More copyright thuggery

“According to an article in the Irish Times (registration required) the Joyce estate has informed the Irish government that it intends to sue for copyright infringement if there are any public readings of Joyce’s works during the festival commemorating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday this June.

James Joyce died in 1941 and the copyright in his work expired in 1991. Then the EU extended terms to life+70 years, and the work went back into copyright in July 1995. The estate has been very active in enforcing their copyright, suing regularly. While some of their actions have been aimed at issues such as protecting the memory of Joyce’s daughter Lucia from scrutiny, other suits have been against non-commercial uses of the works by fans. As such, they seem solely concerned with the financial health of the estate [admittedly one of their roles] having no concern for nurturing the greater cultural legacy of Joyce.

The Irish Times notes that ‘In 1998, the Joyce estate objected to readings of Ulysses live over the Internet, which was facilitated by Ireland.com. The case was settled out of court.’ Now the estate has issued a letter to the Irish government warning that all use must be cleared with the estate – which means that there can be no public reading during the festival, and a planned production of Joyce’s Exiles by the Abbey theatre must be cancelled.

Public readings do not displace commercialised use of Joyce’s work, so the estate does not lose income from their occurrence. Of course, the estate is technically within its ‘rights’ (though this does indicate reasons for reforming European copyright law) but such vigorous enforcement is unnecessary and distasteful.

Thanks to funferal for the link.

Shock, Horror!!! Writers secretly review their own books! And give them Five Stars!

Whatever next! A security glitch on the Amazon.ca site revealed the names of the ‘anonymous’ reviewers who post those helpful reviews of books. And guess what? Some of those anonymous reviews were posted by authors of the books being praised. I ask you!!! The phoney outrage of the mainstream media about this is wonderful to behold.

Thinks… I should have thought of doing that when my book came out. Rats! Another golden opportunity missed. No wonder I haven’t got on in life. Sigh….

Courage online

BBC Online technology correspondent Ivan Noble was diagnosed as having a malignant brain tumour last August. Since then he’s been writing an online diary about it. He will have an operation next week, but nobody (he says) expects him to beat this rap. Like many readers, I am moved by his undemonstrative courage. My Sue had it too.

Light at the end of the spam tunnel?

One of the reasons spam has become so ubiquitous is an intrinsic flaw in Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) — the Internet protocol that handles the sending of mail. Basically, SMTP doesn’t concern itself with authenticating the sender of an email message. This is because it was designed by a community of researchers who trusted one another. But this flaw is what is mainly exploited by spammers, who spoof senders’ addresses to fool SMTP. I’ve long wondered why the Internet community hasn’t decided to close the loophole. Now, it appears that things are happening. An eWeek article reports that: “A grass-roots movement to improve the SMTP protocol that governs e-mail traffic is gaining acceptance, and its lead developer hopes to get fast-track approval by the Internet Engineering Task Force to make the emerging framework a standard. The developing framework, known as Sender Policy Framework (SPF), would prevent the spoofing of e-mail addresses and hijacking of SMTP servers, common tactics used by spammers to remain anonymous to the millions of addresses to which they send unsolicited e-mail. The group behind SPF, known as SMTP+SPF, published its Internet draft Wednesday, the first step on the road to IETF approval, according to Meng Weng Wong, who’s spearheading the effort. Wong, the CTO of e-mail forwarding service Pobox.com, plans to attend the 59th IETF Meeting, which starts Feb. 29 in Seoul, South Korea, to make his case for the IETF to form a working group to study SPF. But Wong said he’s hoping for more than that. He wants the IETF to adopt the SPF framework, bypassing the workgroup stage.” Hooray!

Tim Berners-Lee wrote a lovely essay a while back explaining why it is anti-social (and dangerous for the network) to exploit a particular protocol to gain a commercial advantage.

Conor Gearty on Hutton

My friend Conor Gearty has a terrific 5000-word piece in the London Review of Books on the Hutton report. Excerpt:

“On his best behaviour, Scarlett made a final seizure of control by Number 10 unnecessary, constructing a document that pleased his political masters, and which required some further tinkering rather than a radical overhaul. The replacement of ‘could’ with ‘capable of being used’ and other concessions of this sort made at Campbell’s request have credibly underpinned the allegation of ‘sexing up’. But the whole document was in its conception, structure and language a ‘sexing up’ of intelligence: all Campbell was alleged to have been doing was ‘sexing up’ the already ‘sexed up’, like offering Viagra to a sex maniac. Right from the start, the intelligence community (a spooky term in every sense) should have had nothing to do with the idea of a dossier intended for public consumption. Instead they were drawn into the Campbell world of spinnery and sleight-of-hand, where even they – arch-spinners and sleighters-of-hand – couldn’t cope.”

Pamela Jones on IP mania

Interesting Wired interview with Pamela Jones, founder of Groklaw, about the Linux/SCO row and other matters. Quote:”With time I expect that as tech savvy-ness increases in the judiciary, and it will, someone will notice that software is just math, creativity and math, and patenting 1 + 1 = 2 will eventually set us up to where only the owners of that and similar patents can write software. Meanwhile the rest of the world will move ahead in development, while the United States is stuck in the mud because no one can write 1 + 1 = 2 without crossing somebody’s palm with silver.”

(Some) Windows code escapes into the wild

According to a BBC report, some of the source code for Windows 2000 and NT has been leaked onto the Net. Wonder how it happened — and whether it’s a byproduct of Microsoft’s “shared-source” initiative.

More…From CNET: “The 203MB file contains code from Microsoft’s enterprise operating system, but the code was clearly incomplete, said Dragos Ruiu, a security consultant and the organizer of the CanSecWest security conference, who has examined the file listing.

“It was on the peer-to-peer networks and IRC (Internet relay chat) today,” Ruiu said. “Everybody has got it; it’s widespread now.”

The 203MB file expands to just under 660MB, he said, noting that the final code size almost perfectly matches the capacity of a typical CD-ROM. The entire source code, he said, is believed to be about 40GB, meaning that the file circulating Thursday is only a fraction of the full code base.

“It looks real,” he said. “You can’t build Windows, however. It’s just a bunch of chunks of the operating system.”

BitTorrent — an idea whose time has come

A mark of a great idea is that you always have the “Why-didn’t-we-think-of-that-before?” moment when you first encounter it. BitTorrent is like that. It’s a file-sharing system which discourages ‘leeching’ — i.e. downloading but not uploading. Or, as John Markoff puts it in the NYT, “Under older file-sharing systems like Napster and Kazaa, only a small subset of users actually share files with the world. Most users simply download, or leech, in cyberspace parlance. BitTorrent, however, uses what could be called a Golden Rule principle: the faster you upload, the faster you are allowed to download. BitTorrent cuts up files into many little pieces, and as soon as a user has a piece, they immediately start uploading that piece to other users. So almost all of the people who are sharing a given file are simultaneously uploading and downloading pieces of the same file (unless their downloading is complete).

The practical implication is that the BitTorrent system makes it easy to distribute very large files to large numbers of people while placing minimal bandwidth requirements on the original ‘seeder.’ That is because everyone who wants the file is sharing with one another, rather than downloading from a central source.”

The interesting thing about BitTorrent from my point of view is the way it illustrates the non-infringing potential of P2P technologies. This is a great way of distributing large files (for example, operating system upgrades) and of making much more efficient of the resources attached to the Net. There’s a nice diagram illustrating that here. It’s also Open Source software, written by a guy who lived on credit cards while he was creating it — and who then gave it to the world. What a gift!

Academic niceties — and savagery

George Steiner: photo (c) Vernon Doucette.

One of the cruellest genres is the acerbic academic review. Here is Joseph Epstein on George Steiner’s latest book (the print edition of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard):

Quote 1: “My friend Edward Shils once gave me a most useful clue to the best way to read Steiner. He claimed that many years ago he read a splendid parody of Steiner’s of the way a Soviet apparatchik thought. Steiner, he felt, was a marvelous mimic. And so, I have come to see, he is. What George Steiner has been doing, over the past forty or so years, is an incomparable impression of the world’s most learned man.”

Quote 2:”So high does Steiner come at things, so greatly does he dramatize (and self-dramatize) ideas and all experience, that one may lose sight of the fact that he is himself a very considerable clichémeister. Most of his clichés, of course, come from books. One finds little evidence in Steiner’s writing that he knows either man or life. T.S. Eliot once said of Henry James that he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it. Steiner’s is a mind that seems to have been violated by just about every idea he has encountered.”

Monty Python on Immanuel Kant

While we’re on the subject of Kant, remember the lovely Monty Python sketch where a timid English academic joins the philosophy department of an Australian university where all the lecturers are called Bruce and, er, short on sublety. They have a departmental song which goes like this:

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.

There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya
’bout the raisin’ of the wrist.
Socrates himself was permanently pissed.

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
after half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away,
‘alf a crate of whiskey every day!
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
and Hobbes was fond of his Dram.
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart:
“I drink, therefore I am.”

Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he’s pissed.