The founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee, has been knighted, has been plausibly suggested for a Nobel Peace Prize, and is revered by his peers. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, inspires a worldwide nervousness: “What will the kid do next?” Yet, Facebook does something as important as the World Wide Web: While the Web knows how pages are connected, FB knows how people are connected. So, how can MZ get some of the love the world shows to TBL?

There is a way.

First, let’s make sure MZ is comfortable. Let him take, say, $100 million out of FB as winnings. His co-founders and managers deserve to do very, very well too. In fact, all 1,000 or so employees should make out like freaking bandits. They took a risk, they built a business, they have succeeded beyond anyone’s dreams. They should make more money than they’ll ever need. If $100 million isn’t enough, make it $250 million. Whatever.

No, I’m not going to suggest that FB go away or become a non-profit. But it would have to make a big change. It would have to separate itself as a company from the social data it’s gathered so far.

To do that, FB could create the FB Foundation, or the Social Data Provisioners Consortium, or the World Wide Graph, or whatever. It would be in charge of the social information FB has gathered — who knows whom, who likes what, who isn’t speaking to whom ever again. From now on, that’s where the data FB users generate would go. MZ, in his role as the chair of the Facebook Foundation (FBF) would put together a stellar board, composed of the smartest and most trusted people from around the world to guide its decisions about privacy and other policies.

The FBF would be structurally and legally separated from Facebook. Facebook would continue as the world’s leading supplier of client software and services for people who want to do online social networking. It would continue to sell people to advertisers and make as much money as it can. But it would draw from and contribute to the FBF’s data servers just as would any other group that wanted to create a social networking client, or make other (permitted) use of the FBF data. All those using FBF’s data for commercial purposes would be required to chip in a little cash to keep its server farms well fertilized. (If these servers could be distributed and federated, the cost might be born by the hosts.)

Why would MZ do this? Because it’s the right thing to do. Or, some version of it is. And maybe if FB doesn’t, there will eventually be enough anxiety worldwide to create and populate an open, federated social networking data system that starts from scratch. But it’d be better for us all if it started from the staggering investment in time and information FB’s users have already made in it.

Besides, is there any contributor to the Web more admirable and more admired than Tim Berners Lee? MZ, that could be you! Do what TBL would have done! The MZ legacy FTW!

[And then I woke up...]

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Pew Internet surveyed a bunch o’ experts about where will be in The Cloud in 2020. The survey was more intended to elicit verbal responsesthan to come up with reliable numbers, but overall the experts seem to agree that we’ll be computing with a hybrid of desktop and cloud services. That seems a safe bet, especially since given enough bandwidth, all services are local. (Hasn’t distance always been the time it takes to connect?)

Several of the experts push back against the term “cloud,” Gary Bachula because it’s a “bad metaphor for broadening understanding of the concept,” and Susan Crawford because its ubiquity will mean that we “won’t need a word for it.”

Many worry about the power this will put in the hands of the Big Cloud Providers, with Robert Ackland arguing that “we need the cloud to be built using free and open source software.”

Several believe that there will be some prominent act of terrorism or incompetence in The Cloud that will drive people back to their desktops: “Expect a major news event involving a cloud catastrophe security breach or lost data to drive a reversion of these critical resources back to dedicated computing,” says Nathaniel James, or “a huge blow up with errorism,” predicts R. Ray Wang. Most agree it will be “both/and,” not “either/or.”

Many think that we’re not recognizing the depth of the change. For example, Fred Hapgood is among those who predicts the death, transformation, or marginalization of the PC: “By 2020 the computational hardware that we see around us in our daily lives will all be peripherals – tablets, goggles, earphones, keyboards, 3D printers, and the like. The computation driving the peripherals will go on in any of a million different places…” Says Garth Graham: “By 2020, a ‘general-purpose PC’ and a ‘smart phone’ will have converged into a range of general-purpose interactive connection devices, and ‘things’ will have acquired agency by becoming smart. “The PC is just a phase,” says Rebecca MacKinnon.

Some of the commenters point to the global digital divide, although they don’t agree on which side will be most cloud-based. Gary Arlen says that because of the U.S.’s desktop-based infrastructure, we won’t move into the cloud as rapidly as will less-developed nations. Seliti Arata, however, says, “Business models will provide premium services and applications on the cloud for monetization. However most of the world population will continue to use pirated software on their desktops and alternative/free cloud services.”

As for me, I don’t have predictions because the future is too furious. For example, the speed and availability of broadband access in this country is unpredictable and is by itself determinative, not to mention the Internet-seeking asteroid this is currently streaking toward the Earth. It’s safe to say, however, (= here comes something that in 5 years I’ll feel foolish for having said) that we’re going to move more and more into the cloud. The only thing I’d add to The Experts is that this will have network effects like crazy — effects due to the scale of data and social connections being managed under one roofless roof (with, we hope, lots of openness as well as security).

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Data.gov has announced that it’s making some data sets available as RDF triples so Semantic Webbers can start playing with it. There’s an index of data here. The site says that even though only a relative handful of datasets have been RDF’ed, there are 6.4 billion triples available. They’ve got some examples of RDF-enabled visualizations here and here, and some more as well.

Data.gov also says they’re working with RPI to come up with a proposal for “a new encoding of datasets converted from CSV (and other formats) to RDF” to be presented for worldwide consideration: “We’re looking forward to a design discussion to determine the best scheme for persistent and dereferenceable government URI naming with the international community and the World Wide Web Consortium to promote international standards for persistent government data (and metadata) on the World Wide Web.” This is very cool. A Uniform Resource Identifier points to a resource; it is dereferenceable if there is some protocol for getting information about that resource. So, Data.gov and RPI are putting together a proposal for how government data can be given stable Web addresses that will predictably yield useful information about that data.

I think.

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Robert Wright’s post about Steve Jobs seems to me to be exactly right: Jobs is an artist who would rather create the perfect product than rule the world. (Doc has been saying for over ten years that the best way to understand Jobs is as an artist.)

I am not completely relieved, however. The AppStore is such an appealing business model that what Jobs created for artistic reasons may spread for economic ones. That’s one reason that the competition from Android is so important.

(By the way, the second comment on the Wright column is great, and is from my old friend Evelyn Walsh.)

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Elliot Maxwell is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “Openness: How increasing accessibility and responsiveness can transform processes and systems.” H3e says he came to the question by observing the spread and importance of the Net and its effect on institutions. He sees openness as a lens for understanding processes and systems.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

Openness is a continuum, Elliot says. For example, open source software benefits from openness, but because decisions are made by assigned individuals, it is not itself fully open. Things are open if they’re accessible and can be modified, repurposed, and redistributed. Openness is in part an attitude, he says. E.g., a doctor is more open if s/he is more willing to listen to the patient and to take her/his time. “Openness is not necessarily a product of IT.”

Also, openness isn’t always the right answer. E.g., an electronic health record should be open enough that doctors can see it and so it can be immediately updated as lab results come in. But, it shouldn’t necessarily be open to other people, insurance companies, or the gov’t. Also, openness can make more haystacks, hiding the needles we need to find.

Elliot began thinking about this when Napster was at its high point. Traditional IP sees control as essential to creating an environment that encourages creation. But, we also want to encourage follow-on creators. There’s not a lot of research about how much incentive first creators need. (And, of course, first creators are themselves follow on creators.) Control is expensive and imperfect. (Think DRM). Open source, on the other hand, thinks value comes by distributing and sharing. But, it can be hard to evaluate all the contributions that come in.

Elliot lists some examples of increased openness, and spends some time talking about the attenmpts to open up clinical trials. (ClinicalTrials.gov and the Journal of Failed Clinical Trials.)

Elliot is also especially interested in higher education, which has been relatively unaffected by openness, although he expects that to change. (It’s easier for Harvard and other research institutions to support open access, he says, than, say, community colleges that have different goals and constraints. ) Elliot sees a rise in open educational resources, which will affect teaching institutions. OER will be increasingly driven by customers, rather than being course materials put up on the Web by a teacher. We will know more about how OERs are being used, they will become more interoperable, and there will be incentives for participation and use.

At CMU and other places, there’s work on harvesting what happens to and around digital educational materials. We need better data on student progress, educational outcomes, and the factors that affect student success. He says we also need research on the cmparative effectiveness of digital edu materials, and best practices. Also, it’d be great to extend fab labs digitally.

Elliot sees progress in opening up research. The Human Genome Project was the seminal event that changed the basic model of research, at least in the bio sciences. Open access journals are growing. But, too many institutions still only count publication in closed journals as a scholarly achievement. We don’t yet have good models for how to reward research that is immediately published.

Intellectual property rules need to be recalibrated to recognize the importance of follow-on innovators, and to enable more use by educators. Bayh-Dole should be modified to enable more open licensing. He would also like to see some “orphan work” legislation.

We should change the default of campus events so that they’re open, unless they’re specifically closed. “We should take advantage of greater openness to improve support services.” The government should fund open access to financial aid materials. NIH-funded research should be open to the public within 12 months should be extended to all non-classified research funded by the 11 fed agencies that spende over $100M in research. And the embargo time should be reudced to 6 months. The government ought to include funds for open access publishing when making grants, Elliot says.

Then there’s openness and transparency about academic degrees. We don’t know what it means to get a degree in something. We need more compatibility, comparability and portability of degrees. The government should encourage accrediting agencies to increase their focus on learning outcomes. (Currently only 19% of accrediting bodies say anything more than that a school is accredited or not.)

Q: [ethanz] You’re conflating openness and judging inputs and outputs. Evaluating schools by outcomes is one thing, but that’s different from openness.
A: Openness has to do with the access to the information.
Q: US News and World Report makes a closed evaluation based on open info. When you go more open, you can get unintended consequences. E.g., no one has done an open search engine, because it’s too game-able. What are the unintended consequences of opening up campus events, for example? E.g., Facebook opening up more and more private data. I was hoping you’d tell us more about where openness is inappropriate.
A: Yes. I’ve been talking about openness because that’s where it’s going.
Q: I agree with your framing of first and follow on innovators and with your general direction. But, the limits are important.
Q: As a historian, your directional arrow seems too one-dimensional. Historically, open and closed have worked hand in glove. E.g., the patent system closes paths but forces innovators to reveal what they have. E.g., the closedness of some medical processes.
A: Changing the default for university events would only be for events that were public anyway. And if I sound like I’m giving a litany of open

Q: [me] Is data more open if it’s been cleaned up and put into standardized formats. It’s more reusable, but it may also mean decisions have been made about it that anticipate some uses and not others?
A: It’s situational. In the long run it’s probably likely that all the slicing and dicing would evolve to a smaller way of using this info, because people would be able to build on that info — that’s just a guess. But, when people are unlikely to agree, getting it out quickly would be more usefl. Standardization has some benefits, but if it’s rigid it’s probably wrong.

Elliot concludes about talking about new means of certification. We’re going to find new ways of certifying people in a global environment. There aren’t educational institutions everywhere, and we have a new generation of self-directed learners. That will allow many more people to be certified.

Q: [wendy] What’s the most effective lever for openness? Is it giving credit for being open?
A: We need to recognize that the closed path is not the only way to build value.

Q: Transparency, openness, and open source are each different.
A: OS is a way of building code. Transparency lets us see, but not by itself affect…
Q: At the level of international relations, we can maybe get transparency, but openness will only come from individual administrations…
A: Transparency would let us see what’s happening. But I want us to be able to act on the info we see.

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Dan Gillmor got an offer from a publisher for his “Mediactive” book (“a user’s guide to democratized media”), but the publisher wouldn’t agree to publish it under a Creative Commons license. So, he’s self-publishing it at Lulu. He’s doing this on principle, but also for pragmatic reasons:

… the main reason I’m still getting royalty checks for We the Media is that the book has been available as a free download since the day it went into bookstores. Had we not published it that way, given the indifference (at best) shown by American newspapers and magazines, the book would have sunk without a trace.

Of course, Dan’s motive is not primarily financial:

…this isn’t just a book, at least not way traditional publishers understand books even as they dabble online.

To publishers, books are items they manufacture and send out in trucks. Or else they’re computer files to be rented to publishers’ customers, or customers of Amazon, Apple and other companies that use proprietary e-reading software to lock the work down in every possible way. In both cases, publishers crave being the gatekeepers.

Mediactive aims to be a multi-faceted project. Over the next few years, I hope to experiment in lots of media formats and styles with the ideas here. And — this is key — I also plan to experiment with it in the broader context of the emerging ecosystem of ideas.

Dan reports that the folks at Lulu.com (where — product placement alert — you can get a copy of my young adult book, My $100 Million Secret — are being helpful and creative about supporting books in the new ecosystem. Plus, it’ll be available at Lulu this summer, instead of the year it would have taken to get it onto shelves via the traditional route.

Since Dan is one of the most admirable people around, It would be fun as a community to make his book a success in every way, from spreading its ideas to selling a whole bunch of copies…

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Steven Johnson makes one of his typically brilliantly insightful points in his recent NY Times op-ed: The iPhone is a locked-down device, but it has been the site of arguably the greatest burst of software generativity in the computing era, much of it by small developers. This has led Steve to re-evaluate his adherence to the “unifying creed” that “Open platforms promote innovation and diversity more effectively than proprietary ones.” When Dan Gillmor challenged this in a tweet, Steve responded with a terrific blog post, further considering the point.

The argument is over the issue framed by Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. JZ defines “generativity” as “a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” (p. 70) Steve suggests that we instead judge generativity by the type of results we see, not by the nature of the software or hardware environment on which they run; a generative platform is “a platform that is constantly being re-invented in surprising new ways by a diverse group of creators, where individuals, hobbyists, small startups, and amateurs compete on a level playing field with large incumbents.” So, while JZ assumes that a system’s capacity to produce generative results depends on the system’s openness, the burgeoning of software for the iPhone shows that closed systems can produce wildly generative results.

I think a few things are going on here.

First, Steve is right about the fecundity of the iPhone as a platform, and about its openness to amateur and small developers. But, he’s right because the iPhone is not purely locked down. Apple could exert any control it wants, to any degree, any time it wants, but so far it’s been pretty open. So, the iPhone and the iPad are generative because in practice they generally meet JZ’s criteria. They are, in JZ’s taxonomy, hybrid animals.

But, the fact that there are over 150,000 apps for the iPhone is not the only measure of generativity. Apple has announced it will exclude unruly guests from its party (and Apple gets to define “unruly”), so the unruly don’t even bother to ask for admittance. The AppStore is a ruly environment. Now, there are obviously advantages to the user (as well as to Apple, but we’ll leave that aside for now) in having a device that cannot be disrupted. (“Disruptive” figures large in JZ’s book, but not in Steve’s definition.) For one thing, a ruly device is less likely to melt into a puddle of palm-sized uselessness. But, that’s to say that the iPhone’s limits on generativity are desirable. Steve’s argument is different. He’s saying that the iPhone is generative.

In any case, I think Steve is wrong in his causality. The iPhone has generated 150,000 apps because it’s a cool piece of hardware with a preternaturally appealing UI, useful software affordances built in, and an appealing SDK. Not to mention, it’s got a gazillion users. And the App Store is well-designed for marketing small programs. The iPhone is not wildly generative (in Steve’s sense) because it’s a walled garden; the iPhone could allow other marketplaces for apps to exist without losing its generativity (as Steve notes in an aside).

But, the most important issue is not whether the iPhone is generative. The question is whether Steve is right to renounce the “unifying creed” that generativity depends on open platforms. The argument should not be over whether a particular hybrid device is generative — although it’s helpful to have the case raised — but over the future of the Internet. That’s why JZ raises the issue of generativity in the first place.

JZ defines generativity as part of a polarity. Here’s what he says at the beginning of his book:

…the pieces are in place for a wholesale shift away from the original chaotic design that has given rise to the modern information revolution. This counterrevolution would push mainstream users away from a generative Internet that fosters innovation and disruption, to an appliancized network that incorporates some of the most powerful features of today’s Internet while greatly limiting its innovative capacity—and, for better or worse, heightening its regulability. A seductive and more powerful generation of proprietary networks and information appliances is waiting for round two. If the problems associated with the Internet and PC are not addressed, a set of blunt solutions will likely be applied to solve the problems at the expense of much of what we love about today’s information ecosystem. (p. 8)

The danger is that as cellphones become mobile Internet devices, and as iPods become mobile computing platforms, our new generation of computing devices will be appliances open only at the forbearance of their creators. Those creators may be relatively benevolent, but the question isn’t whether this device or that creator is open. It’s what the future of the Internet and of computers will look like. If appliances become the dominant way of interacting with the Net (and thus how we interact with one another), then no matter how loosely the device creators hold the reins, we are accepting the bit in our mouths. If appliances become the default, then the market for challenging, risky, disruptive, subversive app development is in danger of drying up.

From that point of view, the generativity of the iPhone and the iPad is — to use JZ’s word — seductive. Steve Johnson is right that they have unleashed a torrent of creativity. But it is creativity within bounds. The very success of these devices, driven by the generativity that Steve Jobs allows us and to which Steve Johnson astutely points us, can lead us to the future that JZ fears.

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Dan Gillmor has a terrific piece that looks at what’s worrisome about the iPad and its fawning embrace by the very media that hope to be saved by it.

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John Wilbanks of Creative Commons (and head of Science Commons) is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk about the threats to science’s generativity. He takes Jonathan Zittrain’s definition of generativity: “a system’s capacity to produced unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.”

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

[NOTE: Ethan Zuckerman has posted his far superior bloggage]

ScienceCommons tries to spark the sort of creativity and innovation in science that we find in the broader cultural Net. Scientists often resist the factors that have increased generativity in other realms: Science isn’t very accessible, it’s hard to master, and it’s not very transferable because the sciences exist as guild-disciplines. He says MIT had to build a $400M building to put scientists into the same room so they’d collaborate. There’s a tension, he says, between getting credit for your work and sharing your work. People think that it ought to be easy to build a science commons, but it’s not.

To build a common and increase generativity, John looks at three key elements: data, tools, and text. First, he looks at these from the standpoint of law. Text is copyrighted, but we can change the law and we can use Creative Commons. Tools include contracts and patents. Contracts govern the moving of ideas around, and they are between institutions, not between scientists. Data is mainly governed by secrecy.

The resistance turns out not to be from the law but from incentives, infrastructure, and institutions. E.g. the National Institutes of Health Public Access requires scientists to make their work available on line within 12 months if the scientist has taken any NIH money. Before it was required, only 4% of scientists posted their work. Now it’s up over 70%, and it’s rising. Without this, scientists are incented to withhold info until the moment of maximum impact.

To open up data, you need incentives and infrastructure if you’re going to make it useful to others. People need incentives to label their data, put it into useful formats, to take care of the privacy issues, to carefully differentiate attribution and citation (copy vs. inspiration). So far, data doesn’t have the right set of incentives.

To open up tools, we’re talking about physical stuff, e.g., recombinant DNA. Scientists don’t get funded to make copies. “The resistance is almost fractal,” he says, at each level of opening up these materials.

We need a “domain name system for data” if we’re going to get Net effects. But there’s no accepted data infrastructure on the Web for doing this, unlike Google’s role for text pages.

Science is heading back to the garage, in the Eric Von Hippel sense. [He's sitting next to me at the table!] You can buy a gene sequencer on eBay for under $1,000. You can go to MrGene.com. People around the world are doing this. In SF, a group is doing DIY sequencing, creating toxin detectors, etc. The price of parts and materials are dropping the way memory prices and printer prices did. We need an open system, including a registry, in part because that’s the most responsive way to respond to bad genes made by bad people.

“PC or TiVo for science?” John asks. PC’s are ugly, but they give us more control over our tools and will let us innovate faster.

Q: [salil] You focus on experimental sciences. Are these obstacles present in mathematical and computer sciences? Data and tools are not a big part of math. Not making one’s work available right now in my field counts as a disadvantage. Specialization is an issue (what you call a guild)…
A: Math and physics are at the extreme of the gradient of openness, while chemistry probably sits at the other end. The lower the cost of publishing, the more disclosure there is. So, in math there isn’t as much institutional, systemic resistance because you don’t need a lot of support from an institution to be a great mathematician.
A: Guilds serve a purpose. But when you think about the competency of a system overall, it comes from the abstraction of expertise into tools. In the research sciences, microspecialization has come at the expense of abstraction. But it’s easier and easier to put knowledge into the tools because we can put lots into computers; that won’t revolutionize math, but it will have more of an effect on sciences with physical components. Science Commons stays away from math because it’s working.

Q: [Eric Von Hippel] State of patents?
A: Most of the time in science, patents are trading cards; they’re about leverage and negotiations than about keeping people from using them. If we think about data as prior art, if we funnel it correctly, it becomes harder to get stupid patents. Biotech patents should be dealt with through an robust public domain strategy. “We tend to get wound up about IP, but then you go out in the field and people are just doing stuff.” Copyright is more stressful because patents time out after 20 yrs.

Q: [ethanz] Clearly, the legal response is a tiny part of a larger equation. If you were coming into it now, not trying to put forward this novel legal framework, where would you start?
A: Funders. Starting with the law lets us engage everyone in the conversation, because as the legal group we don’t create text, tools, or data. But we’re focusing on the funder-institution relation. We want funders to write clauses that reserve the right to put stuff into the commons. “If the funders mandate, the universities tend to accept.” Also, it gets easier to do high-quality research outside the big universities. Which means the small schools can do deals with the funders to make their faculty more attractive to the funder. The funder can also specify that the scientists will annotate their data. The funder has the biggest interest in making sure that science is generative.

Q: Then why aren’t funders requiring the data be open?
A: Making data legally open is easy. Making it useful to others is difficult. Curating it with enough metadata, publishing it on the Web, making it machine readable, making it persistent — none of those infrastructures exist for that, with some exceptions (e.g., the genome). So, the Web has to become capable of handling data.
Q: [ethanz] One reason that orgs like CC have been successful is that they put into law something that is a norm on the Web. Math and physics are so open is that they’re open; it’s the norm. The institutional culture within these disciplines has a lot to do with it. How do you shape norms?
A: Carolina Rossini and I have been working on a paper about the university as a curator of norms. CC lets you waive all your rights. We’ve thought about writing a series of machine readable norms like CC contracts but with no law in the middle. E.g., citation is a norm. E.g., non-endorsement is a norm that says that if you use my data, you can’t imply that I agree with you. But the norm that I should mark my data clearly, should have a persistent URL, are things laws can’t govern but should be norms. We use Eric’s ideas here. E.g., branding something with an open trademark.
A: [carolina] We need a bottom up approach based on norms and a top down approach based on law and policy. If you don’t work with both, they will clash.
A: Our lawyer Tim says that norms scale far better than the law. You can’t enforce the law all the time.

Q: [me] “Making the Web capable of handling data”? How? Semantic Web? What scale?
A: It’s a religious question. My sect says that ontologies are human. We should be using standard formats, e.g., OWL, RDF. Some ontologies will be used by communities, and if they area expressed in standard ways, they can be stitched together. From my view: name things in clear and distinct ways. 2. Put them into OWL or other languages in the correct way. 3. Let smart people who need connected data do so, and let them publish. It’ll be a mix of top down standards setting and bottom up hacking. I’m a big SemWeb fan, but I get very scared of people saying that they have THE ontology. It’ll be messy. It won’t be beautiful. The main thing is to make it easy for people to wire data sets together. Standard URIs and standard formats are the only way to do this. We’ve seen this in the life sciences. Communities that need to write big data together treat it the way Linux packages get rolled together into a release. You’ll see data distributions emerge that represent different religions. If it works, people will use it. They’ll be flame wars, license wars, and forking, and chaos, and 99% of the projects will die. You should be able to boot your databases into a single operating system that understands it.

Q: Researchers are incented to make their work available and open. Frequently, institutions get in the way of that. Are you looking at CC-style MTA’s [material transfer agreements]?
A: We published some last year. The first adopter was the Cure Huntingtons Disease and then the Personal Genome Project. We’re going to foundations. We want to get the institutions out of the way, but only the funders can change the experience. NIH requires you to provide a breeding pair of genetically altered mice, kept in a storage facility in Maine [I think]. NIH is moving away from MTAs, going with a you-agree-by-opening agreement.

Q: Privacy?
A: Big issue. Sometimes used as an excuse for not sharing data, but privacy makes the issues we’ve been talking about look simple. It’s a long-term problem. Genomes are not considered as personally identifying, although your license plate is. “There will be a reckoning.” JW’s advice: If you’re dealing with humans, be careful.

Q: Scientists are already overwhelmed by requests. More open, more tagged, means more requests.
A: Yes, we have to design with the negative impacts in mind. We need social filtering, etc. I worry about the scientist in eastern Tennessee or Botswana who’s a genius and can’t get access. If enough of the data is available, maybe you can get a community that answers many of the questions. People generally get into science because they like to talk with people. They’re more likely than most to share. But you have to make it part of the culture that it’s easy. One of the ideas behind the open source trademark concept is that you have to build up a certain amount of karma before I’ll read your email. People are the answer. Most of the time.

Q: Incentives to motivate institutions, but how incentives for individuals to move them in this direction?
A: PLOS was created because Mike Eisner was so pissed at closed journals that he created a business to compete with them. In anthropology, the Society is trying to go more closed, but groups of scientists are trying to go more open access. There’s a battle for the discipline’s soul. Individuals in these institutions are driving it. The key is to get the first big adopters going. Everyone wants to be in the top ten, especially when the first three are Harvard, Yale and MIT. American Chemistry Society is not going to go open any time soon because they make lots of money selling abstracts.

Q: [eric von hippel] I hope you realize how wonderful you all are.

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Charlie Leadbeater has a terrific post on the threats posed by the fact that The Cloud (as in “cloud computing”) too often actually is a recentralizing of the Net by profit-seeking companies.

The easiest example cited by Charlie is Google Books, which provides a tremendous service but at the social cost of giving a single company control over America’s digital library. The problem here isn’t capitalism but monopolization; an open market in which other organizations could (the pragmatic “could,” not the legal or science fiction “could”) also offer access to scanned libraries would create a cloud of books not solely controlled by any single company. (The Google Books settlement threatens to rule out competition because without an equivalent agreement with publishers and authors, any other organization that scans and provides access to books runs the strong risk of being sued for copyright infringement, especially when it comes to books whose copyright holders are hard to find. The revision of the Settlement is less egregiously monopolistic.)

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Here is a letter Lewis Hyde sent to Judge Denny Chin who is considering the proposed Google Books settlement. I’ve also appended a supporting letter written by Eric Saltzman. The issue is that the newly-proposed trustee overseeing the handling of “orphaned works” (i.e., works that are still in copyright but whose copyright holders cannot be found) still does not have the power to adequately represent the interests of the rights holders, especially when it comes to allowing companies that are not Google to license the works. Granting Google a monopoly on these works seems like too much of a reward for Google’s scanning of them (which I’ve costs about $30/book), and does not seem to serve the interests of the rights holder or — more important, from my point of view — the overall social good of increasing access to these works. (Note: I am not a lawyer.)

So, here are the letters, minus some addresses, etc.:

 

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27 January 2010 

Dear Judge Chin:   

I write to amend the letter of objection that I wrote last August in regard to The Authors Guild, Inc., et al. v. Google Inc. (Case No. 1:05-cv-08136-DC).  My August letter is on file with your office as Document 480.   

I shall here limit my remarks to provisions of the amended settlement that are changed from the original settlement, specifically to the role of the newly proposed trustee for orphan works.   

I object to the fact that, despite the amended settlement’s creation of an Unclaimed Works Fiduciary (UWF), the monopoly powers that Google and the Books Rights Registry will acquire, should the Court approve the orphan works elements of the settlement, still stand.  The settling parties have limited the role of the UWF such that he may discharge some duties of the registry in some circumstances, but little else.  He cannot act fully on behalf of the rightsholders of unclaimed books; he cannot, for example, license their work to third parties.   

To put this another way, it is still the case that an approved settlement will in essence grant the settling parties unique compulsory licenses for the exploitation of orphan works.  But why make such licenses unique?  If the Court and the settling parties believe that they can authorize compulsory licenses of any sort, why not go the extra step and grant such licenses broadly so that competing providers can enter this market?   

To address the problem of monopoly in the market for digital books the UWF should be empowered to act as a true trustee.  As such, he should make every effort to locate lost owners, communicate to them their rights under the approved settlement, and pay them their due.  Absent their instructions to the contrary, he should deliver the works of lost owners to the public through the efficiencies of a fully competitive market.   

As Chief Justice Rehnquist has written in regard to the larger purposes of our copyright laws:  “We have often recognized the monopoly privileges that Congress has authorized … are limited in nature and must ultimately serve the public good…” (Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc., 510 U.S. 517 (1994)).  In regard to both content owners and the public, then, the fiduciary needs to operate in an open economy of knowledge and, for that, he will need the freedom to license work to other actors.   

(Note:  I have asked my attorney, Eric Saltzman, to separately address the question of the UWF’s authority to license orphaned works to others; please see the attached addendum to this letter.)   

Yours sincerely, 

Lewis Hyde

Richard L. Thomas Professor of English

Kenyon College 

Addendum 

Eric F. Salzman

Re: The Authors Guild, Inc., et al. v. Google Inc. (Case No. 1:05-cv-08136-DC). 

Dear Judge Chin: 

My client, Lewis Hyde, tells the Court in his letter of January 27th that the new proposed settlement cannot be fair to the owners of the copyrights in the orphan works and to the public unless it allows the Unclaimed Works Fiduciary to make licenses to other providers to allow competition with the monopoly plan that Google and the Plaintiffs now propose to the Court.   

I would like to offer the Court additional support for Professor Hyde’s objection and suggestion.   

If the named plaintiffs or others who “opt in” to the settlement wish to sign on to it with their own copyrights (and if it survives any antitrust process), then that shall be their prerogative.  However, the combination in this class action lawsuit of inadequate representation and significant actual conflicts among the so-called class should make the Court skeptical of granting a monopolistic license of the absent members’ copyrights.   

If the Court does decide to approve a settlement of the case, it should not approve one where Plaintiff’s counsel have consented to deliver the licenses for the orphan works to just one licensee. 

It would be a complete fiction to say that Plaintiffs’ attorneys have adequately represented the orphan works authors and their successors in interest in this case.  The original settlement proposal clearly demonstrated counsel’s willingness and ability to compromise or, at least, to ignore the orphan works owners’ interests in favor of the named plaintiffs who engaged them and whose assent they needed to cut the deal.  

The problem of plaintiff counsel shaping a settlement attractive to the clients before them at the expense of absent class members is a well-discussed problem in class action jurisprudence.  This Court may take notice of an incentive in that direction, the more than fifty million dollars of fees that Google has agreed to pay to Plaintiffs’ counsel if the settlement goes through.   

Allow me to point out two methods whereby the proposed settlements seriously shortchanged the orphan works owners to enrich other class members at their expense.  

The proposed settlement provides that “Google will make a Cash Payment of at least $60 per Principal Work, $15 per Entire Insert and $5 per Partial Insert for which at least one Rightsholder has registered a valid claim by the opt-out deadline” (Emphasis supplied). According to the settlement, total payments will amount to $45 million.  

By definition, no orphan work Rightsholders could meet this registration condition.  Thus was the settlement engineered so that the rightsholders of orphan works and their successors-in-interest would not and could not get any share of the up-front payments total.  

Evidently, in dividing up the scores of millions of dollars that defendant Google was ultimately willing to pay up-front (i.e., unrelated to yet unproven forthcoming revenues) to settle the lawsuit, counsel felt no obligation to share any of it with the orphan works owners, even if the rightsholder should later appear and wish to register and claim that payment.  This very large slice of the pie would go only to the known rightsholders, their de facto clients. 

This economic discrimination against the orphan works rightsholders went beyond just up-front payments. It also took unclaimed (after five years) revenues from exploitation of the orphan works and assigned them to the known rightsholders of other books, thus promising still further enrichment of the client sub-class with actual control over the settlement.   

That particular feature drew such unpleasant attention to the bias in representation in favor of the known rightsholders (and disfavoring the orphan works rightsholders) that it was written out of the settlement proposal now before the Court.  Nevertheless, the Plaintiffs’ counsel who now urge the court to approve this revised settlement agreement are the same counsel who, in the first settlement go-around, assured the Court then (as they do now) that they had adequately represented the entire class, including the orphan works rightsholders. 

Commonality and adequacy of representation are two touchstones for class certification.  “The adequacy inquiry under Rule 23 (a) (4) serves to uncover conflicts of interest between named parties and the class they seek to represent.” Amchem Prods. v. Windsor, 521 U.S. 591 at 625 (1997).  

In Amchem, the Supreme Court upheld the Third Circuit Court’s decertification of the class because it found that “…the settling parties achieved a global compromise with no structural assurance of fair and adequate representation for the diverse groups and individuals affected. The Third Circuit found no assurance here that the named parties operated under a proper understanding of their representational responsibilities. That assessment is on the mark.” Id at 595. 

As demonstrated above, much less than promising the “structural assurance of fair and adequate representation for the diverse groups and individuals affected”, the settlements that were and are proposed to this Court suggest that advantaging the named class members at the expense of the unrepresented orphan works rightsholders was a goal successfully achieved during the settlement negotiation. 

Accordingly, if the Court will entertain a settlement, it should itself take on the burden of making sure that the orphan works rightsholders interests are well protected.  At this point, the best way to do so is to free the orphan works from the monopoly straitjacket that the proposed settlement forces on them.   

Let the parties live with the deal they made for the parties who were, in fact, adequately and aggressively represented. For the inadequately represented sub-class, the orphan works rightsholders, the Court should empower the UWF (or similar fiduciary) to license their works into the open market. With this authority going forward, the UWF will, as well, be able to adjust licensing of digital rights in these works to the market conditions in an area that is still very new and sure to develop in ways that are, today, impossible to predict.   

Professor Hyde’s objection addresses the two enormous flaws in the proposed settlement:  1. the actual conflicts within the class together with the failure of adequate representation of the orphan works rightsholders, and 2.  the anti-competitive effect of the full copyright term license it would grant to Google only.  The first undermines both the process by which the settlement was achieved and, correspondingly, the public confidence in the courts.  The second hurts both the orphan works rightsholders and the strong public interest in access to the knowledge and creativity these books offer.   

Short of a initiating a new attempt at settlement — with new counsel for the orphan works rightsholders — the changes Professor Hyde proposes would achieve a result that would be fair for all the parties and for the public.   

Very truly yours, 

Eric F. Saltzman, Attorney 

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Want to see one way to use the Web to teach? Berkman’s Jonathan Zittrain and Stanford Law’s Elizabeth Stark are teaching a course called Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw. It looks like they have students creating wiki pages for the various topics being discussed. The one on “The Future of Wikipedia” is a terrific resource for exploring the issues Wikipedia is facing.

Among the many things I like about this approach: It implicitly makes the process of learning — which we have traditionally taken as an inward process — a social, outbound process. By learning this way. we are not only enriching ourselves, but enriching our world.

My only criticism: I wish the pages had prominent pointers to a main page that explains that the pages are part of a course.

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I interviewed these two Googly Chrisses at Secretary Clinton’s address. The video is a little over 9 mins, but it’s IMPORTANT TO NOTE that there is a crucial disclaimer 53 seconds in…

Most of the discussion is about the problem of local belief systems and the desire to enforce some global values.

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I’m at Supernova. (live stream) I’ve come in a little late on an afternoon session.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

Werner Vogels talks about cloud computing. He contrasts it with a 1900 Belgian beer brewery that had to have its own electricity generator, which took a lot of maintenance and didn’t help it make better beer. He warns that any offering that taps into the large social networks may find itself with traffic suddenly spiking by orders of magnitude.

Cloud computing’s advantages: 1. Lower costs by eliminating capital investment and reducing operational costs. 2. Increase agility. 3. Removes the “heavy lifting” and letting you focus on what’s differentiating for you. 4. Makes you agile.

He points to some businesses using cloud computing (too fast for me to record).

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Jonathan Zittrain sketches three possible futures, with Amazon as his example. He says he is the session’s “designated fearmonger.”

First, is the Amazon we have, which he likes. It commoditizes Amazon’s scale and power, making it available (via cloud computing, AKA Amazon Web Services) to anyone. Amazon doesn’t tell us how we can use it. “Pound for pound, I’d rather trust my data to the cloud than to my own pocket” because he’s more likely to lose the device in his pocket.

Second, he looks at the Kindle. He has one. He likes it. Yet, “The Kindle is a perfect example of a tethered appliance.” Contrary to Amazon in point 1, the Kindle is closed. “You can’t code for your Kindle…What you see in the Kindle is what Amazon wants to offer you.” E.g., Amazon changed the text-to-speech feature in Kindle 2 because publishers objected. The publishers said it was copyright implicatable event, which JZ thinks it was not. Nevertheless, Amazon changed the feature so publishers could opt out. It is like the iPhone in this. “We define everything that is on the phone,” said Steve Jobs in Jan. 2007. Only in the summer of ‘087 did Jobs allow third party development, although it has to go through the AppStore. We treat this as normal, but it’s not: I have a piece of sw that you want to run, but I can’t just give it to you. (JZ says that Apple refused to allow into the AppStore an app that did nothing but run the Android robotic eye.)

This is not about phones, say JZ. It’s a model that can sweep through our other platforms. Devices increasingly are tied to their vendors. Imagine a clouyd-enabled Internet toaster. Imagine it tells you that you’ve received an update and now has three slots. Then it gets rolled back. Then it’s a juicer. What did you buy? Nothing., You bought a service relationship with breakfast-oriented provider. More and more of your environment is becoming contingent. That’s what the Cloud does to us when it is owned for vendors. E.g., Amazon pulled back copies of 1984 that turned out to be infringing. What happens next time when a federal judge insists that pages be pulled because it’s infringing or inflammatory? Amazon can’t say it wouldn’t do that, because it already has. “As gov’t realizes the opportunities for control and surveillance, we will see a sea-change in how we experience our world.” E.g., An OnStar-like system was used by the FBI to turn on the car’s mic so the FBI could listen in. The company did this and then anonymously sued. The Appellate court held for the company, but on thin grounds.

The third Amazon: Cloud computing concepts applied to people. E.g., Mechanical Turk. But people have used it to astroturf sites, posting positive reviews for money. This raises issues for civic uses. JZ likes the FTC’s guidelines for policing these. He also points to sites like “Human Computing for EDA” that look like games but in fact are doing work for someone; in this case, it’s figuring out how to cram more transistors onto a chip. Suppose it’s kids who are playing. Do we feel good about this? “I have no idea. It’s kind of cool and kind of loogy.” (He gives some other great examples.)

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Bradley Horowitz gets just a few minutes at the end. He’s at Google, formerly at Yahoo. He acknowledges these are uncharted waters. Google Data Liberation Front is an attempt to get as much data as possible into the hands of its owners; Google wrestles with these issues.

Kevin Werbach: Can we rely on good management for this? What about design principles and architectures?

BH: I suggested we hire some “clueful” people but was told, correctly, that it’s important to have these people outside of Google to keep Google on its toes.

Werner: Look at a company’s vision to see if it should earn your trust. Publishers objected to our running reviews of books, but we thought it was better for the customer. (JZ adds that it’s the same for Amazon’s selling used books.)

JZ: Cloud computing and utilities are an interesting comparison. We don’t want utilities to be creative. We have an API called a plug, invented by a janitor who got tired of rewiring every time he needed to move an appliance. Werner’s attitude is like that. Amazon Web Services and Mechanical Turk are utilities that anyone can use for any purpose. That’s like the collective hallucination called email that is run by no one in particular.

Q: Customers don’t care about openness but about the innovation that results from innovation?

Q: There are actually lots of different types of plugs. Standards within country-specific areas.

JZ: Yes, but there are APIs you can buy at Radio Shack (i.e., plug converters). But it’s an important reminder that these standards are self-reinforcing. Everyone loses out except Radio Shack. But you get stuck because all the local plugs are one way, etc. BTW, watch for Google’s willingness to let a third party come in and move your data out, with your permission; Google only lets this happen if there’s reciprocity. Finally, I’m ok with a hybrid universe that includes closed and generative devices. I worry that it won’t be hybrid. It’s an unstable equilibrium. People will mind less and less having an appliance controlled by the vendor.

Bradley: I first became aware of the reciprocity principle at Flickr when Zoomer wanted to pull users’ data out. Users can get their own stuff, but not if it’s going into a site that won’t let it out. The intention behind it was right. If you want to put it into a jail, first bounce it to your desktop where you have it. We’re trying to elevate the conversation.

[Great session]

[POSTED WITHOUT HAVING BEEN REREAD because I'm on the next panel.]

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Google has announced a revised settlement [redlined pdf faq pdf] that it hopes will address the concerns raised by the Department of Justice and many other groups.

Here’s a summary of the summary Google provides [pdf], although IANAL and I encourage you to read the summary, which is written in non-legal language and is only 2 pages long:

1. The agreement now has been narrowed to books registered for copyright in the US, or published in the UK, Australia or Canada.

2. There have been changes to the terms of how “orphaned works” (books under copyright whose rightsholders can’t be found) are handled. The revenue generated by selling orphaned works no longer will get divvied up among the authors, publishers and Google, none of whom actually have any right to that money. Instead it will go to fund active searching for the rightsholders. (At the press call covered by Danny Sullivan [see below], the Authors Guild rep said that with money, about 90% of missing rightsholders can be found.) After holding those revenues in escrow (maybe I’m using the wrong legal term) for ten years (up from five in the first settlement), the Book Rights Registry established by the settlement can ask the court to disburse the funds to “nonprofits benefiting rightsholders and the reading public”; I believe in the original, the Registry decided who got the money. So, in ten years there may be a windfall for public libraries, literacy programs, and maybe even competing digital libraries. (The Registry may also (determined by what?) give the money to states under abandoned property laws. (No, I don’t understand that either.))

The new settlement creates a new entity: A “Court-approved fiduciary” who represents the rightsholders who can’t be found. (James Grimmelmann [below] speculates interestingly on what that might mean.)

3. The settlement now explicitly states that any book retailer can sell online access to the out-of-print books Google has scanned, including orphaned works. The revenue split will be the same (63% to the rightsholder, “the majority of” 37% to the retailer).

4. The settlement clarifies that the Registry can decide to let public libraries have more than a pitiful single terminal for public access to the scanned books. The new agreement also explicitly acknowledges that rightsholders can maintain their Creative Commons licenses for books in the collection, so you could buy digital access and be given the right to re-use much or all of the book. Rightsholders also get more control over how much Google can display of their books without requiring a license.

5. The initial version said Google would establish “market prices” for out of print book, which seemed vague because what counts as the market for out-of-print books? The new agreement clarifies the algorithm, aiming to price them as if in a competitive market. And, quite importantly, the new agreement removes the egregious “most favored nation” clause that prevented more competitive deals to be made with other potential book digitizers.

From my non-legal point of view, this addresses many of the issues. But not all of them.

I’m particularly happy about the elements that increase competition and access. It’s big that Amazon and others will be able to sell access to the out-of-print books Google has scanned, and sell access on the same terms as Google. As I understand it, there won’t be price competition, because prices will be set by the Registry. Further, I’m not sure if retailers will be allowed to cut their margins and compete on price: If the Registry prices an out-of-print book at $10, which means that $6.30 goes to the escrow account, will Amazon be allowed to sell it to customers for, say $8, reducing its profit margin? If so, then how long before some public-spirited entity decides to sell these books to the public at their cost, eschewing entirely the $3.70 (or the majority of that split, which is what they’re entitled to)? I don’t know.

I also like the inclusion of Creative Commons licensing. That’s a big deal since it will let authors both sell their books and loosen up the rights of reuse.

As far as getting rid of the most favored nation clause: Once the Dept. of Justice spoke up, it’s hard to imagine it could have survived more than a single meeting at Google HQ.

Reactions from the critics has not been all that positive.

James Grimmelmann is studying it carefully, but quickly put up a substantial and detailed evaluation of the revisions. He is deep into the details.

The Open Book Alliance (basically an everyone-but-Google consortium) is not even a little amused, because the new agreement doesn’t do enough to keep Google from establishing a de facto monopoly over digital books. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is not satisfied because no reader privacy protections were added. Says the ACLU: “No Settlement should be approved that allows reading records to be disclosed without a properly-issued warrant from law enforcement and court orders from third parties. ”

Danny Sullivan live-blogged the press call where Google and the other parties to the settlement discussed the changes. It includes a response to Open Book Alliance’s charges.

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While Apple has blocked the Someecards app because some of the cards have made fun of public figures, Google has asked the app to port on over to Android phones.

(BTW, I got a Droid today.)

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From Personal Democracy Forum:

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

This is a pragmatic decision because open source software is more likely to withstand time’s arrows (time’s arrow faces forward but it seems to fire them backwards at us), but it’s also important as a symbol: It is yet another validation of open software’s robustness and capabilities; it says that the White House is of and by the people, just as open software is; it symbolizes the Obama administration’s understanding of tech and its embrace of openness.

So, this is good techie news, but also a bit more.

(Here’s the NYT on the news. And I heard about this from my friend Britt Blaser, whose Open Resource Group citizen-to-government software runs on Drupal. (Disclosure: I volunteer as an adviser to Britt’s group.)

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Elizabeth Goodman of UC Berkeley is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on a project she’s just now beginning. It is, she says, “half-baked.” She’s going to compare walled gardens in the computer sense to the original referent of “walled garden” and experiences of community gardens which often are fenced off. She says she comes to this from a design background, and has been looking at “how the metaphors we use shape the possibilities we imagine for them and how people can act in them.”

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

A walled garden was originally a commons, a common ground people can use. We use the term in tech talk because it is a common and concrete metaphor. But, “its salience relies on associations with imagined wall gardens.” Can we expand the “walled gardens” metaphor to make it a more useful tool for thought? Can we do so by looking at real walled gardens?

The initial uses of the term (first in 1680 and then in 1757) was very positive. But digital wall gardens lack openness, can’t share info across networks, that limits what you can look at, etc. Examples: Kindle, the AppStore, and Facebook. When people illustrate digital WGs, they tend to show beautiful, Victorian gardens…not at all like what you experience in your Facebook stream.

Elizabeth notes that walled gardens originally were created not to keep people about to create a microclimate. Fires could be set to raise the temperature. This should help us to see WGs as places of work and production. “So, is it useful to compare how we think about digital walled garden social network sites to how urban gardeners think about members-only community gardens?”

She studied community gardeners and park volunteers in the SF area for two years, because she was interested in shared management. She points out two things about the community garden photo she’s showing: Only members get in, and they’re not collectively cultivated. Each person gets her own small plot. “It is kind of like MySpace”: You can make your own plot as hideously designed as you want and no one will bother you, although if you don’t maintain your site, you get kicked out. (She notes that someone has insisted on distinguishing gardening from landscaping, a distinction she does not much care about.)

Q: [me] Does “gardening” vs “maintaining” when applied to digital realms imply gender? Were gender implications driving its adoption?
A: Probably yes.

Q: How about farming vs. gardening?

[Discussion has become quite conversational, which is wonderful for everyone except the liveblogger.]

Q: Walled gardens keep people out. Digital WPs keep people in.

Q: People in digital WGs have no sense of shared maintenance/management.

WGs are actually less communitarian than I had thought.

Q: First time I heard something called a WG on the Net was AOL.

Q: Is using Flickr, Facebook, or MySpace a faustian bargain?

Q: Urban dwellers really like living near a community garden even if they don’t garden in it. The walls are fences so you can see what’s there.

EG: And that’s a bit like Flickr: People can see much of what you post there.

EG: Here’s a photo of an unwalled garden by a master grower who is going something like a social display of his skill/artistry. But here’s a photo of community garden where a bean plot is next to a mixed flower plot.

Q: [me, summarizing the back channel] The first use of “WG” was for AOL, where the pitch was the order and safety of AOL vs. the wildness of the Web. Now WG seems to refer to locked places. I.e., garden vs. wild becomes walled vs. unwalled.

Q: WGs demarcate space for special creative uses.

[I am doing a completely lousy job here. The conversation is too interesting, plus there's the backchannel. I give up. Sorry. You'll be able to find the webcast at the Berkman site.]

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I do like the fact that Google has a “Google Data Liberation Front.” Their mission: “Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.” Google announced another positive step in this direction for Google Docs. All this is good, and even if it’s over-marketing Google’s openness, it’s the right value to be marketing.

Still, I wish it were easy to download a backup of my gmail.

LATER that day: Meanwhile, Microsoft is opening up its PST mailbox format.

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“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…

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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!

Unless, of course, it sucks.

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I’ve been in a small round of email among friends, arguing over exactly what Larry Lessig means in his article in The New Republic titled “Against Transparency.” It is a challenging article for those of us who support government transparency, and Larry is obviously both influential and brilliant. So, I wanted to be sure that I was following his argument, since it is somewhat discursive.

Here’s what I think is a guide to the flow of the article, with links to the eleven Web pages across which the article is spread. (I’ve made judgment calls about where to divide topics that span a page.) The following is all my gloss and paraphrasing; let me know if you think I’ve gotten it wrong. Note that I intend this only as a guide to reading the article, not as a substitute. I’ve purposefully filed off the nuances, grace notes, and subtleties that make this a Larry Lessig article. (Note also that the italicized bits are not me interjecting; they’re the article’s own objections and qualifiers.)

Section I: Transparency is not necessarily good

[link] Sometimes, transparency that seems good is bad. (“Punch-Clock Campaign” example.)

Especially bad is “naked transparency,” which wants massive amounts of government data made available over the Internet. Naked transparency will “simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.”

Qualifier: Most transparency projects are not bad.

[link] Transparency projects that track the flow of money and influence are particularly bad.

[link] A short history of transparency. (Brandeis)

To be helpful, information has to be incorporated into “complex chains of comprehension.”

Is that what’s happening with what naked transparency reveals? The supporters of transparency haven’t asked that question.

[link] Section II: Transparency leads to untruth

Mere correlations between politicians, donors, and votes does not tell us if the politician is corrupt.

Objection: But, revealing those correlations does no harm.

[link] Yes it does! (Hillary Clinton example.) Once the correlation gets in our head, we can’t get rid of it.

Objection: More information will chase out the bad info.

[link] No it won’t! Our attention spans are shot. You can see this everywhere. (Surveillance camera example.)

[link] Section III: How to respond

Can we get the good of transparency without the bad? No. (JAMA example.)

[link] The transparency argument is following a familiar pattern. Similarly, tech has enabled a “free content movement” that has disrupted the newspaper and music industries.

Let’s not follow that pattern in how we respond. We can’t fight the Net’s lessening of control over info.

[link] We need solutions that accept the Net’s effect. (William Fisher and Neil Netanel examples.)

[link] The solution is obvious. Transparency is inevitably going to raise false suspicions. We are prey to those suspicions because we already believe that politics is corrupt. Therefore, we need to eliminate political corruption.

To eliminate political corruption, we should enact the Fair Elections Now Act.

Caveat: The name of the act is misleading. It’s not about fairness.

Without this, we are doomed.

The transparency movement should support campaign finance reform, and should constantly remind us that transparency is not “just a big simple blessing.”

[link] Likewise for the rest of the Internet triumphalism.

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Harry Lewis has a terrific post about a $300 do-it-yourself book scanner he saw at the D is for Digitize conference on the Google Book settlement. The plans are available at DIYBookScanner.org, from Daniel Reetz, the inventor.

There are lots of personal uses for home-digitized books, so — I am definitely not a lawyer — I assume it’s legal to scan in your own books. But doesn’t that just seem silly if your friend or classmate has gone to the trouble of scanning in a book that you already own? Shouldn’t there be a site where we can note which books we’ve scanned in? Then, if we can prove that we’ve bought a book, why shouldn’t we be able to scarf up a copy another legitimate book owner has scanned in, instead of wasting all the time and pixels scanning in our own copy?

Isn’t Amazon among the places that: (a) knows for sure that we’ve bought a book, (b) has the facility to let users upload material such as scans, and (c) could let users get an as-is scan from a DIY-er if there is one available for the books they just bought?

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A new report from the Open Net Initiative (in which the Berkman Center is a participant) says that among Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Nigeria, only Ethiopia does any substantial amount of blocking of sites:

Filtering in Ethiopia was found to be substantial in regard to both political and conflict/security sites. Ethiopian authorities have also blocked two major blogging platforms, Blogger and Nazret, suggesting political bloggers are the prime targets of censure.

The full report is here.

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I’ve started a series of interviews with FCC folks and others about the progress of the Broadband Strategy initiative. The site is BroadbandStrategyWeek.com. The first interview is with Blair Levin, who’s in charge of the efforts.

The site is in beta, and I screwed up a few things about the video: I sat too close to the camera, etc. But, I’m in beta, too.

The project came about because I volunteered to do whatever I could to help the Broadband Strategy initiative move forward. I’d met Blair at a get-together. He suggested that I do this series and promised access to his team. He also agreed that this series is completely independent (except, of course, for the fact that it depends on access!) and that I have complete editorial control. I got the Supernova conference to agree to pick up some of the production costs, all of which go directly to Sean Fitzroy, the producer of it.

Most of the interviews will go up unedited. I reserve the right to edit, but will not edit out material because it’s controversial. I may well want to edit out some questions that go nowhere, or stumbles that require a re-do of some sort. In the Blair Levin interview, the only edit (besides the splicing together of my camera’s output with the FCC’s, of course) was to move a joke Blair told at the end to the section to which it referred.

All of the videos are in the public domain (CC0), so you don’t have to ask permission to reuse them, mash them up, etc.

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Lee Dirks [site] Director of Education and Scholarly Communication at Microsoft External Research is giving a Berkman-sponsored talk on “Transforming Scholarly Communications.” His group works with various research groups “to develop functionality that we think would benefit the community overall,” with Microsoft possibly as a facilitator. (Alex Wade from his group is also here.)

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

He begins by noting the “data deluge.” But, compuing is stepping up to the problem: Massive data sets, evolution of multicore, and the power of the cloud. We’ll need all that (Lee says) because the workflow for processing all the new info we’re gathering hasn’t kept up with the amount we’re taking in via sensor networks, global databases, laboratory instruments, desktops, etc. He points to the Life Under Your Feet project at Johns Hopkins as an example. They have 200 wireless computers, each with 10 sensors, monitoring air and soil temperature and moisture, and much more. (Microsoft funds it.) Lee recommends Joe Hellerstein’s blog if you’re interested in “the commoditization of massive data analysis.” We’re at the very early stages of this, Lee says. For e-scientists and e-researchers, there’s just too much: too much data, too much workflow, too much “opportunity.”

We need to move upstream in the research lifecycle: 1. collect data and do research, 2. author it, 3. publish, and then 4. store and archive it. That store then feeds future research and analysis. Lee says this four-step lifecycle needs collaboration and discovery. Libraries and archives spend most of their time in stage 4, but they ought to address the problems much early on. The most advanced thinkers are working on these earlier stages.

“The trick there is integration.” Some domains are quite proprietary about their data, which makes it problematic to get data and curation standards so that the data can move from system to system. From Microsoft’s perspective, the question is how can they move from static summaries to much richer information vehicles. Why can’t a research reports be containers that facilitate reproducible science? It should help you use your methodology against its data set. Alter data and see the results, and then share it. Collaborate real time with other researchers. Capture reputation and influence. Dynamic documents. [cf. Interleaf Active Documents, circa 1990. The dream still lives!]

On the commercial side, Elsevier has been running an “Article of the Future Competition.” Other examples: PLoS Currents: Influenza. Nature Preceedings. Google Wave. Mendeley (“iTunes for academic papers”). These are “chinks in the armor of the peer review system.”

Big changes, Lee says. We’ll see more open access and new economic models, particularly adding services on top of content. We’ll see a world in which data is increasingly easily sharable. E.g., the Sloan Digital Sky Survey ios a prototyupe in data publishing: 350M web hits in 6yrs, 930k distinct users, 10k astronmers, delivered 100B rows of data. Likewise, GalaxyZoo.org at which the public can classify galaxies and occasionally discover a new object or two.

Lee points to challenges with data sharing: integrating it, annotating, maintaining provenance and quality, exporting in agreed formats, security. These issues have stopped some from sharing data, and have forced some communities to remain proprietary. “The people who can address these problems in creative ways” will be market leaders moving forward.

Lee points to some existing sharing and analysis services. Swivel, IBM’s Many Eyes, Google’s Gapminder, Freebase, CSA’s Illustra…

The business models are shifting. Publishers are now thinking about data sharing services. IBM and RedHat provides an interesting model: Giving the code away but selling services. Repositories will contain not only the full text versions of reserach papers, but also “gray” literature “such as technical reports and theses,” and real-time streaming data, images and software. We need enhanced interoperability protocols.

E.g., Data.gov provides a searchable data catalog that provides access through the raw data and using various tools. Lee also likes WorldWideScience.org, “a global science gateway” to international scientific databases. Sxty-sevenety countries are pooling their scientific data and providing federated search.

Lee believes that semantic computing will provide fantastic results, although it may take a while. He points to Cameron Neylon’s discussion of the need to generate lab report feeds. (Lee says the Semantic Web is just one of the tools that cojuld be used for semantics-based computing,.) So, how do we take advantage of this? Recommender systems, as at Last.fm and Amazon. Connotea and BioMedCentral’s Faculty of 1000 are early examples of this [LATER: Steve Pog's comment below says Faculty of 1000 is not owned by BioMedCentral] . Lee looks forward to the automatic correlation of scientific data and the “smart composition of services and functionality,” in which the computers do the connecting. And we’re going to need the cloud to do this sort of thing, both for the computing power and for the range of services that can be brought to bear on the distributed collection of data.

Lee spends some time talkingabout the cloud. Among other points, he points to SciVee and Viddler as interesting examples. Also, SmugMug as a photo aggregator that owns none of its own infrastructure. Also Slideshare and Google Docs. But these aren’t quite what researchers need, which is an opportunity. Also interesting: NSF DataNet grants.

When talking about preservation and provenance, Lee cites DuraSpace and its project, DuraCloud. It’s a cross-repository space with services added. Institutions pay for the service.

Lee ends by pointing to John Wilbanks‘ concern about the need for a legal and policy infrastructure that enables and encourages sharing. Lee says that at the end of the day, it’s not software, but providing incentives and rewards to get people to participate.

Q: How soon will this happen?
A: We can’t predict which domains will arise and which ones people will take to.

Q: What might bubble up from the consumer sector?
A: It’s an amazing space to watch. There are lots of good examples already?

Q: [me] This is great to have you proselytizing outside. But as an internal advocate inside Microsoft, what does Msft still have to do, and what’s the push back?
A: We’ve built 6-8 add-ins for Word for semantic markup, scholarly writing, consumption of ontologies. A repository platform. An open source foundation separate from Micrsooft, contributing to Linux kernel, etc.

Q: You’d be interested in Dataverse.org.
A: Yes, it sounds like it.

Q: Data is agnostic, but how articles aren’t…
A: We’re trying to figure out how to embed and link. But we’re also thinking about how you do it without the old containers, on the Web, in Google Wave, etc.
Q: Are you providing a way to ID relationships?
A: In part. For people using their ordinary tools (e.g., Word), we’re providing ways to import ontologies, share them with the repository or publisher, etc.

Q: How’s auto-tagging coming? The automatic creation of semantically correct output?
A: We’re working on this. A group at Oxford doing cancer research allows researchers to semantically annotate within Excel, so that the spreadsheet points to an ontology that specifies the units, etc. Fluxnet.org is an example of collaborative curation within a single framework.

Q: Things are blurring. Traditionally libraries collect, select and preserve schoilarly info. What do you think the role of the library will be?
A: I was an academic librarian. In my opinion, the safe world of collecting library journals has been done. We know how to do it. The problem these days is data curation, providing services, working with publishers.
Q: It still takes a lot of money…
A: Definitely. But the improvements are incremental. The bigger advances come further up the stream.

Q: Some cultures will resist sharing…
A: Yes. It’ll vary from domain to domain, and within domains. In some cases we’ll have to wait a generation.

Q: What skills would you give a young librarian?
A: I don’t have a pat answer for you. But, a service orientation would help, building services on top of the data, for example. Multi-disciplinary partnerships.

Q: You’re putting more info online. Are you seeing the benefit of that?
A: Most researchers already have Microsoft software, so we’re not putting the info up in order to sell more. We’re trying to make sure researchers know what’s there for them.

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