commons

The Death of Memory

OK â?? so articles that begin with the title â??The Death ofâ?¦â?? have a tendency to be alarmist. Despite this the recent news that Dr. Martin Luther Kingâ??s estate is about to auction off his papers (10 000 papers) creates thoughts in this direction. (via On the Commons)

The main fear is that the collection of sermons, speeches and papers that King wrote between 1946-1968 (including drafts of  â??I Have a Dreamâ??) will be bought by an investor and then sold off in pieces to the highest bidders. The economics of this is totally logical it will raise the most money. The downside is that this amazing collection will be spread making research difficult, and maybe impossible. As part of a collection a small note written by Dr King is a valuable addition. Taken on itâ??s own it is worth little and can be maltreated and eventually lost â?? as history has often shown.

This is indeed a death of memory.

The second part of the death of memory concerns the digitisation of communications. Since the dissemination of computers there has been a dramatic rise in communication and creativity. The general impression is that more and more people are writing and creating different forms of creative works. In addition to this more of our photographs are stored on digital storage devices. What are the implications of the shift to digital storage devices?

Cuneiform writing on clay tablets can still be read today after over 4000 years. Through this we have been able to read the Hammurabi code of law and the Gilgamesh epic and legends. (UPenn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology). Older books have a relatively long life expectancy in particular those printed on paper made from cloth rags. â??Ordinaryâ?? paper is less enduring and in particular modern paper since the acid remains in paper made between 1850 and 1950 cause this paper to slowly disintegrate (actually a slow burning acid fire) (Wikipedia).  Microfilm and Microfiche have a life expectancy of 500+ years but in reality this is substantially lower due to wear and tear by users.  Magnetic tape, Videotape, Magnetic disk and Optical disk will last less than 30-40 years.*

Stored digital photos will not be recovered from dumpsters and garage sales (Swapatorium) since they will have become unreadable as well as deteriorated.

All information storage forms require that the reader be able to understand the data. In the case of cuneiform tablets it is necessary to understand the written language. In the case of technologies such as tapes and microfilm it is also necessary to maintain functioning equipment that will be able to read the stored data. In the case of digital equipment it is necessary to save both the hardware and the software.

A good way to begin to understand the magnatude of this problem is to look at the â??Mother Tonguesâ?? chart of the development of computer languages that shows the rise and fall of programming languages.

Who will save the hardware, software and knowledge to be able to auction my collected works stored on several decaying computers? Even if someone eventually would want to read itâ?¦

* Rothenberg, Jeff. ‘Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents’, Scientific American (Jan 1995): 24-29.

Posted on by mklang

Brainstorming: The Politics of File Sharing

Its election year in Sweden and most parties are therefore working hard to show that they have the right stuff. Among the new problems the traditional parties have to face this year also offers up some new surprises like the rise of new political parties. In Sweden since the last election we have seen the rise of both a Feminist Party and a Pirate Party in addition to the attempt of The June List (a Swedish cross-party alliance in the EU Parliament) to become more active in national politics.

One of the issues which has been pushed into the forefront of the political debate is what the position should be on file-sharing.

I have been asked by an established political party to visit them and talk about Copyright, File Sharing, Creative Commons and associated issues. This spans a whole range of items from the technical to the philosophical.

So now I am calling for input â?? instead of just saying the politicians donâ??t get it, participate and help me by brainstorming around the topic: What every politician should understand about filesharing!

Add your comments in Swedish or English…

Posted on by mklang

Academic Publishing and Copyright

The Science Commons has released three “Author Addenda” which are amendments that authors can attach to the copyright transfer form agreements they receive from publishing companies. The purpose is to ensure that the authors retain enough rights to publish their works online.

Every Science Commons Addendum ensures the freedom to use scholarly articles in teaching, conference presentations, lectures, other scholarly works, and professional activities. They differ in the following ways:

Want more information? Read the Background and FAQ.

Posted on by mklang

Hello Denmark

Denmark has launched Creative Commons license! Here is an excerpt from the press release:

On June 10, the Danish versions of the Creative Commons licenses were
launched in Copenhagen at a ceremony held in Politikens Foredragssal. At
the event, hosted by Copenhagen Business School, Professor Lawrence
Lessig (Chairman and CEO of Creative Commons) gave the keynote
address. The ceremony was sponsored by Copenhagen Business School, Bender
von Haller Dragsted law firm (www.bvhd.dk) and IBM Denmark (www.ibm.dk).

Says Dr. Thomas Riis, â??The Creative Commons licenses will benefit the
cultural life in Denmark. Creators and users of everything from music,
weblogs and homepages to paintings and books will profit from the
licenses.â?? Dr. Jan Trzaskowski adds that â??the licenses make it much easier
and faster to exchange creative works, which falls perfectly in line with
the vibrant cultural life in today’s Denmarkâ??.

Creative Commons Denmark.

Posted on by mklang

14th European Conference on Information Systems

Tomorrow the 14th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) begins. This is the biggest annual European IS conference and this time it has the additional bonus of being in my hometown. I have been accepted to the track on â??Open Source, Open Access and the Open Information Societyâ?? with a paper entitled â??Informational Commonsâ??.

The venue: The School of Economics and Law

The conference tracks include: Communities and New Forms of Organizations – eBusiness – eGovernment – Enterprise Systems – Grand Challenges of System Development – Human Computer Interaction – Information and Knowledge Management – IS and Organizational Change – IT in Tourism and Travel – Living in, and Coping with, the society – Mobile Communication, Telematics and Ubiquitous Computing – New Technologies, Innovation and Infrastructure Development – Open Source, Open Access and the Open Information Society – Philosophy and Epistemology of IS Research – Strategic Management of IS and IT – The Economics of IS

A harbour view near the opera

The programme (including a list of all papers) can be found here.

Posted on by mklang

Will blog for cash (and even for free)

Actually I am sceptical to the idea of making money from blogging. In a previous post on the Blogburst I reported about the downsides of commercial feeds (they eat your broadband, usually you dont get more readers, and payment is virtually nil). Obviously there are the exceptions to the rule. In the same way as Madonna makes money from selling records is an exception from the thousands (hundreds of thousands?) who never will.

Dont get me wrong – I am not against money per se. I just dont believe that I will make money directly from my blog. Despite this, I found this news interesting.

Scoopt, the world’s first commercial citizen journalism photography agency, has just launched ScooptWords to help bloggers sell their content to newspapers and magazines. Within the Scoopt interface, you can easily add a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license to your blog right alongside a Scoopt commercial badge. Use the CC license to tell people how your work can be used non-commercially; use the ScooptWords badge to let editors know that your writing can be purchased for commercial use. There’s so much great blog content being created every day — it’ll be very exciting to see how it helps change the way newspapers and magazines are created.

(via Creative Commons)

The attempts to create commercial forms of citizen journalism are fascinating to watch. Again we see the new social uses of media threatening the established business models. Blogs will not kill print media but they will force print media news to adapt to a new reality.  As usual in situations such as these there will be commercial winners and losers.

Posted on by mklang

Freelancers & Copyright

My last post was an attempt to blog via mail but it was less than successful since all that was posted was the header. I obviously have a lot to learn in this area. The post was supposed to include this text:
Today I am attending the Nordic Seminar for Freelance Journalists. This year it is being held in Kungälv at a conference center with a great view of Bohus Fästning (Bohus Fortress). The whole event is between Friday and Sunday but I am here to talk about Creative Commons licensing for the intellectual property slot on Friday afternoon.

Bohus Fortress

The IP block begins with a discussion on recent caselaw which is followed by a presentation called the archaeology of copyright. After a short coffee break I will present Creative Commons licenses and the session closes with a presentation of the Nordic and European Union rules of Copyright. This sounds like an interesting way to spend the afternoon even if it seems like summer has finally arrived.

It will be interesting to hear first hand from the point of view of freelance journalists their views on copyright and hopefully we will even discuss the influence such technology as blogs.

I was concerned that the freelance journalists would not take well to CC but I could not have been more wrong. Their major concern is that their work can be (and often is) “stolen”, in addition to the need to be better at negotiating for payments for the online use of their work by their print media customers.

They often spoke of their concern for their reputation and themselves as trademarks – in particular their concern that online publication in forms that they could not predict may seriously damage their future work.

We had a very good discussion and the response was positive.

Posted on by mklang

CC Newbie Tech Litt

The idea of the publisher In Pictures is to provide basic computer litterature with plenty of pictures. Their primary audience is the beginner in the area.
They have now released 22 computer books under a Creative Commons Att-NC-ND 2.5 license.

The library includes books on software such as Windows XP, Mac OS X Tiger, Microsoft office, Openoffice.org, Dreamweaver 8 and Photoshop. In addition to programming basics such as MySQL, PHP and PERL.

Posted on by mklang

Download Jazz

Música Lliure II contains some great jazz played by (mainly) Catalan artists is online for download. It is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. Here is the blurb from the CC log:

Música Lliure II is a terrific new CD of Creative Commons-licensed jazz music by Catalan artists like Elisabet Raspall, Karion, Ismael Duenas, Joan Diaz, and La Orquesta de la Muerte (with a bonus contribution from Brazilâ??s Gilberto Gil). Produced by FOBSIC and Enderrock, the disc is available for free with the current issue of blues and jazz magazine Jaç. As with its predecessor, Música Lliure, the songs on Música Lliure II are available for free download at culturalliure.cat. Check it out!

Posted on by mklang

Raiding Pirate Bay

What is The Pirate Bay (TPB) supposed to have done?

TPB is the site of a BitTorrent tracker. In other words it helps users to locate BitTorrent files. BitTorrent is a variant (some would say development) of the Peer-to-Peer networks. It (the BitTorrent protocol) is a method for advertising and sharing files over a network.

Basically users looking for files (this can be films, music, texts, software etc) go to the search engine (TPB) and conduct a search. If they find what they are looking for they can download a â??.torrentâ?? file. This is not the actual end file they are looking for. It is a file which contains meta data about the file which they are looking for.

This data contains two sections. One that specifies the URL of the tracker and the other that contains the filename, fragment size, key length and a pass. The torrent file can contain information about many end files.

By activating the torrent file one begins the download of the end file or files. These are downloaded from several computers where the file is stored. As soon as part of the file is downloaded the downloader also becomes a source where others may download this part of the file. Once the download is complete the downloader may decide to keep this file available to others or remove it from the swarm.

Torrents are used to coordinate file sharing of copyrighted material both with and without the copyright holders consent. The technology cannot define whether the actions are legal or illegal. At present I have two complete files which I have been sharing for some time via BitTorrent. Since I am sharing complete files I am called a Seeder.

I have the most recent version of UBUNTU which is a Linux operating system licensed under the GPL license where sharing (and more) it is allowed. I have a film called Elephants Dream which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License and it is therefore permissible to share. In both these cases I am providing a service and helping the legal distribution of material.

OK â?? so that was the technical side. What does TPB do?

TPB is a search engine which helps people find the small tracker (.torrent) files. In other words the small files which contain information about where the end files are within the network. These tracker (.torrent) files are possibly not even capable of being copyrightable. If they are protected by copyright then they are the property of the author â?? in other words their creator. Not the creator of the end files that they track.

TPB case is going to be exciting to watch because the people in control of TPB are well aware of their legal position and of what they are doing. They will not have made the newbie mistake of having copyrighted material on their servers without permission.

Is it illegal to do what TPB does? If I tell you that you can buy a Gucci wallet knockoff at a well known marketplace am I guilty of the crime of â??facilitating copyright infringementâ??? Better still if I tell you how to make your own Gucci wallet am I still innocent? If I could sow and I create a copy of a fashionable suit for my own use is this copyright violation? If I instruct someone else is this â??facilitating copyright infringementâ???

If TPB are â??facilitating copyright infringementâ?? then what about Google? or Flickr? Google helps me find images and texts of masses of copyrighted material. Flickr not only helps me find it but also helps me store it?

What about the local library? They help me find and copy the material I needed to write this postâ?¦

The next step is obviously the question of the police action. The police have removed property from TPB. Removing property is a serious step and the question is whether the alleged crime motivates such action. In the case of computer equipment the question of surplus information must also be taken into consideration. In other words have the police taken too much?

TPB website today states that even servers containing material from organisations not connected with TPB were taken â?? in this case this amounts to a serious violation of an organisations ability to communicate. Can this amount of force justified â?? is the police action proportional to the alleged crime? Especially when other non-accused organisations are affected by police action.

Posted on by mklang