Author: mklang

Counter 09 proceedings

The proceedings from the COUNTER workshop “Mashing-up Culture The Rise of User-generated Content” are available for download. The workshop was a blast with lots of interesting people and the proceedings are well worth downloading and reading. They include:

  • Copyright and Its Limits in the Age of User-generated Content by Niva Elkin-Koren
  • CDPT Mash-up 360. A Cauldron of Creativity: Outcomes from the University of Portsmouth Event by Trudy Barber, Hilary Cooke, Ed Woodroffe
  • From Copyright to Copyleft and from Copyleft to Copywrong or “If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be? by Marina P. Markellou
  • User-generated Contents and Urban Middle Class by Ashutosh Potdar
  • If You Build It, They Won’t Come: Placing User-generated Content in Context of Commercial Copyright Policy by Andres Guadamuz
  • Public Policy: Mashing-up Technology and Law by Puneet Kishor, Oshani Seneviratne
  • The Copyright Dispute: A Transnational Regulatory Struggle by Leonhard Dobusch, Sigrid Quack
  • Revisiting the Role of Critical Reviews in Film Marketing by Finola Kerrigan, Cagri Yalkin
  • Liability of Online Auction Sites for Infringing “User-generated Content”: Have IP Owners Lost the Battle But Not the War? by Christine Riefa
  • User-generated Content and Intellectual Property Rights: Rules Governing an Internet Service Provider’s Liability in Europe and USA by Thanos K. Tsingos
Posted on by mklang

Royal Society Seminal Papers

The Royal Society has done something cool again. They have created a new interactive timeline to celebrate the 350th anniversary year of the Royal Society. But this is not the cool part. The site will have 60 of the most important articles from the oldest scientific journal Philosophical Transactions (this is literally a drop in their huge ocean of 60,000 published since the journal first began in 1665).

Highlights include:

• The gruesome account of an early blood transfusion (1666)
• Captain James Cook’s explanation of how he protected his crew from scurvy aboard HMS Resolution (1776)
• Stephen Hawking’s early writing on black holes (1970)
• Benjamin Franklin’s account of flying a kite in a storm to identify the electrical nature of lightning – the Philadelphia Experiment (1752)
• Sir Isaac Newton’s landmark paper on the nature of light and colour (1672)
• A scientific study of a young Mozart confirming him as a musical child genius (1770)
• The Yorkshire cave discovery of the fossilized remains of elephant, tiger, bear and hyena heralding the study of deep time (1822)

More information.

Posted on by mklang

By train to Australia

I spend a lot of my time on trains between Göteborg & Stockholm. After a quick look through my scanty records I have been to Stockholm (at least) 13 times this year (by train) which makes it a distance of 12 688 km traveled over an estimated time of over 80 hours. If these trips were all put end-to-end this is approximately the distance from Göteborg to Perth, Australia.

but I could not have taken the train…

Posted on by mklang

November book givaway

The last book giveaway worked really well so I decided to continue the tradition a bit longer. Let me know in the comments if any of the books on the list catch your fancy. I have a Swedish list on a separate blog.

Sean Lang Parliamentary Reform 1785-1929

Bruno Giordano The Ash Wednesday Supper

Stephen Gray The artist as thief

The Memoirs of Field Marshal Kesselring

The philosophy of Schopenhauer

Richard Susskind The Future of Law

Beauchamp & Childress Principles of Biomedical Ethics (4th ed)

Michael Morton The Critical Turn: Studies in Kant, Herder, Wittgenstein & Contemporary Theory

Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel

Mark McCormack What they dont teach you at Harvard Business School

Robert Ardrey The Territorial Imperative

Posted on by mklang

Vulnerable IT Society

The whole neighborhood is suddenly pitched into blackness. A major power failure has killed even the street lamps. Thanks to my liking for candles and mobile broadband I still have some connection to the outside world beyond the blackness but it is interesting to see how vulnerable the IT society has become. I have candles to last the night but my laptop will only manage two hours. People are outside on balconies talking on their mobile phones and even walking outside with torches – or probably with the light on their phones.

An interesting experience not common in the safety first Scandinavia.

Posted on by mklang

Three-strikes law is misguided

The three strikes approach to internet-regulation is a misguided approach to the problem. Read David Canton‘s arguments on the topic:

The three-strikes law is misguided, even if you believe such activity should be controlled.

Whether someone has violated copyright is often not a black-or-white issue. Copyright law is complex, and knowing in any given instance whether an infringement happened isn’t easy.

To implement these policies on a mass basis, in a similar manner to handing out parking tickets, ignores this complexity. And the penalty is more than paying a few dollars in parking fines.

Posted on by mklang

Cat & Mouse of internet regulation

Regulating technology is (almost) hopeless. When giving a speech to the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre Symposium on ‘Meeting Privacy Challenges’ in 2008 Senator John Faulkner  said

Trying to legislate to control technological development or the ways people use technology is not perhaps ordering the tide to not come in, but it is certainly like trying to empty a bathtub with a teaspoon.

And yet we keep digging away with the teaspoon. Take for example the latest developments on The Pirate Bay site (via Slashdot)

“The Pirate Bay has shut down their BitTorrent tracker. Instead TPB is now using Distributed Hash Table to distribute the torrents. The Pirate Bay Blog states that DHT along with PEX (Peer Exchange) Technology is just as effective if not better for finding peers than a centralized service. The Local reports that shutting down the tracker and implementing DHT & PEX could be due to the latest court rulings in Sweden against 2 of TPB’s owners, and may decide the outcome of the case.”

Check out warsystems for a better and more thoughtful analysis of tpb’s latest move.

And thats just it. No matter what the single state may attempt to do, technical individuals will find a way to evade the problem for a little while longer. It is doubtful whether this can go on forever, the individuals will still lose but the problems will remain and grow. At best any victory will be a Pyrrhic one.

Posted on by mklang