Michael Heller, from Columbia University, is giving a Berkman lunch-time talk on his book, Gridlock Economy. He says the nutshell version is that when too many people own pieces of one thing, no one can use it. Too much ownership creates gridlock, he says. [Note: I’m live-blogging, getting things wrong, missing stuff, introducing typos, etc.]

Example of gridlock: Too many owners of fragments of mortgages leads to a meltdown because there are too many people for renegotiation of the loans.

Another example: Too many patents to deal with to make advances in bio-tech. There are about 40,000 DNA patents now. Patents have gone up, but fewer “pills in bottles” to cure people. The patents are upstream from the work done to actually save people’s lives.

Another example: “What is the most underused natural resource in America?” A: Spectrum. 90% in this country is dead air. We haven’t updated our allocation system since the 1920s. Geographic licenses with restricted uses and no transfers. That makes it extremely difficult to assemble national wireless networks. We are now almost out of the top twenty for broadband.

Another example: Why do we waste so much time in airports? Why not build more runways and airports? Air travel was deregulated in 1978, and since then only one new airport has been built. If we have 25 new runways, it would end gridlock. But every community is able to block the assemblage of land you need.

We could move from 1% to 20% of energy from wind power, but we can’t set up the transmission from one place to another because of gridlock issues.

Rap no longer raps over samples. Gridlock caused by the recording industry “trying to monetize every shard.”

All of these problems are the same problem. There used to be a fairly tight link between the patent and the product, the land and the subdivision, etc. “That’s the old style economy.” The new style is a funnel. The new style economy is about assembling resources. “The breakthroughs come from assembling multiple pieces of protected property.” The same is true in arts, history, documentaries. “The cutting edge is mashups, is remixes.” “Even with land, the most socially valuable projects require the separate assembly of pieces of property.” But ownership has not caught up with this.

One of the great opportunities is figuring out new tools for assembling resoures, and for updating the structure of ownership to conform to the new structure of innovation.

Tragedy of the commons is that when there’s no clear ownership, shared property may get overused. This was a powerful concept when it was introduced in the 1960s. I was a turning point for the environmental movement because they could see that a bunch of resources issues were really structurally the same. It was also the spur in the push towards privatization: Private property was seen as the solution to the tragedy of the commons: If you own the lake, you have an incentive not to take the last fish out of it. But, privatization can overshoot. But, you can get the tragedy of the anti-commons: Too many owners and not enough use. These tragedies are often invisible: you don’t see the waste of what you’re not using.

Michael’s aim is to make the tragedy of the anti-commons visible by roping together many instances to show they’re structurally the same.

We need to reform spectrum allocation, he says. Patent hasn’t been structurally reformed since 1952.

Q: Pharma and biotech disagree on patent policy. Pharma is more like to change its view. Why?
A: Pharma wants to protect its current pipeline, so it tends to favor strong patents. They are willing to sacrifice more speculative research. Biotech companies like to show VCs that they have patents. They worry about weakening patents.
A: [Jim, who’s written a book on this] Molecules are clearly identifiable. But it’s much harder with software and prcoesses.

Q: [jim] The biotech’s having problems, not mainly because of patents. The joke is that a biotech’s main products are patents. That aside, where’s the evident than the anti-commons is a real problem?
A: So far the best evidence is from Walsh, Cohen. They interviewed scientists who said the anti-commons is not a problem. They’re not blocked by patent law. So, this goes against my thesis. But, those studies wouldn’t get at my concerns. Scientists uniformly say that they simply pirate dozens of patents. That works until they get sued. And the Walsh study doesn’t consider commercial R&D. In pharma, they’d rather extend their current drugs. I don’t think I’ve proven that gridlock is the crucial issue, but it seems to be an issue. By not changing the patent law you’re implicitly making policy as well.

Q: Does what you describe impact innovation driven by money or across the board?
A: Across the board. The open source model gets past this. But even assembling multiple open source licenses can lead to gridlock.

Q: We had an open source CEO summit at Harvard last Friday. There was consensus that this more open approach to sw development would help them economically. Between the commons and the anti-commons, is there a commons that isn’t tragic?
A: Sure. My aim is to encourage people to come up with ways of overcoming the problems, once the problems are visible.

[yochai benkler] This is fabulous. Can you say more about what you think the solution is?For anti-commons to be the problem, you have to assume the problem isn’t with property itself. Is the solution a better idea of property? A better understanding of rights? Transaction costs? Is this about the rapid change of uses so you’re always be behind? How do we move ahead? E.g., what do we do about spectrum? How do you tell what to do? Can you think about this independent of the particular resource?
A: So, Yochai in a polite way is saying, “So what? What do we do about it?” E.g., we all agree that the current telecom model is terrible. Everyone loses. Should the solution be full privitization or a commons? If we have a technological way to get past the scarcity of spectrum, then creating private property is the wrong solution. The freedom-enhancing way is to have a commons, if we can get past scarcity. I am agnostic about this because I don’t know if we have solved the problem of scarcity. But I hope my book moves the debate forward by providing another way of showing what’s wrong.
Q: [yochai] I think the solutions lie in the particulars of the domain. The range for me is models of appropriate based on relations (software services) relative to appropriate based on units that are relatively stable. For me, the anticommons problem is a subset of the spectrum problem, in which rapid innovation renders obsolete. The real problem is that spectrum isn’t a resource. Information doesn’t fall on the floor and get lost.

Q: The public is acquainted with gridlock but frame it through government ownership or intervention, with gridlock arising from regulation. How does your framework frame intervention?

Q: In pharma, ownership incentivizes development. Can you break gridlock into communication and action? You can tell people that the 12 owners of a patent that they’re blocking development. Action would be getting them to do something about it. How do you decide whose valuation is more important?

Q: To what degree is the gridlocked society a description of a set of problems or whether it’s a metaphor. If the latter, where does it get too broad? My mortgage doesn’t really resemble my ideas. What’s the larger mechanism here?

A: On politics: There are lots of areas we deliberately design in gridlock, e.g., criminal justice system or preventing parks from being developed. There’s also regulatory gridlock that stops anything from being built.
On limiting scarcity: When is the right measure the subjective one that lets someone refuse to give up property, and when should you just have to pay the market price? It’s an old question and I don’t have a general answer.
Is it a metaphor? I think there’s more commonality in these diverse areas of the economy. So it’s partially an organizing metaphor, but it’s also meant to describe a new way the economy works. [Tags: berkman economy property michael_heller ]

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Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach are heading Obama’s FCC transition team.

OMG. This makes me so happy. Not only are they amazingly knowledgeable about the issues, they also share Obama’s political temperament: Strong beliefs, an ability to listen, a respect for others that is manifested as gentleness, and a practicality that carries them past mere ideology.

Change is coming to the FCC.

[Tags: fcc susan_crawford kevin_werbach obama net_neutrality ]

13 Comments »

Craig Newmark has dropped by the Berkman Center to chat. He begins by asking us what we want him to talk about. A voice opts for the history of CraigsList.com. [NOTE: I’m live-blogging, typing quickly, not correcting typos, getting things wrong, missing entire paragraphs, etc.]

He says that he got a better education than he needed at Case-Western. In early 1995 he wanted to give back some of what he received, he started some mailing lists, including for events, AnonSalon (a fundraiser) and others. People suggested new categories, including apartments. He was using Pine for email, but it started breaking at 240 mailing addresses. He was going to call the list “SFEvents,” but people said they already call it “CraigsList” and that it’s a brand. Craig didn’t know what a brand is, but he stuck with it.

He says he was a literal nerd in HS. He was not on the AV Squad [I was] but he was on the debating team, which led him to delusions about the effectiveness of rational discourse. He says he’s now comfortable with being a nerd.

Eventually he realized he could turn emails into HTML, an instant Web-publishing solution. Over the next few years, he refined the software. If a task took more than an hour a day, he would automate it. At the end of 1997, he hit three milestones: 1. A million page views per month (he hit a billion in 2004 and now is headed toward 13B. There are 26 people at the company). 2. Microsoft Sidewalk asked him to run banner ads. He turned them down because “I am an overpaid programmer.” 3. People volunteered to help. But it failed because he didn’t lead. So, in 1999 he turned it into a business.

He hired Jim Buckmaster “who is a full foot taller than I am.” He’s a really good manager. “I suck as a manager.” The culture there is that people make suggestions, they listen, and they decide what to act on. Also, it’s continued to try to be simple. And they decided to charge people who are already paying but for less effective ads, so they started charging people listing jobs and real estate brokers. “They asked us to charge them to cut down on certain types of spam, and on the need to post and repost.”

He’s always surprised people are willing to pay for what he does for fun. He’s generalized it to nerd values, including: once you have a comfortable living, it’s more fun to change things than to make more money. His business model: “We can do really well by treating people well and doing some good.”

He says he’s now going to half time as a customer service rep, after 14 years of fulltime. You sometimes see ugly things in customer service, he says. E.g., they saw ugly racist stuff during the campaign. “That takes something out of you.”

“I’ve only regretted giving my email address out once.” It was when he was on The View.

Over the past several years, they’ve begun to understand why CL is successful. “It has to do with the culture of trust we have.” There are bad guys but they’re a tiny percentage. “People look out for one another.” E.g., you can flag abusive ads. If enough people vote for it, it’s removed automatically. “That’s a flawed mechanism,” but it works better than not doing it. As Jon Stewart says, (Craig says) you do hear from extremists, but that’s because moderates have stuff to do. You should treat people the way you want to be treated. Corollaries: Live and let live, and give the other person a break. Nothing profound, he says, but it’s hard to follow through. “We’re trying to listen to people still.” “We decide on new cities based primarily on requests for them.” (567 cities now.) Novel ideas are rare. Most of what’s on the site is based on community feedback, although the child care section was Craig’s idea.

“I have no vision at all, but I know how to keep things simple, and I listen some.”

“We’re a good example of how people collaborate in mundane ways to make things happen. Not bad.” On his way to One Web Day he realized, “I’m a community organizer. I’m more of a meta-organizer.”

Nothing about CraigsList is, in his view, altruistic. It’s just people giving another person a break. “I figured I should extend this to other areas.” E.g., “I help people smarter than me help figure out the future of journalism.” E.g., Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen.

He’s also interested in grassroots democracy. Face to face is a better way of communicating but it doesn’t scale. On the Net, we get millions of people working together to make stuff happens. “This changes the nature of our democracy,” so that grassroots democracy can address the traditional problems with representative democracy. Craig thanks Joe Trippi and Zephyr Teachout. Now we have this big grassroots infrastructure. What do we do with it? “2008 is the new 1776.”

All sorts of things are happening. “It used to be that the guys with money, power and guns got to write the history and our narratives about ourselves. With Wikipedia, everyone has a shot at doing that…It changes the whole course of human history.” We are at a “singularity,” he says. We’re living in a time like 1776. It’s happening faster because the Internet accelerates everything. “I’m trying to play a microscopic part in it.”

He’s involved with the SunlightFoundation.org. He’s working with ConsumerReports. He was involved a little bit in SF’s 311 number. “Mundane, but it’s part of everyday governance. In my fantasies, I apply that to all levels of government.” A bunch of this is in the Obama platform, he says, and we could see some of it next year.

Veterans have been treated badly by the White House, he says, so he’s on the IAVA.org board. To screen claims faster, maybe they shouldn’t care about fraud so much, since veterans and their families are suffering as they wait for their claims to be processed.

As a nerd, it’s a “crime against nature” to be involved in promotion or communication. But he does it anyway. For one thing, he likes the idea of more people getting involved in service. “I do have one message for the kids: Stay off of my lawn.” :)

“The Constitution will be restored on January 20.”

He says focuses on people who can get things done. He lacks patience for those who can’t get things done.

Q: Are there any ways Craigslist has gone in directions you couldn’t have imagined?
A: I never tried to foresee them so it’s hard to answer. I had to have my arms twisted to create personals. They’ve done much more good than problems. Like “missed connections.” I’ve been asked to perform marriages. In a way, the whole thing has been a surprise. I have no vision. I’ve only responded to feedback. It’s all very surreal, but that’s life now.

Q: Why did CL succeed in the early days, as opposed to doing it over newsgroups?
A: Part of it was that everyone understood mail and Web browsers, while newsgroups were hard to used. And newsgroups were ad-spammed badly.We have a problem with spam, and last week we announced a suit against a company that sells ad-spam software. We aren’t litigious but we thought that was a good way to do it.

Q: Has it been a problem keeping CL simple?
A: Keeping it simple is a habit. There are times when we have to debate whether there should be a specific category, or should people have to register with a valid email on the message boards, but I don’t know how to do things except simply.

Q: What about the deal with National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.. How consensual was the deal?
A: Jim knows the details. He felt strongly about it. There was genuine abuse of our site involving minors. We’re not law enforcement professionals, so we got advice from the real experts. There is that sort of abuse and we have to help out. We just started charging for erotic services and we’ll contribute all that to philanthropies. And how do you manage anonymity? Sometimes you need it, for whistleblowers. We tend to the anonymity side. But congresspeople want to know that an email comes from a constituent rather than a mass spammed email. We’re talking about ways to balance anonymity and authentication, but we do need anonymity as a kind of check and balance against an oppressive government.

Q: Does your exposure to some of the uglier aspects has led you to see a more expansive role for government?
A: I have become more balanced, but mainly because I’ve been doing customer service. The best label I can figure is “moderate Libertarian.” I’m looking for a better label. I’m increasing interested in private-public partnerships since I’ve seen market solutions don’t always work, like for health insurance. I’m in the Net neutrality debate and see people misrepresenting it on purpose. (He adds that most lobbyists are ok, and a small number are predatory.)

Q: You’re in many cities but it still seems to be geared towards regional breakdowns. On purpose?
A: Initially we just followed our gut. CL is like a flea market. People get together to do commerce, but really just to socialize. Penelope Green talked about our site being a market in the ancient sense: chaotic and vividly human.

[me] Why doesn’t your company have meetings?

A: We have some. But we minimize them. A meeting of more than six people is already going to be dysfunctional (small group comms theory). Effective communication is a meeting is tough. This also reflects my impatience, a flaw as a human being.

What will be the future of the Communications Decency Act?
A: This is the part of law that says that a site isn’t responsible for what people say on the site, so long as they take some reasonable measures. I think it will stay and possibly be improved.

Q: Have you had any negative interactions with the police?
A: Not really. Once the FBI called asking if we knew there was an ad for plutonium on our site. The result was that someone got a stern talking to from his parents. The police just want to be treated decently and not jerked around. That’s our customer service idea.

Q: Why can’t people search for subsections?
A: Mysql chews up server time doing these searches. We have some ideas for how to do this, but there are bigger things they’re working on.

[Tags: craiglist craig_newmark customer_service community_organizer cluetrain berkman ]

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From a post by Firuzeh Shokooh Valle and Christopher Soghoian at the Open Net Initiative site:

Since 2006, Internet users in Argentina have been blocked from searching for information about some of country’s most notable individuals. Over 100 people have successfully secured temporary restraining orders that direct Google and Yahoo! Argentina to scrub the results of search queries. The list of censorship-seeking celebrities includes judges, public officials, models and actors, as well as the world-cup soccer star and national team head coach Diego Maradona.

Wow. Argentinian celebrities either have a different view of celebrity or of the Web, or both.

The post (which contains much more detail) notes that Yahoo was not notifying searchers that their search results were being blocked, a violation of the Global Net Initiative ethical guidelines that Yahoo, Google, and others recently promulgated. But, Chris Soghoian in an email notes that yesterday Yahoo fixed the transparency problem.

[Tags: berkman oni open_net_initiative argentina celebrities censorship filtering google yahoo global_net_initiative gni ]

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Bryan Kirschner (Dir of Open Source Strategy) and Mario Madden (Open Source Licensing Counsel) at Microsoft are giving a Berkman Tuesday lunch talk on Open Source and Microsoft. [NOTE: I am live-blogging, typing too fast, missing things, getting things wrong, etc.]

They start with three framing positions: 1. Open source has changed the info-communications landscape. It’s “neither a fad nor a magic bullet” [missed the attribution] 2. It brings an opportunity for Microsoft, open source developers, and ICT customers. 3. It’s not any harder or easier to realize this potential, compared to other opportunities (e.g., cloud computing).

In 2004, Msft submitted two licenses to the Open Source Initiative. Now there are 500. There are at least 80,000 Open Source apps that run on Windows. Microsoft is virtualizing Linux on Windows and vice versa, and Silverlight is becoming Moonlight (= a Linux version).

Why is Msft doing this?

1. Motivation. What motivates OS developers? (From Karim Lakhani, who is in the room.) They’re motivated by creativity and learning, economic opportunity, and solving a problem.

2. Commercialization. Some of OS is money-driven, while some is community-driven. “At the end of the day, it’s about value-for-cost and solving a customer’s problem.”

There’s a “world of choice” these days. You use the best tool for the job. Mix and match. E.g., they want Windows to be a great platform for OS apps, including for PHP. So, Windows is working with Zen (commercial PHP company) and the PHP community. If your company wants single-sign-on; Msft has Active Directory that does that, including for php aps. Then, if you want to use cloud computing (Windows Azure), you can use it and it works with Active Directory. Then you could have OpenID and Ruby apps running on Linux. Then you might want to use virtualization to rapidly move apps across hardware, and you could then use OpenPegasus to do cross-platform systems management, contributing back to the Pegasus project. “At the application layer, it really makes sense to strive for openness.”

There’s a human relationship and emotions in the OS community, Bryan says. It’s inspirational. Microsoft wants to comingle, cooperate and co-exist.

Q: You touted collaboration with Novell. Many are not happy with that deal. Some people at Novell quit. The Linux kernel community would be a tougher community. They haven’t been happy about joining forces with you. Do you have any plans to bury the hatchet? E.g., Linus Torvalds is unhappy with Msft’s stance on patents…
A: I wouldn’t hold up Novell as a great example. Our customers, especially our large customers, like it a lot, though. It makes commercial sense, although it doesn’t necessarily make everyone feel happy.
A: [mario] The legal team’s job is to help the team navigate the shoals. We did the best we could in the Novell deal.
A: [bryan] We have an active partnership with Samba. Both sides are happy about this.

Q: I’m a European lawyer. Microsoft’s reaction to the European Court’s decision showed no sign of openness? How do you address the abuse that was found and the open attitude you’re expressing today?
A: [bryan] I’m not a lawyer. The question for me is how do you meet the needs of your customers? The overwhelming body of evidence leads you to openness. We will continue to develop .Net. But it’s not zero sum. We also have support php. The Windows media team wrote a plugin so Windows Media Player would work on Firefox. There have been 6 million downloads, so that’s great.
A: [karim] There’s a lag between court decisions and how the company thinks about it.
Q: My point was that you might have saved 500M euros if you had been more open…

Q: Once sw is fully developed, you’re half done. It still needs quality assurance. How do you assure open source software is of high quality? And how do you know it wasn’t stolen from an open source app?
A: [mario] When code is brought in, it’s up to the engineering groups to do the QA. Legally, OS software is just third party code. We brought in 500M lines of code last year. We scan it. A lot of it was Open Source.
A: [karim] Two studies have compared the quality of code from Open Source vs. commercial and found no difference, except perhaps OS is slightly higher quality because the QA is continuous.
A: [bryan] We’re a platinum sponsor of the Apache Foundation. They have overhead. It makes it easier to deal with them if they’re not under terrible financial stress.
A: [mario] When it comes to OS, we’re driven by business purposes. Can we decrease development costs?

Q: [me] What’s the business case that you see for contributing to OS, as well as enabling Windows to work well with OS? How much are you contributing?
A: [bryan] We contribute in three ways. 1. Product strategy. E.g., contribute to php to make it work better with SQL Server. 2. Does it actually make sense for your product to take an OS or hybrid strategy? E.g., Class server is curriculum management system. It competes with OS. It didn’t make sense to compete, so now it’s an OS product. 3. Having more developers creating more code is a good thing. It’s pie-expanding. E.g., we have XNA libraries for developing games. There are hundreds of XNA projects that are open source now.
Q: [me] Are 500 contributions a lot? Compared to the number of patents? Products?
A: We’ll measure success when every product group considers open source.
Q: [karim] IBM says they have 1,000 developers working on Linux, etc. Do you have any number you can point to that’s similar?
A: No.

Q: Has OS affected how stuff gets done inside?
A: Inside the company, we are not the Borg. Every product group has a lot of autonomy. Agile groups. You also have some 3-year-product-plan projects. Increasingly you’ll see a more blended model.
A: [mario] We have 30,000 developers. It’s hard to know, on the IP, what everyone is doing.
A: [bryan] You’ll see a company-wide statement from the company that we understand the world is heterogeneous, we respect the contributions open source has made, and we’re committed to greater openness. I’ll quote Heidegger: Fear is not knowing what to do. The Windows-Linux oppositional framework in 1998 took the public imagination. We formally responded with a site in 2007, so no one will accuse us of acting precipitously :)

Q: When will Steve Ballmer start putting out the OS msg? He has a reputation for being confrontational.
A: [bryan] He’s a strong, opinionated leader. But you’ve already seen Steve talk about the benefits of supporting open source. Inside Msft, the open source group always talks in terms of what makes sense for business.

Q: This has implications for DC policy positions. I.e., very strict IP enforcement.
A: [mario] We may disagree about strict IP; we support patent reform, for example. But we see our business as about IP. We’ll always support IP and IP rights.

Q: Chances are we’ll find out that the new Redmond Congressperson will be a former Microsoft manager. Since Msft employees have funded about a third of her campaign, when your lobbyists are calling her up, will you be asking to support Open Source?
A: [mario] Fascinating question, and I’m sure not going to comment :)
A: [bryan] We don’t want anyone fighting Open Source. We don’t think it makes business sense.

Q: [karim] If we’re back to big iron — Google is a server farm company — how do we think about the role of open source?
A: [bryan] It changes the dynamics. Clouds and server farms open up a lot more space.

[me[ What about OOXML vs. ODF? Why did you push OOXML as a doc format after we already had adopted ODF? Is that typical of what you mean by openness?
A: [bryan] Open doc formats are really important. I don’t see doc standards as a zero sum game. So being able to understand the doc through a published set of docs doesn’t seem exclusive to me.

Karim concludes the session by pointing out how contentious this topic would have been just five years. “The presence of Mario and Bryan here is a sign of success.” [Tags: berkman microsoft open_source ]

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (did you remember to join?) has blogged about the WIPO Broadcasting Treaty that won’t seem to stay dead. (Great backgrounder and eval by Nate Anderson at Ars Technica.)

The new treaty would mean that to record or reuse a broadcast of a TV show, you would have to get rights not only from the company that created the show, but also from the broadcaster whose signal you recorded. The Europeans have supported this since they backed the Rome Convention in 1961; the proposed treaty would globally standardize this new layer of rights/restrictions.

The EFF has argued that if passed, it would mean that it would be illegal to record even a Creative Commons licensed broadcast; the creator of the work may be fine with it, but the broadcaster might not be. There are no “fair use” exceptions in the proposed Treaty, although it allows signatories to carve out exceptions based on their own copyright laws; the EFF claims that this would create confusion that would chill innovation and speech, as different countries implement different exceptions.

The US delegation has taken up again its call for “broadcast” to include transmissions over the Net.

The new push for the treaty, according to an update by Nate at Ars Technica, is likely to fail because there seems to be an irreconcilable split among countries that want to add this new layer of rights and those that would solve the problem of people stealing and reselling broadcasts simply by using existing laws to prosecute the people who do it.

Yay.

[Tags: wipo broadcasting copyright copyleft media eff ]

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Obama has posted his tech policy.

It’s like someone who understands and values technology and the Internet was elected president.

By the way, the Change.gov site welcomes our comments.

[Tags: obama net_neutrality e-politics democracy technology ]

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Harvard is rescinding Google’s permission to scan its libraries’ books because Harvard thinks the settlement deal between Google and the publishers (which I blogged about enthusiastically here) is too restrictive. According to the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Harvard’s library guy, Robert Darnton, said:

“the settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.” He also expressed concern about the quality of the scanned books, which “in many cases will be missing photographs, illustrations, and other pictorial works, which will reduce their utility for research.”

[Tags: google libraries harvard copyright copyleft ]

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Google has reached a settlement agreement in the lawsuit brought by publishers who were afraid that awareness of the existence of the publishers’ books might leak out onto the Internet. (Non-biased translation: Google has settled with the publishers suing over its books.google.com book search service.)

As far as I can tell from Google’s plain-English explanation (which, overall, is exceptionally clear), the default for out-of-print books that are still under copyright will be that they are available through Google Book Search. You’ll be able to not only see snippets (as now) but will be able to purchase them, with the money being distributed through a new, independent, book rights registry. In addition, libraries and universities will be able to purchase site licenses for all the books Google’s scanned.

For books currently in print and under copyright, it sounds like not much has changed. Google says publishers can “turn on” the purchase and preview options. Couldn’t they before?

Once this settlement is agreed on, we will have what sounds like a reasonable program for working within the bounds of copyright. Much will depend, of course, on what the pricing is.

Now we have to work on fixing copyright so that it serves its original purpose — providing an incentive sufficient to bring authors to write — rather than being used to create an artificial scarcity to serve the economic interests of an industry entrenched in a ditch carved into paper.

[Tags: books google copyright copyleft kindle ]

Wendy Seltzer worries that Google will now become iTunes for books …

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A Canadian court has decided that linking to a defamatory page is not itself an act of defamation. It does leave admit exceptions, such as repeating the content of the defamatory passage or linking the phrase “The truth about Wayne Crookes is found here.”

The chilling effect if the court had decided otherwise would have been positively arctic.

[Tags: law canada hyperlinks defamation wayne_crookes ]

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