About a week ago my untech brother discovered Google Earth. He also told me that Tibet and Lhasa were not there. I put this down to his lack of ability to use the software. But today an article in The Register proves him right. Google Earth have apparently â??mislaidâ?? Tibet.
Does this prove that Google is trying hard to please Beijing? Not sure…
So anyway I owe my brother an apology.
Rainy Saturday mornings are made for being lazy. But unfortunately I am wasting mine by catching up on work. Since the office has moved location at the same time that I am completing my thesis and at the beginning of term real day-to-day work seems to have been pushed aside. But it will not wait. New students are approaching fast!
My main teaching this term will be in two main areas
(1)Â Â Â A distance-learning course on the theory and philosophy of Free Software.
(2)Â Â Â A technology ethics course.
Neither of these courses are new but I am re-vamping the technology ethics course in a big way. The main problem is helping students understand that the technology they take for granted also carries with it problems. Admitting to these problems is not the same as the Luddite impulse to abolish technology but it is the first step at improvement. We need to understand what the problem is if we are to be able to address it.
Previous attempts have been a varying degree of success. Even if the students pass the course I still have a sneaking feeling that some of them just donâ??t get â??itâ??. So this term I am trying something new. The students are going to blog!
Apart from the traditional course material, lectures and seminars the students will be required to set up individual blogs where they will be required to write posts relevant to the different themes of the course. Therefore when the course discusses areas such as privacy or intellectual property the students will be required to post their thoughts and/or other material on the subject.
The course starts with an introduction to the technology and social impact of blogs. Then they will have to go out and start their own (new) blogs. We will also be discussing the importance of visibility, ways in which traffic can be increased and the purpose of blogs either as citizen journalism or entertainment.
This will be followed by a section on basic ethics before the course really begins with applying ethics on questions of technology. The course will end as it usually does with an essay.
Hopefully blogging will enable the students to explore the questions we are looking at on their own terms â?? forcing them to evolve from passive consumers of information to active producers. The students will be graded on their essays but also on their blogs (have not decided upon the criteria for this yet).
In Swedish when things go very wrong we say that it all became pancake â?? so right now I hope that the whole thing does not go pancake.
Since I am not a tecchie the actual innermost workings of software remains a mystery in the same way as good magic or voodoo is a mystery. So upgrading my wordpress blog is anxious experience every time.
So now I have moved to version 2.0.4 and the voodoo seems to have worked. The angry gods of software were appeased by the fear in my eyes, the fresh java in my cup and my slow reading of the howto fileâ?¦
There is a brilliant Calvin and Hobbes strip were Calvin asks his father how the lightbulb works and his father answers â??Magicâ??. Most people take their appliances for granted but would not consider them magic. I find this strange since we blindly trust (no other option really) our appliances and truly think we understand how technology works when we are able to make it function.
There is a world of difference between being able to turn on the light and being able to understand how it worksâ?¦and lets not get started with the ability to record something on a video recorderâ?¦
OK so the GPL is a copyright license. But in part it has also evolved into something larger than life. It has become one of those rare things among legal documents – an icon.
Naturally it is not alone in this position. But what is interesting is that other icons tend to be “larger”. The US constitution is an icon, the declaration of rights is an icon. Very few contracts and licenses can be called iconic since few or none ever make it outside their small community. So what happens when the process of technological development forces the “evolution” of a license?
Unlike nature we cannot expect a natural selection. The development must be moved by an outside force. It can be done either dictatorially or democratically. In one way dictatorially is easier – you don’t have to ask all the people what they think. But using this process does not work with software licenses since the dissatisfaction of users will only lead to the demise of the license. Democracy also has its advantages. It allows for participation and the ability of smart people to bring forward comments and ideas that the dictator may not have recognised. The GPL has chosen a democratic process.
The formal system can best be seen in the overview of the process, which begins with the initial release and presentation of the draft of the GPLv3 with additional documentation such as the overview of the review system and the explanatory documents. In addition to the more formal structure the information needs to be communicated out to the users and to ensure an equality of information transfers was established. The latter was accomplished primarily through the use of the Internet as a distribution method of all texts and additional audio and video material.
The essence of the drafting process here described is to make it possible for the Free Software Foundation to decide the contents of the GPL through the fullest possible discussion with the most diverse possible community of drafters and users. Ideally, we would identify every issue affecting every user of the license and resolve these issues with a full consideration of their risks and benefits. In order to accomplish such a large task, the discussion process involves individual community members and Discussion Committees that represent different types of users and distributors.
The process was formally commenced with the release of the first Discussion Draft of version 3 of the GPL (including additional explanatory material) at the first International Public Conference in January 2006, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The two day event at MIT was recorded and the audio video material was also made available online. The second draft has recently been released.
To ensure that comments on the GPL are collected and dealt with Discussion Committees have been formed. The members of the committees were chosen to represent diverse users groups such as â??â?¦large and small enterprises, both public and private; vendors, commercial and noncommercial redistributors; development projects that use the GPL as a license for their programs; development projects that use other free software licenses, but are invested in the contents of the GPL; and unaffiliated individual developers and people who use softwareâ??. The role of these committees is to organise and analyse the received comments and propose solutions.
The FSF invited the initial members of the Discussion Committees but granted the committees the power to invite further members and to autonomously organise their work process. The committees work to encourage commentary on the license from the sectors they represent. Once the comments have been collected, organised and analysed the committee is responsible for presenting its results of the deliberations to the FSF.
Aside from this organisational method of soliciting and analysing comments from a wider public the FSF have created an online method of allowing anyone to comment directly on the license draft. This is done by creating a software based commenting system, which works in this way. The draft text of the GPLv3 is online and users can mark a section of text, which they wish to comment, and then type â??câ??. Doing this opens a comment box, which allows the user to add a comment.
Once a user has commented on a section of text that section becomes highlighted. If no-one has commented on the text the background colour is white. After a comment the background is light yellow. The colour of the background becomes progressively darker for each comment added. This colour system allows users to see at a glance which sections of the draft are the most commented.
By holding the cursor over highlighted text the user is informed how many comments have been made on that section. By clicking on highlighted text the comments that have been made appear and can be read. The latter feature has the added benefit of reducing the amount of duplicated comments since the commentator can see the commentary of others.
So what are you waiting for? Participate in the democracy!
If you have noticed that it has been quite from this corner of the Internet its because I have been offline in London. Partly I was there lecturing about Copyleft, Free Software and Creative Commons on an intellectual property course organised by Andrew Murray at the LSE. I naturally found time for shopping and culture.
The main cultural event was the Victoria and Albert Museum in general and the Che Guevara exhibition in particular. In addition to graffiti spotting (results will be online on flickr soon).
The shopping was mainly books (I really should try to cut down a little). I frequented mainly second hand stores and ended up with a dozen booksâ?¦ here are some highlights: Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom, Loretta Napoleoni’s Terror Inc, Peter Drahos & John Braithwaite â?? Information Feudalism. Two books by Paul Virilio (The Information Bomb and Negative Horizon) and Val Dusekâ??s The Philosophy of Technology.
On Thursday I will be lecturing at the London School of Economics (LSE) on a course entitled Intellectual Property Law and Policy. The focus of my 1,5 hour talk will be on
1.   Peer-to-Peer Systems and Copyright Infringement
2.   The Rise of Copyleft, the Free Software Foundation and The Creative Commons Project
Even though I did not pick the topics, these are subjects close to my heart and the broad sweep of topics should make the lecture an interesting discussion rather than just getting stuck in the individual details.
Point 1 is the development of technology while point 2 refers to the development of social systems to ensure that the technology does not deprive users of basic freedoms enjoyed prior to the advent of the technology.
Serendipity is making fortunate discoveries by accident. It is also one of those words that both sounds good and denotes a good thing.
While looking for the bibliographic data on Lawrence Rosenâ??s book â??Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Lawâ?? (itâ??s the best on FOSS licensing and it’s also online here), I came across another Lawrence Rosen and his new book â??Law as Cultureâ??. The title was enough â?? I bought it.
Now that I have the book I read the front flap of the dust jacket:
Law is integral to culture, and culture to law. Often considered a distinctive domain with strange rules and stranger language, law is actually a part of a cultureâ??s way of expressing its sense of the order of things.
Rosen is a legal anthropologist and he presents a nice intro to the area of law and culture. All this is good stuff and I am looking forward to reading the rest. How did this book end up in my library and on my â??must readâ?? list? A case of mixed identity, two authors with the same name, an interest in software licensingâ?¦
Serendipity isnâ??t it great?
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.
This is the first of a series of discussions on the version 3 of the GPL. This post will report on the oddly named process of TiVO-isation.
At times the GNU/Linux desktop operating system is seen as the flagship of Free Software but it is important to remember that while the flagship is important and symbolic it is not the foundation upon which the impact of Free Software should be measured.
The greatest technological foundation of Free Software is the use of stripped down Linux kernels in embedded applications. One such application is the TiVO recorder. The TiVO is an embedded device made up of several GNU packages. The device is capable of recording several TV channels at the same time.
The definition of Free Software is sometimes reproduced in a simple â??four freedomsâ?? format. If software fulfils these four conditions it is Free. If any of the four freedoms is limited in any way the software is proprietary. For the sake of completeness the four freedoms are listed here:
Freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
Freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
Freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
According to the freedoms it permissible to modify a GPL licensed program without re-distributing it, or running proprietary software on top of the GPL licensed software.
The TiVO has modified GNU/Linux in order to implement DRM within the operation of their video recorder. In compliance with the GPL, they released the source code for these modifications. Users are therefore able to modify the code and the operation of the video recorder. To this extent the TiVO is GPL compliant.
The problem is that TiVO contains a special mechanism that shuts down the machine if the user attempts to install modified software. Therefore the user is allowed to modify the code but is prevented from in reality from using these modifications in the embedded application of the TiVO. This makes freedom 1 into a sham.
The new version of the GPL (version 3) will prevent the compliance with the letter of the freedoms without the compliance to the purpose and spirit of the GPL.
In the continuing discussion on the governance of the iCommons (the international Creative Commons) we have seen warnings raised by some (for example Tomâ??s article) about the loss of the grassroots. Attempting to address these concerns writers are attempting to explain why the iCommons works and therefore criticism of it is unjustified. For example Golden Swamp writes that the iCommons is a network joining up the nodes. While the network is a nice metaphor vague enough to incorporate almost all fuzzy feelgood thoughts on the virtual organisation and loose alliances working towards common goals â?? what does the network really mean?
If the Commons was a network power would be evenly (more or less) spread over the network â?? this is not so. The power of the Commons emanates clearly from the central point of San Francisco. The closer you are to the epicentre the greater the power.
After experiencing the presence of Microsoft and the Soros Foundation at the iCommons summit Becky Hogge at Open Democracy writes a post with the title that says it all â??Who owns a movement?â??
The Creative Commons is a great idea. It is a set of licenses which people can use. It helps â??ordinaryâ?? people participate in the copyright discourse by visualising the fact that the binary situation of all or nothing copyright is not enough. But the Commons is not a movement in the sense of the Free Software Foundation whose basis is on ideology â?? the Copyleft ideology.
By being pragmatic the Commons has grown faster than many contemporary movements. However this pragmatism is also part of the problem. The emptiness of its ideology means that many of the participants in this movement fill it with what they think it represents. The shock (?) then of seeing Microsoft at â??theirâ?? summit shows the effects of pragmatism. Those who want to see the Commons as being based upon a Copyleft ideology quickly must realise that this is not going to happen.
Does ideology matter?
Yes! If the Commons is to be seen as a movement. Without a central ideology the movement (can it be a movement without an ideology?) cannot define its core values and eventually will splinter.
No! The licenses are simple, standard licenses and nothing else. Naturally even licenses reflect ideologies but they are not in themselves ideologies.
If the iCommons wants to become more than a set of licenses (which it seems to want) it must then discard its all to pragmatic position and be prepared to make some people unhappy. Without taking a stance, setting up a camp somewhere, attempting to please everyone â?? it cannot grow.