Video podcasts

I'm trying out feedburner's podcast generation tools here. Andrew and Christopher have a new video podcast up featuring them having fun with dry ice.
I've added an iTunes friendly video feed of my various videos.

Technorati Tags: childen, creative commons, podcasting, video

Merry Christmas to all

and to all a good night.

Response to the UK Parliament's DRM Inquiry

In order to address the APIG questions on DRM, I need to state some principles.

Firstly, the Church-Turing thesis, one of the basic tenets of Computer Science, which states that any general purpose computing device can solve the same problems as any other. The practical consequences of this are key - it means that a computer can emulate any other computer, so a program has no way of knowing what it is really running on. This is not theory, but something we all use every day, whether it is Java virtual machines, or Pentiums emulating older processors for software compatibility.

How does this apply to DRM? It means that any protection can be removed. For a concrete example, consider MAME - the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator - which will run almost any video game from the last 30 years. It's hard to imagine a more complete DRM solution than custom hardware with a coin slot on the front, yet in MAME you just have to press the 5 key to tell it you have paid.

The second principle is the core one of jurisprudence - that due process is a requirement before punishment. I know the Prime Minister has defended devolving summary justice to police constables, but the DRM proponents want to devolve it to computers. The fine details of copyright law have been debated and redefined for centuries, yet the DRM advocates assert that the same computers you wouldn't trust to check your grammar can somehow substitute for the entire legal system in determining and enforcing copyright law.

Each computers' immanent ability to become any kind of machine and the copying of data that happens as part of this, leads the DRM advocates naturally to the point where they want to outlaw computers, or to take them over by stealth, using virus-like techniques.

The reductio ad absurdum of this is to privilege DRM implementers in law above the owners of the computers on which their software runs, without their effective consent. Sadly, this is exactly what is being demanded by the publishers' lobby.

With those principles established, I will respond to the questions asked by APIG

Whether DRM distorts traditional tradeoffs in copyright law

Yes. DRM arrogates law enforcement to a dumb mechanism. The computer program acts as judge, jury and executioner, and it is controlled by the publisher. It is an attempt to recreate through technological fiat the publishers' dominance, at the expense of both readers and authors, that the Statute of Anne, and subsequent UK copyright laws, were created to fight. Just at the time that computer-based editing, and internet publishing enables all of us to become publishers of our own creative works, the DRM lobby want to re-establish a privileged role for publishers, like the 17th century Stationers' monopoly.

Whether new types of content sharing license (such as Creative Commons or Copyleft) need legislation changes to be effective;

These are designed to work with current copyright law, and involve a fair degree of complication to make them work legally. Changes in copyright law to reinstate the registration requirement, or to revert to shorter, more defensible terms to clarify public domain status of orphaned works would be advantageous to these licenses.

How copyright deposit libraries should deal with DRM issues;

The law should require DRM to be removed, or for the creator of the DRM to fund sufficient emulation software that their publication can be accessed by future scholars. An earmarked tax on DRM may be appropriate here, just as the Statute of Anne provided penalties for not submitting publications in a useful form.

How consumers should be protected when DRM systems are discontinued;

Consumers are generally wise enough to reject DRM systems. Seeing them discontinued reinforces this wisdom. However, a requirement to provide DRM-free copies to the copyright deposit libraries will help.

A more robust requirement would be for the DRM-using publisher to be required to fund the costs of archival copying and emulation until the copyrighted work is released to the public domain, so that this does not burden the limited budgets of copyright libraries. As reliance on DRM frequently leads to bankruptcy due to consumer rejection, mandating the purchase of an annuity to fund this by DRM practitioners may be the safest course.

To what extent DRM systems should be forced to make exceptions for the partially sighted and people with other disabilities;

DRM systems should make exceptions for everyone. They should warn but not enforce. The computer cannot know if I am partially sighted, or have other requirements for transformative software.

What legal protections DRM systems should have from those who wish to circumvent them;

None. My computer is mine; it is not owned by people trying to sell me media. They should have no control over what I do with it. This is prior restraint that reverses the presumption of innocence, and makes the increasingly false assumption that individuals are passive viewers of media, not the creators they evidently are. Penalties for actual copyright infringement are severe enough, let those suffice.

Whether DRM systems can have unintended consequences on computer functionality;

They can be huge. DRM systems inevitably lead to a power grab by publishers to take control of our computers - the Sony DRM debacle illustrates this clearly. As DRM is inherently ineffective, lobbying leads to an effort to repeal by fiat the underlying mathematical laws that govern computers, and the demand for draconian powers over others' computers grows. Any interference by DRM systems with computer owners' ability to listen to, create, edit and publish media should continue to be illegal, and criminal prosecutions under the Computer Misuse Act should be initiated against Sony/BMG and First4Internet for their assault on our computers.

The role of the UK Parliament in influencing the global agenda for this type of technical issue.

The UK Parliament set the precedent for Copyright law in the Statute of Queen Anne that defended authors from rapacious publishers, and which has served as the basis for global copyright law ever since. Re-reading it for this essay, I was struck by how well it balanced authors', readers' and publishers' rights:

Whereas printers, booksellers, and other persons have of late frequently taken the liberty of printing, reprinting, and publishing, or causing to be printed, reprinted, and published, books and other writings, without the consent of the authors or proprietors of such books and writings, to their very great detriment, and too often to the ruin of them and their families: for preventing therefore such practices for the future, and for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books;

We also recall Macauley's judicious balancing in 1841:

It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.

The independence of both MPs and Peers from the extremes of special interest lobbying that bedevil the US Congress and House give an opportunity for the principles of free expression, of jurisprudence, and of underlying scientific facts to hold sway over the fear-mongering fictions of professional fantasists.

also posted here

Technorati Tags: copyright, digital rights, DRM, law, politics, rhetoric, sony

Who could he mean?

One Billion Internet Users (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox):

Some time in 2005, we quietly passed a dramatic milestone in Internet history: the one-billionth user went online. Because we have no central register of Internet users, we don't know who that user was, or when he or she first logged on. Statistically, we're likely talking about a 24-year-old woman in Shanghai.

Susan Cheever can't tell a metaphor from a dining table

In a remarkably thoughtless piece, Susan Cheever writes:

It's late at night, and you are in the bedroom cruising auction sites for furniture on the Internet. You should go to sleep, but you don't. Then you see them, the pair of chairs from your own living room. They are for sale by someone in New Jersey, but they are your chairs. You can even see the stains on the blue one where your son spilled some orange juice and the stitching on the slipcover you repaired. What are they doing out there in cyberspace?

You go into the living room and, sure enough, they are gone, leaving gaping spaces on the floor where they once stood. A table is gone, too, the one your father built for you when you got your own place. The bowl you had as a centerpiece is shattered on the floor. It's a strange experience to see your own property in someone else's possession when they haven't asked your permission for it or paid for it. It's disorienting and infuriating. You've been robbed. That's how it feels when something of yours suddenly appears in cyberspace, whether it's a chair or a book excerpt, a table or a newspaper column.

By using this plonkingly inaccurate metaphor, Cheever helps us clearly differentate theft from copyright infringement. Lets rewrite it to more accurately reflect what is going on:

It's late at night, and you are in the bedroom cruising auction sites for furniture on the Internet. You should go to sleep, but you don't. Then you see them, the pair of chairs from your own living room. They are for sale by someone in New Jersey, but they are your chairs. You can even see the stains on the blue one where your son spilled some orange juice and the stitching on the slipcover you repaired. What are they doing out there in cyberspace?

You go into the living room and they are still there. Evidently someone loved your table and chairs enough to make a perfect copy of them and share them with the world. It's a strange experience to see your own property so appreciated. It's disorienting and beguiling. You've been quoted. That's how it feels when something of yours suddenly appears in cyberspace, whether it's a chair or a book excerpt, a table or a newspaper column.

It's a while since I linked to Orwell's Politics and the English Language, but it always bears re-reading when trying to write to convince.
Update: Bill Herman details the many other fallacies and legal misinterpretations Cheever makes in one short article.

Technorati Tags: copyright, digital rights, meme, rhetoric

Attention at Syndicate

Tantek and I had a great conversation with Eric Hayes and the other smart folks at Attensa at the Syndicate Conference today.

we plan a Attention.xml spec discussion tomorrow from 12 noon to 1 pm at the Syndicate conference, Hilton Hotel, San Francisco

We will spend some time revising attention.xml in the light of Attensa's experience and what we have learned from the microformats process in developing other specifications over the last year. Other attention.xml developers are very welcome to join us there or on irc

Technorati Tags: attention.xml, conference, microformat, microformats, Syndicate

Key indicator for a bubble

Tristan is looking for bubble warnings.

The one that I look for, which I derived from reading Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker, and from my experiences in the CD-ROM publishing business in the mid 90's is this simple rule:

When expensively educated, fashionable young graduates start showing up in your field, you're in a bubble.

Lewis describes this in the investment banking business, when his entire Yale graduating class applied to become investment bankers.

The trouble with this indicator is that if you aren't looking for it it seem like the natural order of things - of course having personable young things hanging on your every word is to be expected - finally you're getting the recognition you deserve!

In practice, however, the finely-tuned herd instincts that get selected for in the Ivy League or the posher UK universities make them flock to the latest bubble.

Technorati Tags: bubble, meme

Wikipedia and the nature of truth

I touched on this briefly yesterday, but AKMA has made me think about it further.
There has been a raging debate in academia over truth and the construction of knowledge for decades. and for most of us it has indeed been an academic discussion (intereresting that 'academic' can be used as a put down just as 'amateur' can be).


What the Seigenthaler incident and the Wikipedia stuff I have been involved in show is that these arguments now have a large public experimental laboratory, as we can now all publish our thoughts on them.


As ever, Douglas Adams nailed it 6 years ago:

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

I think the right approach is to write out your own version of things online, so that people can read your point of view, to allow it to be cited in places like wikipedia that attempt to arrive at truth, and to point out in public when people publish false things about you.

Technorati Tags: meme, politics, truth, wikipedia

Of Bloggercon and Podcasting

As it is now such a focus of discussion, here are my recollections of Bloggercon 2003 and Podcasting.

On the first day, when we were all in the same room, I was sitting there webcasting live, and Adam Curry was in the row behind.

During one of the breaks, I introduced myself and mentioned that I knew he was interested in Audioblogging (as we called it then), and showed him the Python script I'd written to automatically download mp3 enclosures to iTunes. His reaction was that this was cool, and that I should show it off in the Audioblogging session the next day, which I duly did, thanks to Harold Gilchrist making time for me.
You can see me downloading a song into iTunes from the 'syncpod' feed that Adam created for testing iTunes sync after talking to me.

Download my Audioblogging speech here.
Download iPod version of my Audioblogging speech here.

It is a basic human trait to confabulate a narrative for ourselves that puts us in a good light, and it is hard to remember clearly events that happened a couple of years ago, but blogging lets us play the game of Massively Multiplayer Online Truth, as David Weinberger puts it, by preserving contemporary thoughts and notes, which should eventually lead to a more coherent neutral narrative.

Technorati Tags: Adam Curry, BloggerCon, podcasting, QuickTime, video, wikipedia

When rewriting history leaves an audit trail

I got edited out of the history of Podcasting again by a mysterious IP address 82.108.78.107
If you do a whois lookup on this address, you can see it was Adam Curry.


I did previously reinsert this reference to my Bloggercon demo with citations, and I don't want to get into an edit war. Suggestions welcomed.

Technorati Tags: Adam Curry, ethics, podcasting, wikipedia