From CBC Ideas:
Who Owns Ideas?
When you download music or text from the web, you may be innocently breaking the law. Jim Lebans, a producer with CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks, looks at the tangled world of intellectual property and how the digital age is challenging ideas about who owns our culture. Downloadable from: http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/ideas_20081013_8080.mp3
It looks like there is an emerging trend of law schools eliminating grades in preference for pass-fail systems. It started with Yale and Stanford, but Harvard has now announced the same policy. Of course, it is easier for the elite schools to do this than for lower ranked schools, since any passing student at Harvard Law School is likely to be at least pretty good ;-) but it will be interesting to see if second or third rung schools can move in the same direction, or if they are even interested in doing so. They certainly have different incentives, so they may not see pass-fail systems as advancing their interests. Interesting discussion is already developing on Brian Leiter’s blog and on Ann Bartow’s blog.
For my own part, I like pass-fail grading systems and think they could work well in law schools in Canada. They encourage students to spend energy on other activities and not to scrounge for every possible grade in classes. But, of course, it won’t happen: the job market in law is supersaturated and it is in the firm’s interest to maintain a grading system that clearly ranks students. Even if the law schools wanted to move to such a system, they would have no leverage to do so now.
It’s worth noting that medical schools are typically pass-fail, the attitude being that the threshold is gaining admission, and anybody who can get in to medical school and get through it must be good enough. But in Canada at least there is a labour shortage in the medical profession, so everybody gets a job no matter what their grades would have been. No doubt it also makes a difference that there is no private market for medical residents the way there is for articling students and clerks. ]]>
I used to sit on the Policy Committee of the Glebe Parents Day Care, and at one point we struggled with how to handle anaphylactic and non-life-threatening allergies within the day care. It is important for the day care to do whatever it can to ensure the safety of the children, which justifies a complete ban on peanuts and tree nuts in the day care. But this gets complicated when a family claims their child has a life threatening allergy to, say, eggs — something that is very difficult or impossible to eliminate completely. In our day care, some of the staff would have been willing to turn away children with allergies that we could not accommodate, and it was lucky that parents on the committee resisted and made the point that by excluding these children from day cares they would be marginalized, and their parents would be put in a very difficult situation. I raised the prospect that it would in fact be a human rights violation to have a policy of turning away children with life-threatening allergies.
Of course, other day cares across the country are dealing with the same questions, and some have decided to exclude the children rather than accommodate them: link
]]>I’m teaching the course Introduction to Law at the University of Ottawa. Last class, the first real class of the term, I lectured on legal theory and philosophical foundations of law. I thought I’d make it interesting with some outside references. When I talked about John Locke, I included pictures of the character John Locke from the TV show Lost. This is a big show, a popular show. But no, I get dead silence from the class.
Okay, so then talking about Bentham, I showed pictures of Bentham’s body in a glass case at University College London. With his head. They weren’t impressed. Then I tried to blow their minds by revealing that Jeremy Bentham (on Lost) is actually John Locke (on Lost), and showed a picture of Bentham’s head together with John Locke in a coffin (on Lost). But since nobody watches the show, it was all, well, lost on them. So I basically looked like a disgusting, morbid guy who watches some show they’ve never heard of and jokes about dead philosophers. Good start to the year? ]]>It’s always so great to be noticed, and I am honoured to be included on this (expanding!) list of lawyers to follow on Twitter. Thanks JDTwitt!
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On its own, the launch earlier this week of Mozilla’s new Firefox extension, Ubiquity, is not a turning point in the development of the internet. But in the larger picture of the most exciting internet technologies that have been released over the past few months, I believe it fills out a portrait of what the internet will come to look like over the next few years: In the future, the internet will be distributed.
Not that it isn’t already distributed, of course. It infrastructure always has been. But its content was not always so distributed. If you wanted news, you went to a news website. If you wanted to hear music, you went to one of a variety of music sites. If you wanted to interact with other people, you went to a discussion forum or, more recently, a site like Twitter. But a few recent developments on the net change all that and point to a future of increasingly distributed content.
As I wrote earlier, identi.ca is a new microblogging site that runs on open source software that is not only free but distributed, or “federated”, in that users on different laconi.ca servers can connect to one another.
BoingBoing already picked up on this incredible video that basically shows a technique for enhancing video that is similar to what is already familiar in “photoshopped” still images1
They’ve worked out a way to extract spacial information from video frames and then identify spacial features through time (or at least through video frames). I haven’t read the research papers but I wonder if the same technological method that compresses digital video by only changing on screen what changes on the image as time progresses could be (or is being) used to identify different parts of the image through time.
Anyhow, what the video demonstrates is absolutely unbelievable and potentially brings awesome new power to amateur filmmakers to enhance their video. It may start with integrating high resolution photography to make any film HD, but there’s no reason why this can’t be used to radically change videos.
One potential legal issue that the technology presents is to change the value of video evidence. It is already well established that photographs can be modified and should be carefully considered before admitting them into evidence and giving them much weight, but I suspect the attitude toward video has been much more confident. With the technology demonstrated here, that may need to be seriously reconsidered.
1 although it’s ironic that I would use “photoshop” as a verb and then link to the site that’s making the awesome online Photoshop killer called Aviary (↑)
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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has launched Pool, a new social media site.
Pool is a social media project developed by ABC Radio National. It’s a place to share your creative work with the Pool community and ABC producers - upload music, photos, videos, documentaries, interviews, animations and more. It’s a collaborative space where audiences become makers.
Microsoft just launched Photosynth as a service. Read my earlier coverage of Photosynth here. The new service allows users to upload their own images and create their own “synths”. I can’t wait to see what people do with it! Tomorrow and this weekend I’m going out with my camera and finding something to model. Or maybe I’ll synth my kids :-)
P.S.: Credit is definitely due to Microsoft for not only including the feature in the Photosynth client for users to license their synths under Creative Commons licences, but the program actually says “We recommend a Creative Commons license.” That’s one giant leap for Microsoft — well done.
Now, what’s the first thing you want to synth? Let me know in your comments. ]]>
In June 2007, I worked with a law student to adapt the Podcasting Legal Guide for a Canadian audience. Kathleen Simmons and I wrote the PodcastingLegalGuideForCanada and unveiled it at Podcasters Across Borders that year. I have just posted the Guide to Scribd.com, the incredible document sharing platform, and you can read it there. If you like it, please Digg it.
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I finally got around to updating this blog so I thought I’d take a moment to describe the changes. First of all, this site is really a “bliki” — a blog on a wiki — built on PmWiki software. This gives me a lot of flexibility to configure additional functionality and even develop it where it’s missing. Of course, wikis aren’t made for blogging, so I’ve had to do a lot of futzing to get this to work right. The last bits fell into place yesterday when I added support for the social bookmarking and sharing button from AddThis (at the top of every post) and comments from Disqus, appearing at the bottom of each page.
Finally, I used to maintain two separate but overlapping blogs on this site for posts I thought were of a more personal (but not private) nature and for those that were more of professional interest. But as time went by, I realized two things about that division. First, it’s a largely artificial division since my professional interests overlap with my personal interests to such a degree that almost all of my posts ended up categorized in both blogs.
Second, to the extent that there was anything of personal but not professional interest, I’m more of the “Naked Truth” mindset than more traditional business ever was, which is to say that I believe the internet presents the opportunity for businesses to communicate on a more individual level with customers. And for professionals to communicate on a more personal level with clients. Or casual readers.
So my two blogs are now just one blog, which makes posting simpler for me and subscribing simpler for everybody else. I hope to increase how much I blog — if I can just get away from identi.ca! ]]>
Back in January, I was involved in publishing TECHLAW, the magazine of the University of Ottawa Law & Technology Program, the program that I manage. The magazine was an upgrade of sorts from the newsletter we used to publish and send out by email.
The program mailed it out to about 600 individuals in government and cyberscholars from Canada and around the world.
Middle of last week, I uploaded the pdf of the TECHLAW magazine to the wonderful document sharing site Scribd, the originators of the iPaper format for displaying print material. That same day, the good people at Scribd selected it as a Featured Document (rss feed).
UPDATE interjected: Holy cow. Check that out. I set up this blog to use Apture, a tool that’s best described as a way to add links to web page content after it’s published. One of the things it does is to detect links to popular sites like Wikipedia and display them in a special window. But I didn’t know it handled Scribd pages as well, changing the above link to the Scribd.com page for the TECHLAW magazine into a special popup window displaying just the iPaper viewer for the magazine. That is sweet!
Scribd posted it to Twitter and I “dented” it on identi.ca and retweeted it. As of today it has had 660 viewings on Scribd.com, more than the number that we distribued at a cost by post.
Now, it is certainly true that our mailing list is a much more targeted audience than the people who have viewed the magazine on the internet. But it is only a good thing when promotional material is viewed by more people, and in this case the Twitter promotions targeted internet savvy people, some of whom may end up being interested in the material or even — who knows? — the program itself. ]]>Earlier today, I posted this article about the recent decision in the Cablevision appeal. After twittering the post, I got a comment from Anyanwu Law (@techlaw) noting the following:
[T]he Comcast case clearly differs from the MP3.com case, as the Court explained:
Under the new RS-DVR, this single stream of data is split into two streams. The first is routed immediately to customers as before. The second stream flows into a device called the Broadband Media Router (“BMR”), id. at 613, which buffers the data stream, reformats it, and sends it to the “Arroyo Server,” which consists, in relevant part, of two data buffers and a number of high-capacity hard disks. The entire stream of data moves to the first buffer (the “primary ingest buffer”), at which point the server automatically inquires as to whether any customers want to record any of that programming. If a customer has requested a particular program, the data for that program move from the primary buffer into a secondary buffer, and the onto a portion of one of the hard disks allocated to tha
I guess that’s Twitter’s limit on a direct message. Anyhow, what @techlaw is pointing out is that the Cablevision court took pains to distinguish time shifting from other shifting, and considered the technology behind Cablevision’s DVR in a great deal of detail to establish that they are not providing broadcast on demand. Instead, they literally copy the actual broadcast to a small, transitory buffer that can save content on demand. Cablevision’s customer’s can not go back in time and save from the beginning of a show — they can only start recording when they hit the record button.
That is admittedly very different from what my.MP3.com was doing. They stored the audio and streamed it on demand. So the services are similar in that they are both available only to established licensees of the content, but they are different in that Cablevision only provides time shifting, while my.MP3.com provided broadcast on demand.
Point taken, and I appreciate @techlaw’s comments. But I’m frankly skeptical that this difference will be clear to consumers in practice. When you use a Tivo, you have a sense have having recorded a show. Even if it has an always-on buffer and you can record back to the beginning of the show, you have a sense of recording the show. That changes once you’re telling Cablevision to record the show for you. At that point, the experience is of video on demand, and it will seem arbitrary that Cablevision can’t record from the beginning of the show. And then the analogy of “recording” will itself seem antiquated, and it will seem arbitrary that Cablevision can’t play from the beginning of the show.
You see, I’m of the opinion that a major reason why people largely don’t respect copyright law anymore is that copyright law traces distinctions that reflect offline and analogue technologies, distinctions that are no longer relevant from a practical perspective. For instance, the Second Circuit approves of Cablevision’s RS-DVR (Remote Storage DVR) because the constant buffer is very small, transitory and ephemeral.
However, the exemption in copyright law for ephemeral copies is already being co-opted to solve a digital age problem it was never designed to solve. The ephemeral copy exemption was introduced to allow radio station to prepare smooth playlists by making copies of music from records, in order to avoid cuing up each track.1 In that context, I think the idea of an ephemeral copy reflected the real-world experience: the DJs couldn’t generally make copies, but they could make copies that they weren’t going to keep around.
But now the ephemeral copy exemption is being used for digital information, to permit transitory buffers holding only fractions of seconds and, in Canadian law at least, caches designed for network optimization. Some copying is permissible if can fit within this old tech exemption. As a result, buffering systems like Cablevision’s are carefully crafted to create only an ephemeral copy until the customer begins the recording. Surely it would be more convenient (convenience was, after all, the reason the exemption was introduced for radio) for both the cable carrier and the customer if the show could be played back on demand. But by being made to fit within the old exemption, it is no longer natural to the medium. The customer will not understand why the beginning of the show can’t be played back as well. The exemption, and the law, do not reflect the realities, the experiences of the consumer/prosumer.
Which brings me back to my.MP3.com. The reason this service was the first major application created in the cloud is that it makes so much sense in the new realities of a wired world. I already own that CD. If I can prove that I own it, then why shouldn’t I be able to play back the music whenever and wherever I want to? I could just bring the CD with me to work, but here we have technology that can save me the trouble of plastic discs and instead move my music to the cloud. And it could be done without the greater sea change that the music industry was still to confront with Napster and Bittorrent — after all, we still needed to verify our possession of the CD.
From the consumer’s perspective, the argument that Cablevision can only keep a very small, ephemeral recording in a buffer will not be very satisfying, and consumers will demand ways to get video on demand (as, indeed, Bittorrent downloaders already do).
So thanks to @techlaw for that comment. I’m going to look for a way to put comments on these blog posts. I don’t have them because I use PmWiki as the platform for this blog and I’m not happy with the comments extensions. ]]>As Michael Geist wrote earlier this week, a US appeals court has found that network-based Personal Video Recorder (PVR) systems do not infringe copyright. It is interesting that this decision was made in the context of the DMCA, which sometimes seems to see infringement everywhere it looks.
See, Tivo is a hard drive that sits at your house, so copies are made on site by the customer. There are copyright issues there of course, but those issues got much more complicated with cable companies began suggesting they could store the content at the cable company’s end in a way that customers could pull it down on demand. Networks and broadcasters argued that this would amount to massive copyright infringement by the cable company, which would basically be broadcasting on demand for customers. When Cablevision lost at the lower court, it was a technologically backward decision and, for practical purposes, an arbitrary difference between time shifting to a local hard drive versus to a distant hard drive.
Dean Collins pointed out that the Cablevision decision could effectively lead to the movement of more video and audio data into The Cloud — what he calls the cloudification of content. Dean finishes his post with this comment:
BTW The first vendor who will accept the delivery, encoding, remote hosting and physical safe storage of my already purchased cd collection with a monthly fee for streaming of that music content I have legally purchased ‘back to me’ anywhere/anytime will be sure to get my business.
What I find especially interesting about this whole thing is that it can be seen as overturning the trial court decision in the my.MP3.com case. In that situation, if you can cast your mind back to January 2000, MP3.com allowed users to play streaming music from their website once they verified ownership of physical CDs in meatspace. MP3.com thought this protected the labels from copyright infringement since the customer needed to have the physical CD, but it allowed the customer to timeshift the music. It was, in fact, the first major movement of content into the cloud, and the music industry was not pleased.
MP3.com was sued in turn by music distributors and music publishers and lost at trial. Instead of appealing, MP3.com settled for $200 million, and it was all downhill from there.
Is there any substantial difference between Cablevision customers streaming video content on demand to and MP3.com’s customers streaming audio content on demand? Or have we just seen copyright jurisprudence return from a wrong turn it took back in 2000? If my.MP3.com launched today in light of the Cablevision PVR decision, would the music industry even be able to make their case anymore?
And is this reason to be optimistic about the direction of copyright jurisprudence? It is unfortunate that venerable blogger William Patry did not have the opportunity to comment on the Cablevision victory before he ended his longstanding blog last week because, as he wrote, “The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing”.
UPDATE: Court Rules That Video Can Live In The Cloud, Part 2 ]]>
Here’s a terrific example of a large company using microblogging for self-promotion — in this case, a bank.
I was browsing feeds on identi.ca and found some posts by @citizensbanker. That page appears to be an official page of Citizens Bank, with this description provided, along with a link to the Citizens Bank website:
Canada’s best-kept-secret bank. Online, owned by a credit union. A feel-good kinda bank. oh - and with the best rates, too.
It’s pretty intriguing that a bank already has an identi.ca account. Even more intriguing to me is the kind of posts they have there:
Slow day here at the bank today. What. No one has bills to pay?
errrr… how could a bank Not go to a movie starring an accountant?
Yup, I’m feeling at home here. open source. like that. Sorta reminds me of my credit-union roots.
(ahem) I *was* Canada’s first online bank. Popular opinion is that it was the orange bank. It wasn’t. It was me. Just sayin’. ;)
Well, well, well. I’m betting I’m the first bank on identi.ca. Could we be an early adapter again? Yipeeeee!
@citizensbank also replies to other people’s posts, as many people do on these microblogging platforms. That’s a pretty impressive example of a bank — frankly not the kind of company that is usually very personable — using microblogging to put on a very personable face and to connect to other people. Really, using microblogging to be part of a community.
With a little digging I figured out that @citizensbanker is really Nancy Zimmerman, @moneycoach on Twitter. Nancy is a “money coach” but, as she says on her blog, not a financial planner. Her company, Your Money By Design gives financial advice, helping people learn how to manage money “with savvy and a bit of zen”. She also works for Citizens Bank of Canada.
Nancy’s own website doesn’t link to Citizens Bank of Canada, and neither does her Twitter page. Interestingly, however, on her identi.ca page Nancy takes on the persona of Citizen’s Bank, links to their site, and doesn’t reveal who she is as an individual. I wonder if her posts to identi.ca are endorsed by the bank or not? If so, I think it’s a great initiative on their part, and a terrific model for other companies to follow.
Update: I identi’d @citizensbanker to ask if she’s endorsed by the bank and they/she wrote back:
citizensbanker: @kaplanmyrth *ahem* endorsed “by” the bank? But I “am” the bank :)
There has been a flurry of activity over the past couple of months in the Twitterverse and I haven’t blogged any of it because, like so many others tweeps, I’m been too busy Twittering.
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform where people post short messages about what they’re doing and often linking to sites on the web. Users post their own messages and subscribe to follow other users messages. When you follow somebody, you receive their messages on Twitter’s homepage, or your phone, or whatever application you’ve set up to use Twitter. It is wildly popular and some people follow thousands of Twitter users. Sometimes it has a low signal to noise ratio, but it’s also a brilliant way to be seen and heard in a community and keep in contact with your tribe.
Now the site has been pretty much generally unreliable for the past couple of months with slow page loads. But the worst thing from my perspective is that their two best features are down. Tracking, and Instant Messaging. Tracking was a feature that let Twitter users track particular words on the Twitter network so they would be received even if sent by somebody you weren’t following. This was very useful for finding out current information about particular topics but, more importantly, it was a great way to find other members of your tribe based on topics they’re tweeting about. So Tracking has been broken, and they’ve taken down Twitter access through IM while they fix it, or so they claim. I’m starting to suspect that Ping.fm and similar services are going to make IM unnecessary for Twitter.
Anyhow, developments this week made the micro-blogging universe very interesting and worth spending some time blogging about. Fellow Canadian and long time wiki guru Evan Prodromou, founder of WikiTravel, Vinismo and other sites big on collaboration and openness, has now launched a free and open micro-blogging service called identi.ca built on a platform called Laconica. It looks a lot like Twitter, but its openness makes it fundamentally different.
For one, the Laconica software is open source so anybody can use it to set up a micro-blogging service or improve the core. The prospect of a proliferation of these twitterish social messaging services raises the specre of many gated communities where people need to convince their friends to join up and to recreate their lists of friends, but this is another place where Laconica is different. It’s the first service to support the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, which allows different services to exchange microblogging messages. You’re on Identi.ca and I’m on Communi.ca? No problem — we can still subscribe to one another’s feeds.
But the most important thing to have in a social network is the community. It’s of limited value unless it has lots of people behind it. And this is where identi.ca has really been incredibly successful. In the last few days since its launch, identi.ca has attracted lots of the keystone people who make Twitter such an important space, and it has gotten positive attention from media and blogs.
Oh, and I almost forgot about url redirection! As if to demonstrate their commitment to open source licensing, Evan’s company, Control Yourself refused to use existing private url alias services like is.gd or TinyURL (or the brand new and very well launched bit.ly) as part of identi.ca service. Instead, they found open source software for lilURL and built a new URL shortening service called ur1.ca.
Free and open? Check. Distributed and federated? Check. Solid community? Check. It looks like identi.ca has it all going for it at this point. Twitter’s continued hobbled state can only help move more people over to a more stable, promising, forward-looking platform. ]]>