James Vasile, who just gave a Berkman lunch-time talk, distributed a copy of a brief paper, “unlick the Rock,:” which is not yet up on the Web. In it, James suggests that we separate radio into its two functions: DJs who figure out what to play, and the delivery mechanism. Someone should create a plug-in (or sump’in) that lets everyone create playlists using simple HTML, and lets everyone listen to those playlists by scouring multiple sources for the music. So, if you have a copy on your disk, it’ll play that. If there’s an online distributor that has it available, great. If you have to buy it from iTunes, then it’ll let you. Or maybe you have a small p2p network of friends who are sharing music.

Interesting. It’d at least make it difficult to find someone to sue. And the publishers might make some money out of it. And, from my provincial point of view, it’d be a nice case of separating the metadata from the data…. [Tags: james_vasile internet_radio]

Dan Gillmor points to public.resource.org, a nonprofit that encourages us to buy info from government archives and then upload them to the Internet Archive, where all can find these public domain materials for free.

Putting the public domain into the public domain. As Dan says, how subversive! [Tags: public_domain copyright internet_archive public_resource dan_gillmor everything_is_miscellaneous]

Are library catalog data copyright-able? Richard Wallis at Panlibus gives us a good place to start on this fascinating topic.

I’ve recorded a series of interview on topics related to the book with various luminaries. The podcasts are co-sponsored by the Harvard Berkman Center and Wired. The first one is now up. I talk with Cory Doctorow about why explicit metadata goes wrong, and also about what ought to change in the world of law and licenses to let us take advantage of the big pile o’ leaves we’re accumulating.

Coming up in the series (at the rate of about one a week, I believe): Arianna Huffington of HuffingtonPost, Craig Newmark of CraigsList, astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, Kayak’s Paul English, the BBC’s Richard Sambrook, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the DailyKos. [Tags: podcasts cory_doctorow wired metadata metacrap]

Larry Lessig has a great post asking us to call upon the Republican and Democratic parties to insist that all presidential debates ("at least") be made free for use after their initial broadcast.

Abso-freaking-lutely! [Tags: politics copyright copyleft creative_commons lawrence_lessig everything_is_miscellaneous]

John Clippinger is giving a presentation about his just-published book, A Crowd of One: The Future of Identity. [As always, I'm typing quickly, missing some stuff, getting things wrong, and making a seamless talk sound all choppy. But in this case, the remedy is easy: If you want to know more about what John is saying, buy his book.]

John approaches human nature through evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Identity, he says, is social and multiple. Trusted identity is essential for community, he says. And he's interested in how virtual worlds "allow us to build new kinds of institutions, economies and identities."

The brain is not a blank slate, he says, citing Steven Pinker. The brain is "highly specialized, opportunistic, and jerry-rigged." Some of our most important decisions originate at a prec-conscious level. This is very different from thinking we make rational decisions. "It's more a reflex." He points to our "mirror neurons," that enable us to have empathy. Descartes, Hobbes and Rousseau, and the Enlightenment are wrong. Research shows that our natural inclination is to reciprocate, trust and coordinate. Virtual worlds are the new state of nature. You may think you can create any identity you want, but "our identities are socially embedded." And we all have multiple selves.

How do you have a trusted community on the Net? You need a persistent, trusted identity, says John. "But the Web was born without an identity layer." We need one. Just look at all the fraud, flaming and phishing. "How do you make people accountable for their actions without having overly draconian measures? You have to have some way of creating a cost for breaking the rules, being deceptive, etc." John refers to biological signalling theory — there's a cost for deception. [I may be getting this wrong.] You want to make the cost greater than the payoff. That's essential to any kind of trust network, says John.

In re-imagining identity as the virtual and real worlds become more intertwingled, people will want control over their identities. They'll want to have a persistent identity. They'll want multiple identities, the ability to take their identity info in and out of different virtual worlds. They'll want a range of degrees of identification, from anonymity to authenticated anonymity to complete disclosure. And they'll want to develop peer networks of trust and authentication.

Over the past two years, John's been working on a project called "Higgins," an open source interoperable identity system. (It's called "Higgins" because higgins is a long-tail mouse.)

We are getting "new narratives about cultural and political futures, not laden with moralistic doctrine." This is a kind of "social physics": there are some predictable behaviors and phenomena. It looks for "evolutionary stable strategies."

There's an opportunity, John says, to invent new digital institutions: governance mechanisms, more reliance about measured risk and reputation, transparency and accountability for all forms of authority, and acceserated social innovation through digital experimentation. He says the Chinese are very interested in social physics because they want to know if there are rules are principles they can use. [China's interest in social physics as a way of predicting and managing social behavior is not necessarily a good thing.]

Q: [me] Having an identity layer would solve of bunch of problems, but is there demand for identity itself, as opposed to a demand for solving those problems?
A: At SecondLife I was surprised that people do want to be able to authenticate themselves to others. But that doesn't mean they know your real world identity. There are degrees and types of authentication and identity. The user gets to control it. You may give up small attributes or fragments of your identity for particular purposes in particular circumstances. Community norms will arise to govern that.

Q: Is it to authenticate you as a consistent person or to get to a level of trust?
A: There is a need for persistence, frequently, although that can just be a number. And there's another issue about whether you can authenticate the claims you make about yourself. Another party may have to authenticate those, and they may change over time.

Q: How will reputation factor in the changing nature of public opinion? E.g., Don Imus.
A: You have to be careful what you mean by reputation. It may be people rating each other for particular attributes, e.g., trustworthiness at eBay. Those are often easily gamed. I'm interested in work being done on understanding how the immune system [the real one] identifiers cheaters.

Q: Do you see a role for government?
A: Government is going to play an important role. When you have a Linden Dollars exchange, [where Second Life money can be brokered for real money], the government will get involved. And when you set up ecommerce sites, identity matters.

Q: [me] Right now, sites solve their identity problems differently, and generally satisfactorily, pretty much. Given that there are risks to having an identity layer, at what point do we say the ad hoc system is broken enough that we want to have such a layer?
A: The layer won't be uniform. There are risks of abuse, of course, but the identity layer will be an interoperable set of tools for disclosing what users want to disclose.

Q: [chris meyer] Massachusetts no longer uses the SSN for drivers licenses, presumably because it's insecure to have a single number encode so much...
A: There may be one number that makes multiple sign-ins far more convenient. That will enable innovation. But you can't get that without a pretty sophisticated layer underneath. Ad hoc-ery will give way, but not necessarily to uniformity.

Q: People worry about uniform identity not in Second Life but in larger systems. E.g., people have proposed used SpeedPass to use to issue tickets for speeding in the tunnel.
A: They'd be persistent, not consistent. It'd be hard to link them. And people will not do business with businesses that betray them.

Q: [chris meyer] Transparency is two sided. When you suggest it, people get worried that they'll connect up too much information. When does transparency engender trust and when does it not?
A: Transparency may be transparency on not your full identity but on a chosen set of attributes.

Q: Integrated health care records are important for healthcare. If you try to set up a false identity, you could hurt yourself badly from a healthcare perspective.
A: [irving wladawsky-berger] When it comes to health care and children, I believe there will be legislation.
A: [someone else] Yet at Virginia Tech, people didn't know the killer had been hospitalized because of privacy laws.
A: [clippinger] Right now it's ham-fisted. It's either/or. We need it to be more flexible so people can see what they need to see. That's the new generation of social technology we now need.

[Fascinating, although I remain skeptical about the need for an "identity layer." And the reception afterward was a great time to talk with some amazing folks, including the Clipmeister himself.]

[Tags: john_clippinger identity berkman everything_is_miscellaneous]

Mary Wong of the Franklin Pierce Law Center is giving a Berkman talk titled "Copyright & Access to Knowledge: Rights/Rhetoric, Openness/Opacity, Future/Fears." [As always, I'm typing too quickly, missing stuff, getting stuff wrong, paraphrasing wildly...If you want verisimilitude, the event itself is webcast and recorded in multiple ways.] She's going to talk about copyright policy and the a2k (access to knowledge) movement and how some important terms that, in their use in rhetoric, have been misunderstood.

She points to the simultaneous increase in openness and opacity. The "existing regimes" have put up roadblocks. "What is the future if we have rights battling rhetoric, openness fighting opacity?"

Copyright began as a tool of censorship used by the Crown, became a type of trade regulation, and then was established as a private property right, Mary says. The tropes we use to talk about it derive from that history. These tropes have been deconstructed by people like Foucault and Barthes. Mary says that she's not going to examine today deconstructionist issues such as whether the author is a myth.

She says she's not going to suggest stopping treating copyright as a private property right because she's trying to come up with workable solutions. Rather, what can we do about the expansion of copyright in order to increase access to knowledge? "Reconize the spectrum of alternative property rights?" E.g., the commons, the public domain. "Establish balance through 'user rights'"? E.g., elevate and reconfigure Fair Use, and treat it as a right. "Create flexible mechanisms within property?" E.g., Creative Commons.

On alternative property rights: We can all agree that a we need a robust public domain for democracy and for cultural, social and economic development. [No one here exclaims in shocked outrage :)] But how do you turn that into a concrete policy proposal? We don't even have good definitions of public domain and the commons in a way that would let them serve as alternatives to copyright. Usually the public domain is defined more in terms of what it is not than what it is. Are the commons something unowned or owned by a group of people? Is it owned by society in generally? All of these uses are used in the law, and sometimes they're used interchangeably with "the public domain." We don't have a consensus on a definition for either of these terms, but both have gained currency in the copyright debate, she says. "While they're useful hooks and very important direction indicators, they're not necessarily at this stage...the solution." "How can the current discourse be refocused?" (Mary is encouraged by the fact that NGOs and civil society groups are participating in this debate, worldwide, rather than confining it merely to lawyers.)

Our traditional conception of the author is Romantic and has been affecting copyright law for a couple of hundred years. But this is "inadequate to deal with collaborative, communal and social forms of creativity." The term "author" shows up all over the Berne convention. But it's a one-size-fits-all notion that doesn't work in many of the newer forms of creativity that involve "sharing, collaboration and openness." "Can we at least try to reconfigure or manipulate the notion of the author to better serve the understanding of what it means to create something?"

She suggests considering this in terms of human rights rather than property rights. She points to Art. 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. UDHR says that if you create something, you have rights over it. But in a case in the UK, the court decided that that property right needs to be balanced with the rights of users and readers. Canada has also talked about "users' rights."

She is not saying that copyright is a human right. She is suggesting (she says) adopting the human rights framework to bring in more broad and flexible considerations, to give a foundation to users' claims. Even within the US's utilitarian claims (i.e. copyright enables the advancement of the arts and sciences) there is room for natural law claims. And she points to WIPO's acknowledgement of the special needs of developing countries.

Q: (Charlie Nesson ): I'm completely taken by your initial approach. Asking what we can do rather than just talk about it, and the idea of user rights resonate. The user I'm most interested in at the moment is the university. What would be thread that we can pull to effect change? Right now, the burden of proof of Fair Use is on the user, which is tremendously constraining. How about if we (universities) got behind a law putting the burden of proof on the copyright holder? It doesn't require changing the basis of copyright law. It could be a focal point...
A: I'm with you on that totally. To do this, we need to change the mindset. Maybe have the university focus on the human rights frameworks.

Q: If we focus on the users, how do we do it? Do we list things you can't do, or the things you can?
A: We talk about Fair Use as an exception to copyright. What do we do with the existing language?

Q: (J Palfrey ) I love the idea of the university as the user and focal point. But suppose we think of the user as a re-user. Could rethinking who the author is help? Creating isn't just standing on the shoulders of giants but standing on the shoulders of everyone. [Nice.]
A: The reconfiguring of authorship fits in this paradigm, and fortifies it.

Q: (me) How would this play out when it comes to making the world's books available on line?
A: Prof. Nesson's idea of changing the burden of proof would work well here. It would be an opt-out scheme, rather than opt-in, for the publishers. We'll see a battle between the copyright right holder and another right holder.

Q: (Doc Searls) Terms like "user" implies subordinate status. We're still using real estate metaphors, e.g., sites. This stipulates the Web as a series of places, and places are owned. So we have to change our metaphors.
A: Copyright came from literal property. We do need to move past that.

Q: (ethanz): I like reframing it, but I worry about doing it on human rights, which is one of the shakiest of foundations. The Declaration of Human Rights is a huge intellectual battlegrounds, with a number of Islamic nations saying it's incompatible with their views, conservatives in the US objecting, etc. You're building it on one of the most disputed and least binding of "law."
A: I'm trying to distance my suggestion from wading wholeheartedly wading into that particular fray. I'm not saying it should be a full-fledged human right. But that framework provides a good "hook," Article 27 gives us ammunition because it recognizes both the rights holder and the user. .And then maybe tap into WIPO's new interest in copyright for developing companies.

Q: (ethanz): You're being aspirational, and the UDHR is the paradigm of aspirational thinking. A different approach is to ask what we're actually doing as users, and then figure out the legislation we need. E.g., in universities we photocopy chunks of text ("No we don't!" yell several of the law professors, who are also chuckling) and hand them out to students.
A: Yes, it's aspirational. I'm hoping that if you change mindsets, you can change policy. Lawyers like starting points that are definable, neat and can be generalized. But if you have fair use for universities, you end up with various laws for various domains.

Q: how do you get people to see rights as community based?
A: It's a challenge.

[Tags: copyright copyleft digital_rights everything_is_miscellaneous]

Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club, is giving a Berkman talk. Gene Koo (his ex roommate) introduces him as someone doing a form of literary remix. He's teaching a class at Harvard Law called "Literary Visions of Copyright." He's going to talk about the 19th Century copyright battles. [As always, I'm approximating. Matthew speaks eloquently; live blogging generally misses the eloquence.]

The Copyright League consisted mainly of authors who "wanted to rethink and reshape" copyright. James Russell Lowell — poet and president of the League — came up with the motto:

"In vain we call old notions fudge and bend our conscience to our dealing. The Ten Commandments will not budge and stealing will still be stealing." [Approx.]

"This became a mantra for copyright advocates." Note the appeal to a higher authority, Matthew points out.The motto compares commercial dealings to an older and higher regime. Writers at the time — Louisa Alcott, Mark Twain, etc. — petitioned Congress in support of copyright. The US laws were pretty much are they are today, but there was no international protection: British authors couldn't get copyright protection here. This meant US publishers could publish British authors without paying a cent. This also undermined several generations of American authors because a Dickens book only cost $0.25 but a Twain might cost $1.25. (Harper, the publisher, was "the most notorious and proud pirate," says Matthew.)

Kipling wrote a poem about buccaneers that's about book poetry, which someone referred to as "bookaneers." Poe's "Purloined Letter" is about writing stolen but left in public view, another metaphor for book piracy. Dickens, who called himself "the biggest loser" because of his lost royalties, wrote Martin Chuzzlewit about an unstable American system. Harriet Beecher Stowe sued a publisher for publishing a German translation. She lost the case, and was criticized for being against treating people as property but favoring treating books as property. [Wow. These seem to be separable issues!]

There was tentativeness among the authors supporting copyright, says Matthew. They wanted to protect authors but not crush the laborers who manufactured books; if copyright were introduced, they feared book manufacturing would move to other countries. Also, the lack of international copyright enabled cheap editions, supporting a democratic ideal. Mark Twain and Walt Whitman were especially sensitive to these concerns; Whitman's Leaves of Grass positioned him as a friend of labor. Dickens was making tons of money on his speaking tour and was painted as greedy for wanting royalties also. Matthew compares this to current attitudes towards rich rock bands. People also argued that we needed copyright freedom in order to alter British texts for American readers, including taking out some of the lords-and-ladies feel. (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is about American hostility to that, Matthew says.)

Matthew says some of the fun of studying this is that the authors are imposing a narrative on the topic. It's a narrative of natural rights and pirates, even though according to the law at the time, the "pirates" were doing nothing wrong. "They became pirates because that's what we put into our rhetoric until we believed it." "All of this gradually wore down the paradigm of a collective ownership of the works."

Matthew says that we should learn at how we're creating our own narrative of piracy. E.g., the FBI warning at the beginning of DVDs even though copying a DVD for your own use is legal. E.g., Disney recently bought the copyright to Oswald the Rabbit (its pre-Mickey character) even though Oswald's first three cartoons are out of copyright and thus Oswald is out of copyright; Disney is shaping the narrative. Google Books is now also trying to shape the narrative.

Q: [me] Were there moral arguments in favor of not having international copyright?
A: The most effective argument was that it would hurt our workers.

Q: What about logical consistency, protecting authors everywhere?
A: There was a different sense of boundaries. We assume a globalized world. But people were not embracing the natural rights argument. Copyright didn't come out of a rights argument originally, in the Constitution. Someone said it was about copy privilege, not copy right.

Q: (ethanz) In other parts of the world, they make an argument that they need pirated texts in order to go to university. The US violated British copyright when it was developing, so it's right for India and China to do so now. How would Twain et al. have replied to this?
A: Fascinating argument. We didn't have a national literature in the 19th C. Moby-Dick was dismissed. All we can do is imitate, it was thought. One argument was that we need easy access to the British texts until we've established our own American literature.

Q: Would people have paid more if there were a different copyright regime?
A: They get into the minutia of it in the Senate arguments. There's no agreement. The introduction of public access libraries in the middle of the century threw the pricing up into the air.

Q: Was there a parallel rhetoric in Europe?
A: There wasn't much market for American books in England (Cooper and Twain were exceptions), so the British were all for copyright. The government got involved.

Q: Dickens and others acknowledged that they got wider distribution because their earlier books were pirated in the US.
A: Same thing with Google Books: You're getting attention for your books, especially for books that are out of print.

Q: Did people argue that writers wouldn't write or wouldn't share it with the public?
A: Yes. You see this in the Senate hearings. Without copyright, you couldn't professionalize writing enough to enable writers to earn a living, it was argued. Twain said that writers should go live in England for a bit before publishing to get British copyright protection; he was out of touch with what writers can do.

Q: Initially, copyright protection went to printers, not authors. How did that transition happen?
A: (Simon) In the Renaissance, patrons gained prestige from the affiliation. In 18th C Ireland, Swift was able to prosper without copyright. It's an interesting to compare cultures that have and do not have copyright protection.

Q: When did we go from writing to being a professional writer?
A: (Simon) It's hard to pinpoint. [He mentioned a 1774 copyright decision that I missed.]

Q: The audience wasn't receptive to the economic argument, because it came from rich authors. How about the reaction to the moral argument?
A: It's hard to say because the public wasn't a part of the conversation. Women weren't even part of it.

Q: (cbracy) What was the relation between the authors and their works?
A: Authors still tend to have control over their books than musicians generally do. If you publish a book, you own the copyright. That's not the case with screenplays: You sell the copyright. But publishers want to reinforce the idea of single authorship; they don't even like long acknowledgements.

Q: [me] The piracy narrative doesn't hold up in even on its own terms now; now we can't even use works we've bought all the ways we want, and "piracy" just doesn't work as a metaphor. Do you see any other narratives around that might work better?
A: The commons? There's so little discussion of public domain in these 19th C discourses. I'd love to read a history of the concept of the commons (which Louis Hyde is doing).

A: (ethanz) There are developments in the UK that might make Beatles albums public domain in 2012, which will recreate the 19th C situtation in which cheap British imports compete against US music. a: "Sharing" is a counter narrative.

Q: (Gene) You have made a career out of both sides of the copyright issue (i.e., copyrighted works about copyright)...
A: I definitely do feel Jekyl and Hyde about copyright. I'd enforce my copyright if it came up, and we complain when the royalty statements from the Chinese publishers are wrong, but all we can is complain. "I even write the copyright notice for my books." The notice originally said that no characters are intended to resemble people living or dead.

Q: (egeorge ) How would you feel if I did fan fiction based on your work?
A: I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about that. They're writing a screenplay of my book, and it's nothing like the book. I'm getting paid to let them alter my text. If I'm not getting paid, I guess I'd feel that so long as it's non-commercial, I'd be fine about it. It gets word out about your book.

Q: The difference in prices between American and British was multiples. Why?
A: You wouldn't have to pay an advance. Competition. And there was variance.

Q: Who's your next book about?
A: It's secret.

[Great talk. And a very likable, modest fella.] [Tags: copyright copyleft matthew_pearl everything_is_miscellaneous]

Lorcan Dempsey has a brilliant post on why Google's moving from a SOAP API to Ajax syndication transforms it from an information landscape into an "information brandscape"™ Amazon, he points out, is happy to let other apps and sites use its product data because the data — a link to a book, a book cover — is by itself and ad. Google wants to get their actual ads into those other sites. Lorcan goes on to apply this distinction to library Web services.

(BTW, Lorcan, I slapped the trademark on to "information brandscape" so now it's mine. Bwahaha!) [Tags: google libraries amazon lorcan_dempsey everything_is_miscellaneous web2.0 api soap ajax worldcat]

JP Rangaswami points to a Wired interview with Josh Madell of Other Music, a NYC music store's site that'll sell you songs without restrictions on how you use what you've bought. Josh says, for example,:

The nice thing about selling digitally is that the space limitations are much less restrictive than at the physical store, where we constantly have to delete items for space reasons, and also you are never out of stock of an MP3. The thing about iTunes, which is by far the most successful digital store so far, is that despite the cool factor they have been able to hold onto, they are really closer to Best Buy than Other Music in terms of the shopping experience. That's great for some people, but we feel there is a real need for great indie download shops with a curated selection.

JP also points to a funny Other Music video that's an ad in the sense of making Other Music look as over-the-top horrible as possible. It is, as RageBoy comments, durn gonzo. [Tags: music drm other_music jp_rangaswami josh_madell digital_rights itunes everything_is_miscellaneous]