Category: tech

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Blog Archiving Survey

Jessamyn West posts about a survey put out by UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Info & Library Science. They’re gathering data about bloggers’ habits and perceptions, with an eye to preserving blog content permanently.

It’s an interesting question — many blogs certainly fall into the category of journalism, and would be as useful as newspaper archives for historians and researchers. On the other hand, many bloggers post casually and treat the medium as ephemeral. Twitter takes that approach to the extreme.

In any case, I’m curious to see what the UNC folks make of the results.

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Webcasters Lose Appeal of Rate Hike

As I posted earlier, the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board negotiated a sweetheart deal for the RIAA and music publishers, mandating webcasters pay extremely expensive royalties. Webcasters, led by NPR, appealed the decision, but that appeal was rejected.

The new royalty scheme goes into effect May 15. Unless something is done now, a lot of radio stations, new media outlets, and anyone else who wants to stream but can’t afford it, will have to shut down their webcasts.

If there were a principled reason within copyright law to stop this, it would apply to radio as well. Record labels tried and failed to get royalties whenever a record was played over radio (see Lessig’s Free Culture). There is no principle here, it’s just a question of whose pocket the copyright administrators and Congress happen to be in.

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Amazon to Sell DRM-free Music

Ars Technica reports that Amazon will sell DRM-free music from its new online store in May. This follows Apple’s and EMI’s announcement of a similar arrangement on the iTunes music store, also to be launched in May.

Amazingly enough, Steve Jobs may have precipitated an industry-wide change with his “Thoughts on Music” essay. The industry now seems ready to rethink its revenue models [NYTimes] — the digital marketplace is set for a big shakeup.

To be pessimistic for a moment, the worst-case scenario is that both the Apple/EMI and Amazon ventures fail and that failure is blamed on the public’s disinterest in, or toleration of, DRM. It must be noted that even if you buy non-DRM music (e.g. CDs), under current law, you can still be sued for copyright infringement if you share them. By technical or legal means, music buyers are prevented from fully using even DRM-free tracks.

So the upcoming competition between DRM and non-DRM downloads will be inconclusive even if you believe the market can sort out this issue. On the other hand, I bet Amazon will be quite successful… and Apple has already won the PR points it was looking for.

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Linux Proliferation

Linux is free. It does pretty much everything Windows does. So why hasn’t Linux taken over as the most popular desktop OS? Open Source Learning’s Jan Stedehouder answers that it’s a combination of factors but mostly inertia and politics.

This analysis is pretty straightforward; the new idea is to explicitly create an international working group with the goal of Linux proliferation. I happen to think that the consumer market is not the best solution for every problem. This is a case where it has really failed to pick the optimal solution and therefore intervention is a good idea.

On the other hand, open source software development is really a peculiar form of activism; in addition to those who identify as “freedom fighters”, it appeals to apolitical engineers and political bystanders who just want to see the best tools made available. Will their commitment to these tools extend into the explicitly political sphere?

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New Handhelds: Open vs. Proprietary

At this year’s MacWorld, Apple didn’t announce any new computer products — unless you count the iPhone. In fact, Apple has delayed the release of its latest OS update, “Leopard”, until October in order to devote resources to the iPhone. It’s more than a phone — it’s a general-purpose handheld computer. To my eyes, the phone function is a bonus.

As usual, Apple is ahead of the curve. Yesterday, Intel announced its partnership with several other hardware manufacturers to produce a $500 handheld. It will run Linux as well as Windows Vista, which actually makes it a more open platform than the iPhone, for which Apple has announced no plans to release the API.

Since the market failure of the Apple Newton, we’ve been stuck in a world of low-powered, non-standard-OS-running, clunky-interface PDAs. With the huge popularity of “smart phones”, there’s a new willingness to pursue the handheld format. Display technology has also come a long way. And I, for one, have been literally waiting since the Newton.

A few years ago, Duke U. gave out iPods to its entire freshman class. For this year’s freshmen, that’s probably redundant since iPods are more popular than beer. All kidding aside, as popular as laptops are, they don’t get carried everywhere. Cellphones do, but they are locked down and designed so as not to function as general-purpose computers. Handhelds offer extreme integration of computers into daily experience.

College campuses will be the laboratories of this new technology’s cultural impact. We’re not committed to productivity per se; college students will find the fun uses — as well as the innovative workflows that those “on the clock” wouldn’t think to try. One lesson of Web 2.0 is that you don’t design a social environment — you give everyone access and if the product is cool, some of the thousands or millions of users will contribute to it, leverage it, improve it, and turn it into something great.

Of course, you don’t want to compromise the original functionality by allowing remixes. The question of how open to be is very much live right now. See MySpace vs. embedded media widgets, or Alexa vs. Alexaholic. As Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk says in the MySpace article,

Its closest competitor, Facebook, has unannounced (but confirmed) plans to open its site to third-party widgets for the first time. Ultimately, the two sites could come to resemble each other, but which will users prefer? Surely, the one that’s more open and transparent. That approach has prevailed over and over on the web.

Will the public continue to vote with their clicks for the open web model? Probably. Will software and hardware makers draw that analogy to their products? Eventually. I believe that, barring anti-competitive manipulation (e.g. misuse of copyright and patent law), the open model will prevail. But man, the iPhone looks cool…

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Patent Law: Pharma vs. Tech

The Washington Post has a good backgrounder on the politics of the patent debate. I’ve written before about the problems with software patents.

As much as tech companies use and abuse the patent system, there is a basic understanding that patents on the tools of the trade are a roadblock. You either have to challenge them, pay off the patent holder, or as commonly happens, counterclaim patent infringement using your own patents. Even the biggest patent holders, e.g. Microsoft or IBM, would agree that this wastes resources.

On the other hand, for pharmaceutical companies, patents on the tools of the trade are the lifeblood of the business. So these two huge industries are fighting over patent reform. Congress seems to enjoy getting paid by both sides to wind up doing nothing, while the unfairness, stifling of innovation, and costs of the current broken patent system continue to screw the public.

We’ll see what happens: yesterday the 2007 Patent Reform Act was introduced to the House and Senate. [Ars Technica]

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RIAA vs. Colleges Update

As I’ve mentioned before, recently the RIAA has increasingly targeted college and university students for lawsuits. In the past, most people who received notices settled out of court, but the winds may be changing. Ars Technica has been covering the story, including the latest development: North Carolina State University has refused to provide students’ names to the RIAA. Now the RIAA must subpoena the ISP, i.e. NSCU, for the names.

It’s too early to say what will happen here, but certainly the RIAA is no longer getting the cooperation, nor the knee-jerk settlements, it’s used to. Stay tuned.

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Yale Access to Knowledge Conference

Boing Boing mentions Yale’s upcoming Access to Knowledge conference (April 27-29) addressing policy issues raised by new IT developments. Remote participation via the A2K Wiki is encouraged.

We now have the ability to easily share knowledge with everyone in the world. I have talked a bit about the problematic transition from a closed information ecosystem to an open model — the most pressing issue in college IT. We’re looking for ways to preserve the expertise that academia has accumulated and which, to a large extent, has been encoded in professional culture.

Ironically, the principle of free access to knowledge, and the practices to support it, have only developed in closed-access institutions. The project now is to decode those practices into explicit policies, and put our money where our mouth is. Naturally, these new policies run against the grain of some of the protectionist policies of the closed model.

Especially with respect to the law, e.g. “intellectual property”, where educational institutions have special status, we need to make sure that leveling the playing field means increasing protections for the public rather than decreasing protections for educational institutions. A similar reevaluation is going on in many different areas: do bloggers deserve the same First Amendment protections as professional/institutional journalists? (See EFF’s Bloggers’ Rights resources.) Do publishers have the right to control all copying of their work? (See Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture.)

In each case, a deal was struck at some point in the past that gave rights to a limited group of people. Now that the tools are available to all, we have to revisit that deal and see whether the limitations on the group were a key factor in striking the balance or simply a historical accident. We probably do need to expand our concept of a free press to include bloggers. As with other First Amendment rights, the more speech the better. Copyright, on the other hand, probably should not be extended to cover the majority of use of creative works. Historically, non-commercial use was generally unregulated; the absolute power of publishers over their work was limited by its scope.

New technology has shifted the balance in a wide range of areas, and now we need to renegotiate the policy deals. The A2K Wiki provides a good overview of these areas and some policy directions.

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WIPO Broadcast Treaty — Your Chance to Speak

Boing Boing points out the upcoming public hearing on May 9 about the WIPO Broadcasting Treaty.

The Broadcast Treaty is a proposal to let broadcasters (and “webcasters” — people who host files and make them available to the Internet) claim a copyright to the stuff that they transmit. Broadcasters get this special right even if the stuff they’re sending around is in the public domain, or Creative Commons licensed, or not copyrightable (like CSPAN’s broadcasts of Congress). Fair use doesn’t apply to this right.

Seems ridiculous, right? Weigh in!

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Linutop

Linutop is a tiny, cheap computer. It uses less than 6 Watts of power and runs Linux (Xubuntu, to be specific) from a USB flash drive. If you just need a basic machine for web browsing, word processing or instant messaging, this could be perfect.