David Weinberger's Blog, page 92
April 23, 2012
[2b2] Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 50 years later
The Chronicle of Higher Ed asked me to write a perspective on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions since this is the 50th year since it was published. It’s now posted.
April 22, 2012
April 21, 2012
The semi-transparent Prisoner’s Dilemma
A British game show that I never heard offers a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. As the host explains at the beginning, if both contestants agree to split the pot, they split it. If one chooses to split and the other to steal, the stealer gets the whole thing. If they both choose to steal, they get nothing. So, here’s the clip in which one of the players injects a new variable. [SPOILERS IN THE REST OF THIS POST]
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Why does the guy on the right (Mr. Right) finally choose the way he does?
If Mr. Left believes that Mr. Right will Steal, then Mr. Left will Split, so Mr Right might as well Split. If Mr. Left thinks that Mr. Right will Split, then Mr. Left will Steal, so Mr. Right can either Split (so Mr. Left gets the pot) or Steal (so neither gets anything); might as well Split. If Mr. Left believes that Mr. Right will steal and will break his promise to split the pot afterwards, then Mr. Left might Steal just to screw Mr. Right, in which case Mr. Left might as well let Mr. Left get the money rather than foregoing it for both of them, so Mr. Right should Split. No matter how you slice it, Mr. Left should Split.
If that’s right, and if Mr. Left were given time to work it through, then Mr. Left should have Stolen (assuming his aim is to maximize his share). But I’m pretty sure that I’m wrong about that.
April 20, 2012
Neelie Kroes: European Commission’s voice for the open Internet
Neelie Kroes is becoming one of the open Internet’s most influential supporters.
Kroes is Vice President of the European Commission and is responsible for its “digital agenda.” At the Forum d’Avignon I was at (see here and here) she was just about the only person in a positon of power — economic or regulatory — to suggest that the Internet is actually a good thing for culture, and that we need new ways to think about copyright and distribution. Yesterday she gave a speech at the World Wide Web Conference in Lyon in which she called for new thinking to support an open Internet. Most importantly, she explicitly recognized that openness is indeed the property from which the rest of the Net’s value springs.
That a leader of the EC responsible for the “digital agenda” understands this shouldn’t be news. But it is. She even cites Yochai Benkler. Go Neelie!
Her talk begins by nailing its main point:
The best thing about the Internet is that it is open. Indeed it’s built on the idea that every device can talk to every other, using a common, open language. That’s what explains its seemingly endless growth.
Exactly right! Thank you, I’ll be here all week, drive safe, and God bless.
She goes on to explain the many benefits openness brings: “…choice and competition; innovation and opportunity; freedom and democratic accountability.” “Look at what we could do if we opened up our public sectors and put their data online.” She touts open standards. She points to political benefits: “And just look at what openness can do for freedom of speech. The Internet gives a voice to the powerless, and holds the powerful to account.”
Then she turns to the factors that impede openness:
Sometimes the problem is ancient, pre-digital rules that we need to cut back or make more flexible. Other times, openness actually flows from strengthening regulation.
She goes on to say that sometimes it’s about changing a “mindset,” not changing the rules. She says that we need an environment were different models are available and can compete. For example, some people want open discussions and some want moderated forums. We should have all types so people can choose. Likewise, we should have many different business models. People who want to be compensated monetarily for their deserve to be, although many are happy to give away what they’ve created. She says:
Look at the complicating licensing systems for copyrighted material here in Europe. These guarantee that Europeans miss out on great content, they discourage business innovation, and they fail to serve the creative people in whose name they were established.
Woohoo!
After nodding to the need for security and privacy, she gets down to the infrastructure level:
…open competition, brought by the EU, has delivered for Europe. It offers consumers better deals and new, tailored services; market players new opportunities; and potential investors legal certainty.
She states her firm commitment to net neutrality. She is fine with having many market choices, including for cheaper plans that provide limited bandwidth, or access designed for specialized preferences. But, she says, there must always be truly open, neutral access, and she points to the BEREC study due in May that should tell us whether in Europe truly open access is being offered to everyone as an option.
Great speech, especially from a person in her position.
So, let me tell you my one concern. Kroes’ idea of openness means that the Net ecosystem should support the option for closed systems for those who want them: It needs to support copyright and it needs to support offerings from access providers that limit access. In theory there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when you try to engineer an open system to support closed options. So, even the most crazed copyright supporter (let’s just call him, oh I don’t know, “Sarkozy”) is happy to let people give away their own content if they should be nutty enough to want to do so. But to support the “equal and opposite” option of being able to sell content, Sarkozy wants to rejigger the entire system to prevent “piracy.” If you want to offer the closed option with sufficient rigor to prevent all violations, the system would need to become closed. Kroes is certainly not advocating that closure, but the piece I feel is missing from her talk is the recognition that the value of openness surpasses the value that would come from a system engineered to so scrupulously protect IP. We have to accept some degree of risk for IP in order to have the openness that brings us the values Kroes is so eloquent about.
Likewise, I have no problem with access providers offering plans with data caps or that throttle bandwidth (assuming they’re transparent about it); that does not violate my idea of net neutrality. But there are conceivable plans for “specialist user needs” (as Kroes calls them) that would be discriminatory: A plan that gives priority to the delivery of movies (for example) would give those movie bits priority over the non-movie bits that other users of the Net care about. Personally, I think the best protection for the open Internet is structural separation: access providers sell you access — including tiered services — but are not allowed to sell either content or services that discriminate among bits. I don’t know where Kroes stands on this, but again I would have preferred a clear statement about it.
But now I’m just being greedy. Neelie Kroes is an Internet champion at time when we desperately need one.
April 16, 2012
Media reports its reaction as news…again
Secret Service scandal eclipses Obama trip
That’s the headline in USAToday. It’s typical of the news coverage of the Secret Service scandal before the President arrived in Colombia.
Let me fix that for you:
Media’s decision to focus on the Secret Service scandal eclipses Obama trip
The eclipse has only to do with how the media have chosen to cover the trip. And with headlines like the one in USAToday, the circle is complete: the media reporting on the media’s coverage as if they were actually reporting an event.
Sheesh.
April 15, 2012
Timbuktu librarians, scholars, and citizens preserving ancient documents and Islamic heritage
On April 1, rebels overran Timbuktu, so, according to a Reuters article, librarians, scholars, and citizens in this important site of Islamic learning are hiding away thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts. “Estimates for the total number of historic documents in the city, some of them from the 13th century, range from 150,000 to five times that number,” says Pascal Fletcher, the article’s author.
In fact, citizens lined up to deny armed rebels access to the archives where 20,000 ancient manuscripts are stored.
From the article:
ome texts were stashed for generations under mud homes and in desert caves by proud Malian families who feared they would be stolen by Moroccan invaders, European explorers and then French colonialists. Now many fear the rampaging rebels, who carry AK-47s instead of muskets, lances and swords.
Brittle, written in ornate calligraphy, and ranging from scholarly treatises to old commercial invoices, the documents represent a compendium of learning on everything from law, sciences and medicine to history and politics. Some experts compare them in importance to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
(I came across this article in the really useful aggregation site Library News, which (disclosure) comes out of our Harvard Library Innovatino Lab.)
April 14, 2012
[2b2k] Too Big to Know’s network
Valdis Krebs has posted a map of books that Amazon says people who bought 2b2k also bought, and then the web of books that are one degree away from those books.
It’s interesting to parse as you try to discern what the shared interests are. And I’m surprised that Amazon hasn’t picked up on it as a way to sell more books, and that publishers haven’t picked up on it to understand their market better.
In any case, thanks, Valdis!
Erin McKeown on copyright ambivalence
Musician and Berkman Fellow Erin McKeown has written a wonderful post expressing her ambivalence about copyright.
Her heart and her brain are on the side of copyreasonableness, and thus she reacts strongly against the insane copyright totalitarianism that has come to be taken as obvious, normal, and even righteous.
But then this happened: In 2003, she wrote and recorded Slung-Ho with some success.
In 2008, it was used in a commercial shown in the Czech Republic. Last year, a Czech singer issued this song. See it here because Sony, having its sense or irony removed in the operation that removed its heart and common sense, won’t let the video be embedded. Proof:
Let’s stipulate that it’s a rip-off: not a mash-up, not an homage, not an inspired-by. It’s a commercial rip-off intended to make money off the another’s creative work. And the song has done very well commercially.
Erin has mixed feelings, which she expresses honestly. That’s what makes her post so interesting.
And challenging.
I think our current copyright system is insanely inadequate for the new ecology, and that it has the opposite effect that its best-spirited defenders want it to have: the current copyright laws (and mindset) are impeding the greatest cultural flowering in our history, and if those copyright laws are taken to their proposed maximum, they will kill culture dead.
And yet. I write books that are copyrighted. I write them in part to make a living. If you published my book without my permission under your name, I’d be pissed off. If you then sold them at half my publisher’s price on Amazon, my publisher would sue you and I’d happily testify against you. And I wouldn’t feel like a hypocrite. Well, I would (just as Erin feels ambivalent), but I’d remind myself that in this case, that niggling fear of hypocrisy is evidence t hat I’ve fallen into the copyright totalitarians’ trap.
The trap uses the fact that the line between cultural sharing and ripping someone off is blurry. Was George Harrison really ripping off The Chiffon’s in My Sweet Lord? For me, that’s a really blurry line, but ultimately I was sorry that he lost the case, in part because the song was simpler, in part because it was so famous a reference that I thought it was a form of homage, and in part because when in doubt we should allow cultural re-mixing to avoid cultural chilling effects. But the fact that the line is blurry does not mean that all cases are blurry. And Erin’s case and my hypothetical case are to me clear instances where someone is stealing the rewards that should accrue to the creator. I don’t think Erin is being hypocritical in the least: supporting serious copyright reform does not require one to give up all copyright claims. We think otherwise because the copyright totalitarians have succeeded in making us think that the alternative to the current insanity is to have absolutely no protection for creators. But fuzzy lines are still lines. (Well, ok, maybe they’re actually areas, not lines. But that’s neither here nor there.)
If anything, Erin’s willingness to protect her works from an egregious ripoff should make her an even stronger voice in the movement to protect sharing from the current predatory copyright laws.
April 11, 2012
[2b2k] Editorials and echo chambers
From a New Yorker article (April 9, 2012) by Adam Gopnick on Camus:
Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostely not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing…Not "Say this!" but "Sound this way!" is what the great editorialists teach.
April 10, 2012
CFPB.gov goes open source
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — AKA "The Agency Elizabeth Warren Was Born to Lead" — has announced that its software will be open source, with rare exceptions for security, although "… we believe that, in general, hiding source code does not make the software safer".
The CFPB's explanation of why it's going the open source route hits all the right notes: It's easy to acquire, it keeps its data open, and it lets the agency tap into the enormous libraries of available code. Plus:
Open-source software works because it enables people from around the world to share their contributions with each other. The CFPB has benefited tremendously from other people's efforts, so it's only right that we give back to the community by sharing our work with others.
I like it when government talks — and acts! — this way.
