12 June 2008
11 June 2008
The True Costs and Benefits of Open Access
One issue that has been repeatedly (and heatedly) debated since 1994 — when Open Access (OA) advocate Stevan Harnad first posted his "Subversive Proposal" — is a question that some might consider to be the most fundamental question of all for the research community in the digital age. That is, what are the essential costs of publishing a scholarly paper? To date, however, no one appears to have come up with an adequate answer.
So says Richard Poynder, who then reviews the situation with his usual thoroughness. However, he concludes:One thing is for sure: If OA ends up simply shifting the cost of scholarly communication from journal subscriptions to article processing charges (APCs) without any reduction in overall expenditure, and inflation continues unabated, many OA advocates will be sorely disappointed. And if that were to happen, then we can surely expect to see calls for a more radical reengineering of the scholarly communication system.
Well, maybe, but this omits an important point: even if the transition to open access produced absolutely zero savings, it would still achieve something invaluable: making scholarly communications available to all, not just the lucky few at institutions with subscriptions. That alone would make the exercise worthwhile.
10 June 2008
Peter Suber Writing Suberbly
Peter Suber is widely acknowledged as the linch-pin of the open access movement, but an ironic consequence of this is that his own writings on the subject can be overshadowed by the torrent of info he provides on Open Access News. So, in an attempt to do justice in this respect, here are a couple of noteworthy - maybe Suberb is the word - contributions.
The first is a stonker:Here's an epistemological argument for OA. It's not particularly new or novel. In fact, I trace it back to some arguments by John Stuart Mill in 1859. Nor is it very subtle or complicated. But it's important in its own right and it's importantly different from the moral and pragmatic arguments for OA we see more often.
The thesis in a nutshell is that OA facilitates the testing and validation of knowledge claims. OA enhances the process by which science is self-correcting. OA improves the reliability of inquiry.
After that you might prefer some lighter fare, ending on this upbeat note:The short-term outlook is turbulent. But long-term, there are good reasons to think that OA will become the default for new peer-reviewed research literature. Support for OA is growing among scholars, universities, libraries, learned societies, funding agencies, and governments. Even non-OA publishers are increasingly willing to experiment with it. We can implement OA today, without reforming or violating copyright law. OA publishing costs less than conventional publishing and even these costs don’t require new money; long-term, they can be covered by redirecting money now spent on non-OA journals. The economics of prestige temporarily favors older journals, and therefore non-OA journals, but high-quality OA journals are inexorably acquiring prestige to match their quality, and new OA journals launch every week. While non-OA publishers can still influence author decisions, they are powerless to stop the rise of lawful OA from those who are determined to seize rather than spurn the opportunities created by the internet.
The Battle of the Non-Papers
For anyone with any lingering doubts about the absurdity of intellectual monopolies and the organisations who peddle them, enter the non-paper:
A small group of countries opposing the inclusion of intellectual property-related issues in World Trade Organization negotiations has issued their response to an earlier “non-paper” that had called for IP issues to be integrated with the upcoming horizontal, or all-inclusive, negotiations at the WTO.
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The paper is referring to a 26 May proposal, in the form of another “non-paper” seeking to ensure that three major IP issues are on the table for the horizontal trade talks.
Recursive Publics: Hardly a Two-Bit Idea
For some years I have contemplated – and even planned out in some detail - a kind of follow-up to Rebel Code, which would look at the ways the ideas underlying free software have radiated out ever wider, to open content, open access, open courseware, open science – well, if you're reading this blog, you can fill in the rest. Happily, I couldn't find a publisher willing to take this on, so I was spared all the effort (non-authors have no idea what an outrageous amount of work books entail).
Now someone else has gone ahead, done all that work, and written pretty much that book, albeit with a more scholarly, anthropological twist than I could aspire to. Moreover, in true open source fashion, its author, Christopher Kelty, has made it freely available, not only to read, but to hack. The following paragraph expresses the core idea of this (and my) book:The significance of Free Software extends far beyond the arcane and detailed technical practices of software programmers and “geeks” (as I refer to them herein). Since about 1998, the practices and ideas of Free Software have extended into new realms of life and creativity: from software to music and film to science, engineering, and education; from national politics of intellectual property to global debates about civil society; from UNIX to Mac OS X and Windows; from medical records and databases to international disease monitoring and synthetic biology; from Open Source to open access. Free Software is no longer only about software—it exemplifies a more general reorientation of power and knowledge.
I've only speed-read it – it's a dense and rich book – but from what I've seen, I can heartily recommend it to anyone who finds some of the ideas on this blog vaguely amusing: it's the work of a kindred spirit. The only thing I wasn't so keen on was its title: “Two Bits” Now, call me parochial, but the only connotation of “two bits” for me is inferiority, as in a two-bit solution. A far better title, IMHO, would have been one of the cleverest concepts in the book: that of “recursive publics”:Recursive publics are publics concerned with the ability to build, control, modify, and maintain the infrastructure that allows them to come into being in the first place and which, in turn, constitutes their everyday practical commitments and the identities of the participants as creative and autonomous individuals. In the cases explored herein, that specific infrastructure includes the creation of the Internet itself, as well as its associated tools and structures, such as Usenet, e-mail,the World Wide Web (www), UNIX and UNIX-derived operating systems, protocols, standards, and standards processes. For the last thirty years, the Internet has been the subject of a contest in which Free Software has been both a central combatant and an important architect.
By calling Free Software a recursive public, I am doing two things: first, I am drawing attention to the democratic and political significance of Free Software and the Internet; and second, I am suggesting that our current understanding (both academic and colloquial) of what counts as a self-governing public, or even as “the public,” is radically inadequate to understanding the contemporary reori entation of knowledge and power.
The arch-recursionist himself, RMS, would love that.
Nearly Perfect Neelie
Looks like Neelie really gets it these days:
“I know a smart business decision when I see one — choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed,” Ms. Kroes told a conference in Brussels. “No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one.”
Now, if she could just change "open standards" to "open source"....
UK's Second City in Second Life
Whatever happened to Second Life? Well, somebody's still using it, apparently:to create a geo-coded map within Second Life that enables you to explore a scaled 3D version of Birmingham, UK in-world, access geo-tagged BBC and CNN World News, and more.
(Via New World Notes.)
I Came, ISO, I Didn't Conquer
The OOXML farce continues:Four national standards body members of ISO and IEC – Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela – have submitted appeals against the recent approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard.
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According to the ISO/IEC rules, a document which is the subject of an appeal cannot be published as an ISO/IEC International Standard while the appeal is going on. Therefore, the decision to publish or not ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an ISO/IEC International Standard cannot be taken until the outcome of the appeals is known.
09 June 2008
Politics 2.0
This is why we will win:It used to be so easy - the government could just set up a plan, push through it, let the media do its part. But the web 2.0 turned nearly every single Korean into a media figure. Now everyone ventilates his or her ideas on the internet, to which all others are responding back and forth - the amount of communication taking place grows exponentially. It ain't simple and easy anymore. If you want to lead people, you should do it in a 2.0 way, or you're doomed.
Who knows? Maybe even the UK could be like that in a couple of decades....
My Oh EMI
This is getting interesting. After appointing a top Googler as its "digital president", EMI Music has now nabbed Cory Ondrejka, most recently at Linden Lab, and the main technical brains behind Second Life:Two weeks ago, I joined EMI Music as SVP of Digital Strategy.
Why EMI? By hiring Douglas Merrill, EMI has demonstrated a commitment to capitalize on all the technology available to make the music experience better for artists and fans. At Linden, the most important changes I drove were blends of technology and licensing, so when Douglas asked me to join him at EMI, I jumped at the chance. Music touches everyone in the world and is uniquely part of our lives -- how could I not take this challenge?
Two people who really get the digital world at the top of EMI Music: surely *something* good must come of that?
RMS Adds a Little Oyster Sauce
A few weeks back, there was much rejoicing in the open source world over the following story:
Open-source software helped London's Oyster card system move past a proprietary roadblock, an open-source conference in London was told last week.
The Oyster contactless card system, which handles payments for travel on London's buses and Tube system, suffered from lock-in to proprietary systems, which hindered developments to the online payment systems, said Michael Robinson, a senior consultant with Deloitte, at the Open Source Forum event in London. "The hosting was on a proprietary system, centred on one application," he said. "It demanded certain hardware, and was locked into one design of infrastructure."
I refrained from commenting because I have big problems with the Oyster system. It seems I'm not the only one:After our coverage of London's Oyster card, which uses Linux for its online payment system, we had a response from Richard Stallman, head of the Free Software Foundation.
RMS explains why he is/I am unhappy:Each Oyster card has a unique ID, which it transmits when it is used. So if you make the mistake of connecting the card with your name, then Big Brother knows exactly when and where you enter the tube, system and where you leave. For the surveillance-mad government of the UK, this is like a dream come true. Since the card contains an RFID, it can be scanned any time, anywhere - not just when you think you are using it.
Moreover, trying to ban such uses of free software would be futile:Some have proposed that free software licenses such as the GNU General Public License should restrict use of the software to do unethical things. (Military use was the one most often suggested.) I've concluded that this would be misguided. A general tool will inevitably be used for all sorts of things. We cannot prevent surveillance, or wars of aggression, [by] trying to prohibit the use of certain operating systems for these purposes, any more than we could do so by putting restrictions on the use of pens or chairs. The worst evils are committed by governments, and since they make the copyright laws on which free software licenses are based, they could always vote themselves an exception -- or use non-free software.
He does, however, have some practical suggestions for users of London Transport:To protect yourself from surveillance, you must pay cash. It is also a good idea to swap empty Oyster cards with other people from time to time. That way, even if Big Brother finds out which card you have today, he can't use its number to look up all your movements for the past N years. And keep the card in aluminum foil whenever you are not using it -- that way it can't be scanned when it shouldn't be.
Ah yes, the aluminium foil - never leave home without it....
The New Pirate's Dilemma
The Pirate's Dilemma:The Pirate’s Dilemma tells the story of how youth culture drives innovation and is changing the way the world works. It offers understanding and insight for a time when piracy is just another business model, the remix is our most powerful marketing tool and anyone with a computer is capable of reaching more people than a multi-national corporation.
To its credit, it is following its own philosophy:Why would an author give away a book for free? Obviously it makes a lot of sense given the arguments in this particular book, but it’s true for all authors that piracy isn’t a threat, it’s an opportunity.
There are millions of books on amazon.com, and on average each will sell around 500 copies a year. The average American is reading just one book a year, and that number is falling. The problem (to quote Tim O’Reilly) isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. Authors are lucky to be in a business where electronic copies aren’t considered substitutes for physical copies by most people who like reading books (for now at least).
By treating the electronic version of a book as information rather than property, and circulating it as widely as possible, many authors such as Paulo Coelho and Cory Doctorow actually end up selling more copies of the physical version. Pirate copies of The Pirate’s Dilemma are out there online anyway, and they don’t seem to have harmed sales. My guess is they are helping. To be honest, I was flattered that the book got pirated in the first place.
Just one problem: To download, simply click on the link above or the book cover pictured on the left. You’ll be taken to a checkout page where you can set the price anywhere from $0.00 upwards.
How much to put in?
08 June 2008
No ID Card Function Creep? Pull the Other One
Here's an interesting blast from the past, courtesy of that nice Mr Charles Clarke, one-time home secretary:
This letter was sent about eight years ago as a reply to my Member of Parliament, Bill Cash, in response to the second of two letters I wrote complaining about the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill that was then being considered by Parliament.
As you can see from the second paragraph on the second page, the Minister of State responsible for the legislation categorically denied that access to 'communications data' would be extended to local authorities.
Got that? No access to communications data by local authorities making use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, word of honour.
Oh, but wait:Powers designed to allow spying on terror suspects have been used by South Kesteven District Council to investigate anti-social behaviour and fly tipping.
The council carried out surveillence on the public nine times between April 2007 and April 2008, permitted by legislation in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
Now, tell me again why we should trust the UK government over ID cards? At least it seems a few other people are beginning to have their doubts:The government should limit the data it collects on citizens for its ID card scheme to avoid creating a surveillance society, a group of MPs has warned.
The Home Affairs Select Committee called for proper safeguards on the plans for compulsory ID cards to stop "function creep" threatening privacy.
It wants a guarantee the scheme will not be expanded without MPs' approval.
Maybe the Home Secretary could give her word that will never happen....
06 June 2008
GFDL Smackdown: RMS vs. Beijing Underground
Seems like the Beijing underground authorities have infringed on an image from Wikipedia, which uses the GNU Free Documentation Licence: time to call for RMS?A Subway map, drawn back and uploaded onto the Wikipedia back in 2004, became some kind of hit icon in the more underground part of the Chinese capital, with the map being used by the Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall (on the 2nd floor exhibits and in the 4th floor 4D movie hall) — and now, by the Beijing Subway.
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Obviously, they had no idea what the GFDL meant. Quite frankly, the guy that did the map could sue them — but we’ve never seen a GFDL lawsuit.
Maybe it's time we did....
ACTA's Unspeakable Acts
It seems that the Mighty behind the imminent ACTA are aware that what they are up to is literally unspeakable:
I’ve recently heard through a grapevine that ACTA negotiants have reportedly signed non-disclosure agreements as a condition of their participation in this week’s secret closed-door meeting in Geneva.
This is an amazing and frightening step backwards in the history of global governance. It also epitomizes the ACTA negotiants’ dismissive attitude towards the importance of credible, transparent trade policy-making in the current global environment.
Anyone who would seek to radically transform the world’s trade in intangible assets without the participation of most of the world’s governments has learned little from the Asian Financial Crisis, the Iraq War, or the ongoing real estate and credit catastrophe.
Why isn't the mainstream media up in arms about this? Or are they too busy contemplating their own growing impotence and irrelevance? Some of us have been warning about this for six months....
Open Hardware is...Hard
The Economist does one of its periodic "what's going on in that wacky world of open source" pieces, mercifully not as fundamentally flawed as earlier ones. This is about open hardware (OpenMoko, Chumby, Bug Labs, RepRap), and why it's, er, hard:In addition to publishing all the software code for a device, for example, makers of open-source hardware generally reveal the physical information needed to build a device, including schematics, materials and dimensions. This is not something manufacturers normally do, and takes time and effort. Supplying open-source hardware is necessarily, therefore, more time-consuming and complex. “It can’t be as simple as open-source software,” says Peter Semmelhack, the founder of Bug Labs, a company based in New York that sells open-source hardware modules to put into other devices. “It has chips, schematics and things coming from many sources.” And suppliers of those many parts are not always interested in going open source, which further complicates matters. OpenMoko tries to use chips with open specifications, says Mr Moss-Pultz, though some chipmakers are reluctant to play along. “It’s like they’re taking their pants off in public,” he says.
Bill Gates' Closed Source World
Here's a frightening thought: Bill Gates is not so much giving up on his misguided closed-source approach to software as moving on to apply it to all the world's most pressing problems:Finally, Bill Gates got me thinking a lot. His speech on what he is doing next was well worth attending. Bill's thesis is that if we can apply the principles of capitalism to solving the world's problems, we can eradicate hunger, poverty, disease, lack of power and climate change. Market and financial incentives alone are insufficient. We should all acting based upon self-interest and incentivized to work in that self-interest. Governments can help with tax incentives, but giving recognition to those companies and individuals are potentially more powerful. Companies should also be incentivized not to give money, but talent, which in turn provides recognition of the individual and organization making a difference. This recognition can be its own market-based reward since it will benefit the company in the competitive marketplace. This approach can be used to provide not just manpower, but solutions to accessibility of information, medicine and healthcare.
The Vista solution to hunger, poverty, disease, lack of power and climate change? Eeek.
Expensive Oil and the Analogue World
Fascinating stuff:We usually think about technological improvements in productivity as benefiting the highly skilled and educated, and disenfranchising the poorly skilled and uneducated, but what I find most interesting about globalization in an era of $127 dollar-a-barrel oil is that blue-collar workers who make physical things in the West will stand to benefit, newly protected from foreign competition by energy tariffs, while white-collar workers who live off their wits will still feel the immense pressure of competing with everyone else in the world.
05 June 2008
Welsh TV over IP: Yeah, But Why?
As someone who has a Welsh name and not a little Welsh genetic heritage, I'm a big fan of expanding the provision of material in Welsh. But spending lots of dosh on yet another TV over IP platform ain't the way to do that:
Welsh-language broadcaster S4C (hardly rolling in it, thanks to digital TV launches and falling audiences in the multichannel era) has teamed with VC house Wesley Clover to invest £9.5 in Inuk, an Abercynon-based TV-over-broadband operator.
Inuk packages channels under its Freewire brand, including Freeview stations and some premium channels. Inuk also does VoIP. Both are targeted at student halls of residence (now up to 100,000 students), old people's homes etc.
S4C, which operates in place of Channel 4 on analogue platforms, is funded from advertising and a £97 million annual public grant. The investment comes via its S4CDM commercial unit.
Bizarre how normally sane broadcasters lose their marbles over IP-based solutions.
What's Wrong with this Picture?
Ignoring the parodistic language, that is:
Essentially, with the Internet, capitalism gifts the masses with a false commons where people can work, off the clock, creating information and relationships that the ruling class can enclose, appropriate, commodify, and sell back to us at a later date. It’s a way of letting the process of primitive accumulation work as a perpetual, and because of the stagnation of the economies in the advanced capitalist countries, vital, supplement to the mechanism of exploitation, and one that should be seen alongside the other forms of primitive accumulation that are occurring right now and are, for sure, much more important: the direct seizure of Iraqi resources, the copyrighting and commodifying of the material of our bodies, and most obviously, the accumulation by dispossession that is occurring in Africa, in China, in Latin America, as capitalism pushes to its limits and attempts to expunge from the earth any trace of commonly-held land.
What's wrong with it? Well, centrally, it looks at things purely in monetary terms: that everything has a price, and that everything has to be paid for. In many ways, the central insight of commons-based activities is that there are things of worth beyond money, things that capitalism really can't capture (luckily).
Or as Michel Bauwens puts it in his own reply in the same post:The last thing we want and need to do is the be so mentally colonized by the logic of market exchange that all we can and want to ask is just for a bigger piece of the pie. The key question is: how can we both preserve the social achievements of participation and peer production, and make a living at the same time. Out of the answers to this question will come the new social forms.
Where's Walt? On Firefox 3
Walt Mossberg wields much power in the US, so the following is significant:My verdict is that Firefox 3.0 is the best Web browser out there right now, and that it tops the current versions of both IE and Safari in features, speed and security. It is easy to install and easy to use, even for a mainstream, non-technical user.
04 June 2008
Openness in the Middle Kingdom
The most senior Chinese official jailed for sympathising with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests has urged the leadership to make public the events that led to the government's decision to crush the pro-democracy movement.
The demonstrations, which lured more than a million people on to Beijing's streets, ended in a military crackdown on June 4 of that year. Now a fading memory, the massacre is still taboo in the Chinese media.
Bao Tong, once the top aide to purged Party chief Zhao Ziyang, argued that China has been praised for its transparency in handling the devastating May 12 earthquake and should also reveal the rifts in the leadership that led to the massacre.
"Through this quake ... they have tasted the benefits of openness and should know that openness is better than being closed," Bao told Reuters in an interview at his Beijing home.
Sounds good to me.
Fab(bers)
And talking of fabbers, this is cool (and open source):Adrian (left) and Vik (right) with a parent RepRap machine, made on a conventional rapid prototyper, and the first complete working child RepRap machine, made by the RepRap on the left. The child machine made its first successful grandchild part at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK, a few minutes after it was assembled.
That is, a fabber that can replicate itself....
Can the singularity be far behind?
Hacking the Analogue
This digital stuff is all very well, but how can you hack it? Well, maybe along the lines of these hackable T-shirts:C-Shirt shirts each come with a scannable little QR (Quick Response) code in the corner. If you see a C-Shirt that you like, worn by someone walking around town, you can scan the QR code with your mobile phone. (Especially if you're in Japan where people scan QR codes with their phones all the time.) Your phone then captures the shirt's unique URL on the Nota website, where you can load it up and edit the design however you like.
Each design is given a Creative Commons license (that's what the C stands for) according to the wishes of the creator. Once you've got it how you like it, you can have it shipped to you just like any other T-shirt website would do.
So this is how it would work.
Hackable (physical) objects that had digital blueprints would display (discreetly) the QR code, allowing you to download the blueprint and hack it, before uploading it to the supplier. All we need are some fabbers....
TheyWorkForYou Wants YouToWorkForThem
Talking of wisdom of crowds, here's one of my favourite sites, TheyWorkForYou, attempting to harness it in order to make politics more transparent:Video speech matching
TheyWorkForYou has video of the House of Commons from the BBC, and the text of Hansard from Parliament. Now we need your help to match up the two.
We've written a little Flash app where you can (hopefully) match up the written speech being displayed to what's playing on the video. We'll then store your results and use them to put the video, timestamped to the right location, on the relevant page of TheyWorkForYou.
Web 2.0 at its best.
Harvesting the Wisdom of Crowds
Here's a clever idea: use customer reviews to fine-tune your product description. After all, reviews by their very nature tend to be brutally honest, so it's a great place to find out what customers really think. Moreover, you discover what they really like (great for copy) and dislike (better tell the development people....)
Ace Acer
Computer manufacturers are beginning to see the light:Acer sees two killer apps with Linux on computers: operation and cost. Its flavour of Linux will boot in 15 seconds compared to minutes for Windows, and the open source operating system can extend battery life from five to seven hours.
At the same time, the company expects that the price differential of Linux will make the offering attractive for consumers at the low-cost end of the market.
"Microsoft's operating system typically costs around £50 per unit," said David Drummond, UK managing director at Acer. "On a £1,000 PC that is peanuts, but on a £200 computer it is a major issue."
And Acer won't be the last, either: first a drip, then a gush, then a raging torrent....
Open Fashion
There is a theoretical framework (at least) around the fashion industry that supports the argument that nothing is an original idea. The fashion industry makes an excellent exemplar microcosm of this concept in action. Fashion trends gain popularity and then wane and over time different trends are re-appropriated (think the come back of fluro right now). When new ideas or concepts emerge if may become the next big trend if other designers analyse it, take influence from it and incorporate elements into their own works. Pretty soon this becomes a trend, and eventually a fashion convention.
But what if designers explicitly allowed this reuse and adaption? What if these kinds of activities and norms were formalised using the law as an instrument? What would this mean for the fashion industry?
Discuss....
03 June 2008
Microsoft Backtracks Further on Windows XP
This is getting truly hilarious:Microsoft has further extended the life of Windows XP so that computer makers can include the operating system on low-cost desktop PCs, the company announced at the Computex trade show on Tuesday.
Microsoft has been under pressure from computer makers to provide a version of its OS for an emerging class of very low-cost laptops and desktops. Its new Windows Vista OS is widely seen as too resource-hungry for those machines.
In April Microsoft extended its deadline for selling Windows XP licenses for low-cost laptops like the Asus Eee PC. It had originally planned to stop selling most XP licenses on June 30.
At Computex on Tuesday it said it has now also extended the deadline for low-cost desktops. PC makers can now include Windows XP in those systems until 2010, the same as the deadline for low-cost laptops, said Rob Young, a senior director with Microsoft's OEM group.
What's the betting that in a few months time Microsoft will extend this to yet more PCs? Because if it doesn't, I can see a jolly interesting black market developing: "Psst: wanna buy some hot XP discs?"
02 June 2008
Opening the Floodgates
One thing I've never understood is why more low-cost PC manufacturers don't routinely include free software with their offerings. After all, it's the perfect way to provide all the capabilities most users need without increasing the price, or, indeed, taking away the possibility of adding certain other non-free software later.
Perhaps it's simply that PCs haven't been cheap enough for it to matter so much given Microsoft's deep discounts for hardware companies. That's another great thing about the ultraportables: they really do take down prices to new levels.
Against that background, maybe this interesting news will finally signal the opening of the floodgates: a German review of the new Asus Eee PC 900, running Windows XP, that comes not only with the utterly useless Microsoft Works package, but also StarOffice, Sun's supported version of OpenOffice.org. (Via Erwin Tenhumberg.)
30 May 2008
Blender's Big Buck Bunny
Is out:As a follow-up to the successful project Orange’s “Elephants Dream”, the Blender Foundation initiated another open movie project. Again a small team (7) of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community have been invited to come together to work in Amsterdam from October 2007 until April 2008 on completing a short 3D animation movie. The team members will get a great studio facility and housing in Amsterdam, all travel costs reimbursed, and a fee sufficient to cover all expenses during the period.
The creative concept of “Peach” was completely different as for “Orange”. This time it is “funny and furry”!
The Blender Foundation and Blender community have been the main financiers for Peach. As for the previous open movie, a pre-sale campaign to purchase the DVD set in advance will be organized.
Additional support from sponsors and subsidy funds has been realized as well.
Peach also was the first Open Project hosted by the new Blender Institute in Amsterdam. This will make the project more independent, without much involvement of production partners, and also will ensure continuity.
Absurdistan Strikes Again
A little while back I was bemoaning this kind of stuff:
Unbelievably it calls itself Digistan, apparently to indentify with the fascist terrorists based in countries and regions using the Farsi-based suffix “stan.”
I see that the Sultana of Absurdistan, Michelle Malkin, has managed to top even that:The US chain Dunkin' Donuts has pulled an advert following complaints that the scarf worn by a celebrity chef offered symbolic support for Islamic extremism.
29 May 2008
Two Poisonous Proposals: Patents and Chlorine
We have a new enemy, it seems. It's called the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC), and here's one sharp analysis of what it's up toTEC which comprises EU and US high level representatives put a substantive harmonisation of patent law on its agenda. Substantive patent law covers what is patentable or not. The attempt to impose the low US standards on Europe via the Substantive Patent Law Treaty (SPLT) process utterly failed at the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Also progress in the WIPO B+ subgroup (without developing nations) could not be reached. Now the TEC is used as a new forum to push forward with lowering patentability standards through the back door. The TEC is a closed process, and sits outside the WIPO multilateral treaty talks. Since WIPO participants Brazil, India, and China began to fight EU-US proposals for ever more aggressive patents, the EU and US have begun their own bilateral talks.
Interestingly, the TEC is not content with a metaphorical poisoning of the computer industry, but wants to poison the entire European Union literally, with chlorine-soaked chickens:Members of Parliament from all political horizons have reacted with fury to a Commission proposal yesterday (28 May) to re-allow imports of poultry rinsed with chemicals, stemming mainly from the United States.
Concretely, the Commission wants to allow businesses to use four currently banned anti-microbal substances to decontaminate poultry carcasses.
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But MEPs, meeting in Parliament's Environment Committee, were incensed by the decision, which they say contradicts Community food production standards. "The chlorination of chicken intended for human consumption is not acceptable for the EU […] Such food production methods are at variance with the relevant Community standards, and threatening to the EU's entire set of food production standards and rules," states an EP press release.
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If approved, the proposal would effectively lift an 11-year ban on US poultry, which are generally treated with these processes.
The US has been pushing for the ban to be lifted for years but to no avail. However, the issue was recently pinpointed as a top priority in the new "Transatlantic Economic Council" process, which aims to remove remaining regulatory obstacles hampering trade and investment between the two economic giants.
Ah well, at least the TEC is consistent in its aims.
ID Cards: Scandalous as Well as Idiotic
This is outrageous:A Conservative government would have to compensate suppliers of the National Identity Scheme for lost profits as well as costs if it cancelled the project.
"To guarantee these payments knowing that a future Conservative government has already said it will scrap ID cards is improper and quite extraordinary," shadow home secretary David Davis MP told the Financial Times on 24 May 2008, citing the convention that one Parliament may not bind a subsequent one.
Davis wrote to the potential suppliers of the scheme in February, giving formal notice that the Tories would cancel the scheme if elected.
The Home Office told GC News that the contracts include break clauses, which if exercised would mean the government paying costs and an element of lost profits. "It's based on how far the contract has got and various other factors," a spokesperson said, adding that these were standard contractual arrangements following Office of Government Commerce guidelines.
The spokesperson added that "nothing has been created bespoke" to deal with the Conservatives' intentions, and that the figures involved in cancellation are commercially confidential.
In other words, the UK government is trying to use a kind of financial blackmail to keep its idiotic projects going: continue or cough up. And to add insult to injury, it cloaks its activities in secrecy. What a morally corrupt bunch.
Taxing Intellectual Monopolies
Here's an interesting thought:He also reported research that demonstrates patent renewal fees can be used to improve the innovation incentives generated by patent rights. Professor Schankerman set out an analysis of renewal fees as a tax on the property right conferred by a patent, and proposed that the effective tax rate be adjusted to provide socially optimal incentives. His analysis suggests that existing renewal fees impose a highly regressive tax on patents, and suggested that renewal fees should be very substantially increased, especially in later years, to make the effective taxation rate progressive.
Imposing high renewal fees would be a disincentive to file frivolous patents. It would also usefully shift discussion of intellectual monopolies to a more objective, economics-based analyses. That's good, because the evidence that such monopolies are not economically justifiable is overwhelming (as the Gowers Review noted in the context of increasing the term of copyright for music performance.)
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