Not content with the Dublin Writers Festival (here), we also have the Dublin Book Festival this March. Sponsored by the publishers and supported by various greats and goods, it’s happening in City Hall on Dame St. in Dublin 2; apparently there’s a full programme available by email, I fired off a request but didn’t get anything back, and the website doesn’t seem to have all the details. Still, it’s a while away, and it’s only up the road…
Peter Ryan has tagged me with one of these tagging things, and I’m only doing it because he’s from Toronto and I need him to bring me for good coffee and donuts the next time I’m in town.
So, what I have to do is this :
We have been instructed to open the nearest book to page 123, go down to the 5th sentence and type up the 3 following sentences. Or else. The note also demands that we forward this stupidity onto five others.
Following the addition by the good people at Slaw, though, I’ll give two answers - one for a legal book and one for a non-legal book.
First, the law one, then. It’s International Economic Law and the Digital Divide by Rohan Kariyawasam (because I’m trying to get the time to read it - it’s very good but quite detailed - for thesis reasons so it’s still on my desk)
WTO members have held five dedicated discussions on cross-cutting issues relevant to electronic commerce, under the auspices of the General Council. One of the cross-cutting issues of concern is the classification of electronic intangibles. The issue before the WTO is whether the supply of digitised produces which can be delivered either in a physical medium or by way of the internet should be classified under the GATS or GATT, or even the TRIPS. The type of products generally described as electronic intangibles consist of sound recordings, video games, audiovisual works, computer software and literary works, generally any form of content, protected by copyright or other forms of intellectual property rights that can be delivered in a physical form (CDs, CD-ROMs, DVDs, videos, books, newspapers and magazines), or as a form of an electronic transmission over the Internet.
And the non-law one, which is That Neutral Island by Clair Wills (cause I just bought it in paperback this week):
Brennan’s ditty lambasted the Americans for their cavalier attitude to Irish lives, and argued for Ireland’s right to remain neutral. But it also expressed another concern of the Irish government, through one less often acknowledged in the sober language of diplomacy: the belief that if the British were offered the ports, they would never give them back (’For says John, “I find those bases / Are really quite attractive places…”). Where the British were inclined to think of the ports simply as military bases, divorced from the counties and communities in which they stood, Brennan, and behind him the Irish government, focused on the ports as Irish territory - as integral to the country as the Six Counties.
Now, spreading the love, here’s asking for the reading habits of Ruth (because she reads better books than I do), Content and Carrier (because they love their Shakespeare and their law), Nic (to distract him from his thesis, and to bounce the meme to Australia), Tarleton as his fantastic new syllabus must mean he has a desk covered in books, and finally Lilian so that she can use the results in her next presentation on meme culture!
Last year, I wrote about a novel called Consolation (by Michael Redhill) which was longlisted for the Booker Prize; it never made it to the shortlist, although it did pick up some other awards including the Toronto Book Award. This month, here comes news on its selection as the ‘One Book‘ to read (we have a similar scheme in Dublin called One City One Book; the book for 2008 will be Gulliver’s Travels!), part of a bigger libraries-and-literacy programme called ‘Keep Toronto Reading‘ run by the Toronto Public Library, and the media coverage and tie-in by one of the city’s newspapers, the Toronto Star, is a very interesting example of how to draw links between books and other forms of media. (Read/see it here).
Now Consolation itself has a strong media sub-theme, as photography plays an important role in the storyline, and therefore it is already well placed for this sort of thing. The Star adds digital versions of some relevant photographs, has a wonderful video (including a book talk and more), and is encouraging readers to compile and submit their own photographs. The library presents a interactive map that again picks up on some of the century-hopping themes of the book in a nicely visual way. The whole thing is a true encapsulation of multi-media in a way that doesn’t seem forced or tokenistic - the cross-platform ideas flows from the text in many ways and, simply, it works.
(The draft of this post was “Absolutely Scrabulous” but damn you Frank Pasquale (great post though) for using the title first)
The storm (7) in a teacup (10) over Scrabble and Scrabulous is an illustration of what’s wrong with copyright law. As you’re probably sick to death of hearing, Hasbro, owning the copyright in the original Scrabble board game (after a series of buyouts/sales over the game’s long 20th-century history) hold some sort of rights (in the board itself, I think, not the game). They have licensed this for electronic use to another (Electronic Arts) and said other have brought proceedings against a Facebook version of the game called Scrabulous. (Many suspect that the result will be that EA buys Scrabulous and agrees to settle as pat of the purchase-price negotiations. Ah, the majesty of the protection of artists).
At this stage, any pretence that copyright is about the promotion of creativity and knowledge is but a sad joke. This is about the protection of market and little more - and by all means, there’s a case for the legal system protecting this (even if I’d be a sceptic), but it is so far from the stated purposes of copyright law that is tantamount to a redefinition.
Picture the scene. Architect Alfred Mosher Butts is trying to figure out his idea for a game. He says to himself “Well, I could get back to work and go and plan the position of a few windows and doors on that house, but because a company called Hasbro will (in 70 years time) be able to sell the exclusive rights to put this board on a computer network that I haven’t even heard of because it hasn’t been invented yet, I really should stick with it. Yes, it’s copyright law that keeps me going!” Indeed, even if Butts had had an awareness of copyright law, it was the law then in existence (and not the bloated, inflated, extended version that we now know), so any suggestion that an uncontemplated law encouraged him to draw out the picture is beyond comprehension.
Of course, you can argue that it’s essential for a game to have copyright protection if it is to be of any value and consistency in the marketplace and the cultural space. Just like chess, right? Well, as is probably obvious from my tone, we’re fortunate enough that the modern chess board was laid out long before copyright statutes were but a twinkle in the eye of the legislator. And the absence of copyright protection doesn’t seem to stop investment in and the search for new ways to play chess.
My point here is not to absolve the intrepid developers of Scrabulous of any responsibility. Clearly, there are issues in trademark law that they might want to deal with, and they are as much a part of this dance of acquisition and offer as EA themselves. However, if we believe that there’s a social or economic value in protecting EA’s ‘rights’, I feel that this should be worked out outside of the law of copyright, as every time a clearly ludicrous situation like this arises, the moral authority of copyright law is diminished even further. As it turns out, the platform (Facebook) is the first target, and they too have to assess their responsibility and liability (raising issues of gatekeepers and control as summarised by Jonathan Zittrain, here. However, from the point of view of the 21st century user, both Scrabble (TM, whatever) and chess are ‘old’ games and the fact that one can only be touched with permission (in return for silver dollars) and the other is perfectly open for experimentation and dissemination will baffle the average user. And they are right to question why this is the case. This illustrates not just over-protection but the insanity of extending protection over and over and over and over (like a monkey with a miniature cymbal) for works that (if ever protected) should long have passed into the public domain.
All this is as a footnote to the unstoppable John Palfrey who predicted this last October!
Professor Philip Leith (Queen’s University Belfast, former chair of BILETA and a trustee of Bailii) tells Jeremy Phillips at IPKat that
Bailii is currently undertaking a trial of publishing out of print monographs dealing with legal issues … Most publishers have no commercial interest in books after the print run has finished and they are happy to reassign copyright to the author, if copyright was assigned to them. Bailii will only republish a text if there are no copyright limitations. An author wishing to make his out of print monographs available to Bailii will normally thus provide the original word processed files from which the publisher worked….Authors can also revise a work before it is republished….Bailii has no password protection, students can link directly from reading lists to the specified work, and there are none of the constraints on making copies/printing/saving which are usual with commercial systems…It would be helpful if you gave feedback on formatting, ease of system use, and any other comments you might have. Bailii’s structure is oriented towards case law, so comments on how books might best be handled are particularly relevant. Please email me here, with the header ‘Bailii Books’. (edited; read full post here)
Two books that Leith himself worked on are already available - who will be next?
I had some useful conversations with library and disability service staff in my own institution this year about the availability (or non-availability) of in-print texts in various computer formats (frequently, no document or text version was available, just PDFs - this normally means that the text was submitted in document, laid out in something like Quark and then further changes made, thus the Quark version (as subsequently PDFed) is the only accurate version). However, in the case of older, out-of-print texts, there may well be a few authors out there that have a decrepit WordPerfect version lying around on a floppy disk somewhere (what’s a floppy disk, Daddy?). If so, Bailii would love to hear from you!
This review article in the New York Review Of Books deals with the range of books about blogs. I’ve only got a couple of them (some are old, some are new, not all are available officially in this part of the world) but want some more - the article doesn’t really draw on the book themes all that much (pity, really), but even the list is fun to play with. I’ve added my own links to amazon.co.uk where possible, but they may be available elsewhere - I do all (or most of) my online buying at the Book Depository):
We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture
compiled and edited by John Rodzvilla, with an introduction by Rebecca Blood
Basic Books, 242 pp., $20.00
Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
by Lee Siegel
Spiegel and Grau, 182 pp., $22.95
Republic.com 2.0
by Cass R. Sunstein
Princeton University Press, 251 pp., $24.95
Blogwars
by David D. Perlmutter
Oxford University Press, 235 pp., $24.95
The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
by Daniel J. Solove
Yale University Press, 247 pp., $24.00
We’re All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Lawin the Internet Age
by Scott Gant
Free Press, 240 pp., $26.00
Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World
by Hugh Hewitt
Nelson Books, 225 pp., $14.99 (paper)
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture
by Andrew Keen
Doubleday/Currency, 228 pp., $22.95
Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, foreword by Tom Peters
Wiley, 252 pp., $24.95
Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture
by David Kline and Dan Burstein
CDS Books, 402 pp., $24.95
While we’re talking about lists, recently I’ve been using the Mediaforum list of books on Irish media - it’s really useful and now is a good time to share it.
I like fonts and typefaces (as regular readers know and know).
The Atlantic Monthly (a magazine I love and subscribe to, now available online without payment as half the blogs on the planet are reporting this week) has this feature on the development of typefaces. A video insert to match is also available. And Damien noted that Helvetica (the documentary) had made it onto Google Video (but alas, it’s gone). You can buy the DVD instead.
Happy days…
Reviewed in today’s Globe and Mail is a book by University of Toronto history professor Steve Penfold, published by University of Toronto Press: The Donut: A Canadian History. (For anyone who happens to be knocking around Toronto, there’s a talk being given by the author (with free donuts included) on Monday.
Penfold, of course, is well-known in Canadiana, not least as the author of a PhD on donut shops (given an Ig Nobel award in 1999 for said research; actually I’ve always thought that that was a little unfair, as it’s probably on the more relevant and interesting wing of 21st century sociology PhDs…). Looking forward to reading this.
On a related note, Facebook types may wish to give virtual donuts and coffee to their (virtual) friends with this application. We Love Tim Hortons.
(Updated) A welcome development this week is the launch of Law Matters, a relaunch of the ‘law page’ in Monday’s Irish Times. Pre-relaunch, this was a (slightly edited) full judgement from a recent case - traditionally of some value as it may not have been otherwise reported, but of less value in the present day what with online judgements etc (more of that in a moment). While it’s of course much smaller in scope and size than something like the law pages (and matching website) in the Times (”The” Times, or the London Times as I sometimes hear in Dublin!), it may well grow into something resembling it. There isn’t a dedicated section on ireland.com (the website of the Irish Times) yet, but those who have subscriber-access can see the first bunch of case summaries here. The introductory article says:
(Law Matters) will contain synopses of the most important recent judgments from the Supreme Court, High Court and Court of Criminal Appeal. These will not be law reports in the traditional sense of the term, but summaries containing the key legal points in the judgments … In addition to summaries of judgments, we will, from time to time, publish commentary on and analysis of important legal developments. Law Matters will also contain news and information from the legal world.
It’s quite difficult to track down legal news in this jurisdiction. The monthly magazine-style publications of the professional bodies (the Bar Review and the Law Society Gazette) are useful; the Gazette is available in some newsagents in print form and is now available online as a PDF (thanks to Fiona de Londras for spotting this) and the Bar Review is available online for barristers only and can be found in some libraries. A number of the other, regular publications (such as the Irish Law Times) and academic journals (such as the Dublin University Law Journal) can be found in the Westlaw.ie database (expensive if you don’t have access through a library or law school) - and few are found in the international databases (Lexis and Westlaw). Legalperiodicals.org (a UCC project) does provide tables of contents for the legal periodicals (news and academic) and we’d be lost without it. Very few journals publish full-text online (the State-funded Judicial Studies Institute Journal and some of the student journals are honourable exceptions. Of course, the Irish Law Site (developed by Darius Whelan) contains news and events as well as links to useful information. Paid site firstlaw.ie also does current awareness and unreported judgements although I’m not too familiar with it.
Bailii (and the Irish outpost Irlii, again with UCC support) are open-access-to-law sites; this means that we can see court judgements soon after they are handed down - and the Courts Service itself now does the same at courts.ie (although it can be a bit hit-and-miss; one decision I’m waiting on was announced in March, published and read in court in November and still hasn’t appeared…)
SCRIPT-ed is the (newly re-subtitled) journal of law, technology and society edited at the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law in Edinburgh. The final issue of 2007 has just been published on the Web - contents here.
Of particular importance is Chris Marsden’s article (PDF. DOC, HTML) on net neutrality (Net Neutrality and Consumer Access to Content), which includes a particular focus on the UK and European elements of neutrality. Those following the topic will know that Marsden is one of the handful of people that understand both the US-centric debate as it is and the more global perspective as it should be; the article, an overview and also a critique, will be an important reference, citation and starting point for a lot of work in the coming months, including my own.
Of less particular importance but it’s my party and I’ll self-promote if I want to, this issue also contains my review (PDF, DOC, HTML) of the New Directions in Copyright Law books. Complete with a Stephen Leacock reference. Thumbs up to the editors for not taking it out…
Of artistic importance is the lovely cover inspired in part by grey Scottish skies (surely not?).
All this, of course, is in the context of a very interesting editorial by Shawn Harmon and Wiebke Abel, where they set out a manifesto for the future development of the journal, including a new publishing schedule and additional locations of publication, updated Creative Commons licensing, an expanded mandate, a shiny website, and more. They also flag the upcoming conference (coming up, that is, in 2009!)
GOVERNANCE OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES: THE TRANSFORMATION OF MEDICINE, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
An International Interdisciplinary Conference
March 29-31, 2009
University of Edinburgh
More information here. Be there - whatever the colour of the skies!