Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Japanese computer scientist arrest for copyright infringing tool

More on recent international intellectual property battles: Isamu Kaneko, the creator of Winny, a p2p filesharing tool, was arrested in Japan this month. Two Japanese men were arrested last year on copyright infringement charges.

Shelley Jackson publishing on skin

Shelley Jackson, creator of the great hypertext work Patchwork Girl, is publishing a new text, "Skin", entirely on human skin, via tattooes.

From this time on, participants will be known as "words". They are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as its embodiments. As a result, injuries to the printed texts, such as dermabrasion, laser surgery, tattoo cover work or the loss of body parts, will not be considered to alter the work. Only the death of words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words.

Reminiscent of the old book-bound-in-human-skin meme. And Jeter's semiotic sentient nomad tattooes.

(thanks to Amanda!)

Social software history: the case of Habitat

"The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat" offers an analysis of massively multiplayer games with implications for social software... from the late 1980s.
I admit to enjoying the rotating DEATH character.

(via ManyToMany)

Theater surveillance vs derivative art

This week's NYT reports on another case of IP law conflicting with creative use of others' work.

UPDATED: Jesse Walker points me to this sketch of Routson.

...Mr. Routson makes movies of other people's movies.

Since 1999 he has been going to Baltimore-area movie theaters, often on a feature film's opening day, and recording what happens on and around the screen with a small, hand-held camcorder. He shows the grainy, oddly distorted results, which he calls recordings, as DVD installations in art galleries.

Shot without consulting the view-finder, these diaristic works are replete with the mysterious rustlings, irritating interruptions, darkness and partial views endemic in movie theaters. The shadowy images wobble, especially when Mr. Routson shifts in his seat. You hear breathing and throat-clearing...

Mr. Routson's work, which is not for sale, is the latest to find itself in the murky zone between copyright infringement and artistic license, between cultural property rights and cultural commentary. On Oct. 1 a new Maryland law will make the unauthorized use of an audiovisual recording device in a movie theater illegal. Last week two people were arrested in California for operating camcorders in movie theaters. One was apprehended by an attendant wearing night-vision goggles...

(thanks to dad)

Orkut at eleven weeks

"Orkut at eleven weeks" is a rather skeptical case study of the author's experience of Orkut. Good citations, an historical sense, and useful insights on code enforcement, friends' adoption, and timelines.

Antifilter filters: the US and Iran

One step forward, one step back: "Unintended Risks and Consequences of Circumvention Technologies: The IBB's Anonymizer Service in Iran."

A web-proxy service set up by the US government's International Broadcasting Bureau to enable websurfers in Iran to evade censorship is itself massively censoring what they can see.

That is the conclusion of an independent new report released from the OpenNet Initiative, an international collaboration between researchers at the University of Toronto, Harvard University and the University of Cambridge.

Tens of thousands of Iranians log on each day to the US government's IBB Anonymizer service, run by government contractor Anonymizer in San Diego, California. The service was set up in 2003 by the US government to allow people in Iran to surf websites blocked by Iranian authorities.

The sites blocked include those of political dissidents, pro-democracy sites, and western news media such as news.bbc.com. IBB Anonymizer makes these accessible, but the report says it also blocks hundreds of other sites.

"This simply looks at the domain name", says Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School, a coauthor of the report, and filters out any that contain words on a banned list.

One banned word is "ass", which blocks some pornography sites but also blocks the sites "usembassy.state.gov" and "www.grass-roots.org", says the report. Other words include "breast", "bush", "gay", "hot", "my", "old", "pic", "soft", "teen", "trans" and "tv". "They might as well filter every fifth website," says Zittrain.

Michael Moore, the Mouse, and firemen

Intellectual property battles take another twist, with one of the giants - Michael Moore charges Disney with blocking distribution of his new film, Fahrenheit 911.
The BBC notes this datapoint:

But Zenia Mucha, a Disney spokesman, said: "We advised both [Moore's] agent and Miramax in May of 2003 that the film would not be distributed. That decision stands."

Indiewire speculates:

Citing an article in today's New York Times, Michael Moore added that Disney's reason for the decision is to preserve the tax breaks that it receives from the state of Florida and President Bush's brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush.


During a recent discussion about the movie at the Full Frame Documentary Festival, Moore indicated that Mel Gibson's Icon Productions dropped its funding of the movie after getting a warning call from the White House. Miramax later stepped in with money for Moore to make the film, with what insiders have said included an option to distribute the movie.

CNN $$ has more:

Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, told the New York Times that Eisner asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Emanuel said Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where President Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, is governor.


The Times reported that Disney executives denied that allegation. One executive told the paper it did not want to be seen taking sides in the election and risk alienating customers of different political views.


"It's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle," said the executive, who was not identified by the paper.


But Moore said he believed the protection of tax cuts was the reason for the media conglomerate's position.

It's due to screen at Cannes this year.
How long until the Darknet picks it up?

Bunnies do The Shining

More rabbits revisiting horror classics: bunnies do The Shining (1980) in 30 seconds.

(thanks to Saramin!)

Are you a sad ovoid?

Great happy pill ad parody.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Lessig "Free Culture", chapter 6

More notes on reading Lessig's Free Culture.

Rhetorically, Lessig continues to appeal to heroic, suffering individuals - here, Millar and Donaldson. And IP villains, like the Conger.

The eighteenth century grounds more historical support for the free culture idea. Lessig points us to a very early instance of copyright term limitation, when the statute of Anne hit its temporal horizon:

I see no Reason for granting a further Term now, which will not hold as well for granting it again and again, as often as the Old ones Expire; so that should this Bill pass, it will in Effect be establishing a perpetual Monopoly, a Thing deservedly odious in the Eye of the Law; it will be a great Cramp to Trade, a Discouragement to Learning, no Benefit to the Authors, but a general Tax on the Publick; and all this only to increase the private Gain of the Booksellers

And we see the birth of the public domain:

Before the case of Donaldson v. Beckett, there was no clear idea of a public domain in England. Before 1774, there was a strong argument that common law copyrights were perpetual.



After 1774, the public domain was born. For the first time in Anglo- American history, the legal control over creative works expired, and the greatest works in English history - including those of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Johnson, and Bunyan - were free of legal restraint.