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Saturday, January 22, 2005 |
Weinberger on Gates, Lessig, DRM.
David Weinberger blogs about Bill Gates' remarks regarding Digital Rights Management, Larry Lessig's response, and what it all means.
DRM lets Microsoft go up to the next level in our economy, becoming the platform required by Hollywood to view its products. If that means we have to shut down the way in which culture is absorbed and advanced, Microsoft doesn't care. This bullshit about medical records and AIDS may well be what Gates tells himself as he falls asleep. It fits so nicely in a universe in which software is either good or evil. But the whole point about copyright and Fair Use is that culture is complex and art is the discovery of new shades of gray. That's why we need the right to exercise our judgment and to build new visions based on the old.
[Smart Mobs]
Though I wasn't, of course, thinking about DRM at the time, this is very much what I was worrying about in my Tailoring the Web for profit back in the summer of 1998.
11:17:40 PM 
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Scott: Change is gonna come
I've been following some of the coverage of the Blog Credibility Conference at Harvard (from, Weinberger, Jarvis and Winer, among others). It continues to amaze me how much of this debate is a retread of the mid-'90s, when journalists first moved online and discovered that the Web moved really fast, had different norms, gave their readers new voices and made their own voices sound stuffy and institutional. First I think, "Come on already!"; then I think, "Oh, it's okay." Lessons that change one's professional habits need to be learned from experience, and a much wider population of journalists is being exposed to these changes now that blogging software has drastically expanded the universe of personal media.
This post by David Weinberger puts some of this in a smart perspective -- focusing, as I and many others often will, on the critical fact that the vast majority of blogs (like the vast majority of the Web itself) represents stuff created not to "aggregate eyeballs," build traffic, produce revenue, compete with the pros or otherwise challenge or replace the existing order of the media. People are building something fundamentally new, something that had no opportunity to exist before, and that will -- as all such new developments in media do -- end up changing but not replacing what's already here.
There's another disconnection between the "we're-changing-everything" bloggers and those newsroom veterans who don't understand what the fuss is about, and it has to do with scales of time. If you run a newspaper or a TV news operation you have spent your whole professional life in a stable structure, one whose supporting beams of business and technology have never fundamentally shaken or broken under you. The world of professional media has experienced such changes only across the span of a century. But the world of the technology business experiences big changes on a scale of decades -- an order of ten faster. Dominant companies rise and fall, new technologies change the rules of the game, and habits of doing business get tossed in the trash every 10-20 years instead of every 100-200 years.
As a lifelong professional journalist who jumped headfirst into the tech-industry world a decade ago, I've made my choice. I don't see getting anywhere by putting one's money on the idea that change in this field is going to slow down rather than speed up. Which means that, if I were sitting in a newsroom today, I might think it prudent to listen a little less to the voice that says, "Who are these upstarts telling me what's wrong with my work?" -- and a little more to the one that says, "Wouldn't it be fun to do things differently?"
5:18:55 PM
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Supreme Court sets date in Grokster P2P case. The Supreme Court has set a date of March 29 for oral argument in the entertainment industry's appeal of a decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, based on the Supreme Court Betamax case, that Grokster is not liable for infringing uses of its peer-to-peer filesharing software (via Boing Boing post). [Subdued Citizen]
5:16:33 PM
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The Canary Dies in Mississippi.
Ms. Musings, the spirited blog at Ms. Magazine, has a good roundup of where things stand as the 32nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade approaches. It includes a chilling, foreboding description taken from The Nation of current restrictions on abortion in Mississippi:
Virtually every possible restriction on the procedure exists here, from a mandatory twenty-four-hour waiting period after counseling, to a requirement that minors obtain the consent of both parents to have an abortion, to thirty-five pages of regulations dealing with such physical characteristics as the width of a clinic's hallways and the size of its parking lot. The mounting restrictions (Mississippi passed six antiabortion laws last year alone) have delighted antiabortion activists all over the country, who have hailed--and copied--the state's innovations.
Meanwhile, prochoice activists see Mississippi as a glimpse of what might become the norm in a possible post-Roe future. "It's the canary dying in the mine," says Nancy Northrup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights. If the Supreme Court were to reverse the decision, abortion would likely become illegal in thirty states, including Mississippi, according to a 2004 report by the center. Across what can seem like a great divide, the twenty other states have laws, constitutions or court decisions that would protect the basic right to abortion even if Roe falls. While some of these, including New York and Washington State, which both decriminalized abortion before 1973, will likely remain strongly prochoice, others may pass restrictive laws like Mississippi's. [Girl in the Locker Room!]
5:16:26 PM
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IM Story of the Year (So Far)!.
An email message I received today from the Head of Adult Services at my local library:
I recently set up an AIM screen name for the reference desk, with the aim (ha!) of publicizing our IM availability soon. We haven't told anyone about it yet. Nothing on the website, no cards or fliers, no nothing.
Except our AIM profile, that is. A resident teen looked us up and IM'd me this afternoon, asking if we had a certain book in. I was pretty amazed.
And I realized I need to print a glossary to keep at the desk.
He shoots, he scores!
You may remember a similar story about wireless last year.... [The Shifted Librarian]
8:03:29 AM
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