After lurking in the shadows for a few months, the mega transatlantic trade deal TAFTA/TTIP is starting to hit the mainstream media. Here, for example, is an excellent article by George Monbiot in the Guardian, which rightly singles out corporate sovereignty as a key threat:
As we reported a few months back, the UK's misbegotten Digital Economy Act continues to go nowhere fast, with warning letters for alleged illegal filesharing unlikely to go out until 2016, if ever. As you can imagine, the UK recording and film industries aren't exactly overjoyed by this prospect, and have come up with Plan B, as reported by The Guardian:
As many have already observed, the detention of David Miranda comes across as an act of blatant intimidation, as does the farcical destruction of the Guardian's hard drives. But something doesn't ring true about these episodes: spooks may be cynical and ruthless, but they are not generally clueless idiots.
If you follow me on Twitter or elsewhere, you'll have noticed that I've been tweeting rather extensively about the NSA's spying, the most recent attacks on Glenn Greenwald and now the Guardian. If you were still wondering what any of this has to do with open source, this latest news might clarify things a little:
One of the defining characteristics of the digital world -- and one of the problems for copyright law, which was conceived in an analog age -- is the importance of being able to build on the work of others not just indirectly, but directly, through mashups or the re-use of existing material. Stig Rudeholm points us to a fascinating feature in the Guardian about "sweded movies": home-made tributes to Hollywood titles that adopt precisely this approach of creative re-interpretation. The name apparently comes from the film "Be Kind Rewind", where DIY imitations of studio favorites are passed off as Swedish editions.
A recurrent refrain from the copyright industries is that you can't make money from digital goods if they are freely available online. To which Techdirt has been pointing out for years that not only are there many ways of doing precisely that, but lots of people are already coining it as a result. One of the Guardian's columnists has noticed one of them - that in a world of digital abundance, you can make money by selling associated scarcities:
I wrote last week about a curious article in the Guardian calling for “caution” on open source. And now we have another odd piece:
The sad truth is that while the UK has the creativity and technological know-how to produce the next Google, the relatively smooth road to patent protection in the US isn't mirrored here - and that's a stumbling block that will hinder the growth of the UK software developer.
But that is simply wrong. Of all the major software companies, Google has eschewed taking out software patents the most. That's because it knows that the US patent system is broken, and wants to see it reformed:
On Open Enterprise blog.
An extremely feeble article in the Guardian parrots the recording industry's line that piracy is killing music:Global recorded music sales fell by almost $1.5bn (£930m) last year as digital piracy continued to take its toll on the industry, with the UK losing its mantle as the third-largest music market after "physical" sales of CDs collapsed by almost a fifth.
Sorry, I think I missed the proof that this fall was *caused* by piracy: any evidence? No, I thought not. Whereas there is growing research that unauthorised sharing actually increases sales (see the list of examples and links in this post.)
Perhaps the problem is rather that the sales being driven by this unauthorised sharing just aren't being generated fast enough to compensate for the overall decline in the recorded music industry. After all, there's nothing that says it must always grow. Maybe people are just fed up with its antics now that there are plenty of other kinds of music available (under cc licences, for example.)
In fact, there's a rather telling graph that the IFPI has kindly provided. It shows, of course, the decline in total sales of recorded music, breaking it down by "physical", "digital" and "recorded rights". The last of these is pretty much constant, while digital is growing at a modest pace.
But as is so often the case, this graph tells us something quite different from those "obvious" figures - and something rather interesting: that digital sales didn't really exist before 2004.
Thank about it: it took five years after Napster was created before the recording industry finally began to acknowledge the existence of a revolution whose inevitability was obvious to anyone who had spent a few hours online. Is it any wonder that people got fed up with the exorbitant pricing and inconvenient packaging of CDs, and despaired of ever being treated fairly with reasonably-price downloads?
In effect, it was the industry's pig-headed refusal for half a decade to sell people what they wanted that has driven users away. If some - even many - of them turned to unauthorised downloads, is it really any wonder? So before we blame the pirates, how about a word or two for the owners of those heads?
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.
There's a nice piece of work by Charles Arthur in The Guardian today that puts a fascinating post from one of Microsoft's top PR people under the microscope. It's all well worth reading, but naturally the following numbers from the memo and Arthur's analysis were of particular interest:
On Open Enterprise blog.
It's hard keeping up with Rupert Murdoch's fortunes on the Internet.
First, he blew it: he ignored the Net, declaring it of no interest. Then he hit the jackpot, buying MySpace for what seemed an incredibly low price: just $580 million, when Facebook was being valued at billions. That's looking expensive today:News Corp specifically blames MySpace for a loss of $363 million to the company’s bottom line
And now, it looks like Rupert has really lost it:"Quality journalism is not cheap," said Murdoch. "The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites."
Good luck with that, Rupe.
I think it's interesting that I almost never quote from or link to News International titles: there's simply too little there of interest. By contrast, I *do* link quite often to New York Times and Guardian stories, both of which offer stuff not covered elsewhere. So I don't think I'm going to miss Mr Murdoch's titles when they suddenly fall off the digital radar...
The Guardian's crowd-sourcing of the initial analysis of hundreds of thousands of PDFs of MPs' expenses is fast becoming mythic. If you want some more technical details, this post is a good place to start. I was particular struck by the following:As well as the Guardian’s first Django joint, this was its first project with EC2, the Amazon contract-hosting service beloved by startups for its low capital costs.
Willison’s team knew they would get a huge burst of attention followed by a long, fading tail, so it wouldn’t make sense to prepare the Guardian’s own servers for the task. In any case, there wasn’t time.
“The Guardian has lead time of several weeks to get new hardware bought and so forth,” Willison said. “The project was only approved to go ahead less than a week before it launched.”
With EC2, the Guardian could order server time as needed, rapidly scaling it up for the launch date and down again afterward. Thanks to EC2, Willison guessed the Guardian’s full out-of-pocket cost for the whole project will be around £50.
As for the software, it was all open-source, freely available to the Guardian — and to anyone else who might want to imitate them. Willison hopes to organize his work in the next few weeks.
None of this happens without open source to allow zero-cost hacks; nothing happens without clouds, that allow immediate and low-cost scale-up. (Fifty quid? Blimey.) Bottom line: increasingly popular crowdsourcing efforts won't be happening without either.
Great to see Heather Brooke getting at least *some* recognition for the huge service she has done transparency in this country by fighting for access to details of MPs' expenses, thanks to her fascinating piece in the Guardian today, which lets her tell the real story behind recent events. Do read it if you can: it's an extraordinary tale of dogged refusal to give up in the face of unremitting parliamentary arrogance. Best quotation:"Transparency will damage democracy."
I just hope she gets at least a juicy book deal out of all this - I'll certainly buy a copy, and will promote it as much as I can. After all, it's the Telegraph that is getting most of the glory for this, when she did 99.9% of the work, which is downright unfair ("Unsung hero" is the all-too apt title of her Guardian feature).
Amazingly, and to her eternal credit, she's remarkably lacking in bitterness about this:
As a campaigner I was thrilled to see the details finally put into the public domain. This is important information that the public have a right to see. But as a journalist, I was livid. I asked myself - what is the point of doing all that work, going to court, setting a legal precedent, dealing in facts, when every part of the government conspires to reward the hacks who do none of these things?
But I don't begrudge the paper. It is getting the story out in the most cost-effective way possible. What's unforgiveable is that the House of Commons repeatedly obstructed legitimate requests and then delayed the expense publication date and that MPs went so far as to try to exempt themselves from their own law. I wonder, too, how much we would have actually seen if we'd waited for the Commons to publish, given that MPs were given a free hand to black out anything that was "personal" or a danger to their "security". These terms have been so overused by MPs that I've no doubt that items such as cleaning the moat would have been removed for "security" reasons, as would the house-flipping scandal, as an invasion of MPs' privacy.
Kudos to all involved.
Two years ago, the virtual world Second Life was everywhere, as pundits and press alike rushed to proclaim it as the Next Big Digital Thing. Inevitably, the backlash began soon afterwards. The company behind it, Linden Lab, lost focus and fans; key staff left. Finally, last March, Second Life's CEO, creator and visionary, Philip Rosedale, announced that he was taking on the role of chairman of the board, and bringing in fresh leadership. But against an increasingly dismal background, who would want to step into his shoes?
From the Guardian.
Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody
The little brouhaha concerning the Guardian and Barclays Bank is a wonderful object lesson in how the Internet changes everything. Once those super-secret documents were put up for even a few seconds, the game was over: taking them down from the Guardian afterwards really is the proverbial closing of the stable door after the horse has bolted.
Inevitably, a copy has made its way to Wikileaks; inevitably that link is being exposed all over the place, which has led to the site being overloaded (do make a donation if you can: I've given my widow's mite). Barclays Bank can apply for as many injunctions as they like, the judge can - and probably will - huff and puff as much as he/she likes, but the game's over: this stuff is out.
And quite right too: these documents either show the bank engaged in something dodgy, in which case they should be published, or they don't, in which case there's no problem in them being public anyway, since the bank is asking for serious scads of public dosh, and is effectively being part-nationalised.
But even if it weren't, it would be folly to try to keep them secret now: it would only ensure that even more people write about them, and point to them, and maybe even read them. The rules have changed.
At a time when most newspapers are talking doom and gloom, the Guardian is instead *doing* something - and thriving (maybe there's a correlation?). Here's its latest shrewd move:The Guardian today launched Open Platform, a service that will allow partners to reuse guardian.co.uk content and data for free and weave it "into the fabric of the internet".
Open Platform launched with two separate content-sharing services, which will allow users to build their own applications in return for carrying Guardian advertising.
A content application programming interface (API) will smooth the way for web developers to build applications and services using Guardian content, while a Data Store will contain datasets curated by Guardian editors and open for others to use.
So far, so conventional. Here's the important bit:
The Guardian is positioning its Open Platform as a commercial venture, requiring partners to carry its advertising as part of its terms and conditions, while BBC Backstage states clearly that its proposition is for individual developers designers and not for "big corporates".
This is the future of content, which will be made available freely, but revenue-generating features will be bolted on to it as above. (Disclosure: I occasionally write for the Guardian; but not much.)
...but there is this:Police are targeting thousands of political campaigners in surveillance operations and storing their details on a database for at least seven years, an investigation by the Guardian can reveal.
...
Police surveillance teams are also targeting journalists who cover demonstrations, and are believed to have monitored members of the press during at least eight protests over the last year.
Because we know that all journalists are scum, anyway....
The Guardian continues to do its bit for open data:The Guardian has pulled together a collection of datasets drawn from the US
Rather cleverly, it is using Spreadly, aka Google Spreadsheets to offer various formats:Simon Rogers gathered this information and shared the raw data via Google Spreadsheets for anyone to use. This means that people can grab the data in whatever format is most desirable including text, .csv, .xls, and .pdf.
That's great, but why is .odf - also available from Spreadly - omitted? Anything personal? Lack of space? Not enough electrons...?
Good news: Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the person who essentially steered IBM toward GNU/Linux - with huge knock-on effects - has joined one of that nice Mr Obama's policy groups:
Technology, Innovation & Government Reform
The Technology, Innovation & Government Reform Policy Working Group will help prepare the incoming Administration to implement the Innovation Agenda, which includes a range of proposals to create a 21st century government that is more open and effective; leverages technology to grow the economy, create jobs, and solve our country’s most pressing problems; respects the integrity of and renews our commitment to science; and catalyzes active citizenship and partnerships in shared governance with civil society institutions. The Working Group is organized into four sub-teams: (1) Innovation and Government, (2) Innovation and National Priorities, (3) Innovation and Science, and (4) Innovation and Civil Society.
As well as interviewing him for Rebel Code, where he graciously spent some time explaining things when he was a busy man, I also interviewed him for the Guardian. That piece provides a lot of hints at just how wide-ranging his interests are. (Via eightbar.)
That's Stella Rimington, former head of MI5. Her Guardian interview is so packed with good sense that I'll have to quote it at length:A former head of MI5 today describes the response to the September 11 2001 attacks on the US as a "huge overreaction" and says the invasion of Iraq influenced young men in Britain who turned to terrorism.
In an interview with the Guardian, Stella Rimington calls al-Qaida's attack on the US "another terrorist incident" but not qualitatively different from any others.
"That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was as far as I was concerned another one," she says.
In common with Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who retired as MI5's director general last year, Rimington, who left 12 years ago, has already made it clear she abhorred "war on terror" rhetoric and the government's abandoned plans to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge.
Today, she goes further by criticising politicians including Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for trying to outbid each other in their opposition to terrorism and making national security a partisan issue.
It all began, she suggests, with September 11. "National security has become much more of a political issue than it ever was in my day," she says. "Parties are tending to use it as a way of trying to get at the other side. You know, 'We're more tough on terrorism than you are.' I think that's a bad move, quite frankly."
Rimington mentions Guantánamo Bay, the practice of extraordinary rendition, and the invasion of Iraq - three issues which the majority in Britain's security and intelligence establishment opposed privately at the time.
She challenges claims, notably made by Tony Blair, that the war in Iraq was not related to the radicalisation of Muslim youth in Britain.
Read it and weep.
I've noticed increasingly that the "young people" seem to watch YouTube rather than that old-fashioned thing called "TV". Here's a nice piece in the Guardian reminding us that YouTube is much more than a super MTV (what's that?), but is fast turning into a kind of visual Wikipedia: if somebody was able to digitise it, you can probably find it.YouTube is best known for its offbeat videos that become viral sensations. But among its millions of clips is a treasure trove of rare and fascinating arts footage, lovingly posted by fans.
Being able to regard YouTube as a video commons: just one more reason to get rid of 18th-century copyright laws.
Posts
All Comments
To the extent possible under law,
glyn moody
has waived all copyright and related or neighbouring rights to
this work.
This work is published from:
United Kingdom.
