Last year I posted on Google modifying representations of reality (Streetview) and hypothesized about the potential problems. Now we have a potential real world test case as Google might be selling advertisements inside Google Maps:

This patent, which was originally filed on July 7, 2008, describes a new system for promoting ads in online mapping applications. In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads. In addition, Google also seems to plan an advertising auction for unclaimed properties.

Read more at RWW.

it should be Jon Stewart on September 20th, 2001 giving the most honest and powerful reaction I’ve ever watched:

A must for coping with the rest of the media today.

I made this poster for a meeting of the Philosophy Club at Wilton High School. Admittedly, my definition of “philosophy” was pretty loose and this poster’s point was pretty incoherent (apologies to MLK), but I had found myself talking about the 2600 DeCSS case Universal v. Reimerdes so much with my friends, that I figured it might be good to found a club where we could keep similar conversations going. Since our school didn’t have a debate club at the time (there were rumors about an ill-fated trip involving a school bus sinking in the Norwalk River), we didn’t really have any other venues to do this besides study hall.

Luckily, my father happened to be a working philosophy of science professor and had enough spare time to help us get the club off the ground. I think I organized the first session and ranted about the DeCSS case, but we later moved onto more academic subjects and discussions. The club was a high point in what was mostly a difficult period in my life and school. I think I still have some photos that we intended to submit to the yearbook and if those turn up I’ll try and post them. Unfortunately the club never survived after our class’s graduation as we were unable to find a faculty adviser or enough student interest. I would later use the skills I developed to launch Free Culture @ NYU, so I suppose I was on the right track.

The polemical writings of Emannuel Goldstein, editor in chief of 2600 and the main defendant in the case, about the magazine’s choice to publish DeCSS had galvanized me. Goldstein articulated that the issues at hand in the suit were really ones of freedom, source code, and speech, not piracy and profits. As an early adopter of Linux (Slackware 3.3 anyone?) as well as a kid who loved movies and was incredibly excited about the potential of DVDs, the practicalities of the case were quite clear to me: why shouldn’t I be able to run whatever software I wanted to play my own DVDs? Who says I can’t read *that* source code? Jon Johansen, the teenager hacker who cracked the DVD encryption scheme, CSS (not to be confused with the other CSS), played the role of sympathetic hacker who I, not incidentally, looked up to.

Free speech on the internet, heck, freedom itself, appeared to be at stake, threatened by a very bad part of a very new law that sounded like it was bought and paid for by the exact interests suing our magazine.

During the case’s 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals trial in May of 2001, I wore a t-shirt featuring the censored source code while sitting in the audience. The Wall Street Journal interviewed me that day and it wasn’t until last year that I discovered my quote actually made it into the article in the paper:

Looking back, I now realize my interest and involvement in this case marks my early foray into the world of radical online free speech activism and copyright reform. I knew the 2600 case was important (clearly, I spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking about it, debating it, and following it closely), but I did not estimate how much these issues would continue to shape and influence my life and career. I’ve now been involved in this community for almost a decade, and it’s only beginning to get really interesting.

Obviously, I was not alone. This case and these issues not only radicalized a generation of free software developers and enthusiasts, but also trained them with a set of skills necessary to successfully navigate these issues in the future.

My friend and now colleague at NYU, Gabriella Coleman has written an article about our story called “Code is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers“  published in the academic journal Cultural Anthropology. Biella’s paper is one of the best overviews of the conditions that precipitated the birth of a generation of internet and free speech activists. Biella concludes by arguing this type of political activism and legal autodidacticism represents a new kind of engagement with democracy, which of course, I completely agree with and am proud to be part of.

Download the PDF of her paper here, or look for it in your copy of Cultural Anthropology.

This Sunday UnionDocs is hosting one of the first screenings in NYC of the new Girl Talk documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto. I’ll be part of the discussion afterward with my friend Aram Sinnreich.

Email bodega@uniondocs.org for reservations.
7:30pm, May 3rd 2009
322 Union Ave in Williamsburg.
L train to Lorimer / G to Metropolian / J,M,Z to Hewes.
Suggestion Donation: $5
Reservations will only be held until 6:55 pm.

Here’s the trailer:

I hope to see you there!

I spent the first week of college living through September 11th in and around New York City and have since endured recurring plane crash nightmares.

Which is why I was relieved to find out after the fact that today’s close call with Air Force One and two F-16s was a photo-op rather than another generation-defining tragedy.

Reading the New York Times’ extensive coverage of the episode on their blog had me wondering about how the event unfolded on everyone’s-favorite-real-time-reporting-source: Twitter. What was the first tweet that observed the fly by? Was it panicked? How many people retweeted it? What would have Twitter looked like on 9/11?

We’ll never know, but I’ve done a bit of searching for terms related to today’s news (“nyc plane”)* and have discovered one of the first tweets at around 10:30am (around the time of the first flyover) by n8s8e asking JetSetCD whether Obama was supposed to be in NYC:

Shortly after, @The_Pace asks a similar question, and then @hugoyles mentions that Goldman’s trading floor was evacuated. Then @ChicagoSooner reports that CNBC had confirmed the sightings. @Rithesh asked if there was a plane crash in lower NYC, and then @grapejamboy breaks the news that the Pentagon confirmed the flights as a photo-op. From then on, most tweets cover the story properly.

It’s clear that Twitter beat traditional news outlets today in relaying that something was happening with a plane over NYC’s downtown skies. However, as @Rithesh’s tweet demonstrates, there is potential that misinformation gets disseminated (there was no crash) as well, so the system is not noise proof.

There’s also a limit to what can be gleaned from Twitter search at any given moment, and a very real chance that all the signal will itself become noise. As commentators smarter than I have observed, this makes Twitter a fantastic “raw material” in a journalist’s process, but not a final product itself.

But really, what’s the difference between leaving a search open in Tweetdeck and leaving CNN on in the background?

UPDATE: Zander points out this great piece in the Nieman Journalism lab breaking down the Twitter accounts of today in much better and greater detail than I did.

*This search is not scientific at all and is probably leaving out earlier sightings. I tried searching for “plane” but Twitter’s search is frustratingly limited to narrowing queries by day as opposed to hour and minute (which would be ideal here) and will only deliver a max of 1500 results for any term. There are obvious security reasons for this, but it presents a fantastic example of how Twitter can capitalize on search: I’m  willing to shell out a couple of dollars for access to do more sophisticated searching.

Apologies for neglecting this blog for a bit. I’m have got lots of drafts saved so some more posts are on their way.

I wanted to announce that in conjunction with my day-to-day job as Outreach Manager at Creative Commons, I’m now working at Eyebeam (a digital arts space in Chelsea) a day or two a week as a research associate with Michael Mandiberg and Patrick Davison. Michael and Patrick and I are developing a project called “One for the Commons” for Eyebeam’s Open Culture group which will help contemporary and notable (notable as defined by Wikipedia’s hive mind) artists release their work into the commons. We’ve done a lot of work to prepare the project, but there’s still a bit more to do before the site launches; you should see something here about it soon.

I’ve also joined the board of Rhizome, which is an digital art organization at the New Museum. This is a great honor and I’m looking forward to helping them grow. You can help Rhizome now by purchasing space on their $50,000 homepage; an homage to the original Million Dollar Homepage. Also check out my 35 Million Pixel Animated gif from 2006.

Aside from that, I’ve been Creative Commons stuff has taken up most of my other time. It’s been great, we’ve seen a lot of interesting and fantastic things happen in 2009, and there is lots more to do. In case you don’t follow my twitter/facebook feed, I was recently on RTE Radio 1 in Ireland talking with Dave Fanning about the future of the music industry, and today I’ll be on a panel at Cardozo talking about why Network Neutrality is important for Creative Commons.

Also, I posted a trance mix I made in high school and got a funny (positive) reaction on facebook about it. Download DJ_Mecredis_-_Bad_Old_Trance.mp3 or listen here:

I’ve been working as a photographer for MoMA’s PopRally for the last year or so and it has quickly become one of my favorite live events to work for. Last Tuesday was “PopRally: Silent But Deadly“, and the evening’s entertainment would come in form of comedy from and about public domain films. Max Silvestri, a friend and comedian I booked for a Creative Commons Salon was the MC for the night and started off the evening explaining how he was planning on curating MoMA’s Department of Internet Funny Pictures. Above, you can see him highlighting a photo he found on the Internet of a snow penis made in a pickup truck.

What was so special about Tuesday (besides the fact that I took the time to read the instruction manual for my flash prior to showing up) was that MoMA packed the house showing restored mostly-public domain silent films with live improvised piano accompaniment by Ben Model. If you’ve ever watched a silent film, this should surprise you.

On top of that, MoMA featured awesome remixes of those films afterwards. Having taken a couple of film classes and fancying myself a basic appreciation of the history of photography, I know why silent films are historically important but I’ve always had a hard time actually sitting through them. I’ve occasionally downloaded some from the Internet Archive, but never found them particularly engaging or watchable.

But sitting and laughing with the audience at MoMA, I finally understood the appeal of the silent film — it was the presence of an audience affirming and interpreting the screen that allowed me to enjoy it. Since there was no dialog, we, the audience, had to create and share what we thought was happening on screen with our laughter and reactions.

In other words, you’re not supposed to watch silent films by yourself; they require group dynamics to really come alive. This may apply to contemporary film, and may be a reason year after year, Hollywood still breaks box office records despite panicked proclamations that the sky is falling. Theater experiences are highly rivalrous and I think this PopRally really demonstrates why theaters and real live audiences are still very important.

My favorite part of the evening were the remixes that various comedians were commissioned to do. They make less sense without first seeing the original films (none of which seem available online in their entirety), but here’s one that I think definitely works by Joe Mande:

The Knockout: 15 Years Later from Joe Mande on Vimeo.

If you’re not already signed up for PopRally, do not hesitate to join their mailing list, and buy your tickets early because they almost always sell out.

(The ^H’s in the title of this blog post are explained here.)

More history being made this week for the music industry. First, NIN topped the Amazon MP3 charts with a CC licensed instrumental album.

Today, Apple promised to go DRM free on iTunes by the end of Q1 2009.

In October of 2006, I organized the first DRM protests in the states while a student activist in Free Culture @ NYU. A year later, we protested the midtown Apple store after Tower Records went out of business (Tower was our second target after Virgin Megastore in Union Square.)

A couple of months after the Apple protest, Steve Jobs wrote his famous anti-DRM letter to the music industry. Since then Apple has ostensibly been negotiating variable pricing and removing DRM entirely from the store. Jobs probably sacrificed the one-size-fits all $.99 price per song so that he could get DRM completely out of the store.

There are still things to be done, however, before victory is declared. The iPod supporting truly free formats would be nice (I’m becoming increasingly interested in collecting FLAC music), at least until the various patents controlling MP3 expire. Also, native CC licensing built into music stores like Amazon and iTunes would be nice too.

But as Voltaire said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

After receiving criticism for the privacy-violating “feature” of Google Street View that enabled anyone to easily identify people who happened to be on the street as Google’s car drove by, the search giant started blurring faces.

What is interesting, and what Mako would consider a “Revealing Error“, is when the auto-blur algorithm can not distinguish between an advertisement’s face and a regular human’s face. For the ad, the model has been compensated to have his likeness (and privacy) commercially exploited for the brand being advertised. On the other hand, there is a legal grey-area as to whether Google can do the same for random people on the street, and rather than face more privacy criticism, Google chooses to blur their identities to avoid raising the issue of whether it is their right to do so, at least in America.

So who cares that the advertisement has been modified? The advertiser, probably. If a 2002 case was any indication, advertisers do not like it when their carefully placed and expensive Manhattan advertisements get digitally altered. While the advertisers lost a case against Sony for changing (and charging for) advertisements in the background of Spiderman scenes located in Times Square, its clear that they were expecting their ads to actually show up in whatever work happened to be created in that space. There are interesting copyright implications here, too, as it demonstrates an implicit desire by big media for work like advertising to be reappropriated and recontextualized because it serves the point of getting a name “out there.”

To put my undergraduate philosophy degree to use, I believe these cases bring up deep ethical and ontological questions about the right to control and exhibit realities (Google Street View being one reality, Spiderman’s Time Square being another) as they obtain to the real reality. Is it just the difference between a fiction and a non-fiction reality? I don’t think so, as no one uses Google maps expecting to retrieve information that is fictional. Regardless, expect these kinds of issues to come up more and more frequently as Google increases its resolution and virtual worlds merge closer to real worlds.

I went out last night around 1 am to take photos of the celebrations happening in Union Square. At the last minute I downloaded a voice recorder app for my iPhone and hit record as soon as I stepped out the door. I recorded the entire next half hour of shooting photos and talking to people in and around Union Square and I think it does a pretty good job of capturing the mood. Think of it as a Manhattan field recording.

30 minutes, 320kbps 71.4mb file download or listen here: