Home » personal (Page 3)

Category Archives: personal

The Day the Cupcake Stood Still

[Look Behind You! Run, Run for your Life! Nom, Nom, Nom all CC BY]

I turned 32 on the weekend, but with a 9-week old in the house we’re much more in tune with our inner children, too, so I was just blown away when Em made me these amazing Alien Invader cupcakes! There were lots of other highlights – a great lunch with family, some brilliant presents, watching my son giggle away, and an early Christmas party dinner with good friends – but I just had to share the cupcake pictures! 🙂

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

AFACT vs iiNet (and convincing Australia’s teenagers they’re pirates)

pacright

As most people in Australia would now be aware, one of the most important developments in terms of civil rights and the Australian internet has now gone before the courts as a consortium, led by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) is suing ISP iiNet for refusing to cut off customers for alleged (not proven!) copyright infringement in terms of bittorent media downloads. From the Age:

The Australian film and television industry has launched a major legal action against one of Australia’s largest internet service providers for allegedly allowing its users to download pirated movies and TV shows. The action against iiNet was filed in the Federal Court today by Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Disney and the Seven Network. Mark White, iiNet’s chief operating officer, said the company did not support piracy in any form but it could not disconnect customers just because the movie industry claimed they engaged in illegal downloading. Adrianne Pecotic, executive director of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), said the action followed a five-month investigation by the industry.

There are also arguments made that peer to peer networks should simply be blocked (although that argument hasn’t been in quit those terms just yet in this case) but that serves as a good opportunity to remember that p2p and, yes, even bittorent, are not intrinsically for distribution of ‘pirated’ media; there are plenty of things, including feature films, being distributed via peer to peer networks which are entirely legal!

One thing this case should, hopefully, achieve, is to test the extent to which recently imported ‘safe harbour’ provisions actually stand up in an Australian court:

"This is a very important test case for the internet industry in Australia," said Peter Coroneos, chief executive of the Internet Industry Association. "It will test the effect of the safe harbour provisions that were introduced with the US free trade agreement, which provides immunity for ISPs in certain circumstances such as transmission, hosting, caching and referencing activities."

However, as this article from Michael Sainsbury and Fran Foo in Australian IT notes, the lawsuit seems to stand on pretty thin legal grounds (disclaimer: I ain’t no lawyer!):

iiNet managing director Michael Malone said when it received AFACT’s complaints, they were forwarded to the Police. "But AFACT refused to talk to the Police," Mr Malone said. Ms Pecotic brushed aside Mr Malone’s explanation, saying: "The law is clear and iiNet knows that. They cannot pass the buck … it is their responsibility." "There were many things that iiNet could have done and at the very least, issue a warning to the customers involved but they did nothing," she said. Unlike a number of other major jurisdictions such as the United States and Britain, Australia does not have blanket agreement between content companies and broadband providers about file swapping. An Optus spokesperson said that under Australian law there are remedies available to copyright holders, including taking action directly against those alleged to be infringing rights. "It is unfortunate that the rights holders are targeting an ISP because under Australian law, internet service providers may generally be considered conduits which provide carriage services, and as such are not responsible for copyright infringements carried out by customers using their internet services,” the spokesperson said. This position is reflected in sections 39 (B) and 112 (E) of the Copyright Act 1968 (Com), and in the safe harbours set out in Division 2AA, which were introduced protect ISPs from being onerously required to enforce intellectual property rights where they are merely providing carriage services.

On the smaller screen front, TV Tonight notes that Channel 7 is part of the group attacking iiNet, although reading the comments on the TV Tonight post, this action seems to have focused even more people’s feeling that they are downloading television shows because local networks simply aren’t providing the goods in a timely or consistent fashion!

iiNet’s own response seems the most sensible part of this whole debacle:

iiNet’s Managing Director Michael Malone said iiNet does not in any way support or encourage breaches of the law, including infringement of copyright. “In reality, iiNet has been leading the industry in making content available legally through our Media Lounge, including agreements with iTunes, ABC iView, the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Cruizin’, Macquarie Digital TV, NASA Television, Barclays Premier League football, Drift Racing 2007 and classic highlights of golf’s four Majors,” Mr Malone said. Mr Malone said iiNet had not breached any laws and had repeatedly passed on copyright holders’ complaints to law enforcement agencies for investigation. He said iiNet had advised the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) that their complaints had been forwarded to law enforcement agencies and that they should follow the matter up with them. iiNet’s Customer Relations Agreement clearly spells out that customers must comply with the law and that our service must not be used “to commit an offence or to infringe another person’s rights”. “iiNet cannot disconnect a customer’s phone line based on an allegation. The alleged offence needs to be pursued by the police and proven in courts. iiNet would then be able to disconnect the service as it had been proven that the customer had breached our Customer Relations Agreement,” Mr Malone said.

Relying on the idea that customers are innocent until proven guilty?  Whatever is iiNet thinking?

At the same time this lawsuit was announced, AFACT released the following ‘resource’ – Nothing beats the real thing! How copyright, creativity and citizenship shape our society (subtitle: Film Piracy – Your Actions Can Make a Difference) – which has been mailed on DVD and hardcopy to every secondary school in Australia. The ‘resource’ is structured around addressing film piracy; the ‘civics lessons’ here are, at best, tailored to a very specific commercial aim and, at worst, an advertising campaign trying to make relevant copyright laws which have long since been dismissed as out of touch by the most teenagers.  More to the point, a genuine civics lesson on copyright would spend considerable time discussing fair dealing, the public domain and the Creative Commons (and other copyleft licenses) as a channel for personal and political creativity and expression (to be fair, both of these things are mentioned in the ‘resource’, but a single paragraph hardly does the Creative Commons justice, especially when it spend half the time emphasising that CC licenses are complex: “There are lots of different types of ‘Creative Commons’ licences, so make sure you always read the terms and conditions of these before applying them to your work or using material licensed under such a licence.”). How central is film piracy to these civics lessons?  The lesson structure:

afact

Is the ‘resource’ balanced?  I’ll leave you take a look for yourself (6Mb PDF), but I’ve never read an educational resource before which feels the need to include this disclaimer (p. 4.):

The resource is not a propaganda exercise. It does make clear to students that there are harmful consequences from film piracy, but it does so through educationally valid processes. It is an educational approach that allows students to face a significant civics and citizenship issue: their role in a society where many of them and their peers are breaking the law.

All I can say is I’d be really, really disappointed if this was the only resource secondary school teachers were provided when integrating lessons which combine copyright, creativity and civics in the classroom.

[Photo: ‘ars electronica linz 2008’ by Mike from Zurich CC BY (Edited)]

Update: Kim Weatherall has a detailed legal (and possibly more balanced) look at the case here. [Via Peter Black]

Update 2: After writing the EFA response, Nic Suzor has a very robust look at the case on his blog, too.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Thomson Reuters/Endnote sue George Mason Uni over Zotero!

zotero

I was disappointed (but not really surprised) to read earlier this week that Thomson Reuters Inc., the owners of Endnote, were suing George Mason University for housing the team in the Centre for History and New Media which created  of Zotero.  Zotero, if you haven’t been introduced, is a Firefox plugin which makes saving academic referencing material, building an archive of reference details, a pretty much everything else to do with citation, much, much easier.  Endnote is the big proprietary player in this field while Zotero is still a pretty small fish.  While I’ve never claimed to be a lawyer, the the complaint from Thomson Reuters seems based on the notion that (a) Zotero ‘reverse-engineered’ Endnote and (b) that Zotero used the import/translation files from Endnote without permission and what I’ve read suggests both of these claims are probably false.  If anything, in highlighting the proprietary nature of Endnote, I suspect this lawsuit is more likely to be the best publicity Zotero has ever received.  Also, I’d like to add, having used both Endnote and Zotero in tandem for some time (it’s not hard to move between the two) I probably wouldn’t have given the process much more thought.  Until today, that is, where in light of the philosophy at play in this lawsuit, I shall not be using Endnote ever again.

My UWA colleague Sky has made a very smart post on this issue, which I’d like to quote at length:

Now, back when I was doing honours, I used EndNote because the uni provided free copies, and free training. When I switched over to Ubuntu, I stopped using EndNote because it wasn’t available on linux at the time. I also put a bit more thought into the whole thing, and became mildly ticked off that the uni was putting yet more money into proprietary software (a student license for EndNote is about AU$300, although I imagine UWA gets a discount for volume).

I very strongly disagree with the university’s use of Windows, Endnote, and other proprietary software. Firstly, proprietary software goes against the ideals of academic scholarship (openness, peer review, building a body of public knowledge, etc etc). Secondly, the common complaint that “open software isn’t supported” isn’t true in most cases – on the Ubuntu forums you can usually get a response to a question within the hour. Thirdly, it is ludicrous that we are spending this amount of money on software when it could be better placed somewhere else. It could even, conceivably, be given to students and staff to help develop open source tools like Zotero and Ubuntu (or R, or any of the thousands of other potentially useful projects).

You may think that these things don’t matter. Maybe you’re not all that technical, and you’re used to using Windows. Maybe you’re studying anthropology, or politics, or cultural studies, or sports science, and you can’t see how it’s relevant to your work. But it matters. It matters because how we work affects the outcomes of our research – that’s one of the reasons why we have to fill in so many ethics applications. It matters because universities should contribute to a public pool of knowledge, not just “produce intellectual property”. It matters because as academics many of us spend vast amounts of our time working with computers: you may well spend more time with your software than with your kids/partner/students/pet fish/whatever.

I couldn’t agree more, and now that this lawsuit has made the politics behind Endnote and Zotero transparent, I’d like to anyone working in a university today one question: are you using Zotero, and if not, why not?

Update (5 June 2009):I’m delighted to announce that this morning the Fairfax Circuit Court dismissed the lawsuit filed against Zotero by Thomson Reuters.” 🙂

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Building Open Education Resources from the Botton Up

Hello to everyone at the Open Education Resources Free Seminar today in Brisbane. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there in person today, but for those who were there – and anyone else interested – my short presentation ‘Building Open Education Resources From the Bottom Up: How Student-Created Open Educational Resources Can Challenge Institutional Indifference‘ is embedded here:

My apologies for the few glaring typos in the slides – it’s a good argument against recording a presentation at 1am in the morning! Any comments, questions or thoughts either from folks at the seminar, or from anyone else, are most welcome!

Update: If you’re just after the powerpoint slides, you can now view or download them on Slideshare.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Spore, or: The Battleworm 4000 (and kids…)

So, there has been a lot of talk about Spore since it’s initial release almost a fortnight ago and since I’m in the middle of a series of lectures for our new gaming based unit in Communication Studies, I figured I should definitely try it out.  I’m still thinking all of the logistics through, but one thing is clear from the outset: while Spore does have a win-condition (unlike The Sims which is basically endless), it’s not a game, it’s a toy.  Or, rather, it’s not overly satisfying as a game (the gameplay is, to be frank, not all that exciting), but as a toy to build cellular organisms, new species and even space-faring civilisations, it’s absolutely brilliant. Also, even with the weirdest creatures, Spore makes everything cute.  To justify that point, I’d like to introduce one of my species, the Battleworm 4000:

And make sure you watch the video all the way through to meet the kids!  More on Spore, I’m sure, in the coming weeks …

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Five Years!

I realised today that I’ve passed one of those blogging milestones: about a fortnight ago, I crossed the birthday barrier and have now consistently spent Five Years Blogging!  Sure, it hasn’t all been here … like many people I started out on Blogger because it was free, easy and I had no idea what I was doing.  This probably should be a moment for reflection, looking at how much has changed (now I think I know what I’m doing), but as I’m preparing for my last day of teaching for the semester tomorrow, I thought instead I’d refer back to October 2006 I wrote a ‘Why I Blog’ post as part of the Reconstruction special issue on blogging.  Largely, my reasons for blogging remain the same.  I wonder if I’ll still be going in 2013?

[Photo by svenwerk CC BY NC]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Building an Australasian Commons – June 24, 2008: Brisbane

ccauconftopbanner

To explore, expand and expound upon the emerging Australasian Commons, the Creative Commons Australia team have organised a free one-day symposium which investigates a range of activities, programme and philosophies driving open access and the cultural commons across Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia.  I’ll be there, participating in a panel on the Creative Commons and Education, as well joining the team facilitating a workshop on ‘Building Knowledge: Open Education Resources (OER) and Research Materials’.  Here are all the details:

… are proud to announce that registration is now officially open for the Creative Commons ‘Building an Australasian Commons’ Conference. The conference will be held on Tuesday 24th June 2008 from 8.30am – 5pm at the State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane, and is proudly supported by Creative Commons Australia (http://creativecommons.org.au), the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (http://www.cci.edu.aau), and the State Library of Queensland (http://www.slq.qld.gov.au).

This event provides an opportunity for those interested in the free internet to come together to exchange ideas, information and inspiration. It brings together experts from Australasia to discuss the latest developments and implementations of Creative Commons in the region. The conference aims to be an open forum where anyone can voice their thoughts on issues relating to furthering the commons worldwide.

The current programme detailing the array of presentations, workshops and round table discussions can be found at http://creativecommons.org.au/australasiancommons. Attendance is free and open to all comers. However, places are limited, so if you’re interested in attending please register ASAP. Registration closes 9  June 2008. You can download the registration form at http://creativecommons.org.au/materials/ccauconf08/
australasian_commons_conference_registration.pdf
and return it via email to Elliott@creativecommons.org.au.

The conference will be followed on the day at 6pm by the second CCau ccSalon, a showcase of Creative Commons music, art, film and text from Australia and the region.  This will be a great opportunity to mingle and relax after the day’s events while experiencing CC works in action. We look forward to welcoming you at ‘Building an Australasian Commons’.

Keep in mind, it’s a completely free event, so if you’re interested and can be in sunny Brisbane on 24 June, I’ll see you there!

[Image based on Them colors… by jurek d CC BY]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Neon Dreaming…

Hong Kong or Night City?
Did I mention I’ve been teaching in Blade Runner’s Los Angeles William Gibson’s Night City Hong Kong this week? The first time I came to Hong Kong, it was like stepping into a city I’d already met – it was total immersion in the world of cyberpunk, where unashamed capitalism suffers neither restraint nor irony. This visit is no different: at times I love and admire the city, and at times it gives me nightmares, but I’m sure I’ll never ever be able to say that I’m ambivalent! (And the cityscape lends itself rather well to a few photos here and there, too!)

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Marshine on Phobos!

PSP_007769_9010_IRB_Stickney

Following on from my previous post about Mars and the wonderful work of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) project, I just had to post the image above which is of “Marshine” (sunlight reflected off of the surface of Mars) on Phobos, one of Mars’ moons.  You can see more of Phobos at it’s HiRISE page, but just take a minute to look at that amazing image.  For me, at least, it really captures the imagination and a sense of wonder about our wider universe! [Via]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Beyond Broadcasting: ‘Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance’

Beyond BroadcastingI’m very pleased that the ‘Beyond Broadcasting’ issue of Media International Australia is out, not only because it features some excellent articles asking some great questions about the future of television in the era of digital communication, but also because it features an article of mine that I’ve been thinking about on and off for a number of years. My article, ‘Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance‘ has ideas that will already be familiar to readers of this blog (and, indeed, my old blog Ponderance) as the concepts in this paper have slowly built up over time and appeared sporadically in blog form (such as here and here). When I started writing up these fragments into the final paper and posted the abstract in this blog, I was delighted that it provoked a conversation with some of my blog’s readers. A larger number of people seem to have found their way to that post after hitting NBC’s “We’re sorry, but the clip you selected isn’t available from your location” message and punching it into Google, and a few of them offered a comment on this post before heading elsewhere (quite possibly in search of a proxy so they can watch the US-hosted geo-blocked content).

While the article has taken a couple of years to evolve from the initial idea to this published version, the ideas still seem current. Indeed, there was an engaging debate recently in th US between the New York Times Vulture blog (and here, and here) and film and media scholar Michael Newman over the issue of newspapers and blogs posting spoilers about current TV shows when audiences are increasingly time-shifting and either watching their shows a few days later on TiVO, or a few months later on DVD. As I argue in my paper, the problem of avoiding spoilers becomes even harder for viewers in other countries, when the broadcast (or the option to download legally) is often delayed by a number of months – an issue indicative of what I’ve called the tyranny of digital distance.

I’m also pleased that the editors of this themed issue, and the general editor of Media International Australia were kind enough to give me permission to put up a post-print of my article here. (A post-print, for those interested, is the final version of the article submitted to the journal after the peer review process and final changes to the article have been made, but before the article is page-made and the layout done for the journal itself.) So, if you fancy reading the whole paper and you don’t have access to Media International Australia through your library, you can still read the full paper here.

If you can get hold of the journal, there are a number of other papers which are a great read. One of these, Axel Bruns’ ‘Reconfiguring Television for a Networked, Produsage Context’ can be accessed over at his blog.

As always, any comments or thoughts on my paper or the issues it touches on are most welcome!

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Twitter


Archives

Categories