” Almost alone among the cast of literary friends and enemies who populated his life, Orwell has managed to preserve and extend his relevance into a world that he would scarcely recognise.” D.J. Taylor on George Orwell’s enduring influence. Had he lived, GO would have been 99 next month.

Wonderful essay by John Gilmore on the technical absurdities ahead if the Hollings Bill ever became law.

John Gilmore is one of the Net’s Elders — and often credited with the adage that ‘the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it’. He has written a scarifying piece tracing the logical implications of the Hollings Bill to force the computer industry to build copy-protection into all its products.

Free Spam filter
A reader sent me this link.

The Culture of Martyrdom: How suicide bombing became not just a means but an end
Interesting piece by David Brooks in The Atlantic on the origins and philosophy of suicide bombing.

The coming choice: do we want a vibrant computer industry, or a protected movie business?
Blunt Fortune story about Hollywood’s demand that technology march at its glacial pace.

“Hollywood has gone to Washington to stop the trading of pirated movies online. It has thrown its lobbying muscle behind a bill, introduced by South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings, that would order the Federal Communications Commission to find a way to halt this thievery if the entertainment and technology sectors can’t come up with their own solution. Disney CEO Michael Eisner, testifying in favor of the bill, took the opportunity to bash Silicon Valley on the Senate floor: “We’re dealing with an industry where an unspoken strategy is that the killer app is piracy.” […] The bill, however, is anathema to technology leaders like Intel Chairman Andy Grove and Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs. They fear the government could muck up the computer industry royally. Moreover, they question whether it’s their responsibility to rescue an industry that has historically been more concerned with cranking out Frankenstein sequels than embracing change. “Were the manufacturers of printing presses forced to protect the monks?” Grove asked in a recent op-ed piece. “Was the PC industry forced to protect the mainframe computer industry? Why is this case any different?” In an interview, Grove says, “We spent a decade talking convergence, and now that convergence is about to happen the content industry says, ‘Oh, not so soon’ and ‘Not this way and not that way.’ I think they are deadly afraid of [convergence], deadly afraid of what it is going to do to their business.” The message is clear: The studio owners are dinosaurs. If they can’t adapt to the brave new world that companies like Intel and Apple have ushered in, extinction is what they deserve.”

Creative Commons launches next week
“NYT”story.

“Perceiving an overly zealous culture of copyright protection, a group of law and technology scholars are setting up Creative Commons, a nonprofit company that will develop ways for artists, writers and others to easily designate their work as freely shareable.

Creative Commons, which is to be officially announced this week at a technology conference in Santa Clara, Calif., has nearly a million dollars in start-up money. The firm’s founders argue that the expansion of legal protection for intellectual property, like a 1998 law extending the term of copyright by 20 years, could inhibit creativity and innovation. But the main focus of Creative Commons will be on clearly identifying the material that is meant to be shared. The idea is that making it easier to place material in the public domain will in itself encourage more people to do so…”

More comment. Law.com here. Berkman Center briefing here.

My Observer column about the idiocy of corporate suits was published on Sunday, but not in its usual spot on the site. Hence many readers (including yours truly) missed it!

Could the HCI industry be headed down a blind alley?

There’s an awful lot of research going into voice-driven interfaces, on the grounds that that’s where we’re headed. But Ben Schneiderman, the HCI guru from which many of us first learned about the subject, thinks it may all be a waste of time. According to the Washington Post:

“Hollywood and the image of HAL gave us this dream, this hope, this vision, but the reality is quite different,” says Shneiderman, a computer science professor and well-known researcher, sitting in a College Park office more cluttered with books than computers. “It turns out speaking uses auditory memory, which is in the same space as your short-term and working memory,” he adds.

What that means, basically, is that it’s hard to speak and think at the same time. Shneiderman says researchers in his computer science lab discovered through controlled experiments that when you tell your computer to “page down” or “italicize that word” by speaking aloud, you’re gobbling up precious chunks of memory — leaving you with little brainpower to focus on the task at hand. It’s easier to type or click a mouse while thinking about something else because hand-eye coordination uses a different part of the brain, the researchers concluded.

Hollywood vs High Tech
Excellent Business 2.0 article on the absurdity of the studios’ position and what’s at stake in the longer term.

Clay Shirky on the insoluble domain name problem

Typically thoughtful essay. Quote:

“Unfortunately, what made domain names contentious was simply that the internet became important, and there’s no putting the genie back in that bottle. The legal issues involved actually predate not only ICANN but the DNS itself, going back to the mid-70s and the earliest decision to create memorable aliases for unmemorable IP addresses. Once the original host name system was in place — IBM.com instead of 129.42.18.99 — the system was potentially subject to trademark litigation. The legal issues were thus implicit in the DNS from the day it launched; it just took a decade or so for anyone to care enough to hire a lawyer…”