Copyright madness: latest absurdity

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Clay Shirky, quoted in Boing Boing:

At Etech this year, I gave a talk entitled Ontology is Overrated. I want to put a transcript up online, and Mary Hodder, who recorded the talk, graciously agreed to give me a copy of the video.

When she came by NYC last week, she dropped off a DVD, which I then wanted to convert to AVI (the format used by my transcription service.) I installed ffmpeg and tried to convert the material, at which point I got an error message which read “To comply with copyright laws, DVD device input is not allowed.” Except, of course, there are no copyright laws at issue here, since I’M THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.

Got that? I am in possession of a video, of me, shot by a friend, copied to a piece of physical media given to me as a gift. In the video, I am speaking words written by me, and for which I am the clear holder of the copyright. I am working with said video on a machine I own. Every modern legal judgment concerning copyright, from the Berne Convention to the Betamax case, is on my side. AND I CAN’T MAKE A COPY DIRECTLY FROM THE DEVICE. This is because copyright laws do not exist to defend the moral rights of copyright holders — they exist to help enforce artificial scarcity.

Overtaking Google?

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Ben Hammersley has a piece in today’s Guardian arguing that Yahoo is catching up with Google. Hmmm… Much as I like Ben, his reasoning — though provocative — seems a bit thin. “Google’s reputation comes from three things”, he writes, “the quality of its search results, the cutting-edge research and prototypes it produces, and the interfaces it provides for other programs to tap into, known as their application program interface (API).” Ben glosses over the first while praising Yahoo’s new research team and its now-released API. I’ll take his word on the API, but the research effort seems pretty flimsy. And the search results still aren’t anything like as good. We all agree that Google needs competition to keep it sharp, but I honestly don’t see Yahoo as providing it yet.

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On this day…

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… in 1855, Charlotte Bronte died in Haworth, Yorkshire.

… in 1755, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was published.

Security blindness

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Interesting editorial in MIT Technology review about the long term implications of siphoning off research funding to support a narrow security agenda. Excerpt:

American technology—just like its foreign policy, domestic politics, and popular culture—has been swept up into what Presi­dent George W. Bush calls “the global war on terror.” The U.S. R&D establishment has narrowed its interests in the years since September 11, 2001, concentrating its resources on technologies that provide security: weapons systems, defenses against biological weapons, biometrics, network security. The U.S. government’s research-and-development budget is now bluntly militaristic. In fiscal year 2005, federal R&D spending rose 4.8 percent to $132.2 billion, but 80 percent of that increase went to defense research. And most of that increase is committed to the development of new weaponry, like the ­ballistic-missile defense system. In all, the government will spend 57 percent of its R&D budget for 2005, or a record $75 billion, on defense-related projects. President Bush’s proposed 2006 budget, now being debated in Congress, would introduce cuts to many civilian programs but spend an additional $600 million on defense research.

The author (Jason Pontin) goes on to point out that organisations like the Natiional Science Foundation and the national Institutes of Health are being correspondingly starved of federal funding.

How to use the dial telephone

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Lovely 1920s instructional film made by AT&T which Quentin found. It makes an interesting point which has a contemporary resonance, namely that technologies which once seemed strange can become so commonplace as to be invisible. It’s impossible to imagine a child growing up nowadays in Western society who did not instinctively know how to use a phone. But there was a time when a telco felt it needed to produce a movie to introduce customers to its new-fangled device.

Quote of the day

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No one knows which way the Supreme Court will go, but the tech industry fears disaster: If the creators of programs that enable sharing over the Internet are liable for what people do with the software, then the manufacturers of any devices that enable copying could also be at risk. So everyone on the trail that leads from you to a given digital file is in danger — the computer manufacturer, the CD-burner manufacturer, the audio-editing software writer, the Internet service provider and the telecom company.

Andrew Leonard, writing in Salon about MGM v. Grokster, now before the US Supreme Court.

Chinese puzzles

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China is the great enigma of our time, riddled with contradictions. It’s clearly an awakening geopolitical giant, and is potentially the only country which might one day challenge the US for global supremacy (a thought which keeps many right-wing US crazies awake at night). Almost every piece of electronics kit I buy (yea, even the sleekest stuff from Apple) has “Made in China” stamped on it somewhere. Microsoft has set up two labs in China — one to do R&D, the other to speed up the transition from R&D lab to product. Bill Gates spends a lot of time wooing the Chinese leadership. Yet the official position of the leadereship is that a special Chinese version of Linux is what will underpin all computing on its territory.

The Chinese (communist) government proclaims its desire to become a fully-fledged member of capitalist society and has even signed up to WIPO. And yet Mark Anderson (who keeps his eye on these things) says that no US company would dream of risking its intellectual property in China. Western companies are happy to have their hardware made there, but wouldn’t risk revealing their software there because of fears of being ripped off.

This has had an interesting side-effect. The Indian government, which hitherto has been one of the few administrations to take a relatively enlightened line on intellectual property at WIPO, seems to be hardening its stance and moving towards the ‘Strong IP’ side of the argument. One explanation for this could be that the Indians (who see China as their major rival) have spotted what’s going on and think that by having a Strong IP regime they can attract the Western investment that eschews China. This might be a shrewd move in the short-term, though in the longer term it may lock the Indians into the unfolding IP catastrophe.

In the course of seeking enlightenment on the Chinese enigma, I came on this elegant lecture, “Peering into the Future of China” by Brad DeLong of Berkeley. I wish more academics were as clear as this.

Those grammar-checking tools…

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… are, well, useless. Sandeep Krishnamurthy of the University of Washington has been doing some testing of Microsoft Word’s grammar checking abilities. He ran this text past it…

Marketing Bad

Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany. Updating of brand image is bad for processes in one company and many companies.

McDonalds is good brand. McDonald’s is good brand. McDonald’s are good brand. McDonalds’ are good brand. McDonald’s and Coca Cola are good brand. McDonald’s and Coca Cola is good brand. MCDONALD’S AND COCA COLA IS GOOD BRAND.

Finance good for marketing. Show me money!

4P’s are marketing mix. Four P’s is marketing mix. 4Ps is marketing mix. Manager use marketing mixes for good marketing. You Know What I Mean? Internets do good job in company name Amazon. Internets help marketing big company like Boeing. Internets make good brand best like Coca Cola.

Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft. Gates do good marketing jobs out Microsoft. Gates build the big brand in Microsoft. The Gates is leader of big company in Washington. Warren buffet do awesome job in marketing. Buffets eat buffets in city and town in country.

… and found that Word passed it without comment. To be fair, other programs fare little better. Still, Krishnamurthy’s verdict is harsh:

My conclusion is that the “Spelling and Grammar Check” feature on Microsoft Word is extraordinarily bad (especially the Grammar check part).  It is so bad that I am surprised that it is even being offered and I question the ethics of including a feature that is this bad on a product that is so widely used.

I ran the text past MS Word for Mac. The only thing it objected to was the sentence “4P’s are marketing mix”.

Iraq: status report

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Very good Open Democracy piece by Tim Garden, who was formerly Assistant Chief of the Uk Defence Staff. Sample:

Four distinct groups now threaten Iraq. First, former regime elements, who are largely drawn from the Sunni population, and number somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 fighters. There are then two different groups of Islamic extremists who can field suicide attacks. The foreign fighters, including those led by Musab al-Zarqawi, number about 1,000. A new development is the emergence of home-grown Islamist insurgents. They are still fewer than 500, but their numbers are increasing and they can deliver great destruction. Fourth, the biggest security problem of all comes from organised crime. At least twelve of Iraq’s eighteen governorates have a major crime problem, particularly when the criminals work with the insurgents.

Garden sees two possible outcomes:

1. A fragile, but improving, situation in Iraq with the hope that coalition forces might leave by the end of 2006.

2. A country which begins to look more like Afghanistan than Vietnam, with increasingly lawless regions. The prospect for coalition forces is then without limit, as the worst route of all would be to abandon Iraq and allow it to become a force for instability in the region.