Well, that didn't take long. Google has admitted that putting Clause 11 into its EULA was a mistake. Frankly, it's a cut-and-paste error as I had guessed. As reported in a number of places (see, for example, CNET). Google has pulled the unnecessary language.

It was never clear to me how Google planned to capture any of the customer's data from general use of Chrome in the first place. One thing that is pretty clear is that Google will store auto-suggest and search-box info, along with the originating IP address. I'm sure Google has its own business purposes for this, but to me it looks like a prime target for bad guys in black hats and bad guys with legal discovery motions, all of whom would love to get their hands on peoples' search histories.

I'm filing this under "IP Abuse" because I'm starting to think Chrome, Google's new wonder-browser, is a tool for (potential) copyright abuse. I was first tipped to this by Edward Champion, who blogs under the title "Reluctant Habits." In a post dated September 3, he picks apart the Chrome EULA and does not like what he sees.

In essence, Google has applied the same EULA that it uses for Gmail to everything you put into the Chrome browser. What, you never read the gmail EULA? You do realize it gives Google copyrights in your email, right? Yeah, it does.

Anyway, here's the relevant clause from the Chrome EULA:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

That's potentially very bad. Should Google ever choose to make use of those rights it could cause problems ranging from simple embarrassment to loss of serious value. For example, I work at a company that makes Web-based tools for securities traders. If someone runs our tools in a Chrome browser, does that mean Google owns (or thinks it has any rights to) my customers' financial data? Should I be telling my customers not to run Chrome? Does this principle apply to anyone who ever does any home banking in the Chrome browser?

This condition seems completely unnecessary for a browser. I can't find any similar language in the Firefox EULA. The Internet Explorer EULA has language some people object to in terms of disabling and potential interference, but it doesn't seem to contain any terms claiming ownership of content. WTF, Google?

OK, I'm in need of help here. Have I got this right?

This is a set of innocuous-sounding proposals to "co-ordinate" and "harmonise" radio spectrum use. It contains high-minded phrases like "safeguard media pluralism." It proposes setting up some kind of overarching governing body (Body of European Regulators in Telecommunications (BERT)). National regulators would have to submit proposed regulations to BERT. Seems pretty simple. That's one side.

On the other side we have some pretty inflammatory language. "European Parliament rushes towards Soviet Internet" screams the not-for-profit FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure).

The FFII claims to be "largely responsible for the rejection of the EU software patent directive in July 2005" and to speak for over 100,000 members. Their objection to the telecom package seems to revolve around a set of amendments that were (to use a US phrase) back-doored in at the last minute. Apparently, these amendments would permit BERT "to define which are the authorised software applications for the internet." Which is to say, if your preferred app doesn't meet with regulatory approval then you can't run it, your ISP can't provide it to you?

That'd be... bad. But wait, there's more.

A site called "TELECOMTV" is conducting a related petition campaign against the package, on the grounds that among the 800 or so amendments to the package is language that would remove ISPs content-neutral immunity.

In particular, ISPs currently aren't required to monitor or police content or user identities on their networks, until something specific arises such as an allegation of copyright violation or other illegal activity. ISPs are "mere conduits" under current laws; the new amendments would remove that protection and force ISPs to track or even block individuals' access to the net.

TelecomTV is arguing for the removal of three specific amendments that would force ISPs to act as copyright police. They are also opposed to the spread of something like a "3 Strikes" rule ("Ripotse Graduee" in French) that would require ISPs to warn, discipline, and eventually sever users.

This doctrine is presently generating a lot of criticism in France where it was first proposed. Organizations such as "La Quadrature du Net" are calling for a moratorium on new rules related to digital telecoms rights & freedoms. The argument is that the MEP (Members of the European Parliament) didn't really understand what they were voting on, don't grok the net, and need to consider the implications of new regulations more fully before passing them.

I hope I've done this issue some measure of justice. An American point of view isn't necessarily going to translate some of these things well, even though most of the published materials are in English.

For years (and I mean YEARS - remember this report from 2005? Or Diebold's abuse of takedown notices from 2003?) copyfighters have been complaining about the abuse of the DMCA's takedown notice provisions.

In the ongoing saga of Universal Music versus a dancing baby, we have finally gotten a ruling stating that copyright holders must take fair use into account. Timothy Lee's write-up on the decision for ars technica goes through the claims Universal made and notes that the judge either simply ignored them or slapped them down. (Hint to Judge Jeremy Fogel: ignoring the Cartel's willful stupidity may reduce your blood pressure but isn't likely to get them to stop it.)

So what happens now? Well, Stephanie Lenz's suit against Universal is still alive at this point, but there's nothing stopping them from throwing more legal sand in the gears. In theory Lenz and her EFF lawyers can now begin discovery for their case. We'll see how far that goes.

EFF posted a PDF of the decision: http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/lenz_v_universal/lenzorder082008.pdf

Cory Doctorow and DJ Spooky on stage together in NYC to benefit the CBLDF.
Details here: http://www.cbldf.org/pr/archives/000367.shtml

Two very interesting and thoughtful people. Benefiting a great charity. What more could you ask? (except to be in NYC this Thursday night)

A little over a year ago I was writing about negotiations between SoundExchange and Web streamcasters. The issue was a set of exorbitant new fees authorized by the US Copyright office. Back then it appeared that Congress might even pass some kind of legislation. In the glare of scrutiny and public outcry, the Cartel backed down, a little. Web radio didn't die.

But it did ingest a poison - a slow-acting set of fees and restrictions that may yet kill the nascent industry. According to Peter Whoriskey's story in this weekend's Washington Post Pandora may have to shut down due to the fees.

Pandora is wildly popular by Internet standards: over 1 million online customers, a top-10 app for iPhone, and adding 40,000 new customers/day. With numbers like that, why would the business shutter? Well, according to the story, 70% of the anticipated USD 25 million all those customers generate will go to fees. The company is losing money even as it grows, when it should have gone revenue-positive next year.

Last year it was Markey who tried to broker a deal. This year the Congressional go-between seems to be Berman (D-CA) but he's frustrated to the point of pulling the plug. Regardless of individual Congresscritters' frustrations, nothing seems to be in the works to fix the fundamental inequalities that force Web casters to pay rates more than double that of satellite radio. Sat radio rates are based on percentage-of-revenue, a metric that Web radio has asked for repeatedly and never gotten; Web radio pays per-song. Traditional radio, of course, still pays no performance royalties.

Oddly, the Pandora blog has nothing about this; last year Westergren used the blog as a hell-raising tool.

Our friends at the FMC sent me a couple pointers to upcoming events, primarily their fall seminar series. Here are the pointers of interest:
Monday, September 22, Old Town School of Folk Music, Chicago, IL: http://www.futureofmusic.org/events/Chicago08/
Monday, October 6, Public Theater, New York, NY: http://www.futureofmusic.org/events/NYC08/

Seminars cost $25 and are primarily targeted at musicians and other people involved in the business of making, selling, or distributing music.

Kevin Kelly - who a few months ago put out the notion of "true fan" - has another interesting assertion in his blog: people want to pay for stuff.

Why, then, is copying - and not paying - so prevalent? Kelly says that people want to pay if they perceive that the exchange is fair, if it's easy enough, and if they understand some sort of benefit that comes from the paying.

Just stating a benefit (enabling creators to be paid) isn't enough. Conversely, just threatening a negative (lawsuits) isn't enough. Kelly refers to a survey of UK youth in which the surveyed indicated a desire for a monthly-fee unlimited use music service. More or less the way television is delivered to them now.

I'm more or less on-board with this notion. It's essentially what Copyfight has been arguing for years: the experience matters, new business models are needed, etc. The place where I differ is when Kelly asserts that what we want is a relationship, and that paying is a form of/part of that.

I'm sorry, but I really don't want to have a relationship with iTunes, or NBC, or even a hip Web 2.0 technology like Flikr. Paying for these things doesn't make me feel differently in respect to them. I want to have a relationship with people, whether it's a Big Name creator like Joss Whedon or other fans. If Whedon makes his creations available on iTunes or NBC then I might pay those entities as a necessary component of being a fanboy, or if other fans share images on Flikr that's part of a relationship. Paying is just incidental, which is why I think Kelly isn't paying enough attention to his own hints that the payment process has to be so easy (seamless) that it fades into the background.

Given that the guests include Cory (boingboing) Doctorow and Randall (xkcd) Munroe I doubt most anyone will notice I'm there. On the other hand, I can't imagine putting Cory and myself in the same place and NOT having discussions of intellectual property arise. As I've noted before, Cory has been putting some effort into educating SF writers on the status and realities of modern copyright practices. As Guest of Honor at the con he'll have lots of chances to air his views and talk about his different projects

His blog entry pulls out all the embedded URLs from the article and includes four links to discussions of photographers rights. Bookmark this one: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0806.html#1

Microsoft wished for a new trial, but must not have asked nicely enough this time. Last time it was accused of infringing Alcatel-Lucent (digital music) patents it won, getting a negative verdict and large judgment thrown out. This time, however, Judge Marilyn L. Huff of the U.S. District Court in San Diego not only upheld the verdict, denying Microsoft's request for a new trial, she increased the penalty against the infringing software maker to a whopping USD 511.6 million in damages and interest.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft said it would appeal, meaning the five-year-long patent scuffle is likely to continue for years to come.

I had a nice chat last week with Mike O'Donnel of iCopyright about their new service for small and independent publishers. The company has a large for-pay service that is used by large publishers, including news wires, to track the digital progress of copyrighted materials and they're reusing some of that technical infrastructure for the new offering.

O'Donnell noted that previous attempts to let individuals control how their intellectual property is used, particularly Creative Commons, lack a number of useful features. iCopyright is promoting itself as an alternative that is free to small-scale creators, and supported by advertising and partner revenue.

But back up a step - what's wrong with CC and how can it be fixed? Well, some of the lacks are that there is no loopback to the creator. If I put a CC license on my works I have no way to track how those works are being used, or to confirm that something is in compliance with my CC license terms. CC also has no enforcement system and if I wish to charge a fee for use (a term specified in CC licenses) there's no mechanism to help me collect these fees.

iCopyright addresses each of these. When you use their service you build a ©reator tag and use that as part of your copyright notice on your writing, artwork, photo, etc. The tag links back to the iCopyright servers, which track clicks and loads so you can find out who's viewing your tagged material, where it's displayed, and so on. Separately, iCopyright has a scanner technology similar to Attributor, which attempts to find places on the Web where tagged content is being used, potentially without permission.

As the owner of the ©reator tag you get a profile on their site that you can use to publicize yourself and to set the terms for use of your work. Unfortunately, the free service doesn't allow you to vary permissions by item - you need to pick one model for sharing all content associated with that tag. For example, if you wish to charge a fee for use of your photos, iCopyright will give you a Paypal link so people can give you the fees you set. If, however, you also want to give away your blog entries for free you can't use the same ©reator tag - you'd have to create another one and attach the free license to the second tag.

As a free-to-creators service this seems like a step forward - we definitely need more active and more powerful tools to turn copyright flexibility and fair use ideas into actionable entities. It's far from the last word, I'm sure.

The Futurist online has an interesting think piece by Patrick Tucker on the possible future of writers, books, and writing in this century. Riffing primarily on a talk by Tim O’Reilly from earlier this year, Tucker visits interesting notions such as "the book as souvenir."

There's not a whole lot new here for Copyfight readers but it's an interesting checkpoint that draws together several ideas. One is that modern online writing (primarily blogging) is barely paying the bills even for fairly popular writers, particularly those dependent on ad clicks for revenue. Another is that those who are (still) reading books are interested in more than the content of the page - they're looking for connection and probably also participation of some form.

One way to take this is to think of the book as a part of, or maybe just an intro to, a set of experiences such as blogs, chat, conferences, parties, or formal training situations. Not all of these are appropriate for all published books, but genres such as science fiction have long connected writers to their fans through conventions and other gatherings, much less formally organized.

Finally, there's the question of whether or not the book-qua-book will survive all this evolution and revolutionary change. Will things like the Kindle put the book as we know it to rest? Probably not. As Michael Agger documents in his piece for Slate, the act of reading a physical paper book creates distinctly different - and notably pleasurable - mental states that just aren't found yet in any other reading device.

Nobody quite knows why this should be so - perhaps it's something to do with the book-as-artifact, or maybe it's as simple as the fact that we aren't subjected to the same kinds of distractions and interruptions with a physical book as we are subject to when reading online or with an e-book device. However you assign it, though, it seems that books in some form are likely to be around for quite a while. If only we can figure out how to keep publishing profitable...

The CS Department at University of Washington have released a report with this title reporting on an investigation of copyright enforcement as it currently exists on P2P networks.

The report's site contains a summary of the report's findings, a downloadable PDF of the full report and an online FAQ describing their research methods and key findings. I haven't digested the full thing yet, but the three basic conclusions are stated pretty bluntly:

1. Anyone can be framed for copyright infringement. The remote and automated generation of complaints shifts the burden significantly onto the accused to prove their innocence.
2. In addition to malicious framing, innocent people can still be erroneously fingered, even if they've never run a P2P program
3. Privacy in P2P networks is partial or illusory at best

Could it be? Say it with me. That'd be... The Cartel.

OK, so I'm not about to start a new career as a singer-songwriter. Which is probably good since I'd probably be foolish enough to give away my own recordings of my own performances for free and if I used BitTorrent for that then I could be the one getting DoSed.

But that's in the hypothetical future. Here in the real present, it's a company called Revision 3. This company uses BitTorrent to distribute its own high-quality digital shows. This past weekend they were subjected to a SYN-flood attack that brought down their servers. The flood was specifically aimed at the port they use for their torrent tracking server.

In a brief blog snippet on CNET, Elinor Mills asked who would want to bring down Revision3? Good question - it's not a well-known company with lots of aggrieved foes. Yesterday, Jim Louderback posted an extensive dissection, including amusing explanations for newcomers describing what a SYN-flood attack is.

Apparently the attacker (MediaDefender) made no attempt to hide its actions. In fact, the company has previously been exposed - by its own leaked emails - as a deliberate miscreant on peer-to-peer networks. So it's not too surprising they're still at it.

But according to Louderback's posting, the company admitted to worse, including "abusing Revision3's network, over a period of months." Excuse me, isn't that illegal? You know, Company A steals Company B's resources to make a profit - what do we call that? Theft? Fraud? Or just Cartel business-as-usual? Louderback points out that DoS attacks are illegal computer fraud and abuse and claims that the FBI is "looking into" the matter.

My cynical side says this won't amount to a hill of beans, but one can still hope.

Sherman, set the wayback machine to 2005! No, I'm not talking about the Internet Archive's Wayback machine. I'm talking about traveling back in time to late 2005 when the 'net was buzzing - angrily - about a Cartel proposal to require DRM to be embedded in every broadcast signal. The end of 'free' TV? No more time-shifting allowed? You remember that.

In the end, the Cartel got half a pie. There's a flag, but the FCC explicitly stated that it wasn't supposed to prevent home recording. Even "redistributing it within the home or similar personal environment as consistent with copyright law" is allowed. That's a quote from the FCC's rulemaking on the issue (helpful PDF from our friends at the EFF).

So why are we talking about this again? Well, it seems that Microsoft's Vista Media Center suddenly started refusing to record over-the-air digital content broadcast by NBC. Here's a screen capture provided by the EFF, which is trying to raise the profile on this incident:

According to Greg Sandoval at CNET, Microsoft has admitted that it implemented the Broadcast Flag and is claiming that it's based on FCC rules. Duck and cover! Duck and cover!

Aside from being just blatantly wrong in its justification, MSFT's admission raises a host of questions. First, it seems likely that the broadcast flag wasn't just added to Vista Media Center recently. So why did it just become visible? One possibility is there's a bug somewhere - certainly wouldn't be the first time. But nobody's claiming this was an error. Another possibility is that NBC asked for recordings of its popular programs to be blocked. Or maybe the flag on those programs was erroneously set. So far NBC is mum, claiming to be looking into things.

My cynical take on it is that they're waiting to see how many people notice and complain. If they get a lot of bad stink they claim it was an error, apologize, and move on. If this blows over then they can feel they have a green light to block home recording any time they want, at least for people foolish enough to use Vista as their DVR.

MythTV, anyone?

I don't blog much about the minutae of the cascade of digital music-related lawsuits in part because there are people who obsessively blog these things and I've lost patience with it over the years. One place that hasn't lost patience and generally does a very good job with the details is Recording Industry vs The People.

Yesterday they published an entry that caught my eye because it goes to the heart of something I've been wanting to see for a while: someone is trying to kick the legs out from under the set of suppositions that the RIAA are using to sue the pants off everyone and anyone.

Here's a short list of things the RIAA would like us to believe and have (by and large) gotten judges to agree with:

• You are not allowed to make MP3 copies of tracks on CDs you legally own


• Placing MP3s into a file directory that might be accessed from outside your computer is equivalent to giving away copies


• An IP address is equivalent to a personal identifier

Well now we a judge rejecting the RIAA's motion for summary judgement in the case. If the judge had bought into the RIAA's premises above the case would've been another slam-dunk win for the Cartel. Instead Judge Wake appears to be ready to change his earlier stance and agree with the defendants (and their EFF counsel) that simply placing copies in a directory is not a "distribution". This is key because if there's no distribution then there's no copyright infringement.

Furthermore, there's a good question to be argued as to whether the defendants are even the ones who put that MP3 file there. Such an issue would be settled by a trial, but the RIAA doesn't want trials. Its jihad is based on filing and rapidly settling thousands of these lawsuits. Having them go to trial would prove time-consuming, risky, and expensive even if the Cartel won.

For a large variety of reasons, the Cartel can't afford to wage this war in the court trial dockets. It needs to be conducted in the mass, scalable fashion whereby the threat of the judiciary is used to extort payment from consumers... err, victims... err, named defendants.

Despite the amount of time this case has already dragged out, it's still in the very early stages. As Eric Bangeman pointed out in his ars technica story on the denial, Judge Wake's reasoning is at odds with other judges' decisions on similar issues. For the great majority of cases, the RIAA is being successful in its jihad. My guess is that they'll argue this case a little further to see if Judge Wake can be swayed back. If he continues to rule against them, they'll drop the case before it goes to trial - they have no incentive to get an actual verdict on the books against them and an appeal would be even more expensive. So long as the tide continues to run in their favor, the Cartel can keep going even if it has to drop a case now and then. To truly kick the legs out from under them would require an act of Congress or a decision by a much higher-level court. Neither will happen soon.

Cory Doctorow has structured an interesting...something around his book Little Brother. I don't know what to call this - it's part charity, part pay-for-value-received, part experiment.

The idea is that Cory gives away this book - it's online for free. But there are people (true fans, maybe?) who want to donate to Cory in return for the value they receive with this book.

Cory doesn't want direct donations, not least because he doesn't want to cut his publishers out of the loop. In the donation page linked above he points out that they add significant value. So what he's proposing is a method for people to get copies of the book into the hands of teachers and librarians, who otherwise might not have funds for it or who might have to pay out of their own pockets. Librarians or teachers who want to receive free copies put in requests and they're matched up with people who want to donate. Cory and his staff are apparently donating their time and administrative effort to coordinate the giving.

This is my little signal boost for a guy who seems to keep showing how giving away his books makes things better.

Clay Shirky is one of the better Big Thinkers on the Web today, particularly in the arenas of social media and cooperative interactions. He's published an essay called "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus". In part this is related to his new book Here Comes Everybody but focused around a single idea.

The idea is that, contrary to the naysayers, we are doing something, potentially the start of something huge. That something is participating, whether it's in something as erudite as Wikipedia or as trivial as lolcats and World of Warcraft. We're taking some of the hours we currently waste on passive television viewing (Shirky estimates roughly one trillion hours of television are watched by the Internet-connected population) and putting them into "an architecture of participation."

Now, as a Copyfighter, the thing that interests me is that almost all of that participation involves creation and sharing, to some degree. If you're in a constrained environment like Warcraft or Second Life, then the acts of creation and sharing you can engage in are limited by the virtual world's structure, coding and rules, few of which are accessible to the mass of players. But if you're out on the wider 'net then your creation and sharing are inevitably going to bump up against the intellectual property structures of the physical world.

So maybe the Copyright Wars were inevitable. And maybe, if Shirky is right, they're not only inevitable, but it's inevitable that we - the online, wired, connected, sharing population - will win. Or our children will. Looked at this way the Copyright Wars aren't just the death throes of a few mass media empires with badly outdated business models - they're the collateral damage of a tectonic culture change. That's a cool thought, even if it's probably wrong in some of the details.

Gaiman included a few "final" thoughts on copyright. Given how much he's involved himself in the discussion of these issues over the years I seriously doubt this'll be his final word, but perhaps he feels he has no more to say on the Rowling case.

In this entry he's reflecting on his own copyright battles with Todd McFarlane over authorship of certain material that Gaiman wrote. He also links to the judge's decision in that case. There are no real parallels that I can see, and Gaiman says as much. Still, it does point out that he has first-hand experience of someone trying to steal things he wrote and that there is a framework within law for dealing with such things - where such framework does not include Ms. Rowling's emotional appeals to 'think of the charity'.

Gaiman put up a blog entry explicitly calling out fair use. In it he talks about the Rowling/RDR Books case, noting that her approach is different from his own in response to 'unauthorized' material that has been put out on him and his writing.

He also notes that his own two first books were at best legally shaky in Fair Use terms - an aggressive lawsuit could easily have shut him down from writing anything more. On the one hand that'd be a shame - Gaiman is popular and has gone on to write many well-respected and awarded books. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's a career path we can depend on a lot of people following.

Ms Rowling is not the only one concerned with how much of her work others are taking. Law.com has a report from Janet Conley on a lawsuit by three academic publishers against Georgia State University.

At issue are incidents like a 32-page copy made by a music professor. The prof claims that the copying was within University guidelines ("no more than 20%") and that the cost of the volume ($250) was prohibitive for students to purchase. The publishers claim that the U's practice of digitizing and distributing course packs of excerpts costs them money in lost book sales.

The case is a little different from typical copyright suits such as the Rowling case. The publishers are not seeking monetary damages, nor are they particularly trying to punish the University. Instead what they're hoping to do is create a legal precedent saying that Georgia State's guidelines and practices do not constitute fair use and not only should this university be enjoined, but the multitude of other schools with similar practices should be stopped.

As Conley points out, this case may break new ground. Past cases have been decided on issues around the creation of paper copies (Xeroxing) often by for-profit institutions. In this case, the copying at issue is digital and the organization doing the copying is non-profit. The educational area is one where courts have traditionally afforded a greater degree of leeway in fair use and even the plaintiff's lawyer has to admit that he can't find a law or binding precedent stating how much digital copying would be "not too much." It seems likely that if the case ever makes it as far as a decision that decision would be appealed. My personal opinion is that they'll work out a settlement before it gets that far - neither side wants to see a precedent set that would go against them. Plus there's a core reality that academic publishers and educational institutions exist in a kind of death-grip dependency that would harm both if it was violently broken.

Or, formally, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. v. RDR Books, 07-cv-09667. But since it was Rowling testifying Monday, that's where the focus is. If Mark Hamblett's piece for law.com is accurate it appears things are getting nasty right off the bat. Considering how heated some of the comments were on my last entry on this topic I expect there's a fair bit of passion in the air.

The basic question is whether or not the lexicon itself is a protected fair use creation or whether its printing should be enjoined as copyright infringement. Or, as Rowling called it, "wholesale theft."

Rowling's arguments seemed to be laced with emotional appeal and what strikes me, frankly, as shenanigans. She's so upset about the book that she had to fly personally to New York to testify, even though the judge offered to accept written testimony. The book has also "decimated [her] creative work" even though she gave the Lexicon Web site an award in 2004. And, somehow, the publication of this book is going to stop her project of doing her own lexicon, as if her fans wouldn't buy every single work she published. Did you know she was just about to give away all the proceeds from her lexicon to charity? News to me. Hey, Rowling, how about you take some of that $9 billion in book sales and donate it instead?

Mind you, I'm not convinced she's not right - the Lexicon book may well be infringing. I just dislike cheesy appeals to emotion. Think of the children! Puh-leeze. None of this is really germane to the question of whether or not the Lexicon is a transformative reference work, in which case it ought to be protected. Fortunately there's no jury to be swayed in this trial - let's hope Judge Patterson sticks to reasoning from the facts.

Daily Kos posted a think piece this weekend. The essay argues that big media have, in effect, caused their own devaluation. That is, the "amateurish" state of news on the Web is not really due to the proliferation of bloggers or non-authority sources such as Wikipedia. This is the thesis advanced by Andrew Keen in his book The Cult of the Amateur. Instead, the problem is that there has been a systematic attack on big news sources once considered reliable (CNN, the NY Times, the Washington Post, etc.) by forces such as talk radio and Fox News.

It's no coincidence that these latter are by and large right-wing, and Daily Kos is itself quite left-wing. However, that doesn't make the argument necessarily wrong. Just something more to think about.

Neat-o-rama blog reported that students in UT San Antonio were told to come up with a "code of academic integrity in order to combat plagiarism". Apparently they then copied a chunk of their code from BYU.

Now on the surface this is a ha-ha funny story about kids who copy when they shouldn't. But the people I think don't get it here are the teachers and Neat-o-rama (though in fairness the blogs' commenters seem to get the point better than the blog itself). Why shouldn't the students copy an existing code from a university that is respected and has presumably tested and refined its code over some period of time? What's the value in inventing something new when there are good examples around?

By analogy I suspect you wouldn't find many differences in the criminal codes of the various US states pertaining, say, to burglary. The established terms and definitions are shared; the understanding of the crime is shared. The specific wording may vary here and there, but if I was going to set up a 51st state it would seem logical for me to look at and probably copy criiminal codes that have (you should pardon the term) been debugged by others.

In terms of inventive arts I don't think there are a whole lot of innovations one ought to make in putting together a code of conduct. Clarity, forthrightness, simplicity and other metrics related to the understandability of the result seem to me to count for a whole lot more than how the particular words are arranged.

It's true that one of the important parts of an educational writing exercise - as well as in the real world - is learning to acknowledge one's sources properly. And I'd bet the students didn't do that here, but whose fault is it for not teaching them that?

Riffing on the same theme as compfight, Google has added a feature to its advanced search that lets you find Web pages with explicit usage rights as a search parameter. The parameter lets you specify a few combinations of free to use, share, and modify.

Unfortunately, the feature is buried by default under a collapsed page region. It's one click to expand, but I wonder if many people - even advanced search users - will go that extra step. Most searchers I know are in a hurry to get results.

The search form provides a link to an explanation of Usage Rights, which includes a further link to Creative Commons. It's not exactly the kind of feature that will drive awareness and publicity, but it's a small step forward.

Onion Network News gives us a guideline for how to figure out whether the FCC will find something obscene or permissible. Maybe the Supreme Court should include this in their review.

Neil Gaiman posted an update on the experiment of making American Gods free online to read. Numbers from Harper Collins, which is hosting the e-book, show a decent number of unique views and a fair number of page impressions. If their numbers and my math are right the average viewer is reading about 45 pages online, which is 1-2 chapters.

That's not much for a full-length novel, but apparently it's enough to interest people, since H-C reports that weekly sales of the book have gone up threefold since the start of the experiment. Sadly there's no way to correlate sales data with the free online read data. Perhaps it's new readers, perhaps it's people remembering they meant to buy it anyway, or replacing an old copy. Perhaps it's people dissatisfied with the cumbersome online interface but interested enough to invest their cash in getting a better interaction.

One experiment is just a data point and doesn't necessarily tell us a whole lot. However, the positive trends in all these numbers are probably good enough leverage for Gaiman to push the experiment further. We shall see. Meantime, it's probably not wrong to say "free books online sells more paper copies." I think that's what Cory said last year.

Clay Shirky gave a talk at the Berkman Center covering some of the ideas from his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The video is online from Harvard under a Creative Commons license. The focus of the talk is Shirky's notions about the enabling power of the Net and along the way he has a lot of interesting things to say about sharing, including Napster and a variety of other collective sharings like American dubbings of Japanese anime.

There's a lot of power in sharing and Shirky points to several interesting examples of that power. The video is a bit long and definitely not high production value, but definitely worth the time. I need to read the underlying book to parse through the ideas more fully than I can get from a single talk.

File this under "rampant speculation." The headline is that New Line Cinema, maker of the Lord of the Rings movies, is calling it quits, with top execs out and assets being snapped up by Warner Brothers. Question: did the ongoing legal problems over those movies sink the studio?

End of last year it looked like New Line was in the clear, having finally settled its long-running legal battles with Peter Jackson, and green-lighting two "Hobbit"-based movies. But just about four weeks ago trouble broke out again with the Tolkien estate suing New Line for... well let's call it "cheating them blind."

Ironically, just about the time this suit was filed I pointed to an LA Times piece on how Disney had screwed over a naive young author. The Tolkein estate isn't young and it has lots of money to hire lawyers. Their primary claim seems to be the same, though - given the massive grosses taken in by the Rings movies they've been paid, um, let's see here... NOTHING.

I can't figure out from the various news stories whether WB is taking on all of New Line's debts and obligations or whether those will be shed the way New Line's 600 employees will be. Assuming that WB still wants to see the Hobbit movies made (on the "we will make another kajillion dollars this way" theory) then they'll probably come up with some kind of settlement that leaves them in clear control of the rights.

Kevin Kelly has caused a bit of a stir by putting out a model for patronage support of creative people. His concept is that of a "true fan" and the piece's title is "1,000 True Fans". The idea is that if a person was willing to spend about one day's salary (Kelly picks the arbitrary sum of $100) then an artist could be supported by one thousand such people.

This is on the surface a very attractive idea, not least because the numbers seem manageable. Most people well enough off to be regularly on the Net probably can manage a $100 donation. Most people can conceive of appealing to an audience of 1,000. It's almost the polar opposite of the mega-millions/blockbuster mentality that pervades so much corporate media production, from books to movies to music and so on.

Unfortunately the idea isn't as appealing once you dig past the ideal surface and into the gritty details. Probably the best counter-analysis I've read so far is John Scalzi's: "The Problem With 1,000 True Fans."

Scalzi starts from the point of being someone who probably has at least that many True Fans already. And then points out a number of uncomfortable things, such as those fans being drawn from a base population that is at least two orders of magnitude greater. And that even though the tens of thousands of well-off Netizens represents a good pool of people from which Fans may be drawn it's still a very small pool and quickly exhausted.

Just to pick my own personal favorite example, the south-by-southwest festival this month features over 2000 bands, interactive artists/designers, filmmakers, and other creative types. Supporting just that one festival by Kelly's patronage model would consume nearly a quarter-million True Fans. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of the vast sea of writers, musicians, and artists who would like to get paid and maybe even make a living from their creative work.

That doesn't make Kelly's idea stupid - it just makes it not-completely-thought-out, which is OK. Right now you can cast your eyes around the Web and find a hodgepodge of "Donate" buttons and similar mechanisms for fans to express their direct support of creative types; these also have their pros and cons. We need more big thoughts on how to develop alternatives to (that can co-exist with) large corporate funding.