Copyfight Update

Here is the one 12-minute presentation Canadians need to watch to inform themselves of the ongoing Canadian copyright "debate".

The Harper Conversatives have proposed new legislation that will make many non-commercial aspects of "fair use" illegal on the internet, restricting Canadian creativity, commentary, and parody.

Prof. Geist's argument is that harshly restrictive intellectual property laws inhibit collective creativity, hamper incentives to develop new business, distribution and monetization models, pander to narrow "old-media" interests, and put Canada at a competitive disadvantage. He makes his argument by debunking copyright "myths" including the need for Digital Rights Management (DRM, aka anti-circumvention) technologies that lock down legitimate non-commercial acts such as home recording; the validity of locking consumers to the manufacturers closed standard (which is also anti-competitive); and the inability of content producers to protect themselves and profit under more open regimes.

In effect, these proposals place a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of a minority few who simply can not be trusted to act in the public or cultural interest. Just last week, none other than Microsoft demonstrated this by declaring that it would no longer support its DRM-laden commercial music standard. Not only did this leave hundreds of thousands of honest consumers with worthless and unplayable music collections, it doubly punishes them for choosing to trust the corporation and buy their music rather than download DRM-free copies with the added flexibility to play on non-Microsoft music players and be sampled and remixed into new songs.



More info at Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

April 30th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: copyright, CIPPIC, DRM, monoculture

Worldometers

Watch the counter on human births tick by, a life a second, and tell me that Worldometers is anything other than an absolutely incredible website. It gives you an amazing sense of the living earth, its dynamism, and cumulative human activity by giving you something to sense. 6.6 billion is a big number, but it seems more tactile when watching the population ticker flit by. With every tick, I try to recall someone I know as if they were just being born. It is a heady experience to try and conceive of a life with every second, potential and actual lived experience and meaning compressed into a moment replaced only by the next and the next. What a wealth -- and what a burden. Probably your entire world will be exhausted in about 100 ticks. And for all that exhaustion, you then have to figure the sensation needs to be repeated another 66 million times before you've accounted for the human population of earth.

Try the same experiment with the other tracked objects. Testing the limits of the imagination to track the number of bikes produced in a minute (can you visualize 100 bikes as each pops into existence?) or the number of lightening strikes per second on earth (about 100) gives you a good sense of your sense of the earth, and your slice of it, on a daily basis.

April 29th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: simultaneity, worldometers, phenomenology, proximity

The Spiritual Algorithm

This is the first result of a Google Images search for "uncompromising beauty."



That's right -- it is the Excalibur 5, a window so convenient to wash that it truly is a beautiful thing. While grit and grime flit from this window like dandruff, the mind is set free to fret about other aesthetic matters. Such as the dangerous prevalence of order. Or the madness of having your wishes realized.

Now, changing the tense to create a non-existent word, "uncompromised beauty" nevertheless conjures the mien of courage precedent to any enduring existence. And indeed we find this:



This is no mere landscape though. It is framed by an advert which offers that "You Need Not Sacrifice Convenience For the Uncompromised Beauty This Parcel Presents!"

Google seems to have a curious privilege for confabulating beauty with "convenience" in one sense or another. It isn't clear which. Though in both examples it seems to be the convenience of having the time to think about things other than these beautiful things. In which case beauty would exist only to negate the things in which it is vested (things or concepts), and therefore exist effectively nowhere.

This is different from ascribing an "essence" to beauty as that which is uncompromising and uncompromisable. Essences have no home by definition, so perhaps it is unsurprising that they wouldn't find one in Google either. However, the twinge of melancholy in every beautiful object is that it is merely a trace or shadow of the beautiful essential potential. As a search engine, Google is a concept of concepts to which one would not be faulted for turning to divine hidden patterns. Can it be trusted to do so? In this case, Google seems to be up to something. There's a pattern displayed in these two images that seems to promote the value of convenience as pre-eminent to the essence of beauty. If we then search for the un-essence of beauty, what will we find?

Defining by negation, "compromised beauty" ranks this as the most representative image:



According to its parent website, this is an image from the 1990 Indian film "Haseena Atombomb". It is reviewed as "a masterpiece of gutter-trash-art. It is a breathtaking slice of the bizarre and the macabre as well as a searing sociopolitical indictment and commentary on a society gone haywire." The plot includes the following episode: "The film switches back to the present, and Atomic, having been rescued by Tubby on the emaciated Pegasus clone skips off homeward to enjoy her wedding to local stud, Cool Joe and village law enforcer who is one hell of a fellow. He also goes for white when it comes to transport - the four legged kind that is. Just as the marriage is about to be consummated the bliss is shattered as the vengeful goons who had been thrashed by Tubby return to satisfy their "animal lust"."

I'd say inverse Google is bang on. Atomically so.

April 24th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: no help from Google, priorities

Code / Law I

BoingBoing.com today has great fuel to fire the liberating relationship between language and computer code.

The first example from Penguin Publishing charges six authors with the task of writing "digital fiction" to tell stories in ways never before attempted. The authors take up the challenge through diverse means, such as using an interactive Google Map to confabulate physical location and narrative chaptering. It's a remarkable effect well beyond mere "set pieces". As we all commonly now see even our own cities and localities through the lens of the Google Map (I use it at at least three or four times a week to navigate Toronto) the effect brings the reader into a familiar (if not merely familiarly abstract) proximity with an otherwise unknown and distant space and time, and which need not necessarily be depicted in the story itself.



Then, in a particularly Perec-ian turn that is the literary equivalent of peeking in the neighbor's window, the reader can also click on the "green tabs" for descriptions, info, sidebars, images, and sounds peripheral to the main narrative yet -- by virtual of the underlying map -- are not devoid of context.

The second example on BoingBoing is an in-house production ("Gadget 13") that blends the classic gameplay of Breakout with a block of quoted text. By bouncing puck off paddle, the quote can be physically shaved of words in a visceral sort of textual deconstruction in which neither the author or the reader have complete control of a constantly shifting meaning.

All of this is interesting to me because it shows how computer code can be used to liberate accepted hegemony of textual production. Of which, as a lawyer and human rights advocate, I clearly have a vested interest in overcoming. The experience of a statute, for example, is entirely one-dimensional: utterly abstracted from its subjects, swaddled in a grammar of artifice and the arcane, disambiguated only where referenced and referring to a disembodied network of regulations and policy directives, requiring complex rules of procedure to interpret and determine, and therefore nearly inaccessible to most people. Consider instead the possibility of a "digital statute" -- a true "law code" -- which can embed all the reports relied upon by Parliamentary committee in promulgating the statute, or which features a "time slider" that allows you to scroll back and forth between revisions, or which allows the reader to click on a single word to bloom it into a "mind map" infographic that shows every instance of its use in Hansard or by NGO advocates.

Recognizing interpretive "Law 2.0" functions as the "official statute" relied upon by courts would go a long way to making it a truly public document. The potential as I see it is that experiments in language and code of this kind can liberate and make accessible the "meta text" of a statute beyond the highly trained lawyer-as-canton or the judicial interpreter as omnipotent gatekeeper. It does, in other words, facilitate a more immediate and indeed coherent connection -- just as in the Penguin Google Map story -- between the general and the specific, or between the rule, its expression and re-presentation in language, and its application to specific cases. Along with the infinite number of other "green tab" potentialities effaced by one-dimensional re-presentation.

April 17th, 2008 / 2 Comments / Tags: codelaw, text, deconstruction, meta, law 2.0