machine-envy

This week’s column at the New Statesman is a reaction to all the silly season stories calling for a complete ban of Facebook/YouTube/the internet.

Some people are so quick to judge. At the beginning of August, the national treasure that is Sir Elton John was reported, albeit by that other great national treasure, the Sunnewspaper, as calling for a complete closure of the internet. Apparently, Reg was advocating an experimental halt to all internet traffic in order to see whether, as he believed it might, such a return to our creative roots would stem the tide of mediocrity in popular music. As part of his Luddite rant, Elton chastised Sun readers, telling them to “get out there - communicate”, which prompted one of my more sardonic email pals to quip: “You can see he’s really got the whole internet thing, can’t you?”

Read the rest here.

The day after I wrote it, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee released an altogether more sensible critique of personal security online. It’s well worth a read, just for the amazing expert evidence their Lordships collected.

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.

Two items of copyright geekery in this morning’s Guardian. Firstly. Alice Gould gives the legal 101 on hijacking”user-generated content” for a traditional media setting (well done Media Guardian for removing that nasty subscription barrier, by the way). Her conclusion:

The law may appear antiquated in the fast-changing world of the internet, but in most cases citizen journalists have the same legal protection as any other journalists.

And on the letters page Jonathan Mitchell QC suggests that the Guardian’s legal team are fostering “deeply undemocratic” ideas, after the publication of Winston Churchill’s famous “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech over the weekend:

When MPs make speeches in parliament, these are recorded in Hansard and the report is subject to parliamentary copyright (formerly crown copyright) under section 165 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Houses of Parliament might in theory restrict republication of the debates in Hansard; but for many years they have, in practice, allowed this quite freely… Even that formal permission would not be needed now, as parliamentary copyright lasts only 50 calendar years, so that the last remnants of copyright in this speech ended on December 31 1990.

Read the entire letter here.

After James showed me the web is us/ing us video, I wrote about it for my latest openDemocracy piece. It’s the first time I’ve been able to join up my interest in linguistcs with my interest in the information age, and I’m quite proud of the result.

After the Sandinista government took power in Nicaragua in 1979, its reform of the education system included expanding the country’s schools for the deaf. The schools’ methods had been harsh and broadly ineffective, consisting of drilling the children in lip-reading and spoken Spanish. But eventually - simply by bringing previously isolated deaf children together - they generated an unexpectedly positive side-effect.

Largely, the children had been living with hearing relatives, and had had no opportunity to communicate with other deaf children. Brought together, however, they pooled the makeshift gestures they had used at home. What resulted was a usable jargon that was all the children’s own. When new groups of deaf pupils arrived at the schools - their minds ripe for natural language-learning - they took the jargon of the older children and turned it into a fully-fledged, expressive language. Now known as Nicaraguan Sign Language, or Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN), this was the type of language, according to the Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, with which “a child can watch a surrealistic cartoon and describe its plot to another child”. It is a language that can be used in poems, jokes and life histories, one that “is coming to serve as the glue that holds the community together”.

Read the rest here.

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.

I’m pleased to announce that as of 15 January next year, I’ll be joining the Open Rights Group as their new Executive Director!

Suw Charman, ORG’s outgoing Exec Director, has just posted the announcement on the ORG website. I’m looking forward to working with her, ORG’s Ops Manager Michael Holloway, and the incredibly diverse and talented group of people who make up ORG’s board, advisory council and army of expert volunteers.

It’s a big year ahead for digital rights. ORG scored a massive success with their Release The Music campaign against the extension of copyright terms in sound recordings, but this recommendation will need pursuing in Europe, where the music industry has vowed to take its rhetoric next. And there’s a lot more going on which requires the scrutiny of the digital rights community - like the e-voting pilots scheduled for this year’s local elections in March.

Of course, joining ORG means I’ll be leaving my post of Technology Director at openDemocracy. I’ve had a great two years there - watching the website go from strength to strength and working to build and launch a sister website, ChinaDialogue. I’ll miss the friends I’ve made there, they’re some of the most dedicated and talented people I’ve ever worked with. I wish them all the best of luck in continuing to develop what I believe is a worthwhile and necessary exercise in political analysis on the web.

I’ll still be writing my columns for openDemocracy and the New Statesman. All in all, it’s going to be a pretty busy year - I’m looking forward to it already.

Some really fab coverage on Gowers in the Guardian and the Observer, starting with this Leader from Friday’s edition:

“…The report was given a guarded welcome by the recently formed Open Rights group which campaigned strongly against extending the 50-year limit, but the war is not won yet. The Gowers report is only a staging post, a way of influencing UK government thinking before Whitehall submits its own policy to Brussels where the final decisions will be taken. The real lobbying has only just begun.”

Then on Saturday one of my favourite writers, Marina Hyde, throws in her twopence worth:

“It was, of course, barely a fortnight ago that readers of these pages were pleased to take a lesson in political theory from my temporary Guardian colleague Mick Hucknall, the lead singer of Simply Red and a signatory of the aforementioned ad, who opened a presumably self-parodic opinion piece with the statement “copyright is fundamentally socialist”. Mick then contrived to conflate notions of intellectual property - and there’s something about “property” that grates with our fifth-form Marxist’s thesis - with solid leftwing values, though I’m afraid I’d rather lost track of his point by the second mention of “the free flow of ideas”, and realised we were being asked to conceive of a Beverley Sisters track as such.”

And finally, new media heavyweight John Naughton files his analysis on Sunday:

“American neocons like to say that the only things found in the middle of the road are ‘white lines and dead armadillos’. Much the same applies to intellectual property (IP)…”

As someone who’s devoted the last two years to getting accessible arguments about IP into the national press, I’m celebrating.

I got to do one of those funny mini-interviews for New Media Knowledge this week, you know, the lovely throwaway kind that ask you what radio shows you listen to and what issues get under your skin. It made me feel very special.

Name:Becky Hogge.

Personal website or blog: Machine Envy.

Day jobs: Technology Director, openDemocracy; web culture columnist, New Statesman.

How would you describe yourself to the world? I channel geeks.

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?