Tag: process

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Copyright Policy

Library and Academic Computing staff met today to start a discussion of copyright policy. When we looked at library practices in our DAM working group, it quickly became clear that A.) copyright practices vary widely among the different areas of the library (books, reserves, music and slides are all handled differently) and B.) fear of infringing copyright is a driving force in decision-making.

In order to bring our varying practices into accord, we need a library-wide policy on copyright. And in order to write that policy, we need to learn much more about copyright — we’ll try to reduce the fear of infringement by reducing the uncertainty involved. Unfortunately this area of law is relatively unsettled, and certainty may only be found in the courtroom. But if/when it comes to that, it will help us and other libraries and colleges to have a robust established policy. The opposite, a history of compliance with publishing industry demands, will only work against us. Either way, having an established policy is a crucial first step.

For the next steps, we’ll be bringing in expert speakers on copyright and colleges and libraries. Each of the group participants will also do some research about existing copyright practices in their field to bring to the next meeting. In the longer term, we’ll need to educate other SLC community members about these issues and work towards a campus-wide policy.

I’m very happy just to start the discussion, and quite optimistic that we can come up with a consensus that works with everyone’s interests. If anyone wants to contribute research material, please post a link in the comments of my previous post, Copyright Resources.

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Fundamentals for Technologists

Each spring sees the opening of another baseball season. This is one of my favorite spectator sports, but every year there is one thing that bothers me about it, That is the way that semi-professional, university, and sometimes even high-school stars enter the [Japanese] professional leagues and immediately display a skill that puts their veteran teammates to shame. There hardly seems to be any difference at all between amateurs and professionals. Amateurs play for pure enjoyment, while professionals play to make a living. The difference between them ought to be much greater.

In every confrontation with a real American professional team it seems that what we need to learn from them, besides their technique of course, is how uniformly faithful their players are to the fundamentals. Faithfulness to fundamentals seems to be a common thread linking professionalism in all areas. …

The opposite case, where the difference between amateur and professional is most striking, is Japanese sumo wrestling. There even the collegiate grand champion has to enter the professional ranks in the third division down from the top and work his way up while being treated like any other raw recruit. … [T]here seems to be what can only be termed a thick barrier between amateur and professional, built by a long tradition among professionals of almost superhuman effort. It takes more than just bodily size and strength to become a professional sumo wrestler. Kageyama Toshiro, Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go, p.36. Kiseido, Tokyo, 1978.

Besides being insightful, this point raises the question: what are the fundamentals in my field, and am I faithful to them? What is a professional approach? In educational technology, the project is to make new technologies available and workable as teaching and learning tools. We guide teachers and students to informed working relationships with these technologies. (Here, “technology” includes both tools and techniques.) The fundamentals are research, familiarity with new technology, and consultation to help teachers and students find the right tools.

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Software Patent Trends

The Patent Prospector reports on IP Law 360’s 2006 survey [subscription required] of tech patent litigation. Increasingly, new product launches are met with lawsuits, and more often from non-practicing patent holders (“trolls”) or patent licensing companies working for them. As you might expect, Microsoft is the #1 target.

The patent system is a mess. The House of Representatives acknowledged as much this week, holding patent reform hearings. But in particular, software patents are a huge problem.

To get an idea of what’s at stake, let’s start with some background: Bitlaw’s history of software patents. Why are software patents problematic? Amazon’s “One Click” patent is a classic example. To many people, a patent for clicking the “Buy” button seems ridiculous. Richard Stallman has been particularly outspoken and lucid on this point.

In the past year, there have been new attempts to improve the patent process like IBM’s IP marketplace manifesto. Interestingly, large, established corporations like Microsoft and Oracle are leading the push in the tech sector for patent reform. This is largely due to the ease with which big tech companies exchange patent licenses — quickly resolving patent disputes is a way of life.

New York Law School’s Peer to Patent Project made headlines in May 2006 with the US Patent and Trademark Office agreeing to a pilot peer-review program. Unfortunately there has been no news out of USPTO since then. Check out the Peer to Patent proposal.

We only grant the limited monopoly of a patent in return for the benefit of the innovation entering the public sphere. With the Free Software movement gaining traction, we may eventually decide that software openness is so fundamental that we shouldn’t pay for it at all. But either way, opening the patent process to peer review is the first step to allowing that decision to be made by the public.

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Merit-Based Search Results?

This Slashdot post by Bennet Haselton proposes a new direction for search algorithms. The current best, Google’s PageRank, is a trade secret. Although they claim that their “methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult,” in fact Google is in a continual arms race with people manipulating the system — “spamdexing”, i.e. achieving high-ranked search results for reasons other than user satisfaction.

Haselton’s suggestion looks like a good start — an open-source algorithm that uses samples of the user base rather than aggregating all users’ “votes” (clicks). This would certainly render current spamdexing schemes obsolete. Of course, as statisticians will tell you, getting a properly randomized, representative sample is a problem in itself. Usually, in order to factor out influences you don’t want to measure, you need to gather some demographic data from participants — raising privacy concerns.

And what is “merit” anyway? Is popular reaction its best measure? How can an algorithm distinguish sincere offerings from click greed?

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Why Web 2.0 is a big deal

As Eben Moglen writes, “one of the most lucid pieces of artful public instruction I’ve ever seen.”

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Industry Standards and Free Software

What is Free Software?

Why use Free Software?

These two essays by Richard Stallman cover a lot of ground, and I think he does a great job of laying out the issues as both ethical and empirical questions. While the ethical questions are perhaps inherently debatable, the empirical ones are not. It is neither necessary nor in our long-term interests for software to have owners.

So the question is, why do we still use commercial software? In the SLC Digital Media Lab, which I set up, we use a closed, commercial operating system (Mac OS X) as well as several software packages which have built-in restrictions on copying, use, and modification (Adobe Creative Suite, Autodesk Maya, Apple iLife and Final Cut, etc.). On the other hand, we also use free software (Audacity, Blender, Firefox, Jahshaka, NeoOffice, VLC, etc.).

At one time, free operating system software (GNU/Linux) was not up to snuff in stability and compatibility. Beating Windows in stability was not a high hurdle, but it was a quite valuable achievement, as evidenced by the commercial success of Red Hat Linux in the mid- to late 1990s. And since the advent of OpenOffice.org (formerly StarOffice, released in 2000), there has been no really valid excuse to run Microsoft’s office suite, much less its OS.

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The Virtues and Limits of Cataloging

The first wave of digital evangelism has passed. With the dot-com bubble burst and with the help of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, among others, we are much less attracted to the pitch that all problems will be solved by the application of massive amounts of data.

Around the same time, Google proved that there is an extremely usable middle ground between cataloged, curated information sets and hopelessly disjoint stacks of data. Users increasingly choose the convenience of Google, and more recently Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube, over the authoritative thoroughness of library-mediated research.

Librarians cringe at amateur cataloging. It’s like home dentistry. Google’s black-box PageRank reflects the “uniquely democratic nature of the web” by choosing relevant information based on proxies for trust, reputation, and authoritativeness (not expert assessments of those qualities). Flickr and YouTube use “Web 2.0” social tagging techniques to roughly categorize content. Even non-librarians can appreciate the pitfalls of letting just anyone add meta-data – they’ll get it wrong.

But talking to librarians, I’ve started to appreciate whole other levels of control over the process and content of cataloging. IANAL — I am not a Librarian. The following discussion is for entertainment purposes only.

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