8-Bit Wonder

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released its holiday e-card, which it describes as its 2010 "Year in Review" done in eight-bit game graphics style. Its three levels include "EFF vs. The Copyright Troll," "Free Your Phone," and "Save Your Privacy."

In reality, with the complexities of 2010 for Internet freedom advocates forced to think hard about WikiLeaks and the war on diplomacy that it represents, they really might be playing this Obama vs. Assange online game.

Unter den Linden

Virtualpolitik friend and digital journalist Bernhard Drax complains that a recent video has been pulled in Germany for alleged copyright violations. Although known for his use of machinima, Draxtor's low-tech video only uses a 2D representation of his 3D avatar.

As algorithms are developed to automatically pull YouTube videos with certain kinds of background music, the effect on videos that might incorporate copyrighted tunes unintentionally (rather than for critical or creative effect in editing, as in the Draxtor case) could lead people in public places to think differently about ubiquitous muzak if it interferes with vernacular video-making.

(My favorite appropriation of a likeness may be in this Mac vs. PC send-up.)

Letter to UC Faculty

Okay, normally I don't reproduce things in their entirety, and I feel compelled to do a lot of counter-reading of the arguments in a given digital text.

But I am going to break my rule when it comes to this letter from the University Libraries and the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication. Rate hikes for subscriptions to scholarly databases have become a real problem for anyone who wants to keep resources available to students in difficult budget times. Speaking personally, we've had serious problems in the Humanities Core Course with nearly losing access to some critical digital collections that were important for our information literacy goals.

I'm like most people who teach in the UC system: a lot of my work appears in closed peer-reviewed journals that is aggregated into products sold by a very limited number of for-profit companies.

For example, to see some of my work, your library would have to pay Taylor and Francis/Sage (for Discourse), Elsevier (for Journal of Second Language Writing), and Oxford Journals (for Literary and Linguistic Computing). Gale controls access to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, which I wrote for in grad school. And if I want to point someone to reviews of my book, the pointer would go via one of the portals at Wiley. So I understand that boycotts are not appealing, but this is a particularly egregious case.

Re: Informational Update on a Possible UC Systemwide Boycott of the Nature Publishing Group

Dear UC Divisional Chairs and Members of the UC Faculty,

UC Libraries are confronting an impending crisis in providing access to journals from the Nature Publishing Group (NPG). NPG has insisted on increasing the price of our license for Nature and its affiliated journals by 400 percent beginning in 2011, which would raise our cost for their 67 journals by well over $1 million dollars per year.

While Nature and other NPG publications are among the most prestigious of academic journals, such a price increase is of unprecedented magnitude. NPG has made their ultimatum with full knowledge that our libraries are under economic distress—a fact widely publicized in an Open Letter to Licensed Content Providers and distributed by the California Digital Library (CDL) in May 2009. In fact, CDL has worked successfully with many other publishers and content providers over the past year to address the University’s current economic challenges in a spirit of mutual problem solving, with positive results including lowering our overall costs for electronic journals by $1 million dollars per year.

NPG by contrast has been singularly unresponsive to the plight of libraries and has employed a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy that directs major price increases to various institutions in different years. Their proposed new license fee is especially difficult to accept in a time of shrinking UC library budgets and with the many sacrifices we all continue to make Systemwide. Capitulating to NPG now would wipe out all of the recent cost-saving measures taken by CDL and our campus libraries to reduce expenditures for electronic journals. More information about the UC Libraries’ concerns, including a history of previous unsustainable price increases from this publisher and others, is available on the CDL’s Challenges to Licensing page at http://www.cdlib.org/services/collections/current/challenges.html

UC Libraries have already taken a stand against NPG. After recently acquiring Scientific American, NPG doubled the institutional site license fee and raised the price of an institutional print subscription seven-fold. In response, UC Libraries, along with numerous other institutions throughout the country, discontinued their license to the online version and reduced the number of print subscriptions. As a first response to the current NPG proposal, UC Libraries plan to forgo all online subscriptions to any new NPG journals. But more drastic actions may be necessary.
What can UC Faculty do to help?

UC Faculty and researchers author a significant percentage of all articles published in NPG journals and are a major force in shaping the prestige of its publications. In the past six years, UC authors have contributed approximately 5300 articles to these journals, 638 of them in the flagship journal Nature. Using NPG’s own figures, an analysis by CDL suggests that UC articles published in Nature alone have contributed at least $19 million dollars in revenue to NPG over the past 6 years—or more than $3 million dollars per year for just that one journal. Moreover, UC Faculty supply countless hours serving as reviewers, editors, and advisory board members.

Many UC Faculty now believe that a larger and more concerted response is necessary to counter the monopolistic tactics of NPG. Keith Yamamoto, a Professor and Executive Vice Dean at UCSF (yamamoto@cmp.ucsf.edu) who helped lead a successful boycott against Elsevier and Cell Press in 2003 (http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA379265.html), has begun to assemble a group of Faculty that will help lead a UC Systemwide boycott of NPG. This means that unless NPG is willing to maintain our current licensing agreement, UC Faculty would ask the UC Libraries to suspend their online subscriptions entirely, and all UC Faculty would be strongly encouraged to:

• Decline to peer review manuscripts for journals from the Nature Publishing Group.
• Resign from Nature Publishing Group editorial and advisory boards.
• Cease to submit papers to the Nature Publishing Group.
• Refrain from advertising any open or new UC positions in Nature Publishing Group journals.
• Talk widely about Nature Publishing Group pricing tactics and business strategies with colleagues outside UC, and encourage sympathy actions such as those listed above.

We clearly recognize that the consequences of such a boycott would be complex and present hardships for individual UC researchers. But we believe that in the end, we will all benefit if UC can achieve a sustainable and mutually rewarding relationship with NPG. In the meantime, UC scholars can help break the monopoly that commercial and for-profit entities like NPG hold over the work that we create through positive actions such as:

• Complying with open access policies from Federal funding agencies such as the NIH
(http://publicaccess.nih.gov).
• Utilizing eScholarship, an open access repository service from CDL
(http://www.escholarship.org/publish_postprints.html).
• Considering other high-quality research publishing outlets, including open access journals such as those published by PLoS and others.
• Insisting on language in publication agreements that allows UC authors to retain their copyright (http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/manage/retain_copyrights.html).

A full list of journals currently licensed from NPG by UC Libraries is attached. We will keep you informed as this situation progresses, including the possibility of canceling all NPG titles.

Please feel free to contact the University Librarian on your campus with questions or concerns, or any of us. You can also communicate your concern to key contacts at NPG. The managing director of NPG, Steven Inchcoombe, and other members of the executive committee can be reached at exec@nature.com.

Sincerely,
Laine Farley
Executive Director
California Digital Library
University of California, Office of the President

Richard A. Schneider
Associate Professor, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery
University of California – San Francisco
Chair, University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication

Brian E. C. Schottlaender
The Audrey Geisel University Librarian
University of California – San Diego
Convener, University Librarians Council

Update: For more on the rhetorical moves in the librarians' call for a boycott, see "Fight Club Soap" from Bethany Nowviskie.

Beam Me Up Linden

Although some bloggers loved Star Trek in Second Life, now its creators are saddened to announce that "Star Trek Museum to Close." The letter of complaint that explains the closure and rails against the economic model that discourages fan participation has a number of interesting features.

For a long time our house sales and donations have been inadequate to pay the huge Linden Labs bills. On top of that, Linden Labs has made it more difficult to attract people to the museum. We cannot be in the Showcase because we use copyrighted material. Our events, which brought hundreds of new visitors a week, and donations, have been disallowed, while yard sales, nude beaches, penis stores and fake contests are allowed to flourish) and it is especially difficult to sell homes with all the limitations and expense of advertising. Without visitor donations and house sales, it is impossible to pay the bills. I have hung on as long as possible to try to save the museum, all the hard work by the staff and volunteers, and all the homes. Besides the monetary cost of running this place, taking care of the museum, fixing and finding things, helping visitors and residents, advertising, bookkeeping, all require a huge amount of time and energy, and I cannot afford the expense or the many hours per day any longer. To be honest, I am really looking forward to having more time for my real life ;-) To all of you who have been helpful around the museum, supported the museum with your tiers and rents, and generous with donations, you know who you are and how appreciative I am. I sincerely thank you again. To others, my only advice is to donate to the places you love in SL, or they may disappear too, as so many have. With our home-world gone, Tsora and I will most likely be retiring to our little corner of the universe, the Vulcan colony in Eridani, and do look forward to your visits.

In some way it constitutes a classic virtual world "goodbye" that acknowledges the demands of the real world, gives credit to community and collaboration, and -- frequently -- places blame for the surrender to a corporate entity.

In this case it is interesting also to note the role that copyright played in the project's lack of viability, an issue that Henry Jenkins has written about frequently to describe the frustrations of fans who want to appropriate content for new platforms, uses, and audiences.

We Are the World

I'm not sure how I feel about the White House's celebration of "World Intellectual Property Day."

To give the Obama administration credit, they have a range of viewpoints to their comments website, which range from a litigious rodeo photographer to a graduate student in historical musicology, but the emphasis on enforcement and the powers of the Justice Department don't seem to bode well for free culture attitudes at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Sixty Million Dollar Man

Virtualpolitik friend Kembrew McLeod recently wrote in the Atlantic about "How to Make a Documentary About Sampling--Legally."

While we raised the money to license about two-dozen songs and some footage, our film nevertheless contains over 400 brief-but-unlicensed uses of copyrighted material. When I can't sleep at night, I sometimes count how much we'd be liable for: up to $150,000 in statutory damages, per infringement. 400 x $150,000 = $60,000,000. Sixty. Million. Dollars.

Why did we use so many clips? Ben and I wanted the film's aesthetic to reflect its subject matter: collage, hip-hop sampling, and the rise of remix culture. Copyright Criminals documents how hip-hop producers have, since the genre's origins, cut and pasted portions of old records into their own music. For years, hip-hop stayed beneath the commercial radar, which gave producers a lot of creative freedom to make their art however they wished. The music that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s often featured densely layered musical collages that were groundbreaking.
. . .
Fun fact: If they sue us, the case would be called Bridgeport v. Copyright Criminals. Something is fundamentally wrong when a professor who studies copyright has problems making and distributing a documentary because the film's subject matter stands in the way. But after a lot of hard work, our film made it into the world.

So, how did we pull it off? Two words: fair use. This U.S. statute allows you to quote from copyrighted works without permission for the purposes of education, commentary, criticism, and other transformative uses. In 2005, the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Social Media worked with documentarians to develop and publish an influential document that helped strengthen fair use. The Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use provides clear guidelines for quoting copyrighted content in ways that documentarians considered fair.

Given that courts pay attention to a particular community's standards when deciding copyright infringement cases, this was a key factor in successfully persuading broadcasters, DVD distribution companies, and insurers to relax their stringent rights clearance policies. This made it possible for Copyright Criminals to air on television. In fact, fair use might very well apply to the many examples of transformative sampling documented in Copyright Criminals; even music industry attorneys have privately admitted this to me. One major irony of our film is that if fair use had been more firmly established for sampling twenty years ago, things might have turned out very differently for Public Enemy and others.

It's a rhetorically interesting piece in which McLeod wants to distance himself from "the rant of a spoiled child" and uses the language of civics to make his point, as when he says that the public needs a "democratic system of checks and balances developed by real people."

Waiting for the Appropriating Moment

The New York Times describes an interesting example of appropriation art in a story about "Texts without Context," which describes David Shields' new book Reality Hunger, a "manifesto" composed half of borrowed and unattributed quotations. In the NYT review of the actual book, reviewer Luc Sante tries to assess Shields' claim that a literary movement is brewing, one that can also be seen in Jonathan Lethem's recent essay on "The ecstasy of influence," which ran in Harper's.

Taking Down the Takedown

In the panel on "Fair Use: Perspectives on Copyright and Fair Use for Digital Learning" at the Digital Media and Learning conference, lawyer Jason Schultz, tactical media expert Patricia Aufderheide, media literacy educator Renee Hobbs, and Virtualpolitik friend Steve Anderson made the argument for a vigorous defense of fair use.

Certainly, as an educator, it sticks in my craw that this video about Stephen Colbert and his mobilization of web fandom by a student in my digital rhetoric course has had its soundtrack blanked by YouTube. Anyone who watches the video's visuals or looks at the other content on this singer-songwriter's channel would see that this is a person interested in creative uses and original commentary rather than mere piracy and that his brief use of Colbert footage clearly exceeds any threshold for transformation and uses the clips in the context of criticism.

Schultz argued that more educators like me should be fighting back and should take advantage of the services of a pro bono lawyer from his own Berkeley clinic or from Stanford or the ACLU or the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Since after a takedown, parties have a10-14 day window to challenge and that sometimes it is possible to countersue over a malicious takedown thanks to the 512(f) provision in copyright law.

Although he admitted that the Shepard Fairey case might not be working out as he had hoped, that there was still the possibility to make good law, as in the so-called "dancing baby case" or Lenz v. Universal in which Prince's policing of the uses of the song "Let’s Go Crazy" was called into question, because he was supposed to consider fair use before sending out a takedown notice. Sometimes these cases involve what might be seen as obviously political forms of speech, as in the case of Online Policy Group v. Diebold, where the rights of Swarthmore students to publish incriminating documents from the voting machine company were defended in the name of the citizen's right to know and the judge's interpretation of how "reasonableness" is constituted, but Schultz argued that many forms of everyday activities and what I call "digital rhetoric" in the Virtualpolitik book should be protected.

For example, many wedding videos show a dance known as the "electric slide," which choreographer Ric Silver has energetically pursued copyright control over, which has led to many takedown notice sent to happy amateurs celebrating a new couple's nuptial bliss. Schultz describes how Silver was eventually persuaded to be less litigious and accept a Creative Commons license as an alternative that would assure him credit without inducing misery. Sometimes those who use takedown notices for purposes of harassment are even forced to apologize, as in the case of Michael Crook.

In the case involving MoveOn.org and Brave New Films that took advantage of the recognizability of Colbert's famed "truthiness" to promulgate alternative media about "falsiness," even Colbert mocked his parent company Viacom's copyright zealousness and how they were going after Robert Greenwald for nothing more than stealing a rhetorical device. Much like dolphins caught in tuna nets, after this case Viacom promised to operate a dolphin-style fair use hotline that promised to get back to content posters in three business days, which was tested by the creators of "Ten Things I Hate about Commandments."

As panelists pointed out it is corporations who are some of the most active content-appropriators, so there is considerable irony in seeing enforcement largely play out on the consumer level. Some fair use attorneys, such as Michael Donaldson, have developed a viable business model working with and for studios and using fair use in cases. For many times of "nonparticipatory digital media" there is no clearing of clips, and the Colbert Report and the Daily Show take their fair use privileges for granted. Many also talked about how the film Copyright Criminals would be used as a fair use test case.

Hobbs noted that there was a common misunderstanding among educators that students had no fair use rights. She asserted that fair use was for all citizens and did not just cover noncommercial uses. Apparently the group did not want to put the famed fair use "four factors" in copyright up on the board in order not to propagate the "priesthood" attitude currently dominant. During the question and answer session, an educator from MIT bemoaned the fact that "kids share interactive media," and he was forced to deal with the takedowns that resulted.

There was also a lot of discussion about Anderson's Critical Commons, which offers an open architecture system and no moderating. Despite the "close and cathected relationship to the film industry" at his own institution, where many students "imagine themselves to be future copyright owners," the database has grown. The terms of service for the project were written by a legal team at American University and then rewritten to be as comprehensible and direct as possible. Unfortunately, as Aufderheid pointed out, people in higher education concerned most directly with classroom use were not gatekeepers and that librarians, instructional teachnologists, lawyers and others making day-to-day policy in the university weren't necessarily serving the agendas of empowerment. As Aufderheide also noted, fair use is not media specific.

Virtualpolitik friend Nonny de la Peña had her own story to tell about getting licenses for airing content that involved a charge of $7500 for a New York Times article only shown for a moment on the screen.

Hobbs argued that far too often the role of "adding value and repurposing" was underestimated, although -- as with any form of expression -- educators might need to give instruction about "using just the amount you need to accomplish your purpose" in respecting both the rights of
the owner and the rights of the user. Starting at perhaps nine years old, many young filmmakers were "learning from grappling with experience." However, Hobbs observed that now that few classrooms were equipped with VHS, teachers had to cope with less pedagogical flexibility in the era of CSS encryption, According to panelists, teachers said "over and over" that "we want to be lawful."

Aufderheide said that more needed to be done with the "incredibly broad middle" between civil disobedience and compliance. The group agreed that the precedents set by music sampling with some of the "stupidest judges and worst decisions" had made examples of clearing into the norm. Thus the music recording industry had become "not a field where they use fair use" and not a good model for how today's digital users might use pieces from multimedia digital files to "comment" or "illustrate" or serve "incidental" or "archival" purposes. The Center for Social media has archived a number of "best practices" documents here. Hobbs has also had a role as a media literacy educator in developing best practices for her own field, which may include use in teaching a lesson, developing curriculum materials, sharing curriculum materials, creating student work, and sharing creative work among students. Hobbs describes this as work that "meets the transformative standard."

With cloud computing, many of the group's members worried that this "shackling of public and private" may make the copyright situation even worse and that students eager to participate in electronic portfolio programs might experience unintended consequences if their creative works were taken to be infringing.

Nonetheless, in the elevators afterward, there was some hopeful talk about the forthcoming decision to be made about extending fair use replication rights to educators more generally rather than just limit it to the current protected classes of film and media professors who had thought to lobby Congress in response to their work with the DMCA. In connection with the efforts of my colleague Karen Lunsford, I wrote a letter in support of the case for educational file-ripping, since discussion leaders showed a DVD movie of the opera Porgy and Bess in connection with instruction in the Humanities Core Course and using the MPAA suggested method of VHS recording in a dark room to capture key clips without taking up class with time-wasting copyright and credit front matter wouldn't make the critical subtitles adequately legible to students.

Who Owns the Pope's Face

The Catholic News Agency explains in "Holy See declares unique copyright on Papal figure."

The statement cited a "great increase of affection and esteem for the person of the Holy Father" in recent years as contributing to a desire to use the Pontiff's name for all manner of educational and cultural institutions, civic groups and foundations.

Due to this demand, the Vatican has felt it necessary to declare that "it alone has the right to ensure the respect due to the Successors of Peter, and therefore, to protect the figure and personal identity of the Pope from the unauthorized use of his name and/or the papal coat of arms for ends and activities which have little or nothing to do with the Catholic Church."

The declaration alludes to attempts to use ecclesiastical or pontifical symbols and logos to "attribute credibility and authority to initiatives" as another reason to establish their “copyright” on the Holy Father's name, picture and coat of arms.

This isn't the first use of copyright law by the Vatican, as this Virtualpolitik story from 2006 indicates, but it represents an interesting attempt to control the visual rhetoric associated with the Pope, as well as the verbal rhetoric. And this is a pope who had previously warned against excessive copyright restrictions and the exercise of power by rich countries that they represented.

Of course, like all public figures, the image of the pontiff has been Photoshopped, as in this gallery of images of heightened security around the Pope, and there is even a Photoshop tutorial about turning the Pope into Governor Palpatine of Star Wars fame.

A Dam Shame

As an opponent of current copyright law in the digital era and of the ideology that children need to be blocked from the Internet as well, I have to admit that there are sometimes moments in which I can relish certain characteristics of my opponents under the current regime and their tenacious litigiousness.

The New York Times has just reported that "Chinese Firms Accused of Stealing Code" are being sued by the U.S. maker of the "Cybersitter" software, which accuses contractors for the authoritarian regime of pirating over three thousand lines of code to produce the controversial "Green Dam Youth Escort" software that also limited access to pro-democracy or pro-human rights sites.

From my conversations with colleagues who are computer scientists, I have to say that that sounds like a lot of code to have been lifted wholesale. On their programming assignments, students often receive failing grades for borrowing just a few lines, which one friend compares to "giving the same answer to a question about 'how I spent my summer vacation'" as someone else in its obviousness.

The best part is that the Cybersitter company is also suing U.S. manufacturers who kowtowed to the Chinese in exchange for market share by agreeing to install their anti-free-speech software product on all new machines.

Chalk Up a Win for Blackboard

"In Potential Blow to Open-Source Software, Mellon Foundation Closes Grant Program" from the Chronicle of Higher Education tells of a disastrous development in philanthropic support for free and open software. The Mellon Foundation's Research in Information Technology program, which was closely timed to the Open Source Initiative and provided funding for the Blackboard alternative Sakai and the EndNote alternative Zotero. Open Courseware evangelist David Wiley first announced the merger on his blog. Some, like Steve Foerster, have argued that large, philanthropic foundations aren't needed and point to the success of Moodle as an example, but I worry that this decision could negatively affect products that I use on a daily basis as a scholar, since RIT has also been a supporter of JSTOR and ARTstor, which I wish were less proprietary.

Update: Virtualpolitik friend Dan Cohen says it is not the end of the world here.

Open and Shut Cases

Thanks to my fellow NEH-Vectors Fellow Micki McGee for this image of the banner for the 2009 Adobe Government Assembly. Of course, having a company that manufactures proprietary software celebrate its openness in a bid for more government contracts might seem a strange rhetorical move, but at least it indicates that Google isn't the only one making this pitch. Choosing to highlight a YouTube video on the platform of its Mountain View competitor in a number of fields may also seem strange, but the conflation of the administration's rhetoric of "transparency" and the PDF format loathed by pro-disclosure groups like the Sunlight Foundation depends on inferring a presidential endorsement.

When in Doubt, Blame the Internet

Coming into work yesterday, I heard a segment on the radio about teen dishonesty, in which a spokesperson for the Josephson Institute repeatedly made a causal connection between lax morals among the young and access to the Internet.

Indeed, the Institute, which boasts of having White House approval for their Character Counts program, has been pressuring Google for several years to omit advertising and search engine results that would lead students to content from term paper mills, sometimes in ways that seem to support the rhetoric of the movie and record industry in calling everything piracy and ignoring how great writers have appropriate material throughout our entire literary and rhetorical tradition.

Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis. Helen Keller pilfered an early short story, “The Frost King.” Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, has been accused of stealing twice. The list goes on. Plagiarism is as old as the printing press, which allowed text to be distributed wider, easier, and cheaper.

The advent of the Internet has reinvented the practice. Any academic institution that considers itself free of piracy is probably either turning a blind eye or fooling itself (and should check the April edition for a free anti-plagiarism tool).

Not only is it possible to copy and paste online text into essays, but it is incredibly easy to buy entire essays and pass them off as one’s own. Google says it will address the issue by banning companies that sell essays online. Google also blacklists companies that sell or promote weapons, tobacco, cigarettes, or gambling.

That’s not to say those items are not available elsewhere online, but rather that Google is trying to live up to its unofficial motto: Do No Evil. At the time of writing, the inclusion of companies selling essays online had not yet been included in Google's AdWords Content Policy document, but a Google spokesman confirmed the sale of essays in the AdWords service had been disallowed and updates to the Content Policy would be made in the near future.

As Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course, I have to deal first-hand with the consequences of plagiarized student work, but I don't appreciate seeing the Internet demonized or unworkable models for policing intellectual property praised.

Actually, I have had a skeptical view of the methods and causal claims of the Josephson Institute for a long time. I well remember working at a delinquency prevention center for the California Youth Authority, where I ran an after-school tutoring program and computer lab. My supervisor loved the slick pamphlets and videos of the Josephson Institute and wanted to take academic time away for their secular sermons, which I usually refused to give. If we had any free time to talk about ethical dilemmas in the classroom, I often spent the time on emphasizing how the harm for students' lapses could be minimized, since I thought that low-income students of color with family members in the justice system often paid disproportionately for their transgressions. Thus, I was more likely to mention birth control distribution or strategies for avoiding people packing weapons, rather than abstinence or principled stands on violence.

After all, even exhibitionism, dissimulation, and transgression may have their own kind of moral authority on the Internet.

View Open Source

This image of the HTML code on the White House website represents what one sees if one chooses the "view source" command in your browser window. It lets you see how the site uses XML, Javascript, and CSS to improve its appearance, availability for RSS feeds, and interactivity, while still making content available in the public formats preferred by archivists and advocates for access by the disabled.

What you can't see is today's announcement of a momentous change at "WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal," which explains that the current administration has finally abandoned the proprietary software system of the previous administration in favor of a well-regarded open source content management platform alternative: Drupal.

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

The great Drupal switch came about after the Obama new media team, with a few months of executive branch service (and tweaking of WhiteHouse.gov) under their belts, decided they needed a more malleable development environment for the White House web presence. They wanted to be able to more quickly, easily, and gracefully build out their vision of interactive government. General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), the Virginia-based government contractor who had executed the Bush-era White House CMS contract, was tasked by the Obama Administration with finding a more flexible alternative. The ideal new platform would be one where dynamic features like question-and-answer forums, live video streaming, and collaborative tools could work more fluidly together with the site's infrastructure. The solution, says the White House, turned out to be Drupal. That's something of a victory for the Drupal (not to mention open-source) community.

Drupal proponents have long tried to make the case that open-source software could be just as safe, just as stable, and and just as reliable as pre-boxed software, even if hundreds, thousands, or even millions of volunteer developers had their fingers in the mix at some point along the way. The White House's seal of approval doesn't hurt.

Thanks to Alex Halavais for the link.

If You Can't Stand the Heat

A new cookbook based on crowdsourcing sponsored by HarperStudio could be seen as very different from the community-based model of the Unitarians who contributed to the first Joy of Cooking or the Junior League members of Charleston, West Virginia in the fifties who produced the books that still sit on my pantry shelves. As one piece points out, it could be another case of monetizing the labor of others done on the Internet, as even a laudatory blurb like this one makes clear:

These days, more and more books have accompanying Websites and smart authors even try to attract readers online before the book is even published. Sometimes they even try to enlist those potential readers into contributing to the book (for free).

By building on a structure of contests and finalists Food52 hopes to generate a cookbook that could be a profitable enterprise for the two professional writers who are managing the site.

Of course, like fairy tales, I think it can questionable to claim intellectual property over recipes that get handed down over time. My own mother-in-law was very scrupulous about citation in her own making of index cards, so we would know that some supposed heritage recipes actually came from product packaging from the turn of the last century.

The Rules of the Biz

This morning, many Twitter users received the e-mail from the company's co-founder Biz Stone informing them that the Terms of Service of the popular microblogging site had changed.

It's a dramatic transition, because the new terms of service consists of 2,883 words by my count, not counting supporting documents, while the old terms of service was one of the most streamlined by the standard of other social computing sites with a mere 743 words. (Twitter credited Flickr as the source of much of their legal verbiage at that time.) The company blog posting that covers the changes doesn't say much about the hefty additions to the copyright policy, even though not much infringement seems possible with 140 text characters.

Government Work

It is interesting to note a new category on the photo-sharing site Flickr: "government work." It's a choice that suggests certain forms of authority and proprietary interest that is very different from the term "public domain," which appears on other digital files on the site. (See above for how the term is used on the White House Flickr stream. Click to enlarge.) In contrast, the Library of Congress's Flickr site suggests that many of their images have "no known copyright restrictions," although they don't go so far as to make public domain claims, even for images created over a hundred years ago by government employees. The Flickr stream for the State Department is still using the Creative Commons license, although it is likely that they will soon follow the White House lead.

Detective Mechandise

Mandatory installation of the screening software Green Dam on all computers sold in China after July 1 has now prompted a copyright claim from Solid Oak, the maker of the CyberSitter filtering program.

Many U.S. companies have been cooperating with the Beijing government to ensure continued lucrative contracts with the huge Chinese market, but the Obama administration has apparently sent a letter protesting the initiative on human rights grounds. The letter has not been publicly released, but a statement, "Secretary Gary Locke and USTR Ron Kirk Call on China To Revoke Mandatory Internet Filtering Software," seems to make the tone of protest clear.

You Ought to Be in Pictures

Bag News Notes has been doing some interesting analysis of the White House Flickr stream. The ones of First Lady Michelle Obama are particularly remarkable.

Yet, unlike the State Department Flickr photostream, in which the images sport Creative Commons licenses, after its diplomats were scolded by Rebecca MacKinnon for initially claiming "all rights reserved," the White House images come with the following cumbersome statement in legalese asserting considerable restrictions on use.

This official White House photograph is being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way or used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement of the President, First Family, or the White House.

Given the number of school children who might want to use these images in reports and manipulate them in Photoshop to best serve the requirements of their projects, these limitations seem patently unreasonable.

At least the White House Flickr site isn't as ridiculous as the one belonging to NASA HQ, which actually bears the copyright symbol, even though such photographs of taxpayer-funded operations are obviously part of the public record.

Best Practices Make Best Perfect

The question of what constitutes "best practices" is addressed in terms of respecting copyright law in the video above from the Center for Social Media, but there are many other areas in Internet culture that the conventions about proper digital conduct may be similarly perceived to be unclear.

For example, recently I joined the group about Faculty Ethics on Facebook, which is trying to develop guidelines about appropriate behavior for faculty members on Facebook. As someone who teaches a course on digital rhetoric, I'm not sure that course tools from my university are always the best option for exploring subject matter related to social media. Jenna McWilliams has also suggested some tweaks to address the fact that it can be difficult to provide effective instruction without using the actual channels for communication in conjunction with the classroom experience.

The impulse driving guideline #1 is a valid one. It is, as Lynn Sykes, a teacher and friend, pointed out to me, a great big social networking world out there, and the minute we introduce social media into the classroom we also introduce the risk that learners will stumble upon material that is inappropriate for the classroom setting.

But ignoring this risk doesn't make it go away; indeed, it leaves many students ill-equipped to make intelligent decisions about what to do when they encounter this kind of material in real life, as they are certain to do. Learners who have access to social media and adult support for reflecting on their engagement with it in their homes will be prepared, of course. It's the learners with less access and less extracurricular support--in other words, the poor, the disadvantaged, the learners who have historically been left behind in school, in work, in life--who can most benefit from the experience of engaging with social media in the classroom.