digital

Dutch Innovation

The Dutch collecting societies support CC – this is a great leap forward, I cannot help but wonder what the Swedish societies will do now? Probably try to continue to ignore technology, innovation, the commons, and reality…

From Paul Keller – CC Netherlands Project Lead:

On August 23, 2007, Dutch collecting societies Buma and Stemra and Creative Commons Netherlands launched a pilot project that seeks to provide Dutch musicians with more opportunities to promote their own repertoire. This project enables members of Buma/Stemra to use the 3 non-commercial CC licenses for non-commercial distribution of their works. It also allows Dutch composers and lyricists who already use the CC NonCommercial license to join Buma/Stemra and have them collect their royalties for commercial use of their works.

Before now Dutch authors have not been able to make their work available online under the CC NC license while at the same time having Buma/Stemra collect their royalties for commercial use of those works. The Netherlands is the first country to bring such a collaboration between a music copyright organization and Creative Commons, a move applauded by Lawrence Lessig, the founder and chairman of Creative Commons International, as “the first step towards more freedom of choice in the field of exploiting music works in the digital world.”

The press release by Creative Commons Netherlands and Buma Stemra can be found here. And for more information about what’s going on in the Netherlands check out CC Netherlands website.

Posted on by mklang

Graffiti & Copyright

A recent advert posted all around Göteborg features artwork by Banksy. I have written about Banksy earlier in this blog (here, here, here and here). I cannot pass signs like this without thinking about the copyright questions this raises.

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The first point that needs to be made is the fact that despite the fact that Graffiti may be illegal the artist has copyright in his work. This means that even though the artist may be arrested his (or her, naturally) work may not be copied and reproduced without the permission of the artist.

Now Banksy is not the artist most concerned about copyright – in his book “Wall and Piece” there is a quote in the beginning “Copyright is for losers”. But what I would like to know is whether or not the the people who printed the poster even bothered to think about the question of copyright.

My guess is that the group probably feels some kind of affinity with countercultures and therefore assumes that they either do not need permission, or if they did need permission they would surely get it. The creators of the poster may actually have asked for and received permission but somehow I doubt it since Banksy tends to be rather withdrawn.

A clue in this direction can be found on his website, where a small popup appears with the text:

“Banksy has not organised or been involved in any of the recent exhibitions of his work”

Posted on by mklang

Regulating Violence

Is the regulation of violence in video/computer games censorship? Or is it a question of protecting the innocent? Naturally paternalism in all forms includes a “pappa knows best” attitude however there are cases of censorship/control/paternalism which we can accept and other forms which we tend to react against.

The forms of Internet censorship (more here) displayed by states such as China and Saudi Arabia are usually criticized as forms of censorship unacceptable in democratic societies while they themselves argue the need to protect their cultures and citizens against the corrupting influences online. It is, it may seem, a question of perspectives.

Then what of the regulation of violent computer games? Are computer games supposed to be seen as forms of speech to be protected? Or are we on a dangerous slippery slope when we start excluding forms of speech? The New York Times has an article showing that the US courts tend to find laws against computer game unconstitutional.

Considering the US approach to Free Expression this is not surprising. The European approach – in particular the French, German and Scandinavian models could not be as clear cut in this question. This only means that the US is against censorship and feels the cost of this decision is worth it, while many other jurisdictions feel that the damage caused by this extreme acceptance of free expression may cause discomfort and hardship to individuals and groups beyond the eventual benefits of the speech.

The ever eloquent Judge Posner is quoted in the article:

“Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low,” he wrote. “It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.”

The problem is that there is often great value (moral rather than economic) in quixotic pursuits and the practice of subjecting people to hardships in order to prepare them for eventual future hardships is really only useful in military training and never a satisfactory way of raising children.

Posted on by mklang

Too late for a good idea

Is it ever too late for a good idea. Sometimes the world just moves along and makes what would have been a good idea obsolete. One of the local free newspapers (Metro) reports that the government wants to take a softer approach on illegal file sharing. Despite the uncertainty of the source – I rarely trust tabloids and free newspapers even less – it is an interesting idea.

The idea now is not to send in the police at once but rather have the copyright holder send the infringer a letter. The reporter makes this all sound like a matter of sending a polite reminder much in the tone of “Uhm, excuse me… but you seem to be infringing my copyright”. If the infringer then does not react a civil suit will follow.

This idea is long overdue. Digital copyright infringement should be a civil procedure rather than a criminal one.

Unfortunately the idea may be so long overdue as to be useless. The world has changed and I am not sure that there is any longer a window of opportunity for this idea. In part this is because the habits and expectations of internet users have changed and in part because the interpretation of our international obligations may require us to use criminal rather than civil procedure.

Posted on by mklang

Web Politics

Andrew Chadwick (author of Internet Politics – fantastic book which I reviewed for Information, Communication & Ethics in Society) is organizing a conference Politics Web 2.0 to be held at Royal Holloway, University of London in April 2008.

Has there been a shift in political use of the Internet and digital new media – a new Web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards Web 2.0 impact, if at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the communication of politics and policy? Does Web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for researchers to share and debate perspectives.

(via Lex Ferenda)

Posted on by mklang

Free Expression & T-shirts

Did you know that you could be arrested for wearing a t-shirt with an inappropriate text on it? No I am not talking arrested for indecency or for bad taste. Several people in the United States and the United Kingdom have been arrested for wearing t-shirts with political messages on them. In July last year I presented several examples of this on this blog.

In 2004 Nicole and Jeff Rank were removed from the event at the West Virginia Capitol in handcuffs after revealing T-shirts with President Bush’s name crossed out on the front. Nicole Rank’s shirt had the words “Love America, Hate Bush” on the back and Jeff Rank’s read “Regime change starts at home”

The good news is that the couple settled their lawsuit against the federal government for $80,000, the American Civil Liberties Union announced Thursday (via ABC news).

It’s good to hear that the even if protesters are arrested the right to freedom of expression is still a valued and protected right. However, the threat of being arrested is not something that most people want to experience and therefore freedom of expression is diminished even when people are compensated later.

Posted on by mklang

Moving the blog

My blog has suffered from technical issues. For the last year I have been less than happy with the level of IT service at my department so I have taken the major step of moving packing my blog and moving it to an external location.

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The move has entailed lots of small frustrations but I think that I have found most of the small technical bugs. Lets hope it works now!

Posted on by mklang

The Problem with Tilde

A small annoying bug has crept into the system! When attempting to access my blog on

nothing happens. When using the address

http://www.ituniv.se/%7Eklang/wrote/

The blog works. Most annoying.

Did you spot the difference?

WordPress (my blog software) is having trouble when the browser uses the link with the symbol Tilde (thatâ??s the squiggle ~) in front of my user name. It works when Tilde is written in html encoding %7E.

Tilde is written as %7E in html. Unfortunately most links to my blog and even the links which show up when you google me are written with Tilde. So I seem to have disappeared from the blogosphere.

Bah!

I have handed this over to support so I hope that this will be fixed â?? soon!

Posted on by mklang