I was playing KEXP on my computer over the weekend, and I say to my five year old "Hey isn't it cool we can play a station from the Internet on the computer?"

She looks at me like I'm stupid.

"On the computer?" she says, quizzically.

"Yes." I say.

She laughs. She thinks I'm being funny. "Daddy," she says, "the Internet is the computer".

To a five year old the computer and the network are redundant terms.

Jim Groom notes the creation of a Copyright Czar. The bill is here. I'm guessing since the "Drug Czar" idea worked out so well, the government just couldn't help itself.

You want to know how screwed up the world is? The sponsor of this bill, Patrick Leahy, is a huge Grateful Dead fan. From Wikipedia:

Leahy is a fan of the Grateful Dead. He has not only attended concerts, but has taped them, and

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="202" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

has a collection of the band's tapes in his Senate Offices. Jerry Garcia visited him at his Senate offices, and Leahy gave a tie designed by Garcia to Senator Orrin Hatch (who responded by giving Leahy a Rush Limbaugh tie). Surviving band members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart have participated in fundraisers for Leahy and his Political Action Committee, the Green Mountain Victory Fund. Leahy also appeared in a videotaped tribute to the Dead when they received a lifetime achievement award at the 2002 Jammys. His Senate website notes this response to a question from seventh grade students from Vermont's Thetford Academy who asked Leahy which Dead song was his favorite, he replied: "... my favorite is "Black Muddy River" but we always play "Truckin'" on election night at my headquarters."

Peace, Love, and Selling Out.

So I posted this news item over on the OCWC blog, but given the touchiness of the whole "free" debate, I thought I'd put my own thoughts on the matter over here.

The first thing to realize is the Consortium has no position on for-profit ventures involving courseware. We don't endorse them, we don't attack them. And our members can decide on exactly how they wish to enforce their copyright -- the Consortium requires that institutions release at least ten courses to non-commercial use -- but beyond that institutions have discretion in how they choose to manage their licenses. It's a baseline, not a line in the sand.

So with that off the table, let's talk about commercial use.

I tend to not be as religious about it as some. I tend, for example, to see a difference between ad-funded efforts and resale efforts, and I think the share-alike clause tends to cover many concerns that the non-commercial does. Were I releasing something, I'm not entirely sure I'd forgo the non-commercial restriction -- I think, quite frankly, it'd depend on the nature of what I was releasing. The goal would be to get it into the hands of those people that could use it in the most effective manner possible. To the extent commercial activity does that I'm in favor. To the extent it doesn't, I'm opposed.

So, do commercial ventures ultimately aid or hinder the distribution of material? I think that ends up being a policy issue -- not a philosophical one, which is why tracking these ventures like AsiaOnline ends up being so important. If we could get past the "free as in beer" tirades and start looking at some real world data we might actually get somewhere on this, or at least find some common ground.

That's why I greet things like AsiaOnline with a combination of excitement and trepidation. I think the movement is young enough that we can bear to see how some of these things play out. The key here is not resistance, but vigilance.

I know, an edupunk forgoing resistance for vigilance ... have I sold out already? But for every EMI there are a dozen Matador and Merge records, a dozen indie labels that make the revolution possible -- how do we distinguish between the two? How do we foster innovation and distribution while preventing monopolization and appropriation? I'm may be accused of begging out, but I'm not entirely sure we have an answer on that yet. In the meantime, there are numerous ways to proceed, and that's good.

Sorry, but this is horrendous news:

A federal judge in New York today put the kibosh on the planned publication of a contentious book version of the popular (now defunct) fansite, ruling it violates Rowling's creations.

U.S. District Judge Robert Patterson Jr. dismissed defense arguments that the Lexicon was protected under fair-use provisions of copyright law.

I know readers here won't need a primer on how ridiculous this is. The right to compose literary guides to extant works has existed for hundreds of years. Take, for example, the multiple guides to James Joyce's Ulysses (incl. one written by his friend Stuart Gilbert). Or the guides to Middle Earth, many of which I would guess Rowling has on her own bookshelf.

Art has always been a conversation, and works like lexicons are one of the many aspects of that conversation. But it is apparently more important for the courts to protect the rights of millionaires to make more money than it is to keep that conversation open -- just yet another example of our culture's readiness to raid the infrastructure of the past while refusing to pay our own productions forward. Rowling's influences: C.S. Lewis, T.H. White, Roald Dahl, and J.R.R. Tolkein would shake their heads in disgust at this behavior were they alive today. My sense is all those authors thought they were building a world to be shared between them and their readers, not building a walled garden with a EULA pinned on it.

Because I'd really forgotten what a typical business laptop looked like, I thought I'd not make trouble and just have my new job give me a standard business laptop. You know, being the new guy, I didn't want to ask for all kind of weird blogger crap.

It's been kind of an interesting experience, because I am so used to only having a home laptop, I'd forgotten how streamlined your average corporate machine is:

• No integrated webcam


• No SD card reader


• No integrated micrpohone


• No pre-installed movie editing software

I don't think this is unique to my current situation, mind you. I'm sure most universities have quite similar default machines.

And I take full responsibility for not thinking through my request for a default install -- other than the absence of new media features it is a sweet machine, and I found an old webcam to throw on it and I'll buy some movie making software and screencasting apps.

But isn't it funny we live in a world where business machines have MS Access and InfoPath installed by default, applications that only 2% of the end users will utilize, but things like movie making software and webcams and screencasting apps are still an oddity on business machines?

Might one of the simplest things to do at a university be to talk to your IT department about what a modern default install and hardware config might look like? Just in case a professor *does* get an urge to Skype someone or hang out in Second Life or webcast her class?

If we are serious about participatory media, it belongs in the base spec.

I've been looking for examples of agile solutions to real world problems to put into a presentation I'm giving on my last day here, and this one just fell into my lap today:

IN the past, said Stacie R. Hankins, a special assistant at the United States Embassy in Rome, when the ambassador prepared to meet an Italian political figure, the staff would e-mail a memo about the meeting and attach biographies of those who would be attending to be printed out.

Today, she said, they still produce the memo, but “now they attach a link to the Diplopedia article” — Diplopedia being a wiki, open to the contributions of all who work in the State Department. The ambassador, Ronald P. Spogli, frequently reads the biographies on his BlackBerry on the way to the meeting.

The advantages are obvious, in efficiency and in saving paper, but it has required a leap of faith, too. For, theoretically at least, anyone at the State Department could have edited the biographies Mr. Spogli was reading — unlike traditional resources.

I love stories like this -- stories of stodgy, bureaucratic agencies trying to reverse their ossification with new lightweight tools that promote a culture of openness. So many times when I'm talking to people about this technology they feel separated from the heroes of DIY community, assuming that people that start things like LibriVox or flu wiki must be technical geniuses (wrong) or exist outside of the business constraints most people live in (ok, point taken).

But when you read stuff like this, it resonates with people in large organizations:

The advantage of Diplopedia, she said, isn’t necessarily the ease of creating new material, but the ease in finding information. “The political section used to keep biographies on political people, and the economics people kept biographies on economics people,” she said. “It was not always up to date. You didn’t always know what the other had.”

The practical information, likewise, is material that was floating around the halls of the State Department, but not typically written down.

“Not to resort to clichés, but it demonstrates the long tail effect,” Mr. Johnson said. “A lot of things are not things that you would put on a traditional Web site. If someone directed a desk officer to create an article, it would not be about how to order lunch. That might seem trivial — but getting food into the main State Department building is not an easy task.”

If anyone else has examples of open tools penetrating into Kafkaesque realms, please share. I'll update this blog with them as I find them.

So what happens when you're in the middle of playing Halo, and someone from the New York Times calls you for off the cuff analysis? Well, this:

But even without the straight ticket, Mike Caulfield, a co-founder of bluehampshire.com, a political Web site, said he expected Mrs. Shaheen to win.

“People kind of treasure their indecision,” he said of New Hampshire residents. “They kind of hold on to it much longer than people in other places might. But if 2006 is any guide, the independents will break very hard for the Democrats.”

I stand by the quote though. The reporter was primarily calling me not on the race, but looking instead for some demographic context. And yeah, "indecision" is what I said, because I do think it's ambiguous whether this is a good thing about NH-ites. I blame the primaries, where you're always more interesting as someone in the process of deciding than as someone who has signed on.

I do wish that Dean Barker, the BH co-founder who is a nationally recognized expert on this specific race, had been called instead -- but by a fluke, he was on vacation this week in some undisclosed location.