If any further proof were needed of the fading line between real and virtual, here comes a story about Google Maps moving beyond the tangible:The fictional continent of Azeroth in the World of Warcraft now has an area that uses Google Maps API. The map, if we may add, is amazingly accurate. Accordingly, there are over 15,000 data points covering 69 resources with their exact map location in the WoW database.
I can't wait for the virtual mashups.
The Gowers Review is now out. I've not had time to read it all yet, but there's a good summary in the Treasury's press release:Whilst the Review concludes that the UK has a fundamentally strong IP system, it sets out important targeted reforms. The reforms aim to:
* strengthen enforcement of IP rights to protect the UK's creative industries from piracy and counterfeiting;
* provide additional support for British businesses using IP in the UK and abroad; and
* strike the right balance to encourage firms and individuals to innovate and invest in new ideas while ensuring that markets remain competitive and that future innovation is not impeded.
There's some good news in this:To ensure the correct balance in IP rights the review recommends:
* ensuring the IP system only proscribes genuinely illegitimate activity. The Review recommends introducing a strictly limited 'private copying' exception to enable consumers to format-shift content they purchase for personal use. For example to legally transfer music from CD to their MP3 player;
* enabling access to content for libraries and education establishments - to ensure that the UK's cultural heritage can be adequately stored for preservation and accessed for learning. The Review recommends clarifying exceptions to copyright to make them fit for the digital age; and
* recommending that the European Commission does not change the status quo and retains the 50 year term of copyright protection for sound recordings and related performers' rights.
But I worry about what the following will mean in practice:With the music industry losing as much as 20 per cent of annual turnover to piracy and counterfeiting, the Review recommends strengthening enforcement of IP rights through:
* new powers and duties for Trading Standards to take action against infringement of copyright law;
* IP crime recognised as an area for police action in the National Community Safety Plan;
* tougher penalties for online copyright infringement - with a maximum 10 years imprisonment;
* lowering the costs of litigation - by using mediation and consulting on the use of fast-track litigation. The Review acknowledges that prohibitive legal costs affect the ability of any to defend and challenge IP; and
* consulting on the use of civil damages as a deterrent for IP infringement.
If this means going after large-scale counterfeiters, well and good. But if we're talking about "tougher penalties" and "police action" for all kinds creative uses - mashups etc. - then there are going to be big problems.
Parenthetically, here's a characteristically wise and well-written piece by Larry Lessig in today's FT about one aspect of the report. He's worried that the Gowers recommendation on not changing the status quo for sound recordings may be ignored by the UK Government to keep some of its industry chums happy:There is not much doubt about what it will say on this proposal. There is much more doubt about whether the government will follow the report's sensible advice.
Lessig then makes his usual sensible pitch about orphan works, including with the following splendid peroration:There are some who believe that copyright terms should be perpetual. Britain did the world a great service when it resolved that debate almost 300 years ago, by establishing one of the earliest copyright regimes to limit copyright to a fixed term. It could now teach the world a second important lesson: any gift of term extension should only go to those who ask.
Today I received an email from a service I signed up to recently. I'd forgotten about it because it dealt with the apparently yawn-worthy subject of what my local Member of Parliament said. In fact, the service promises to deliver to me, freshly-baked, all the wit and wisdom of said Honourable Member.
Now, truth to tell, what the chap opined about the number of buses on Chelsea bridge was less than gripping. But the point is, I now know when he speaks, and what he says. Not only that, the information on the site TheyWorkForYou.com presents a gloriously Web 2.0-ified version of Parliamentary speeches, complete with Ajaxy popups, and links to more information about MPs than you could shake an identity card at.
In short, the service turns the whole area into a data wonderland. This is what open politics should be. Thanks: YouReallyReallyDoWorkForMe.
Today's Web user depends on search - well, I do, at least. But search/Google is really only doing words. And, as any fule kno, words is easy. Now video, that's quite a different matter.
So the appearance of any site claiming to make videos searchable is at least worth a look, so to speak. Coull.tv is one such:coull.tv enables you to activate objects within a video - making people, objects and other items clickable. Anybody can then add tags and comments describing the video and or the objects in that video. This enables the video or parts of it to be easily found; the more popular tags and comments become, the more often coull.tv will suggest them in related searches. coull.tv will use the power of the community to help categorize and tag every element of a video. coull.tv has no pre-roll or post-roll advertising in the way of the viewing experience.
There are two important elements here. First, the fact that elements within a video can be demarcated and made clickable. But that on its own doesn't make a search engine: it just turns video flow into discrete elements. The second part of the coull.tv equation is to get users to do the difficult bit: indexing all those elements. In fact, this is probably the only way video indexing is going to be done for a long while. Automatic recognition through some kind of AI is just too difficult currently.
God knows, the last thing we need is another video sharing site; happily, coull.tv seems to be searching for something more. (Via John Battelle's Searchblog.)
If you go to Dell's main site at www.dell.com, you have an unexpected option on the pop-up list of countries and regions at the bottom, as this post shows. Yes, Dell really seems to get this Second Life lark.
One of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 is the ability to combine data from various sources - the mashup. And yet, in a sense, mashups so far have been purely additive: you take something and add it to something else to create a third. The two sources rarely meet in any deep way to forge some truly new information or insight, other than ones born of clever data representation (not to be sneezed at, either).
That's what makes the new Swivel service important. The Web site reveals nothing currently, but TechCrunch has some tantalising details:the site allows users to upload data - any data - and display it to other users visually. The number of page views your website generates. Or a stock price over time. Weather data. Commodity prices. The number of Bald Eagles in Washington state. Whatever. Uploaded data can be rated, commented and bookmared by other users, helping to sort the interesting (and accurate) wheat from the chaff. And graphs of data can be embedded into websites. So it is in fact a bit like a YouTube for Data.
But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof). Compare gas prices to presidential approval ratings or UFO sightings to iPod sales. Track your page views against weather reports in Silicon Valley. See if something interesting occurs.
And better yet, Swivel will be automatically comparing your data to other data sets in the background, suggesting possible correlations to you that you may never have noticed.
This is really heavy stuff, and will allow truly new information, and new kinds of information, to emerge from the comparison of other data - something that gets stronger the more data that is uploaded. And what makes me think it's going to be hugely successful is that it has a viable business model attached:Not all data will be public. The companies business model is to provide the service for free for public data, and charge a fee for data that is kept private. Private data can still be compared by the owner to public data sets.
Which is exactly what you want: all the benefit of the public data, but none of the issues of sharing your own. Essentially, this allows limited private grazing of a new data commons, whose overall creation and care is paid for in part by that grazing. Brilliant.
Update: Swivel is now up, in beta at least. Inevitably, there's not much to see yet.
Here's an interesting twist on the Digg idea: a site that does not merely vote stories up or down, but which rates them in terms of their reliability - quality, not mere popularity:In recent years, the consolidation of mainstream media, combined with the rise of opinion news and the explosion of new media outlets, have created a serious problem for democracy: many people feel they can no longer trust the news media to deliver the information they need as citizens.
To address this critical issue, NewsTrust is developing an online news rating service to help people identify quality journalism - or "news you can trust." Our members rate the news online, based on journalistic quality, not just popularity. Our beta website and news feed feature the best and the worst news of the day, picked from hundreds of alternative and mainstream news sources.
This non-profit community effort tracks news media nationwide and helps citizens make informed decisions about democracy. Submitted stories and news sources are carefully researched and rated for balance, fairness and originality by panels of citizen reviewers, students and journalists. Their collective ratings, reviews and tags are then featured in our news feed, for online distribution by our members and partners.
It's a laudable idea, although I'm not sure how it will be funded in the long-term, or whether it will fall victim to people with an agenda putting together a clique to skew the results. (Via OpenBusiness.)
An interesting story here:Microsoft wants to make its Windows operating system available on the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) notebook computers, OLPC chairman Nicholas Negroponte said at the NetEvents conference in Hong Kong on Saturday.
...
"We put in an SD slot in the machine just for Bill. We didn't need it but the OLPC machines are at Microsoft right now, getting Windows put on them."
The SD slot is needed so that memory can be boosted sufficiently to run Windows. That probably won't be a problem in terms of cost, because memory just keeps on getting cheaper. But what's deeply ironic here is that the current price of the GNU/Linux-based OLPC system - around $140 - is utterly dwarfed by the cost of Windows. Obviously Microsoft will offer a cut-down, el cheapo version, but nonetheless the unjustifiable disparity between hardware and software costs is striking.
Microsoft's interest is understandable - it doesn't want to lose a potentially huge and impressionable market. What is less understandable is Negroponte's willingness to give up all his fine principles of empowering children, and to allow them to be shackled by closed source/DRM/Trusted Computing - for what looks like a rather pathetic and unbecoming reason:"I have known [Microsoft chairman] Bill Gates his entire adult life. We talk, we meet one-on-one, we discuss this project," said Negroponte, according to a transcript provided to vnunet.com.
Gosh, you must be important. (Via Slashdot.)
This, surely, is what technology was invented for:Unsuggester takes "people who like this also like that" and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest.
After all, who wants to know about things that will slide down your mental gullet like a proverbial oyster? What we need are intellectual chicken bones that makes us choke on new ideas.
I came across this worthy project through an article about Tibet by Paul Jones:
The Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library project at the University of Virginia is pleased to make available the alpha release of the Unicode character based Tibetan Machine Uni OpenType font for writing Tibetan, Dzongkha and Ladakhi in dbu can script with full support for the Sanskrit combinations found in chos skad texts.
Alpha release here, people: could all Tibetan hackers please hammer the code.
Yes:The European Union's telecommunications watchdog has called for regulators to take a backseat in setting standards--and allow consumers to take the lead by picking the platform that offers the services they want.
Speaking on Monday here at the ITU Telecom World 2006 conference, Viviane Reding, the EU's commissioner for information society and media, said regulators should no longer be the main force in charge of mandating standards.
...
Reding said the spectrum freed up by the switch to digital TV will offer a "once-in-a-generation opportunity" for expanded wireless services, adding that regulators must be flexible and "get out of the command-and-control system."
Now, if we could possibly make that liberated spectrum into a commons....
A new one for the commons collection:Climate commons is a networked conversation space that creates a cross-disciplinary platform for planetary ecological concerns. Twelve people who research issues relevant to the arctic and climate change contribute the progress of their investigations and reflections from October 10, 2006 through January 10, [2]007. These networked conversations can be read by and contributed to by visitors to the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary art Boston or on the web at climate-commons.net.
It also offers some open source-y goodness:
Matt Shanley has created three main visual tools to help foster the dialog on this site.
The word count history graph uses sparklines to give you an idea of the ups and downs of site activity at a glance.
The hexagraph provides a spatial representation of the threads of a conversation. You can literally see when a conversation branch is bursting at the seams.
Category highlighting reveals common threads by illuminating the key words.
Each of these extensions will be released as an open source project in early 2007, around the time Climate commons is coming to completion.
I have to say, though, that there is something vaguely jarring about a project to do with climate change, sustainability and all that coming to "completion": shouldn't it just go on and on? (Via WorldChanging.)
Good news, you might think:Novell today announced that the Novell edition of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite will now support the Office Open XML format, increasing interoperability between OpenOffice.org and the next generation of Microsoft Office. Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others on a project to create bi-directional open source translators for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office, with the word processing translator to be available first, by the end of January 2007. The translators will be made available as plug-ins to Novell's OpenOffice.org product. Novell will release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project. As a result, end users will be able to more easily share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, as documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites.
Pretty cool, huh? Well, maybe not.
The code may well be released as open source, but there's the small matter of patents they might draw upon. Given that "Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others", there must be the fear that to produce these undeniably handy translators Novell has availed itself of some inside knowledge kindly provided by that nice Mr Ballmer.
I've no idea whether that happened or not, but if I were in the OpenOffice.org group I do know I'd be refusing the proffered chalice - just in case. (Via LWN.net.)
In these dark days when everything seems to be getting worse with the environmental commons, it is rare to come across something as positive as this:
Vast tracts of rainforest in Brazil are to get a new protected status.
The segments of land in the northern Para state together cover 16.4 million hectares (63,320 sq miles), an area of land that is bigger than England.
Thousands of wildlife species inhabit the pristine forest, including jaguars, anteaters and colourful macaws.
Campaigners say the decision made by Para Governor Simao Jatene is one of the most important conservation initiatives of recent years.
If it is true, then Governor Jatene deserves to go down in the annals as a wise and great man. The only trouble is, I can't find anything confirming this wonderful news on the site of one of the organisations quoted in the story above. Instead, there is just a rather dry report on forest management.
Let's hope.
Sad to see the once-rigorous nation of Immanuel Kant falling for the, er, cant of the content industries in the copyright reform discussions:But Jerzy Montag, Member of the Green Party opposition, sees this slightly differently. “The current reform draft is in some points friendly to industry and antagonistic to the interests of authors and creators,” he said. “We should give more rights to creators, but I am pessimistic here. And it makes me see red to think about how vehemently based on the current draft the CDU-SPD [Social Democratic Party] coalition wants to go after users.”
The target of Montag’s critique is a proposed change to establish criminal liability for illegal private copies. A mass complaint against 25,000 private users resulted in a clear statement of a court in Karlsruhe that it was unable to bear that load and therefore would not open proceedings in minor cases.
The German justice minister reacted with the introduction of a “bagatelle clause” into the draft proposal to limit criminal proceedings on commercial “pirates.” Yet after heavy criticism over legalising intellectual property theft from rights holders and some members of parliament, the minister withdrew the bagatelle clause (which refers to a minor case of no commercial relevance).
"Pirates", "intellectual property theft", and so on, and so on....
Here's one that famous blogger Mahmood Ahmadinejad probably prepared earlier:Jalal Haji-Gholam-Ali who is a member of Sharif Technical University’s Advanced ICT Scientific Board and consultant of the ICT Ministry in launching the Persian Linux Project, reiterated, "Launching the Pilot Study phase of Persian Linux Project has be[en] commissioned to TCI’s Research Center."
...
Emphasizing that many of the main services of the ICT are Linux-based, he reiterated, "That ministry is determined to migrate towards Linux."
Referring to the establishment of an infrastructure Software Work Group at the Secretariat of the ICT Ministry, he said, "This work group is established aimed at facilitating the migration of the ICT Ministry towards full usage of Linux."
(Via tuxmachines.org.)
I suppose every frog has its day, but I hope that this doesn't mean the end for Azureus as we know and love it:Azureus, maker of the popular peer-to-peer client, has revamped its software to include video publishing and distribution tools with a much slicker and user-friendly interface. To support the new platform, called Zudeo, the company has raised a $12 million second round of funding.
This space is hot; BitTorrent last week said it had raised $20 million from Accel Partners and Doll Capital Management. Much like BitTorrent, Palo Alto-based Azureus incorporated, took venture money, and came up with a business model only after the massive success of its open source software.
After all, it's well known that bloat is bad for frogs and software.
Sir John Sulston is one of my heroes, right up there with RMS. Indeed, Sulston can reasonably be called the RMS of genomics (or maybe RMS is the Sulston of software). More than anyone else, it was Sulston who fought for and won the free availability of the human genome's digital code. Without him, I suspect that the company that once seemed set to become the Microsoft of molecular biology, Celera, would "own" the human genome, with all the appalling things that this implies.
I mention this because there was short piece by him in the FT recently. It's an edited extract from a talk he gave; the editing and extraction are not very well done, and it certainly doesn't do justice to the man or his ideas. For that, you should read his book The Common Thread - significantly, subtitled "A Story of Science, Ethics and the Human Genome".
Great literature it ain't, but it fair bristles with the same sense of mission and moral imperatives that makes RMS's stuff such fun to read. If RMS is St IGNUcius, perhaps Sulston is St Johnomics.
Interesting:Ultimately, our aim is to conceive a computer-based representation of provenance that allows us to perform useful analysis and reasoning to support our use cases. The provenance of a piece of data will be represented in a computer system by some suitable documentation of the process that led to the data. While our applications will specify the form that such a documentation should take, we can identify several of its general properties. Documentation can be complete or partial (for instance, when the computation has not terminated yet); it can be accurate or inaccurate; it can present conflicting or consensual views of the actors involved; it can be detailed or not.
The open science meme is rather in vogue at the moment. But Bill Hooker raises an interesting point (in a post that kindly links to a couple items on this blog):should we be calling the campaign to free up scientific information (text, data and software) "Free Science", for the same reasons Stallman insists on "Free Software"?
Interestingly, there is another parallel here:Just as free software gained the alternative name "open source" at the Freeware Summit in 1998, so free open scholarship (FOS), as it was called until then by the main newsletter that covered it - written by Peter Suber, professor of philosophy at Earlham College - was renamed "open access" as part of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in December 2001. Suber's newsletter turned into Open Access News and became one of the earliest blogs; it remains the definitive record of the open access movement, and Suber has become its semi-official chronicler (the Eric Raymond of open access - without the guns).
I remember well during the heady Web 1.0 days worrying about business models (I know, this made me something of an oddity). Because it was clear to me that the banner advertising then in vogue just wasn't going to cut it. Net advertising - it'll never catch on, I thought.
Close. Not.
The second Net boom/bubble has been largely driven by Google and its targeted ads. The knock-on effect is that Net advertising is thriving, and no more so than in the UK, apparently. This article has some interesting figures on the differences between the UK and US markets, tying them in to techno-socio-economic factors.
One of the heartening things about fighting the inequities of the current system of intellectual monopolies is that there are a growing number of like-minded people and sites doing it. One, for example, is Moving to Freedom, and from here I learned about another, called Questioncopyright.org.
I can particularly recommend the essay there entitled "The promise of a post-copyright world". As well as a thorough, and unusually illuminating history of copyright (yes, it's all the fault of us Brits again), it closes with this important insight:As the stream of freely available material gets bigger, its stigma will slowly vanish. It used to be that the difference between a published author and an unpublished one was that you could obtain the former's books, but not the latter's. Being published meant something. It had an aura of respectability; it implied that someone had judged your work and given it an institutional stamp of approval. But now the difference between published and unpublished is narrowing. Soon, being published will mean nothing more than that an editor somewhere found your work worthy of a large-scale print run, and possibly a marketing campaign.
Here's a very sharp post from Urizenus Sklar, which is a comment on Wagner James Au's post, which in turn was commenting on the news that Second Life has its first (dollar) millionaire:
Anshe Chung has become the first online personality to achieve a net worth exceeding one million US dollars from profits entirely earned inside a virtual world.
As Au points out, Chung doesn't really have this million dollars: her ability to realise it is contingent on all sorts of factors:
If Anshe Chung gradually sold all her Second Life assets over the span of a year or two to prevent market devaluation, and if all the assets actually in the inventory of various avatars working for Anshe were successfully transferred back to her, and if throughout that time the in-world economy remained stable and the population continued growing, and if Second Life did not suffer any serious interruptions of service either through hacking, scalability failures, sale of the company, or other unforeseen acts of God-- why, Anshe Chung's account holder would have, at the end of that long and arduous process, well over $1,000,000.
But as Sklar brilliant notes, Bill Gates's wealth is equally chimerical and contingent:If he started slowly selling his stock, but not so fast that the value tanked, and IF open source software doesn’t wipe him out before he sells and IF Google doesn’t wipe him out before he sells, and IF a lawsuit doesn’t wipe him out first, and IF his business doesn’t get dismantled for anti-trust violations, and IF he doesn’t get shot, and If as soon as he gets his money out he doesn’t put it in financial derivatives and they tank and IF as soon as he gets it out his wife doesn’t make him spend it on starving children in Africa before he gets to stuff his mattress with it, then I suppose he is a billionaire. But what are the chances of that?
Beyond the wit, what this post serves to underline is that there is no substantive difference between "virtual" wealth made in the "virtual" world, and "real" wealth made in the "real" world.
A very interesting transcript of a conversation between Reuters and Warner Music Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman. The latter is clearly trying to come across as a hip, reasonable chap:Adam Reuters: How has the music industry, from production to marketing to distribution, changed in the MySpace, YouTube era we find ourselves in?
Edgar Bronfman: It really is all about the sense of community. There used to be a sense of community if you remember a really great record store where you could go through all the albums and talk about your records. Now you can have that sort of sharing in a virtual community or on an Internet community, and therefore do it much more broadly.
But later on, he is revealed for what he is when he slips in the Big IP Lie:Intellectual property is intellectual property, whether it’s in the form of an avatar or a song or any such thing. These are the creations of someone’s mind, and it’s property as real as real estate.
No, Ed, no, no, no. What you call "intellectual property" is really an intellectual monopoly: it is a limited privilege, granted by the state, to encourage creativity. It is not property, however much you might like to claim it implicity. It is a bargain, with a quid pro quo: it has to allow reasonable "fair use", and it has to be given up after a reasonable time. You and your industry seem to have forgotten both aspects.
Might I suggest you start talking about intellectual monopolies rather than "intellectual property" to help remind you about your obligations under this bargain?
As if it isn't enough having to fight for Net neutrality, now it looks like in Europe we've got to do the same for Mobile neutrality:This study undertaken by Booz Allen Hamilton, on behalf of the UMTS Forum, considers the impact on mobile consumers and the overall industry ecosystem of two alternative spectrum management scenarios for wide area communications. Firstly, continuation of the current harmonised approach, which is based on internationally agreed band plans using a designated group of technology standards. Secondly, the liberalised scenario, which advocates flexibility through generalised technology neutrality.
The report concludes, through qualitative and quantitative analysis, that consumers and the overall industry ecosystem are best served through continuation of the current harmonised approach. The qualitative analysis demonstrates that in a harmonised environment consumers benefit from the increased penetration of end-user services due to the speed of innovation and network effects (i.e. Metcalfe’s Law); while the industry ecosystem benefits from the improved cost structure provided by the large market size, and scale effects resulting from a harmonised environment. Finally, the quantitative analysis suggests that spectrum harmonisation will benefit end-users through greater usage of end-user services, at lower ARPU, with a larger consumer surplus.
So, a report commissioned by opponents of mobile neutrality - the "liberalised scenario" - comes out against it: what a coincidence.
But all the arguments in favour of Net neutrality - level playing field, the ability to introduce new services without asking permission from network operators etc. etc. - apply here too. Don't be fooled by this arrant nonsense: long live the wireless commons. (Via openspectrum.info.)
Some fine reporting from Matthew Broersma on Techworld has dug up some interesting stuff about the so-called "failed" open source desktop implementation in Birmingham:Birmingham City Council has defended its year-long trial of desktop Linux, claiming it to be a success, despite an independent report showing it would have been cheaper to install Windows XP.
In an exclusive interview with Techworld, head of IT for the council, Glyn Evans, argued that the higher cost resulted from the council having to experiment with the new technology and build up a depth of technical understanding, as well as fit it with the complex system already in place.
The £105,000 saving that the report says would have resulted from going with Windows XP has also come under question as it was calculated using the special discounted licence rate that Microsoft offers councils - something critics argue is a calculated effort to prevent public bodies from building up technical knowledge of open source offerings.
Fishier and fishier - good work, Matthew.
I've written elsewhere about my pleasant surprise at Sun choosing the GNU GPL for Java. But an obvious question that follows on from that news is: which GPL? B
This is a highly political question, with no easy answer. And yet Simon Phipps, Mr Open Source at Sun, has given a good 'un:the very first question Richard asked me about OpenJDK was "GPL v2 or later" or "GPL v2 only"? I explained that Sun could not in good faith commit to using a license sight-unseen for such an important code-base. It's used on 4 billion devices, there are more than 5 million developers dependent on it for their living, and the risk - however slight - that the GPL v3 might prove harmful to them can't be taken. So while we are very positive about the GPL v3, committing to using it when it's not finished does not seem responsible stewardship. I hope we can use it, but I can't express that hope by committing in advance. So for now, the Java platform will be licensed under just the GPL v2.
Sounds fair enough to me.
There's plenty of noise in the press (and blogs) about the Google Book project, or the Million Book Project. These are all interesting and laudable (well, those bits of it in the public domain, at least), but what about elsewhere?
Here's an interesting piece about the Digital Library of India (DLI) initiative. Here, for example, is an issue I bet you've never considered before - I know I haven't:Designing an accurate OCR in the Indian languages is one of the greatest challenges in computer science. Unlike European languages, Indian languages have more than 300 characters to distinguish, a task that is an order of magnitude greater than distinguishing 26 characters. This also means that the training set needed is significantly larger for Indian languages. It is estimated that at least a ten million-word corpus would be needed in any font to recognize Indian languages with an acceptable level of accuracy. DLI is expected to provide such a phenomenally large amount of data for training and testing of OCRs in Indian Languages. Many of the contents, besides scanned images, have been manually entered for this purpose. Using this extremely large repertoire of data, a Kannada OCR has been developed.
(Via Open Access News.)
Some people might say I already write too much about copyright; but for those who don't, and are dying for even more of the stuff, here's a blog on the subject. And not just any old blog (like this one); how's this for author credentials:Senior Copyright Counsel, Google Inc. Former copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary; Policy Planning Advisor to the Register of Copyrights; Law Professor Georgetown Law Center (adjunct), Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (full-time faculty member, founding director L.L.M in Intellectual Property program), author of numerous treatises and articles (including one on fair use with Judge Richard Posner), including a forthcoming multi-volume treatise on copyright.
The latter, by the way, is a cool 6,700 pages long.... (Via Against Monopoly.)
Talking of geography, here's geograph, which "aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of the UK and Eire". That's nice, but I'd like to see this go further.
Imagine if pix were available for a much finer mesh - say, every ten metres (or something). Imagine, then, using some software like Photosynth, a seriously cool piece of software that is sadly closed source (and Microsoft's, to boot), to stitch all those images together into a complete, three-dimensional world - our world - that you could navigate through, while able to see everyone else there doing the same.
Third Life, anyone? (Via Open (finds, minds, conversations)...)
The Internet famously abolishes geographical location, but people are still located. This means that you often want to know where your family, friends and acquaintances are. Where Are You Now (WAYN) lets you provide your present and future locations for interested parties. It's an obvious idea - so obvious, in fact, that I wonder why it hasn't come along before. (Via Quoi9.)
Massachusetts, we know, has had a troubled time when it comes to implementing ODF. But here's some fresh blood on the technical advisory group that will oversee that project. Oh, but wait a minute, who's this newcomer? Andy Updegrove has the details:That person is Brian Burke, the Microsoft Regional Director for Public Affairs, and if that surprises you, it surprises me as well, given the degree of acrimonious debate and disinformation witnessed in Massachusetts over the last 15 months involving the Information Technology Division's transition to ODF.
Er, Microsoft? As in "not-really-keen-on-ODF" Microsoft? Isn't this a little bit, well, you know - blatant?
Still hedging its bets somewhat, Corel has finally done it:Corel Corporation (NASDAQ:CREL; TSX:CRE) today announced that Corel WordPerfect Office will be updated to support new XML-based file formats, the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML).
Better late than never.
If users are a software company's bread and butter today, developers are the future. That's why Microsoft has built up such an impressive developers' programme. Keep them sweet, and you keep tomorrow safe.
Well, that was the theory, but something seems to be going wrong. The latest of the by-now venerable Evans Data reports on developers shows some pretty amazing trends.
Try these for size:
developers said that in the next 12 to 18 months they expect to be developing more Linux apps than Windows apps.
...
developers with Linux chops report that their top two development choices are Web-based interfaces and rich client applications. This was expected because these types of apps have such wide usage.
The No. 3 choice, however, falls under the category of “emerging market”: Linux desktop apps.
...
The organizations that these developers work for (or are aligned with) will be taking a look at many open source applications in the next two years, the survey finds.
A hefty 69% will consider open source browser Firefox, with 70% planning on considering application development software.
Also interesting is the popularity of code re-use:developers are using chunks of code from the open source library, or open source third party solutions, to complete their own projects.
The survey finds the practice is particularly popular because of today’s tight development cycles. Also driving popularity is the cornucopia of open source choices that are now available. Some 32% of developers say “ease of use” prompts them to use pre-written open source code, with 25% reporting “quality” as their rationale.
Is that the sound of a bandwagon approaching? (Via Tuxmachines.org.)
Bad rumours swirling around BitTorrent: that it's getting lots of dosh, presumably to go corporate and "respectable", and that the man behind it, Bram Cohen, is out of it.
Somehow, I don't think the new BitTorrent strategy will be very popular with its current users. Whether the company can make money by fawning all over the big content monopolists remains to be seen. I'm not holding my breath.
On Technorati's home page, there is a rather witty piece of self-deprecation: "55 million blogs...some of the have to be good." Not only must some of them be good, but you can also expect them to be on any subject. So it should come as no surprise, I suppose, that there is a blog devoted to the subject of trademarks. (Via Luis Villa's Blog.)
I've written about the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative several times. It began at MIT, but is now spreading as other institutions make their courses freely available. However, most of this material is in English, and part of the point of open courseware is for people all over the world to have access. That means it needs to be translated, and what better way than to do it via a kind of open translation process?
That's pretty much what the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS) does:This site invites volunteers to help transcribe many available Open Educational Resources (OER) video lectures into English. The OERs included in this site are from MIT OCW and many other insitutions. You don't need to be able to speak Chinese to help. Everyone who can understand and type English is encouraged to participate.
The man behind OOPS is Lucifer Chu:In 2003, Chu, known for translating J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings into Chinese, read an article in Wired magazine that described Asian students trying to use MIT’s OCW.
"I was deeply touched," he says. "After I read the article, I thought, what if?" Chu quit his job at a publishing house and founded the OOPS project to translate MIT’s OCW site for Chinese-speaking people.
He was able to do this because of an rather daring gamble:His life was set to change in the late 1990s, when he first began reading the English editions of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic Lord of the Rings. On hearing that a movie version of Tolkien's trilogy was in the pipeline, Chu approached a local publisher and offered to translate the works into Chinese for a minimal fee.
The deal was that if the translated works sold less than 10,000 boxed-sets, or 40,000 individual copies, Chu would donate his translation services for free. If, however, sales surpassed the 10,000 mark he would receive 9 percent of the retail value of each book.
It was a gamble, but within weeks of the release of the first of director Peter Jackson's big-screen trilogy in December, 2001, Chu's translation had become a national bestseller.
The number of boxed-sets sold in Taiwan to date stands somewhere in the region of 220,000 and Chu is now worth in excess of a cool NT$27million.
Now his team of some 700 translators have moved on from the original MIT material and started work on that released by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
A classic story of a do-gooder made good? Maybe, but not everyone is happy with his efforts:A group known as COER, or China Open Education Resources, which is a paid fulltime crew of university professors and intellectuals in China working on translating MIT courses, have let Chu know that OOPS's volunteers are undermining their work.
Don't you just love human nature? (Via Open Access News.)
And not just Brazil:The OpenDocument Format Alliance (ODF Alliance), a broad cross-section of organizations, academia and industry dedicated to improving access to electronic government documents, today applauded Brazil's decision to recommend ODF as the government's preferred format; India's decision to use ODF at a major state government agency; and Italy's decision to recognize ODF as a national standard.
(Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)
Clever:IBM, the world's largest computer company, has a successful venture capital group operating in the heart of Silicon Valley, yet it makes no investments in startup companies. Instead, it tells VC firms what types of startups it might want to acquire and waits for the Silicon Valley innovation machine to do the rest.
This is the second part of the interview, in which Rosedale talks about the future of Second Life, including funding options, the arrival of big business, the open sourcing of Second Life's code, and the rise of the 3D Web. The first part, which traces the origins of Second Life, can be found in a posting made yesterday.
Glyn Moody: What's your overriding principle in running Second Life? How do you decide detailed economic and social policies – elements that clearly have a huge impact on how Second Life is experienced by residents?
Philip Rosedale: The overriding principle is that it should run itself. And, in particular, that the best way to make SL stable in the long-term – and I say that word "stable" in the physics context, related to complex systems – [is to] have a high degree of heterogeneity and a high degree of locality in [its] behaviour. While there may be a loose framework of unifying principles, the majority of the policy and the majority of the environment is determined by the local area that you're in.
We should be able to define low-level rules of interaction – that there will be a reputation system, or that you can transfer inventory between people, or land has an ability to exclude others from it if you choose as the landowner. Our idea is to use low-level rules to make SL stable, not high-level governance, and in fact to do high-level governance only to the minimal degree that we can't simplify our way out of.
For example, economic policy is at some level necessary globally, only because the efficiency of a single currency is such an enormous public good, right? If there's one Lindex, there's $35,000 a day in trading and that will make it fairly stable, and having it be stable is a public good. There are a few cases where you need to use global systems, but we basically try to avoid those wherever we can.
With social policy – we don't really have any. The community guys say: be nice to each other and don't impair each other's ability to interact, and we'll use force to establish that if necessary. But I think that will give way to more and more sophisticated systems of local control. So, like the question of dispute resolution and arbitration and crime in SL, long-term I totally expect that to be managed by an overlapping set of locally-defined standards. If you look two years in the future or something, I suspect getting in trouble in SL would probably mean getting put on someone's blacklist. Or getting subjected to a trial by users – not by Linden Lab – [where] at the end of it you get put on that blacklist. And because it's a public trial getting put on that blacklist is very serious because 60% of the people in SL subscribe to that blacklist.
I suspect that that kind of user-created governance is much more likely to be successful. Indeed, I would say that one of the appeals of SL as compared to the real world is that the real world unfortunately has too many cases in which it seems necessary to use central control to establish an optimal system for everyone. In the real world there are key resource like historically steel and now silicon and oil, that humans can easily park on top of the only places on the earth's surface where those resources are, and then use guns to maintain control of those resources – or something like guns. Governments have to act to break up the monopolistic and therefore inefficient positions that can be established by single individuals over those resources.
But of course SL doesn't have any fundamental resources that you need to control, so establishing a monopoly position in SL is much harder - maybe, hopefully, impossible. So we'll try to set the low-level rules so that's it's as unlikely as possible that anyone can have a monopoly on anything. But I think we'll be more easily able to do that because we have access to the code in a way that I suppose only God has access to the code in the real world.
Glyn Moody: As well as the in-world traders, we are now seeing major RL companies enter Second Life; some residents are worried that this will turn Second Life into a huge market research experiment or into a virtual shopping mall: how do you view things, and how will you assuage their fears?
Philip Rosedale: Well, I don't think I've done a good job assuaging people's fears, and I think that's the right expression. But as a deep thinker about the behaviour of complex systems, I do feel fairly confident that major real-life companies will succeed in SL only to the extent that they are able to offer real value in the same manner in which those people that have been there for three years have offered value.
The real life companies in the real world can just park in New York and enjoy the benefits of being in New York – you just don't get that in SL. I also think that there is a kind of sense of community and a sense of a shared future in SL, the very powerful fact that you are writing the future – you as the user, all of us collectively. That is a very powerful, almost spiritual thing about what it's like to be in SL. And I think that if you're a real life company trying to turn SL into a marketing experiment you'd have to fight and win against that force, and I don't think you will. Even if we as a company were bound and determined to turn SL into some huge market research experiment, from which we would maximally profit, I don't think we'd be successful, given where it is now.
But I think if we can build low-level rules that keep it a level playing field then that is the primary thing that will keep all of that spirit in place. And I don't see us doing anything in any other direction. We have struck no deals with these big companies, we have no relationship with them, we don't even know how many there are or who they are. It's hard to tell who's buying what, but it looks like the real-world companies represent a low single-digit percentage of land ownership at this point.
Glyn Moody: Will your business model bring in enough to allow you to grow rapidly as Second Life takes off, and still make a profit?
Philip Rosedale: The money people are paying as land-use fees – the recurring fees per acre per month - that's a profitable business. We've set the prices pretty low at the outset, because we just wanted a lot of creativity. When people are new to systems like this they don't believe it's all going to work. So it was in our interests to make these servers as cheap as possible. But we always had in mind that that would be a fundamental part of the business and we needed to set prices in a way that made sense. If you look at the recurring price of a server today, depending on what kind of server you're buying, what kind of customer you are - whether you're buying on the islands or on the mainland – it's a couple to several hundred dollars a month – that's a fine business.
I think that on an even higher level than that, we believe that it's all going to be a good business just because of the size of the economy. We can reasonable ask a fee against what's going on in the economy in a variety of ways. I think today land-use fees are the right way to do that because it's a bit like being an entrepreneur who wants to move to a new country. You look for a country that offers like no sales tax and no corporate income tax. When you move your company there the only thing you probably pay for is a lease on the land and basically that's what we're offering here. I think to an entrepreneurial content creator we probably feel like Malaysia or something.
Glyn Moody: As Second Life matures, might you add things like a corporate income tax or a sales tax?
Philip Rosedale: We could, there's also things like advertising. Right now, people do pay us to list classified ads and also place listings. That could be a way to make money in the future. Sales tax on transactions? Maybe someday, we wouldn't rule that out. Our mission is to get the most people creating the most amazing content and experiences. So we'll be pretty aggressive about changing our business model only to the extent that it keeps that going at maximum speed.
People often ask, beyond the money, how will you say that you were successful, Philip? What I always say is that I will feel like I've been successful personally if I have made it grow as fast as it could. And if I slowed down some of that growth to convert it into wealth for myself, well, shame on me. The people behind the company are very principled about changing the world in a positive way through technology – that's Mitch [Kapor], Pierre [Omidyar], Jeff Bezos, Benchmark Capital, Catamount Ventures, and Ray Ozzie, all the people behind us, they've got the same perspective.
Glyn Moody: You've recently appointed a Chief Financial Officer who has had experience in making an IPO: does that mean you are thinking about doing the same at some point?
Philip Rosedale: I think the only thing I'll say about that is just that the company is making money in a way that will enable us to exist and grow as we like and as long as we like as a standalone company. Whether it's a private company or a public company, we can be a successful company in our right.
Glyn Moody: If someone made you a substantial offer for Second Life, would you consider taking it – or are you so committed to your vision that it would trump any consideration of money?
Philip Rosedale: Oh, without question, yeah. I can only speak for myself, personally. First off, I've had the fortune to be successful enough not to be tempted by dollars – I mean, everybody is tempted by dollars – I just mean that I've had the good fortune to convert enough brainpower into money historically that it makes me pretty insusceptible to that. But I fall back on what I just said to you: I would never make a decision that would cause this thing to grow any less slowly than it can, because I think that I'm making people's lives better. And I hold myself to the question: did I make as many people's lives better in as short a time as possible as I could? If I felt like the answer was “no”, and in particular because I wanted to make some money or something, I'd feel terrible, and I wouldn't do it.
If somebody came to us with a big offer, well, the question would be: How could the people who were offering us that money help us grow SL faster - better technology, better experience for more people? I think that what we're doing is so innovative, and in particular the way we run the company is so unusual, and the way we've built SL in many ways is so unusual, that it's pretty unlikely that there'd be another company out there that could help us do that. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I just mean that I would have to be convinced.
Glyn Moody: Going back to this tremendous growth, how will this be managed in-world – will there, for example, be new continents? And would you contemplate allowing different local (real-world) laws to be applied to some of that new land if the servers were located outside the US?
Philip Rosedale: To the first point - What will SL look like long-term? - I think if you look at the islands, people are already gluing them together, there's motivation to create contiguity. So I think that SL over the years to come will look like a bunch of large continents, that will have different characteristics, like we were talking about earlier. That may be related to governance and zoning and things like that.
The second question, about laws reflecting where servers are based, we just don't know. We're trying to be pretty smart about it, but the company's here in the United States right now. Yeah, the servers could be in another country, maybe that'll make the local laws apply differently on those servers - I just don't know. We're thinking about that, we're trying to learn as much as we can about it, we just don't have any immediate strategy.
Part of the problem here is there's a whole bunch of things about SL that are untested from a legal standpoint. So what we try to do is to err on the side of providing a lot of information and informing everyone. We talk to lots of people in the United States Government, for example, just saying, look, this is what's going on, this is what's happening, if you care, you can get more information, and talk to us about it, here's what on principle we think this means. There's a lot of different aspects of this that are going to be really fascinating to watch play out and that we couldn't give a final word on.
Glyn Moody: What is the US Government's attitude in general to this?
Philip Rosedale: I don't know. What I would say about everybody who comes into contact with SL, that has been really uplifting, everybody seems to get that it's a good thing, it's fundamentally an empowering thing. And nobody, whether you're the government or a company, nobody wants to screw that up. All the companies that I meet with, the CEOs, these companies that come into SL and do things, whenever I meet people, at least from my sample, they're all very smart and inspired about what SL is and what it can be, and can they just be there and be a part of that and not mess it up. I suspect that governments will have the same perspective. The US Government is pretty smart about doing things like taxation in a way that does not quench people's ability to innovate. I think that's what's cool about what we're doing, it's not just an economic discussion. Everybody who comes in contact with this and sees it is like, oh my God, this is making the world better: we've got to take that into account when we think about legislating.
Glyn Moody: You use a lot of open source to run Second Life, and you've said that you will be opening up elements of the code: what's the situation at the moment?
Philip Rosedale: So yeah, without speaking to specific timing or plans - and we've thought and are thinking lots and lots where there might be exceptions to this - but it seems like the best way to allow SL to become reliable and scalable and grow. And we've got a lot of smart people here thinking about that.
Glyn Moody: Looking forward, what are your views on the convergence of three-dimensional virtual worlds like Second Life with today's Web – the 3D Web as some are calling it?
Philip Rosedale: People always believe that the idea of simulating a three-dimensional world will make the experience of people in it different because it's three dimensional, and that's certainly true. However, there's a second thing about the 3D web that makes it different than the 2D web, and is really important, which is that there are other people there with you when you're experiencing it.
Look at MySpace. When you go to a MySpace page, you can listen to their music. What is the listening experience like? Well, it's still just you sitting in front of your computer listening alone to that music. But in SL, if you're listening to somebody's music, whether live or pre-recorded, there's a very good chance that there's someone next to you listening to the same music, and so you're able to turn to them and say: What do you think? Or you're able to turn to them and say: Have you been here before, and, if so, do you know where the lawnmower section is?
That, I think, is what makes the potential of the 3D Web different perhaps even more so than the spatial difference between 3D content, and 2D content. And I think that alone makes it very likely that there will be a kind of a 3D Web, that has this shared experience property. That's what everyone will look back on and say: Wow, that is what made it different.
Blender is a fine 3D modelling package, with a remarkable history:The "Free Blender" campaign sought to raise 100,000 EUR so that the Foundation could buy the rights to the Blender source code and intellectual property and subsequently open source Blender. With an enthusiastic group of volunteers, among them several ex-NaN employees, a fund raising campaign was launched to "Free Blender." To everyone's shock and surprise the campaign reached the 100,000 EUR goal in only seven short weeks. On Sunday Oct 13, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Blender development continues to this day driven by a team of far flung dedicated volunteers from around the world led by Blender's original creator, Ton Roosendaal.
Now someone is trying the same approach with the MMORPG Ryzom, which needs a helping hand:Ryzom is an innovative MMORPG, which has been developed since the year 2000 by the independent studio, Nevrax. For the past two years Ryzom has been marketed and sold to gamers, developing a fiercly loyal fanbase. Unfortunately, due to market conditions and other unforseen cirucumstances, a request to begin bankruptcy proceedings has been filed at the commerce tribunal.
Until now, Nevrax has produced Ryzom, as a typical commercial software company. Nevrax, not the players, decide what direction the virtial world of Ryzom takes. We want to turn this model on it's head and give players control over the virtual world their character's inhabit. We want to purchase the source code, game data, and artwork, so that we can further develop it by placing it under a Free Software license.
Whales may share our kind of intelligence, researchers say after discovering brain cells previously found only in humans and other primates.
They were touted as the brain cells that set humans and the other great apes apart from all other mammals. Now it has been discovered that some whales also have spindle neurons – specialised brain cells that are involved in processing emotions and helping us interact socially.
Now there's a surprise."This is consistent with a growing body of evidence for parallels between cetaceans and primates in cognitive abilities, behaviour and social ecology."
How about if we stop eating them, then?
So the ID'ers are stepping up the pressure, here in the UK. They have a shiny new Web site - Truth in Science, no less - that looks jolly impressive in its comprehensiveness. You might think it would require an equal number of pages to counter the arguments put forth there. Fortunately, that is not the case.
It all comes down to the following section:
What is Intelligent Design?
The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
Well, natural selection is not an "undirected process": it is one absolutely directed by a very simple, readily comprehensible mathematical fact: that a system with a greater rate of growth than rival systems will inevitably overtake the latter as time progresses. The graph is steeper, so whatever the starting point, there will come a time when it overtakes every other system's graph. The difference in growth rates is what is known as the "natural selection": in fact, there is no selection, just this gradual but inevitable emergence.
Every change to a system that causes it to grow faster is a change that will be propagated more thoroughly than one that tends to slow down the growth. This means that systems "evolve" - that is, that they change over time in such as way as to maximise their growth (and note that this evolution is not unique or directed at any particular "goal".)
On the other side, the basic fallacy of invoking "intelligent" design to explain "certain features" of the universe, is that it explains nothing. It is a completely circular argument: things are as they are because an "intelligent cause" made them that way.
That is neither explanation nor science, and as such has no place in either schools or universities except as fodder for debating societies who wish to hone their skills in demolishing specious arguments.
A year ago, I would have dismissed the idea of a Web-based desktop as pretty pointless. Today, spending as I do around 99% of my time within Firefox - browsing, using GMail and Writely - I have to admit that it has a certain logic.
EyeOS bolsters its case by adding two crucially important features: it's free software, and it doesn't use Flash. There's a demo for you to try it out, as well as a begging bowl - they need some dosh to move the project on.
Criminal profilers are drawing up a list of the 100 most dangerous murderers and rapists of the future even before they commit such crimes, The Times has learnt.
The highly controversial database will be used by police and other agencies to target suspects before they can carry out a serious offence. Pilot projects to identify the highest-risk future offenders have been operating in five London boroughs for the past two months.
At the moment:Experts from the Metropolitan Police’s Homicide Prevention Unit are creating psychological profiles of likely offenders to predict patterns of criminal behaviour.
But, as everyone knows, psychology is something of a hit-and-miss business, and not really reliable enough or scalable enough for rolling out across a nation. What we really need is something more precise, something more scientific - like a genetic pre-disposition encoded in the genome.
Some people claim to have found certain genomic characteristics of those who commit major crimes; the obvious step would be to screen people's genomes automatically for those genetic elements before they committed the crime they were hardwired to perpetrate, sparing society many problems and expenses.
Since the proof would be scientific, and not merely based on the fallible judgment of a psychologist, the guilty would have no basis to appeal against the sentences imposed upon them. Indeed, even more money could be saved by simply refusing to allow what would be unnecessary appeals in such cases, where the proof of future guilt could be found in nearly every cell of their body.
How fortunate, then, that the UK has the largest DNA database in the world....
I wrote about an open source fabber recently, and now here's another one, the RepRap:The difference with RepRap, which is the size of a fridge, is that the ideas behind it are not owned by anyone. Dr Bowyer's vision is a machine that can be made, adapted and improved by its users. "I did not want an individual, company or country to make money from this," he said.
If Dr Bowyer's vision is realised there could be profound implications for the global economy. Instead of large companies manufacturing large numbers of consumer goods and distributing them to shops, consumers would buy or share designs on the internet, manufacturing items on their own replication machines.
If you want the code, Matthew Aslett has dug it out, as well as the RepRap's home page. One of the coolest aspects of the RepRap is that it can make its own parts.
Think about it.
As I mentioned, last week I had an article in the Guardian about Second Life and the concerns over the CopyBot program. This was largely based on an extensive interview with Linden Lab's founder and CEO, Philip Linden, conducted on 6 November, 2006, together with email follow-ups.
One of the frustrating things with articles for hard-copy titles like the Guardian is that space is always at a premium. This means that there were only a limited number of quotations that I could use from the interview, and that a huge amount of interesting material remained unprinted. Happily, blogs can function as an adjunct to traditional publishing, offering all kinds of supplementary material.
So I'm making the full text of the interview available here. I've tidied this up only minimally, since I was keen to preserve the incredible energy and enthusiasm that Rosedale transmits in his speech. This first part concentrates on the roots of Second Life; the second and final part, looks at its current state and possible futures.
Glyn Moody: When did you first start thinking about creating an imaginary world? What was the attraction of the idea?
Philip Rosedale: I'd say there are two things about me that probably made me so passionate about what we are doing. The first was that since I was a little kid I was interested in physics, and also in how things worked. I was doing doing electronics when I was really young, and started programming computers as soon as I had enough money to get one.
I think the second thing about me that made me have the particular bent on Second Life that I did was that I was very creative. Sometimes you get that, you get somebody who's fairly artistic and creative but they get into science and technology. I'm definitely one of those people. I am left-handed, and I'd say cognitively I'm really left-handed.
Glyn Moody: You've mentioned books as being very important to you as a child, and the fact that they represented an early form of virtual reality: to what extent is your work with virtual worlds a kind of authorship or creativity for you?
Philip Rosedale: I think there's an important differentiation. I think there are people who played a lot in Dungeons and Dragons, and read a lot of books, and immersed themselves in the fantasy world that can be constructed through the simulator that is your brain, by reading books. And I think there are lot of people who went in the direction of saying, Well, can't I create a book in a computer that is my own vision for a particular kind of world? And then you, the user, can wander around in my vision. I think that there are a lot of people in history who have done a lot of really interesting projects that fall into that category. But it's really important to note that Second Life isn't one of those.
The difference is that Second Life is not under my control, and it was never my fantasy to be the Dungeon Master of Second Life. I was very, very passionate from the earliest times about the idea of creating a place that re-implemented the laws of physics in a simulation. But once that was done, I like everyone else would be free to play however I wanted with those Lego blocks, where the Lego blocks were atoms in this new world.
I point that out because there is a real upper limit to what one creative person can do when they are the only artistic input into the structure of a world. And I think there is also an experiential upper limit: World of Warcraft or Everquest can only be so interesting so long as all the content is basically laid out by a first Michelangelo who draws out the world. Second Life just was never that way - it was just dirt at the beginning. I never tried to create anything beautiful, I didn't want to make a book.
Glyn Moody: So in a way you had the same intuition as the free software people about collaboration being a much richer avenue for creation?
Philip Rosedale: I was excited by the idea of being able to build things and show them to people. And I wanted those other people to build things and show them to me. The ability to communicate with great sophistication and to externalise one's thoughts – about my intentions, my thoughts, my designs – those were the two foundational things that I was trying to enable in building the environment.
Glyn Moody: With 20-20 hindsight your career looks as if at every step you've done things in order to achieve your final goal; to what extent did you consciously say: I'll do this and then this in order finally to build my virtual world?
Philip Rosedale: When Snow Crash came out in 1992, my wife bought me the book for my birthday and said: Oh, you're going to like this, another one of these crazy people like you thinking about this simulation stuff. So by then amongst my friends I was well known as the guy into this digital world idea.
I used to do a presentation on the mythology of the Metaverse. Movies often present you with a picture of a future that's mature, and then they try to suggest in some either really detailed or minimal way how things got to be that way. And I always laughed about how the mythology of the Metaverse was always wrong.
People would always say, Well, it all started because businesses wanted to visualise data in 3D and time went by and now we have people walking their dogs and dancing – that's baloney. It never happens that way. New mediums are always used by creative people for play first. And they're not used by big businesses to better imagine their data. The same thing was true of instant messaging, email, television, radio, the Web itself – all of those mediums were used initially for entertainment and just for people who wanted to goof off. They were not trusted; and then as time went by they became trusted, and then people began using them for business because they were in the vernacular by that point.
In the mid-'90s I was already telling my friends this Metaverse thing isn't going to work until it's really sexy and exciting, and it's not going to be with the computers that are around. All these companies and projects are going to fail, and that's going to suck. Because we're all dreaming this dream, and all these people are getting companies funded to go after it, and I want to do that too, but I know that it isn't going to work.
I said to people: video compression over the Internet – this is 1995 - however, will work, and that's a powerful communication enabler. And besides that, I wanted to get some experience writing programs for Windows. So I said, OK, I'll write a program that does multipoint video conferencing – a solvable algorithmic problem if you're just trying to do 2-way 28.8 modem communication of video streams.
So I built this product called FreeVue. Rob Glaser saw it, asked me to go to RealNetworks. I didn't want to move to Seattle; the big final decision that I made to go to RealNetworks was that – and I told my friends this – I'm going to go to Real Networks because I'm going to get a great engineering management experience because this project is going to be a big project – this virtual world thing.
In mid-1999 networking got fast enough, and Nvidia released the big 3D card, the GeForce2, and I said, Man, I'm out of here, I've got to start this, it can be done. But the "it can be done" was always contingent on the idea that it had to be playful and fun and chaotic and just crazy for the kind of vision for the Metaverse to take off.
Glyn Moody: I believe that originally Linden Lab was going to be a hardware company: could say a little about those early days – what you were trying to do, and what happened to change your mind?
Philip Rosedale: In '93 I was trying to imagine a way to put multiple cheap monitors around one's head. For $300 you could buy pretty good monitors. If you wanted to create an immersive display where you could really have the world all around you, you could put three of these things right next to each other – or more, but three was good – but you had to hold your head 15 inches from the screen to be immersed in the image. All these companies were trying to build head-mounted displays so you could look around, but that was dumb because you couldn't build LCDs that had anyway near the quality of a monitor, even for $30,000.
I was sitting one night just totally obsessed with this problem, and thought: God, you know, what would be really cool would be if I didn't have to move my head - I can't move 40 lb monitors around: what if I didn't actually move my head at all? What if I couldn't move my head at all, but when I tried to look to the left and right, there was something that could feel me trying to look to the left and the right, and would move my view around. And I realised this was a powerful idea.
Fast forward six years. I had some money, and I had time. I said: I am going to get a shop and a welder and a milling machine and I'm going to build this thing, because it's going to cost 50 grand to prototype. So this is '99 to late 2000 - and we actually got it working: we have it here in the office. There's all our machine tools and stuff at the back and you can try it out. They call it "The Rig": our users have heard about it, most people don't know what it is. But it's really, really a cool idea, and we want to get back to it.
There were probably four or five of us in the office by the time we were fiddling around with this prototype, and I remember saying: you guys, even if we build this haptic rig, and you can literally walk into a virtual world and hold your hand up in front of your face and look at it: Where are we going to go with this thing - Doom? It seemed like a pretty paltry use for such revolutionary technology.
Obviously, even in '99 we had been prototyping some of the simulation layers of Second Life, but we had this realisation: the much bigger problem is the software, the hardware's easy. You can use any number of interfaces for this stuff, but the thing that matters so much here is the place. The place that we're all going to go is the hardest problem from a technology perspective and also probably the best business. So that was it.
Glyn Moody: In April 2003, you made a major change to Second Life when you decided to allow residents to keep the intellectual property rights to the things they made. I've come across a couple of explanations for what led up to that, including de Soto's book, The Mystery of Capital, and a meeting involving Larry Lessig and Edward Castronova: could you untangle what exactly led you to make that change, and why it was important?
Philip Rosedale: In 2002 a guy named Doug, who works here, gave me that book, The Mystery of Capital, and he said: You've got to read this. It had a terrible front cover, and I don't have much time for business self-improvement books, and I remember looking at it and thinking: oh god, this is one of these books that some academic wrote because he needed to finish his degree. But Doug's a really smart guy, and I was like, OK, if Doug says to read it, I'll read it. Those first 15 pages it reads like – I don't know what it reads like – it reads like the Gettysburg Address – it's just moving. Basically I read that, and I was like, man, oh man, that's so convincing.
There's a book I read before that, though, that we were talking about a lot, which really informed our design, and that's Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. That was one of the most important things because it was in 2001, 2002, that we got into this idea that the way online games worked was just completely inconsistent with what we're trying to do, and that Everquest or online games of the time were what Jane Jacobs was talking about when she said that planned cites all failed.
Then you read Death and Life of Great American Cities, and what that says is that it all has to be random. The randomness gives way to overlapping behaviours where some people are walking to go to the store, some people are walking to their home, some people are walking to go to work. Those people all run into each other, there's a kind of a commons behaviour where they'd like to just double click on their work and get there immediately, but they can't: they have to walk. That means they entertain each other: some of the times you're the one being entertained, and some of the times you're the entertainment, that's kind of what Jane Jacobs said. And we were like, oh yeah, that's exactly what we want. Because if the world is just created by everybody, then you'll have this very haphazard, crazy kind of feel to it, and that'll be incredibly powerful the way New York is.
The Mystery of Capital was like a follow on to that, because it said for people to build that way everybody has to own their own intellectual property - including of course physical real estate - in a very explicit way with alienability and all that stuff.
Then we had this little Star Chamber, with Larry Lessig, Ted Castronova, Julian Dibbell, Mitch Kapor. We all sat down and looked at what was going on and those guys were like, yeah, you've got you're thinking exactly the right way, you've got to let the economy be free running and real.
Glyn Moody: Around the same time there was something of a revolt among the residents of Second Life over the tax system then in place: what exactly happened?
Philip Rosedale: That was us doing dumb stuff and getting reminded of it. We were never misaligned with people's creative intentions – the idea of no taxation without representation. Our initial economy wasn't very real – the economy more or less worked the same way, but you couldn't convert things back and forth to dollars. We always intended to make it completely real, so that people could use those tokens of value, transferable in any way they wanted. That went back to some of the 2001 thinking about how people that owned property or whatever in Second Life would be the operators of Second Life, and that at least some of them would want to make money doing that.
The whole tax revolt thing was very funny because what we were trying to do was balance the public commons - resources that you access in Second Life like scripting and land and how many prims you could build and whether they had lights on. We built this taxation system that every Monday would automatically tax you according to how much stuff you had in the world and how big it was. It's still fundamentally a good idea; the problem was this tax bill that you got every week that was so algorithmically complicated that no human, us included, could estimate what their tax would be. It was terrible. So people just had a horrible experience with that.
It was kind of chance that people were so pissed off with the prim accounting system at about the same time we switched over to allow people to own land. The other thing was, in the initial economy you couldn't pay more and get more land – you had to earn more money within the economy to buy more land. When we made that change at the end of 2003, we said, look look look: this is just land, this is just property. If you want to buy more of it, you can buy it with dollars, we're not going to stop you from doing that.
That pissed off people too, because they said: Look, we want it to be a pure meritocracy. If you're successful in Second Life you cannot use US cash to get more land, you have to please other people. And in principle, I think that's lovely. But the problem is you've got a sort of "water seeks it's own level" there around design; arbitrage always exists. So it seems foolish to be a big central "we're going to catch you if you're cheating" organisation and try to keep people from selling those credits, those Linden dollars on the side. So we said, screw that, we're just going to open the system all the way – you can buy land and turn Linden dollars into dollars.
The biotechnology industry has proposed to change the international generic naming of medicine ingredients, which at the moment are public property, into unique names for each medicine, making it harder to substitute them with cheaper versions, and linking them to trademarks, sources say.
And why are they doing this? Not to stymie generics that can be made available to those unable to afford high drug prices, oh my word, no. As Nathalie Moll of EuropaBio, the European association for biotechnology industries, explained, the change is"not so much for us but for the patient"
Aw, bless 'em: always thinking of others these selfless pharmaceutical companies.
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