Lex Ferenda

This blog will go quiet for a few days, as I’m off in Canterbury for the Critical Lawyers Group conference, “Human Rights and Human Wrongs”.

See you on Monday.

(Apologies for the cod-Latin)

Update: Canterbury was excellent, but I’ve had a few busy days. I’m still here, just in the quiet carriage. Back to normal now.

Toronto’s public library system is one of the largest in the world, and features the landmark Reference Library, which I’ve always been quite attached to. Therefore, it was with some happiness that I read about “Lawyers Love Libraries” (more hereKeep Toronto Reading, and involves a lot of the major Bay Street law firms.

In personal news, my proposal (with the intriguing title of ‘Minerva’s Mouse: The Challenge of Cyberlaw’!) has been accepted by the Osgoode Hall graduate conference (information here, but not much available yet) for this May. As a former (one-year) student at Osgoode, I’m thrilled to get a chance to go back and to talk about my research. I may even take a spin by the Reference Library and drop a toonie in the tin while I’m there!

Add Karlin Lillington’s blog (techno-culture) to your feedreader, blogroll, aggregator, bookmarks or nearest beermat. Karlin is a journalist with the Irish Times and an excellent writer on technology (and other things too, although it’s the techie-stuff that she’d be known for…)

Anyway, techno-culture was certainly one of the earliest Irish blogs to cover Internet and tech issues, but it has been off the air for some time. As she explains, it’s been quite a saga, involving GoDaddy being a baaad mothershutyourmouth and finally a successful installation of Wordpress, and boom! it’s back.

A few ads have appeared in print publications recently, reminding those who are working in limited companies to pay attention to an upcoming legal change. As a couple of people have mentioned this to me offline (”I saw this ad about law and emails, is that what you’re studying?” “Um, not really, but thanks”), and there are in fact some interesting, broad questions relating to the amendments to the European Communities (Companies) Regulations (for that is what they are talking about), here are my thoughts. Damien asks whether this is a silly law: on balance, I conclude that it should be OK. Read the rest of this entry »

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

From Night Mail (text) by English poet W.H. Auden, who was born 100 years ago today. Night Mail was used in a famous film (with music by no less than Benjamin Britten!) tracking the progress of a London-Scotland overnight mail train. It’s the perfect ‘communications’ poem, and therefore I’m happy to share the excerpt above in recognition of the Auden centenary.

More: Guardian editorial | previous post

This is a remarkable story.

CDDB (now Gracenote) is the Internet database of CD information (tracks, authors) etc that most computer-based CD players (right from earlier playback-only applications through Winamp right up to iTunes) use. I have not-so-fond memories of trying to persuade early versions of WinAmp to talk to CDDB via a fairly rigid firewall. But by now it’s quite a huge database - it takes the data manually entered by end users and is, generally speaking, a database containing track listings for virtually all (CD) recorded music.

Controversially, it started out as a free software product, licensed under the GPL; however it is now a highly closed, commercial project, with media players being required to pay a fee to Gracenote and to enter into a contract with Gracenote (which has caused some fuss, especially in relation to exclusivity, display of logos etc).

Anyway, that brings us up to this week’s controversy. Gramaphone magazine writes about Joyce Hatto’s ‘recordings’:

Several days ago, another Gramophone critic decided to listen to a Hatto Liszt CD, of the 12 Transcendental Studies. He put the disc into his computer to listen, and something awfully strange happened. His computer’s player identified the disc as, yes, the Liszts, but not a Hatto recording. Instead, his display suggested that the disc was one on BIS Records, by the pianist Lászlo Simon. Mystified, our critic checked his Hatto disc against the actual Simon recording, and to his amazement they sounded exactly the same.

See, the CDDB (or alternative) system uses track lengths (etc) to create a unique ID (checksum) for each CD. The data is stored on Gracenote servers by unique ID - when you insert a CD, your iTunes (or whatever) calculates the checksum, sends it to Gracenote, they respond with the list of names and artists. But did we ever think it was a detective tool?

So Gramaphone noticed something fishy; and of course, Hatto’s recordings had previously been questioned. She had not performed in 30 years (due to illness, apparently) but had recorded over 100 critically acclaimed discs. On her husband’s record label. So now, the plot thickens.

Pristine Audio and Royal Holloway have carried out significant forensic work, with results like this:

(The top one is the ‘copy’, the bottom one is the ‘original’. Similar exercises have indicated that virtually every Hatto recording is a copy, or a slightly modified version (e.g. pitch), of a well-known recording)

Wikipedia has a good collection of links. What will happen next?

Update: the husband strikes back. (He doesn’t explain how the conductor is an unknown, Rene Kohler, who probably doesn’t exist, or deal with many other problems…)

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (official | wikipedia | TWP episode summaries), which started its Irish run this week (it’s been on the air in the US and Canada for a few months), looks like it’s going to be a great source for clever lines and setpieces about the American media (in the same way that producer Aaron Sorkin’s previous show, The West Wing, became a starting point for many interesting conversations about American politics). Indeed, just as the West Wing was suggested as a pedagogical tool for political science, will we see Studio 60 in media studies classes?

I’ve always had a thing for the movie Network, and was therefore delighted to see the gloriously derivative opening sequence where Judd Hirsch (him from Taxi) as the producer of the Studio 60 show (that’s the show-within-a-show, keep up at the back) goes crazy in front of the camera (or as it’s described in the news clips, ”does a Peter Finch”). So we have a TV show about the TV business (told through a show-within-a-show) featuring fictional news bulletins running a story about the show-within-the-show, talking about a movie about a news show. If this sounds all too Baudrillard for you, you’re not the only one.

Anyway, Hirsch doesn’t reappear after he is summarily fired (the main hook for the series is the double-headed production team of Bradley Whitford (aka Josh*) and Matthew Perry), but it’s one hell of a way to go. From the transcript, I’ve reconstructed the speech/rant as best I can - it’s great! (The speech isn’t seen in full, and is broken up by other dialogue) Click to read Read the rest of this entry »

I recently found myself wondering about the use of PowerPoint (or similar) presentations on the Web, and in particular in the context of academic conferences and e-learning projects.  At the VideoForum show in London, I had an opportunity to play with E-Lectern, an interesting system that (potentially) combines streaming video, slides and two-way text.  Apparently it hasn’t been used all that much in higher education, but a number of NHS programmes in the UK are using the system.

On my laptop, I have a copy of Keynote, Apple’s “non-powerpoint” application. It’s part of the iWork package well integrated with the rest of the Mac applications (e.g. iPhoto and the iLife suite).  It has a useful but not-well-advertised feature where presentations can be customised and exported as QuickTime videos.  (This is suitable for upload to YouTube and similar sites, too).  This is a surprisingly straightforward to add some good visuals to a Web project.  But any return path has to be separate (quite a few universities and conferences will webcast their seminars or conferences and use IRC (or similar) to take questions: Global Voices, Berkman (Harvard) and Vloggercon are examples), which has advantages and disadvantages.

Remembering, of course, that simply converting one file and throwing it on the Web is bad karma; some would even say it is evil, lazy, slothful and sinful!  Hmmb.

Know of any other good ways of doing this?  Would love to hear it.  I’m especially interested right now, as part of my research assistant job involves organising consultation meetings within the university, and attracting staff and students to the online versions/adaptations of what is dealt with at the ‘real world’ presentations is a challenge.  Especially given that we are talking about a very mixed user community (so anything like ‘oh, just put it in SecondLife’ won’t be taken seriously).

YouTube features this brilliant flute player (on the front page).  Woo hoo!  More from his Myspace profile.

(Hey, it’s the weekend)

Simon McGarr writes (also here) about the copyright issues relating to the use of Oireachtas (parliamentary) footage in satire (disclaimer: I contributed some (basic) ideas to this article). It’s a good read, and builds on some ongoing ideas that Simon, Fergal Crehan and others have been working on. To me, it’s a situation where there should (in principle) be no legal obstacle, but working through the various legal devices (standing orders, terms and conditions, copyright restrictions) is quite time-consuming. I hope they succeed; we desperately need political satire that goes beyond the tiresome mimic-and-repeat that Today FM has been dining out on for the last ten (or so?) years.

As a reminder of the long arm of modern copyright law, the Register reports on breach of copyright through forwarding an email. Although the headline reads:

Emails can infringe copyright, ruling

the judgement itself opens with a much less dramatic:

This is a dispute about fibre-cement roof slates.

And they say poetry is dead.

Anyway, despite the headline, this case is not about email in the slightest, but simply a reminder of how low the bar for ‘originality’ is (and indeed, 200 or so paragraphs are about slates, and 10 about copyright!). The judge finds that a particular business letter was “an original literary work” because it “involve(d) a substantial degree of independent skill and labour“. It’s a traditional sweat-of-the-brow approach. If you are troubled by this idea, as I am, you should read Carys Craig’s helpful article (PDF) on how the Canadian Supreme Court rebalanced the test for originality in CCH v Law Society. Indeed, the shift towards a greater sensitivity to the ‘public interest’, based at least in part on free-flow-of-information ideas, is perhaps a useful way to connect the originality debate with issues of email and the Web. However, in general it should be noted that this particular English judge was applying existing law, and made no comments about law reform or technology or anything of the sort.