In Your Face

Has everyone gone Facebook mad? It certainly seems so, and apparently I'm not the only one to think so. But whatever your views of Facebook now, it looks increasingly likely that it's going to be very big.

As I mentioned recently, the first sign that it had aspirations to being more than just another social network was when it opened up its platform. Now, it has underlined the platform aspect by purchasing Parakey.

Who? you might well say. Well, this might give you a hint of why it's an interesting move:

Parakey is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive—e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars. In fact, it looks like a fairly ordinary Web site, which you can edit. You can go online, click through your files and view the contents, even tweak them. You can also check off the stuff you want the rest of the world to be able to see. Others can do so by visiting your Parakey site, just as they would surf anywhere else on the Web. Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too. Friends and relatives—and hackers—do not have direct access to your computer; they’re just visiting a site that reflects only the portion of your stuff that you want them to be able to see.

Interested? You should be.

In explaining Parakey, Ross cuts to the chase. “We all know ­people…who have all this content that they are not publishing stored on their computers,” he says. “We’re trying to persuade them to live their lives online.”

"Live their lives online": well, that explains why Facebook bought the outfit. Among other things, Parakey will let Facebook users twiddle endlessly with their profiles even when they're offline.

Oh, and that "Ross" is Blake Ross, one of the moving forces behind Firefox. Parakey is based on Firefox technology, and will be (partly) open source. Assuming that Facebook keeps those parts open source (and it's hard to see how it could avoid doing so without rewriting the code from scratch), that means that Facebook could well become something of an ally for free software.

Well, I suppose that's a good reason to join the Facebook stampede.

Your Money or Your Life

Remember patents? They're those things that are supposed to promote innovation. Take surgeons, for example: they would never invent new ways of saving lives without some kind of financial incentive to do so - I mean, why should they?

So it's only logical that patent lawyers should be encouraging surgeons to patent anything that might save lives:

"What it does is it provides something for other companies to work around. The patent is out there. It's wide open. The whole world looks at it and thinks, 'How do I get around it?' That inspires more creativity and more development," Raciti said.

Well, that's logical: let's put obstacles in the way of people trying to save lives - it's more of a challenge.

The medical community is weary. "It's not clear that providing a monopoly over a certain process promotes innovation in the field of patient care delivery," said Aaron Kesselheim, a patent attorney and doctor who conducts health policy research at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

"The legal concern is that physicians won't do something because they're concerned that somebody will sue them, and if that affects the care that they are trying to provide to the patients, then that's a negative," he said.

Sometimes you get the impression that patent lawyers really want to hated. (Via TechDirt.)

Selling Off the Family Spectrum Commons

Radio frequencies form a commons for each country. Mostly these have been enclosed through auctions selling them to the highest bidder. Whether that's a good idea is another matter, but assuming for a moment that you think it is, at the very least you'd try to get plenty of dosh for this precious resource.

Well, according to this fascinating, and extremely thorough, paper, that didn't happen in the US:

According to calculations presented in this paper, since 1993, the government has given to private interests as much as $480 billion in spectrum usage rights without public compensation. That comes to more than 90 percent of the value of spectrum usage rights it has assigned from 1993 through the present.

Now, admittedly "as much as $480 billion" includes zero, but I don't think that's the case here. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that the US public won't be getting. Which means that there are some companies - and corporate fatcats - who are richer by the same amount.

So, how about if we start treating like a commons instead? That way, you can be sure that everyone gets their fair share - unlike the situation in America.

Virtual Stars, Real Stars

For anyone who is sceptical about the possibilities of Second Life - and virtual worlds in general - point them at this rather impressive video. It is a recreation, in 3D, of Van Gogh's Starry Night, which grows before our eyes. Interesting to note, too, that if copyright lasted for ever (even minus a day), this kind of creative re-use would never be possible.

Moo Goes Sticky

Those irrepressible harvesters of the commons have added stickers to their range. All the wonderful features of Moo cards are there, including being able to pick and crop every image individually.

(Almost) Admiring Miro

I'm not a big fan of IP TV. After all, the Net is essentially everything TV isn't - interactive, non-linear, intelligent (well, some of it). But if you really must watch TV-like things online, the best thing to do is to check out Miro - the new name for Democracy Player (which always struck me as misleading). Speaking as a non-connoisseur of these things, it seems to do everything it should, it looks pretty cool - and it's free software. But only if you absolutely must.

The (Open) Source of Red Hat's Success

Continuing his great series of interviews with key people in the world of business open source, Matt Asay (does this man never sleep?) talks to Matthew Szulik, CEO of Red Hat. I wrote a lot about Red Hat in the early days, but I've not followed it so closely recently (bad boy), so it was fascinating to get an update on what is arguably the most successful and most important open source company. In particular, I found this revealing:

In sum, our belief is that the best management is the peer process, just as in open source. If you measure up to your peers at Red Hat, you thrive. If you don't, you either change or self-select out. When you find people that can do things in an "honest way," without a mercenary view of their assignment, you win. A lot of people don't like this approach, and they leave.

In other words, the best way to run an open source company is to use the open source methodology. Imagine that.

Seeing the Power of the Visual Commons

I've written before about Microsoft's Photosynth, which draws on the Net's visual commons - Flickr, typically - to create three-dimensional images. Here's another research project that's just as cool - and just as good a demonstration of why every contribution to a commons enriches us all:

What can you do with a million images? In this paper we present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user.

One of the most interesting discoveries was the following:

It takes a large amount of data for our method to succeed. We saw dramatic improvement when moving from ten thousand to two million images. But two million is still a tiny fraction of the high quality photographs available on sites like Picasa or Flickr (which has approximately 500 million photos). The number of photos on the entire Internet is surely orders of magnitude larger still. Therefore, our approach would be an attractive web-based application. A user would submit an incomplete photo and a remote service would search a massive database, in parallel, and return results.

In other words, the bigger the commons, the more everyone benefits.

Moreover:

Beyond the particular graphics application, the deeper question for all appearance-based data-driven methods is this: would it be possible to ever have enough data to represent the entire visual world? Clearly, attempting to gather all possible images of the world is a futile task, but what about collecting the set of all semantically differentiable scenes? That is, given any input image can we find a scene that is “similar enough” under some metric? The truly exciting (and surprising!) result of our work is that not only does it seem possible, but the number of required images might not be astronomically large. This paper, along with work by Torralba et al. [2007], suggest the feasibility of sampling from the entire space of scenes as a way of exhaustively modelling our visual world.

But that is only feasible if that "space of scenes" is a commons. (BTW, do check out the paper's sample images - they're amazing.)

Jathia’s Wager: Open Source Cinema

Maybe because films remain glamorous to some, applying open source ideas to cinema seems to be a perennial favourite. Here's another one, Jathia’s Wager:

Jathia’s Wager is a science fiction story about a young man living in an isolated community of humans, who must make a life changing decision about his future and his species.

Details of its open process:

Step 1: Initial Script is put online, press releases are issued and project is announced to the world (COMPLETED )

Step 2: Script changes and alternative versions are submitted and “hashed out in the forums.” Community votes (hopefully via digg if the community embraces this) on the scripts they like the most.

Step 3: Top 5 scripts are chosen from voting and resources (if you add tons of impossible effects, but no one donates resources to create those, then there’s not much we can do) and posted on the site.

Step 4: Casting / scene scouting starts in Los Angeles (of course everyone is free and encouraged to shoot their own versions as well). Videos and casting stuff will be posted online for the community to contribute to.

Step 5: Shooting, all raw video files are uploaded for the community to edit.

Step 6: Post production, editing, finishing touches, DVD authoring.

Step 7: 5 official versions of the same film are released. Links and posts to all derivatives will be posted in the forums and we’ll have successfully made a collaborative, open-source film that anyone can remake, reedit or reinterpret.

An Unintended Act of Open Government

Although unintentional in this case, here's a good example of why we need open government:

"Big Brother" plans to automatically hand the police details of the daily journeys of millions of motorists tracked by road pricing cameras across the country were inadvertently disclosed by the Home Office last night.

Leaked Whitehall background papers reveal that Home Office and transport ministers have clashed over plans for legislation this autumn enabling the police to get automatic "real-time" access to the bulk data from the traffic cameras now going into operation. The Home Office says the police need the data from the cameras, which can read and store every passing numberplate, "for all crime fighting purposes".

Thank goodness there won't be any function creep.

More Parallel Universes

Some while back I wrote a piece called "Parallel Universes" looking at the surprising similarities between the world of open source and open access. So I was interested to see that there's trouble 't mill over the use and misuse of the term "open access":

I don't know and I don't care what [Nature editor] Maxine means by "open" or "free". I care what the BBB [Budapest-Bethesda-Berlin] Declarations mean. Peter is not defining terms however he likes; he is working with published, widely accepted definitions. He is well within his rights to expect that other people will indeed use the same definitions: that is, after all, the point of having developed and published them. Nature does NOT have "many open access projects and products", it has one (barely) OA journal and the excellent Precedings, together with a number of commendable free-to-read initiatives (blogs, Nature Network, the various free-to-read web special collections, etc). "Open Access" is not a fuzzy buzzword that Maxine is free to define as she sees fit, and if she is going to start abusing it as marketing for Nature then she most certainly does need telling off.

Which is all rather similar to a discussion taking place in the computer world about who has the right to call themselves "open source".

Green Government, Open Government

Talking of open government:

To Chance in particular, and the Greens in general, the promoting of FOSS is ultimately the promotion of the party's own values. Simply encouraging the use of FOSS in public institutions, he suggests, would improve government, "both because it would be more focused on a just, equitable, and sustainable future and because it would force government to be more open, transparent, and participatory. We suffer from an incredibly centralized, opaque, and disempowering government in England and Wales. We desperately need the participatory ethic of free software to transform government."

BBC Hoist By Its Own Petard

Oh, this is rich:

A revised version of FairUse4WM reappeared on forums late last week, and the utility now effectively strips the DRM from iPlayer content allowing it to be copied and played into perpetuity rather than for the limited period intended by the BBC.

Which, of course, was inevitable. But what's droll is the BBC's spin:

"We know that some people can — and do — download BBC programmes illegally. This isn't the first piece of software to be hacked or bypassed. Nor will it be the last. No system is perfect. We believe that the overwhelming majority of licence-fee payers welcome this service and will want to use it fairly."

So, let's get this straight. The "overwhelming majority of licence-fee payers welcome this service and will want to use it fairly", while "some people can — and do — download BBC programmes illegally".

And yet the BBC insists on imposing DRM on the "overwhelming majority" who "want to use it fairly" - and so don't need DRM; meanwhile, the people who "can - and do - download BBC programmes illegally" will be able to get around the DRM anyway, as the BBC admits.

So DRM is pointless for both groups, and hence pointless for everyone. Moreover, it not only inconveniences the law-abiding majority, it locks some of them out entirely, in the case of Mac and GNU/Linux users.

God, what a mess the BBC is in - and not just logically.

Harry Potter 7: The End of an Era

In case you hadn't noticed, the last Harry Potter novel is coming out on Saturday. It's the end of an era - not just because it's the last, but also because, apparently:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows ... has hit BitTorrent.

Assuming this is actually Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and if the most closely-guarded text in the world of intellectual monopolies really is out, maybe it's time for the guardians of those monopolies to forget about them.

(Hint: the latest Harry Potter book does not consist purely of text, and the essence of reading it is not something you can download from BitTorrent.)

Chile Heats up the WIPO Debate

Wow, this was precisely the kind of thing I was calling for - but not expecting to happen:

In the wake of the recently concluded broadcasting negotiations at WIPO in June 2007 (Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights) where a proposed instrument for the protection of broadcasting organizations was put on cold storage but not terminated, a Chilean proposal on the examination of limitations and exceptions in the copyright area has come to the fore.

Chile has proposed that the WIPO copyright committee examine limitations and exceptions for the blind, educators and librarians. India has reinforced Chile’s reformist thrust by calling upon WIPO to consider socially relevant issues such as access to knowledge and education.

...

Chile’s multi-pronged endeavours to imbue the WIPO patent committee and the WIPO copyright committee with a more reflective and development- oriented approach is welcome and of significant strategic import to the Development Agenda and the access to knowledge (a2k) movement. In addition to the limitations and exceptions proposal tabled to the SCP, Chile’s proposal on patents and standards carries reinforces discussions that have begun to take place at the World Trade Organization and the Internet Governance Forum on remedies to mitigate the inherent tension between the public interest and patents in information and communications (ICT) standards.

These might seem tiny, tangential, even trivial issues, but don't be fooled: even raising them within the context of WIPO's hitherto hardline pro-intellectual monopolist framework is of huge symbolic significance. (Via IP Justice.)

Open Source War in Pakistan

Oh-oh, not good:

The emerging open source insurgency in Pakistan may have found its plausible promise [= alpha code release]: to defeat the Pakistani military establishment.

...

If true, Pakistan may devolve much faster than anticipated. Will we see it hollow out?

Let's hope Western governments have plenty of radiation detectors on order....

Gartner's Trough of Disillusionment

There is a scandal brewing over open standards in Europe:

On June 29 2007, the European Commission agency IDABC published document written on contract by Gartner initiating the revision of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and the Architecture Guidelines (AG) .

The first version of this very important document has been published in 2004 and introduced a strong support and request for open standards and xml for the exchange of data between administrations within Europe, as well as with the citizens. This has been relayed and used in many countries to support open standards as well.

This is now threatened in this new report EIF v2.0 by Gartner

This second version, not yet endorsed by the European Commission, nor by the member states, but that could well enter soon such an endorsement process, wants to update the previous version of the European Interoperability Framework but, contrary to the first version, it threatens explictely the good process of more open standards that had been a long time push of IDABC.

The core of the problem is the following passage from Gartner's report:

Gartner acknowledges the importance of open standards. IT vendors and system integrators should also recognize that open standards are the way to go. The era where proprietary standards lead to a sure base of loyal customers is fading away. IT is becoming just like any other industry where true added value and competitive pricing determine the winners.

Yet, Gartner recommends not to focus on the use of open standards per se. Whether open or not, standards are to further the deployment of public services. EIF v2.0 should facilitate the most profitable business model(s) of cost versus public value, under proper recognition of intellectual property rights, if any. The support for multiple standards allows a migration towards open standards when appropriate in the long run.

The use of 'open source' software may further the deployment of public services. However again, whether open source or not, it is the most viable software that should be allowed to survive in the infrastructure. So again, EIF v2.0 should facilitate multiple options to co-exist, and to compete.

This is completely daft. Saying

Gartner recommends not to focus on the use of open standards per se. Whether open or not, standards are to further the deployment of public services. EIF v2.0 should facilitate the most profitable business model(s) of cost versus public value

is like saying

Gartner recommends not to focus on the use of moral standards per se. Whether moral or not, standards are to further the deployment of public services. EIF v2.0 should facilitate the most profitable business model(s) of cost versus public value

In other words, it fails to take into account that focussing narrowly on "the most profitable business model(s) of cost versus public value" is short-sighted, because by definition, "not to focus on the use of open standards per se" means allowing closed standards. And so the long-term costs are going to be greater because of vendor lock-in. In fact, Gartner itself says this:

To facilitate evolution over time and to support the migration from one standard to another and to avoid vendor lock-in it is therefore paramount to design for support of multiple standards.

But it confuses multiple standards of any kind with multiple open standards. There are no easy migrations between different closed standards, or closed standards and open ones. "To facilitate evolution over time", *all* the standards must be open.

Around this deeply flawed core thesis, the rest of the report reads like a puff for Gartner's methodology - including its tiresomely pretentious Hype Cycle (talk about hype). Pretentious and useless: at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" it places - wait for it - IPv6. I hate to break it to Gartner, but IPv6 passed through that stage about eight years ago.

Give that the IDABC, which commissioned this study (who knows why) has hitherto been pretty sensible on open standards, we can only hope they consign this whole report to the bin where it belongs. To help it on its way, do sign the petition and send your (polite) comments to the IDABC before September as they have specifically requested:

Everyone who sees interoperability as an effective means to come to better pan-European eGovernment services is invited to read the document and reflect on its content.

IDABC is interested in your reactions.

A summary of reactions (that reach us before September 15, 2007) will be published on the IDABC web-site (http://ec.europa.eu/idabc) and will constitute another input into the revision process.

Really, an offer we can't - daren't - refuse.

Update: As I signed the petition I noticed that it insists on a full physical address - country isn't enough. This seems foolish to me, and is likely to lead to people not signing. Unless they were to enter random information in the unnecessary fields....

More Grist for the (Circumscribed) Copyright Mill

Although doing away with copyright altogether is probably not such a hot idea - after all, the GNU GPL, and the edifice of free software it supports, depends on it for its efficacy - there is increasing evidence that we should be limiting its scope.

Here's some more:

The 2001 Information Society Directive (2001/29/EC) is introduced thus: “If authors or performers are to continue their creative and artistic work, they have to receive appropriate reward for the use of their work…” (Recital 10). “A rigorous, effective system for the protection of copyright and related rights is one of the main ways of ensuring that European cultural creativity and production receive the necessary resources and of safeguarding the independence and dignity of artistic creators and performers”(Recital 11).

This study shows quite conclusively that current copyright law has empirically failed to meet these aims. The rewards to best-selling writers are indeed high but as a profession, writing has remained resolutely unprosperous.

Interestingly,

Compared to the UK, writers’ earnings are lower and less skewed in Germany. This may reflect a more regulated environment for copyright contracts in Germany. It may also reflect the globalised nature of English language markets.

More about the study, and links to its consituent parts can be found on this page.

The Open Library Opens Its Doors

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.

First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.

Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.

But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply "free to the people," as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it's more important than ever to be open.

Fine words, but turning them into reality is a monstrous undertaking. Not because any of the required technologies are that difficult to develop or implement, but simply because the current hypertrophied copyright system makes it impossible.

At best, the Open Library will provide us with a bunch of public domain texts like Project Gutenberg, but prettified, plus what looks like a wikified catalogue with tantalising info about all the other books we can't read online.

That's all great to have, and kudos is due to all those behind the project, but is but a pale imitation of what we could - should - have if copyright did its job of encouraging new creation, and got out of the way of such laudable projects.

Open Legislation

Given that it's clear what the source code of democracy is - its laws - an obvious thing to try would be to apply open source techniques to the process of drawing up legislation:

"In the world of open source, your contribution, vetted and approved by your peers, gets committed into the mainline in a completely transparent and accountable process," Amanda McPherson, director of marketing Email Marketing Software - Free Demo for the Linux Foundation, told LinuxInsider.

"If Joe Citizen could impact and view the legislative process in the way a Linux developer can, I believe the result would be superior legislation," she said. "Lawmakers would be judged on results, those with the most and best to contribute could do so, and special-interest groups working selfishly would be exposed."

Moreover, there's a technology just waiting for this kind of approach:

"Laws go through all kinds of markups, changes and amendments," Leyden said. "The process has evolved from making those changes on parchment to at least using word-processing documents, but it's not that big a step to think of moving to the next generation of tools and crafting a whole piece of legislation on a wiki."

Interestingly, one of the main voices quoted in these two articles on open legislation is Eben Moglen who - quite unsurprisingly - has many insightful comments on the idea. Yet another reason to read them.

The State of the Citizen Media Nation

The undisputed doyen of citizen media - aka open journalism - is Dan Gillmor. He's just published a splendid review of the field that is positively stuffed to the gunwales with links to the main sites and stories in this field. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this is now the single best place to start for those wishing to understand open journalism.

Why We Need a Knowledge Commons

Here's a neat device:

With Exbiblio, you have seamless, direct access to digital information and the world of the Internet. Imagine once again that you are reading your newspaper, but instead of tearing out an ad or article, writing a reminder or recording a voice message, you use your portable, hand-held scanner to capture just a snippet from the article or ad, swiping it across the text as if using a highlighter.

When you connect your Exbiblio scanner to the digital world -- for example, by wirelessly connecting to the "smart" phone or PDA you are carrying -- the Exbiblio solution instantly searches for the information you have captured, and digital versions of the paper document are found and stored.

Sounds cool - but it depends critically on having free access to that cloud of information. In other words, it depends on the existence of a readily accessible knowledge commons that it can draw upon seamlessly. If such devices had to pay for every snippet they pull down, the knock-on cost and infrastructural complexity required to keep track of who is demanding their shilling will kill it. (Via Open Access News.)

Net Radio: Death or Dishonour?

Well, look at this. After all the high drama about the imminent death of Net radio because of the exorbitant licensing rates being demanded, we have an interesting twist:

SoundExchange announced yesterday new terms of a proposal to address the concerns regarding the minimum fees for webcasting set by the Copyright Royalty Judges (CRJs).

Under the new proposal, to be implemented by remand to the CRJs, SoundExchange has offered to cap the $500 per channel minimum fee at $50,000 per year for webcasters who agree to provide more detailed reporting of the music that they play and work to stop users from engaging in “streamripping” – turning Internet radio performances into a digital music library.

In other words, we won't kill you provided you enslave yourself and your listeners through DRM'd music. (Via Ars Technica.)

Good Code, Ugly Code, Open Code

And talking of 0.01 code and self-deprecation:

I have released AjaxLife’s (very ugly and hackish) code under the revised BSD license. :D

You can find it at http://code.google.com/p/ajaxlife/. As it says, the code is messy. But eh.

That’s what you get when you throw something together over the weekend in a language you don’t know. And for added fun, part of the code was lost at some point (file corruption) and had to be recovered by decompiling. So, as I said. Ugly code. :p

Well done Linus, er, Katharine.

Not Really Patent At All

Hmm, I'm not really clear what's going on with this "European Interoperability Patent" (EIOP) stuff:

Essentially, it is an idea that is based on what he calls the concept of “soft IP”, which, he says, is encapsulated within the Blue Skies strand of the EPO’s Scenarios project. The EIOP would be an EU-wide patent granted by the EPO that would be “open”. In other words, EIOP owners would not be able to get injunctive relief – either preliminary or permanent in cases of infringement; instead, EIOP owners would effectively be signing up to the concept of licences of right, so that anyone who wanted to use a patent would be able to do so as long as an appropriate licensing fee was paid (it is a concept that exists under the laws of some European countries already, including the UK). If a fee could not be agreed, then the matter would go to the courts, which would adjudicate on what amount would be reasonable.

Actually, I can understand where IBM is going with this, but I'm less sure about the FFII on the basis of the following hints:

“The FFII has a new leadership and we think that it has changed, and become more mature. The FFII is critical if Europe is going to develop as somewhere in which to build a patent system that can exist in a more facilitative and less conflicting nature with open innovation models … the FFII has influence and a strong voice; something it proved in the CII debate. We feel there is now an opportunity to engage and have a constructive dialogue.”

CII refers to the dreaded "computer-implemented invention", and is basically a trick to get European software patents in through the back door. I do hope that the FFII is not going to do something silly. I obviously need to investigate further. (Via The Inquirer.)