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: 3 June 2009

Video Chat, NGO Incorp, Smart Grid, and Enterprise Sales Funny

1. Tinychat -- very simple web-based take on videochat. Pro members get higher resolution, more rooms, and privacy. (I like the "free = public, charge for private" business model)
3. One Click Orgs -- One Click Orgs is building a website where groups can quickly create a legal structure and get a simple system for group decisions. We think social enterprises, collectives and activist groups have better things to think about than obscure legal clauses. Still getting built, but a good idea. We're one step closer to Charlie Stross's vision from Accelerando of a twisty maze of cross-shareholding organisations whose bylaws are Python scripts.
4. Trilliant Acquisition Signals Next Phase of Smart Grid -- smart grids rely on networked power meters and consuming devices. Therefore there are possible alliances between powerline broadband and smart meter companies, as this union shows. Finally, a use for broadband power? (via monkchips on Twitter)
5. The Vendor-Client Relationship -- should mandatory watching for everyone in enterprise sales. (via johnclegg on Twitter)

Four short links: 26 May 2009

Databases, Sensors, Visualization, and Patents

1. Flare -- dynamically partitioning and reconstructing key-value server. Currently built on Tokyo Cabinet, but backend is theoretically pluggable. (via joshua on delicious)
2. Implantable Device Offers Continuous Cancer Monitoring -- the sensor network begins to extend into our bodies. The cylindrical, 5-millimeter implant contains magnetic nanoparticles coated with antibodies specific to the target molecules. Target molecules enter the implant through a semipermeable membrane, bind to the particles and cause them to clump together. That clumping can be detected by MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). The device is made of a polymer called polyethylene, which is commonly used in orthopedic implants. The semipermeable membrane, which allows target molecules to enter but keeps the magnetic nanoparticles trapped inside, is made of polycarbonate, a compound used in many plastics. (via FreakLabs)
3. Visualizing Data source -- the source code to examples in Visualizing Data.
4. The First Software Patent (Wired) -- was issued on this day in 1981, for a complex full-text storage and retrieval system. Tellingly, business strategy of the owner of the first software patent was ... to become a patent lawyer. A day that will linger in irritation, if not live in infamy. (via glynmoody on Twitter)

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)

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: 16 Jan 2009

Toys, telegraphs, transparency, and travel in today's roundup of short interesting links.

1. New Law Could Wipe Out Handcrafted Toy Makers - CNN story on a new consumer safety law that mandates expensive quality tests for components of toys, even those handmade in the US by micro-businesses. It's not clear what a solution looks like: mass-produced in China or micro-produced in the USA, a lead-filled toy is still unsafe. However, if the cost of proving safety prevents safe toys from reaching the market, the consumer has lost. I wonder what Make and Craft have to say about it.
2. Bio of Samuel Morse - he was more interesting than I realized. He also came up in Andy Kessler's How We Got Here, which I just finished reading and thoroughly enjoyed. See also Steven Johnson's guest post Joseph Priestley and the Open Flow of Ideas on BoingBoing. Understand the history of technology if you wish to understand its future.
3. Ze Frank's Explicit - a serious blog by Ze, where he talks about how he does what he does. I had always thought of Ze as a funny guy, based on his video podcasts, but when I met him at Foo Camp I realized he was a performer. George Clooney isn't a bankrobber like Danny Ocean. Sarah Michelle Gellar doesn't slay vampires like Buffy does. Miley Cyrus isn't a teen musical superstar like Hannah Mon... ok, some actors are like their characters, but most aren't. Ze takes performance seriously whether it's on the web, on video, in person, or on Twitter--he consciously approaches it as a task, and deliberately chooses how he does it. Think of this as "Inside the Actor's Studio" for the Internet age.
4. The Dopplr Personal Annual Report - a beautiful PDF report of your travel, automatically generated using the Prawn PDF library. Their sample travel report is that of Barack Obama. Internet businesses are able to capture lots more data than was possible in the past, and one way they differentiate themselves is by reflecting it back in useful and beautiful ways.

Richard Jefferson Interviewed in Com Ciência

I enjoyed this interview with Richard Jefferson (caution: PDF) from Com Ciência No. 102, October 05, 2008. Richard runs CAMBIA, a group that fights for open innovation in biological sciences. He's particularly cautionary about the potential for patents to greatly restrict the development of Synthetic Biology (SB):

But don't doubt there will be some very interesting biological understanding that emerges from engineering experimentation in SB. Probably some very helpful insights. But to make it truly open? It simply won't happen. There will be too many dominating patents that can stop an SB implementation that never even contemplate SB.

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.

The wiretapping accusation against P2P and copyright filtering: evidence that we need more user/provider discussion

I would by no means argue with celebrated law expert Paul Ohm when he suggests that cable companies and other ISPs might be breaking the federal wiretap law by doing deep packet inspection. This was the recent news from a WIRED reporter blogging from Computers Freedom & Privacy.

I will leave it up to the lawyers to decide whether the wiretap law was passed with the intent to keep providers from reducing traffic that strains their bandwidth, or from complying with requests from movie studios to prevent the unauthorized exchange of first-run films. I'll also let lawyers decide whether the ISPs are shielded by exemption that allows them to protect their service.

But I can't help observing that the same kinds of deep inspection that Ohm decries (and that permits China and other governments to censor content) is also used for spam and virus filtering. Superficial traffic analysis could perhaps, someday, identify spam and viruses, but it's currently critical to check for the signatures of malicious content. Would Professor Ohm like to personally handle the 2000% increase in email he'd get if he forced his ISP to stop filtering?

On the other hand, I wonder whether web mail services such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and Google would be guilty of wiretapping if they check traffic. After all, they are not delivering traffic to another system as Comcast is; they are terminating the traffic on their own systems, where their users access it. I'd think they have a much stronger defense, partly because the data is technically on their own systems, and partly through the claim that they need to run filters to protect these systems from viruses, or even just excessive traffic.

These dilemma suggest to me that the relationship between ISPs (or mail service providers) and customers has to change, and perhaps that the wiretap statute has to adapt. What we want is that most perplexing of legal solutions: to screen out malicious behavior and impacts that users don't like, while leaving positive and desired behavior alone.

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Yochai Benkler, others at Harvard map current and future Internet

Harvard's world-renowned Berkman Center for Internet & Society is celebrating its tenth anniversary with a conference called Berkman@10. I'll report here on today's sessions, which were organized as a fairly conventional symposium (although as loosely as one could run it with 450 attendees). Tomorrow will be set up as an unconference, where the audience defines most of the topics and self-organizes into small-group discussions.

• Whither peer production--wither peer production?
• The conscious commons
• What will a Harvard for six billion people look like?
• Designing for cooperation
• Seeding and modeling
• The dilemma of openness
• The Berkman Center broadens

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Book review: "The Future of the Internet (And How to Stop It)"

Most of us in the computer field have heard more than our fill about the free software movement, the copyright wars, the scourge of spyware and SQL injection attacks, the Great Firewall of China, and other battles for the control of our computers and networks. But your education is stifled until you have absorbed the insights offered by comprehensive thinkers such as Jonathan Zittrain, who presents in this brand new book some critical and welcome anchor points for discussions of Internet policy. Now we have a definitive statement from a leading law professor at Harvard and Oxford, who combines a scholar's insight into legal doctrines with a nitty-gritty knowledge of life on the Internet.

You can read Zittrain for cogent discussions of key issues in copyright, filtering, licensing, censorship, and other pressing issues in computing and networking. But you're rewarded even more if you read this book to grasp fundamental questions of law and society, such as:

• What determines the legitimacy of laws and those who make and enforce them?
• What relationship does the law on the books bear to the law as enforced, and how does the gray area between them affect the evolution of society?
• What is the proper attitude of citizens toward law-makers and regulators, and how much power is healthy for either side to have?
• How can community self-organization stave off the need for heavy-handed legislation--and how, in contrast, can premature legislation preclude constructive solutions by self-organized communities?

Core questions such as these power Zittrain's tour of technology and law on today's networks. "The Future of the Internet" takes us briskly down familiar paths, offering valuable summaries of current debates, but Zittrain also tries always to hack away at the brambles that block the end of each path. Thanks to his unusually informed perspective, he usually--although not always--succeeds in pushing us forward a few meticulously footnoted footsteps.

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