Can you feel the excitment in the air? It’s happening tomorrow. Yes it is Friday and the weekend weather is looking great but thats not what I am talking about. Tomorrow the courts will present their ruling for the Pirate Bay Case. It promises to be an interesting read.
Author: mklang
The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control
An interesting sounding book The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control by Ted Striphas is out now both in print and in a online Creative Commons version or as the author puts it:
…not only as a copyrighted, bound physical volume, but also as a Creative Commons-licensed electronic book. You can download the e-edition by following the “download” link of the navigation bar, above, or by clicking here. The file is a “zipped” .pdf of the complete contents of Late Age, minus one image, for which I was (ironically) unable to secure electronic publishing rights.
I don’t want to split hairs but the digital version is also covered by copyright – but I get what he means. This sounds like a really interesting book and I am looking forward to reading it. For those of you who want more than the title here is the blurb:
Ted Striphas argues that, although the production and propagation of books have undoubtedly entered a new phase, printed works are still very much a part of our everyday lives. With examples from trade journals, news media, films, advertisements, and a host of other commercial and scholarly materials, Striphas tells a story of modern publishing that proves, even in a rapidly digitizing world, books are anything but dead.
From the rise of retail superstores to Oprah’s phenomenal reach, Striphas tracks the methods through which the book industry has adapted (or has failed to adapt) to rapid changes in twentieth-century print culture. Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon.com have established new routes of traffic in and around books, and pop sensations like Harry Potter and the Oprah Book Club have inspired the kind of brand loyalty that could only make advertisers swoon. At the same time, advances in digital technology have presented the book industry with extraordinary threats and unique opportunities.
Boyle Public Domain podcast
Here is an interesting podcast of James Boyle on his book The Public Domain (via BoingBoing)
Professor James Boyle describes how our culture, science and economic welfare all depend on the delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain —the realm of material that everyone is free to use and share without permission or fee
Intellectual property laws have a significant impact on many important areas of human endeavour, including scientific innovation, digital creativity, cultural access and free speech. And so Boyle argues that, just as every informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment or civil rights, every citizen in the information age should also have an understanding of intellectual property law.
The right to blaspheme
On March 26 the United Nations Human Rights Council voted yes a resolution that makes blasphemy a serious offense against human dignity. Unsurprisingly the countries behind the proposal are the same countries that view blasphemy as a serious crime and punish it with long criminal sentences, corporal punishment or death. The Economist has a good article that explains why free speech should protect individuals not religions.
Wikipedia to vote on change from GNU FDL to CC BY-SA
Sorry for the horrible abbreviations in the title!
Wikipedia is in the process of deciding to go from using the GNU Free Documentation License to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license. One of the reasons for this move is that the GNU Free Documentation License is less flexible to use for wikipedia. More information from the Creative Commons blog:
A community vote is now underway, hopefully one of the final steps in the process the migration of Wikipedia (actually Wikipedias, as each language is its own site, and also other Wikimedia Foundation sites) to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license.
This migration would be a huge boost for the free culture movement, and for Wikipedia and Creative Commons — until the migration happens there is an unnecessary licensing barrier between the most important free culture project (Wikipedia of course, currently under the Free Documentation License, intended for software documentation) and most other free culture projects and individual creators, which use the aforementioned CC BY-SA license.
To qualify to vote, one must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15. Make sure you’re logged in to the project on which you qualify, and you should see a site notice at the top of each page that looks like the image below (red outline added around notice).
Click on “vote now” and you’ll be taken to the voting site.
For background on the migration process, see Wikimedia’s licensing update article and the following series of posts on the Creative Commons blog:
- On being a creative commoner
- Wikipedia and attribution
- Wikipedia licensing Q&A posted
- Wikipedia/CC news: FSF releases FDL 1.3
- Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses released
- DRAFT Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses
- Approved for Free Cultural Works
- Wikipedia and Creative Commons next steps
- Progress on license interoperability with Wikipedia
Here’s a great “propaganda poster”, original created by Brianna Laugher (cited a number of times on this blog), licensed under CC BY. See her post, Vote YES for licensing sanity!
Indeed, please go vote yes to unify the free culture movement!
On philosophical advice
Not all intelligent sounding advice is actually good advice and most philosophical advice is on the level of a bad sound-bite. Most of it just sounds cool but is totally useless real life applications. The latest strip from Jorge Cham of PhD comics has come online:
What this means in real life thesis writing (if I now may offer some advice…) is not to dig to deeply into “how-to-write-a-phd-or-masters” books since they are filled with obvious advice and keep you busy reading the wrong things. I think that Nike had the right approach with their slogan “Just do it”.
Advanced Free Software Tools
My friend and colleague Henrik Sandklef will be offering a really cool course at Göteborg University. Check out Advanced Free Software Tools:
Advanced Free Software Tools prepares you, theoretically and practically, for working in a distributed FLOSS development environment.
So, if you want to learn about motivation behind FLOSS, basics of copyright and other legal concepts, licensing, code evaluation, code coverage, profiling, coding practices, development infrastructure, release management, version control, test environments, communication with projects and developers … and much more?
Send an email to sandklef@ituniv.se to get more information
Cool images of seeds and pollen
The Guardian maintains some pretty neat photo galleries – the photo below is from there. Actually I am pretty sure I saw someone like this at the bus stop yesterday!
These strange alien structures are among the seeds and pollen conserved at the Kew Millennium Seed Bank. Seeds from more than 10% of the world’s flowering plants – around 30,000 species – have been collected in the decade since the bank was established. Kew is celebrating this milestone with an exhibition Banking on Life (4 April – 13 September), and a book of electron micrographs The Hidden Sexuality of Flowers by Rob Kesseler and Madeline Harley (Papadakis, £35)
Why numbers don't mean much – file sharing in Sweden
Presentation is everything. Shame that the truth may interupt an otherwise nice story. The Guardian was not alone among international media commenting on the implementation of IPRED (Directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights) in Sweden. The article entitled Swedish internet use plummets after filesharing curb introduced began:
Internet traffic in Sweden – previously a hotbed of illicit filesharing – has fallen dramatically following the introduction of a law banning online piracy.
Lets begin with some of the obvious errors. The “hotbed of illicit filesharing” is a strange thing to call Sweden. We have a high Internet/broadband penetration and the Pirate Bay was launched and maintained by Swedes but there is no way that a county with 9 million inhabitants could be at the top of the file sharing list?
The fact that TPB was launched in Sweden does not mean that its users are Swedish or in Sweden – this is basic stuff – so did the writer want to increase the sensationalism in the article or doesn’t he understand how the Internet works? Check out this map of TPB users around the world.
TPB Tracker Geo Statistics
The statistics is now based on unique users connected per minute! Should provide alot more accurate data.
Keep in mind that a torrent client usually only connects to the tracker once every 15-20 minutes.
The next problem is that the measurements of the 30-50% drop in traffic (depending upon who you read) seems to be that the measurements where taken from a much too small sample and the drop mirrors a similar drop on the measured servers occurring at the same time last year (Sources in Swedish here).
Yes, there are file sharers in Sweden and yes one of the most popular torrent trackers was founded in Sweden. But the files are uploaded and downloaded from all locations across the world and a large dip in traffic may mean a number of things. Having said that there is no doubt that a number of users turned of their file sharing when IPRED entered into force – but only to begin searching for anonymity tools. It is extremely likely that the users who stopped file sharing will return since there is still no viable legal alternative.
Brilliant protest
Bit late but what a great idea!
A woman in Paris holds condoms with a picture of Pope Benedict XVI. This condoms were released to mock the pope after he rejected condoms as a weapon against AIDS during his African trip.
From the Guardian.