I’ve just sent out the August 18, 2009 issue of JOHO, my newsletter. (It’s completely free, so feel free to subscribe.) It’s all new material (well, new-ish) except for one piece.

[Tags: joho newsletter technodeterminism news journalism media cluetrain ]

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RecapTheLaw.org has a Firefox extension that both gives access to public docket records and makes them actually publicly accessible. The courts charge for access to these dockets, including every time you search and for every page of search results. The system is called PACER. RECAP gives you access to PACER (and is PACER spelled backwards). When you use RECAP to view a docket through PACER, RECAP uploads it into the Internet Archive, since the docket info is in the public domain even though the courts charge you for accessing it. The next time someone goes through RECAP to find that docket, she’ll get it for free from the Internet Archive. RECAP also adds helpful headers and other metadata.

RecapTheLaw comes out of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. Well done!

[Tags: law courts dockets ]

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Jake McKee was the Global Community Relations Specialist at Lego. In his essay in the tenth anniversary edition of Cluetrain (subtle product placement, eh?) he tells how Lego learned to engage with its users, and how this was good for everyone. (Josh Bernoff writes about this here.) Lego was a great example of how a business can benefit by getting down off its high horse and playing in the grass with its customers. Thank you, Jake.

Now Jake is gone from the company, and Lego has become an excellent example of how to be a clueless, frightened laughingstock. A 14-year-old user used Legos to create a stop-motion homage to Spinal Tap, which Spinal Tap projected in concert and wanted to include in its DVD. Lego refused to give permission. As a company spokesperson said: “…when you get into a more commercial use, that’s when we have to look into the fact that we are a trademarked brand, and we really have to control the use of our brand, and our brand values.”

First, I am not a lawyer, but: No. The Lego logo wasn’t shown anywhere in the video, and it’s hard to believe that Lego could win a suit.

Second, No. How customer unfriendly can you get? You sell us something that enables us to create what we want, and now you say you get to control what we create? You won’t let us take photos or videos of what we create? Does Crayola get to tell us we can’t post photos of the inappropriate messages I write with their crayons, because it might hurt their image among their target audience of 3-9 year olds and cretinous participants in political debates?

So:

Top Five Inappropriate Items to Construct out of Legosâ„¢ brand Legosâ„¢, owned by Lego Systemsâ„¢, a Lego Groupâ„¢ company

5. Legoâ„¢ Mindstormsâ„¢ dildo

4. Legoâ„¢ ThePiratesBay ship logo

3. Legoâ„¢ world’s most ineffective and uncomfortable condom

2. Legoâ„¢ official Spinal Tapâ„¢ Mud Flaps

1. Legoâ„¢ giant upraised middle finger

[Tags: copyleft copyright drm trademark spinal_tap harry_shearer ]

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Jason Calacanis has an excellent post making the case against Apple, from an Apple fan’s point of view. I’m basically with him.

Doc Searls has long said that the key to understanding Steve Jobs — and thus to understanding Apple — is that Job’s an artist. We understand when an artist wants to maintain complete, obsessive control over his creations, especially when they are as beautiful as some Apple products are. But it’s not just artistry at work at Apple. Apple tends towards totalitarianism.

You can see why in its computer architectures: Its products work because they’re relatively closed systems that run tightly controlled hardware, unlike Microsoft’s operating system that has to be able to work on just about every piece of hardware that comes along. And Apple’s stuff generally works beautifully. (I switched from Windows to the Mac about three years ago.) But the hardwired connection between the iPod and iTunes — only recently loosened — is there not to benefit users, but to meet the DRM needs of recording companies and to tether users to Apple. The hardwired connection between the iPhone and the App Store represents a disturbing direction for the industry, in which Apple acts in loco parentis to protect users from their own software decisions, and (apparently) to exclude products they believe hurt the business interests of their partners. The App Store’s success makes it particularly threatening; it’s easy to imagine Apple’s rumored tablet adopting the same strategy, then other companies following suit.

It’s not an unmixed picture, of course. The removal of the egregious DRM from iTunes is a step forward, and seems to have been a step Apple eagerly took, and the movement of the Mac’s OS onto Unix added admirable transparency. Plus, Apple makes some beautiful stuff that works beautifully.

I just wish that going forward, I felt more confident that Apple is on our side, not just as customers but as digital citizens.

[Tags: apple drm copyright copyleft computers microsoft jonathan_zittrain generativity ]

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Marc Bourgeois is doing some excellent blogging of the RIAA v. Tenenbaum trial. Fascinating.

Tags: tenenbaum riaa joel copyright copyleft nesson law

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1. The court has rejected Charlie Nesson’s basic defense of Joel Tenenbaum’s sharing of music files. The case is going to jury which may levy the same sort of insanely excessive fines as in the Jammie Thomas-Rassert trial. I hope Charlie’s team can convince the jury that the fines and the entire process are so onerous and disproportionate that the RIAA has been abusing the court system. Of course, IANAL, and IANAOTJ (I am not on the jury).

2. Barnes and Noble has launched its e-book software. It runs on iPhones as well as on PC’s and Mac’s. I’m having trouble finding which formats it supports, but judging from its Open dialogue, not PDF, .doc, .html, .mobi, or text. It does support .PBD books.

After a very very quick session playing with it, it seems quite competitive with the Kindle, and because I’m running it on my Mac and not on the little piece of crippled hardware I bought from Amazon — the Kindle is just barely adequate as a reader, and is still overpriced by more than 100% in terms of its value, imo — having the use of a keyboard and a mouse is a big step up. And, unlike the Kindle, you can use whatever fonts you have on your machine. Still, it’s only incrementally better than the Kindle’s software (again, on a quick look), not a great leap forward for readers.

One of B&N’s big advantages is that it’s hooked into Google Books, enabling you to download public domain books that Google has scanned in. You do this by searching for a book on the B&N site and noticing the “free from Google Books” label. Be sure to sort by price; otherwise B&N lists the for-pay versions first. If B&N wants to be aggressive in this space (= succeed), it should create an easy-to-find section that lets you browse Google’s free books. Get us using the ereader and then sell us the copyrighted books. (If B&N has such a section, I couldn’t find it quickly enough.)

BTW, I presume (and thus may be wrong) that Google did a special deal with B&N to enable this. If so, I find it worrisome. If Google is going to be granted a special right to scan in books without fear of copyright reprisals, it will be the de facto national e-library, discouraging others from undertaking similarly scaled scanning projects, and thus should be making its public domain books equally and maximally freely available. IMO.

2a. [Later that evening:] B&N stores are now providing free Wifi. Yay!

3. Apple is not permitting the Google telephone service into the Apple App store, thus simultaneously and inadvertently making the case for Zittrainian generativity.

4. [Later that day]: On the happy front, Google has open-sourced an implementation of Wave.

[Tags: copyright copyleft books e-books google libraries everything_is_miscellaneous charles_nesson jonathan_zittrain law fair_use amazon kindle b&n ]

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A Pew Internet report says that while 56% of Americans have accessed the Internet wirelessly, there’s a stark racial divide in the devices we use. About half of the African-American and English-speaking Hispanic population accesses the Net through cellphones and other handheld devices, but only 28% of white Americans have ever done so.

Three bullet points quoted from the report:

* 48% of Africans Americans have at one time used their mobile device to access the internet for information, emailing, or instant-messaging, half again the national average of 32%.

* 29% of African Americans use the internet on their handheld on an average day, also about half again the national average of 19%.

* Compared with 2007, when 12% of African Americans used the internet on their mobile on the average day, use of the mobile internet is up by 141%.

We can read this in many different ways:

• Mobiles are helping to end the digital racial divide

• Mobiles are extending the digital racial divide by providing second-class Net access to African Americans

• For a far greater percentage of African Americans than white Americans, the Net is less generative and participatory

• We’d better make sure that the carriers become device independent and Net neutral

[Tags: digital_divide mobiles pew race ]

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Despite the title of Andrew Conry-Murray’s article in InformationWeek — “Why Business IT Shouldn’t Shrug Off Chrome OS” — it’s on balance quite negative about the prospects for enterprises adopting Google’s upcoming operating system. Andrew argues that enterprises are going to want hybrid systems, Microsoft is already moving into the Cloud, Windows 7 will have been out for a year before Chrome is available, and it’d take a rock larger than the moon to move enterprises off their legacy applications. All good points. (The next article in the issue, by John Foley is more positive about Chrome overall.)

A couple of days I heard a speech by Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra at the Open Government Innovations conference (#ogi to your Twitter buffs). It was fabulous. Aneesh — and he’s an informal enough speaker that I feel ok first-naming him — loves the Net and loves it for the right reasons. (“Right” of course means I agree with him.) The very first item on his list of priorities might be moon-sized when it comes to enterprise IT: Support open standards.

So, suppose the government requires contractors and employees to use applications that save content in open standards. In the document world, that means ODF. Now, ISO also approved a standard favored by (= written by) Microsoft, OOXML, that is far more complex and is highly controversial. There is an open source plug-in for Word that converts Word documents to those formats (apparently Microsoft aided in its development), but that’s not quite native support. So, imagine the following scenario (which I am totally making up): The federal government not only requires that the docs it deals with are in open standard formats, it switches to open source desktop apps in order to save money on license fees. (Vivek Kundra switched tens of thousands of DC employees to open source apps for this reason.) OOXML captures more of the details of a Word document, but ODF is a more workable standard, and it’s the format of the leading open source office apps. If the federal government were to do this, ODF stands a chance of becoming the safe choice for interchanging documents; it’s the one that will always work. And in that case, enterprises might find Word to be over-featured and insufficiently ODF-native.

Now, all of this is pure pretend. And even if ODF were to become the dominant document standard, Microsoft could support it robustly, although that might mean that some of Word’s formatting niceties wouldn’t make the transition. Would business be ok with that? For creators, probably yes; it’d be good to be relieved of the expectation that you will be a document designer. For readers, no. We’ll continue to want highly formatted documents. But, then ODF + formatting specifications can produce quite respectably formatted docs, and that capability will only get better.

So, how likely is my scenario — the feds demand ODF, driving some of the value out of Word, giving enterprises a reason to install free, lower-featured word processors, depriving Windows of one of its main claims on the enterprise’s heart and wallet? Small. But way higher than before we elected President Obama.
TAGS: [Tags: odf ooxml microsoft microsoft_office open_office open_source aneesh_chopra obama standards sgml ]

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David Pogue reports that Amazon has deleted some books from people’s Kindles, even though people had paid for them. It seems that the publisher decided it didn’t want them offered after all. [NEXT DAY: More exactly, the publisher that owns the copyright objected to another publisher selling the book.] So, Amazon deleted the books and credited people for their purchase.

The books were George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. OMG.

[Tags: amazon digital_rights copyleft copyright app_store ]

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From the National Journal:

Sens. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan., secured $30 million in federal funding for the State Department’s efforts to promote Internet freedom as part of the agency’s fiscal year 2010 spending bill. The program must be approved by the full Senate and the House before it makes its way to President Obama’s desk. The money would promote widespread, secure Internet use by individuals residing in countries practicing repressive Internet monitoring, censorship and control. The outlay is “a low-cost method of allowing people, especially those living under repressive regimes, to access all-source, uncensored, unfiltered information,” the senators said in a Friday press release.

“Tearing down these Internet cyberwalls can match the effect of what happened when the Berlin Wall was torn down,” Specter said. “This funding seeks to enable freedom of thought, expression and the unimpeded flow of ideas and information, and I am pleased my colleagues have recognized the program’s importance.” Brownback added the battle being waged in the streets of Iran and China is also being fought on micro-blogging site Twitter, social network Facebook and other platforms. “This is a pivotal moment for people living in oppressive regimes. The best way to ensure their ability to communicate and share their story with each other and the world is to keep the Internet open,” he said.

The House passed a State spending bill Thursday that did not include Web freedom funding but Energy and Commerce Committee member Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., earlier this week urged lawmakers to hold a hearing on the role of the Internet in giving a voice to those in repressive countries. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who in the 109th Congress chaired a high-profile Internet freedom hearing of the House subcommittee that oversees global human rights, has repeatedly introduced legislation that would prevent U.S. tech firms from working with nations that capture and convict citizens for engaging in democracy promotion and human rights advocacy online.

The NY Times reports on danah boyd’s kick-butt keynote at PDF09, in which she pointed to the class divisions in the Net:

Is the social-media revolution bringing us together? Or is it perpetuating divisions by race and class?

Many of us would like to believe the Internet is a force for unity, but danah boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, thinks we’re deceiving ourselves.

Speaking last week at the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference that explores how technology is changing politics, Ms. boyd asked a packed audience of activists, political operatives, entrepreneurs and journalists to raise their hands if they use Facebook. Almost every hand in the place went up. Then she asked who uses MySpace, and barely a hand was seen.

How could that be? Sure, Facebook is growing much faster. But MySpace is far from dead. In May, Web-traffic tracker comScore reported that Facebook and MySpace are neck and neck in terms of U.S. visitors, with 70.28 million that month for Facebook, up 97% from a year ago, and 70.26 million for MySpace, down 5% from last year.

vMs. boyd got some answers from group of people she’s been hanging out with over the last four years: U.S. teens. During the 2006-2007 school year, her conversations with high-school students began showing a trend of white, upper-class and college-bound teens migrating to Facebook–much like the crowd in the conference hall has. Meanwhile, less-educated and non-white teens were on MySpace. Ms. boyd noted that old-style class arrogance was also in view; the Facebook kids were quicker to use condescending language toward the MySpace kids.

“What we’re seeing is a modern incarnation of white flight,” Ms. boyd said. “It should scare the hell out of us.”

More in the article, including research by Eszter Hargittai… [Tags: internet class social_class sociology politics e-democracy ]

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