John Palfrey

Via Jon Bonne, a story from Editor & Publisher on the merits of RSS as e-mail lurches from crisis to crisis.

I am extremely pleased to see that Prof. Michael Watkins of the Harvard Business School has begun a weblog on the Harvard blogs server.  He plans to comment on “world events on weekdays” — a very sound policy and a great topic for blogging.  This university revolves around its faculty, in many respects, and having faculty willing to try out weblogs is fantastic.

Prof. Lessig’s got a very interesting quote, courtesy of Glenn Brown, from back when the recording industry, back in 1967, was trying to *retain* a compulsory licensing system.  Cf. Terry Fisher’s draft chapter 6, “An Alternative Compensation System.”

He gets the story just right.  I admit that I was secretly pleased to see a new posting in August to Copyfight despite the fact that Donna’s supposed to have some time off between Berkman and EFF!

Check out the terms of use section in Yahoo!’s announcement of its new RSS 2.0 feeds (which, as a general matter, is terrific news).  They effectively grant to individuals and non-profits a license “for personal, non-commercial uses” and “ask that you provide attribution to Yahoo! News…”  They also reserve “the right to require you to cease distributing these feeds at any time for any reason.”  I’m surprised at how much the license sounds, in effect, like a Creative Commons ”Attribution-NonCommercial” license, but is not one — and by how terse the statement in the terms of use is.  The (cc) license would do one thing that this terms of use does not: it could embed the license in the feeds themselves.  Maybe they wanted to do something slightly different than what the by-nc license achieves, in terms of being able to pull back rights and/or limit use of the name and logo in a very precise way.  I can’t tell if the terms of use was written by an uncharacteristically self-controlled lawyer or if some technologist decided not to show it to anyone in the counsel’s office. 

In any event, the decision to release these feeds is a cool one.  I applaud, loudly, what Yahoo!’s trying to do here.

Update: Dave makes a nice point, that I missed in my first pass, in the comments field below: when exactly is attribution required?  With every otherwise infringing use of the material, or just if blogging it or displaying on the web as part of an aggregation of syndicated work, say?

The spam problem has reached epic proportions.  Check out the many comments to this post.  Spam fixing should move nearer to the top of the agenda, if it’s not there already. I’m about to go to challenge/response, too, I fear.

Adina Levin: “What’s happening is related to the boom vision of ‘Internet push’ technology, yet very different.”  Nice analysis, plus some French on Wiki in the previous post.

I’ve been in Budapest, Hungary, for the past few days, as part of a programme for ICT policy types from Eastern Europe, Africa and Mongolia, courtesy of the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute, the Markle Foundation, and the Stanhope Centre.  It’s quite a collection of activists, lawyers, technologists and others who are working to promote ICTs (shorthand for Information and Communications Technologies) in their countries.  I talked today about intellectual property rights.  The activists collected sounded as though they were 100% opposed to the export of US-style copyright to Europe (via the EU Copyright Directive and other means) and to the rest of the world via multi- and bilateral treaties.  The news about the WIPO meeting, which broke broadly yesterday, cancelled allegedly due to US corporate pressure, has caused quite a stir here.

I’ve been extremely impressed by the people I’ve met here.  There’s a project in Croatia, for instance, which OSI has supported, called MI2, represented by a colorful and charming guy called Tao.  They’re considering implementing a form of alternate compensation scheme for musical recording artists, not dissimilar from the idea that Prof. Terry Fisher has been exploring for his forthcoming book, Promises to Keep.

I had a terrific run this evening along the Danube, which splits (bit of trivia) the old city of Buda and the thriving commercial city of Pest, joined into one in the late 19th century.  I ran up to Margaret Island, an amazing spot in the middle of the river.  No other runners during the entire trip, but lots of people out and about.  It’s a strikingly beautiful city.

Thanks to many who commented, we’ve made some changes to the BloggerCon model.  The highlights, as you may have noted, are that 1) we’ll give away at least 25 spots randomly on September 1 to those who have signed up to be on the list of possible “scholarship” recipients and 2) we’re making the BoF sessions on October 5 free of charge to all bloggers.  We are well on our way toward filling the other seats available at the original price-points (many thanks to those who continue to sign up and to support the event), which we hope will enable us to break even on out-of-pocket costs and provide a terrific experience to those who come.  Potential sponsorship, whether to support individual bloggers or to host an event during the conference, will enable the possibility of further changes to the model.  We’ll keep listening and working hard to make the conference as accessible and as great as we can.

As to the substance of BloggerCon, which has also been raised in several places, including on GrepLaw: this conference is by no means intended to be a cheerleading session for weblogs.  We look forward to hearing from those who have interesting stories about what they’ve done with weblogs, to be sure.  But we are academics, first and foremost, and are naturally skeptics.  Consider the H2O discussion on this topic.  Such skepticism — are blogs really any different? are they just a supernova, to burn out, or into the next wave of technology? – was certainly the theme of the session on weblogs at our Institute of Politics studygroup on weblogs.  It’s our job at the Berkman Center to ask the tough questions about trends in Internet and society.  We think it’s important for the dialogue to be open to a variety of viewpoints, along a variety of axes — political bias among those axes.  And, yes, we do engage in a limited amount of advocacy on certain topics core to our mission.

My hypothesis: there’s definitely something interesting happening in the blogs space, which is why I’m proud of what we’re doing to build out into it and trying to see what we can learn.  If my hypothesis proves to be wrong and blogs are a bust, I’ll admit it.  Meanwhile, I’ll keep exploring.

I’m not sure there’s ever been a conference at the Berkman Center that has received so much attention as BloggerCon has two months before it’s actually happening.  It’s quite flattering in its way.  And we’ve been delighted by the number of people who’ve signed up in the first few days of registration.  Not all of the buzz has been positive, though, so I thought it might make sense to respond to some of it.

One track of commentary has been about the conference price ($500 for full-fare, $250 for academic fare).  We’ve heard from a number of people whom we’d love to have here in Cambridge that they’d come to the event, but for the cost.  That’s a very valid point, and we’re pleased that so many people have mentioned it directly.  We’ll do something positive to address this problem, to be sure, and will announce it shortly.  This conference, like everything we do at the Berkman Center, is not-for-profit.  No one or no institution will make a dime on it, no matter how many people decide to come and to pay.  That’s been the plan from the start and a pledge to everyone thinking of participating.  Why do we need to charge for attendance at all?  Well, almost exclusively so that we can pay for the coach-fare travel of speakers and their accommodation.  It’s a reality of running a conference here.  We recognize, clearly, though, that we want to have bloggers at this conference who can’t afford a $500 entrance fee – it would be a shame to do otherwise.  We hear that and will do what we can to fix it.

Other forms of less-than-positive commentary: the Register, for instance, ran a story today that took a different tack.  In addition to mentioning the cost of the conference, the author took aim at two Berkman fellows — Dave Winer and Jim Moore — as well as generally at the Berkman Center.  Dave and Jim are well-respected for their work in various parts of this space and deserve better.  The Center itself is a vibrant, ambitious place working on a broad range of issues related to the Internet, law, technology, society, developing countries, and occasionally, yes, political economy.  Most of our work we offer free and clear to anyone who wants to participate in an event or series or use what we’ve done.  I’d welcome any journalist to come visit us, see what we’re up to and to engage us on the merits.  We’ve got a strong public spirit, and we’re certainly not out to fleece anyone.  Dave and Jim, in particular, are leaders in this regard.