I frequently talk on Creative Commons around NYC and figured I’d upload a recent generic set of slides in case anyone found them useful. The download at SlideShare is a PDF which will work on any platform. Unfortunately there’s no audio, so if you want me to explain it all you’ll have to get me to show up!
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:
Techdirt is reporting that Against Monopoly is reporting that HBO is sending take down notices to people who have uploaded their own recordings of the Inaugural Concert: We Are One. I haven’t been able to verify this, but if it is indeed the case, it would seem that HBO is misunderstanding their rights under copyright law. Note that I am not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice.
Since HBO merely owns the copyright to their recording of the concert, they can’t control what other people were doing with their own recordings from their own cameras. This is because a work is not entitled to copyright protection unless it is fixed. The actual performance that happened that evening wasn’t fixed or copyrighted until it ended up on HBO’s tapes (or hard drives).
If the content of the concert was in the public domain or free (e.g., The Star-Spangled Banner is in the public domain since it was created prior to 1923), then any audience member who recorded it had the right to make a recording of it and distribute that recording since they owned the copyright to the video. Putting aside questions of anti-bootlegging laws (which are arguably unconstitutional and not relevant to DMCA takedown notices), it is not clear that HBO can prevent distributions of privately filmed performances of public domain works that were performed in a public venue, which, if the Against Monopoly report is correct, is what part of what they’re trying to do.
However, according to the Wikipedia page, a lot of non-public-domain non-free content was performed.
Which means that by recording and distributing a live performance of say, a Bruce Springsting song, an audience member might be infringing on the boss’ copyright, but probably not HBO’s copyright. Does anyone know more about bootlegging laws and how they might or might not apply here?
So what right does HBO have to send takedown notices for other people’s works? Sending fraudelent DMCA takedown notices is itself a violation of the DMCA, so if you’ve been threatened by HBO for posting videos you recorded at the inaugural concert, you probably have the right to file a putback, and perhaps take action against HBO.
There are bigger questions, however, about the inaugural committee’s right to leverage tax payer money and support to sell off exclusive rights of a public event to a private entity such as HBO. I’m not clear on whether their status as a legal entity would entitle them to do this.
Anyway, while I would like to see HBO put the concert into the public domain along with other works of the federal government, that is probably impossible as the recording contains works that are in copyright, such as Bruce Springsting songs.
There is the possibility that HBO could put the video but not the audio into the public domain, but I do not think there is an easy work around for including both the audio and video. This is not to say, however, that HBO is justified in sending nasty letters to citizens interested in helping celebrate an important event.
I sympathize with the inaugural committee’s desire to produce and execute a fantastic recording of a historic moment in American history. I know that this kind of production costs money and there must be incentives for creating it. But I think the conflicts between HBO and citizens indicate that copyright is not the proper incentive here. It alienates too many citizens interested in documenting their own version of history, and given the context and content of our current president’s administration, sets the wrong precedent for sharing that history. HBO should be ashamed of themselves.
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.”
I’ve been using less and less of Facebook recently, and I’ve started to wonder why. I primarily use it to organize events, keep track of contacts (once a month I need to reach someone whose e-mail I don’t have) and occasionally upload photos that I don’t want to put on Flickr and/or want to tag with people I know.
My loss of interest in Facebook is exemplified by my current infatuation with Twitter. I was deeply skeptical of Twitter when I first heard about it, but signed up and quickly forgot about it. After I stumbled across a couple of Twitter accounts and started following them, I decided to actually try it out.
Now I’m hopelessly addicted. As Mike Arrington said, I need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.
But I hadn’t given a lot of thought to moving on from Facebook until I came across Molly Schoemann’s post on “Why I left Facebook“:
Because every damn time I signed on to Facebook, my feed went like this:
[Girl you found distasteful in high school]: Has posted pictures from her wedding!
Click here to view her photos, while wondering if perhaps you misjudged her, back in the day. Find photos distasteful, even for wedding photos. Feel slightly depressed, if also vindicated.
You get the idea. Molly has perfectly articulated my Facebook fatigue. I’ve found that I’ve had trouble separating the signal from the noise. In fact, most of Facebook has just become noise to me. The useful parts are specific ones. I either receive an e-mail telling me that is an event that I want to go to (though I rarely RSVP correctly — either over or under obligating myself for months) or I search for someone’s e-mail or phone number.
The feed now both scares and bores me.
Facebook is now suffering from information overload and we lack the resources to adequately deal with it. Sure, I can select “Less Information about [Guy I Barely Know]” but the problem seems to systemic to Facebook in general. I don’t think Facebook is objectionable because it publishes private or otherwise hard to find information, I think its objectionable merely because it publishes too much valueless information, period.
Creating adequate filters is the essential solution to this problem, and it is why Google was so successful. They created a filter to tame the info-glut of the late 90s on the web.
Google was solving a problem that was essentially an artificial intelligence once: how does a machine know what you are asking for? How can a machine understand what you want to find? Google’s solution was to leverage the collective intelligence of the web in order to infer meaning about its content.
Facebook has tried making stories more interesting by showing me stories involving more than one friend. The system is making an educated guess about what stories I’ll find most interesting. It picks the ones that implicate multiple friends, and to some extent this works as a good indicator as to whether I’ll find a particular item interesting.
But my interest is still waning.
Stop reading now if you hate Twitter, because you’re not going to enjoy this next part.
I think Twitter presents a better solution to taming the Signal-to-Noise Ratio of social networks. This is because Twitter’s inherent filter is better and more active. On Facebook We’ve been brainwashed to mindlessly accept most relationships of people we know in real life, (rejecting a friend request is serious business, most people just leave them queued up in), but we haven’t actually taken into consideration the fact that we’ll be inundated with trivia about their lives.
With Twitter, the filter is better for a number of reasons.
First, relationships are asymmetrical, which removes the friend hoarding incentive. In other words, that there is no reason for me to follow you unless I’m interested in what you have to say. The fact that I follow you means nothing about me. Compare this to the incentive of you and I being friends, symetrically, on Facebook. Even if we aren’t that close, there is little incentive for me to deny your request if I’m interested in showing how popular I am; what human doesn’t want to show how popular they are? Facebook’s architecture rewards friend hoarding, and consequently, information overload, in a way that Twitter’s doesn’t.
Second, if I begin to follow you on Twitter and you are posting boring, irellevant, or uninteresting items, then I will unfollow you. No hard feelings, I’m still probably friendly with you, we might even be good friends IRL, but what you are offering on this platform is not what I want from it. While unfollowing may sometimes precipitate unfriending, the former certainly does not necessitate the latter.
Thirdly, if I miss posts on Twitter, it seems less personal and less of an issue. No big deal, I’ll read your next post.
Fourth, the whole point of Twitter is to Keep it Simple Stupid. By limiting the amount of characters or content a person can post to 140, the emphasis is about conveying as much meaning and value with as litle content as possible. This dramatically increases the quality of the SNR since users feel compelled to not waste characters or posts.
In short, Twitter has avoided the information overload problem, or perhaps I have avoided information overload on Twitter, because its architecture naturally yields a better filter. This is A Good Thing.
Facebook can over come this, maybe, and I think it may still be useful as a friend-indexing-social network for organizing events and looking up phone numbers, but it will be a difficult challenge to get over the info-glut.
It turns out the Wall Street Journal’s sloppy journalism cuts both ways. On Friday I blogged about how the WSJ was reporting that the RIAA had ceased filing lawsuits against individual file sharers. Stupidly, I didn’t really think about their source or attempt to verify the claims myself. Neither did the Associated Press.
Ray Beckerman (who had skeptically acknowledged these reports when the WSJ article first surfaced) has discovered that the RIAA filed another round of lawsuits against individuals just last week, a discovery that directly conflicts with the WSJ piece.
The WSJ’s article suffers from exactly the same flaws as its piece on network neutrality; high on conjecture, low on meaningful facts about the get of the article. The lead establishes that the RIAA is “set to drop its legal assault” but goes on to describe the negotiations the RIAA is establishing with the ISP industry. Noticeably missing from the rest of the article is any evidence demonstrating that the RIAA is actually stopping its legal assault.
So we only have ourselves to blame — we read what we wanted to read and without Ray Beckerman’s excellent sleuthing, we might still be giving the RIAA credit for coming to its senses.
Whether it was the RIAA lying to reporters (which Ray seems to believe is the case) or the WSJ trying to see a story where there wasn’t one, this was a case of not thinking critically enough about sources and evidence based reporting. Either way, if the network neutrality article didn’t give you enough reason to distrust the WSJ’s technology reporting, this incident should. This also leads me to believe that the WSJ has under-critical technology reporters rather than a malicious agenda to purposely misunderstand technology topics.
There’s a lot to be cleared up in this situation and there is probably some truth to the RIAA winding down their lawsuits, but I don’t think we should hold our collective breath or consider this the victory we initially did.
The suits were based on the questionable notion that making files available in directories through peer-to-peer software like KaZaa was a violation of the copyright of the owner of the works. The RIAA was not going after people downloading music, or even people who had sent a file to someone else, but rather the set of people who had shared directories with files that looked like music and were available for public perusal.
This was problematic because the copyright statute doesn’t actually say anything about “making available.” The right to control who distributes one’s work is one of the rights granted to authors by the statute, but the RIAA had no evidence that file sharers had actually distributed the files, just that they had made them available and that the files could potentially be distributed.
Consequently, the RIAA had to argue that “making available” was actually part of the copyright statute when it wasn’t. When the handful of suits (out of 35,000) made it to court, some Judges started to realize this, and through the selfless and amazing work of Ray Beckerman, the legal community slowly turned against the prosecution.
All in all, the RIAA’s campaign to sue their own customers was a disaster. CD sales continued to plummet and filesharing’s popularity only increased. This is not to mention the public relations catastrophe the industry now faces. Musicians hate being associated with large corporations that the public perceives as evil, and more substantively, musicians have not seen any of the settlement monies the RIAA has been collecting on their behalf.
The RIAA is claiming that the campaign “was successful in raising the public’s awareness that file-sharing is illegal” which is demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the law and technology.
So what is next? The RIAA claims that they will be making deals with ISPs to institute something roughly similar to a 3-strikes and you’re out policy against file sharers. The terms and details of these agreements are not flushed out (and will probably never be made available to the public), but on some level, this is a less vicious form of negotiation with the technical realities their industry is facing.
But there is already evidence of ISPs acting in haste to dismantle legal file sharing outfits. TorrentFreak has a story about an open source software tracker having their service revoked by their ISP because they were accused of hosting an illegal torrent of the game Command and Conquer. YouTube already engages in auto-take-downs of videos that are supposedly infringing.
I’m a huge fan of the site LegalTorrents.com and have used it for distributing the uncompressed (~1gb) versions of two Creative Commons videos, A Shared Culture and Media That Matters: A CC Case Study. Because everything on LegalTorrents is free to share (under an appropriate CC or similar public license), it is the perfect counterexample to the RIAA’s claim that file sharing is inherently illegal.
Put another way, file sharing in and of itself is not illegal (just as crowbars in and of themselves are not illegal) and sites like LegalTorrents demonstrate this. We should not let the RIAA use the fact that they’ve abandoned their campaign as a positive cover to privately intimidate ISPs into breaking the Internet.
More importantly, we should keep the pressure on ISPs about preserving network neutrality. When used on the public net and ISPs, deep packet inspection filtering and application layer filtering are violations of network neutrality and if the RIAA is successful in pushing these technologies as “solutions” to the file sharing problem, we are going to have a much larger problem on our hands than 35,000 dispersed lawsuits.
By now everyone knows about the Wall Street Journal’s shoddy net neutrality hit piece.
The article went to great lengths to conjure that Net Neutrality support was waning among its most ardent supporters — Google, Lessig, Obama and others had all said or done things “recently” that indicated they were no longer pushing as hard for the net to stay neutral.
In the last two days, virtually every individual mentioned in the piece has come out against the WSJ and argued that either their positions were misinterpreted or that their quotes were taken out of context.
The WSJ has claimed that their piece has “gotten a rise out of the blogosphere” and has not issued any retractions or corrections to the article.
Other bloggers are commenting on the particular misunderstandings and misinformation in the article, but I’m interested in analyzing the WSJ’s behavior as I believe it is symptomatic of a larger affliction of the newspaper.
Here are some things I think are noteworthy about the situation:
Network neutrality is one of the primary reasons why digital journalism is viable, and the reason why newspapers are threatened online, so there is no surprise the WSJ sees the principle as a threat: they think it is in their interest to do so.
As Gandhi put it:
“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”
