Property

German Copyright

The German Bundesrat on the 19th May voted to change German copyright law (The Bundesrat position) which was implemented in 2003 and has received heavy criticism. (Press release)

The Bundesrat recommends a copyright legislation which is more positive towards teaching, research and education in an effort to promote scientific information and public access to such information. The public right to information has been laid out in the government plan â??Informationsgesellschaft Deutschland 2006â??

Unfortunately my German is too weak to understand this more fully. Anyone seen any translations/comments?

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People & technology

The concept of technological determinism can be explained with the quote from Homer (unconfirmed) â??The blade itself incites to violenceâ??. When I try to explain technological determinism to my students I usually ask them to think about their iPods. What are the people who build and sell a device which fits 10 000 songs saying about intellectual property?

Another cool application of technology is flickr.com. I like the work of the graffiti artist Banksy so here are a few images taken from the Banksy pool.
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wyn gilley

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Marble Arch. Nolifebeforecoffee.
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Near Drayton Park Train Station, N7 London. atomic shed.

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Hocker Street, Shoreditch. distantbombs.
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Corner of Noel Street and Poland Street, London, 2001. Simon Crubellier.

The point (not of Banksy but of technology application) is that in a cool interconnected way I can follow Banksyâ??s work. Since he is a graffiti artist it is not going to be displayed for too long. Flickr provides both the storage medium but also a searchable area where interests can gather. Not only can I find images from all over the world I can also follow them by theme (e.g. Banksy) and see the work of different photographers. The development of the social organisation of photography via sites like this is very cool.

The point is not simply mindless technology optimism but rather that given a technological base people will find social uses for it. It is not about developing a business model but rather that by applying technology in an unorthodox way people will develop and organise their interactions with the help of technology. But we still need to develop the technology and make it more available, cheaper and free to manipulate.

Part of the problem is (naturally) that there is not enough political will to fulfill this vision. As soon as we approach anything like this someone starts talking about the need to ensure that business can profit from technology. Profiting from technology is ok – but not if it stops the development of a better socio-technical organisation. The development of a new socio-technical organisation began the dissemination of the web but has faltered with the demands of business to make profit and the inevitable crash of a market based upon words & greed…

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Bah, lazy hypocrites!

Its soon time for me to lecture on plagiarism again. I give this lecture every year to groups of students who are about to write their thesis. The idea is both to help them understand the boundaries between quote, citation, paraphrase & plagiarism and to get them to start thinking about the nature of property in relation to intellectual goods.

Giving this lecture today is aided by the current discussion on copyright and file sharing. In my IT & ethics course I regularly attempt to discuss the problem of file sharing and ask my students what they believe is the moral position of the person who illegally downloads music or films. Usually among my students 80-90% of those who download music do not consider there actions to be morally wrong and nor do they consider themselves to be stealing. The most often used legitimisation of their actions:
1. that they are not depriving anyone of use.
2. the entertainment industry is rich enough.
3. they would not buy that which they download and therefore there is no loss to the industry.

Considering these points it is interesting to attempt to raise awareness about plagiarism. In one way it is pretty easy: if you get caught you will be punished and it is humiliating. But this is not a good starting point since the stress is on not getting caught as opposed to building awareness.

Attempting to discuss student plagiarism is made more difficult recently when two professors have been accused (correctly) of plagiarising others work in their books. One is a professor at the University College of BorÃ¥s who has been sloppy when quoting others his/her own defence other are harsher and call it plagiarism (DN 29/4 â?? 2006)

The second is a professor at the University of Göteborg who has stolen other peopleâ??s works and included them in his work. The excuses for this theft was that the book was written under a very short deadline and the works from which he borrowed material are included in the bibliography.

We would never accept these excuses from our own students then why would these professors even think that the excuses would work for them?

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Rainy Sundays

Its almost a cliché. Its a rainy Sunday afternoon! The good news is that a large second hand bookstore nearby (Röde Orm in Haga) was having a major sale 10 kr per book. Most of the good stuff was gone but I came away with Lars-Ingvar Sörenson licenciate thesis from 1997 entitled Naturrätt, egendomsrätt och praxis (Natural rights, Property rights
and praxis). I am looking forward to reading it.

It begins with a quote from Sitting Bull’s speech 1875 where he speaks about his enemy and says, amongs other things:

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege. This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. (online version included here)

What can be better on a rainy sunday?
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Text editing blues

Like bad tasting medicine editing is an aweful process which is only done because of its obvious benefits. Its terrifying the amount of errors that can be spotted at this late stage. Today I even found an incomplete sentence… it simply tapered off like someone losing a chain of thought.

This is the begining up until the research question. Not sure about it though…

This work begins with the thesis that there is a strong relationship between the regulation of technology and the Internet based participatory democracy. In other words, the attempts to regulate technology have an impact upon the citizenâ??s participation in democracy. This work will show what this relationship is and its effect on democratic participation.
Taking its starting points from the recent theoretical developments in regulation, disruptive technology and role of ICT in participatory democracy, this work is the application of three theoretical discussions. These theoretical discussions are used in the empirical exploration of six areas: virus writing and dissemination, civil disobedience in online environments, privacy and the role of spyware, the re-interpretation of property in online environments, software as infrastructure and finally state censorship of online information. The purpose of these studies is to explore the effects of these socio-technical innovations upon the core democratic values of Participation, Communication, Integrity, Property, Access and Autonomy. The overall research question for this thesis is therefore:
What are the effects of technology regulation on the Internet-based participatory democracy?

To connect to an earlier ongoing discussion about the text: The book is now 257 pages long and 99 479 words long. Do you think that word can handle going over 100 000 words or will it simply melt…

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21 days

Sunday. A bright full moon outside in a clear black sky. Today I re-worked the case study on property in virtual worlds and have added 1219 new words to the thesis production. Writing on property made me think about the Seagulls in Finding Nemo “Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine…”

Seagulls in Finding Nemo

The recommended reading of today is from the entry on Property from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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23 days

Todays production was +1478 bringing the total up to 177 pages and 87 064 words. It was a good day.

And the countdown is still in the twenties. Today was lots of work on filters & censorship (Look at OpenNet iniative). On Yahoo! helping China chase cyberdissidents and Google creating a ideologically clean (Chinese style) search engine for China. Its obvious that the companies are bending over backwards to gain access to the Chinese market. Despite all the corporate retoric their actions speak louder than words.

censorship
Censorship by Eric Drooker

Reading tip for the weekend: Rosemary Coombe “Commodity Culture, Private Censorship, Branded Environments, and Global Trade Politics: Intellectual Property as a Topic of Law and Society Research“

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JEP is back

The return of a scholarly journal…

We are pleased to announce that JEP is back. As of today The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) is back in business with a February 2006 issue, the first in more than three years. The online journal, renowned for its articles analyzing and forecasting the e-publishing industry, has a new home with the University of Michigan University Library Scholarly Publishing Office.

The first new issue includes, amongst others, articles by Bilder “In Google we Trust” and Downes “New Media Economy: Intellectual Property and Cultural Insurrection“.

So what are you waiting for? Get JEP here!

Posted on by mklang

28 days

Sunday and its snowing outside. Todays total for the countdown is +3100 words, which makes a total of 82 900 words or 169 pages). Its 28 days left until I have to hand it all in.
The picture of the day is the Avro Avian IVM biplane.

This plane crashed and was wrecked beyond repair in Cartierville, 1939. From the Aviation History Online Museum. Nice advertising on the airplane.

Todays reading tip: Harris Property and Justice, Oxford University Press. Unfortunately its not online but you can read a review by David Lametti “Property and (Perhaps) Justice” McGill Law Journal.

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Memory & Art

This painting has been with me since I was born. Its almost strange to have had something for this long and still discuss who owns it. Does it belong to the culture from where it came? Many cultures claim art that has ended up in foreign countries. Does it belong to the artist? Intellectual property is life + 70 years and moral rights last forever… What did my distant relative agree upon (and with whom) when he bought the painting in Africa and transported it to Sweden? It has since then travelled to many other places in the world. Does it matter? One day I must write a longer analysis on this topic… a book maybe?

pilipili

About the artist: Pilipil Mulongoy
Born in 1916, he occupies an exceptional place in Congolese painting; they call him the Sorcerer of African luxuriance. Son of a fisherman from Lualaba, he participated in hunting and fishing where he gathered these themes which he later transposed onto his canvas. Pilipili Mulongoy studied in the atelier and later, the Academy of Beaux-Arts of Romain Desposes in Lubumbashi where he developed an essential understanding and skill in the plastic arts in the vast African subcontinent. Pilipili became a professor and integrated a new studio, the “Hangar” at the Academy.
The text was taken long ago from somewhere else… I would love to acknowledge the source but I cannot remember or find where I found it. Another flaw with a copyright system is that you have to remember things like this! (last part in italics added later).

Posted on by mklang