Scrutiny

According to Machinist and CNet News, Google has promised the court that it will launch a technology for YouTube designed to automatically locate and take down material that infringes copyright. Google is being sued by Viacom and by a consortium of European sports teams for not sufficiently patrolling the video site for instances of their content being posted by users. The law requires Google to respond to take-down notices submitted by copyright owners; the case, if it doesn’t get settled before going to court, will deal with what counts as a reasonable response.

The plan to automatically filter YouTube for infringing content should take us right back to the Napster case. As I predicted in the book, we’re already collectively forgetting that the court did not shut down Napster. It merely required Napster to filter its network, blocking users from accessing copyrighted material on other users’ computers by removing it from its search results. There was a lot of back and forth about how effective the filter that Napster installed was, and how diligent the RIAA was about providing Napster with the information it needed to filter out its member companies’ content, but it didn’t matter because, with so much music unavailable, the network dried up and users went elsewhere.

So, what’s different here? First, in the intervening time, the technology for filtering has certainly improved. Google has not gone into detail about how their YouTube filter will work, but it will certainly benefit from six years of innovation in such tools. Moreover, all the content is stored at YouTube. Napster had to recognize in real time that a logged-in user was offering something they shouldn’t, whereas Google has the entire database just sitting there, ready to be scanned and filtered. And, in terms of long-term consequences, the value of YouTube is not overwhelmingly its provision of copyrighted content, they way Napster’s was — an effective filter is not likely to kill off the site.

On the other hand, part of the problem is that YouTube is a massive and constantly fluctuating corpus — precisely the problem Google is being sued for in the first place. Despite being diligent about removing content, they can’t seem to keep up with all the users uploading clips from TV shows and movies, and all the take down notices coming from the studios and broadcasters. Presumably, an automatic filter is intended to improve on whatever they’re currently doing. But, it will also presumably suffer from the same problems Napster’s filter did. First, users will game the system, trying to beat the filter. Napster users started renaming files with obvious spelling errors, to avoid the early filter that looked for artist names, even going so far as converting them to pig latin, i.e. “itneybray earsspay,” or reversing the name, i.e. “yentirb sraeps”. More importantly, the filter will likely identify false positives, removing content that shouldn’t in fact be removed. And there’s great incentive for Google/YouTube to over filter (to appease the court and avoid a lawsuit) and little incentive for them to protect those users who get caught up in that net, or to reinstate their videos.

My particular concern is that the filter will depend on some form of visual recognition and pattern matching — i.e., it will look for what is likely to be Stephen Colbert’s face, and assume it has liekly located an unauthorized clip from The Colbert Report. Napster upgraded its filter, from one that blocked according to filenames to a system of audio recognition that compared the music itself to known songs. The risk, as usual, is for fair use. Would a news documentary or a video parody that included a few seconds of Colbert get caught in the filter plans to impose?

Alfred Yen at Madisonian.net recently commented on a short Newsweek piece about the penalties that can be imposed on parents for the legal infractions of their children. (The full piece is reproduced here.) He points out that

Leading the list of monetary fines (there is also listed a 6 months jail sentence in Kansas for allowing underage drinking at home) was “illegal downloads,” with a fine of “up to $150,000.” Next was “weapons” in California (up to $30,000 “if someone is killed or injured because a child was allowed access to a weapon,” followed by vandalism in Arkansas (a mere $15,000). So, according to this list, the worst thing a parent can do is give his or her child access to a Internet-connected computer that gets used to download infringing material. It’s apparently worse than giving him or her access to a gun that is used to shoot someone. Interesting priorities.

Yep. Of course, this $150,000 number rarley happens in practice, at least with individuals. In the RIAA lawsuits brought against individuals by the RIAA or its member labels, the overwhelming majority are settled, apparently at around $3750. (See Ray Beckerman’s thoughtful and regularly updated synopsis of the RIAA lawsuit process.) The $150,000 number is more a comment on the priorities apparently embodied in copyright law — though motivated in part by lobbying from the music industry, among others.

One of the many troubling things about the RIAA’s strategy of suing individuals for copyright infringement across peer-to-peer networks is that these individuals are sometimes under age, and the RIAA has been willing and eager to extend responsibility to the parents. This is just another aspect of their effort to extend liability and penalty towards secondary agents, whether it be the makers of the file-trading networks, the producers of technologies like mp3 players, the ISPs, the universities.

This may be changing, however. Back in February, an Oklahoma judge found in favor of the defendant in Capitol v. Foster. Foster was charged with copyright infringement, but she claimed that she was not the user they had identified and had never downloaded music from the Internet. Her daughter may or may not have been the one who had been downloading, but the record label decided to push the case, arguing that as the owner of the Internet account used, Foster should be held responsible anyway. The court agreed. And this month, they ordered the record label to pay Foster’s lawyer’s fees, which had ballooned to $68,685.23. Groklaw notes that this decision may have serious repurcussions for this strategy, as it is the first time the RIAA has had to cover costs of those wrongfully sued, which apparently happens quite often. It may also explain why the RIAA has slowed its lawsuit strategy (stopped at 17,587?) and replaced it with its “pre-litigation letter” approach — 2,423 and counting. But it is also a nice reminder

The Internet has been tarred and feathered as a haven for sexual predators and pedophiles since its inception; while I don’t mean to dismiss the concern entirely, I’m often troubled by the way that reports of this lurid terror are regularly magnified, overemphasized, and used as justification for regulations of the Internet that go far beyond the scope of the threat.

The latest version of this worry has emerged around social networking sites, especially MySpace, after some cases began to emerge where MySpace played some role in the criminal solicitation of a minor. MySpace has been under pressure recently to develop ways of patrolling its massive site to make it safer for kids; The Associated Press reported today that MySpace has removed 29,000 profiles whose users matched registered sex offenders. North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper is calling for legislation that would require adults to prove their identity before being allowed to create a profile, and require kids wanting to set up profiles to have their parents prove their identity. (This would likely mean entering a credit card number, though there are other ways. Requiring users to establish identity would make it easier for MySpace to compare their users to the sex offender registry; currently you do not need to indicate your identity to establish a profile, which means MySpace has not necessarily identified all registered sex offenders with profiles.) As Farhad Manjoo notes at Machinist, one of the problems of such a rule is how to define “social networking site” — would it apply to YouTube? del.icio.us? Twitter?

29,000 sounds like a lot, and part of the reason this is news is because MySpace had announced back in May that it had found and removed 7,000 registered sex offenders from its site; the revelation that the number is much larger adds an alarmist ring to the issue. But this quantification of the problem lends a great deal of power to these fears, and is often the reason they can be exploited for political gain. It made me want, despite my skepticism of quanititative evidence more generally, to put these numbers into some perspective. But I find that doing so also reveals how difficult it is to reach reliable numbers. Here goes…

According to a May 2007 report from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, there are 602,139 registered sex offenders in the U.S. This number has likely changed since then, but presumably not by an order of magnitude, so let’s use it. The AP report is not explicit about whether MySpace is comparing their users against only this U.S. registry, or if there are also international ones they have access to. So let’s make the assumption that they’re only using the U.S. registry. It’s also not clear from the report whether the 29,000 includes the 7,000 deleted in May, or if they located 29,000 more. If it’s 29,000 total, this means that 4.81% of all U.S. registered sex offenders had MySpace profiles that were located and deleted; if it’s 36,000 total, then that represents 5.98% of the registered sex offenders in the U.S. This feels, at least to me, like a pretty big number; if it was discovered that 6% of registered sex offenders were regularly attending Little League games (maybe they are), would we want to intervene? moreover, this doesn’t tell us how many MySpace user profiles of registered sex offenders did not include their real names and therefore have not been located and deleted — I imagine, if you’re a registered sex offender, that you wouldn’t be too inclined to provide your real name, though I don’t know to what extent there are other services MySpace offers that would require a credit card, making it more likely that real names end up being involved.

The AP report also notes that MySpace has over 180 million user profiles. This number is only an estimate of course, mostly because new profiles are being added all the time. But if we use this estimate, this means that the 29,000 or 36,000 profiles deleted represented approximately 0.016% or 0.02% of all MySpace profiles. These numbers feel small, to me at least. It is important to remember that we can’t necessary use them to stand for a percentage of all MySpace users, just a percentage of profiles; a single user may have multiple profiles. We could take this to suggest that, while there may be more profiles of registered sex offenders, the 29,000/36,000 at least represents that many people; maybe some of the profiles they have yet to discover are these same people; we might also take it to mean that some of these 29,000/36,000 may be multiple profiles of the same person, meaning there were fewer users identified as sex offenders (though if this were the case, to a significant degree, it’s likely that MySpace would make it known in order to downplay the concern.) Also, profiles remain even if their users logged on once and then never came back; the number of active profiles is significantly smaller, though this also applies to the number of sex offender profiles, though perhaps to a different degree.

Of course, we have obviously not accounted for sexual predators who are not registered as sex offenders for whatever reason — they’ve never been caught, they’ve yet to do something criminla but are about to, they were indicted as a minor or under some other circumstance that does not require them to register — or their crimes were in countries that do not maintain a registry, or a registry that MySpace has access to.

Just to add to the tangle, it’s probably important to recognize that part of the fear is based on the assumption that any child who has a MySpace profile is at risk of being accosted by one of these sex offenders. According to research reported in the Journal of Adolescence (blogged about here) a random sample of 2423 profiles by users under 18 years old, 948 were set to “private,” which means they can only be seen by the user’s friends. of the remaining “public” profiles, only 8% revealed their full name on the site, only 1% provided an email address. (Of course, I’m relying here on the abstract of the research and a secondary retelling of the published results of a research project; lots of details about how these numbers were reached are unavailable to me.)

I find it frustrating that the rhetorical power of a number depends in part on its clarity, which means its ability to obscure the complexity of the issue. And developing other numbers to counter it is an exercise in continued frustration. They always depend on unknowns, which must then be ignored, estimated, or explained away — or represented in ways that then undercut the rhetorical power of the number produced. I could say “29,000 sex offenders were removed from MySpace’s 180 million profiles” or I could say “roughly either 29,000 or 36,000 user profiles that likely represented some of the profiles maintained by sex offenders registtered in the U.S. were removed from MySpace’s approximately some number of active user profiles less than 180 million and changing every day.” Both are “true;” in some way the second statement seems like a fairer and more accurate representation, but it’s pretty clear which has more rhetorical oomph, which one will make it into the abstract of the paper, which will get it published, which will get picked up by the press.

And, these numbers always represent another attempt to make compelling numbers for the sake of some argument. A report that says 36,000 sex offenders were removed from MySpace is different than a report that says that 0.016% of MySpace profiles represent sex offenders, which is different than a report that says that 99.984% of MySpace profiles are people without records of sex offenses. Each of these claims is loaded, an “accurate misrepresentation” of the issue.

Update: “The Numbers Guy” at the Wall Street Journal has raised some similar concerns.

One of my favorite activities is putting together a syllabus; I love how I can look at a beautifully crafted course and see the whole exciting journey laid out, all the pieces already in place.

I just came across this course, taught by Michael Shanks, called Ten Things. Shanks is an archaeologist at Stanford, and his course draws together his field with work in the sociology and history of technology to help students rethink the relationship between technology, culture, and society. Each week focuses on one artifact, from the pyramids at Giza to Wedgewood china to the mouse, as  a way in to undermining some commonplace assumption about technology. Then each student develops their own portfolio on an artifact of their choice.

His notes on the final class, where he talks about “thing theory“, are a lovely synopsis of what the sociological study of technology, and particularly actor-network theory, have to offer.

InsideHigherEd and the Chronicle are both reporting on an amendment, being proposed by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, to the Higher Education Act (which is currently up for renewal). The rule would require universities to take certain measures to curb online copyright infringement by their students, and report their efforts back to Congress. The details of the amendment could still change, but according to InsideHigherEd, the amendment would require colleges to:

* Report annually to the U.S. Education Department on policies related to illegal downloading.
* Review their procedures to be sure that they are effective.
* “Provide evidence” to the Education Department that they have “developed a plan for implementing a technology-based deterrent to prevent the illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property.”

The measure would also require the education secretary to annually identify the 25 colleges and universities that have in the previous year received the most notices of copyright violations using institutional technology networks.

(The text of the amendment is apparently here, though the link is currently not working for me.)

This is the latest in a series of indications that Congress has decided to be concerned about file-trading at universities — or, to put it in plainer terms, Congress is increasingly embracing the entertainment industry’s strategic of targeting universities. This is a part of the that industry’s “bottleneck” strategy to counter unauthorized downloading. What do you do with a problem that happens on a small scale in a million places? One tactic is to go after all of these miniscule violations, or at least enough of them to send the message that each is risky. DRM encryption and lawsuits against individual file-traders both aim to do this. But it’s becoming increasingly plain that individual lawsuits are about as effective as throwing sand at a tidal wave, and DRM is much better at locking legitimate consumers into complex pricing schemes than at actually preventing illicit copying. So, the entertainment industry has also tried a second strategy, squeezing the bottlenecks, where pressure on a select few might extend restriction to the many. This includes the operators of peer-to-peer networks, if they can be found; the network service providers; the electronics and software manufacturers; and schools. By exerting pressure on them, they may be able to convice/compel them to shoulder the effort of policing their users — or at least be held financially responsible for not doing so. In terms of universities, this has meant everything from informal requests to police their students, legal threats against them as network providers, public pronouncements designed to shame them into compliance, directives that they convey pre-lawsuit letters to students — and now, perhaps, a legal obligation.

The problem here is (at least) three-fold. First, “technology-based deterrents,” by which they mean filters imposed on campus networks to block copyrighted materials, really don’t exist in a form that actually does what they want it to. Any system universities might be required to impose would be expensive and unwieldy.

Second, much of this file-trading is happening on closed networks set up by students, that may ride on the infrastructure of the campus network but do not live under university control. To intervene in these, aside from trying to shut them down altogether, would require even more cost and intervention, and would put the school in an icky position of patrolling students’ use of their own information technologies to a very detailed degree.

But most of all, a university is not only an educational institution, it’s also a place for the everyday life of the students who attend. A school administration must attend to providing both. However you feel about it, file-trading is not an interruption of the education of students: it does not interrupt teaching, it does not undermine the intellectual environment, it does not distract from schooling any more than sports or campus events do. So it is only an aspect of the life that students lead — which happens to occur on university grounds, and thus can fall under university scrutiny.

Certainly, schools should, and must, cultivate a safe and lawful environment for both an intellectual and social community to flourish, and that does require enforcing campus rules and helping to enforce laws. But they also must offer a space that allows these young adults to be agents of their own free choice, just as we expect of institutions that provide services for any other community of adults. This actually means that universities must avoid taking advantage of their oversight of student life, and act just as any other provider of resources to a community of people. If we do not require AOL or Earthlink or Verizon to monitor the information activities of their clients for copyright infringement, we must also not require universities to do so either, simply because they can.

Despite my copyright politics, I actually have a great sympathy for the efforts by authors and musicians to control how their work is first released. Call me old-fashioned, but I do think there’s a difference between unpublished and published, and I like that part of the artistry can be about crafting that first moment. Still, I wanted to point out a comment from Salon blog-umnist Farhad Manjoo at Machinist (a terrific blog that’s become my second click when I go online, after Salon) about how the multiple leaks of the new Harry Potter book demonstrate that the information environment has forever changed, and that security measures (like DRM) simply cannot cope. Despite millions of dollars of extraordinary security measures to protect the higly-anticipated final installment, including satellite tracking of delivery trucks, leaks of the final book’s major plot points, and even digital photos of each page, have surfaced online. Again, fans are largely fuming about the leaks, and I can appreciate it, though Manjoo makes some very compelling points about how this is unlikely to hurt Rowling or Scholastic financially.

But then he delivers the sad truth:

Rowling intended her story to be released a certain way. She wanted it to come out on July 21, she wanted it to come out on paper (and audiobook), she wanted people to delight, together and simultaneously, to the climax of a tale they’ve been waiting a decade to read. The artist, in other words, expected a certain fate for her art…

So let me try to say this kindly, hopefully without causing any offense: What the author wants is not, anymore, all that will happen. Today, artists — even those as powerful as J.K. Rowling — can’t reasonably expect such dominion over their art. A well-laid plan is dashed by some guy with a camera and a lot of time on his hands, and that’s that. And mostly this loss of control is a good thing, for fans as well as for artists. Rowling and her wizard have, after all, benefited tremendously from the Internet; through fan fiction and unending online discussion, creative Pottermaniacs have immeasurably deepened and intensified her work, keeping it thriving between releases.

Much of the discussion about the internet and copyright and peer-to-peer and control mechanisms have been about the economics (are sales going down? do people try new works and then buy them?) and the law (should re-distribution be illegal? Is copyright working in this altered environment?). But I think some of the most interesting questions are going to be about the cultural questions. How will the experience of entertiainment change? Will we have these blockbuster moments, where many of us gather at the same time for a carefully crafted mega-experience? If not, is that good or bad? How will the relationship between the original and the secondary material (parodies, sequels, reviews, criticisms) change, perhaps in ways that fundamentally change what “the” and “original” mean? And how will artists and writers innovate in this new environment, conjuring up new ways to thrill people never before possible in the bottlenecked, mass-produced, blockbuster version of culture we’ve had for the last century or so?

Is Harry Potter the last blockbuster? Probably not. We’ve been wondering about the death of the mass culture experience for a long time now, long before the Internet, as film attendance declined in the 60s and 70s, the three television networks become hundreds, the VCR allowed time-shifting, and the terrain of popular music fractured into dozens of sub-genres. But I do wonder if the pop culture phenomena of the near future will have very different contours, in part because of the power to circulate and recreate that is so taking advantage of digital technology and the Internet.

An interesting post from Mosaic designer and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, who apparently started his first blog five weeks ago, where he reflects on the experience of blogging and its potential as an emerging form of communication. It’s an intriguing combination of astute observation and fundamentalist cybergush. One comment was particularly interesting:

Fifth, writing a blog is way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book — but provides many of the same benefits.

I think it’s an application of the 80/20 rule — for 20% of the effort (writing a blog post but not editing and refining it the quality level required of a magazine article, a published paper, or a book), you get 80% of the benefit (your thoughts are made available to interested people very broadly)…

This of course assumes that you’re not trying to make a living writing magazine articles or books, or you’re not trying to get tenure as a professor by publishing peer-reviewed research papers.

Many have fretted about the way online communication — particularly e-mail, though blogs get tyhis criticism too — is diminshing the quality of writing. Perhaps there’s a risk there. But I think there’s something to what Andreessen is saying here, the way traditional “publication” imposes a kind of barrier — not just about who gets to publish and where, but the concomitant expectation that what you’re writing has to be perfect, polished, complete. As a writer, I can attest, this is an intimidating and powerful barrier. Blogging seems to have developed a set of cultural norms where rough draft quality is acceptable, even expected, where what Andreessen calls “incremental thinking” is acceptable, where revision is acceptable. I certainly aspire to being a superb writer, and have a special place in my heart for those (be they scholars, novelists, or bloggers) who have that gift. But I also think there’s value to the kind of loose freedom associated with blogs, where its best to just get it there, get the conversation going.

Of course, the last piece of Andreessen’s comment is crucial — this is not just a question of shifting cultural norms, but also of the inertia of infrastructural arrangements: economic relationships, reputation economies, professional expectations. I can blog all I want, have rich conversations with academic colleagues and everyone else by doing so, but that still (at least right now) would guarantee that I wouldn’t get tenure, if I did so to the exclusion of writing peer-reviewed journal articles and scholarly books. [the last bit was added in response to Eszter’s comment.]

I’m right now in the process of developing a graduate reading course, with my students Dima and Erik, on the foundational thinking around technology and society, so it was opportune that a note about this book just floated in on my never-ending river of email. The book is a collection interviews in which the same five questions were posed to many of the leading thinkers in the philosophical and sociological study of technology. It’s an excellent list of people (ready? Joseph Agassi, Mario Bunge, Harry Collins, Albert Borgmann, Paul Durbin, Andrew Feenberg, Joan H. Fujimura, Peter Galison, Allan Hanson, Donna J. Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Don Ihde, Ian C. Jarvie, Bruno Latour, Bill McKibben, Carl Mitcham, Andrew Pickering, Daniel Sarewitz, Dan A. Seni, Peter Singer, Susan Leigh Star, Lucy Suchman, and Isabelle Stengers.) And, the questions are provocative:

1. Why were you initially drawn to philosophical issues concerning technology?

2. What does your work reveal about technology that other academics, citizens, or engineers typically fail to appreciate?

3. What, if any, practical and/or social-political obligations follow from studying technology from a philosophical perspective?

4. If the history of ideas were to be narrated in such a way as to emphasize technological issues, how would that narrative differ from traditional accounts?

5. With respect to present and future inquiry, how can the most important philosophical problems concerning technology be identified and explored?

I won’t dub this “required reading” yet, because I haven’t read it all. But I just spent some time on the website for this book, which offers excerpts from one answer from each of the scholars. The writing is of a refreshingly high quality, and is lush with insights.

Curiously, my two favorite comments are not about technology at all, but about academia. The first comes from Susan Leigh Star, who notes the way that academic scholarship so regularly fails to allow attention to the marginal, the personal, the frail, and leaves us with philosophies of technology that remain distant from real human experience. She gives these academic techniques amusing names, one of which is

the Wall of Infinite Sequels. Such as “in future work we hope to extend this analysis to include such important issues as context, affect, and a more qualitative expansion of the independent variable, inequality.” Or “It was beyond the scope of this study to include more variety in the sampling framework, such as women, minorities, or pay rates. Too much variability in the independent variables managed here would have produced a combinatorial explosion.”

The second is from Bruno Latour. In response to question two, he balks at the idea that he has revealed anything to anyone, in part because we’re all so unwilling to see the complex entanglements of the technological and social elements of our world — but mostly because academics are intellectual troglodytes:

Academics, as a rule fail to appreciate so many things, that it is hard to know where to start! There is this near impossibility with modernism and modernists in general to be sensitive to what is given in experience that baffles me. There are still people who fret in sociology, anthropology and may be philosophy, because in my definition of techniques “I give a role to non humans”… and they pronounce this sentence as if they were saying “Latour is a pervert, a zoophile” or something of the sort. So we have been connected, attached, folded with non-humans for millions of years, and especially for the last three centuries, and it would come as a surprise for academics?! How strange. In my experience, academics live in a world that still predates all the industrial and technical revolutions. They are sort of upper paleolithic – and even that is unfair because in that time they had already lots of stones… and when you see the way philosophers treat stones, it is not encouraging…

Sony introduced Crackle yesterday; it’s their overhaul of Grouper, a user-generated video site a la YouTube that Sony bought for $65 million last year. Crackle is now designed to offer not “amateur” web video, but the work of aspiring filmmakers and animators.

Farhad Manjoo at Salon pointed out yesterday that part of what Sony is offering is the benefits of its own diverse corporate assets:

The company is now leaning on what MBA-types might call “synergy.” Sony owns many entertainment properties — movie studios, record labels, a huge video game business — and can thus offer attractive rewards to creators looking for more than YouTube fame.

The rewards Crackle offers to filmmakers for uploading their videos include a potential pitch to Columbia Pictures, a two-day apprenticeship at Sony Imageworks Animation Lab, and a night performing on the stage of The Improv. As far as I can tell, Sony does not own any of The Improv, but is certainly in a position to negotiate sweet deals with partner organizations to assemble its rewards for its content providers, not unlike what they do for Survivor or Project Runway. User votes will decide who receives these rewards in various categories.
I just wanted to point this out; I suspect you will see more about Sony on this blog in the months
to come. What we’re seeing is a series of corporate players working out the viable economic and cultural positions they’re willing to occupy and their customers are willing to embrace, all amidst the shifting dynamics of digital culture: changes in the economics of information and distribution, current re-thinking of the evaluation of amateur and professional expertise, the appropriate relationship between culture and commerce. One viable intersection point seems to be the YouTube model: company makes possible the uploading of content and the maintenance of the community that forms around it; advertising is delivered alongside for the purposes of revenue. Another seems to be this contest model, where company hosts content loaded there in pursuit of rewards, viewers are offered both the content and the role in adjudicating the contest. Farhad’s observation is one reason why I think this is an appealing model to the Sony and the like: the contest can also deliver, dirt cheap, the cream of the crop into their entertainment / star system, and presumably on their terms — just like American Idol contestants winning exclusive but restrictive recording contracts with a Sony/BMG sub-label and a management contract with Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment. User-generated content also becomes a form of A&R, with user votes replacing the assessments of music label reps.
I think Sony is in an intriguing, though perhaps not unique, position in regards to these maneuvers — being a company that offers content and tools, hardware and software, computational technology and consumer electronics.

I’m a week late on this one, but the list of Seven New Wonders of the World was announced on July 7. The selected sites, in alphabetical order, are Chichen Itza (Mexico), Christ the Redeemer (Brazil), the Great Wall (China), Machu Picchu (Peru), Petra (Jordan), the Roman Colosseum (Italy), and the Taj Mahal (India), with the Great Pyramid of Giza (Egypt) as an “honorary candidate” — the only remaining “Ancient Wonder of the World”.

and, still…
Some technology-related thoughts. First, I think it’s fascinating that all seven new wonders are made of stone. The rules stated only that the sites had to be man-made, completed before 2000AD, and be an in acceptable condition. Among the 20 finalists were some other familiar stone creations, including Stonehenge, the Acropolis, and Easter Island, as well as some structures not made of stone: the Sydney Opera House, the Statue of Liberty and, my vote for one to include, The Eiffel Tower. Its fascinating to me that, as we commemorate the “new” wonders of the world, we seemed to have avoided the whiff of novelty we so often celebrate, and gone back to the building material we almost never use. (Sorry, Industrial Revolution, you’re still a blip on the historical map.)

Which brings up the question of who “we” are. According the Wikipedia entry and the sources it cites, the list is controversial. It was organized by a private entrepreneur, Bernard Weber, and based on votes from the public, allegedly over 100 million, by phone or online. 77 monuments were initially nominated by an expert panel, and the private Foundation narrowed the list to 20, apparently based on votes already tallied. Theres was no limit on people voting multiple times, and there was plenty of gaming the system: according to Newsweek, Brazilian telecom companies helped support Rio’s “Christ the Redeemer” statue by waiving phone charges for calls to the Foundation’s voting line, and text messaging all of their customers with an urge to vote. The Petra received 14 million votes just from within Jordan; Jordan has a population of 7 million. And the Taj Mahal apparently leapt from #14 to #3 in the final month of voting, after a massive campaign that included every major newspaper and television station urging people to vote.

It’s also a testimony to our vast communication networks that this project was based on public votes, regardless of the details. The Seven Ancient Wonders of the World (The hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis as Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus, the Colossus at Rhodes, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and the Great Pyramid of Giza) may have been selected by Antipater of Sidon, a Greek poet, or Herodotus and Callimachus, Greek scholars — which also explains why the monuments are curiously all crowded around the Mediterranean. So whatever you think about the populist claims about the Internet, and not to over-valorize a glorified call-in poll, but there is something changing here about how we establish expertise and make history.

Finally, I love that this list is apparently in competition with a 2006 list produced by USA Today and Good Morning America — which included the Internet.

Self-professed “communication junkie” Dima Epstein is proposing a CommFree Day on the first Saturday of every month, beginning August 4. The idea is that, for those of us who love media and information technology, but also understand on some level that it shapes and shifts how we are in the world and can swamp our other priorities, that one day a month without our computers, cellphones, and TVs would be an enlightening and refreshing experience, a way to gain perspective. Or as Dima puts it,

I am not suggesting doing that out of hatred towards technology… Quite the opposite. I suggest that because I think we need this break to reflect on where we are heading and reflect on the role media and information technologies play in our lives. I think it is a healthy practice, and the key for it success is it becoming a practice…

My additional suggestion was that, if you’ve take part in CommFree Day on Saturday, then Sunday should be a “Day of Attunement” — what I want is for people to spend a day using their communication technologies all they want, but doing so in a way that is attuned to the role they’re playing, to how they mediate their relationships, their citizenship, their social identity.

Here endeth the lesson. I’m going to stop reading Dima’s blog and get back to work — on my computer.

I wrote a post about two weeks ago, about the Morse v. Frederick decision, in which the Supreme Court found that a high school principal could stop a student from posting a banner during a school-sanctioned activity, and suspend him for it, that obliquely promoted drug use. The reasoning laid out in the court opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts, is that the school’s obligation to teach its students about the dangers of illegal drugs justified the limitation of the student’s right to speak.

I had not had a chance to read the concurring opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas. But apparently Stanley Fish did, and he posted a reaction on his New York Times blog. And I find myself deeply troubled by both Thomas’ argument (no great surprise) and Fish’s comments (more surprising).

Thomas agreed with the court’s decision, but wrote a concurring opinion to highlight a different reasoning for it: that public school students have no free speech rights:

In my view, the history of public education suggests that the First Amendment, as originally understood, does not protect student speech in public schools…

Like their private counterparts, early public schools were not places for freewheeling debates or exploration of competing ideas. Rather, teachers instilled “a core of common values” in students and taught them self-control…

In short, in the earliest public schools, teachers taught, and students listened. Teachers commanded, and students obeyed. Teachers did not rely solely on the power of ideas to persuade; they relied on discipline to maintain order…

In light of the history of American public education, it cannot seriously be suggested that the First Amendment “freedom of speech” encompasses a student’s right to speak in public schools. Early public schools gave total control to teachers, who expected obedience and respect from students. And courts routinely deferred to schools’ authority to make rules and to discipline students for violating those rules…

To be sure, our educational system faces administrative and pedagogical challenges different from those faced by 19th-century schools. And the idea of treating children as though it were still the 19th century would find little support today. But I see no constitutional imperative requiring public schools to allow all student speech. Parents decide whether to send their children to public schools… If parents do not like the rules imposed by those schools, they can seek redress in school boards or legislatures; they can send their children to private schools or home school them; or they can simply move. Whatever rules apply to student speech in public schools, those rules can be challenged by parents in the political process.

Thomas’ hideous argument aims to roll back more than a century of progress in pedagogy. It perfumes its reprehensible position with a whiff of constitutional originalism, when it suits his argument. And in the end, it falls back on a gross assumption that choosing your child’s school and its policies is as simple as choosing this or that brand of soap. Just shop around for the best public school, or move to a more expensive neighborhood, or pony up the cash for private school, if you don’t like that Clarence Thomas refuses to set any guidelines on school principals and how they choose to stifle your child’s efforts to speak, think, or criticize.
But don’t look to Stanley Fish to note any of this. In his post (requires subscription to TimesSelect), so absurd it may even be a pristine parody of itself, he lauds Thomas’ principled stance, even wants to extend it:

If I had a criticism of Thomas, it would be that he does not go far enough. Not only do students not have first amendment rights, they do not have any rights: they don’t have the right to express themselves, or have their opinions considered, or have a voice in the evaluation of their teachers, or have their views of what should happen in the classroom taken into account. (And I intend this as a statement about college students as well as high-school students.)

One reason that students (and many others) have come to believe that they have these rights is a confusion between education and democracy. It is in democratic contexts that people have claims to the rights enumerated in the constitution and other documents at the heart of our political system – the right to free speech, the right to free assembly, the right to determine, by vote, the shape of their futures.

Educational institutions, however, are not democratic contexts (even when the principles of democracy are being taught in them). They are pedagogical contexts and the imperatives that rule them are the imperatives of pedagogy – the mastery of materials and the acquiring of analytical skills. Those imperatives do not recognize the right of free expression or any other right, except the right to competent instruction, that is, the right to be instructed by well-trained, responsible teachers who know their subjects and stick to them and don’t believe that it is their right to pronounce on anything and everything.

What this means is that teachers don’t have First Amendment rights either, at least while they are performing as teachers. Away from school, they have the same rights as anyone else. In school, they are just like their students, bound to the protocols of the enterprise they have joined. That enterprise is not named democracy and what goes on within it – unless it is abuse or harassment or assault – should not rise to the level of constitutional notice or any other notice except the notice of the professional authorities whose job it is to keep the educational machine running smoothly.

I find myself speechless that a university professor, especially one as accomplished as Fish, could honestly espouse such a position. It’s the worst kind of academic exclusionism, an ivory dungeon where students are not only treated as entirely separate from the real world, but are locked there for their own good and disciplined into submission. I can only say, there are plenty of ways to combine good pedagogy and a progressive position on the civil rights of students and teachers, plenty of ways to teach democratic principles and live them at the same time, plenty of ways to host education and democracy in the same classroom.

This video includes a demo of an image application called Photosynth, that can scrape all the pictures from Flickr of, say, Notre Dame, and assemble them into a single navigable visual space. It’s even more amazing than it sounds. Watch:

[Thanks to Eszter for the link.]

I find things like this amazing, though it is certainly a sign of the fact that I find weird little policy issues amazing. The Russian website allofmp3.com has been shut down by the Russian government; the site sold a huge collection of popular music, including most releases from the U.S. major labels, for 10-20 cents a song, in unprotected mp3 format, and had surpassed Apple iTunes in sheer volume of distribution. [Thanks to stereogum for the info.]

The company was in a grey legal area: it paid licensing fees to the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society, their equivalent of our ASCAP, and thus argued that it was a legitimate business; the RIAA claimed it was illegal, arguing that the Russian licensing group did not represent their interests. In January they sued allofmp3.com for — wait for it — 1.65 trillion dollars. [Thanks to boing boing for the info.]

Apparently, and here’s the amazing thing to me, the Russians shut the site down in response to U.S. pressure, which was actually made explicit. According to the London Times article:

Susan Schwab, the US Trade Representative, singled out allofmp3.com during talks last year on Russian membership of the WTO and said that closure was a non-negotiable condition of entry. She and German Gref, Russia’s Minister of Trade and Economic Development, signed an agreement in October in which Moscow pledged to shut down the site, which contains one of the world’s largest online collections of pirated music.

As important as I think copyright is, its amazing to me that the question of trade relations with Russia and the governance of an organization like the WTO doesn’t have bigger issues to focus on than whether allofmp3.com exists or not. But that’s the way the U.S. has played this, at the behest of the music and movie industries and their coziest technology partners: stem the tide of online file-trading — and upstart distributors — through lawsuits, anti-piracy rhetoric, legislation, and DRM here in the U.S., and extend those same tactics abroad by tacking them on to trade agreements and treaties. It’s stunning to think about how many allies the MPAA and RIAA have enlisted in this effort, from Congress and the FCC to ISPs and universities to the Boy Scouts and Junior Achievement — and governments around the world. And last January, apparently, Visa and Mastercard told the Russian company they would refuse to process credit card purchases.

Man, Matt told me to use that site like three years ago, and I never got around to it.

The Times article also notes that another Russian site, mp3sparks.com, has already emerged, looking curiously similar to the old allofmp3.com site. I just tried to buy the new White Stripes album, but their credit card service is down… hmm…

In the short time that Apple has become the third largest music retailer — not digital music, mind you, music altogether (recently passing Amazon, behind only Walmart and Best Buy) — its easy to forget that the major music labels have only ever had short contracts with Apple to sell their music. Despite the confidence with which Steve Jobs has commandeered the market for online music, he has always been a hair’s breath away from finding himself without major chunks of his library.

This week, Universal Music Group, which is responsible for roughly one in every three major pop music release, announced it would not renew its two year contract with Apple, opting only for a month-to-month arrangement. [Thanks to Adam Engst of TidBits for pointing out the New York Times article.] This seems to be part of the ongoing scuffle between Apple and the majors about pricing — Jobs has stood firm on a flat fee, whereas the labels want to be able to price songs and albums differently depending on popularity and release date — and the fact that iTunes downloads are formatted to play only on iPods — the labels want some compatibility with other players, whereas Jobs, umm… doesn’t.

I think it’s fascinating to look at this news in light of the recent decision by EMI to allow Apple to sell its music without DRM copy protection. It was easy for many to see the EMI announcement as the leak in the dam that would inevitably lead to the rjection of DRM. Universal’s decision may be related or not to EMI’s move — could they be jockeying for a good negotiating position for price and control as they let go of DRM? or could they be flexing their muscles as a gesture that they need not follow suit? But it’s certainly a stark reminder that Apple is negotiating a precarious balance here. Play the “no DRM!” card too hard, or hold too tight to the iPod exclusivity, and they may find that a very large chunk of their music is suddenly only available at Microsoft? And its a reminder — and this was my point in the book, though I’ve been wishing lately that I had made it even more pointedly — that these questions of ownership and technical protection measures are, at their base, very much economic strategies, though fitted with compelling rhetorical rationales, between companies jostling for control of a precariously fluid market.

Amidst my long-standing obsession with copyright, I try my best to also keep up with free speech issues. I guess the idea, in my latest thinking, is that I study “what structures culture,” the rules and constraints and pressures and assumptions that shape the terrain on which we participate in and build our cultural conversation. Free speech cases strike me as particularly important, though in some ways they’ve grown quaint in the shadow of the Internet, which seems like a fully open space for speech but most certainly isn’t, in all sorts of ways we haven’t yet gotten a grasp on.

In the recent slate of decisions issued by the Supreme Court, led by the newly-minted and carefully conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, two cases dealt with the speech laws of the First Amendment. One had to do with the rules established in the McCain-Feingold campaign reforms of 2002, banning special-interest advertisements in the month before an election that could be construed as campaigning directly for or against a particular candidate. The decision went in favor of the Wisconsin Right to Life group accused of violating the rule, when they ran ads gunning for, ironically, Senator Feingold. The SCotUS decision argued that the ads were not directly urging voters to vote against Feingold, only to contact him and express displeasure about his recent filibuster they didn’t like — against Bush’s conservative judicial nominations (hmm…). This could be construed as a ruling supporting free speech, in that the speaker was protected from government restriction, though I have long suspected that we’re going to have to significantly reconsider our First Amendment protections of corporate and non-profit campaigning in light of the incredibly power and financing of 527s and activist groups.

The second decision is one of those quaint ones, reminiscent of the landmark decisions in the 1960s about anti-war armbands, profanity on the back of a jacket, burned draft cards — except in place of politics, we’ve got the quirky dynamics of postmodern media celebrity. The case, Morse v. Frederick, pitted a public school student against his principal. The school had ushered the students outside to watch the Olympic torch pass; there, a group of students unfurled a banner that said “Bong Hits 4 Jesus”. Principal demanded it be removed; one student refused and was suspended for it. The student, Frederick, claimed it was simply a meaningless statement meant to get them on TV; the principal, Morse, said it encouraged the use of illegal drugs. The Supreme Court found against the student, arguing that their rule against student messages encouraging drug use was not a First Amendment violation.

The relevant precedent here is Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, in which the court ruled that a school could not stop students from wearing black arm bands protesting the Vietnam war. The Tinker court argued that student speech could not be restricted “if it could not be justified by a showing that the students’ activities would materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.” But the Roberts court, in an earlier decision, had established that a school could restrict certain kinds of speech even if it is not a substantial disruption, based on the “nature of what is appropriate for children” - in that case, lewd and indecent speech, and here, the presumed celebration of drug use. Concurring opinions from Alito and Kennedy specified that drug use is a special case that justifies intervention.
I’m not suggesting that students can say anything and everything in any circumstances. But establishing that the school can restrict speech — not actions, mind you, just speech — not only if it disrupts the education of others, but if it goes against their sense of decency — worries me. Certainly there are wildly inappropriate things that could be said in school, and should not. But it is notoriously easy for school administrators to take way too conservative a stance on what is appropriate, either because they tend to be a conservative, puritanical, and jumpy breed, or because it is easier to limit the rights of students than risk offending a parent or two. But we have an obligation as educators, not only to sustain a protected and uplifting environment for our kids, but also — and this is much harder — to show them by example that our society is committed to free speech, even when its less then pretty. School is a should be rarified space where children can flourish, but they also need to flourish as citizens, in a public institution dedicated to public values. As Garrett Eppse noted in a sharp Salon article about these decisions,

The idea that that in a free society debate should be, as a former Supreme Court said in New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964, “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” does not apply to the young. Solemn acquiescence is the major skill of citizenship to be taught in the schools of our democracy, and those who will not learn the lesson can be punished.