JohnSpam

I’ll be at the Open Video Conference in New York this Friday and Sunday.

The conference will host some incredible presenters, including Clay Shirky, Mark Tribe, and Xeni Jardin.

Sponsors / Partner Organizations include the Berkman Center, The Participatory Culture Foundation (Miro), and Creative Commons.

You should come.

I found this somewhere…

download high res

In case you missed it, the interwebs will tell you how Notre Dame alumni, and to a lesser extent students, voiced their displeasure at Obama’s invitation to speak at Notre Dame because of his stance on abortion rights and his support of embryonic stem-cell research.

I sent the email below to Notre Dame Law today.

Notre Dame Law Admissions Council:

After careful consideration, I have decided to withdraw my application for admission. I truly appreciate your offer of admission and I am certain that Notre Dame offers an excellent legal education. However, I believe I may not be the right fit for Notre Dame. To be fair to other applicants, as well as your staff, I believe now is an appropriate time to withdraw my application.

I feel compelled to share that the recent outcry over President Obama’s invitation to speak at Notre Dame weighed heavily in my decision. I do not feel that I would be best served by, or that I would best serve, a community in which such a significant portion of alumni and students are so strongly motivated by a religious agenda.

Thank you for your consideration of my application. I wish you the best of luck in finding candidates for the 2009 admissions cycle.

Sincerely,

John Randall

(To be fair, the admissions council at Notre Dame Law probably won’t miss me much; They hadn’t yet offered me a seat in the class.)

It is important to remind people and organizations that religious behavior can have negative social consequences to go along with the ones that are commonly held as positive, despite the social norms most of us have internalized that make doing so a little uncomfortable. I hope that other candidates choosing not to attend Notre Dame are equally honest in their communications with the school.

When you have an organization’s ear for whatever reason, please consider using it. One doesn’t always need to stand in the street and hold a sign to be heard.

Someone at the Rochester Institute of Technology has done some research on exactly how far copyrighted media needs to be tweaked before YouTube’s copyrighted content filters give it a pass. The author isn’t identified, but that appears to be an accidental omission.

http://www.csh.rit.edu/~parallax/

A possible future: As users try to tweak media to beat the content filters, creating filters that don’t create too many false positives is going to be a difficult or insurmountable challenge. Which am I underestimating– (a) the technology or (b) those trying to get around it?

Excerpted from Corey Doctorow’s email list:

Here’s a talk I gave earlier this year at the O’Reilly Tools of Change
for Publishing conference in NYC, about the way that DRM gives
distributors control over publishers and writers. This talk went down
very well, and is the source of “Doctorow’s Law,” which a lot of people
have asked me about: “Any time someone puts a lock on something you own,
against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, it’s not being done
to your benefit.“

UPDATE: Looks like he pushed it to BoingBoing as well.

Richard Stallman, godfather of the copyleft movement, founder of the Free Software Foundation, original developer of GNU and author the GPL, spoke at Cardozo Law on March 31 on “Copyright vs. Community.”

I hadn’t previously experienced a Stallman lecture. I had certain expectations though, and I wasn’t let down. His juvenalian satire may make his message less accessible to some, but his humor-laced expressions of anger at the establishment go a long way in motivating a certain slice of the copyleft crowd. (I’ve explored the growth of the copyleft movement on Biella Coleman’s Hacker Ethics class blog, as well as the relationship between the lulz and geeky activism in an essay for Clay Shirky’s Election2008: User Generated Media and the Political Process class.)

Stallman came out swinging and didn’t let up. About 20 minutes in, the ideas that the wild, bearded man was raving about actually started to click into place. The air in the room changed as he steadily won the crowd over. Nervous laughter transformed into genuine guffaws.

Stallman presented a bold plan for the future of copyright. (Joey deVilla at Global Nerdy has posted a detailed outline of a lecture by the same title that Stallman gave at the University of Toronto in July.) In short, Stallman proposes that we divide copyrighted works into three categories based on what they mean to society:

1. practical functional works (software, reference works, educational works, recipes, fonts, etc.)
   • must be free (as in freedom) for the user to do just about whatever she wants
   • non-commercial sharing allowed
   • modification and derivative work allowed
2. works that witness the thoughts of certain parties (academic work, essays, blogs, etc.)
   • non-commercial sharing allowed
   • commercial re-distribution prohibited
   • modification prohibited (modification = mis-representation of the author’s ideas)
3. arts and entertainment
   • non-commercial sharing allowed
   • monopoly over commercial redistribution granted to creator for 10 years
   • monopoly over modification and derivative work granted to creator for 10 years

His proposed solutions are quite different than the proposals in Lawrence Lessig’s “Remix”. The unanswered questions in both Stallman’s and Lessig’s proposals can be forgiven at these early stages, as they are outlines that need further fleshing out. They aim to illuminate a potential way of dealing with the “Digital Dilemma” we are faced with as costs of reproduction and distribution approach zero. Both plans are built on insights into the nature of creativity, motivation, and commerce in the digital age. These proposed solutions are a positive step forward, and a pleasant change from the overwhelming outcry against the the status quo that tends to dominate copyleft discourse.

Throughout the lecture, Stallman was uncompromising… but if anyone in the copyleft movement has earned the right to be dogmatic, it’s Stallman.The Q&A that followed was entertaining but uncomfortable as Stallman forced every questioner to clarify and re-phrase their questions using his preferred verbiage. The mood lightened considerably when one questioner, in response to Stallman’s chastising “I don’t understand what that would mean!?”, responded “Whichever makes you the most angry.”

Whether you agree with Stallman’s delivery or not, his proposal is clear and worth considering. I don’t think it is even close to attainable in the short term, but it is informed by a lucid and frank, albeit one-sided, assessment of the current situation we find ourselves in.

As usual, thanks goes out to Joly at punkcast.com for recording the event. (FYI– Ogg files can be played easily using the VLC player.)

• Presentation:
  • Video – http://punkcast.com/1552/1552-01/1552-01_richard_stallman_copyright_vs_community_video.ogg (646MB)
  • Audio – http://punkcast.com/1552/1552-01/1552-01_richard_stallman_copyright_vs_community.ogg (74MB)

• Q&A:
  • Video – http://punkcast.com/1552/1552-02/1552-02_richard_stallman_copyright_vs_community_q&a_video.ogg (353MB)
  • Audio -  http://punkcast.com/1552/1552-02/1552-02_richard_stallman_copyright_vs_community_q&a.ogg (40MB)

Cross posted from FCNYU

Old and New Net Wars over Free Speech, Freedom and Secrecy or….
How to Understand the Hacker and Lulz battle against the C0$

NYU’s very own Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor, New York University, will be speaking at Columbia this Thursday at noon. Gabriella is a talented scholar and friend. This is a great opportunity to see her speak. Details below.

Thursday November 13: noon – 2:00pm
Columbia University Communications Colloquium
270B IAB (International Affairs Building:
http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/tour/11.html
http://www.iserp.columbia.edu/calendar/

In this talk I present a cultural history and political analysis of one of the oldest Internet wars, often referred to as ?Internet vs Scientology,? which in recent times has witnessed a different incarnation in the form of ?Project Chanology,? which is orchestrated by a group called Anonymous who has led a series of online attacks and real world protests against the Church of Scientology. I argue that to understand the significance of these battles and protests, we must examine the culturally antipodal relationship between Scientology and hacker/geek culture. In so doing I will demonstrate how long-standing liberal ideals take cultural root in unexpected ways in the context of these battles and I will use these two cases to reveal important political transformations in Internet/hacker culture between the mid 1990s and today.

Technorati Tags: event, freeculture, freecultureNYU, GabriellaColeman, Scientology, talk

(Cross posted from FCNYU– comments there)

FC NYU is proud to be sponsoring this screening with Computers and Society:

Released in December 2007 by the League of Noble Peers (Alan Toner, J.J. King, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Luetgert, Luca Lucarini, and others), Steal This Film 2 tries to go beyond the current discussions around file-sharing to look at what kinds of social change are precipitated by massive changes in our capacity to communicate. The film argues that the changes wrought by networked, peer distribution are historical on the scale of the printing press and tries to explain why.

For many of you these argument will be familiar. These are strange times, in which to many of us the battle already seems to have been won. Yet governments continue to enact harsh laws expanding the scope of copyright protection and increasing sanctions for its infringement, lawsuits are levied against filesharers, fines imposed and arrests made – all intended to destroy or delay what is an inevitable change in how we look at creative work.

At the same time there has developed a burgeoning area of cultural production outside of both the institution of copyright and the historical channels of distribution, be they television, cinema or music stores. Deep beneath the sand the playing field of culture is shifting, in no small part due to the combined actions of millions of peer produsers.

Alan Toner, one of the peers responsible for the film’s production, will be present for a discussion afterwards, during which there will
also be a demonstration of STF’s footage archive.

http://stealthisfilm.com/Part2/
http://footage.stealthisfilm.com/
http://knowfuture.wordpress.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Film

Sunday, November 16, 2008
7:00pm – 9:00pm

Room 109 Warren Weaver Hall
251 Mercer Street
New York, NY

RSVP on Facebook

Election2008 / Civil Liberties
Reporters claim that the secret service is stopping them from interviewing people in the crowd at McCain/Palin rallies.

Water
Nestle is suing a county for promoting their tap water as cleaner and safer than bottled water. The International Bottled Water Association is considering similar action.

But, Your Bottled Water is Contaminated,
and
Bottled Water No Purer Than Tap Water

some additional info:
reddit.com: search resuls for “bottled water”

Fear
echoing Boing Boing: Lexington, KY – Student Arrested For Terroristic Threatening because he wrote some zombie fiction.

Copyfight
echoing BoingBoing:Selling used CDs is still legal in America even if they are marked “not for resale”. First sale doctrine upheld.

Religion / Games
Wish i had more information on Islamic content in games.

Technorati Tags: civil liberties, copyfight, election2008, terrorism, puppy, puppy, religion, water

I’m doing some informal research on new media and the election for a class…
If you’ve got a minute, I would love to hear your reactions to http://www.palinaspresident.us/. Identities won’t be revealed.

Please email me.

Are you an undecided voter? Who are you voting for?
How does did you think it was funny? how did you feel about it?
Did you / would you forward it? To who? Who are they voting for?
What do you think of Palin in general?
Has your opinion of Palin changed over time?