I spent some time this week with Patrick  de Laive, one of the founders of Fleck.com, a reinvention of Third Voice that looks much more promising. Fleck lets you leave comments and annotations on any site. Those notes can be seen either by the whole world or by one of your designated groups. It has obvious applications within an organization, and is a nice, open annotation platform that people may find lots of uses for. Plus, it’s a pretty cool implementation, and the upcoming one has lots and lots of miscellaneous goodies.

I’ve flecked the “play pen” page where you may be reading this post…

According to the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences’ governing body has proposed an open access policy according to which faculty members would make their research available for free either on a university site or on their own site. This would be in addition to publishing in academic journals, some of which charge $20,000 a year for a subscription. It’d be an opt-out program. The Harvard Crimson has a good editorial supporting it.

Yay! Locking research up in for-pay journals slows the pace of knowledge. The peer review system — one important way ideas are vetted — does not require the existing print publication system. Harvard’s move will not only make more information more widely available, it may help nudge the system itself into a form that better serves our species’ interests: As more schools adopt open access programs, researchers will have an increasing disincentive not to lock their work up.

I’m actually not sure how this will work, especially with regard to its being opt-out. If I’ve just had an article accepted by The Journal of Hydroponic Pediatrics. do I then also submit it to the Harvard open access server? If so, in what sense is that opt out?

Obviously, I’m also interested in what sort of metadata and aggregation facilities Harvard will supply to make these articles easily findable.

But what pleasant questions to contemplate! [Tags: open_access harvard publishing copyright a2k]

Patrick Leary had a terrific article in Journal of Victorian Culture in 2005 that Alexander Macgillivray just pointed out to me. It’s called “Googling the Victorians,” and the premise is: “Fortuitous electronic connections, and the information that circulates through them, are emerging as hallmarks of humanities scholarship in the digital age. ” He’s got some great examples — tracking down the meaning of an 1858 cartoon’s “Remember the grotto!” caption — to make the point that “What is most striking, and often quite useful, about this sort of fishing expedition is how often the sources in which one finds a ‘hit’ are utterly unexpected.” Here’s another:

…when searching for additional instances, beyond those I had found in print sources, in which the Saturday Review had
been referred to by its critics’ nickname, the Saturday Reviler. Google instantly
located the phrase in the following: a biographical account of Charles Haddon
Spurgeon, as a favourite epithet of his associates; the short-lived 1872 periodical,
The Ladies; an 1864 book about the contemporary stage magicians the Brothers
Davenport; an appendix, by Richard Burton, to his 1885 edition of Arabian Nights;
and a magazine account of a conversation with Frank Harris about his tenure as
editor in the 1890s.

Leahy goes on:

Such experiences reinforce the
conviction that the very randomness with which much online material has been
placed there, and the undiscriminating quality of the search procedure itself,
gives it an advantage denied to more focused research. It has been often and
rather piously proclaimed (by myself, among others) that googling around the
internet cannot possibly substitute for good old-fashioned library research, and
this is certainly true. But we are perhaps reaching a point in our relationship to
the online world at which it is important to recognize that the reverse is equally
true. No amount of time spent in the library stacks would have suggested to me
that any of those sources would be an especially good place to look for instances
of that particular phrase, and if it had, the likelihood of actually discovering
the phrase in a printed edition of any of them would have been virtually nil.

This is an excellent argument for reversing the current momentum of copyright law. Our culture benefits from having as much of this stuff searchable and available as possible. Since 19th century stuff is generally out of copyright, the Victorian scholars are in good shape, as Leahy notes. But why should our ability to research, learn and understand suddenly come to a galloping halt towards the beginning of the 20th century?

I don’t want to miss another of Leahy’s points: “…the vast reach of online
searching is connecting people, not merely with information, but with one
another, often in the most unexpected and fruitful ways.” [Tags: copyright scholarship google everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Thomas Mann (no, not that one) has a fascinating and important article about why tagging, folksonomies, and the rest of the hip Web 2.0 stuff is inadequate to meet the needs of scholars looking for information. It is, at least informally, a response to the Calhoun Report.

His example of trying to find information about “tribute payments in the Peloponnesian War” is classic and convincing: Finding what the scholar needs requires smart human guides and the smart guides that humans have created for scholars.

But, of course that doesn’t scale:

I would be the first to agree that the inexpensive indexing methods of term weighting, tagging, and folksonomy referrals–none of which requires expensive professional input–are entirely appropriate for dealing with most of the Internet’s Web offerings. With billions of sites to be indexed, it is out of the question to think that traditional cataloging can be applied to all of them. No one in his right mind would say otherwise.

But there is a crucial distinction that is being swept under the rug: the difference between quick information seeking and scholarship.

And, he says, scholarship requires books. Thus, the labor- and intelligence-intensive scholarly information clustering techniques will continue to work because the flow of books will continue to be relatively slow:

The universe of books published every year is much smaller, and much more manageable, than the universe of Web sites; this is the “niche” of sources to which professional cataloging should be primarily devoted. … Most of the billions of Web sites do not merit this level of attention to begin with; they are too inconsequential and too ephemeral. If we are going to promote scholarship, it is not enough to simply digitize the books for immediate retrieval if term weighting of keywords, tagging, and folksonomy referrals are the only mechanisms we provide for finding them. It is not at all unrealistic to propose that research libraries fill the niche of providing the best, most systematic, access to books…

He later says that systematic cataloging should not exclude all non-books.

As an argument for maintaining human expertise in manually assembling information into meaningful relationships, this paper is convincing. But it rests on supposing that books will continue to be the locus of worthwhile scholarly information. Suppose more and more scholars move onto the Web and do their thinking in public, in conversation with other scholars? Suppose the Web enables scholarship to outstrip the librarians? Manual assemblages of knowledge would retain their value, but they would no longer provide the authoritative guide. Then we will have either of two results: We will have to rely on “‘lowest common denominator’”and ‘one search box/one size fits all’ searching that positively undermines the

requirements of scholarly research”…or we will have to innovate to address the distinct needs of scholars.

My money is on the latter.

He concludes:

We need to make the best possible use of our principles, our experience, our tested practices, and our technologies, and not yield to the temptations to let either the technologies themselves or transient fashions constrict our vision of what needs to be done to promote scholarship of the highest possible quality–and that is a goal very different from striving to provide ’something quickly.’

Amen.

(Thanks to Bradley Allen for the link.)

[Tags: thomas_mann tagging catalogs library_of_congress libraries taxonomy folksonomy 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]

Tim Spalding has a terrific post analyzing why his LibraryThing has ten times the number of book tags as Amazon. [Tags: amazon librarything libraries tags tagging everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy]

Seb Schmoller notes a research project by Steve Graham at Durham University exploring how many institutions now routinely use software to sort customers/users/citizens. Stephen writes:

...in the UK, software now organise everything from call centre phone queues, the prioritisation (and stalling) of Internet traffic, the identification and tracking of those deemed ‘risky' or ‘threatening' on commercial shopping streets, people's access to premium (electronically-tolled) areas of urban roads, the allocation of financial and insurance services, the geography of shops and bank branches, and the experience of energy markets.

His project will explore how software is being used to sort us, the social assumptions behind it, how those assumptions are embedded in the code, and the practice's social and political implications.

Great topic.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy seb_schmoller steve_graham sociology ]

After lunch, we went around in small groups to stations where folks each had 7 minutes to demo their sites. Some very cool stuff is going on, including (and, damn, I lost my notes so I apologize for what I'm forgetting):

Metavid takes C-SPAN feeds of public domain video of our government in action, strips out the copyrighted stuff, and makes it all searchable by indexing the close captioning provided by our government. Once you've found the clip you want, they give you the code to embed it in your site. Way cool.

Front Porch Forum is a Vermont-based service that uses email listservs and the Web to let geographical neighbors talk to one another. It's a terrific and simple idea that happens to have been executed so well that in one case, 90% of homes have signed on. They've found that the optimum size for a virtualized neighborhood is about 300 real homes.

Congresspedia is an open Wikipedia-style wiki with entries for every congressperson, every bill and every rule.

Can you guess what FedSpending has lots of data about? You're right! It's a project by OMB Watch, and is funded (as several of these projects are) by the Sunlight Foundation.

The Capitol News Connection feeds 230+ public radio stations with stories pertinent to their localities.

MorePerfect is a wiki where people can use the wisdom of the political crowds to craft language for bills, proposals, referenda, etc. Rather than aiming at "neutrality," the way Wikipedia does, it aims at contributors being "constructive." So, if you disagree with a bill, you're asked not to reverse its meaning and insert stupid comments. Instead, create your own bill. They even have posted the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights as wikis, asking people to improve them.

The Gentilly Project has volunteers in New Orleans color coding houses on maps according to their state of repair. Part of the story is what they've learned about getting volunteers to do the work efficiently, which includes having a deadline, breaking a big project down into little steps, and being sure all the sub-projects are transparent to one another. The other part of the story are the results, which reveal that we have to make lots more progress, and that the progress is not as unevenly distributed as one might think.

The Campaigns Wikia is an ambitious attempt to gather information about significant campaigns around the world, using the Wikipedia format.

Lots and lots going on, building an infrastructure of facts and relationships that is direclty valuable, but, perhaps even more important, will be the source for mashups and visualizations we haven't yet thought of. [Tags: sunlightberkman berkmansunlight berkman politics everything_is_miscellaneous]

On second thought, just read Ethanz's descriptions of the projects. Way better than mine.