machine-envy

A few weeks ago, I was having tea and cakes with a friend, talking about the usual stuff - Second Life, DRM, the BBC’s iPlayer. Together we came up with a rather implausible train of thought, which said friend dared me to turn into a piece for my New Statesman column. I think it’s turned out rather well:

It is a well-known fact that, despite the oft-lauded opportunities for self-development through digital creativity offered by the online virtual world Second Life, many people still use it exclusively to explore the more adventurous side of their sexuality. Although I’m not a regular S’Lifer myself (my excuse is that my laptop does not have the appropriate graphics card) it came as no surprise to me when, dining with a Second Life enthusiast last year, I was informed of the competitive market for penises in-world.

Apparently, the creative ingenuity of the businesses supplying avatar add-ons is so great that models intended to attract admiration become obsolete within months. If nothing else, this conversation resulted in the coining of what I still consider would make the world’s best band name: Last Month’s Penis.

On 27 July, the BBC is to launch its controversial iPlayer…

Read the rest here.

Our conference packs here in Buenos Aires included a map I had not seen before - showing the distribution of royalty fees paid in 2002. From the site, creator, Worldmapper:

Over half (53%) of the value of all royalty and license fees paid in 2002 were received in one territory: the United States. Large proportions of these fees were also received in Japan and the United Kingdom.

These fees are the payments made by someone who wants to use an idea, invention or artistic creation that legally belongs to someone else. To receive these fees a copyright or patent is needed, which may remain active for years after the initial invention…

Read the rest here.

Yesterday was my first day working with the Open Rights Group. It’s going to take me a while to gain pace with the rest of the team, and the bevvy of projects they’re working on both in terms of campaigns (e-voting, more IP stuff, and the European Television without Frontiers legislation are all under the spotlight right now) and behind-the-scenes work.

I’ve been trying without success to get the widget in del.icio.us working so I can post links direct to this blog. In the meantime, here are a couple of titbits:

• Lawrence Lessig on net neutrality and municipal broadband in Wired
• Unsigned punk band make top 40 (health warning: they are represented by the PR company Quite Good, who were responsible for all the noise about Sandi Thom last year)

Like many Brits, the BBC’s Radio 4 holds a very special place in my heart. After two weeks away from home, I was craving two things - a cup of tea made without UHT milk, and the mellow sound of received pronunciation washing over me from the wireless on my bedside.

Imagine my surprise, then, when late on Sunday night I heard this broadcast. It’s a niche show called In Business, and this week’s episode was completely dedicated to companies which use and produce open source software. It’s worth listening to just to hear the wonderful voice of presenter Peter Hall endlessly repeating the words “source code”. Download it here.

My interview with Andrew Gowers has gone up on openDemocracy.

“‘Look at the debates that there have been on intellectual property since the arrival of the internet. They have been loud and shallow. They have been between people who say everything’s free and you shouldn’t pay for anything and people who say everything’s mine, and you should pay for everything. And actually neither of them are right.’ Andrew Gowers is sitting in a back room of the British government’s vast Treasury building. It’s just a few hours after the launch of his year-long reviewof the framework governing intellectual property, a text he hopes will change the nature of the debate not just in Britain, but internationally.

“The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property has been broadly welcomed by copyright campaigners…”

Read the rest here.

As predicted, those who want the copyright terms in sound recordings extended are making a huge amount of noise this week. They’re explicit about their hope - that government will ignore the recommendations of an independent review that has taken nearly a year to complete, and give them what they think they want anyway.

If politicians would like a clear view of how popular an extension of term is going to make them, they need look no further than the bevvy of responses to Mick Hucknall’s incredibly ill-advised piece on Comment is Free last week. Even if you ignore the ad hominem stuff, the reaction’s pretty damning.

Ahead of its official launch after next week’s pre-budget speech (12.30, Wednesday 6 December, economy fans) the BBC is reporting that the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property will recommend that copyright terms on sound recordings should not be extended.

Boingboing may be reporting this as a victory, but the battle isn’t over yet. The government will need to agree with Gowers, and as we know, a lot of high-level lobbyists have been side-stepping the independent review and going straight to the top. This week is the week to be making noise about why copyright terms shouldn’t be extended. My column in the New Statesmen this week is dedicated to the issue.

If you live in the UK and you haven’t signed ORG’s Release the Music petition yet, get to it. So far the media have gone with the “Poor Cliff” angle, but the other side of the story needs to be told too. Can you write a blog post/write to your MP/Give a Testimony that will let the UK government know that Gowers has got it right?

Last Friday, Open Business, in collaboration with Bookmooch and Magnatune, held the inaugural MiniBar, a geek social meant to rival SF’s CC Salon. It was a whole lot cooler than most techie meets, being hosted in a warehouse bar off Bricklane and having actual DJs and everything.

Here I am with Open Business Hannah - you can see lots more photos here. I was especially pleased to meet Ben Goldacre, who writes the Bad Science column for the Guardian, and Mark Pilkington, mission control for Strange Attractor.

This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy tries to add something useful to the commentary surrounding Novell’s recent Faustian pact with Microsoft. In particular, it asks whether either the deal’s nod to non-commercial developers or Moglen’s threat to legally fork FLOSS with GPL v3 are predicted by Lawrence Lessig’s recent, controversial, “two economies” theory. My thanks to oD’s operations manager Felix Cohen for advice and additional research:

“The Novell/Microsoft deal could divide the FLOSS community into those who code for profit, and those who code for fun. In their 2 November statement, Novell and Microsoft stated that “Microsoft will not assert its patents against individual non-commercial open source developers”. Read this statement closely and it speaks to a future where FLOSS code development is split down the middle, where amateurs tinker and professionals profit.

”Interestingly, this same future has recently been hinted at by another figurehead of free culture, Lawrence Lessig. On 28 September this year, the Creative Commons pioneer wrote a short blog post entitled “On the economies of culture”. In it, he argues that “the Internet has reminded us that we live not just in one economy, but at least two”. One was the common or garden “work for pay” economy, the second that embodied in Wikipedia, which went by a variety of names, including “amateur” and “non-commercial”. These were “separate spheres”, argued Lessig, but ones that could and should be linked, in order “to inspire the creative work of the second economy, while also expanding the value of the commercial economy”.”

Read it in full here.

A little story that might be of interest to the “Piracy funds terrorism” crowd…

BBC news reports allegations today against Silvio Berlusconi and his lawyer David Mills that Mills, the estranged husband of UK Culture secretary Tessa Jowell, set up a network of offshore companies for the former Italian prime minister:

“Prosecutors say these offshore companies were used to buy American film rights which were sold at hugely inflated prices to Mr Berlusconi’s television company, Mediaset.

”It was a complex system designed, they allege, to ensure the former prime minister avoided paying tax.”

If found guilty both men face 4-12 years in jail. Read the report here.