Burn this flag

There has been a senatorial foofooraw about an anti-flag-burning amendment, ably punctured by many, including John Scalzi and Scott Adams. However, at the same time, the Broadcast Flag has been slipped into the Telecom bill.

The broadcast flag is a far more serious restriction on freedom of speech. It gives legacy broadcasters a veto over the design of future technology. What it most reminds me of is the Red Flag Act, when the entrenched Railway lobby inserted a clause requiring any self-propelled road vehicle to have a man walking 60 yards ahead of it, carrying a red flag to keep it under 4mph in the country and 2mph in town. There is a similar effort to treat the net as broken TV in the EU.

As Adams put it "The thing to remember about freedom is that it’s not given, it’s taken".

Technorati Tags: Broadcast Flag, law, Open Rights Group, ORG, politics, rhetoric, television

More Net Neutrality Advocacy

Joining me in talking about Net Neutrality in video, here's one from Tim Berners-Lee, and one from Rocketboom. There is a proposal for legislative language that defines Internet service in terms of agreed packet protocols, and forbids calling non-compliant networks Internet. I've signed it - please read it and sign it too.

Technorati Tags: net neutrality, Open Rights Group, ORG, podcasting, politics, rhetoric, Supernova, telco

Michael Arrington - Core Values - Bloggercon IV

Here's the Core Values session at Bloggercon IV.

Technorati Tags: BloggerCon, blogs, conference, rhetoric, video

Net Symmetry

David Weinberger interviewed me at Supernova talking about Net Neutrality, or rather Net Symmetry.

Technorati Tags: movie, net neutrality, ORG, politics, Supernova, telco, USF, VoIP

Barcamp SF introductions

Here's the recording of the Barcamp SF introductions. Broadcasts of some sessions tomorrow - if you're here with a Mac and a video camera or iSight or MacBook built-in one, come find me.

Technorati Tags: Barcamp, San Francisco, video

Doc Searls - Changing the World - Bloggercon IV

Here's the Changing the World session at Bloggercon IV.

Technorati Tags: BloggerCon, politics, social, video

Lisa Williams - Emotional Life Bloggercon IV

Here's the Emotional Life session at Bloggercon IV.

Technorati Tags: BloggerCon, video

Niall Kennedy - Standards for Users - Bloggercon IV

Here's the Standards for Users session at Bloggercon IV.

Technorati Tags: BloggerCon, blogs, Users, video

Chris Pirillo - Users in Charge at Bloggercon IV

Here's (most of) the Users in Charge session at Bloggercon IV.

Technorati Tags: BloggerCon, conference, Users, video

Bloggercon bootleg feed

Bloggercon bootleg feed live from my camera.

Update: Offline for now - maybe back tomorrow. Check subsequent posts for recorded sessions.

Technorati Tags: BloggerCon, video

Taxing VoIP - regulation telcos like to see

The FCC has imposed Universal Service Fund taxes on VoIP services that connect to the legacy phone network. USF is allegedly a way to bring services to rural and low-income communities, but in practice is outdoor relief for big telcos. I assume that the telco lobbyists see this as a victory, but as it only applies to interconnecting services, those that are pure internet services now have an even bigger cost advantage.

As for subsidising communications for low income users, it looks like the internet is doing a far better job by making everything cheap or free, as even the homeless are connected to the net.

Technorati Tags: politics, Supernova, telco, USF, VoIP

How are we all feeling?

I am feeling very impressed with We Feel Fine.

Technorati Tags: blogs, statistics, visu

iPod friendly versions of Dvorak's troll confession

Dave Winer managed to stir up a storm by capturing a video of John Dvorak confessing how he trolls Mac users for extra pageviews. Although Dave posted the video in QuickTime format using open codecs (JPEG video and 8-bit uncompressed audio), which should mollify Mark Pilgrim somewhat, the iPod Video won't play this. I converted it using the handy iSquint tool into standard mpeg-4 files. I present 3 alternatives for you:

1. iPod compatible MPEG-4 version, using H264 codec - requires QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84
2. iPod compatible MPEG-4 version, using the previous MPEG4 codec - works in QuickTime 6 or earlier iTunes
3. Dave's compatible MOV version via BitTorrent - should play back to QuickTime 1.0 once you have downloaded it

Those of you playing close attention will notice I am using markup based on the microformat brainstorming for expressing alternative versions of the same file. As this uses rel-enclosure, it will be picked up by Mark's Universal Feed Parser, and also by FeedBurner's version of my blog feed.

Technorati Tags: bittorrent, formats, HTML, microformats, movie, podcasting, QuickTime, troll, video

Robogames

15th-18th June - Robogames at Fort Mason, San Francisco, CA

The Robogames is the US's biggest robot competition, featuring battlebots, robot building contests and my boys playing for the UK in International Humanoid Robot Soccer.

Andrew and Christopher made a video report on Saturday.

Walukiewicz's Law

When I joined the BBC in 1988, my first direct manager was Ian Walukiewicz. When I expressed my frustration with management or colleagues to him, he explained it by a very simple principle.
People take jobs to improve themselves. They pick things that are hard for them. So, if you hate people you go into personnel, if you are chronically disorganised you go into management, and if you break everything you touch you become an engineer.
Derek Powazek and Merlin Mann discuss how they suffer and work extra hard at writing and being organised, respectively.
Which makes me wonder what things I am doing because I am bad at them. I've always been told that I'm completely useless at small talk and meeting new people, so the fact that I went to 4 public events last week and have 5 more lined up this week should be a big hint as to the character flaw I'm trying to fix.

Technorati Tags: Barcamp, BBC, BloggerCon, mashpit, meme, microformats, Robogames, social, Supernova, where

Open formats revisited

Mark Pilgrim has a thorough post explaining his move to open formats. If you care about preserving your data, you should go and read it. On one small point I may be able to give some advice. Mark said:

[I spent] Years of creating content, most recently video content in iMovie. Home movies of my children being born and growing up, heavily edited and burned to DVD and distributed to friends and family. Plus a few screencasts and some other odd video projects I’ve never released. Years of tagging and organizing an ever-growing collection of music, photos, and multimedia. I’ve now exported all my home movies as .DV files — one for the final product, one for all the unused clips. All other edits are lost. All editability is lost.

Mark, have a look at the QuickTime format. It is published and open, has been substantially the same for 15 years, and iMovie (finally) stores it's edit lists in it.

Technorati Tags: formats, video

Scoble eschews PR

When I dropped by Vloggercon on Sunday, I ran into Scoble and Furrier in the lobby, and said hello. They mentioned that they now realised they didn't need a press release. This matches what we do at Technorati - we just blog things ourselves. The press can find them.

Scoble puts it this way:

I talked with the grassroots FIRST. Against the advice, by the way, of a lot of PR people (they wanted me to break the news to Walt Mossberg or someone "important" first — they thought that's how I was going to get the biggest story going).

They all are wrong. I almost bought into it too. In fact, I did. On Saturday I talked with maybe 20 people and said "can you wait until Tuesday to talk about it?" I wanted to give the story to the Wall Street Journal too. Not to mention I wanted to tell my coworkers before the story hit. I didn't get that chance and I'm lucky, in hindsight, that I didn't. Because the story started on the grassroots first it got far far bigger than if I broke it on a big newspaper.

Of course, the Cluetrain chaps were ahead of us all:

15. In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.
16. Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

Technorati Tags: meme, press, rhetoric, technorati, writing

Once a troll, always a troll

Dave Winer got Dvorak to admit to being a troll. No surprises there - I discovered a while back that his columns are straight parody fodder. Deconstructing the Troll is based on this one and To Troll or Not to Troll, That Is the Question is based on this one.

Technorati Tags: attention, blogs

When antonyms are synonyms

I had an odd moment of cultural misunderstanding yesterday - I was speaking to an Open Media developers group and I said "Technorati is catholic in what formats it accepts" - and no-one knew what I meant. "You're the pope?" was the reaction.

I quickly restated: "Would you prefer it if I said we were format agnostic?"

Technorati Tags: meme, microformats, rhetoric

Lots coming up over the next couple of weeks

• 6/13 7:30pm-8:30pm - Geo Microformats BOF II: Developing a 'directions' Microformat @ Paseo Room, Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, CA
  The goal of this BOF is to once again bring together key interested folks in the geo and microformats communities, discuss the work on the directions microformat to date, and brainstorm on proposals for a directions microformat.
• 6/20 10am-7pm - MashPit @ Wharton School, SF (u)
• 6/20 8pm Microformats.org 1 year anniversary (u)
• 6/21-23 - Supernova 2006 - at Wharton West / The Palace Hotel, San Francisco, CA (u)
• 6/23-25 - BarCamp San Francisco - at Microsoft (u)
• 6/23-24 - BloggerCon IV - at CNET

Technorati Tags: Barcamp, BloggerCon, microformat, microformats, Supernova, where

The BPI gets tangled in DRM

Just after the All-party Internet Group moved towards a sensible position on DRM, the British Phonographic Industry gave confused testimony to the Select Committee for Culture, Media & Sport inquiry into New Media and the Creative Industries.

Obviously, the Record Labels' official lobbying group is going to be self serving, but they do seem very confused by DRM, judging by their headlines:

• BPI reassures consumers: “We will not sue you for filling your iPod with music you have bought yourself"
• Failure to extend copyright term "could turn an export into an import” - akin to scattering Britain's crown jewels of music across the globe.
• BPI to sue illegal website AllofMP3.com
• Digital downloads can cost more to distribute than CDs
• BPI hopes to reach voluntary settlement on download royalties
• Apple should make iTunes compatible with other players
• Music “more popular than ever”

Let's group these together and deduce some consistent legislative proposals

BPI reassures consumers: “We will not sue you for filling your iPod with music you have bought yourself"

BPI Chairman Peter Jamieson: “We believe that we now need to make a clear and public distinction between copying for your own use and copying for dissemination to third parties and make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs for their own private use in order to move the music from format to format we will not pursue them.”

Excellent, so lets have a law explicitly permitting non-commercial copying, and lets also make DRM technology that interferes with it illegal.

Apple should make iTunes compatible with other players

Jamieson called on Apple to open up its software in order that it is compatible with other players. “We would advocate that Apple opts for interoperability,” he said.

Well, iTunes is actually pretty good at turning locked purchased files into uncompressed Audio CDs. That said, requiring them to distribute DRM-free files would solve this problem too. So nice to find a policy that satisfies all your points.

The next three are a bit of a conundrum, however

BPI to sue illegal website AllofMP3.com

AllofMP3.com’s claims to be legal are false, she said. Neither artists nor record companies receive any payment from the site.

BPI hopes to reach voluntary settlement on download royalties

BPI Chairman Peter Jamieson revealed that the BPI, together with music download stores and mobile companies are still trying to reach an amicable settlement in their dispute with music publishers and songwriters over the royalties which must be paid on downloads.

So, the BPI and AllOfMp3.com are both selling downloads that they don't have clear rights to? Tricky stuff. And yet:

Digital downloads can cost more to distribute than CDs

When questioned on the relative prices of CDs and downloads, Richardson revealed that for an independent company like his, the costs charged by digital distributors are actually higher than those for physical product.

Speaking later, he said, “It is early days for digital music. At this point in time the cost of distribution for downloads is actually higher than for CDs. Regardless of that, however, distribution remains a relatively small part of the investment record companies make in music. All of the key costs for a piece of music remain virtually the same whatever format you distribute it on.”

This gets more confusing. Apple takes a small enough proportion of the price per song for the iTunes store that it has been accused of loss-leading them to sell iPods, and AllofMP3.com is just charging for bandwidth, so how are you running up these costs?

Clearly we need to find a way to separate paying for music from distributing it, as combining them, and trying to wrap them up in DRM is what is causing you such problems.

Failure to extend copyright term "could turn an export into an import” - akin to scattering Britain's crown jewels of music across the globe.

“British music is one of Britain's greatest ambassadors, but failure to extend term could turn an export into an import,” he said. “If we lose the Crown Jewels of British music, little money will flow back to the UK.”

Ok, you've really lost me there. If the UK term is lower than foreign ones, as at present, then that is a great way to favour domestic production over imports - you can sell old foreign recordings in the UK with impunity, and you have 45 years more protection in the US so you can export your back catalogue there. Seems like a win-win for the UK public and economy, and suggests there would be a big benefit from shortening copyright terms in the UK further.

Music “more popular than ever”

Asked to summarise the position of UK record companies, Jamieson said, “Music has never been more popular. But it’s not time to break out the champagne just yet. Digital was always a threat and an opportunity, and I believe we are getting beyond the threat stage.

Richardson dismissed the idea that the internet somehow renders record companies redundant. Many of the oft-quoted examples of internet-built bands are simply an adaptation of long-established business methods. “Far from doing without record companies, they have used the internet to get themselves better deals with record companies,” he said.

So, music is more free, more available, more popular, and less subject to manipulation and domination by the labels. I think it is time to break out the champagne.

Technorati Tags: art , audio, BPIP, Digital Commonwealth, digital rights, DRM, economics, law, meme, music, Open Rights Group, ORG, politics, rhetoric

Net Neutrality and copyright

Susan Crawford is comparing the copyright debate with the net neutrality one:

I've been working steadily for quite a while on a paper comparing the IP battles to the network neutrality battle. As we've all discovered, these are very hard issues. There aren't clear answers, although the social benefits of the neutral-substrate internet (like the social benefits of the public domain) seem to be ignored by the people claiming the need for protection of their property rights.

It's finally becoming clear to me that the social argument is the only real argument. [...]

The key, though, is that neutrality (or unbundling, my preferred way of doing this) will be better for society as a whole. Awarding very strong property rights to the network providers, like awarding very strong property rights to content companies, won't be as beneficial to society as tempering those rights somewhat. We've done this in the IP context with things like fair use and "limited times" for copyright and patent protection. Indeed, the whole point of IP law is to encourage the creation of useful things for society; benefiting IP owners is a means towards that end.

Susan's underlying analogy has some promise, in that in both cases there are monopolies granted that create a kind of property right over a public good, or at least one with positive externalities. A while back I tried out multiple alternative arguments against copyright extension and DRM. Lets see how the copyright ones fit the net neutrality frame. These are the copyright arguments:

Liberal collectivist

The shared culture of society should belong to the people together, not to faceless corporations.

Libertarian

Our ability to express ourselves freely should not be constrained by a state-granted monopoly.

Liberal Economist

As non-rivalrous goods with a vanishingly small marginal cost of reproduction, cultural goods reach maximum utility by being freely replicable.

Conservative

Creating property rights in goods that can be duplicated at will is inflationary, and undermines the value of real physical property that is the bedrock of a stable society.

Translating them into net neutrality we get:

Liberal collectivist

The infrastructure society needs to communicate should be controlled by the people together, not to faceless corporations.

Libertarian

Our ability to send data to each other freely should not be constrained by a state-granted monopoly.

Liberal Economist

The value of packets transferred is only clear to the originator and sender, not to the intermediary carrying them, so maximum utility is realised by enabling the endpoints to set values, not the network operator.

Conservative

Giving network operators the power to decide whose packets get priority undermines the traditional balance between family, government and other authorities that keeps society stable.

Doing this did make it clear that the argument is weaker in pure net neutrality terms. Emphasising the monopoly rights over public goods (cable-laying and radio spectrum rights) that they have used to build the networks may be better in this kind of argument.

Technorati Tags: copyright, Digital Commonwealth, digital rights, economics, meme, net neutrality, politics

Badgering the Beeb

Cory and Rufus are encouraging us to sign an Open Letter to the BBC, badgering them about the Creative Archive. Something about its phrasing is a bit odd though. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, and then I thought about the curious love-hate relationship we have with the BBC in the UK, and I realised that they got the tone of sanctimony from the BBC itself.

Last week's Dr Who starred Maureen Lippman as a malign alien BBC announcer who steals souls through television, and she played it just right:

This reminded me a lot of the goddess Media in Gaiman's American Gods, though Neil was using a US TV archetype. The BBC has always wanted to set the cultural tone of the nation, and I don't think it is a coincidence that Orwell wrote 1984 after working there during the war. That episode makes the control of the faceless masses through TV explicit, but the Reithian attitude behind it is a familiar one.

However, it did set the cultural tone, certainly for my generation and before, and the tone was of a kind of shabby, well-read respectability, an Auntie knows best feeling, with a dash of 'lets put the show on right here' panto that let you know they weren't taking it too seriously. The old Dr Who was clearly made with an effects budget that wouldn't cover the hairdressers bill on a Hollywood film, but the willing suspension of disbelief made us complicit in this.

I grew up with the pips, the Shipping Forecast, Just a Minute, I'm Sorry I Haven't a clue and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, with Playaway, The Clangers, Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine, with Dr Who, Top of the Pops, Fawlty Towers, Monty Python, Dads Army, Yes Minister and Blackadder. I'm proud of all these, and I am doing my best to share the best of them with my boys too.

I have been shaped by this culture too, I am involved, and I feel obliged to tell the BBC what to do in my own sanctimonious way. Having worked there, I know very well that the BBC is not a thinking entity, but a sprawling coalition of bickering bureaucracies that somehow manages to make great programmes despite it's internal regulations. But perhaps someone there can pick up on this and change things a little.

The BBC is bound by existing rights agreements, so it may not be able to distribute everything under a looser license as Rufus would like, but there are things it could do. Anything more than 50 years old is public domain, and could be released now, including all the Coronation footage used so well in that episode. Going forwards, new contracts can be drafted to enable public non-commercial use online, and I hope the BBC is considering this closely.

But the UK-only license is the sticking point. The BBC has gone down a wrong path here by expending significant resources to try an enforce territoriality online, blocking non-UK IP addresses, and locking up the content in Windows Media DRM to try to enforce a UK-only, one week duration public right through technological means. If they are bound by law, fair enough, bind others by law too, but don't use machines to enforce the law.

The BBC World Service exists for the very purpose of spreading British culture worldwide, and is funded to do exactly that. Let some of its funding be used to enable worldwide server access, and save the money and time spent on spurious technical protections that are, after all, easily circumvented (as my including that clip shows).

Just as the Archbishop of York had to come from Africa to explain to the English what a treasure they have in the Anglican prayerbook, perhaps the BBC should consider how much expatriates like me and Neil care about this, and how many others would be as entranced if they could have easy access. The BBC should be ashamed that Neil Gaiman has to furtively obtain Dr Who when they have the opportunity to share it with the world.

Technorati Tags: BBC, bittorrent, copyright, creative commons, culture, digital rights, DRM, Live TV is Dead, meme, podcasting, rhetoric, television, video

Building openness in - Pingerati and Microformat search

Now we've announced Pingerati and Microformat search, I get a chance to reflect on what has been keeping me busy for the last month, and behind the hiatus in my writing here. I have been building a parallel infrastructure to our Blog indexing, focused on Microformats instead.

Microformats are a way of expressing common kinds of things we refer to online in HTML, such as people, places events and reviews. They are built on layers of open standards, and meant to re-use and converge existing ideas, not make up new ones out of thin air.

When Dave and I were building up Technorati, we were able to do so because of the underlying openness of the web environment - the infrastructure of the net itself, and the open source servers, databases and parsers we connect together to make the data flow.

We also built on a culture of openness that owes a lot to Dave Winer - the openly accessible list of updated blogs gave a place to start in finding blogs to index, and by feeding back links to bloggers we encouraged cross-blog conversations.

When we added tags to blogs we used the rel-tag microformat in conjunction with existing category conventions, and made sure the links were not proprietary, but under authors' control. Again, helping people make connections through open standards.
By being open, we let everyone's world grow.

Although we are seeing more Microformats in blogs every day, we know that they make sense in other places too, and we need a way to encourage people to experiment with them, and find how they can add value to the world. Indexing them and reflecting them back to writers, but building an open data flow that others can tap in enables much more.

So, for the last couple of weeks, I've been working on Pingerati, which is a way to route Microformats around. If you have pages with data to share, you can ping it. If you want to find who has Microformats, it will ping you. The protocol is as simple as it could be, and it should enable the kind of positive sum gains I was talking about yesterday.

Technorati Tags: blogs, emergence, HTML, meme, microformat, microformats, search, tags, technorati, Web 2.0℠