From jeebesh at sarai.net Thu Jun 4 13:08:27 2009 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 13:08:27 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Call for Contributions to Sarai Reader 08 : Fear Message-ID: <87315582-36B1-4128-827A-4F1AFA36FA0F@sarai.net> Call for Contributions to Sarai Reader 08 : Fear I. Introducing the Sarai Reader II. Concepts and Questions for Sarai Reader 08 : Fear III. Guidelines for Submissions I. Introducing the Sarai Reader Sarai (www.sarai.net), an interdisciplinary research and practice programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, invites contributions to Sarai Reader 08: Fear. Previous Readers have included: 'The Public Domain' : Sarai Reader 01, 2001, 'The Cities of Everyday Life' : Sarai Reader 02, 2002, 'Shaping Technologies' : Sarai Reader 03, 2003, 'Crisis/Media' : Sarai Reader 04, 2004, 'Bare Acts' : Sarai Reader 05, 2005, ‘Turbulence’: Sarai Reader 06', 2006 and 'Frontiers': Sarai Reader 07, 2008. All the Sarai Readers are available for free download at http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/ The Sarai Reader series aims at bringing together original, thoughtful, critical, reflective, well researched and provocative texts and essays and images by writers, scholars, practitioners, photographers, artists and activists, grouped under a core theme that expresses the interests of Sarai in issues that relate to the media, information and society in the contemporary world. The Sarai Readers have a wide readership, both in India and internationally. We also invite proposals to initiate and moderate discussions on the themes of the Sarai Reader 08 on the Reader List (http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list ) with a view to the moderator(s) editing the transcripts of these discussions for publication in the Sarai Reader 08. II. Concepts for Sarai Reader 08: Fear Modernity’s great promise – the freedom from fear - now lies in ruins. One can argue that this vision was always compromised. Modernity (especially in the form that emerged in the west, under capitalism) always hid its own fears, and hid from its own fears: the fear of epidemics, of urban panic, of the homeless multitude and of criminal activity. This led to a drive for transparency: of separating the civic from the criminal, the civilized and the barbaric peoples, the human from the non-human, life and the machine. With the mass slaughters of the twentieth century where more died than ever in recorded human history, this promise lay shattered. Today, the drive for transparency has been rendered doubly difficult, with new mobile populations, new networks, and previously unimagined terrors. Sovereignty seems an antiquated slogan of the past, and in the wake of the financial shocks of 2008, there seems to be some substance in the contention that western capitalism has entered a phase of possibly long-term decline. Today's opacity brings with it a new sense of enduring fear. Not necessarily the terror of sharp and sudden shocks alone, but of the slow mutation of our lives and our times into minefields of uncertainty - personal, social and political. Does anyone any longer trust the weather, the air, the water we drink, the food we eat, the blood that courses through us? And who doesn’t have misgivings about the experts on prime-time television who talk about the trustworthiness of the value of money or the colour of our dreams. Everything, from the small talk that lubricates sociality to the small print that pads contracts, comes laden with disclaimers. While the fear of a world war may have somewhat receded, the perils of rogue nuclear attacks, of a sudden and lethal outbreak of a virus, of flash floods and freak storms, of forest fires and stampedes, of road rage and suicide bombers, of turbulence in the economy and accidents in the air constitute the counterpoint to the confidence of progress. The transmission of fear relies as much on the subtle, almost epidermal contact between human beings as it does on whispers, rumours and panic attacks orchestrated through television and the Internet. The effects of these transmissions are visible in a spectrum of situations and processes, ranging from unstable sentiments in the economy to urban myths about malevolent androids and psychopaths to apocalyptic cults to the robust return of the supernatural in popular culture in the form of new urban horror genres in cinema, gaming and comics. Lacing all this is the salt of terrorism and the so called 'war on terror’ - the two forces that have done more to generate discourses of anxiety on an everyday basis than anything hitherto known or imagined. Fear also generates its own industries, which stretch from medicine and pharmacology to insurance and engineering and architecture to surveillance and security. We use the fear of what we know to insure us from the fear of what we do not, or cannot know. A careful analysis of risk hedges the frontiers of every dream. Sarai Reader 08 is interested in these phenomena as cultural processes. We want to ask how fear and anxiety shape individual and collective dispositions, how lives and social processes are designed and invented around or against them, and what effects they have on politics, economy and life. We are interested in fear as language, as mode of communication, as a way of ordering and rendering the world. We are interested in texts that will look at the transmission, generation and processing of fear on an industrial scale, that will encompass mechanisms designed either to allay or intensify fear or ratchet up and down levels of anxiety or the feeling of security. A broad range of interests could be: 1. The experience of fear as a somatic, epidermal, sensate phenomenon. Fear as experienced in confinement and fear in situations of mass panic, social hysteria, stampedes, riots etc. 2. The relationship between fear and laughter, between fear and the uncanny, between fear and ennui. 3. Anxieties and dangers to do with industrial processes, with machines, with automobiles and aircraft and the fear of accidents 4. Fear as political communication, the relationship between fear, the discourse of security, terrorism and authoritarianism. 5. The popular culture of paranoia in films, television, advertisement and literature. 7. The fear of nature running amok, or the revenge of nature. 8. Fear and foreboding in speculation and economic downturn. 9. The abiding presence of vampires, aliens, ghosts and monsters. 10. How does the design of everything from cities to houses to cars to computers account for fear, risk and the chances of damage? 11. The cultivation of risk, danger and fearlessness in extreme sports, stunts, financial speculation, bravado and cultures of physical and spiritual heroism. 12. The relationship between fear, anger and hatred. 13. Agendas and manifestos, renewing the call for freedom from fear, or anticipating things we should worry about. The form that contributions can take can be varied. We want to invite practitioners and others some of whom may be audacious even as others may be tentative, wherever in the world they may be located, whether they are located in the domains of theory, research, contemporary art, media, information and software design, politics or commentary to join us in Sarai Reader 08. You are invited to contribute through essays, dialogues, arguments, interviews, photographs, image-text combinations, comics, art-works, diary entries, research reports, commentaries and manifestos that can evoke responses to an investigation of fear in all its myriad dimensions. We have always viewed the Sarai Reader as hospitable to new and unprecedented ideas, as a space of refuge where wayward reflections can meet half-forgotten agendas. This is why we see it possible to imagine Sarai Reader 08 as setting the stage for a productive encounter with the demand for an account of the limits, margins and edges of our times. III. Guidelines for Submissions Word Limit: 1000 to 3500 words 1. Submissions may be scholarly, journalistic, or literary - or a mix of these, in the form of essays, papers, interviews, online discussions or diary entries. All submission, unless specifically solicited, must be in English only. 2. Submissions must be sent by email in text, as rtf, or as word document or open office attachments. Images must be in black and white, 300 dpi, and in the tif format. 3.We urge all writers to follow the Chicago Manual of Style, (CMS) in terms of footnotes, annotations and references. For more details about the CMS and an updated list of Frequently Asked Questions, see http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.html For a 'Quick Reference Guide to the Chicago Manual of Style' - especially relevant for citation style, see - http://www.library.wwu.edu/ref/Refhome/chicago.html 4. All contributions must be accompanied by a three/four line text introducing the author, including a working email id. 5. All submissions will be read by the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader 08 before the final selection is made. The editorial collective reserves the right not to publish any material sent to it for publication in the Sarai Reader on stylistic or editorial grounds. All contributors will be informed of the final decisions of the editorial collective vis a vis their contribution. 6. Copyright for all accepted contributions will remain with the authors, but Sarai reserves indefinitely the right to place any of the material accepted for publication on the public domain in print or electronic forms, and on the Internet. 7. Accepted submissions will not be paid for, but authors are guaranteed a wide international readership. The Reader will be published in print, distributed in India and internationally, and will also be uploaded in a pdf form on to the Sarai website. All contributors whose work has been accepted for publication will receive two copies of the Reader. IV. Where and When to send your Contributions Last date for submission of Abstracts by 30th July, 2009. (A brief outline/abstract, not more than one page, of what you want to write about ) Last date of submission of Essays or works by 15th October, 2009. Expect the reader to be published by February 2010. Please send in your outlines and abstracts, and images/graphic material to - 1. (for articles) to Editorial, Sarai Reader 08 2. (for proposals to moderate online discussions on the Reader List) to - Monica Narula, List Administrator, the Reader List 3. (for images and/or graphic material) to Iram Ghufran, Media Lab, Sarai-CSDS -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20090604/811608d6/attachment.html From pranesh at cis-india.org Fri Jun 5 11:57:58 2009 From: pranesh at cis-india.org (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 11:57:58 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] IP and the Working Group on the Right to Development Message-ID: <4785f1e20906042327g7a836089s10e19d836a104dea@mail.gmail.com> Dear All, The Working Group on the Right to Development, a body established by the UN Commission on Human Rights in1998 and whose mandate was continued by the UN Human Rights Council, is looking at the WHO's IGWG and Wipo's Development Agenda. The IP-Watch report talks of the body working towards a better balance between the "needs of industry and the needs of public policy". Do people on this list believe that such a distinction is valid? Can't it be argued that 'IP maximalism' harms industry too, while benefiting a few monopolists / established players? Regards, Pranesh Experts Aim To Balance Intellectual Property Rights And Human Rights By Kaitlin Mara on 15 May 2009 @ 6:05 pm The United Nations human rights framework is being brought to bear on intellectual property law, in the hopes that the weight of expert voices in human rights can lead IP regimes toward a better balance between the needs of industry and the needs of public policy. The Working Group on the Right to Development, an intergovernmental political body, in August 2008 took on the task of examining two intellectual property-related development partnerships that could influence the work of policymakers in at least two UN institutions. The two partnerships are: the World Health Organization (WHO) Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG), and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Development Agenda. The examination is being carried out by a high level-task force, a small team of technical experts that acts at the behest of the working group. The task force was created with the intention of moving right to development discussions beyond political declarations from the working group into concrete progress. The task force held its annual meeting from 1-9 April. The task force secretary is Shyami Puvimanasinghe, from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The coordinator of the unit on the Right to Development at OHCHR is Goro Onojima. The task force has completed an initial review of the IGWG process, which included an independent consultation paper (IPW, United Nations, 3 April 2009 [1]), though it has plans to make a ‘return visit’ in the future to check on ongoing work. Analysis of the Development Agenda is still in the planning phases. The task force is tracking preparations for a conference on IP and global challenges being hosted by WIPO 13-14 July, to see if attending the conference will be useful for its mandate. But to represent the right to development there, the task force must wait for a mandate from the working group, which meets for one week starting 22 June. IP and human rights usually operate on different levels - an IP right is a temporary monopoly; a human right is seen as something universal and never-ending - but they can come into conflict. The critical point with intellectual property rights and human rights, according to Stephen Marks, a public health professor at Harvard University who also chairs the high level task force, lies in resolving the longstanding tension between these two kinds of rights. For example, if patent limits access to new technologies it could be construed to be an obstacle for the realisation of the human right to benefit from scientific progress, said Marks. At the same time, IP has a valuable function in stimulating innovation that leads to that scientific progress, he added. Defining Development: Human Rights Criteria The high level task force is comprised of five experts, currently: Marks, the chair; Nico Schrijver of Leiden University (Netherlands) Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies; Sakiko Fukuda-Parr of the New School (US); Raymond Atuguba of the Law Faculty at the University of Ghana; and Flavia Piovesan of the Faculty of Law at Pontifical Catholic University of São Paolo (Brazil). It also includes international agency observers from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), World Bank, the UN Development Programme, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). It carries out its reviews of development partnerships using a set of criteria [2] [doc, Annex II] for evaluating partnerships. The criteria analyse: structural framework, for example whether a partnership’s institutions contribute to “an enabling environment for sustainable development” or promote good governance; process, for example the promotion of gender equality or provisions for meaningful stakeholder consultation; and outcome, e.g. whether the partnership achieves “improvement in the well-being of populations and all individuals” in accordance with the declaration on the right to development. The task force also has a mandate to draw up a set of “operational sub-criteria” [3] [pdf] that would include more specific, concrete provisions. The work of the task force is submitted to the Working Group on the Right to Development, which takes recommendations from the task force but is not bound by them in making decisions. The criteria are not yet finalised, and information gleaned from the process of analysing partnerships is being used to refine them. The exercise has a deadline of 2010 to come up with a set of final criteria. Future work past the 2010 deadline is an area of contention. A 2007 working group report [4] [pdf] said that future work might “take various forms, including guidelines on the implementation of the right to development, and evolve into a basis for consideration of an international legal standard of a binding nature, through a collaborative process of engagement.” If a legal convention on the right to development were to be formed, the high level task force would likely become the drafting body for international legislation, as it is the expert body on the issue, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. Susan Mathews, who was previously the secretary of the working group, said there are several potential outcomes of this evaluation process. After the working group presents programmes of developmental assistance and other partnerships to the Human Rights Council, the council adopts resolutions endorsing the findings of the working group, providing it legal backing. Alternatively, the criteria of the working group could be adopted as a soft law mechanism, providing guidelines for implementation and perhaps more flexibility than international law as presently interpreted would allow, she said. At the same time, any set of criteria needs to have a practical application. “It is not clear what the future beyond the third phase due to be concluded in 2010 will be, and how the working group will continue its work and whether the task force will continue in this form or take another. However, it is essential that the work done till that date is carried on in some form or it will not have a sustainable, lasting impact or value,” Mathews explained. Sources said that a group of countries from the global South referred to as the Non-Aligned Movement [5] and the Group of African countries would like to see a binding international agreement, in recognition of international obligations and responsibilities pertaining to the right to development. For countries in the Non-Aligned Movement, the right to development has a distinct “international dimension.” With regard to the right to development acquiring legal character, developing countries are the primary actors making the push. Industrialised countries, by contrast, prefer the right to development to fall under the auspices of national governments, and thus have called for more tempered language regarding binding legal norms, according to sources. The human rights paradigm and its values have already begun to shift the world of intellectual property in the health sector, said Marks. The 2001 WTO Doha Declaration on Public Health, which outlines flexibilities in intellectual property rights trade rules that can be used to better serve public health needs, as well as the so-called “paragraph 6” solution which provides further flexibilities aimed at serving countries that lack the manufacturing capacity to produce needed medicines, are both examples of this shift, he added. The June meeting of the working group will indicate the next steps on the intersection of IP and public interest goals for the human rights experts. Categories: English, Features, Human Rights, IP Policies, Patent Policy, Public Health, Themes, United Nations, Venues, WHO Article printed from Intellectual Property Watch: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog URL to article: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2009/05/15/experts-aim-to-balance-intellectual-property-rights-and-human-rights/ URLs in this post: [1] IPW, United Nations, 3 April 2009: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2009/04/03/high-level-task-force-on-human-rights-turns-eye-to-health-and-ip/ [2] set of criteria: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/development/groups/docs/reportHLTF2008.doc [3] has a mandate to draw up a set of “operational sub-criteria”: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/9session/A.HRC.9.17.pdf [4] 2007 working group report: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/development/docs/WGreport2007.pdf [5] Non-Aligned Movement: http://canada.cubanoal.cu/ingles/index.html -- Pranesh Prakash Programme Manager Centre for Internet and Society W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283 From kcpanigrahy at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 12:49:06 2009 From: kcpanigrahy at gmail.com (Krushna Chandra Panigrahy) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 12:49:06 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] =?utf-8?q?=28no_subject=29?= Message-ID: Thanks for your mail.We will do the needfull later.Thanking you. -- K.C. Panigrahy,Directer,TRIBAL MUSEUM Koraput- 764020 Orissa,India -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20090605/10d4b4b6/attachment.html From tariqueata at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 16:14:20 2009 From: tariqueata at gmail.com (Tarique Ata) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 16:14:20 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] [arkitectindia] Chomsky on Obama speech Message-ID: <40b4c7420906060344t64dbe5e1x8bd95cdd979d88a2@mail.gmail.com> *Chomsky: What Obama Didn't Say in His Cairo Address Speaks Volumes About His Mideast Policy* *By Noam Chomsky , AlterNet. Posted June 4, 2009 .* *The U.S. has played a decisive role in sustaining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obama gave no indication that its role should change. * A CNN headline, reporting Obama's plans for his June 4 address in Cairo, Egypt, reads "Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world." Perhaps that captures his intent, but more significant is the content hidden in the rhetorical stance, or more accurately, omitted. Keeping just to Israel-Palestine -- there was nothing substantive about anything else -- Obama called on Arabs and Israelis not to "point fingers" at each other or to "see this conflict only from one side or the other." There is, however, a third side, that of the United States, which has played a decisive role in sustaining the current conflict. Obama gave no indication that its role should change or even be considered. Those familiar with the history will rationally conclude, then, that Obama will continue in the path of unilateral U.S. rejectionism. Obama once again praised the Arab Peace Initiative, saying only that Arabs should see it as "an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities." How should the Obama administration see it? Obama and his advisers are surely aware that the initiative reiterates the longstanding international consensus calling for a two-state settlement on the international (pre-June 1967) border, perhaps with "minor and mutual modifications," to borrow U.S. government usage before it departed sharply from world opinion in the 1970s. That's when the U.S. vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution backed by the Arab "confrontation states" (Egypt, Iran, Syria), and tacitly by the PLO, with the same essential content as the Arab Peace Initiative, except that the latter goes beyond by calling on Arab states to normalize relations with Israel in the context of this political deal. Obama has called on the Arab states to proceed with normalization, studiously ignoring, however, the crucial political settlement that is its precondition. The initiative cannot be a "beginning" if the U.S. continues to refuse to accept its core principles, even to acknowledge them. In the background is the Obama administration's goal, enunciated most clearly by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to forge an alliance of Israel and the "moderate" Arab states against Iran. The term "moderate" has nothing to do with the character of the state, but rather signals its willingness to conform to U.S. demands. What is Israel to do in return for Arab steps to normalize relations? The strongest position so far enunciated by the Obama administration is that Israel should conform to Phase I of the 2003 Road Map, which states: "Israel freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)." All sides claim to accept the Road Map, overlooking the fact that Israel instantly added 14 reservations that render it inoperable. Overlooked in the debate over settlements is that even if Israel were to accept Phase I of the Road Map, that would leave in place the entire settlement project that has already been developed, with decisive U.S. support, to ensure that Israel will take over the valuable land within the illegal "separation wall" (including the primary water supplies of the region), as well as the Jordan Valley, thus imprisoning what is left, which is being broken up into cantons by settlement/infrastructure salients extending far to the east. Unmentioned as well is that Israel is taking over Greater Jerusalem, the site of its major current development programs, displacing many Arabs, so that what remains to Palestinians will be separated from the center of their cultural, economic and sociopolitical life. Also unmentioned is that all of this is in violation of international law, as conceded by the government of Israel after the 1967 conquest, and reaffirmed by Security Council resolutions and the International Court of Justice. Also unmentioned are Israel's successful operations since 1991 to separate the West Bank from Gaza, since turned into a prison where survival is barely possible, further undermining the hopes for a viable Palestinian state. It is worth remembering that there has been one break in U.S.-Israeli rejectionism. President Clinton recognized that the terms he had offered at the failed 2000 Camp David meetings were not acceptable to any Palestinians, and in December, proposed his "parameters," vague but more forthcoming. He then announced that both sides had accepted the parameters, although both had reservations. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met in Taba, Egypt, to iron out the differences, and made considerable progress. A full resolution could have been reached in a few more days, they announced in their final joint press conference. But Israel called off the negotiations prematurely, and they have not been formally resumed. The single exception indicates that if an American president is willing to tolerate a meaningful diplomatic settlement, it can very likely be reached. It is also worth remembering that the George W. Bush administration went a bit beyond words in objecting to illegal Israeli settlement projects, namely, by withholding U.S. economic support for them. In contrast, Obama administration officials stated that such measures are "not under discussion," and that any pressures on Israel to conform to the Road Map will be "largely symbolic," the *New York Times* reported (Helene Cooper, June 1). There is more to say, but it does not relieve the grim picture that Obama has been painting, with a few extra touches in his widely heralded address to the Muslim World in Cairo on June 4. [image: Quantcast] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20090606/2a0a2d21/attachment-0001.html From kcpanigrahy at gmail.com Sun Jun 7 13:49:13 2009 From: kcpanigrahy at gmail.com (Krushna Chandra Panigrahy) Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 13:49:13 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] comman law Message-ID: Dear sir, Please send your e-journal regularly. -- K.C. Panigrahy,Directer,TRIBAL MUSEUM Koraput- 764020 Orissa,India -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20090607/b1cbd249/attachment.html From pranesh at cis-india.org Mon Jun 8 15:04:05 2009 From: pranesh at cis-india.org (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 15:04:05 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Fwd: What has copyright to do with democracy? In-Reply-To: <9957c3710906062355l65425118q972f30488d6fe184@mail.gmail.com> References: <4a29d61f.121abc0a.7d91.27b9SMTPIN_ADDED@mx.google.com> <9957c3710906062355l65425118q972f30488d6fe184@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4785f1e20906080234y429427bcw1c1349e9e4023dcb@mail.gmail.com> Dear All, Here is an interesting discussion that is taking place on nettime. I wonder what people on this list make of it. Cheers, Pranesh -- Pranesh Prakash Programme Manager Centre for Internet and Society W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283 Forwarded conversation Subject: What has copyright to do with democracy? ------------------------ From: *Karl-Erik Tallmo* Date: Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 06:24 To: nettime-l at kein.org In view of recent debates, not the least those in Sweden, I wrote this article about the democratic aspects of copyright legislation. Many people today claim that copyright and democracy are incompatible concepts, that copyright infringes the privacy of readers and other cultural consumers etc. I believe it is not that simplistic: >What has copyright to do with democracy? > >Abstract: The debates on whether or not copyright and democracy are >compatible concepts are not new. It has been discussed since the >1700s and concerns a form of separation of powers. Copyright is a >monopoly, but at the same time, when copyright came, it was a strike >at another form of monopoly, the printers' rights, with their roots >in the guild system. Copyright could not occur until censorship was >abolished, and it can actually be seen as a complement to the >freedom of expression. Copyright was early associated with privacy >issues. However, if proportionality is not followed in the >maintenance of law, both integrity and freedom of expression could >be threatened. This text is part of the annual book "For or Against the Citizenry: Power sharing", which is published for the third time by the democracy study group D2D. It is available free of charge on the web. Read the whole article at: http://www.nisus.se/archive/090525e.html Karl-Erik Tallmo -- __________________________________________________________________ KARL-ERIK TALLMO, Swedish writer, artist and journalist. ARTICLES: http://www.nisus.se/archive/artiklar.html BLOG: http://slowfox.wordpress.com IN ENGLISH: http://slowfox.wordpress.com/category/in-english/ __________________________________________________________________ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime at kein.org ---------- From: *Heiko Recktenwald* Date: Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 15:12 To: nettime-l at kein.org Good question, I asked the same, when I read some remarks claiming a connection. IMHO is is plain nonsense! Your argument that copyright is a monopoly is weak. You could say the same about property. Property as a monopoly against thieves. Both are absolute rights against everybody In contrast to contracts that give rights against certain people only. And that printers had such a monopoly is weak as well. Printers did what they wanted. As a matter of fact. Like thieves and users of P2P networks worldwide do what they want. But rights may be weak as well in certain situations. When you dont secure your bicycle in certain parts of some towns thieves may come and steal it. People may not care about your copyright as well. Copyright is usefull in the internet too, see Google v. the publishers, but the enforcement is rather difficult. It is fun to have a library of mp3s. And unlike bicicles that are still expensiv mp3s cost nothing to produce as far as copying is concerned. Nobody believes the arguments of the music industry when it comes to mp3s from the 70s, oldies. The catalogue of the internet is much bigger than the catalogue. In the case of google books as well. Copyright is more or less just disapearing in certain cases in the times of the internet by what people actually do. But this is anarchy, not democracy. The natural status according to Hobbes. I would not even call it a revolution. A revolution is some new law, here we have nothing. The most interesting part in that game play the mp3-search-engines and organisers of catalogues like Piratebay. Search engines may sell their result and Piratebay is an open invitation to detectives to find out what certain people that really exist have on their harddrive. Search engines and Piratebay etc are hard organisations in a soft game. I would boycott boths, well, P2P does not work without, but I boycott P2P as well. Servers like, you know the names, are hard organisations as well, but they dont serve such a clear purpose and this is their strenght. All you need is google and your brain. H. Karl-Erik Tallmo schrieb: <...> ---------- From: *Novica Nakov* Date: Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 12:25 To: nettime-l at kein.org Here is an interesting talk about the same topic: http://blip.tv/file/981403 Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, talks about the rise and success of pirates and why pirates are necessary in today’s politics. He’ll also outline the next steps in the pirates’ strategy to change global copyright laws. The fight against copyright aggression tends to focus on economic aspects of the shift to a networked economy. Falkvinge explains how this conflict is much more important: the fight against the copyright regime is about the right to fundamental civil liberties—down to the postal secret, whistleblower protection, freedom of the press, and the basic pillars of democracy itself. From O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo, Santa Clara, CA, April 16, 2008. -- Novica -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20090608/0105a464/attachment.html From nicheant at gmail.com Wed Jun 10 02:40:26 2009 From: nicheant at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?TmlzaGFudCB8IOCkqOCkv+CktuCkvuCkgeCkpA==?=) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:40:26 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] 'The Wikipedia Revolution' In-Reply-To: <4439ee330906091404y486e39f0sdefff9ebad90c3b2@mail.gmail.com> References: <4439ee330906091404y486e39f0sdefff9ebad90c3b2@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4439ee330906091410p5b579c13h49d58640c0dc3508@mail.gmail.com> Like Boiling a Frog David Runciman Review of 'The Wikipedia Revolution' by Andrew Lih The best one-volume encyclopedia in the world used to be the Columbia Encyclopedia, first published by Columbia University Press in 1935. In our house we have the fifth edition, from 1993, and we still get it out occasionally to look up kings and queens and old-fashioned stuff like that. It’s a lovely book, fat but portable and full of nuggety little entries on most things you can think of. It also has quite a poignant preface, in which the editors talk about the difficulties of updating an encyclopedia in such a fast-changing world: they note how much history, politics, even geography they have had to revise since the collapse of the Soviet Empire just a couple of years earlier. They are clearly proud of their efforts to keep up to speed, but some things inevitably slip through the net. There are for example no entries for ‘email’, the ‘World Wide Web’ or the ‘internet’, all of which were just beginning to attract attention in 1993. The editors think the pace of change at the end of the 20th century means that traditional works of reference are going to have a hard time keeping up. Really they have no idea. 1993 wasn’t so long ago; Bill Clinton was president, a fact that the Columbia editors boast about having been able to include at the last moment (the last moment here meaning the weeks or months between the book’s being set and its arriving in the shops or in the hands of door-to-door salesmen). Yet in encyclopedia publishing, 1993 is now prehistory. Even 2000, when a sixth – one has to presume final – edition of the Columbia appeared, belongs to another age. Two years later, a one-time market analyst called Jimmy Wales started up an experimental online project called Wikipedia, which allowed volunteers to create their own encyclopedia entries that could then be revised or even entirely rewritten by anyone else who happened to be logged on. Wales, like everyone else involved in the project, didn’t know if it would work, but since the technology was available it seemed worth a try. In its first year, Wikipedia generated 20,000 articles, and had acquired 200 regular volunteers working to add more (this compares with the 55,000 articles in the Columbia, all subject to rigorous standards of editing and fact-checking, though this in itself was a small-scale enterprise compared to the behemoths of the industry like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, whose 1989 edition covered 400,000 different topics). By the end of 2002, the number of entries on Wikipedia had more than doubled. But it was only in 2003, once it became apparent that there was nothing to stop it continuing to double in size (which is what it did), that Wikipedia started to attract attention outside the small tech-community that had noticed its launch. In early 2004, there were 188,000 articles; by 2006, 895,000. In 2007 there were signs that the pace of growth might start to level off, and only in 2008 did it begin to look like the numbers might be stabilising. The English-language version of Wikipedia currently has more than 2,870,000 entries, a number that has increased by 500,000 over the last 12 months. However, the English-language version is only one of more than 250 different versions in other languages. German, French, Italian, Polish, Dutch and Japanese Wikipedia all have more than half a million entries each, with plenty of room to add. Xhosa Wikipedia currently has 110. Meanwhile, theEncyclopaedia Britannica had managed to increase the number of its entries from 400,000 in 1989 to 700,000 by 2007. Part of the reason the astonishing growth of Wikipedia took even its founders by surprise was that this wasn’t their first attempt to set up an online encyclopedia. Wikipedia was an offshoot of something called Nupedia, which Wales had established in 2000 with the aim of using online volunteers to produce a new work of reference that would be free to use. The mistake Wales and his Nupedia collaborators made was to assume that any encyclopedia has to go through a formal editing process if it’s going to be reliable. Editors were appointed whose job was to decide on appropriate topics, open them up to online editing and then approve final versions once an agreed standard had been met. The editing process had seven stages from ‘assignment’ to ‘mark-up’, and was a slow, frustrating and ultimately fruitless business. By the end of the first year about two dozen articles had been completed, while the drafts of a few hundred more were still being fretted over. It looked like the vast additional resources and manpower that the internet had made available for checking reference books was going to overwhelm the capacities of anyone trying to process the information. Hence the Wikipedia solution, stumbled on more by chance than by design: don’t try to process the information. It is generally assumed that what is distinctive about Wikipedia is that it is open to anyone to contribute, but that was true of Nupedia too. Wikipedia is different in that it doesn’t try to frame the creation of new entries with commissioned beginnings and fixed endpoints. It is open to anyone to initiate an entry on Wikipedia, and no entry is ever formally closed, since it is also open to anyone to keep editing and altering whatever is already there. Wikipedia still uses a large volunteer army of editors and ‘janitors’ to oversee the whole process, looking out for flagrant abuses and sounding the alarm when disputes get out of hand. But it is not the job of any editor to decide what counts as an entry. If there is any doubt about whether something is too trivial to take up space even in so limitless a space as Wikipedia it is put to the vote of others users (and any vote can always be overturned by another vote further down the line); otherwise, if you don’t like an entry it is up to you to change it. The editors are there to try to ensure this is done in as non-abusive a way as possible. But it is not up to anyone to call time on anything. That’s how it works. The puzzle is why it works, given that this way of compiling an encyclopedia seems to have a flaw so obvious it is hardly worth stating: if no entry is ever nailed down, how do you know when you are reading an entry that someone hasn’t just interfered with it, making it thoroughly unreliable? The early years of Wikipedia were dogged by this suspicion, and many people – including a lot of schoolteachers and university lecturers who could remember the distant days before 2002 when books were books and editors actually edited – were openly derisive of a work of reference that appeared to make no effort to discriminate between good information and bad. It is easy to assume that some version of Gresham’s Law, which states that bad money will always drive out good, must apply to the circulation of facts as well. Why would anyone with good information want to put it in a place where bad information could contaminate it at the touch of a button? Wouldn’t they choose to keep it to themselves, or at the very least give it to someone who could recognise its true value, leaving open-access encyclopedias to the mercies of all the flakes and grudge-bearers who want to use its veneer of objectivity to force their craziness down other people’s throats? Well, the answer is apparently not. One of the remarkable achievements of Wikipedia is to show that on the internet Gresham’s Law can work in reverse: Wikipedia has turned into a relatively reliable source of information on the widest possible range of subjects because, on the whole, the good drives out the bad. When someone sabotages or messes with an otherwise sound entry, there are plenty of people out there who see it as their job to undo the damage, often within seconds of its happening. It turns out that the people who believe in truth and objectivity are at least as numerous as all the crazies, pranksters and time-wasters, and they are often considerably more tenacious, ruthless and monomaniacal. On Wikipedia, it’s the good guys who will hunt you down. Wales thinks this tells us something surprising and reassuring about human nature. ‘Generally we find most people out there on the Internet are good,’ he says. ‘It’s one of the wonderful humanitarian discoveries in Wikipedia that most people only want to help us and build this free, non-profit, charitable resource.’ But in truth it’s a bit more complicated than that. Wikipedia works because it is highly distinctive in the way it pulls knowledge together from many different sources. Most Internet-based techniques for gathering information are aggregative, in that they try to pool as much information as possible, allowing all the prejudices and random bits of disinformation that attach to individual opinions to cancel each other out. This is true of the many different kinds of polling that take place on the internet, which use the wisdom of crowds to produce answers far more accurate than any individual can give. It’s also pretty much what happens at Google, where everybody else’s searches are monitored to help filter the information that you might find useful. Aggregative methods minimise personal responsibility for what is produced and place all the emphasis on collective outcomes – after all, who knows, or cares, what their own Google searches are adding to the sum of knowledge (or subtracting from it)? However, Wikipedia’s approach to knowledge gathering is not aggregative but cumulative. It builds up information bit by bit, edit by edit, and it never stops. It also leaves a virtual paper trail for every entry, so that it is possible to trace the various steps by which an article has reached its current form. When knowledge is generated by crowds, no single individual has much personal responsibility for what is produced, but nor does any one person have a realistic prospect of shaping the outcome. With Wikipedia, the opposite is true. The fact that there is no final version means that anyone can change anything, but it also means that every given change can be attributed to a particular individual. Though it is possible, and common, to make edits on Wikipedia anonymously (by hiding behind a nickname), it is still true that someone is always responsible for everything that happens, and that someone always knows who they are. So the fact that there are no authoritative versions on Wikipedia is what makes it possible to generate a sense of personal accountability for particular entries, since any entry at any given time is the responsibility of the last person to edit it. This seems to be enough to make most people want to get it right. But it also means that those who don’t want to get it right can have their mistakes corrected. The secret to Wikipedia’s success lies in the fact that personal responsibility for particular mistakes can’t be erased, but the mistakes themselves can be. Still, it takes a lot of policing. Wikipedia has a ‘Recent Changes Patrol’ whose job is to surf the site picking up on all the endless obscenities and absurdities that are inserted by people who can’t believe a website would allow anyone to change any page on it (when they discover that they can, but that changes quickly get corrected, the fun wears off). More serious tinkering requires more concerted oversight. From its outset Wikipedia has aimed to operate according to a code of conduct (of which the centrepiece is the proposition that ‘Wikipedia has a neutral point of view’), but to dispense with firm rules. However, in 2004, the three revert rule (‘3RR’) was introduced in order to prevent tit-for-tat battles, whereby corrections are corrected back to their original form (known as ‘reverts’), then corrected back again, and so on, because two contributors cannot agree on a single point of view. The classic case concerned the entry for Gdansk. The name of the town was changed by a German contributor to Danzig, then by a Polish contributor back to Gdansk, then back to Danzig, with no sign of this stopping until the administrators intervened. The 3RR states: ‘An editor must not perform more than three reverts, in whole or in part, on a single page within a 24-hour period.’ Just three changes per 24 hours in a work of reference might seem absurdly fluid by traditional standards, but for Wikipedia this was a draconian measure, adopted with deep reluctance by some. Even so, the Gdansk/Danzig wars were only finally settled when the matter was put to a vote of the wider Wikipedia community, and it was agreed that the town could be referred to as Danzig in relation to the period between 1308 and 1945, and in the biographies of ‘clearly German persons’; otherwise it was to be Gdansk. It took two years of back and forth to reach this point: a traditional encyclopedia editor could have settled it in ten minutes. Nevertheless, the consensus position on the name appears to have stuck, which given the history of Gdansk/Danzig is no small achievement. That Wikipedia represents a finely calibrated balance between licence and surveillance, and between anonymity and responsibility, is something often missed by those who want to translate its achievements elsewhere. It is not an easy model to replicate. One notorious failure came in 2005, when the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times decided to experiment with a ‘wikitorial’, which would allow anyone to contribute to the writing of an editorial column using the same techniques as a Wikipedia entry. The aim was to let readers shape the views expressed by the newspaper; the result was a complete mess, as the entire process was hijacked by vandals determined either to skew the political slant of the piece, or to overwhelm the Times editorial page with the sort of shock images in which the internet abounds, and the project was quickly abandoned. The newspaper had made two mistakes. First, its editors seemed to imagine that a wikitorial would edit itself, so they left it alone while they devoted themselves to other things (like editing ‘real’ columns). But as Wikipedia shows, freedom requires constant vigilance, and a column will write itself only if someone is on hand to fight off all the people who will try to wreck it. Second, a newspaper editorial is actually a much less open-ended form of writing than an encyclopedia entry. Newspaper writing has a shelf-life: it appears and is read at a particular time, often on a particular day. As a result, contributors have an incentive to try to skew the whole process at the moment of maximum impact. The Wikipedia principle that all mistakes can be corrected (so that it is hardly worth trying to introduce them) has much less force in the case of newspapers, because by the time any corrections have been made most readers will have moved on. This is why encyclopedias have been made better by the advent of the internet, but newspapers have been made worse: the cumulative impact of the readers’ comments that can now be appended online to almost any article tends to diminish most forms of human understanding. Bias is not cancelled out on the readers’ pages of newspaper websites, as might happen if opinion were being aggregated, but nor is it eliminated over time, as in the case of Wikipedia. Instead, each contribution just sits there, glowering back at you, demanding your attention. I recently read through the hundreds of comments that Guardian readers had attached to an article about Julie Myerson, the novelist who wrote about her drug-addicted son and sparked a wave of middle-class outrage and voyeuristic delight. What was striking was not just the anger of all those who wanted to see the Myersons suffer horribly for their crimes, but the equivalent anger of all those who were disgusted by such vindictiveness, and the anger of the people who were appalled by the prissiness of that response, and the anger of the people who couldn’t believe anyone would waste their time caring about this rubbish, and on, and on. Everyone was furious with everyone else, and determined not to be shouted down. No one with a reasonable point of view would bother wasting it on a site like this. When tempers are frayed, and time horizons are short, the bad drives out the good. One of the ironic consequences of the open-endedness of the Wikipedia editorial process is that many of its articles are preoccupied with the immediate past. The desire to update the facts about any given subject often means that the facts that remain are the most up-to-date ones. Biographical entries on living individuals tend to concentrate on the most recent things they have done, particularly if these have generated a lot of newsprint that can be used as source material. For an encyclopedia, Wikipedia devotes far too much space to the latest scandals and controversies, whose significance, if any, is impossible to gauge. But this is not a reflection of some desire on the part of the founders of Wikipedia to stir up interest by courting topicality and trivia. Far from it: it reflects an almost touching reverence for properly grounded evidence that underlies the entire Wikipedia project. Although anyone can edit anything in Wikipedia, everything that appears there is supposed to carry a reference to some published source so that it can be checked by other readers. The Wikipedia policy on this is as follows: The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth – that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true. Editors should provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged, or the material may be removed. The proliferation of newspaper sources on the internet means that this is often the best place to look for new, verifiable source material (particularly if you are not too bothered about truth). Most of the information out there is recent information, and so therefore is most of what winds up on Wikipedia. The insistence that everything in Wikipedia can be referred to something outside itself stems from an anxiety that the encyclopedia might otherwise become its own source material, and start to generate free-floating facts out of nothing. One of the many fascinating details to emerge from Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution is that both Jimmy Wales and one of his first collaborators, Larry Sanger, are self-confessed and totally earnest ‘objectivists’, meaning followers of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Sanger wrote his doctoral thesis at Ohio State University under the title ‘Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification’. He and Wales first encountered each other on an internet forum Wales had established in 1992, which offered a ‘Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy’ and described itself as ‘the most scholarly of all Objectivist discussions available on the networks’. Other early contributors to Wikipedia learned about its existence through the community of online objectivists, and it was this bond as much as anything that drove the project forward in its initial stages. What is objectivism? Frankly, I have no idea. I have never read a word by Ayn Rand, and though I know she is an object of veneration in some surprising places (Alan Greenspan, for instance, is a fan), the little bits I have picked up always sounded a bit bonkers to me.* So this seemed a good test of Wikipedia’s much vaunted NPOV (neutral point of view): I would look her up on Wales and Sanger’s encyclopedia to find out what she’s all about. Well, it’s hard to express in mere words just how dispiriting an experience it is trying to find out about objectivism on Wikipedia. This isn’t because the entries seem biased or uncritical. It is just that they are so introverted, boring and just long. The entry on Ayn Rand herself is more than 8000 words long and covers her views on everything from economics to homosexuality in technical and mind-numbing detail. There are separate lengthy entries on objectivist metaphysics, objectivist epistemology, objectivist politics, objectivist ethics, plus entries on all Rand’s various books, including the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and entries on all the characters in these novels, and entries that offer plot summaries of these novels, and even entries on individual chapters. All of it reads as though it has been worked over far too much, and like any form of writing that is overcooked it alienates the reader by appearing to be closed off in its own private world of obsession and anxiety. Compare this with the entry on Rand in the 1993 Columbia Encyclopedia: 1905-82, American writer, b. St Petersburg, Russia. She came to the United States in 1926 and worked for many years as a screenwriter. Her novels are romantic and dramatic, and they espouse a philosophy of rational self-interest that opposes the collective of the modern welfare state. Her best-known novels include The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). In The New Intellectual (1961) she summarised her philosophy, which she called ‘objectivism’. That’s it (with a couple of references appended), and seems admirably clear in 70 words. Also, by allocating her 70 words, the Columbia editors give some indication of what they think she’s worth: on the same page she gets more space than the French architect Joseph Jacques Ramée (1764-1842) and the Swiss novelist Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947), but fewer words than the French historian and politician Alfred Nicolas Rambaud (1842-1905), the Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) and the Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay (1852-1916). That also seems pretty clear. Wikipedia still has its advantages, however. Despairing of discovering anything about Rand that I could make sense of, I looked up the article on Jimmy Wales, to see if that shed any light on his personal philosophy. This article is also long, but more reasonably so, given that Wales is responsible for one of the most significant inventions of the 21st century. It is also admirably even-handed, managing to convey that Wales is both something of a visionary and also something of a creep. The section on his personal life includes this detail, which neither he nor anyone else has seen fit to edit: ‘His first wife, Pam, was quoted in a September 2008 W magazine article as saying that Wales, because he believed altruism was evil, discouraged her from pursuing a nursing degree when they were married.’ The entry also details the break-up of Wales’s second marriage and the claims of a subsequent girlfriend, the Canadian conservative columnist Rachel Marsden, that she only discovered he was ending his relationship with her by reading about it on Wikipedia. I guess that’s ‘objectivism’ for you. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wales has long since fallen out with Sanger, re-editing his Wikipedia entry to remove any reference to him as a co-founder of the project, even though both men were there from the beginning. But it may be Sanger’s PhD title that gives the clearest indication of some of the difficulties that lie ahead. ‘Epistemic circularity’ is a fancy way of saying that Wikipedia could prove too successful for its own good. This is not because entries on the site are likely to start cannibalising each other and end up reducing the whole thing to a relativistic soup: Wikipedia is still very good at distinguishing cross-references within the site from source material outside it. Instead, the problem may come as the source material itself starts to ape the wiki-model. Already, academic publishers are grappling with the problem of open access, which makes increasing numbers of academic articles freely available on the web (‘free’ here meaning not only free to use but also free to dice, slice and reproduce in another format). Some of the pressure for this move is coming from the people who fund academic research and who want to see it disseminated as widely as possible. But a number of funding bodies (particularly in the sciences) are also questioning whether it makes sense to wait until research is ‘completed’ before publishing it. Why not put earlier draft versions out there, or even just the initial raw data, and let others see what they can make of it? This opens up the possibility of collaborative editing online: authors might ‘publish’ draft versions of their books and readers could tinker with them to produce something they are happy with. Of course, the idea of the permanently updatable book raises the prospect of nightmarish copyright issues (or more likely the end of copyright altogether), and it is hardly attractive for academic publishers, since it cuts off their most obvious revenue stream, which has always been to charge for the finished product, properly edited in-house. It also raises difficulties for the idea of verifiability. Wikipedia needs its source material to be relatively stable, so that its entries can have fixed reference points. But if the reference points are themselves subject to endless change, then it becomes much harder to know what counts as verification. Meanwhile, as conventional publishing starts to open up to the Wikipedia way of doing things, the encyclopedia is toying with a revert back to more conventional methods. German Wikipedia has started experimenting with ‘flagged’ articles, which means articles that have been certified as reliable and free from vandalism, to meet a demand for certainty from German users. (Incidentally, this is not the only international variation in Wikipedia practice that seems to conform to national stereotypes: on Japanese Wikipedia, editors are much more reluctant than their Western counterparts to alter existing pages and prefer to conduct their exchanges on adjoining discussion sites rather than blithely interfering with what someone else has written.) The German experiment has now led to a demand for approved articles to be published separately on a static website protected from editing, in order to give readers the option of something that has been pre-verified. The question of ‘flagging’ is one of the issues discussed in the afterword of Lih’s book, which addresses the most pressing challenges Wikipedia is likely to face in the future. Other concerns include the creation of a fully-paid executive staff, something that may cause serious divisions in an organisation that relies so heavily on voluntary labour; the risk of a major lawsuit by someone who has been libelled in a Wikipedia entry (the fact that anyone can remove the offending information doesn’t prevent them from trying to sue, though it isn’t clear who would be liable – the person who introduced the libel or the last person to edit the page on which it appears?); and the increasing complexity of the editing software, which is putting off many new contributors. More interesting than any of this, though, is the fact that the afterword was written as a wiki: that is, as a collaborative exercise using software similar to that of the encyclopedia itself, and made available to be freely copied and distributed. It is good of Lih to include it, since it is somewhat better written than the rest of the book, having a tighter style and a sharper focus. The single-authored chapters are full of interest but rather indulgent, containing too much incidental detail about people Lih wants to please. The afterword has none of that – it just gets to the point, and doesn’t worry about offending anybody. It helps that this is a book, so space is limited, and this particular wiki can’t indulge in the commonest vice of entries on Wikipedia, which is not knowing when to stop. Yet even a piece of writing that has been edited by so many people can’t resist the occasional cliché. The multiple authors of the afterword write: ‘The Wikipedia community might be like the frog slowly boiling to death – unaware of the building crisis, because it is not aware how much its environment has slowly changed.’ When I read this, I thought: is it really true that frogs can be slowly boiled to death without realising what’s happening to them? So I looked it up on Wikipedia, confident that there would be an entry. There is: type in ‘boiling frog’ and you go straight to a page that tells you everything you need to know. It gives you examples of the use of the term, its history and a discussion of the veracity of the central idea, including a description of the late 19th-century experiment in which it was first demonstrated and the more recent experiments that have cast doubt on it. Links at the bottom of the page take you to accounts of these later experiments in scientific journals, which suggest that the whole thing is a myth. So there it is: you won’t find any of this in the Columbia, or Encyclopaedia Britannica, or anywhere else for that matter. There is no other way I could have found out about boiling frogs – truly, for all its flaws, Wikipedia is a wonderful thing. [David Runciman teaches politics at Cambridge. He is the author of Pluralism and the Personality of the State, The Politics of Good Intentions and Political Hypocrisy.] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n10/runc01_.html From skoost at skoost.com Sun Jun 14 18:07:13 2009 From: skoost at skoost.com (Krushna Chandra Panigrahy) Date: 14 Jun 2009 12:37:13 +0000 Subject: [Commons-Law] A little gift - Krushna Message-ID: <20090614123600.49F66C3379@skoismta08.skoost.com> Krushna Chandra Panigrahy belongs to Skoost and sent you a little gift. Click below to collect your gift: http://uk.skoost.com/fun?commons%2Dlaw%40sarai%2Enet/19146124/4 P.S. This is a safe and innocent gift that Krushna Chandra Panigrahy sent from Skoost, the free goodies website. This e-mail was sent to commons-law at sarai.net on 6/13/2009 2:15:51 PM on behalf of Krushna Chandra Panigrahy (kcpanigrahy at gmail.com) From siddharth.narrain at gmail.com Mon Jun 15 20:58:41 2009 From: siddharth.narrain at gmail.com (siddharth narrain) Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:58:41 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Announcing the Bengaluru Pride and Karnataka Queer Habba '09 In-Reply-To: <52cddec0906150800u48c8b785w5e6e5a4140c58b02@mail.gmail.com> References: <52cddec0906150800u48c8b785w5e6e5a4140c58b02@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1773a06d0906150828l2e0c7ebei5bf26d74ffca795a@mail.gmail.com> *Bengaluru to Celebrate Queer Pride for the Second Time* **After last year’s successful and vibrant queer pride march, which saw over 600 people celebrating and affirming queer lives in Bengaluru alone, Karnataka is gearing up for its second edition christened Karnataka Queer Habba. This year we as individuals and organisations, under the banner of Campaign for Sex-workers and Sexual Minorities Rights (CSMR), have decided to extend the festivities to a week beginning with a cricket match on June 21st and culminating with the pride march on June 28th. Come celebrate along with us as Bangalore’s LGBTQ community paints the town pink on the*28th June 2009 *. Like last year, this time too the pride march will begin at National College, Basavanagudi at 2:00 p.m and go up to Puttanachetty Town Hall via Sajjan Rao Circle and Minerva Circle and will culminate with a series of speeches as we gather on the Town Hall steps. Actress and theatre personality Arundhati Nag will address the celebration at the end of the march. After the success of last year’s pride we have decided to host an even bigger event christened “Karnataka Queer Habba” this year. As a run up to this year’s Pride March we will be hosting *a week of events *across the city. The events will include: *“Queering the Pitch”: Cricket Match* - When : Sunday, June 21st, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. - Where : RBANMS Play Ground, Gangadhar Chetty Road, Ulsoor. - Contact : Gurukiran 98803 65692 or Sunil 99450 90301 *Dalit-Sexual Minorities Dialogue on Stigma and Discrimination* - When : Monday, June 22nd, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. - Where : Indian Social Institute (ISI), 24 Benson Road - Contact : Manohar 96322 23460 *Release of Human Rights Watch Report - This Alien Legacy: The Origins of “Sodomy” Laws in British Colonialism **-** followed by a discussion **“**Laws that Terrorise: Threats to Indian Democracy**”* - When : Tuesday, June 23rd, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. - Where : Institute of Agricultural Technologies (IAT), Queens Road. - Contact : Arvind 99800 10933 *Pirat Dyke Film Screening of One in Ten and Desert Hearts*** - When : Wednesday, June 24th, 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. - Where : Swabhava Office, 4th Floor, No. 1., M.S. Plaza, 13th A Cross, 4th Main Road, Sampangiramnagar (opposite Sampangiramnagar Police Station) - Contact : Nitya 99164 82928 *Public Discussion on Religion and Sexuality* - When : Thursday, June 25th, 4:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. - Where : United Theological College (UTC), Millers Road - Contact : Shubha 92434 46105* * *Evening of Theatre and Dance Performance* - When : Friday, June 26th, 4:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. - Where : St. Josephs College of Commerce auditorium - Contact : Sumati 98451 65143 *Story Telling Sessions* - When : Saturday, June 27th, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. - Where : Cubbon Park - Contact : Deepak 93437 63497 * * *Bengaluru Pride 2009*** - When : *Sunday, June 28th*, 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. - Where : National College Basavanagudi to Puttanachetty Town Hall via Sajjan Rao Circle, Minerva Circle and J.C. Road - Contact : Siddharth 98450 01168 ; Nithin 98860 81269 or Umesh 98457 91850 Email: bengalurupride at gmail.com Website: www.bengalurupride.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20090615/53a62892/attachment-0001.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 7306 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20090615/53a62892/attachment-0001.jpe -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Press Note.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 192213 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20090615/53a62892/attachment-0001.pdf From pranesh at cis-india.org Thu Jun 18 11:37:16 2009 From: pranesh at cis-india.org (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:37:16 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Japan outlaws downloading of copyright-infringing files, even if for personal use Message-ID: <4A39D994.50209@cis-india.org> Some disturbing news from Mike Masnick of Techdirt: Plenty of countries have reasonably pointed out that the entire point behind copyright laws was to protect again commercial for-profit copying -- and thus, private, non-commercial personal use copying really shouldn't be covered by copyright laws. Of course, for an entertainment industry hell-bent on filing lawsuits against people rather than adapting to the marketplace, this is a serious, serious problem. So, the recording industry has been lobbying hard in any country that carves out an exception for private copying, trying to make it illegal. Unfortunately, it appears they've won in Japan. A new copyright law has been passed that [1]specifically says that private, non-commercial copying is infringing (via [2]Cybeardjm). This really isn't all that surprising, given that Japan has also been pushed on [3]copyright extension and a recent court ruling found that [4]uploading your own content for personal storage could be infringement. Still, it's yet another victory for entertainment industry lobbyists who will do anything possible to pass laws to protect old business models. [1] http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3iecfa450e38f03b7755419a073c71750d [2] http://twitter.com/cybeardjm/statuses/2195784230 [3] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071106/182419.shtml [4] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070529/005749.shtml From Billboard: [snip] The new statute will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2010 but contains several caveats that raise the question of how it will be enforced. The user must be aware that the files were illegally uploaded and the new law does not stipulate any fine or jail term for contravening it. [/snip] -- Pranesh Prakash Programme Manager Centre for Internet and Society W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 260 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20090618/c7ccfeb3/attachment.bin From pranesh at cis-india.org Thu Jun 18 16:51:56 2009 From: pranesh at cis-india.org (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:51:56 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Dodgy piracy statistic (again!) in the UK Message-ID: <4A3A2354.9020909@cis-india.org> An excellent piece by Ben Goldacre tracing the damned lies and statistics behind the recent spate of music piracy figures in the UK. Series: Bad science Illegal downloads and dodgy figures Ben Goldacre guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 June 2009 23.09 BST You are killing our creative industries. "Downloading costs billions," said the Sun. "MORE than 7 million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, government advisers said today. Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material." That's about a tenth of our GDP. No wonder the Daily Mail was worried too: "The network had 1.3 million users sharing files online at midday on a weekday. If each of those downloaded just one file per day, this would amount to 4.73bn items being consumed for free every year." Now I am always suspicious of this industry, because they have produced a lot of dodgy figures over the years. I also doubt that every download is lost revenue since, for example, people who download more also buy more music. I'd like more details. So where do these notions of so many billions in lost revenue come from? I found the original report. It was written by some academics you can hire in a unit at UCL called Ciber, the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (which "seeks to inform by countering idle speculation and uninformed opinion with the facts"). The report was commissioned by a government body called Sabip, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property. On the billions lost it says: "Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10bn (IP rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs." What is the origin of this conservative figure? I hunted down the full Ciber documents, found the references section, and followed the web link, which led to a 2004 press release from a private legal firm called Rouse who specialise in intellectual property law. This press release was not about the £10bn figure. It was, in fact, a one-page document, which simply welcomed the government setting up an intellectual property theft strategy. In a short section headed "background", among five other points, it says: "Rights owners have estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and piracy cost the UK economy £10bn and 4,000 jobs." An industry estimate, as an aside, in a press release. Genius. But what about all these other figures in the media coverage? Lots of it revolved around the figure of 4.73bn items downloaded each year, worth £120bn. This means each downloaded item, software, movie, mp3, ebook, is worth about £25. This already seems rather high. I am not an economist, but to me, for example, an appropriate comparator for someone who downloads a film to watch it once might be the rental value, not the sale value. In any case, that's £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the economy, as reported in the press? Plenty will have been schoolkids, or students, and even if not, that's still about a third of the average UK wage. Before tax. Oh, but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473m items and £12bn (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist. I asked what steps they took to notify journalists of their error, which exaggerated their findings by a factor of 10 and were reported around the world. Sabip refused to answer questions in emails, insisted on a phone call, told me that they had taken steps but wouldn't say what and explained something about how they couldn't be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after 10 minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the call was off the record. I think it's OK to be confused and disappointed by this. Like I said: as far as I'm concerned, everything from this industry is false, until proven otherwise. -- Pranesh Prakash Programme Manager Centre for Internet and Society W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 260 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20090618/f2d5e7db/attachment.bin From lawrence at altlawforum.org Sat Jun 20 09:56:41 2009 From: lawrence at altlawforum.org (Lawrence Liang) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2009 09:56:41 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] 1st Trial on file sharing- fines of 1.9 Million Message-ID: US mum is guilty of file-sharing By Jonathan Blake Newsbeat US reporter A woman has been ordered to pay $1.9 million (£1.2m) in the only file-sharing case to go to trial in the US. A jury in Minnesota ruled Jammie Thomas-Rasset, 32, had violated music copyright and must pay damages to the record industry. The mother of four from Minnesota was accused of illegally sharing 24 songs from artists including Sheryl Crow and Green Day. Outside the courtroom Thomas-Rasset said the damages were "ridiculous". It was the second time record companies had taken Thomas-Rasset to court. The first trial ended without a verdict. A spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America said the companies were willing to settle out of court for a much smaller amount. "Since day one we have been willing to settle this case and we remain willing to do so," said Cara Duckworth from the RIAA. Previous cases Most people targeted by the music industry had settled for around £1,500 each. It is not clear if Thomas-Rasset plans to appeal against the decision. This case was the only one of more than 30,000 similar lawsuits to make it to trial. Record companies accused Thomas-Rasset of uploading 1,700 songs to the Kazaa file-sharing site before it became a legal service. In court she described herself as a "huge music fan". Defence lawyers argued companies could not prove that she was sharing the songs, suggesting her children or ex-husband may have done it. Companies including Sony, BMI, Universal and Warner Music say they are now concentrating on working with internet service providers to crack down on the worst offenders of file-sharing. Online piracy has been blamed for a decline in music sales in recent years. Thomas-Rasset said she has no means of paying the fine: "There's no way they're ever going to get that. "I'm a mom, limited means, so I'm not going to worry about it now." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20090620/9c54ae11/attachment.html From patrice at xs4all.nl Sat Jun 20 11:07:27 2009 From: patrice at xs4all.nl (Patrice Riemens) Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:37:27 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [Commons-Law] 1st Trial on file sharing- fines of 1.9 Million Message-ID: <49443.86.91.173.154.1245476247.squirrel@webmail.xs4all.nl> > US mum is guilty of file-sharing > By Jonathan Blake > Newsbeat US reporter > > A woman has been ordered to pay $1.9 million (£1.2m) in the only > file-sharing case to go to trial in the US. > > A jury in Minnesota ruled Jammie Thomas-Rasset, 32, had violated music > copyright and must pay damages to the record industry. > (...) My friend Dave, usually quite clued in in that sort of issues, expressed the following additional thoughts: - Obviously RIAA wanted to make an exemplary case in order 'to get the message across' - and this case was relatively straightforward and clear cut as far as fact were concerned. - She was allegedly represented by a lousy lawyer, a 25 years old, for whom this was his first major case. So he failed to look at the (rather large) body of previous arguments and cases in this type of suits. And did he not call in adequate defense withnesses, like EFF types etc. - The jury did not like her. Possibly because of her 'attitude'. And so it was quite happy to go along with plaintiffs in 'making an example'. - RIAA probably won't go after her to claim the financial damages even if she doesn't relent, as they are quite satisfied with the spine-chilling verdict itself, and do not want more adverse PR. This does not distract from the fact that the whole case itself is bananas, of course. From pranesh at cis-india.org Sun Jun 21 17:24:50 2009 From: pranesh at cis-india.org (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:24:50 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] 1st Trial on file sharing- fines of 1.9 Million In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4785f1e20906210454r7a0fe22cx61ab7556f49e5b17@mail.gmail.com> Lawrence, just wanted to add a few points: 1. There is excellent coverage of this case at Ars Technica , whose reporter Nate Anderson was present during the proceedings. 2. According to most observers, the quantum of the damages will work against the RIAA because they will lose a) credibility (USD 80,000 per song???) resulting in a backlash of opinion; b) will increase the strength of the unconstitutionality arguments being championed by Prof. Charles Nesson (in the Joel Tenenbaum case) (U.S. law allows claims from $750 all the way up to $150,000). 3. There is a chance of this being settled by the RIAA and Thomas-Rasset 4. The quantum of damages allows Thomas-Rasset to plead bankruptcy under an interpretation by a court that 'wilful' under bankruptcy law is not the same as 'wilful' in copyright law -- that in bankruptcy law 'wilful and malicious' intent has to be shown, and that this would be difficult to show (hence allowing her to declare bankruptcy). 5. There a torrent with 24 "representative" songs that the RIAA took to court available on The Pirate Bay. On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 09:56, Lawrence Liang wrote: > US mum is guilty of file-sharing > By Jonathan Blake > Newsbeat US reporter > > A woman has been ordered to pay $1.9 million (£1.2m) in the only > file-sharing case to go to trial in the US. > > A jury in Minnesota ruled Jammie Thomas-Rasset, 32, had violated music > copyright and must pay damages to the record industry. > > The mother of four from Minnesota was accused of illegally sharing 24 songs > from artists including Sheryl Crow and Green Day. > > Outside the courtroom Thomas-Rasset said the damages were "ridiculous". > > It was the second time record companies had taken Thomas-Rasset to court. > The first trial ended without a verdict. > > A spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America said the > companies were willing to settle out of court for a much smaller amount. > > "Since day one we have been willing to settle this case and we remain > willing to do so," said Cara Duckworth from the RIAA. > > Previous cases > > Most people targeted by the music industry had settled for around £1,500 > each. > > It is not clear if Thomas-Rasset plans to appeal against the decision. > > > This case was the only one of more than 30,000 similar lawsuits to make it > to trial. > > Record companies accused Thomas-Rasset of uploading 1,700 songs to the Kazaa > file-sharing site before it became a legal service. > > In court she described herself as a "huge music fan". > > Defence lawyers argued companies could not prove that she was sharing the > songs, suggesting her children or ex-husband may have done it. > > Companies including Sony, BMI, Universal and Warner Music say they are now > concentrating on working with internet service providers to crack down on > the worst offenders of file-sharing. > > Online piracy has been blamed for a decline in music sales in recent years. > > Thomas-Rasset said she has no means of paying the fine: "There's no way > they're ever going to get that. > > "I'm a mom, limited means, so I'm not going to worry about it now." > _______________________________________________ > commons-law mailing list > commons-law at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > > -- Pranesh Prakash Programme Manager Centre for Internet and Society W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283 From pranesh at cis-india.org Wed Jun 24 17:10:02 2009 From: pranesh at cis-india.org (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:10:02 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] 1st Trial on file sharing- fines of 1.9 Million In-Reply-To: <4785f1e20906210454r7a0fe22cx61ab7556f49e5b17@mail.gmail.com> References: <4785f1e20906210454r7a0fe22cx61ab7556f49e5b17@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4785f1e20906240440te427f00s405f03e05cd26cb5@mail.gmail.com> Ars Technica gives a run-down of the six possible options facing Jamiie Thomas-Rasset: Now that Jammie Thomas-Rasset owed $1.92 million to the recording industry for sharing 24 songs on KaZaA back in 2005, the case might seem to be closed. In reality, though, Thomas-Rasset still has numerous options for dealing with the verdict. Let's run them down. ### Pay it According to Thomas-Rasset, paying the $1.92 million damage award is simply impossible. As a brownfield development coordinator for the Mille Lacs band of the Ojibwe, Thomas-Rasset doesn't bring the cash home in wheelbarrows. "Like squeezing blood from a turnip," is how she described any attempt to collect on the judgment. ### Settle According to Thomas-Rasset's testimony during the trial, she could have settled back in 2005 for $5,000. The RIAA says that the amount was somewhere between $3,000-5,000; more importantly, it remains willing to settle the case. Our understanding is that Thomas-Rasset has simply been unwilling to negotiate a settlement; she would rather pay nothing, continually claiming innocence. A judicially-ordered settlement conference before the trial produced nothing. Kiwi Camara, Thomas-Rasset's lawyer, said yesterday that she would examine a settlement offer, but he wouldn't commit to anthing. Certainly, when facing a $1.92 million award, $5,000 looks like a bargain—the amount wouldn't even cover the plane tickets for recording industry attorneys to attend the trial. But if you feel that the record industry is "extorting" you, this is no doubt an unappetizing plan. ### Bankruptcy > The sheer, outrageous size of the damage award in the case is already prompting calls to change the law. Bankruptcy is of course an option, but there are potential complications: not all debts can actually be discharged in bankruptcy court. Back in 2007, the EFF [prepared a brief report][1] on the issue, intended for lawyers who were arguing exactly these types of cases. [1]: http://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/RIAA_v_ThePeople/P2P_bktcy_memo.pdf The report pointed out that copyright infringement judgments can be discharged, unless the infringement was ruled to be a "willful and malicious injury." (Note that although Thomas-Rasset was found liable for "willful" copyright infringement, this is a separate standard that requires a separate judicial ruling on her state of mind.) The issue doesn't come up often with relation to copyright infringement judgments against individuals, of course, so it's not clear how this might unfold. The takeaway, though, is that clearing the debt in bankruptcy court is possible, but not guaranteed. Should Thomas-Rasset take this route and fail to have the debt discharged, settlement would suddenly look like a super-appealing alternative to having wages garnished for the rest of one's life. ### The constitutional challenge Though the case is "over," it's not actually over. The jury has made its ruling on the facts of the case, but Judge Michael Davis can still run on matters of law. One key matter, made even more relevant by the massive $80,000 per-song damage award, is the [constitutionality of such a damage award][2]. Is it an "excessive fine" under the Eighth Amendment? [2]: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/06/record-labels-awarde That amendment says that "excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." Camara has already indicated that he plans to contest the award on these grounds unless Thomas-Rasset takes a settlement. Would it work? Recall that after the first trial, Judge Davis took his opportunity to assail that verdict with these words: "Thomas allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs—the equivalent of approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total damages awarded is $222,000—more than five hundred times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of three CDs. While the Copyright Act was intended to permit statutory damages that are larger than the simple cost of the infringed works in order to make infringing a far less attractive alternative than legitimately purchasing the songs, surely damages that are more than one hundred times the cost of the works would serve as a sufficient deterrent." Given that that penalty is now eight times greater than it was in that case, we can certainly expect Judge Davis to give the issue a close look. Davis, the [first African-American judge][3] to head up the Minnesota US District Court, is no lightweight justice who was just fitted for his robe. He was appointed to a lifetime seat on the federal bench back in 1994 and has already served a term on the nation's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—the most secret chamber in the country. [3]: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/06/26/new_chief/ He showed no emotion at all during the verdict yesterday, of course, but based on his previous comments about this case, it's hard not imagine him holding out hope that a well-argued set of legal challenges comes his way and allows him at least some discretion in mitigating the award. ### Appeal Such motions would take place within the federal courts, but Thomas-Rasset could also appeal the entire case to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, too. Federal appellate cases are generally high-profile, high-cost affairs, but the legal team of Camara and Sibley have indicated their continued willingness to represent Thomas-Rasset. ### Change the law The sheer, outrageous size of the damage award in the case is already prompting calls to change the law. Even among the Ars commentariat, plenty of readers believe that Thomas-Rasset did infringe the 24 copyrights at issue, but there was near universal disdain for the jury and for the law that allowed such an award. But the outrage isn't confined to the blogosphere. The Washington lobby group CCIA, backed by AMD, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and others, calls the verdict "ridiculous." "Our copyright laws are overbroad, being misused and enforced with a zeal out of proportion to common sense," said CEO Ed Black. "When Sony BMG massively and illegally distributed music CDs containing spyware that compromised individual users' computer security and infected government and military networks worldwide, the FTC only ordered them in 2007 to reimburse end-users up to $150 for computer damages. Yet when Ms. Thomas shared 24 songs belonging to Sony BMG and other labels on the Internet, she was penalized $80,000 for each single track." He concluded, "Copyright law was created in a different era for different business models. It needs to be reformed." Judge Davis feels the same way and has already "implored" Congress to "amend the Copyright Act to address liability and damages in peer‐to-peer network cases such as the one currently before this Court." University of California law professor Pam Samuelson, an expert on statutory damages and copyright law, also [called for reform][4] in a [fascinating paper][5] released in April 2009. [4]: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/profs-protest-massive-p2p-damage-awards.ars [5]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1375604 In reference to the first Thomas-Rasset judgment, Samuelson concluded, "Some jurors in the Thomas case wanted to award $750 per infringed song, while others argued for $150,000 per song; why they compromised on $9250 per song is a mystery. In today’s world where the average person in her day-to-day life interacts with many copyrighted works in a way that may implicate copyright law, the dangers posed by the lack of meaningful constraints on statutory damage awards are particularly acute." One key suggestion for reform: allowing judges to revise damage awards to below the current $750 minimum threshold in such cases. Had the amount been a "mere" $750 a song, for an $18,000 total fine, the Thomas-Rasset case would have offered little incentive to reform the law. But when the first of the RIAA's 30,000+ actions goes to trial and the plaintiffs emerge with a $1.92 million award... legislators may take notice. On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 17:24, Pranesh Prakash wrote: > Lawrence, just wanted to add a few points: > 1. There is excellent coverage of this case at Ars Technica > , whose reporter Nate Anderson was present during > the proceedings. > 2. According to most observers, the quantum of the damages will work > against the RIAA because they will lose a) credibility (USD 80,000 per > song???) resulting in a backlash of opinion; b) will increase the > strength of the unconstitutionality arguments being championed by > Prof. Charles Nesson (in the Joel Tenenbaum case) (U.S. law allows > claims from $750 all the way up to $150,000). > 3. There is a chance of this being settled by the RIAA and Thomas-Rasset > 4. The quantum of damages allows Thomas-Rasset to plead bankruptcy > under an interpretation by a court that 'wilful' under bankruptcy law > is not the same as 'wilful' in copyright law -- that in bankruptcy law > 'wilful and malicious' intent has to be shown, and that this would be > difficult to show (hence allowing her to declare bankruptcy). > 5. There a torrent with 24 "representative" songs that the RIAA took > to court available on The Pirate Bay. > > On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 09:56, Lawrence Liang wrote: >> US mum is guilty of file-sharing >> By Jonathan Blake >> Newsbeat US reporter >> >> A woman has been ordered to pay $1.9 million (£1.2m) in the only >> file-sharing case to go to trial in the US. >> >> A jury in Minnesota ruled Jammie Thomas-Rasset, 32, had violated music >> copyright and must pay damages to the record industry. >> >> The mother of four from Minnesota was accused of illegally sharing 24 songs >> from artists including Sheryl Crow and Green Day. >> >> Outside the courtroom Thomas-Rasset said the damages were "ridiculous". >> >> It was the second time record companies had taken Thomas-Rasset to court. >> The first trial ended without a verdict. >> >> A spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America said the >> companies were willing to settle out of court for a much smaller amount. >> >> "Since day one we have been willing to settle this case and we remain >> willing to do so," said Cara Duckworth from the RIAA. >> >> Previous cases >> >> Most people targeted by the music industry had settled for around £1,500 >> each. >> >> It is not clear if Thomas-Rasset plans to appeal against the decision. >> >> >> This case was the only one of more than 30,000 similar lawsuits to make it >> to trial. >> >> Record companies accused Thomas-Rasset of uploading 1,700 songs to the Kazaa >> file-sharing site before it became a legal service. >> >> In court she described herself as a "huge music fan". >> >> Defence lawyers argued companies could not prove that she was sharing the >> songs, suggesting her children or ex-husband may have done it. >> >> Companies including Sony, BMI, Universal and Warner Music say they are now >> concentrating on working with internet service providers to crack down on >> the worst offenders of file-sharing. >> >> Online piracy has been blamed for a decline in music sales in recent years. >> >> Thomas-Rasset said she has no means of paying the fine: "There's no way >> they're ever going to get that. >> >> "I'm a mom, limited means, so I'm not going to worry about it now." >> _______________________________________________ >> commons-law mailing list >> commons-law at sarai.net >> https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law >> >> > > > > -- > Pranesh Prakash > Programme Manager > Centre for Internet and Society > W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283 > -- Pranesh Prakash Programme Manager Centre for Internet and Society W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283 From pranesh at cis-india.org Wed Jun 24 17:14:32 2009 From: pranesh at cis-india.org (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:14:32 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] 1st Trial on file sharing- fines of 1.9 Million In-Reply-To: <4785f1e20906240440te427f00s405f03e05cd26cb5@mail.gmail.com> References: <4785f1e20906210454r7a0fe22cx61ab7556f49e5b17@mail.gmail.com> <4785f1e20906240440te427f00s405f03e05cd26cb5@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4785f1e20906240444i10635ba8teafd1763d31ae54a@mail.gmail.com> And more from Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), covering the same grounds more or less, but with a bit more about the precedents in the excessive punitive damages vs. due process bit:: The jury in the retrial of Ms. Jammie Thomas-Rasset deliberated only a few hours today before concluding that she had [willfully infringed the copyrights of 24 songs and awarding $1.92 million in statutory damages][1] ($80,000 per recording) to the record label plaintiffs. The verdict represents a huge increase over the $220,000 award in the [original trial][2], which was overturned by the judge based on a [faulty jury instruction][3] pushed by the record labels. Ms. Thomas-Rasset has said she doesn't have the money to pay this award (those wondering whether bankruptcy might protect her should consult [EFF's 2007 memo][4] covering the intersection of copyright verdicts and bankruptcy law, as well as [In re Barboza][5], 545 F.3d 702 (9th Cir. 2008)). [1]: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/jammie-thomas-retrial-verdict.ars [2]: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/riaa-convinces-jury-impose-fines-filesharing [3]: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/09/capitol-v-thomas-judge-orders-new-trial-implores-c [4]: http://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/RIAA_v_ThePeople/P2P_bktcy_memo.pdf [5]: http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2008/09/22/0656319.pdf Given the size of the statutory damages award, Ms. Thomas-Rasset's legal team will likely be seriously considering a constitutional challenge to the verdict. A large and disproportionate damage award like this raises at least two potential constitutional concerns. First, the Supreme Court has made it clear that “grossly excessive” punitive damage awards (e.g., [$2 million award against BMW for selling a repainted BMW as "new"][6]) violate the Due Process clause of the U.S. Constitution. In evaluating whether an award "grossly excessive," courts evaluate three criteria: 1) the degree of reprehensibility of the defendant’s actions, 2) the disparity between the harm to the plaintiff and the punitive award, and 3) the similarity or difference between the punitive award and civil penalties authorized or imposed in comparable situations. Does a $1.92 million award for sharing 24 songs cross the line into "grossly excessive"? And do these Due Process limitations [apply differently to statutory damages than to punitive damages][7]? These are questions that the court will have to decide if the issue is raised by Ms. Thomas-Rasset's attorneys. [6]: http://supreme.justia.com/us/517/559/case.html [7]: http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/07a0242p-06.pdf Second, [recent Supreme Court rulings][8] suggest that a jury may not award statutory damages for the express or implicit purpose of deterring other infringers who are not parties in the case before the court. In other words, the award should be aimed at deterring *this* defendant, not giving the plaintiff a windfall in order to send a message to others who might be tempted to infringe. It's hard to know without having been in the courtroom, but if the record industry lawyers urged the jury to "send a message" to the millions of other American file-sharers out there, they may have crossed the constitutional line. [8]: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-1256.pdf For more on the details of these constitutional doctrines, I recommend a recent article by Prof. Pamela Samuelson & Tara Wheatland, [Statutory Damages in Copyright Law: A Remedy in Need of Reform][9] (full disclosure: Prof. Samuelson is a member of EFF's board of directors). For those who want a shorter summary of the debate in podcast form, I recommend Prof. Douglas Lichtman's IP Colloquim episode entitled [Statutory Damages and the Tenenbaum Litigation][10]. While I disagree with some of Prof. Lichtman's conclusions, his guests do a wonderful job summarizing the relevant cases and concepts. [9]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1375604 [10]: http://www.ipcolloquium.com/Programs/5.html I assume these arguments will first be submitted to the trial judge in post-trial motions. After all, this judge has [already indicated][3] that he found the previous $220,000 award to be "unprecedented and oppressive." On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 17:10, Pranesh Prakash wrote: > Ars Technica gives a run-down of the six possible options facing > Jamiie Thomas-Rasset: > > > Now that Jammie Thomas-Rasset owed $1.92 million to the recording > industry for sharing 24 songs on KaZaA back in 2005, the case might > seem to be closed. In reality, though, Thomas-Rasset still has > numerous options for dealing with the verdict. Let's run them down. > > ### Pay it > > According to Thomas-Rasset, paying the $1.92 million damage award is > simply impossible. As a brownfield development coordinator for the > Mille Lacs band of the Ojibwe, Thomas-Rasset doesn't bring the cash > home in wheelbarrows. "Like squeezing blood from a turnip," is how she > described any attempt to collect on the judgment. > > ### Settle > > According to Thomas-Rasset's testimony during the trial, she could > have settled back in 2005 for $5,000. The RIAA says that the amount > was somewhere between $3,000-5,000; more importantly, it remains > willing to settle the case. > > Our understanding is that Thomas-Rasset has simply been unwilling to > negotiate a settlement; she would rather pay nothing, continually > claiming innocence. A judicially-ordered settlement conference before > the trial produced nothing. > > Kiwi Camara, Thomas-Rasset's lawyer, said yesterday that she would > examine a settlement offer, but he wouldn't commit to anthing. > Certainly, when facing a $1.92 million award, $5,000 looks like a > bargain—the amount wouldn't even cover the plane tickets for recording > industry attorneys to attend the trial. > > But if you feel that the record industry is "extorting" you, this is > no doubt an unappetizing plan. > > ### Bankruptcy > >> The sheer, outrageous size of the damage award in the case is already prompting calls to change the law. > Bankruptcy is of course an option, but there are potential > complications: not all debts can actually be discharged in bankruptcy > court. Back in 2007, the EFF [prepared a brief report][1] on the > issue, intended for lawyers who were arguing exactly these types of > cases. > >  [1]: http://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/RIAA_v_ThePeople/P2P_bktcy_memo.pdf > > The report pointed out that copyright infringement judgments can be > discharged, unless the infringement was ruled to be a "willful and > malicious injury." (Note that although Thomas-Rasset was found liable > for "willful" copyright infringement, this is a separate standard that > requires a separate judicial ruling on her state of mind.) > > The issue doesn't come up often with relation to copyright > infringement judgments against individuals, of course, so it's not > clear how this might unfold. The takeaway, though, is that clearing > the debt in bankruptcy court is possible, but not guaranteed. Should > Thomas-Rasset take this route and fail to have the debt discharged, > settlement would suddenly look like a super-appealing alternative to > having wages garnished for the rest of one's life. > > ### The constitutional challenge > > Though the case is "over," it's not actually over. The jury has made > its ruling on the facts of the case, but Judge Michael Davis can still > run on matters of law. One key matter, made even more relevant by the > massive $80,000 per-song damage award, is the [constitutionality of > such a damage award][2]. Is it an "excessive fine" under the Eighth > Amendment? > >  [2]: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/06/record-labels-awarde > > That amendment says that "excessive bail shall not be required, nor > excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." > Camara has already indicated that he plans to contest the award on > these grounds unless Thomas-Rasset takes a settlement. > > Would it work? Recall that after the first trial, Judge Davis took his > opportunity to assail that verdict with these words: "Thomas allegedly > infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs—the equivalent of > approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total > damages awarded is $222,000—more than five hundred times the cost of > buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of > three CDs. While the Copyright Act was intended to permit statutory > damages that are larger than the simple cost of the infringed works in > order to make infringing a far less attractive alternative than > legitimately purchasing the songs, surely damages that are more than > one hundred times the cost of the works would serve as a sufficient > deterrent." > > Given that that penalty is now eight times greater than it was in that > case, we can certainly expect Judge Davis to give the issue a close > look. Davis, the [first African-American judge][3] to head up the > Minnesota US District Court, is no lightweight justice who was just > fitted for his robe. He was appointed to a lifetime seat on the > federal bench back in 1994 and has already served a term on the > nation's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—the most secret > chamber in the country. > >  [3]: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/06/26/new_chief/ > > He showed no emotion at all during the verdict yesterday, of course, > but based on his previous comments about this case, it's hard not > imagine him holding out hope that a well-argued set of legal > challenges comes his way and allows him at least some discretion in > mitigating the award. > > ### Appeal > > Such motions would take place within the federal courts, but > Thomas-Rasset could also appeal the entire case to the Eighth Circuit > Court of Appeals, too. Federal appellate cases are generally > high-profile, high-cost affairs, but the legal team of Camara and > Sibley have indicated their continued willingness to represent > Thomas-Rasset. > > ### Change the law > > The sheer, outrageous size of the damage award in the case is already > prompting calls to change the law. Even among the Ars commentariat, > plenty of readers believe that Thomas-Rasset did infringe the 24 > copyrights at issue, but there was near universal disdain for the jury > and for the law that allowed such an award. > > But the outrage isn't confined to the blogosphere. The Washington > lobby group CCIA, backed by AMD, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and others, > calls the verdict "ridiculous." > > "Our copyright laws are overbroad, being misused and enforced with a > zeal out of proportion to common sense," said CEO Ed Black. "When Sony > BMG massively and illegally distributed music CDs containing spyware > that compromised individual users' computer security and infected > government and military networks worldwide, the FTC only ordered them > in 2007 to reimburse end-users up to $150 for computer damages. Yet > when Ms. Thomas shared 24 songs belonging to Sony BMG and other labels > on the Internet, she was penalized $80,000 for each single track." > > He concluded, "Copyright law was created in a different era for > different business models. It needs to be reformed." > > Judge Davis feels the same way and has already "implored" Congress to > "amend the Copyright Act to address liability and damages in > peer‐to-peer network cases such as the one currently before this > Court." > > University of California law professor Pam Samuelson, an expert on > statutory damages and copyright law, also [called for reform][4] in a > [fascinating paper][5] released in April 2009. > >  [4]: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/profs-protest-massive-p2p-damage-awards.ars >  [5]: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1375604 > > In reference to the first Thomas-Rasset judgment, Samuelson concluded, > "Some jurors in the Thomas case wanted to award $750 per infringed > song, while others argued for $150,000 per song; why they compromised > on $9250 per song is a mystery. In today’s world where the average > person in her day-to-day life interacts with many copyrighted works in > a way that may implicate copyright law, the dangers posed by the lack > of meaningful constraints on statutory damage awards are particularly > acute." > > One key suggestion for reform: allowing judges to revise damage awards > to below the current $750 minimum threshold in such cases. > > Had the amount been a "mere" $750 a song, for an $18,000 total fine, > the Thomas-Rasset case would have offered little incentive to reform > the law. But when the first of the RIAA's 30,000+ actions goes to > trial and the plaintiffs emerge with a $1.92 million award... > legislators may take notice. > > On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 17:24, Pranesh Prakash wrote: >> Lawrence, just wanted to add a few points: >> 1. There is excellent coverage of this case at Ars Technica >> , whose reporter Nate Anderson was present during >> the proceedings. >> 2. According to most observers, the quantum of the damages will work >> against the RIAA because they will lose a) credibility (USD 80,000 per >> song???) resulting in a backlash of opinion; b) will increase the >> strength of the unconstitutionality arguments being championed by >> Prof. Charles Nesson (in the Joel Tenenbaum case) (U.S. law allows >> claims from $750 all the way up to $150,000). >> 3. There is a chance of this being settled by the RIAA and Thomas-Rasset >> 4. The quantum of damages allows Thomas-Rasset to plead bankruptcy >> under an interpretation by a court that 'wilful' under bankruptcy law >> is not the same as 'wilful' in copyright law -- that in bankruptcy law >> 'wilful and malicious' intent has to be shown, and that this would be >> difficult to show (hence allowing her to declare bankruptcy). >> 5. There a torrent with 24 "representative" songs that the RIAA took >> to court available on The Pirate Bay. >> >> On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 09:56, Lawrence Liang wrote: >>> US mum is guilty of file-sharing >>> By Jonathan Blake >>> Newsbeat US reporter >>> >>> A woman has been ordered to pay $1.9 million (£1.2m) in the only >>> file-sharing case to go to trial in the US. >>> >>> A jury in Minnesota ruled Jammie Thomas-Rasset, 32, had violated music >>> copyright and must pay damages to the record industry. >>> >>> The mother of four from Minnesota was accused of illegally sharing 24 songs >>> from artists including Sheryl Crow and Green Day. >>> >>> Outside the courtroom Thomas-Rasset said the damages were "ridiculous". >>> >>> It was the second time record companies had taken Thomas-Rasset to court. >>> The first trial ended without a verdict. >>> >>> A spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America said the >>> companies were willing to settle out of court for a much smaller amount. >>> >>> "Since day one we have been willing to settle this case and we remain >>> willing to do so," said Cara Duckworth from the RIAA. >>> >>> Previous cases >>> >>> Most people targeted by the music industry had settled for around £1,500 >>> each. >>> >>> It is not clear if Thomas-Rasset plans to appeal against the decision. >>> >>> >>> This case was the only one of more than 30,000 similar lawsuits to make it >>> to trial. >>> >>> Record companies accused Thomas-Rasset of uploading 1,700 songs to the Kazaa >>> file-sharing site before it became a legal service. >>> >>> In court she described herself as a "huge music fan". >>> >>> Defence lawyers argued companies could not prove that she was sharing the >>> songs, suggesting her children or ex-husband may have done it. >>> >>> Companies including Sony, BMI, Universal and Warner Music say they are now >>> concentrating on working with internet service providers to crack down on >>> the worst offenders of file-sharing. >>> >>> Online piracy has been blamed for a decline in music sales in recent years. >>> >>> Thomas-Rasset said she has no means of paying the fine: "There's no way >>> they're ever going to get that. >>> >>> "I'm a mom, limited means, so I'm not going to worry about it now." >>> _______________________________________________ >>> commons-law mailing list >>> commons-law at sarai.net >>> https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law >>> >>> >> >> >> >> -- >> Pranesh Prakash >> Programme Manager >> Centre for Internet and Society >> W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283 >> > > > > -- > Pranesh Prakash > Programme Manager > Centre for Internet and Society > W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283 > -- Pranesh Prakash Programme Manager Centre for Internet and Society W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283