Brad Sucks came to Harvard this week and gave a performance-conversation and addressed the class I’m co-teaching with John Palfrey (blogged here and here). There were a few surprises.

What was not surprising was that Brad’s totally delightful, frank, and just a good guy.

First, he pronounces his last name (Turcotte) as Tur-COTT, not Tur-COAT. I stand corrected. Also, he likes his name written as “Brad Sucks,” not “BradSucks.” Sorry twice, Brad!

Second, especially during the class, I was struck by how different copyright looks to Brad than it looks to, well, lots of others. It’s not just that copyright protection looks to Brad like a limitation on how widely his music spreads and his musical career builds. Rather, it was how foreign copyright looks to him. From what he said, it seems like an imposition of an artificial construct place on top of the work.

Here’s what I think is happening, although I can’t say that this is what Brad is thinking. To people who think of music as a work, copyright looks like the natural boundary of their work, the ethical edge of their work itself. Others (Brad, maybe?) think of music not so much as a work as a shared experience, as a connection with listeners. For them, listening is co-creation. The work feels more like a performance to them. The concept of copyright doesn’t fit easily over such a view.

Third, Brad surprised both the class and the attendees at the performance-conversation with his claim that he is a “horrible capitalist” who gives his songs away for intensely practical reasons, not because he’s an anti-copyright activist.

Thanks for coming, Brad. And thanks for being so BradSucksy. [Tags: brad_sucks bradsucks copyright copyleft music harvard ]

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Why do some economically well off cultures have good food and others do not? Wouldn’t making good food — by which I mean delicious food that you love to eat — be a prime directive of every land? They’ve had thousands of years to work on getting some great recipes down. After all, there are poor cultures that have great food. So, why do entire cultures screw up this most basic of human pleasures?

EXTRA CREDIT question: Last night I gave a talk and afterwards was taken to dinner (thank you very much for the food and conversation) at an Italian restaurant at which every dish had at least twelve ingredients: Rare roasted veal stuffed with striped bass crusted in romano crumbs roasted with fennel basted in onion pate fried in the oil of squid grown in olive oil and fed striped bass found inside the gullets of ocean-farmed veal. Question: Is this the sign of a chef who is insecure or imaginative? Creative or bored? (The right answer is probably the right answer to most questions: It depends.) [Tags: food cooking chefs puzzle doep]

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I was just taking a little break, watching some political ads on YouTube.

Yup. Ads I want to see. Ads I enjoyed. Not ads thrust in my face, interrupting me.

Yup, I was watching ads I want to watch. As if that were something we always could do. [Tags: ads marketing broadcast politics ]

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Here is an extract from the summary of FreePress.net’s filing with the FCC protesting Comcast’s throttling of bittorrent, a clear violation of Net neutrality (and possibly of laws against impersonation, although that one seems like a stretch to my non-lawyerly mind):

Free Press focuses these comments on two topics: network discrimination and required disclosure.

Regarding network discrimination, Free Press et al. urges the FCC to declare that discriminatory tactics, such as those employed by Comcast, violate federal policies and will not be tolerated. First, we demonstrate that four relevant sources of law prohibit broadband discrimination: 1) The FCC Internet Policy Statement, 2) The Communications Act, 3) Precedent in a recent order and 4) The FCC orders eliminating ISP open access. Second, we refute the arguments advanced that discrimination is merely ‘reasonable network management.’

Arguments based on bandwidth, “delaying,” and anti-competitiveness are as dangerously wrong as they are irrelevant. Moreover, we show that Comcast’s actions are anticompetitive.

Regarding disclosure, Free Press et al. demonstrate that, while network providers must be required to disclose their network management practices, disclosure is not enough. First, network providers should be required to disclose their network management practices so that consumers, the tech community, software providers, and the FCC can respond accordingly.

Second, while we generally prefer a competitive market solution, which disclosure can often promote, disclosure alone will not result in pro-consumer or pro-innovation market outcomes here. The market is too concentrated for disclosure to discipline the market participants or empower consumers.

Third, network providers have repeatedly made a deal with the public and the FCC in merger reviews, sworn declarations, and FCC proceedings—the network providers were relieved of competition and in exchange promised not to discriminate, not merely to disclose their discrimination. Similarly, the FCC pledged it would ensure for consumers an open Internet, not mere disclosure, should the network providers break their vows. The rubber has now hit the road.

[Tags: net_neutrality comcast bittorrent fcc harold_feld ed_markey]

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Harold Feld explains Ed Markey’s Internet bill, and why he likes it even though it’s not as strong as it might be.

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One more item just crossed the ol’ digital desktop: J.H. Snider, a Shorenstein Fellow, is having a talk and dinner on Feb. 19 at 6pm on the current FCC auction as “a paradigmatic example of special interest politics and media failure.” It’s in Cambridge, and if you want to go, you have to rsvp to camille stevens by putting an underscore between her names and sending it to her @harvard.edu. In any case, you can read Snider’s “The Art of Spectrum Lobbying: America’s $480 Billion Spectrum Giveaway, How it Happened, and How to Prevent it from Recurring” here.

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According to The Times, British school kids will be assigned a unique number that will be associated with their school records and that will follow them for life. Privacy advocates are concerned.

Not to mention that in the UK, when they say this is going on your permanent record, they’ll really mean it.

Tags: privacy uk education

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Let me disambiguate that title: Reuters is offering a Web service, called Calais, that will parse text and return it in a form (RDF) that can be utilized by Semantic Web applications. It uses natural language processing (from ClearForest) to find structures of meaning such as places, jobs, facts, events, etc. It apparently has its own metadata schema, but it allows users to extend it. It’s an open API, and Reuters is being quite generous in how much they’ll let you submit during this beta period. It’s English only for now, although they plan to support other languages, opening the exciting prospect of being able to find items of interest in languages you don’t understand via a unified metadata framework.

I’m going by the site’s FAQ. I haven’t tried it and can’t tell how well it works, how accurate it is, how comprehensive or detailed its metadata are, and how much post-processing cleanup uses will want to provide (which of course depends on the application). There are some points I just don’t understand, such as the claim “Calais carries your own metadata anywhere in the content universe.” But if it works within some reasonable definition of “works,” and if it gets widely adopted, Calais could make a lot more information a lot easier to find, and to process for further meaning. [Tags: semantic_web semweb everything_is_miscellaneous reuters calais nlp ]

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Terry Heaton writes about CNN’s firing his friend, Chez Pazienza, a producer at American Morning, for what he was writing in his blog:

According to Chez, he was terminated for violating network policy by not running what he was writing through their vetting system. So he was fired not for blogging but for the content of his blog. “It’s not that I’ve been writing,” he wrote in an email. “It’s WHAT I’ve been writing.” That may be the official decision, but the truth is he was fired because he had the balls to write about the industry without telling CNN. I would add that there is no mention of his connection to the network on his site, and as a producer, it’s hard to justify the notion that he’s in any way a public figure or publicly connected with the company.

CNN may feel a little safer, but do you think the journalists there think this is a good policy? [Tags: blogging journalism media Chez_Pazienza ]

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The NY Times reports that Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences will vote next week on a proposal that would require faculty to deposit a copy of their articles in an open access Harvard repository even as they submit those articles to academic journals.

I like this idea a lot. I only wish it went further. Faculty members will be allowed to opt-out of the requirement pretty much at will (as I understand it), which could vitiate it: If a prestigious journal accepts an article but only if it’s not been made openly available, faculty members may well decide it’s more important for their careers to be published in the journal. I would prefer to see the Harvard proposal paired with some form of official encouragement to tenure committees to look favorably upon faculty members who make their work widely and freely available.

Nothing is without drawbacks. A well-run, reliable, thorough peer-review system costs money. But there’s also an expense to funding peer review by limiting access to the work that makes it through the process. Likewise, while the current publication system directs our attention efficiently, but there’s a price to the very efficiency of such a system: innovation can arise from what looked liked inefficiencies. There’s value in the long tail of research.

If we were today building a system for evaluating scholarly research and for making it maximally available, we would not build anything like the current paper-based system. Well, we are building such a system. The Harvard proposal will, in my opinion, help.

Disclosure: I’m a fellow at the Berkman Center which is part of the Law School, not the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and I’m not a faculty member in any case. Stuart Shieber, one of the sponsors of the proposal, is a director of the Center.) [Tags: open_access peer_review scholarship research publishing media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Interesting thread at AbovetheLaw.com about what Obama was like as a law professor. No, it’s not a simple Rah Rah Gobama! thread.

And when people dismiss the effect the Internet is having on politics, this should remember that — for example — we now take for granted that we can aggregate recollections like these.

(The U of Chicago Law School still lists Obama as a faculty member, including a photo of him in his younger days.)

(PS: Gobama!)

[Tags: obama politics everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Remember Grokster? It was an attempt to be Napster without having a centralized database of songs and users. It was shut down by a unanimous Supreme Court decision.

Go to Grokster.com now and you are not only told that Grokster is no more but that you are at risk simply by having gone to the site.

YOUR IP ADDRESS IS 123.123.123.123 AND HAS BEEN LOGGED.
Don’t think you can’t get caught. You are not anonymous.

(The IP address they give is the right one.)

The site then suggests:

In the meantime, please visit www.respectcopyrights.com and www.musicunited.org to learn more about copyright.

RespectCopyrights.com really should be called FearCopyrights.com. It’s an MPAA scare site that doesn’t let you know you still have rights when using copyrighted material. (It captures the back arrow key in your browser, which is not only annoying, controlling and disrespectful, it’s a way of driving up the hit count.) MusicUnited is an music industry pro-DRM propaganda site. Hey, it’s their right. It’s a free country. Sort of.

[Tags: copyright copyleft grokster riaa mpaa broadcast_flag drm ]

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