machine-envy

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.

The Trib published a great piece on MIT’s One Laptop Per Child (known as the XO-1) initiative yesterday. It’s a shame they’ve chosen the picture they did for the website, as there are some great ones in the print copy. Plenty available on the internets, though.

New stuff I learnt from this piece:

• IBM and Microsoft are collaborating on a rival low-cost child’s computer, called “The Classmate”, which will come in at “up to” $400
• The first laptops left a factory in Shanghai last week, to be road-tested for final changes.
• The first five countries to order a million laptops will most likely be Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand

Obviously, loads of people are bitching about them already. They’re late. They’re too expensive. They don’t have that cool wind up thing you showed us at WSIS.

”The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk … and with a tiny little screen” says Bill Gate, apparently. Hilarious. Even on this issue the man does FUD. It’s one laptop per child, Bill, ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD. Not worried those five million little blighters might grow up liking Linux, are you?

It’s not just techies having a go - the development community is questioning “whether it is worth spending $100 on a laptop, when so many schools don’t even have enough books.” I got a preview of some of the stuff they’re going to want to ask at an event at the LSE a couple of weeks ago. I’d worry too if a load of Silicon Valley tech evangelists started saying they could solve the problems you’ve been working on your whole life. We’ll just have to see.

But surely you can deliver a whole load more books over wireless than on a dead tree?

UPDATE: A nice gallery of XO-1 pics here.

This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy is on the fate of “professional journalism” in the new media age. Since newspapers generally devote forest-loads of copy to their own fate at the hands of the internet, this is a topic I’ve steered clear of for a number of years. But here’s my tuppence worth.

“”We’re Google. So sue us”. Thus read the headline in The New York Times, atop a story highlighting the number of legal cases brought against the maverick search-engine company in its short history. From pornographers to parenting directories, Google has seen more people in court than most of its rivals.
“When Google’s purchase of YouTube was announced on 10 October, many commentators believed the company was just buying itself more legal woes. YouTube had been hailed as a revolution in citizen webcasting, but it was unclear how many of the staggering 100 million videos downloaded each day featured original content, and how many were simply copyrighted material uploaded illegally by other users.

“The copyright argument against (for example) entire episodes of The Smurfs appearing on YouTube without any compensation to the original creators would seem clear. But Google’s ownership of the successful social-networking site adds a new dimension to the evolving relationship between Google and other information-providers - a relationship leading the company to face an increasing number of legal challenges focused on disputes over the frontiers of intellectual-property law.

“Google’s stated mission is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It’s unsurprising, then, that as the company moves ever-nearer towards its goal, and starts making considerable income in the process, those previously in the business of information might get a little tetchy…”

Read the rest here.

Speaking of ideas-in-progress, Prof Jonathan Zittrain gave a lecture at the LSE last Friday entitled: “What would you put on the one laptop per child?”. It was basically an introduction for development types to his generativity theory, via the $100 laptop initiative, but he tested a few interesting ideas during the lecture, which are worth repeating.

He seemed to propose the stripped-down laptop as an alternative to the dystopian “information appliance” of his theory. Then he posed the question, should OLPC laptops be identified as such on the network, so they can actively seek each other out to swap code? Or would this be a kind of discrimination, or a violation of privacy that outweighed the benefits of collaboration?

More for the ideas scrapbook…

This fortnight’s article for openDemocracy continues on a theme:

“My column a fortnight ago (”Claiming our digital rights”, 26 September 2006) sparked a train of thought that hasn’t stopped chugging through my brain since. The piece was a celebration of the imminent victory over that most unsuitable of technologies, digital rights management, but sounded a note of caution: that the victory appeared to have been won on consumer-interest grounds rather than those of democratic principle. Two cheers, said the column, but let’s save the third for when rights in the networked age are won for citizens, not shoppers.
“Colin Crouch, Klaus Eder, and Damian Tambini have a phrase for what I’ve been fretting about these last two weeks: the “marketisation of citizenship”. It is a neat phrase for a bundle of restrictions that increasingly impact on my everyday life in the public arena…”

Read the rest here.

My new column for openDemocracy comes ahead of international Day Against DRM (next Tuesday), and starts a thread of thought I want to pursue further - should we fight for our digital rights as “consumers” or “citizens”? I had an interesting conversation over coffee with someone who could be described as a veteran political insider yesterday. We talked about how language inside UK government has completely transformed over the years, such that the NHS, education and the welfare states are now all “services” accessed by “customers”. Apparently, the problem is that many people who access these “services” are not (yet) UK citizens, making the term problematic.

Urban inhabitants of the western world might be surprised to see handfuls of protestors outside their local Apple store next Tuesday. But rather than protesting about working conditions in Chinese factories producing hardware for the iPod, these freedom fighters will be damning practices that prevent them from playing digital music they’ve bought from the iTunes online music shop in their car. That’s right, this Tuesday 3 October is international “day against DRM”.

Read the rest here.

Yuck. Why so bad? Read this (surely the most high-fallutin’ headline of all time).

Will be writing on this over the coming weeks. Any more info or research gratefully received.