Musing about unheralded heroes and heroines and accidental criminals and IPR

I love Auden’s poetry. I have particular fondness for The Unknown Citizen (or JS/07/M/378, the reference Auden gave to him), so much so that I tend to recall the closing lines of the poem almost weekly in one context or another:

 

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:

Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

 

Unknown citizens have fascinated me for decades. The amateur historian in me has a peculiar bent: I’m fascinated by stories of people whose impact on our lives is belied by their relative obscurity, people whose fifteen minutes of fame changed the course of a tiny part of history, while being largely forgotten by history in general. Take Tank Man for example.


Twenty-three years on, we still don’t know his name. We don’t know if he’s alive or dead or where he is to be found. History isn’t good at remembering people when you don’t know their names.

At least Tank Man knew what he was doing.

Sometimes (some would argue I should use the word “Often” here) people have their impact on history accidentally. Take William Huskisson for example. Statesman, Privy Councillor, MP for multiple constituencies, we remember him principally for being the first person to die in a railway accident: he was run over by Stephenson’s Rocket, and died despite being taken to hospital by Stephenson himself. Now there were people who died in railway accidents before that, but they weren’t the ones to make the news.

My passion for unheralded heroes started in a strange way. As a young boy, I was fascinated by what we then called “general knowledge” or “quizzing”, and as a result had amassed a vast quantity of “useless” information by the time I was 18. It all began with the story of Denise Darvall. You see? I’ve just proved something to you.

Most readers will be familiar with the name of Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who performed the world’s first heart transplant. Some may even remember the name of Louis Washkansky, upon whom Barnard operated.  A few will remember that the operation was carried out by Barnard at the Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town. Even fewer will remember that the operation took place on 3rd December 1967.

But who remembers Denise Darvall?

Denise Ann Darvall was the donor of the heart used by Barnard. A 24 year old killed tragically earlier that very day, run over by a drunk driver while she was out shopping for cake. A true accidental heroine, largely forgotten by history.

I could go on and on, but won’t. As you can probably see, I’m fascinated by stories of accidental and often obscure heroes and heroines, how history picks a random few up and puts their names up in lights, yet leaves unnamed and forgotten the many others involved. Every invention, every political event, every scientific idea, has its share of heroes and heroines, often unnamed, sometimes accidental, always obscure.

Sadly there is now a new branch of accidental and obscure for me to study.

The accidental criminal.

I’ve been concerned about digital rights management and intellectual property rights for some years now, deeply concerned. Those concerns rose to the fore during the infamous Digital Economy Act, a process with the singular, perhaps unique distinction of sullying and besmirching the reputations of politicians involved, in all three major parties.

Those concerns are now growing.

This, despite the relatively balanced and even-handed approach to intellectual property rights taken by Professor Ian Hargreaves in his report, commissioned by Prime Minister David Cameron. If you haven’t read the report, please do.

Why am I more concerned?

Firstly, because outcomes often tend to be disconnected to what the commissioned report said: we’ve been here before, as I document here. We’ve had consultations and discussions and reports aplenty, all saying largely sensible things, only to find that what actually happens has very little to do with the reports and recommendations; instead, it appears to be based on narrow, biased lobbying.

Secondly, this lobbying tends to be based on very questionable numbers, again something I’ve written about before in Numbers of Mass Distraction. Don’t believe me? Why not read what the US Government Accountability Office has to say on the subject?

Thirdly, the objective of the lobbying tends to be to enact law that is focused on getting the “low hanging fruit” of the accidental downloaders, the unaware, the weak, the unwary. Why? Because it’s easier to bully them.

I’m not here to defend karaoke-loving grandmothers convicted of illegal downloading. I’m not even here to defend grandmother 83-year old Gertrude Walton, sued by the RIAA in 2005. [At least her defence was impeccable. She didn’t just not have a computer, she’d died some time earlier.]

What I am here to do is to ensure that you understand what’s going on.

But more important than all this is the fact that a very questionable industry practice has been spawned, with very questionable practices. The ambulance-chasers of the IP world, nakedly going after, threatening, seeking to criminalise, the unknowing, the weak, the unaware, the unwary. A practice that needs to be looked at very carefully by all governments, in terms of what they do and how they do it.

Which is why I found this paper on the subject, by Kalika Doloswada and Ann Dadich, refreshing, interesting, an unexpected ray of hope. Please read it.

Some of their key takeaways:

  • The preferred vehicle to prevent illegal downloading is litigation, but there’s scant evidence of this working.
  • Where there is litigation, there’s scant evidence of the monies collected making their way to the creators.
  • Technological advances: closed private networks, IP blockers, identity obscuring tools, anonymous file-sharing networks, encrypted systems: make it hard to get to the IT-savvy, particularly the IT-savvy with criminal intent
  • Despite all this, the preferred mode of the ambulance-chaser is to go after, and to criminalise, the low-hanging fruit of the unaware, the unwary, the unable to defend.

I have over 2000 CDs. I’ve paid through the nose for all of them. I own the vinyl for a hundred or two of them, and have owned (and left behind in India) many more.

I have owned hundreds of cassette tapes, all pre-recorded.

I’ve never taped off the radio, copied someone else’s vinyl on to tape, or downloaded something illegally.

I thought I knew the law. Yet I may have repeatedly broken the law (apparently!) by buying a CD and transferring its contents on to ITunes over the years. As the Daily Mail says here:

People like Terry Fisher and Charlie Nesson over at the Berkman Center have been pushing for alternative ways to resolve the publishing/copyright/IPR impasse for some years now. People like Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing have been writing about for years.

It’s time we all got involved: otherwise we’re going to get the future we deserve, with schoolyard bullies using questionable tactics, data and processes to go after the weak.

More importantly, as a result of the lobbying by these people, we’re going to destroy the ability of the digital world to live up to its promise: in education, in healthcare, in welfare, in government, and in business as a whole.

The lawmakers who allow all this to happen (DMCA, ACTA, DEA, Hadopi, et al) will make more bad laws and move on.

The lobbyists who use questionable data to influence the lawmakers will make their money and move on.

The cowboy firms that collect monies through threats and fear and because of the ignorance of those they prey on will make their money and move on.

The industries who need to change will have staved off change for a short while as a result.

Then everything will change. The laws will change. They must change. Because the law does not remain an ass for long.

But criminal records are forever.

Learning about Solanaceae

Have you ever visited CultureSheet.org? if you haven’t, please do so. It’s worth it, seeing how a data-gathering encyclopaedic website gently morphs into a community and a social network. Fascinating. I wish them well.

They make a very important point early on: I quote from the site:

The core of the CultureSheet has become the glue that ties everything together: a taxonomic structure that serves as a framework for plant cultivation guidelines. Thanks to this structure we can reduce plant name typos to a bare minimum. Every plant enthusiast is encouraged to help in building a plant cultivation database which makes experience and know-how available.

“We can reduce plant name typos to a bare minimum”. Love it. Spending time getting taxonomies right is always worth it. Having spent a lot of time in capital markets, I was shocked by the sheer waste that goes on in that environment because the “statics” aren’t accurate. To my disbelief, when I left that space, I found the same thing happening wherever I went. Tons of waste because of errors in names, addresses, item descriptors, things that don’t change that often. There’s a whole ream of posts to be written about the mess of reference and low-volatility data. But not today.

Today I want to just mull over Solanaceae. As CultureSheet says:

The Solanaceae are a medium-sized family of flowering plants belonging to the Asterids 2). The family provides many products used by human beings for food, drugs and enjoyment. This includes edible species such as the potato, tomato, and eggplant (aubergine) and a host of minor fruit crops. Medicinal plants such as deadly nightshade, jimson weed, tobacco, and henbane are the sources of drugs such as atropine, hyoscine, nicotine and other alkaloids. Solanaceae species of horticultural importance include petunia, floripondio, velvet tongue, and butterfly flower. Species such as tomato, potato, tobacco, and petunia are important experimental organisms in genetics and molecular biology. The family is a group of plants that consists of trees, shrubs, and creepers.

If you go to the Natural History Museum site, under Uses of Solanaceae, you get the following:

  • Food -edible fruits and tubers such as the tomato, potato, aubergine/eggplant and chilli pepper;
  • Horticulture -common ornamental plants include Petunia, Schizanthus (commonly known as the butterfly flower), Salpiglossis (commonly known as painted or velvet tongue), Browallia and floripondio;
  • Medicinal, poisonous, or psychotropic effects -famed for their alkaloid content and used throughout history deadly nightshade, jimson weed, tobacco, henbane and belladonna are sources of drugs such as atropine, hyoscine, nicotine and other alkaloids;
  • Biological study –model experimental organisms such as tobacco, petunia, tomato and potato are used in examining fundamental biological questions in cell, molecular and genetic studies.

As the saying goes, they had me at chili pepper.

One family of plants. Covering potatoes, tomatoes, aubergines, chillies, tobacco, belladonna, mandrake root, jimson weed, deadly nightshade, henbane, atropine, nicotine. In use as edible foods, as ornamental plants, as poisons and hallucinogens, and as model experimental organisms.

One family of plants, growing as trees, bushes and shrubs and as creepers.

One family of plants, growing pretty much everywhere.

One family of plants whose classification has remained rock-steady while others have withered on the vines of modern taxonomy.

Worth investigating, wouldn’t you say?

So that’s what I’m doing. I want to understand more about this family of plants. If any of you knows something that will help me, please let me know. In the meantime I shall continue to dig into the Web, what a wonderful resource.

 

The Arab Spring of the West

As you’ve probably noticed by now,  the Arab Spring, the collective name for the protests in the Middle East and North Africa since 18 December last year, has captured the public’s imagination. If you want to remind yourself of the events that constitute the Arab Spring, you could do worse than try the Guardian’s excellent interactive timeline, a snapshot of which is shown below:

 

This post is not about the Arab Spring per se.There are many other places you can read about it, covered by many people who know far more about it than I do.

While all this has been going on, there’s been a second, much gentler conflagration amongst the digerati. The Blefuscudian question they’ve been trying to address is this: What role did social networks and social media in general play in the Arab Spring? The Big-Endians say Everything, the Little-Endians say Nothing, and while they continue to argue I am sure we will all live happily ever after. This post is not about them either.

What this post is about is a question that’s been troubling me for some time. And that is this: What is the Western equivalent of the Arab Spring? I’ve also been thinking of the natural follow-up question to it: When will it happen?

I may be completely wrong. [If I am, I’m sure you’ll tell me.]

But.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the Arab Spring of the West is already upon us. Why?

The original Arab Spring, the Arab Spring of the Arabs, was about disaffected people, mainly youth, giving vent to their feelings about injustice and inequality and unreasonable behaviour of the powers-that-be, by rising up and challenging the control structures around them.

I guess it’s natural for us to think that there won’t be a Western equivalent, there are no comparable conditions of injustice and inequality and unreasonable behaviour.

Perhaps there aren’t.

But then again, maybe there are.

Disaffected youth.

Giving vent to their feelings.

Feelings spurred by injustice and inequality and unreasonable behaviour.

Rising up to challenge the control structures around them.

Hmmm.

It gets me thinking.

The US State Department, Amazon, EveryDNS, Mastercard, Visa, Wikileaks, Assange, Manning…..

Sony, the PlayStation Network, not-Anonymous, Anonymous, hacking of PS3s, GeoHot…..

Super-injunctions, Justice Eady, Lord Chief Justice Judge (really, that’s his name), CTB, NEJ, LNS, JIH and for that matter CDE, FGH and LMN….and all that jazz

Hmmm.

Maybe that’s the way the Arab Spring will look in the West. As “traditional” control structures like superinjunctions and DMCA and CFAA are found to be unjust and unreasonable by disaffected youth. As they rise up and challenge the control structures. In the West.

I wonder.

Artificial scarcities tend to get met by artificial abundances. Over time, the artificial scarcities lose. No one, not even Qadhafi, can sustain being a Qadhafi forever.

A coda:  All this talk about scarcity and abundance reminded me of the old Shaw quote:

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

 

 

On firehoses and filters: Part 1

Image above courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.

 

I’ve never been worried about information overload, tending to treat it as a problem of consumption rather than one of production or availability: you don’t have to listen to everything, read everything, watch everything. As a result, when, some years ago, I heard Clay Shirky describe it as “filter failure”, I found myself nodding vigorously (as us Indians are wont to do, occasionally sending confusing signals to onlookers and observers).

 

Filtering at the point of consumption rather than production. Photo courtesy The National Archives UK.

 

Ever since then, I’ve been spending time thinking about the hows and whys of filtering information, and have arrived “provisionally” at the following conclusions, my three laws of information filtering:

1. Where possible, avoid filtering “on the way in”; let the brain work out what is valuable and what is not.

2. Always filter “on the way out”: think hard about what you say or write for public consumption: why you share what you share.

3. If you must filter “on the way in”, then make sure the filter is at the edge, the consumer, the receiver, the subscriber, and not at the source or publisher.

 

What am I basing all this on? Let’s take each point in turn:

a. Not filtering at all on inputs

One of the primary justifications for even thinking about this came from my childhood and youth in India, surrounded by mothers and children and crowds and noise. Lots of mothers and children. Lots and lots of mothers and children, amidst lots and lots of crowds. And some serious noise as well. Which is why I was fascinated by the way mothers somehow managed to recognise the cry of their own children, and could remain singularly unperturbed, going placidly about their business amidst the noise and haste. This ability to ignore the cries of all the other babies while being watchful and responsive to one particular cry fascinated me. Years later, I experienced it as a parent, nowhere near as good at is as my wife was, but the capacity was there. And it made me marvel at how the brain evolves to do this.

Photo courtesy BBC

There are many other justifications. Over the years I’ve spent quite a lot of time reading Michael Polanyi, who originally introduced the “Rumsfeld” “unknown unknowns” concept to us (the things we know we know; the things we know we don’t know and the things we don’t know we don’t know). I was left with the view that I should absorb everything like a new sponge, letting my brain work out what is worth responding to, what should be stored for later action, what should be discarded. And, largely, it’s worked for me. Okay, so what? Why should my personal experience have any bearing on this? I agree. Which is why I would encourage you to read The Aha! Moment: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight, by Kounlos and Beeman. Or, if you prefer your reading a little bit less academic, try The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People are Eccentric. In fact, as shown below, the cover of the latest issue of Scientific American MIND actually uses the phrase “An Unfiltered Mind” when promoting that particular article.

 

b. Filtering outputs

We live in a world where more and more people have the ability to publish what they think, feel or learn about, via web sites, blogs, microblogs and social networks. We live in a world where this “democratised” publishing has the ability to reach millions, perhaps billions. These are powerful abilities. And with those powerful abilities comes powerful responsibilities. Responsibilities related to truth and accuracy, responsibilities related to wisdom and sensitivity. Responsibilities related to curation and verification. None of this is new. Every day we fill forms in with caveats that state that what we say is true to the best of our knowledge and ability; every day, as decent human beings, we take care not to offend or handicap people because of their caste, creed, race, gender, age. Every day we take care to protect minors, to uphold the confidentiality of our families and friends and colleagues and employers and trading partners and customers. Sometimes, some of these things are enforced within contracts of employment. All of them, however, should come under the umbrella term “common decency”.

 

These principles have always been at the forefront of cyberspace, and were memorably and succintly put for WELL members as YOYOW, You Own Your Own Words. Every one of us does own our own words. Whatever the law says. It’s not about the law, it’s about human decency. We owe it to our fellow humans.

When we share, it’s worth thinking about why we share, something I wrote about here and here.

c. Filtering by subscriber, not by publisher

Most readers of this blog are used to having a relatively free press around them, despite superinjunctions and despite the actions taken to suppress Wikileaks. A relatively free press, with intrinsic weaknesses. Weaknesses brought about by largely narrow ownership of media properties, weaknesses exacerbated by proprietary anchors and frames, the biases that can corrupt publication, weaknesses underpinned by the inbuilt corruptibility of broadcast models. Nevertheless, a relatively free press.

The augmentation of mainstream media by the web in general, and by “social media” in particular, is often seen as the cause of information overload. With the predictable consequence that the world looks to the big web players to solve the problem.

Which they are keen to do.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft et al are all out there, trying to figure out the best way of giving you what you want. And implementing the filtering mechanisms to do this. Filtering mechanisms that operate at source.

There is a growing risk that you will only be presented with information that someone else thinks is what you want to see, read or hear. Accentuating your biases and prejudices. Increasing groupthink. Narrowing your frame of reference. If you want to know more about this, it is worth reading Eli Pariser’s book on The Filter Bubble. Not much of a reader? Then try this TED talk instead. Jonathan Zittrain, in The Future Of The Internet and How to Stop it, has already been warning us of this for a while.

Now Google, Microsoft, Facebook, all mean well. They want to help us. The filters-at-source are there to personalise service to us, to make things simple and convenient for us. The risks that Pariser and Zittrain speak of are, to an extent, unintended consequences of well-meaning design.

But there’s a darker side to it. Once you concentrate solely on the design of filterability at source, it is there to be used. By agencies and bodies of all sorts and descriptions, ranging from less-than-trustworthy companies to out-and-out malevolent governments. And everything in between.

We need to be very careful. Very very careful. Which is why I want to concentrate on subscriber-filters, not publisher-filters.

Otherwise, while we’re all so busy trying to prevent Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, we’re going to find ourselves bringing about Huxley’s Brave New World. And, as Huxley predicted, perhaps actually feeling good about it.

 

More to follow. Views in the meantime?

 

 

RIP Seve Ballesteros 1957-2011: Goodbye to a golfing genius

Talented people do things that others cannot do.

A genius, on the other hand, does things that others cannot even imagine.

Seve Ballesteros, who passed away early this morning, was a true genius, revelling in doing things that others believed couldn’t be done. Revelling. You couldn’t help but see just how much he enjoyed doing what he did; his enthusiasm and passion were of epidemic proportions, infecting all in any sort of proximity, even via television.

It wasn’t enough for him that he was the youngest to win the Open for over eight decades. It wasn’t enough for him to be the first (and second) European to win the Masters. It wasn’t enough for him to be part of the first European team to win the Ryder Cup on American soil.

Such records are there to be beaten. And they will be beaten. They’re not what defined Seve.

What defined Seve was his supreme talent and his effervescent personality, a combination that ensured he kept doing things others could not imagine, as in the examples below. Others drove cars in and out of car parks. Seve drove golf balls in and out of car parks. Others went down on their knees, enslaved by the game. He went down on his knees to show his mastery of the game. Others played for the tiger line. He moved the tiger line to places it had never been.

 

The car park golfer in action


 

On his knees, bringing the golfing world to its knees

 

 

Driving the 10th at the Belfry… because it was there to be done

 

 

I’m not much of a golfer. As they say, I stand too close to the ball. After I hit it.

Yet I love my golf, love playing it when I can, however badly. There’s something about the game that fascinates me, how each shot is as unique as a snow crystal; how each game is really three: you play the opponent, you play the course and conditions, and you play yourself.

Like most of you, I’ve watched Seve many times on TV and video; like some of you, I’ve had the privilege of watching him play “live” a few times. And I will never forget him.

Seve Ballesteros, you taught a world that it was possible to do things others could not imagine. As importantly, you taught a world how to do this while visibly enjoying yourself.

Your talent, your attitude, your enthusiasm, have been an inspiration to generations. We salute you.