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.

Sue Thomas of the Writing and the Digital Life weblog brought my attention to a row that broke out a few days ago between Mena Trott (co-founder of a major weblog software developer) and Ben Metcalfe, leader of the BBC’s developer network. Mena was arguing that bloggers should be more civil in comments to other people’s blogs while Ben argued honesty was more important. This is an argument that will never be resolved because both sides seem to be trying to make rules applicable to all webloggers when all the evidence (including my research to date) seems to be showing that webloggers are performing a wide range of practices, each with their own appropriate norms and values.

Mena is arguably right that commenters should respect the norms of behaviour that appear to be present on a given weblog but Ben is right to suggest that in the subset of weblogs dedicated to rational critical discourse (a small subset of the whole), norms of politeness may be inappropriate and stifle debate. The real problem they are (unwittingly) identifying is not "how can we enforce or encourage a single norm of weblogging behaviour" but "how can webloggers signal what the ‘rules of engagement’ are for the spaces they create?" Perhaps bloggers could create "creative commons" style "licenses" around commonly-held behaviour norms?

P.S. In that case this blog might be labelled "comments encouraged, politeness not required, provision of evidence for opinions encouraged, statement of conflict of interest required where appropriate".

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.

A few days ago I wrote arguing that the case against continued effective control of ICANN by the US government needs to be made as the "hands off" American argument seems to be almost ubiquitous online. Well, I finally found an organization making this case - IP3 - Internet and Public Policy - which has just put out "ICANN Reform: Establishing the Rule of Law". Ironically it is an academic at an American university who is making this case. Prof Hans Klein argues in the paper:

ICANN?s history shows how private governance can be captured by powerful players. At WSIS governments need to create and enforce a legally-defined framework that limits the power of all stakeholders — including governments themselves. By establishing the rule of law, the politicized processes of ICANN can be replaced by predictable, fair, and efficient decision-making.

It looks as if Hans Klein’s work and those of other allied academics is finally getting some press coverage in the run-up to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

The first keynote speaker at AoIR6 - Ang Peng Hwa - was an advocate of international regulation of the Internet and taking control of ICANN out of the hands of the US (see Ordering Chaos: Regulating the Internet - summarised here). Even the predominantly US audience at this year’s Association of Internet Researchers conference appeared sympathetic to his view (or at least not actively hostile!). The Economist (nominally British) takes different view [registration required]. The leader makes some interesting assertions quite quickly:

ICANN’s stewardship has succeeded because its focus has been not on politics, but on making the network as efficient as possible. The sometimes fierce debates that break out among techies have been conducted transparently.

I’m not an Internet governance scholar but from what I remember reading this is rather dubious.

It is also no accident that many of the countries loudest in their demands for the internet to be taken out of American hands are those, such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that are keenest on restricting its use by their own citizens.

Well, as we have recently heard private Internet companies are hardly standard-bearers of freedom on the whole.

In the accompanying article the Economist did unearth an interesting factoid which didn’t come up in the keynote speech we heard (which was largely lacking in the all-important gossip about this process):

Some countries demanded that groups representing business and public-interest causes be thrown out of the room when governments drafted documents for the summit in November. In one instance, delegates from China and Brazil actually pounded on tables to drown out a speaker from industry.

I would really like to know what that industry speaker was trying to say…

Update: I have started to run across more and more US coverage (on American Public Radio’s Future Tense, for example, or on This Week in Tech which is currently the most popular podcast. I have yet to hear anyone invited to speak when the issue comes up from the anti-US-governance side on this issue. I suspect it is because they don’t know who to ask. So is there a media-savvy person prepared to point out the real or potential problems in US dominance over the Internet’s architecture and to make the case for international governance? For that matter, is there a good document available online that makes this case?

The tile of Steven Berlin Johnson’s recent book - Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter - gives you a pretty good idea of what his argument is. I don’t want to re-cap his whole book - it’s a short and easy read in any case, and more nuanced and interesting than a synopsis would suggest. However if you haven’t read the reviews he suggests that while the content of TV shows and video games may disappoint, the increasing complexity of multi-stranded TV programming and the puzzle-solving that takes place in the better kind of video games are giving our brains a work-out and making us better at solving those problems. He also suggests that reality TV helps us to develop better “social intelligence” while watching it because it encourages us to analyse the relationships between participants (although those relationships tend to be cartoonishly exaggerated and manipulated).

I didn’t have great expectations of the book - I feared given its bestseller status it might be merely “pop science” posturing - but having read it (in part because I will be contributing to the Sage Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents, and the Media) I do think the author raises some interesting points that haven’t been examined in earlier research - particularly when he talks about the increasing complexity of (at least some) television drama. That said, he is clearly and explicitly writing a polemic, so he does, I feel, underplay the importance (and potential impact) of the content of media. This was brought home to me in a passage early in the book (pp. 31-32) where he discusses playing SimCity with his nephew.

He was picking up the game’s inner logic nonetheless. After about an hour of tinkering, I was concentrating on trying to revive one particularly run-down manufacturing district. As I contemplated my options, my nephew piped up, “I think we need to lower our industrial tax rates.” He said it as naturally and as confidently as he might have said, “I think we need to shoot the bad guy.”… My nephew would be asleep in five seconds if you popped him down in an urban studies classroom, but somehow an hour of playing SimCity taught him that high tax rates in industrial areas can stifle development.

What that made me think of immediately is not “how impressive that a kid is thinking about urban development” but “how sinister that a video game can embed a particular (laissez faire capitalist) world view and pass it on to a kid who (because of the out of classroom context) may be more inclined to accept it without questioning its assumptions.

So I wouldn’t take the book as the last word in the long-running debates around media effects - but it is an interesting and useful contribution nonetheless. I would be interested if anyone could point me to discussions among media effects scholars about this book to see whether its suggestions are in fact old hat in the academic community.

For more of his arguments you can read selected pages via the Amazon link above or read an excerpt from the New York Times Magazine. The author has done the obligatory book promotion blitz so you can also hear him on Morning Edition. His work has also been the talk of the blogosphere (bloglines search) (technorati search). This may in part be thanks to his status as an Internet pioneer and friend to A-list bloggers like Cory but I suspect some of the favourable reception it has received online is because he is clearly One Of Us - a video game player, board game geek and fan of TV shows like Lost, 24 and The Sopranos. He starts his book with a description of his childhood love for APBA games - ‘fantasy baseball’ games played with dice and cards. Right away I was charmed….

Online magazine Salon has a fascinating roundup of recent developments in the burgeoning market for kid tracking. I didn’t realise that intrusive technologies are already on the market - from GPS trackers (obvious) to RFID tags sewn into pyjamas or school ID badges (sneaky). It doesn’t go into surveillance of the online experience itself which is very common - AOL has a "guardian" feature that lists:

• Web sites your child successfully visited.
• Web sites your child attempted to visit but was restricted from.
• The number of e-mails and Instant Messages your child has sent.
• Your child’s Address Book and Buddy List activity.

But at least AOL’s tools notify your kid that you are tracking them - many other addon ‘parental control’ programs do not.
Is anything permissible in surveillance as long as you are monitoring a child? The UN convention on the rights of the child includes a right to privacy. But two countries have yet to ratify it - Somalia and the US.

Update: The department’s own Prof Sonia Livingstone has written a book chapter defending a child’s right to online privacy in “Information Technology at Home” (edited by Kraut, to be published by OUP).

Defining what is pornographic is clearly tricky - does the above plaque on board the Pioneer 10 spacecraft count? Perhaps… In the course of research on online pornography for an upcoming report on harm and offense in the media I came across this quote which raised a smile in the report Youth, Pornography and the Internet - an otherwise fairly grim read:

Content drawn from mainstream art and science has been called pornographic. For example, a plaque carried on Pioneer 10, the first space probe to leave the solar system, was called pornographic because it included engravings of nude human figures. … one newspaper published the images on the plaque, but erased the nipples, saying that "[a] family newspaper must uphold community standards." Another newspaper affiliated with a religious denomination said that the plaque should have had praying hands rather than nudes. And a major newspaper printed the image in full, but received a letter from a reader that said, "I was shocked by the blatant display of both male and female sex organs. . . . Isn’t it enough that we must tolerate the bombardment of pornography through the media of film and smut magazines? Isn’t it bad enough that our own space agency officials have found it necessary to spread this filth even beyond our own solar system?" On some of the committee’s site visits, various parties objected to Internet images of classical Greek statues of the human body and Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

The insularity of American web publishers has long been a pet peeve of mine so the launch of the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers with accompanying American-style logo struck a sore nerve. It’s true that in their overview of common issues FAQ they point out that laws vary between countries but several of the sub-FAQs fail to make this point and some of them could therefore actually mislead the unwary. Like their guide to defamation law which says, “If the plaintiff is a public figure, he or she must also prove actual malice” - not true in the UK, for example, I believe. I think in Europe people also have more rights to privacy than here (eg I think you in theory have to get permission from people you take pictures of if you want to publish them though I am not sure about this).

Simply calling it the Legal Guide for American Bloggers would help a lot here, and if they encouraged other major blogging countries’ policy wonks to produce similar guides (and linked to them) that would help a lot too. Meanwhile, serious UK and European bloggers might want to look at The Legal and Regulatory Environment for Electronic Information by Charles Oppenheim which I picked up some time ago though it is now four years old (can anyone suggest anything more recent and/or cheaper?). Suggestions via comments of websites and other online resources relevant to other countries would be welcome.

Of course, I should add, the EFF’s publication of a guide like this is, on the whole, a Good Thing, they have produced lots of other good stuff both for Americans and for the wider Internet-using public and if you are in the US and a blogger (or just want to see how their law affects ordinary members of the American web publishing public) this guide is well worth reading. Also see their guide to How to Blog Anonymously…

Blog censorship gains support | CNET News.com

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I was browsing in the Victoria and Albert Museum and I came across Life in Victorian Britain by the appropriately-named Michael St John Parker for Pitkin Guides. I found it intriguing because it is clearly aimed at children or early adolescent and its view of the Victorian era in Britain is (to my eyes) startlingly conservative. For example:

A servant’s life might well have been described as rigorous and limited but, in general terms, domestic service offered security, respectability, and valued employment and training to the vast majority of those involved

Or take this:

In once sense the workplace horrors of the Industrial Revolution cannot be overstated, but in another sense they should be looked at in perspective. The vast majority of people in pre-industrial society lived in poverty, squalor, discomfort and danger. The workers who joined the new factories were fleeing an existence as agricultural labourers which was even harsher…

These would be controversial claims if developed at length but they are just stuck in in passing alongside a lengthly paean to the technological progress and Imperial greatness of the Victorian era. And my guess is that the kids reading this stuff won’t have the grounding in the detailed history to judge it properly or see what it omits. It is being taught at schools using texts similar to this one (which was published in 1999) that have stuck me with an abiding faith in the virtues of the British Empire even though intellectually I am now at the very least ambivalent about it!

P.S. For a more balanced view with copious references to original archive material you could do worse than consult The Learning Curve from the (UK) National Archives.

A strong libertarian strain persists among parts of the US ‘digerati’. This manifests itself problematically when it comes to issues around hate speech. By an odd coincidence this issue popped up twice for me today. Google News somehow managed to list National Vanguard (a nasty neo-fascist rag) as a news source and has now removed it. And I was surprised when I looked at the rules for submitting content to Ourmedia the other day that pornography (not defined) is banned while no rules govern hate speech. When I raised the issue, I was told by one of the site’s creators that they, “don’t want to be in the business of deciding what constitutes hate speech” (though they are apparently happy to decide what constitutes porn).

It would be nice to think that this won’t turn out to be a problem for them but I fear sooner or later it will. I have urged them to reconsider and at least introduce some tagging system for their content - not because I am worried myself about harmful media effects but because, as I said, “I worry that if teachers and librarians have no way of “protecting” kids from content that might offend those kids’ parents, they will not direct them to ourmedia and indeed might end up blocking access to it.”

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