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Here is an email Nagla Rizk sent to the Berkman mailing list. I’m posting it with her permission.

When we stormed the streets last January, we chanted “Aish, Horreya, Adala Egtema’eya” (“Bread, Freedom, Social Justice”). We knew exactly what we wanted: a better livelihood for all. At the time, Egypt was experiencing high rates of economic “growth”, a superficial sign of positive economic performance that did not trickle down to the masses. Part corruption part inaction, a 4-5% (or even the earlier 7%) growth rate was by itself meaningless as it did nothing to alleviate poverty or ease the merciless income inequality.

Equally serious was the iron grip on freedom of expression. In a typical Arab regime manner, Egypt focused on encouraging economic freedoms in the strictest neoclassical sense, while simultaneously continuing to harshly stifle political freedoms. Not surprisingly, Egypt fared relatively well on indices of doing business, while performed dismally on democracy and freedom indices.

The January chant, therefore, was a fierce cry against this asymmetry. More deeply, it was a cry for real development, one encompassing freedom of expression coupled with poverty alleviation and better income distribution. The cry of the masses reflected a street awareness of the complexity of development as human dignity and active citizenry — an enlightenment that the ruling elite lacked.

Ten months down the road, yesterday we chanted in Tahrir, “Aish, Horreya, Adala Egtema’eya” (“Bread, Freedom, Social Justice”). Why?

Bread and Social Justice:

No one expected bread and social justice right away. People wanted a roadmap, a plan, a timeline. They got none. Naturally, what emerged was a series of demonstrations and strikes by employees and workers whose demands were never acknowledged, let alone addressed. Rather than tackling the root of the problem or starting a dialogue with the protesters, SCAF chose to order them to go home. To add insult to injury, SCAF and its government portrayed them as the cause of instability, turning the rest of Egypt against them. Dividing Egyptians has been a repeated tactic by SCAF, supported by state media.

Meanwhile, the economy has suffered gravely. Tourism and foreign investments have been the obvious casualties. Egypt’s net foreign reserves have fallen from $36 billion in 2010 to $22 billion, its credit rating has been downgraded, prices continue to rise and the budget deficit to swell. The stock exchange has plummeted. The central bank has just announced it raised interest rates for the first time since 2009 to protect local deposits and the Egyptian pound. The rise in the cost of borrowing would lead to further contraction in the economy. As the state of street safety worsens thanks to SCAF’s incompetence, the economy continues to weaken.

Aggravating the situation has been the perception of the business class as allies of the old regime. This has put all members of the business community in one pot: the corrupt. The anti capitalist rhetoric (global really) has fed into calls for tighter regulation of the private sector within a general anti business environment. In addition to scaring away potential investors, the sad news is that several entrepreneurs and small business owners have closed down and workers have been laid off, compounding unemployment. Hardly any support would be expected from an incredibly weak government whose ministers are too scared to sign into backing businesses lest they should be seen as favoring the ‘corrupt’.

Egypt’s economy is in trouble. And as SCAF prolongs the transitional period, further instability is witnessed and foreseen.

Freedom?

The political atmosphere under SCAF is no different from Mubarak’s. Indeed, we are still under Mubarak’s emergency law of 30 years. So far, 12,000 civilians have been subjected to military trials. Currently our good friend Alaa AbdelFattah, the prominent activist and blogger, is detained by SCAF for refusing to answer as a civilian to a military tribunal. SCAF and Egypt’s police continue to torture detainees. Egyptian women detained by SCAF were subjected to virginity tests.

SCAF have also carried out unprecedented attacks on media, specifically attacking the premises of two television stations, both documented on video. SCAF have also exerted pressure on media content. Recently a prominent TV person withdrew his popular show in protest against SCAF’s pressure. And of course state media has continued to deliver false messages in support of SCAF.

On March 19, we excitedly participated in a referendum on 9 constitutional amendments to the 1971 constitution. The amendments were accepted by a 77% majority. Right after, SCAF dictatorially issued a constitutional declaration with 63 articles including the amendments with some editorial changes. This nulled the old constitution. Article 56 of the declaration gave SCAF their legitimacy as rulers of Egypt. This was not subject to a referendum.

On October 9, we wept witnessing the Maspero massacre, where SCAF vehicles brutally run down street protesters in scenes that moved the whole world. SCAF’s attempt to justify this act as carried out by civilians who stole military vehicles is laughable. If true (which it is not), such claim would illustrate the utter failure of SCAF to maintain security on the street. Additionally, attempts by SCAF and State TV to portray Maspero as a sectarian strife is another example of how SCAF labors to fuel divisions among Egyptians. No less is SCAF’s maneuvers to flirt with different political factions – first the Muslim Brotherhood and later the ‘liberal’ parties.

And now last week’s incidents in Tahrir and elsewhere in Egypt, particularly Mohamed Mahmoud Street. We have all witnessed footage of the atrocities of police officers shooting at Egyptians. SCAF representative and Minister of Interior have come out denying any shooting. This is an insult to Egyptians’ intelligence, no less than all SCAF crimes being investigated by committees assigned by SCAF themselves.

In short, we have a clear failure of SCAF to lead the political transition and to allow for proper management of the economy by an independent government. SCAF has ruled with an iron fist, with a very weak government in place. A mix of political naivite and the desire to protect own interests (they are a major recipient of US aid and a major economic player), SCAF’s amateur performance has brought to disarray the politics and economics of a very complex country.

Today…

As I write, Egyptians are divided yet again, thanks to SCAF’s insistence amidst this chaos to run elections on Monday and not two weeks later. Some want to boycott the elections. Among them are those who believe that voting will give SCAF legitimacy, which they refuse. Others believe their votes will be rigged in favor of SCAF’s interests. A third group is simply worried about the lack of security at the voting stations.

Boycotting the elections would be a grave mistake in my opinion. For the first time in years, we have a chance to choose representatives who would take us one step towards building a democratic state. It is our chance on the road to freedom.

The atmosphere in Egypt is now grim. Elections are around the corner while our people continue to be subjected to police brutality. Yesterday SCAF appointed a new prime minister who is refused on the street. Tahrir is coming up with an alternative. As I write now, a statement is being read on TV: revolutionary forces met with El Baradei who is willing to head a national salvation government if asked to do so by SCAF. And he would give up the nomination for presidency. No one knows what will happen in the next hour.

In the meantime, we continue to defy, mourn and hope. One thing we know: we should not again be storming out calling for bread, freedom and social justice.

Nagla Rizk
Cairo
November 26th, 2011
11.42 pm

I’m at the final meeting of a Harvard course on the future of libraries, led by John Palfrey and Jeffrey Schnapp. They have three guests in to talk about physical library space.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

David Lamberth lays out an idea as a provocation. He begins by pointing out that until the beginning of the 20th century, a library was not a place but only a collection of books. He gives a quick history of Harvard Library. After the library burned down in 1764, the libraries lived in fear of fire, until electric lights came in. The replacement library (Gore Hall) was built out of stone because brick structures need wood on the inside. But stone structures are dank, and many books had to be re-bound every 30 years. Once it filled up, 25-30 of Harvard libraries derived from the search for fireproof buildings, which helps explain the large distribution of libraries across campus. They also developed more than 40 different classification systems. At the beginning of the 20th C, Harvard’s collection was just over one million. Now it adds up to around 18M. [David's presentation was not choppy, the way this paraphrase is.]

In the 1980s, there was continuing debate about what to do about the need for space. The big issue was open or closed stacks. The faculty wanted the books on site so they could be browsed. But stack space is expensive and you tend to outgrow it faster than you think. So, it was decided not to build any more stack space. There already was an offsite repository (New England Book Depository), but it was decided to build a high density storage facility to remove the non-active parts of the collection to a cheaper, off-site space: The Harvard Depository (HD).

Now more than 40% of the physical collections are at HD. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences started out hostile to the idea, but “soon became converted.” The notion faculty had of browsing the shelves was based on a fantasy: Harvard had never had all the books on a subject on a shelf in a single facility. E.g., search on “Shakespeare” in the Harvard library system: 18,000 hits. Widener Library is where you’d expect to find Shakespeare books. But 8,000 of the volumes aren’t in Widener. Of Widener’s 10K Shakespeare, volumes, 4,500 are in HD. So, 25% of what you meant to browse is there. “Shelf browsing is a waste of time” if you’re trying to do thorough research. It’s a little better in the smaller libraries, but the future is not in shelf browsing. Open and closed stacks isn’t the question any more. “It’s just not possible any longer to do shelf browsing, unless we develop tools for browsing in a non-physical fashion.” E.g., catalog browsers, and ShelfLife (with StackView).

There’s nobody in the stacks any more. “It’s like the zombies have come and cleared people out.” People have new alternatives, and new habits. “But we have real challenges making sure they do as thorough research as possible, and that we leverage our collection.” About 12M of the 18M items are barcoded.

A task force saw that within 40 years, over 70% of the physical collection will be off site. HD was not designed to hold the part of the collection most people want to use. So, what can do that will give us pedagogical and intellectual benefit, and realizes the incredible resource that our collection is?

Let me present one idea, says David. The Library Task Force said emphatically that Harvard’s collection should be seen as one collection. It makes sense intellectually and financially. But that idea is in contention with the 56 physical libraries at Harvard. Also, most of our collection doesn’t circulate. Only some of it is digitally browsable, and some of that won’t change for a long long long time. E.g., our Arabic journals in Widener aren’t indexed, don’t publish cumulative indexes, and are very hard to index. Thus scholars need to be able to pull them off the shelves. Likewise for big collections of manuscripts that haven’t even been sorted yet.

One idea would be to say: Let’s treat physical libraries as one place as well. Think of them as contiguous, even though they’re not. What if bar-coded books stayed in the library you returned to them to? Not shelved by a taxonomy. Random access via the digital, and it tells you where the work is. And build perfect shelves for the works that need to be physically organized. Let’s build perfect Shakespeare shelves. Put them in one building. The other less-used works will be findable, but not browsable. This would require investing in better findability systems, but it would let us get past the arbitrariness of classification systems. Already David will usually go to Amazon to decide if he wants a book rather than take the 5 mins to walk to the library. By focusing on perfect shelves for what is most important to be browsable, resources would be freed up. This might make more space in the physical libraries, so “we could think about what the people in those buildings want to be doing,” so people would come in because there’s more going on. (David notes that this model will not go over well with many of his colleagues.)

53% of library space at Harvard is stack space. The other 47% is split between patron space and space staff. About 20-25% is space staff. Comparatively, Harvard is lower on patron space size than typical. The HD is holding half the collection in 20% of the space. It’s 4x as expensive to store a work on a stack on campus than off.

David responds to a question: The perfect shelves should be dynamic, not permanent. That will better serve the evolution of research. There are independent variables: Classification and shelf location. We certainly need classification, but it may not need to map to shelf locations. Widener has bibliographic lists and shelf lists. Barcodes give us more freedom; we don’t have to constantly return works to fixed locations.

Mike Barker: Students already build their own perfect shelves with carrels.

Q: What’s the case for ownership and retention if we’re only addressing temporal faculty needs?

A lot of the collecting in the first half of the 20 C was driven by faculty requests. Not now. The question of retention and purchase splits on the basis of how uncommon the piece of info is. If it’s being sold by Amazon, I don’t think it really matters if we retain it, because of the number of copies and the archival steps already in place. The more rare the work, the more we should think about purchase and retention. But under a third of the stack space on campus ideal environmental conditions. We shouldn’t put works we buy into those circumstances unless they’re being used.

Q: At the Law Library, we’re trying to spread it out so that not everyone is buying the same stuff. E.g., we buy Peruvian materials because other libraries aren’t. And many law books are not available digitally, so we we buy them … but we only buy one copy.

Yes, you’re making an assessment. In the Divinity library, Mike looked at the duplication rate. It was 53%. That is, 53% of our works are duplicated in other Harvard libraries.

Mike: How much do we spend on classification? To create call numbers? We annually spend about 1.5-2M on it, plus another million shelving it. So, $3M-3.5M total. (Mike warns that this is a “very squishy” number.) We circulate about 700,000 items a years. The total operating budget of the Library is about $152M. (He derived this number by asking catalogers who long it takes to classify an item without one, divided into salary.)

David: Scanning in tables of contents, indexes, etc., lets people find things without having to anticipate what they’re going to be interested in.

Q: Where does serendipity fall in this? What about when you don’t know what you’re looking for?

David: I agree completely. My dissertation depended on a book that no one had checked out since 1910. I found it on the stacks. But it’s not on the shelves now. Suppose I could ask a research librarian to bring me two shelves worth of stuff because I’m beginning to explore some area.

Q: What you’re suggesting won’t work so well for students. How would not having stacks affect students?

David: I’m being provocative but concrete. The status quo is not delivering what we think it does, and it hasn’t for the past three decades.

Q: [jeff goldenson] Public librarians tell us that the recently returned trucks are the most interesting place to go. We don’t really have the ability to see what’s moving in the Harvard system. Yes, there are privacy concerns, but just showing what books have been returned would be great.

Q: [palfrey] How much does the rise of the digital affect this idea? Also, you’ve said that the storage cost of a digital object may be more than that of physical objects. How does that affect this idea?

David: Copyright law is the big If. It’s not going away. But what kind of access do you have to digital objects that you own? That’s a huge variable. I’ve premised much of what I’ve said on the working notion that we will continue to build physical collections. We don’t know how much it will cost to keep a physical object for a long time. And computer scientists all say that digital objects are not durable. My working notion here is that the parts that are really crucial are the metadata pieces, which are more easily re-buildable if you have the physical objects. We’re not going to buy physical objects for all the digital items, so the selection principle goes back to how grey or black the items are. It depends on whether we get past the engineering question about digital durability — which depends a lot on electromagnetism as a storage medium, which may be a flash in the pan. We’re moving incrementally.

Q: [me] If we can identify the high value works that go on perfect shelves, why not just skip the physical shelves and increase the amount of metadata so that people can browse them looking for the sort of info they get from going to the physical shelf?

A: David: Money. We can’t spend too much on the present at the expense of the next century or two. There’s a threshold where you’d say that it’s worth digitizing them to the degree you’d need to replace physical inspection entirely. It’s a considered judgment, which we make, for example, when we decide to digitize exhibitions. You’d want to look at the opportunity costs.

David suggests that maybe the Divinity library (he’s in the Phil Dept.) should remove some stacks to make space for in-stack work and discussion areas. (He stresses that he’s just thinking out loud.)

Matthew Sheehy, who runs HD, says they’re thinking about how to keep books 500 years. They spend $300K/year on electricity to create the right environment. They’ve invested in redundancy. But, the walls of the HD will only last 100 years. [Nov. 25: I may have gotten the following wrong:] He thinks it costs about $1/ year to store a book, not the usual figure of $0.45.

Jeffrey Schnapp: We’re building a library test kitchen. We’re interested in building physical shelves that have digital lives as well.

[Nov. 25: Changed Philosophy school to Divinity, in order to make it correct. Switched the remark about the cost of physical vs. digital in the interest of truth.]

So what did I learn at the Forum d’Avignon about the fate of the Internet in Europe?

It’s of course impossible to distill the entire conference, especially since much of the benefit was getting to meet some fascinating people. And, it’s impossible to feel confident about these lessons because the event consisted of 450 invited guests, so my sample was skewed, even though there was an attempt to achieve balance across cultures, beliefs, and genders. (Fully half of the attendees were women.) Nevertheless, …

Within this set of policy makers and large industry players, there is a conviction that the Internet is primarily a threat that has put all of culture and creativity at risk.

Why do they see it that way? Many of them are content publishers. To them, the Net looks like a competitive publishing medium that connects cultural content to consumers via search engines. Although the conference puts this concern in terms of the failure of the Net to connect consumers to worthy objects of culture, virtually all the public discussion was about the economic threat the current purveyors of mass culture feel. They believe that without the strictest enforcement of copyright, creators won’t be able to earn a living, and thus the Net will kill culture. The idea that the Net is actually the greatest engine of culture in history was expressed only three times, each time by Americans. [The next day: That last sentence is an overstatement. Americans expressed this idea the most directly and forcefully, it seems to me, but not solely.]

Authors rights were taken at the Forum as an economic imperative and as a moral imperative. There is no sense at all that those rights might be usefully balanced with the rights of “consumers” and makers. None. Zilch. Fair Use — granted, an American concept — was raised once in passing. (Victoria Espinel, Obama’s IP Czar, mentioned it, very positively.) The attendees were so convinced that authors’ rights are supreme that they left the conference convinced that there is consensus on the topic. Indeed, the conference ended with a summary of the ministerial summit on culture that was held in parallel with the first day of the conference: All the stakeholders agree on the supreme importance of fighting piracy. Of course, that ministerial meeting [Later: it was called the Cultural Summit, I have learned] included no users at all. So much for “all the stakeholders.” (I pointed this out to the person who convened the meeting (which I was not at, of course), and he said that the government representatives were there to represent users.)

Because of their view of the Net as a publishing medium, and because of the abundance of content on the Net, the dominant paradigm of the Forum views Google as the center of the Net. The participants thus wondered what sort of legislation is required to enforce “search neutrality” against Google. Now, there is no denying that Google is a center of the Net, and its algorithms have a great deal of effect on which pages are seen. But the participants at the Forum had what seemed to me to be a monomaniacal focus on Google, which makes sense if you’re thinking of the Net as a pile of content mediated by an index. They seemed to have no sense that there are living networks of people recommending and linking outside of Google’s search box. And for many of us, the transformative effect of the Net has been as a social place, not as an information medium.

Based on random interactions, it seems to me that at this meeting the small coalition that supported users’ rights as well as authors’ rights consisted of Americans, librarians, and students. Had there been more hackers here, I suspect they’d join our little band, but engineers, geeks and techies were woefully under-represented.

Overall, quite depressing, with the most profound anti-Internet sentiment coming from President Sarkozy in an 1.5 talk and discussion he favored us with.

Vive l’internet ouvert!

[All errors in French due to Google Translate.]

________

It is true that European Commissioner Neelie Kroes attacked the focus on copyright as misguided. Many in the media seem to have heard this as a call for copyright reform. (Here’s my live-blogging of her remarks.) I did not. I thought she was fully backing the rights of authors and strong copyright protection, but saying that we need to do more to create business models that create more money for creators. I did not hear Neelie suggesting copyright reform. I hope I’m wrong.

This week’s Berkman Buzz:

• VIDEO: Justin Reich discusses technology and educational equality:
  link

• Juan Carlos de Martin publishes an op-ed in La Stampa on Italy’s digital agenda [in Italian] link

• The Citizen Media Law Project reviews an ACLU/NAACP lawsuit revolving around an ad at the Philly International Airport link

• Dan Gillmor argues against SOPA link

• Herdict attends the first EU Hackathon link

• Harry Lewis reviews this week’s government attacks on freedom of speech and thought link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Zambia: Porn Video Sparks Debate on Gender, Culture and Morality” link

Steve Crossan, head of the Cultural Institute in Paris, is demo-ing Google’s super spiffy swirling virtual bookcase. The Cultural Institute was set up in April. It’s a group of engineers. They’re building tools and services for the cultural sector, to help people get to online content in an emotionally engaging way.

One pilot project: Dead Sea Scrolls online, searchable and zoomable. Another the WebGL Bookcase.

Another: Memory of a Nation. In 2012 they’re focusing on bringing together archival content with personal testimony.

They’re also developing a physical space. In a virtual world, what shall one do with a physical space to explore culture? The space will be opening in April-May 2012.

Steve introduces Amit Sood to talk about the Google Art Project. He was working on Android, but spent his 20% time (“on Saturdays and Sundays” :) on a collaborative project with 17 great museums. It launched on Feb 1. It’s trying to give an idea of how to enjoy the museums and art in a different way.

He points out that it does not look like a Google page. He goes to a Brueggel at the Met. He zooms in extremely tight (brushstroke close) and very easily, without obvious latency. The “gigapixel” zoom is crazy good. There’s an info panel with plenty of info, including multi-media. You can also do a street view through the museum. (Not all the paintings are at the gigapixel level.) You can add artworks to your personal collections, and annotate it, including sharing details. (The details can always be zoomed back out.) You can share your collections on any social medium.

Why did Google do the project? It started out of passion, not out of corporate strategy. But after they launched, it got a lot of internal support. The four person team was multicultural. Access to info is critical, he says. He grew up in India, where simply walking into a museum was not a real possibility. He reminds us how lucky we are. That was his personal motivation. Other team members did it in order to create new audiences. How can we reduce the snob factor of museums? Finally, because it’s an immersive experience.

25M people have visited. 100,000 collections. Version 2 is coming.

Q: Will you open archives of unplayed music? And can artists create their own gigapixel images?

A: We’re working with archives.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

We begin with a report on a Ministerial meeting yesterday here on culture — a dialogue among the stakeholders on the Internet. [No users included, I believe.] All agreed on the principles proposed at Deauville: It is a multi-stakeholder ecosystem that complies with law. In this morning’s discussion, I was struck by the convergence: we all agree about remunerating copyright holders. [Selection effect. I favor copyright and remunerating rights holders, but not as the supreme or exclusive value.] We agree that there are more legal alternatives. We agree that the law needs to be enforced. No one argued with that. [At what cost?] And we all agree we need international cooperation, especially to fight piracy.

Now Robert Darnton, Harvard Librarian, gives an invited talk about the history of copyright.

Darnton: I am grateful to be here. And especially grateful you did not ask me to talk about the death of the book. The book is not dead. More books are being produced in print and online every year than in the previous year. This year, more than 1 million new books will be produced. China has doubled its production of books in the past ten years. Brazil has a booming book industry. Even old countries like the US find book production is increasing. We should not bemoan the death of the book.

Should we conclude that all is well in the world of books? Certainly not. Listen to the lamentations of authors, publishers, booksellers. They are clearly frightened and confused. The ground is shifting beneath their feet and they don’t know where to stake a claim. The pace of tech is terrifying. What took millennia, then centuries, then decades, now happens all the time. Homesteading in the new info ecology is made difficult by uncertainty about copyright and economics.

Throughout early modern Europe, publishing was dominated by guilds of booksellers and printers. Modern copyright did not exist, but booksellers accumulated privileges, which Condorcet objected to. These privileges (AKA patents) gave them the exclusive rights to reproduce texts, with the support of the state. The monarchy in the 17th century eliminated competitors, especially ones in the provinces, reinforcing the guild, thus gaining control of publishing. But illegal production throve. Avignon was a great center of privacy in the 18th century because it was not French. It was surrounded by police intercepting the illegal books. It took a revolution to break the hegemony of the Parisian guild. For two years after the Bastille, the French press enjoyed liberty. Condorcet and others had argued for the abolition of constraints on the free exchange of ideas. It was a utopian vision that didn’t last long.

Modern copyright began with the 1793 French copyright law that established a new model in Europe. The exclusive right to sell a text was limited to the author for lifetime + 10 years. Meanwhile, the British Statute of Anne in 1710 created copyright. Background: The stationers’ monopoly required booksellers — and all had to be members — to register. The oligarchs of the guild crushed their competitors through monopolies. They were so powerful that they provoked results even within the book trade. Parliament rejected the guild’s attempt to secure the licensing act in 1695. The British celebrate this as the beginning of the end of pre-publication censorship.

The booksellers lobbied for the modern concept of copyright. For new works: 14 years, renewable once. At its origin, copyright law tried to strike a balance between the public good and the private benefit of the copyright owner. According to a liberal view, Parliament got the balance right. But the publishers refused to comply, invoking a general principle inherent in common law: When an author creates work, he acquires an unlimited right to profit from his labor. If he sold it, the publisher owned it in perpetuity. This was Diderot’s position. The same argument occurred in France and England.

In England, the argument culminated in a 1774 Donaldson vs. Beckett that reaffirmed 14 years renewable once. Then we Americans followed in our Constitution and in the first copyright law in 1790 (“An act for the encouragement of learning”, echoing the British 1710 Act): 14 years renewable once.

The debate is still alive. The 1998 copyright extension act in the US was considerably shaped by Jack Valenti and the Hollywood lobby. It extended copyright to life + 70 (or for corporations: life + 95). We are thus putting most literature out of the public domain and into copyright that seems perpetual. Valenti was asked if he favored perpetual copyright and said “No. Copyright should last forever minus one day.”

This history is meant to emphasize the interplay of two elements that go right through the copyright debate: A principle directed toward the public gain vs. self-interest for private gain. It would be wrong-headed and naive to only assert the former. B ut to assert only the latter would be cynical. So, do we have the balance right today?

Consider knowledge and power. We all agree that patents help, but no one would want the knowledge of DNA to be exploited as private property. The privitization of knowledge has become an enclosure movement. Consider academic periodicals. Most knowledge first appears in digitized periodicals. The journal article is the principle outlet for the sciences, law, philosophy, etc. Journal publishers therefore control access to most of the knowledge being created, and they charge a fortune. The price of academic journals rose ten times faster than the rate of inflation in the 1990s. The J of Comparative Neurology is $29,113/year. The Brain costs $23,000. The average list price in chemistry is over $3,000. Most of the research was subsidized by tax payers. It belongs in the public domain. But commercial publishers have fenced off parts of that domain and exploited it. Their profit margins runs as high as 40%. Why aren’t they constrained by the laws of supply and domain? Because they have crowded competitors out, and the demand is not elastic: Research libraries cannot cancel their subscriptions without an uproar from the faculty. Of course, professors and students produced the research and provided it for free to the publishers. Academics are therefore complicit. They advance their prestige by publishing in journals, but they fail to understand the damage they’re doing to the Republic of Letters.

How to reverse this trend? Open access journals. Journals that are subsidized at the production end and are made free to consumers. They get more readers, too, which is not surprising since search engines index them and it’s easy for readers to get to them. Open Access is easy access, and the ease has economic consequences. Doctors, journalists, researchers, housewives, nearly everyone wants information fast and costless. Open Access is the answer. It is a little simple, but it’s the direction we have to take to address this problem at least in academic journals.

But the Forum is thinking about other things. I admire Google for its technical prowess, but also because it demonstrated that free access to info can be profitable. But it ran into problems when it began to digitize books and make them available. It got sued for alleged breach of copyright. It tried to settle by turning it into a gigantic business and sharing the profits with the authors and publishers who sued them. Libraries had provided the books. Now they’d have to buy them back at a price set by Google. Google was fencing off access to knowledge. A federal judge rejected it because, among other points, it threatened to create a monopoly. By controlling access to books, Google occupied a position similar to that of the guilds in London and Paris.

So why not create a library as great as anything imagined by Google, but that would make works available to users free of charge? Harvard held a workshop on Oct. 1 2010 to explore this. Like Condorcet, a utopian fantasy? But it turns out to be eminently reasonable. A steering committee, a secretariat, 6 workgroups were established. A year later we launched the Digital Public Library of America at a conference hosted by the major cultural institutions in DC, and in April in 2013 we’ll have a preliminary version of it.

Let me emphasize two points. 1. The DPLA will serve a wide an varied constituency throughout the US. It will be a force in education, and will provide a stimulus to the economy by putting knowledge to work. 2. It will spread to everyone on the globe. The DPLA’s technical infrastructure is being designed to be interoperable with Europeana, which is aggregating the digital collections of 27 companies. National digital libraries are sprouting up everywhere, even Mongolia. We need to bring them together. Books have never respected boundaries. Within a few decades, we’ll have worldwide access to all the books in the world, and images, recordings, films, etc.

Of course a lot remains to be done. But, the book is dead? Long live the book!

Q: It is patronizing to think that the USA and Europe will set the policy here. India and China will set this policy.

A: We need international collaboration. And we need an infrastructure that is interoperable.

The morning session begins with a debate between Olivier Bomsel (head of the ParisTech Chair of Media and Brand Economic) and James Boyle (law prof at Duke, and one of the founders of Creative Commons). It is moderated by Patricia Barbizet, managing director, Financièr Pinault. The question is whether “intellectual property” (a phrase that already skews the discussion, of course) is a universal value. (Disclosure: I come in thinking that “IP” is not a universal value, and is not even a fully coherent value. And I am and admirer and acquaintance of Jamie Boyle.)

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

Patricia: We should try to find a common view among artists and regulators [and audiences/participants? and culture itself?] and across cultures. We want to try to avoid dogmatism. We want a constructive and pragmatic dialogue.

James begins. He sketches three agendas to try to frame the debate. First, the enforcement agenda starts from the idea that copyright becomes more needed as it becomes cheaper to copy. As copy costs approach zero, control should approach infinity, according to this view.

Second, the development agenda starts from the needs of human beings, especially those in the developing world. It stresses flexibility in copying, acknowledging that the US and Britain used to take looser view. E.g., Dickens called America a nation of pirates.

Third, the boring agenda: It demands empirical evidence. It says we have strong intuitions about what technologies will do, and those intuitions are almost always wrong. It seeks balance, democratic dialogue, is somewhat upset by IP policy to be set by treaties, the texts of which are often classified, which is hilarious, as if there would be rioting in the streets over anti-circumvention policies. [He's being ironic.] The boring agenda is humble. You will hear little about it today; it is poorly represented at international conferences. The European Database Directive was spposed to create more databases, but there have been fewer and the prices have gone up. I hope the boring agenda will find a litle space here today.

Patricia: Is Creative Commons the future? James: CC is based on copyright. It allows users to set their own terms. E.g., you can download James’ book for free because his publisher and he agreed that would drive attention to it. CC goes to scientists, artists, musicians, and asks if they would like to share their work. Many say yes, they’d like to help build a commons. But CC is a private attempt, which addresses our culture’s ignoring of the value of commons. You used to know that the works of your generation would come into the public domain within your lifetime. You could adapt them, translate them, etc.. Now, the works of everyone in this room will not be available for such usage in our lifetimes. Extending the lifetime of copyright beyond the lifetime of authors does not incentivize the dead authors to write more, although the US Congress doesn’t agree.

Olivier: Economics by modernizing ownership theories in the ’60s, plus the info revolution that began in the ’70s, has rolled all prior thinking and law into IP. It’s not necessarily what the Founding Fathers were talking about. We’re in a new phase, using new property theories. Then we can ask whether [theories about?] copyright and brands are independent. [I'm having trouble understanding the translation.] One of the features of the Net is that it’s the first tool that enables you combine various things…publication for anonymous audiences. The question of who speaks, who curates, the environment of the expression is very important. Let me finish this line of reasoning by saying that the 19th C idea of publishing is to make public and known. “Make known” obviously leads you to the issue of brands, because it means linking to this expression a certain number of identifiers and words that give meaning to the expression. [Sorry. but I'm pretty much transcribing. It doesn't make sense to me either, which is certainly a translation problem.] I think there’s a real issue. What do we mean by publish? It means posting on a Web page. It means releasing signs into an accessible space. But, signs if they go no further than that are nothing more than noise, unless your an archivist and taking a very deliverate approach to identifying a particular form of expression, most consumption of meaning is via names, proper nouns. The author can only be identified as such when he has been authorized by a publisher: “Yes this is an author, I put his name next to mine onf the Web page in which I put his content.” All this is much more complicated than this.

Patricia: So you need both publishing and distribution. Olivier: I wasn’t invited to conferencs such as this until I published a book, and got co-branded.

Q: In the past, creators were not necessarily linked to the financial side. The Net turns things on its head. The creator is the bourgeois owner?

Olivier: Ownership is never popular. It is asymmetric. Society gives someone an advantage, and society then asks whether it was right to do so, and whether the collective destiny should be sacrificed by granting individuals sovereign power. [New translator!] This might shock libertarians or primitive communists.

James: Pres. Sarkozy ways that the rights of authors stands in opposition to the Anglo tradition. But one should look at the arguments in France about the Author Rights after the French Revolution. Diderot v. Condorcet. Diderot thought the author’s rights were eternal and natural, and should be easily transferrable to publishers. Condorcet said some things similar to what Olivier said: It is a question of liberty, stopping people from uttering the words of others. He said we should have something like a brand, e.g., this is the James Boyle authorized version. What we have is not as perpetual as Diderot’s, although it’s getting there. It’s also not Condorcet’s that consists of a right of paternity and attribution. So, the tradition of Authors Rights has always had the same concern as the Anglo tradition: The rights of authors are good but how far should they extend. That is the question. The French do not perfectly respect traffic laws. We could have embedded governors that enforce compliance. It would save lives. But would the cost of enforcement be worth it. I think not. And that is the question we should be addressing. It is not am atter of “I love piracy,” but “How far the enforcement? What are the costs?”

Olivier: If you create too many incentives for technology to get around the law, it then becomes unenforceable. And I think that James is trying to open up as an avenue. If you create more responsibility for enforcement of law, you can make the enforcement much more effective and less costly.

Now Bruno Perrin summarizes an Ernst & Young report that the Forum commissioned on IP laws in G20 countries. How are these countries are using the technologies and approach the new risks. [Back to the bad translator.] He shows a map that shows a fairly consistent framework in these countries: Copyright lasts from 50 to 70 7ears. [Well, 70 years after the death of the author.] Countries with harsh enforcement don’t necessarily find less piracy. The most universal factor is the new proven risk to reputation, and of course this involves brands. Audiences and artists respect more and more trustworthy [something]. IP remains the key element when it comes to creating innovation, and it is the interest of all to protect it. (The report is available openly.)

A lawyer [no name in program or intro; sorry] There are differences among IP rights among countries, resulting from those that have civil law and those with common law with copyright. There’s moral right in copyright companies, but moral rights cannot be ceded between living persons in those countries. We’re talking here about the right of the author to be recognized as the creator of the work, and the one who can guarantee its integrity. That can be ceded in copyright countries, but the author would nto be able to control how the work will be used later. Then there’s common law which is a different approach. [Yes, it's my fault that I have to rely on a translator, but I wish I could rely on this translator :( ] [A longer string of words is emitted from the translator.]

Patricia: Piracy. Sarkozy said the good thing about France’s piracy laws is that it has informed a generation that works have prices.

Bruno: We tried to come up with a list of the arguments used by pirates so we could counter them and put an end to them. We were pleasantly surprised by them. Five out of 8 are connected with distribution problems: where, when, how, ease, interoperability. Then there’s the failure of the users to understand their obligations, but education can deal with that. The question of censorship by governments. Then there’s the question of price, which is justifiable [?] but there’s a response to that coming through when it comes to legal free offerings and streaming. [Another stream of compressed words from the translator.] To beat the pirates, you have to come up with a better service.

Patricia: Why are users, producers, and access providers entering into alliances?

Bruno: You have to talk about money. Here’s a chart that shows that in the past four years, the new players are telecom operators, and major media groups. The stock market cap and net cash have increased for these new players. Meanwhile, headcount has only gone up 1%. Excessive power is not a good thing. Consumers are becoming more demanding. [Another stream of seeming-words] We’re confident that things are happening.

Patricia: To sum up: IP is a universal value. It develops differently in different countries. This leads to alliances among stakeholders who had little interaction. Now they are forced to come together [word schmeer] protection diversity coming together.

Now there is a roundtable:

• Fedle Confalonieri, Mediaset Italy

• David Drummond, VP Google, USA

• Victoria Espinel, IP enforcement coordinator, Office of Mgt and Budget, USA

• Francis Gurry, Managing Dir., World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)

• Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission

• Elisabeth Niggeman, Managing Director, National Library, Germany

Patricia: Francis, do you think the current agreements are adapted to the digital age?

Francis: The international agreements are the last recourse. They are a starting point, that dates back to the 19th C, but there are gaps to be filled particularly when it comes to the rights of the different stakeholders. There’s a conf next year about actors’ rights and audio-visual materials. Third, there are quite a lot of questions that have not yet reached the level to be dealt with international agreement. [The good translator!] There are orphan areas that haven’t been discussed yet.

Patricia: There are new conceptions arising…

Francis: Yes. Law is just one part of the solution. For instance, yesterday we talked about facilitating access to creative work — making legal access as easy as illegal access. For that you need a new infrastructure, one not based on territories. I’m talking about global licenses that now require having to go through national levels. At the end of the day, we have to strive for a global market because the tech is global.

Patricia: People used to follow the rules of their countries. Then there were multinationals. This led to new apoproaches on a mltinational level. You’re suggesting it’s important to have consensus or at least multi-cultural dialogue. Or always differencves that have to be preserved?

Francis: We have to have a functional convergence so the tech functions. At the same time there can be certain areas preserved for national policy. E.g., we’re currently negotiating improved access for the blind; this is an exception in the copyright law. Next week we should be able to reach an international agreement that lets there be an exception in France (for blind-accessible works) available in other French-speaking countries. That currently doesn’t exist.

Patricia: Elisabeth Niggemann, how do you feel about the current legislation. Does it enable you to make available all works available to the public?

Elisabeth: I would have said yes when I entered as a librarian. But things have changed dramatically because of the digital revolution. People expect to find everything on line. Click and access. We can’t play our role. E.g., our library is only 100 years old. Everything in our stacks has been given us by publishers and music industry. About 25M media. Because we only started collecting in 1912, almost everything is under copyright. What can I do? Almost nothing, because of copyright. I’m not complaining, merely citing. We have to open up what we have in our stacks. If not, we’ll keep them sage, but they’ll be hidden, forgotten, not used. The treasures of our heritage have to be used and re-used, and we have to build on it. And this is really at risk.

Patricia: Should we enlarge the provisions? Is it legislation? Collective license?

Elisabeth: It’s a mixture of all that. We need money to digitize everything so it’s available. On the other hand, publishers make beautiful things, and it’s good that they give their metadata. But the big gap is the 20th centure, a black hole. Nobody earns anything from it, and it’s under copyright. Legislation could enable us to deal with orphaned works in the printed world. Researching the legal availability of orphaned works is expensive and difficult. It’d be good to have licenses that give money to the creators. We need a mi of legislation that backs these licenses, but also licenses that are worked on by the stakeholders that comes to a compromise so that everyone can gain from these works that are out of circulation and out of commerce.

Patricia: Do countries agree about orphan works? Do we all agree that it’s a black hole?

Elisabeth: I’d like to believe it’s a common view. Of course, the stakeholders won’t always share the same views and approaches and how much it’ll cost to buy a license. Controversy in the details, but we all share more or less the same view. It’s still an issue how you can do a cross-border license. I can imagine licenses being granted nationally because we have collecting societies. But how do you do it internationally? Within EU, yes, but globally it’s a big problem.

David: As one of the architects of the Google Books Settlement, we hope there’s a common view. But it didn’t work in the US. Legislation is required. There are lots of obstacles but we should do it. We get that people didn’t think our approach was good, but the black hole remains.

Patricia: But Google is signing more agreements…

David: A misconception is that Google is all about free content. But we’ve always had partnerships with content creators. “Traffic acquisition costs” in our annual report = content creators who embed our stuff. The content creators, including large media companies, make money out of this. Billions of dollars generated with content creators. Now, it’s turned out that the advertising/free models hasn’t worked that well. E.g., the news industry. Media industry and Google are headed toward distribution models that include paying for content. We sell e-books. Our OnePass project lets you subscribe to news. And we just launched Google Music which sells music through deals with the music industry.

Patricia [lightly]: I think many of us are so startled by the size of the figures in Google’s accounts that we miss the details. Yesterday, Sarkozy talked about Google…

David: We’re an indexer. We crawl the Web. If people don’t want it searched, we don’t crawl it. We are attempting to provide as much info to users as we can. We believe in openness in software. Android is open. The Chrome browser also.

Patricia: People use Google to find creations…

David: It’s important that artists have all the options to make their works available for pay, for free, etc. There’s tremendous amounts of info for free. But if you want the best, it’s expensive, and creators need to be compensated for that. We want to bring the great offline works online, but you can only do that if you have a model that compensates creators.

Neelie: Someone told me that yesterday was frightening and then exciting. When I was a small girl, I thought “What would I do if I didn’t have fear?” We should do our job, but not be afraid. We are talking about a digital single market. We should use the privilege of the digital single market. It is global. But we are open to imagination, and that should be our lead role. I am in completely in favor of a decent remuneration for creators. I agree with Sarkozy that we if we don’t feed the artists, it is over.

Patricia: We all agree. [really?]

Neelie: Many many artists are living on a thousand euros a month, which is not enough. That’s true for 97.5% of one of the collecting societies. We need to go to back to the basics. Put the artists in the center, of copyright law and our entire policy on culture and growth. We need out of the box thinking. I was startled when Sarkozy called HADOPI an “awareness tool.” It’s about piracy. Also, I’m a strong believer in the Cloud. That gives a possibility of tackling the problem better.

Patricia: Do Americans and Europeans agree about the cloud?

Neelie: Maybe. Let me be a politician. I cannot explain to Europeans why iTunes isn’t selling films in Europe, or why Spotify is introduced this week in Belgium but not elsewhere. We have to educate our children.

Patricia: Are we dreaming that our children are learning not everything is free?

Neelie: The main thing is to that people have options. Politicians need to listen to arguments, such as in the E&Y paper, but politicians have to translate them into policy. If your start is that artists should get a decent remuneration, then you go from there to try to provide options. If people can’t buy or download what they want, they think politicians are not doing their jobs.

Francis: When the Net started there was a lot of resistance among rights owners. Now it’s different. I appreciate the E&Y arguments. We do need to create the infrastructure for a global digital market.

David: I agree. Technology can be an aid here. E.g., Youtube fingerprints copyrighted material when asked. Infringers an either take it down or let it stay up with ads and make money out of it. [Will someone please say something about Fair Use]

Elisabeth: The Bern Convention says copyright exists from creation. When I see Wikipedia and more, I think we can keep global agreements and still do something voluntarily.

Fedele: If you’re doing the same job, you need the same rules, and the revenues have to be the same. Our job is far more banal than monks copying works: television. If Google uses tech to keep an eye on content, there’s streaming. The European audio-visual industry has a turnover of about €92B euros. About half go into the products. I agree with Sarkozy. I’m old, been around. I can put myself into the shoes of the newcomers. I remember what happened in France with the Fifth TV channel. You couldn’t have many commercials, Sundays off. We were the forerunners, although we were pirates at the time, although we were paying copyright for US materials. It’s all culture, and it needs to be protected. I’m not saying we need Big Brother, but when you look at the financial side of programs such as this, you have to be careful of the investments. If you want to take our content, you have to pay. So, let’s do it in that way.

Patricia: [bad translator] What’s your reaction to piracy?

Fedele: We believe in technology because programs especially for young people will have their web sites, put in the ads, make money. Quite clearly we have to adjust our offerings to the different platforms. Our business model is based on copyright and exclusivity. Recently in the EU there was a question about a game of football in Turkey or Greece. We and Skye and other bidders pay something like 100M euros to have all the championship games. In Turkey you can broadcast the same game as us that we have exclusive rights for. If they can do that, the system collapses. What is ours should be seen as ours.

Patricia: Laws? Regulations?

Fedele: Neelie Kroes has the mandate. The EC says every users should be digital by 2013, and we support that. That’s wonderful. If you want to get people to forget about things being free, it’s education. HADOPI is a step in the right direction. It’s like a speed limit on the motorway. [Cf. Jamie Boyle's point] Everyone in business would like a monopoly, but we’re realistic. It’s up to politics and step in and regulate.

Patricia: What’s your next move, Victoria, since you’re in charge of policy for the US gov’t.

Victoria: My job is to oversee IP overall for the US, which is broader than copyright. E.g., trade secrets, patents. But I’ll focus on copyright. We need a combination of approaches. The Obama administration has been supporting having the public sector come together voluntarily to take actions to reduce infringement. We think this is flexible and sustainable. We’ve had 3 voluntary agreements reached this year, two about copyright, to try to quarantine sites that are bad actors. We are trying to gather data. We need an empirical basis to see if our approach is working. We need to know if it’s not working. We also feel this is just one part of the solution. We’ve increased law enforcement. We focus on sources of supply, not on consumers: businesses built with the intention of distributing infringement product. There is a public awareness gap and we’d like to educate consumers. We need to be doing more cooperatively with other countries. We need as a govt to be encouraging an environment that provides legal alternatives consumers find appealing. The Cloud is raising issues already raised by the Internet, putting it on steroids. Any debate that says the Cloud is good or a danger is overly simplistic. You can have Cloud services built to be legal or not. The Cloud’s capacity and flexibility makes it easier to build legal services that are what consumers want. To the extent people are building Cloud services with the intention of dedicating them to illegal activity [interesting two qualifiers] we will go after them. When I began, I though we would not need many changes. But after a review, we made 20 legislative suggestions to Congress, although most were not about copyright. One was to increase penalties (which is not entirely accurate, she says). We think the max penalties for copyright is appropriate where they are. We are concerned where IP infringement is tied to particularly egregious conduct, such as supporting terrorism or organized crime; judges should have the discretion to increase penalties. We’re seeing some truly gruesome examples of ties between organized crime and IP theft. We are particularly concerned about this. The second place we think our laws could be strengthened is with respect to streaming sites. Our focus is on distributors. When sites are built for distributing illegal content, we think that should be subject to criminal penalties. Our law is ambiguous about streaming, and we think it should be clarified.

Neelie: This debate is missing the fact that people should be allowed to use the Internet. We’ve focused on piracy. Education is important. But we also have to offer alternatives, for most people are not interested in illegal actions. I completely agree with the White House that much can be done voluntarily.

Victoria: We are keenly aware that enforcement of IP on the Net can have an impact on free speech, fair use, due process, and these are extremely important to our administration. They have to be respected and protected and made a priority.

Q: [bad translator] I run a small govt called Naive. Liability, responsibility, voluntary agreements, fear … these words keep coming up and are important. Internet operators have a cultural responsibility. I propose universal cultural contribution. Internet operators could pay a few pennies for the use of eac work. Track each usage.

A: [tax person from E&Y] Taxation has a major influence on how a cultural industry is run. Studies show taxes are a major lever used by countries. [String of translator gibber] Managing digital rights is a very complex system.

A: Neelie: I was intrigued by the interview with Frederic Mitterand in Le Monde. I agree with his proposals. But we should be strict; member states should be make their own reservation. It’s not just telecom providers. [This must be insider EC baseball.]

Q: [spotify] We need time. Music has small margins and we need huge volumes for things to work properly. We need time to get things up and running.

Q: I’m a publisher. Fedele talked about the economics side. We’ve talked about fear. We have 1500 authors, of which 50 have a significant level of remuneration. The rest are frightened about losing the little they have. We need a rebalancing of the economic conditions, or else fear will take over. I have an author who wants to publish but not in one particular country for political reason. Do we think of the author’s rights or the consumers’ rights?

Q: [from Viviendi] Condorcet was not against intellectual property. “Any privilege is awkward in the face of liberty…It is harmful to the rights of others …” [didn't get it]. Condorcet has people do not create books for money, but if he doesn’t get money, he has to find another way of making a living.

James: We’re forgetting that Internet has been wonderful for authors. More people are authors on the Net than ever before. Question: Would some of the proposals not make the Internet more like Minitel than the Internet. Minitel: Totally controlled. No creativity.

Q: [robert levine] I am the author of the book Free Ride. It’s avalable on a pirate site in Brazil that also sells farm equipment. David, Google has matching algorithms, but did you only offer it to media companies that were willing to do a media partnership. If the solution is tech, why can’t sites like this and ThePiratesBay be taken out of search results for Google.

A: [david] Links to pages with infringing content are taken down.

Q: I’m from the Italian copyright authority. We are going to try to adopt a law to fight piracy. I’ve been disappointed today. The question is, as we see it, is: We don’t have the time to get involved with philosophical debate. The telecom operators are avoiding their responsibility. The EC isn’t saying anything.

Victoria: As an American, we love the Internet. When I started this job, I spent a lot of time outside of DC talking to companies that had a range of views on these issues. I was struck by the level of fear, anger, distrust. They were very emotional. That’s true on both sides of the debate. That’s an extremely unhelpful dynamic. We’d like to see better cooperation come out of these voluntary agreements. At the end of the discussion if there’s true participation, the level of trust and fear go down. We can’t let fear freeze us. We need to tackle the issues.

Fedele: We’re not afraid either. If you’re an entrepreneur you see everything as an opportunity. We were pirates. One starts up as an arsonist and ends up as a fireman.

Q: The pirates make sure that my films don’t get pirated for two weeks. That’s the type of loyalty. Google tells me how to find the pirated films. The telcos charge for the download. Lots of money is being made, but the artist isn’t making money.

Francis: The end of the day, the point of the tech is to enable us to communicate. The artist is king.

Q: [me...except I didn't get called on: Author's rights, sure. But what are you doing to institute and expand Fair Use to protect the rights of readers/re-users?]i

Notes on the first afternoon session. I was in the first half of this, which I am not blogging. It was ably moderated by Eric Scherer of France TV. (He looks ahead for them.)

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

Eric asks Cynthia Fleury (philosopher): What would the Net be like without curating? We would never find out. There is no walk in the woods without a path. The idea is that this puts innovation on the periphery. But it should be in the center. 45% of Net users speak English. The typical user is male, under 35, a graduate. The network architecture revolves around the US. Only 2% [of what] is accounted for by African countries. Cultural diversity is limited, affecting curation. There are positives: A more open public space. We are all our own media, as Castells has said. Chomsky’s logic is still there, however. Friedman’s statement that the world is flat is wrong; the Internet creates more concentration and relief through curation because these aren’t open systems. FB brings you into contact with people you already knew. At the same time there is no culture without cultural co-creation. There is a utilitarian approach here; people go through three pages of Google and stop. Also you’re under pressure of breaking news, rumors, low-quality voice. So curation is important. So use different search engines, go beyond the 50th page of results. But, as PAscal says, the ground has to be prepared — you have to be open and ready to discovery. I am interested in our ability to destructure mediation — go straight to a source, bypassing the authorities. Demediation. Then you remediate: you check what you have against what the mainstream media say about it.

The former head of Google France gets asked if someday we’ll know more about the Google ranking algorithms? He says the algorithm will enter the public domain in 2014. They’ll try to keep it secret as long as possible. There’s so much at stake that it is a strategic choice by Google to say as little as possible.

Can there be neutral listing? Cynthia: No. Maybe there are good reasons to become transparent.

Gilles Babinet (Pres. opf French National Council of Digital and Eyeka). Google is a Western thing. But emerging cultures have lots and lots of mobiles. Also: I find fascinating the polarization of Net and the art. When you create a new web site, you are close to artistic creation. You have to avoid this idea that art and the Net are partitioned. It’s like the Salon that didn’t want the Impressionists; that what we have to avoid.

Gilles: I don’t know if any other country has as rich a cultural heritage as France. The French National Council ought to be making the most of it. As Pres. Sarkozy said, trying to control things is reactive and will cost more energy than it’s worth.

Cynthia: What’s most interesting about Internet: The balance between expertise and transmission. If you have successful curating, it means money to some, and learning and power to others. That’s the history of transmission. We need to have a certain amount of lack of understanding because that’s what keeps us interested and pulls us forward. The Internet is calling expertise, intellectualism, and commitment into question.

Gilles: The Americans tells us they need to find a way to protect cultural goods just as they protect technical goods.

Cynthia: Obviously I agree with that. Indigenous knowledge must enjoy IP protection. It’s crucial to know who the author of a work of art is. And it has to be passed over into the public domain.

They move us into the grand hall — vaulted ceilings — for a talk by Pres. Nikolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy has not exactly been a friend of the Internet. The last time I heard him talk was at LeWeb when he was a candidate. Among the three candidates who spoke there, Sarkozy’s talk was clearly the most hostile to the Internet, viewing it primarily as a site of gossip and slander.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing A SIMULTANEOUS TRANSLATION badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

President Sarkozy: I was going to give a prepared speech but instead will speak off the cuff. Never before have cultural protagonists — politicians, heads of gov’t — had to make so many efforts to come up with imaginative, new responses to the challenges that humans have never had to face before. I know my presence here surprised some observers. Why talk about culture in such a crisis? Because culture is the bedrock, and the bedrock of our response. The French response to the crisis is to invest massively in culture and anything having to do with culture. That is the French way of doing things. France believes that cultural goods are essential goods. That is the basis of the choices we have made. To live, man needs to feed himself, be healthy, and needs culture. France is the only developed country that has not cut into its cultural budgets — and around in Europe cultural budgets are being cut 20, 30, 50% — but we have increased those budgets.

I’m an optimist. The world has never needed cultural protagonists the way we do now. You give life sense, you build links, you create collective sense. The offshoot of globalization is that citizens need a sense of belonging to their country. What better way than through the adhesion to one’s culture.

Why have we had to show such boldness? Because all cultural protagonists are facing a crisis of distribution. This is a matter of extreme seriousness, if we consider — as I consider — it is no service to culture to say that it is free for all. The disappearance of traditional distribution methods threatens traditional culture itself. You used to go to a record store or a DVD store. That is shattered. So, we have to reengineer a viable economic model from A to Z. This is not simply a matter of imaging. You have to be courageous. I will be blunt. I have always believed that there would be no form of creation if there were no longer to be respect for upholding and respect for copyright and author’s rights. This is of the essence and shapes all the rest.

Bon Marche invented the very concept of author’s rights. A musician has ownership over the music he writes. An author has ownership over the book he publishes. To deny the ownership of artists on their work amounts to negating all forms of creation. What was the status of creators before they had ownership? They were simply court jesters. Those were the lucky ones. Your predecessors long ago might find a benefactor who fell in love with a particular musician’s works and would protect him. What enabled artists to break out of that yoke? What give musicians and writers independence and freedom? What enabled them to recovery their ownership. Copyright. The idea that you could live on the benefits of what you created. There is no independence when you rely exclusively on the genersoity of benefactors.

I am determined not to accept that a tech revolution, even as positive as the Net in other respects, should call into question the ownership rights of a creator over his or her works. To challenge that is to acknowledge anuy economy of culture.

Why is it so complex? I remember the 2005-6 debate where people on my side said you shouldn’t defend these ideas even if they’re right because youth will rise up against you. But one should not renounce one’s beliefs simply because you have to explain things to people before you persuade them. I even had people say I would lose this election if I did not understand this extraordinary revolution that has turned all on its head. We imposed, against much resistance, legislation (HADOPI) against piracy and to protect author’s rights.

I don’t want there to be any ambiguity, so I want to respond to those who ultimately believed what I believe, but decided not to defend a just idea for political reasons.

First, I was indeed elected as president. One can uphold copyright without alienating the majority of people. People are down to earth and can understand if you explain it.

Second, I was told I lost that war. Piracy is part of people’s lives, I was told. When I saw certain sites where daily newspapers were offering their articles free and people weren’t buying the paper any more. How little respect you have for what you do! And how stupid to think that people would pay for what they would get for free. Within a few months of HADOPI, there was a 35% drop in privacy, so the battle wasn’t lost. The internet society has to be guided by rules, just as real society is. The great USA went about it our way. NZ, S Korea likewise. The battle is not lost.

Now we have to tackle the streaming web sites and there is no reason not to do so. What was ambiguous was that p2p pirating was based on an ideology that was based on an initially positive ideology: sharing. The approach wasn’t in and of itself negative. On streaming sites the ideology of sharing has gone out the window; they’re about making money.

They claimed I’m a fanatic. But HADOPI is just a means to an end. Tech is evolving, so the law must too. All we want to do is protect author’s rights. Once the principle of protecting author’s rights is enshrined, why not?

And at the Digital E8, I said lets invite the Net giants to talk with us. I was told that they’d think we’re trying to gag them. When you invite people to talk, you’re not gagging them. So, we sat down and talked, and there was no tension. The idea is not to protect our backyard but to pull these worlds together. The Net revolution is a phenomenally positive development, but we need to talk. And to utter the forbidden word: Taxation. [Google pays no taxes in France.] I cannot accept that these companies pay no taxes in France. You can’t have all your clients in one customer and your team in another customer, and pay taxes ina third country where the taxes are the lowest.

We can support this Net revolution while still talking with Google, Zuckerberg, Microsoft, and talk about author’s rights, taxations, the fact that the latest Marakesh bombing was done by someone who discovered how to make a home-made bomb on the Internet.

In our mind, there isn’t an opposition between the Net world and cultural world. There is a need to get together, speak the same language, lay the foundations for an economy that is viable for Net giants and creators and that doesn’t ruin what the creators create. Culture is an investment that will get us out of this crisis, not a mere expenditure that one can cut back on. Culture is not a luxury. So, I felt it my duty to be here you in this beautiful city, even though there are heavier burdens to shoulder.

Q: I’m a Bollywood actress and writer. I am French. I am also Indian. Completely both. For me culture means the ability to choose among our own passions, and not the ideas that are fashionable. For this we need cultural diversity. So: What is culture?
A: For me, culture is meaning. “Culture is the response one gets when one wonders what one is doing on Earth?” [He's quoting someone I couldn't get.] What gives our life meaning. There is a spiritual and cultural answer to this. Culture is the only area in which there is no notion of progress because culture is the only way man has found to better his condition. When you go to L’escaux Caves you realize it’s the Sistine Chapel of the time — the same sense of transcendence, getting man out of the Kantian chains that bind us. If I take off my head of state cap, I would simply say that culture is an investment. France welcomes 20M tourists a year. What would France be without its culture? If I look at it as a politician, culture is what binds a society. It is the lifeblood. It is why men and women do not know one another share common emotions. Without culture there is no sense of nationhood. If I were to speak as a reader or listener, culture is emotion. A special sort of emotion experience by the composer or writer, but that has universal value. The more personal the feelings expressed, the more unique, the more universal. And, to come around full circle, how can you define culture as what it is not. It is not that extra bit of soul — I hate that expression — for the well-fed society that can afford it. It is not part of the whole. It is the whole. From culture you achieve cohesiveness. You don’t have life and then the spangle of culture. Culture is our identity. Finally, what is culture not? It is the very opposite of sectarianism, of the accepted dogma, of conservativism, of the sheep mentality, of the Pavlovian reflex, of the automatic geographical alignment, of the concern for image at whatever cost.

Q: I am an American anthropologist from India. It is music to my ears to hear that music is a necessity. If there were no investment in culture, my discipline would disappear, which would not be a sorry for the world, but would be for us anthropologists. When you make it clear that culture is a non-negotiable priority even or especially in this time of fiscal crisis, how can make this argument in other countries? Can you draw on your experience with other locations?

A: Need only look at what has happened throughout the world. When the Spanish steel industry was swept around, the city of Bilbao was ruined because its economy rested on it. They made a tremendous wager, betting on architectural quality (Frank Gehry) and culture (Guggenheim Museum). Bilbao generates 220 million euros because of this. Bilbao was saved by cultural investment. When Germany reunited, they decided that the capital would be in Berlin, and built an exceptional capital. Culture is what Berlin has to offer. They’ve had a time attracting companies to Berlin, so real estate prices have stayed low, attracting artists. But 13% of the jobs in Berlin are in the arts and culture. Liverpool’s response in the crisis was to invest massively in cultural terms, and it worked. The cities of the Ruhr are another example. I have had to make painful decisions in Moselle [?] and Metz [spelling!] where 30% of jobs were military. We had to redeploy bases and barracks once my predecessor, Chirac, abolished compulsory military service. So, we abolished military jobs. The implications were colossal. So, we decided to build the Bourbon [?] Center in Metz. It received more than one million visitors. We’re going to dig our heels on this. We’re going to build a Louvre in Lens [?], which has suffered two brutal revolutions: the collapse of the mining industry and the textile crisis. That will project will be a success. We’ll have the museum of the Mediterranean in Marseilles. The Impressionists housed in the ___ museum, the dream I have is of a magnificent museum in Normandy. When the crisis befell us, we came up with a plan to relaunch the economy which included 400B euros worth of additional money for culture. I think there were 83 cathedrals needed to be restored, of hwihc 50 have been restored. And the living arts! Art is always living art — people go on stage and perform. We have not touched one penny of that money. It is our certainty that the best way to respond to the crisis is to invest in culture, just as in aerospace. And if you look at the history of art, creation has never been better than in countries that feel good about themselves. The two phenomena are intimately interconnected. When I look at French cinema, I think Thank heavens our predecessors set up systems that I have done everything to protect. That’s why the French film industry is not in the situation of some of our neighbors that have seen their film industries go down the drain. I may be bold but I have a sense of risk.

Q: [A film maker - Vanya [?]] Barbara Hendricks this morning said that art is as important as air and water, and you said the same. I am a member of Culture and Diversity. Our goal is create cultural opportunities for poor kids. We want to bring them toward art and art schools, but often the importance of art is often quite removed from their lives. They receive art passively through tv, internet and films. But they have little opportunity to be active. What can we do?

A: Look at the extraordinary way the US puts films, music, etc., at service of their economic interests. The brands take root. I’m not saying it’s deliberate, but it works. There’s a steamrolling effect. The generosity of French artists and film directors is equaled elsewhere. We are very happy to screen American films and show American artworks. We do want our American friends to remember that there are other countries. That’s another debate. Reciprocity has to exist in the cultural industry. Beyond exchange. We have to be able to defend this principle. It’s not just the under-privileged. The privileged don’t always appreciate culture. We want to use this extraordinary instrument — the 5,000 colleges in France — to create the new audiences for opera, theater, film, etc. We have started a program where we by the rights to 200 films and make them available to all these colleges. This was not a way of competing with the film industry, but the idea was that if you start watching films in college, you will continue as an adult. We have 264 national theaters, 600 theater troupes, a huge reservoir of plays. But where are the audiences? I’d like to see these plays, once they have toured, to go to the colleges and schools, to shape and form the audiences of tomorrow. Take opera. The cost of a seat is pretty prohibitive, yet the operas are full. I’d like to buy up the rights to these operas and enable these shows to play in schools and colleges. Then there are underprivileged. We’re taking an initiative bringing exhibitions…going out to meet the people. In one case only 19% had ever been in a museum. We’re trying to decentralize, e.g., the Mobile Pompidou exhibition. It’s a simple stage under a tent so people aren’t intimidated. Suddenly they lay their eyes on a Picasso. Can you imagine the effect? That work of art now is not foreign. It’s part of one’s village. Culture is too often sensed as foreign. Whatever you background, when you set your eyes on a work of art, you appreciate it. There is no pre-determinism. Art’s value should be self-evident. You walk down the street and see something beautiful. You don’t need to be told or have it explained. The more you know the more you need to be told. When it’s simply about emotion, nothing needs to be explained to you. [Wow is that false. And it's inconsistent with his Net views. If we respond to art without training, then why hasn't the Net clustered around works of art?]

Q: How about free access to museums?

A: I don’t think that’s the ultimate response because you don’t respect what is free. Everything has a price. Everything has a value. There has to be a bit of an effort for there to be pleasure. But we have for 18-25 and teachers access to museums should be free. The number of visits as a result of this decision: 2.7M youths have gone in. Teachers: 500K. Culture is an amazing, fantastic domain that holds true. You have to be pragmatic, generous, open-minded. I am against access to museums being free because they need to sustain themselves. But for young people and teachers this was a good move. If teachers don’t get into the habit of going to museums, how can their pupils learn.

Q: [a Swedish student] Ever since I was a child, I wanted to make a difference. First as a poet. Then wanting to become the Sect’y General of the UN. My generation was born into the Internet. We invented Facebook, Skype, and Spotify. This has changed how we communicate and interact, across borders. From my point of view, these are great developments. Culture is beautiful and is in all that we do and are. Everything that isn’t developing is degenerating. Values are changing. Why is the defense of IP fundamental in your policy? Isn’t it in opposition to access to culture you’ve stood up for? Isn’t the fight against piracy a hopeless case.

A: I see haven’t persuaded all of you. An artist who wants music to be disseminated free of charge always has that option. I am challenging the pirating of works who do not want that. Who would buy the film or music if you can access it free of charge. There is now a quite cheap offering on the market. It’s right that you should pay less for a record or CD you buy on the Internet. For music we’re going to set up a system comparable to the CNC system we set up for film. I want providers to contribute musical creation just as a certain number of actors contribute to creation in the film industry. Just as there’s a national film center (CNC) there should be a national music one, which should be partially funded by the providers. When there are no writers or music, what is your generation going to get? For music there has to be composers, for films etc. If they don’t have ownership, what will they become of them? The famous will remain in the catalog until their rights fall into the public domain. If your first film or record is not enough to live on, how will you do the second? I asked Zuckerberg — who is remarkable and I admire — if he’d like his work pinched, and he said “Of course not.” Explain to me why a famous author or film maker should have fewer rights than those who are not famous. Go ask Google or Microsoft. Don’t tell me I’m not in favor of the free market! We should fight harder for author’s rights! I think it’s beginning to sink in. I know in Sweden, regulation is a dirty word. We defend our rights, but we’re not refusing the Internet. France is where the Net has developed the fastest and the most. Let us not ask the wrong questions. Illegal streaming sites are doing untold damage and I fully intend to fight them. I do not want to see profit made from the simple theft of other people’s work, just as in the national bond issue, I have earmarked a lot of money so Frederic Mitterand can digitize what are in the French national libraries. Big companies wanted to do it, but we said no. Freedom needs laws. Not too many regulations, but when there is no regulation, it is those who have the most clout and fewest scruples win.

Q: When we try to understand the current revolution, we should look back to the Printing Revolution. Technological rev is not only a change in tools, but influences all levels of culture.: distribution, production, communication, and sharing of culture. We have to rethink all aspects concurrently. We need mediation and explanation. With my students we explore other economic models, or a global license. Shouldn’t we try to reconcile technology and our culture in a period of massive piracy?

A: Yes, it’s a massive revolution, but that shouldn’t lead us to turn our backs on our democratic traditions. We have to find the right balance. On a global license: I am completely against this completely crazy idea. I believe that the identification between the author and his work is of the essence. If we all into some kind of melting pot, we are denying everything that is individual and specific. No one is defending this crazy idea. We are indeed facing challenges. E.g., digital TV that puts on the same screen the traditional, regulated services and the Internet world, which is not regulated and that does not contribute to the film industry the way the traditional services do. The latter will be stealing audience share. So we are going to have to work on how to regulate digital, connected TV era. Or, cloud computing: There again, what happens to your private copy that no longer needs to be uploaded? The battle against illegal downloading will become a matter of the past because in cloud computing there won’t be any need to download anything. But as I said initially, we’re ready to have a third or fourth version of our anti-piracy laws. We believe in protecting author’s rights and them getting individual remuneration for their work. The ways and means of doing this will change, and no one could not say that the Net is not a major step in social connection. But we don’t want our democratic principles thrown out the window. Of course we have to regulate and do it within a framework. It takes 3 mins to download a film. We want to be flexible but stick to our fundamental principles.

Q: [economist] I work on the economics of art and culture. You’ve today demonstrated how clearly you understand the connection. You’ve made the tax system a priority in your own cultural policy. The VAT on some cultural goods has risen in France. Is this consistent with your support of culture.

A: For France, the VAT on the same goods should be the same, whether hardcopy of digital versions. I understand the problems that may arise out of this for the European Commission. But as of Jan 1 2012 we’ll apply reduced VAT for hardcopy goods. Why should it be 7% on the Net and 19.6% for hardcopy. The globalization caused by the Net leads to major distortions in competition, which we cannot accept. So, I’m requesting that VAT on digital and ebooks be the same, at a reduced rate. It will be implement on Jan 1., and I hope that the European Commissioner will not come down to us too hard. This is a personal message to her. I do not understand that there should be a VAT differential to books, films, records, music, because in my mind cultural goods are the same and should have equal standing. In France cultural goods are considered to be essential goods, like food. Now, why we have increased VAT from 5.7 to 7% on cultural goods, is a way of protecting that sector; VAT in France is 19%. I cannot ask the French to tighten their belts and hear one sector complain about a rise from 5.7 to 7%. We have maintained VAT at 2.2% for living arts and press. So let no one say we’re being unfair to culture. We have protected the cultural area ferociously. We have smoothed the burden across the board. I hope the EC lets me work calmly on the record industry. I take this very seriously. Your memories are of smell and music. The systematic destruction of the music industry I cannot simply shrug off. That’s why I’m thinking about reduced VAT for music, as I’ve done for films.

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) Law and Political Sciences department herby invite scholars, practitioners and policy makers to participate in the 8th International Conference on Internet Law & Politics (IDP 2012): Challenges and Opportunities of Online Entertainment by submitting papers, from either legal or political science perspectives, focusing on the following topics:

• Online Entertainment and its implications in fields such as, among others, the legal framework of audiovisual communications, the liability of intermediaries, legal aspects of videogames and online gambling, social networking sites, behavioural advertising, privacy, data protection, defamation, protection of minors, intellectual property, new models of content distribution, user generated contents, illicit and harmful contents, net neutrality, new generation networks, antitrust.

Papers may also focus on:

• Legal issues relevant to the current status and future perspectives of the Internet, such as, among others, online privacy, data protection, intellectual property, ISP liability, freedom of expression, cybercrime, e-commerce.
• Issues regarding electronic government, such as, among others, open data, reuse of public sector information, political participation online, e-procurement, Internet governance.

Interested participants should first submit an abstract (a 300-word outline) of their paper by 20 December, 2011, indicating clearly its subject and scope, and including a provisional title. There is no need to use a template for submitting the abstract. The abstracts received will be peer-reviewed and authors will be notified of the outcome by 10 January, 2012.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be required to send the full paper by 26 March, 2012. Full papers should not exceed 8,000 words in length, including notes and references. For the full paper authors should use the conference template that will be available to download from the web. The full papers will be peer-reviewed as well. The outcome will be notified by 16 April, 2012. Final version of the paper (camera ready) should be sent by 30 April, 2012. All papers accepted will be included in the electronic proceedings of the Conference, which will hold an ISBN number. Accepted papers may also be selected for oral presentation at the Conference.

Important dates

• Abstract submission: please submit a 300-word outline by 20 December, 2011.
• Notification of acceptance of abstracts: 10 January, 2012.
• Full paper submission: please submit the full paper by 26 March, 2012.
• Notification of full paper’s acceptance: 16 April, 2012.
• Final version (camera ready): 30 April, 2012.

Please send all submissions by electronic mail in a .DOC or .ODT document to: uoc.idp2012@gmail.com

Sebastian Anthony points to a distinguishing philosophy of Firefox that was not clear to me until I read it. The title is “Firefox is the cloud’s biggest enemy,” which he in the comments admits is not entirely apt. Rather, Firefox wants you to own and control your data; it uses the cloud, but encrypts your data when it does. This is a strong differentiation from Google Chrome and Microsoft IE.

I’m trying out posting where I’ll be talking. I haven’t before because it seems to me to have no value except as boasting. Some of the events are open to the public, but I’m also going to mention some that aren’t because I guess I’m boasting. Let me know how obnoxious you find this. I’d be happy never to do it again. Anyway…

Monday I’m keynoting the DLF Fall Forum in Baltimore.

Tuesday I’m giving at talk in White Plains at the Westchester Library System Annual Meeting.

Friday I’m on a panel discussing “What’s next in the social media revolution?” at the the National Archives. There’s a Social Media Fair and Reception at 5:30, and then the panel at 7pm.

This week’s Berkman Buzz:

• Ethan Zuckerman explores mapping and storytelling at Occupy Wall Street: link

• Dan Gillmor critiques the WikiLeaks payments blockade: link

• The Citizen Media Law Project spots Bigfoot fighting for free speech: link

• Herdict covers China’s censorship of the ‘Occupy’ movement: link

• Weekly Global Voices: “United Kingdom: At Age 77, a Life of Inspiration”
  link

Notes from the Civil Society and Politics transformation in the Internet Age, organized by the Communication and Civil Society seminar of the IN3 in in Barcelona, Spain, in October 26-27, 2011. More notes on this event: comsc. The limits of the mass media and the emergence of mass self-communication in the digital age
Lluís Bassets (El País Associate Director), Manuel Campo Vidal (Journalist), Mayte Pascual (TVE Journalist), Ricardo Galli (Meneame.net), Klaudia Alvarez (Communication group DRYbcn), Vicent Partal (Vilaweb, chairs) Ricardo Galli

(this speech is partly based on Ricardo Galli’s article Pienso, luego estorbo — I think, therefore I’m in the way)

Some of the reactions against the 15M movement were expected — as the ones from the extreme right wing — but some others were unexpected, and nevertheless were as foreign, strange, surprising for the activists of the social movements.

Several initiatives like #nolesvotes or Democracia Real Ya’s protests for May 15th (15M) became extremely popular in online platforms, with massive acceptance and viral communication and, notwithstanding, they would not appear on the papers. Why?

• Lack of belief that things would come to something real. That is, lack of belief that there would not be a transposition from online spaces to offline spaces.
• Lack of a press conference. Indeed, there were some, but were unattended by journalists.
• Avoid a call effect: if it appears on the papers, there is more likelihood of success. Thus, let us not air it.
• Phagocytosing of the topic by some journalists, that love being the subject of their own news, instead of reporting the real characters of the movement.

After the 15M, some media begin to cover the events, but also to discredit both the movement and some of the more visible heads (or arbitrary so-called heads of the movement — which were not).

Some of the things that have happened — and media still have to learn — is that lots lots of things have happened since 15M, there are lots of people involved, the movement is evolving… and nonetheless, it is still being ignored.

Lluís Bassets

We have to think of mass media as institutions that are evolving themselves, and sometimes it is this very same evolution or transformation of the media the most interesting event. Media are not mirrors of the society, but institutions that are part of it. And, as such, are actors worth being analysed too.

We also have to deal with the 15M phenomenon in its context: the Arab Spring and the economic crisis. This is a global revolution due to a crisis of representation, of mediation: the mediation of governments, of trade unions, of media.

What is a TV, a radio, a newspaper on the Internet? sections? a 24-hour cycle? Media have to become just the contrary of what they nowadays are. And journalists do still have a future — and a very bright one, indeed — if they stick to their core values: verifying the sources.

But big journalism needs time, reflection, quietness. And the problem is that the pace of the new times is so fast that makes it difficult for this journalism to take its time.

Manuel Campo Vidal

Media are in a deep and long transition. And not only because of the crisis of the paper vs. digital, and not only because of the crisis of advertisement. The economic crisis only implies more speed and depth, but the transition is not a consequence of the economic crisis. The nature of crisis of media is the divergence between old and new media.

But conspiracies might not be the best way to explain what is happening, the reasons why media companies and most journalists are fighting against the unstoppable change. It has to be acknowledged that we are living in disconcert: we know what we are leaving behind, but we do not know where are we heading to.

The Arab Spring was tweeted, but Twitter did not spark the Tunis or the Egypt revolution. Or Facebook. Or any other social networking site. The Internet was a valuous instrument, one without which the revolutions may have not been the way there were, but by no means the revolutions began on the Internet.

The real challenge now for traditional media is to recover their lost reputation. Reputation, in an Information Society, is the only thing of value (information is free), and that is the capital that a journalist should take care of.

Mayte Pascual

There is a mutual lack of confidence between traditional media and digital or new media. And mutual understanding would be highly beneficial for both parties.

We need to be more communication-literate to understand the new era we are entering. More and more things will be explainable in terms of communication, and thus we must know how communication happens, how it shapes people’s minds, etc.

And traditional media have to learn too how the inner functioning of social movements.

Klaudia Álvarez

What is relevant is not whether a medium is traditional or new or digital, but who owns it, who is speaking through it.

Related to that, another huge different is whether in a given medium sender and receiver are interchangeable or not. Can I be a sender and not only a receiver in that medium? This really makes a difference.

Being a writer and not a reader, having a blog, is not only writing or having a blog, but changing your mindset: you are building your own reality, they are now aware of their possibility to create a reality. Communication autonomy is about building realities.

But empowerment happens only for people that can actually be empowered, that is, people in the bad side of the digital divide, or socially excluded, are more difficult to reach by empowering tools.

And empowerment comes in detriment of (traditional) media. And traditional media usually fight this loss power, which indeed happened in the 15M.

Discussion

Manuel Castells: if there is something left to journalism, it is credibility. And there is a clear deadline for the disappearance of traditional media: the day all people now aged 60 or older are already gone. There is thus an unavoidable need for a transition, but this transition has to be smooth, with as less victims as possible.

Arnau Monterde: the collective intelligence is transforming the way information is created and distributed, the way the sources are verified. Thus, it is very difficult to state that media-literacy is a personal must, because now the media are produced by the collective and collectively. It is the outcome of minor contributions that becomes a major contribution.

Campo Vidal: there is a media bubble that is unsustainable, both economically and socially speaking. There are — in some fields — too much media (e.g. digital TV) and clearly overrated.

More information

• Mesa V. Los límites de los medios de comunicación y la emergencia de la autocomunicación de masas a la era digital, by Ricard Espelt.

Notes from the Civil Society and Politics transformation in the Internet Age, organized by the Communication and Civil Society seminar of the IN3 in in Barcelona, Spain, in October 26-27, 2011. More notes on this event: comsc. The incidence of the new social movements. Exploring new fields for political action
Joana Conill (UOC-IN3, chair), Mònica Oltra (Coalició Compromís), Joan Subirats (IGOP), Raúl Sanchez Cedillo (Nomad University) Mònica Oltra

Increasingly, governments and political parties lie as if their citizens were uninformed idiots. The political discourse has reached astonishing levels of misery that thus keeps the citizen away from politics. And it is very difficult to articulate a political discourse out of the party system, out of partidism.

Added to that, we live in an information blackout, as mass media have been taken over by political parties and lobbies.

Did the 15M Spanish Indignants movement had any impact on political parties and governments? Partly yes, as minority parties were just making the very same demands on the democratic process that were made on the 15M protests. Thus, these minority parties have somewhat been legitimated in their demands by the movements and, vice-versa, the social movements have also somewhat been legitimated by a part of the formal political institutions that are represented by the minority political parties.

But social movements should not be capitalized and appropriated by political parties, even minority ones. Parties should take part and participate in the movements — preferably at an individual or personal level —, but not appropriate them.

What parties can do is to represent the rhetoric of the invisible ones, the ones that are not represented by anyone, any political party, the ones that do not appear in the political agenda.

And the way to make (new) politics should be reporting accompanied by making proposals: “destroying” accompanied by “building”.

Participation is not freedom of choice amongst some given options, but freedom to decide what has to be chosen.

Joan Subirats

Democracy has been emptied out of values, and only the rules, the procedures remain:

• Representation: citizens do not believe that political parties represent them anymore.
• Intermediation: political parties do not seem to be channelling the needs of the citizens to the places where decision-taking happens.
• Function: political parties do not represent the citizens because they are no more their equals. Politicians are privileged ones and thus cannot understand nor share the needs of “normal” citizens.
• Insiders: political parties have evolved from citizen tools to influence the institutions to tools of the institutions to influence on the citizens.

The 15M movement is stating that politics can happen outside of institutions; that the public sphere is not the monopoly of the public powers; and that representation do not compulsory has to take place by means of institutions.

We need not to improve, but to transform. And this transformation might be a shift back to the commons:

  Polity Policy Improve Reform of the voting system e-Government
Open Government Transform Commons Raúl Sánchez

It is difficult to tell where the thresholds of a movement are when it is based on network architecture and collective intelligence.

The 15M movement is an open, autopoietic system that is constantly creating and reshaping itself. The 15M is a movement based on Spinozan affections and the estigmergies amongst its members.

The 15M movement proved that it is possible to take decisions without anyone taking them. The 15M is a actor in a non-place, a neuronal network without a central subject, challenging the current scenario of politics, contesting the statement that things cannot be different.

Discussion

Q: does the 15M need to move from movement, and embody itself in an organization? Sánchez: most probably the network that the 15M is definitely in need of a “body”, a formal way to present itself before the others. And this can happen formalizing its members in an organization, or achieving some milestones that define the movement through specific actions.

Mayo Fuster: I sometimes have the feeling to be watching a 15M ad, in the sense that few people acknowledge that many things just happened, without much planning, and most of them difficult to foresee. How do you see the 15M in a 10 year horizon? Oltra: got plenty of hope with people camping on the streets, hope that the movement won’t be absorbed by other movements or institutions, that it will achieve something. Subirats: don’t think that the 15M is not a movement, but the expression of a change of era. Thus, in a 10 years future, what is likely to happen is that some structural changes if have not happen they will certainly be slowly happening. Sánchez: most probably there will be the very same sense of transition that we are now living in, only deeper.

More information

• Taula IV. La incidencia de los nuevos movimientos sociales y la investigación de nuevos escenarios para la acción política, by Ricard Espelt.

Notes from the Civil Society and Politics transformation in the Internet Age, organized by the Communication and Civil Society seminar of the IN3 in in Barcelona, Spain, in October 26-27, 2011. More notes on this event: comsc. The transformations of Civil Society in the Information and Knowledge Society
Oscar Mateos (Ramon Llull University, chair), Joan Coscubiela (UOC-IN3), Gemma Galdón (UOC), Ada Colau (Plataforma d’Afectats per la Hipoteca). Òscar Mateos

What are the big changes that we are facing? It is not an era of change, but a change of era, Joan Subirats. The 15M movement has put the spotlight on many ongoing dynamics that were working for the change. And, arguably, the ones that understand the 15M are part of it, and one can only be part of it if one understands the movement. There are new languages, platforms, ways to communicate, and that is part of the change too. And maybe these processes are the very true outcomes of the movement, and not what it is traditionally asked to a movement: an impact on institutions or the taking of power.

Joan Coscubiela

Our society is in a dire crisis, especially in our social organizations. And this crisis is boosted by technological change.

The relationships between economics and politics, and between corporations and unions have been altered, and the balance of power amongst these institutions has radically changed. Some reasons are that the habitat (the factory) has been radically transformed; the disappearance of the aggregation of interests due to the disaggregation of identities; the difficulty to build a collective identity upon which to leverage a movement.

The dismantlement of the factory, the dismantlement of the national economy, and the dismantlement of the nation-estate. The integrated factory becomes the networked enterprise. There are central workers and workers on the periphery.

There is also a crisis of the communication channels in traditional unions, based on the integrated Fordist factory and the assembly of workers.

All these crises are undoubtedly weakening the strength and even legitimacy of traditional trade unions. But, if this crisis of legitimacy will be especially tough in Anglo-Saxon unions (based on the firm or the factory, or European unions (based on the economic sector), it might be that Mediterranean-type unions (based on the notion of class, or of social equity) will have it more easy to regain legitimacy, even if a deep transformation is notwithstanding required.

The great opportunity for trade unions is how to leverage the power of ICTs to regain legitimacy to refund the forms of participation.

Gemma Galdón

With the coming of the Internet and the intensive use of social networking sites and similar tools make the medium become the message: the fact that the 15M movement is very live on the Internet is part of its very definition, of its DNA, and tells much on the nature and characteristics of the movement.

There is a qualitative leap in the way participation is understood: besides being present on a demonstration, being active on the Internet (gathering information, commenting, creating opinions, broadcasting messges, etc.) can be as much important as physical presence. Notwithstanding, either on the street or on the Internet, legitimacy comes not from the diffusion of information, but from being committed with the movement. Only commitment leads to legitimacy and reputation, and not only mere participation by being active on social networking sites.

The logic of expansion of social movements is no more centralized, but rhizomatic: it obeys to no traditional logics, especially cultural logics or logics of power.

Indeed, social movements of the past five years have detached themselves from the international political and economic agenda. Nowadays movements no more follow international leaders to their international meetings of the World Bank or the G8. Social movements increasing have their own agenda, and an agenda that is created and updated ad-hoc.

This change is partly due because information and the communication tools have been democratized to the limit. What is difficult now is opacity and non-transparency. Diffusion of information and ideas and calls to action are now cheap and fast. On the other hand, this is a double-edged sword: repression is now more easy than ever for the ones in power, as identification of individuals and collectives is immediate.

The problem is: are we making any impact? When the whole world protested against the second invasion of Irak, nothing happened. And, worst indeed, there does not seem to exist an alternative to the broken representative democracy.

The challenge is how to leverage the common sense we reconquered and turn it into a driver of change, based on new forms of political transformation.

Ada Colau

The new forms of participation not only surprised the traditional social movements, but also the newer ones, that became “obsolete” even if they were recent. These newer social movements were based on platforms that (a) focused on a specific issue and (b) acted as a helping collective so you could reach out (instead of a vertical organization where the individual helps the organization to reach out). These platforms had to transform into networks and the new ways to organized that the Internet and, especially, social networking sites made possible.

That was the case of V de Vivienda [H stands for Housing] in Spain, on of the seeds that afterwards would nourish the 15M Spanish Indignants movement. V de Vivienda was auto-convened and auto-organized, by means of SMSs and e-mails.

V de Vivienda succeeded in putting on the political agenda the housing bubble and the social and economic problems derived from it.

The answer from the political institutions to the movement was very shy and myopic. So, after all the energies poured into the movement, it does not seem be having much impact. What to do about it? How to keep on without being discouraged? The new strategy is increasingly being civil disobedience, so that a change in the Law is forced. But civil disobedience is individual, not collective, so the collective has to find ways to support the individuals that will enter civil disobedience (i.e. in the present case debated here, resistance to eviction and the movement helping people to resist evictions and, at last, stop them).

The network helped in building a critical mass around the issue of mortgages and evictions, as this is not a geographically concentrated problem, but quite a spread one.

Discussion

Manuel Castells: one of the reasons of the crisis of trade unions is that they are part of the power, they come from a paternalistic way to understand society. And social movements are fighting just against that.

Manuel Castells: changes, real and structural changes need their time and own pace, and that that change begins with a change in the processes.

Ismael Peña-López: acknowledging the truth of the aforementioned statement, the problem is that people’s lives happen in the short run (evictions, unemployment subsidies have limited time spans in the range of months), and thus some milestones have to be achieved in the short run. This is especially true not only to protect the victims of economic crisis, but also to avoid the draining of energy of social movements, that can fade away and dissolve if anything tangible and concrete can be achieved (and this should be achieved without violence).

More information

• Mesa III: Las transformaciones de la Sociedad Civil en la Sociedad de la Información y el Conocimiento, by Ricard Espelt.

Notes from the Civil Society and Politics transformation in the Internet Age, organized by the Communication and Civil Society seminar of the IN3 in in Barcelona, Spain, in October 26-27, 2011. More notes on this event: comsc. Net neutrality struggle and new movements in the digital era
Ismael Peña-López (chair), Txarlie (Hacktivistas.net), Carlos Sánchez Almeida (Bufet Almeida), Gala Pin (X.net) Txarlie

Hacktivism works as a free software project: it collects information, documents the processes and implements actions. The idea is avoiding reinventing the wheel but implementing the same ideas and processes in other social projects — in this specific case, the Spanish Ley Sinde.

Each revolution has its tool. The Protestant Reformation cannot be understood without the printing press, the soviet revolution without fliers and posters, and the 1960s protests without the television.

The Internet is thus the tool of the 15M movement, and not only the Internet as a device, but also as a philosophy, as an architecture, with distributed power, policentric. Indeed, the 15M movement is not a protest without leadership, but, on the contrary, it is a protest with multiple leaders, more leaders than ever.

When it comes to Net Neutrality, the idea is do not wait until the Net is not neutral, but to actually prevent its enclosure. And there is indeed an urgent need to digitally empower people, so that there is no need to prevent the stealing of liberties, freedom instead of having to recover it.

Facebook is becoming less of a social networking site, of a democracy site, and more of a shopping mall. That is why activists are constantly moving from one platform to another one. This is not happening, though, with Twitter, that is keeping its horizontal, totally flat essence.

It is interesting to stress the fact that often people use some applications for their own purposes, and purposes that were not foreseen by the owners. And sometimes these new usages do confront the current law and thus the owner of the tool either takes sides with the activists or against them, but can no more remain neutral.

It is not a crisis, it is the system. The only difference is that we are now better informed on what is happening. Let us, so, take the chance to make an informed change.

Carlos Sanchez Almeida

Sometimes it is possible to define common rules for a collective, but sometimes it is not. And sometimes it is the very design of a system the one that has its own rules embedded in its architecture. That is happening on the Internet, that was designed in a way that included its functioning rules.

When a new territory is conquered, the first thing is imposing one’s will, the second one is to try and justify it morally, and last comes the making of rules to accommodate the new reality. The conquest of (or attempt to conquer) the Internet is no different in its aims… even if we have not yet gone through the first stage.

But as the Internet is resisting the siege, the power is trying to come through the back door and impose new rules. But the way these rules are legitimated is through media and by changing people’s minds. Thus, the centre of the power are media. What tools do we have to achieve that?

The problem with the Internet is that there are as many tools as initiatives, and as much initiatives as people.

What happened with the Spanish Ley Sinde is that it indirectly and unwillingly contributed in clustering all the different initiatives fighting for different liberties, ending up in a unique voice that colluded against the attack to social rights.

Once out of the narrowness of Internet-focussed fights, it is now the time for the assault to the very fundamentals of power: money and the media.

Gala Pin

The attacks against the Internet are not attacks against a technology, but against civil liberties like the freedom of expression, the freedom of thought, etc.

On the other hand, promoting the changes that the new technologies now enable does not necessarily goes against some private interests (e.g. the artists’). On the contrary, it quite often defends those interests, although most times requires a redefinition of how things are made.

Hacking is another type of civil disobedience, and especially effective one in this new territory that is the Internet. Hacking plus collective intelligence is certainly a very powerful combination to resist the attacks to the Net.

Discussion

Carlos Sánchez Almeida: there is a high probability that cybercrime will increasingly be on the papers, as it will be the alibi that the power will use to be able to be “legitimate” in attacking the Internet. The first aggression will be against the place where we met to prepare our revolutions.

Q: on the one hand we picture the power as a very smart institution and, on the other hand, we also picture the power as completely clueless. Isn’t that a contradiction? Txarlie: it’s probably both. It is true that the power understands the Internet as a whole, looking at its possibilities and the powers it challenges; but it is also true that its forms are mostly unknown, partly because the Net is so flexible that it is very difficult to predict in its next action. The collective intelligence moves in the boundaries and thus circumvents the power. The power understands its potential, but not its boundaries. Carlos Sánchez Almeida: one of the reasons the governments have attacked P2P networks — when they kept people quite and numb at home — is because they are not the ones in power: the power is financial and the corporations (who own what is exchanged in P2P networks).

Q: so, what’s the next step? Carlos Sánchez Almeida: we need a democracy; a new and reformed one, but a democracy. And this new democracy must be more transparent and, over all, more accountable. In the case of Spain, bipartidism should be broken by voting the smaller parties.

Mayo Fuster: why has not the 15M and other activisms taken more into account the tradition of the commons, of cooperatives, etc.? Txarlie: partly this has been due to the fact that it was preferable to begin from scratch, to avoid predefined mindsets, to promote trial and error, to experiment. The idea was that any solution had to come from the debate within the 15M itself to be legitimate.

Mayo Fuster: what is going to happen after the 15M with the Internet? will it become a 11S of the Internet? Gala Pin: We are living a dire crisis while which there has been poor or any proposal at all to improve people’s lives. The 15M has been, in many ways, the only thing that has happened to directly address the crisis. Thus, it is not a only movement of protest, but the expression of a general feeling of a real need of change.

Mayo Fuster: how does power works inside the 15M? Carlos Sánchez Almeida: there is no power in the 15M movement, the power is outside. The 15M is a network of networks, with their own programme, working autonomously. Thus, there is no such thing as power in the 15M movement, which is but a mere platform. The Indignants Movement cannot be defined in terms of power, of structure, of hierarchy. The movement must not provide answers, but communication channels, build agorae where debate can take place.

Notes from the Civil Society and Politics transformation in the Internet Age, organized by the Communication and Civil Society seminar of the IN3 in in Barcelona, Spain, in October 26-27, 2011. More notes on this event: comsc. Net neutrality struggle and new movements in the digital era.
John Perry Barlow (Electronic Frontier Foundation).

The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also truth, Niels Bohr.

We are living in an era where we are both able of greatest advances in human technology and, at the same time, able to destroy ourselves or endanger the lives of all of us. The corporation is supposed to be made of humans, but as a construct they are more than that. Corporations used to mediate between people, and because of the instantaneous network of global communications all those processes have been increasingly accelerated. And they corporations are now in the process of swallowing the Earth, for the benefit of all of us, but at the same time against our survival.

While it is true that huge corporations are like a cancer, it is also true that each individual is like a cell that is part of that tumour. And, thus, the question is: as a cell from a tumour, what do you do?

Once there is a possibility to communicate your thoughts instantly across the world, the you as a container of thought, or knowledge, is challenged. And this is related with the crisis of monotheism, which is based on thoughts not easily spread and shared, about the monopoly of thought. Monotheism is opposed to pantheism, as the unity of thought is opposed to the multiplicity of thought.

The same tools that are so useful for sharing your thoughts and acts are, at the very same time, the best surveillance tools ever. And not only in the real time, but also in past times, as your actions can be traced back because of the breadcrumbs you left behind.

And there is almost no way to avoid the visibility. Privacy is thus arguably not defensible — even sometimes not desirable either — but this does not mean that we have to change the way institutions look down on people, or to change the way that institutions present themselves before the public. But until this change happens, there have to be ways to balance the powers of institutions and citizens.

There is a will to control expression and its spread. And copyright has become one of the main barriers to expression, despite the fact that it was designed to protect the freedom of expression. Sharing is hardcoded in human beings, and the fact that sharing can be prevented because somebody owns them is, basically, against the future.

An incredible gift to the future is the ability to be able to discover everything that one needs to know.

There is a problem that we must address: the growing concentration of wealth, energy and power. And a concentration that still wants more, as stated in Barlow’s Law of Economic insufficiency: the more you have, the shorter it feels. We have to collectively stand up and find ways that they do not get more, of that the more they get the more it gets redistributed. We have to find ways to make the world work the same way that we found ways to make the Internet work, taking into consideration the ecology of the resources.

Discussion

Manuel Castells: the world is run by “ungrateful dead”, the institutions that rule the world are dead and it is impossible to expect from them any kind of change, or even reflection. And, as some demonstrators said, it’s not about the crisis, is that I don’t love you anymore. So, dead institutions on one side, people willing to love something else on the other side. The way of reconstruct this world is through a long process, so we need patience and a road map for the long run. But something quick must be done also in the short term to avoid the total collapse of the system. Surely the networks of solidarity will work to avoid collapse.

Q: We have to try help people understand that the nature of authority has changed. John Perry Barlow: If you change consciousness, politics will change itself. The problem is that some issues are like a religious view that might not be able to change. Maybe half the population has to die first before a change is acknowledged.

Ismael Peña-López: will the death of half the population really make a change? Won’t we hit a glass ceiling that will prevent any kind of change? JP Barlow: the cyberspace is, in may ways, a feminine movement, made of sharing, of collaboration. And even if women are still struggling with their own glass ceiling, they are actually changing the mentality of many, substituting a monotheism (male) with a new pantheism (feminine).

Scott F. Johnson has posted a dystopic provocation about the present of digital scholarship and possibly about its future.

Here’s the crux of his argument:

… as the deluge of information increases at a very fast pace — including both the digitization of scholarly materials unavailable in digital form previously and the new production of journals and books in digital form — and as the tools that scholars use to sift, sort, and search this material are increasingly unable to keep up — either by being limited in terms of the sheer amount of data they can deal with, or in terms of becoming so complex in terms of usability that the average scholar can’t use it — then the less likely it will be that a scholar can adequately cover the research material and write a convincing scholarly narrative today.

…

Thus, I would argue that in the future, when the computational tools (whatever they may be) eventually develop to a point of dealing profitably with the new deluge of digital scholarship, the backward-looking view of scholarship in our current transitional period may be generally disparaging. It may be so disparaging, in fact, that the scholarship of our generation will be seen as not trustworthy, or inherently compromised in some way by comparison with what came before (pre-digital) and what will come after (sophisticatedly digital).

Scott tentatively concludes:

For the moment one solution is to read less, but better. This may seem a luddite approach to the problem, but what other choice is there?

First, I should point out that the rest of Scott’s post makes it clear that he’s no Luddite. He understands the advantages of digital scholarship. But I look at this a little differently.

I agree with most of Scott’s description of the current state of digital scholarship and with the inevitability of an ever increasing deluge of scholarly digital material. But, I think the issue is not that the filters won’t be able to keep up with the deluge. Rather, I think we’re just going to have to give up on the idea of “keeping up” — much as newspapers and half hour news broadcasts have to give up the pretense that they are covering all the day’s events. The idea of coverage was always an internalization of the limitation of the old media, as if a newspaper, a broadcast, or even the lifetime of a scholar could embrace everything important there is to know about a field. Now the Net has made clear to us what we knew all along: most of what knowledge wanted to do was a mere dream.

So, for me the question is what scholarship and expertise look like when they cannot attain a sense of mastery by artificial limiting the material with which they have to deal. It was much easier when you only had to read at the pace of the publishers. Now you’d have to read at the pace of the writers…and there are so many more writers! So, lacking a canon, how can there be experts? How can you be a scholar?

I’m bad at predicting the future, and I don’t know if Scott is right that we will eventually develop such powerful search and filtering tools that the current generation of scholars will look betwixt-and-between fools (or as an “asterisk,” as Scott says). There’s an argument that even if the pace of growth slows, the pace of complexification will increase. In any case, I’d guess that deep scholars will continue to exist because that’s more a personality trait than a function of the available materials. For example, I’m currently reading Armies of Heaven, by Jay Rubenstein. The depth of his knowledge about the First Crusade is astounding. Astounding. As more of the works he consulted come on line, other scholars of similar temperament will find it easier to pursue their deep scholarship. They will read less and better not as a tactic but because that’s how the world beckons to them. But the Net will also support scholars who want to read faster and do more connecting. Finally (and to me most interestingly) the Net is already helping us to address the scaling problem by facilitating the move of knowledge from books to networks. Books don’t scale. Networks do. Although, yes, that fundamentally changes the nature of knowledge and scholarship.

[Note: My initial post embedded one draft inside another and was a total mess. Ack. I've cleaned it up - Oct. 26, 2011, 4:03pm edt.]