Odograph.com

Cool:

ITHACA, N.Y. (May 11, 2009) – In a dramatic change of practice, Cornell University Library has announced it will no longer require its users to seek permission to publish public domain items duplicated from its collections. Instead, users may now use reproductions of public domain works made for them by the Library or available via Web sites, without seeking any further permission.

The Library, as the producer of digital reproductions made from its collections, has in the past licensed the use of those reproductions. Individuals and corporations that failed to secure permission to repurpose these reproductions violated their agreement with the Library. “The threat of legal action, however,” noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, “does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates. We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks.”

The immediate impetus for the new policy is Cornell’s donation of more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive

(details at www.archive.org/details/cornell).

There have been a number of articles which make the argument “we must pay the AIG bonuses so that businessmen keep their trust in the system.”

I heard that a few times yesterday before it occurred to me how exactly backwards it was.

At this point in time, business needs to earn our trust. They need to convince us that they are not playing the game laid out by Taleb (and probably others) before this blew up. They need to convince us that they aren’t making long-term risky bets in exchange for short-term bonuses.

Until they convince us of that, I am not going to trust them with an unregulated, too big to fail, investment bank and bonus structure.

That was my thought, and it turns out I’ve got a big thinker in my corner:

James Hamilton on “AIG outrage”

To add another:

James Kwak on “The Tipping Point?”

It’s been a long time since I posted a comment on Copyright and “Copyfight” issues. Dymaxion World makes a shift back to the same topic, with a fine piece written yesterday:

Stepping aside from issues of Michael Ignatieff, Stephen Harper, and George W. Bush, let me return to one of my other favourite subjects: the problems with copyright law. My objections to current copyright maximalism basically come down to two biggies:

1) Current law effectively eliminates the growth of the public domain – copyright law is always being extended to prevent currently-copyrighted works from lapsing. I’m a big believer that culture is a cumulative endeavour, and contemporary artists should be able to draw on their predecessor’s works, after a decent interval, without fear of sanction.

2) Current law really enriches a few major corporations at the expense of the far more numerous small artists. There’s little to no evidence that small artists benefit from double-lifetime copyrights, and no evidence that the community benefits from retroactive copyright extensions.

Very true.

-more here

(I support the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, at Duke Law.)

From Econbrowser:

If you’re looking for an alternative to the talking heads and endless spinning, here are some quantitative tools for following the U.S. elections that I’ve found useful.

Top of my list would be the betting exchange Tradesports, according to which the Republicans took a real beating this last week. Retaining control of the House is now less than a 50% probability, and Democrats gaining control of the Senate has also become a significantly more plausible event than it was judged to be a week ago:

Price of contract paying $100 if Republicans retain control of House. Source: Tradesports

- more here

Scan This Book!

In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. [...]

When I started this blog I really expected copyright and intellectual property issues to be a major theme. I even created a “Copyfight” tag for it. I evolved away from that, I guess because I came to see energy and environment issues (and the war) as more critical.

For what it’s worth though, I think copyright has been stretched too long (should be, say, 50 years for individuals and corporations). It was therefore interesting to see that:

The head of the US copyright office has accused Congress of making a mistake by extending the length of copyright in America, calling the term “too long,” and saying that Congress made a “big mistake.”

The remarkable admission came at the tail end of an event held at the UNC Law School on November 2, 2005, when Mary-Beth Peters, the Register of Copyrights, and a panel of copyright scholars, lawyers and bureaucrats convened to deliberate copyright in public.

- more here

I’m reading Accelerando right now. It’s a bit of cyberpunk meets technological singularity. Those two ideas have been mined pretty well. It is therefore surprising that reading this book is like drinking from a firehose of possible, short term, technological and social trends.

We start by meeting a guy whose “job” is to wander around, living out of a suitcase, thinking up ideas and patenting them. He doesn’t actually make anything. The “value created” is the idea, and the patent locks it in. It lies fallow until some working business bumps into the same problem and solution. The amazing thing is, given how broken the US patent system is, and the mismatches between old ideas of intellectual property and new ideas of information-commerce … this would have really worked well in the last couple decades. We see it in the real world, in corporations whose sole purpose is to acquire masses of information-related patents, and then sift through looking for ones “co-invented” by active players. In this world, Microsoft or Sun can honestly “invent” an idea, and then end up (decades later) owing $200 million to some guy with a patent at the bottom of his sock drawer.

I’m big on R&D, and think the little-guy engineer deserves a level paying field … but I think the way to do that would have been to narrow down what was patentable. We are instead buried by “patentable ideas” anybody could have thought of on a bus-ride, and burdened by lawyers pursuing those bus-ride-patents.

Update:

As a real-world example, consider software “plug-ins.” The general technique has been around for many decades. The idea is that you write a program, but to allow your users and 3rd parties to improve it, you put in a special kind of hook. You allow them to write small programs (plug-ins) to a specification, and your program runs those programs as sub-routines. I don’t know if they were first, but one early (and famous) example was Photoshop and its plug-ins. Now, here’s the real-world fact: Once the “plug-in” technique was knows, every programmer worth his salt used it when it was applicable. I’ve used it a few times myself (from the 80’s through the 90’s). But, it is a broken aspect of our patent system that every time a “plug-in” is used in a new kind of program (and editor, a web browser), it is considered “novel” and a patent can be filed on it.

The patent system “plays stupid” and says “Oh, no one would have thought to use a plug-in here. That’s brilliant!”

It was totally obvious to use “plug-ins” in a web browser, but that didn’t stop Microsoft from being hit with a $1.2 Billion dollar lawsuit for making this obvious move.

Some of my strongest titles come from someplace else. In this case, it is a column by James Boyle at the Financial Times. It begins:

In two earlier columns on Europe’s database directive, and European public information, I pointed out that our policy-process is almost evidence-free. New rights are created on the basis of anecdote and scaremongering. There are other examples and they are not confined to Europe.

Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. What do we do? We extend the copyright term repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. The US goes from fourteen years to the author’s life plus seventy years. We extend protection retrospectively to dead authors, perhaps in the hope they will write from their tombs.

Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.

This article is a good, strongly argued, overview of the “copyfight.” I found it at the Corante Copyfight blog (here). It is a bit of a break from my recent focus on energy and the environment, but if you haven’t really got a handle on the copyfight, this might be a good place to start.

… I actually gave a little money last year to The Center for the Study of the Public Domain, referenced in that article and founded by its author.

I think copyright has been going off the rails for while, but when I’d say something like “copyright is getting out of hand” to my buddies, they’d get a look kinda like “this guy is starting to sound a little crazy.”

I suppose it does sound crazy at first. I mean, what could be simpler than copyright as we learned it in grade school? Don’t copy what you didn’t write. That’s easy. The software and music piracy thing is about as simple. Don’t copy things you didn’t buy. Even that is pretty good. It only misses some things that you don’t have to buy (public domain, free software, creative commons licenses, etc.).

Again, it still sounds pretty simple. Well this past week we’ve had some news that illustrates the “crazy talk” that copyright might be getting out of hand (from On The Commons):

I could hardly believe that Starbucks might actually stop people from taking photos in its coffee salons. But once Larry Lessig blogged about the topic in May 2004, coffee mavens from New York to Hong Kong and points in between chimed in with their own stories. The stories were remarkably similar: while taking snapshots of friends in a Starbucks, a manager or barista would tell them they were not allowed to take photos in the store. Starbucks never clarified its policy or non-policy on the issue (their PR rep never got back to me last year), but the speculation is that Starbucks was trying to prevent anyone from photographing their signature “trade dress” interiors. One of the more hilarious responses was a website, Starbucksphotos.com, now dormant, which invited people to post snapshots of themselves in Starbucks (Flickr has a large array of photos tagged with Starbucks, however).

Now comes word from the Chicago Reader (January 28; subscribers only) that the managers of Chicago’s Millennium Park require a permit and payment of a fee in order to take photos in a Chicago park. In a story by Ben Joravsky, “The Bean Police,” we learn that Warren Wimmer was trying to take a picture of Cloud Gate, a massive sclupture knoown known locally as “The Bean,” when two security guards on Segways cruised up to him and asked if he had a permit – “a permit that lets you take pictures of the park.”

I’ve actually seen something similar. A couple were about to take pictures of themselves before they entered a movie theater. The ticket-collector stepped out and informed them that it was “illegal” to take picture there, outside the theater on the front steps. I’m not sure of the technical legality – but it does seem crazy, as different bits of the world are shut down and “owned.”

Everything is becoming ephemera.

This struck me a few years ago, as digital cameras started to catch on, and my friends started to post pictures to various sites. There were hundreds of new photos every day, and despite that surge in supply, many of those early users copyrighted their snapshots in the vain hope that someone would swoop down to buy them. The numbers were against it.

The new explosion is in the written word. There are the millions of blogs out there, with thousands more created each day [technorati]:

Today, Technorati tracks almost five million weblogs, up from 100,000 two years ago. The Pew Internet study estimates that about 11%, or about 50 million, of Internet users are regular blog readers. A new weblog is created every 7.4 seconds, which means there are about 12,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers — people who write weblogs — update their weblogs regularly; there are about 275,000 posts daily, or about 10,800 blog updates an hour.

This exploding production may create a new kind of media, but the fraction that needs to be preserved as our history falls.

I say this despite the fact that I love old books and old photos, or perhaps because I think the focus should be there. We might have 100,000 California sunsets recorded in 2005, but we can’t go back and get 100,000 more images of California in 1905. We might have 100,000 responses to Sun’s OpenSolaris project, but we can’t go back and get 100,000 responses to Ford’s new motorcar. No, those old images (and handwritten blogs) are lost as they decay or are discarded.

Our history is lost through attrition as our new ephemera explodes around us (yes, including this post).

My one hope is that a lot of the past might still remain, safely on someone’s dry, dark, shelf. Maybe, given technology for the conversion, and a green-light from the government, we will be flooded with scraps of the past as well as the present. That would be nice, but I’m not sure how high to hope.

(See also the “podcasting explosion” as a new source for digital ephemera.)