Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Opinion > Making Votes Count: Gambling on Voting” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/opinion/13SUN1.html?ex=1402459200&en=40e4afe91f2a555f&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND”>Opinion: Making Votes Count: Gambling on Voting.
New York Times, June 13, 2004.

Dan Gillmor points to this NYT editorial that compares standards for gambling machines to the lack of standards and testing and regulation for e-voting machines. He notes that the editorial page is doing much more serious reporting than the newspaper’s “news” staff.

Edward W. Felten at Freedom to Tinker points to and summarizes two excellent articles about copyright.

• Copyright’s Communications Policy by Timothy Wu. Wu is Associate Professor of Law
  at University of Virginia. This 96 page pdf document discusses the historical context of “copyright’s poorly understood role in the regulating competition among rival disseminators.”
• Mark Lemley’s Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Justifications for Intellectual Property “is a devastating critique of a new style of copyright-extension argument.” Lemley is at the Stanford University School of Law and the paper is “University of California Ð Berkeley
  Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series
  Paper No. 144,” a 67 page pdf.

The State of Social Tools
BY STOWE BOYD,
Darwin Magazine, June 2004.

The big story of the transformation of business culture isn’t the props Ñ the servers, networks, ten million websites, and all the information lying around in databases and in HTML Ñ but what people are saying to each other and how they coordinate their actions, behavior and goals.

Thanks to Many 2 Many

Here is an interesting idea: blog a famous work of literature, full text, one day at a time. Three examples:

• The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
  started at page 1 on May 30th, 2004
• The Diary Of Samuel Pepys
  This site is a presentation of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the renowned 17th century diarist who lived in London, England. A new entry written by Pepys will be published each day; 1 January 1660 was published on 1 January 2003.
• James Joyce’s Ulysses: One Page Every Day. In honor of the 100th anniversary of the date that Ulysses is set, this lauded book will be presented here page by page starting with page one on Bloomsday, June 16, 2004 ending with the last page on June 14, 2006.

The Free Expression Policy Project
By Nancy Kranich
Senior Research Fellow, 2003-04 and the FEPP and past president of the American Library Association.

In the last decade, mass media companies have developed methods of control that undermine the public’s traditional rights to use, share, and reproduce information and ideas. These technologies, combined with dramatic consolidation in the media industry and new laws that increase its control over intellectual products, threaten to undermine the political discourse, free speech, and creativity needed for a healthy democracy.

In response to the crisis, librarians, cyber-activists, and other public interest advocates have sought ways to expand access to the wealth of resources that the Internet promises, and have begun to build online communities, or “commons,” for producing and sharing information, creative works, and democratic discussion. This report documents the information commons movement, explains its importance, and outlines the theories and “best practices” that have developed to assist its growth.

Also available in PDF.

While Declan suggests that the FCC is no longer needed, we see today’s Wall Street Journal has a story that describes new problems, caused by technological changes, that, it seems to me, may require more regulation, not less.
. Airports Clash With Airlines Over Wi-Fi by Amy Schatz. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.:
Jun 8, 2004. pg. B.1. [requires subscription].

…the airlines are asking the FCC a
crucial question: whether a landlord has the right to bar tenants from
setting up individual Wi-Fi networks.

Why the FCC should die

Declan McCullagh argues pursuasively that the FCC has outlived its usefulness and has become a major source of “bureaucratic malfeasance” (media centralization, restricting first amendment rights…). I agree with the first part of his thesis. However, his solution of privatizing the whole spectrum is completely off the mark. The airwaves are owned in common by all citizens, not space to be owned and sued over like land. The FCC is supposed to be protecting that “space” for the common good, and we as citizens need to hold the FCC accountable to us, not the monster media conglomerates. His solution would speed the movement toward media centralization, definitely *not* a good thing! Interesting food for thought though.

Its justification for existence was weak 70 years ago, but advances in technology since then have eliminated whatever arguments remained. Central planning didn’t work for the Soviet Union, and it’s not working for us. The FCC is now an agency that does more harm than good.

RSS: From Grassroots to Mass Appeal

Here’s a solid overview article on RSS by Stephen Downes. One of the more interesting things he points out is the similarity between RSS (used by bloggers and news sites primarily) and OAI (used by the academic arena). Read on!

Operating parallel to RSS, and using a slightly different format, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) operates on the same principle. Instead of using RSS, OAI feeds list resources using (typically) Dublin Core, which while providing the same type of information as may be found in an RSS channel, offers more detailed information about authorship and publication data.

[Thanks Shifted Librarian!]

ATAC: Abusable Technologies Awareness Center

This looks like quite a useful blog. Their goal is to “provide current and accurate information about technology that oversteps its bounds.” The list of panelists is quite impressive and, if the first two posts are any proof, there is quite a bit of interesting discussion going on here (see for example: The “right” kind of challenge to e-voting security and Open Source won’t save e-voting)

Washington > Legal Opinions: Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn’t Bind Bush” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/politics/08ABUS.html?hp”>”Legal Opinions: Administration lawyers decided bans on torture didn’t bind Bush” (Log in may be required)

A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation’s security.

The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons.

WHAT?! So responsibility for the torture of Iraqi prisoners goes all the way to the top! Can an entire administration be impeached?