by Fred -

Cause Caller and Robocalls

Cause Caller

When I was developing my thesis project, Cause Caller, for my masters at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, I was routinely confronted with the idea of including a feature allowing ordinary citizens to have access to the auto-dialing capabilities that normally only telemarketers and political campaigns use.

In other words, should I have created the functionality where users can “robodial” politicians similar to how politicians harangue citizens? The technology is still trivial to implement — users could simply record one message and have it sent to every politician on a list automatically.

The Federal Trade Commission just passed a law “basically outlawing” similar telemarketing calls. But the  twist is that the law seems to specifically protect prerecorded political robocalls:

However for those who have called on the FTC to help eliminate the other phone scourge – political robocalls  – the new rule will not help.  Calls from political campaigns are considered protected speech an FTC representative said.

Somehow political robocalls are considered speech where business solicitations aren’t, and cannot be regulated by a trade commission. While this does give me better legal footing to launch such a feature, I’m still not thrilled about adding it.

Part of what makes Cause Caller fun (and effective, I think) is because citizens are obligated to verbalize their ideas to politician’s offices in their own voice, repeatedly. This has the effect of bringing them closer to the democratic process, because even if they are simply reading a script, they are interacting with another citizen about an issue they care about. By removing that human element I would effectively remove the core element that makes the exchange meaningful. Cause Caller would annoy politicians offices and that is about it.

by Fred -

Outsource Your Plagiarism with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

I saw “Amazing but True Cat Stories” on BoingBoing the other day and it inspired me to come up with some Amazon Mechanical Turk Human Intelligence Tasks. I’m looking into actually implementing some right now and will probably start running them soon, so I’ll write about them here when I have them up.

The Mechanical Turk is a web service run by Amazon that allows you to pay hundreds, if not thousands of people to perform menial tasks that computers are not capable of. It takes it name from the true Mechanical Turk, a hoax from the 18th century that could play (and beat) people at chess, when in fact the pieces were being ingeniously controlled by a midget. But I digress.

I’ve been investigating the HITs that are already on the site. I had looked through a lot a number of months ago, but they have only gotten better.

This one struck me* as interesting:

Rewrite 5 Sentences

Please re-write the below sentences 3 times each.

You should always start and end every meal with a flourish, and a delectable dessert is sure to make a splash. Now is the time to enjoy those tempting food baskets you have on hand, to sweeten up your dessert offerings. Try using the goodies from a gourmet gift basket.

A fruit tart with a tender, buttery crust is a perfect complement to imported chocolates from a chocolate gift basket. Whichever gift baskets you decide to use, your picnic will sure to be delicious.

A good rule of thumb is to start your meal with a bang and give it an impressive finish. A sumptuous gift basket dessert is just the finishing touch that your picnic needs. Gourmet gift baskets are filled with decadent goodies that you can pull out and use anytime.

Tasty treats like imported chocolate gift baskets and fruit baskets, with a flaky, buttery crust will satisfy the love of your life when you bring them for the dessert of your next picnic. Whatever the menu you ultimately decide on, your picnic will be the most delicious part of your day!

Otherwise, you can have fresh fruits, salted nuts and cheese after the meal. Nachos and crackers dipped in sweet sauce, likewise, complements your wine. Wine baskets or Fruit baskets tend to be the most impressionable!

Please upload .txt file when submitting.

The writer, by accepting this HIT agrees to extend an exclusive unlimited term license to the purchaser to use the original content developed. Once the article is accepted by the purchaser and paid for, the content written for this HIT may not be sold, traded or given away to any other individual or company, nor used for any other article writing assignment elsewhere. Moreover, the writer agrees that the purchaser has full rights to amend and modify the content at will and to use it wherever the purchaser deems fit.

At $3.50 this was the most expensive HIT on the site as of this writing. Why would anyone need such mundane cooking copy rewritten?

I’m certain its because someone is rewriting a cook book to resell commercially. But why is it just the text about a recipe and not the recipe itself? Recipes can not be copyrighted, so the actual ingredients and list of steps to make a dish can be freely copied.

Thessaly and I have discovered many, if not all of our favorite chef‘s recipes are available on line gratis from various spammy recipe sites. This is convenient when we’re cooking at friends or away from home and don’t have access to her cookbooks but know the recipe we want to cook.

The part of a recipe that isn’t copyable, however, is the text surrounding it or introducing it, or anything minimally creative about the recipe. This means that if Alice muses about how she came to discover the fact that grapefruit and avocado (can you tell I love this salad?) make a great combination when paired with a white wine vinaigrette and curly endive, you can’t copy that part.

It’s pretty clear that this HIT is designed to route around this “feature” of copyright law by hiring a massive horde of re-writers to do the dirty and boring work of plagiarism. I tried Googling some of the original phrases supplied by the HIT’s creator but nothing came up. Let me know if you recognize any — I’d be curious to discover the source material.

So just remember, the next time you want to blatantly plagiarize a book (or a college essay if you’re so inclined) you can hire hundreds of anonymous web users to do it for you.

*UPDATE: Monday AM my example HIT no long seems active. I’m going to search a bit more for similar ones and try to get a screen shot but I’m sure more will crop up soon.

by Fred -

On SIEC, or Sudden Involuntary E-mail Cessation

I had a dream this morning that I was about to be executed. I was in some kind of prison with padded beige walls. Somewhere else in that dream someone was showing me a long list of their e-mails and I was like “wow” I also lost my camera bag and saw big waves.

After I woke up I frantically checked my phone to see if GMail was still down. It was. Then about half an hour later I had 30 unreads in my inbox. It had been almost 24 hours with no-access to my non-work e-mail and I thought I was going to die. I realized that I’ve gone offline for much longer but being online with no e-mail access and being unprepared (no vacation message) is much much worse.

After tweeting (the irony that Twitter was up while Gmail was down was not lost on me) that I was unraveling I received a number of Facebook messages comiserating and suggesting remedies from people whom I haven’t talked to in a while (one was years — like a decade, sudden e-mai loss brings people together.) A suggestion was to setup gmail to forward to a yahoo account. While this wouldn’t have helped in this situation, it’s definitely a good way to do e-mail redundancy backups in the cloud. Maybe I’ll also have that account forward back to a separate Gmail backup. The only single thought that was worse than having to go another hour without e-mail was losing it all.

Why all this fuss about e-mail? Why are you such an egotistical communication nut, Fred? The basic reason is that I find e-mail immensely more enjoyable and reliable than any other communication medium. Despite yesterday’s downtime, my e-mail reliability has actually been quite high compared to my phone or any other medium’s reliability. And I like asynchronicity.

by Fred -

Upholding Open Source Licenses

Lessig posted yesterday about the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s ruling upholding  the “Artistic License“:

I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE “IP” court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them “open source”) copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. (The specific license at issue was the Artistic License.) This is a very important victory, and I am very very happy that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society played a key role in securing it. Congratulations especially to Chris Ridder and Anthony Falzone at the Center.

In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

Important clarity and certainty by a critically important US Court.

As Lessig points out this is incredibly important, and in the long and short term, will make my job a lot easier.

Every time I get into a conversation with someone who is fairly legally minded regarding Creative Commons, they ask me, “But does it actually work?” meaning, does the law actually pay attention to these licenses that CC puts out? If someone breaks my CC license, will judges even care? Previously I’ve had to point to two international cases where CC licenses were upheld but demurely note that they haven’t, yet, been tested in the United States.

Now they have effectively been tested on a federal appeals level and have passed with flying colors. Aside from a Supreme Court decision, the free software and culture movement couldn’t have asked for anything better from the courts.

An excerpt from the opinion:

Open source licensing has become a widely used method of creative collaboration that serves to advance the arts and sciences in a manner and at a pace that few could have imagined just a few decades ago.  For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“MIT”) uses a Creative Commons public license for an OpenCourseWare project that licenses all 1800 MIT courses.  Other public licenses support the GNU/Linux operating system, the Perl programming language, the Apache web server programs, the Firefox web browser, and a collaborative web-based encyclopedia called Wikipedia.  Creative Commons notes that, by some estimates, there are close to 100,000,000 works licensed under various Creative Commons licenses.  The Wikimedia Foundation, another of the amici curiae, estimates that the Wikipedia website has more than 75,000 active contributors working on some 9,000,000 articles in more than 250 languages.

It’s important to understand that the case isn’t testing a particular CC license per se, but testing a class of “open source” licenses which CC belongs to while underscoring the importance of licenses such as the six that CC stewards.

Anyway, congratulations to everyone at Stanford and JMRI for winning the case.

by Fred -

ChowHound Doesn’t Understand The Conversation That Is The Web

There I was, advocating for the power of the web to connect people. How ChowHound was this awesome site to connect people looking for food. I even posted a link on ChowHound to my blog review of Picchu. But apparently that’s unkosher on ChowHound. They don’t like outbound links. I just received this e-mail, indicating that my post was deleted:

Hi:

We’re sorry, but we’ve removed your post (below).  Chowhound’s mission is to be a trove of opinions and information, rather than a nexus of outbound links to opinions and information. So please opine on the Chowhound site rather than direct our audience elsewhere for your thoughts. Please either cut/paste your blog opinions or encapsulate them in your Chowhound.com postings.

We understand that there’s a fine line between sincerely wanting to point your fellow hounds to good info which happens to be elsewhere and plotting to steer our large audience elsewhere for promotion/ self-promotion. The problem is that we have far too many users and far too little time to draw this distinction. We need to stave off the considerable desire to use our loud microphone for promotion.

You can see more on our guidelines for bloggers and other journalists, including the appropriate ways to include your blog URL on Chowhound, in our Etiquette: http://www.chowhound.com/topics/367605#2259234

—
The Chowhound Team
Chowhound.com
For Those Who Live to Eat

I don’t really get this. Is ChowHound worried about serving extra-Google juice to the undeserving barbarians outside their walled garden? What if they implement a nofollow policy ala Wikipedia?

If they’re worried about keeping conversations “inside” their forums, then they don’t seem to be understanding the nature of the Web as conversations happen everywhere. After I post this I’ll send the link to Twitter, and then that will show up on Facebook, and maybe I’ll send it in an e-mail to a friend I know cares about ChowHound, and so on. Finally I’ll track responses and conversations via Pingbacks and Google Analytics. As Dave Winer says, “The web is a conversation, too.”

ChowHound’s solution is to have me copy and paste my own work (raising questions about what would happen if I object to what rights they claim to my work) for no other reason than to help ChowHound police their own boards is also silly.

Finally, while I’m sympathetic to the idea that policing ChowHound for “self promotion” is difficult, I’m not sure killing outbound links (or directions to external information) really solves this problem. Why couldn’t I just talk about myself? Or my hypothetical favorite restaurant which I happen to own?

Admittedly the spam / promotion problem is one of the hardest to solve on the web. Millions of words and thousands of hours have been spilled on Wikipedia trying to define what is notable and what is not in an attempt to keep Wikipedia clean from mindless self promotion. But ChowHound is not Wikipedia.

What I ultimately object to is the mindless approach CH has taken to moderation. Instead of really basing the decision on a community standard, the choice to remove posts is made from the top down, using mercenary logic.

by Fred -

Updates On Josh Harris and Facebook Censorship

John points out the Boing Boing post about Josh Harris claiming Pseudo.com was really a hoax:

I now acknowledge that Pseudo Programs, Inc., a New York City based Internet television network founded in 1994 and sold from bankruptcy in 2000 was the linchpin of a long form piece of conceptual art. Pseudo burned over $25 million in private and institutional capital over a span of seven years. Pseudo was a fake company.

Woah.

And the conclusion is that Noneck’s facebook updates about his deportation are really PHP serialized data, says Mark:

That text is serialized PHP data. Specifically, it is an array (think of an array as a “group”) of six integers: 672053, 672054, 672056, 672057, 672058, and 672059. No idea what these mean, but as they are more or less in succession, I’d guess that they’re ID numbers for a database table.

Brian is suspicious that there’s anything behind YouTube’s take down of the video:

As for YouTube taking down the video, that has very little to do with whether or not it’s actually infringing. The DMCA requires that YouTube take down anything that anyone claims is a copyright infringement, so long as the claim fits a certain set of criteria. It’s not up to YouTube to decide whether it’s actually infringing; they’re just passing the message along. However, your friend can submit a counter-claim to YouTube, which they have to pass back to the IOC. The IOC can then either ignore the counter-claim, in which case YouTube has to put the video back up, or they can sue your friend, in which case a court decides whether infringement took place.

Let me just reiterate what I said — I’m not really placing any blame on YouTube. I understand how take down notices work, but Brian also provided YouTube’s policy here. What I was blogging about, and I should have been more clear about this, is the IOC’s reasons for sending such a take down notice, not YouTube’s reasons for obliging. From my original post:

My feeling is that the IOC likes to squash Tibet-related videos involving the IOC’s logo. Their dubious DMCA take down notice is a clear example of a corporation using copyright to stifle free speech.

So again, I’m questioning the IOC’s actions for doing this, not YouTube’s.

Apparently the video seems to be back up? I can’t find any evidence for this.

by Fred -

Pseudo YouTube

Pseudo Logo

I was Googling around the other day looking for some vintage Silicon Alley article and came across a wonderful Wired article about Pseudo.com. Pseudo blew through millions of VC funds at the end of the 20th century on lavish SoHo parties, technology, and all kinds of behavior that no self-respecting startup kid would attempt in 2008. There are some uncanny things coming out of the mouths of this older startup set:

“When TV first came out, it had an impact like a social atomic bomb,” [Josh Harris] says. “But the mode of intimacy that I’m presenting, which we’ll experience via the Net, is going to be bigger.”

What’s so heartbreaking about it all is that Harris was right, really. Just at the wrong time. Broadband saturation wasn’t anywhere near where it needed to be. No one had Flash (or any other capable video codec) installed on their browser, and no one really understood the notion of viral media. People sent links and an occasionally MP3. I had a collection of .wmv files that I’d DCC to friends over IRC, but that was basically as far as it got.

Harris is convinced that when broadband Net access becomes ubiquitous, millions of consumers will end up doing exactly what he’s about to do. “Of course they’re going to be watching each other,” he says. “It’s inevitable. Everything I’m doing will be considered commonplace, just 10 years from now. It’ll be no more unusual than listening to a stereo or watching TV.”

What Harris really had wrong, however, was the death of privacy, which is a generational fight which will take much longer to settle. I’m still generally unconvinced that humans can live totally publicly, though things like Twitter, Facebook, and Google in general are contributing to an erosion towards attitudes about privacy erosion that we have very little control over. Harris is obviously an exhibitionist who understood the power of the ‘net, and perhaps predicted phenoms like Tila Tequila and Justin.tv, but couldn’t speak for all of us.

According to Jayson Blair (?!) Pseudo liquidated their assets in 2001 after the bust and their inability to find more cash.

But where are they now?

Josh Harris’ name is virtually ungoogleable, and Wikipedia doesn’t offer any help.

His girlfriend at-the-time, Tanya Corrin, however, wrote about her experience in the New York Observer:

Josh liked to tease me that he’d be the most popular. Getting press is one of the things Josh does best. Since living in public was his idea, he positioned himself as the “visionary” and me as “the hot girlfriend.” I would have preferred to be presented as more of a partner. But it was Josh’s project and money, and he was starting to freak out about the latter, so I let it go.

But what about the artist, Nico Haupt? He seems to be running with a 9/11 conspiracy crew and selling a shirt that simply says “TV Fakery” here, as part of his Haupt Couture brand.

by Fred -

Noneck, The Peoples Republic of China and Fair Use

My friend and fellow-NY-techer Noel “Noneck” Hidalgo was deported from China last week. He got rounded up as one of the people documenting the “Free Tibet” protests in Tienanmen square. Here’s the video he shot:

What’s interesting is that Facebook seems to be censoring Noneck’s posts about his deportation — his original status updates were deleted but the comments referencing them stayed. My friend Elizabeth observed that all of Noneck’s Facebook status updates that referenced “deportation” have been changed to

a:6:{i:0;i:672053;i:1;i:672054;i:2;i:672056;
i:3;i:672057;i:4;i:672058;i:5;i:672059;}. 10:08am Co

Anyone familiar with what this could mean? At first I thought it was geo-coordinates, but that doesn’t seem likely as they aren’t recognizable longitude / latitude numbers. Update: Here’s a screenshot:

Olympic Rings from Wikipedia

In other news, the IOC is now using copyright to assert ownership over their trademarked logo. They have sent a take-down notice to YouTube demanding that video of a demonstration in NYC be removed since it uses their logo. YouTube is in the habit of taking any videos down if there’s a copyright claim, so it is not surprising they obliged the IOC. But what’s not clear is why the IOC thinks they have a copyright claim over their logo. Usually the only infringement claims regarding logos are founded on trademark law, not copyright law.

Copyright is designed to restrict use of creative original works by granting a limited monopoly to the works creator. In the United States any work copyrighted prior to 1923 is in the public domain. Even if the Olympic ring logo was copyrighted at the time of its inception (1913), it would now have lapsed into the public domain, so the IOC wouldn’t have a copyright claim to it.

Wikipedia seems to have come to a fairly schizophrenic conclusion about this. On the one hand, it states that the logo is in the public domain. But on the other hand, it says the use of the logo is restricted by the IOC’s manual, which is a whopping 105 pages. Pages 20 and 27 have information about how the logo is used, but it’s not totally clear to me what laws the IOC believes protects their copyright in a logo created prior to 1923. Wikipedia also states that the logo is an insignia and its use is restricted and is independent of any copyright claims. I’ve heard that the IOC will simply refuse to allow a country to bid in the city-selection-process if they feel that their rights are not being protected there.

If anything the logo is protected by trademark law, which is designed to give legal recourse to manufacturers and corporations against counterfeits and confusingly similar marks. Typically use of logos for journalistic purposes or even incidental use by anyone else, is not grounds for claims of trademark infringement. Thus, it makes little sense that a video could infringe on trademarks (so long as they weren’t using an NBC logo in the logo in the corner, etc.).

My feeling is that the IOC likes to squash Tibet-related videos involving the IOC’s logo. Their dubious DMCA take down notice is a clear example of a corporation using copyright to stifle free speech.

Anyway, I am not a lawyer, so this is shouldn’t be construed as anything but a lay opinion.

by Fred -

Picchu in Sapporo

Originally it was supposed to be me and my friend Henrik heading out to dinner. Then it was me, him, and Henrik’s girlfriend Maj. Great. But then when we finally met in the lobby it became 3 more people.

And I made my disclaimers. I did. I said I had no idea if this was going to work out, that people would just have to follow me. That it was Italian food. But I had to go. The review was too fanatical to miss — this was the only concrete recommendation I found for Sapporo. People complained and hemmed and hawed and tried to avoid committing but I just said I had to go. And our party of 2 became a caravan of 6, following me out of the hotel.

I had had the prescience (perhaps from a previous trip to .jp) to attain directions from the hotel desk but was not exactly confident. Flashbacks of menu items featuring “live chicken liver w/ hearts” came to mind. One block down, 5 more before we had to turn left for another 5 blocks, but the Japanese don’t really use street addresses, so what did it matter? I lost count but guessed that we had to go through the pedestrian mall.

When we finally ended up at the block it was as if we were in ex-urban Sapporo. No more street attractions or well lit alleys. Loud bars that smelled of the horrible cigarettes which everyone smokes in Japan.

I start frantically looking around; one of those “mini” blocks that cuts the block in half and suddenly multiplies the number of corners I have to worry about.

Henrik says “I usually don’t see Fred this confident, so its OK.” I ponder what happens when we can’t find the place and we’re 2 miles out from the hotel with no plan.

I turn the corner and its there. Picchu. Why would they have the ‘h’ if they have the double c? Anyway, its undoubtedly the place so we step in after cautiously asking if they’re open. Who knows where the chef is.

When we get the wine menu it is surprisingly decent. I recognize the Chianti and the Barba D’alba and some other wines. They rank them in order of price; typically efficient Japan.

We order the D’Alba. Fine.

Then Juan-Carlos says he’s from Italy, so he knows.

Somehow I dragged an Italian to eat the cuisine of his home country in some backwater Japanese restaurant in Sapporo.

So we get the first course. Seasonal spring pickles. Surprisingly good.

Then the second course of a pate on bread that no one can identify. I’m just happy that there are no vegetarians with us.

We are all impressed with the wine and the Europeans are more so — the dollar is weak against the yen but the euro goes a long way. And that the dish we’re having now is from Juan-Carlos’ home town. Its a garlic paste with anchovies served with raw vegetables to dip.

After 10 minutes of hearing the sous-chef beat a whisk we’re delivered “the best carbonara I’ve ever had” says our friend from Piedmont. The chef doesn’t speak any Italian so we’re totally spooked how he’s pulling this off. But we keep eating. A little later we demand bread for scarpetti. And he spends 5 minutes grilling and toasting a dense mix between challah and focaccia to use to scoop up the rest of the fluffy carbonara sauce.

And the courses keep coming and we keep ordering more wine.

It was a spectacular evening and as we headed back to the karaoke and bars everyone who wasn’t there was asking me “about this Italian place.” I tried to explain to them that it was the Internet, that it was a lonely post on Chowhound that go us there, and nothing more. But somehow, despite this crowd, it doesn’t register. And that’s fine.

by Fred -

iSummit 2008

iCommons iSummit 2008 Panoramic

So I figured I’d do a little follow-up on my trip to Sapporo for the iSummit. As with most conferences the action was really in the hallway chats and impromptu meet-ups over dinner and FREE BEER, but there were some highlights in the sessions and  keynotes.

CCi legal day was very productive and had a lot of jurisdictional leads talking and sharing notes. . Prodromos Tsiavos’ presentation about the participation cc-licenses list kind of blew me away, but that’s mostly because I’m a license / list junkie. Giorgos Cheliotis’ graphs about license adoption were sobering as well — license “liberalizing” tends not to happen as much as we might think or hope, but there is a lot of data to parse (he doesn’t, for example, look at individual users’ choices to modify the licenses of their work over time) but he’s on to something good and is really leading the way for commons based research. Later in the conference he announced plans for a “Commons Research” conference in 2009 and it sounded like space and funding had also been secured.

During the iSummit, individual tracks had varying degrees of cohesion. Aside from the keynotes, I was personally only able to attend the DIY Video Session and Open Business. The Video Session started off really great — Mimi Ito (Joi’s fantastic professorial sister) made a solid point that we shouldn’t really confuse DIY Video with Open Video. The desire for definitions ran throughout most of the conference sessions, and the DIY Video track was no exception. But Mimi suggested that we mark a clear boundary between the idea of Open Video (or content for that matter) and DIY Video. Like Free Software, Open means something and implies an orthodoxy, something Mimi thought  might be in conflict with the style of the communities of practice she studies. That is, it is all fine and well to have a defintion of Open Video, but don’t try to apply it directly to DIY Video, which generally involves people who only have basic understandings of the copyright issues implicated by their work. Trying to encourage Vidders or AMVers to use open licenses might be barking up the wrong tree.

Nevertheless, the open video definition evolved into something relatively obvious — created by open tools, released in open formats online in such a way that the source material is reusable and meaningfully licensed for such future use. People seemed to be interested in encouraging video makers to release “b-roll” footage or stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor as much of it goes to waste sitting on hard drives. One of the best features about the Video session was that everyone there had ‘skin in the game’ as producers, directors and so on. This meant that they were able to speak well and cogently about the challenges they face.

Henrik Moltke & Jamie King

Later on Jamie King (Steal this Film I + II) and Henrik Moltke (Good Copy Bad Copy) went back and forth about the economics of releasing work for free and what an ethical ask is — whether Radiohead / GirlTalk / NIN’s approach for selling access to free work was reasonable. Henrik thinks if he made another film he’d be open to something along the lines of what Radiohead did, whereas King thought this was unethical.

What was interesting is that King felt that for the most part, putting any terms on the distribution of a work is unethical. Henrik later showed numbers of income for how GCBC did and the results were a little surprising. Most of his revenue came from traditional licensing deals with larger networks, and very little came from donations. It’s been a long time coming, but I now feel that donations-based revenue streams are a very weak business model and free culture has a lot more potential looking elsewhere for innovative models.

One of the big issues we debated is the “novelty” or “scene” factor inherent to making these films. Even though STF and GCBC did well (though not outstandingly so) they depended on a particular community that had access to BitTorrent and the Pirate Bay. What happens when someone releases a Golf Documentary? Peer distribution and support for non-tech-niche video may be difficult for a long time.

Anyway, later on I visited the Open Business track which promptly broke into two groups. Jon and I were supposed to give a CC+ presentation but that somehow got taken off the docket. Our groups had to answer the question “What is Open Business?”

Almost totally independently both groups to came to the conclusion that the term is nothing more than a marketing ploy (see: Amex Open Business Card) in the vein of “green business.” The overwhelming feeling was that business is business is business and that you cannot survive now without being a little open. Whether this means letting people share your content, access your API, or just understand your finances, openness has become a market constraint and it behooves consumers (users? citizens?) to put even more pressure on businesses to open up.

Here are some random observations that may or may not be interesting:

  • The conference hall was actually really nice and comfortable. If anything it was too much space, but I didn’t get that “worn out” feeling that was happening a lot at previous conferences.
  • The green tea ceremony was awesome.
  • The t-shirt printers (C-Shirt) were awesome too.
  • Paul Keller’s collecting Society keynote was fantastic.
  • Sapporo is ridiculously far away.

More photos are here.

Next I’ll post a story about finding a wonderful Italian restaurant in Sapporo via Chow Hound.