Much in the way of interesting and awful has gone on this week in the areas of intellectual property, privacy, digital rights, open source, and Googlization. A lot of it comes down to the rights of citizens and businesses in a networked society both parties helped create, the crucial need to protect the public domain, where innovation lies, and the golden rule: he who has the gold (in this case, money and political power) makes the rules.
IP ALLIANCE TO OPEN SOURCE: YOU’RE PIRATES. ME: YARR! Like anti-healthcare legislators who take money from insurance companies, the US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance and its friends in congress should not have any say in determining the future of copyright and intellectual property, and how other countries set their own IP laws. Instead, the IP Alliance wants the United States to consider a Pirate or Enemy Of The State any nation that uses and encourages free/open-source software. Indonesia is the latest nation on the Alliance’s 301 watchlist for having the audacity to give “preference to free/open-source software because it will cost less and reduce the use of pirated proprietary software in government.”
That’s Apache, Blender, GNU packages, Linux packages, Perl, Python, Ruby, Thunderbird, and WordPress, for starters. While I fully agree with Cory Doctorow that “this is like crack dealers campaigning against having a laugh with friends because happiness reduces the need for intoxicants,” what angers me about it is the sheer hypocrisy of the IP Alliance and the businesses it represents. Any technologist or R&D person will tell you that an astonishing number of these same companies use free/open-source software to maximize their technology budgets, innovate using these free tools and then slap patents and all kinds of proprietary-IP stickers on their final products. You think I’m kidding? The Recording Industry Association of America website runs on Apache and PHP. *facepalm*
No, kids, Walt Disney did not invent Cinderella and Snow White. Just like Disney built its fortune by copyrighting works in the public domain, the IP Alliance fosters this unethical business model: Build on or monetize free or cheap ideas and technologies that have come before, and then shut off these alternatives by buying yourself several congresspeople. (And people wonder why the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision was so dastardly and wrong.) When the technology world clamors for automation, standardization and interoperability, i.e. different systems of different capabilities playing together more efficiently, is not the time to make useless noise against open standards and technologies. During a recession when innovation is key, charging $1000/lb for a sack of shit top dollar for clunky, mediocre products and enforcing these as preferred solutions with political bribery, in lieu of free, shared and open source technologies, is stupid and tantamount to the communism Real Americans so fervently dread.
SPYCAMGATE Schools spy on kids through webcams. This shocker made it into the mainstream news, so I’m sure all of you know about the class action lawsuit filed against Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion School District and associated offenders by now. What you probably don’t know is that this is not an isolated incident. In the PBS Frontline Digital Nation documentary, which aired earlier this month, a Bronx school administrator boasts that he regularly monitors students remotely through their school-issued laptops. Parents: This is an egregious violation of privacy, especially using property purchased with your taxes. Take this opportunity to check your kids’ equipment, know your rights and read Cory Doctorow’s Creative-Commons-published Little Brother before he is thrown in the brig with the Indonesians.
PLEASE ROB ME & SCRUB MY KITCHEN FLOOR WHILE YOU’RE AT IT Despite being an IT professional or perhaps exactly because of it, D has no social media accounts. He can be contacted solely via email, phone or the occasional private IM. His rationale is that there is enough information about him out there, should someone choose to search hard enough or pay enough, that he doesn’t need to feed the beast. Conversely, Twitter Queen (someone at work actually called me this today) here is still not afraid that someone is going to rob my house when I’m gone and tweet from the road because they have to a) know where I live and b) say hello to aforementioned big, burly husband if he happens to be home. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. You’ll just have to find out. Big, burly Neighbors 1 and 2 and crazy hunter dude with shotgun may be around, too, so take your chances.
Patrix comes closest to pointing this out, but if you are smart about what social media outlets you pick, employ the highest privacy settings and don’t declare your street address or UTM coordinates, you can tell the whole world you’re leaving your jewelry and electronics on the back porch and are going away for a month and folks will not be able to use social media to locate your home. Unless they bribe your crappy friends, in which case you’re screwed anyway and it’s not Twitter’s or FourSquare’s fault.
MORE BAD NEWS FOR GOOGLE Google’s Top Executives Defied Italy’s Privacy Laws Except this time, I’m on Google’s side. They did not act quickly enough to pull down a YouTube video that showed kids bullying an autistic/handicapped boy, which violates Italy’s privacy laws, but this may be the only chance for justice for the assaulted child. Should the kid’s guardians sue, the video may be thrown out as evidence for being fruit of the poisoned tree (assuming Italy does assault lawsuits & has similar legal code). This is a tough one: Do we allow Google to flout international laws in humanitarian ca(u)ses, but complain loudly that we don’t want a large corporation in our business when it comes to our email and Buzz? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
BOOK Tarleton Gillespie, law-technology-media-culture professor and blogger, was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on February 23rd to speak about the politics of online media platforms. I wasn’t able to attend but am waiting on responses from friends who did attend. Gillespie’s book Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture nicely sums up the fight for digital culture and the links in this post. From the Wired Shut website:
… the enforcement of copyright law in the digital world has quietly shifted from regulating copying to regulating the design of technology …
… this approach to digital copyright depends on new kinds of alliances among content and technology industries, legislators, regulators, and the courts, and is changing the relationship between law and technology in the process. The [print,] film and music industries are deploying copyright in order to funnel digital culture into increasingly commercial patterns that threaten to undermine the democratic potential of a network society.
That’s it for This Week in the Fight for Digital Culture. Keep thinking. Keep fighting.
Here I am, in full costumed regalia. Guess I was going for a Saint / winged-football-goddess sort of look. Not many notice that the mask represents a football field with yard lines. Yes, I am a dork.
It doesn’t look too shabby in the picture above, but I wasn’t pleased with the quality of my costume this year for a number of reasons:
a) Notice severe lack of headdress. Thanks to bad weather all across America over the weekend and the classic incompetence of Delta Airlines gate agents, I didn’t reach New Orleans halfway into Sunday. Therefore and alas, between abuse taken during repeated trips to the airport and the fact that the sealant fumes still coming off it would have rendered our entire airplane unconscious, my headdress had to be left behind. An almost-seizure-inducing hour on the phone yesterday with Delta corporate customer service got me a $100 voucher good towards the purchase of a future flight. Woo to the hoo.
b) Too tired on Tuesday morning to do anything more glam with hair. Boo!
c) The wings didn’t make it past the car. Yes, I forgot to put them on once we reached our destination, leaving me prey to an endless string of tourists asking, “What are you supposed to be? An Indian?” I wanted to say, “Yeah, Mardi Gras Indian!” But, I didn’t think they would understand.
d) Costume 2010 would have been decidedly more spectacular had I not been forced to wear a whole sweatsuit under it. Damned cold. Actually, damned fluctuating temperatures, which made poor Loki so ill he had to go to the doctor on Mardi Gras Day instead of leading the annual Krewe of Chartreuse walk. Ick.
Caught some of the Zulu parade, walked into the Quarter, ate chili cheese tots at the Three Legged Dog, and ended up at home away from home, i.e. Fahy’s. As usual, our evening ended early. To quote Editor B: “Mardi Gras is primarily an early morning holiday, at least to me. It’s kind of like Christmas in that way. This is contrary to the image many casual tourists might have in mind, due to the common association linking revelry with late nights. But I rarely stay out late on Mardi Gras, and for me the best part of the day is generally before noon.”
Happy Lent!
The NOPD officers were patient, professional, and extremely generous to little children and abusive, space-hogging idiots this year. And I mean generous to a fault. I am so down with certain New Orleans ordinances prohibiting fencing of public property, especially when people cordon off whole quarter to half city blocks with caution tape and pitch teary, obscenity-laced fits as soon as parade-goers Invade Their Space. Required reading for folks attending Mardi Gras parades in uptown New Orleans: If I Were Carnival Dictator
We had a great time at Thoth this year. Great weather, gorgeous floats, lots of quality throws. Thanks, Thoth!
A guy I knew ages ago had me read a short story he penned called The Futility Of Being A Gopher. If I remember correctly, it’s all about a gopher who goes about its business in a hobbity burrow. Once you start to feel for this gopher, by sheer virtue of having spent five valuable minutes of your life reading about it, and again if I remember correctly, an alien spaceship crashlands into Earth, said portion of Earth including the gopher. Gopher is teats up, or teats flattened, given a spaceship is on top of it. The End.
I was 19 at the time and had no use for such pointlessness. The gopher was to start its epic journey towards Z’ha’dum or Mount Doom or something that rhymes with Oom and save the planet from a threat we were blissfully unaware of, thus shedding a limited gopher-shaped body to transform into something bigger and more heroic. Super Kryptonite Investi-Gopher or Gophero, the sworn enemy of mutant carrots everywhere. Now that I am in my 30s and think back on that story, my friend may have been onto something. I’m sure there were some other clever, post-modern metaphors in there, but the most obvious one stands out: Life is out of your control, and crap happens when you dream about the great plans you just made. Or that the gopher was doing it all wrong and could be Herr Commandant of the Underground Resistance if it had simply armed itself. The futility of being a pacifist country gopher, as it were.
All of this is to say that I’m terribly frustrated today. I was supposed to be in New Orleans tonight, but will not leave until early Sunday. See this horrible monster in the Southeast that doesn’t even have the common decency to dress in complementary colors? Thanks to it, I will putz about my house – rearranging the folded clothes and plowing my driveway yet another time – for an extra 36 hours and lose an important day of Carnival.
Could be worse, could be gopher pancake under an alien spaceship.
