Omega Point

Blogathon 2009: “Legally, we have to refer to you as Catherine December.”

After hear­ing Dave Olsen talk a bit about the restric­tions being applied — in par­tic­u­lar, to the “pedes­trian cor­ri­dors” being estab­lished here in Van­cou­ver dur­ing the Olympics, I’m con­cerned about the impli­ca­tions for free speech, as well as the poten­tial for these laws to endure after the Olympics have ended.

I’ve been con­vinced for a long time that the biggest threat to free speech in the 21st cen­tury is not, as in past eras, some kind of trend towards author­i­tar­i­an­ism, but rather, intel­lec­tual prop­erty encum­brances. The idea that VANOC can trade­mark lines from O Canada is appalling to me. It’s bad enough that the Olympics have become so branded and mired in the exclu­siv­ity of the brand that they’ve threat­ened Olympia Pizza in Vancouver’s West End, to say noth­ing of the actions taken since then.

Thus, I whole­heart­edly sup­port the choice to the True North Media House in response to the line trade­marked by VANOC.

But I’ve been think­ing about sit­u­a­tions where The Author­i­ties have con­fis­cated mem­ory cards or deleted pho­tos and so, I’m won­der­ing about tech­ni­cal workarounds to this: I would con­sider using an EyeFi card in my cam­era to tether with a 3G phone (say, a jail­bro­ken iPhone or pos­si­bly some­thing with rea­son­able bat­tery life.) to auto­mat­i­cally upload my pho­tos to my web­site or Flickr so that I wasn’t actu­ally stor­ing any pic­tures, I was post­ing them live. Short of jam­ming or Iranian-scale net­work mon­i­tor­ing and packet inspec­tion, there would really be lit­tle any­one could do, assum­ing the images them­selves were legal.

If I take a photo of a poster with the Olympic Rings, is dis­tri­b­u­tion of that photo a trade­mark or copy­right vio­la­tion? Is my use of the words “Olympic”, “2010”, “Win­ter”, or “Games” in this post action­able? No, but what if I’m doing so in protest of some­thing involv­ing one or more of those words?

I mean, I don’t seri­ously con­sider myself at risk for hav­ing the last name “Win­ters”, or for writ­ing under that name, but it’s so impor­tant to explic­itly affirm that I have the right to do so when propos­ing –or pass­ing!– any law that pur­ports to restrict speech.

Suggestion Box: Attribution/ShareAlike/ActuallyTellMeAboutIt

Cre­ative Com­mons cov­ers almost all use cases apart from one revealed on Twit­ter this morn­ing: you’ve granted oth­ers the right to use and remix your work, but how do you know if someone’s done it? Sure, it’s cer­tainly cour­te­ous to do so, but they’re not nec­es­sar­ily under any oblig­a­tion to let you know about it.

This post is © Cather­ine Win­ters, licensed under CC-Attribution-ShareAlike. Also, let me know.

With that in mind, I pro­pose the Cre­ative Com­mons Actu­al­lyTellMe­AboutIt license. I know I’d like to hear when some­one uses my stuff! Plus, hey, the icon’s obvi­ous, right?

On the other hand, CreativeCommons.org defines “Attri­bu­tion” as: “You let oth­ers copy, dis­trib­ute, dis­play, and per­form your copy­righted work — and deriv­a­tive works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.”

So I sup­pose it is already implied that you would even­tu­ally hear of this. Still, it would be nice to cod­ify it some­how with­out hav­ing to post any specifics of the means of attribution.

If kids don’t learn about making tasers in school, they’ll just learn it on the streets.

The CBC is run­ning a story on enter­pris­ing young hooli­gans mak­ing good enter­tain­ing use of readily-available giant capac­i­tors. Oh no, home­made tasers! Well, no, not exactly. They sure hurt and make you pee your­self though!

This actu­ally reminded me of things I did in high school, so maybe this is some­thing we want to encour­age! (“Hi, Cather­ine? About din­ner next week? Yeah, I’m not sure we’re totally com­fort­able with you hav­ing any oppor­tu­nity to tell our kids any­thing at all, actually…”)

Look, part of liv­ing in a tech­no­log­i­cally sophis­ti­cated soci­ety is under­stand­ing that there are things peo­ple will do with tech­nol­ogy that doesn’t mesh up with what its design­ers intended. Fur­ther, we can’t stop that from hap­pen­ing, except through fur­ther edu­ca­tion. (“…and that’s why we don’t lick elec­tri­cal sock­ets, class.” “Ohhhhh!”)

The prob­lem is that peo­ple all too often want a quick fix for run­away knowl­edge, and that usu­ally takes the form of leg­is­la­tion, or of ceas­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion of doc­u­ments con­tain­ing Iraqi nuclear “secrets”.

So in this case, what’s the leg­is­la­tion we’re sup­posed to sup­port? Inter­net hack­ers must be stopped from threat­en­ing chil­dren? Cam­eras must be licensed to pro­hibit the extrac­tion of their inter­nal com­po­nents? Cam­eras should not con­tain flashes? No energy weapons at school? Oh wait. That last one is actu­ally pretty smart.

Upon read­ing the CBC arti­cle, one notes that there’s def­i­nitely a “oh no, inter­net!” vibe to it, but nobody quoted in it is actu­ally sug­gest­ing that the cur­rent “leave your knives and things at home, please” laws and school poli­cies aren’t enough. Truly a refresh­ing change.