Yay!
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Really, free books for you
Speaking of ethics and intellectual property rights...
Turns out that thanks to the Internet, the new Harry Potter book has already been pirated. See, J.K. Rowling has for years forbid the creation of an eBook for her massively popular series, which is, I suppose, her right as the creator of the series and all that.
But it only took a few hours after the midnight release of Harry Potter 6 for copies to have been scanned with OCR readers and shared on IRC channels (man, that takes me back).
What impresses me most about this project isn't that it was done at all--if there's a way to get something for free, the Internet will eventually provide it--but the worldwide coordination of the folks who managed this project. It took 11 hours for all 672 pages of this book to be scanned, and now, nearly a week later, it's widely available in any format you'd like.
When I got on the bus the Monday after the book was released, at least half a dozen people were reading it, including myself. Thankfully, I finished it that afternoon so I didn't have to cart it around for another day. But man, now I wished I'd just grabbed a word file and put it in my PDA; even if it was a lot shorter than the last one, I still didn't relish carting that book around and trying to read it in the tiny space afforded me by the large man who sat next to me on the bus.
Turns out that thanks to the Internet, the new Harry Potter book has already been pirated. See, J.K. Rowling has for years forbid the creation of an eBook for her massively popular series, which is, I suppose, her right as the creator of the series and all that.
But it only took a few hours after the midnight release of Harry Potter 6 for copies to have been scanned with OCR readers and shared on IRC channels (man, that takes me back).
What impresses me most about this project isn't that it was done at all--if there's a way to get something for free, the Internet will eventually provide it--but the worldwide coordination of the folks who managed this project. It took 11 hours for all 672 pages of this book to be scanned, and now, nearly a week later, it's widely available in any format you'd like.
When I got on the bus the Monday after the book was released, at least half a dozen people were reading it, including myself. Thankfully, I finished it that afternoon so I didn't have to cart it around for another day. But man, now I wished I'd just grabbed a word file and put it in my PDA; even if it was a lot shorter than the last one, I still didn't relish carting that book around and trying to read it in the tiny space afforded me by the large man who sat next to me on the bus.
Friday, July 22, 2005
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Administrative note
With reliable Internet access finally restored, I'm slowly typing in entries I've written the last few weeks. I started with the shorter ones, but here's a preview of what's to come if you're interested in coming back tomorrow evening and reading up. (Note: the awesomely substantial posts are the ones I've put off posting until later tonight/tomorrow, so it's really in your best interest to come back and look for the new ones.)
Among the highlights:
July 8: Day one of digital divide, in which our heroine explains why she doesn't think the argument is all it's cracked up to be. Really.
July 11: Day two of digital divide, in which our heroine softens the blow and explains why she's not crazy.
July 14: You call yourself an influential? Our heroine explains that the concept of an "influential" is nothing new, and points you toward some studies done back in the 1920s, when they were called "opinion-makers."
July 15: Our trusty blogger explains why she thought this week's class speaker (and the people whose ideas she was discussing) was slightly off when explaining how an influential works and how ideas are spread from the engaged folk to the rest of the population. You'll especially want to see this one.
Among the highlights:
July 8: Day one of digital divide, in which our heroine explains why she doesn't think the argument is all it's cracked up to be. Really.
July 11: Day two of digital divide, in which our heroine softens the blow and explains why she's not crazy.
July 14: You call yourself an influential? Our heroine explains that the concept of an "influential" is nothing new, and points you toward some studies done back in the 1920s, when they were called "opinion-makers."
July 15: Our trusty blogger explains why she thought this week's class speaker (and the people whose ideas she was discussing) was slightly off when explaining how an influential works and how ideas are spread from the engaged folk to the rest of the population. You'll especially want to see this one.
A final note on Chinese bloggers
A few weeks back I got into a sort of blogging-in-China phase. And today, conveniently enough, as I'm in the process of typing in entries, I came across this piece from The Washington Post, which argues that it's not just Microsoft (the object of my earlier derision) but also Yahoo and Cisco and others who have sold their technological souls to do business with the Chinese government.
Anne Applebaum, the author of the Post piece, (who, ironically enough, uses a Yahoo address as her contact line) brings up the issue of whether the sorts of deals these companies are making are even legal:
I've said it in a lot of posts before this, and I'll say it again: This is really scary stuff, and the chapters we read for class this week didn't even begin to scratch the surface. (The chapters, by the way, were published six weeks before the introduction of MSN's My Spaces to the Chinese blogosphere.)
Anne Applebaum, the author of the Post piece, (who, ironically enough, uses a Yahoo address as her contact line) brings up the issue of whether the sorts of deals these companies are making are even legal:
If this isn't illegal, maybe it should be. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the United States passed a law prohibiting U.S. firms from selling "crime control and detection" equipment to the Chinese. But in 1989, the definition of police equipment ran to truncheons, handcuffs and riot gear. Has it been updated? We may soon find out: A few days ago, Rep. Dan Burton of the House Foreign Relations Committee wrote a letter to the Commerce Department asking exactly that. In any case, it's time to have this debate again. There could be other solutions -- such as flooding the Chinese Internet with filter-breaking technology.As with many stories, I'm continually amazed this has hit bigger (for the record, I first learned about it from an AP story back in May). The blogosphere especially has been silent on the issue, aside from a few dozen people linking to the Wired story back in June, which itself was a few weeks behind the curve.
I've said it in a lot of posts before this, and I'll say it again: This is really scary stuff, and the chapters we read for class this week didn't even begin to scratch the surface. (The chapters, by the way, were published six weeks before the introduction of MSN's My Spaces to the Chinese blogosphere.)
Free books for you
Lately, I've been wondering what philosophical difference divides a good-old library, where one can go to enjoy free books, from downloading music off P2Ps. Why is it that the book industry doesn't rise up to complain about all those people stealing the intellectual property of authors like the thousands of recording artists and lawyers who swear they'll go broke if we don't pay $16.99 for yet another version of Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill." (I admit to not doing too much digging beyond Wikipedia into the history of libraries, but that entry leads me to believe the library boat had already sailed by the time book publishers came along.) It's safe to say that I generally tend to err toward the side of free use for all.
It is with this mentality that I approached Lessig's "The Future of Ideas," and I'd intended to write a little rant on its applications in regard to musical file sharing, essentially claiming, for perhaps the 5,000th time since I first encountered Napster that night in my freshman year dorm room, that music should be free, or at least freer than it is.
Ahh, but then I went home last week to visit my cats and my family. My mom works in a photo lab in one of those big box stores, and constantly regales me with stories about the completely random enforcement of copyright rules in her store. Big box store has a corporate-wide policy that each photo lab tends to enforce on its own, though my mom has done a bit of research and generally concluded that the laws on which big box store claims to be basing its policy don't exist. Basically, if you go into big box store to have your photos developed (or to have copies made of other photos) and they look "too good," the store employees are empowered to deny you your photos on the basis that you've probably stolen them from a professional and don't have permission to be making copies of them. This makes sense if you're trying to make copies of a professional portrait or something, but too often my mom's co-workers have randomly (and trust me, it is completely random) denied newlyweds access to the only copies of their wedding pictures because they looked "too good," even though the groom's second cousin took them with a disposable Kodak. (My mom, for the record, eventually helped get the photos back into the couple's hands.)
Through her protests of the big box policy, my mom's shared with me strange tidbits of American copyright law, much in the fashion of Lawrence Lessig.
Both examples, though, can apply to a simple statement Lessig makes: "Sometimes, a society gets stuck." We're stuck right now as we try to figure out what's fair to music-lovers and artists alike, just as my mom's big box employers are stuck because they tried to make a blanket policy that can easily be understood by big box employees and the lowest common denominator among their shoppers.
It is with this mentality that I approached Lessig's "The Future of Ideas," and I'd intended to write a little rant on its applications in regard to musical file sharing, essentially claiming, for perhaps the 5,000th time since I first encountered Napster that night in my freshman year dorm room, that music should be free, or at least freer than it is.
Ahh, but then I went home last week to visit my cats and my family. My mom works in a photo lab in one of those big box stores, and constantly regales me with stories about the completely random enforcement of copyright rules in her store. Big box store has a corporate-wide policy that each photo lab tends to enforce on its own, though my mom has done a bit of research and generally concluded that the laws on which big box store claims to be basing its policy don't exist. Basically, if you go into big box store to have your photos developed (or to have copies made of other photos) and they look "too good," the store employees are empowered to deny you your photos on the basis that you've probably stolen them from a professional and don't have permission to be making copies of them. This makes sense if you're trying to make copies of a professional portrait or something, but too often my mom's co-workers have randomly (and trust me, it is completely random) denied newlyweds access to the only copies of their wedding pictures because they looked "too good," even though the groom's second cousin took them with a disposable Kodak. (My mom, for the record, eventually helped get the photos back into the couple's hands.)
Through her protests of the big box policy, my mom's shared with me strange tidbits of American copyright law, much in the fashion of Lawrence Lessig.
Both examples, though, can apply to a simple statement Lessig makes: "Sometimes, a society gets stuck." We're stuck right now as we try to figure out what's fair to music-lovers and artists alike, just as my mom's big box employers are stuck because they tried to make a blanket policy that can easily be understood by big box employees and the lowest common denominator among their shoppers.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
A real digital divide
As a bunch of you know, I've had spotty Internet access lately. While it's given my lots of time to do off-line things like read actual books (I highly recommend "The Historian," by the way), it has forced me to live my off-work hours away from blogland. Sure, I could read blogs from work, and even write out my posts (literally write out--with a pen and paper!) and plan all the things I would say when I had reliable access again, but no way in hell was I going to actually log into blogger and post from the office. People in my field have been fired for that, repeatedly. And so I was forced to sit on the sidelines for days, weeks even, unable to participate. Oh how I pined... (note: heavy, heavy sarcasm).
So I've had lots of time to think about what it means to be online and connected. Now that I've been able to post all these entries that have been sitting in a notebook, you should know my feelings on the digital divide and how it often serves as a punching bag of sorts for all that ails our society. I admit I wasn't completely in the dark--I had lots of time at work to browse the Internet, after all, and it's not like I wasn't checking my e-mail 800 times a day like always. But still, without the nightly Internet fix, dripping into my body hour after hour like so much heroin, I did things like clean my apartment, laundry, go for walks and read books. Maybe if we just unplugged everyone for a few weeks a year, the world would be a much more calm place.
Bonus perk: Not paying much attention to Karl Rove for many days. God it felt good.
So I've had lots of time to think about what it means to be online and connected. Now that I've been able to post all these entries that have been sitting in a notebook, you should know my feelings on the digital divide and how it often serves as a punching bag of sorts for all that ails our society. I admit I wasn't completely in the dark--I had lots of time at work to browse the Internet, after all, and it's not like I wasn't checking my e-mail 800 times a day like always. But still, without the nightly Internet fix, dripping into my body hour after hour like so much heroin, I did things like clean my apartment, laundry, go for walks and read books. Maybe if we just unplugged everyone for a few weeks a year, the world would be a much more calm place.
Bonus perk: Not paying much attention to Karl Rove for many days. God it felt good.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
In class tonight, someone made the type of comment we’ve heard over and over again: Blogs are great because they did X, and without blogs, X wouldn’t have happened. The example this time was the bike lock story that circulated a while back (last summer, maybe?) , and the sentiment was that without the blogs telling everyone how easy some $150 bike lock was to pick with a simple ball point pen, the news wouldn’t have spread. (Whether that’s a good thing or not is up to bikers and would-be bike thieves to figure out.)
But, like we’ve often done in this class, I think we give the blogs too much credit. When the news was spreading, I was by no means even a moderate blog reader, and yet I knew about it. So did my mom, who reads blogs even less than I do. I heard about it from friends who read bike magazines, or I heard about it from CNN, which actually picked up on it pretty quickly. Yeah, some guy figured out how to steal a bike and posted the directions on the Web, but the events that followed were not unique to the dynamic world of the Internet.
I guess this is just yet another reminder, to the people in the class and to the entire world, not to give blogs too much credit for taking part in a campaign or cause that was getting along just fine without them.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
(un)divided
As I said a few weeks back, I’ve never been much of a fan of the digital divide, the concept or the book. I appreciate its place in the literature and canon of recent media and technology discussions, but, like so many other highlights, I’ve always felt that it’s ignoring the big picture. Maybe that’s because I think anything devoted exclusively to the Internet and technology is only a smaller piece of a larger communications pie. It’s an especially pertinent belief, I guess, when the subject is something that concerns those who aren't necessarily getting an equal share of the technological pie.
Don't get me wrong, please. There are a LOT of people and a LOT of voices that are being silenced for lack of access to technology. But even if we evened the technological playing field, do we really think the Internet would be a utopian place where all voices would be given an equal share? I doubt it. There are bigger societal problems here than whether inner city youth have access to the Internet (which, again, I am SO TOTALLY IN FAVOR OF, so please don't misread me), and I feel like sometimes we just blame everything on the "digital divide" so we don't have to figure out what's really wrong with our country.
Why
Saturday, July 02, 2005
A little thanks goes a long way
Emi links to an article asking why Congress doesn't blog, and I at first was going to respond with some comments basically agreeing with the they-have-no-peers-to-mimic argument the author makes. I mean, she's got some good points, that blogs would take valuable time from lawmakers' staffs, that most constituents would bother to read them anyway, et cetera. Yet again, most lawmakers are behind the curve, which is right where we'd expect them to be. No big news there.
But then Norton gets to her final point, that there are ways for lawmakers to connect with the blogosphere besides actually maintaining a blog. Norton mentions a few politicians who have posted messages of thanks to blogs who've supported their causes and such, and it hit me: Lawmakers need to be doing this. Fine, don't maintain your own blog, be baffled by the technology, worry about your message coming across wrong, but at the very least if you know there's a group of highly involved, engaged and active people out there, why the hell aren't you taking two seconds out of your day to tell a staff member to thank them? Would it really be that hard to add a once-a-week post on Kos or something from a senator just thanking the people for caring?
But then Norton gets to her final point, that there are ways for lawmakers to connect with the blogosphere besides actually maintaining a blog. Norton mentions a few politicians who have posted messages of thanks to blogs who've supported their causes and such, and it hit me: Lawmakers need to be doing this. Fine, don't maintain your own blog, be baffled by the technology, worry about your message coming across wrong, but at the very least if you know there's a group of highly involved, engaged and active people out there, why the hell aren't you taking two seconds out of your day to tell a staff member to thank them? Would it really be that hard to add a once-a-week post on Kos or something from a senator just thanking the people for caring?
Friday, July 01, 2005
Electorate dismissed
I am not alone in the last few years in wondering what the advent of instant electronic communication has done to our relationships with other people. Sure, it's easier to get in touch with one another, but it's also quite easy to dismiss an e-mail from someone you don't want to deal with. Example: A friend with whom I'm not on such good terms sent me an e-mail, and I skimmed it over my morning cup of coffee one day and decided I'd stew for a while before responding. Six months later, that message is way, way way down at the bottom of my in-box and I've yet to respond. Would I have responded by now if he'd sent me a printed letter or card?
What this means for our political system is still up in the air, but I have a sneaking suspicion that e-mail will not be the great tool that will bring our representatives closer to us as it has for grade school classmates or friends of friends of friends. I don't have much faith that lawmakers read every piece of printed mail that arrives in their offices, so I pretty much have less than no faith that they read even 5 percent of the e-mails that fill their intern's Outlook boxes.
Johnson offers a (somewhat frightening) brief history of the House and Senate e-mail systems, but every time I turned a page I stopped to wonder if any of it mattered. My senator could have the best e-mail system ever designed, but I still don't think he'll read any messages I send to him, let alone consider the contents.
What this means for our political system is still up in the air, but I have a sneaking suspicion that e-mail will not be the great tool that will bring our representatives closer to us as it has for grade school classmates or friends of friends of friends. I don't have much faith that lawmakers read every piece of printed mail that arrives in their offices, so I pretty much have less than no faith that they read even 5 percent of the e-mails that fill their intern's Outlook boxes.
Johnson offers a (somewhat frightening) brief history of the House and Senate e-mail systems, but every time I turned a page I stopped to wonder if any of it mattered. My senator could have the best e-mail system ever designed, but I still don't think he'll read any messages I send to him, let alone consider the contents.
