On the follies of Copyright expectations

29 Jan 2006

I’ve been occupied the last few days trying to get an effective fileserving/sharing/roaming profile (domains) environment working with Samba, and was thinking this evening about the implications of a network-wide media share. At present, it’s illegal, though not particularly morally reprehensible in view of the fact that all content on it would be ‘licensed’ (just not for duplication in a digital form, under present copyright law — scheduled to be overturned).

It is a truth universally acknowledged… that the absence of a fair-use provision in Australian copyright law is simply an oversight on the part of legislators. (Apologies to Austen fans :P)

What if it’s not?

There is, now, what Paul Sheehan termed “little squares of light“, signifying connectivity in an “advanced, ironic, post-ethnic polyglot societ[y]“. Before that? The “Dark Age” (also Sheehan). It did exist. There was a time before computers and multimedia were intrinsically connected (depending on your definition of multimedia–multimodal media is perhaps more apt). There was, indeed, a time before multimedia existed — though we can, perhaps, trace its origins to Wagner’s 1849 essay, “The Artwork of the Future” and the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk — which, in turn, traces back to Greek drama, but no matter!

Yet irrespective of when this arose, legislators are meant to have acknowledged the imminent rise of the copyright-violating, citizen-empowering, content-producer-collaboration-dictat at the hands of the web. We’re expecting the wrong thing. Media has progressed, the law hasn’t. Yet.

But what if it doesn’t? Does this matter? Speaking to an influential podcast-media personality yesterday afternoon, it became clear that there had emerged between citizen media and conventional mechanisms a fissure that certain people were very reluctant to bridge. Suspicion exists between the two ‘industries’ (though it was suggested that an ‘industry’ cannot exist until someone is making money: perhaps not the case with citizen media, overblown acquisitions aside) where ‘citizen media’ is concerned that any partnerships with ‘conventional media’ will stifle innovation. Clearly, this is wrong, and ignores the ‘citizen’ part of ‘citizen media’: any partnership cannot exist without the ‘citizen’ remaining, thus changing conventional media. And if the ‘citizen’ component is dissolved, it becomes a meaningless acquisition as ‘media’ already exists, and ‘citizen media’ without the ‘citizen’ has no impetus whatsoever.

However, that aside, this (perhaps mutual) hostility raises interesting notions.

If we consider the two to exist in entirely distinct and disparate spheres, then new possibilities arise. We accept that citing and re-using ‘mass media’ material in new creations is, for a time, impossible. We accept that a ‘normalisation’ is taking place, to cite the much-lauded ‘village square’ concept of communal media: that we are returning to a ‘normal’ state, and that broadcast top-down media was a temporary hiccup in the state of human being. The difference, then, is that we now exist in a globalised state where those with whom we communicate (or, share media/experience) is not limited by geography… but remains limited in scope (sensual experience, for example, is rather inhibited by the tyranny of distance).

In two hundred years, assuming mass media assimilated back into ‘normality’ today, all copyright would have expired and all work could be cited, quoted, re-used and abused as people willed it. There is clearly no great possibility of this happening: acknowledged even by the mass-media-hostile personality interviewed. Should we care? Maybe. If there is material worth reproducing, that is.

The web is a temporal media, still. Never before have such vast volumes of information been so volatile, in part because such vast volumes of information have never been so accessible (in an entirely un-web-standards-related sense). Hence, it is possible that the alleviation of this access will hurt more than it would had we not known what was possible. The nature of this detachment from the web isn’t something to be discussed here — suffice to say, global energy crisis, war, censorship (because the web remains relatively dependent on a small number of servers — DNS root servers particularly) and a variety of other factors could all play a part. But what would this mean?

Earlier, I alluded to the ‘globalised village’ concept, and how that, in some senses (no pun intended), fails. What we are now seeing is a series of online ‘communities’ existing in parallel, with very occasional (but also very complex) perpendicular relationships. There is no global village. There are a series of global communities, with which people can choose to participate and engage to whatever extent they deem desirable. A series of factors aside from the web and MSM have also led to the decline of the physical ‘village’ environment — urban sprawl, globalisation in a physical sense (highly mobile populations, etcetera) and the like are examples of such — but there is something wrong with an entirely directed, specific, no-overlap environment. Ben remarked a day or two ago that it’s intriguing his three best friends all have an affinity for English (and two of those teaching it), whilst he is indifferent about the language, as about teaching (though remarked it is ‘fun’ where maths is concerned!).

Rarely, in Internet-based communities, have I seen someone engage with people outside of their own area of principle interest. Web sites work like that. They are sites with a purpose: and, if they do not have a purpose, the traffic they attract is often sporadic and undirected. Even this blog has a purpose — it must, to have attracted (and retained) the attention of an American with an interest in web publishing. Once attention is engaged on one front, it is possible to explore others — it’s possible that people with an interest in web publishing and accessibility will read this post simply because it popped up in their feed reader and looked vaguely interesting (though length is doubtless a deterrent!). Back to the term ‘site’ — clearly, this word’s etymology ensures it cannot be divorced from its real-world meaning.

People do not simply enter a building for no reason. This parallel fails to some extent as the power of search-engines come into the equation — but, remember, search engines must also discover a ‘site’ at some point (impossible without incoming links). Which brings us back to the parallel-with-occasional-perpendicular-bridges image (note, parallel cannot mean linear because of the nature of hyperlinks. Perhaps I speak of parallel Möbius strips?)

Irrespective of the mechanisms for web-based exploration, web media and mainstream media both fail to serve an encompassing purpose of human interaction. Copyright makes no difference to this. Observe how distracted this post is. Observe how I return to the topic of copyright harshly, how it does not link to the important defining qualities of human interaction (which, it must be said, the web in part facilitates). This was both intentional and unavoidable: there is no better link. Copyright doesn’t matter, and previously created content under copyright does not matter. Eventually, copyright will dissolve, and a harmonisation between formally detached publishing mechanisms (I have decided that is all the difference is) will come about. People will continue to express themselves, drawing on the content of their time — ideas are aside from copyright — whilst, perhaps, drifting apart from this new media and back into the village…

Four things

29 Jan 2006

It’s Matthom’s fault.

Four jobs I have had

1. IT support/troubleshooting guy
2. Westfield Christmas decorations assembler at some signage place
3. Web… something. Designer/markup guru/accessibility consultant/CSS wizard/JavaScript mangler extraordinaire. That’s really a job title.
4. I’m all out, I think. Can I do “Three things” instead?

Four movies I can watch over and over again

1. The Matrix (and ONLY the Matrix, not :Reloaded or :Revolutions, because they sucked bigtime)
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. Underworld :D If anyone (in Sydney) wants to go see the sequel sometime let me know…
4. Ice Age

Four places I have lived

1. Lat: 33:54:24S (-33.9067) Lon: 151:13:01E (151.2169)
2. Lat: 33:54:44S (-33.9122) Lon: 151:12:50E (151.2139)
3. Lat: 33:54:23S (-33.9063) Lon: 151:13:30E (151.2249)
4. Lat: 33:55:09S (-33.9190) Lon: 151:14:14E (151.2373)

Four TV shows I love

1. Um. Wrong person. I’m going to tag Steve at the end of this post, which should be most amusing. Hopefully he’ll name a podcast instead!

Four places I’ve vacationed

1. New Zealand
2. A boat. A big boat.
3. Mansfield, VIC
4. Tea Gardens/Hawks Nest, NSW :)

Four of my favorite dishes

1. I hate this question.
2. I can’t even choose food in a restaurant, from a menu.
3. Let alone with out any guidance in some forever-bounced-around-the-blogosphere meme.
4. This is my answer. My favourite dish is indecision.

Four sites I visit daily

1. Google. Duh.
2. Quirksmode, but rarely not-through Google.
3. My comment-spam moderation page :-/
4. whisper.joahua.com, for music playback. I’ll post about this sometime.

Four places I would rather be right now

This isn’t really a valid question seeing I’m doing this on a weekend. Not fair.

1. Bed.
2. Floating in a pool somewhere. Not normally me, but for some reason that has enormous appeal right now.
3. On a couch, reading a book (without thinking “I’ve got so much other stuff to do! I haven’t got time to read!”)
4. Making engaging rich media for the web. Scheduled for later today. One of several exciting things coming soon!

Four bloggers I’m tagging

1. Steve
2. Ben
3. LTTD, mostly because I want to see how a collective weblog would deal with this whole… blogging equivalent of chain-mail thing.
4. I can’t think of anyone else (who hasn’t already been tagged/done it) I’d want to inflict this on :P

This is interesting, because I once completely shunned that whole ‘e-mail survey’ thing, but now recognise it as a not-entirely-neccessary not-entirely-evil neccessary evil. Having said that, still not a huge fan :P

Skype Sucks

28 Jan 2006

NetMeeting video is still unbeaten. Trying to video conference with a guy in Melbourne today, MSN was on the cards but sucked even in a LAN environment, Skype was tried and looked awesome fullscreen and in a LAN environment, but bombed out pretty badly for web-cam support at the Melbourne end and in terms of bandwidth — you can’t even scale the video! — and NetMeeting was great in terms of reliability and decent quality over both LAN and Internet connections (and yes, it let you scale. Last update, 1996. Or whenver. A while ago!).

Unfortunately, NetMeeting is too difficult to use, and one end (or both ends… our end I’m 99% sure is working fine as I write this) had routing difficulties because, obviously, NetMeeting doesn’t use some crappy central directory server unless you select the “Microsoft, please steal my information” checkbox. Which, unlike the latest MSN Messenger install, isn’t ticked by default.

PC software makers suck. Earlier this week I… had an encounter with Tori’s laptop, featuring no less than 188 individual specimins of spyware: A new record for me. I started trying to dis-infect but eventually pronounced it vaguely beyond repair. The spyware was such that it was blocking sockets for all applications EXCEPT I.E. (presumably because it can control Internet Explorer infinitely better than it can anything else–more than a couple of sites were blocked, too), so I couldn’t even update the anti-spyware definitions. It’d also broken Windows Update. Yar, this be re-install territory. Caused, probably in no small part, by “ticked by default” junk.

Something unpredictable…

27 Jan 2006

[Or, making up for a distinct absence of posting for various reasons not to be discussed but hopefully rectified – the content absence, that is – by this post.]

Until about three weeks ago, I was convinced I was going to take a year off between finishing school and starting uni to work full time. I’d roundly insulted a small web firm a couple of weeks before leaving for New Zealand, re-building their site with CSS in about three hours (it wasn’t perfect, but it was a decent effort) and going into their office to tell them their version sucked and mine was better. To date, the website in question hasn’t been ‘fixed’, as it were, but I got a call the day after I returned from New Zealand asking if I was interested in coming in for an interview. I’ve been working four days a week there since.

Tori came back. We spent some time together, and I kind of realised that putting off University for another year wasn’t a brilliant move, contrary to what more than a handful of… older people… had said. The main reason is probably social (which I don’t ever talk about too much on here, I guess), but financially it’s not… compelling… to stay any further away from the other side of Uni any longer than is neccessary, because “that side” means a job/career I’m interested in as a longer-term option, hence financial stability more so than in an industry I’m perfectly interested in provided I get to do the things I like — and where I am presently fortunate enough to be in a position where that’s pretty close to what I’m doing — and indifferent about it (the industry) otherwise. Social/political information theory notwithstanding, because that’s an entirely separate kettle of fish that relates both to my pre- and post- uni directions. Which are, incidentally, IT/connectivity/accessibility now, and education later. Somewhere in the middle there’ll be (is?) a fusion of the two, which has been bandied about a little over the last 12 months. I had a very interesting conversation RE: something along these lines last night, which will hopefully evolve into something in the not-too distant future!

So yes, as of Monday I’m officially an Arts student at the University of Sydney. In a way I feel bad about this because I’d said to work that I was planning on sticking around in a near-F/T capacity for a year (and at the time I had been), but at the same time this feels so much more… sensible? Plus everyone was mind-blowingly nice about it, even though I called on Saturday to say I’d be in late Monday because I had to enrol (because of when the offer had come in, and because I’d been putting off saying it the week before).

Anyway, in summary: I’m working nearly full time doing web development in an awesome role where I get to do lots of CSS, semantic-web junk, usability work, and some occasional JavaScript (though mercifully not too much! Still learning. If anyone else in Aus is interested in getting a copy of Jeremy Keith’s allegedly-excellent “DOM Scripting” book, let me know so we can order a few copies from Amazon and get cheaper shipping, because no-one in Australia is stocking copies for another month or three!). And as much or as little server-side work as I want. At the minute I’m unequivocally saying “little”, but that might change at some point, maybe. I’m going to uni, too. That doesn’t start until March, so I’m going to be working ‘normally’ up until then, and after that feeling my way according to timetables, how much of a life I have, how broke I am, etcetera!

Tied into the whole work thing, my first to-be-promoted-on-TV website is going live sometime in the wee hours of Sunday Monday, which is audaciously exciting. Not in the least because it will hopefully attract insane amounts of traffic, and the CSS-is-good-for-your-bandwidth-costs argument carries weight here!! It also features AJAX, chiefly for usability/bandwidth-saving reasons… but also because it’s just damn cool! Anyway, there will be posts, screenshots, etcetera (probably saying the same kind of thing I just said, only naming names and with pretty pictures!) scheduled for release here to co-incide with the site’s launch, so… watch this space.

As for Uni? English, Philosophy, Classics and (Ancient) Greek are currently on the menu. Greek… may be swapped out, possibly. For Linguistics or maybe Latin if anything, but possibly not. The reasoning behind it — because I’ve attracted many strange looks as I tell people I’m planning on studying Ancient Greek — is essentially:

1. Learning another language (any other language) helps me understand English better. Doing English, no-one will ever explain grammar and structure of language to me. It sucks. Admittedly, Linguistics could prove to be useful in this department, too.
2. Ancient Greek ties in with the Classics courses I’m taking. Don’t ask me to remember what they are, or even look them up, because I don’t have a copy of my preferences (they took it, because their stupid computers were stupidly broken. I’m so glad I’m not studying IT!) and it’s not available online yet and I’m just lazy. And trying to get this massive post finished so I can get back to having a life, or something.
3. The New Testament is written in Greek. As Kristen so eloquently expressed it last night:

   You can be one of those people at Bible studies who go “Well, the greek word for that actually means ‘this is ambiguous…’”

   Heh. Marcelo coughed something that sounded suspiciously like “Moore College” (a Sydney Bible college) when he found out, but that’s not really what I had in mind choosing it… maybe, though!</li> </ol> Anyway. The blog has nearly caught up to me. Almost. There’s a bunch of other stuff happening, but this is the glut of stuff I needed to write at some point and had been putting off!

2GB

27 Jan 2006

I broke that mystical bandwidth barrier today. Don’t really know why, still. I can only assume Dale was entirely correct about usage/faster upload, because goodness knows posting of content hasn’t been particularly up to scratch (in terms of volume, anyway) of late!