machine-envy

In all likelihood, the Gowers Review of intellectual property is already written. But, as it bounces between government departments for consultation, what it is going to say is still very much up for grabs. Which makes it all the more important, if you believe copyright in sound recordings shouldn’t be extended from 50 to 95 years, that you go over to Releasethemusic.org and sign their petition.

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.

Missed this news when it broke last month, but intrigued to hear today that Google has inaugurated it’s own political action committee (PAC) to support candidates seeking electoral office in the United States. According to Google’s chief communications bod Ricardo Reyes, Google will use the PAC to lobby on issues such as net neutrality. This detailed article in today’s Guardian summarises the PAC, and details some of Google’s other lobbying efforts.

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 week’s column in the New Statesman stretches a metaphor. After Tony Neate, director of GetSafeOnline advised UK web surfers to “treat their PC like their car” and maintain it with regular updates, lock it away safely behind a firewall, etc, I go on to suggest that, if we want our PCs to remain open and flexible, we should learn how to drive them safely on the information superhighway. Funnily enough, the day after I filed this I went to a seminar at the Oxford Internet Institute chaired by Jonathan Zittrain, whose work on internet generativity I cite in the piece. The discussion - about “badware”, executable code that is not malware in the traditional sense, but dangerous in the wrong hands - bore out many of the ideas in this piece.

A trip to Brussels earlier this week served to do the same. We were there to discuss citizens access to information, and Shamit Saggar, professor of political science at the University of Sussex, said something that’s been ringing in my ears ever since: “The logical conclusion on the Gutenberg Press was compulsory schooling”. There’s a theory that bears exploring.

Anyway, for those that can bear a stretched metaphor or two, here’s the column (and before you ask, why the headline has referenced phishing is beyond me):

“Batten down the firewalls, release the anti-spyware hounds, and up the spam alert to red status: 21 per cent of us are now more worried about online crime than about being burgled. According to a survey for the UK’s Get Safe Online campaign, fear of being duped by hackers is enough to put some of us off going online altogether.

”And we’re right to be concerned. In the week the survey was released, coinciding with the national internet safety roadshow, Microsoft issued a record number of security patches for its software, and the online virtual world Second Life was attacked by a code storm of self-replicating grey goo…”

Read the rest here.

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.

This week’s column for the New Statesman is on the Google New’s defeat in the Belgian courts. It’s all you’re going to get for a fortnight out of the NS, since apparently, my column’s being turned into ad space next week. Charming.

Last year, back when a girl could get a hotel room and a £500 fee for telling a roomful of newspaper execs what a blog was, a director from one of the UK broadsheets taught me a lesson about how the web was changing the news agenda. Each morning, he said, his assistant would download a page from Google News that listed for him and his editorial team the ten top stories around the world that day. Though it would by no means define where they might choose to focus their attention, it was another tool for them to use in their quest to talk back to the world.

Today, Fleet Street might be wondering what happened to Belgium…

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.

I’ve just seen that TechnoLlama name-checked me on blog day, and I’m chuffed to bits, especially as I get a lot of my most interesting legal titbits from his blog, like this observation on a spurious software patents winning BBC’s Dragon’s Den.

I’m gutted I can’t be at the VI Computer Law World Conference in Edinburgh, which starts today, and which was organised by Andrés, the man behind TechnoLlama.