BoingBoing reports boingnantly on the miserable enthusiasm of the (unelected, heavily-lobbied) European Commission for making it illegal to provide families with an Internet connection if any member is accused of having violated copyright three times.
Take a look at your hard drive and tell me for sure that a judge reviewing the charges in a 1-2 minute traffic-court style proceeding would not find you unworthy of a European Internet connection. Three Flickr photos you passed around because they were amusing? Three newspaper articles you downloaded and attached to emails you sent to friends? Three recipes you enjoyed and shared with your family? Three attachments friends sent you that you didn’t ask for but didn’t bother deleting because you didn’t even realize they were copyrighted? Three extended quotes from medical information sites sent to an ailing relative?
And, by the way, downloading copyrighted material is not necessarily a violation of copyright. Fair use creates exemptions that are based on factors other than mere possession.
This rule has nothing to do with advancing our arts, sciences, education, government, or economy. So, if the EC passes two more stupid/insane/corrupt (your choice) laws, can we disconnect them from governance? Please?
“In the spirit of Open Access week” (writes John Palfrey), Harvard’s Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review is today launching a new online publication. The new publication is Amicus. The idea is for law journals and other institutions to publish “as a supplement to their regular mode, shorter, open pieces formatted for the web that have serious work behind them and which link more actively to other arguments, online and offline.”
John contributes his own excellent essay, about the rhetorical spaces of the Internet: From the intro:
In this essay, I explore several of the privacy and speech problems that arise in the context of lives partially mediated by digital technologies. I conclude by arguing that we should focus not just on the civil rights and civil liberties problems, but also on the opportunities afforded by life in these new public spaces online.
Amicus joins the Berkman Center’s Publius in the open square of the Net…
If you go to the bio page I maintain for people who are considering hiring me as a speaker — which is how I make most of my living — you’ll see a reference towards the bottom of the paragraph to my having written gags for Woody Allen’s comic strip for seven years. If you hover over the reference, a popup will add that I wrote about 40% of the gags. But, I usually ask to preview how people are planning on introducing me as a speaker, precisely so I can remove that credit. Even though the comic strip was in hundreds of newspapers and ran for seven years, few remember it, so if I get introduced as having written for Woody Allen, I then have to spend 60 seconds explaining that there was a comic strip, that I didn’t write for any of his movies, that I only met him twice, that I’m sure he wouldn’t remember me, that I’m not funny — all of which is exactly how you don’t want to begin a talk.
Now, the guy who originated the strip, drew it, managed it, signed it, and wrote a lot of the gags has written an article in The Guardian about the experience. Stuart Hample’s memoir of the strip is quite fascinating, at least to me. (Disclosure: Stu took me under his wing, treated me well, and was a nice guy. I have only good feelings for him.)
Because in some areas I am disciplined to the point of OCD, I wrote seven gags a night for those seven years, winnowed down to about 50 that I would send to Stu every week. He would tell me which ones he and Woody had accepted — about 3 a week, I recall — sometimes with comments from Woody Allen. Having Woody Allen critique gags was a rare privilege. It plus the $25 per gag kept me going.
Writing seven gags a night takes some of the romance out of the endeavor. Especially because the Woody Allen strip was looking for wry moments as much as for big gags, the challenge was coming up with situations. Woody is in an existentialist bakery. Woody decides wearing shoes is oppressive. Woody is insulted that a bear won’t chase him. Whatever. If you have the situation, it’s easy to wring a set of three panels out of it, and probably get a Sunday pay-off as well. Plus, there was always the possibility that the real Woody Allen would supply an actually funny punch line, or tell you how you could improve yours. Pretty cool.
I’ve always been ambivalent about using this credit. I mention it in my speaker’s bio and other places because it’s good for business. But it’s easily misunderstood and easily over-stated. Plus, I’ve always had the nightmare that someone will fact check my ass with Woody Allen, who would not remember me. Stu’s warm acknowledgment of my little contribution has made me feel better about this. But it remains a weird line in my resume, and one that can distort an audience’s expectations. So, I will continue to keep it out of introductions.
While I’m fessing up, here’ a little known fact: My mother’s first cousin, with whom she was especially close, was Tiny Tim. Yes, the ukelele-playing 1960s punch line, Tiny Tim. Mom used to babysit him. There’s been a recent resurgence of interest in him. I met him once briefly at my mother’s funeral and again by standing in line at Spooky Town, where he was a Halloween performer. But I can certainly vouch that he was totally for real. Obviously somewhat crazy, but incredibly sweet, and completely serious about his music — he was in fact a serious musicologist.
So, there you have it. Two Unnoteworthy Celebrity Connections. I’m looking forward to your own contributions to this confessional genre…
Now, as health care reform is being debated, would be an excellent time to ask your friendly local Senators to support adding Certified Public Midwifery to the list of healthcare providers who can receive Medicaid funds.
CPM’s are trained professionals. They are not nurse midwives and thus send women into the “regular” health care system when the women are at risk in any way. But, if you are pregnant, not at risk, and want a home birth, a CPM is the person to call. CPMs are hugely dedicated women who work long hours for little pay because they love healthy women and their healthy babies [1234]. I say this as a proud parent of a CPM.
There are two new-ish Radio Berkman interviews up: Me talking with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger about his book that argues that we are in danger of forgetting how to forget, and Russell Neuman on learning from the past of the media.
I think there are two pieces of news that will be most salient for people as they look at this report. The first is a response to the question: “how are we doing?”, and the answer is that we’re overall middle-of-the-pack, no better. The second responds to the question: “what policies and practices worked for countries that have done well?”, and the answer to that is: there is good evidence to support the proposition that a family of policies called “open access,” that encourage competition, played an important role.
Elliot Noss of Tucows — agreeing with the Benkler report — has posted about why the state of Canadian broadband is not nearly as healthy as a report from the incumbent providers would have us believe. He concludes: “I want, and there is no reason we cannot have, at least 100mbs full symmetrical bandwidth. It is a global competitive imperative. Telcos, Cablecos, I do not want your lousy bowl of 1.5mbps gruel. Please sir, may I have some more?”
My Blackberry 8830 does what it needs to do. I can type on it. I can take it to Europe. With the Gmail app installed, I can read and delete emails and have them deleted from my gmail inbox. I an view web pages through a keyhole. I can recharge it off of my laptop. I can run the vaguely accurate Verizon GPS on it. I can fit a couple of downloads on it.
But I don’t love. I’m very glad to have it. But it does nothing for my hormone levels.
My eye now is roving. Verizon has announced it will be offering the Motorola Droid in November, which runs Google’s Android operating system. Unless there are some gotchas — if it has half of what we’re expecting, can we call it the Hemodrhoid? — I’m going to be explaining to my BBerry that the problem is really with me, not it, and then making the switch.
I don’t expect it the Droid to be as beautiful as the iPhone. Nor will there be as many apps. But, it will be beautiful enough, and as people write more skins for it, it may get better with age. And there are already more than enough Android apps, which is exactly how many I need.
Most of all, though, there won’t be an AppStore. The AppStore is the seductive angel of death for computing. It enables Apple to keep quality up and, more important, to keep support costs down. But a computer that can’t be programmed except by its manufacturer (or with the permission of its manufacturer) isn’t a real computer. The success of the AppStore is a gloomy, scary harbinger. From controlling the apps that can go on its mobile phone, it’s a short step for Apple to decide to control the apps that can go on its rumored slate/netbook device. And since so much of the future of computing will occur on mobiles and netbooks, this portends a serious de-generation of computing, as predicted by Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.
So, some of my technolust for a phone I haven’t even seen yet is due to the political hope it promises. Rally ’round the Droid, boys and girls!
The Berkman Center has published a draft of a review of broadband around the world. It’s posted for public review and comment now. This is the result of a huge effort by some incredibly talented and smart people, led by Yochai Benkler, and supported by the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
In Finland, you have a legal right to be connected to the Internet, at at least 1mbps. The right begins in 2010. In 2015, your legal minimum connection speed will be 100mbps. (In the US, broadband connections generally start at 1mbps.)
According a right to connect is not the only way to ensure universal connectedness, of course. But it sure is one way.
