Category Archives: bad code

(Thanks, Peter!) Continue reading →

From Jennifer Granick, director of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society:

The Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society is collecting stories about problems with locked cell phones to support our request to the Copyright Office for an exemption to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions for cell phone unlocking. The original comments filed are here. These will be for the reply comments.

If you have a good story, know someone who does, or are aware of a community of people who might be interested, please send the link to them.

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So I was on the “Docklands Light Railway” in London, reading the ads above the passengers’ heads. Here, by far, is my favorite:

Abuse, Assault, Arrest:
Our staff are here to help you. Spitting on DLR staff is classified as an assault and is a criminal offence. Saliva Recovery Kits are now held on every train and will be used to identifty offenders against the national DNA database.

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Google has been sued by the Authors Guild, and a number of individual authors. This follows similar threats hinted at by the American Association of Publishers. The authors and the publishers consider Google’s latest fantastic idea, Google Print — a project to Google-ize 20,000,000 books — to be “massive copyright infringement.” They have asked a federal court to shut Google Print down.

It is 1976 all over again. Then, like now, content owners turned to the courts to stop an extraordinary new technology. Then, like now, copyright is the weapon of choice. But then, like now, the content owners of course don’t really want the court to stop the new technology. Then, like now, they simply want to be paid for the innovations of someone else. Then, like now, the content owners ought to lose.

This is the best case to illustrate the story I told at the start of Free Culture. Property law since time immemorial had held that your land reached from the ground to the heavens. Then airplanes were invented — a technology oblivious to this ancient law. A couple of farmers sued to enforce their ancient rights — insisting airplanes can’t fly over land without their permission. And thus the Supreme Court had to decide whether this ancient law — much older than the law of copyright — should prevail over this new technology.

The Supreme Court’s answer was perfectly clear: Absolutely not. “Common sense revolts at the idea,” Justice Douglas wrote. And with that sentence, hundreds of years of property law was gone, and the world was a much wealthier place.

So too should common sense revolt at the claims of this law suit. I’m an academic, so this is a bit biased, but: Google Print could be the most important contribution to the spread of knowledge since Jefferson dreamed of national libraries. It is an astonishing opportunity to revive our cultural past, and make it accessible. Sure, Google will profit from it. Good for them. But if the law requires Google (or anyone else) to ask permission before they make knowledge available like this, then Google Print can’t exist. Given the total mess of copyright records, there is absolutely no way to enable this sort of access to our past while asking permission of authors up front. Or at least, even if Google could afford that cost, no one else could.

Google’s use is fair use. It would be in any case, but the total disaster of a property system that the Copyright Office has produced reinforces the conclusion that Google’s use is fair use. And for all those people who devoted years of their life to defend the right to p2p file-sharing — here’s your chance to show what this battle is really about:

Google wants to do nothing more to 20,000,000 books than it does to the Internet: it wants to index them, and it offers anyone in the index the right to opt out. If it is illegal to do that with 20,000,000 books, then why is it legal to do it with the Internet? The “authors'” claims, if true, mean Google itself is illegal. Common sense, or better, commons sense, revolts at the idea. And so too should you. Continue reading →

We (Creative Commons) just upgraded to Apple’s Tiger to get the benefit of some cool new iCal features. I’m regretting the decision already. I had moved to Mail.app a while ago, after being frustrated with Entourage’s bloat. And after some tinkering, I had crafted a series of hotkeys to automatically move mail from the inbox to different folders. I have always been astonished that this function wasn’t integrated into mail applications — do you all really drag and drop the hundred of emails you file, or do you just not file email?
Anyway, though Apple proudly lists all the improvements to Mail as an inducement to upgrade, it doesn’t list the things it broke — in particular, scripting. No longer can you script within Mail. And while you can script at the system level, hot-key support for those scripts doesn’t work right now.
This is a bug, no doubt. I imagine they’ll fix it. But meanwhile, they’ve also changed the naming convention for such scripts (used to be ctrl, now ctl, etc., or something like that). All of which makes me wonder: who is it that thinks changes like this are improvements? How could you ever imagine that there’s more good than harm done by a change like this? Just part of an endless conspiracy to disable the ability to automate life in macland. Why work to automate when some genius will change a convention to force you to recode every time you “up”grade a system?
Update: I thought I had posted this update last week. Sorry for the delay. Just about an hour after I posted this, a modest coder sent along his work which solves the problem. Check out Red-Sweater’s Fastscripts. See also this free plug-in. Continue reading →

Ever since I interviewed Dave about blogs for my book, Free Culture, I’ve been thinking a lot about his idea of “amateur journalists.” It is a powerful concept, which rewards careful thought. To see its value, we must remember the original meaning of “amateur,” meaning one who does something for the love of it alone. And when we think of journalism that is regulated by those ideals, it is easy to see why such journalism nicely complements commerical journalism. As he said to me,

“An amateur journalist simply doesn’t have a conflict of interest, or the conflict of interest is so easily disclosed that you know you can sort of get it out of the way.”

It is because I found Dave’s view so compelling that I’ve been worried for sometime about the emergence of advertising in blog space. I’m not against it. I just worry about how it might put pressure on the “doesn’t have a conflict of interest” norm. If the virtue of the amateur is to seek the truth, that virtue could be in tension with the desire to earn more ad revenue. The simplest way to get linkbacks is to say the most absurd things imaginable.
But the more I’ve talked about this with observers and friends, the more I think the real fear is not bloggers tempted by ad revenues. It is instead the emergence of the equivalent of tabloids in blog-space: commercial entities whose sole purpose is to generate ad revenue, who do that by being as ridiculous and extreme as possible.
The danger here is that the conflict has returned. Just as the British tabloids care little about the truth in their path to selling papers, commercial blog-loids care little about the truth in trying to attract eyeballs. And it is here that the cycle turn vicious: for the amateur space feeds the professional troll by careful and repeated efforts to show that claims made are false or outrageous. If you’re paid by the click, who cares why people click.
This creates a dilemma for open and honest disagreement about the facts. For here there is a conflict in interest: the interest of the amateur journalist is not the interest of the professional troll. Yet the only way the amateur can do his job — by quoting and criticizing — is to feed the troll.
We either need a way to cite that doesn’t reward bad behavior. (Copyright law restricts that (Google, for example, would be really angry if you started linking to caches rather than original locations).) Or we need a way to know when to ignore.
In either case, imho, it would be useful to think more about this conflict in interest, if the nature of the amateur space is not to be displaced by something different. Continue reading →

I screwed up an update on the last entry, and seem to have lost the comments, which I hadn’t read after the first few. I apologize, and will see if there’s a way to recover. Continue reading →

So there’s a view about the file-sharing debate held by most people who don’t know anything about the debate. It is a view the recording industry likes most people to hold. It is a view far from anything anyone interesting is saying.
The view – call it the uninformed stereotype (US) view – goes something like this: that there are just two sides to this debate, those who favor “piracy” and those who don’t. Supporters of Grokster are people who favor piracy, and who are against artists.
On Thursday, at the NYPL, I had the extraordinarily pleasure of being on stage with Jeff Tweedy and Steven Johnson, for a discussion titled “Who Owns Culture?” The evening started with 15 minutes of me and my “powerpoint” (actually, Keynote), and then a 50 minute discussion with Tweedy and me, moderated by Johnson. There was then time for questions from the audience.
It was an extraordinary evening. I had the chance before to talk to Tweedy, so I wasn’t surprised. But he was extraordinary � funny, subtle, smart about the issues, and deeply passionate. Suffice it that neither he nor I (as is obvious to anyone on this page) subscribe to, or fit, within the US view. I explicitly denounced “piracy”; Tweedy — in context — said nothing to support the view that people should infringe the rights of other artists.
David Carr of the New York Times was at the event. He wrote a review. Everyone I’ve spoken to loved the piece. I think they loved it because it was a piece printed in the Times, and we’re a culture that loves attention more than accuracy.
The review says nothing inaccurate about me, or the views I expressed. But, imho, it is filled with quotes from Tweedy, taken out of context, to support the US view. Nothing in the article suggests anything was said at all contrary to the US view. One reading the piece would think, there they go again, those supporters of theft, and haters of artists.
I’m not sure why there needs to be a NYTimes, if its role is simply to reinforce what people already think, especially with pieces like this. God forbid the Nation’s paper of record should reflect something more subtle or complex than the crudest view of an important debate. Continue reading →

An insanely poor editorial by the NYTimes about Grokster. Continue reading →

Regarding Mr. Orlowski’s breathless rant about Doonesbury and Creative Commons: as the Surburban Limbo evinces (thanks, Staci!), the plot-line is actually two years old. While you’d have to be a bit clueless to believe that Thudpucker is actually speaking CC-speak, it would be quite amazing to think that he was speaking CC-speak in January, 2003. Sure, CC had been around for six weeks. But even Mr. Trudeau is not following events that closely.
Another mistake, Mr. Orlowski. Will you correct this one? Continue reading →