I greatly enjoyed last weeks’s Berkman Center event about some of the ways the Web is affecting the movie industry, which included a screening of an indie movie that has been released only on the Web.

First here was a panel discussion with Rob Burnett [twitter:robburnett1], Elaine McMillion, and me, moderated by Jonathan Zittrain. Rob is the executive producer of “The Late Show with David Letterman” and the director and co-creator of the new indie movie We Made This Movie. Elaine is a Berkman Fellow and is orchestrating a crowdsourced, interactive documentary called Hollow. Jonathan Zittrain is extremely Jonathan Zittrainy, which is a wonderful thing. We talked about what the Net is doing to movies, and you couldn’t ask for two more insightful commentators than Rob and Elaine, led by the Best Moderator in the Business.

Then we watched Rob’s movie, which I loved. [Disclosure: I did a little free consulting about the Web release.] The movie is hard to describe, which is a good thing, but it’s funny, engaging, touching, and deeply clever. In fact, it transcends its cleverness, but of this I can say no more. It’s also got an incredibly talented ensemble cast that made me think of Diner. Go to the movie’s site to find out how to see it online. (Hint: It’s on iTunes.)

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Jonathan Kamens has started a petition to the White House to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Here’s the nut of his explanation:

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act protects the privacy of your email, requiring law-enforcement authorities to show probable cause and obtain a search warrant before they can read it. Except it doesn’t, really, because under the ECPA, any email left “on the server” for more than 180 days is considered “abandoned” under the ECPA, and any prosecutor in the country can get access to it simply by signing a letter requesting such access.

The law was written in the days when people’s email stayed on the server only until they downloaded it from there to their desktop computer over a slow modem. Nowadays, however, virtually everybody leaves their email “on the server” so that it can be accessed from anywhere on any device. So virtually everybody’s old email is accessible to law-enforcement authorities without a search warrant. This is horrendously unacceptable, and this petition calls on Congress to amend the law and on the Obama administration to support and push for such an amendment.

It turns out that I am less concerned about privacy than are most of my friends (not you, Jeff!), but this petition makes complete sense to me. The ECPA is a textbook example of a law that’s been outstripped by technology.

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NASA, getting all sciency on us, is apparently sitting on a potentially historic discovery by the Curiosity rover on Mars until further tests can confirm it.

Confirm shmonfirm! This is the Internet! What do you think Curiosity has discovered on Mars?

An AOL CD offering 500 free hours?

• OJ’s footprint?

• A copy of Ray Bradbury’s “The Earthling Chronicles”?

• A black slab with “BRB” written on it?

• ….?

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This isn’t news. I’m just slow. But in July, Mozilla announced it will launch its new mobile operating system in Brazil. The plan, apparently, is to focus first on emerging markets.

The Mozilla mobile OS is going to be completely open, based on HTML 5. This means you won’t have to develop for a framework specific to a platform (iPhone or Android, e.g.). Because it’s Mozilla, it will be open open. (Remember, Mozilla are the folks that bring us Firefox.)

Another reason this is good news: The Mozilla browser is third, behind IE and Chrome, and is dropping. Mozilla is a pillar of open openness and we don’t want to lose it. Mozilla growth opportunities = Goodness.

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From an email:

…an online discussion on Open Access (OA) from the perspective of the developing world.

Funded by DFID, through the Mobilising Knowledge for Development (MK4D) programme in the Institute for Development Studies at Sussex University, and managed through the African Commons project in South Africa and the Centre for Internet and Society in India, the discussion will be hosted on UNESCO’s WSIS Open Access Community Forum. This open access dialogue will provide a valuable space to discuss different perspectives on what open access means for the developing world and what it can offer.

There is compelling evidence which indicates that OA has finally entered mainstream discourse. Yet, in the developing world context there remain specific challenges and untapped opportunities for OA. A series of open access discussions aimed at developing world critical thinkers, activists and academics, seeks to explore insights and articulate opinion on OA in the developing world. Join us for stimulating debate!

Register here:

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Dear Joe,

Congratulations on your victory! I’m proud to have you as our new Congressperson from the 12th district here in Brookline and environs. Barney Frank has left you some big shoes to fill, and I’m looking forward to watching you lace up.

Barney did a great job representing our local interests. But our district, and our Commonwealth, has always looked beyond what’s good for us locals. We’ve always had an eye out for the larger common good. That’s why we keep electing Kennedys.

An issue has arisen that not only needs your support, but could help you make exactly the right kind of early mark. Forgive me if you are already on top of it, but, briefly, the Republican Study Committee on Friday issued a report on copyright reform that was — from the point of view of many of us on the Web — shockingly helpful. I say “shockingly” because Congress overall has been woefully one-sided and antiquarian on the question of copyright, taking laws designed for previous centuries and actually making them far worse.

That was Friday. By Saturday afternoon, the Hollywood lobbyists had forced Paul Teller, the head of the RSC, to withdraw the report on the specious grounds that it had not gone through “adequate review.” If so, perhaps Paul Teller should resign. But, I’m willing to bet 10,000 RomneyBucks that instead the young author of the report, Derek Khanna [twitter:dkhanna11], will take the fall.

Anyway, the report punctures three myths about copyright, and proposes four areas of reform:

• Statutory damages reform

• Expand Fair Use

• Punish false copyright claims

• Heavily limit the terms for copyright, and create disincentives for renewal

I urge you to take a look. Imagine a world with copyright reformed in this way. And if you think the proposals are wrong-headed, impractical, or whatever, at least embrace them as a starting point for a conversation this country very much needs.

This could be a great issue for you, Joe. You’ll find a whole lot of constituents who would be thrilled to see you take a leadership role in this important discussion.

And it won’t just be your constituents. You’ll find yourself surfing a wave — the Internet constituency that represents the future of our party, nation, and globe.

Looking forward to seeing you show the bold leadership your family is famous for and that has so many of us excited about your first term in Congress — the first of many, we hope!

Best,

David Weinberger
Constituent

Note: The original report was here, but people have put up extra copies in case the RSC physically removes the report from the Web. Here’s the copy I posted.

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A Republican Study Committee has posted a document (as a pdf) that nails three myths about copyright law and suggests four areas of reform.

Later that day: The author of the memo has put himself forward for questions at Reddit.

A few hours after that: The MPAA and RIAA have leapt into action, forcing the Republicans to retract the report. Dreams die fast in DC. Fuckwads. (Hat-tip to Jay Rosen.) (And just in case the Republicans decide to take the memo down, here’s a mirror.)

The 3 myths are:

1. The purpose of copyright is to compensate the creator of the content

2. Copyright is free market capitalism at work

3. The current copyright legal regime leads to the greatest innovation and productivity

And the four “potential policy solutions” are:

1. Statutory damages reform

2. Expand Fair Use

3. Punish false copyright claims

4. Heavily limit the terms for copyright, and create disincentives for renewal

I’ve started a thread at Reddit if you want to talk about it.

And for a flat-out statement of how the Net’s regulators don’t understand the cultural revolution they (we) are facing, here’s the statement by Amelia Anderstotter to the 2012 Internet Governance Forum. Amelia is a member of the European Parliament, from the Pirate Party:

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Siva Vaidhyanathan [twitter: sivavaid] has a really well-done (as usual) article that reminds us that for all the excitement about Massive Open Online Courses — which he shares — we still have to figure out how to do them right. There are lots of ways to go wrong. (And I should hear note that I’m posting this in order to: (1) recommend Siva’s article, and (2) make an obvious point about MOOCs. Feel free to stop here.)

The fundamental issue, of course, is that real-world ed doesn’t scale very well. The largest classes in the real world are in the hundreds (oh, maybe some school has a course with thousands), and those classes are generally not held up as paradigms of Western ed. Further, traditional ed doesn’t scale in the sense that not everyone gets to go to college.

So, now we have a means for letting classes get very big indeed. Hundreds of thousands. Put in the terms of Too Big to Know, the question is: how do you make that enormous digital classroom smarter than the individuals in it? 2B2K’s answer (such as it is) is that you make a room smart by enabling its inhabitants to create a knowledge network.

• Such a network would at a minimum connect all the participants laterally, as well as involving the teacher
• It would encourage discussion of course topics, but be pleased about discussions that go off topic and engage students socially.
• It would enable the natural experts and leaders among the students to emerge.
• It would encourage links within and outside of the course network.
• This network would enable students to do their work online and together, and make those processes and their traces fully available to the public.
• All the linking, discussions, answered questions, etc., would be fed back into the system, making it available to everyone. (This assumes there are interactions that produce metadata about which contributions are particularly useful.)
• It would encourage (via software, norms, and evaluations) useful disagreements and differences. It doesn’t always try to get everyone onto exactly the same page. Among other things, this means tolerating — appreciating and linking to — local differences among the students.
• It would build upon the success of existing social tools, such as liking, thumbs upping, following…
• Students would be encouraged to collaborate, rather than being evaluated only as individual participants.
• The learning process would result in a site that has continuing value to the next students taking the course and to the world.

I’m not trying to present a Formula for Success, because I have no idea what will actually work or how to implement any ideas. Fortunately, there are tons of really smart people working on this now, with a genuine spirit of innovation. All I’m really saying is something obvious: to enable education to scale so that MOOCs don’t become what no one wants them to be — cyber lecture halls — it’s useful to think about the “classroom” as a network.

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Jonathan Spencer [twitter:JonnyVeeArgh] creates informative visualizations for the BBC (“The Beeb”), but as he takes the train (or as the Brits say, a “lorry”) into work (“lift”), he works on his own videos (“bangers”). Here’s his latest (“the penny dropped”), which is about his continuing theme (“ringo”), noise (“warm beer”):

NOISE V014L H264 from Jonathan Spencer on Vimeo.

Click to go to the Vimeo page that explains the order producing the chaos.

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Lots of good stuff as VP Gore answers questions mainly about climate change.

But there’s also this from him:

Our national information infrastructure is no longer competitive. We need to invest in more bandwidth, easier access, and the rapid transition of our democratic institutions to the internet. And we need to protect the freedom of the internet against corporate control by legacy businesses that see it as a threat, and against the obscene invasions of privacy and threats to security from government and corporations alike. Please think about this: almost everytime there has been a choice between privacy/security on the one hand and convenience on the other, the mass of folks have chosen convenience. I for one believe the “stalker economy” on the internet is undemocratic and anti- American. Are folks at the gag point on this yet? Thanks, btw, to the Reddit community for fighting off Sopa and PIPA. Keep your powder dry; more big struggles ahead.

F@#$ing Florida :(

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