Academia

Limiting the Open Society: notes from a lecture

Today I was presenting on the FSCONS track of the GoOpen conference in Oslo and the topic for my talk was Limiting the Open Society: Regulation by proxy

Limiting the Open Society  

To set the stage for my talk I began by asking the question why free speech was important. This was closely followed by a secondary question asking whether or not anyone was listening.

The point for beginning with this question was to re-kindle the listeners interest in free speech and also to wake the idea that the concept of free speech maybe is something which belongs in the past a remnant of a lost analog age which should be seen as a quaint time – but not relevant today.

Naturally it was not possible to present a full set of articles on the reasons for why free speech is important during a 20 minute presentation but I could not help picking up three arguments (with a side comment asking whether anyone could imagine a politician saying free speech was unimportant).

The main arguments were
John Stuart Mill’s truth argument presented in On Liberty (1869) from which this quote is central:

“However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth”

Basically Mill’s argument can be broken down into four parts:

  1. The oppressed may represent the truth
  2. Without criticism we are left with dead dogma
  3. Opinion without debate meaningless
  4. Deviant opinions may be unaccepted truth

The second argument I presented was from Lee Bollinger’s The Tolerant Society: Freedom of Speech and Extremist Speech in America (1986)

Bollinger argues that the urge to suppress disagreeable speech is part of a need to suppress all ideas and behavior that threaten social stability. While Mill argues that it is important to support speech because it maybe right Bollinger argues that habits of tolerance in all its forms (including speech) are important to combat paternalism.

“…the free speech principle involves a special act of carving out one area of social interaction for extraordinary self-restraint, the purpose of which is to develop and demonstrate a social capacity to control feelings evoked by a host of social encounters.”

The final argument I presented was one of positive law – free speech is important because the law says it is important. The high point of this argument can be seen as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which created an international understanding of the importance of rights (including speech).

After this introduction I presented the concepts in an historical background. Again I needed to be brief so I could not really go into detail. I jumped straight into the period 300 years ago when the discussion on the rights of man in Europe was at a high point. The fear of censorship in advance (imprimatur) or punishment after the fact was of great interest. The results of these discussions were documents like The Rights of Man and the Citizen presented after the French revolution, the United States Declaration of Independence and the Swedish Freedom of the Press Act of 1766.

The problems with these documents and the regulatory acts which followed where that they presented potential rights but did nothing to ensure access to communications media. In fact the communications media became ever more centralized and access was granted to a more and more limited group of (similarly minded) people. The negative aspect of this situation were (1) centralized media can easily be controlled and (2) allowing small group access means that the individual members have to conform to remain in the in-group.

To re-enforce the concept of in-group and out-group I showed an image of the speaker’s corner in London where any individual may speak without being harassed its not a legal right even if it seems to be an established practice. Speaker’s corner is sometimes seen as an example of openness but in reality it is proof of the failure of our ability to speak openly anywhere.

Then we moved quickly along to the Internet as an example of where a technology was developed that made personal mass communication available to a wider audience.

The exciting thing about the Internet is that it carries within it freedom as a side effect of its creation. This freedom was developed by common agreement (of a homogeneous group) into the open end-to-end, packet switching “liberal” ideology that we experienced in the early days of technology.

Naturally the problem with any idea that is developed under a consensus is that any use, concept, idea or speech which falls outside the consensus is easily suppressed and lost. But more on this later.

In the early days we were overly optimistic and believed texts such as John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

But naturally this was not going to last since the freedom we relied on was in reality a bi-product of corporate activity.

Our reliance on technology is a reliance on services created and provided mainly by corporate actors. And corporate actors have different priorities. It’s not about individual goodwill but it is about profit. Milton Friedman wrote in Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits…

It is not evil for companies to be all about profit but if there ever is a clash between individual freedom and profit then the corporation has an obligation to focus on profit at the cost of freedom.

At this stage at the lecture I shifted on to the problem of censorship. First I addressed the issue of self-censorship and used a quote by George Orwell on the topic.

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.

It is very difficult for us to know that we are censoring ourselves.

The next problem is the fact that even if we have something to say this does not mean that there is anyone who will (or can) listen. Basically we are lost in crowds.

These first two hindrances to communication are inevitable but they also create a bias against speech and the spread of ideas. From this point I began to address issues that can be (and should be) addressed.

The first issue was affordances. I showed the image of by Yumiko Hayakawa of the ‘Anti-Homeless’ park bench. And as I always do I asked the audience to spot the ethical problem in the image. The problem is that the bench discriminates among users by allowing only certain types of use. People with weak legs (old people?) struggle to use this bench, no people will loiter on this bench, and naturally no homeless people can sleep on this bench.

image from Yumiko Hayakawa essay Public Benches Turn ‘Anti-Homeless’ (also recommend Design with Intent)

Without engaging in a wider discussion the park authority can implement regulation without rules. No law expelling homeless people is necessary and therefore no legal review is ever carried out.

On the topic of affordances I brought up the German engineer problem. Here is the story behind the creation of SMS messaging (LA Times)

Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.

As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.

That became Hillebrand’s magic number — and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.

“This is perfectly sufficient,” he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. “Perfectly sufficient.”

Since then Twitter was developed from SMS and therefore we see how a engineer speaking German is today controlling the way in which we communicate today.

Another form of censorship is the whole problem of the chilling effect of law when it’s law is applied in situations where it has the effect of limiting speech – even if the purpose of the law was something completely different.

As a final form of censorship I spoke about the negative effects of End-User License Agreements (EULA). Many of the platforms upon which we depend for our communication have demanded of us that we agree to terms of use which we may not understand or which may have changed dramatically since we last read them. The result is that users are stuck in a perpetually weak situation.

So what’s really going on? Why doesn’t the state act or react to the erosion of our rights. These rights which are apparently so fundamental and important.

Well in part its lack of knowledge. Many states do not know the problems we are facing. The second part is that these are contractual agreements and the state is concerned about intervening in agreements (between consenting parties) and finally – and more ominously – the state benefits from the system.

States are able to stand tall and use words like rights, democracy, speech without limiting or censoring. They don’t have to. What the state does is they require acts (like data retention or surveillance) carried out by our service providers. If the state needs anything it can then collect it from the providers. The good news is that the state can claim to have clean hands. This is regulation by proxy.

So what can be done? Here I presented three strategies:

First, keep focused; remember what free speech is for. A second quote from George Orwell, this time from his preface of Animal Farm:

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Second a demand that the state should end regulation by proxy and return to its own purpose. And the protection of citizen’s rights should include limiting the rights of actors. Speech on any medium should be protected – not only from the acts of the state.

Thirdly. The third was not really a new suggestion but more of an alternative. If the state cannot protect our speech then it should declare free speech as a thing of the past a remnant of a bygone analog age. This will not help much – but at least it will stop the hypocrisy.

Posted on by mklang

GoOpen Oslo

On the train to Norway to participate in GoOpen in Oslo. My talk is entitled Limiting the Open Society here is the abstract

With social media quickly becoming the communications tool of choice many have hailed this as an introduction to an open transparent society. But how open is this open society? Is this new stage in the information society really open or is this an illusion brought about by popular technology? This talk looks at the weaknesses and control mechanisms built into the technology and the different regulations and policies implemented to control our communications.

The GoOpen event has lots of great presenters! I am looking forward to hearing Bente Kalsnes on How open should open data be?, Karin Kosina on Art and Hacking in Syria, Berglind Ósk Bergsdóttir on IMMI – Redefining Free Speech for a Digital Age, Smári McCarthy on The Industrialization of the Internet, Primavera di Filippi on Cloud Computing and Regulatory Policies, Christian Siefkes on Commons-based Peer Production and many many more.

So if you are in the neighborhood you should really drop by!

Posted on by mklang

Notes from a lecture: Copyright – One size fits all?

The setting for my lecture yesterday was the venerable SERI and the event was the annual “birthday” lecture: It was 41 years ago that the first seminar on law and computers was held in Oslo and this event launched what is today SERI.

The title of my lecture was Copyright – One size fits all? Unpacking Sophocles. The goal was to demonstrate that by bending and twisting copyright to fit new technologies and expressions we will eventually “break” copyright.

 

Copyright: One Size Fits All?

The lecture began with a brief introduction to cultural relativism and presented a quote from Franz Boas

“…civilization is not something absolute, but … is relative, and … our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.”

Franz Boas 1887 “Museums of Ethnology and their classification” Science 9: 589

To visualize this I showed a clip of Siberian/Thuvan throat singing and explained that while we lack the tools for judging the quality of this singing this was an example of Siberian/Thuvan singing and it is a genre quite different from other forms of throat singing.

The same applies to the concepts of right and wrong but we are so embedded in our values that we are, at times, unable to see what is right or wrong.

In addition to this we must, especially in the world of copyright, pay attention to technology. And in particular to the fact that technology is not neutral and comes with particular affordances (i.e. limitations and/or possibilities).

I showed the audience the image of the tube bench and asked if they saw the ethical problem.

image from Yumiko Hayakawa essay Public Benches Turn ‘Anti-Homeless’ (also recommend Design with Intent)

This is an excellent example of regulation without rules. There are no signs explaining how to use the bench, there is no need to patrol the park to ensure misuse. In fact you could argue that this bench is equally inviting to all. But this bench is unfair in its equality. If you do not fit in you are not welcome. A homeless person cannot sleep on the bench. Without specific – and unpleasant – rules we regulate “correct” behavior in this park.

Now if you mix technology and cultural production we get a heady mix. But skipping head we touched down just briefly in 1631 with an example of the dangers of technology (printing). The example was the Wicked Bible.

This bible was a reprint of the King James bible but contained a serious typo in Exodus 20:14, where the Seventh Commandment reads, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The printers were fined 300 pounds and their printers’ license was revoked. Today there are only 11 copies of the original 1,000.

It was not the event with the bible that created a need for copyright but there was a concern with the power of the printers and a recognition that society needed more cultural works. So in 1710 the Statute of Anne was enacted with the purpose of:

Wheras printers, booksellers, and other persons, have of late frequently taken the liberty of printing… books, and other writings, without the consent of the authors… to their very great detriment, and too often to the ruin of them and their families: For preventing therefore such practices for the future, and for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books…

The first copyright act was not about culture it was about science. It was for the production of useful books.

But this was too good to last. The gift of monopoly was going to be used in more and more places and ways. Copyright expanded from useful books to other forms of cultural writing. The length of time the monopoly lasted was increased. Copyright was made international via conventions. And most problematic it was tweaked to suit new forms of technological expression.

For the latter I told story of Napoleon Sarony and Oscar Wilde and the case of Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony where the US supreme court explained that photographs were equal to text and deserved protection under copyright.

Copyright became a natural part of our thinking. It became hegemonic and natural – we could not image a world without it.

At about the same time we began to embark on the social century. Everywhere common folks were demanding to be part of – and have a say in – life. In politics, in the workplace, in economics, in the schools… the people demanded their “right” to be part of the decision making process.

Aided by technology ordinary people entered the realm of professionals. Kodak nr 1 was released in 1888. It was the first mass-produced cheap easy to use camera. It was portable and had a short exposure. What this all meant was that Kodakers (amateur photographers, see “’Kodakers Lying in Wait’: Amateur Photography and the Right to Privacy in New York, 1885-1915”, American Quarterly, Vol 43, No 1 March 1991)

The problem was that even with the development of cheap recording devices for sound and vision – transmitting these to others was remained in the hands of larger organizations.

But technology was changing this too. With digitalization the expense of copying all but vanished, with connectivity the possibility of communicating to a wider audience became possible for “everyone”. With new digital devices we began to change our behavioral patterns. Here I exemplified with MP3 players that can contain so much music that choice is not an issue. It is interesting that we praise the selling of devices that almost cannot be used legally. What message does an iPod that has 160gb of storage (that’s 40 000 songs according to apple) send? (1) please go buy some music or, (2) download the internet here.

The final major change was storage. Storage is both similar to the iPod example and different to it. Storage means no longer having to decide what to remove. Storage today means that the only problems we have are how to organize our information so that it can be retrieved later. And what about letting people forget? Forgetting is a social necessity and is quickly becoming a scarce commodity (Mayer-Schönberger has written a fascinating book on the subject “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age”).

These changes pushed the social century into the next phase: the social decade. All the points made earlier come together. The theoretically possible becomes the inevitable.

At this point it is a clash of norms mainly in the form of an end of passive consumption. But what does it all mean? To ease into this stage I took the help of Douglas Adams and his amazing quote from The Salmon of Doubt (2002)

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

With this quote I wanted to point out that the Swedish Copyright Act was enacted in 1960. The group of people who thought long and hard about its content, form and scope were probably around 50 years old. The technological acceptance level (i.e. what is a normal use of technology) was developed before they were 35 so this means around 1945. Think about it – what level of technology was dominant in 1945?

It is not unfair to say that this group had no chance to enact legislation capable of suiting our technological reality today.

At this point in the lecture I wanted to bring in law and morality in relation to copyright so I drew a simple taxonomy

As an example of Homage I showed clips from the Odessa Steps scene in The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925) and the station steps scene in The Untouchables (Brian De Palma, 1987). This is acceptable and praiseworthy. The artist building on the past, Eisenstein’s opinion does not matter.

In Cross Culture I showed a clip from the Kill Bill (Tarantino, 2003 & 2004) trailer and argued that we take offence when someone in Asia copies a dvd but profiteering from another’s culture is art. (Laikwan Pang: “Copying Kill Bill”, Social Text 83, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2005.)

In the remix corner I showed an Anime Music Video (AMV) combining ABBA and Anime cartoons called FMA AMV Gimme a Man After Midnight – Abba

Here is a form of cultural creation building on the past re-using and copying. It is unfortunate that this is not supported by law. The AMV practice is huge with groups and subgenres in the same way as Siberian Throat singing. It is culture, it is an entry point for artists and it is a legitimate form of artistic expression. (Check out The rewards of non–commercial production: Distinctions and status in the anime music video scene by Mizuko Ito. First Monday, Volume 15, Number 5 – 3 May 2010)

For pure downloading I did not show any clip. What I meant was of course illegally downloading copyrighted material. While I understand the desire… it is simply a parasitic behavior.

Now the problem is that when our technology makes it easier and easier to break the law there are cries from those who are invested in the current system and who profit well from it who cry that something must be done. Unfortunately you cannot put the technological genie back in the bottle. And this is not what they want. They want all the advantages of technology – but they don’t want it to change everyone’s behavior and negatively impact their business models. They want to have their (and our) cake and eat it. So they call upon the law to create artificial barriers.

In doing so they further twist and stretch copyright to the boundary of imagination.

The copyright industry/lobby (incredibly bad term so I ask you to understand me) also attempt to explain their actions to us – the consumers. This is done to lobby themselves into a better political position. Unfortunately this group seems to have forgotten themselves and the world in which they live.

The message they send is very top down. It comes, as if we were still living in the radio age, like mass media from one to many. To explain what I mean I showed the anti-piracy advertisement Piracy – it’s a crime

The problem with this advert is that is filled with the most bizarre and bad arguments. In attempting to portray illegal downloads as wrong they say things like: you wouldn’t steal a car.

Naturally today we no longer live in the top-down world. We the people no longer respect… We respond. One such response makes a joke out of the Piracy – it’s a crime advert. I showed a clip from The IT Crowd – Series 2 – Episode 3: Piracy warning parody

OK so what should we do?

Now the pirates (how’s that for another hugely vague and silly term) or anti-copyrighters may say “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” Shakespeare Henry VI (Part 2) Act 4, scene 2 but that may be going a bit too far.

Lawyers need to adapt in two main ways. (1) We need to be better a arguing and legitimizing and (2) we need to change the law.

First off we need to accept polycentric regulation. In Antigone the playwright Sophocles argued that if the law went against morals (natural law) then you could act in accordance with natural law. This gave a nice choice between following one or the other depending on the way you feel about a particular thing. In other words you could do what you like and find a way of legitimizing it later.

But Sophocles had it easy. Today it is not an either or situation. We are regulated and controlled by masses of factors from the law to culture to technology etc. Learning to navigate and understand this is incredibly important for any law that attempts to balance interests of several groups. But if the law fails to be relevant it is quickly going to become useless.

In the case of copyright this means abandoning the heavy-handed “one size fits all approach” in two ways. First copyright should not be used for everything and second it should not be applied in the same way on the things it is used for.

What we see today is a failure in these two areas and it is killing the usefulness of copyright.

I closed the lecture by presented a list of changes I would like to see in relation to copyright law.

Free Digitalization of cultural artifacts: There should be no additional copyright protection for simply digitalizing anything in the public domain. Also material bought and paid for by Public Service radio and tv should be released freely much earlier than today.
Limit terms of protection: Some copyrightable stuff is pointless and irrelevant as it is produced. Most is pointless and irrelevant and forgotten within five years. So 70 years after death is simply ridiculous. Sure some will suffer but today the few are supported at the cost of the many. The well known are pushing the obscure into the vacuum of the eternally forgotten.
Allow refusal of copyright: If you do not want to copyright something you should not have to! Freedom should be a default.
Allow creative use: Increased rights of fair use. Nordic law does not allow the quotation of images and video clips. This is a simple oversight which the legislators could not imagine that we would need when they enacted the law 50 years ago.
Public domain protections: There is no term for the concept public domain in Nordic languages. This means that the public domain – which is under attack everywhere – is handicapped in all discussions since there is no accepted term of reference. The default is copyright, this is not a level playing field upon which to have a discussion.
Resolve Orphan works problem: Seriously! Do it. Do it now!
Promote Multiple Creators: Copyright is built on the myth of the single author. The content creation of today is much wider. Recognize the fact that multiple creators exist and need to be supported.
Folklore & traditional knowledge: end cultural imperialism…

It was a great lecture with an interesting discussion that lasted well into the night. Thank you SERI.

Posted on by mklang

No, I have not read your gods

Warning: Pointless rant.

Much of my work is multi or cross-disciplinary which means that I get to meet lots of fascinating people in different departments and from different disciplines. It all began when I moved from law to technology. I needed to learn new theoretical frameworks, new canons of literature, new methods and approaches etc.

I had moved to provide valuable insights from a different perspective to the department but in reality I needed to learn their language and culture to be able to talk. In doing so I lost some of the language and culture that made me unique and valuable to the department.

One of the problems with multidisciplinary work is that it can easily fail unless both disciplines are open to accept new ideas.

Once I had left my comfort zone I realized that I might as well continue to roam about and have been lucky enough to join in several fascinating discussions from the perspectives of many different disciplines. The people and arguments I have met have enriched my own thinking in ways that single disciplines could not.

But every now and then the nasty face of dogmatism appears. Someone at some department challenges me: you do not belong here, you do not belong in our discipline, and your ideas are less valid since your undergrad degree comes from the wrong field.

In a recent episode of Big Bang Theory, Sheldon asks Penny for acting lessons to improve his teaching:

Penny: Let´s take you out of your comfort zone
Sheldon: Why would we want to do that? It´s call the comfort zone for a reason

But I digress.

Strangely enough the most common form of attack is to find an obscure theoretician within the field, often some great thinker to whom everyone refers (but few bother to read) and attempt to hit the invader over the head with.

A typical situation is to engage the invader in a discussion on an obscure (and often irrelevant for the main discussion) point in the works of the great. The goal is to either get the invader to accept the speaker’s mastery of the subject – or even better an admission of ignorance! Ah the joy when the speaker can smile knowingly in shock and horror to signify that your discipline lacks all value.

This is an academic pissing contest. And from experience there are four strategies: attack, counter, deceive, evade.

To attack is to meet the speaker head on. This is an “all in” strategy. It looks brilliant if you win by flattening the opponent. You are king of the little pile – the alpha male in the seminar room – but it is not a long-term strategy. You can never be best at everything and it does not support cooperation.

Counter is to attack but not on equal terms. Instead of meeting the opponent with his or her own weapons you bring out your own armies. Dust of a dead theory from your own field and force the speaker into a battle on your own terms. Less impressive and still crap for long-term cooperation.

Deception is another strategy. This is basically faking it (partly or completely) you have no idea what they are on about but you might get away with it. This approach is massively horrible if it fails later. It is also damaging for the ego if you succeed in pulling it off. Not good for long-term cooperation. It is the grown up version of lying to the teacher about doing your homework. It is pissing in your own pants when it is cold outside (warm at first but cold in the long run). It is strangely also the most commonly used strategy. In my more pessimistic periods I believe all of academia is filled with people faking it.

Evasion is basically letting the running bull pass the flag. Admit to not knowing of this academic giant. Ask the speaker to explain briefly and question on why that particular theorist is relevant to the discussion in hand. Don’t be put of with comments like “I will send you an article” – if the speaker wanted a fight, give him/her one. But make sure he/she does the work. Demand to know the relevance of the theory, be polite, inquisitive, learning and hoist the s.o.b. on his own petard. Its not good for long term collaboration, but why on earth would you want to work with the little shit anyway?

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I leave you with the Omid Djalili demonstrating effects of different cultures in an argument:

Posted on by mklang

Call for Papers: GiKII VI

GikII VI, FREEDOM, OPENNESS & PIRACY?
26-28 June 2011
IT University
Göteborg, Sweden

Call for papers
Is GikII a discussion of popular culture through the lens of law – or is it about technology law, spiced with popular culture? For five years and counting, GikII has been a vessel for the leading edge of debate about law, technology and culture, charting a course through the murky waters of our societal uses and abuses of technology.

For 2011, this ship full of seriously playful lawyers will enter for the first time the cold waters of the north (well, further north than Scotland) and enter that land of paradoxes: Sweden. Seen by outsiders as well-organised suicidal Bergman-watching conformists, but also the country that brought you Freedom of Information, ABBA, the Swedish chef, The Pirate Bay and (sort of…) Julian Assange. We offer fine weather, the summer solstice and a fair reception at the friendly harbour of Göteborg.

So come one, come all… Clean your screens, look into the harder discs of your virtual and real lives, and present your peers with your ideas on the meaning of our augmented lives. Confuse us with questions, dazzle us with legal arguments, and impress us with your GikIIness. If you have a paper on (for example) regulation of Technology & Futurama, soft law in World of Warcraft, censoring social media & Confucius, the creative role of piracy on latter day punk or plagiarism among the ancient Egyptians – We are the audience for you (for a taste of past presentations see http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/gikii/ ).

Application process

Please send an abstract not exceeding 500 words to Professor Lilian Edwards (Lilian.Edwards@strath.ac.uk) or Dr Mathias Klang (klang@ituniv.se). The deadline for submissions is 15 April 2011. We will try to have them approved and confirmed as soon as possible so that you can organise the necessary travel and accommodation.

Registration

As with previous years, GikII is free of charge, and therefore there are limited spaces available, so please make sure you submit your paper early. Priority is always given to speakers, but there are some limited spaces available for students and non-speakers. Registration will be open shortly at http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/gikii/

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Gikii 2011 in Göteborg

Sharpen your pencils and polish your mice its soon time to submit abstracts for GikII 2011 which will run 26-28 June in Göteborg. The cfp is being tweaked as we speak and I am both honored and intimidated to be the local host of this great event – the sixth annual GikII.

For those of you who have not met the GikII check out last years call for papers:

GikII is a workshop concerned with exploring the legal interaction between popular culture, speculative fiction, and new technologies. It has been described unimaginatively as trail-blazing, innovative, fun and informative. We like to think of GikII as the legal workshop equivalent of a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, in other words, it is “like having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick”. GikII is where the bravest, fun-est (not to be confused with funniest) and zaniest ideas about law and technologies are discussed. In some instances we explore technologies so new that in fact there is not even a term to describe them, while some other times we have discussed technologies long gone. We only ask that you are imaginative and think of your fellow travellers instead of yourself. GikII is all about giving legal scholars the opportunity to engage in blue skies thinking (variations of the visible electromagnetic radiation spectrum may occur depending on which planet you may currently inhabit). If you have a paper that is languishing at the bottom of your hard drive and is crying out to see the light of a USB stick, GikII is the place for you. We laugh in the face of tradition and make rude comments about scholarly convention.

Or why not browse the five earlier events at Edinburgh 2006, Oxford 2007, Oxford 2008, Amsterdam 2009, Edinburgh 2010

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FSCONS @ GoOpen in Oslo

FSCONS is taking to the road! Having been in Gothenburg for the last four years, we felt like spreading our wings a bit to see how far they take us. The 22nd-23rd of March, we’ll be in Oslo to give a very special FSCONS track at the GoOpen 2011 conference organised by the Norwegian Open Source Competence Center. In traditional FSCONS spirit, we’ll mix, match, and find topics that express the convergence of technology, society and culture.

Time and date: 22nd of March 09.30-21.00 and 23rd of March 09.00-15.30 Where: Oslo (Radisson SAS Scandinavia, Holbergs plass) check out the Program and Registration.

Speakers from Germany, Iceland, Austria, Sweden, France and Norway itself will express their thoughts and ideas in 12 sessions running in parallel in the same place and time as the rest of the GoOpen program. Of particular interest for FSCONS participants might be the sessions taking place also in the technical track, which include previous years Nordic Free Software Award winner Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson talking about PageKite and Evan Prodromou talking about StatusNet.

Speakers joining us for the FSCONS track are:

* Pippa Buchanan on Community Learning On Demand & The Future
Of The Web Is Made By You
* Primavera di Filippi on Cloud Computing and Regulatory Policies
* Mathias Klang on Limiting the Open Society
* Bjørn Ruberg on Fighting a distributed denial of service attack
* Karin Kosina on Art and Hacking in Syria
* Smári McCarthy on The Industrialization of the Internet
* Berglind Ósk Bergsdóttir on the Icelandic Modern Media Institute (link not up yet)
* Christian Siefkes on Commons-based Peer Production
* Bente Kalsnes on journalism and open data (link not up yet)
* Stian Rødven Eide on Evolution of the Free Software Ecosystem
* Jonas Öberg on Cloudberries in Culture – Nordic Creativity in Focus

The program runs during the morning and early afternoon on both days. Just before lunch on the 23rd of March, we’ll open the floor to lightning talks, run jointly with the technical track. If you are interested in giving a presentation during the lightning session, you should contact jonas@ffkp.se to express your interest. Please note that the lightnings will be limited to 1-2 minutes in length.

Posted on by mklang

Ranking Web of Universities

The Cybermetrics Lab released today the 12th edition of its Ranking Web of Universities. This is the world broadest coverage ranking of Universities showing the performance of 12,000 higher education institutions worldwide.

Focusing not only on the research dimension, but considering also other academic missions like teaching, community engagement and knowledge and
technological transfer, the Ranking Web is offering a series of truly global indicators that reveal the outstanding performers, the excellence in education and the international impact and visibility of the universities.

The main results from the current edition are:

  • US dominance: The Ranking is headed by MIT and Harvard University, followed by Stanford and California Berkeley. There are 115 North American universities among the Top 200, including 16 Canadian ones.
  • Academic Digital Divide. The concerning gap between US and the Developed World Universities is not being closed. Only 59 European institutions are cited in the Top 200, including 10 UK ones, mostly in the leading group (Cambridge and University College of London are the EU best ones)
  • Language barriers. The globalization of the Web penalized the international visibility of French, Japanese or Korean universities.
  • Australian, Scandinavian, Singapore and surprisingly Taiwanese institutions show a performance close to the Canadian universities.
  • Size is a relevant factor in the emerging countries. Sao Paulo in Brazil, UNAM in México and Peking and Tsinghua in China are examples to be considered. No Indian university appears in top 500.
  • Open Access policies. The scores show that many universities are launching big efforts to populate their repositories, greatly expanding the availability of academic papers. On the contrary, there are still a few hundred institutions with two or more web domains, a bad practice that penalizes not only their rank but their overall visibility in search engines.

“In this edition a new indicator has been applied for reflecting more accurately the academic impact of the web contents” said Isidro F. Aguillo, Head of the Cybermetrics Lab. “The goal is to provide a complete overview of the academia worldwide, without using subjective criteria or excluding universities solely by technical reasons and guaranteeing no economical or political interests affect the scores”. “We are very surprised by the use of incomplete or flawed rankings for recognition of foreign university degrees. The current report constitutes a robust evaluation resource that can useful worldwide” said Isidro Aguillo.

Posted on by mklang

Questionable New Renaissance

On the 10 January 2011 the Comité des Sages (give me a break, what a title) delivered their report ‘The New Renaissance’ (again with the big titles). But seriously, the Comité was set up by the European Commission in April last year with the purpose of making recommendations for bringing Europe’s cultural heritage online. The reports main headings cover areas like:

  1. Ensuring wide access to and use of digitised public domain material
  2. Stimulating the digitisation and online accessibility of in-copyright material
  3. Reinforcing Europeana as the reference point for European culture online
  4. Guaranteeing the sustainability of digitised resources
  5. Finding sustainable financing for digitisation and Europeana
  6. Complementing public funding through public private partnerships for digitisation

Also they have some interesting & innovative ideas (compared to others) for resolving the orphaned work issue and preventing it from re-occurring by introducing a registration for copyright. This would also help works which are not orphaned but just ignored.

On the question of digitalization the sages (LOL, again I can’t ignore the title) suggest that  if right owners don’t want to exploit then digitization should be paid for with public money in collaboration with the private sector. Also in the case of non-copyrighted, ignored or orphaned works digitalization should grant the digitalizor up to 7 years preferential use by private partners.

My main beef – and it seems to be shared by the 1709 blog – is the conflict between the reports title and the reports content: The New Renaissance will only be digital. Now don’t get me wrong I like digital. But in an age when we are closing museums and libraries, or cannot afford to display the contents of our archives digitalization is an alternative. However it is also an excuse not to maintain the physical – and that would not be a renaissance.

Posted on by mklang

Cybersecurity and bad science

Via Bruce Schneier comes a link to an OECD report “Reducing Systemic Cybersecurity Risk” written by Peter Sommer & Ian Brown stating that the threat of cyberwar has been grossly exaggerated. Bruce has written about this before. He links to an interesting article “…on cyberwar hype and how it isn’t serving our national interests, with some good policy guidelines.”

From the executive summary of the Sommer & Brown report:

Analysis of cybsersecurity issues has been weakened by the lack of agreement on terminology and the use of exaggerated language. An “attack” or an “incident” can include anything from an easily-identified “phishing” attempt to obtain password details, a readily detected virus or a failed log-in to a highly sophisticated multi-stranded stealth onslaught. Rolling all these activities into a single statistic leads to grossly misleading conclusions. There is even greater confusion in the ways in which losses are estimated. Cyberespionage is not a “few keystrokes away from cyberwar”, it is one technical method of spying. A true cyberwar is an event with the characteristics of conventional war but fought exclusively in cyberspace.

Basically cyberwar/cybersecurity is plagued by bad science. For more on bad science I warmly recommend Ben Goldacre’s book.

Posted on by mklang