Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Chris Saad, head of the DataPortability Project, weighs in on last week's announcements from MySpace, Facebook, and Google of new data-sharing services. Saad says that while none of these services fully achieve the goals of DataPortability, all are steps in the right direction, and MySpace's approach is most promising. Saad points out that data-sharing is grounded in a social contract. He gives the good example of an email address book. When someone sends me email, it's understood that I'm free to put it in my address book, and that I'm mostly free to do as I please with my address book. I can, for example, export my address book to a third party site to see if my friends are using the site. However, I face social pressures not to do something malicious like sell my address book to spammers. If I did that, many of the friends in my address book might not speak to me again.
Now social networking sites are trying to hash out a similar social contract for the use of their customers' data. When Facebook cut off Google from its Connect service, it was effectively trying to establish a similar, albeit more restrictive, social contract: using information from Facebook is OK, but sharing it with third parties is not. But it's not clear how well this will work. As Tom pointed out a few months ago, it's extremely difficult to limit the spread of information once it's been released online. Also, notice that in the address book example, much of the force of the social contract comes from personal ties to the people in my address book. Companies don't have personal relationships, and they can't exert pressure on one another in the same ways individuals can. So when information-sharing is automated, informal social mechanisms may not be sufficient to stop abuse.
There are several ways the social networking world could evolve. One is the totally open approach of email, in which it's assumed that any information you put online can be widely shared. Another is the walled garden approach that now dominates with instant messaging, in which sites tightly control access to information and offer very little third-party access to it, and people have to sign up for multiple services to reach everyone. A third possible model is a "data ownership" model, in which sites share information while users retain ultimate control over it. But as Ed Felten pointed out back in January, ownership may not be a good way to think about privacy issues. It may not be possible to design contractual mechanisms that make these ownership claim enforcible. And that would mean we'd face a choice between a totally open model and a totally closed one, with very little in between.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan's Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Willem de Kooning, they tell the story of de Kooning's 1953 visit from Rauschenberg, a kindred spirit in loving "the rude parodic squawk in the temple of art." But Rauschenberg wasn't stopping by de Kooning's studio to pay homage; he was there to ask for a de Kooning drawing — to erase. In honor of the late Robert Rauschenberg, we're pleased to present the scene in its entirety.Link | Here's a video about it. (Thanks, Coop!)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Jealousy doesn’t have to be a negative emotion. It doesn’t have to be a cohort of anger or resentment. All it needs is a dash of hope.
I’ve always been a jealous person. I’ve always wanted things that others had. Skills they possessed. Authority they held. Success they enjoyed. But instead of feeling sorry for myself and grow spiteful of those who had, I found it to be the best motivation to imitate, adopt, and strive for the same rewards.
For me, all it took was a core belief that there was no reason I couldn’t do the same. That there was no such thing as a cosmic conspiracy allowing just a chosen few to prosper and oppressing the many.
I’m saddened every time I meet those who believe to the contrary. I think it’s such a fundamental enabler for achieving more that it almost seems unfair that it’s not a universal instinct instead of an acquired belief.
The Guardian is a great newspaper and produces a lot of good content. So I was excited to see that it had done a story on Apple, digital rights management, and the future of the music industry. And the piece does a good job of summarizing the problems created by DRM and the business case against using it. However, one thing I found kind of amazing was the part where it notes an industry study suggesting that digital rights management has no effect on "piracy" rates. The Guardian says: "The assertion is remarkable. If DRM does not in fact discourage piracy, then it is merely a nuisance for the user." But of course the assertion isn't "remarkable" at all. It's a point people have been making for close to a decade. What's remarkable is that it's taken this long for the industry -- and mainstream reporters -- to figure out what a lot of us have been saying since the beginning.
But the even more annoying thing is that the article never mentions the DMCA (or its European equivalents). For example, it talks about the Microsoft PlaysForSure fiasco, and about the problems that users will have once Microsoft shuts off its "license servers." What it doesn't mention is that laws in the US, UK, and elsewhere make it illegal for third parties to offer software utilities to deal with the problems. That transforms the issue from an ordinary business blunder into a serious public policy issue. Microsoft has every right to shut down its license servers if it wants to. But consumers should have the freedom to download third-party software that would convert their PlaysForSure music libraries into an open format so they don't have to put up with Microsoft's arbitrary restrictions. So, for that matter, should customers of the iTunes store. But thanks to the DMCA, it's illegal to use such tools, and a felony to "traffic" in them.
Unfortunately, while there's been increasing coverage of the problems with DRM, there has continued to be little real discussion of the DMCA. Which is a real problem, because the millions of customers who made the mistake of purchasing DRMed music would really benefit from the freedom to use their legally-purchased music as they see fit. Indeed, a lot of them might be inclined to exert political pressure on Congress to change the law if they knew that the problem was largely Congress's fault in the first place. But because press accounts of the issue don't even mention the legal problems, most consumers assume it's just a garden-variety technical glitch and the law doesn't get changed.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
