Robert Darnton is just the latest scholar to suggest this - this time in the NY Review of Books. But there’s a key assertion made which I don’t quite follow:

Most book authors and publishers who own US copyrights are automatically covered by the settlement. They can opt out of it; but whatever they do, no new digitizing enterprise can get off the ground without winning their assent one by one, a practical impossibility, or without becoming mired down in another class action suit. If approved by the court—a process that could take as much as two years—the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States.

How is the position of a potential digitizer of orphaned copyright works (whether a commercial or not for profit venture) worse than before the Google suit? Google has set up a third party body that potential future entrants to the market can work with and has shown that it is possible to reach an agreement with publishers, at least in the US (something that was hitherto supposed to be entirely impractical). So if Google is successful they will encourage others to enter the market and if they are not commercially successful someone else may take up the challenge. Perhaps if it isn’t a commercial proposition Google could even be persuaded to hand over Google Books to a non-profit?

As I understand it nothing in the existing ruling gives Google a perpetual exclusive right to do what they are doing - they are just the only people to have tried (and they may be the only organization with the vision, the money and the technological skills to succeed).

Am I missing something?

Tom Steinberg, leader of the group of policy wonks and e-government/e-democracy hackers-for-good best known for their sterling work under the MySociety label has come together with a group of individuals from government, Cisco, Ofcom, Google and others (working in their personal capacities) to form a Power of Information Taskforce which has just released a draft of its Power of Information Taskforce Report. The remit of the taskforce is here, but briefly it is intended to help the government help the public using web 2.0 and better use of citizen- and state-generated information.

Consistent with the overall approach of the taskforce, the report will be available in a comment-able form for two weeks, after which it will be handed officially to the Cabinet Office.

From what I’ve seen from a brief view of the report it makes a useful contribution to encouraging the UK government to open up its data and practices to public deliberation and scrutiny. It does however appear to be missing a strategy to formally integrate participation in relevant social media sites as part of the normal activity of (selected) civil servants. On the one hand, many might see such outreach activity as an optional extra they can easily forego given their already busy workloads dealing with phone calls, emails and the post. On the other hand, it may be necessary to provide rules outlining how to judge how much engagement with social media is “sufficient” and which social media is strategic, since it would be possible for an enthusiastic civil servant to spend all of his or her time intervening in this way at the expense of other work.

The past two days I spent at MIT’s CMS’s conference ‘The Future of Entertainment 2′ bringing together top notch mobile, internet and entertainment professionals (MTV Networks, Yahoo!, TBS) to discuss where the entertainment industry is headed.

Transmedia is a hot topic - the development of content that can be delivered on many mediums is being used by both television shows and advertisers. Henry Jenkins discussed interactive television not just as clicking a button to be taken into an interactive on-screen experience, but instead as any form of interaction with a television show in the physical world, e.g. CSI’s involvement in Second Life.

I was especially impressed with the mobile media panel: Marc Davis, Yahoo!, Bob Schukai, Turner Broadcasting, Alice Kim, MTV Networks, Anmol Madan, MIT Media Lab

Alice Kim:
- How do we get compensated?
- How do we stay relevant to our userbase, which is very forward looking?

Marc Davis:
- In the next few years, 4 billion people with cell phones and wireless connections to each other
- Realtime sharing of video from billions of geolocated phones live
Anmol Madan:
- Computation models on how people share things in media
- Ultimate goal is to make all phone interfaces socially aware

Bob Schukai:
- 90% of our research is outside the US.
- The US is behind on mobile and broadband. Way behind
- We can learn a lot from other geographies

Also, ran into some familiar faces such as Laurie Baird (Turner) who introduced me to great other Turner folks, Todd Cunningham (MTV) and Jing Wang (MIT). Ended up at GamBit which is MIT’s terrific new research initiative to conduct digital games research. Oh, and heard a lot of FCC bashing… we may want to look into that a bit more…
All in all 2 great days!

(You can find detailed session reports here)

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BoingBoing recently published an extraordinary allegation - a reader claims Yahoo’s new web ad publishing network tries to insist that non-US web surfers must not see their ads. Of course this is very difficult if not impossible for a potential content publisher to guarantee - but imagine if it was? If successful, Yahoo would be responsible for ghettoising the Internet just in order to make their ad network more efficient. I’m a little disappointed the media hasn’t picked this up yet - I can imagine the furore if some French ad network did the same thing to American content…
This is not a new problem, by the way. There have been repeated attempts to produce artificial national restrictions to Internet-distributed content. The BBC’s Creative Archive License for example appears only to allow UK residents to re-use their material.

I just stumbled across an interesting podcast from BusinessWeek - "The Blog Elite" wherein they interview leading bloggers and podcasters with a business bent. The first of these interviews was with Leo Laporte, a radio veteran who went to podcasting and started one of the most popular podcasts around - This Week in Tech.

He made a number of thought-provoking comments but what I found most intriguing is that he pointed out some differences between podcasting and blogging. Podcasting is not just blogging in sound instead of text. It is consumed differently (it can be listened to while doing other tasks so it doesn’t require your whole attention) and, he argues, while blogs are about the content, podcasts are to a much greater extent about the personality of the creators because what comes across in the voice is of greater importance. I realised that in my case it is certainly true - I listen to his radio show not so much because of what I learn there about technology but because (when it gels) I enjoy the laid-back, friendly back and forth between the participants as they talk about the tech news.

He also made some interesting (and to me worrying) comments about how because podcasts are a ‘grassroots’ medium they are seen as more authentic and that advertisers can exploit this authenticity to sell their products. Thankfully his personal view is that most podcasters will never make significant money at it so they shouldn’t try - they should instead do it for the love of it and to express and share whatever it is they wish to express.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (leading UK think-tank) has launched a 3-week consultation (on their blog) concerning Britain digital future.

Today we launch the first of three week-long online consultations, as a way of gathering opinion, ideas and recommendations for our Digital Manifesto. We will post questions under the following themes, over the following weeks:

• 7th-13th April: Innovating
• 14th-20th April: Reassuring
• 21st-27th April: Empowering

In each instance, we invite replies to our specific questions (added to this blog) from all sorts of perspectives, and all types of expertise. With authors’ permission, we would like to be able to use or quote these ideas in our final publication, and credit them accordingly.

I reckon that media and new media scholars should make their voice heard about their preferred direction of new media development in Britain (and elsewhere)? Top of my head: open source, in-house capacity, surveillance, digital inequality, etc, etc, and unfortunately etc. again.

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Joe Krauss, who co-founded Excite, reveals that although the top 10 searches on Excite were made much more often than any other searches, they only represented 3% of the total searches made that day. In other words - power laws notwithstanding - most searches are the only search made with that term or set of terms on that day. There really is a huge variety in what people look for online.

Of course what isn’t clear is how much diversity there would be if you clustered searches by theme (eg what proportion of all searches are about sex in some form or another). For more about how the Internet makes it possible to address the diverse interests of people as well as their “mass” interests, see this blog post I made earlier.

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