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Friday, May 06, 2005 |
Cory on EFF, PK, ALA, and alia's win in the Broadcast Flag case:
And to the studio execs whom I faced across the table, who shouted at us and excluded us and told us that this was going to happen no matter what: NEENER NEENER NEENER.
The next move here is that the studios will take this to Congress and try to get a law passed to make this happen. No chance. They got ZERO laws passed last year. This year the best they've been able to accomplish is making it slightly more illegal to videotape movies in the theatre.
The fact is, elected lawmakers are not suicidal enough to break their constituents' televisions. Watch and see: over the next year, we're all going to roast any lawmaker who so much as breathes the words "Broadcast Flag" in a favorable tone.
"In the seven decades of its existence, the FCC has never before asserted such sweeping authority. Indeed, in the past, the FCC has informed Congress that it lacked any such authority. In our view, nothing has changed to give the FCC the authority it now claims."
10:24:42 PM 
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The Broadcast Flag Has Been Lowered.
We won the broadcast-flag case today in a 3-0 decision. You can read it here. .
The regulation has been struck down.
Lots of Google News coverage already here.
The broadcast-flag challenge was a case that Public Knowledge organized and financed. We're still looking for help to pay for the case, so I hope folks here will take the opportunity, if they haven't already, to contribute to PK or become a member. It's easy.
I should add that we couldn't have done it without our co-plaintiffs, Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, American Association of Law Libraries, Medical Library Association and the Special Libraries Association.
[Godwin's Law - feed.rdf]
10:14:58 PM
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And a HUGE victory for the Stanford CIS.
So it's Saturday morning here in Australia, and I'm reading my email in reverse order. First the fantastic news about PublicKnowledge. Now this: The Stanford Center for Internet and Society has won an important case about anonymous speech. An anonymous participant in an online chat posted comments critical of Ampex and its chairman. They sued for defamation. The poster sued under the California anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) statute. Ampex tried to dismiss and run away. The Court of Appeals ruled at first that there remeained anti-SLAPP jurisdiction. The District Court then refused to award fees. The Court of Appeals has now reversed the District Court and ordered fees. The case was argued by a law student. It will have an important effect in stopping the abuse of process against online critics.
[Lessig Blog]
10:14:54 PM
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Court on Broadcast Flag: You Can't Hide Elephants in Mouseholes (Donna Wentworth).
Killer quote from the ruling against the FCC's broadcast flag regulation [PDF]:
We can find nothing in the statute, its legislative history, the applicable case law, or agency practice indicating that Congress meant to provide the sweeping authority the FCC now claims over receiver status. And the agency's strained and implausible interpretations of the Communications Act of 1934 do not lend credence to its position. As the Supreme Court has reminded us, "Congress does not...hide elephants in mouseholes." Whitman v. Am. Trucking Association 531 U.S. 457, 468 (2001). In sum, we hold that the Commission only has general autority under Title 1 to regulate appartus used for receipt of radio or wire communication while those appartus are engaged in communication.
[Copyfight]
10:14:37 PM
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Jamais Cascio: Green Building Performance.
We love green buildings and sustainable architecture. Since the cost of going green when building a new structure is not significantly greater than not doing so -- and whatever added expenses occur are quickly recovered by lower operating costs -- we can't see why designers wouldn't build green. And since there's a strong correlation between cities with more green architecture and cities with more of the "creative class" driving their economies, we're likely to see even more regions encouraging (or even requiring) green building standards.
But as we all know, results don't always match design. How energy efficient and sustainable are these buildings, really?
The Woods Hole Research Center, one of the United States' premier institutions of environmental study, decided to find out for themselves. WHRC moved into its Bill McDonough-designed Ordway Campus building last year, and has spent the last year testing its performance. The Ordway building includes photovoltaics, solar thermal collectors, ultra-efficient windows and more, and was designed to reduce energy consumption by over 25% from the previous Woods Hole building while nearly doubling available space. In order to gauge whether the building meets its design, Woods Hole has set up 75 different sensors throughout the structure, measuring flows of electricity, heat, air and water, as well as the site's overall environmental condition.
The first year's results appear promising. From the Performance Overview:
For the past year the WHRC Ordway facility has performed closely to our originally modeled expectations. Total energy usage was 96,389 kWhrs with 30,589 being generated onsite by our photovoltaic system. The remaining 65,800 kWhrs was pulled from the electric grid. The upshot of this is that 32% of our facility’s total energy requirement was provided by the PV system.Even with a facility that is nearly twice the size of our old combined offices and labs, we are using less total energy and spending less money on energy while reducing emissions attributable to our operations to 36% of our previous total (17% of the national office average for a building of same size). With the installation of a wind turbine this will probably drop to zero, or even to negative emissions, meaning that we will effectively be reducing the emissions attributable to our neighborhood.
Real-time data from the sensors are available on the web. Building Energy Flow and HVAC System Results can be viewed with any browser; Performance Trends and Meteorological Trends are only available to Internet Explorer/Windows users.
[WorldChanging: Another World Is Here]
10:03:11 PM
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Lessig on the use of BzzzAgent: Advice taken.
We read; we've discussed; we've lost sleep; we've decided....
. . .
. . . for all the extremely powerful reasons these discussions have mustered, we were wrong to use this tool to spread our message. This is not, again, because BzzAgent is evil. It is not because it shouldn't be used to spread any message. It is not because understanding achieved through networks of humans is worse than the understanding produced through a survey. It is instead because this way of spreading our message weakens the power of our message.
Creative Commons, as you've reminded us, is a movement. Its aim is to get creators to take responsibility for the environment (as our founder Jamie Boyle puts it) of creativity that we live in. It gives artists and authors free tools with which to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intend their creativity to carry. These tools help creators say something. With them, creators stand in the space between the extremes of “All Rights Reserved” and “No Rights Respected,” and they say, this space is right.
Creators who do this do so, I hope, because they believe an environment of balance is better than an environment of either extreme. They thus mark their work with a sign of that balance. But it is critical within this economy that they do this voluntarily. That they join because they believe.
If there is power in this movement, it comes from this volunteer economy. That doesn't mean we won't pay people to work for us; it doesn't mean we don't think people should be paid for their work. What it means is that we can't dilute the meaning of what it says when someone says, “I'm a commoner.” (I'm sure no one ever says that, but you know what I mean.) Authenticity is essential. The power of the authentic act — an artist giving up remix rights; an author allowing her book to be shared freely -- is the power that makes this movement grow.
That authenticity is not jeopardized, I believe, by the fact we have (a small number of underpaid) employees at Creative Commons. No one here is doing it for the money. Nor is that authenticity jeopardized when a company “partners” with us (though again, none of our “partnerships” are partnerships in the traditional sense): Everyone understands companies are paid to pick winning strategies; when they align with us, that simply reinforces our strategy. But I have come to agree that that authenticity would be jeopardized by messengers whose message is mixed. If BzzAgents do as their rules require (ie, reveal their affiliation) then the person who hears their message wonders: are you saying this because you believe it, or are you saying this because it will earn you a reward? And if it is the reward, then where is my reward? What's my cut?
. . .
But in all this, you that have taken what we started and made it yours, you need to help. We need broader public support, or support in a broader public. You need to help us make that happen. Part of that help happens in this space. But it is extremely easy to live life in the opinioning fields, and never live life face to face. It is fundamental mistake of all modern politics: mediation. We need something more than mediating structures (whether blogs, or newspapers, or television). We need people who look people straight in the eyes and say, this is a good idea, and you should try it.
[Lessig Blog]
7:22:02 AM
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What Dave said.
"Basically it's bad economics to spoil a good thing for a couple of incremental bucks today, for zero total bucks later."
(Dave Winer regarding his observation that despite the growing amount of traffic the NYT and others are generating from their RSS feeds, they'll probably not recognize those feeds themselves are ads for their stories; rather they'll start placing third-party ads on their feeds and see their click-through rates go down. And then, they'll wonder why.)
[rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog]
7:14:52 AM
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Your Identity, Open to All. ZabaSearch is a new search engine for finding the unlisted numbers of celebrities, as well as their addresses and satellite pictures of their homes. Trouble is, you're in there too. Is ZabaSearch an invasion of privacy? Xeni Jardin quizzes the site's founders. [Wired News]
7:10:09 AM
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Archy hiring.
. . .
First, the open source movement doesn't advocate ending corporate hierarchies. It advocates good code. The Cluetrain Manifesto (specifically, Dr. Weinberger) says hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Which is true. But subversion is not elimination. Nor is observation the same as advocacy.
Second, I'm not consigning academic degrees and pedigreed qualifications to "anachronistic times." Or to anything. Those are terrific honors, and useful to have. They are also beside the point. (Several points, actually.) What I wrote, and Gatto writes, isn't about them. It's about those the old system missed or squashed, and that will find fresh advantages in a flat new world that rewards the growth and practice of intellegence, regardless of whether or not it shows up in grades, SAT scores or IQ tests.
Third, the Net, the Web, and the growing portfolio of freely available services that make possible what we're doing here (e.g. the RSS feed of a Technorati search that automatically brought Dave Friedman's post to my attention), are flat-out utopian — Not in their aspirations, but in their achievments. Hell, look at Wikipedia. Pretty freaking amazing, if you ask me. Go back fifteen years and imagine the Internet we have today: something nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve. Can you name the big, hierarchical company that made all that happen? Can you name the big, hierarchical companies behind HTML, HTTP, SMTP, POP, BIND, XML, or RSS? How about new ones sprouting like weeds... attention.xml, for example? Some helped, sure. But we live in a world now where a guy like Steve Gillmor — a journalist, fergoshsake — can call for a standard, enlist smart technical help (qualified by their good work, not by IQ scores nobody knows or cares about), and push it out into the marketplace.
As for alternatives to IQ tests for selecting employees, how about this advice, provided by one of the best bosses I ever had: Recruit for the position, but hire for the person.
. . .
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
[I culled (almost) all the argument about IQ from that and left a different theme (largely) intact.]
7:09:58 AM
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Plan B: Ignore the Science?. Politics is trumping research findings in the widening debate over Plan B. Several studies show the drug doesn't induce abortions, but that's done little to quell opposition from pro-lifers. By Kristen Philipkoski. [Wired News]
6:59:59 AM
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