- Planting trees in cooler climates may actually speed up climate change The more you hearif you believe it of coursethe more it seems that this really is one of those situations where the world either has to operate together or where there have to be some seriously good incentives for poorer countries to do things for t
- I may have just found the absolute best / worst present for a five year old ever made It’s a great big artificial arm made of soft toy material with huge claws that they can wear over their real arm. My cousin’s going to love me, and her parents are going to totally hate me…
Author: Tom Coates
- Are you cleverer when you’re hungry? Given that most schools in the UK are currently focusing on making sure children have had a good breakfast in order to improve behaviour and concentration, it’s an interesting and impactful argument to make…
- Wendy Grossman writes about the recent advert posted by 4500 musicians protesting about Gowers rejection of copyright term extension on recordings Turns out some of the people who protested werewelldead. Makes you wonder who decided to protest on their behalf. Maybe the people who actually own the recordings? Bit dodgy.
- My lovely colleague Simon Willison has gone and finally relaunched his weblog in Django I know weblog redesign posts are a bit 1999 but still, it’s really clear and well organised with a range of innovative little UI and archiving touches. Worth a look.
- Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist goes to meet business types and weirds them out because he’s not interested in profit maximisation I think I love Jim Buckmaster. Craigslist may not represent a replicable model, but it’s nice to have a counter example to the kind of advertising strip-mining that eviscerates sites and services because it can only think of eyeballs not communities…
- Sam Sethi reports on being fired my Mike Arrington on Twitter Funny chap, Sam. Not one predisposed towards calming things down (in my highly limited experience of him). Not really got a clue what this whole Le Web debacle is about. Too busy. Sorry.
- Webb’s keynoting at ETech. That’s going to be fun. Lovely topic and one which he’s going to knock out of the {insert sporting metaphor}.
- I don’t think I’ve ever been more troubled than by watching the various Philips Bodygroom adverts I suspect the only way I could be more troubled is if I tried to use the appliance in question. Eek.
- I’ve been playing a bit with Widsets today. It doesn’t work seamlessly, but it’s pretty interesting… I really think this is a better model than that of a mobile browser. The browser is useful too, but this dashboard style approach seems more suited to the available interfaces…
- Use the Wii-Mote as a lightsabre, by the creator of MacSabre earlier in the year You don’t even have to have a Wii to use it, and can instead hook it up to your Mac. No Wii? No Matter…
- I met that chap from ‘Random Acts Of Reality’ the other night at the Webby do And charming he was too. Funny evening, but definitely notable for the people present, some of whom I hadn’t seen in years and a good proportion of whom were totally awesome fun.
- Victor Keegan writes quite glowingly about ORG and MySociety He points out that he hasn’t seen groups quite like these in any other country of the world. I think, after some initial reserve about their first projects, it would be difficult for me to find fault in the work that MySociety have done recently. Bravo.
- Oxbridgelife – a profoundly troubling and actually quite insulting website designed to find jobs for people from Oxford and Cambridge Note that it’s really got nothing to do with whether the people who went there were any good, just that they happened to go to a couple of universities. A solid embodiment of old boy networks…
So the Gower’s Review has been released and you can download it as a PDF. I’ve not read it in detail yet, although I hope to in the next couple of days, but the impression I get is that in general it’s pretty positive – if I’m reading it correctly, it contains recommendations that individuals should have the right to make private copies of their music, that copyright terms should not be extended and that there should be a general provision that any subsequent term extensions should not be retroactive – ie. that people with copyright get what they were entitled to when the work was created. It looks like he’s also recommended no changes to the EU’s patent law with regards to software patents or genes or business practices, and that there should be provisions which require media that contains DRM to be clearly labelled. That one alone is pretty bloody interesting. In addition orphaned worksstuff that no author can be found forwould be easier to reuse legally, and libraries and research institutions should be given special provisions to protect, preserve and utilise copyrighted information.
There’s some stuff I’m less sure about. It’s probably reasonable to make sure there are mechanisms in place to dissuade the illegal commercial distribution of copyrighted material and to protect legitimate IP. However I’m a bit confused about the specifics of how this might conceptually affect people whosaygive music to friends, as teenagers have been doing since the creation of the blank cassette tape decades back. And obviously, you have to think about loopholes and ways in which companies can find ways to circumvent the spirit of the law while remaining within the letter – for example, I’m not sure that the rights for Libraries to make copies for preservation counts for much if they don’t have the right to circumvent DRM restrictions to do so. I’ll look forward to reading more about that later when I’ve got more time.
Any reactions from anyone else? What do you think about Gowers?
- Pixelotto is a well-publicised (in the UK) attempt to replicate the success of the Million Dollar Homepage, but this time with a new gimmick It’s actually trying to collect $2 million dollars, and the differentiator is that one person who clicks on the ads will be awarded $1 million dollars or 50% of the prize fund, with the rest going to the organisers. Smart, if slightly creepy, model…
- Alexa stats match Sitemeter stats for relatively well-trafficed sites I’m pretty surewell I know, actuallythat Alexa rankings don’t coincide so effectively the further you go down the rankings. When you get to me the two are almost entirely unrelated…
- Some straight couples are deciding not to get married until it’s a universal right that gay people can exercise too It’s a lovely sentiment, and the people concerned really have all my respect for making this choice. I think it’s more of an indication of personal morality than a political campaigning move though. None the worse for that of course…
- Octogenarians sing ‘Fix You’ by Coldplay A weirdly moving bit of television and music that has a certain cheese factor that’s cut quite nicely by the sense that the people who sing know exactly what they’re singing about – more than anyone a third of their age possibly could…
- Beautiful graphic design in the Gloucester Road Underground station by Chiho Aoshima I’ve seen the adverts for this all around the tube, but I didn’t realise it would be displayed like this. I totally want to go and see this now. It looks sort of beautiful…
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On Gower and Release the Music…
Tomorrow the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property will report its findings, which should be of interest to everyone in the UK who cares about everything from DRM, the legal situation regarding copying your own music onto your iPod (strictly speaking, this is currently illegal) all the way to whether or not you think that work created today should move into the public domain at some point in the future or not. It’s an important review, and one well worth looking out for.
I’m on the advisory board of the Open Rights Group who are awaiting the review with considerable interest, particularlybut not exclusively—because many of the traditional rights of people in the UK to use, reuse, protect and even create works are under threat by shifts in technology and pressures to extend copyright terms. This review will be a significant indication of whether that particular tide is likely to turn.
In particular, one thing that ORG cares a lot about is the proposed extension of copyright on sound recordings. People in favour of copyright extension argue that it’s necessary to give artists income into their pensionable years, but for the most part artists very rarely make any money at all from recordings that record companies refuse to distribute. The people who make money from such moves are the record companies themselves and a tiny proportion of recording artists, the rest of whom find that they cannot even get their music out into the world because it’s not financially viable for the record companies.
More importantly, these moves are part of a larger trend from copyright holders to keep extending copyright to be in effect a right that should extend in perpetuity. Since a few years ago when it looked like Mickey Mouse might be about to move into the public domain, well funded interest groups in the US have fought to extend copyright terms to keep these few immensely valuable properties in the hands of multi-nationals. In the meantime, these moves have kept immense repositories of literature and art and creative work that had fallen out of circulation from ever seeing the light of day. This affects everyone from libraries and historians through to the wider culture, who may never have access to vast archives of interesting and useful creative material the way that they do have access to Shakespeare or Beethoven.
A couple of years ago I attended an event called Content 2.0 in which Tony Wilson was interviewing someone significant at the BPI. I forget his name, I’m afraid. I asked one question of him. It went as follows:
I see from your suing of file-sharers that you are an honourable man who believes that theft is wrong. Can I take this to mean that you will fight against copyright extension, which amounts to an attempt by the companies that you represent to steal from every man, woman and child in this country?
The answer I received was, let’s just say, not particularly helpful. Amid spurious assertions about the UK’s need to compete with the US and statements about artist’s right to get recompense, one thing gradually became clear, which became even clearer when Tony Wilson stated out loud that he absolutely did not see why created material should ever move into the public domain, and that work created by Thomas Hardy should always remain exploitable by Hardy’s descendants.
Whether or not you believe that should be the case, this is not an argument that you hear much from the copyright extension lobby, but it is the heart of their enterpriseeven when it’s worth wondering how often the rights to these works reside with the heirs at all, or how many labours of love created by individuals must lay forgotten and unappreciated in order to protect the tiny proportion that might still make money a hundred years on.
It’s for these reasons that I’d like to encourage everyone who reads this site to look at the recommendations of the Gower Review carefully and to be aware of the weight of issues that it might have an impact upon. Andif I can be more forward stillI’d like to ask you to consider signing the petitions on Release the music and on the Downing Street Petition Site and help to make a statement that copyright extension should not be a default position, that it is not obvious, and that we are prepared to resist the incursion of corporate interest over what belongs to each and everyone of us and to our culture as a whole.