Really sharp essay by Dave Winer on the current copy-protection mania in Congress

Excerpt:

The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act would require rearchitecting all computer and software systems, and networks — including the Internet — so that every act of copying would be subject to what’s known as Digital Rights Management, a brilliant spin on an old idea, copy protection. It failed in the 80s, in the software business and the movie business, because copying is so very basic.

Computers do a lot of copying, all the time, and almost all of it is non-controversial. To insert a new controller into every bit of code and hardware that does copying would be like diverting the Mississippi River to irrigate the Great Plains, another idea the Congress contemplated at one time. You can’t do it, it won’t happen, there aren’t enough dollars or programmers in the world to make it so. Even in these tough economic times, it would be hard to recruit capable programmers to perform an act as utterly idiotic as trying to disable copying on computers.

Now the law may pass, but the future it envisions will not. The government will eventually realize that it would cripple even their own computers, so at some point they must come to their senses, and stop listening to the industry execs (many of whom are in bed with the entertainment industry) and talk directly to some scientists and engineers and find out what’s possible.

I suppose it’s also possible that we could vote Hollings and his colleagues out of office. That would be something. And politicians could be opportunists now, but only if they know something about computers. Get on the talk shows and strut [5] your stuff. A reasonably informed Congressperson could really shine now.

The ACM has written to Senator Hollings pointing out the flaws in the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA). It’s a good, temperate letter which can be found here.

Is the ‘digital divide’ narrowing?
Robert Samuelson thinks it is.

But he’s only talking about the domestic divide in the US, and even then I’m not sure. What his article does successfully highlight, though, is how vague the concept of the ‘divide’ seems to be.

A new role for the DMCA in quelling free speech
Salon article on how the ‘church’ of Scientology has found a way of using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to intimidate ISPs hosting its critics’ web sites. Basically just another illustration of my ‘contested space’ thesis.

Wired: “The Church of Scientology has managed to yank references to anti-Scientology websites from the Google search engine.”

How to be creative: keep an untidy desk

Let’s face it, my study is a mess. Lots of computers surrounded by piles of paper — magazines, books, letters, drafts etc. My wife (a supremely tidy, organised administrator) despairs of me. When people come to stay (or even come to dinner) I have to ‘tidy’ my study, which basically means sweeping all the piles into containers and placing them out of sight. This of course is a disaster for me because the act of sweeping the piles into boxes scrambles what is in fact a sophisticated filing system.

But now comes a marvellous New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell (yes, he of The Tipping Point) arguing that there are very good reasons why creative people are great pilers of paper. Excerpt:

‘Why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to “recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.’

So there! Why I feel six inches taller already.

Lovely essay by Richard Posner on plagiarism. Makes the point that most creative endeavour involves borrowing ideas from others — which is why nobody ever wrote a popular song who did not ‘borrow’ from what went before. This is why the copyright mania now sweeping the world is nuts. Here’s an excerpt:

“Plagiarism,” in the broadest sense of this ambiguous term, is simply unacknowledged copying, whether of copyrighted or uncopyrighted work. (Indeed, it might be of uncopyrightable work[~]for example, of an idea.) If I reprint Hamlet under my own name, I am a plagiarist but not an infringer. Shakespeare himself was a formidable plagiarist in the broad sense in which I’m using the word. The famous description in Antony and Cleopatra of Cleopatra on her royal barge is taken almost verbatim from a translation of Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony: “on either side of her, pretty, fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth the god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with which they fanned wind upon her” becomes “on each side her / Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, / With divers-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem / To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool.” (Notice how Shakespeare improved upon the original.) In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot “stole” the famous opening of Shakespeare’s barge passage, “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, / Burn’d on the water” becoming “The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble.” Mention of Shakespeare brings to mind that West Side Story is just one of the links in a chain of plagiarisms that began with Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe and continued with the forgotten Arthur Brooke’s The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, which was plundered heavily by Shakespeare. Milton in Paradise Lost plagiarized Genesis, as did Thomas Mann in Joseph and His Brothers. Examples are not limited to writing. One from painting is Edouard Manet, whose works from the 1860s “quote” extensively from Raphael, Titian, Velásquez, Rembrandt, and others, of course without express acknowledgment. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.

Hear, hear! And while we’re at it, here’s a nice satirical piece on the subject by Steve Mirsky.

DAN GILLMOR: Don’t Deny Privacy for Security’s Sake

(March 18, 2002) One of the more pernicious bits of propaganda to emerge in post-Sept. 11 America is the notion that security must trump liberty. The nation’s founders are surely spinning in their graves to see their descendants sell out their heritage.

Now we’re being told of the supposed incompatibility between security and privacy in the practice of everyday business. You won’t be surprised to know that the major beneficiaries of this misinformation are the corporate busybodies themselves.

There’s no doubt that security has been lacking. Our technology infrastructure is riddled with flaws, most of them the result of an architecture that wasn’t designed with security in mind. Some are simply the result of poor programming practices.

But corporate America has never been a friend of privacy. Building dossiers on customers and regulating their behavior has always been something of a Holy Grail for businesses.

Abandoning their supposed libertarian principles, Silicon Valley companies and their competitors around the world are racing to help the snoops. Hardly a day passes that I don’t get a press release from a company promoting some new tool that would let government and private interests collect and manipulate information about our daily lives.

For some powerful business interests, privacy is an unacceptable threat. The entertainment industry, for example, wants to prevent any possibility of unauthorized use of copyrighted material. There’s only one way to achieve this – a fundamental lockdown of digital hardware and software – and the result would be a privacy debacle, because the only way to police users would be to monitor everything they view, read and hear.

Meanwhile, companies are dropping privacy products. In one of the more depressing examples, Network Associates is abandoning products with the Pretty Good Privacy encryption protocol for desktop computers.

Encryption is one technology that promotes security and privacy. Yes, it enables bad people to communicate. But if we want a safe economy in the Digital Age, strong cryptography – with its positive and negative uses – isn’t an option. It’s a requirement. [ more…]

Here’s clicking at you, kid.
Yeah I know it’s terrible but even the NYT couldn’t resist it.

As the first step in an ambitious program to establish the Internet as a future forum for film study, the American Film Institute plans to collaborate with the Georgia Institute of Technology to create a scholarly Web site for the movie “Casablanca.”

Good, critical review of John Cassidy’s book about the Internet bubble — Dot Con.