Thoughts on the social impacts of communication policy and educational technology.
Google seeks to turn YouTube rights clash into profit | Business | guardian.co.uk
When it first came out Google’s fingerprinting technology was billed as a means to flag YouTube videos as violating copyright. Now, they’re hoping to turn it into a means for the “pirates” to make ad revenue for the content producers. This is an important step in possibly legitimizing online sharing.
Law.Gov: America’s Operating System, Open Source – O’Reilly Radar
An amazing announcement about law.gov, a tool that could revolutionize access to legal documents in America:
We envision Law.Gov as a distributed, open source, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.
From the public.resource.org site:
Law.Gov is an effort to create a report documenting exactly what it would take to create a distributed registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.
Transparency in law is at the foundation of why a democracy works. That these documents are still largely locked inside private databases and books, despite being absent of all copyright protection, in this age of easy storage and access is surprising. Perhaps all that was needed was an initiative like this one.
Noting all of the prominent IP academics on the “Co-Conveners” list gives me hope that there will be easy access for citation managers (the one technical requirement thing on my wish list).
Special Interests See ‘Classified’ Copyright Treaty; You Can’t | Threat Level | Wired.com
Want to know the language of the ever-transforming proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement? It’s classified.
The fact that this treaty continues to be discussed in secret is beyond explanation. Has anyone started a petition against this?
GOP senators: Net neutrality rule making must be bipartisan (Ars)
Republican senators are asking that any net neutrality regulations be a bipartisan effort, which is fine, so long as we’re talking about Republicans and Democrats and not the public and business interests.
“We do not believe that the Commission should adopt regulations based merely on anecdotes, or in an effort to alleviate the political pressures of the day, if the facts do not clearly demonstrate that a problem needs to be remedied,” they wrote.
What has always interested me about this point is that, in my view, internet neutrality is an effort to maintain the status quo — not “speculation about what may happen in the future.”
“As we analyze this situation further, we remain hopeful that any future Commission action will create an atmosphere that is conducive to promoting freedom, investment and innovation not only at the edge of the Internet but at its core as well.”
The problem with this logic is that by making the core anything less than a commons, the edge stands to suffer both from a public sphere and business standpoint. Traffic throttling and packet inspection along the very heart of the Internet don’t seem like “innovation” to me.
The Internet is about to die. Literally die! (Ars)
In a surprisingly simultaneous move, an industry-sponsored report was released stating that net traffic is growing and stands to be transformed by the costs that this might impose on carriers.
When far right and left wing groups are working together on an issue, you can bet that it has bipartisan support.