Just started. Webcast there as well. First introductions....
Orville Schell, dean of the JSchool at UCB: Now in China, there is the question, what does it mean to be Chinese? The internet is one of those places where you begin to see the discussion, weblogs, chatrooms, txt messages.
Will China change the internet? This is an old theme in China: use technology from the west but then also reject politics, value, all the things that create revolution and radical change. Can China use what it wants but keep its own identity, keeping out what it finds too foreign? He quoted John Perry Barlow: the global space you are building will naturally be free of the tyrannies you are imposing... and then noted the posting on the internet in China recently with 14 questions for the propaganda department, why they exist, posing the kind of challenge that Barlow would have been proud of.
Annalee Saxenian, our new dean of SIMS: The Politics of Standards. Some people refer to it as the politics of protectionism.... And key for future development in China: applications, content, engineering and design. And the internet.
Panels on Internet Development in China and Regulation and Control of the Internet. Here are some notes from the second panel this afternoon:
Cindy Cohen, EFF: every time there is a new tool, a free speech mechanism, it has to fight for it's survival...
regarding privacy, the record of the internet has been more mixed... on balance. Architecture as policy - Mitch Kapor. That is an important observation, because the architecture will determine people's rights. In China we see the worst story around, where greatly accelerated internet use, 78 million users in China and 4 million broadband users.
Original strategy was filtering content. But the strategies to get around those are easy to implement and widespread. So now the reaction is not so much content filtering, but a distributed system of surveillance, with systems installed on users computers and used by ISPs -- often made by US companies and government who are trying to use those things here. And the US government has started this with Kalia, and forced it onto foreign governments through standards. China has taken the lead on doing voice recognition software for the purposes of surveillance and for doing video with almost instantaneous high speed transfer.
Bill Xia, pres of Dynamic Internet Projects -- and makes technologies that can get around the surveillance systems: He says the biggest challenge in China today is not technology, but the social issues. In China, surveillance occurs during the routing of packets where the to and from are watched. Also, the government claims that they are blocking things like porn sites, but in fact when you look at the blacklists, this is not true. There is severe overblocking of all sorts of things, including sites like 3dweb.com. Fear: truth or illusion? People say they don't worry because they have nothing to hide. But it occupies people's minds. And destroys traditions, as well as changes language: traditional Chinese characters have been filtered out of the culture. He thinks that there are cracks in the Chinese control system, and the fact that there are 500k users in China of his company's system to get around the control (out of 78 million users in China).
John Battelle (moderator) asked if users feel it's dangerous to use the product. And Xia responded no for regular users, but yes for some others, but then got cut off on the next presentation.
Jonathan Zittrain (on video from Cambridge): Gave a chilling effects example where a DMCA C&D letter caused Google to remove a site, where on the supply side, the links then went to the original info at chilling effects. But on the other hand, other sites are deleted entirely from French and German search sites.
On the demand side, if you go to Google.com in China, you are redirected to the University of Beijing search site. Also, some testing of sites showed they were blocked by China, as well as many key word searches like "std" or "revolution." Found a few thousand sites that were blocked, including news sites, UC Courts, British Courts, porn, etc.
Tracking filtering is becoming more difficult, because there are new forms of filtering including the client side stuff. Also, if you do the wrong search, you are blocked from Google for about 20 minutes. Including searches that are not subversive at all. Comparatively, in Saudia Arabia, it's more bark than bite, verses China, which is the opposite.
Opennet Initiative is Zittrain's latest project examining filtering, along with folks from other universities. Examples of filtering they've found: the word "ass" in any domain gets blocked, which ends up filtering the "US Embassy" site. He clearly relishes giving this example, as with the rest of the presentation. He's having a lot of fun here.
He also challenges the NYTimes to get involved, so that when things open up, they have established their brand, since they are now totally blocked in China.
Jie Cheng, associate professor at Tsinghua University Law School: talked about how the filtering standards need to be revised. The social norms are more important than what the normative law. Later at the cocktain party, she talked about how China needs to be better with filtering, so that they don't block so many harmless sites. Obviously she has a hard job, coming here to explain her country's actions and policies to this audience but she and the audience were cordial in explaining questions and positions. It's a difficult position she's in.
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Best quote of the day: Tom Vest, Packet Clearing House: "ruling a great nation is like hooking a small fish, a light touch might be best."
This year's Computer Freedom & Privacy Conference, organized by the Samuelson Clinic's Deirdre Mulligan and Laura Quilter, is currently underway in Berkeley. Several biploggers are in attendance and are blogging the panels and discussions.
The second and final day of Ideas Into Action: Implementing Reform of the Patent System contained morning panels on Non-obviousness, Post-Grant Review (a.k.a. Opposition), and Litigation, while the afternoon was spent primarily on an Industry/Institutional Issues panel. There is a summary by journalist Susan Kuckinskas of internetnews.com. What follows here is merely one biased person's review of a day full of speakers.
MORE...Today, Berkeley buzzed with even more geeks than usual as proceedings began on a symposium optimistically titled Ideas Into Action: Implementing Reform of the Patent System. Though termed a "pretend" conference by the April 1 edition of PATNEWS, the event's opening press conference and tutorial boasted real people equipped with legal pads and pens ready to dissect the latest bombshells on the patent reform frontier: new reports from the Federal Trade Commission and the National Academy of Sciences on what's wrong with the patent system and how it might be fixed.
One of the bombshells turned out to be a dud. In the way of high-minded projects, the NAS report ran a bit behind schedule and is embargoed until Monday, causing NAS guy Mark Myers to explain as much and then mostly sit with zipped lips -- not hot press conference stuff. This left the floor to the FTC (commissioner Mozelle Thompson and senior policy analyst Susan DeSanti) and Boalt Hall profs (Peter Menell and Robert Merges) endeavoring to explain how patents, innovation, and competition can all get along.
The FTC report (if you're not up to the full 315 pages, Susan recommends you try the 18-page executive summary) divvied its reform proposals into three categories, each briefed by PowerPoint slides and professorial remarks: beefing up the non-obvious requirement for the initial patent grant, expanding opportunities for opposition and post-grant review, and lowering the burden of proof for challenging patent validity in court. As Merges characterized the current state of the system, the PTO process is "democratic" -- i.e. underpaid, yielding "good quality for the dollar" -- while patent litigation is "gold-plated," boosting patent quality at the cost of millions per case to those who can afford to pay. With polite praise for the poor examiners and silence on the subject of rich litigators, the reformers proposed that the solution lies somewhere in between. What else could you conclude from more than 5,000 pages of transcripts?
Indeed, a lot of hearings went into the FTC report, with the DOJ riding shotgun on the competition piece. (Fans of numerology will want to explore the "Nine No-Nos" of patent licensing DOJ issued in the 1970s.) Today's speakers were optimistic that Congress may actually be listening in; no less than Representative Howard Berman (D-Calif.) called Mr. Thompson on his cell phone on his way across the bay this morning. The Commissioner himself concedes that intellectual property "is not very sexy" -- so if Congress is listening, what do we want them to hear?
Tomorrow: What happens when you put CISCO, Microsoft, Genentech, eBay, Google, Symantec, Intel, and patent talk together during the deepest doldrums of afternoon slump?
- "If I had it to do all over again, what I would have done was confer with everybody, do what I did with the rating system, explain it [the issue of barring studios from sending out copies of their movies for screening by those who vote on Academy Awards because of fears of online piracy], persuade them, listen to people, talk to them, which has been my hallmark," Mr. Valenti said. "I didn't do it, because time was urgent, so I moved too fast."
Gosh. Seems like the super-mini-DMCA and Broadcast Flag could stand some of this conferring as well, instead of just trying to slip them past the public, electronics manufacturers, technology developers and academics for quick and dirty adoption. Say goodbye to those unconferring ways and hope for something more adaptive to new technologies and new ways of interacting with media and artists.
Nonfiction media, the news, has 24 hours of high value, and then the content turns into something else. It's a swift transition news content makes into the status of history, an archive of facts and information, a social accounting, that has a different meaning and use after it stops being news. The production of it relies on various institutions and practices, as well as political, social and economic forces that change over time and shift it's place in society. The press is privileged, as it has constitutional protections for freedom of the press, libel protections, and other legal protections, not to mention access to governments, records and situations that the rest of the public doesn't have. There is a reason why we don't force the press to be licensed or pay a tax, and grant some level of immunity for search and subpoena or prior restraint. These privileges are there in exchange for certain responsibilities the press accepts in a kind of social agreement with users to serve the public with useful, trustworthy information, or find itself irrelevant and disdained.
At the Mediamorphosis (API) conference two weeks ago, one of the three workgroups of participants proposed using Digital Rights Management tools (DRM) to help insure secure content. These weren't technologists but I don't think they meant a firewall to make their content secure in archives, but rather DRM that would prevent the content from being opened by anyone anywhere outside their firewall that they didn't authorize. The subject then came up in the blog where it was noted that Michael Silberman (MSNBC) said: I think DRM could be used to keep people from stealing, and get them to pay for content. And it could be used to facilitate the making of content.
I think some of this desire for DRM on the part of creators of news content has to do with thinking that when users access free news content online, it means to creators that users don't value the content because they don't pay for it. Under the old model, paying for a newspaper meant to users and creators alike, that they were paying for the paper and the delivery, and to the creators, that their content was valued because it was bought. The newspaper's business department knows the real story, which is that those subscriptions don't cover the cost of content, ads and classifieds do. Subscriber zipcodes helped sell the ads so subscriptions attracted revenues and defrayed the cost of paper and delivery. But perhaps they also said something more about the need by those who report the news to feel like their work is valued. Corresponding with this is the desire to protect what they see as the "free" accessing of their sweat and hard work, with little regard by the user for that work.
What some reporters don't see is that online the content's value is expressed through users linking, thereby expresssing their own attention as well as referring other users, under an ad model, or clicking through RSS feeds to the content websites as well as the general authority generated by past good work. Users value good work and they show it by coming back and by linking or following other's links. (I understand that the current biz model relies heavily on paper business models paying for content generation, followed by the repurposing of that content under a licensing fee to their websites that use the ads to generate revenue. But I do think that eventually content creators will figure out how to leverage ads to pay for that content generation online.)
DRM the way Silberman describes using it is something each content maker would define, where they would decide what sort of restrictions to make on users accessing and distributing the content. Ordinary users, if they have trouble opening the article, sending it to friends and family or saving it indefinitely, all of which is annoying, will abandon the information because using it doesn't reflect the social norms they understand with fair usage of news content, and it confuses them, but hackers will figure out how to get around it. And imagine the chaos for users as they access different content makers' work, each with different settings and restrictions.
DRM is a different technology than a firewall in that DRM is wrapped around the media and goes to the user's machine, whereas the firewall resides at the servers of the content provider and is a barrier to entry. DRM as both the technology solution, as well as a legal structure, is not a sound way to go with this content most valuable for 24 hours, versus say a work valuable for many, many years, something like a novel or movie or music might constitute, which is a different issue and argument for the social, copyright and technical issues. News content has the potential, if you share it, to keep you in front of users as an authority and make users happy to be a part of your information community. Users will go elsewhere if they meet technical difficulty, and if the information is not available under less complicated circumstances, they will abandon their search for that content in favor of some other topic or content they can get more easily. But this is a use and technology argument against DRM for news and I don't think that is the most important issue here, though it is important.
There is also the issue that there has never been DRM that has not been cracked eventually. That being the case, technical news DRM would eventually be cracked by those who want access (as opposed to legal DRM which might make cracking illegal, like the DMCA, which I don't want to get into here, but it has been discussed quite a bit in other posts if you want more information.) Practically speaking, it is unlikely that news DRM would work any better to achieve the goals of the news makers, than it has for record companies, movie makers or gaming companies. But this is also not the most important reason not to implement DRM in news content.
There is a point to consider in the case Ernie Miller wrote up a while ago about the copyright case on newspaper headlines in Japan. I think though that something similar here in the US would not win because the title of an article would fall under the "names, titles and short phrases" that don't get copyright protection, partly because they are factual, even if they are a kind of expression (tends to fall more in the trademark area of IP for names and phrases). Therefore, using DRM to completely restrict an article, to the extent that it denies the user access to the title, author, publisher and date as unprotected metadata, might keep users from seeing this metadata. This metadata is also content in a way, and contains some factual information around the event that isn't really copyrightable at all. Also, the amount of effort needed to create and publish the work significantly affects the value of the work and the way the law treats using bits of it under fair use, even if our copyright laws are too obtuse and out of date to recognize these as well as the specific digital vs. analog media differences. But users instinctively see this, as the use the media, and therefore expect different things from digital news media than from analog articles, expect to share articles they see with people in email, quote from them in blogs and repost headlines; they have more expectations with digital news media.
The most important reasons news media companies and creators should not implement DRM is because of fair use considerations of the content itself, as well as the maintenance of their positions as reporters of news, and authorities of information.
Online, bloggers and other web content makers use and depend on traditional journalism by discussing news within their writing, as well as by linking, making traditional journalism a kind of authority. These users are filtering for audiences, pointing to things, saying to their readers: look at this for some reason, and here, I'm telling you what I think about it, and here's the link to the article itself, to some other backup to do with the subject, to someone else talking about the same thing. Snippets of content, used because of fair use, commented and fisked, are key to this as well, to show what is being discussed. Imagine Roger Ebert having to review a movie without the clips, describing the whole thing. It's possible, but not nearly as powerful as being able to cut and paste something that needs to be shown.
So Reuters announces plans to use FAST ESP or Fast Search to scan for copyright violations across thousands of feeds. Tom Curley at AP announced last Fall that he wanted to wrap AP content in DRM. Both are misguided attempts to control their business models as they are disintermediated by digital media (and like every other industry facing the paradigm shift due to the information age, it means sorting out a new business model and changing, not holding on to what you've got -- or you'll find yourself in the company of buggy producers). It's not that they shouldn't police unauthorized commercial use of their products. But for anything but those problems which could be solved by search systems like FastESP, they should abandon DRM and other technical self-help methods to keep people from their content. Using any technology that gets in the way of users interacting with the content annoys people and lessens their overly-informed and highly mobile audiences. This is not a way to win friends or be an authority. And, if a company is using a Reuters or AP feed in an unauthorized manner, it would seem to me they could contact them directly. If the corporate user wasn't willing to comply, and are outside of any legal bounds, what is to stop that same illicit feed user from just hacking the DRM? In the end, those who want the feed will hack it, and all the folks who are just readers with a lot of choices will move on to other sources when they can't open or talk about the content online.
Here's what you want: users who, every time something in the world happens, think, hey, I need this media company's content, this writer, this site's take. If you use DRM or make barriers, you will reduce your standing as an authority for news both as content and as linking expression because invariably some won't be able to open it or link to it. If you make yourself unlinkable, you will cause yourself to be irrelevant across the influencers on the internet that point to the sources, filter them, for other users. Who links to the Wall Street Journal? In Technorati, they have 354 links compared with the NYTimes at 39,412 and the Washington Post at 21,319. Who do you think has more authority online? The paper with premiere content in its niche and 600,000 online subscribers, and a lovely firewall? Or the paper of record. Now imagine losing that authority with the DRM you wrap around your articles.
You're nothing online if you're not linkable.
(Originally published on Napsterization.org/stories/.)
Deep. "Note worthy news links from around the internet."
Mini. "A byte-sized companion to Deep Links."
In the interest of choice, I'm hoping they do a demi. You know those marketing guys say that when you offer small, medium and large, by far the biggest seller is medium. Demi-link. How 'bout it? The tagline could read: "Like two espressos after lunch, with grappa. An EFF-correcto."
Anyway, I'm thrilled the EFF has brought active blogging back to its site and I really enjoy reading Fred Von Lohmann, who I haven't seen blog before, write about Wicked Player Pianos and such. It's only occasionally we hear from him on Pho. Though I must say that as I got to the end, I noticed what turned out to be a link to their "File Sharing" category (it's to the left of the Permalink which is to the left of the Technorati cosmos link. For a split second, I thought he was going to share a piano file with me. But oh well... I am discombobulated a little (you have no idea the kind of day I have had, what with 2 hours traveling 1 mile in the hot sun on the bay bridge because some guy decided to jump off).
Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Fred is joined by Jason Schultz (of Copyfight and Geeklaw) and Donna Wentworth (Founder and uber-bloggerati member of Copyfight) on the sized "deep" blog, and Ren Bucholz who's doing the miniLink blog.
Also, I've switched the blogroll at the right, to reflect these great blog additions.
