News for me

1. Data Jurisdiction -- information from the NineFold hosting company in Australia. Has some Aussie-specific content, but would be great to see this internationalized. (via Lachlan Hardy)
2. Anatomy of an Idea (Steven Johnson) -- people who think the Web is killing off serendipity are not using it correctly. Lovely glimpse at how he works, chasing trails of ideas down and using Google and Twitter for research. (via Maria Popova)
3. Autograph Stickers for Kindle Books (Clay Johnson) -- clever solution to the "but I can't get my Kindle book autographed!".
4. TextExt.js -- Javascript to extend textboxes with tags, prompting, autocomplete, and more. (via Javascript Weekly)

Posted by Nat Torkington on January 27, 2012 11:00 AM · permalink

1. Mobile Overtaking Web -- provocatively packaged extrapolations of ComScore and similar numbers to conclude that Americans spend more time interacting with mobile apps than with web sites. I'm sure you could beat an iPhone developer to death with the error bars.
2. Best Privacy Policy Ever -- satiric privacy policy from a Firefox plugin.
3. The Time for Libraries is Now -- forceful presentation on the need for librarians (aka "information professionals") in an age of excess information.
4. Google 2011 vs Microsoft 1995 (Nelson Minar) -- interesting analysis which prompted Andy Baio's comment Google will be in trouble if their strategy succeeds, or if it doesn't.

Posted by Nat Torkington on January 25, 2012 11:00 AM · permalink

1. fbootstrap (GitHub) -- HTML, CSS, and JS toolkit for Facebook apps based on Twitter's popular Bootstrap library.
2. Focus on the User -- adds a bookmarklet "Don't Be Evil" which shows your Google search as it would have been before Google+ began artificially inserting itself into Google search results. Written by Facebook engineer and Firefox co-creator Blake Ross, this is a gloriously subtle commentary on the pollution of search results from the privileging of Google+.
3. Treasure Hunt for Mysteries of Mind and Brain (Mind Hacks) -- one of the coauthors of Mind Hacks, Tom Stafford, has written two small self-published books on the cool things you can do with your brain: exploring your blind spot, and lucid dreaming.
4. Pirate Bay Launches Physical Object Category -- We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare parts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years. We at O'Reilly believe this too. (via Annalee Newitz)

Posted by Nat Torkington on January 24, 2012 11:00 AM · permalink

We've heard a lot about "piracy" in the last few months. But as you'd expect, there's a lot of confusion, particularly by the folks doing the name-calling, about what pirates really are.

Pirates aren't petty thieves, snatching a video or two from the local video rental shop. Pirates were (and are) after the big kill: the galleons filled with gold from the new world, the oil tanker that can be held for a few million dollars in ransom. If we're going to talk seriously about piracy, it's not kids downloading the odd song or TV episode, nor is it third-world software developers downloading the ebooks that I've edited and written. That's shoplifting at worst, and while I'm not going to condone shoplifting, it's a cost of doing business, and not a particularly large one. As Tim O'Reilly has argued, and as O'Reilly's sales indicate, the additional exposure you get through piracy more than compensates for any "lost sales," especially since the sales you lose are the sales you were never going to make in the first place. Sites that sell copyrighted music that they have not been licensed to sell are a more serious problem, but again, this is a problem that's easily solved by making your work as widely available and as easily accessible as you can; this will put parasites out of business.

That's not to say that piracy isn't an issue. Just that it's a different issue than the one the MPAA wants us to think about. There is some major league piracy going on, and it's all about the abuse of copyright by the major copyright holders. It's hard to think about Righthaven except as an instance of piracy. (And Righthaven ended up where most pirates historically ended up.) The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which has been widely used to suppress parody, unfavorable reviews, and the like, was a huge intellectual property land grab that fully deserves the name "piracy." At O'Reilly, we had a narrow escape a few years ago. "Head First Java" starts each chapter with an image taken from an old movie for which the copyright had expired, placing the movie in the public domain. Someone collected several of those movies into DVDs and copyrighted the DVD. Luckily, we discovered it (and were able to find new images) before we published the book and ended up with a court summons. That too is piracy. So is much of the patent trolling that's currently going on: one small but particularly painful example is Luma Labs' decision to take their product off the market because of a worthless patent claim. They determined that they'd almost certainly win in court, since their product was demonstrably based on prior art going back to 1885, but they'd almost certainly go bankrupt paying the legal fees.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) have to be understood in this light: it's just another IP land grab. It's an attempt to frighten those who would compete with the established media companies, an attempt to assert monopolistic control over creativity. The ability to take domains offline without due process, even on the basis of inadvertently linking to copyrighted material, is nothing if not an attempt to legitimize theft on a grand scale. Because there is no due process, a defendant can't respond until he's already out of business; and then, it's a matter of whether the defendant can outlast Hollywood in their ability to pay legal fees. "Justice" is meaningless if you run out of money before you get to the end of your case.

Let's look at what would have happened historically if we had today's copyright regime. Many of Shakespeare's plays are based on older works. Many of the histories go back to Holinshed's " "Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland," and if you've read Holinshed and Shakespeare side by side (I have), there's more than just an occasional chance echo. What would Shakespeare have owed to the Holinshed family? Would they have been able to take him "offline" under the DMCA? "Hamlet" is believed to be based on a lost, earlier "Hamlet" (called the Ur-Hamlet, possibly written by Thomas Kyd, one of Shakespeare's contemporaries) that has been lost. With modern IP law, we'd still be paying royalties to the unknown author of the Ur-Hamlet, and we wouldn't have Shakespeare's masterpiece.

Then as now, borrowing wasn't limited to theatre. Mashups, which have been repeatedly attacked by the entertainment industry, are by no means a new art form; they've been central to creativity for years (related examples are embedded below). Bach's "Goldberg Variations" incorporate a number of popular songs of the era, including the always popular "Cabbages and Beets drove me away from you," in its entirety, along with "Get closer to me, baby" (that's what the German really means, except the "baby" part). So did Beethoven's sonatas, particularly the second movement of the magnificent Opus 110 piano sonata ("Our cat had kittens" and " I'm a slob, you're a slob"). I could list examples for pages; musicologists spend entire careers searching for this stuff. The complexity with which these songs are woven into a much greater piece is amazing, but they're there, they've obviously there once you know what to look for, and they go way beyond what would survive "fair use" and the DMCA, let alone SOPA and PIPA.

Even more fundamentally, there is no such thing as creativity that doesn't rely on the past. Sometimes the links are very subtle and hidden; sometimes they're out in the open, and we don't notice them only because we've declared Bach and Beethoven "great composers" and forgotten the popular music of their day. Our peculiar post-Romantic notion that all real artists somehow create their works out of nothing is partly to blame. Nothing could be further from the truth. And it's not just art. In a very rare moment of humility, Isaac Newton said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

So the notion that creativity can be owned, and that any use of someone else's ideas requires compensation, is nothing but an attempt to steal all of creativity. Whoever can pay their lawyers the most wins. Anyone smell pirates in the room? I am not willing to sacrifice this generation's great artists on the altar of Hollywood. I'm not willing to have the next Bach, Beethoven, or Shakespeare post their work online, only to have it taken down because they haven't paid off a bunch of executives who think they own creativity.

The Constitution of the United States provides a legal basis for copyright and patent, but it's for a specific purpose: it's "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." We've gone way beyond that now, with patent and copyright piracy: our notion of intellectual property is now hindering both science and art.

In Book IV, section 4, of St. Augustine's "The City of God", Augustine tells the parable of a pirate captain who is captured and brought before Alexander the Great. The emperor says "How dare you terrorize the seas"? The pirate captain replies, "How dare you terrorize the whole world? Because I only have one ship, I'm called a pirate; because you have a great navy, you're called an emperor." The difference between a pirate and an emperor is one of scale only. And that's the position we find ourselves in here: the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) and its allies have twisted the discussion so we're talking about the wrong thing. We shouldn't be talking about the small-scale piracy of individual movies (which probably helps sales in the long run, as we've observed in the publishing business). We should be talking about the real piracy, the wholesale takeover of creativity by the media industry. That's the piracy we should be outlawing.

Photo: Jolly Roger by Joe Shlabotnik, on Flickr

Related:

• Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution
• SOPA and PIPA are bad industrial policy
• Book piracy: Less DRM, more data
• Research report: Impact of P2P and Free Distribution on Book Sales

Posted by Mike Loukides on January 23, 2012 04:00 PM · permalink

The IBM Powers of Ten video is a classic: as the stolid narrator ticks off powers of ten, the camera pulls back or zooms in and a new layer of complexity is revealed. We need a Powers of Ten video for SOPA.

At the initial scale, Hollywood lobbyists convinced Congress to push a bill through that would give Hollywood a measure of control over Internet sites by facilitating DNS takedowns, placing liability on site operators, and generally placing restrictions on Internet businesses designed to benefit existing content distributors. The depressingly smooth passage of the bill meant serious measures were called for: the blackout day. On that day, tens of millions of people became alerted to the consequences of SOPA and wrote to their representatives. SOPA has stalled, possibly died. And there was rejoicing.

But step out a power of ten and you see SOPA was just the latest in a series of legislative manipulations by existing media companies to benefit their coffers. Whether it's extending the term of copyright, criminalizing the circumvention of DRM, or trying to ban repeat-downloaders from the Internet, these media companies are powerful and use their power to extend their profits. Sometimes they even exploit their access to the user to perpetuate their cause, for example by putting unskippable pre-roll anti-piracy messages on every legitimately-purchased DVD. There's no indication that a victory over SOPA means there won't be a SOPA 2.0 in six months time.

Step back further and you see that Internet companies have set themselves up as new distribution channels while the old distribution companies were napping. Amazon can take an author's book and put it in consumers hands without ever involving a publisher, and Apple are following suit. Amazon, Apple, and Google all distribute movies. The legacy distribution companies are owned by the content production companies, and their "save our business" message muddles whether it's content production or legacy distribution that's threatened by these new Internet companies. Congress put their legislative thumb on the scales in a business dispute: old money vs new money, incumbent rent extractor vs upstart.

Step back further and you see that Congress thumbs the scales all the time. Between the money that can be earned from corporations and unions as a lobbyist after leaving Congress, and the money needed to run a campaign to be elected in the first place, there are a lot of reasons for Congressional representatives to be receptive to advances from monied interests. This means their legislative attention is not on the good of society or even the majority, but for the good of those willing to spend money to buy it. This is the big picture view, the root of the problem.

Congress is a flea pit. We can crack the fleas one at a time as they bite us, or we can clean house. I see widespread jubilation on the success of the SOPA skirmish, but only one or two people thinking and talking about how we win the war. We win when we end this stream of Internet-breaking bills, and that will only happen when Congressional election campaigns are no longer paid for by monied interests. An independent Congress will still listen to business and unions, it just won't have to roll over and beg when money whistles.

This is, obviously, a bigger problem to solve. Lessig has called it a "generational" problem: pernicious money will take 30 years to eradicate, so we may end up cleaning up the country for our children. The size of the change doesn't make it impossible. It's a strategy problem, like every other: spend time and money at every power of ten, more where it's urgent and important, investing in R&D where a way forward isn't immediately obvious.

What does it mean to attack it at every power of ten? Simply:

1. Fight SOPA when it's urgent. Well done, immediate crisis is over!
2. Prepare to fight SOPA 2.0 and TPP and ACTA 2.0 and .... Until we fix Congress, there'll be more attempts to provide welfare for legacy distributors. Blackouts won't work. Get the holdouts (Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc.) to join in a sustainable coalition to oppose future fuckery. Obama's election was made possible by incredible tools for mobilizing voters; we need similarly evolved tools. Invest a little now so we don't have a cold start when the next bad bill comes along.
3. Buy online. Be the change you want to see: use your wallet to feed the companies you want to succeed, don't spend with the ones who want to break your Internet. Low-priority but ongoing.
4. Buy and read Lessig's new book Republic, Lost. He was ahead of the curve when he alerted us to problems with copyright law, and he's been ahead of the curve in his identification of corruption as an issue. This is research.
5. Join rootstrikers or any other group working to eliminate the root cause of Internet-breaking legislation: corruption. At election time, give them money instead of making campaign donations.
6. Invent the next thing we can all do which will bring us closer to change.

You'll notice I don't have "get Internet giants to lobby Congress" on my list. I'm sure they'll do that already, but I don't believe you can fight this fire with fire. They may need to lobby tactically, but strategically you fight fire by taking away its fuel or oxygen and that means taking obligation-creating campaign donations away from Congress.

If we don't do this, we'll keep scratching and crushing the fleas one at a time until we're miserable from all the bites. We need to zoom out a few powers of ten and clean house to solve the underlying problem.

Posted by Nat Torkington on January 21, 2012 07:05 PM · permalink

On December 5, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick joined with state treasurer Steven Grossman to create an open government initiative with the promising moniker Open Checkbook. The site launched to some acclaim and has received over 220,000 hits. I decided to take a look at what's offered and what's missing from this site, and to ask someone in the government here in Massachusetts to describe their thinking in creating the site. The results can give us some insight into the effort it takes at each stage to release government data--and even more significantly, what it takes to increase the data's value.

As a finance project, Open Checkbook hones in on one area of open government: how it spends. With Open Checkbook you can find out where the money goes in the Massachusetts state government, right down to particular salaries or particular payments to vendors. This is highly welcome in a tight economy, especially in a state that is still often unfairly tarred as "Taxachusetts," decades after tax rates were lowered--a state where news of patronage and pension scandals is common enough to get tiresome--a state where cynical voters have put referendum questions on the ballot in favor of lower taxes at least three times.

I discussed Open Checkbook with Jeffrey Simon, who works for the Governor as the director of the state's economic stimulus program and who was involved in the Open Checkbook from the beginning. The site is run by a steering committee formed by the Governor and Treasurer and made up of members of their staffs. The approach being used in Open Checkbook is based on the experience they had developing the state's stimulus program, and the website that Director Simon's office created for that program. The steering committee has been eager to add context to data, helping visitors who are uninitiated in the arcanery of state budgeting get a sense of what expenditures are for.

A first look at the web site

Let's take a quick tour of this service. To get to the home page, visit the main Massachusetts government portal, look down the right-hand side, and click on "Open Checkbook." You can then explore finances a