge that will fill the gaps left by the unbundling of the job, that start to solve workers’ issues in creative new ways. And conversely, what I hope we don’t see is a knee-jerk attempt to shoehorn today’s independent, networked workers into the old paradigm of full-time single employer work, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sherpashare recently did a study of on-demand drivers, asking them what they like and don’t like about this new model of work.  Not surprisingly, they love the flexibility and freedom that comes with (semi) independent, networked working lifestyle.  But they also want more control over their work, chafing at the level of control that many of the services-oriented (vs. marketplace-oriented) platforms exert.  That makes sense to me.   There’s also an obvious need to basic support tools and services (for example around finance and insurance/benefits). Now, a year later, many these kinds of services have indeed begun to emerge.  Over the past several months, I’ve spoken to many entrepreneurs approaching this problem, from a bunch of different directions.  Here is my latest snapshot of how that market looks today:

Nearly all of these are brand new. Many of them are pre launch, and many of those are just at the idea phase.  And, as you’d expect, they are all tackling different facets of the problem. Here’s a quick review of the categories I’ve been tracking: Job Discovery: gotta find work, and there are an increasing number of competing options out there. Matching those opportunities to workers will be important.  (see: Dispatcher, Opus for Work, BlueCrew) Education & Training: along with the unbundling of the job comes, to some extent, the unbundling of education & job training.  The need here spans both sector-specific training and more general education like financial management. (see: Peers, KungFu) Community: as workers become more independent, we will need new ways to form various forms of community support, from commiserating, to peer-learning, to organizing. (see: Coworker, Domino, Sherpashare) Equipment: gotta have the tools and the space to do the job. (see: CoPass, Breather, ReCharge, IdleCars, Breeze) Admin: keeping track of your finances, expenses and taxes as an independent worker totally sucks.  April 15th is doomsday.  There are a bunch of tools providing helpful services here.  (see Zen99, Benny, Hurdlr, And Co) Banking: money is at the center of everything, and independent workers have unique financial needs, in particular related to lumpy cash flow, saving for taxes, and overdraft & lending.  (see: Even) Benefits & Insurance: clearly a huge issue, relating to everything from healthcare, to disability, to liability, to operating insurance. Traditional insurance plans aren’t built for this economy, and insurance will be a huge part of continuing to build trust, safety and security in this sector.  (see: Stride Health, Freelancers Union) Identity & Reputation: perhaps the biggest opportunity, in my view. As independent workers work across platforms and services, reputation is their currency.  Platforms are built on trust, and workers need to be able to port that trust from one context to another.  Unclear how we will get to a world where workers control their identity and reputation data -- could be indirectly, through banking, insurance, or job discovery.  (see: Opus.me, Karma, Traity, Checkr) This is surely incomplete, and many of the examples span categories, but it’s a start. The happy confluence There will undoubtedly be many tensions as this market develops, particular around the sharing and control of data (for example, worker-facing APIs and the right to be represented by a bot).  There is, however, a nice potential synergy between the needs of work platforms and worker support platforms.  In order for work platforms to maintain the arms-length relationship with worker/partner/contractors required for proper 1099 status, they will necessarily need to relinquish some amount of control, which could really open up the market here.  We will see. Finally: if you are working on this, I want to know you!

Over the course of the past year, I've been interviewed a bunch of times about the "peer economy" or the "sharing economy" (Fastco, Wired, NY Times, PBS Newshour), with most of the focus on the public policy considerations of all this, specifically public safety regulations and the impact on labor. A question that comes up every time is: "aren't all of these new independent workers missing out on the stability provided by full-time employment?"  (e.g., healthcare, steady work, etc). My answer has been: yes, for the moment. BUT, there is an emerging wave of networked services which will provide this stability to independent workers, albeit in a different form than we're used to seeing. My colleague Albert describes this as the "unbundling of a job" -- the idea that many of the things that have traditionally been part of a job (not just steady money and healthcare, but also sense of purpose, camaraderie, etc.), will in the future be offered by a combination of other organizations, services and communities.  Albert takes the idea a lot farther than I will here, where I just want to focus on some of the more immediately practical developments. Thus far, this idea hasn't gotten a lot of press attention, as the number of visible services providing this kind of support has been small.  But it is growing, and I expect we'll see at least a small handful of these kinds of services gain traction in the next year. The oldest and most venerable organization doing this is the Freelancers Union.  New Yorkers will recognize their subway ads that have run for decades, advertising their programs and member benefits.  Freelancers Union's roots are in the pre-networked era, focusing largely on independent creative types in NYC, and their scope has grown dramatically over time, growing nationwide and adding services like insurance and medical plans. What we expect to see a lot more of are services that are tailor-made to support independent workers who reach customers and deliver their work through web and mobile platforms.  For example, Peers, which is essentially Freelancers Union for the peer economy. So, what kinds of services are we talking about exactly?  Here are a few of the kinds of services we've been noticing and think we'll see more of:

• Insurance: One of the biggest challenges in this space has been how to insure it.  We're seeing established firms consider how to address the space, as well as brand new insurers that are tailor-made for it.

• Job discovery & optimization: Many networked, independent workers make real-time decisions about what kind of work to do (e.g., driving vs. assembling furniture), as well as which platforms to use (uber vs lyft).  This is currently a manual, non-optimized process.  Increasing discoverability and lowering switching costs will also be an important competitive vector to ensure workers' interests are being met by platforms. (e.g., sherpashare)

• "Back office" - taxes, accounting, analytics:  Dealing with paperwork is a huge headache for busy independent workers, and we're seeing a bunch of saas-type offerings to help people manage it all (e.g., 1099.is, Zen99, Benny)

• Healthcare: Gotta have it.  This is a topic in its own right, and not expressly specific to the indie economy, but we are seeing massive experimentation and innovation in how independent actors can buy healthcare (e.g., teladoc, medigo to name 2 of many)

I suspect that by the end of 2015 we will not only have a much longer list of example issues and services, we'll see that some of these have gotten traction and started to make a difference for independent workers. So, if you're a reporter covering this beat, I think this is an interesting angle to pursue.  If you're a lawmaker or policymaker, I'd think about this as an important and growing part of the ecosystem.  And if you're an entrepreneur working in this space, we'd love to meet you :-)

There has been a lot of debate about how to protect Internet Freedom. Today, Senator Ted Cruz has an op-ed in the Washington Post on the subject, which starts out with an eloquent and spot-on assessment of what we are trying to protect:

Never before has it been so easy to take an idea and turn it into a business. With a simple Internet connection, some ingenuity and a lot of hard work, anyone today can create a new service or app or start selling products nationwide.

In the past, such a person would have to know the right people and be able to raise substantial start-up capital to get a brick-and-mortar store running. Not anymore. The Internet is the great equalizer when it comes to jobs and opportunity. We should make a commitment, right now, to keep it that way.

This is absolutely what this is about. The ability for any person -- a teenager in Des Moines, a grandmother in Brazil, or a shop owner in Norway -- to get online and start writing, selling, streaming, performing, and transacting -- with pretty much anyone in the world (outside of China). This is the magic of the internet.  Right there. By essentially a happy accident, we have created the single most open and vibrant marketplace in the history of the world.  The most democratizing, power-generating, market-making thing ever.  And the core reason behind this: on the internet you don't have to ask anyone's permission to get started. And that "anyone" is not just the government -- as we're used to asking the government for permission for lots of things, like drivers licenses, business licenses, etc. In fact, more importantly -- "anyone" means the carriers whose lines you need to cross to reach an audience on the internet.  A blogger doesn't have to ask Comcast's or Verizon's permission to reach its subscribers.  Neither does a small merchant, or an indie musician or filmmaker. Contrast that with how cable TV works -- in order to reach an audience, you need to cut a deal with a channel, who in turn needs to cut a deal with a carrier, before you can reach anyone.  It is completely out of the realm of possibility for me to create my own TV station in the Cable model.  In the Internet model, I can do that in 5 minutes without asking anyone's permission. What we don't want is an internet that works like Cable TV. So I agree with Ted Cruz -- his description of the internet is exactly the one I believe in and want to fight for. But where I think he and many others miss the point is that Internet Freedom is not just about freedom from government intervention, it's freedom from powerful gatekeepers, who would prefer to make the internet look like Cable TV, controlling and restricting the mega marketplace we've been so lucky to take part in. Let's not let that happen. p.s., I would encourage any conservatives pondering this issue to read James J. Heaney's powerful and in-depth case for "Why Free Marketeers Want to Regulate the Internet"

I've been a remote or semi-remote worker for a long time now.  Which has a boatload of pros (flexibility) as well as cons (distance from "the watercooler"). Over time, I've tried lots of things to help forge a stronger connection among my distributed or semi-distributed teams.  As you would expect, it's always a lot harder in the semi-distributed context, where some people are face to face and some people aren't.  In those cases, it's always hard to get the f2f people to adopt technology for casual chatting. My new favorite tool for this is Sqwiggle.   Sqwiggle is a chat / video service for distributed teams.  My favorite feature is that, rather than seeing each person in always-on real-time video, you see black & white snapshots in 10-second intervals.  This removes a lot of awkwardness.  My second favorite feature is the ability to initiate a video conversation unilaterally -- in other words, if I want to video with Zander, I just click on his face and start talking.  No need for "ring him".  The folks at Sqwiggle like to note that this results in much more frequent, but a lot shorter, conversations (like what you get when you're in an office together). At USV, we've set up a "Sqwiggle Bot" in the office -- it's an old iMac, sitting on my desk, which is hooked up to a wide-angle camera and is persistently logged into Sqwiggle.  Anyone who is working remotely (as lots of us always are), can just dial into the bot, and "poof" we're sitting in the office.  It looks like this:

From my home office, it looks like this:

You can see Zander on the right, and Fred's and Albert's offices in the background. So, that's been great, and we're using it more and more. The thing that is more vexing is actually a much simpler problem:  Group chat. Back when I was at OpenPlans, we were heavy IRC users.  The whole team (folks spread across multiple cities, but concentrated in NYC) was always in the #openplans IRC channel, and it was the social hub of the office.  And not just for remote folks -- when it was time for lunch, people would ping the IRC channel.  There was tons of chatting back and forth, via IRC, among people sitting next to each other.  It was, and is, great. There are a few features that make group chat in IRC awesome: 1) regular chat is unobtrusive.  Meaning, you can be in a room, but not get a notification of every single message. 2) username notifications.  when someone wants to get your attention, they just mention your handle, and your client bounces a notification to get your attention. 1 and 2 together mean that you can stay logged in to the channel all day long, not be overwhelmed by it, but still be directly reachable when people want to get your attention. 3) it's hackable. Since it's an open system, you can write all kinds of hacks.  Our SVN repo was tied into IRC, so every time someone committed code, it posted to the channel.  We had a bot that would reply to certain kinds of questions with silly answers.  You can build whatever kinds of things on it you want. In sum, it was (and is) a fantastic tool for staying connected with a large group. If you were to add in persistent history and video-chat, you'd have the perfect tool. it's worth noting that you can do similar things with other tools.  Campfire, by 37signals, does a lot of this. So does Skype. Those are good tools, but what I've been looking for recently, but haven't been able to find, is a way to get a similar experience out of Google Hangouts.  The reason being that the entire USV team is in Gmail all day long, and does a fair amount of one-to-one chatting in gChat (now Hangouts).  So, rather than doing the (likely impossible) work of getting everyone to use a new tool, I really really want a way to accomplish this in Hangouts, which we all already use. What's extra frustrating is that, until recently, you could accomplish something similar in Google Talk using Partychat, since Google talk was built on the open XMPP protocol.  But with the switch from Google Talk to Google Hangouts, Google dropped support for this:

We realise Google's migration to Hangouts breaks @partychat due to removal of XMPP federation support. We are considering workarounds...

— Partychat (@partychat)

May 16, 2013

If you listen closely enough, you can hear the eerie mantra "embrace, extend, extinguish" emanating from the Googleplex... So, I've been trying to figure this out.  And it's been frustrating.  If there is a solution out there, I'm dying to know it.

I am so inspired by Kid President.  If you haven’t seen the video, go watch it now, and get your pep talk on. So… with kid on our shoulder, let’s think about how to make NYC more awesome.  From a tech policy perspective :) A few weeks ago the (already awesome) NY Tech Meetup launched a call for conversation about how to make NYC a better place — for the tech community specifically, and for the broader community more generally.  The set of goals they kicked off the conversation with were:

1. Make New York City the most wired city on earth by providing every New Yorker and every New York business, regardless of location, access to the fastest broadband networks at the lowest cost.

2. Reinvent the education system to allow every child, young adult, and all New Yorkers to develop the skills necessary to thrive in a 21st century economy and world.

3. Make New York City the clear choice for entrepreneurs, software engineers, and other technically skilled professionals to start a business and build a career by making it easy to find partners, financing, office space and housing, employees, and access to markets.

4. Support the appointment of a Deputy Mayor for Technology Innovation with an appropriate budget charged with the responsibility of reinventing New York City government with a 21st century framework.

5. Make New York City’s system for civic participation the most open, transparent, accountable, participatory, and innovative in the world.

6. Make New York City the most citizen-connected community on earth, where its people connect with each other to unleash a powerful new 21st century economy: selling to each other, renting to each other, funding each other, sharing with each other, coworking with each other, meeting up with each other, and hiring each other.

7. Support public policies that would ensure that technology and the opportunities available to the tech community can reach all New York’s citizens, and help solve issues related to healthcare, human rights and justice, gender equality, transportation, the environment, and other issues of fundamental importance to all New Yorkers.

(note: I had a hard time bolding the last one :-) These ideas are a starting point, and it’s been interesting to see how people have reacted to it so far — re-prioritizing (through voting) the list above and adding new ideas. What I like about the NYTM’s list is that it’s not just about making NYC a place that’s inviting for companies to locate to (through things like tax breaks, etc), but about making NYC a leader as an open, connected, wired city.  It’s about using tech policy as a starting point to bring opportunities afforded by the internet and networks of people to the city as a whole.

"What if there really were two paths… I want be in the one that leads to awesome." -#kidpresident — Brandon Hatmaker (@brandonhatmaker) February 3, 2013

So, in the words of Kid, let’s get on the path to Awesome.  In NYC and everywhere.

It's been a fascinating few days in the politics of information.

Late in the day last Friday, the House Republican Study Committee released a report that took a fresh look (for American major political parties) at copyright reform, which has since set off a firestorm.

The report addresses three common misconceptions about copyright:

1. The purpose of copyright is to compensate the creator of the content
   (No, the purpose is to incentivize the production of creative works)

2. Copyright is free market capitalism at work
   (Actually, it's a form of government subsidized monopoly)

3. The current copyright legal regime leads to the greatest innovation and productivity
   (Actually, the current regime stifles many aspects of modern innovation and productivity, and leads to rent-seeking and economic drag)

Then lists a handful of practical problems with today's copyright regime:

• Retarding the creation of a robust DJ/Remix industry;

• Hampering scientific inquiry;

• Stifling the creation of a public library;

• Discouraging added-value industries;

• Penalizing legitimate journalism and oversight.

And finally goes on to suggest four major reforms that would improve the situation:

1. Reform Statutory damages
   Under current law, damages are generally applied by statute (not by actual damages), leading to typical requests for $150,000 per infringement of a copyrighted work.  This is out of touch with the reality of actual damages, clogs up the court system, and as Khanna suggests: "the idea that your iPod could make you liable for a billion dollars in damages is excessive".

2. Expand fair use
   While the US has fairly generous fair use provisions relative to elsewhere in the world, it's still not kept pace with todays technology (copying as part of everyday management of digital files) or culture (remix).

3. Punish false copyright claims
   Under today's laws, infringing a rights holder's copyright (i.e., by copying or sharing a file without permission) is severely punished, while incorrectly violating someone's lawful use of content (like when the DNC livestream was taken down -- incorrectly -- for using copyrighted music) is completely unpunishable.  This is ridiculous and unfair.

4. Limit copyright term
   Khanna suggests a reduction in the term of copyright, which -- for those who don't follow this space -- has grown from the constitutional provision of 14 years (renewable for another 14 years if the author was alive) to the current system of lifetime of the author plus 70 years.  The latest extension, in 1998, has been dubbed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, as it was timed with the impending expiration of Disney's copyright of the original Steamboat Willie film.

For folks who have followed the copyright debate, none of these ideas are new.  What is new is hearing them from the official research arm of a major political party in the US.

Not surprisingly, the report received immediate praise from many in the tech community, who have grown increasingly frustrated with the state of copyright law in the US and its incompatibility with digital culture and modern innovation.

Perhaps more interestingly, the report was also hailed by members of the Republican party, who see this as one of the key issues for the future of the party -- one that can help them re-connect with a younger generation that has the web in their blood (and therefore has a very different conception of content ownership and the right to remix).  Here is a tweet from influential republican strategist Patrick Ruffini:

[tweet https://twitter.com/patrickruffini/status/269974969524580353]

And then, in a move that was not at all surprising, the RSC retracted the report, less than 24 hours later and reportedly under pressure from copyright industry lobbyists.

All of this raises a question we have been asking for some time now: who will be the party of the Internet Generation?

Our view (and I'll get to who "we" is in a second) is that the internet -- and network-based solutions powered by it -- have caused a substantial mind shift in young people.  The Internet Generation simultaneously understand the importance of community-driven solutions and non-economic forms of production, and also have an aversion to top-down, bureaucratic regulation.  Neither the ideology of the left nor the right fits.  The "we" I'm referring to is the group that Steven Johnson dubs the "Peer Progressives" -- a group that believes in networks, markets, open platforms and collective action.  My colleague Albert Wenger has written a fair bit about the idea.

So, another way to ask the question above is: who in America will adopt the Peer Progressive agenda?  Our view is that whoever does, will -- by using the lens of network-based solutions -- be both most effective at solving our biggest problems AND most effective at attracting the Internet Generation to its ranks.

In today's Times, David Brooks has an opinion piece on The Conservative Future, in which he teases out some of the tensions facing conservative politics, outlines several sub movements, and specifically mentions the RSC report and it's author, Derek Khanna:

Rising star Derek Khanna wrote a heralded paper on intellectual property rights for the House Republican Study Committee that was withdrawn by higher-ups in the party, presumably because it differed from the usual lobbyist-driven position.

....

Since Nov. 6, the G.O.P. has experienced an epidemic of open-mindedness. The party may evolve quickly. If so, it’ll be powerfully influenced by people with names like Reihan, Ramesh, Yuval and Derek Khanna.

It will be interesting to see if the GOP does try to become the party of Peer Progressives and the Internet Generation.  This question is completely up for grabs right now -- I'd say the Dems have a leg up on social issues, but they've got a long way to go on understanding the Internet; and both the Republicans and Libertarians have some natural alignments but some big disconnects. This will be a really interesting story to watch play out, and see who ultimately finds the new center (which isn't really at the center, but perhaps on a slightly different dimension).