©ollectanea

If Web 2.0 is a little bit fuzzy for you, have a look at this entrancing YouTube video highlighted on Lessig's blog: Lawrence Lessig. Incredible, no?

Check out the NYT Technology article about PARC's startup whose goals are to go head to head with Google: In a Search Refinement, a Chance to Rival Google - New York Times. The idea of a "conversation" with a search engine is quite appealing, to say the least, but what interested me even more about this article is the idea that there will be something better than Google. One of the concerns I hear most often about the Google Book Search project, aside from the copyright issues, is that a company's ownership and control over the accumulated knowledge represented by 30 million books is unprecedented and frankly, quite scary. But Google lives in a world where control slips through one's fingers, inevitably. More, better pushes hard on all those who would preserve their status as best. Trying to predict where anything this dependent on technology might go is impossible. So, we voice our concerns, we question, we push for improvement in projects like Book Search, and we keep looking for new opportunities to accomplish our objectives. Collectively, we all keep going...

Putting a much finer point on it than I did yesterday, Larry Downes compares the escalating efforts to rein in file sharing to various revolutions of the past: The revolution will be televised...on YouTube | Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He admits he's jet-lagged as he writes this, but that's one of the interesting things about being able to blog from anywhere at any time. Our first reactions are a lot more colorful than our polished drafts. I, for one, appreciate seeing the color from time to time, especially about a subject that can be as gray as copyright.

I read with interest today that the President of the Bibliotheque National, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, has apparently been forced to resign:Jean-Noel Jeanneney quitte la presidence de la BnF - Tour de Toile du BBF. You might wonder why this seems important to me, unless you know what I'm studying at the iSchool...

But, more generally, it's of interest because Jeanneney is an impassioned critic of all things Google. In fact, in his slim volume, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge, he says at one point, something to the effect, "Whatever Google does, we should do the opposite."

His principle criticism was that selectivity and organization should be at the heart of the process of digitization, and of course, Google's goal is to digitize everything and let the users sort it out through search, tags, bookmarks, etc. He also criticizes our reliance on the market to do what he thinks should be done with public money in Europe. At the core of Google's undertaking, and implicitly rejected in France's efforts that so far involve only public domain works, is reliance on fair use to justify digitizing books still in copyright. Being an employee of a Google Library partner, I'm not neutral on the matter, but I must say that the book is very well written and raises good points. Nevertheless, one commenter on the blog where I saw this note about Jeanneney's departure seemed to suggest that there might be a connection between the fact that Google had so far digitized 10 million books and the Bibliotheque National, 100 thousand, and Jeanneney had essentially castigated Google for performing well. While neither of the figures is likely accurate, they get the general gist of the point across.

As always, there's no doubt a lot more to the story than initial reactions suggest, but I wonder whether Jeanneney's departure signals an opening for a new attitude towards mass digitization projects in France. Not coincidentally, I am headed there in 5 weeks to interview several librarians about their views of the future of the library in France. I have both Bibliotheques Nationales on my agenda, as well as 2 University libraries and a municipal library (Lyon). It's an exciting time to be thinking about the future of libraries, and May is a fine month to visit Paris.

As we've noticed this year, there have been numerous indications that things may be shifting a bit in a positive way with respect to the business models of the media companies that have most resisted such change. We have discussed some of these indications in earlier posts here on Collectanea. Most are optimistic postings. I tend to be an optimist. But lately I've encountered a few things that bring out my pessimistic (some would say, realistic) side. One in particular seems to signal that even when large media companies finally engage the future and embrace (or seem to embrace) new technologies, their ways of thinking about their businesses can remain largely unchanged. MySpace illustrates this point.

Originally conceived in a way that fully integrates the functionality of Web 2.0, the idea that content can be mixed and matched and shared and reused by applications all over the Web, MySpace now finds itself chafing at the openness of this model. It allows MySpace page owners to link to pages where content is served with advertising. In the complex way revenue streams work on the Web, this means to MySpace owner, Rupert Murdoch, that other companies are making money from the content that "belongs" to him (ie, his users' content). So he has moved to block his users from linking to rival sites that display content with advertisements. In Silicon Valley, this is not playing very well, as might be expected. I wonder whether it suggests that although we may not see copyright as the battle cry in this kind of dispute, the underlying issue has simply resurfaced in a new way. It is still the content owner challenging the upstart technology wishing to make money from some use of the content. Actually, in this case, it's not technically his content under copyright law, but it's his content in the sense that he seems to think of his users as a commodity whose content he should be able to control. It will be interesting to see what effect if any this has on the commodified user.

It was a big week for copyright. Events were reported all over the blogosphere. My friend and fellow grad student, Carlos Ovalle, has a nice roundup on his blog, Copy This Blog, where he reports several unsurprising legal opinions based in the sad music industry war against college students, and in a post a few days earlier, the related decision of Ohio University to ban p2p software on its system.

MPAA's former head, Jack Valenti, died this week. Lawrence Lessig offers an interesting memoir.

And the Stanford Center for Internet and Society posted a note about a decision that determined that downloads were not performances for ASCAP/BMI/SESAC royalty purposes.

Tobe Liebert, one of my favorite law librarians (I have lots of favorite law libraians -- our UT Law School Library is one of the best!), posted a note about Siva Vaidhyanathan's explication of his position regarding the three serious dangers of the Google Book Search Project, well articulated and succinct. His argument raises important questions about a future that includes wildcard projects like Google Book Search. If you have a chance to see Siva in person, don't miss it.

On another note, I am winding down my first full year of grad school. Classes end next week. Papers are due, presentations will be made, files of printed articles will be dumped (recycled, of course). It has been a really amazing experience for me, one that still astonishes me, nearly 9 months into it. I'm registered for the summer session and for the fall. I shift focus next year to research, having been accepted into the Ph.D. program. In the meantime, I head off to France to do a little bit of research, sort of getting my feet wet in the Seine (and the Cote d'Azure). Whatever I conclude based on my little sojourn will be reported through the CIP, perhaps even here on the blog. I'm going to write a paper, though I have to admit, I call it that only reluctantly, because I am planning to put my money where my mouth is -- I'm focusing on the future of the book, and I'm going to place all my research data, analysis, results and predictions in forms that explore that future. So, it will be fun, as well as instructive for me to figure out novel ways to report research in progress. I hope you'll enjoy that exploration too. The future of libraries is affected directly by the future of books so it is in our interests to pay attention to the expansion of the expressiveness we experience in books today.

A fellow Texan, and a fellow Ph.D. candidate (at North Texas State University), Brian Kenney gave a lecture about 2 weeks ago, ALA TechSource | Does Print Still Matter? Brian Kenney on the Future of Content in a 2.0 World, that really piqued my interest. He has much to say on the subject of the future of libraries, and I recommend that you read the ALA Tech Source article about his talk. But the thing that really caught my eye was an example he used of a traditional publisher successfully integrating Web 2.0 social technologies into its online publishing for the most part, sans DRM -- The New York Times. I visit this site all the time. Many of my bookmarked pages are Times articles. The permalink feature allows me to preserve my links to the articles even after they would normally enter the Times' archive and require higher levels of subscription service to access them than I enjoy. Kenney points out that the Times uses other means to attract and keep customers on its site:

Kenney discussed the move by The New York Times into the 2.0 world: "...once on the site, stickiness abounds. Comments are invited on features. Video and audio extend the text content." Kenney noted there are over two dozen blogs integrated throughout the site, ranging from "Bats," about the upcoming 2007 baseball season to "On the Runway," offering a behind-the-scenes look at the fashion industry. "Most significantly," he said,"other users serve as guides to Times content. Tag clouds crop up. You can view the most popular articles by those most emailed, those most blogged, or by most popular search terms."

This integration of the user experience--and opinion--radically changes the construct of the traditional newspaper, which has relied on an editorially created hierarchy based on placement within the publication. "Real estate, in print, is everything, that and the font size of headlines," Kenney said.

This contrasts sharply with the approach of most publishers in the print world exploring business models on the Internet. Most ebooks are DRM heavy, one of the factors contributing to the lackluster performance of the genre.

The Times example also points out the decreasing importance of control in general, even to highly successful old-media businesses. The NY Times makes it easy -- not difficult of expensive -- for readers to reuse and refer to its content. Contrast this approach with some of the restrictive user licenses libraries must agree to in order to make electronic resources available to our constituents. I suppose it is just the natural evolution of business models given the shock of the potential unleashed by the Web, and that things take time. Nonetheless, it is encouraging to see such high-profile examples of publishers inviting users to make use of content, instead of asserting copyright as both a sword and a shield, when it is now possible to be profitable without so inhibiting use and enjoyment.

An interesting little brou-ha-ha has erupted at Harvard over the effort by students to provide materials the University makes available through an official portal, in alternative ways. As explained at The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: No Course Material Allowed on Student Site, Harvard Says, and elaborated a bit in the comments, many issues are mixed into the controversy.

It is not always so obvious to some that course materials that are available only behind password protection, are there because institutional rights to use them are limited, either by the terms of Harvard's licenses with the suppliers, or by the doctrine of fair use to the extent, if any, that Harvard relies on fair use to provide course materials to students in electronic formats. In either case, Harvard probably would be liable for its failure to protect the interests of the copyright owners in those works, either under its contracts, or under copyright law, if it failed to act in the face of complaints from the copyright owners.

There are branding issues also. The Harvard portal is appropriately adorned with Harvard's logo. The student site raises significant trademark use issues, but again, not everyone knows or fully appreciates these issues.

So, we are educators. Why not use this event to teach those who are clearly eager to create some of the rules of the road for creating? This is the perfect "teachable moment," as we in academe would say. We have here energetic, creative, positive students who see something they think is a problem and who do more than simply complain, or grumble about -- they actually invest their own time and energy to demonstrate what they believe is a better alternative (that's debatable of course, but frankly beside the point here).

But it gets even better: When one factors in the incredible power of Web 2.0 capability, not only are the students in line to learn something about intellectual property law, but Harvard (and all of us) are in line to learn something about the potential reach and value of information we have on our servers if we will open it to opportunity. Aside from the information that we must protect by limiting its access, there is a wealth of information on our servers that we could open to other uses. This is a great mutual learning opportunity, one I would jump on like a duck on June bug if I were there! This kind of thing doesn't come along every day.

Just noticed an interesting entry at the Institute for the Future of the Book (if:book), if:book: chromograms: visualizing an individual's editing history in wikipedia that connected up for me with an article I had read earlier at Peter Brantely's blog, shimenewa, Recontracting authors' rights.

Peter was commenting upon the marvelous possibilities for research that open access provides -- not merely access to results, but access to a rich data treasure that can be mined for connections, where the value is in the collection rather than the individual work. The if:book note is about just that kind of mining: researchers at IBM are mining the very open Wikipedia for information about how editors work, how they manage a peer production project.

Open access is not an end in itself. It is instrumental. It admits possibilities that no one has thought of today. These possibilities are the heart and soul of research. Open access enables the heart and soul of research. Freely accessing others' writings is not the payoff for open access, it is a small, first step, a door through which creativity enters. It is worth pursuing. It is worth spending scarce resources to make it possible, not so an article can park itself in an institutional repository, but so that someone who isn't yet born can connect up some dots some day because the article and a gazillion other things were there for her to ponder, search, mine, analyze, ...

I don't often lose sleep over copyright issues anymore. But last night I could not stop thinking about the Copyright Office's new resource for *children.* Please have a look if you haven't already: Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright. There's a text only version if you want to skip the cartoons and the music (assuming you are not 13). This bothers me on so many levels, but I'm only going to address one level here, the most obvious. My experienced, calm, collected voice is telling me to wait a few days before I write this. Ok, at least wait a few days before I publish it. Clearly, I am ignoring that voice. I should at least acknowledge that I'm probably overreacting. I no doubt will feel differently about it after I have thought about it for awhile. Maybe I'll write about it again after a few days.

That said, do children really need to know about copyright? Well, I reluctantly must admit that yes, they do. Should they need to know about copyright registration, copyright history, and the role copyright plays in protecting film, music, art and literature? Well, it's not like they need to be protected from this, like it was senseless death, war violence or something cruel and ugly. So, it is commendable that the Library of Congress offers a well-done, straightforward, and fairly neutral informational piece. What would we expect the Library to talk about, other than what it does, which is, in this case, copyright registration. A narrow slice of the copyright pie, to be sure, but again, that's one of the things the Library does that no one else does.

But on the other hand, remember what it was like to be 13? Was registering your copyrights something you were all that concerned about? Should you have been? Have things changed that much with respect to how likely it is that the metaphorical box of things you created during your 13th or 14th year of life needs protection? From what? From becoming part of the stream of creativity (my metaphors are all over the place) from which you yourself borrowed to create?

If I had one opportunity to tell kids about copyright, I suppose I would mention its role in protecting the commercial interests of creators and distributors like the film, music, art and publishing industries, but in the next breath I would appeal to their own sense of how most things we all create are not meant for commercial exploitation, but instead are meant to be shared, reused, remixed and borrowed from. I'd say, "Look inside that box of things you created last year. Let's look at where all your things came from. Let's see how borrowing and modifying and adding your own ideas works in real life, and what we all need to keep that going."

The lesson I would teach is about the fact that *YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING* if you want your own creativity to be added to and be a part of a flowing, lively stream, rather than be caught up in a little eddy that goes nowhere. Congress (something here about infinite wisdom) has created a set of rules that, without your doing anything beyond the mere act of creating (tangible things, of course), keeps everything you create in that box, locked away, maybe forever, but at least for, let's see, you're 13? Let's say you'll live to 78, your box of stuff stays locked away for the rest of your life (65 years) plus 70 more years. Yes, in 135 years your box of stuff will possibly join the stream of creativity. If the box is still around then. And somebody finds it. And they know you and only you created it, and when you died. And they know about copyrights. If that doesn't fit your idea of what you want, then YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING. You have to let people know that you have something else in mind for your box of stuff. Fade to Creative Commons logo/website.

The assumption that everything needs "protection" for 1 1/3 centuries is so out of step with the reality of how we all create and most importantly, *why* we all create (overwhelming, not to make a living from our creations), and the serious consequences of being out of step with reality makes me very sad, and angry. The waste, the untapped creativity, and the criminalizing of creativity cannot be defended in my opinion. One size does not fit all. Given the enormity of the explosion of creativity enabled by the networked environment, to say nothing of creativity in the real world, the lessons we need to teach are about taking responsibility to do individually what Congress cannot seem to do for us as a nation -- create a copyright that fits our widely divergent needs, rather than one that both stifles us creatively and turns us into criminals (or potential civil litigants -- there's another interesting copyright lesson for kids) if we ignore it. We need to tag our creative works with simple statements that express how we feel about their place in the creative stream. I would recommend Creative Commons licenses for many reasons, but any statement about sharing is better than doing nothing and thereby consigning your work to copyright's centuries-long holding bin, or perhaps appropriately named, wastebasket.

A little off-topic in that there's not a copyright angle in here anywhere, but hoping that our audience is filled with bibliobloggers, I'm passing Meredith Farkas' Survey of the Biblioblogosphere Update | Information Wants To Be Free note on to you. She's conducting a survey of library bloggers as a follow-up to one she did 2 years ago. It only takes a few minutes to complete the survey. She'll be publishing one or more articles based on her analysis of the data, later on. So go check it out!

I was directed to the site, from Open Access News, Peter Suber's running commentary on all things to do with, well, open access. This particular post focused on copyright, but in the context of increasing populations that include more and more people who are willing to write without making it their living: More Authors, Less Copyright. So, I visited. It was a blog called The Technology Liberation Front with several authors of whom I had heard, but many more that were new to me. Tom Bell was the author of this particular post. Anyway, the focus of the blog is federal Interent policy, whatever that touches -- certainly copyright, but also a host of other issues that we don't talk about that much here. I recommend you pay it a visit if you're interested in the broader issues of Net policy.

Lessig' gave a talk about remix culture back in March at TED: How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law. His talk was just posted this month. For anyone who has seen him give a talk in the last 1 - 2 years, this won't be new, but it's very streamlined and very succinct. The video only runs about 18 minutes and it's excellent -- watch this!

Lessig emphasizes the importance of competition, that "more free" can compete with "less free," that artists' choice (to distribute differently, for example, to make their own works more freely available) is the key to defeating monopoly, and that laws that criminalize our children's creativity are corrosive -- and we can do better.

I have been developing an argument that touches on these same themes at Mass digitization ~ changing copyright law and policy, and in fact I had just posted this new segment last weekend that talks about how the sheer availability of so much good free content online inevitably puts pressure on even Hollywood and the music industries to stop making it hard for people to get to their content (DRM and subscription barriers, among others). Check it out.

Yahoo! announced today that it will be supporting Semantic Web and microformats to improve search results for structured data (as reported in ReadWrite Web: And Nerds Became Kings: Yahoo! to Announce Semantic Web Support - ReadWriteWeb). The Semantic Web has been a dream of Tim Berners-Lee for a long, long time, and up until now, pretty much way behind schedule because it just seemed, well, too hard. Things are changing.

They always do.

You know how RSS allows you to get feeds from your favorite blogs and other newsy Websites? That functionality is one example of how we are able today to break the offerings on a Webpage up into small parts and send them zipping around the Web. The text is separated from the formatting on our page, the way the text is displayed isn't carried around with it. That enables a snippet of our text, maybe the first paragraph for example, to be displayed by someone, anyone who subscribes to our feed.

Semantic Web potentially micro-bites the content even further -- into little bits that are identified as to precise type: this part is a last name; this part is a first name; this part is a phone number; this part is a set of key words; this part is an abstract, etc. People might tag text down to this level to enable its extraction and manipulation, its readability by computers (see Michael Jensen's article, The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority, about the importance to Authority 3.0 of being computable); its reorganization for other purposes. It gets treated like data rather than information or knowledge (don't let's debate what those things are just now).

What might this mean for copyright policy and practice? Wow, it just sends the mind reeling. I can't begin to imagine the implications, but one thing seems clear: a Semantic Web has the potential to further dramatically reconfigure the relationship between copyright owners and those who wish to access and use their copyrighted works. Implicit in the markup for computer recognition, extraction and manipulation is a license to actually do those things. Atomized text and images, sounds, audio-visuals. Wow. Might a whole new round of fear and loathing be right around the corner? Or will this just add to the steady pressure on copyright owners to open up their works to use and reuse -- if they want attention at all?