Predicting the present in Cory Doctorow’s “Pirate Cinema”

posted on 4 February, 2013 with tags , , , , ,

Cory Doctorow is coming through town again, this time on his tour for Homeland, the sequel to his excellent young adult novel Little Brother. Cory likes to talk about how his fiction “predicts the present”: taking the bits of future that are already here, just not yet evenly distributed, and applying them more widely. It’s a neat trick that makes his sci-fi seem eerily prescient, and I know Little Brother has been boosted by supporters of Occupy who saw much of their story foretold in his writing.

In another of Cory’s young adult books, the recent Pirate Cinema, much of the plot focuses on draconian copyright enforcement systems and backlash. Of course, there’s a rich history to pull from: the battles over SOPA and ACTA were just the latest in a long narrative that Cory has been engaged with for years. His “Theft of Intellectual Property Bill (TIP)” might have been fiction, but it’s a logical extension of what we’ve already seen.

Combine predicting the present with some old-fashioned coincidence, and things start to get spooky. Take Cory’s “Jimmy Preston,” who in Pirate Cinema gets a then-unprecedented five-year prison term for sharing music files. Cory writes:

But he’d collected 450,000 songs on his hard drive through endless, tedious, tireless hours of downloading. From what anyone could tell, he didn’t even listen to them: he just liked cataloging them, correcting their metadata, organizing them.

Compare that to the real-life Jeremiah Perkins, who just a few months after Pirate Cinema‘s release was also sentenced to five years for filesharing. According to a report prepared on behalf ot the movie studios, his group iMAGINE was well-known for “their consistently good quality of audio captures” and “their high volume of releases”.

I hope that Jeremiah Perkins doesn’t face the same ultimate fate as Cory’s Jimmy Preston, who didn’t do well in prison. Even more importantly, I hope we don’t see more jailtime for filesharers.

When the book came out, I saw at least one review that said the action was too over-the-top, the law too excessive, the studio groups too vindictive to possibly reflect reality. Detractors should take note: when the book came out, the mainstream probably wouldn’t believe a five-year sentence for file-sharing. Then it happened. Cory’s good at predicting the present.

New policy: don’t share coverage of academic research unless the research is open access

posted on 3 February, 2013 with tags , ,

I’ve identified a little gap in my support of open access publishing that I hope to remedy with this new practice. When I encounter a news article about a new study or paper, the first thing I do is look for the underlying paper. (It’s a good idea anyway, given the standard complaints about science journalism.) If the underlying paper is not available for at least public access, I’m not going to talk about it. As my friend Tom put it, “It’s not published until it’s open access. I’ll talk about it once it’s published.”

I don’t know how much of an effect this can have, but I know that it stems from a real problem. Academics don’t choose to publish in traditional, closed access journals because they offer any better deal; rather, it’s a career booster. A publication in a “top” journal comes with prestige, which is major currency to researchers trying to make a name. As a result, in Harvard Library’s memo encouraging open access, for example, the Faculty Advisory Council cites a need to “move prestige” to open access publications.

The hope, with my new policy, is that academics who want more members of the public to read about their results might choose a publication option that people haven’t pledged not to share, and maybe journalists will know that covering closed access papers results in less social engagement. It’s a long shot, but it’s something I can do.

So here goes. You want a story about how shark embryos can detect predators from inside the womb? You got it. The underlying research is in PLoS One. But that story about how many animals cats kill a year? Sorry, that one’s locked up.

Rewriting the Declaration of Independence using only the 1000 most common words

posted on 25 January, 2013 with tags , ,

I’ve rewritten the introduction to the US Declaration of Independence using the “Up Goer Five” text editor that only allows the 1000 most commonly used words (inspired by this new classic XKCD comic). Here you go:

When in the course of things that happen to humans one group of people needs to break away from being under the power of another group of people, and to take a full place next to all the other groups of people with power because the whole world and the big guy in the sky know they should have their own full place, they still have to explain to all the other groups of people why they want their own full place so bad.

It’s amazing how few words 1000 is. Lots of words I expect to be able to use (like country!) are unavailable. Still, I think this more or less gets the point across. But the absolute peak of the art form is Sherwin Siy’s take on “Ozymandias.”

Writing the Prince symbol in Unicode

posted on 25 January, 2013 with tags , ,

In the early 90s, the musician Prince dropped his name and started going by an unpronounceable symbol. He called it “The Love Symbol,” and it’s a combination of the traditional male (♂) and female (♀) symbols.

Prince_logo.svg

Apparently (at least according to Wikipedia) Warner Bros had to send out floppy disks with a custom font to the music press they hoped would review his record. As a side note, this would be one of my all-time favorite collectibles. A purple (and you know it’d be purple) floppy disk with the Prince font? So great.

Anyway, so the Prince symbol is not eligible for inclusion in Unicode, which “does not encode personal characters, nor does it encode logos.” Still, though, the Unicode geeks on mailing lists have talked about it, charmingly using the shorthand TAFKAP (for The Artist Formerly Known As Prince). In one 1999 thread, a guy named Marco Cimarosti (personal homepage, in Italian, last updated 2009) proposed a canonical encoding of the glyph, using these combining characters:

01AC LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH HOOK
030A COMBINING RING ABOVE
0335 COMBINING SHORT STROKE OVERLAY
032C COMBINING CARON BELOW

The end result, which will only work if you’re viewing this page in UTF-8 and have proper font support1 is Ƭ̵̬̊. Rendered large, that’s:
Ƭ̵̬̊
It’s not perfect, and it isn’t very simple to type, but it beats writing out The Artist Formerly Known As Prince each time.

  1. If you don’t have the right font, I can recommend Symbola [↩]

Viral Betamax tweet

posted on 17 January, 2013 with tags , ,

I never know when the things I’m interested in around copyright policy have general appeal, and I definitely thought this vague joke — on the occasion of the 29th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Sony v. Universal (the Betamax case) — was a bit obscure.

Twitter disagreed; it’s far-and-above the most widely retweeted thing I’ve ever posted, closing in on almost 1,000 retweets. Who knew?

Kicking off year two of Iron Blogger SF

posted on 14 January, 2013 with tags ,

I’ve just completed the wrap-up of the first week of Iron Blogger SF, year two, and man am I excited this time around. By almost every measure, Iron Blogger SF has been a success for me: I’ve written many more posts, been much happier with the way my writing has developed, and as a side benefit have gotten much more traffic than I ever have before. (It’s small numbers, as ever, but the graph is up and to the right, so who can complain.)

In case you don’t know how Iron Blogger works: if you’re participating, you commit to posting a blog post each week. If you succeed, great, and the other Iron Bloggers are a built-in group of readers. If you go a week without posting, you put $5 into a pot, and eventually we use the pot to fund a get-together with some drinks. It’s fun.

After a year, I’m really starting to feel some ownership of the program, and starting to think about ways we can tweak it to better serve our particular group and to help diversify the pool of bloggers. I think everybody is better off if the collection of blog posts each week cover a bunch of different topics from as many different perspectives.

Are you in San Francisco and interesting in joining? It’s been a great way to ease into blogging regularly. Let me know if you’d like to sign up.

Goodbye Aaron Swartz, 1986-2013

posted on 13 January, 2013 with tags ,

The world is poorer place today without Aaron Swartz, an extraordinary hacker and activist who took his own life on Friday. It’s been a roller coaster of a few days as I and the people I know try to process this news, sadness and anger turning to grief and resolve. There have been many thoughtful tributes to Aaron, who in only 26 years inspired so many with his character and accomplishments: my colleague Peter Eckersley wrote the touching obituary on EFF’s site; Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig, Quinn Norton, Jillian York, Rainey Reitman, James Grimmelman, Karl Fogel, Brewster Kahle, Rick Perlstein, Danny O’Brien, Tim Berners-Lee, and many more have written beautiful words that do as much as possible to sum up a truly extraordinary life.

swartz-curious

It’s a tragedy that he is gone, and another tragedy that we’ve lost the next 50 or so years of Aaron that we might have had. At 26 he had already committed a decade and a half to creating amazing work in the name of causes he supported. Any one of his accomplishments could provide the basis of an impressive obituary. The sheer breadth and depth of them speaks to the scale of his brilliance. That they should all belong to a young man only a year older than I am is incredibly humbling.

One reason I’m so sad today is because Aaron stood so thoroughly for the cause of information freedom. I mean that in two senses: first, of course, he stood up for this endeavor, committing his life to improving the world in this arena. Through his software development, his speaking, his writing, and his life he pushed the ball forward, and we have made progress we would not have made without him. The battle against SOPA, to pick just one example, would have looked very different in his absence.

But also, for so many, he stood for that cause in a more figurative sense. His fight was that fight, and he was to my mind inextricably linked with information freedom. He stood in for it, acting as a representative and an example.

That’s a difficult mantle to bear, and I worry about the stress it would have caused him. I’ve read that he was having difficulty funding his legal defense but was terrified of asking for money, for example. I hope that wasn’t because he knew how much he meant to all of us.

It’s not very productive, though, to try to get into the head of somebody who has decided to take his own life. I understand that his family (and Lessig and many others) think that at least some of the blame rests on the shoulders of an overly aggressive prosecuting attorney. Who can say? I will say this, though. The actions of the prosecuting attorney were completely out of line and disproportionate to any sense of justice. That was as true last week as it is today. Whether or not the ridiculous charges are responsible for his death, they were responsible for destroying his life. That is enough.

It is time to take the energy of anger and of grief and channel it into productive outlets. First and foremost, in tribute to an extraordinary life, should be an effort to rectify the extraordinary injustices he fought. That means copyright reform, improving open access to information, and bringing the penalties for computer crimes into the realm of sanity.

This is a long struggle, and it will mean changing the way people look at the world. I’m saddened to see people still saying Aaron “returned” the files he downloaded from JSTOR. That construction can only underpin the theft metaphor that the prosecution depended on. JSTOR never had anything taken from them. It’s not just nonsensical to say there was something to return, it’s a misconception that contributes to the injustice he faced.

Aaron committed his life to this fight, and if he were still with us he would continue it today. Few people are so brilliant, so talented, and so driven to do what is right as he was. None of us can finish his work, but maybe all of us can.

Sunday morning in San Francisco

posted on 6 January, 2013 with tags ,

Shot overlooking Downtown and the Bay Bridge from Bernal Hill

I took this photograph this morning from Bernal Hill, a little earlier than I would normally be awake because the dog I’m sitting for (Hi, Ace!) demands it. I’ve been up to the hill a bunch of times, and the view is still striking.

I’ve lived in San Francisco for a little over a year now, but I’m still frequently getting asked how I’m enjoying it. It’s a very different city from the last few places I’ve lived. But my most common answer (unless I’m very frustrated with something at the moment) is that it’s so easy here to surround yourself with beautiful scenery.

From this spot on Bernal Hill, you can see from the Candlestick Park and the freeway interchanges all the way across downtown and Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate, way out on the north tip of the peninsula. It’s quite a place, this city.

Walking the Ohlone Way

posted on 2 January, 2013 with tags , , , , ,

Maira and I were walking around her neighborhood in Glen Park when we stumbled across a tiny road called Ohlone Way. It’s pretty charming. It’s properly marked as a street, but the entire length is unpaved, and not much wider than a single car across. It rained a few days ago, and the ground was still a bit muddy and marked with deep tire tracks.

Ohlone Way sign, marked by the entrance in concrete

The name, it turns out, is something of a pun. “Ohlone” is a name used to describe some 40 different groups of Bay Area Native Americans. The groups spoke different languages, had different traditions, and in some cases weren’t even in contact with each other, but have been lumped together because of their geographic proximity. Still, “Ohlone” is preferable to the unwieldy exonym “Costanoans” — derived from the Spanish name for the people — which seems to have fallen out of favor in the 60s or so.

In 1978, an author named Malcolm Margolin published a book documenting the lives of these people who lived in the Bay Area before Europeans arrived, called The Ohlone Way. That book has since become pretty widely cited, and is still in print some 35 years later. FoundSF has published an excerpt from that book that provides a good introduction.

I don’t know how to find more history about this little street in San Francisco, but I’d be surprised to find out it wasn’t named after the book. In any case, it’s worth strolling down Ohlone Way if you find yourself in the neighborhood.

Connecting to SFPL-Wireless

posted on 22 December, 2012 with tags , , , , ,

The San Francisco Public Library has the right idea about offering unfiltered Internet access. When you connect to the open wifi network, you’re given this notice and the ability to click right through:

San Francisco Public Library is committed to providing free and equal Internet access to the public without filtering content. We do, however, ask that you respect your fellow library users and refrain from viewing obscene, offensive, harmful matter, or illegal materials prohibited by law.

There may be some uncertainty about what the future of public libraries looks like, but everybody ought to agree that it involves sticking to their core values of free and private access to the information of the world. Asking patrons to be respectful of the other people in the library is a good thing; imposing rigid software-based filters is not.

That’s why, while I personally think it’s not a very great idea to watch porn in a library, the Seattle Public is correct in not installing filters or otherwise censoring what people are allowed to access.

That’s the right idea even if we assume these are perfect filters that have no false positives and no false negatives. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out in a compelling criticism of UK censorship efforts, that’s never the case, and the collateral damage can be dramatic.

Even in places where there’s not the same institutional commitment to free access to information, it’s rarely effective and frequently frustrating to start censoring a list of sites or even arbitrarily defined categories of sites. For example, it’s hard to justify the US Patent and Trademark office blocking EFF’s site, among others, on their guest wifi, and airlines are behaving a bit silly when they install filters on their inflight wifi.