Here's A Use Of Drones (Nearly) Everyone Will Like

It seems like every other headline is about drones these days -- drones being used in battle, drones being used by the police, drones as a threat to privacy. As we've noted before, it's easy to get the impression that drones are inherently evil, and should be made illegal or something (good luck with that.) But drones are simply a new kind of technology, largely made possible by Moore's Law and the dramatic reductions in size, weight and cost it has brought with it for electronic control devices. Like any other technology, drones can be used for all kinds of purposes, both good and bad. It's just that we have heard mostly about the more dubious ones. To remedy that, here's a heart-warming tale of how drones could tackle one of the most serious threats facing wildlife around the world: poaching. 

On Techdirt.

World Copyright Summit: 7 Billion Elephants

In a couple of weeks' time, the World Copyright Summit takes place in Brussels:

Creating value in the digital economy

The World Copyright Summit is a truly international and cross-industry event addressing the future of the creative community and the entertainment business in the digital economy.

All stakeholders involved in creative industries – creation, licensing, usage, collective management, legislation and dissemination of intellectual property and creative content – now have a unique forum to exchange views on the value of creative works, the future of authors’ rights, the role of creators and their collective management organisations.

It's certainly a pretty high-powered event, judging by some of the big names there. There's Francis Gurry, Director General, WIPO; Michel Barnier, European Commissioner, Internal Market and Services; Maria Martin-Prat, Head of Unit “Copyright”, Intellectual Property Directorate; and Marielle Gallo, Member of the Committee on Legal Affairs, European Parliament.

Alongside these, we have the heads of just about every industry association for writers, musicians, filmmakers etc., as well as a few big names from the creative and media worlds - people like The Reg's Andrew Orlowski and Robert Levine.

The organisers really seem to have included everyone, just as they say: "All stakeholders involved in creative industries – creation, licensing, usage, collective management, legislation and dissemination of intellectual property and creative content."

Well, everyone except one: The Public.

The public is the elephant in the room at this conference - or, rather, the seven billion elephants in the room.

Not only is the public not participating here, it is not even mentioned, as if the very word were some kind of defilement in these hallowed halls celebrating the great intellectual monopoly of copyright, and ways of extracting the maximum "value" from it.

In the extensive programme [.pdf], the nearest thing I can find to an acknowledgement that the public exists is the odd mention of "consumers" - that is, passive recipients of the content industries' largesse - like this one:

Several initiatives around the world have attempted to connect rights holders – and primarily creators – to consumers in order to promote values such as the respect of copyright. This session looks at some of those projects which are aiming to bring creators and consumers closer together.

Even here, then, the "connection" between these consumers and rights holders is "respect of copyright". It's almost as if no other connection can be imagined - the idea, say, that art loses much of its deeper meaning as a social act without an appreciative and involved audience.

Indeed, that word "respect" is hammered home again and again throughout the programme. It forms one of the three defining themes of the whole conference. But here "respect" means one thing only: respect of the public for the monopolies of the rights holders.

This huge and insulting asymmetry is perhaps the perfect symbol of all that is wrong with industries based around copyright today: they sincerely believe that the "respect" involved is all one-way - that the public has no right to respect whatsoever; that laws can - and should - be passed that take from the public and never give, just as the copyright ratchet means term is always extended, never shortened.

This conference, then, is the perfect expression of an industry talking to itself, reinforcing its own prejudices and delusions, and unwilling to accept that the world has changed utterly under the impact of digital technologies; unable even to mention the idea that it's time to engage with those seven billion people - not as consumers, but as new kinds of creators, just as worthy of "respect" as the traditional kind - and rather more numerous.

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The Elephant in the Library

As I read about the incredible riches of content stored on the Internet, one thing worries me increasingly: who's doing the off-site backups? Too many of the current stores seem to have single points of failure, but nobody's really talking about this serious issue - call it the elephant in the library.

So it's good to hear of new projects that aim to back up content independently of others. Things like HathiTrust:

HathiTrust is a bold idea with big plans.

As a digital repository for the nation’s great research libraries, HathiTrust (pronounced hah-tee) brings together the immense collections of partner institutions.

HathiTrust was conceived as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository for these universities to archive and share their digitized collections. Partnership is open to all who share this grand vision.

HathiTrust is a solution.

To prospective partners, HathiTrust offers leadership and reliability.

It provides a no-worry, pain-free solution to archiving vast amounts of digital content. You can rely on the expertise of other librarians and information technologists who understand your needs and who will address the issues of servers, storage, migration, and long-term preservation.

Not all of this content will be freely available to all, although that will be the main emphasis - here's the current stats:

2,123,209 volumes
743,123,150 pages
79 terabytes
25 miles
1,725 tons
335,300 volumes (~16% of total)
in the public domain

Still, it's good to have backups for proprietary content too: if in the coming apocalypse it's lost because the primary stores go down permanently, there's no hope of ever opening it up.

And if you were wondering:

What does the name HathiTrust mean?

Hathi (pronounced hah-tee) is the Hindi word for elephant, an animal highly regarded for its memory, wisdom, and strength. Trust is a core value of research libraries and one of their greatest assets. In combination, the words convey the key benefits researchers can expect from a first-of-its-kind shared digital repository.

Google Shoots an Elephant

So Google has done the deed, and bought YouTube.

I can't help thinking of a story by George Orwell, called Shooting an Elephant. In it he describes how, as a police officer in Burma, he was called to deal with a rogue elephant.

He went with his gun, and an expectant crowd gathered. It soon became clear that the elephant had calmed down, and posed no danger. But Orwell realised that despite this, he was going to have to shoot the elephant: the crowd that had gathered expected it of him, and whether it was the right thing to do or not, he had to do it. And so he did.

It seems to me that Google's acquisition has much in common with this story. Once news started leaking out, the crowd gathered, and Google had to buy YouTube, whether it was the right thing or not, because the crowd expected it.

In the same way, there is now a growing expectation that Yahoo will buy something big - anything - to "counter" Google's move. And so another crowd begins to form, and another elephant must needlessly die.

A Mammoth Open Genome Project

Open genomics just goes from strength to strength. As this press release reports, there are now over 100,000,000,000 bases (DNA letters) in public databases, all of which may be freely downloaded.

This represents sequences from some 165,000 different organisms. Nearly all of these are living today, but there is an interesting move to sequence extinct animals too. The secret is to find enough ancient DNA, sufficiently well-preserved, that it can be sequenced.

Recently, an important breakthrough in this area was achieved by sequencing nearly 30 million bases of a woolly mammoth. As the relevant paper reports, the sequence identity between this set and the DNA of today's African elephant is a remarkable 98.55%. This means that we are not so far from being able to reconstruct most of the mammoth genome, using the African elephant DNA as a kind of scaffolding. The obvious next step would be cloning a mammoth, using modern-day elephants as egg donors and surrogate mothers.

Do not try this at home.