Joho the Blog

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.

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

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.]

Michael Nielsen is giving a Berkman talk on the networking of science. (It’s his first talk after his book Reinventing Discovery was published.)

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.

He begins by telling the story of Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal winner and blogger. (Four of the 42 living Fields winners have started blogs; two of them are still blogging.) In January 2009, Gowers started posting difficult problems on his blog, and work on the problem in the open. Plus he invited the public to post ideas in the comments. He called this the Polymath Project. 170,000 words in the comments later, ideas had been proposed and rapidly improved or discarded. A few weeks later, the problem had been solved at an even higher level of generalization.

Michael asks: Why isn’t this more common? He gives an example of the failure of an interesting idea. It was proposed by a grad student in 2005. Qwiki was supposed to be a super-textbook about Quantum Mechanics. The site was well built and well marketed. “But science is littered with examples of wikis like this…They are not attracting regular contributors.” Likewise many scientific social networks are ghost towns. “The fundamental problem is one of opportunity costs. If you’re a young scientist, the way you build your career is through the publication of scientific papers…One mediocre crappy paper is going to do more your career than a series of brilliant contributions to a wiki.”

Why then is the Polymath Project succeeding? It just used an unconventional means to a conventional means: they published two papers out of it. Sites like Qwiki that are an end in themselves are not being exploited. We need a “change in norms in scientific culture” so that when people are making decisions about grants and jobs, people who contribute to unconventional formats are rewarded.

How do you achieve a change in the culture. It’s hard. Take the Human Genome project. In the 1990s, there wasn’t not a lot of advantage to individual scientists to share their data. In 1996, the Wellcome Trust held a meeting in Bermuda and agreed on principles that said that if you took more than a thousand base pairs, you need to release it to a public database and be put into the public domain. The funding agencies baked those principles into policy. In April 2000, Clinton and Blair urged all countries to adopt similar principles.

For this to work, you need enthusiastic acceptance, not just a stick beating scientists into submission. You need scientists to internalize it. Why? Because you need all sorts of correlative data to make lab data useful. E.g., Sloane Digital Sky Survey: a huge part of the project was establishing the calibration lines for the data to have meaning to anyone else.

Many scientists are pessimistic about this change occuring. But there’s some hopeful precedents. In 1610 Galileo pointed his telescope at Saturn. He was expecting to see a small disk. But he saw a disk with small knobs on either side — the rings, although he couldn’t resolve the image further. He sent letters to four colleagues, including Kepler that scrambled his discovery into an anagram. This way, if someone else made the discovery, Galileo could unscramble the letters and prove that he had made the discovery first. Leonardo, Newton, Hooks, Hyugens all did this. Scientific journals helped end this practice. The editors of the first journals had trouble convincing scientists to reveal their info because there was no link between publication and career. The editor of the first scientific journal (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society) goaded scientists into publishing by writing to them suggesting other scientists were about to disclose what the recipients of the letter were working on. As Paul David [Davis? Couldn't find it via Google] says, the change to the modern system was due to “patron pressure.”

Michael points out that Galileo immediately announced the discovery of four moons of Jupiter in order to get patronage bucks from the Medicis for the right to name them. [Or, as we would do today, The Comcast Moon, the Staples Moon, and the Gosh Honey Your Hair Smells Great Moon.]

Some new ideas: The Journal of Visualized Experiments videotapes lab work, thus revealing tacit knowledge. Geiger Science (from Springer) publishes data sets as first-class objects. Open Research Computation makes code into a first-class object. And blog posts are beginning to show up on Google Scholar (possible because they’re paying attention to tags?). So, if your post is being cited by lots of articles, your post will show up at Scholar.

[in response to a question] A researcher claimed to have solved the P not-P problem. One of the serious mathematicians (Cook) said it was a serious solution. Mathematicians and others tore it apart on the Web to see if it was right. About a week later, the consensus was that there was a serious obstruction, although they salvaged a small lemma. The process leveraged expertise in many different areas — statistical physics, logic, etc.

Q: [me] Science has been a type of publishing. How does scientific knowledge change when it becomes a type of networking?
A: You can see this beginning to happen in various fields. E.g., People at Google talk about their sw as an ecology. [Afterwards, Michael explained that Google developers use a complex ecology of libraries and services with huge numbers of dependencies.] What will it mean when someone says that the Higgs Boson has been found at the LHC? There are millions of lines of code, huge data sets. It will be an example of using networked knowledge to draw a conclusion where no single person has more than a tiny understanding of the chain of inferences that led to this result. How do you do peer review of that paper? Peer review can’t mean that it’s been checked because no one person can check it. No one has all the capability. How do you validate this knowledge? The methods used to validate are completely ad hoc. E.g., International Panel on Climate Change has more data than any one person can evaluate. And they don’t have a method. It’s ad hoc. They do a good job, but it’s ad hoc.

Q: Classification of Finite Groups were the same. A series of papers.
A: Followed by a 1200 word appendix addressing errors.

Q: It varies by science, of course. For practical work, people need access to the data. For theoretical work, the person who makes the single step that solves it should get 98% of the credit. E.g., Newton v. Leibniz on calculus. E.g., Perleman‘s approach to the Poincaré conjecture.
A: Yes. Perelman published three papers on a pre-press server. Afterward, someone published a paper that filled in the gaps, but Perelman’s was the crucial contribution. This is the normal bickering in science. I would like to see many approaches and gradual consensus. You’ll never have perfect agreement. With transparency, you can go back and see how people came to those ideas.

Q: What is validation? There is a fundamental need for change in the statistical algorithms that many data sets are built on. You have to look at those limitations as well as at the data sets.
A: There’s lots of interesting things happening. But I think this is a transient problem. Best practices are still emerging. There are a lot of statisticians on the case. A move toward more reproducible research and more open sharing of code would help. E.g., many random generators are broken, as is well known. Having the random generator code in an open repository makes life much easier.

Q: The P v not-P left a sense that it was a sprint in response to a crisis, but how can it be done in a more scalable way?
A: People go for the most interesting claims.

Q: You mentioned the Bermuda Principles, and NIH requires open access pub one year after paper pub. But you don’t see that elsewhere. What are the sociological reasons?
Peter Suber: There’s a more urgent need for medical research. The campaign for open access at NSF is not as large, and the counter-lobby (publishers of scientific journals) is bigger. But Pres. Obama has said he’s willing to do it by executive order if there’s sufficient public support. No sign of action yet.

Q: [peter suber] I want to see researchers enthusiastic about making their research public. How do we construct a link between OA and career?
A: It’s really interesting what’s going on. A lot of discussion about supporting gold OA (publishing in OA journals, as opposed to putting it into an OA repository). Fundamentally, it comes down to a question of values. Can you create a culture in science that views publishing in gold OA journals as better than publishing in prestigious toll journals. The best way perhaps is to make it a public issue. Make it embarrassing for scientists to lock their work away. The Aaron Swartz case has sparked a public discussion of the role publishers, especially when they’re making 30% profits.
Q: Peter: Whenever you raise the idea of tweaking tenure criteria, you unleash a tsunami of academic conservativism, even if you make clear that this would still support the same rigorous standards. Can we change the reward system without waiting for it to evolve?
A: There was a proposal a few years ago that it be done purely algorithmic: produce a number based on the citation index. If it had been done, simple tweaks to the algorithm would have been an example: “You get a 10% premium for being in a gold OA journal, etc.”
Q: [peter] One idea was that your work wouldn’t be noticed by the tenure committee if it wasn’t in an OA repository.
A: Spiers [??] lets you measure the impact of your pre-press articles, which has had made it easier for people to assess the effect of OA publishing. You see people looking up the Spiers number of a scientist they just met. You see scientists bragging about the number of times their slides have been downloaded via Mendeley.

Q: How can we accelerate by an order of magnitude in the short term?
A: Any tool that becomes widely used to measure impact affects how science is done. E.g., the H Index. But I’d like to see a proliferation of measures because when you only have one, it reduces cognitive diversity.

Q: Before the Web, Erdos was the moving collaborator. He’d go from place to place and force collaboration. Let’s duplicate that on the Net!
A: He worked 18 hours a day, 365 days/year, high on amphetamines. Not sure that’s the model :) He did lots of small projects. When you have a large project, you bring in the expertise you need. Open collaboration has the unpredictable spread of expertise that participates, and that’s often crucial. E.g., Einstein never thought that understanding gravity required understanding non-standard geometries. He learned that from someone else [missed who]. That’s the sort of thing you get in open collaborations.

Q: You have to have a strong ego to put your out-there paper out there to let everyone pick it apart.
A: Yes. I once asked a friend of mine how he consistently writes edgy blog posts. He replied that it’s because there are some posts he genuinely regrets writing. That takes a particular personality type. But the same is true for publishing papers.
Q: But at least you can blame the editors or peer reviewers.
A: But that’s very modern. In the 1960s. Of Einstein’s 300 papers, only one was peer reviewed … and that one was rejected. Newton was terribly anguished by the criticism of his papers. Networked science may exacerbate it, but it’s always been risky to put your ideas out there.

[Loved this talk.]

If meaning is use, as per Wittgenstein and John Austin, then what does “know” mean?

I’m going to guess that the most common usage of the term is in the phrase “I know,” as in:

1. “You have to be careful what you take Lipitor with.” “I know.”
2. “The science articles have gotten really hard to read in Wikipedia.” “I know.”
3. “This cookbook thinks you’ll just happen to have strudel dough just hanging around.” “I know.”
4. “The books are arranged by the author’s last name within any one topic area.” “I know.”
5. “They’re closing the Red Line on weekends.” “I know!”

In each of these, the speaker is not claiming to have an inner state of belief that is justifiable and true. The speaker is using “I know” to shape the conversation and the social relationship with the initial speaker.

1., 4. “You can stop explaining now.”
2., 3. “I agree with you. We’re on the same side.”
5. “I agree that it’s outrageous!”

And I won’t even mention words like “surely” and “certainly” that are almost always used to indicate that you’re going to present no evidence for the claim that follows.

Journalist and friend Luca de Biase wonders why the Italians have not risen up against the unabashed corruption of the Berlusconi years.

Italians are living an “after war”, a cultural war that devastated the country. Rebels have conquered the government and have destroyed peace, in Italy. Fear, urgencies, finances, are concentrating attention on the short term. Italians can rebel again. But most of all, they need perspective and peace.

How to get peace?

Luca suggests a direction more than an answer:

Italians, probably, don’t really need a rebellion. They need a shared vision based on facts and reality (not on ideology and reality shows): a deep cultural change, that helps them in understanding their shared project, that helps rebuild a perspective and that makes them look ahead with an empirically based hope.

Although Luca does not say so in this piece, I suspect he looks to the Internet as a tool for forging that shared vision and project.

(Luca has invited me to the Italian Internet Governance conference in Trento in November for a panel discussion. Perhaps part of our discussion can be whether the lack of an Italian Spring indicates a failure of the Internet as a political/cultural tool. After all, if we’re going to give some credit to the Net for its role in Arab Spring, then shouldn’t it get some of the blame? Or, should we wonder how much worse the Italian situation would be if there were no alternative at all to Berlusconi’s Orwellian control of the mass media?)

This week’s Berkman Buzz:

• The Digital Public Library of America announces $5 Million in Funding from the Sloan Foundation and Arcadia Fund:
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• Ethan Zuckerman recaps Beth Coleman’s presentation on “Tweeting the Revolution”
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• John Palfrey describes teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on the history, present, and future of libraries
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• Rebecca MacKinnon examines why censorship is a central issue in Tunisian political discourse and debates
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• The Youth and Media Project launches a new website
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• The Citizen Media Law Project reports on how one doctor’s complaint turned a public database private
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• Weekly Global Voices: “Israel: Joy and Anger Continue Over Shalit Deal”
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In an interview with Will Knight at Technology Review, Joi Ito explains some of what he hopes to accomplish as director of the MIT Media Lab, and shows why he was a brilliant choice for the position. “It’s becoming more like a Media Lab ‘network’ than a Media Lab ‘place.’”

And is the case with networked knowledge, the value is in the differences it encompasses:

To take all the different technologies that we have and to connect it with someone like a Kevin Rose, or an Ev Williams, or a Shawn Fanning, that’s a really interesting two-way thing because the students here get how a real Internet startup guy thinks about a product, and how they think about design, and, you know, Shawn [Fanning] can meet people who do real math. To me, that’s a huge synergy that we don’t currently get from, say, relationships with some of the big companies we have.

As for Joi’s interests: ” …for me it’s Internet startups, openness, and human rights. I definitely have that bias.” What an excellent set of biases!

[Disclosure: Like much of the tech world, I count Joi as a friend.]

Maura Marx introduces Jill Cousins of Europeana who says that we all agree that we want to make the contents of libraries, museums and archives archives available for free. We agree on interoperability and open metadata. She encourages us to adopt the Europeana Data Model. Share our source code. Build our collections together. So, we’re starting with a virtual exhibition of migration of Europeans to American. The DPLA and Europeana will demonstrate the value of their combined collections — text and images — by digitizing material and making it available as an exhibition. (Maura thanks Bob Darnton for building European ties.)

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.

Maura Sullivan, president elect of the American Library Association, moderates a panel about visions of the DPLA. Each panelist gets 5-7 minutes

John Palfrey: It’s a bridge we’re building as we walk over it. But it has 5 aspects. 1. Digitizing projects. It’ll be a collection of collections. We should be digitizing in common ways with common formats. But, DPLA will also be: 2. Code. SourceForge for Libraries. Anyone can take and reuse it, including public libraries. 3. Metadata. That’s what makes info findable and usable. It’s the special sauce of librarians. But we haven’t done it yet. We need open access to metadata. 4. Tools and services that ride on top of a common platform. E.g., extraMuros, Scannebagos. 5. Community.

Peggy Rudd, Texas State Library and Archives Commission. We want to see someone walking down the street with a cellphone who says, “I’m going to DPLA it.” We should take as a guiding idea that all people in the country ought to have access to the infrastructure of ideas. We have to think about access. Those of us in public libraries are going to be the digital literacy corps. Public libraries are going to be the institutions that can ensure that people can discover things and will help people evaluate what they find, ensuring what they find is relevant, and help people get the most out of the DPLA.

Brewster Kahle, The Internet Archive. I grew up in a paper world. But I believe the Archivist is right: If it’s not online, it doesn’t exist. There are now two large scale digital library projects in the US. Ten million books are available from a commercial source, and 2M that are public (at OpenLibrary.org). But let’s step back and see where we want to be: Lots of publishers and authors who are paid; a diversity of libraries; everyone can be a reader, no matter what language, proclivities, disabilities. Let’s go and get 10M ebooks. 2M public domain (free), 7M out of print (digitized to be lent), 1M in print (buy ebook and lend them). Libraries ought to ebooks and circulate them, one loan at a time per one book. DPLA ought to help libraries buy new eBooks to lend them, as well as scanning the core 10M book collection, and enable al libraries get the digital collections. At this point, a 10M ebook collections requires about $30K of computers, which is within the budget of many libraries. For this, we would get universal access to all knowledge. How do we stay on track? Follow the money: is the money being well spent. And follow the bits: the bits should be put in many places. “Together we can build a digital America that is free to all.”

Amanda French begins with John Donne, “Sunrising.” [I am here heavily paraphrasing!] For most, the sun rising is a beginning, but for lovers it is an ending. The unruly sun of the digital text is rising, calling us to work, whereas I would rather snuggle in bed with a book. Love can exist in a commercial relationship, but that’s not ideal. I would like a library that supports me in all my moods, from contemplation to raucous sociality. We need proof of love. Physical libraries manifest that love. The DPLA must manifest itself as more than a web site, many quiet and generous services to readers, developers…technical and social. While I agree that if it isn’t online, it doesn’t exist, but if it’s only only online, it only half exists. And I want a physical building. Not just a server center. [Again: I've poorly paraphrased.]

Jill Cousins, Europeana. We want the DPLA because we get access to your stuff. [Laughter] But DPLA can improve on Europeana with open data, Open Source, Open Licensing. Also, we should be interopable. Our new strategic plan has four aspects. 1. Aggregating content as an trusted source. 2. Facilitating, supporting cultural eritage. 3. Distributing: Wherever people are. 4. Engaging: New ways to participate in cultural heritage. Europeana currentlu has 20M items, multiple languages. I’m particularly interested in the APIs so material can be distributed to where people will use it. (She points to content about the US that is in their distributed collection.) To facilitate: Labeling content so users know it’s in the public domain. What’s in the PD in analog form ought to stay in the PD in digital form. Engage: Cultivate new way for users to participate in their cultural heritage. One project: People are asked to bring their memorabilia from WWI. So, why DPLA: We are the generation that can give acccess to the analog past. If we don’t digitize it and put it online, will our kids?

Carl Malamud. When I think of the DPLA, I think of the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. There’s a tremendous reservoir of knowledge waiting to be tapped. Our Internet is flooded with only certain types of knowledge, and other types are not available to all. E.g., our law and policies — the operating system of our society — are not openly available because private fences have enclosed. E.g., if you’re a creator, you draw on imagery that has accumulated over thousands of years. Creative workers must stand on the shoulders of giants. But much of that image is locked up in for-profit corps that have built walls around public domain material. Even the Smithsonian only allows its images to be used by paying for them. We already have beautiful museums and bottomless libraries. What if the DPLA created a common reservoir that we could tap into. What if the Hathi Trust put everything that have into a common pool. Another metaphor: A bridge that connects our capitol to the rest of the country. DC is a vast storehouse. Most of the resources are hidden. We need public works projects for knowledge. A national digitization project, a decade long. Deploy the Internet Core of Engineers. “If a self-appointed librarian in an old church can publish 2M books, why can’t our government do more?

[I had to see a man about a dog, and missed a couple of questions.]

Q: How do we transform the use of public libraries?
Peggy: They have to evolve, and many are evolving already. E.g., user-created content. 46% of low-income families don’t have computers or Internet access.

Q: Bandwidth is a critical issue, particularly in rural areas. I hope that the DPLA realizes it’s going to have data-heavy materials. How are we going to build bandwidth to the public libraries?
Peggy: I’m happy to see the Gates Foundation here. They’ve worked with local libraries to provide and maintain bandwidth. 5mb is not enough when kids swarm in after school.

Q: Imagine an Ecuadoran American mother who is a part time student. She belongs to a lot of communities. I want to make sure that the coding of the DPLA recognizes that we each live in multiple communities.
Peggy: We all agree.

Q: First, in 1991 a White House conf was talking about not just scanning, but enable people to send in their materials (e.g., super8 family movies) that could be digitized. Second, DPLA has a huge potential for freeing up resources at the local library so it can spend its resources on customizing content to what that community needs, or let the person customize the library for herself.

Q: How does an ordinary person get involved in DPLA right now. Lobbying?
John: Lots of ways. Mobilization counts. The effect on local libraries needs to be explained; no one here thinks or wants the DPLA to hurt local public libraries. That’s a crazy thought. But that needs to be explained. I would be so sorry if this project led to the closing of a single library. And, yes, I think we should have a way for individuals to donate. How can you get involved in the setting up of this project: Deciding what the DPLA is an open process. There are six workstreams. Today is meant in part as an invitation to join in those workstreams. There will be meetings over the next 18 months; the meetings will be open. Come. We need people to build with what we create. We need people to think of new use cases. In April 2013 when we come together for the launch, if there are ten more people attending, that will be a sign of success.

Q: What do you have in the collection for children, 0-8? Why will a parent want to use the DPLA?
John: The DPLA needs to create a common infrastructure so people can create libraries and services out of the combined collection. But as a parent of a six and 9 year old, we’ll keep buying paper books and reading to our kids. The DPLA is not a replacement.
Peggy: Univ. of Texas in Arlington did a study at what engages students in the study of the history of Texas. Students perform better on tests if they had a greater interaction with real documents. We’re bringing history to the classrooms.
Carl: The Encyclopedia of Life has pictures of bugs, etc. And the Smithsonian has a great online resource [didn't catch it], and the net thing the kid will want to do is visit the Smithsonian.
Amanda: If it isn’t online people don’t know it exists. If they know …[Ack. Lost the rest of this post. Noooooo]