Archive for February, 2009

Today Georgetown hosted the Eighth Scholarly Communications Symposium to discuss the implications of the Google Book Search Settlement. Siva Vaidhyanathan and James Grimmelmann both had great points to make. The session was recorded and will hopefully be posted soon, but in the meantime here are my notes:

James Grimmelmann

• Google Book Search (GBS) started out as an indexing project
• The scale makes individual negotiation prohibitively expensive
• Hanging over all this is the orphan works prohect
• Google is becoming potentially the world’s largest book seller
• This is an elegant solution to breaking the orphan works logjam because it is opt-out
• “Google may become the only game in town for serious online access to many of these works.”
• Book Rights Registry
• Settlement makes almost no provision for the privacy of readers
• Privacy is at the hear of an intellectual history that libraries are at the center of
• No consumer-rights work
• First sale, etc. are shot
• All copyright owners are bound by this because of its class-action nature
• If this lawsuit was to try the copyright status of GBS, it didn’t need to be class-action
• Class-action was necessary to solve orphan works, but paradoxically throws all those unknown owners behind the worrisome provisions
• “This is not the way these types of things should be done in a democracy. We have public institutions to solve gigantic issues, not the courtroom. The courtroom’s adversarial approach is the wrong way to determine the future of information.”
• But the settlement is still a net positive

Siva Vaidytanathan

• Most books will never pop out in GBS. Even rediscovered works will only make a couple cents a year.
• GBS will have minimal impact on out-of-print works – otherwise they would be in print
• Lessig, Doctorow, etc greeted GBS with much excitement. It was a big company fighting for fair use.
  • Copying was incidental and necessary – what mattered was the user experience
  • Siva disagreed with Doctorow over whether or not Google indexing would be a boon to authors
• Sony Betamax had created the general right to copy for personal uses and gave breathing room for technology companies
• Fair use isn’t supposed to be decided en masse. It need to be determined on a case-by-case basis
• Libraries should have done this, especially because they have special rights under copyright
• “Nothing about Google is just about what’s on the screen.” GBS was about gathering the lexicon of humanity – they want semantic analysis of text to improve search function. This was not simply about creating an index.
• Google was imposing the copyright norms of the web onto the rest of the world – the default is expecting copying by search engines
• If Google had lost, they would have been betting their whole business
• Deal with libraries was quid pro quo – libraries got a digital copy of everything they gave Google. That is payment for the use of the material. That was the APA’s silver bullet.
• Google needs to still care about this project in ten years.
• “Why are we betting everything on what may be a fly-by company in the scale of history.” We are sacrificing better options for expediency.
• The nondisclosure agreements are anathema to scholars and academics, but that’s how Google works
• Libraries are one of the few noncommercial places in America. Google’s vending machine is troubling because it changes that.
• Deeply troubled by lack of user confidentiality
• We need to know how book search algorithm works
  • It doesn’t reflect what experts consider the top books in a given field
• The gatekeeping function is about standard and term setting. That’s where winners and losers are picked. This is far subtler than it used to be.
• Not convinced we’ve missed the opportunity
  • Outlining the Human Knowledge Project (like Human Genome Project where scientists rejected Venter’s Solera – a private project. The two databases complement each other)
  • Pool resources globally – to preserve and extend the record of human knowledge

Q&A

• Budget setters may stop physical collections
  • Scans are not archive quality and have errors that may be undiscovered
• Because the libraries are not parties to the lawsuit, they have no real standing
• Google’s presence takes the air out of any other digitization plans
• Access medium, not a preservation medium.
• Rare materials should be digitized more because that’s what people cannot get access to
• Open Content Alliance is a “heartbreaking” story

I have an opinion piece in Georgetown’s newspaper about open access and Conyers’ bill which would end the NIH policy.

The right way — the fair way — is to continue the NIH open access policy that requires researchers receiving taxpayer money from the NIH to submit a copy of their manuscript to the free, publicly accessible PubMed Central database. By removing the barrier to scholarship, open access allows scholars to advance the frontiers of knowledge and lets ordinary Americans increase their awareness of various medical conditions.

Check out the whole thing here and take action to support open access here.

I have a new post up on Techdirt about my (sorta) home town of Chicago rushing head first into a Big Brother network of surveillance cameras:

Under the auspices of fighting crime and preventing terrorism, Chicago’s Police Superintendent Jody Weis is hyping CCTV as having “limitless” crime-fighting potential. The reality, as is evident to anyone who has actually researched this type of thing, is that studies have shown municipal surveillance cameras to have little to no positive effect on crime. Further, London is widely known to have the most extensive CCTV network in the world, but that served as little deterrent to the terrorists of July 2005. But instead of bringing this up, the Sun-Times and Chicago officials point to a test in which “live video was used to catch a petty thief in the act of sticking his hand in a Salvation Army kettle outside Macy’s State Street.” Given the cost in both dollars and civil liberties, it is hard to justify catching petty criminals stealing some coins from charity.

Head on over to check the rest of it out.

[Sorry for longish, rambling post, but it's important.]

In 2001/2002, MIT unveiled MIT Open CourseWare – an initiative to make available the material from their classes. For free. Online. Today, they publish more than 500 courses per annum – ranging from simply syllabi and assignments to full video recordings. They have been joined by Yale, University of Michigan, Tufts, Notre Dame and hundreds more around the world. (And, if things go to plan, Georgetown will be joining soon.)

MIT could have joined the dime-a-dozen for-profit distance learning businesses that sprouted up with the Internet, but given the dramatically decreased costs of publishing online, MIT, with the generous support of some very charitable foundations, decided to change the game. And I think, in time, that game change will change the world.

But to get there – that changed world where higher education doesn’t remain the purview of a select cadre of ivory tower dwellers – much more needs to be done.

I’ve been involved trying to make sure Georgetown does its part, but now is the time for big thinking. We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars to stimulate the economy and, one hopes, prime it for continued success.

Education is a key part of continued competitiveness, growth and success. It’s no secret that the United States cannot compete on manufacturing cars or sewing t-shirts. We need to develop the human capital to embrace our future as a knowledge economy. We need a population equipped to research, develop, synthesize, manipulate and invent new information. We need education to get there.

Yet, America is falling further and further behind. Our primary education system has been hemorrhaging opportunity for decades. Fortunately, we have had an unrivaled network of institutions of higher education. The world’s best and brightest come to American universities – the same ones American high school students aspire to join. These schools have – through their introductory courses – served to catch up students from diverse backgrounds. In essence, our universities have made up for high school failures (at least for the students who make it through the high schools to universities).

But we’re failing to do that now.

In his recent interview with Charlie Rose, Harvard professor Michael Porter, who studies international competitiveness noted that America has fallen out of the top 10 in college attainment. Although we have many of the best colleges in the world, supply is falling short of demand.

That is why Open CourseWare makes sense now, more than ever. We need to utilize the Internet to “explode the classroom.”

People crave education. Laid off factory workers don’t want to work at Wal-Mart. They want to receive knowledge so that they can compete again. In a Biblically bad economy, people don’t curl up and cry. They seek knowledge to make sense of the world. And thanks to UC-Irvine and MIT, plenty of people are turning to OCW to study finance and management.

Whether you like it or not, the government is going to be a big part of our economy for the foreseeable future. It has always played a role in education – establishing universities, funding research and employing top academics. My argument is that it should play a role in opening higher education to all.

This could take many forms:

• Mike Caulfield has been doing some thinking about why OCW is stimulus worthy. The idea is to fund OCW efforts at any university that commits to produce 10 courses in an open manner. Financial constraints are one of the main challenges to OCW, so let’s stop paying dying industrial car companies, and let’s fund the next generation of thinkers.
• I’ve mused that perhaps OCW should be framed in terms of taxpayer access. Just as my paying taxes to NIH justifies my access to their research, shouldn’t my taxes to the University of Illinois justify my access to an OCW site of theirs? (By the way, NIH Open Access is threatened. Please help.)
• And most recently, the very smart folks at the New America Foundation have included a proposal for an “Open University” in 10 New Higher Education Ideas for a New Congress:

(6) Open University

Approximately 5 million adult workers displaced by global trade will need education and retraining over the next 10 years. There are millions of additional adults who have some college, but no degree-many of whom would like and should be encouraged to complete their studies. Modeled on Great Britain’s 40-year-old and well-regarded Open University, Congress could seed a non-profit American Open University that provides low-cost, quality online education to undergraduate and graduate adult learners everywhere. Students would benefit from the flexible higher education course times and offerings associated with distance education programs. An American Open University would need to be seeded with $100 million over five years to begin operation and guarantee students access to financial aid. (Five years in, accreditation would attach, thereby enabling students to access the main federal financial aid programs.) Priority should be placed on proposals that partner with existing, accredited colleges and universities.

Pros: Future-oriented, big idea; appeals to working class and professional adults wanting or needing to go back to school for undergraduate or graduate training; successful model in the existing Western Governors University started by Governors Roy Roemer (D-CO) and Mike Leavitt (R-UT); low cost.

Cons: Traditional higher education community will oppose competition claiming inadequate quality assurance and duplication of both for-profit University of Phoenix and non-profit university distance education offerings (e.g., University of Maryland); United States Open University failed in 2001 when British financing was pulled before the school was accredited-a problem avoided here with seed financing.

Moderate Alternative: American Open University grant funds could instead be distributed to existing state colleges and universities to develop and expand distance education course and degree programs. Priority would be given for programs directed at degree and certificate completion for those adults with some prior college credit. This moderate alternative removes most of the traditional higher education community’s expected opposition, but reduces visionary appeal.

I’m not particularly biased in favor of one option over the others, but know that something needs to be done to open education to more people. We are already seeing wonderful exhibitions of what is possible on top of an education infrastructure (see here and here). If we expand the free (as in freedom, if not price) educational content available, we can unleash a new generation of knowledge workers who will pull us out of this crisis.

From 1987, via @torproject, comes this emotional appeal for anonymity (and reuse):

The contemporary ego is enormous, and suits for plagiarism are not uncommon. “I wrote this,” is the accusation. “You copied it.” How times have changed! Up through Shakespeare’s day, writers were more interested in basing their thoughts on older works than in writing something totally original. School children would compress the works of the classics or elaborate on them. They learned through imitation. Instead of having to guarantee to their professors that every word they uttered and every thought they conceived was theirs alone, they were expected to show that everything they said had been said before. Even Shakespeare’s plays were developed from histories and older plays and romances and stories, the authors of which are unknown in many cases.

Read on.

As much as I know the reality is far from it, part of me always yearns for the cyberlibertarian utopia of the 1990s. Best characterized by Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, the hope that the Internet and other digital connections would lead to dramatically increased freedom has not come true. In fact, there are plenty of signs that the opposite is viable.

However, reading a post on Patrick Meier’s always interesting blog, iRevolution, a little bit of hope was rekindled. Writing about the role that ICTs play in Burmese activism, Patrick notes that two researchers found that the “Bangladeshi cell phone network extends well into Burma so activists can use phones from Bangladesh to relay information.” Further, Burmese citizens with Internet access are more likely to fancy themselves activists.

While I imagine it isn’t terribly hard to jam the Bangladeshi cell network, as it stands now, the spillover effects of the Bangladeshi ether is probably a boon to activists seeking connectivity outside of the official telecommunications systems.

In what other ways could governments, NGOs and activists utilize the spillover of digital networks to assist domestic dissidents? The United States has operated Voice of America and Radio Free Asia/Europe for decades, so the precedent for sending freedom-enhancing electromagnetic waves into authoritarian areas is there. Why not do so with the Internet and cell phone networks? It could even be better than VOA because it would take away that paternalistic feel of VOA et al. and allow the Burmese to speak for and to themselves.

This morning, Rebecca MacKinnon spoke at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about the Internet in China. The talk examined the role of the ‘net in shaping public discourse in China:

Cyberspace has clearly become one of the liveliest public forums in China, despite the efforts by the Chinese government to control online access and content. China’s netizens have become more skillful and assertive in utilizing the Internet to voice their opinions and, occasionally, force the Chinese government to become more responsive.  But the Internet has also allowed more nationalist and radical views to contend for influence and sway public opinion.  How is online public opinion changing Chinese society? Will the new freedoms found in the virtual world lead to greater political participation or help fuel resurgent nationalism? How is the Chinese government responding to online activism?

I was able to attend it and greatly enjoyed the event. Rebecca’s slides and my notes from the event are below. I embedded them with Scribd because the formatting was funky.

RMack Speech Notes

Update: Here is the link to the video of Rebecca’s speech.

Also, here’s the paper I wrote last semester about the role of American Internet companies operating in China. Rebecca’s work was instrumental in my research.
Freedom Fighters – The Role of Internet Corporations in Promoting Digital Freedoms by Kevin Donovan [Updated]

Take any crisis in the past 10 years and there has been an increasing amount of digital content created immediately during and after the crisis events. For events like the Mumbai terror attacks in November, the amount of information is enormous and lasts multiple days. For shorter, more localized events like US Air Flight 1549 crashing in the Hudson, the amount is understandably lower. But in either case, pervasive new media allows citizens and professionals alike to create massive amounts of data. Sifting through and making sense of it all can quickly overwhelm an individual person or news organization.

Recognizing this, Ushahidi, the brilliant crisis mapping application, is approaching the question of how to filter through the information overload. Their simple approach is to “crowdsource the filter.” Writing on their blog, Erik Hersman calls this project “swift river” and will allow connected individuals to “go and rate the information as it comes in… where the more people you have weighing in on any specific data point raises the probability of finding the right answer. The information with greater veracity is highlighted and bubbles to the top, weighted also by proximity, severity and category of the incident.”

According to Erik, the prototype has successfully filtered a large amount of data and can combine experts and amateurs. When I first read this, I was understandably excited to see this in practice. During the Mumbai attacks, I watched as Gaurav Mishra chronicled the events by scanning blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and the MSM in order to synthesize and explain the story to his audience (in classic bridge-blogger style). His incredible public service kept me glued to my screen over Thanksgiving break. Amid his heroic effort, Gaurav occasionally mentioned to his appreciative audience how exhausted he was, and I can only imagine how much work it took. A reliable “Swift River” style tool would have allowed Gaurav to grab a couple more hours of sleep, knowing that the important truths would rise to the top. A look at the mock-up they provided shows a bit more what they imagine – individuals transparently describing their sources and adding “facts” that they trust to be true.

A mock-up of Project Swift River

No news consumers are completely autonomous; we all rely on some sort of filter. There is a spectrum from the obsessive consumers whose filter is minimal – reading and watching a ton of first-hand reports from Twitter, Flickr, etc. – to the mainstream consumers who get their news from CNN or even water cooler conversations.

My belief is that there is a sweet-spot for this spectrum of signal-to-noise filters – somewhere between (1) the exhausting work of reading all the information/analysis coming out of a crisis and (2) the lackadaisical, third-hand accounts which are colored by personal bias and memory.

The Spectrum of News Sources and Potential Downfalls

No one’s crisis news intake will ever be completely autonomous – even eye-witnesses only experience so much. But filters, especially the unreliable ones that exist in our world, can act like people in the children’s game “telephone” where each node can obfuscate the truth. Although news sources also add analysis, insight and context, my hunch is that during and immediately after a crisis, what matters most are verifiable facts. Ushahidi’s idea seems like a great way to find the sweet-spot for crisis reporting.

Although it will have to answer the same questions that were sneered at Digg and Wikipedia – who will trust a bunch of amateurs?! – a wealth of literature supports the ability of crowds to quickly and reliably reach consensus. Certainly there are some serious questions given the importance of the information that will be filtered (and I wish I had my copy of Infotopia to revisit how the wisdom of crowds can fail), but the open source nature of the project will allow for experimentation and revision that the New York Times or other news sources cannot do very adeptly.

Georgetown’s Scholarly Communication Committee (of which I am a new member) has put together a great event to discuss the Google Book Settlement. Entitled “Google and the Future of Higher Education,” it will feature UVa Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, NYU Professor James Grimmelmann and GU Press Director Richard Brown. Vaidhyanathan is a close watcher of Google and the author of an upcoming book called “The Googlization of Everything” and Grimmelmann has written extensively on Google and the Book Search settlement.

The event will be held on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 10 a.m – 11:30 a.m. at Lauinger Library [map], Murray Room, 5th Floor. Please remember to RSVP to wco4 (at) georgetown.edu

The official description follows:

Eighth Scholarly Communication Symposium
Google and the Future of Higher Education

On October 28, 2008, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers announced the settlement of the litigation concerning the Google Books Project.  Under the project, Google has been scanning millions of books provided by major research libraries and other sources.  For those books not in the public domain, the publishers and authors claimed that Google’s scanning infringed their copyrights.

The settlement presents significant challenges and opportunities for higher education.  It creates a mechanism for Google to pay rights holders for the right to display more of the books’ texts than it currently does under the current program.  Google will then distribute payments to copyright owners.  Google, in turn, will generate revenue through advertising and by selling to users the ability to see full text.

At stake is the clash between seemingly competing missions.  The academy, at its core, creates and disseminates knowledge.  Google’s goal is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.”  Is the academy surrendering its mission to a private corporation?  Is this a new intellectual enclosure movement?  Our speakers are uniquely situated to shed light on this case and its context for the Georgetown community.

Hope to see you there.

Mike had a story yesterday about how the University of Tampa told students that they could have no more than 3.4 people in their dorm rooms watching the Superbowl, lest they violate the public performance provision of copyright. Unique case of confusion, right?

Actually, I had a similar moment while watching the game with (more than 3.4) friends. During the commercial for Hulu, a friend quizzically asked, “How can they advertise if they are illegal?” A couple of my friends murmured agreement before I informed them that Hulu was started by Fox and NBC and pays for the shows the content they have.

It really struck a chord with me.

The big content companies have so perverted public perception of intellectual property and the Internet that people presume that any good service online is illegal. Think about that! Even people whose friend is a (self-admitted) IP geek assume that perfectly normal behavior (time shifting content) is only the domain of “pirates.” Not only does it speak to the lack of innovation from big content, it represents a huge hurdle for the future of media (although my generation is willing to use Hulu, even if it were illegal).

Mike rightly chastised IP lawyers for mocking the confusion instead of working to improve the confusing state of copyright law. I would chastise myself and the rest of the free culture movement for not providing enough education as to the realities of intellectual property and innovation.