Boyle on WIPO and webcasting rights

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Lovely Financial Times column by James Boyle. Sample:

I teach intellectual property law, a subject that is attracting attention from economists, political scientists and people who simply want to make money. These, after all, are the rules that define the high­technology marketplace. Are we doing a good job of writing those rules? The answer is no. Three tendencies stand out.

First and most lamentably, intellectual property laws are created without any empirical evidence that they are necessary or that they will help rather than hurt. Second, the policymaking process has failed to keep track of the increasing importance of intellectual property rights to everything from freedom of expression and communications policy to economic development or access to educational materials. We still make law as though it were just a deal brokered between industry groups – balancing the interests of content companies with those of broadcasters, for example. The public interest in competition, access, free speech and vigorous technological markets takes a back seat. What matters is making the big boys happy.

Finally, communications networks are increasingly built around intellectual property rules, as law regulates technology more and more directly; not always to good effect…

Donate your copy of Microsoft Office to Katrina relief!

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From Good Morning, Silicon Valley…

On Friday, [Massachussetts] state officials approved a proposal to standardize desktop applications on the OpenDocument format — a move that will strip some 50,000 state computers of Microsoft’s Office and effectively eliminate Microsoft, which has chosen not to support Open Document, from the state’s procurement process. Microsoft, it should be noted, could add native support for Open Document to Office, but won’t, no doubt because doing so could encourage the spread of non-Microsoft formats. In an interview with DesktopLinux.com, Massachusetts’ chief information officer, Peter Quinn, said the shift to open formats was inevitable. The state runs a “vast majority” of its office and system computers on Windows — “only a very small percentage of them run Linux and other open source software at this time,” Quinn said. “This is in tune with the general market in the U.S. But we like to ‘eat our own cooking,’ in that we are using OpenOffice.org and Linux more and more as time goes along, because it produces open format documents. Microsoft has remade the desktop world. But if you’ve watched history, there’s a slag heap of proprietary companies who have fallen by the wayside because they were stuck in their ways. Just look at the minicomputer business, for example. The world is about open standards and open source. I can’t understand why anybody would want to continue making closed-format documents anymore.”

Good stuff. Lots more coming in the same vein.

No direction home

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Just finished watching the first part of Martin Scorsese’s riveting film about Bob Dylan. As the credits rolled I saw the words “With Special Thanks to Steve Jobs”. For what, exactly?

Microsoft at 30

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This morning’s Observer column.

Microsoft has grown up, and is beginning to experience the mixed blessings of corporate middle age. On the one hand there is the respectability and status of being the most famous company in the world after Disney, and the complacency that comes from having $50 billion in the bank. On the other hand, there’s the furring of the corporate arteries, the slowing of reflexes and the dawning realisation that you are no longer the coolest kid on the block.

And, as if to confirm the suspicion of internal unease, this week also saw the announcement of massive restructuring of the company’s corporate structure. Its seven divisions will be merged into three groups – Platform Products and Services, (formerly Windows, MSN, and the Server and Tools division); Business (formerly Office and Microsoft Business Solutions); and Entertainment and Devices (formerly Xbox and mobile devices)…

The most cited

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Fascinating list of the 50 most-cited 20th-century works in the Arts and Humanities Index. No. 1 is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, followed by James Joyce (Ulysses), Northrop Fry (Anatomy of Criticism), Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations) and Noam Chomsky (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax). Chomsky appears three times in the list, as does Joyce. Wittgenstein appears twice, as do Karl Popper and Levi-Strauss. Hmmm…

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

Grief

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Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves”. Eric Lindemann, who was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940s and interviewed many relatives of the 492 people killed in the 1942 Coconut Grove fire, defined the phenomenon with absolute specificity in a famous 1944 study: “Sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from 20 minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.”

Yep. I recognise most of that. This was Joan Didion writing in yesterday’s Guardian about her reaction to the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

Why the copyright suit against Google Print is wrong

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From Larry Lessig’s blog…

Google has been sued by the Authors Guild, and a number of individual authors. This follows similar threats hinted at by the American Association of Publishers. The authors and the publishers consider Google’s latest fantastic idea, Google Print — a project to Google-ize 20,000,000 books — to be “massive copyright infringement.” They have asked a federal court to shut Google Print down.

It is 1976 all over again. Then, like now, content owners turned to the courts to stop an extraordinary new technology. Then, like now, copyright is the weapon of choice. But then, like now, the content owners of course don’t really want the court to stop the new technology. Then, like now, they simply want to be paid for the innovations of someone else. Then, like now, the content owners ought to lose.

More… Ed Felten chips in.

Quagmire: the Saudi perspective

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From the New York Times…

WASHINGTON, Sept. 22 – Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said Thursday that he had been warning the Bush administration in recent days that Iraq was hurtling toward disintegration, a development that he said could drag the region into war. “There is no dynamic now pulling the nation together,” he said in a meeting with reporters at the Saudi Embassy here. “All the dynamics are pulling the country apart.” He said he was so concerned that he was carrying this message “to everyone who will listen” in the Bush administration.

Prince Saud’s statements, some of the most pessimistic public comments on Iraq by a Middle Eastern leader in recent months, were in stark contrast to the generally upbeat assessments that the White House and the Pentagon have been offering.