Category Archives: Culture

These posts will deal with Copyright and other cultural topics

A convergence: ICE, Copyright, O’Dwyer Swartz

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I think we’re in the middle of a very bad convergence of cultural inhibitors. Most things that would fall under the purview of culture is copyrighted. Historically, we never had much trouble with this as individuals. However, now we’re seeing more and more problems with this. As I’ve discussed in the past, ICE is heavily involved, individuals like James O’Dwyer and Aaron Swartz are in the middle of two different kind of legal action and content owners are coming up with new ways to control their material.

What do I think is going on? I think that we could be seeing the end of our ability to freely use our culture. We are also seeing the US attempting to govern the world’s copyright law. For instance, the US is seeking to extradite O’Dwyer over a links page, something like Justin.TV, which in the UK isn’t illegal and no one is sure if it’s actually illegal in the US or not (See this ars technica article for more information). This isn’t the only case like this. ICE seized a website that was declared legal in Spain.

One of the best parts of the copyright law for consumers is the First sale provision. This allows a consumer that owns a book, but not the copyright, to sell this book to some one else. Or do with this book anything they want to after the first sale. However, we’re seeing this ability erode away. Autodesk, makers of AutoCad, are suing a guy that is trying to resell a two copies of AutoCad. They are claiming it violates their copyright and their End User Licence Agreement.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is another manner in which content owners are exerting excess control over their content. If you bought a song from iTunes, that DRM is going to last longer than the copyright which it is absurd in my opinion.

Another case where DRM and content ownership is going to have a long term negative impact is in the PC gaming industry. There are a few major platforms for game digital game distribution. Steam being the largest, however all these games are put into a walled garden of “ownership” where you are able to play the game and use it, but you aren’t in control of the actual content. You have absolutely no ability to resell the game. In the past, if you didn’t like a game after you bought it, you had the ability to sell it for a loss to some place like Gamestop. With these online platforms you don’t have the ability to do that, as it would cannibalize sales from Steam itself.

Other services are starting to get into the act to prevent copyrighted materials from being sole without the owner’s consent. Today, PayPal has decided to ban payments to any website that is illegally selling copyrighted material (Torrent Freak article). This is pretty serious. As a company the have the right to do so, and I’m very sure that there will be some other service that will provide secure monetary transfers.

Based on these observations, I believe that our government and content owners are working to control and limit the freedom of usage of our own culture. It’s not a conspiracy, as the government is actively working with RIAA and MPAA to help regulate the material. ISPs have recently gotten involved in the game as well (EFF commentary). These groups are working to use copyright to gain more control over the material every day.

What can we do? Contact your government officials, get educated through EFF and Creative Commons, and other organizations like this.

Further reading:
Lawrence Lessig Code 2.0

Aaron Swartz and Freedom of Knowledge

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Aaron Swartz has been arrested and accused of a multitude of crimes, for a break down of them go here, for gaming a big journal retrieval site called JSTOR (it is a large one many journals are stored within this site). As some one that works with these retrieval services quiet often and has actually hit the limit for the amount of citation data you can pull from them, they can be frustrating. Some of the work I’m personally doing right now is related to citation analysis and co-authorship analysis. Which allows networks of knowledge flows to be seen. Another method is to do a word analysis within articles to create knowledge networks based on what articles are about, what knowledge is contained in each of the articles. Apparently, in the past, Swartz has done something like this. Some of my colleagues also use techniques to allow additional gathering of information. Most of this information, even with you have legal access, is difficult and very time consuming to procure. In this case, Swartz has access and may have been able to get a hold of this data through other means. JSTOR mentioned in one of their releases that they have a program that allows for high volume access to their publications. 

This case also has made me think of a few other issues with our current knowledge retrieval systems and repositories. Companies need to make money off these publications, so we can’t have them for free. However, through my research, I’ve used articles that are 20 years old. If this knowledge was patented, I would be able to access this and use it with no problem at this point. In many cases, it could happen sooner as many patents aren’t renewed after a certain time frame. Using a scientific article is typically more like using something published under a creative commons license, which means you can remix the information. Through citations you give credit where it is due. In most cases you can get access to the data and models, if you give the person credit, either through citations or co-authorship. Why does this work? Because the research is publicly funded.
Authors can also pay to allow full free access to their work depending on the journal. However, in most cases they don’t, or don’t get the article to be free continuously. However, there is some relief from the burden of paying for individual articles, Google Scholar, is able to find articles that scientists have on their personal websites, and allow access to “working paper” versions, which means they aren’t quite publishable yet, even after they have been published. 
I think for publicly funded research we need to have an exception to the copyright law, which changes it from 70 years to 10 years. Depending on the field even 10 years is to long. The work my wife is doing articles cited which are that old are typically cited because it’s giving credit to trail blazers. These papers are typically cited in the hundreds compared to the average of the tens. Once the copyright expired there would be much more competition for distribution of the articles and reduces the risk to the knowledge community if any given retrieval system or journal fails.
This Swartz case scares me in general, because it will make it even more difficult to access information and care a large risk if you create scripts to make it easier to get access to massive amounts of data.

NASA

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I’ve gotta say, it’s hard to be a lover of space, NASA and scientific exploration right now. With the end of the shuttle program around the corner, and a new bill to cut a huge amount of funding from NASA (article) things are looking rather down right now. Basically this would kill the James Webb telescope. I think this would be a terrible thing.

Why should we invest? Well, the US prides itself on being number one in everything, even if we aren’t actually number one. Without continuing to push the frontier of research we will fall behind eventually. The article above, or another article mentioned congress killing the Super Collider in Texas, it would have been able to produce the novel results that the Large Hadroc Collider is producing now. The US would be the world leader in particle physics. We are starting to fall behind. Europe is going to be the world leader, and in the future we will be reading articles written by Europeans. We could be excellent teaching centers for particle physics for years to come, but the best of the best will not be in the US.

The same could happen with astronomy. The Hubble Telescope led to over 9,000 scientific papers being published. Yes, that may seem like we were probably spending more money on research than just the money that we spent on Hubble, but remember we were also producing jobs to support those scientists that were writing the papers. The Webb Telescope is going to be significantly more powerful than Hubble. We have had some amazing picture of space and the universe around us because of Hubble. Pictures of the Crab Nebula, Pillars of Creation and the Rose Galaxy. See below.

Top Left Crab Nebula, Right Pillars of Creation Bottom Rose Galaxy

For me, these images instill a feeling of awe and wonder. Through the Hubble we’ve expanded our understanding of how the universe works and how dangerous of a place we live. The rose galaxy, or galaxies, are two galaxies colliding with each other. Our galaxy is actually predicted to collide with the andromeda galaxy in a few million years. We know this because of Hubble.

We are also starting to realize that what we’re learning at the particle level may interact with the origins of the universe. For example, string/M theory also is a theory about how the universe was started. We need to be able to keep seeing back in time to understand how these theories interact with each other.

Controversies IV – Vaccines

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Today I learned something interesting. A guy who does Judo with me told me that in France there are concerns over Hep B shots and Multiple Sclerosis. Apparently, this is based on a discredited publication and health authorities have not been able to convince the French to begin taking the vaccines again. This is of serious concern for me, because he also mentioned that the vaccination rate was something like 30% or so.

In some ways France is lucky, because the vaccine isn’t as serious as the vaccine people are rejecting in the US. They are rejecting MMR (Measles Mumps and Rubella), which are highly contagious. What can we learn from these two cases?

First, it is extremely difficult to overcome personal beliefs on scientific evidence. In both cases many different studies have been conducted to verify the safety of the vaccines. In the US, the connection was completely debunked. The Journal the Lancet it is the UK medical journal, actually went so far to retract the article. It was a flawed study where there were only 12 patients, they were unwilling included and the author was also being paid. There were many cases of ethical violations and the guy isn’t even allowed to practice medicine in the UK any more. He now works in the US. So, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary people still believe these findings.

Second, we learned that it’s not only conservatives, or a segment of the population that is uneducated that hold these anti-science beliefs. The topics I’ve talked about have focused primarily on that group. This controversy is with the liberal well educated group of people living in California. They have celebrity spokespeople and many of these people are engineers or some other scientifically based  profession. These people should know better.

What are the risks if we don’t vaccinate though? Well, vaccination works through protection of the herd. Everyone needs to be protected in the “herd” otherwise everyone is at risk. Well, that just sounds like a scare tactic. Ok, yes a bit, however vaccines don’t always work. You could have gotten vaccinated for MMR and it didn’t actually give you the anti-bodies you needed. It’s difficult to test for these things and expensive. Not something you’d want to subject a small child to. So, lets say that unknown to you, your child’s vaccine didn’t work, and another kid in class was intentionally unvaccinated. He some how comes across measles and comes to school with it. Your child could become ill, as well as any other person in the school that the vaccination didn’t work for or intentionally wasn’t vaccinated.

Ok, let’s say you’re right, why is Autism increasing? Well, partially we’ve changed the standards for what fits autism over time. In the past only people like Rainman would have been considered autistic, now there’s a well defined spectrum that includes a lot more types of behaviors. Other reasons may be from who are having children together. A recent study (WSJ summary) showed that Eindhoven has a significantly higher rate of autism than two other areas where there are many less technology jobs, thus less engineers and scientists. This also would indicate a possible reason why Silicon Valley might also have a higher rate than other places in the US. This does need additional research to compare regions in the US to regions like this and others around the world.

In conclusion, just because you believe non-scientific things does not mean you are stupid. There are a lot of changes in scientific literature. However, we need to develop techniques to educate people and convince them that the new data is right and that there is not some grand plot to make some one money (anti-vac think its the pharmaceutical companies lying) or destroy our economy (anti-climate change thing it’s a conspiracy to destroy the US economy). These groups are increasing risk to everyone. We need to as a general public, figure out a way to address these problems.

Further Reading:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/california-stud/
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_waronscience/

Is the internet a truly democratizing technology?

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Boring title I know. However, I believe this is an extremely important discussion to have. Are technologies political things? Many people claim that the internet has radically changed things. That through the internet now all sorts of political activities can happen. Things are freer and more open. Is this true? Is this a result of technology? Does this technology have to be democratizing? I’m going to argue that while there are political implications of many technologies, there are other factors to considered when talking like this.

Can a road have political implications? Most people would argue that, no it’s a road, you use it to get from point A to point B, or just for fun. Well, what if you have to use public transportation and some one designed a bridge so that the bus couldn’t go over it? Would it be political then, or would the person who designed it be instilling political capabilities into a technologies? I would say in this case, the technology was used to prevent the lower class from reaching a nicer area in New York. A designer named Robert Moses designed many bridges for NYC from 1920-1970 that prevented exactly this type of traffic from occurring (Winner, 1986).

Other cases include using assembly lines to control how workers work and the steam engine to force people to work at a steady pace, or a takt time. Other technologies such as an automated tomato picker forced a lot of other changes in California. For instance it laid off workers, forced small farms to combine into larger farms to use the technology, which drove down the cost of tomatoes which big farms were taking advantage of, and also changed the tomato itself. It actually forced the development of a harder tomato so it could survive the automated picking. Which really pissed people off.

Ok, but we’re in the age of the internet. Big deal, what’s your point with all these old technologies? Arab Spring. Protesters were able to rally using the internet. The US government created these things called suitcase internet This allows users to create a mesh network and connect to websites so users are able to get around the walls that governments put into place. Wikileaks is another source of political technology. Sure, it’s just a site where you can upload files, but you could say that anything is just a site. The point is that there are norms and expectations around Wikileaks that allows some one to feel secure if they leak something to.

Additionally, governments are starting to and continuing to control the internet and how it is used. Eric Schmidt, of Google, is worried that this sort of governmental control is only going to increase. Hacktivists such as Lulz Sec and Anonymous are only going to increase the likelihood of this. The US government itself has a conflicting approach to hackers. In the cases where these hackers are going after groups that are not within the US or not the US government, the State Department has been extremely supportive. However, as soon as these groups change focus to the US, they are declared terrorists groups, or something close, which much be destroyed. NATO recently declared much the same thing.

We are in the beginning of a struggle over the future of the internet. Hacking groups are standing up for regular users and attempting to change the direction of governments. There have been a few successes coming from unexpected locations. This op-ed has some of them. The TL;DR of the article is that the UN lambasted some of the UK’s laws, and that an Australian ISP backed out of a filtering agreement with the Government.

Clearly there are many different uses for the internet. These uses can be good and bad. However, these uses have political ramifications. The choice to hack, the choice to be social on the internet, and the choice to educate yourself all impact how the future of the internet goes. I don’t support hacking. However, it is forcing transparency and increasing awareness of people both in and out of cyber space, what is actually going on in the Interwebs.

Also, the UN declared the three-strike laws for copyright, where if you get caught three times you lose internet for life, to be a violation of human rights.

References:
Winner, L. (1980) “Do Artifacts have Politics?” Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1: https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/download/attachments/75695134/Langdon+Winner+Artifacts+and+Politics.pdf

Soft War: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504943_162-20073030-10391715.html