One of the intriguing things about the BBC’s recently broadcast docudrama Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution is that in order to balance the liberal perspective they invited Slavoj Zizek on as an apologist for Robespierre. It’s not often you find calls for revolution on mainstream TV programming (well OK it is on BBC2 not BBC1 but in a high profile time slot). I wasn’t convinced in the end by Slavoj’s “no omelette without eggs” argument but I was struck that the BBC seemed incapable of leaving the audience in any doubt that the revolutionary terror was a Bad Thing. Why provide the appearance of balance then have a voiceover ending which leaves the viewer with the ‘author’s message’ that the French revolutionary terror was the precursor to bloodthirsty dictators like Pol Pot and Stalin? I suppose the BBC’s explanatory blurb said it all:

during the 365 days that Robespierre sat on the Committee of Public Safety, the French Republic descended into a bloodbath … [this documentary] looks at how Robespierre’s revolutionary idealism so quickly became an excuse for tyranny.

Still the programme is well worth watching if only for the chilling reconstructions of the committee’s own deliberations, based on contemporary sources.

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?

Kalev Leetaru has done a valuable bit of digging in this comparison of Google Books with the Open Content Alliance’s work. Conventional wisdom is that Google’s work is on a broader scale but restricted because of its commercial focus while the Open Content Alliance’s work is on a smaller scale but as “a partnership of libraries and corporate sponsors under the administration of the Internet Archive” they are thought to be the ‘good guys’, offering access “available without restriction to public access and enjoyment”. It appears however that the OCA allows its partners to (for example) prohibit unauthorised commercial use of scanned material even when that material is out of copyright, and it occasionally mis-labels out of copyright works as copyrighted (though in fairness Google may well make similar errors).

The piece provides rather more detail on the minutiae of digitization than most outside the book preservation community will find interesting, but those interested in the future of books online may find it an interesting read.

The New York Times summarises its findings and legislator reactions though the NYT’s summary of its summary rather overstates matters - the report does not say, “the sexual solicitation of children online is not a significant problem” but it does conclude it is a problem for a small minority of children who are likely already to be exhibiting other risky behaviours.

The full text of the report (and the executive summary etc) is here.

Sonia Livingstone and I have just finished our draft of:

Livingstone, S., & Brake, D. (in prep). On the rapid rise of social networking sites: New findings and policy implications. Children and Society.

If you’re a policy-maker or educator and would like to see it before publication, please email me (dbrake {at} gmail.com).

These three Google employees may be the world’s most powerful censors

The New York Times Magazine today featured Google’s Gatekeepers - a look at the small unaccountable team within Google who decide whether and to what extent they will comply with the wishes of governments around the world who wish to regulate its operations. Encouragingly, Andrew McLaughlin, global public-policy director, is a Berkman Fellow, which is about as good a place as I can imagine to start from if you want to appreciate Internet regulation issues.

More disturbingly, Nicole Wong describes her role as finding an approach which “will allow our products to move forward in a country” (which should come as no surprise - as a publicly-held company it is legally obliged to maximise its profits).

Google has long insisted that it wasn’t interested in or involved with news gathering that involved human intervention - “we just serve stuff up using algorithms”, they say. (Of course the algorithms at Google News are continually tweaked to ensure that people using them get the kind of results that Google believes that they want, and the selection of news sources themselves is done by humans…) But I just noticed a new programme off in a corner of Google - Power Readers in Politics - essentially a group blog run by a small and Google-selected set of politicians and journalists, attached to Google Reader. Also see their Canadian version.

How Wikipedia Works, a free-to-access book (also available in print) about all aspects of Wikipedia by some Wikipedia ‘insiders’ and
Is something fundamentally wrong with Wikipedia’s governance processes, a roundup of concerns from someone who has been both participating in it and studying it (inspired by this list of concerns by another critic, but adding links to specific cases).

I have not researched the subject sufficiently to have a view on the accuracy of the claims of problems but I was dismayed at the sheer number of allegations…

You can find an assortment of papers delivered at Media, Communication and Humanity linked here (ordered by subject).

The BBC’s iPM programme/podcast recently featured a short piece about the right of the police and other bodies to access communications data - that is any data about our communications short of the communications themselves - which websites we access, who we phone, when and from where. Stuart Ward, whose blog posting inspired the piece, was concerned that new government proposals would give authorities direct access to this data without their having to request it from telecoms operators and ISPs. Well it’s true that these companies have the right to question any such request but I can’t help thinking that’s not much of a safeguard. What proportion of requests are refused? And would businesses really be willing to resist government pressure to hand over data given that they are not privy to the reasons it is wanted? What startles me is that as it was explained communications data requests can be authorised on the say-so of a senior police officer alone - no judicial or other oversight is involved (except, as I said, if a telco or ISP objects). The argument I imagine is that communications data is not as sensitive information as communications themselves, but it can still reveal your physical movements and (through web traffic and search terms) quite a bit about what you are thinking…