I wrote an article which has been published on the Swedish Green Party website Cogito.nu. The article discusses the dangers to democracy posed by digital restrictions management (DRM). In the article I discuss the way in which regulation works by using an example of picking up dog poo. Strange mixture of DRM & dog poo but I think it works. The article is available here (in Swedish).
When Professor Lessig published his book “The Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” in 1999 the book quickly became both a bestseller and a highly influential component in the discussion on the regulation of technology.
After the publication Professor Lessig set up a wiki about the book. The idea was to allow anyone who was interested to help to develop version 2 of The Code. That version is still accessible here. Lessig took the Wiki text December last year, and then added his own edits. Code v2 is the result. Now the work of compiling the new version of The Code has been completed and it is available for download here. The new text is also available in a Wiki.
Somehow, somewhere along the line our society has decided that certain types of intellectual endeavour were worth protecting and encouraging. Not all types. Just some. Through brilliant social positioning and political lobbying these intellectual endeavours have achieved the status of property. (For more on this read No Trespassing â?? Eva Hemmungs Wirtén).
Stop! Think! Property. Property is usually considered amongst the human rights. The focus on property right occasionally risked upsetting the balance of rights and encroaching on other rights. This led Martin Luther King to write:
Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.
Despite the fact that intellectual property protection as we understand it today is not as old as many believe, we have managed to raise it to an eternal value. This is to say we believe that this is the way that it always has been. Implicit with this idea comes the follow-up thought that changing this is not worth the effort.
The interesting thing is that there are many types of knowledge that is not protected by intellectual property. Some of these are not valuable but others are extremely valuable.
A personâ??s honour is something that may be painstakingly built up over a lifetime within the community group. Whether this person is a diamond trader or part of a criminal organisation this is a valuable commodity, which is unprotected. Defamation law attempts to cover certain parts â?? but this protection has nowhere near the far-reaching effects of intellectual property.
A farmerâ??s knowledge over the terrain and weather, a craftsmanâ??s knowledge of tools and materials and a teachers experience are all valuable commodities in the daily life of these people.
My current favourite example comes from an article by Emmanuelle Fauchart and Eric von Hippel (his books are available online free) about the value of the knowledge of French chefs. Especially in their struggle to gain and maintain Michelin stars.
A star in the Michelin Guide is a valuable commodity. It makes and breaks restaurants and the career of chefs. It has also been the source of some scandals (wikipedia).
The question the article poses is why when the commodity is so valuable donâ??t chefs copy each other? Rather than innovate and surpass their competitors why not emulate? There is no law, no intellectual property in food dishes. Despite the fact that they are highly creative. The answer, according to Fauchart and von Hippel lies in â??norms basedâ?? intellectual property systems.
What we see is regulation by advanced group norms that allow the group to:
â?¦specify the nature and extent of rights that a group member can assert to intellectual property. They also include procedures for the claiming of intellectual property rights, and community-accepted types of sanctions for violators.
This is a thought-provoking article. We need more work in this vein to be able to show that the present intellectual property regime is far from being the only game in town.
Once again copyright is used in a way to prevent the public from gaining access to material from dead authors. The first reports on this issue that surfaced in June . Joyceâ??s grandson, Stephen Joyce has limited access to material, attempted to prevent publication of scholarly works, demanded access to literary conferences (New Yorker) – his actions are tolerated since he controls the copyright of James Joyce.
James Joyce died in 1941. His work forms an important part of world litterature in general and Irish littarature in particular. It’s interpretation and exploration is part of world culture and heritage. And yet copyright law enables his grandson to limit this exploration. The grandson of Joyce knows about as much about what Joyce would have wanted as my cat does – if I had one. The point is that copyright is granted as an incentive for the writer – as a thanks for the bonus to society. But what happens when copyright is used to limit access? Doesn’t this mean that the bargain fails?
In another example of copyright abuse concerning dead authors we see that the widow of the works of Jorge Luis Borges is actively preventing re-publication:
Here is the story from The Chronicle Herald I quote it in full since it is short and I could only retreive it by using Google cache.
Despite huge demand, a French publishing house says it has been unable to reprint its critically acclaimed edition of the complete works of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges because of a dispute with his widow.
French editor Gallimard published the two tomes under its prestigious La Pleiade imprint in 1993 and 1999, but they sold out within less than a year each time, said Francoise Issaurat, spokeswoman for the publisherâ??s press office in Paris.
Borgesâ??s widow, Maria Kodama, inherited the sole rights to his estate when the author died in 1986, although the will was contested. Kodama, whom the publisher says does not want the work reprinted, has drawn fire from Borges scholars who accuse her of denying them access to his papers and of trying to shape interpretations of his life and work.
“We never received the authorization of Mrs. Kodama to reprint the Pleiade collections, which were enormously successful,” Issaurat said. “We could have sold 30,000 copies of each, easily.” Kodama and her representatives were not immediately available to explain why she has not authorized the reprinting. However, Franceâ??s Nouvel Observateur magazine cited the publisher as saying that Kodama was concerned the first edition was riddled with errors and that she had demanded they hire a new editor.
Whether or not you can, want or need to read the works of Joyce & Borges is not the point. (But you should try – they are great for a reason). The point here is to question the rationale of granting copyright terms beyond the life of the author.
Take for exampel Borges “The Book of Imaginary Beings“. It was published in 1967. The book was an expanded version of the Spanish edition “El Libro de los Seres Imaginarios” (published 1957). The Imaginary Beings contains descriptions of 120 mythical beasts from folklore and literature. The book is copyrighted on publication. Borges died in 1986 and according to copyright regulation the copyright protection does not elapse until 2056.
The rationale behind such protection is to ensure that the write profits from his/her writing. To ensure this the state offers the opposite of the market ideology – the monopoly. So far so good. The author has a monopoly on his/her work as a thanks for making this work available to the public and therefore enriching it.
But this sitaution/contract/agreement/understanding fails when the heirs of the creator prevent the communication of the work to a wider audience. They have not created anything so why are they being given this position?
(via Errata)
The London Science Museum has an exhibition called Dead Ringers, which is on the uses and abuses of discarded mobile phones. It includes some interesting information online. The exhibition goes beyond the simplistic statistics of our rapidly growing mountains of discarded IT stuff.
Beyond more traditional ideas of using specially made biodegradable materials and the idea of re-cycling our gadgets on interesting idea is the use of pasta to make circuit boards.
Naturally pasta is biodegradable but it also comes with an additional advantage. Since pasta quickly becomes soft when boiled it is easy to remove components which are attached to the pasta circuit board. This makes the job of re-cycling components more cost efficient and more attractive.
Is there a catch?
Naturally this is not all good. No, the concern is not that food production will be diverted to gadget-making but we do focus more on gadgets than on more basic necessities. The problem is that presenting solutions such as biodegradable materials relaxes concerns. We can collectively shrug and claim that the problem has been solved. This is not so. There remains a missing component for this to be true. We need harsher regulation to enforce rules demanding manufacturers use more biodegradable material in their gadgets. Market solutions would be a nice option but have proven in the past to be ineffective.
More on high tech trash here & here.
It’s a hot summer. Brains are melting and work is sluggish. Despite this deadlines loom over us the unrelenting sunshine. My PhD thesis defence is on the 2 October. The book goes to the publishers in the last week of August.
The title of the work is “Disruptive Technology – Effects of Technology Regulation on Democracy” and it will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. The blurb on the back cover will have this text:
Social interaction is partly shaped by technology being used. Therefore technological innovation affects modes of social interaction. While gradual technological innovation is often assimilated, some changes can be more disruptive. This research examines the democratic impact of attempts to control disruptive technology through regulation. This is done by studying attempts to regulate the phenomena of online civil disobedience, viruses, spyware, online games, software standards and Internet censorship â?? in particular the affect of these regulatory attempts on the core democratic values of Participation, Communication, Integrity, Property, Access and Autonomy. By studying the attempts to regulate the disruptive effects of Internet technology and the consequences of these regulatory attempts on the IT-based participatory democracy this work shows that the regulation of technology is the regulation of democracy.
If anyone wants to read an advance version it’s available here. If you send me comments before end of August then I can make changes in the text.
Other facts about the book:
It’s 272 pages long
It’s 103027 words long
It will have a cover design by Jähling.
The social and cultural impact of mobile media has received too little study so here is an interesting call for papers to an international conference on social and cultural aspects of mobile phones, convergent media, and wireless technologies – The conference website Mobile Media 2007 will be up in August 2006.
Date: 2-4 July 2007
Place: The University of Sydney, Australia
…This relatively short history of mobile telephony is concurrently marked by the shift of the role of users from consumers to active producers – and mobile media is being heralded as a new site for consumption, democratic expression, individualism, citizenship, and creativity.
We also invite papers on all aspects of mobile media, including, but certainly not restricted to:
* what does it mean to talk about mobiles as media?
* how do we map and theorise the transformations underway with mobile platforms, applications, and networks?
* mobile art
* mobiles and photography
* emerging cultural and narrative forms for mobiles (such as mobile films and videos)
* intersections between mobiles and Internet technologies
* wireless technologies and cultures
* mobile television, radio, and other kinds of broadcasting
* video calling and communications
* sexuality, intimacy, and mobile media
* mobile media and national or regional cultures
* subcultures, minority cultures, majoritarian cultures, and mobile media
* how do gender, sexuality, disability, socio-economics, cultural and linguistic contexts inflect cultural practices in the far-from-even-and-even terrain of mobiles?
* mobile media and political economy
* mobile gaming
* what are the implications of mobile media for our concepts of culture, communication, and media
* mobiles, community, and public sphere
* mobile media, place and space
* ramifications of mobile media for creative, cultural and media industries
* challenges of mobile media for policy, regulation, and legislation.
The UK Government has launched a public consultation on Part I and III of The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), allowing the police to ask for the disclosure of encryption keys or force suspects to decrypt encrypted data has not yet been implemented but the government considers time has come for it. The arguments relate to the rapid development of encryption products and the increased availability to such products including integrated security features in operating systems.
Comments on the two draft codes are expected by 30 August.
(via EDRI)
Finally done. I handed in my edited thesis to my supervisor today. The work spans 268 pages split up into 1769 paragraphs, 9953 lines. Which became 101 956 words. It includes 7 tables and 2 figures, not including the cartoon in the acknowledgements.
Since I have already survived two seminars on the work with revisions after each now my supervisor will read the work again and I will be able to make minor changes after his comments.
From the brilliant Jorge Cham – PhdComics
Then its summer – not a lot happens then. With any luck I will avoid reading my thesis. Just let it be until the begining of August. Then the work is off to the printers and upon its return a copy of the work is nailed to the university notice board along with information about the public defence which will be in September (one of the days: 25th, 26th or 27th still undecided…). If I pass & survive my defence then I am well and truely finished with this project.
The title of my thesis is “Disruptive Technology” and it has the subtitle “Effects of Technology Regulation on Democracy” if you want to read the latest version download it here.
The blurb on the back of the book is important since it has to interest the reader and at the same time be a factual discription – without being too long, complex or explanatory… So after a period of thought and procrastination this is what I have:
This work is on the democratic effects of attempts to regulate disruptive technology. By looking at the phenomenon of online civil disobedience, viruses, spyware, online games, software standards and Internet censorship this work shows the effects of regulation upon the core democratic values of Participation, Communication, Integrity, Property, Access and Autonomy.
Social interaction and organisation are, in part, shaped by the technology used. The social differences between the technology of snail-mail and the technology of e-mail are defined by features that the technology allows, and the limitations that constrain, the user modes of interaction. Therefore technological innovation and development over time affects the ways in which social interaction and communication are carried out. Certain forms of gradual technological innovation and development may be easily assimilated while other forms are more disruptive. This disruption can be seen in the way which new technologies affect the organisation of social interaction and are called, in this work: disruptive technology.
This work studies regulation as an attempt to come to terms with the disruptive effects of technology upon social interaction. This is done by focusing on the attempts to regulate the disruptive effects of Internet technology and the consequences of these regulatory attempts on the IT-based participatory democracy. In conclusion, this work will show that the regulation of technology is the regulation of democracy.
Would you read this book? If so you can download it here.