I hope that the developers of GNU Hurd are enjoying the headlines about HP's new CEO as much as I am. Here's a sample:
There's lots more on Google News.
My trip to the Supreme Court of the United States yesterday to see the Grokster v. MGM oral arguments was eye-opening in a number of respects. Although seeing the arguments was very exciting, the overall experience was incredibly disenchanting. I do not intend to return to the court for oral arguments.
Perhaps naively, I had bought into the idea that the judiciary -- and the Supreme Court as its highest representative -- is somehow above the normal buying and selling of favor and political power that goes on in Washington. I thought that the court had the potential to be pro-public in a way that money and party politics had made impossible in the legislative and executive branches. I've changed my mind.
At least in a sense, the Supreme Court is actively and aggressively anti-public. The court doesn't want the public in the court room. They don't want the public exposed to their ritual and processes in any other ways ways except at a delay and or highly mediated. In my opinion, they are easily the least transparent branch of US government and, perhaps most disconcertingly, even their small overtures toward public involvement are just as much for sale as everything else in Washington DC.
Yesterday and the day before, people traveled from all over the country to Washington DC to sleep on the ground with the chance of getting one of the 210 seats (50 of which were reserved for the public we were told) in the room where Grokster would be argued. Less a dozen -- maybe closer to half dozen -- of the people with me on the ground that night got into the court. There are two major reasons.
The Public Comes Last -- But Mostly Not At All
There are 210 gallery seats in the Supreme Court. Supposedly, 50 are reserved for the public but in reality, even these are up for grabs by VIPs. Basically, everybody who is not the public gets a chance at those seats before the public does. That includes: members of the press, members of the Supreme Court bar (basically any lawyer whose practiced for a few years and jumped through a few hoops) and friends of the court: an impossibly broad distinction that seems to boil down to a very long list of rich and powerful people. This means that Jack Valenti can waltz right in 20 minutes before things start while the guy who slept there all night gets turned away.
To make matters worse, the Supreme court batches business in a way that packs the room unnecessarily. The court began by admitting new lawyers to the Supreme Court bar. This basically entails reading the lawyers' names out and then asking the group to stand at once. Each of these lawyers (and there were several dozens) gets to bring four friends and family members to their big day in the court. This is reasonable. But there is no pause before the arguments so each of those family members takes up one of the precious few seats. It is really necessary to organize these hearings in a way that takes seats away from the public who are interested in seeing a case being argued and gives them to lawyers family members who often don't care?
Finally, when the public doesn't get in, they simply don't get access to the information. CSPAN cannot broadcast the court in progress and nor can anyone else. Transcripts and recordings are taken real-time but are not released for months after the court is over. There is no overflow room with closed circuit video or audio and it would be trivially easy to make one. As it stands, you either get in or you don't. If you are Jack Valenti, you always do. If you are the interested public with less money and political sway, it almost always means that you don't.
Line Sitters
By midnight last night when I arrived, there were more than 50 people in line. The majority of these (the vast majority probably) were professional line sitters. It may sound silly but it has evidently become the rage for the well heeled in Washington to get into congressional hearings and -- on some nights the Supreme Court as well -- by hiring someone from a professional line standing company to stand in line for them overnight.
Call it market efficiency, but the reality of the situation is that those spots reserved for the public are bought and sold just like everything else in Washington. If you happen to be part of that unfortunate majority of the country's population that has to work a job to pay the bills -- but not the kind of job that pays well enough that you can afford to hire a USD 8-35/hour line stander, you will probably not get in in the Supreme Court to hear a popular case.
In the early morning, the nice group of South Asian line-sitters in front of me were replaced by well rested and well dressed MGM and Time Warner executives. While the hirers were almost all industry people, a few folks from the Grokster and Streamcast boards got in using a similar tactic. I arrived after the line had grown past 50. That was generally interpreted to mean that I wouldn't get in. As a result, I made the somewhat conflicted decision to pay an entertainment industry line sitter who was, as Seth Schoen put it, "not very good at his job," 50 USD to send him home to his bed and to send me to his little patch of concrete. Matt Norwood, who arrived with me and took up the next place in the line was the third person to not get into the court.
General Feelings
It would be simple to set up closed circuit video as they do in the Vatican. It would be simple to release the transcripts that are already written or to broadcast arguments. But it doesn't happen. The few spots that exist go everywhere but to the general public.
As far as the line sitters go, you can call it a market responding to a need but that doesn't make me feel any better. I'm not bitter -- I got in. However, I am upset that most of the folks who slept on the concrete with me did not. More than half of the folks on the ground who would have got in packed up and went home when their "worms" showed up or their contracts expired. The larger portion of campers were simply turned away at the door.
I understand that the Supreme Court doesn't want to become part of public life in the same way that other parts of the government are but I think their current behavior goes well beyond that. The court goes out of its way to block any public participation or direct public monitoring of the process. The market (no more than a euphemism for the richest and most powerful) safely snatches up any of the scraps that the court throws to the unwashed hordes.
This is the reality of Supreme Court. Maybe that's OK and maybe it is not. I only ask that we not not pretend it is any different or any better than this.
I have a unofficial policy of not writing "this what I did today" blog entries. Today has been special so I'm going break my rule.
Yesterday night, I met up with Matt Norwood of Columbia Law School and soon-to-be of the Software Freedom Law Center to take a bus down to Washington DC to sleep on the sidewalk in front of the United States Supreme Court with the ultimate goal of seeing the oral arguments to Grokster v. MGM -- an extremely important P2P case and probably the most important copyright and technology case since the Sony Betamax.
Seeing the case argued was an important goal but so was showing support for the EFF and for meeting a hole host of old friends (Seth Schoen, Wendy Seltzer, Annalee Newitz, Cindy Cohn) and for a meeting a few people on my "really should meet" list including Kragen Sitaker.
I met all of the people I'd hoped to met and many new smart and passionate freedom lovers, slept at the court and, through a rather sneaky set of events that I'll detail tomorrow, managed to get into the court to hear the arguments. I was behind a column and at the very back of the room but I was one of the 35 people from the general public that got in so I can't complain.
In my shamelessly biased opinion, I think the case was argued very well by our side and somewhat less well by the entertainment industry lawyers.
The industry lawyers were passionate but the passion behind the responses seemed to overshadow the substance of their argument. The justices asked the industry counsel repeatedly for a description of the legal standard that the industry would replace the simplified version of Betamax that Grokster is clinging to. The industry counsel repeatedly failed to answer these questions in a way that the Justices thought was satisfactory.
Justices that I suspected would be hostile toward Grokster's position, including Justices Ginsberg and Scalia, returned repeatedly to the idea of the lone inventor in her garage unaware of exactly how she might predict the impact or use of her technology without being sued out of business from all sides before she had a chance to let the technology prove itself. They seemed concerned about the industry blocking the next Xerox machine, iPod, or printing press. Souter, Breyer, and Stevens each grilled the industry lawyers on their own. Rehnquist, who due to his respirator from his recent illness was tastelessly -- but accurately -- dubbed "Justice Vader" by one person at the court, said very little.
In what I'm sure is certainly a Supreme Court first, the justices asked, "what about the iPod?" Both counsels used hypothetical examples like, "so I want a file and you have it on your computer," that I thought introduced the fun idea of sharing music online with Supreme Court justices. Of course, I haven't seen their iPods, but I suspect the Justices and I have different taste in music anyway.
The justices seemed comfortable with the technology at hand which was something I was worried about going in. They seemed to solid understand of the technological issues in the case. The only tech slip I caught was a bit of "bits and bytes" confusion uttered by Grokster's counsel.
Minus this minor slip, Richard Taranto did what I think was a very good job. The justices seemed quite upset with the fact that certain issues in the case has been bifurcated at an early stage in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and decided separately -- something that was done with agreement of both parties and court at the time. If this really is the court's largest problem with Grokster's case, we're in a good position. I'll echo what Fred von Lohmann said afterward and say that I believe that the justices asked all of correct questions. I'm ready to be cautiously optimistic as we wait until this summer to hear the decision.
I will not be totally surprised if the court decides to tweak or add a little bit to Betamax but I think there seemed to be agreement by most involved that Betamax was a pretty good idea overall. Evidently, Jack Valenti, who autographed one of Seth Schoen's Betamax tapes on the way in to court, even gave the nod to that.
If the decision comes down against us, it will obviously be a very bad thing. I'm not primarily concerned, as most people seem to be, in the loss of technologists ability to innovate -- although it does concern me. What I am very worried about is the local effects on P2P technologies. I've recently launched a few popular websites and if it had instead been popular videos and not ten kilobyte chunks of HTML, I would now be faced with paying for a five or six figure bandwidth bill -- unless I used P2P.
P2P is essential technology for spreading and democratizing the distribution of media with any sizable footprint on the disk. The technology for the grassroots and democratic production of information is quickly becoming a reality and if P2P technology is killed now, video and audio makers without record deals or deep pockets become voiceless and helpless. Of course, this is a risk of that the RIAA and MPAA are more than willing to take.
However, I'm also concerned with what will happen if Grokster wins. I'm afraid that a decisive court loss for the entertainment industry will help make the industry lobbyists increasingly effective in pushing congress toward anti-P2P, anti-technology, pro-industry and legislation like the INDUCE act.
In closing, I want to send many thanks to everyone who helped make this case possible and to everyone who helped make sure it was argued so well on our side. Also thanks should go to the folks from CEA for organizing a little demonstration that went head to head with the music-industry's demonstration and to Public Knowledge who organized and sponsored a great little post-argument shindig for all of the good guys and their supporters.
There are two blog entries that have been at this URL and, unfortunately, I'm not sure which one you're looking for. It could be one of these two:
As announced earlier, I recently gave a talk on Ubuntu and its relationship to Debian and the process of derivation and the difficult process of balancing forking and collaboration in Manizales, Colombia. This talk ended up being more of an introduction to Ubuntu and to Debian and Debian derivation and I didn't really get to dig my teeth into the key issues that the title might imply to the degree that I'd hoped. The talk was mostly a combination of my recent talks Customizing Debian given at NYLUG and BaDoPi and Introducing Ubuntu given at GULEV.
In addition to the fact that there was a packed gym of more than 1,500 highly receptive people, the talk will probably be most memorable for the fact that I managed to spill water onto and severely damage my laptop during the talk and for the fact that the power went out for 10 minutes in the middle of the speech.
For folks that are interested in a general introduction to Ubuntu and its relationship to Debian, or who want to give their own version of the talk, you can use all of the information I have:
I hope to revisit this topic again soon and do a small part to stimulate a productive discussion in Ubuntu on ways the relationship to Debian can be improved and reinforced and in Debian about ways that we can manage relationships with derivers more constructively.
Clearly, Ubuntu folks are learning a lot, through things done right and through things we can do better in the future, on how to collaborate in doing what I really believe has the potential to become a new, better kind of fork that -- if we can pull it off -- may have a lasting impact on the way that Free and Open Source software (and distributions in particular) and developed. The CDD folks are shedding light on the issue from another interesting angle.
Several years ago, I was getting ready to send my passport to the Indian embassy to get a visa and had put my passport in the big front pocket of my hooded sweatshirt. I stopped into a restroom to relieve myself on the way to the mail room. In the shuffling over the toilet, I managed to knock my passport out of my hoody pocket directly into the now very used toilet.
I dried it off the best I could and, using my fingernails, carefully dropped the passport into the envelope and sent it off to the consulate.
I still have the same passport and it's sometimes fun to remember this event when an immigration officer is pawing my passport and giving me a hard time.
Now let's see who remember this story at the next big keysigning.
Last week, as I was up on the podium having my talk at XIV CNEIS introduced to a packed room of something like 1,500 people, I opened a bottle of water and placed it on the the cloth-covered row of tables between my laptop and another workstation. What I didn't realize at the time was that I had in fact placed the bottle precariously on the gap between two tables. Immediately, the water bottle tipped and began to slowly empty its contents into my laptop's keyboard.
As quickly as possible, I picked the bottle up and tried to right it. It immediately fell the other direction to dump what water remained into the keyboard of the other computer.
I beckoned to someone for a cloth, ignored what was going on as best as I could, and began to speak. I explained that my laptop might catch fire, explode, or simply stop working during the talk. Many people thought I was joking. I wasn't.
I guess the fact that they thought I was joking is a testament to my ability to act cool under pressure. My laptop -- at least it's keyboard -- is not doing as cool.
I wish I could say that last week saw my worst laptop and water related incident. However, last week is in competition with several occasions when I justified the extra price paid for a Panasonic Toughbook CF-25.
On the second most spectacular occasion, I came home late and tip-toed into a room I shared with my girlfriend at the time who was already asleep, I plugged the laptop into its AC adapter and then I proceeded to drop the machine into a square laptop-shaped plastic bucket that I found lying conveniently next to the bed.
It was the bucket of my water my girlfriend had been soaking her feet in and I winced as I heard the splash of my laptop hitting the water and the thud of it hitting the bottom of the bucket.
Due to the toughbook's water resistant design, last week's relatively minor incident will almost certainly end up costing me more money to fix than the incident with the Toughbook. On the bright side, the workstation's keyboard I also nailed last week seems to be fine.
White Noise by Don DeLillo includes one of my favorite vignettes. The characters in the book go on a small tourist trip to an ordinary barn in America had become, through constant photography, the most photographed barn in America. People photograph the barn because it is, after all, the most photographed barn in America. Here's a short expert:
"No one sees the barn," he said finally.
A long silence followed.
"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."
He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.
"We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura."
You can read here for the full excerpt.
In the last few days in Colombia, where my talk on Ubuntu and Debian put me on the front page of an important newspapers and lots of people have turned their cameras toward me, I empathize a little bit with the barn.
In certain moods, I really like Julie London. Of course in both lyrics and delivery, she can be a little bit over-dramatic. Play Misty For Me is a good example.
Julie opens it claiming, in one of her most seductive voices, that she's, "as helpless as kitten up a tree." My favorite lines follow:
Walk my way,
And a thousand violins begin to play,
Or it might be the sound of your hello.
You can listen yourself in OGG Vorbis or MP3.
I like the little flurry of instruments when she finishes the line about the thousand violins playing but lets get a couple things straight:
I guess it just sounds better than:
Walk my way,
And two flutes begin to play.
After a last minute offer and an impulsive decision, I arrived today in Manizales, Columbia for the XIV Congresso Nacional de Estudiantes de Ingeniería de Sistemas and its co-conference, the IV Congresso Internacional de Software Libre GNU/Linux. I'm one of a small number of international speakers they've shipped in. I'll be speaking about Ubuntu and about customizing and building on Debian this Thursday March, 17. See the conference schedule for details. Notes and slides will follow.
At the beginning of the trip here, airport security spent more time checking my backpack than I spend packing it. At the end, landing in Manizales was the first time I've been on a flight where the degree of mountain dodging would have qualified it as a "difficult" level in a computerized flight simulator. It's my first time in Colombia and it's been great so far.
Short of RMS, I don't know many attendees. If you're going to be around, get in contact with me or just find me and introduce yourself.
Many people think that Mika and I have confusingly similar names. Folks think it's funny that two people with such similar names live together in the same apartment.
Well, in the last day, Mika have put most of North and Central America between us but it doesn't seem to have disambiguated things very much. Mika is still at Columbia. I'm in Colombia.
As many people know, I can appreciate an informative sign. That's why I was happy to see this useful sign inside a train bathroom to help remind patrons of the consequences of their presence:
For the last couple months, I've been lurking on the public Unicode mailing list. It's a lot of fun and there are many very smart people who are both serious geeks in technical sense and serious language geeks. I hope that after I take some time to acclimatize myself, I will be able to get more involved and become a productive presence.
Part of being acclimatized is getting used to all of the names for symbols in different scripts. There has been a lot of discussion lately about Arabic's (apparently very controversial) teh marbuta. In ways I don't exactly understand, the teh marbuta can change into a teh in certain situations.
Every time I see teh, I can't help but think it's a typo made when someone was trying to type a definite article -- a very common mistake in places like IRC. I can think of some funny and confusing IRC conversations about the teh and heh code points.
Yesterday, an email yesterday with a lead-in very similar to the following one made it past my spam filter. (I've changed all of the details to protect the innocent but it's true to the style and effect.):
From: Mr. John Richard <presidentialdirection@yahoo.com> Subject: NIGERIA PARTNER Dear Sir, This email may come as a suprise to you but I am very glad to make your acquaintance.
To my surprise (and probably to yours as well) this email was not a 419 scam. It turns out, John is from Nigeria and he really wanted to be a partner on a Free Software project I'm working on! I was glad I read the whole message before hitting delete!
I think this is interesting case for two reasons:
First, I can't help but think that had I not had been using a machine spam filter, I would have deleted this in a heartbeat. This is a rare example of a mail that could be correctly identified by many (most?) computer spam filters using techniques like Bayesian analysis on the complete message but incorrectly by human filters who make a decision based on the headers and the first paragraph.
Second, it made me think about the impact that these 419 scams must be having on legitimate Nigerian mail. I've heard it said that most 419's were, at least historically, are actually run by Nigerians although I don't know if this is still the case. In any case, it seems that many people have come to associate Nigeria and Nigerian email writing styles as indicative of scams.
It seems possible that Nigerian Internet cafes are full of emailers with names like Mr. John Richard who use yahoo email addresses and who come from a culture where it is common to write subjects in ALLCAPS. When they write to people they don't know, they -- quite sensibly -- start mails apologizing for the fact that they may have surprised their readers with an unannounced missive. Spammers and scammers put all these more upstanding folks at a real disadvantage when it comes to getting their message out.
A few years ago, Enrico Zini and I were talking about spam and he introduced me to an idea that I thought made a lot of sense. Basically, he said that the only real solution to spam is education: Until we educate people to not buy the things advertised in unsolicited email, spam will persist because there will be an economic incentive for it to do so.
There are other ways to stop spam being sent but these alternatives seem to boil down to making the spammers' medium either prohibitively expensive or regulated -- neither of which are solutions I'm comfortable with with a number of reasons.
Enrico's idea broke down for me today when I received religious "spam." It was a email from someone trying to convert me to Christianity.
As one of my friends put it, it's surprising that unsolicited religious mail is not more common and I don't doubt that it will become more so in the future. The problem with the education model for combating spam and these religious mass-marketing campaigns is that there is no reaction that we can educate people not to have that will eliminate the messages. There is no link to click and no phone number to call in the email. Religious spammers have a message and the chance that you might get it and become saved eternally -- no matter how improbable -- is enough to justify their effort.
At this point, religious spammers are using the tools of the commercially-motivated spam industry so they are connected. However, I can't help but see this is a profoundly more problematic type of spam creation.
I met a girl named Ionna yesterday.
If I were named Ionna, I would make it one of my life's goals to live in a spherical home like this at least once in my life:
Thanks go to Greg Pomerantz -- my lawyer, my photo-documentarian -- for pointing me to WIPO's page on Women and Intellectual Property.
In most ways, the page is a pretty standard Women and Field X page. Greg suggested that perhaps WIPO hired a Women And consultant who specializes in making pages and pamphlets like this. It seems plausible.
The page is everything one would imagine. It is equipped with an eclectic collection of pictures of women bent over test tubes side-by-side with women engaging in activities that WIPO seems to think are both particularly feminine and rich in currently unexploited IP potential -- things like ballet dancing and banging on a traditional drum.
Evidently, WIPO is concerned by the fact that, "traditionally women have not generally held major prominence in the intellectual property field, an area frequently seen as a 'masculine' activity in years past." They go on:
It is critical that outreach programs to build awareness about the importance of intellectual property and its protection target [women] ... Women, just as men, deserve to be given the means to enable them to use intellectual property as a tool of economic and social empowerment.
That's right ladies: Men have been owning and exploiting ideas in increasingly egregious and unethical ways for the last several centuries. There's an unfair gender division between the people who are using IP unfairly and those who are merely suffering the consequences. It's about time you stepped up to the plate!
Like IP in indigenous knowledge, this is really indicative of WIPO's major problem: the only tool they have to solve problems with IP is more IP. I'm not confident that WIPO is well equipped to implement -- or even understand -- solutions that require challenging the language and idea of ownership of knowledge through which they understand and attempt to solve problems.
Because a birthday that involves copyright infringement is an Unhappy Birthday...
In a fit of copyright high-protectionist fervor, I whipped up Unhappy Birthday last night. Many thanks to Seth Schoen who helped save me from my own atrocious spelling, grammar, and thinkos.
The site is a commentary on the fact that the song Happy Birthday To You is under an actively enforced copyright held by Time Warner. This site gives folks the tools and information they need to report unauthorized public performances of that work wherever they may occur.
If educating people and upholding the principle of copyright means risking a DoS of ASCAP's licensing enforcement infrastructure, that's a risk I'm willing to take. Please join me and spread the word! Unhappy Birthday is more fun when more people play.
The site is online at: http://www.unhappybirthday.com
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