Berkman Buzz, week of August 4

A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations. If you'd like to receive this by email, just sign up here.

In addition to our look at the past week's online Berkman conversations, we're taking a close look at conversations from "Wikimania 2006." The conference will go through the weekend, so stay tuned for next week's Buzz. 

What’s going on…take your pick here or browse below.

* Bill McGeveran wonders about bloggers and freedom of press.
* Derek Slater responds to Tim Armstrong's arguments about DRM and the DMCA.
* Tim Armstrong reacts to Derek Slater's arguments about DRM and the DMCA.
* Jonathan Zittrain answers questions about generativity.
* Jake Shapiro looks at revenue sources for podcasting.
* John Palfrey examines benefit of software patents.
* Stopbadware.org alerts consumers of badware through search.

Talk about Wikimania 2006.

* David Weinberger documents Jimbo Wales' announcements.
* Ethan Zuckerman captures Lessig's Wikimania keynote.
* John Palfrey focuses on 'interoperability' in Lessig's keynote.

The full Buzz.

"Nevertheless, the story does circle around a very difficult conflict at the core of this dispute: how can we balance a free press with a reasonable degree of personal privacy? The balance in this country has tilted extremely heavily toward free rein for the press in the past. If you think bloggers are precisely like journalists, you may see no trouble extending that rule into the future. Like Lithwick, I tend toward the belief that “the world has suddenly become too small” for that rule to persist completely unchanged. More of our lives become reportable all the time. Other people have put pictures of me on Flickr that I don’t remember being taken; my students will probably rate me at online sites built for the purpose… "
Bill McGeveran, "Lithwick on Privacy and Blogs"

"Apparently, Tim thinks it's useful to "shift the focus" from this bad statute to bad media company choices.  But, again, there is no reason for them to use this hypothetical "good" DRM.  Using "bad" DRM may be a rational choice for them (at least, but for other forces e.g. P2P), even though they're bad choices for society as a whole.  The problem is giving those bad choices the protection of the law. Tim thinks that attacking the DMCA wrongly deflects the blame. To the contrary, I think discussing the merits of hypothetical "good" DRM wrongly deflects attacks on the DMCA. Many people seem to think that we can just throw enough geeks at this issue, then DRM and lawful use will co-exist in harmony, just like DRM will stop piracy some day.  Surely, there are better and worse implementations of DRM, but all DRM under the DMCA is bad DRM.  The focus should remain squarely on that point..."
Derek Slater, "All DRM Under the DMCA is Bad DRM"

"So against that rather lengthy backdrop, let me see whether I can figure out just where Derek and I agree, and where we part company. The task is, if anything, complicated by what I think is the very large overlap where derek and I are on exactly the same page. IT's common ground between us that the DMCA has doen essentially nothing to prevent copyright infringement online (and has, if anything, made such infringement more difficult to detect by driving it underground). This failing is central to Derek's critique but peripheral to my own. We also agree that the present legal and technological regime is marked by a host of objectionable qualities, including a diminished sphere of lawful and fair use as against the world of non-digital (or more precisely, non-DRM'ed: the spheres do not entirely overlap) media. We agree that repeal of the DMCA would likely solve these problems. We disagree on whether any other solutions, short of repealing the DMCA, may also be available. We are trying, it seems to me, to get the same destination, but I am interested in the question whether there is an alternate route; Derek thinks that exploring whether there is an alternate route is, at best, a distraction from what should be the main avenue of repeal; and at worst, an actively counterproductive step that makes repeal of the DMCA less likely by laying blame for our present predicament elswhere than on the statute itself..."
Tim Armstrong,  "Technical {and, or, vs.} Legal Solutions to Digital Copyright's Excesses"

"'Suppose we assume you're right about the general problem.' What do you say should be done? I suggest a few things in the paper. a. I'd like to get ISPs to take action against obviously compromised machines on their network (more on that in #8 below).  b. I think that virtual machine environments -- simplified in the draft to a "red/green" architecture -- may offer some technical help, since users could then run "risky" software and not find it catastrophic if the software turned out to be destructive. That's because data from important apps would be in the "green zone," and the red zone would have a quick "reinstall me to my original pristine state" switch. This has some of the drawbacks I discuss in #2 above about secure application environments, and it raises the issue of there needing to be a checkpoint Charlie to decide when to move data from one zone to the other. Plus there's the problem of deciding what belongs in what zone, and deciding who makes that decision. The comments so far here have been very helpful to my thinking about this solution. c. Solving the sorts of problems that get the regulators up in arms -- "they're pirating all my movies" -- will reduce pressure to produce locked-down PCs."
Jonathan Zittrain,  "Jonathan Zittrain Responds"

"But I wonder about the opportunities for a new take on voluntary support and the kind of messaging and relationship that would be required in the new medium. It’s one thing to endure seasonal pledge drives, or to feel the steady drumbeat of year-round on-air reminders to contribute. It’s quite another to imagine listeners responding to the atomized audio files reaching them through various syndicated destinations, or played as a one-off in a flash player on some site.There’s an alignment in pushing for open syndication and free access - it holds true to the spirit of a public media mission, it may help connect with new audiences for existing content, and - not coincidentally - it builds numbers that attract sponsors to pay the bills...."
Jake Shapiro, "Membership"

"OK, enter the complicating factor: what if you are an entrepreneur who is devoted to creating a wonderful new generative (to use Jonathan Zittrain’s term) technology, say in the Web 2.0 space? One hard problem faces you early in the process. So, you get the part about being part of a development community, building your cool new platform, sharing it in various ways, making a market for your services, and generating a return for your investors. But what should you do about patenting? Say you, like me and others, are queasy about the current patent system (”yuck, I just don’t like them,” or “I don’t want to participate in that mess”), you don’t have much time or money, and you face an uphill battle in your crowded marketplace already. What’s a sensible, reasonably public-spirited, honest entrepreneur trying to make a living and a return for investors (if you’re lucky, or unlucky as the case may be, enough to have them) supposed to do?"
John Palfrey, "What should Web 2.0 entrepreneurs do about software patents?"

"We’re entering a new phase here at StopBadware.org. Google—which is one of our partners—will present people with a warning before they visit websites that have been reported to StopBadware.org as sites that distribute badware. These warnings currently link to a general page on StopBadware.org , but as we finish researching sites, we’ll replace the general page with one of our individual website reports (see an example here). Hopefully this next step will bring us that much closer to fulfilling our mission of providing people with reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help them make better choices...."
Stopbadware.org, "Safer Searching"

"He makes some announcements. First, the One Laptop Per Child project (= $100 laptop) will include Wikipedia "as the first element in their content repository." Second, Wikiversity has been established as a "center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities," for all levels and languages. It includes learning communities. Coming up in the next year, they'll becreating an advisory board. Also, Wikia is working with Socialtext to a wysiwyg editing environment. (Disclosure) He tihnks it'l lbe big. [Yup. Learning the Wikipedia markup language discourages lots of people from correcting small errors. It'll be fascinating to see if Wikipedia scales when the markup barrier to editing is removed.] Jimmy says there should be more of a focus on quality. This past year, Wikipedia has refined its policies on biographies. They've also made progress on tagging images and ensuring that Wikipedia only uses fair use images. "
David Weinberger, "[wikimedia] Jimmy Wales"

"Jonathan Zittrain gets the first group “woo!” of the conference, suggesting that this gathering is a Woodstock for the 21st century, speculating about babies being born in the aisles and Jimmy Hendrix with a keynote speaker. He introduces Larry Lessig as a “bridge-lawyer”, riffing on the bridge-blog idea the Global Voices crowd often pitches. Larry’s capable of explaining law to geeks, to scaring the pants off lawyers, to making everyone hopeful and scared at the same time. Larry’s talk focuses on the idea of read-only and read-write cultures (RO vs. RW). He tells a story about John Philip Sousa visiting Congress to warn legislators about gramophones, “these infernal machines”, which are destroying the practice of singing “the songs of the day or the old songs” around the porch. If the gramophone is allowed to spread, “we will not have a vocal chord left” due to evolution. In an odd way, Sousa was right - the gramophone killed the read/write culture of the day, where people consumed and created the popular song. “These infernal machines” led to the rise of a read-only culture, where creativity is consumed, but consumer is not a creator. Read-only/read-write is a phenomenon that exists beyond the creation and dissemination of culture. Lessig asks us to hail back to the Republican Party - the one that elected Lincoln - which first campaigned for Colonel John Fremont under the campaign: “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men, Fremont”. Free labor wasn’t meant in the sense of free beer - it was freedom to engage in labor...."
Ethan Zuckerman, "Lessig's Keynote at Wikimania"

"Interoperability, he’s saying, is the key to the story — the Free Culture story — of which Wikipedia is such an illustrative chapter. The instinct to control a platform that you give (or sell) to other people is understandable, but it is also stupid. There needs to be interoperability and free standards that provide the widest range of freedoms for human beings to build upon the platform (sounds a lot like JZ’s Generativity). We need to remember this lesson as we build a free culture. But we also need to make it possible for this platform to enable people to participate in a free culture. We need also to support the work of the Free Sofware Foundation and work toward free CODECs to allow content to flow across various platforms.But we need to move past the technical layer, and enable a platform at the legal layer, too, one that protects free culture...."
John Palfrey, "Lessig on Interoperability at Wikimania 2006"