Four short links: 13 November 2009

Open Source Design, Interesting NoSQL Use, Copyright Documentary, Location Intelligence

1. Open Source Enters The World of Atoms -- an academic statistical analysis of open design. We indicated that, in open design communities, tangible objects can be developed in very similar fashion to software; one could even say that people treat a design as source code to a physical object and change the object via changing the source.
2. Why I Like Redis (Simon Willison) -- coherent explanation of why Simon likes and uses a particular nosql system. I can run a long running batch job in one Python interpreter (say loading a few million lines of CSV in to a Redis key/value lookup table) and run another interpreter to play with the data that’s already been collected, even as the first process is streaming data in. I can quit and restart my interpreters without losing any data. And because Redis semantics map closely to Python native data types, I don’t have to think for more than a few seconds about how I’m going to represent my data.
3. © kiwiright (Vimeo) -- short documentary about copyright, made to raise awareness of the issues in New Zealand. (just as applicable to the rest of the world)
4. Your Movements Speak For Themselves (Jeff Jonas) -- Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day. Every call, text message, email and data transfer handled by your mobile device creates a transaction with your space-time coordinate (to roughly 60 meters accuracy if there are three cell towers in range), whether you have GPS or not. Got a Blackberry? Every few minutes, it sends a heartbeat, creating a transaction whether you are using the phone or not. If the device is GPS-enabled and you’re using a location-based service your location is accurate to somewhere between 10 and 30 meters. Using Wi-Fi? It is accurate below10 meters. A thought-provoking roundup of the information leakage with modern locative systems. (via TomC on Twitter)

Four short links: 27 August 2009

Copycrime, Die Music Industry Die, Open Government Data, Augmented Reality

1. Second Degree Murder and Six Other Crimes Cheaper Than Pirating Music -- I'm outraged that the Obama administration is supporting the RIAA on the case against Jammie Thomas, a single mother of four who has to pay them $1.92 million for downloading songs. That's more expensive than murder and six other crimes... (via Br3nda)
2. Bill Drummond Talk (MP3) -- cofounder of the KLF gives 130 years of music industry history and explains why music's future might depend on not recording it. (via Br3nda)
3. NZ Government Recommends CC-BY -- NZ all-of-Government licensing framework recommends CC. So far as copyright works are concerned, NZGOAL proposes that agencies apply the most liberal of the New Zealand Creative Commons law licences to those of their copyright works that are appropriate for release, unless there is a restriction which would prevent this. The most liberal Creative Commons licence is the Attribution (BY) licence. So far as non-copyright information is concerned, NZGOAL recommends the use of clear “no-known rights” statements, to provide certainty for people wishing to re-use that information..
4. Augmented Reality: 5 Barriers to a Web That's Everywhere (ReadWriteWeb) -- great post with five areas that need to be addressed before we can move from "wow" to commonplace. Interoperability: Right now you cannot see information from the Wikitude AR environment if you're looking through the Layar AR browser. This could be the coming of a new browser war just like that of the 1990s. It may not be obvious and it may not even be true that users have a right to view any layer of Augmented Reality through any Augmented Reality browser. Interoperability, standards and openness have been what has let the Web scale and flourish beyond the suffocating walled gardens of its early days. The same is true of telephones, railroads and countless other networked technologies. Logically then, a lack of interoperability between AR environments would be a tragedy of the same type as if the web had remained defined by the islands of AOL and Compuserve or Internet Explorer, forever. (A lack of data portability when it comes to Augmented Reality could cause substantial psychological distress!)

Four short links: 24 July 2009

Copytweet, MacMarket iShare, Open Source Under Fire, and OLPC War Stories

1. Are Tweets Copyright-Protected (WIPO) -- According to an Internet posting on blogherald.com by Jonathan Bailey, every time a new communication technology emerges, it shifts the copyright landscape, and new copyright issues that do not fit existing intellectual property (IP) standards arise. With Twitter, for example, while its terms of service clearly state that tweeters own anything they post on the service, the 140-character limit to a Twitter post makes it almost impossible for the work to reach the level of creativity required for copyright protection. In the same vein, titles or short phrases usually cannot be protected since their length contributes to their lack of originality, as defined by copyright law. A roundup of the copyright issues raised by Twitter, which is a little like a roundup of the climate issues raised by ants.
2. Apple Has 90% Revenue Share Of >$1000 Computers (Ars Technica) -- wow. (via publicaddress on Twitter)
3. Open Source on the Battlefield -- Fortunately, SFC Stadtler knew how to use open source software. Using found hardware, like a laptop pulled from the trash, and wires pulled from collapsed buildings, he was able to establish a wireless network between the towers and the home base. He was able to install freely available voice-over-ip software on this recycled hardware, which turned the computer into a wireless telephone. The soldiers were now able to communicate with each other and the home base. At no cost. (via Jim Stogdill)
4. Sweet Nonsense Omelet (Ivan Krstić) -- Horror stories from the inside about the shoddy suppliers of OLPC hardware. Thinking back, there’s a hardware incident I remember particularly fondly: one of our vendors sent us a kernel driver patch which enhanced support for their component in our machine. They chose to implement the enhancement by setting up a hole which allowed any unprivileged user to take over the kernel, prompting our kernel guy to send a private e-mail to the OLPC tech team demanding that, in the future, we avoid buying hardware from companies whose programmers are, direct quote, “crack-smoking hobos”.

Four short links: 14 July 2009

Twenty Questions, CC Pix, INSERT INTO WEB, and Wash Your Hands!

1. Twenty Questions about GPLv3 (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) -- twenty very challenging questions about the GPLv3. foo.js is a JavaScript library released under the GPLv3. bar.js is a library with all rights reserved. For performance reasons, I would like to minimize all my site’s JavaScript into a single compressed file called foobar.js. If I distribute this file, must I also distribute bar.js under the GPL?
2. CC Searching within Google Image Search -- what it seems. (via waxy)
3. YQL INSERT INTO -- insert into {table} (status,username,password) values ("new tweet from YQL", "twitterusernamehere","twitterpasswordhere"). That's too cool. (via Simon Willison)
4. CleanWell -- very low-cost recyclable enviro-friendly antimicrobials to battle third-world disease. Met the founder at Sci Foo. He said women wash hands more than men, because women enter bathrooms in pairs. Single easiest way to increase handwashing compliance is to put sinks and basins outside the room, in public view.

Four short links: 3 July 2009

Stats, Public Domain, Sewers, and Garbage

1. OECD Factbook -- Flash-built impressive data explorer from OECD. Go to Indicators > Load and, in the words of Ben Goldacre, "prepare for nerdgasm". (via bengoldacre on Twitter)
2. James Boyle is on Twitter -- author of the book The Public Domain.
3. Sewers and Startups (Pete Warden) -- designing to last, reminds me of Saul Griffith's heirloom design riff. When I joined Apple back in 2003, the central build farm for all projects had both PowerPC and x86 Darwin boxes, and our code had to compile on both. Steve was playing a long game, years before the Intel switch he was obviously planning for it, (though I only caught the significance in retrospect).
4. Open Data Makes Garbage Collection Sexier, Easier, and Cheaper -- pragmatic use for open government data. For more on the author of this post, see Hello World for Open Data by Tim Bray.

Four short links: 23 June 2009

1. Easter Eggs for Real Life (Neil Gaiman) -- ok, I know easter eggs are already part of real life, but this is still cool. Gaiman recommends a restaurant run by a friend, and the friend has set up a special phrase that to mention to the server, at which point something good and special will happen for them to eat or drink. Think of it as a restaurant Easter Egg. I love language, I love Gaiman's books, I love surprises, and I love that here Gaiman's using the digital sense of Easter Egg (surprise hidden in a program) rather than the analog sense (because there's no searching involved).
2. ASCAP Wants To Be Paid When Your Phone Rings (EFF) -- what the title suggests. You are lost in a twisty maze of rights, all policed by vampires. From ASCAP's point of view, this is a legitimate claim. From anyone else's point of view, it's ridiculous.
3. Tooling Up The Body (MInd Hacks) -- using tools has lots of interesting effects on our perception is the general gist of an intriguing study that provides further evidence for the theory that the brain treats tools as temporary body parts. We talk about using the Internet as our "offsite brain", so it tickles me to learn that the brain treats tools as offsite body parts.
4. Email Patterns Can Predict Impending Doom (New Scientist) -- when Enron was about to collapse, email patterns changed: the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees. Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely. (via BoingBoing)

Four short links: 18 June 2009

Weaker Copyright Good, YQL.gov, GeoSPARQL, Happiness

1. Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society (Michael Geist) -- Given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that "weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society." This is consistent with the authors' view that weaker copyright is "uambiguously desirable if it does not lessen the incentives of artists and entertainment companies to produce new works." (read the original paper)
2. Using Public Data for Good With the Power of YQL -- The first part is a new batch of YQL tables providing data on the U.S. government, earthquake data, and the non-profit micro-lender Kiva. The second part is an incredibly easy way to render YQL queries on websites. After all, what good is data that no one can see?
3. GeoSPARQL -- RDF meets geo goodness. SELECT ?s ?p ?o WHERE { ?s gn:name "Dallas" . ?s ?p ?o } (via the geowanking mailing list)
4. How To Be Happy in Business -- this Venn diagram makes me happy. (via Ned Batchedler)

Four short links: 14 May 2009

Open Source Ebook Reader, Libraries and Ebooks, Life Lessons, and Government Licenses

1. Open Library Book Reader -- the page-turning book reader software that the Internet Archive uses is open source. One of the reasons library scanning programs are ineffective is that they try to build new viewing software for each scan-a-bundle-of-books project they get funding for.
2. Should Libraries Have eBooks? -- blog post from an electronic publisher made nervous by the potential for libraries to lend unlimited "copies" of an electronic work simultaneously. He suggests turning libraries into bookstores, compensating publishers for each loan (interestingly, some of the first circulating libraries were established by publishers and booksellers precisely to have a rental trade). I'm wary of the effort to profit from every use of a work, though. I'd rather see libraries limit simultaneous access to in-copyright materials if there's no negotiated license opening access to more. Unlike the author, I don't see this as a situation that justifies DRM, whose poison extends past the term of copyright. (via Paul Reynolds)
3. Lessons Learned from Previous Employment (Adam Shand) -- great summary of what he learned in the different jobs he's had over the years. Sample:
   • More than any other single thing, being successful at something means not giving up.
   • Everything takes longer than you expect. Lots longer.
   • In a volunteer based non-profit people don't have the shared goal of making money. Instead every single person has their own personal agenda to pursue.
   • Unfortunately "dreaming big" is more fun and less work than "doing big".
4. Flickr Creates New License for White House Photos (Wired) -- photos from the White House photographer were originally CC-licensed (yay, a step forward) but when it was pointed out that as government-produced information those photos weren't allowed to be copyright, the White House relicensed as "United States Government Work". Flickr had to add the category, which differs from "No Known Copyright", and it's something that all sharing sites will need to consider if they are going to offer their service to the Government.

Four short links: 7 May 2009

iPhone Rocketry, Copywrongs, Econopocalypse, and Empire

1. How To Use An iPhone To Fly RC Airplanes and Helicopters -- So I had my basic idea down. iPhone joins the Linksys router network. It gets an IP address. Then, I open up my pilot program. The pilot program interfaces with the router via SSH (I couldn’t think of a better way that has redundancy, and speed, and was already buily by someone else). The pilot program interprets what the iphone is doing, and outputs data to one of the ethernet ports of which there are conveniently 4. Rudder, Ailerons, Throttle, Elevator.
2. Economist Debates: Copyrights and Wrongs -- The Economist live debate about copyright, with the moot "This house believes that existing copyright laws do more harm than good." Public comments, voting, and new informed opinions each day.
3. How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street (NYMag) -- story of the software developer behind a lot of the mortgage repackaging software. Many good lines, e.g., But even then, I was wondering why I was making more than anyone in my family, maybe as much as all my siblings combined. Hey, I had higher SAT scores. I could do all the arithmetic in my head. I was very good at programming a computer. And that computer, with my software, touched billions of dollars of the firm’s money. Every week. That justified it. When you’re close to the money, you get the first cut. Oyster farmers eat lots of oysters, don’t they?
4. Yow -- words of wisdom from John Battelle on Google as the new Microsoft: If any lesson is to be drawn, perhaps prematurely, from all this, it's that no company - or two companies - can lead a culture for longer than half a generation. After that, the culture starts to distrust the companies' motives, regardless of whether they are pure or well intentioned.

Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement

Guest blogger Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and an advisor to the Samuelson High Technology Law & Public Policy Clinic at Boalt Hall. She has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies pose for traditional legal regimes, especially for intellectual property law.

This piece will appear in the July 2009 issue of Communications of the ACM. Readers may also be interested in the slides from Pam's recent presentation, "Reflections on the Google Book Search Settlement."

Google has scanned the texts of more than seven million books from major university research libraries for its Book Search initiative and processed the digitized copies to index their contents. Google allows users to download the entirety of these books if they are in the public domain (about 1 million of them are), but at this point makes available only “snippets” of relevant texts when the books are still in copyright unless the copyright owner has agreed to allow more to be displayed.

In the fall of 2005, the Authors Guild, which then had about 8000 members, and five publishers sued Google for copyright infringement. Google argued that its scanning, indexing, and snippet-providing was a fair and non-infringing use because it promoted wider public access to books and because Google would take out of the Book Search corpus any digitized books whose rights holders objected to their inclusion. Many copyright professionals expected the Authors Guild v. Google case to be the most important fair use case of the 21st century.

This column argues that the proposed settlement of this lawsuit is a privately negotiated compulsory license primarily designed to monetize millions of orphan works. It will benefit Google and certain authors and publishers, but it is questionable whether the authors of most books in the corpus (the “dead souls” to which the title refers) would agree that the settling authors and publishers will truly represent their interests when setting terms for access to the Book Search corpus.

Orphan Works

An estimated 70 per cent of the books in the Book Search repository are in-copyright, but out of print. Most of them are, for all practical purposes, “orphan works,” that is, works for which it is virtually impossible to locate the appropriate rights holders to ask for permission to digitize them.

A broad consensus exists about the desirability of making orphan works more widely available. Yet, without a safe harbor against possible infringement lawsuits, digitization projects pose significant copyright risks. Congress is considering legislation to lessen the risks of using orphan works, but it has yet to pass.

The proposed Book Search settlement agreement will solve the orphan works problem for books—at least for Google. Under this agreement, which must be approved by a federal court judge to become final, Google would get, among other things, a license to display up to 20 per cent of the contents of in-copyright out-of-print books, to run ads alongside these displays, and to sell access to the full texts of these books to institutional subscribers and to individual purchasers.

The Book Rights Registry

Approval of this settlement would establish a new collecting society, the Book Rights Registry (BRR), initially funded by Google with $34.5 million. The BRR will be responsible for allocating $45 million in settlement funds that Google is providing to compensate copyright owners for past uses of their books.

More important is Google’s commitment to pay the BRR 63 per cent of the revenues it makes from Book Search that are subject to sharing provisions. The revenue streams will come from ads appearing next to displays of in-copyright books in response to user queries and from individual purchases of and institutional subscriptions to some or all of the books in the corpus. Google and the BRR may also develop new business models over time that will be subject to similar sharing.

One of the main jobs of the BRR will be to distribute the settlement revenues. The money will go, less BRR’s costs, to authors and publishers who have registered their copyright claims with BRR. Although the settlement agreement extends only to books published prior to January 5, 2009, BRR is expected to attract authors and publishers of later-published books to participate in the revenue sharing arrangement that Google has negotiated with BRR.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 7 Apr 2009

Maps, meaning, makers, and orphaned works:

1. Lens Tools and Fisheye Map Browsing -- a summary of magnification in maps through history, culminating in use of the fisheye/lens as a way to explore layers and data in thematic maps. (via Titine's delicious stream)
2. Socially Relevant Computing -- frustrated by the meaningless examples and work in computer science classes, Mike Buckley started sending students into the real world and building projects for handicapped people, firefighters, children, etc. Read their SIGCSE paper (PDF) for more. (via Andy Oram)
3. Maker Faire Africa -- I wish I could go!
4. Google Book Search Lawsuit Settlement Analysis -- finally a simple statement of why many folks aren't happy with the Google Book Search lawsuit settlement: Thanks to the magic of the class action mechanism, the settlement will confer on Google a kind of legal immunity that cannot be obtained at any price through a purely private negotiation. It confers on Google immunity not only against suits brought by the actual members of the organizations that sued Google, but also against suits brought by anyone who doesn’t explicitly opt out. That means that Google will be free to mine the vast body of orphan works without fear of liability. Any competitor that wants to get the same legal immunity Google is getting will have to take the same steps Google did: start scanning books without the publishers’ and authors’ permission, get sued by authors and publishers as a class, and then negotiate a settlement. The problem is that they’ll have no guarantee that the authors and publishers will play along. (via Glynn Moody)

Four short links: 25 Mar 2009

IT, AI, IQ, and UK today:

1. Definition IT -- a blog about the ways in which IT is becoming a problem and not a solution. In the absence of any independent global standards or best practice models that guide the delivery of technology into businesses we have relinquished control to the suppliers of our technology. The suppliers are in a mammoth arms race to sell more products and this has become the de-facto controller for the delivery of technology into businesses. No one statement in the blog is outrageous, but they add up and indicate an industry that isn't delivering the value it claims to.
2. What is a Good Recommendation Algorithm? -- Greg Linden starts an interesting conversation at the CACM blogs.
3. Why Money Messes With Your Mind (New Scientist) -- interesting psychological research. the volunteers who had been primed with the money-related words worked on the task for longer before asking for help. In a related experiment, people in the money-word group were also significantly less likely to help a fellow student who asked for assistance than were people in the group primed with non-money words.
4. Obama's Diplomatic Gift to UK Leader Fubared by DRM (BoingBoing) -- we can laugh, but Obama's team is stacked with ex-RIAA lawyers.

Four short links: 23 Mar 2009

Digital rights, digital wrongs, newspaper science, and hardback socializing. Just another four short links:

1. Twitter Mistrial -- this isn't a calamity for justice, we're just able to do something we couldn't do before (were there many jurors running pamphlets off on their printing presses in the old days?) so we need to figure out whether we want it or not.
2. UK Government Outlines Digital Rights Agency -- a strawman proposal for a rights agency to mediate between producers and consumers. The conservative in me bucks at market intervention, but I find it hard to argue with the problem statement: Consumers are no longer prepared to be told when and where they can access the content that they want. They do not see why a TV show that is airing in the US should not be available in the UK. They are not willing to wait to see a film at home until several months after it has passed through the cinemas. They don't accept the logic that says that if you have bought a CD you cannot then copy that music onto your iPod. And of course with digital content perfect copies can be made with very little time and at virtually no cost.
3. With a Newspaper Gone, Who's the Watchdog and Where Do Advertisers Go? (Julie Starr) -- roundup of people treating the closure of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, which leaves the town print-free for news, as a science experiment: if local councils really become unaccountable when local papers cease to investigate them, I’d expect to see a big increase in the value of positions of financial authority at local government level. Those positions will suddenly become a lot more valuable if no-one is watching the purse-strings all that carefully, so more candidates will want them and those candidates will spend more to win them.
4. The Tweetbook -- two years of tweets as a hardcover book. Fascinating to see the ephemeral preserved in print, although in general I wonder about the wisdom of trading ephemeral for eternal. (via Waxy)

Four short links: 13 Mar 2009

Museums, Labs, Businesses, and Hash--all in today's four short links:

1. Shelley Bernstein Talks About the Brooklyn Museum at the National Library of New Zealand (Paul Reynolds) -- I've written about Shelley's work before. Brooklyn [Museum] is not about using social media as just another marketing and visitor experience tool-set. Rather, as Bernstein said last night, Brooklyn Museum itself is now a social network - that is its job - to be a center for the community to have a conversation. Wonderful to see New Zealand continuing to learn from the best.
2. Google Labs India -- interesting projects, including Digital Noticeboard and SMS Channels (Google ID required to view the latter). Interesting to see the projects worked on in different countries. The latter is like Mozes.
3. Privacy and Free Speech, It's Good for Business (PDF!) -- Northern California ACLU have produced a book aimed at businesses that frames free speech issues as a business good: The practical tips and real-life business case studies in this Guide will help you to avoid having millions read about your privacy and free speech mistakes later. The advice is straightforward and specific, not of the vague and "don't be evil" variety. Give users an opportunity to defend their anonymity. Provide notice, within no more than seven days of receipt of a subpoena, to each user whose personal information is sought, and inform the user of her right to file a motion to quash (fight) the subpoena. Give the user at least thirty days from the time notice is received to file a motion to quash the subpoena. (via BoingBoing)
4. pHash, The Open Source Perceptual Hash Library -- a perceptual hash is a signature for a file, built in a way that two files that represent similar things (e.g., two photographs of the same poster). (via Joshua's delicious stream)

At Risk: Universal Online Access to All Knowledge

I’ve been following Brewster Kahle and Robert Darnton, a University Professor and director of Harvard’s Library, recently, and they’re concerned over the settlement of the lawsuit between Google and the authors and publishers, over the scanning and use of books in Google Book Search. In my experience, Brewster is extraordinarily thoughtful and takes a long view. Early in my career, I was a librarian. I love books. So while I’m not a lawyer and I find this settlement confusing, I’m writing about it because I think it merits awareness and a serious discussion.

The key issues appear to be whether the business model created by the settlement will lock up content that essentially belongs to the public domain (per Brewster) and whether the publishers’ and authors’ creation of a Google monopoly for books will harm access to knowledge in the future (per Darnton). Below, I’m relying on their words to explain this further.

Last week Brewster posted “It’s All About the Orphans” (http://www.opencontentalliance.org/2009/02/23/its-all-about-the-orphans/) on the blog of the Open Content Alliance, focusing on the plight of “orphan works” - that vast number of books that are still under copyright but whose authors can no longer be found:

"After digesting the proposed Google Book Settlement, it becomes clear that the dizzyingly complex agreement is, in essence, an elaborate scheme for the exploitation of orphan works… The upshot, if the Settlement is approved, would be legal protection for Google, and only for Google, to scan and provide digital access to the orphan works. Presto! … So, should the Settlement be approved, Google will be handed exclusive access to the orphans, and the public loses out… I, personally, am amazed at this creative use of class action law. The three parties have managed to skirt copyright law, bypass legislative efforts, and feather their own nests - all through the clever use of law intended to remedy harms. This Settlement, if approved by the judge, will accomplish things appropriate to a legislative body not to private corporate boardrooms. Let’s live under the rule of law, as arduous as that might be, and free the orphans, legitimately, not for one corporation but for all of us."

And in “Google & the Future of Books” (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281), an article that Darnton published in The New York Review of Books last month, the focus is slightly different but the upshot is the same:

"After reading the settlement and letting its terms sink in—no easy task, as it runs to 134 pages and 15 appendices of legalese - one is likely to be dumbfounded: here is a proposal that could result in the world's largest library… Moreover, in pursuing the terms of the settlement with the authors and publishers, Google could also become the world's largest book business - not a chain of stores but an electronic supply service that could out-Amazon Amazon… The class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition… We are allowing a question of public policy - the control of access to information - to be determined by private lawsuit… As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly - a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information… The settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company… This is also a tipping point in the development of what we call the information society. If we get the balance wrong at this moment, private interests may outweigh the public good for the foreseeable future, and the Enlightenment dream may be as elusive as ever."

A lot seems to be at stake and the court may approve the settlement in June! I don't care if the settlement means that Google will get even richer (disclosure: I’m a Google shareholder). The question is: to what extent will WE become poorer?

Four short links: 10 Mar 2009

1. Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation Sets Up Its Own BitTorrent Tracker -- the money shot is not that they're using the same code as Pirate Bay, it's "By using BitTorrent we can reach our audience with full quality media files. Experience from our early tests show that if we’re the best provider of our own content we also gain control of it.". Finally, a broadcaster realizing that they have to jump into the conversation with customers even though they don't know how it ends. (via BoingBoing)
2. Sita Sings The Blues Released -- release of the movie that was mired in copyright strife, now freed under Creative Commons Attribute And No Damn DRM licensing. It still is copyright-entangled: some of the songs in the movie are restricted and if you want to reuse the songs in your reuse of the movie then you'll have to wrangle with the copyright overlords.
3. Crisis of Credit Explained in Infographics -- a great 10m movie explaining the whole disaster from cash to crash, with an infographic-meets-Flash-game feel to it. This is the future of educational films. I've embedded it below. (via Flowing Data)
4. Cowpox Smallpox -- very clear essay from Maciej Ceglowski about how the economic dramas and the climate dramas challenge our democracy in the same way. You might know Maciej from Argentina on two steaks a day or Dabblers and Blowhards. Complexity as a result of feedback loops caught my eye, as that's part of the talk I gave at Webstock, "Better Stronger Failures": "Feedback loops in the financial world are even worse, since the entities being modeled are aware of their behavior - and aware of the models being used to study them. Investors form strategies based not just on market conditions, but on their perceptions of others' perceptions of market conditions, and so on in a hall of mirrors effect. Any algorithm that can reliably predict the behavior of a financial market will be used by participants in that market to earn money, altering the system in a way that leaves you right back where you started. In this sense our ability to model economics will always be worse than our understanding of the weather, since we don't have to worry about a raindrop anticipating that it will hit the ground before it even forms, and taking steps to change the outcome."

Four short links: 3 Mar 2009

The problems of Creative Commons around the world, ebook futures, open source biomed research, and a new open source conference:

1. The Case For and Against Creative Commons -- skip straight to page two, where the article talks about the places around the world where CC isn't working. "More exactly, they fear that if you try to convert artists to CC who had never thought of copyrighting their works before, they may simply fall in love with the concept of making money through full copyright and stick to it." (via Paul Reynolds on a mailing list)
2. Are We Having The Wrong Conversation About eBook Pricing? -- "The first TV shows were basically radio programs on the television — until someone realized that TV was a whole new medium. Ebooks should not just be print books delivered electronically. We need to take advantage of the medium and create something dynamic to enhance the experience. I want links and behind the scenes extras and narration and videos and conversation...". Yes, but radio shows still persist even though they're delivered through the Internet. Old formats don't have to die in the face of new media, the question is what's best for a particular purpose. I read books on my iPhone as I go to sleep at night ... I don't want hypermedia linked videos and a backchannel. I don't want the future of ebooks to be 1990s Shockwave CD-ROM "interactives". (via Andrew Savikas' delicious feed)
3. Sage -- "a new, not-for-profit medical research organization established in 2009 to revolutionize how researchers approach the complexity of human biological information and the treatment of disease. Sage’s objectives are: to build and support an open access platform and databases for building innovative new dynamic disease models; to interconnect scientists as contributors to evolving, integrated networks of biological data." Apparently they'll be seeded with a pile of high-resolution very expensive data from Merck. (via BoingBoing)
4. Open Source Bridge -- open source conference in Portland, OR, started to fill the void when OSCON moved to San Jose. Very open source: they show you all the proposals, and you can even subscribe to a feed of the proposals as they come in. Many look good, though I'm pretty sure that 1993 called and wants its Tcl back. This conference might be just the excuse I need to visit Portland.

Four short links: 23 Feb 2009

1. Work in Small Batches -- I'm obsessed by the pursuit of quality, but at human scale and not in the stultifying ISO9001 process. The ever-wonderful Startup Lessons Learned blog ties together Toyota Quality, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment, with good explanations of why it works. (I'm reminded of "yes it works in practice, but can it work in theory?")
2. RSS Hits the Big Time -- the stimulus bill requires government departments to offer Atom or RSS feeds of how they spend the money. The "omigod wow RSS in law!" comments remind me of when I first saw a URL on a billboard: it was the all-digital world impinging on my real physical world (or vice-versa). Reminded of William Gibson talking about our fleeting separation of digital and physical worlds.
3. Objective C Internals -- talk by Kiwi Foo Camp alumnus and recent emigre (Pixar's gain is Australasia's loss) about the innards of Objective C. I always find that I understand language features better when I understand an implementation mechanism for them.
4. Prime Minister Delays NZ's Insane Copyright Law -- the delay isn't the important bit, it's the committment to abolish the bad law if the ISPs and the recording industry can't reach an agreement. I was at the press conference, twittering furiously, and it was quite clear that the PM felt the law was crap and if the two parties hadn't been mid-negotiation then it would have all been repealed. Optimism!

Four short links: 23 Jan 2009

Potty mouth, piracy, pointers to the future of the web, and Presidential technology woes, all in today's link roundup.

1. F*ck the Cloud - Jason Scott's brilliant (and profanity-strewn) rant about cloud computing and the things people throw away without thinking about. Jason, an Internet historian, has a unique perspective and I think what he says makes a lot of sense. "[I]f you’re not asking what stuff means anything to you, then you’re a sucker, ready to throw your stuff down at the nearest gaping hole that proclaims it is a free service".
2. Pirating the Oscars - Andy Baio summarizes online piracy of the Oscar-nominated movies, as he has done since 2003. It's interesting to see what's new this year: movies are taking longer to leak, but more of them are being leaked.
3. Webkit Owns Mobile - Alex Russell lays out the case that Webkit "has mobile all sewn up". I've been saying for the last umpty years that the Web is at a Windows 286 stage of development--we need 3.1 to come along and standarize the widgets that presently everyone reinvents. I recognized that in this line from Alex: "If we look at the APIs of Dojo, Prototype, or jQuery as a set of suggestions for the APIs that the web should expose, then it becomes pretty clear that we’ve still got a long long way to go".
4. New Staff Find White House Tech in Dark Ages - they've gone from a startup to The Enterprise (not Star Trek, alas, just a big company) and now are learning the pain of IT rules that are bigger than they are.

Landmark Case Upholds Open Source Licenses

The U.S. Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit has issued a wondrously clear and unambiguous opinion (pdf) that supports the enforceability of open source and public licenses. It is great news for user and contributor communities, and their lawyers. Nothing that I've seen posted so far actually quotes any of the juicy parts of the opinion, so I've included some of that.

The Back Story:

The software in the case is licensed under Artistic License 1.0, which was written by Larry Wall in the late 80s. The defendants allegedly copied the software into their own products without complying with key Artistic License requirements—they did not include the original authors’ names, copyright notices, references to the COPYING file, information about sources of the original files (e.g., SourceForge), or a description of how the original files had been modified.

The plaintiff asked the court for an injunction prohibiting distribution of the defendants’ products, arguing that by violating these license conditions, the defendants violated the copyright in the software.

In a nutshell (and omitting legal fine points), the decision under appeal denied the injunction, holding that copyright protection is not available for software distributed free-of-charge under an open source license.

This truly shocked the open source, free software, and public license community, and a coalition of groups led by Creative Commons filed a “friend of the court” brief (pdf) in support of the appeal. (In the interests of full disclosure—Allison Randal and I worked on the brief on behalf of The Perl Foundation.)

The Ruling:

The appellate court reversed the lower court’s decision in an opinion that open source lawyers have dreamed about but never thought that we would see.

The court paid tribute to the diversity and importance of the open source, free software, and public license community:

“Public licenses, often referred to as “open source” licenses, are used
by artists, authors, educators, software developers, and scientists who
wish to create collaborative projects and to dedicate certain works to
the public…Open source licensing has become a widely used method
of creative collaboration that serves to advance the arts and sciences in
a manner and at a pace that few could have imagined just a few decades
ago.”

And after noting that “lack of money changing hands” does not equate to lack of economic value, it wholeheartedly endorsed enforcement of the Artistic 1.0 license:

“The clear language of the Artistic License creates conditions to protect
the economic rights at issue in the granting of a public license. These
conditions govern the rights to modify and distribute the computer
programs and files included in the downloadable software package. The
attribution and modification transparency requirements directly serve to
drive traffic to the open source incubation page and to inform downstream
users of the project, which is a significant economic goal of the copyright
holder that the law will enforce.”

Perhaps the happiest aspect of the opinion is the assured and sophisticated discussion of open source processes, projects, and economic value. Although the briefs filed by the plaintiff and by Creative Commons undoubtedly assisted the court’s analysis, it seems safe to conclude that the court was already aware of the significance of open source—yet another sign that the “movement” actually has come of age.