bricoleur

Overbroad Censorship & Users

2011-12-11T17:24:00.001-08:00

A lot of good stuff has been written about why the currently pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is bad for the future of the internet, the technology industry, international human rights, security, free speech [pdf], privacy, blind people and jobs. One thing I haven’t seen is a succinct description of the problems of site-wide censorship when it comes to ordinary, non-infringing users. So... I’ll try to do that here.

SOPA’s unit of analysis is a “site or portion thereof” See Section 102(a). By contrast, if a portion of a site is infringing, SOPA’s unit of censorship is everything at the domain name. See Section 101(17), 102(c)(2)(B) and 102(c)(2)(A).

The harm that does to ordinary, non-infringing users is best described via a hypothetical user: Abe. Abe has never even so much as breathed on a company’s copyright but he does many of the things typical of Internet users today. He stores the photos of his children, now three and six years old, online at PickUpShelf* so that he doesn’t have to worry about maintaining backups. He is a teacher and keeps copies of his classes accessible for his students via another service called SunStream that makes streaming audio and video easy. He engages frequently in conversation in several online communities and has developed a hard-won reputation and following on a discussion host called SpeakFree. And, of course, he has a blog called “Abe’s Truths” that is hosted on a site called NewLeaflet. He has never infringed on any copyright and each of the entities charged with enforcing SOPA know that he hasn’t.

And yet, none of that matters. Under SOPA, every single one of the services that Abe uses can be obliterated from his view without him having any remedy. Abe may wake up one morning and not be able to access any of his photos of his children. Neither he, nor his students, would be able to access any of his lectures. His trove of smart online discussions would likewise evaporate and he wouldn’t even be able to complain about it on his blog. And, in every case, he has absolutely no power to try to regain access. That may sound far-fetched but under SOPA, all that needs to happen for this scenario to come true is for the Attorney General to decide that some part of PickUpShelf, SunStream, SpeakFree and NewLeaflet would be copyright infringement in the US. If a court agrees, and with no guarantee of an adversarial proceeding that seems very likely, the entire site is “disappeared” from the US internet. When that happens Abe has NO remedy. None. No way of getting the photos of his kids other than leaving the United States for a country that doesn’t have overly broad censorship laws.

There are millions of US internet users just like Abe. If you are one of them, I urge you to make your voice heard by going to AmericanCensorship.org or EngineAdvocacy.org/voice.

* All names of services meant to be fictitious.

Images are public domain, sourcing here.

RightsCon 2011 Images

2011-10-24T23:56:00.000-07:00

Here are a set of images I used during my SV Human Rights Conference presentation along with the attribution for each.

Fight between Rioters and Militia, from Pen and Pencil Sketches of the Great Riots.

The Frame, from Typographia.

Printing Press, from Typographia.

East Front of the Capitol, from Washington: Historical sketches of the capital city of our country.

Ocellated Mound-builder (Liepoa ocellata), from Birds: The elements of ornithology.

House of Commons

2011-10-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

In honour of the defeat of the bill to ban the use of Twitter in the UK House of Commons. Images from Old and New London and the New International Encyclopedia.

Apple

2011-10-08T17:27:00.000-07:00

Given last week's sad news. From The Apple Culturist.

Mango

2011-09-30T09:36:00.000-07:00

Mmmm mangos. Public domain image from The Mango.

Grass Mud Horse

2011-09-27T08:38:00.000-07:00

Another public domain image. This time of an alpaca, the nearest relative of the Grass Mud Horse, in honour of CPJ which is in town today. The image is from The Alpaca.

Washington, DC

2011-09-21T18:25:00.000-07:00

Am in DC for an INTA talk. Here's a great set of PD images of historical DC from Washington: Historical sketches of the capital city of our country.

The Lady and the Pirate

2011-09-20T14:56:00.000-07:00

This is the first of a series of PD Images posts with good images from the public domain collection of Google Books.

DMCA Rulemaking: The Caveat

2010-07-26T08:42:00.000-07:00

Many are celebrating the release of the Copyright Office's new set of 17 USC 1201 (a)(1) exemptions which allow for the circumvention of certain technological protections to make lawful uses of copyright protected works. They include circumventing:

DVD protection for copying short portions for commentary or criticism;
mobile phone programs for interoperability (such as adding a program that the operator doesn't want added);
mobile phone programs for network interoperability (such as allowing use on another operator's network);
video games for testing security flaws;
computer programs protected by obsolete dongles; [This one is particularly satisfying to me as I helped the Internet Archive get this way back in 2003.]
literary works when no edition allowing read-aloud exists.

I'm paraphrasing and over-simplifying, so take a look at the actual determination of the Librarian of Congress for more (and more accurate) detail.

While these are significant steps forward in both the specific "classes" exempted and the more reasonable scope of "class" that the Office continues to embrace, the celebration misses the fact that the vast majority of us will not be able to take advantage of the new exemptions. For example, the first exemption that allows for the circumvention of DVD access protection for educational and other uses of short clips clearly envisions students and media professors copying and short bits of films for use in criticism and discussion. This is a good step forward but its actual usefulness is hampered by the fact that the tools these students and professors might use to make that (now) lawful fair use are still illegal under 17 USC 1201 (a)(2) and/or 17 USC 1201 (b). The exemptions only apply to the actual act of circumventing (17 USC 1201 (a)(1)) but not any of the tools needed to accomplish the circumvention (17 USC (a)(2) and 17 USC 1201 (b)). So unless the students can somehow circumvent the DVD protections all by themselves, what they have received is a theoretically appealing but practically useless exemption. For students to actually be able to reasonably and legally make use of DVDs and cell-phone owners to exercise the ordinary "ownership" rights in their phones we need exemptions from (a)(2) and (b). Those are not forthcoming.

The exemptions won today are big steps forward and many were hard fought and well-won by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF deserves our thanks, congratulations and donation, but we still have a long way to go.

Update: El Pedro points out in the comments that there may be non-circumventing ways to record from DVD.

Copyright Issues Ripe for Reform

2010-06-18T15:40:00.000-07:00

Wrote a post on the Tools of Change in Publishing blog. Some thoughts about important issues in copyright related to ebooks. Comment there if you can.

In Praise of Transactional Attorneys

2010-02-18T16:28:00.000-08:00

I have always respected the attorneys that draft and negotiate commercial agreements. In the last while, I've been doing a bunch of that myself and so have increased my understanding of the joy and difficulties they face.

The basics of the job include working with one or more groups of other attorneys from other companies to negotiate and draft an agreement to reflect the terms of a commercial deal. It can be as simple as I will give you X number of widgets for Y amount of dollars or as complex as hundreds of pages attempting to deal with all sorts of contingencies. These deals are then used by companies to figure out what they should do, for example pay $Y when X widgets are delivered, and, extremely rarely, they are used by courts to figure out whether a company has wronged another by violating the contract.

There is a lot of joy in making a deal work and thinking of creative solutions to disagreements but the job is also VERY tough. To put it in computer terms, imagine the contract as a computer program. In each the object is to be able to interpret the words and have that interpretation drive a result. Now imagine that there is no compiler for your program and that you can't run any tests. All debugging must be done only theoretically and in your head. Imagine that you are coding with another person that is likely to be trying to develop a program that does something significantly different from what you want it to do. You and the other programmer may have different time constraints and, even though you are trying to do different things, you have to be on good terms with the other person because she could just as easily decide to stop working on your project. You and the other person take turns editing the code but without a common coding environment or standard tools to figure out whether the other person (or you) goofed it up. Then imagine that the code you are writing has a high probability of only ever being "run" through two different interpreters with significantly conflicting points of view about desirable outcomes and you likely won't get to see the result of any of these "runs." Or you may be asked to interpret the code in light of complete changes in context. Include a small chance that your code will be "run" by a relatively unbiased interpreter but the outcome of that one interpretation will be at extremely high stakes, often millions of dollars. Finally, know that you will likely get little credit for writing good code but will be crucified if the one time your code is run it doesn't work flawlessly. Now you are beginning to understand how hard the job of a good transactional attorney is.

Great transactional attorneys also pack a whallop of business sense and are very hard to find. Of course I believe our department at Twitter has some folks that are extremely good at this, and the team at Google is also wonderful. If you are not lucky enough to work at either of these companies I'd also recommend the great folks at Fenwick, Heather Meeker of Greenberg Traurig and Suzanne Bell of Wilson Sonsini. Wherever you work, give thanks for your transactional attorneys, I'm sure they deserve it.

Twitter Lists

2009-11-02T19:35:00.001-08:00

Loving Twitter Lists. Just added the widget to this blog for my list of folks who tweet about internet law.

Google Book Search Hearing

2009-09-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

Full video is up. Am looking forward to seeing it all. Cnet has a story with some quotations from it.

Twitter

2009-09-10T21:51:00.000-07:00

Today was my first day at Twitter. Good vibe about the place. Shouldn't change this blog much though it may allow me to blog a bit more about copyright since I won't be dealing with those issues at work.

"Makers" Schedule

2009-07-29T20:29:00.001-07:00

Another great essay by Paul Graham. This time about keeping control of your schedule to ensure large chunks of uninterruped time. Paul can sometimes wear programmer-colored glasses and this essay is no exception. I completely agree that programmers are one group that often needs uninterupted time, but they are not alone in any way. Even Paul's bogeyman -- "managers" -- often need uninterrupted time to focus on problems of strategy or operation (or any other type of problem or goal). There are LOTS of ways to do this. Paul mentions office hours as a way to consolidate and shorten meetings. We've been doing that for product counsel legal advice for years now and I highly recommend the "office hours" approach. In a large organization, it can also have big benefits in terms of reminding people that maybe they should drop in to ask your advice on something as long as you consistently schedule the office hours and hold them in visible locations (our preferred room was a glass walled room on a busy walkway in the center of campus).

Some other things I have heard tried:

Meeting Mondays (or no meeting Thursdays): The important thing here is that you designate certain days as acceptable for meetings and others as not throughout the company. The fewer exceptions, the more likely this will work.
Meeting with yourself: My calendar at Google was world-writeable within Google. That meant that if I wanted uninterrupted time, I had to schedule it. One way to do "no meeting Thursdays" is to just schedule yourself for an all day meeting with yourself on Thursday.
Retreats: Being in a physically different place as well as being "booked" for uninterrupted time can be amazingly productive. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, two other programmers turned managers like Paul, to regular extended retreats to think.

I'm sure there are many more ideas along these lines and I'll try to update this post with links as I come across them.

Update: David Weinberger on office hours.

On Leaving Google

2009-07-12T08:18:00.000-07:00

Working in Google Legal has been a dream job. The people at Google are phenomenal. In every part and at every level of the company there are great people with multiple useful talents in addition to those that got them the job. For a lawyer, the issues we dealt with every day were fascinating, the real-world impact of our work was humbling, and the ethical compass of the place remained true

Among many other things, I am proud to have been part of the legal department that helped:

Increase transparency for removals: Google remains the only search engine that sends legal notices to ChillingEffects.org to document search results suppressed for legal reasons. UPDATE: I'm pleased to report that as of sometime in the last few months, Yahoo! is sending at least some (maybe all) of their notices to ChillingEffects. This is GREAT news and I apologize to Yahoo! for not noticing this earlier.

Stand up to the Department of Justice: Google was the only search engine provider that stood up to the Department of Justice’s overbroad request for search query information.

Launch Google Book Search: Google is making books easier to find by using fair use for a great purpose and is working to expand access to books through the Book Search settlement.

Stand up for users: In my experience, Google does “focus on the user.” Google Legal is no exception in its decisions about everything from global product functionality to individual removals. As a result, we’ve been threatened or sued many times for user-focused functionality and what our users have said through our services.

There are many other examples, and many more that are confidential or privileged, but these give you a flavour of the types of things the Google legal department gets to do. I still can’t recommend it highly enough (really, go check out the jobs page).

Thank you Googlers, it was an honour.

Babysitting in Nantucket

2009-06-18T11:44:00.000-07:00

A quick shout out to my cousin-in-law's Nannytucket site. If are in Nantucket and need a babysitter, check them out!

Garmin 305 + Camera = Photos on Maps

2008-12-14T15:19:00.000-08:00

I have a Garmin Forerunner 305 (which is a GPS running/biking workout helper) and a Canon 870IS (pocket digital camera). Since each device records the date/time with its information, you can later combine the latitude/longitude from the GPS with the photos from the camera to be able to see pretty exactly where your photos were taken (this is called "geotagging" your photos) and to create something like this:

View Larger Map
In this post, I'll go through the various steps necessary to create that result using my GPS logger and digital photo set-up but many of them are transferrable to other loggers and set ups (though at $169, last I checked, the 305 is a steal). I use Picasa, Google Maps and Google Earth because I think they are good products but you should know that I may not be unbiased because I also work at Google. Other photo managers and hosting services can be used. From the looks of it, Flickr does this very well too.

Taking Pictures

When you are ready to start taking pictures, turn on your GPS logger. For the Garmin, I also needed to "start" my "run" in order to record the GPS log. You don't need to do anything special when you take pictures and when you are finished taking all the pictures you want to appear, turn off your GPS logger. On the Garmin I also needed to "stop" my "run."

Downloading the GPS log
If you haven't already, you'll need to install the Garmin Forerunner 305 drivers and software (these links are for Windows). Then open up the Garmin Training Center software (ug, relatively horrible and proprietary) and download your GPS log from the device. Find the part of your "history" from when you took the pictures and note the date/time from the very first entry (you'll need it later). You should then be able to right-click on your log and "Export" it. Unfortunately you can only export in the little-supported Garmin format, so choose a place where you'll be able to find it and export as .tcx.

Converting the GPS log
There are a number of ways to convert from TCX to GPX (a much more commonly supported format). I used the online converter from gpsvisualizer. You could also download a perl script to do it locally. In either case, you need to save the resulting GPX file for the next step.

Synchronizing your pictures with your GPS log

To match my images to where they were taken, I use GPicSync. It is a relatively simple program and works best if you have segregated the pictures you want to geotag into their own folder. It will then ask for that folder's location and the location of the GPX formatted GPS log. You'll also need to have GPicSync calculate the correct offset between the date/time recorded by your GPS logger and the date/time from your camera. To do that, go to "Options|Local Time Correction" in GPicSync and enter in the time from the first enty in the GPS log and the relevant bits of time from the first picture (for example if the GPS log time start was 15:08 and you waited a bit before taking your first picture which was at 8:15, you'd enter 15:08 and 8:08). Now you should be ready to geotag the photos by clicking "Synchronize." If you leave the rest of the default settings intact each of your images should now have a lattitude/longitude in its EXIF geolocation field and you should get a backup folder with the photos as they were before you synchronized, a log in your photos folder and a KML file in your photos folder. After checking that everything went well, you can delete the backup folder and two extra files.

Creating a KMZ file in Picasa

Open the picture folder in Picasa (you may have to import them into Picasa if it is not already there). You should see a small crosshairs in the bottom right of each photo and be able to see lattitude/longitude informaiton when you choose "Properties" when viewing a photo. You should then select all of the photos that you want to include on your map and choose "Tools|Geotag|Export to Google Earth File." This may take a little while, but should produce a KMZ file that contains thumbnails and smaller versions of each of your images. The KMZ file can be opened directly in Google Earth and should show your pictures where they were taken. For example, here's mine.

Uploading the KMZ file to the web and importing it to Google Maps

Upload your KMZ file to somewhere on the web that is accessible to the world. I used Google Sites, but this can be anywhere. Then sign in with your Google Account and go to Google Maps. Click on the "My Maps" link and "Create New Map." Choose the map's title and publication settings and then click "Import" and provide the URL for your KMZ file on the web. You should then have a Google Map window which includes your images. Click "Save" and "Done" and you'll see what other people will see when they come to the map.

[NB: Though it seems based on the "Import" dialog box that you should be able to upload directly from your computer, I couldn't get that to work for me.]

Enjoy!

Google + Authors + Publishers + Libraries

2008-11-03T07:50:00.001-08:00

After a long negotiation, along with the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide, Google announced last week that we've reached an agreement that will greatly expand online access to millions of in-copyright books in the U.S. If approved by the court, the agreement will also resolve the two U.S. Google Book Search lawsuits.
Here are a few links worth reading: Google blog post, joint press release, executive summary [pdf] and Google site.
Information for authors and publishers is at the Settlement Administration site.

Playing with Gmail

2008-07-21T17:25:00.000-07:00

Been doing a little playing around with Gmail and regexes of late. A few things to note: (a) fetchmail is great, (b) if you want to backup your entire gmail account on Windows, this Life Hacker Guide is great but be sure to read the comment about port 995, (c) Google appears to only allow a certain number of pop messages to be fetched per connection, meaning you'll have to rerun fetchmail a bunch -- I don't think this is an error in how fetchmail is set up, (d) if you are looking for a good way of stripping attachments, try mboxscrub.pl from O'Reilly (though likely you'll need to modify the regex for the beginning of a new message (in the elsif condition), I think "/^From /" without the trailing dash is correct. It is amazing how much poorly structured data is in a few years worth of email.

GPSBabel (wonderful)

2008-07-10T20:05:00.000-07:00

I bought a Garmin 305 a while ago (their new model looks even better) in the hopes that a gadget would spur me to exercise and to play around with geocoding photos. It has mostly worked. It did get me to exercise more and getting data on my runs is very satisfying but its windows software is sluggish and not that great. Plus it uses its own weird format making using the data elsewhere a bit of a pain. Fortunately, GPSBabel exists and was really easy to install. Just a quick "apt-get install gpsbabel" and the addition of "blacklist garmin_gps" to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist to make sure gpsbabel's usb driver is used instead of the default one on my debian/knoppix system. Then I use "gpsbabel -t -r -w -i garmin -f usb: -o kml -F out.kml" to create a KML file that is more useful. Woohoo! Will post more on geocoding photos (which it is fabulous for) in Windows and Linux later.

La Paloma *

2008-07-06T15:44:00.000-07:00

based on the recipes found in Cocktail Jen (from Esquire) and The New York Times

3oz fresh grapefruit juice
1oz fresh lime juice
simple syrup to taste
soda
Optional: 2oz tequila (I used Conmemorativo)

Most recipes recommend starting with a grapefruit soda (Jarritos is recommended with others using Fresca or Safeway Select). I like the fresh fruit as long as it is well strained to get rid of the pulp. It also allows you to make the drink lighter and less sweet (especially for the non-alcoholic version). Some serve it with a salt rim, such as the version in the photo (credit to Urban Mixer), but I leave that off and serve it in a tall glass with lots of ice.

* I've been on a bit of a tear making interesting drinks at home. Mostly non-alcoholic though alcohol could go in most of them. Anyhow, I figured I would post some of the recipes here to spread the joy of a refreshing summer drink. Where they are consciously based off the creations of others, I'll post links.

Books are weapons in the war of ideas

2008-06-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

David Weinberger describes a visit to the Open Content Alliance's scanning operation at Boston Public Library. A healthy dose of optimism after the sad news that Microsoft has stopped its scanning operation. The title of the post and the image on the right is from a U.S. Government war poster digitized by Boston Public. You can see the rest of the set or more from Boston Public at Flickr.

Congratulations to Boston Public and the Open Content Alliance.

[disclosure: I work on Google Book Search]

FOIA and Copyright

2008-04-11T12:20:00.000-07:00

Another problem with crown copyright comes to light as British Columbia uses it to restrict distribution of FOIAed documents. Before you feel all superior (if you are an American), though the US doesn't have crown copyright (or federal copyright in the US in most situations), the federal government may be able to claim copyright abroad and states may also claim copyright. So this also could have happened here.

PS A good article on US government copyright is Becky Dale's column "Can The Government Copyright Public Records?"

Update: Only four days later comes news from Boing Boing that the State of Oregon is asserting copyright in the arrangement, compilation and notes of its revised statutes. Ug.

Graham: Creativeness, Roles and Companies

2008-03-26T07:20:00.000-07:00

Paul Graham is a great writer and has written many great essays. His most recent makes the argument that humans are "naturally" suited to not having bosses and not working in large companies (he talks about the difficulties of groups over 8 people). I agree that there are many downsides to working at companies and I could certainly write about the upsides and why I love what I'm doing at Google, but that wouldn't really be disagreeing with Paul. I don't take him to be saying that starting your own company is always better, just that you should be aware that organizations of greater than 8 people have a cost that should be taken into account. He talks about it as being a "restrictiveness" that takes toll on creativity and says that it is a particular problem for engineers. Which brings us to his dismissal of why others won't feel the pinch:
"The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a piece of code you don't need to write it again. So a programmer working as programmers are meant to is always making new things. And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you're going to face resistance when you do something new."
I don't agree with this characterization of programmers as more creative than others. It is true that you never have to write the same code again (though how many times have you written authentication or a wrapper around an authentication class) but that doesn't mean that everything you write flows out of a brand new non-linear creative endeavour any more than a sales person's pitch is entirely new. Sales people sell services that have never existed (and then they get engineers to code this selling process into an online flow and move on to selling new stuff). Support folks get entirely new questions all the time (and then get engineers to code a system for responding to the easy stuff in an automated way). These folks that Paul singles out as being less restricted (or less "meant" to create) do all sorts of breathtaking new things too. I've seen support folks handle a very angry person with an issue with a brand new type of product by creating solution to the user's problem and explaining it in a way that is brilliant. I've seen sales folk come up with entirely new types of business arrangements or finding an elegant "in" to a relationship. It is certainly true that both of these groups do a bunch of work that is less creative, but so do engineers, even at startups (gasp!). These are the things that follow the creative move, things like debugging, unit testing, perfecting UI, etc. A good startup as well as a good big company, will value creation (and the stuff after the creation) in all of its people, not just the ones that are from Paul's chosen tribe.