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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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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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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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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There’s a terrific article in the NYT about Lessig’s Fair Use Project’s involvement in defending a small publisher who brought out a Harry Potter encyclopedia. When the publisher went from Web to print, and from free to for-money, the Potter folks sued, saying it’s unfair. The author, Joe Nocera, says:

For, as Mr. Lessig points out, anybody who owns a computer can now create content that is based on someone else’s creation. Indeed, we do all the time, by posting content on Facebook, on YouTube, everywhere on the Internet. If the creation of that content is deemed to be a violation of copyright, “then we have a whole generation of criminals,” said Mr. Lessig — which is terribly corrosive to society. But if it is fair use, as it ought to be, then it becomes something quite healthy — new forms of free expression and creativity.

He concludes on quite an optimistic note. [Tags: copyright harry_potter lessig fair_use ]

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This Mon, Feb 11, at 7pm, there will be a Very Special Web of Ideas: A concert by and conversation with Brad Sucks (AKA Brad Turcotte), the webbiest musician on the Web. We’ll listen to some songs performed live and talk with Brad about what the battle over “business models” means to someone making music.

Note that we’re not holding this one in the Berkman Center. It’ll be in Griswold Hall Room 110 at Harvard Law. It’s free and open to all; rsvp to [email protected].

[Tags: berkman brad_sucks brad_turcotte music RIAA ]

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A student in each session of The Web Difference will blog the class, so I’m not going to live blog the course, which I could only do when John Palfrey is leading it, as he is today. So, what follows are some some notes and comments. (The class notes will be up on the site tomorrow, probably.)

JP explains the “layer” view: Infrastructure, Logic, Apps, Content. He indicates that the layers are messy and that this is over-simplified. But I’m struck by the layer-cake look of this, with each tier slightly narrower than the one beneath it. Presumably, this is so the structure will look sturdy. But if it were drawn to scale, the content layer would be like a frisbee balanced on a pin.

The main topic today is whether you can see the same Internet from anywhere in the world. Answer: No, you can’t. JP points to Internet Services Unit where you can report sites to the Saudi government as deserving to be blocked. The Saudis block by having a single big pipe out to the Internet. Everything has to flow through the Saudi proxy. The Chinese filter similarly but also at every layer of the stack.

JP points to a site that compares the results of Google searches run here and in China. In poking around during the class, we discover that Chinese language searches seem to get the same results whether you’re searching from google.com or google.cn, as if google.com is assuming that if you are looking for search terms in Chinese, you want to see the censored results. Odd.

John takes the class through the many, many ways countries can filter the Net. Then he leads a discussion of which elements of a society might be interested in either filtering the Net or keeping it open.

John is going to Turkey tonight for talks with various interested parties there about the virtues and vices of maintaining an open Internet. [Tags: censorship filtering open_net_initiative china ]

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Harold Feld, who understands this stuff as well as anyone and 150 times better than I do, is calling on the FCC to stop the current spectrum auction because of underhandedness in the killing of the bid by the Frontline group. Harold has more details here. And Dow Jones has a shorter version here. Harold also points to an op-ed by one of the Frontline members.

[Tags: fcc auction d_block harold_feld frontline spectrum telecommunications ]

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Jonathan Zittrain, of the Oxford Internet Institute and the Berkman Center (this is sort of like Al Gore winning both the Oscar and the Peace Prize in the same year), points out that apps written on top of social networking sites (or other such Web service providers) are subject to different regimes of control than general-purpose computer apps. Very interesting. If these walled gardens become the Web’s new infrastructure, Jonathan’s right that there will be big changes in authority, liability, and control — and the norms, techniques and policies we use to enforce them.

[Tags: berkman jonathan_zittrain facebook oii ]

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