Last month, I gave a version of my “War on General Purpose Computing” lecture to the University of Westminster Law School. The Guardian captured the talk on video and edited it for length, then posted it.
My latest Guardian column is “Why did an MPAA executive join the Internet Society?” which digs into the backstory on the appointment of former MPAA CTO Paul Brigner as North American director of the copyright-reforming, pro-net-neutrality Network Society group, which manages the .ORG domain name registry.
I asked Brigner whether his statements about DNS blocking and seizure and net neutrality had been sincere. “There are certainly a number of statements attributed to me that demonstrate my past thoughts on DNS and other issues,” he answered. “I would not have stated them if I didn’t believe them. But the true nature of my work was focused on trying to build bridges with the technology community and the content community and find solutions to our common problems. As I became more ingrained in the debate, I became more educated on the realities of these issues, and the reality is that a mandated technical solution just isn’t a viable option for the future of the internet. When presented with the facts over time, it was clear I had to adjust my thinking.
“My views have evolved over the last year as I engaged with leading technologists on DNSSEC. Through those discussions, I came to believe that legislating technological approaches to fight copyright violations threatens the architecture of the internet. However, I do think that voluntary measures could be developed and implemented to help address the issue.
“I will most definitely advocate on Internet Society’s behalf in favor of all issues listed, and I share the organization’s views on all of those topics. I would not have joined the organisation otherwise, and I look forward to advocating on its behalf.”
Update: Joly sez, “After his appointment we (ISOC-NY) did pull Paul up on the carpet to explain himself – you can find the salient MPAA passage here
Why did an MPAA executive join the Internet Society?
(Image: Stop SOPA!, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 51295441@N07’s photostream)
I was in Prague last Saturday, giving an address to the General Assembly of Pirate Parties International. The video is on YouTube.
Here’s a podcast of my last Guardian column, Protecting your Facebook privacy at work isn’t just about passwords:
Facebook has threatened to sue companies that force their employees to reveal their Facebook login details. As laudable as this is, I worry that it will fail to accomplish its primary objective – protecting Facebook users from employer snooping.
Increasingly, firms configure the computers and devices on their internal networks to trust “self-signed certificates”. These cryptographic certificates are the same files used by your browser to establish secure, eavesdropping-proof connections to websites and to validate software updates, and to generally validate the identity of remote machines and guard the files they send you from tampering and spying.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
Robo Pastierovic has created Advanced Comic Book Format (ACBF), a free/open format for online comic books. ACBF has a lot of cool features: support for creator metadata; per-panel/page definitions; multiple text-layers for multiple languages; text formatting and style data; auto-indexing and more. The format is CC-BY-SA, and can be found on Launchpad, along with GPL’ed viewers for GNU/Linux and Windows.
There’s screenshots, too. Robo was kind enough to convert the comic adaptation of my story Craphound, which appeared in my CC-licensed graphic novel Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of Here and Now — he also translated the comic into Slovak and included the translation in a separate layer.
Review:
SFRevu
“The novella showcases all of Doctorow’s strengths. We have fascinating ideas by the bucketful, but they never swamp the personal dimension of the story. Jimmy’s struggles to deal with his past, his isolation as the only immortal, and his complicated relationship with his childhood friend and sometimes lover Lacey are all skillfully handled, giving the story emotional depth that belies its flashy set pieces. Despite the extravagant setting, the story is still deeply relevant to our own time and place; it tells us both that things will change and keep on changing, but that the basic elements of human life, our relationships to our parents, ourselves, and each other, will still be with us.”
Benjamin Wald, SFRevu
Jon Winokur, editor of the stupendous Portable Curmudgeon books, asked me to contribute to his latest project, “Advice to Writers,” so I did.
Here’s a podcast of my last Publishers Weekly column, A Whip to Beat Us With:
Jim C. Hines’s e-books are marketed both through a big publisher and solo. The books that were re-priced by Amazon were his solo titles—unagented, and unrepresented by a major publisher. As an individual, Jim has no leverage over Amazon. Not so Macmillan, which controls a much larger number of SKUs and has much more leverage. Macmillan made headlines during its tense standoff with Amazon in 2011 over e-book pricing, but the publisher was able to sway Amazon because it could make a credible threat that it might get up from the negotiating table and take all its books, too—and others might follow.
But Macmillan’s edge—its scale—is also its undoing. Every day, Macmillan sells more e-books that have been locked into Amazon’s format. The millions of dollars that Amazon customers spend on Macmillan’s DRM-locked e-books represent millions of dollars of e-books Macmillan customers lose if they wanted to follow Macmillan away from Amazon. Publishers believe DRM protects their books. But DRM has created a world where publishers who walk away from negotiations with a DRM vendor like Amazon leave their customers behind.
Not just Macmillan. Any publisher that sees a substantial portion of its income from DRM vendors becomes little more than a commodity supplier to those vendors. If Hachette or HarperCollins decided to bite the bullet and pull their titles from Amazon during a dispute, how many of their authors would stay with them, knowing that the world’s largest bookseller and most popular e-book platform no longer carried their titles?
To appreciate this vulnerability, just look at what happened in February with the Independent Publishers Group, a distributor that asked Amazon to hold the line on its discount. They weren’t able to reach an agreement, and Amazon removed all IPG’s e-books from the Kindle store. The day that happened, IPG sent out a communique describing the situation and asking its readers to avoid the Kindle store in future.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
