Haters gonna hate. Lovers gonna love. And BMOrg? Gonna justify their existence with an ever increasing pool of regulations.

We welcome the new boss, Charlie Dolman. I’ve never been to his doof Secret Garden in the UK but everyone I know who has, describes it as the world’s best party. Personally, I’d give that to Burning Man, but they better watch their ass for Lightning in a Bottle because it is the world’s best outdoor rave. Others would beg to differ – Tomorrowland in Belgium was officially named the best party in the world at the Ultra Music Festival dance music awards in Miami this year. And a DJ friend from Australia, Stretch Papercranes recently posted some footage on Facebook of a party I really want to go to now, also in Belgium, Pukkelpop:

Charlie is a Burner, seems like he knows what’s up, maybe he can fill the void left by Opulent Temple with some of the World’s Top 100 DJs…or, more suitable to the San Francisco disco snob crowd (myself included of course), the World’s Top 100 Alternative DJs (thanks Scumfrog for posting this)

So, let him begin with the controversy. People are trying to smear Burning Man, others heralding its death; standards are being lowered, focus is being lost. Regionals are springing up, but BMOrg’s iron fist control of a brand they supposedly don’t monetize, is an impediment to the growth of this. Let alone the high cost of gasoline leading to increased costs to move art cars and art projects around the continent.

Let me show you the latest from the haters, and then I’ll follow up with some context and discussion:

How Gang Rape and Gonorrhea Came to Define the “Culture” of Burning Man

Some have pointed out that the site is snarky to the point of sarcasm; witness their more recent post, “10 Terrible Secrets Behind the Burning Man Festival that Sodomites and Socialists Don’t Want You To Know“). However, if you read the comments, the author insists that he is being authentic. The issues raised may be exaggerated, but they do exist.

We’ve written about sexual assaults and gang violence before. They seem to be getting worse, as BMOrg tries to mutate the crowd into their own mysterious concoction. This is an area where community education is desperately needed, let’s try to prevent crime rather than hush it up.

We’ve also covered the economic restrictiveness before. BMOrg is archaicly threatening their community with lawyers – about as far to the opposite of 21st Century business thinking like “crowd-sourcing” as you can get. There is a whole economy out there – a real economy, not a magical made up “gift” economy where people with nothing mooch off wealthier people who can afford to give things of value away to strangers. This real economy of Burners should be supported by the Burning Man powers that be. Not sued by them.

This nastiness people feel towards BMOrg over copyright is nothing new, and the article makes some good points. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, founded by Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow, is a non-profit I support. They are like an ACLU for the digital world. You’d think Burning Man would co-operate them, instead somehow through their hippy Doctor Seuss machine of a decision making process, they came up with a policy so unique and restrictive that the EFF actually had to come out against them. If you live in the rest of the world, you might not realize the significance of a thing like this in the tech community in San Francisco. I mean, this is a small town, despite the (mostly hidden) money and global reach. Everyone’s on social networking, everyone’s plugged in, everyone knows everyone. At least half of Burners are from San Francisco and at least half either work in a technology related job or are personally tech-savvy. Burning Man has been built by the tech industry, it would be a sadly different thing without it. Burning Man listened – a bit – to the EFF, but they still impose a digital rights management policy far in excess of any other event.

I think Burners have a great opportunity to use the spread of our network to help the world make the right decisions about these issues. Who owns ideas? If I make a Burning Man logo out of duct tape and stick it to my trailer, have I really robbed from Burning Man? Have I really hurt them, in any way? Aren’t I actually giving them free advertising? What is real and what is virtual, and should they be treated the same or differently? These are important issues of our times, and Burners are plugged into the industries that are most affected by them. This is like a white collar version of the #Occupy movement. And there’s more at stake than just Burning Man – the entire regulatory environment of cyberspace, and hence the freedom of speech of the Internet, is at risk from 20th century views about copyrights.

Here’s Burner Cory Doctorow, a hero to hackers, writing at Boing Boing about the biggest thing going on in computing right now (open source hardware and manufacturing), with one of the most eloquent technology op-eds I’ve ever read in my 20+ year career in tech:

In the beginning, we had packaged software and we had sneakernet. We had floppy disks in ziplock bags, in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines. They were eminently susceptible to duplication, were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.

Enter Digital Rights Management in its most primitive forms: let’s call it DRM 0.96. They introduced physical indicia which the software checked for—deliberate damage, dongles, hidden sectors—and challenge-response protocols that required possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy.

These failed for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers. Honest buyers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they chafed at the inconvenience of having to lug around large manuals when they wanted to run their software. Second, these didn’t stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. People who took the software without paying for it were untouched.

In the same way, BMOrg’s rabid defense of their brand, has not led to any less promiscuous use of it by Burners and unscrupulous merchants who see an opportunity to sell to 61,000 people, but fail to understand the “sacredness” of the 10 Principles. Just like the ban on feathers has not reduced the amount of MOOP generated in Black Rock City or dumped on the sides of the highways leading out of the event; and indeed, it’s arguable whether it has had any impact on the amount of people rocking out with their feathers out on the Playa. If feathers are outlawed, then only outlaws will have feathers. And if only Burning Man can use the Burning Man logo and name for anything, how do they expect Burner culture to spring up everywhere and grow independently?

BMOrg could be more like the Borg, from Star Trek. “We will assimilate you”. This was Microsoft’s growth strategy, “embrace and extend”, usually accompanied by their marketing strategy to sow “fear, uncertainty and doubt”. Worked a treat. Some start up party trying to use the Burning Man logo in Hungary, to attract Burners? Partner with them, charge them a license fee, promote them on your web site, get their database. Not “we’re a non-profit, and we’re going to spend all the money donated to us on lawyers and lawsuits so we remain in control”. Can’t you see, BMOrg? These strategies of restrictions, punishments, banishment, “shunning”, all the negatives you employ, are not working. They’re not making the party better. Somehow despite overwhelming apparent demand for tickets, the party is shrinking.

Cory makes a good point about “one size fits all regulation”. If MOOP came from a car, should we ban cars? If MOOP came from a feather, should we ban feathers? Look, there’s a beer can on the Playa – better ban beer cans!

The important tests of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose are first whether it will work, and second whether or not it will, in the course of doing its work, have effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress, Parliament, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it’s unlikely I’d succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles, and asked, “Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would be “No”. This is because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications, but useless to bad guys. We can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we’d be foolish to risk changing them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies—even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies—no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

However, if I were to show up in that same body to say that I had absolute proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous, and I requested a law prohibiting hands-free phones in cars, the regulator might say “Yeah, I’d take your point, we’d do that.”

We might disagree about whether or not this is a good idea, or whether or not my evidence made sense, but very few of us would say that once you take the hands-free phones out of the car, they stop being cars.

Burning Man’s harsh and restrictive intellectual property ownership position, does not seem to bring them any benefits, and in a broader context, is an extension of the tyrannical cyber-rule that is being constructed all around us by the Man. Burners should be on the frontlines fighting against it, not rolling over and accepting it – or worse, gobbling up all the BMOrg propaganda and promoting it.

…So, our regulators go off, they blithely pass these laws, and they become part of the reality of our technological world. There are, suddenly, numbers that we aren’t allowed to write down on the Internet, programs we’re not allowed to publish, and all it takes to make legitimate material disappear from the Internet is the mere accusation of copyright infringement. It fails to attain the goal of the regulation, because it doesn’t stop people from violating copyright, but it bears a kind of superficial resemblance to copyright enforcement—it satisfies the security syllogism: “something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done.” As a result, any failures that arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation doesn’t go far enough, rather than the idea that it was flawed from the outset.

Laws for the sake of laws, change for the sake of change. Our party was founded on anarchy; the idea of the remote desert location always suggested a sense of freedom and adventure.

So Charlie, new event director, new senior figure in the BMOrg, we call on you to loosen the reins a little and embrace and extend and empower the Burners. Let’s have real, meaningful change – new policies moving in the right direction, not just more and more rules every year. This small battle over copyright and who owns the photos we take or pose in, is a microcosm of one of the most important ones in history. As Cory Doctorow says:

We haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that runs on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will, not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.