9/16 Suggested Reading and Viewing

A bit of a linkdump:

We ran across an interesting discussion on piracy and video game development on the Tumblr blog of independent game designer Notch. Our contribution can be found here.

BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder presents a convincing narrative on the place of DIY in education and daily life through an interview with The Atlantic.

The UK government has announced that while “rights holders” (i.e. the culture industries) will have to pay 75% of the costs related to pursuing illegal file-sharing under the 2010 Digital Economy Act, but ISP’s will have to foot the remaining 25%. For ISP’s, this means footing a multi-million pound cost for law enforcement actions which provide economic benefit another industry entirely. And much like the taxes tacked on to our cell phone bills, these costs are going to be passed directly on to consumers by the ISP’s, so essentially, the public will now be paying to help UK copyright holders protect their profits.

Copyright vs. The Law

Techdirt points us to an interesting conflict going on in Sweden:

The Swedish National Police have been attempting to build a database which allows them to match shoe-prints found at crime scenes with the type of shoes that made them. In order to build the database, they have simply been downloading pictures of shoe treds from the internet. Now, some shoe companies are claiming that those images are their intellectual property and cannot be taken without permission.

The police claim that the law lets them ignore copyright in solving crimes, but an intellectual property professor quoted in the article notes that such an exemption only applies in the direct police investigation of a specific crime — not for the sake of building up a general database. The professor suggests that this appears to be a clear violation of Swedish copyright laws.

Fine points of Swedish copyright law aside (for the time being), what’s interesting here are the two potential ways to approach the dispute:

If we trust that the motive of the police is to protect the life and property of the citizenry, then we can see the conflict over the database as taking root in a claim by commercial brands that the protection of their intellectual property in the abstract (it should be safe to assume that this database will not result in any real economic damage) should trump the ability of the police to solve actual crimes.

If we’re feeling more cynical about state power, we could view this as a conflict between copyright and state power. Which source of authority is exerts more influence: the corporation’s ownership of it’s intellectual property or the state’s ability to surveil its citizens?

Open Universities, pt. 2

In our previous post we discussed the possibility that web-casting academic lectures could transform universities in some way, possibly making academic information accessible to more people outside the university, or helping to keep lecturers honest and accountable. On Monday, the New York Times published this story about attempts by humanities scholars to use the internet to transform the process of peer review:

some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.

So the idea here is not that digital information systems will help make education more accessible, but rather that they could be used to allow a broader segment of the public to weigh in on key academic questions: Which research findings are interesting, convincing or valid? Can research that stands the test of peer review by experts hold up in the court of public opinion? In other words, the process of internet reader review could be use to break down the social power and exclusivity of expertise, one important step in opening the intellectual commons.

Liberating iPod/iPhone Power Technology

In this video from MintyBoost, you can see the process of reverse-engineering the proprietary technology Apple requires for charging devices such as iPods. Apple generally requires any company making iPod charging devices to keep this technology confidential, thereby limiting the market on compatible devices to Apple’s whim. However, a little technical know-how allows such a device to be hacked and the specs set free.

Carl Safina on Deepwater Horizon

An informative talk on the scope of this tragedy so far, but most relevant to our purposes here is the following conclusion that Safina makes:

I think we have to understand where this leak really started from. It started from the destruction of the idea that the government is there because it’s our government, meant to protect the larger public interest.

If you look at the page for this talk on the TED website, you can read through lots of comments about the role of de/regulation in creating and prolonging this disaster.

How the Fashion Industry Works Without Copyright

Open Universities?

With growing concern in the United States about the cost, accessibility and quality of education, it may be useful to consider a recent trend in American Universities: many professors now publicly ‘share’ video of their lectures, opening their courses to anyone with internet access, rather than only to paying, enrolled students. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a great story about this.

Personally, as a lecturer myself, I imagine having my lectures taped and shared would make me self-conscious in practice, which might cause me anxiety or help me improve my lectures. It certainly might make professors accountable to a broader public, and help “peer review” their claims. It is also appealing in theory to consider the ethic of open-source teaching, which could push the conventional limits of public education. I have always found that colleges and universities are places where the ethic of an intellectual “commons” is strong; this trend still survives in the age of the corporate university in a somewhat muted form.

I am also a fan and follower of online lectures. The European Graduate School offers many lectures online, and considering their faculty of superstar theorists, this is a unique opportunity to hear from Zizek, Butler, DJ Spooky and a whole slew of continental philosophers, media and cultural theorists, film directors and other media practitioners. John Merriman‘s lectures at Yale in modern European and French history are online. MIT’s Open Course Ware site provides syllabi, assignments, lectures and other media to anyone with a web browser. There must be countless others.

Of course, many universities will worry about harming their bottom line, if prospective students can see lectures without enrolling and paying. Some professors will be uncomfortable, unable or unwilling to share their lectures. No matter how the “classroom” or the price of textbooks and materials might change in the internet era, it remains the case that students who want a credentialed degree will have to enroll and pay. Internet video alone won’t solve a national problem with access to education, rising tuition, failing schools, and so on, but sharing lectures online is already stretching the boundaries of the classroom.

digital books: when it rains, it pours.

The recent release of David Shield’s book Reality Hunger: a Manifesto (see here and here) comes on the heels of increasing controversy in Europe over Helene Hegemann’s literary debut Axolotl Roadkill (see here). Hegemann is already caught up in an intellectual property scandal; we’ll see what happens to Shields. Both books take a recombinant, “remix” approach to writing, cobbling together excerpts of other people’s writing with their own bits of text. How very contemporary. The idea of remixing as a unique mode of cultural production and the attendant issues of intellectual property that always seem to follow it have now made it into the book market.

While consumers read literary mash-ups like last year’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, media giants like Amazon, Sony and Barnes & Noble are competing to get the reading public hooked on portable hand-held digital reading devices: Kindle, Reader and Nook. Consequently, the publishing industry is already embroiled in typical efforts to protect corporate property: conflict over ebook file formats and which devices can read which formats, as well as concern over the proliferation of ebooks as a hot commodity for file sharing.

At the same time, but getting less media attention, has been Google’s ongoing commercial/legal negotiation with various publishers, universities and other authorities as they expand the ever-growing Google Books project. The project makes a massive amount of material available to the public, online, much of it for free, but many books and other printed materials are still not fully usable or readable thanks to pressure from publishers.

There are many things that are controversial about Google Books. For one, why should we trust a private corporation with the next generation of media services we would normally expect from public libraries? If Google cuts a deal with publishers, much of the content would likely become pay-to-play – and then, publishers would have some say in the cost and accessibility of their products. Even if Google was committed to keeping user access free and open, other issues might arise, too.

Nicholas Sarkozy, Jean-Noël Jeanneney and others close to the French National Library have argued that Google books will only speed the trend of cultural globalization as Americanization, and place control of books belonging to France’s national “patrimony” in non-French hands. Other times, their line seems to be pan-European. But whether they argue for a French digital library (like Gallica), or a European Union version (like Europeana), the point is to mount a public, European challenge to American corporate digitization projects like Google’s.

These varied anecdotes suggest that we’re witnessing an interesting moment of transformation in books, and in the ways that people talk about, think about, buy and sell, and fight over, books. With so much intellectual content and so much money at stake, this dialogue, now fairly widespread, will only get hotter.

Prelinger Manifesto: On the Virtues of Preexisting Material

Rick Prelinger, a force in internet archiving, is also the author of this useful manifesto On the Virtues of Preexisting Material, in which he outlines 14 Principles for using preexising works to make new work:

1 Why add to the population of orphaned works?
2 Don’t presume that new work improves on old
3 Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom
4 The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful
5 Dregs are the sweetest drink
6 And leftovers were spared for a reason
7 Actors don’t get a fair shake the first time around, let’s give them another
8 The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers
9 We approach the future by typically roundabout means
10 We hope the future is listening, and the past hopes we are too
11 What’s gone is irretrievable, but might also predict the future
12 Access to what’s already happened is cheaper than access to what’s happening now
13 Archives are justified by use
14 Make a quilt not an advertisement

Brief note on the culture of privatization

Op-Ed collumnist Roger Cohen has a nice piece in today’s New York Times about “The Narcissus Society,” in which he connects America’s staggering social fragmentation and anomie to our inability to wrap up the health care debate in a productive way. The piece, short and sweet as it is, connects many of the threads we try to weave together on this blog.