LSE Research Online has been substantially re-vamped since the last time I looked. You can browse a mix of full text and abstracts of work from our department here, and if you register you can make saved searches that email you when new material arrives or which you can subscribe to as RSS feeds. This link should be to an RSS feed of full text items from our department as they arrive (please comment if the link does not work).

Note: The repository is not even close to representing the entirety of the department’s output (it currently contains 195 items, 81 of which are available in full text) but hopefully it will become increasingly useful as staff and students learn about and use it.

If I were to be really cool I would say that I was among the first to join Friendster but moved to Myspace fairly early on when most of my friends-in-bands were totally ‘in’ to it (and ‘I’m here to help’). I would also say that I was invited to Joost beta (because I like to download stuff). I would also say that I’ve been ripping & burning lots of music and films from p2p’s early hay days (you have to get real about what you can take with you on the road). And although I brushed elbows with some big name record companies on this topic it didn’t refrain me from, all lovey dovey, r&b-ing. I would also say that I flirted with AIM, MSN and Yahoo Messenger but when a deceased friend kept reappearing on AIM it was time to go. I forgot my password for MSN (and gosh, I get fairly upset about Microsoft’s passport thing, so MSN got abandoned very fast) and Yahoo meant a blast from the past who kept on sending offline messages (’next!’ as they say in sheaux biz). I would also say that from the mid-1990s I taught myself some basic programming mambo jumbo and toyed with the idea of becoming a digital architect. It turned out that I had a short attention span. Never got into the hang of BBS. Yes, I do remember BBS. As a matter of fact, I stem from that period, from before when terms like ‘being networked’ and ‘digital’ seemed to become the norm for a lot of us; I know that there was no internet and no email for instance (well, for the common peeps like me). I guess these statements date me so to speak.

John Palfrey’s blog post on the Berkman Center’s project on Digital Natives raises the question who are actually these so-called Digital Natives? In his and Urs Gasser’s upcoming book ‘Born Digital’ (Basic Books, 2008) they explore and address an emerging global culture of connectivity, communication and content. Where the world is the network and the people the content… Where multi presence no longer differentiates between analogue players and the digital world. Are we then all Digital Natives? No. Are we all Born Digital? Heck, I’m not and even if I were, there would be no guarantee that I would be a Digital Native.

So, this is a discussion we’re having at the Berkman. What are the attributes? Age, culture, economics, etc. All of them? Who do they represent? What is its place in our day-to-day activities? I guess the main claim explored is the idea that connectivity and communal activities seems to be defining how people will live and work in times to come (a claim I’m critically assessing but will write about in due course). What are the implications for privacy? Safety? IP? Information quality? etc. And looking at sites like Google and Facebook where platforms are provided for us to connect (and create) we should ask ourselves how commonality here is really governed… And what that actually means from both user- and firm-centric perspectives.

So to tell you the truth: I have pimped my ‘all-features’ cell phone (truth be told that we usually lead separate lives). I would also say that I love taking pictures so possess more cameras than one might consider healthy, so transgressed into the bits & bytes of it (oftentimes end up with tears in my eyes and my good ol’ camera with real film in my hands). Aw my gawd. I’m an old fart (thank you, David Weinberger ;-).

I thought I had written my own robust defence of Google Book Search and book digitisation in general but it seems I haven’t - at least I haven’t found any on this blog or my personal one (though I posted enthusastically about meeting Brewster Kahle who runs the Internet Archive and briefly mentioned my own experience of using Google Books).

Kevin Kelly has had a go at providing a popular account of the potential importance and utility of the widespread availability of books online in Scan This Book! in the New York Times. He rehearses many of the good arguments against the ever-lengthening text copyright regime and for the social utility of book scanning programmes but unfortunately his argument is somewhat spoiled by his need to “epater les bourgeois”.

First by hyperbolic statements: “The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years.” Inventions? Talmudic scholars (for one) would be surprised to learn we had just invented annotation.

Secondly, and more importantly, by un-necessarily sweeping and apocalyptic predictions about the way technology will (must?) change existing businesses (like publishing).

Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library.

Much of what he says is arguably valid for non-fiction and particularly scientific research but less so for fiction where (as Updike says) we actually seem to like reading (or viewing) self-contained narratives (though we may then go on to comment on them or construct other self-contained narratives based on them).
He usefully points out that academic science is heading faster than other fields towards the universal library but doesn’t think through the implications. Academics need to publish freely to advance and do so happily but only because there is a state system in place that pays them to be experts because society benefits from their creation and dissemination of knowledge. It is hard to imagine the same model being applied to the writers of cookbooks, say, but in the UK we pay authors a (very) modest sum when their books are checked out of the public library.

Could some form of super-UNESCO (or a number of national government initiatives) help to fund freely-available fiction (or other creative works) to be added to the universal Internet library of the future? Perhaps paid for through a levy on broadband subscriptions as suggested by some in France - the Global License? This is approximately the way the BBC works, for example (though it is not as free as it should be in sharing the content that our license fees have paid for). Surely this is a more attractive proposition for artists than having to individually flog “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, ads, sponsorship or periodic subscriptions” which KK suggests are the options that will be available to artists in the brave new world when their individual works themselves are no longer saleable.

KK anticipates some of the hostile reaction that followed from John Updike (speaking predominantly on behalf of fiction authors) and by Nicholas Carr (among others) more generally:

Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

I for one am in the young enthusiast camp but I don’t think it means that the way things work in the creative industries has to be swept away in order to bring the (near)-universal Internet library about.

If we could reduce the term of copyright to 14 years, renewable for another 14 (as Creative Commons suggests) and if copyright could be easily asserted at a central database but the default for works where the ownership was unclear was that such work would be in the public domain, authors would still be able to get paid for their works during their most valuable commercial life but we would have a huge public domain of useful information instead of the stunted one we have now.

The above suggestions still radical (more radical than many authors and publishers would like, I am sure) but are consistent with the new potentials technology offers without requiring the total restructuring of publishing…

I’ve not provided as fully thought-through or well-ordered set of arguments here as I’d like (and not perhaps a particularly original point of view either - it draws heavily on Lawrence Lessig’s thinking, for example) but there’s as much polishing here as I can spare considering the £0 I am getting paid to write this! What do you think?

Update: As if in answer to my wishes, I have just heard about a very promising bill in the US House of Representatives - the Orphan Works Act which would release into the public domain works where the owner is no longer known. Someone should set up a campaign to support Lamar Smith (the bill’s sponsor).

David Brake

TakeAway - ‘the Festival of do it yourself Media’ is on in W London. This sounds like a great idea and I hope events like this one take off across the country. So much of government policy about the digital divide is about enabling people to consume Internet media - little effort seems to be going into helping people produce their own. My only concern is that the programme does look a little ‘art world’ inward-looking. I wonder whether it will manage to reach out to people not already integrated in the art and techie communities…

ColdPlay’s new CD (reports boingboing and Digg) includes truly draconian digital rights management in an attempt to prevent piracy. I am more relaxed than some about DRM - if it is well-regulated but if record companies behave in this way they will certainly be shooting themselves in the foot (as some hope they will).

According to this report the disc won’t play on a wide variety of in-computer CD players and other devices that might enable you to turn the music into MP3s but the warning that this is the case is apparently only given inside the CD case (once you have bought it) and the company claims it will not accept returns except in the event of manufacturing-related problems.

This is unacceptable - what if (like me) you don’t listen to your CDs as CDs any more - you just turn them to MP3s so you can listen to them through your MP3 player? What if the only CD player you have is one of the long list of excluded players? This together with the Sony ‘root kit’ fiasco suggests that many entertainment companies are not being responsible in their self-regulation of DRM. If you are going to use DRM that is this restrictive you should be made to prominently label your discs so potential purchasers can know what they are getting.

In response to comments by the “Cream gang” here’s a brief and I hope final statement of why I think their approach to improving the public’s digital rights situation is wrong.

I agree with them that the public is currently unlikely to rally behind any calls for (for example) a roll-back of the number of years of copyright protection or controls on DRM. Unlike them I don’t think that if we give corporations their heads they will eventually overstep and make themselves fatally unpopular. I don’t believe they are that stupid - they will push copyright as far as the public will accept and no further.

I think we both agree however that the public will accept a situation which is worse than it needs to be - mainly because they don’t really understand what might be possible if things were different. (I think however that the row over Google Books might just provide one easy to grasp example of how excessively strict copyright protection damages the public interest).

I also agree that lobbying the Guardian and the Register et al is a bit of a waste of time since as Nick Mailer, Martin Coxall et al point out they are already converted (though by all means keep lobbing them the press releases - after all it costs little to add a few names to the list).

I think however (and this is where we differ essentially) that there are a large number of elected representatives who have not thought through copyright issues and are not that interested in them but who could be persuaded to take the right path through reasoned argument even if there are no votes in it for them. That’s where the focus of the Open Rights Group should be (and I imagine where it will be). Not in lobbying Internet users or the general public but in presenting persuasive arguments about the public good to key expert decision makers.

Of course it would be better if the public understood the issues and got on board but there are large swathes of policy-making that take place without substantial input from the public as a whole because the public as a whole doesn’t care enough about the issue in question.

The Open Rights Group (which does need a proper website not just a blog) has been launched as a kind of British Electronic Frontier Foundation. I’m sure it will do some sterling work but it’s a shame that almost immediately some digital rights extremists (an unlikely grouping) came along to a brainstorm for its founding and put a cat among the pigeons by being very rude about it (entertainingly).

It’s hard to take seriously their argument that corporations should be encouraged to behave more and more badly until their digital abuses are recognised by the public, but they seem to have managed to spark a lot of online flaming. You’d think the respondents, most of whom have more than a decade of online experience would know better than to respond to trolling?

Update: The ORG doesn’t have a ‘proper’ website yet but when searching for something rights related I did find the Campaign for Digital Rights which seems to share a lot of the ORGs objectives and has quite a bit of useful information about the state of UK and European law and why it should be changed.

Cory Doctorow of the EFF uses BoingBoing to highlight to the work of the Chilling Effects Project who have apparently recently produced a report on how Internet copyright law is abused to silence legitimate uses of the Internet.

I’m glad the Chilling Effects group is out there and they do provide some good case studies but unless I miss my guess the statistics provided in Cory’s summary of the report are a little misleading. They found, for example that “Thirty percent of notices demanded takedown for claims that presented an obvious question for a court (a clear fair use argument, complaints about uncopyrightable material, and the like)”. But I assume they are working from a database of notices sent to them by people who are annoyed at receiving such notices - a somewhat biased sample. There may be lots of legitimate takedown notices which they never see. I would like to see the report itself and read more about the methods used to produce it but there aren’t any details on the site yet.

It is possible to get published in for-profit journals and still publish on your own website as well, depending on what the policies of individual publishers are. The SHERPA project brings together the copyright policies of the major publishing houses in one place so you can see what your rights are. I am certainly glad that so many of my fellow Internet studies academics have made much of their scholarship available online - often pre-publication and fairly often even post-publication (usually in a ‘draft - not for citation’ form, but still…)

My Mac won’t let me import and edit video from a DVD I made from my own footage! At least it won’t without additional software. It doesn’t seem likely that Apple lacks the savvy to tackle this - it seems more likely that providing software to allow grabbing and editing video off a DVD player would open Apple up to the accusation that it was facilitating piracy. Seems like I am not the only person facing this issue either.

So as Prof. Lessig suggests, the technologies of copyright protection (or limitations designed to prevent ‘misuse’) can end up preventing not just criminal but legitimate use of technologies. I have written a bunch more stuff about copyright on my own blog. If you are interested to know how I am struggling to solve my Mac problem (by jumping through a remarkable number of hoops!), click on the link following: (more…)