Words about people, information, and the space in between.
Plus other things. By David Kidd
Yale University Press won’t be publishing the images of those Islamic cartoon caricatures in its book about said Islamic cartoon caricatures, because its advisors advised that bombs might go off somewhere, at sometime, by someone.
That an academic publishing would act so unacademically is depressing. But censoring itself to prevent imagined violence only validates extremist methods. For shame.
In response to the Google Book Search Settlement, a bunch of party-poopers are forming the Open Book Alliance, which opposes Google’s and anyone else’s book digitization process unless it is: “undertaken in the open, grounded in sound public policy, and mindful of the need to promote long-term benefits for consumers rather than isolated commercial interests.”
Here’s a glimpse at this unholy alliance:
Frankly, I’d find it hard to go against the Internet Archive, one of the most noble and important projects in human history, on any matter. But throw in libraries and a smattering big tech, and you have one hell of an opponent.
Of course it should. If it has cultural and artistic significance, it’s probably worth keeping around. The Democratic Party of Japan doesn’t agree:
The DPJ strongly urged Prime Minister Taro Aso, who is known as a big fan of manga, not to build the facility aimed at collecting and exhibiting manga and animated films.
Although funding for the project gained Diet approval as part of the fiscal 2009 supplementary budget in late May, the DPJ has said that if it wins the election it will scrap the plan and shift part of the money to social relief for single-mother households.
More here, including responses from people who probably hate single mothers and/or their households (i.e., the apparently struggling content creation industry).
John Bell on ‘proper’ Shakespearean accents:
“As long as our actors are taught to exploit the timbre and range of their voices, to experiment with their emotive power, to employ clear diction and sharp articulation, accent is no consideration. We are speaking in our own country to our own audience. Until we are comfortable with our own voice, we can never own the material, be it Shakespeare or any other.”
Lawrence Lessig’s rundown of the Google Book Search Settlement is perhaps the best articulation of the ‘against’ position I’ve seen. He urges us not to look at Google as a kitten, but rather a tiger cub that can’t help but grow into a vicious man-eater.
In particular, Lessig talks about how the Settlement changes the print-based ‘ecology’ of ‘free access’, which guarantees access to published information, to an ecology of confusion and complexity that will actually inhibit access, despite Google’s intentions. He draws an analogy to film documentaries, where each snippet in the film may have separate negotiated rights and agreements attached to it, making it exceptionally difficult to legitimately clear all the rights, and consequently, not worth the effort to do so. More fuel for the pro-piracy camp, in fact.
Lessig’s ultimate point is that the balance has been shifting too far towards commercial interests. Where once we had publicly supported and legally recognised institutions (libraries) that guaranteed access to cultural works, we are moving towards “permission culture” with a “tendency” towards access, but not a “guarantee” of access. This is partly a consequence of moving towards digital publishing environments, which makes it all the more pertinent to refine our legal and public institutions around access, rather than leaving it up to Google and the Author’s Guild.
Interesting stuff and well worth watching if you’re not up to speed on the issues surrounding this monumental change to publishing and copyright.
Panic, confusion, fear … that’s what happens when you mash together Google, the centuries-old book publishing industry, and one of the most complicated legal settlements in the past 30 years.
In this round, the authors get their chance to be confused. Should they opt in or opt out?
William Morris says they should opt out of the settlement:
“Now they’ve got this license to sell your books at a pre-negotiated one-time royalty that you’re stuck with unless a court changes the settlement,” Eric Zohn, an attorney in business affairs at William Morris, said in an interview. “It’s like a legislative change. Under copyright law, you don’t have anything without express written consent from the copyright holder. Now the court is saying Google is free to sell your book unless you expressly tell them not to.”
The Author’s Guild says William Morris doesn’t know what’s going on:
“[Here’s] the deal in one sentence: unless you want to sue Google, there’s no good reason to opt out of the settlement. If you want to allow your book to be searchable in Google’s database, and you want to be fairly compensated for Google’s use of your work, and you want to retain complete control over whether, and how, your book is displayed or sold to users, you should remain in the settlement.”
Way to go, AG. Sounds like sunshine and rainbows from here on in. Now how about getting onto this and this.
Stephan Kramer from Germany’s Central Council of Jews says:
“It makes sense and is important to publish an edition of Mein Kampf with an academic commentary,” Mr Kramer said. “A historically critical edition needs to be prepared today to prevent neo-Nazis profiting from it.”
The book, which has been banned in Germany for more than 60 years, goes out of copyright in 2015.
I’ll just come right out and say it: Tron is one my favourite movies.
It’s not great by any standard measure, but it had one attribute that made it stand out: the simulation. Visually, Tron was exceptionally well realised. It was beautiful, unique, considered, and somehow understandable. It successfully conveyed a vision for such an odd, outlandish (and cheesy) scenario, and I walked away thinking that if I were ever to be turned into a computer program, then everything would look like Tron. This is why Tron became an iconic film, and it’s why its sequel, Tron Legacy, probably won’t be.
It wasn’t just the visuals alone that made Tron what it was — the physical environment itself was a crucial factor in making the world seem ‘right’, even though it was clearly ridiculous. Tim touches on this in his Trembling Hand post about the light cycles in the new movie, and I couldn’t agree more.
[The original film] is still a wondrous representation of cyberspace, where the very laws of ‘nature’ are those that pertain to code, not particles. The low polygons, inertia-free movement and Gauraud shading were all essential to that vision. Making it more ‘real’ makes it more intuitive, but making it unreal was what originally made it unique.
Tron embodied the rule-based world of computers, and the art and action reflected this in every frame. The fact that these simple, low-polygon bikes could only move at 90-degree angles only emphasised the arbitrariness of the world — that the characters were in a human-constructed environment that valued order and efficiency. Indeed, it was quite a dark, horrifying place, where being permanently erased from the system, pixel by pixel, felt somehow more final than dying, for at least the latter contained the possibility of an afterlife.
Let’s look at the original light cycle sequence, which is still exciting after all these years.
Now let’s look at a light cycle clip from Tron Legacy (a better, higher res version is here).
It may be exciting and interesting in other ways, but it’s certainly lost something. It increased the polygon count, made things slightly more realistic, and borrowed a lot of the icons from the original — it certainly looks Tron-ish — but it lacks the essence of Tron. More critically, its treatment of cyberspace is somewhere in the middle of its minimalist predecessor and the simulacrum of The Matrix, but it ignores the conceits that made these worlds work.
On that note, I’m not judging the film outright, and I do hope to be surprised by the film. The trailer does look good despite my issues with it, and the cast and crew on the payroll is a pretty solid line-up (for what it’s worth). I’ll go into it with an open mind. Yes, really.
I’m an enormous fan of genetics. Perhaps dangerously so. That’s why I spent most of this evening swimming through Edge.org’s Church & Venter fest.
In roughly six hours of lectures both scientists tried to convey how the world will be changed by the ability to routinely read genetic sequences into computing systems and then store, replicate, alter and insert them back into living cells.
The rate at which this technology is now improving puts silicon to shame. Dr. Church noted that between 1970 and 2005 gene sequencing had taken place on a Moore’s Law pace, improving at about 1.5 times per year. Since then it has improved at the rate of an order of magnitude, or ten times annually.
Cory Doctorow weighs in on Free.
Bits of note:
I think [Free] has exactly the same problem as The Long Tail, namely, an unwillingness to consider the wider implications of a world centred on a commodity that can be infinitely reproduced at no marginal cost.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Anderson’s dismissal of the Free Software Foundation founder, Richard Stallman, the original free software hacker who launched the GNU/Linux project that is the forebear of today’s free/open source movement. Anderson mentions Stallman, dismissing him as “anti-capitalist”.
But this is to miss one of the most important points. There’s a pretty strong case to be made that “free” has some inherent antipathy to capitalism. That is, information that can be freely reproduced at no marginal cost may not want, need or benefit from markets as a way of organising them.
…
Anderson paints a rosy picture of free, even noting the gains we all experienced as a result of the creative destruction of travel agents and stockbrokers thanks to Expedia and Etrade, but he fails to clearly and explicitly state something to the effect of: “The information revolution is not painless or bloodless. Its wrenching changes have and will put those of the industrial revolution to shame. Much of value will be lost.”
I’ve been cautiously optimistic about the Google Book Search Settlement. There are a few things to iron out — and I still haven’t wrapped my head around the implications of Google having access to a goose that lays golden eggs (i.e., making money from orphaned out-of-print-but-in-copyright books) — but on the whole, I think it’s dangerously exciting.
But that was before I read Section 3.7(e) of the agreement, which grants Google the “right to exclude books for editorial or non-editorial reasons”. Crikey. It’s no wonder the very next sentence says it “is an issue of great sensitivity to Plaintiffs and Google.”
Damn straight it’s an issue.
Make no mistake: the word editorial is used very specifically. Google certainly has the right to exclude books based on commercial reasons or as the result of a legal obligation, but to claim they should have the right to exclude books based on non-existent editorial guidelines? That’s what you do when you own the editorial, not when you distribute it, and especially not when it goes against your own policy.
This is different to the recent Amazon gaff where Jeff Bezos shoved one of his tentacled fingers into our Kindles and yanked our books away from us. While I don’t accept his apology (because he hasn’t addressed the issue, i.e., that Amazon can do this at anytime), I do accept that Amazon needs to go into new territory with guns blazing, which means they’re inevitably going to shoot someone in the thigh. Google, on the other hand, isn’t going into new territory. It’s about to become a monopolistic book selling juggernaut that can make editorial decisions based on a mysterious and changing set of guidelines, and we should all be concerned.
The Financial Times says Apple “is racing to offer a portable tablet-sized computer in time for the Christmas shopping season, in what the entertainment industry hopes will be a new revolution.” Somewhat surprisingly, book publishers are getting in on the ground floor:
Book publishers have been in talks with Apple and are optimistic about being included in the computer, which could provide an alternative to Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader and a forthcoming device from Plastic Logic, recently allied with Barnes & Noble.
“It would be a colour, flat-panel TV to the old-fashioned, black and white TV of the Kindle,” one publishing executive said.
It’s a shame that this publishing executive slightly misses the point. A good e-reader needs four things: access to texts, portability, an ‘eye-friendly’ screen, and good battery life. A tablet PC has perhaps two of those qualities (an iTunes store will pump out books and subscriptions, and it’s small enough to fit comfortably into a bag), but unless it uses something comparable to e-ink, it will likely not last more than eight hours, and won’t be particularly easy on the eyes.
Random House imprint Delacorte Press will bring out 14 unpublished short stories by Kurt Vonnegut — each in e-book form. From ArtsBeat:
In a news release, the publisher said that the first story, “Hello Red,” would be available as an e-book on Aug. 25, and a second, “The Petrified Ants,” would be released on Sept. 29; the rest would be available on Oct. 20.
