Billg’s knighthood

The London Times asked me what I thought of the UK government giving Bill Gates a knighthood for his contribution to UK enterprise. I was happy to oblige. [Thanks to Quentin for finding the online version.]

The amazing Wiki movement

Wikipedia is one of the wonders of the world — a multilingual project to create a complete and accurate free content encyclopedia. It started in January 2001 and is currently up to 198083 articles in the English version. And now there’s Wikitravel, a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide. So far it has 1067 destination guides and other articles written and edited by Wikitravellers from around the globe.

Richard Dawkins on the first Macintosh

Nice piece by the author of The Selfish Gene. “The first Mac I saw may have been one of the first in Britain, for it was at the house of my colleague WD Hamilton, shortly after he arrived from Michigan in 1984, and he may well have shipped it over. Bill showed it to his dinner guests one evening, and it stunned us. I immediately echoed Huxley’s remark on closing The Origin of Species: ‘How extremely stupid not to have thought of that’…”

Reflections on Hutton

The Hutton Report is out. It includes a devastating attack on the BBC and lets Blair, Hoon and the government generally off the hook. Gavyn Davies, the Chairman of the BBC Governors, has resigned. The Prime Minister was at his most sanctimonious in the Commons this afternoon, parading his much-vaunted ‘integrity’ like an outraged spinster who had been accused of providing carnal services to passing tradesmen. A few thoughts on this gloomy spectacle.

1. The BBC blew it. It was known that Andrew Gilligan was, journalistically speaking, a slightly loose cannon. (As if to prove that, he had a column in The Mail on Sunday — a revolting right-wing rag.) But even loose cannons hit the target sometimes. So when the uproar over his ’45 minutes’ allegation began, the BBC ought to have conducted a really thorough inquiry into his research, notes, etc. and then taken appropriate action — which might have included a correction or an outright retraction. Instead they dug in for a fight to the finish with Blair and Campbell without having checked that the ground on which they stood was absolutely secure.

2. This would never have happened under the previous Director-General, John Birt. What people forget is that the BBC got into a similar mess with the (then Tory) government in the mid-1980s over a documentary alleging fascist infiltration of the Tory party. A new Chairman (Duke Hussey) was installed by Margaret Thatcher. Hussey promptly fired Alastair Milne, the Director-General who had investigated and stood by the offending programme, and installed John Birt as Deputy DG in charge of news and current affairs. Birt installed an editorial regime of Stalinist thoroughness which ensured that nothing went out on air without being approved by the management. At the first whiff of governmental displeasure, the Birtist thought-police would be crawling over the complained-of journalism or journalist. Some of us were very critical of this regime (me especially — I was the Observer‘s TV columnist at the time), because it gave the impression that the BBC was not behaving independently — that it was too attentive to governmental whim.

All this happened partly because Birt was obsessed with news and current affairs. His successor, Greg Dyke, is quite different — he’s an entertainment and ratings man. Despite the fact that his job description includes the phrase “editor-in-chief” he seems to have taken little interest in the BBC’s journalism. His evidence to the Hutton inquiry included the astonishing admission that he only became aware of the problems with Gilligan’s story well after the event.

3. What will happen now is very much a re-run of 1987. A new Chairman will be appointed by the Government. Dyke will probably then be sacked, and replaced by someone thought to be more interested in journalism. There will be a thoroughgoing review of BBC editorial procedures, etc. etc.

4. British judges have an ancient tradition of being deferential to the government of the day. Hutton continues the tradition. Whenever he had a choice of giving the benefit of the doubt to the government or the BBC he chose to give it to the official line. This means, IMHO, that his report is likely to be biased in important respects. And the fact that he is an eminent judge proves nothing other than he is an eminent judge. After all, I remember how the Lord Chief Justice himself (Lord Widgery) was called upon to investigate the ‘Bloody Sunday’ killings in Derry in January 1972 — when soldiers of the Paratroop Regiment opened fire on unarmed civilians, killing 13. Widgery was the UK’s most eminent judge, yet his report was a deferential whitewash of the army’s behaviour, and the events of that terrible day are still being re-examined by an interminable inquiry conducted by foreign judges.

5. Another things that is obscured by the pious discussions surrounding the publication of Hutton’s report, is that sanctimonious, altar-boy Blair employed the most aggressive attack-dog this side of the Bush White House — Alastair Campbell. If you’ve ever listened to reporters’ accounts of what it was like to be on the receiving end of Campbell’s aggression you’d be inclined to be belligerent in response. This, indeed, was probably what led to the initial editorial mistakes in the BBC. They thought this was just another case of Campbell ‘trying it on’ again.

6. Gavyn Davies has taken responsibility for the BBC’s failure and resigned. He has thus behaved honourably — unlike all of Blair’s cronies (Robinson, Mandelson, Vaz, etc.), all of whom clung on to office long after a decent person would have resigned.

7. Finally, there is the Big Issue which the setting up of the Hutton inquiry served to obscure (which is why I thought it was a master-stroke by Campbell). The fundamental problem is that Blair took the UK into a war on the basis of a pre-determined but secret agreement with George Bush and false or misleading intelligence. What Hutton claims to establish is that Blair did not know the intelligence to be faulty. In which case, what has been established is that the Prime Minister is not so much a knave as a fool.

SCO gets crazier by the minute

Recently Darl McBride, the cuckoo-clock CEO of SCO, has been making weird assertions about the GPL — specifically that it violates the US Constitution. Here’s what a real constitutional lawyer (Larry Lessig) has to say about that:

“As the December 4th letter asserts (but does not defend), “SCO asserts that the GPL … violates the United States Constitution.” McBride makes the same claim less directly in his January 8th letter to Congress (“the GPL … is in direct contradiction to .. the recent Supreme Court decision in Eldred.”) And thus, it follows, that the US Congress, and US government, should do what they can to assure that the GPL “not be allowed to continue to undermine” US copyright industries.

But this argument makes a category mistake. The US Constitution is a restriction on governments, not individuals (except perhaps the 13th Amendment which seems to apply directly to individuals.) If McBride, for example, were to lock RMS up and forbid him from talking, he wouldn’t be violating RMS’s “free speech” rights. Only a government (or someone acting under government authority) can violate “free speech” rights. Likewise, if McBride were to take RMS’s computer, that wouldn’t be a “taking” in violation of the 5th Amendment. It would be theft, but every theft is not a constitutional violation.

Likewise with the GNU GPL. The GNU GPL is a copyright license. It is the creation not of a government, but an individual. There is no way that an individual can violate the constitution merely by writing a contract. And the argument that he can reveals that the author has no understanding of the way constitutional law functions.

It might be that McBride is saying that it would be unconstitutional to enforce the GNU GPL, because any copyright law that would “free” content would be inconsistent with the Copyright Clause. That, unlike the former claim, would at least be a coherent constitutional claim. Coherent, but false. It would constitute a radical departure from the historical interpretation of copyright law, for the Copyright Clause has always been understood to give Congress the right define the property right that copyright is however it wants. If Congress allows people to waive copyrights, that’s fine under the Constitution. SCO’s claim against this tradition would be that Congress acted unconstitutionally in when it wrote a Copyright Act that allows copyright owners to waive some of their rights.

This is, again, a silly interpretation of constitutional law. And more importantly, it is a totally baseless interpretation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Eldred. If Eldred means anything, it means that Congress has a broad discretion to balance the rights of copyright as it deems best — within the express limits of the clause. There is no express limit in the copyright clause that mandates proprietary production.

SCO is flailing, and failing. If this is all it has, then it will soon be forgotten.”

The tyranny of extreme copyright

From an article by Robert S. Boynton in today’s New York Times Magazine:

“Last fall, a group of civic-minded students at Swarthmore College received a sobering lesson in the future of political protest. They had come into possession of some 15,000 e-mail messages and memos — presumably leaked or stolen — from Diebold Election Systems, the largest maker of electronic voting machines in the country. The memos featured Diebold employees’ candid discussion of flaws in the company’s software and warnings that the computer network was poorly protected from hackers. In light of the chaotic 2000 presidential election, the Swarthmore students decided that this information shouldn’t be kept from the public. Like aspiring Daniel Ellsbergs with their would-be Pentagon Papers, they posted the files on the Internet, declaring the act a form of electronic whistle-blowing.

Unfortunately for the students, their actions ran afoul of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D.M.C.A.), one of several recent laws that regulate intellectual property and are quietly reshaping the culture. Designed to protect copyrighted material on the Web, the act makes it possible for an Internet service provider to be liable for the material posted by its users — an extraordinary burden that providers of phone service, by contrast, do not share. Under the law, if an aggrieved party (Diebold, say) threatens to sue an Internet service provider over the content of a subscriber’s Web site, the provider can avoid liability simply by removing the offending material. Since the mere threat of a lawsuit is usually enough to scare most providers into submission, the law effectively gives private parties veto power over much of the information published online — as the Swarthmore students would soon learn.

Not long after the students posted the memos, Diebold sent letters to Swarthmore charging the students with copyright infringement and demanding that the material be removed from the students’ Web page, which was hosted on the college’s server. Swarthmore complied. The question of whether the students were within their rights to post the memos was essentially moot: thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, their speech could be silenced without the benefit of actual lawsuits, public hearings, judges or other niceties of due process.

After persistent challenges by the students — and a considerable amount of negative publicity for Diebold — in November the company agreed not to sue. To the delight of the students’ supporters, the memos are now back on their Web site. But to proponents of free speech on the Internet, the story remains a chilling one….”.

CDs a dying breed — according to Forrester Research

Reuters report:”Music downloads will render the ubiquitous compact disc all but obsolete in the next five years, yet half of all companies that begin selling digital songs online will fail by year-end, a researcher warned on Saturday.

By 2008, one third of music sales in the United States and nearly 20 percent in Europe will come in the form of downloads and streaming music over the Internet, building a multi-billion dollar business for the battered music industry, according to a new study by consultancy Forrester Research.

“The industry is going through a complete change in the way people consume music,” Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research analyst told a gathering of music and technology executives at the annual MidemNet conference.

He said the U.S. market alone for downloads and subscriptions to online music stores will top $300 million this year from a virtual standing start a year ago.

“By 2007 or 2008, CDs will be something only old people have,” Bernoff said.”

The ethics of downloading

The NYT asked Aaron Schwartz to contribute a piece defending downloading. He wrote the piece, but apparently the Times chopped it (presumably the notion of someone arguing that downloading music was not unethical was a bit strong for that venerable organ). Anyway, Aaron’s unexpurgated piece is interesting. And it has some useful stats and references.

Knobbery

My friend Quentin went to the CES in Las Vegas but encountered so much ridicule for coming back without a cool gadget that he went out and bought a knob! Actually, it’s a “USB Multimedia Controller & Input Device”. If you like jog-shuttle controls, then it’s just the thing. It can be a volume control one minute, and a scrolling controller the next. And it glows in the dark with an eerie blue light. All he needs now is a new PowerBook to go with it.

SOTU annotated

I’ve always found found Presidential State of the Union (SOTU) addresses too cloying to watch. They’re all so fantastically complacent, somehow. So it’s nice to know that there are critical intelligences out there who can supress nausea and analyse the bombast. Like James Fallows, who has produced an annotated version of Dubya’s latest effort.