Technology

information & communication technology

World Intellectual Property Day :-(

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World Intellectual Property Day has become little more than a lobbyist day with creators, users, and the facts once again getting lost in the process.

Read the rest of Michael Geist’s commentary on WIP Day in Canada.

On the bright side, there is Creative Commons as a counterbalance to vested corporate interests:

In sum, the Creative Commons toolset encourages and enables participation in creativity by everyone, not only those with access to copyright lawyers. This is as it should be in modern democracies, where the tools for expression and creativity are available to everyone as everyday consumer goods.

Net Neutrality, Copyright and You

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Monday, April 23rd, is World Book and Copyright Day, and according to the Director General of UNESCO:

Much has also been said about the book as the driving force behind a wide array of income-generating activities and about the role of the book within today’s knowledge economies as an instrument for learning, sharing and updating knowledge. Of course, the linguistic dimension of publishing, an instrument of expression that lives through language and within a language, has also been emphasized and remains a decisive factor.

Lastly, as there can be no book development without copyright, the celebration of the Day has always been closely associated, from its inception and throughout all these years, with an awareness of the importance of the moral and heritage protection afforded to works of the human spirit and their creators.

Well, I think that the DG of UNESCO is way off the mark on the value of copyright and how much it protects the individual creator, especially in a digital, networked world. Organisations like Creative Commons are of even more value in the developing world than in the richer countries, helping individual artists reach their markets without going through the bottleneck of middlemen like publishers. Writers who publish books in the traditional way only receive a small amount of the end unit price, while direct to consumer models like Lulu give up to 80% of proceeds to the creator. When copyright outlives the actual creator, whose interests are being served?

At this time in the evolution of the industrial economy, copyright helps to entrench corporate incumbents and makes it difficult for innovative start-ups.

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The same goes for Internet access, where large corporations with their vested interests control the pipes. Jevon has put forth a good explanation on why Net Neutrality is an important issue for all of us:

Most large internet service providers come from incumbent industries such as Telecom or Cable TV. These large companies have been good and reasonably efficient at rolling out infrastructure, but they have also been birthed in the womb of government protection, artificial market dominance and a market segment that has an inelastic demand for their services.

Why does that matter? Well, it’s a fair bet that if it hasn’t already happened, high speed internet subscriber rates will soon start levelling off. As markets like Canada, the US and the UK see this peaking of subscribers, these incumbent companies will begin to look for ways to meet revenue growth projections. We’ve already seen what this can do here in Canada, it’s happened with our national cellular phone providers.

Get involved in the debate now, before it’s too late and our Big Brothers control not just our past culture but our ways of sharing information to create new culture.

I recently wrote about Packet Shaping and mentioned an organisation called NetNeutrality.ca. Today, this is all that is left of their website:

Thank you to all those who have supported our websites. Due to increasing legal concerns resulting from our public participation in the Net Neutrality debate, we have at this time decided to shut down the operation of these sites.

We have no comment for the media and will not be releasing any additional detail about the factors leading up to this decision. We are currently looking for an appropriate organization to take over these properties and who has the resources to properly operate these sites.

Update: the Net Neutrality website is back up and running :-)

Google buys Marratech

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I knew that sooner or later Google would get into the synchronous web-conferencing business. They just announced the purchase of Marratech, which is in my opinion one of the best web conferencing products out there. And on top of that, it was built in Sweden, not Silicon Valley, and designed by a Canadian [félicitations, Serge].

I’ve used Marratech on several occasions over the past few years and for a while spent several hours a day collaborating with colleagues across the country on Marratech. It is just as good, if not better, than most of the other platforms that I’ve used, and at the time had the least restrictive licensing model and an excellent load distribution capability.

Now that Google owns Marratech we will see the commoditization of these platforms that have, up to now, been very expensive. We’ll also see some competition from open source, like DimDim, for those who want to host their own system. It’s pretty obvious that the days of selling six-figure web-conferencing license agreements will soon be over. I wouldn’t buy a new proprietary web-conferencing system at this time, until we see what Google does.

Via Geoffroi Garon

Phone oligopolies ask to deregulate

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I came across this PR piece from Bell-Aliant on TechEast today:

Aliant announced today that it has applied to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) for forbearance from regulation of local residential telephone service in nine competitive exchanges in the Halifax area. [snip] With forbearance, customers in these areas will experience the full benefits of competition, with greater value through increased choice and flexible offers that can be delivered in a more timely manner.

A little more digging and I connected to an article on CBC:

The Conservative government’s move last week came against resistance from the CRTC, whose rules were intended to handicap the big telephone companies until they lost 25 per cent or more of phone users to competitors.

[Industry Minister] Bernier expects that the decision to liberate the big players will result in rapid price reductions, but consumer advocates fear the established operators will use their new freedom to squelch emerging competitors.

I don’t feel that competition is real when you only have a few companies in the market. For example, there is little competition for wireless data in Canada, as shown in this graph by Tom Purves:

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I’d like to re-iterate a post I wrote last year, which discussed the April 2006 edition of The Atlantic. It included five past articles on the subject of Markets & Morals. Here are two pertinent quotes, from the 19th and 20th Centuries respectively.

Henry Demarist Lloyd wrote in March 1881, “When monopolies succeed, the people fail”  and that “The nation is the engine of the people”, in his piece denouncing the practices of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. There is little doubt today about the world wide power and influence of monopolies and oligopolies.

In 1967, John Kenneth Galbraith warned of the dangers of blindly having faith in our industrial/corporatist systems:

The greater danger is in the subordination of belief to the needs of the modern industrial system – These are that technology is always good; that economic growth is always good; that firms must always expand; that consumption of goods is the principal source of happiness; that idleness is wicked; and that nothing should interfere with the priority we accord to technology, growth, and increased consumption.

Just as each generation must work to preserve its democracy, so we have to constantly keep corporate interests at bay, for no matter how much NewSpeak they put forth about the “full benefits of competition”, the truth is that we, the citizenry, are being hornswoggled.

Packet Shaping

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Michael Geist reports that Rogers engages in packet shaping on its network:

For the past 18 months, it has been open secret that Rogers engages in packet shaping, conduct that limits the amount of available bandwidth for certain services such as peer-to-peer file sharing applications. Rogers denied the practice at first, but effectively acknowledged it in late 2005. Net neutrality advocates regularly point to traffic shaping as a concern since they fear that Rogers could limit bandwidth to competing content or services.

Skype is a peer-to-peer application and one which I have used for several years, though it doesn’t seem to work on my Bell-Aliant Ultra DSL connection. Some people have suggested that Skype’s service is just getting worse, but my experience is that it works for everyone on my contact list but me. When I talk, my speech is broken. At the same time, Google Talk works just fine. I’m wondering if Aliant is testing out packet shaping on our local switch and has yet to roll it out to the entire network.

Anyway, it’s clear that telecom oligopolies like Rogers have no problems applying these dirty tactics in their search for profits. According to NetNeutrality.ca:

Net Neutrality in Canada is the principle that consumers should be in control of what content, services and applications they use on the public Internet.

It’s a simple concept that has wide-ranging implications on how the Internet operates.

“When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end” – Sir Tim Berners Lee.

It is our belief that the Internet is more than just the physical infrastructure over which it operates. It is a vibrant marketplace and an entirely new format for free expression, even a political landscape and a tool for free organization. Some ISPs in Canada however, are overstepping their role and cannot separate their participation in this network from their component ownership and commercial interests.

LCB Big Question for April

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The Learning Circuits Blog asks, what should Instructor-Led Training (ILT) and Off-the-Shelf Content Vendors do today in the face of more demanding customers, lower margins and more competition?

I’m not sure what vendors should do, but as their business model has been declining, some of us have been promoting open source technologies and business models as well as do-it-ourselves informal learning approaches. During my exploration of shareable digital content, through a Creative Commons search, I came across this photo:

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Here’s a post I made a couple of years ago on This New Business of Learning.

Swivel, for data

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Swivel is an online data upload, comparison and sharing platform. You can upload spreadsheets, or import them from Google, and then create visually appealing graphs. I came across Swivel in the last copy of Fast Company, which shows that the company already had 585,816 graphs uploaded at the the end of its first year of operations.

Swivel has a lot of potential for business uses (it was originally developed to graphically interpret Google AdWords campaigns) but also for information campaigns, such as civilian deaths versus military deaths in Iraq or the use of Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr.

I can see all kinds of projects for students to delve into the world of data in a much more enjoyable way; kind of like YouTube for geeks. All you need is some publicly available data sets (lots on the web from government agencies and non-profits) and start comparing and creating. Finally, it seems that Swivel will remain free:

The rules will be simple:

  • If you upload data for the public, Swivel is free.
  • If you upload data and choose to keep it private and secure, there will be a fee.

It’s very easy to post a Swivel graph to your blog, like this one on world CO2 emissions:

2000 by Region/Country

World Economic Forum – Networked Readiness Index

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The WEF has released its Global Information Technology Report, which includes the Networked Readiness Index:

Since it was first launched in 2001, The Global Information Technology Report has become a valuable and unique benchmarking tool to determine national ICT strengths and weaknesses, and to evaluate progress. It also highlights the continuing importance of ICT application and development for economic growth.

The Report uses the Networked Readiness Index (NRI) to measure the degree of preparation of a nation or community to participate in and benefit from ICT developments. The NRI is composed of three component indexes which assess:

– environment for ICT offered by a country or community
– readiness of the community’s key stakeholders (individuals, business and governments)
– usage of ICT among these stakeholders.

Here are the top ten (plus one) rankings:

  1. Denmark 5.71
  2. Sweden 5.66
  3. Singapore 5.60
  4. Finland 5.59
  5. Switzerland 5.58
  6. Netherlands 5.54
  7. United States 5.54
  8. Iceland 5.50
  9. United Kingdom 5.45
  10. Norway 5.42
  11. Canada 5.35

This is the first time that Denmark tops the list, while the US slipped from 1st to 7th place.