BIBLIOTHEKE

Similar to the brief mentioned yesterday from 17 comp sci profs, 22 media studies scholars have filed a brief (PDF) discussing how the case relates to scholarly work and education. Long excerpt:

Amici are deeply concerned that recent legal, commercial, and political turmoil surrounding the proliferation and use of “peer-to-peer” communicative technologies threaten to chill legitimate contributions to teaching and research in this nation’s institutions of higher education. This Court and the United States Congress have clearly articulated the value of education and scholarship to the workings of the Republic. Further, both acknowledge that teaching and research often require the unauthorized copying, distribution, re-fashioning, and performance of copyrighted works without permission from the copyright holder, and thus have cleared a space within the strictures of copyright law to allow for such publicly beneficial uses. The foundation of that space is “fair use,” which, though an affirmative defense to the accusation of infringement, has granted educators a certain measure of comfort that they would not be sued by copyright holders for infringement. However, the penumbra of perceived “users’ rights” that emanate from Sec. 107 of the Copyright Act has proven inadequate to protect many important acts central to teaching and research. Within this context, the academic utility of searching, indexing, and sharing of copyrighted materials remains in doubt among educators and scholars. Doubt creates a chilling effect, stifling the most creative uses of digital technology in the classroom or in academic research. This chilling effect is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of peer-to-peer systems. Peer-to-peer technology is not functionally distinct from other, more familiar, less demonized methods of resolving communicative processes such as sending e-mail, creating hyperlinks, and employing search engines such as Google.com. All of these functions potentially (and commonly) infringe the copyrights of others. With this in mind, we conclude that the standard set forth by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in In Re Aimster is inadequate to protect the activities of educators and researchers. In fact, it is counterproductive. The problem with the standard that technologies that are capable of substantial non-infringing uses comes not from the question of capability, but from the fact that within the classroom “non-infringing” is so unclear. The Aimster standard would add another layer of complexity and doubt to the educational project. Therefore it would hinder “the progress of the sciences and useful arts.” In contrast, the unambiguous declaration by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Grokster — that the standards this Court set forth in Sony are alive and appropriate for this digital age — does grant educators comfort and confidence. Nor do certain “compromise” positions outlined in briefs submitted in support of neither party in this case protect the interests of educators and researchers. Ultimately, we wish to encourage the Court to consider that Sony did more than legalize home taping and “time shifting.” It democratized participation in the project of recording the collective memory of this dynamic nation. Sony went beyond the traditional parameters of fair use and showed the potential for an emerging set of clearly articulated “users’ rights.” Teachers, scholars, critics, journalists, fans, and hobbyists would all benefit greatly under a regime that offered them clarity and confidence about how they interact with works and the copyright system that governs them.

shamelessly lifted from BB and Sivacracy

…and why the government needs to focus on providing Wi-Fi/broadband. Read or listen at Wired.

Excerpt:

You’ll be pleased to know that communism was defeated in Pennsylvania last year. Governor Ed Rendell signed into law a bill prohibiting the Reds in local government from offering free Wi-Fi throughout their municipalities. The action came after Philadelphia, where more than 50 percent of neighborhoods don’t have access to broadband, embarked on a $10 million wireless Internet project. City leaders had stepped in where the free market had failed. Of course, it’s a slippery slope from free Internet access to Karl Marx. So Rendell, the telecom industry’s latest toady, even while exempting the City of Brotherly Love, acted to spare Pennsylvania from this grave threat to its economic freedom.

Let’s hope this is just the first step. For if you look closely, you’ll see the communist menace has infiltrated governments everywhere. Ever notice those free photons as you walk the city at night? Ever think about the poor streetlamp companies, run out of business because municipalities deigned to do completely what private industry would do only incompletely? Or think about the scandal of public roads: How many tollbooth workers have lost their jobs because we no longer (since about the 18th century) fund all roads through private enterprise? Municipal buses compete with private taxis. City police departments hamper the growth at Pinkerton’s (now Securitas). It’s a national scandal. So let the principle that guided Rendell guide governments everywhere: If private industry can provide a service, however poorly or incompletely, then ban the government from competing. What’s true for Wi-Fi should be true for water…

Via Freedom to Tinker and Boing Boing, 17 comp sci profs have file an amicus brief (PDF) in the Supreme Court Grokster, a case that will determine whether p2p tech is illegal and if tech companies can be liable for copyright infringement using their products. I’ve only read what F2T and BB posted of it, but I reproduce it here for convenience. This except provides a fantastic compact argument for why p2p is vital to the overall growth of networked tools:

Amici write to call to the Court’s attention several computer science issues raised by Petitioners [i.e., the movie and music companies] and amici who filed concurrent with Petitioners, and to correct certain of their technical assertions. First, the United States’ description of the Internet’s design is wrong. P2P networks are not new developments in network design, but rather the design on which the Internet itself is based. Second, a P2P network design, where the work is done by the end user’s machine, is preferable to a design which forces work (such as filtering) to be done within the network, because a P2P design can be robust and efficient. Third, because of the difficulty in designing distributed networks, advances in P2P network design — including BitTorrent and Respondents’ [i.e., Grokster’s and Streamcast’s] software — are crucial to developing the next generation of P2P networks, such as the NSF-funded IRIS Project. Fourth, Petitioners’ assertion that filtering software will work fails to consider that users cannot be forced to install the filter, filtering software is unproven or that users will find other ways to defeat the filter. Finally, while Petitioners state that infringers’ anonymity makes legal action difficult, the truth is that Petitioners can obtain IP addresses easily and have filed lawsuits against more than 8,400 alleged infringers. Because Petitioners seek a remedy that will hobble advances in technology, while they have other means to obtain relief for infringement, amici ask the Court to affirm the judgment below.

I don’t really want to give any more fame to the comments from ALA prez-elect Gorman last week, but George Needham’s satirical post at It’s all good is a rather amusing response.

John Heilemann gives us tons of dirt on Google’s path to IPO. Tons of untold stories, like the engineer squating in CEO Schmidt’s office to Sergey and Larry playing hardball with VCs, breaking rules all along the way.

From Cory Doctorow:

It’s not a service I’d use, but I believe that it’s the kind of service that is vital to the Web’s health. The ability of end-users to avail themselves of tools that decomopose and reassemble web-pages to their tastes is an issue like inlining, framing, and linking: it’s a matter of letting users innovate at the edge.

[…]

And so on — it’s my screen, and I should be able to control it; companies like Google and individuals should be able to provide tools and services to let me control it.

He’s right. As I noted before, the problem people (myself included) have with it has more to do with the fact that it’s being done by Google, a company we all worry will turn into another Microsoft. However, if WAG the Dog web localizer is good, then AutoLink is good. If the concern is how it will be used, then we should remember that “fraud isn’t bad because it uses proxying, or deep-linking, or inlining: fraud is bad because it’s fraud, no matter what tools it employs,” as Doctorow puts it.

Also linked is Yoz Grahame’s entertaining take on the whole thing.

John Ritterbush, a colleague of mine from Northwestern, has a fantastic new blog, Anatomy of a Psychictoad, with an interesting post on Beauty and the Biography. In it he asks, “can you admire art without the artist’s biography?” His post is a great point to start, and this began as a comment there, so perhaps read what he wrote and continue on…

I’ve often thought about this as well. Clearly, there are levels of appreciation of art. Last night I saw City of God. It’s a great film even if you don’t know how it was filmed, but it becomes much more interesting when you learn that it was filmed in the slum with real slum kids for actors. In a more direct example, Mulholland Dr. is a great film to the average viewer, but understanding the background of its production is absolutely vital to understanding why the film is the way it is. And with Bill Viola, his work it great, but it takes on a whole new level of meaning to someone who, like Viola (and, incidentally, Lynch), has devoted years to meditation.

That said, typically when someone judges what is or is not art (whatever that is supposed to mean), it’s really just a discussion about whose opinion they want to adopt. Appreciation of art is not about some objective worth or value. Value of a work of art seems more rooted in the depth of justification a creator or admirer can come up with and how well they can defend that position, much like Marcus’ explanation to Titus Andronicus for why he killed the fly.

However, this is also an artificial view of art that doesn’t really get to the root. IMO, understanding of art is all about, well, understanding. If all action is art, and I think beyond question that it is, appreciation of art is about being able to relate to the artist. Thus, we return to the problem John posed from the beginning: how much do you have to know about the background of the artist and/or work? I’ve no idea. However, the first step in appreciation of art is appreciation of oneself. Understanding how an artist makes his decisions first requires understanding on a personal, unarticulated level about how decisions are made within. In order to recognize how one relates to a work, one must understand those parts of himself that relate. Thus, in my view, appreciation of art has more to do with appreciation and understanding of oneself.

Jesse James Garrett breaks down the tech that’s introducing desktop app functionality to web apps.

Slashdot article and discussion

Kembrew McLeod’s new book, Freedom of Expression®, is available as a downloadable PDF. From the publisher:

In Freedom of Expression®, Kembrew McLeod covers topics as diverse as hip-hop music and digital sampling, the patenting of seeds and human genes, folk and blues music, visual collage art, electronic voting, the Internet, and computer software. In doing so, he connects this rapidly accelerating push to pin down everything as a piece of private property to its effects on music, art, and science.

Google has implemented a new “movie:” operator that can be used for finding info on, obviously, movies. Type in movie: followed by a zip code or city name to get show times and theaters (Evanston, IL). This will be a pretty cool supplement to IMDb which I have been addicted to for a long time now.

More on the official Google blog and /.

librarian.net linked yesterday to a fantastic article by Nathan Bierma on the future of libraries: Future Bound: The greatly exaggerated demise of an American institution. He discusses how audio books and multimedia have had tremendous growth at a time when the ebook was supposed to be taking over (which it barely has started to). He discusses the transformation of libraries into social centers with cafés and computer labs. The thing people who predict the death of libraries often forget is that they are the central public structures for many communities. The only thing that will make them fail is not solidifying that position by concentrating on making them community cultural and tech hubs. Anyway, this article is a must-read.

Last week we had a very interesting discussion on the Web4Lib discussion list about how libraries relate to other online tools like, of course, Amazon and Google. I thought Alane Wilson’s post was dead on in a lot of ways, although we shouldn’t forget the absolutely vital role that non-tech librarians play. Going Web doesn’t mean dropping the expertise that has made libraries what they are, even if sometimes the hype on the tech side makes it appear that the biblio- side is obsolete.

On the flip side, sometimes experienced librarians will have to give up some of the control over tech-related projects. The best way to do this? Develop a culture of participation.

Another great post, by Karen Schneider, made a number of interesting points including:

We have been told that even when we saw a trend truly developing, a trend, not a fad, and we who follow trends recommend we ride it like a wave instead of being next year’s adopters. We can own a technology and build our user base through it, the way the rest of the world operates, or we can ignore it until the commercial forces have coopted more users and by the time we do adopt it people are asking where we have been with it. “My users won’t understand it”–in the early 20th century, in the Social Work movement, librarians went out of their way to help immigrants learn the ways of the New World. That is what we do. That is who we are. Books are just one quiver in our bow. Besides, in many cases, by the time librarians get around to adopting some newfangled trend, their users already well understand it

As for me, I’m going to include this post I made in response to some thought-provoking comments by Brian Collier:

- [On how libraries are the only place to get old news articles, particularly with the NYT business model] -

That’s an issue that online news services have to figure out. What happens if they follow the public’s advice and shift to an open archive model? It’s a future being publicly debated so we should probably be prepared for it. Of course, if libraries can get web localization working nicely, we can look forward to the day when I can go straight from google to the library holding in one click.

My point is that we can’t just expect the current apples and oranges to stay apples and oranges. It’s a model that’s broken on both sides, since online tools like LexisNexis are by no means easy to use in comparison to web search. As such, our job is to make our tools better, integrate the online experience as much as possible and find our worth in quality of service and ease of use. Depending solely on our exclusive access to a body of information, in this case news archives, would just be making the same mistake all over again. Our resources are necessary and are far, far, far more extensive than what’s available online, but it’s useless if patrons find other services they feel fit their needs and believe the myth that libraries are no longer very necessary, a belief that will only increase as more info gets connected.

- [On whether libraries will be largely web applications] -

Our statistics and interactions with patrons show that they are moving en masse to online services and the feedback we get, at least in my department, indicates they expect our services to behave like other applications they use.

But libraries still have a significant physical role which, like this topic, is currently being debated to death. WRT academic libraries, I like how Carlton College’s Sam Demas put it (as noted by Kathlin Smith in CLIR Issues):

“[Demas] uses the ancient Library of Alexandria as a frame of reference for the modern library. Decrying the specialized focus of many academic libraries, he turns to the ideal of the Mouseion­a ‘temple of the muses’­that was, ‘in name and in fact, a research center, a museum, and a venue for celebrating the arts, inquiry, and scholarship.’ Libraries such as this provide not only information resources but special collections, art exhibits, and performances; they also support scholarship and encourage engagement with it.”

Add to that the library as a computing hub and you have yourself a better library than existed before.

So the library as a web app is just one part of the mix, but perhaps the most important part. It’s a major function that libraries have to consciously acknowledge. This means adopting tools and methods that work, like making user-generated data an integral part of the services we provide.

That is actually the reason why we need to view it as a web app. Wired’s Chris Anderson is absolutely correct by pointing out in his Long Tail discussions that a web applications’ success depends on how it benefits from user participation. Asking what features patrons want isn’t enough. What makes Google and Amazon so great isn’t primarily the loads of cash, it’s the ways in which they make data generated by the users central to the services they provide. The web is interaction. People use and like Google’s ranking because it is an artifact of mass behavior. There’s nothing preventing the library community from developing their own applications other than the inability to recognize this as a priority.

These two articles are great resources on the wiki phenomenon:

Wikis Described in Plain English from Common Craft
Wikiphilia - The New Illness from Hacknot

And while we are on the subject of wikis, don’t forget to buy some Wikipedia products for the fundraiser.

Battelle links to Vimeo, a Flickr-like system for videos.

A couple cool videos on there are a clip of Marc Cantor talking about the lack of metadata for podcasting, etc, and a clip of Wooden Mirror by Daniel Rozin which was all the rage at the 2000 Siggraph (and one of my personal favorite works of digital/analog art).

Over the past week or so folks have been up in arms about the Google Toolbar’s new AutoLink feature. I haven’t tried it (IE only), but the core of the major complaints is that it adds links to web pages without the consent of web authors, something very much like the Microsoft Smart Tags feature that was pulled from the XP release. For the two most cited blog posts on this subject, see Scobliezer and Micro Persuasion.

Now BBC is running an article, Google’s toolbar sparks concern, that shows how this directly affects library/info sci folks:

AutoLink works by creating a link to a website based on information contained in a webpage - even if there is no link specified and whether or not the publisher of the page has given permission.

Directing users

If a user clicks the AutoLink feature in the Google toolbar then a webpage with a book’s unique ISBN number would link directly to Amazon’s website.

It could mean online libraries that list ISBN book numbers find they are directing users to Amazon.com whether they like it or not.

As you can see, this is a real problem along the lines of Google hijacking your content.

UPDATE: Ross Singer posts to web4lib

“Hey, I’m currently adding functionality in WAG the Dog to do /just the
opposite/.

I guess I need to make it into a toolbar, now.

:)

Probably a bit like LibraryLookup.

However, it looks like everyone needs to start really breaking down the ethics and limits of all of this. After all, what makes the Google toolbar bad seems to have more to do with the fact that it’s a Google project rather than an independent one.

UPDATE 2: arguments in support of AutoLink here

A couple interesting articles on Google from Library Journal:

The first, Google Out of Print by Roy Tennant, takes a critical look at the copyright restrictions of the service, speculating that there will be an overrepresentation of text from the pre-1923 books.

The second, The Google Opportunity by Stephen Abram, lists some ways that libraries can keep relevant in a post-Google Print world. A couple of the good points he makes:

Get on the bandwagon early When you experiment, you become expert as innovations hit their stride. We should experiment more with pilots in specific areas—such as the adoption of new browsers like Firefox or Opera that offer some hope for browser “biological” diversity and will reduce our exposure to the spam, virus, and spyware wars. I’d love to see libraries riding the crest of the e-learning wave; there’s development money here, and libraries are integrally tied to continuous and institutional learning. We should also experiment with ethical P2P file sharing and streaming media architectures in preparation for the new generation of files that hold information and cultural objects.

[…]

Make the library discoverable What happens when you search for your library on Yahoo!, MSN, and Google? Your web site is there, right? … If we want to survive we must place our messages where the users are seeking answers and will trip over them. Today, that usually means at Yahoo!, MSN, and Google.

Everybody’s been talking about Righting Copyright: Fair Use and Digital Environmentalism from the current BOOKFORUM, so I’m linking to it for those who haven’t yet read it. It’s actually a very good overview of the current state of digital copyright and what some call the Digital Environmentalism movement, led by folks like Lessig, that is working to make copyright more sane.

I don’t have much to say that can’t be taken care of with the following links:

mSpace info
Classical Music Browser (requires Mozilla-based browser)
Slashdot article and discussion
Register aritcle

more on the semantic web movement (interesting articles and applications with varying degrees of relevance):

Wikipedia entry
A Comparison of Hyperstructures: Zzstructures, mSpaces, and Polyarchies (PDF)
Taking a Stand on the Semantic Web
August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web

Faceted Metadata Search and Browse
The Flamenco Search Interface Project
Endeca
Seamark

Google Scholar now has a preferences page to specify your institution (if it’s among the few included in the pilot) and get links to your resolver in the results. I don’t have time to play with it just yet, but according to a post by North Carolina State University’s Andrew Pace on the web4lib listserv, they are using DOI. U of Virginia’s Jim Campbell backed this up with a link to a blurb on the CrossRef site saying CrossRef and Google are working together on this:

Google would like to use the DOI as the primary means to link to an article so CrossRef and Google will be working on this as well as a template for common terms and conditions for use of publishers full text content.

Bowing to the primary complaint from ILL librarians and staff about the Ariel electronic document delivery software, Infotrieve has announced that they are working on a patch that will make Ariel 4 compatible with older versions of the software. As previously noted here on Bibliotheke, the incompatibility between older versions and the recently released 4th version of the EDD system used by most libraries caused quite a stir. Now, if they could create a working and easy-to-use patron delivery function with LDAP support and full support of Odyssey, we might start getting somewhere.