John Niven, a former A&R (Artiste and Repertoire) man in the music business explains in the Times where a lot of the money pouring into the music industry in the 1990s really went.
"Post-graduation, in the early Nineties, I was certain of two seemingly contradictory things. 1) I didn't want a proper job of any description just yet, thank you very much, and 2) I wanted - after four years of university plus two of playing guitar in a penniless indie band - to earn some money. Both lazy and avaricious, without even knowing it I was already an ideal candidate for a career in the music business...
The marketing meetings were an eye-opener. Records were “this useless, stinking piece of shit”. Artists were “clowns”, “losers” and “spastics”. Like many a bright-eyed newbie before me I was quickly, viciously, disabused of the notion that record companies loved music.
It also soon became apparent that, if you were lazy and avaricious enough, there was only one area of the music business to be in. The kind of area where you could reasonably expect to be handed a six-figure salary, a BMW and a bottomless expense account in return for rolling out of bed at noon. A&R - Artiste and Repertoire, to give the full handle - is responsible for finding and developing new talent...
There is a Hunter S.Thompson quote that has become the music industry's Magna Carta: “The music industry is a cruel and shallow money-trench. A long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side.” It's appropriate enough given that the dominant emotions within A&R culture are fear and loathing: fear that you had - or were about to - signed the wrong thing. Loathing because one of your peers had just signed the right thing...
As you've probably gathered, there was a problem with my A&R career. I was absolutely terrible at it. But then again, so was everyone else. You were a success if you could produce a profitable act every two or three years...
jetting off every other month to some exotic location for a “convention”; a scarcely credible four-day holocaust of drugs and expense-account abuse. Miami for the Winter Music Conference, Cannes for MIDEM, Cologne for Pop Komm, New York for CMJ, Texas for South by South West: hundreds of A&R men spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on flights and entertainment. In a good year these conventions might produce one signing of note."
Read the whole thing and think about it the next time you hear anyone calling for copyright term extension to sound recordings in order to ensure old, poor, retired artists get their pensions.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
Judicial Review of Serious Fraud Office decision to stop BAE-Saudi corruption inquiry
Yesterday and today the High Court in London has been holding a judicial review hearing into the Serious Fraud Office decision to stop BAE-Saudi corruption inquiry. The review was sought by the Campaign Against Arms Trade and The Corner House.
Update from the Corner House:
"On Friday 15 February, at the end of the two-day hearing in the UK's High
Court, the two judges did not give a ruling but said they would do so 'as
soon as possible'.
Documents made public on the first day of the hearing (14 February 2008)
reveal that BAE Systems wrote to the Attorney General on a 'strictly
private and confidential' basis urging him to halt the Serious Fraud
Office investigation into allegations that BAE had bribed Saudi Arabian
officials to secure the Al Yamamah arms deal.
The company argued that the investigation should be dropped on commercial
and diplomatic grounds.
To see these and other documents, follow the links from the home page of
our website (http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk) or go to the 'Control BAE'
(http://www.controlbae.org) website.
Below is some of the UK media's coverage of the judicial review over the
past few days.
best wishes from all at The Corner House
Susan Hawley, Nicholas Hildyard, Sarah Sexton and Larry Lohmann
PRESS COVERAGE
1) 'BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince'
The Guardian, Friday 15 February 2008
2) 'A cover-up laid bare: court hears how SFO inquiry was halted'
The Guardian, Friday 15 February 2008
3) 'Government rolled over to Saudi BAE threats, says judge'
The Guardian, Thursday 14 February 2008
4) 'Judge criticises dropping of BAE inquiry'
Financial Times, Friday 15 February 2008
5) 'Blair used 'irresistible pressure' to halt investigation into
BAE-Saudi arms deal'
The Independent, Friday 15 February 2008
6) 'Britain powerless in face of Saudi threats, court told'
· Judges sceptical about efforts to resist pressure
· BAE review told ministers entitled to ignore treaty
The Guardian, Saturday February 16 2008
7) 'SFO was 'powerless' to resist Saudi pressure over BAE investigation'
The Times, Saturday February 16, 2008
8) 'Justice has been debased in the fight against terror'
The Observer, Sunday February 17 2008"
Update from the Corner House:
"On Friday 15 February, at the end of the two-day hearing in the UK's High
Court, the two judges did not give a ruling but said they would do so 'as
soon as possible'.
Documents made public on the first day of the hearing (14 February 2008)
reveal that BAE Systems wrote to the Attorney General on a 'strictly
private and confidential' basis urging him to halt the Serious Fraud
Office investigation into allegations that BAE had bribed Saudi Arabian
officials to secure the Al Yamamah arms deal.
The company argued that the investigation should be dropped on commercial
and diplomatic grounds.
To see these and other documents, follow the links from the home page of
our website (http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk) or go to the 'Control BAE'
(http://www.controlbae.org) website.
Below is some of the UK media's coverage of the judicial review over the
past few days.
best wishes from all at The Corner House
Susan Hawley, Nicholas Hildyard, Sarah Sexton and Larry Lohmann
PRESS COVERAGE
1) 'BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince'
The Guardian, Friday 15 February 2008
2) 'A cover-up laid bare: court hears how SFO inquiry was halted'
The Guardian, Friday 15 February 2008
3) 'Government rolled over to Saudi BAE threats, says judge'
The Guardian, Thursday 14 February 2008
4) 'Judge criticises dropping of BAE inquiry'
Financial Times, Friday 15 February 2008
5) 'Blair used 'irresistible pressure' to halt investigation into
BAE-Saudi arms deal'
The Independent, Friday 15 February 2008
6) 'Britain powerless in face of Saudi threats, court told'
· Judges sceptical about efforts to resist pressure
· BAE review told ministers entitled to ignore treaty
The Guardian, Saturday February 16 2008
7) 'SFO was 'powerless' to resist Saudi pressure over BAE investigation'
The Times, Saturday February 16, 2008
8) 'Justice has been debased in the fight against terror'
The Observer, Sunday February 17 2008"
Students lose copyright suit against Turnitin
Four students who you might remember sued Turnitin last year for copyright infringement look to have lost their case.
"A United States District Court judge in Virginia has issued an order indicating that a motion for summary judgment filed by iParadigms seeking dismissal of plaintiffs' copyright infringement claims will be granted and thereby removed the action from his trial calendar. iParadigms is the creator of the Turnitin(R) Plagiarism Detection Service.
"This is a just and proper decision based on the law," says Andrew Smiley, a prominent New York trial attorney and frequent legal commentator.
The action in Virginia was instituted by four high school students who had allegedly submitted papers to Turnitin, which is licensed and approved by plaintiffs' school districts. The students claimed that their intellectual property rights were being violated because papers submitted to Turnitin are incorporated into the Turnitin database to prevent future collusion. iParadigms' motion for summary judgment sought dismissal of plaintiffs' claims based on both their agreement to a contract that precluded the relief they were seeking and based on the fair use defense under the Copyright Act. 17 U.S.C. Section 107."
The students had registered the copyrights in the papers they submitted Turnitin so you'd have thought de facto copying them to a database for commercial use would be clear copyright infringement. Looks like the judge decided contract law trumps copyright in this instance as the students through submission of the papers effectively signed an agreement not to take such legal action. The question of fair use for educational purposes also comes into the case but I'm not sure how Turnitin can really avail themselves of such a defence. In any case it will be very interesting to see the details of the judge's order.
"A United States District Court judge in Virginia has issued an order indicating that a motion for summary judgment filed by iParadigms seeking dismissal of plaintiffs' copyright infringement claims will be granted and thereby removed the action from his trial calendar. iParadigms is the creator of the Turnitin(R) Plagiarism Detection Service.
"This is a just and proper decision based on the law," says Andrew Smiley, a prominent New York trial attorney and frequent legal commentator.
The action in Virginia was instituted by four high school students who had allegedly submitted papers to Turnitin, which is licensed and approved by plaintiffs' school districts. The students claimed that their intellectual property rights were being violated because papers submitted to Turnitin are incorporated into the Turnitin database to prevent future collusion. iParadigms' motion for summary judgment sought dismissal of plaintiffs' claims based on both their agreement to a contract that precluded the relief they were seeking and based on the fair use defense under the Copyright Act. 17 U.S.C. Section 107."
The students had registered the copyrights in the papers they submitted Turnitin so you'd have thought de facto copying them to a database for commercial use would be clear copyright infringement. Looks like the judge decided contract law trumps copyright in this instance as the students through submission of the papers effectively signed an agreement not to take such legal action. The question of fair use for educational purposes also comes into the case but I'm not sure how Turnitin can really avail themselves of such a defence. In any case it will be very interesting to see the details of the judge's order.
Tiscali and BPI go to war over 'three strikes' payments
From the Register: Tiscali and BPI go to war over 'three strikes' payments
"Tiscali, the UK's fourth largest broadband provider, implemented a "three strikes" arrangement with the record industry to disconnect illegal filesharers last summer, The Register can reveal.
But over a matter of hours yesterday any deal that Tiscali thought it had made with the BPI evaporated in a row over money.
Relations between the pair are in disarray as they battle over who should cover the costs of sending warning letters to peer to peer users and then disconnect persistent copyright infringers. The system the two-million-customer ISP believed it had agreed with the BPI is the same one that the government is pushing all ISPs to enforce."
Thanks to Glyn at ORG for the pointer.
"Tiscali, the UK's fourth largest broadband provider, implemented a "three strikes" arrangement with the record industry to disconnect illegal filesharers last summer, The Register can reveal.
But over a matter of hours yesterday any deal that Tiscali thought it had made with the BPI evaporated in a row over money.
Relations between the pair are in disarray as they battle over who should cover the costs of sending warning letters to peer to peer users and then disconnect persistent copyright infringers. The system the two-million-customer ISP believed it had agreed with the BPI is the same one that the government is pushing all ISPs to enforce."
Thanks to Glyn at ORG for the pointer.
Commissioner McCreevy's handout to aging rock stars
The Times has billed Charlie McCreevy's announcement on copyright term extension for sound recordings as a New lease of life for ageing rock stars
Waterboarding now illegal again in the US
The acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury, has reportedly said waterboarding is no longer allowed under US law. This is the same Steven Bradbury who in 2005 secretly authorised the CIA to engage in waterboarding of terrorist suspects.
Democratic senators have been opposing president Bush's attempts to have Mr Bradbury confirmed in his post.
Democratic senators have been opposing president Bush's attempts to have Mr Bradbury confirmed in his post.
Uk heading towards police state
Simon Jenkins in full flow in the Guardian.
"The machine is out of control. Personal surveillance in Britain is so extensive that no democratic oversight is remotely plausible. Some 800 organisations, including the police, the revenue, local and central government, demanded (and almost always got) 253,000 intrusions on citizen privacy in the last recorded year, 2006. This is way beyond that of any other country in the free world.
The Sadiq Khan affair has killed stone dead the thesis, beloved of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, that any accretion of power to the state is sustainable because ministers are in control. Whether this applies to phone tapping, bugging devices, ID cards, NHS records, childcare computer systems, video surveillance or detention without trial, it is simply a lie. Nobody can control this torrent of intrusion. Nobody can oversee a burst dam...
The grim reality... is that it has seen a substantial section of the British establishment allowing itself to believe that private dealings between lawyer and client, and between MP and constituent, should no longer be considered immune from state surveillance. A cardinal principle of a free democracy is thus coolly abandoned. It is not a victory for national security. It is a victory for terrorism...
When the council can bug you for fly-tipping, when prisons can record conversations with defence lawyers, when any potentially criminal act can justify electronic intrusion - and when ministers resort to the dictator's excuse, "The innocent need not fear" - warning bells should sound.
There is no "balance" to be struck between civil liberty and national security. Civil liberty is absolute, security its handmaid. Measures are needed to protect the public, but a firm line needs to be drawn round them. The line must accept a degree of risk, or a police state is just around the corner...
To claim that Britain is a police state insults those who are victims of real ones. But I have no doubt that feeble ministers are slithering down just this road, pushed by the security/industrial complex. It is not oversight that must be increased, but rather the categories and boundaries of surveillance that must be drastically curbed...
...how often must we remind ourselves that the bomber need not kill to achieve his end when we appease his yearning for the martyrdom of repression? The amount of surveillance in Britain is grotesque. It is a sign of the corruption of power, and nothing else."
"The machine is out of control. Personal surveillance in Britain is so extensive that no democratic oversight is remotely plausible. Some 800 organisations, including the police, the revenue, local and central government, demanded (and almost always got) 253,000 intrusions on citizen privacy in the last recorded year, 2006. This is way beyond that of any other country in the free world.
The Sadiq Khan affair has killed stone dead the thesis, beloved of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, that any accretion of power to the state is sustainable because ministers are in control. Whether this applies to phone tapping, bugging devices, ID cards, NHS records, childcare computer systems, video surveillance or detention without trial, it is simply a lie. Nobody can control this torrent of intrusion. Nobody can oversee a burst dam...
The grim reality... is that it has seen a substantial section of the British establishment allowing itself to believe that private dealings between lawyer and client, and between MP and constituent, should no longer be considered immune from state surveillance. A cardinal principle of a free democracy is thus coolly abandoned. It is not a victory for national security. It is a victory for terrorism...
When the council can bug you for fly-tipping, when prisons can record conversations with defence lawyers, when any potentially criminal act can justify electronic intrusion - and when ministers resort to the dictator's excuse, "The innocent need not fear" - warning bells should sound.
There is no "balance" to be struck between civil liberty and national security. Civil liberty is absolute, security its handmaid. Measures are needed to protect the public, but a firm line needs to be drawn round them. The line must accept a degree of risk, or a police state is just around the corner...
To claim that Britain is a police state insults those who are victims of real ones. But I have no doubt that feeble ministers are slithering down just this road, pushed by the security/industrial complex. It is not oversight that must be increased, but rather the categories and boundaries of surveillance that must be drastically curbed...
...how often must we remind ourselves that the bomber need not kill to achieve his end when we appease his yearning for the martyrdom of repression? The amount of surveillance in Britain is grotesque. It is a sign of the corruption of power, and nothing else."
5000 medical records stolen
The routine loss of personal data continues.
"A laptop containing the medical records of more than 5,000 patients has been stolen from a hospital...
The computer was taken from the outpatients department at Russells Hall Hospital in Dudley, West Midlands, on January 8.
It contains a database with information on 5,123 anticoagulation patients...
Letters have been sent to those affected and police have launched an investigation."
"A laptop containing the medical records of more than 5,000 patients has been stolen from a hospital...
The computer was taken from the outpatients department at Russells Hall Hospital in Dudley, West Midlands, on January 8.
It contains a database with information on 5,123 anticoagulation patients...
Letters have been sent to those affected and police have launched an investigation."
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Microsoft encourage teens to think of jail time for copyright
It seems Microsoft has been spreading the message amongst teens that they will go to jail if they don't put a stop their piratic habits.
The irony of a convicted monopolist preaching to teenagers about breaking the law is unlikely to be lost in the commentary from the usual suspects. Thanks to Michael Geist for the pointer.It's not clear whether Microsoft's statement to teen respondents -- "When you do not follow these rules you are open to significant fines and possibly jail time" -- is entirely accurate, particularly when teens under the age of 18 are involved. Emily Berger, an intellectual property fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is skeptical. "I think it's being used as a scare tactic," she said. "It's a real stretch of the law to say it's theoretically possible."
Nevertheless, Microsoft wants to correct teens' woeful ignorance. To do so, it has turned to Topics Education, a developer of custom curricula, to create a curriculum called "Intellectual Property Rights Education" for middle school and high school teachers. The Microsoft-sponsored curriculum consists of Web-based resources and case-study driven lesson plans that aim to engage students about intellectual property issues.
To support its teachings, Microsoft has launched MyBytes, a Web
site where students can create custom ringtones, share content -- "their own content," as Microsoft makes clear -- and learn more about intellectual property rights.
Musicians, fans and online copyright
Given the plans to make ISPs monitor their networks for copyright infringement and cut off suspected transgressors here's a timely event, organised by Ian Brown from the OII, which I would very much recommend.
Musicians, fans and online copyright
Wednesday, March 19, 2008 2:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Old Theatre, London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
Is home downloading killing music? Should Internet Service Providers monitor customers to try and spot copyright infringement, and disconnect downloaders? Do musicians need new laws to benefit from the opportunities of the Internet?Join us to debate these questions and more with leading copyright thinkers from the music world, government, consumer groups and universities. Confirmed speakers include John Kennedy (CEO of IFPI), Paul Sanders (CEO of PlayLouder), Becky Hogge (Open Rights Group), Lilian Edwards (Southampton University), Rufus Pollock (Cambridge University) and Michelle Childs (Knowledge Ecology International).
EU commissioner plans to extend copyright term for sound recordings
Via Michael Holloway on the ORG list and Europa: "Commissioner Charlie McCreevy today announced his intention to propose to the College that the term of copyright protection for European performers be increased from 50 to 95 years. Summarising the main thrust of the proposal, Commissioner McCreevy stated: "I strongly believe that copyright protection for Europe's performers represents a moral right to control the use of their work and earn a living from their performances. I have not seen a convincing reason why a composer of music should benefit from a term of copyright which extends to the composer's life and 70 years beyond, while the performer should only enjoy 50 years, often not even covering his lifetime It is the performer who gives life to the composition and while most of us have no idea who wrote our favourite song – we can usually name the performer."
McCreevy is the internal market commissioner and it looks as though he has swallowed and is regurgitating music industry PR.
"The Internal Market Commissioner intends to bring forward a proposal to extend the term of protection for sound recordings to 95 years. This proposal should be ready for adoption by the Commission before the summer break of 2008.
McCreevy is a chartered accountant and was the Irish finance minister for a time (1997 - 2004) and he knows his way around money but I doubt he ever met an economist in the finance department who told him the term of copyright was too short. He's smart enough to understand the economics and will therefore be approaching the push for copyright term extension from a political rather than an economic or competition perspective.
Update: Remember that the proposal to extend copyright term was recently defeated in the EU parliament's CULT Committee.
McCreevy is the internal market commissioner and it looks as though he has swallowed and is regurgitating music industry PR.
"The Internal Market Commissioner intends to bring forward a proposal to extend the term of protection for sound recordings to 95 years. This proposal should be ready for adoption by the Commission before the summer break of 2008.
If nothing is done, thousands of European performers who recorded in the late fifties and sixties will lose all of their airplay royalties over the next ten years. "I am not talking about featured artists like Cliff Richard or Charles Aznavour. I am talking about the thousands of anonymous session musicians who contributed to sound recordings in the late fifties and sixties. They will no longer get airplay royalties from their recordings. But these royalties are often their sole pension", says Commissioner Charlie Mc Creevy in describing the rationale behind his proposal.
"I am determined to ensure that this extension will benefit all artists – whether featured artists or session musicians," the Commissioner says. "For session musicians, the record companies will set up a fund – a substantial fund reserving at least 20% of the income during the extended term to them. For featured artists, original advances may no longer be set off against royalties in the extended term. That means the artist would get all the royalties during the extended term." he adds.
The Commissioner also proposes a 'use it or lose it' provision. That means that, in case a record company is unwilling to re-release a performance during the extended term, the performer can move to another label."
There's that old soundbite about poor musicians with no pension again. What about poor plumbers with no pension? Will they get paid for 95 years for every tap they fix? And it takes a bit longer to put in a kitchen sink than to sing a song. Performers should be required to do pension planning like everyone else. And it is easy in the case of royalties, as at least you know when they are scheduled to stop.McCreevy is a chartered accountant and was the Irish finance minister for a time (1997 - 2004) and he knows his way around money but I doubt he ever met an economist in the finance department who told him the term of copyright was too short. He's smart enough to understand the economics and will therefore be approaching the push for copyright term extension from a political rather than an economic or competition perspective.
Update: Remember that the proposal to extend copyright term was recently defeated in the EU parliament's CULT Committee.
Canada a top US copyright violator
From CBC Canada:
"Canada has joined Russia and China as the biggest violators of U.S. copyright law, according to the U.S.-based International Intellectual Property Alliance.
In a report filed to U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab on Monday, the group recommended that Canada join the other two countries on the USTR's Priority Watch List."
I wonder if the the real reason that the IIPA has targetted Canada is because Michael Geist managed to get his government to drop plans for a Canadian version of the DMCA? The reason given the report is that the Canadians haven't implemented the 1996 WIPO treaties yet. The IIPA, incidentally, was set up in 1984 by eight trade assocations representing the various branches of the publishing, entertainment and software industries, covering about 1500 companies altogether. It was partly as a result of their lobbying that Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act got amended in 1984 to enable the US to impose trade sanctions against countries suspected of infringing US intellectual property rights.
In addition, since the US trade representative's office are tasked with providing a hit list of suspected IP infringing countries each year but don't have the staff to do the research or generate the figures, the IIPA kindly provide them with a report on estimated losses to US IP industires in countries around the world. After all they did have a ready made intelligence network of 1500 companies with branches all over the world and employees in those places who were more than happy to present estimates of how big they felt their local piracy problem to be. Incentives to inflate the figures are fairly obvious and given a similar opportunity to influence government policy the patent reformists I mentioned earlier today would probably take similar advantage.
The problem again is that real data on the cost of intellectual property infringement is notoriously difficult to find.
Update: Meanwhile via the good professor Geist and CBC News I learn that:
"A who's who of powerful companies and business associations have banded together to push for less restrictive copyright reform, driving a stake into the heart of the federal government's argument for its new copyright bill.
The Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright, a group that includes Google, Yahoo, Rogers, Telus, the Canadian Alliance of Broadcasters and the Retail Council of Canada, among others, on Tuesday sent its stance on seven key copyright principles to Industry Minister Jim Prentice, Canadian Heritage Minister Josée Verner and several other cabinet ministers."
"Canada has joined Russia and China as the biggest violators of U.S. copyright law, according to the U.S.-based International Intellectual Property Alliance.
In a report filed to U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab on Monday, the group recommended that Canada join the other two countries on the USTR's Priority Watch List."
I wonder if the the real reason that the IIPA has targetted Canada is because Michael Geist managed to get his government to drop plans for a Canadian version of the DMCA? The reason given the report is that the Canadians haven't implemented the 1996 WIPO treaties yet. The IIPA, incidentally, was set up in 1984 by eight trade assocations representing the various branches of the publishing, entertainment and software industries, covering about 1500 companies altogether. It was partly as a result of their lobbying that Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act got amended in 1984 to enable the US to impose trade sanctions against countries suspected of infringing US intellectual property rights.
In addition, since the US trade representative's office are tasked with providing a hit list of suspected IP infringing countries each year but don't have the staff to do the research or generate the figures, the IIPA kindly provide them with a report on estimated losses to US IP industires in countries around the world. After all they did have a ready made intelligence network of 1500 companies with branches all over the world and employees in those places who were more than happy to present estimates of how big they felt their local piracy problem to be. Incentives to inflate the figures are fairly obvious and given a similar opportunity to influence government policy the patent reformists I mentioned earlier today would probably take similar advantage.
The problem again is that real data on the cost of intellectual property infringement is notoriously difficult to find.
Update: Meanwhile via the good professor Geist and CBC News I learn that:
"A who's who of powerful companies and business associations have banded together to push for less restrictive copyright reform, driving a stake into the heart of the federal government's argument for its new copyright bill.
The Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright, a group that includes Google, Yahoo, Rogers, Telus, the Canadian Alliance of Broadcasters and the Retail Council of Canada, among others, on Tuesday sent its stance on seven key copyright principles to Industry Minister Jim Prentice, Canadian Heritage Minister Josée Verner and several other cabinet ministers."
Harvard become the first US university to mandate open access to faculty researhc papers
According to Peter Suber, Harvard have become the first university in the US to mandate open access to research publications of academic members of staff. The text of the motion was:
Update: Mike Carroll, unsurprisingly, has lots and lots to say on the subject :-)
Sample:
Peter's colleague, Gavin Baker has collected a round up of the reactions to the decision. Well done to the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences say I. It'll be a boost to the open access movement and interesting to observe how it actually works in practice.On behalf of the Provost’s Committee on Scholarly Publishing, Professor S. Shieber will move:
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.
To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.
The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.
Update: Mike Carroll, unsurprisingly, has lots and lots to say on the subject :-)
Sample:
[Disclosure: I've been a supporter of the Harvard initiative since its inception and have provided informal input to its proponents periodically along the way.]
How big a deal is this initiative by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences? It's huge.
First, this is a bottom-up initiative. Open access advocates have been working hard over the years to get faculty authors to pay greater attention to their copyrights. While faculties at various institutions have adopted resolutions supporting open access as a principle and as a goal, this is the first time that faculty authors as a group have stepped up and really acknowledged that the Internet matters and that business-as-usual publishing fails to take advantage of the Internet as a means for spreading knowledge throughout the world.
Second, by precommitting themselves in this fashion, the faculty has recognized that copyright is an author's right. With rights come responsibilities. These authors have committed to each other that they will take greater responsibility for managing their copyrights and for providing the public with free access to their work.
There are a number of heroes in this story. Within the administration, Steve Hyman, the provost, set up a faculty committee to study scholarly communication issues and practices. Stuart Shieber (Computer Science) chaired that committee and, along with his committee members, labored for more than a year to make this happen.
It is now up to faculty on other campuses to reflect on whether they too are willing to be responsible authors in the twenty-first century.
Senate approves legal immunity for telcos involving in mass wiretapping
From SiliconValley News: The US Senate has signed off on legal immunity for the telcos involved in the Bush administration's mass warrantless wiretapping program.
"The Senate voted Tuesday to shield from lawsuits telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on their customers without court permission after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.After nearly two months of stops and starts, the Senate rejected by a vote of 31 to 67 a move to strip away a grant of retroactive legal immunity for the companies.
President Bush has promised to veto any new surveillance bill that does not protect the companies that helped the government in its warrantless wiretapping program, arguing that it is essential if the private sector is to give the government the help it needs."
Put down that MP3 player or we shoot
The Guardian has another over-reaction story where a woman at a bus stop reported a man using an MP3 player to the police because she thought the music player was a gun. He was subsequently arrested by armed officers.
The police were acting responsibly given the nature of the report and fortunately no one got hurt but they should remove the innocent man's fingerprints and DNA from their databases.
The police were acting responsibly given the nature of the report and fortunately no one got hurt but they should remove the innocent man's fingerprints and DNA from their databases.
Forcing ISPs to be copyright police
Peter Bradwell has an interesting post on the DEMOS blog about the government's reported plans to force ISPs to cut off customers suspected of copyright infringement.
The proposals, as reported at least, seem to be that ISPs would give two warnings to users about the downloading of pirated material, before being banned from their connection.
I wouldn't be surprised if the final consultation Green Paper contains somewhat different proposals. But starting from the presumption that these or similar proposals are really under consideration, there are two points that vex me about this.
Firstly, this would be an interesting and serious change to the principle that ISPs do not discriminate between types of traffic (see (and here) the related network neutrality debate - we touched on this in the FYI pamphlet). There are both ethical and practical reasons for this. For the former, the questions relate to ISPs' mandate to police networks; and the process of deciding what and whose traffic is legitimate and legal. In terms of practicality, it is difficult to see how this will actually work. Can I email my friends mp3s? Will something be scanning what I send? What is the technology that facilitates this? in short, exactly how will ISPs determine what is an illegal piece of data? There's more on this here.)
It is interesting that this is happening in an area less than ethically, culturally and even economically clear-cut (music downloading). Whatever arguments I have heard, I do not see as entirely valid the simplistic connection between stealing a product from a shop and sharing music online - as it is made, for example, by the BPI. Music is more than a product - it is part of our cultural life. It needs to be shared, built upon, talked about and critiqued. Cultural industries are supposed to support people's ability to do this, and not play too strong a role in deciding how it happens.
Which leads to the second point. It strikes me that the music industry are precisely the wrong people to be negotiating with Internet Service Providers. It's like asking non-doms to write their own tax rules. The recent past has, surely, all but destroyed much of the bigger end of the music industry's credibility in the field of promoting the interests of music and culture? The self-interest of some of the biggest players seems to me to have helped to promote misguided technological constraints; has restricted people's ability to use new technology to explore new ways of making and distributing (and selling) music and film; and has almost certainly worked to the financial detriment of their industry (try to find a decent download service for films in the UK, especially for Mac users, for example).
BIO report: no empirical evidence to support patent reform
Yet again we see the absence of empirical evidence to support policymaking in the intellectual property arena. This time a report from the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) points out quite reasonably that there is little empirical evidence to support the notion that the patent system needs radical reform to protect us from patent trolls, overbroad patents, poor quality patents etc. It might be intuitively "obvious" that such things would damage innovation, access and commercialisation, just as it might feel intuitively "obvious" that millions of people swapping songs freely on the Net causes damage to CD sales. But there is no demonstrable causal link and little or no empirical evidence in either case enabling us to see the real effect of a multitude of complex interracting parameters. Law Professor, Chris Holman says:
The report critiques three recent studies by the FTC, NAS and NRC that have been widely cited by those claiming the current patent system is broken and in need of major reforms. In particular, the report points out a dearth of empirical evidence to support allegations that poor quality patents, patent thickets, patent trolls, etc., are impeding innovation and product commercialization. The report also notes a recent trend in the courts tightening up the requirements of patentability (e.g., Fisher and KSR) and limiting the availability of permanent injunctions (eBay v. MercExchange) could effectively address many of the concerns expressed by critics of the patent system, obviating the need for a legislative fix.Holman has looked into the impact of human gene patents on research, specifically trying to find all instances where such patents had been the subject of litigation in the US courts. He found a limited number of cases and seems to have concluded that these patents are not therefore a big problem. Of course revorded litigation tells us nothing of the chilling effect of such patents or the collective of cease and desist letters in cases which never reach the litigation stage. In addition to the culture of secrecy in the academic and commercial life sciences that John Wilbanks talks so eloquently about, the lack of apparent litigation in this area, at least as turned up by Professor Holman, would constitute insufficient evidence for me to drop my concerns about human gene patents yet.
Particularly with respect to biotechnology and so-called "gene patents," scholars have noted that most of the attacks on the current patent regime are often based on assumptions and anecdote. See, e.g., See Timothy Caulfield et al., Evidence and Anecdotes: An Analysis of Human Gene Patenting Controversies, 24 Nature Biotechnology 1091, (2006). Empiricial studies that have been conducted indicate that third party patents have had little impact on biomedical research, particularly in the noncommercial academic sector. See, e.g., John P. Walsh et al., View from the Bench: Patents and Material Transfers, 309 Science 2002, 2002-03 (2005).
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Writer Sues Mel Gibson Over 'Passion'
Also from AP via Findlaw:
"A screenwriter sued Mel Gibson and his production company on Monday, claiming he was misled by the actor-director into accepting a small payment for writing "The Passion of the Christ," and was refused extra money when the film became a blockbuster."
"A screenwriter sued Mel Gibson and his production company on Monday, claiming he was misled by the actor-director into accepting a small payment for writing "The Passion of the Christ," and was refused extra money when the film became a blockbuster."
The Power of Diversity: The Performance of Distributed Problem Solving Networks
The webcast of the OII's "The Power of Diversity: The Performance of Distributed Problem Solving Networks" open session is now available.
Scott Page was entertaining on the stats of the wisdom of crowds and John Wilbanks had a particularly powerful contribution on the prevailing culture of secrecy in the academic life sciences.
Scott Page was entertaining on the stats of the wisdom of crowds and John Wilbanks had a particularly powerful contribution on the prevailing culture of secrecy in the academic life sciences.
Tolkien estate sues New Line Cinema
The Tolkien estate is reported to be suing New Line Cinema for lack of payment of royalties on the income from Peter Jackson's hugely successful Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
"The plaintiffs seek more than $150 million in compensatory damages, unspecified punitive damages and a court order giving the Tolkien estate the right to terminate any rights New Line may have to make films based on other works by the author, including "The Hobbit."
"The plaintiffs seek more than $150 million in compensatory damages, unspecified punitive damages and a court order giving the Tolkien estate the right to terminate any rights New Line may have to make films based on other works by the author, including "The Hobbit."
Such an order would scuttle plans by New Line to make a two-film prequel based on "The Hobbit." "Rings" trilogy director Peter Jackson has already signed on to serve as executive producer on the project, which is tentatively slated to begin production next year, with releases planned for 2010 and 2011.
"The Tolkien trustees do not file lawsuits lightly, and have tried unsuccessfully to resolve their claims out of court," Steven Maier, an attorney for the Tolkien estate based in Britain, said in a statement. "New Line has not paid the plaintiffs even one penny of its contractual share of gross receipts despite the billions of dollars of gross revenue generated by these wildly successful motion pictures."
Maier also claims the film studio has blocked the Tolkien estate and the other plaintiffs from auditing the receipts of the last two films."
Having looked into and written about some past Tolkien IP disputes in my book and found Cathleen Blackburn, who represents the Tolkien trustees, to be tremendously thoughtful and helpful, my perspective fwiiw is that they take a very balanced approach to IP in practice. So when Steven Maier says they do not file lawsuits lightly, he can be taken seriously and has the record to prove it. The movie industry on the other hand don't have a similar history. So insofar as one can, without access to the full details of the case, I would be inclined to believe that justice requires that the Tolkien trustees prevail here.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Coloured pencils review
This is brilliant.
"Today I acquired a set of color pencil devices. You can get them in certain specialized shops. Note the device color range greatly varies by manufacturer; mine wasn’t even in the 6 bit range, producing only up to 24 colors when displayed. Invitations are not required for usage of color pencils though the service is paid only, with unfortunately no trial period...."
Thanks to Tony for the pointer.
"Today I acquired a set of color pencil devices. You can get them in certain specialized shops. Note the device color range greatly varies by manufacturer; mine wasn’t even in the 6 bit range, producing only up to 24 colors when displayed. Invitations are not required for usage of color pencils though the service is paid only, with unfortunately no trial period...."
Thanks to Tony for the pointer.
Monday, February 11, 2008
"Improving airport security - the terahertz revolution"
On Tuesday 19th February at Oxford Brookes University, the Oxford branch of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers are hosting a lecture by Chris Mann, Chief Technical Officer of ThruVision, entitled "Improving airport security - the terahertz revolution". ThruVision are one of the companies developing imaging technologies that "see through" clothes and other opaque materials.
Henry Murray's analysis of the personality of Adolph Hitler
Thanks to J. Callihan and Jean M. Pajerek via Cornell University Law Library's excellent INSite current awareness service for the following:
"Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler
http://library.lawschool.cornell.edu/WhatWeHave/SpecialCollections/Donovan/Hitler/index.cfm
"The Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler" is a fascinating report that is part of Cornell Law Library’s Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection. The collection consists of nearly 150 bound volumes of Nuremberg trial transcripts and documents from the personal archives of General William J. Donovan (1883-1959). General Donovan worked on the staff of Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson (later U.S. Supreme Court Justice Jackson) which gave Donovan a unique perspective on the war crime trials. "Wild Bill" Donovan is better known for his work as head of the Office of Special Services (OSS) during World War II, which led to his recognition as the father of the CIA, which morphed from the OSS after the war. The report was commissioned by the OSS in preparation for dealing with Hitler and Germany after the war. The analysis of Hitler was compiled by Dr. Henry A. Murray, a pioneering psychologist of the time and Director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Only 30 copies of the report were created so the analysis has not been widely available. Cornell Law Library’s copy is the only copy easily accessible to the public online. The site includes a PDF version of the 227 page report. The entire book or parts thereof can be downloaded from the Table of Contents page. A “More Info” option gives links to related articles about the Nuremberg collection, Dr. Murray, and the OSS. The site provides an interesting look at Hitler and the emerging field of psychology. [JC]"
A fascinating historical document widely available only due to the hard work and insight of Cornell's librarian Claire Germain and her colleagues, Dr Nina Murray (Henry Murray's wife) who granted Cornell permission to digitise the work and the existence of the Net. It is a terrific simple and bounded but nonetheless powerful example of what a few dedicated individuals can do with the help of the technology.
"Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler
http://library.lawschool.cornell.edu/WhatWeHave/SpecialCollections/Donovan/Hitler/index.cfm
"The Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler" is a fascinating report that is part of Cornell Law Library’s Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection. The collection consists of nearly 150 bound volumes of Nuremberg trial transcripts and documents from the personal archives of General William J. Donovan (1883-1959). General Donovan worked on the staff of Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson (later U.S. Supreme Court Justice Jackson) which gave Donovan a unique perspective on the war crime trials. "Wild Bill" Donovan is better known for his work as head of the Office of Special Services (OSS) during World War II, which led to his recognition as the father of the CIA, which morphed from the OSS after the war. The report was commissioned by the OSS in preparation for dealing with Hitler and Germany after the war. The analysis of Hitler was compiled by Dr. Henry A. Murray, a pioneering psychologist of the time and Director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Only 30 copies of the report were created so the analysis has not been widely available. Cornell Law Library’s copy is the only copy easily accessible to the public online. The site includes a PDF version of the 227 page report. The entire book or parts thereof can be downloaded from the Table of Contents page. A “More Info” option gives links to related articles about the Nuremberg collection, Dr. Murray, and the OSS. The site provides an interesting look at Hitler and the emerging field of psychology. [JC]"
A fascinating historical document widely available only due to the hard work and insight of Cornell's librarian Claire Germain and her colleagues, Dr Nina Murray (Henry Murray's wife) who granted Cornell permission to digitise the work and the existence of the Net. It is a terrific simple and bounded but nonetheless powerful example of what a few dedicated individuals can do with the help of the technology.
Gov 2.0, or Truly Transformative Government
The webcasts of the OII 'Gov 2.0, or Truly Transformative Government' event, organised by Ian Brown, are now available.
Ross Anderson's 15 minute talk in particular is essential viewing.
Update: Comments from Prof Anderson's slides below:
Ross Anderson's 15 minute talk in particular is essential viewing.
Update: Comments from Prof Anderson's slides below:
‘The Software Crisis’
· Since the 1960s about 30% of large private sector IT projects have failed
· We now have much better tools for managing the complexity but we haven’t cut the failure rate!
· We just build bigger better disasters
· So the failure rate is a function of corporate IT capability, appetite for risk and so on
The Public Sector is different
- According to Joe Harley CIO at dept for work and pensions public sector IT projects have a 30% success rate
- Public sector IT is £14 billion
The economics of dependability
- Rapidly growing field in which we study the effect of incentives on complex systems
- Most work so far is on individuals and firms acting as rational principals not on agency
Public choice
- Analysis of agency effects in public sector organisations – Buchanan, Tullock etc
- Insight – a modern state isn’t a personal kingdom any more. Ministers and officials incentives differ from those of Henry VII
- Ministers want to get in the papers and get re-elected. Officials want to maximise control
- Can this give us any insight into systems failure?
Private sector projects
- Suppose you are developing a new branch automation system for a high street bank. You need the directors to – commit to a specification closing down options early, shut up and keep out of your way for two years while you code up and test it, take hard decisions if need be when you deploy it and parts of it don’t fit how people really work
- How feasible is this for a minister
Ministers and projects don’t mix
- Ministers are not hired to do stuff but to resolve conflicting interests in society
- Most supplicants are rent seekers, most alarms are false alarms and will go away
- So a sensible minister will respond to most demands by flannelling and doing nothing
- Absolutely the last thing a minister wants to do is take lots of hard decisions up front and be explicit about them
Ministers and projects don’t mix (2)
- The second thing s a good project client has to do is to shut up for 2 years while the system is being built
- How practical is it for a minister to keep out of the limelight for two years
- And the third thing to accept quickly and publicly that some promises won’t be delivered, and change the business accordingly
Other toxins
- Power struggles, as with dept of health officials fighting doctors for control of patient health records (a fight that began in the early part of the 20th century)
- ‘Electoral’ (look good with the voter) projects such as ID cards
- ‘Security’ as with the Cabinet Office framework for information assurance
- All quite comprehensible to an economist – security economics is now well studied
The Result
- Public sector projects are started with eye-catching but unrealistic objectives
- The stated objectives get changed many times as ministers bid for attention
- Suppliers know this – they low-ball the contract and then make their money on the changes
- Normal public sector risk aversion doesn’t work. Ministers are in a tournament for promotion; chickens usually roost on the next guy’s watch; and suppliers know failures will be covered up
Public sector projects that work
- Congestion charge: extremely simple stable specification – ‘Every car that comes into
- Land registry systems – done by officials incrementally without any ministerial attention
One future
- Large complex systems nowadays evolve rather than being built from scratch (Office, Google, Facebook…)
- If government want to build ever more complex systems that actually work, it will have to re-invent itself around evolutionary systems development
Another possible future
- Economists realised in the 1960s and most politicians by 1989 that macroeconomics places limits on how much the state can do
- I believe that 70% systems failure rate is also telling us that microeconomics also places limits
- Societies are complex systems too and if you try to manage stuff centrally you can only get so far
- Maybe this is the next big divide between liberals and big government folk (left and right)
80 Irish government laptops go missing
The press in Ireland have latched onto the data loss issue and inevitably found themselves a story of lost government laptops.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
The Crime of Selling Abandoned Copies
Also via the Museum of Hoaxes blog - William Patry has an interesting story about a postal worker who was convicted for selling undelivered DVDs that the US Postal Service, on the instructions of the owners of the DVDs, had thrown away.
If you came across a trash can filled with lawfully made compact discs and DVDs that the copyright owner had authorized to be put in that trash can and then thrown away because it didn’t want to pay the postage to have them returned, do you think you could be criminally prosecuted for selling those copies, and would you think that the copyright owners would be entitled to restitution under the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act? If you answered no to these questions, you would be wrong according to the Eighth Circuit.
Here’s the opinion, United States v. Chalupnik, 2008 WL 268997 (8th Cir. Feb. 1, 2008), court’s docket no. 07-1355, available on the court of appeals’ website, here (search for Chalupnik).
The facts are pretty much these (at least as recited in the opinion): defendant was an employee for the U.S. Postal Service. BMG Columbia House is a mail order operation selling CDs and DVDs by mail. Many of these discs are undeliverable. Rather than pay the postage to have them returned to it, BMG Columbia House instructed the Postal Service to throw them away. The Postal Service did throw them away. Defendant then retrieved them from the trash and sold them to area stores, netting $78,818. A surveillance camera showed defendant retrieving the items and he was arrested; he was originally charged with felony mail theft, but then pleaded guilty to misdemeanor copyright infringement. The trial court sentenced defendant to two years probation and ordered him to pay $78,818 to BMG in restitution. Chalupnik appealed .
The district court’s theory was “I do believe that there is in fact a lost opportunity to ... BMG, that the people that bought those CD's ... would likely have bought new CD's, and that that represents a real and substantial loss to ... BMG in the amount of $78,818.” The government argued that “BMG is a victim because it owns the discs, sells them with permission of the copyright owners, and controls the disposition of undeliverable discs; that each time Chalupnik sold an undeliverable disc, the artist lost a royalty and BMG lost a potential sale; and that the amount of those losses is conservatively estimated by Chalupnik's gross revenues, $78,818.
The court of appeals agreed that BMG Columbia House was a victim within the meaning of the MVRA, but held that no loss had been established...
Among the many things I find amazing in this whole debacle is the assumption that there could be copyright infringement. The copies had been thrown away at the direction of the BMG Columbia House (which may or may not have also been the copyright owner). I would think that means any ownership in the copies had been abandoned and that therefore anyone was free to do with them what they wanted. If instead of the postal worker having taken them out of the trash, what if the trash dump owner had discovered them and sold them?"
Invisible ink pens for paper voting
Wonderful story at the Museum of Hoaxes about the perils of paper voting. 20 Chicago voters were allegedly told that the touchscreen voting styluses that they had been given to mark their paper ballots were pens that used invisible ink.
Friday, February 08, 2008
Obama "Yes We Can" re-mix
Can you imagine anyone doing these kinds of re-mixes with one of our esteemed prime minister's speeches and making it work:
Rowan Williams should advise the government on ID cards
William Heath thinks people should read the text of the speech that Rowan Williams has been so heavily critcised over because he is prepared to talk in public about difficult subjects and with a deep understanding of the complexities of the real world.
"
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People diss Rowan Williams but he spelt out years ago why customer was such an unsatisfactory term for the active participant in “services” such as health or education.
Now he spells out, in his widely-misunderstood (has anyone READ the original text?) speech on Sharia, why the spiritual grounding of our ID System plans is as offensive as Islamic primitivism:
The danger arises not only when there is an assumption on the religious side that membership of the community (belonging to the umma or the Church or whatever) is the only significant category, so that participation in other kinds of socio-political arrangement is a kind of betrayal. It also occurs when secular government assumes a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity. There is a position – not at all unfamiliar in contemporary discussion – which says that to be a citizen is essentially and simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state, in such a way that any other relations, commitments or protocols of behaviour belong exclusively to the realm of the private and of individual choice. As I have maintained in several other contexts, this is a very unsatisfactory account of political reality in modern societies; but it is also a problematic basis for thinking of the legal category of citizenship and the nature of human interdependence.
Go Beardie! I’m wholly unrepentant in my long-held view that he would make the best possible keynote speaker for a major gathering of the public-sector “transformation” community. Tell me: who else in any position of authority is articulate at this level, and thinks it’s important to work from basic principles and beliefs as we re-engineer and codify the relationship between people and they state? Not over[paid Touche Accentroid Young, nor dazed and confused Sir Bonar and Sir Wally, nor the egomanic great clunking fist.
We can’t even broach this conversation in the public media without the Sun screaming treason and some Kirsty or Johannes Humphrissimus Maximus Interromptor interrupting everyone half way through their first sentence. It is, to quote a phrase, far from ideal."
Well said.
Lord Bingham on the rule of law
The ever excellent ARCH blog points me to a wonderful speech on the rule of law given by Lord Bingham in 2006. His thoughts on the tension between the government and the judiciary are spot on as you might expect.
"ministers and public officers at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them reasonably, in good faith, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred and without exceeding the limits of such powers... The historic role of the courts has of course been to check excesses of executive power, a role greatly expanded in recent years due to the increased complexity of government and the greater willingness of the public to challenge governmental (in the broadest sense) decisions. Even under our constitution the separation of powers is crucial in guaranteeing the integrity of the courts' performance of this role.
he British Government, through one entity or another, is very frequently involved in litigation. It is usually successful, but not invariably so. When unsuccessful it is displeased, being driven like every other litigant by a belief in the rightness of its cause but also no doubt by a belief that the public interest is best served by its succeeding. In the past the convention was that ministers, however critical of a judicial decision, and exercising their right to appeal against it or, in the last resort, legislate to reverse it retrospectively, forebore from public disparagement of it. This convention appears to have worn a little thin in recent times, as I think unfortunately, since if ministers make what are understood to be public attacks on judges, the judges may be provoked to make similar criticisms of ministers, and the rule of law is not, in my view, well served by public dispute between two arms of the state. Some sections of the press, with their gift for understatement, have spoken of open war between the government and the judiciary. This is not in my view an accurate analysis. But there is an inevitable, and in my view entirely proper, tension between the two. There are countries in the world where all judicial decisions find favour with the government, but they are not places where one would wish to live. Such tension exists even in quiet times. But it is greater at times of perceived threats to national security, since governments understandably go to the very limit of what they believe to be their lawful powers to protect the public, and the duty of the judges to require that they go no further must be performed if the rule of law is to be observed. This is a fraught area, since history suggests that in times of crisis governments have tended to overreact and the courts to prove somewhat ineffective watchdogs. In our country and in the United States, decisions have been made of which neither country can be proud. The cautionary words of Justice William Brennan of the United States Supreme Court in 1987 remain pertinent:
"ministers and public officers at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them reasonably, in good faith, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred and without exceeding the limits of such powers... The historic role of the courts has of course been to check excesses of executive power, a role greatly expanded in recent years due to the increased complexity of government and the greater willingness of the public to challenge governmental (in the broadest sense) decisions. Even under our constitution the separation of powers is crucial in guaranteeing the integrity of the courts' performance of this role.
he British Government, through one entity or another, is very frequently involved in litigation. It is usually successful, but not invariably so. When unsuccessful it is displeased, being driven like every other litigant by a belief in the rightness of its cause but also no doubt by a belief that the public interest is best served by its succeeding. In the past the convention was that ministers, however critical of a judicial decision, and exercising their right to appeal against it or, in the last resort, legislate to reverse it retrospectively, forebore from public disparagement of it. This convention appears to have worn a little thin in recent times, as I think unfortunately, since if ministers make what are understood to be public attacks on judges, the judges may be provoked to make similar criticisms of ministers, and the rule of law is not, in my view, well served by public dispute between two arms of the state. Some sections of the press, with their gift for understatement, have spoken of open war between the government and the judiciary. This is not in my view an accurate analysis. But there is an inevitable, and in my view entirely proper, tension between the two. There are countries in the world where all judicial decisions find favour with the government, but they are not places where one would wish to live. Such tension exists even in quiet times. But it is greater at times of perceived threats to national security, since governments understandably go to the very limit of what they believe to be their lawful powers to protect the public, and the duty of the judges to require that they go no further must be performed if the rule of law is to be observed. This is a fraught area, since history suggests that in times of crisis governments have tended to overreact and the courts to prove somewhat ineffective watchdogs. In our country and in the United States, decisions have been made of which neither country can be proud. The cautionary words of Justice William Brennan of the United States Supreme Court in 1987 remain pertinent:
"There is considerably less to be proud about, and a good deal to be embarrassed about, when one reflects on the shabby treatment civil liberties have received in the United States during times of war and perceived threats to national security … After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary. But it has proven unable to prevent itself from repeating the error when the next crisis came along.""
Verizon reject MPPA call for ISPs to act as copyright police
Verizon executive vice president for public affairs, Tom Tauke, in an interview with the NYT, rejects the movie industry's call for telecos and ISPs to act as copyright police.
"Once you start going down the path of looking at the information going down the network, there are many that want you to play the role of policeman. Stop illegal gambling offshore. Stop pornography. Stop a whole array of other kinds of activities that some may think inappropriate...
"Once you start going down the path of looking at the information going down the network, there are many that want you to play the role of policeman. Stop illegal gambling offshore. Stop pornography. Stop a whole array of other kinds of activities that some may think inappropriate...
When you look back at the history of copyright legislation, there has been an effort by Hollywood to pin the liability for copyright violations on the network that transmits the material. It is no secret they think we have deeper pockets than others and we are easy-to-find targets...
Anything we do has to balance the need of copyright protection with the desire of customers for privacy."
Better than free
Kevin Kelly:
"The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free...
This super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy...
Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.
"The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free...
This super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy...
Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.
Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?
I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
Well, what can't be copied?
There are a number of qualities that can't be copied. Consider "trust." Trust cannot be copied. You can't purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you'll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world...
From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.
In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values. I call them "generatives." A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold."
His "generatives", btw, are immediacy, patronage, findability, authenticity, personalization, interpretation and embodiment.
Copyright Criminals
Kembrew McLeod and Benjamin Franzen's 10 minute documentary Copyright Criminals is available on YouTube.
OiNK amin's bail extended again
From The Register:
"Cleveland police have extended the bail granted to the former administrator of an alleged music piracy site for a second time, in a bid to collect more evidence for a case that could mark a watershed for UK internet law.
"Cleveland police have extended the bail granted to the former administrator of an alleged music piracy site for a second time, in a bid to collect more evidence for a case that could mark a watershed for UK internet law.
Alan Ellis, a 24-year-old IT worker from Middlesbrough, was arrested in October on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and copyright infringement offences, over his site OiNK's Pink Palace.
A police spokeswoman said today that he had been briefly reinterviewed today for clarifications and granted police bail to reappear on May 6. The extension has been sought to allow more time for computer forensics, she said...
Since his arrest, Ellis has publicly argued that OiNK merely provided a Google-like indexing service, and cannot be held accountable for the actual music files that the trackers poined to. It's the same defence that's set to be used by the administrators of the Swedish BitTorrent tracker Pirate Bay in their upcoming trial.
If a copyright prosecution is ever brought against Ellis, it would be a test case for a 2003 amendment to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act that states a criminal offence may be committed by a person who "distributes otherwise than in the course of a business so as to affect prejudicially the honour or reputation of the author or director"."
UK IPO decide not to appeal software patents case
David at IPKat says the UK Intellectual Property Office has decided not appeal the recent decision in the Astron Clinica software patent case and then raises a really good question about the implications:
"After the recent decision of Astron Clinica (IPKat posts here and here), and a decent two week period for reflection, the UK-IPO have now decided that they will not be appealing against the decision. Consequently, a new practice notice has just been issued by the UK-IPO...
This appears to settle for now the matter of computer program claims, which many will be relieved to see (although not, of course, those against software patents in general). The IPKat sees no reason why he should not have the following claim allowed by a UK-IPO examiner (where claim 1 is an allowable method claim):
"A computer program comprising computer program code adapted, when said program is loaded onto a computer, to make the computer execute the procedure of claim 1".
There is nothing wrong with this, according to Kitchin J in Astron Clinica and the new practice notice, so one of the IPKat's amenuenses will be putting exactly this form of claim to a UK examiner in the near future, in the expectation of it being allowed. After all, we should be looking at the invention as a matter of substance, not the form in which it is claimed. Can anyone see the reason why this claim would not be allowed at the EPO? The IPKat suspects he can, but would like others to first point out why he is wrong, yet again, on the subject."
Keep a close eye on IPKat to see how the proposed claim is received.
Meanwhile Automony has lost its against a refusal of their patent application relating to automated computer searching. The judgement is available at BAILII.
"After the recent decision of Astron Clinica (IPKat posts here and here), and a decent two week period for reflection, the UK-IPO have now decided that they will not be appealing against the decision. Consequently, a new practice notice has just been issued by the UK-IPO...
This appears to settle for now the matter of computer program claims, which many will be relieved to see (although not, of course, those against software patents in general). The IPKat sees no reason why he should not have the following claim allowed by a UK-IPO examiner (where claim 1 is an allowable method claim):
"A computer program comprising computer program code adapted, when said program is loaded onto a computer, to make the computer execute the procedure of claim 1".
There is nothing wrong with this, according to Kitchin J in Astron Clinica and the new practice notice, so one of the IPKat's amenuenses will be putting exactly this form of claim to a UK examiner in the near future, in the expectation of it being allowed. After all, we should be looking at the invention as a matter of substance, not the form in which it is claimed. Can anyone see the reason why this claim would not be allowed at the EPO? The IPKat suspects he can, but would like others to first point out why he is wrong, yet again, on the subject."
Keep a close eye on IPKat to see how the proposed claim is received.
Meanwhile Automony has lost its against a refusal of their patent application relating to automated computer searching. The judgement is available at BAILII.
The new traceability of influence
Jon Udell has some interesting thoughts on the anxiety and celebration of influence:
Larry Lessig’s video in support of Barack Obama is making the rounds in the blogosphere. Scanning the transcript I found a comment entitled Andrew Sullivan which reads:
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
I’ve read that paragraph before. But not in the Lessig transcript. It comes from this Andrew Sullivan article in The Atlantic.
Why append it to the Lessig transcript? I think the anonymous commenter — who, however, chooses to identify himself or herself with the law firm Latham and Watkins — is drawing attention to the similarity between that paragraph and this one which does appear in the Lessig transcript:
So I want you to shut your eyes and imagine what it will seem like to a young man in Iraq or in Iran, who wakes up on January 21st, 2009, and sees the picture of this man as the president of the United States. A man who opposed the war at the beginning, a man who worked his way up from almost nothing, a man who came from a mother and a father of mixed cultures and mixed societies, who came from a broken home to overcome all of that to become the leader in his class, at the Harvard Law Review, and an extraordinary success as a politician. How can they see us when they see us as having chosen this man as our president?
Was Lessig’s paragraph influenced by Sullivan’s, which it’s reasonable to suppose he has read? My guess is that it was. If so, was the influence conscious or unconscious? My guess: unconscious.
This reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2004 New Yorker article on plagiarism, Something Borrowed...
In Something Borrowed, Gladwell refers to Lessig:
Creative property, Lessig reminds us, has many lives — the newspaper arrives at our door, it becomes part of the archive of human knowledge, then it wraps fish. And, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they are going.
But I digress. The real point here is that nowadays, even as ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we don’t necessarily lose track of where they came from. A couple of years ago, Tim O’Reilly wrote a blog post entitled Act your way into a new way of thinking, which he said was “a fabulous quote from Richard Pascale’s book Delivering Results.” Tim added this postscript:
Whether or not Lessig’s paragraph was influenced by Sullivan’s, the ways in which we influence one another are becoming more transparent, more traceable...P.S. Very cool to be able to find the original source for the first quote via Google book search. As it came to me, it was simply labeled “Richard Pascale, Stanford Business School.”
But the fact that all these connections are traceable is a wonderful thing."
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Clock ticking on EchoStar's DVR
Jonathan Z. has a lovely analysis of the TiVo V Echostar decision last week.
"Last week a federal appellate court upheld a judgment against EchoStar in a patent case brought by TiVo. I think this case is fascinating, and open a chapter of FOI with it:
TiVo introduced the first digital video recorder (DVR) in 1998. It allowed consumers to record and time-shift TV shows. After withstanding several claims that the TiVo DVR infringed other companies’ patents because it offered its users on-screen programming guides, the hunted became the hunter. In 2004, TiVo sued satellite TV distributor EchoStar for infringing TiVo’s own patents6 by building DVR functionality into some of EchoStar’s dish systems.
A Texas jury found for TiVo. TiVo was awarded $90 million in damages and interest. In briefs filed under seal, TiVo apparently asked for more. In August 2006, the court issued the following ruling:
Defendants are hereby . . . to, within thirty (30) days of the issuance of this order, disable the DVR functionality (i.e., disable all storage to and playback from a hard disk drive of television data) in all but 192,708 units of the Infringing Products that have been placed with an end user or subscriber.
That is, the court ordered EchoStar to kill the DVR functionality in products already owned by “end users”: millions of boxes which were already sitting in living rooms around the world with owners who might be using them at that very instant. Imagine sitting down to watch television on an EchoStar box, and instead finding that all your recorded shows had been zapped, along with the DVR functionality itself—killed by remote signal traceable to the stroke of a judge’s quill in Marshall, Texas.
With EchoStar’s lost appeal, that moment is now closer.
Such remote remedies are not wholly unprecedented. In 2001, a U.S. federal court heard a claim from a company called PlayMedia that AOL had included PlayMedia’s AMP MP3 playback software in version 6.0 of AOL’s software in violation of a settlement agreement between PlayMedia and a company that AOL had acquired. The court agreed with PlayMedia and ordered AOL to prevent “any user of the AOL service from completing an online ‘session’ . . . without AMP being removed from the user’s copy of AOL 6.0 by means of an AOL online ‘live update.’”
TiVo v. EchoStar and PlayMedia v. AOL broach the strange and troubling issues that arise from the curious technological hybrids that increasingly populate the digital world. These hybrids mate the simplicity and reliability of television- like appliances with the privileged power of the vendor to reprogram those appliances over a network.
We’ll be seeing more and more of these cases crop up. As our information appliances become exclusively tethered to their makers, the feature (for the maker, and sometimes the user) of being able to update it instantly also become the bug (for the maker, and usually the user) of being ordered to update it instantly. Randy Picker has written a terrific paper arguing that such tethering is a good thing — and that regulators should act to force manufacturers to tether their devices to they be updated later to conform to new or changing legal standards. I think he’s wrong, and in the book try to articulate what’s wrong with his position. His is the presumption to rebut, since actions like demanding the frying of a patent-infringing DVR are completely consonant with the law as it is today — it’s just that there hasn’t been that ability before...
From what I can tell, the stay pending appeal is now dissolved — which would mean that the 30-day clock is ticking towards hundreds of thousands of fried EchoStar boxes in people’s homes."
Voting with (Little) Confidence
Also via Risks Digest: Voting with (Little) Confidence
Electronic voting systems--introduced en masse following high-profile problems with traditional voting systems in the state of Florida during the 2000 presidential election--were designed to quell fears about accuracy. Unfortunately, those concerns continue to permeate political conversation. The Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008, introduced recently by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), proposes government funding for jurisdictions that use electronic voting to switch to systems that produce a paper trail. But many experts say that a paper trail alone can't solve the problem.See the original article in MIT's Technology Review for links to the study.
Ben Bederson, an associate professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, was part of a team that conducted a five-year study on voting-machine technology. Bederson says that machines should be evaluated for qualities beyond security, including usability, reliability, accessibility, and ease of maintenance. For example, in a 2006 Florida congressional election, some voters were uncertain whether touch-screen machines had properly recorded their votes, especially after 18,000 ballots in Sarasota County were marked "No vote" by the machines. "Security, while important, happens to be one of those places where voting machines actually have not proven to fail," Bederson says. "However, in many other ways, they have failed dramatically, especially [regarding] usability. The original Florida problem was primarily a usability issue." (Among the problems in Florida in 2000 was the case of Palm Beach County, where some voters were confused by a ballot design that listed candidates in two columns. The confounding layout led some people to mistakenly vote for Patrick Buchanan when they intended to vote for Al Gore.) Bederson's team, which included researchers from the University of Maryland, the University of Rochester, and the University of Michigan, particularly focused on usability, and they evaluated electronic voting systems built by Diebold, Election Systems and Software, Avante Voting Systems, Hart InterCivic, and Nedap Election Systems, as well as one prototype built by Bederson himself.
Transplant patient has NEW kidney removed after NHS computer blunder
Via Risks Digest: Transplant patient has NEW kidney removed after NHS computer blunder
"A kidney transplant patient was forced to have the new organ removed after just a few hours – when it was discovered that the patient's blood type had been incorrectly recorded on a computer database.
The mistake, believed to be the first of its kind in Britain, would have led to the organ being rejected – with possibly fatal consequences."
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
US-Antigua gambling dispute highlights defect WTO system
From IQsensato:
"The dispute between the United States (US) and Antigua and Barbuda has already made GATT/WTO history. Antigua challenged various US measures relating to gambling and betting services arguing that they were inconsistent with the US obligations under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). This was the first dispute arising under the GATS to reach the Appellate Body. It was also the first time that the GATT/WTO has adjudicated on the public morals defence, namely, whether a member can justify imposition of trade restrictions on the basis of the protection of public morals in its territory. Additionally, the case has resulted in a rare withdrawal of commitments under the GATS as the US decided to modify its GATS Schedule to exclude gambling and betting from its market access commitments...
WTO remedies fall short of what one might ask of an effective legal system. First, there is no compensation for past harm or loss. Second, compensation in the form of enhanced market access depends on the consent of the party that violated the rules; and, in any event, some WTO members do not have the capacity to use the compensatory enhanced market access. Third, retaliation is not optimal: WTO arbitrators have previously recognized that a member may find itself in a situation where it is neither realistic nor possible for it to retaliate for the full amount of the level of nullification and impairment in all of the sectors and/or under all agreements. Furthermore, as noted in Brendan McGivern’s commentary on the dispute, retaliation under the TRIPs Agreement is especially difficult for a number of reasons. One, regardless of the legality of the authorization from the WTO, violation of intellectual property rights might be frowned upon by other WTO members and the international community generally. Two, for some products, it might not be easy to act against the TRIPs rights of US rights holders without affecting the TRIPs rights of nationals of other WTO members. Three, given the absence of rules on valuation of suspension of intellectual property rights, it would be difficult to ensure that the retaliation does not exceed the authorized amount."
"The dispute between the United States (US) and Antigua and Barbuda has already made GATT/WTO history. Antigua challenged various US measures relating to gambling and betting services arguing that they were inconsistent with the US obligations under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). This was the first dispute arising under the GATS to reach the Appellate Body. It was also the first time that the GATT/WTO has adjudicated on the public morals defence, namely, whether a member can justify imposition of trade restrictions on the basis of the protection of public morals in its territory. Additionally, the case has resulted in a rare withdrawal of commitments under the GATS as the US decided to modify its GATS Schedule to exclude gambling and betting from its market access commitments...
WTO remedies fall short of what one might ask of an effective legal system. First, there is no compensation for past harm or loss. Second, compensation in the form of enhanced market access depends on the consent of the party that violated the rules; and, in any event, some WTO members do not have the capacity to use the compensatory enhanced market access. Third, retaliation is not optimal: WTO arbitrators have previously recognized that a member may find itself in a situation where it is neither realistic nor possible for it to retaliate for the full amount of the level of nullification and impairment in all of the sectors and/or under all agreements. Furthermore, as noted in Brendan McGivern’s commentary on the dispute, retaliation under the TRIPs Agreement is especially difficult for a number of reasons. One, regardless of the legality of the authorization from the WTO, violation of intellectual property rights might be frowned upon by other WTO members and the international community generally. Two, for some products, it might not be easy to act against the TRIPs rights of US rights holders without affecting the TRIPs rights of nationals of other WTO members. Three, given the absence of rules on valuation of suspension of intellectual property rights, it would be difficult to ensure that the retaliation does not exceed the authorized amount."
UK eborders PNR
SpyBlog has a few things to say about the responses by the Border & Immigration Agency to Tom Griffin's FOIA request. Spyblog feels the data collection is excessive and dangerous.
Therefore these checks will also have to be applied, effectively, to internal travel within the supposedly United Kingdom, by aeroplane or by ferry, between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
If they are allowed to get away with this, Soviet / Apartheid style internal travel bureaucracy, they try it on all other international travel and function creep and extend it to internal flights or trains or ferries in the entire UK.
We have no problem with the Police or intelligence agencies requesting such information for specific, narrowly targeted terrorist, espionage or drug or smuggling etc. investigations.
It is absolutely intolerable that such data is handed over, routinely, and automatically, in bulk, on the millions of innocent people who travel every year. Data Trawling through millions of innocent people's personal records is an expensive, ineffective and dangerous way of trying to protect our borders, and an unjustifiable abuse of our freedoms and liberties.
Hynix claim Rambus set patent trap
From SiliconValley News:
"Rambus ensnared memory chip manufacturers in a "patent trap" in its attempt to "control the industry," a lawyer for Hynix Semiconductor told a jury in San Jose on Monday.
William Price, representing Hynix, the world's second-largest maker of memory chips, told jurors that in the 1990s Rambus participated in standards-setting meetings of the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council and then secretly and illegally used JEDEC information to patent standards for dynamic random access memory, or DRAM.
Rambus gathered information from JEDEC as the chip makers spent millions adopting the standard and building plants to manufacture the chips, Price said. "At that point Rambus would come forward and say, 'Aha! We own the technology on that standard,' " he told jurors. "That activity is called a patent trap."
Hynix made its opening arguments in the final trial of the seven-year patent infringement lawsuit."
The UK Identity Chernobyl and the information half life
Kim Cameron likes the idea of an information half life that flows naturally from his coining of the term identity Chernobyl to describe the HMRC 25 million data loss.
Well said.The notion of information half-life is a great one. Let’s adopt it.
The tendency for “information to merge” is one of the defining transformations of our time. When it comes to understanding what this means, few think forward, or even realize that there “is a forward”.
The “contextual separation” in our lives has been central to our personalities and social structures for many centuries.
Call me conservative, but we need to retain this separation.
The mobility and clonability of digital information, in combination with commercial interest and naivite, lead us toward a vast sea of personal information intermixed with our most intimate and tentative thoughts.
The essence of free-thinking is to be able to think things you don’t believe as part of the process of grasping the truth. If the mind melts into the computer, and the computer melts into a rigid warehouse of indelible data, how easy is it for us to change, and what is left of the mind that is “transcendental” (or even just unfettered…)?
The ramifications of this boggle the mind. The alienation it would cause, and the undermining of institutions it would bring about, concern me as much as any other threat to our civilization.
Cross pollination: getting bloggers to talk to scientists
Jon Udell raises an interesting issue on the degree to which conversations about a particular scientific topic can progress independently of each other in ghettoised specialist communities, communities who could enlighten each other if only they managed to communicate.
When chatter in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere intersects with scientific discourse, I’m always interested in the ways that citations do, or don’t, cross the border between those domains. In 2006, for example, while checking references for a podcast with Steve Burbeck about multicellular computing, I traced a meme about how we humans are really a hybrid of human and bacterial cells. The mainstream vector was a New York Times magazine story on obesity. It got to the blogosophere by way of a Wired News story. But the original Nature Biotechnology article mentioned in the Wired story was linked nowhere that I could find...Update: No sooner said than done.
Here’s one approach that could help. When the citation engines in the blogosphere find references in blog entries to scientific articles on the web, they could resolve those to their most canonical forms: DOIs, PubMed records. And they could make equivalences among those forms. That way, conversation in the blogosophere about a scientific article, and scientific conversation about the same article, would tend to hang together and would be discoverable in the same contexts.
Why does this matter? Well, the marginalrevolution blog is influential, widely cited in the blogosphere. The entry that cited the PLoS Medicine article was itself widely cited. But the PLoS Medicine reaction to the article is not part of the blog conversation. I had to work really hard to find it, and to include it here.
The conversation-tracking tools used by bloggers should discover scientific discourse related to a scientific article as easily as they discover blog discourse. Conversely, the conversation-tracking tools used by scientists should discover blog discourse as readily as scientific discourse. Public understanding of science would improve, and so would scientific understanding of the public.
Real ID rule the worst of both worlds
The CDT has branded regulations issued by the Department of Homeland Security relating to the Real ID act as the "worst of both worlds."
Final regulations issued by the Department of Homeland Security have rendered the REAL ID Act, intended to strengthen processes for issuance of driver's licenses nationwide, virtually useless as a security measure, while exacerbating privacy problems, CDT concluded in a comprehensive analysis of the rules, which were issued last month. CDT is urging Congress to enact legislation addressing concerns about the privacy and security of information that will be stored on the new cards and in an electronic system used to link the states.
The forger, Fisk and Saddam
Apparently Robert Fisk's biography of Saddam Hussein is selling very well in Egypt. There is just one slight problem - he didn't write it.
Modern democracy means one dollar one vote
Tom Gallagher has a nice review of Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism in the San Francisco Chronicle.
"The people referred to in the title of Ha-Joon Chang's book, "Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism," are advisers from rich nations who tell poor countries to embrace free-trade policies that rich nations themselves never practiced. Quoting a 19th century German economist on the British, Chang writes that today's rich nations are effectively "kicking away the ladder ... in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up" after them. But the history of capitalism has been so thoroughly rewritten, Chang says, that most of these "Bad Samaritans" suffer a form of "historical amnesia" and "do not even realize that they are hurting the developing countries with their policies."...
As Chang describes the way it really was, you realize how amazing it is that free market ideologues have been able to shoehorn Great Britain into a free-trade version of world history, given that it rose to economic dominance while building a world empire.
"The truth," he writes, "is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913 - the first episode of globalization - was made possible, in large part, by military might, rather than market forces." And this period of imperial free trade followed long years of high tariffs and careful protection and nurturing of selected British industries..
One American who was having none of that, Chang points out, was Alexander Hamilton, who became the country's first treasury secretary and implemented an array of policies to protect the country's "infant industries" (a term coined by Hamilton): "protective tariffs and import bans; subsidies; export ban on key raw materials; import liberalization of and tariff rebates on industrial inputs; prizes and patents for inventions; regulation of product standards; and development of financial and transportation infrastructures."...
"[M]arket and democracy clash at the fundamental level," Chang writes. "Democracy runs on the principle of 'one man (one person), one vote.' The market runs on the principle of 'one dollar, one vote.' " Chang's point may seem obvious, yet it is one infrequently made, due, presumably, to the power of wealthy individuals and nations. But just as obvious is Chang's conclusion that if developing countries "want to leave poverty behind" and nurture their fledgling industries just as today's rich nations once did, "they have to defy the market.""
"The people referred to in the title of Ha-Joon Chang's book, "Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism," are advisers from rich nations who tell poor countries to embrace free-trade policies that rich nations themselves never practiced. Quoting a 19th century German economist on the British, Chang writes that today's rich nations are effectively "kicking away the ladder ... in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up" after them. But the history of capitalism has been so thoroughly rewritten, Chang says, that most of these "Bad Samaritans" suffer a form of "historical amnesia" and "do not even realize that they are hurting the developing countries with their policies."...
As Chang describes the way it really was, you realize how amazing it is that free market ideologues have been able to shoehorn Great Britain into a free-trade version of world history, given that it rose to economic dominance while building a world empire.
"The truth," he writes, "is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913 - the first episode of globalization - was made possible, in large part, by military might, rather than market forces." And this period of imperial free trade followed long years of high tariffs and careful protection and nurturing of selected British industries..
One American who was having none of that, Chang points out, was Alexander Hamilton, who became the country's first treasury secretary and implemented an array of policies to protect the country's "infant industries" (a term coined by Hamilton): "protective tariffs and import bans; subsidies; export ban on key raw materials; import liberalization of and tariff rebates on industrial inputs; prizes and patents for inventions; regulation of product standards; and development of financial and transportation infrastructures."...
"[M]arket and democracy clash at the fundamental level," Chang writes. "Democracy runs on the principle of 'one man (one person), one vote.' The market runs on the principle of 'one dollar, one vote.' " Chang's point may seem obvious, yet it is one infrequently made, due, presumably, to the power of wealthy individuals and nations. But just as obvious is Chang's conclusion that if developing countries "want to leave poverty behind" and nurture their fledgling industries just as today's rich nations once did, "they have to defy the market.""
Big music labels sue China search giant
From Yahoo News:
"Three global record companies have launched legal proceedings against China's top Internet search engine Baidu.com Inc, accusing it of violating copyright by giving access to music files, an international music trade body said.
(Advertisement)
Universal Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Hong Kong) Ltd and Warner Music Hong Kong Ltd have asked a court to order Baidu to remove all links on its music delivery service to copyright-infringing tracks that they own the rights to, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said in a statement.
The claims have been filed with a court in Beijing, said IFPI, which is backed by global music industry heavyweights."
"Three global record companies have launched legal proceedings against China's top Internet search engine Baidu.com Inc, accusing it of violating copyright by giving access to music files, an international music trade body said.
(Advertisement)
Universal Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Hong Kong) Ltd and Warner Music Hong Kong Ltd have asked a court to order Baidu to remove all links on its music delivery service to copyright-infringing tracks that they own the rights to, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said in a statement.
The claims have been filed with a court in Beijing, said IFPI, which is backed by global music industry heavyweights."
Danish Court orders ISP to block access to Pirate Bay
From Reuters - a Danish court has ordered an ISP, Tele2, to block customer access to Pirate Bay at the request of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Google oppose Microsoft takeover of Yahoo!
Unsurprisingly Google have reacted negatively to Microsoft's bid to take over Yahoo!
"Microsoft has been trying to depict a Yahoo takeover as a boon for both advertisers and consumers because the two companies together would be able to compete against Google more effectively.
But Google is painting a starkly different picture, asserting that Microsoft will be able to stifle innovation and leverage its dominating Windows operating system to set up personal computers so consumers are automatically steered to online services, such as e-mail and instant messaging, controlled by the world's largest software maker.
In a move that illustrates just how badly Google wants to torpedo the deal, Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt called Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang Friday to offer his help in repelling Microsoft, according to a report Sunday on The Wall Street Journal's Web site, which cited anonymous people familiar with the matter.
The assistance didn't include a counterbid, but may have included supporting other potential suitors, or a revenue guarantee in exchange for an ad partnership with Yahoo, the people said, according the newspaper."
"Microsoft has been trying to depict a Yahoo takeover as a boon for both advertisers and consumers because the two companies together would be able to compete against Google more effectively.
But Google is painting a starkly different picture, asserting that Microsoft will be able to stifle innovation and leverage its dominating Windows operating system to set up personal computers so consumers are automatically steered to online services, such as e-mail and instant messaging, controlled by the world's largest software maker.
In a move that illustrates just how badly Google wants to torpedo the deal, Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt called Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang Friday to offer his help in repelling Microsoft, according to a report Sunday on The Wall Street Journal's Web site, which cited anonymous people familiar with the matter.
The assistance didn't include a counterbid, but may have included supporting other potential suitors, or a revenue guarantee in exchange for an ad partnership with Yahoo, the people said, according the newspaper."
Monday, February 04, 2008
MP bugged and everyone's aghast
So Jack Straw considers it entirely unacceptable for an MP to be bugged during a meeting with one of his constituents, who happens to be wanted by the US as a terrorist suspect. This the same Jack Straw who for years has, along with his colleagues in government, been tediously repeating the "nothing to hide nothing to fear" mantra?
The Wilson doctrine has theoretically protected MPs from this kind of covert surveillance since the 1960s. So we must look to the technical concept of 'externalities' so familiar to economists as one of the key reasons why government can repeatedly pass laws facilitating increasing intrusive surveillance. They act comfortable in the belief that such laws won't apply to them, just to the untrustworthy citizenry. Maybe it is time we dropped the Wilson doctrine and MPs shared the consequences of the fall-out from ill-conceived laws?
The Wilson doctrine has theoretically protected MPs from this kind of covert surveillance since the 1960s. So we must look to the technical concept of 'externalities' so familiar to economists as one of the key reasons why government can repeatedly pass laws facilitating increasing intrusive surveillance. They act comfortable in the belief that such laws won't apply to them, just to the untrustworthy citizenry. Maybe it is time we dropped the Wilson doctrine and MPs shared the consequences of the fall-out from ill-conceived laws?
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