I wrote a submission to the Commerce Select Committee on the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill.
The PDF is available for a slightly better formatted reading experience
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That BoingBoing Thing – Finale
20-May-10SO, I was getting ready on the weekend to tear apart Rob Beschiza’s comments on the prior posts under a great title -”The Fisking of Rob Beschiza!” when I mentioned it to a friend of mine who looked oddly at me and said simply “And that will get you what, exactly?”
And he’s right. There’s nothing I want or expect from BoingBoing and Rob Beschiza at this point. There’s nothing they’re going to get from me. I won’t be reregistering, because I don’t like the arbitrary way they treat the people who make up their community. They’ve made it clear they’re not going to change that approach.
So be it.
On to other things, like saving the Internet, and defeating ACTA. Stuff that matters.
That BoingBoingThing, Part deux
10-May-10Rob Beschiza, Managing Editor of BoingBoing posted a couple of comments on my last post. Rather than filling up the comments queue, I thought I’d answer them here.
Hi Rob, thanks for stopping by. Seems a little odd to me that it takes a public blogpost to get any sort of reaction from you, rather than email nearly 10 days ago, but at least you’re here. Not listening, though, it seems.
You confuse “entitlement” with “expectation”, and then use “entitlement” in a pejorative manner. Bravo! I never said I was entitled to post at BoingBoing – I said that, as a registered participant, I had an expectation that BB would behave in a fair and reasonable manner.
Your ad-meister, Mr Battelle, charges people who advertise on BB, and other properties, based on the number of visitors and pageviews that are generated. Whether I look at the ads or not, I am a part of the value chain that pays any remuneration you receive as Managing Editor.
That BoingBoing Thing
09-May-10I got banned from BoingBoing recently.
This, in itself, is not huge news and I’m not weeping in my tea over it, but the incident is worth examination, I think, as a part of the wider “knowledge economy” and the implications of that. First, here’s what happened.
BoingBoing, for those who don’t know, bills itself as a “directory of wonderful things”. Wikipedia says:
Boing Boing started as a zine in 1988 by Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair. Issues were subtitled “The World’s Greatest Neurozine”. Associate editors included Gareth Branwyn, Jon Lebkowsky, and Paco Nathan. Along with Mondo 2000, Boing Boing was an influence in the development of the cyberpunk subculture. Common themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney and left-wing politics. The last issue of the zine was #15.
Boing Boing became a Web site in 1995 and later relaunched as a weblog on January 21, 2000, described as a “directory of wonderful things.” Over time, Frauenfelder was joined by three co-editors: Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, and Xeni Jardin. All four Boing Boing contributors are, or have been, contributing writers for Wired magazine.
On 28 April, Xeni Jardin published an article about Twitter and the advent of “twitter nazis”. The way BB generally publishes is to point to an article on another site, quote a little to get your appetite going, and offer a little commentary. In this case, the article featured was on the New York Times and quoted actor John Cusack who, the article claims, has suffered at the hands of the evil spelling nazis. Cusack has written guest posts for BB in the past, and this connection was mentioned. More…
Hoist with their own petard!
14-Apr-10The Government Accountability Office has made a study of “efforts to quantify the economic effects of counterfeit and pirated goods” and concluded that “difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts” (h/t Ars Technica)
No surprise to those of us who have been calling “bullshit” all along, but what’s really interesting is why they’ve made the study. According to Ars:
It’s all due to the PRO-IP Act, which passed under President Bush and has led President Obama to appoint an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator within the White House. Part of the IPEC’s duties include gathering data on piracy and counterfeiting, and current IPEC Victoria Espinel is now rounding up that data. The GAO report is part of this process, and it certainly doesn’t make industry estimates look compelling. More…
The Wellington Declaration
12-Apr-10On Saturday 10 April, a group of concerned people got together in Wellington NZ (where the next round of ACTA began today) to hold a PublicACTA Conference to discuss the issues around the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Michael Geist and Kim Weatherall were keynote speakers, and the group broke down and analysed what we know about ACTA and what’s wrong with it.
The event was streamed and recorded and you can play or download the video at http://www.r2.co.nz/20100410/
The outcome of the meeting was the Wellington Declaration which you can sign up to if you agree with it at http://www.gopetition.com/online/35443.html. Russell Brown has a very nice summary of it over at Public Address.
More than 2000 have already signed, from around the world. The petition will remain open but PublicACTA will be delivering a physical copy to the negotiators tomorrow, so the more signatures the better.
Tell your friends
Busy week for ACTA watchers
06-Mar-10There have been a bunch of leaks from the ACTA process lately, and this week saw 2 of the biggest – the names of the countries who are opposing transparency and, even more surprisingly, a breakdown of the positions different negotiating teams are taking on aspects of the US proposal, known as the “Internet Chapter”. I think both documents are genuine, though I wouldn’t put it past the negotiators to put out misinformation as part of a bait-and-switch campaign, but I haven’t read through the documents yet in enough detail to comment on them, though others have:
One thing that stands out, as Nat notes, is that the reported New Zealand positions are much more realistic and reasonable than MED’s public utterances would have lead us to anticipate. That’s great, but we’re only one voice at a table we shouldn’t really be sitting around. And I say again, there is nothing in a confidentiality agreement that limits you exposing your own position to your own citizens. If you’ve got nothing to fear… More…
Censorship and the DIA filter
17-Feb-10The NZ Department of Internal Affairs is launching a web filter to block child abuse images (CAI)/child pornography(CP) (See my thoughts on terminology) in March, according to ZDNet. As part of the structure, there will be an Independent Reference Group that will have oversight of the process and be a point of review for complaints against the filter and its operation.
I am part of the Independent Reference Group, mainly because I don’t believe the filter will work, and because I am implacably opposed to any extension of it.
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton spoke eloquently last week about freedom of information and what some countries needed to do about it. This cyber-sabre rattling was, however, in contrast to Vice-President Joe Biden’s “piracy” summit at the White House last year. Biden’s view (as instructed by the “copyright industries” – and I can feel totally happy about using that term now, as even their key lobbyist refers to his clients that way) appears to be that information doesn’t want so much to be free as bought and sold.
There’s another interesting contrast: President Obama’s transparency memo – his first presidential act – seems to have no impact on the United States Trade Representative, Ambassador Ron Kirk, who still insists that the ACTA negotiations are a matter of “national security”. It’s an interesting sidenote that almost all the other nations involved in ACTA swear they’ve all urged greater transparency in the negotiations, so one is left wondering which country is actually keeping it secret. Lookin’ at you, Barack! More…
Bless me Internet, for I have sinned. It is 6 whole months since my last post. Woh!
So what happened to drag me away from the keyboard?
- I got a dog (using the same rule as cats – see other blog)
- I helped run a BarCamp on Open Government
- I did a couple of other projects that I can’t link to or talk too much about
- I had bronchitis (been a pretty crappy winter all around, health-wise)
- I was accepted as an exhibitor in the Kapiti Arts Trail this weekend (#91)
- (I’m sure there was some other stuff)
- Oh yeah, I signed up on Twitter.
That last is the big one, really, as it chews up the most time. I have barely looked at RSS since April, and have only made one post to my family blog. It’s really quite fascinating to me (10K tweets later) and not a little frightening. I’m following most of the people I used to use RSS for, but now it’s in real time.
So, what’s hauled me back to the keyboard? ACTA – the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement – you may remember that I’ve blogged on this before. Well, it’s just entered its next round, in Korea, that well-known home of freedom and civil liberties (and the first country in the world to pass a 3 strikes law and implement it).
So, wassup with ACTA? For background, I’d like to point you to a recording of me discussing ACTA with Kim Hill on National Radio recently. Very pleased with the event and it’s now very timely, as ACTA has reared up again. More…