The New Freedom » Report from IS2K7

Saturday, June 9th, 2007...12:35 pm

Report from IS2K7

I’m back! The conference was cool, I’m glad I went. Here’s my wrap-up:

Left on Thursday. Pretty long journey, R5 to Philly, New Century Bus to NYC, Fung-Wah to Boston, MBTA to my hotel. The connections were fast and to be honest I was disappointed by the lack of explosions/chickens on the buses.

Conference began early the next day in the Ames Courtroom in Harvard Law’s Austin Hall. Fruit, breadstuffs and some pretty good coffee were provided for breakfast, which was nice. In total I’d say there were roughly 150-200 people there, almost all of them with impressive credentials on their name tags (mine simply said “Rich Jones”. I was thinking about scrawling ‘h4xx0r’ underneath, but that would have gone against my better judgment in taste). Lots of Harvard law people, librarians, lawyers and CEO-type people. I’d say I was the youngest person there, although there were some Harvard students from their Free Culture chapter, and there was nice kid from Brown who I met in the second working group, whose ears perked up when I mentioned infoanarchism. Other than that, it was mostly older folk. Which is to be expected, I suppose, but I still found it slightly disappointing. You can call me ageist, but I really do feel that ‘old people’ don’t fully understand the implications and the possibilities of free information. Free Culture is, for the most part, a youth movement. Young people have more naive idealism which is necessary to push the boundaries of both what we’re allowed to do and what we’re capable of doing. The first keynote addressed this.

Frank Paynt, The Internet
The first keynote speaker was John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center. He’s quite a young guy and I liked what he had to say. He didn’t say anything new, but he provided a nice summary of the situation as it stands. He noticed the distinction between the previous generation of people who had to learn to adapt to new technology and the current generation, who are, as he puts it, “Born Digital”. Those who are born digital have to create and upkeep a digital identity, are better at multitasking, and are constantly submersed in digital media. The most important thing, however, is that our generation is shifting from being consumers to creators. We’re growing sick from the crap mass media is feeding us and we’re going to have more fun and feel better if we make our own stuff. DIY, baby.

He also mentioned some problems, like loss of real-life participation, digital ethics, especially around plagiarism, and the issues surrounding transparency. It was nice to hear him say that the current copyright system is very outdated. He also mentioned that he wants to see a completely open public library of science. Currently, at Harvard, you must have a Harvard ID to enter the library. Why not use the internet to make that information available to everybody? Seems like a good idea to me. However, after his presentation, the mic was passed around the audience for comments and one person actually disagreed. He was a really old guy who said he’d been donating money to Harvard for the very reason that they keep the information in the library closed off from the public. I simply can’t wrap my head around this. The only reason I can see for this is so that Harvard can maintain some kind of elitism, essentially saying “This information belongs to us privileged few. You have not been admitted and you have not payed to come to Harvard, so you haven’t earned the right to access these ideas.” Which is, of course, a load of bullshit. Are you really that much of a douchebag that you’d put your own elitism ahead of furthering public knowledge? What kind of scum bag are you?

After that was the first working group, University: Agenda For Fair Use. The discussion was facilitated by Patricia Aufderheide, who is responsible for the Documentary Film-Makers Best Practices for Fair Use, which popped up on BoingBoing a few days ago. I found this group pretty disappointing. We were supposed to discuss issues where fair use had come up. I mentioned problems with Creative Commons actually restricting what I considered fair use. Also mentioned were The Phantom Edit, DeCSS and the legality of online libraries. The thing I found most disturbing were the number of teachers who were afraid to use copyrighted materials in their teachings. They said that 15 years ago it was no problem, you just pushed play on the tape and didn’t worry about it. Now that technology has made it easier for students to watch educational videos, teachers have become afraid to use such learning aids. Which is absolutely ridiculous. When it comes to education and the creation of art, everything is fair use. It doesn’t matter, learning is a greater social benefit than any market.
The room did not have many forward thinking people in it. It was full of lawyers and suits who were more concerned with abiding by the law and reaping the economic benefits of it than of questioning what the purpose of the law was or what good it did for society. This issue was never even addressed, although it is the heart of the problem. Any sensible system of copyright will be to protect the artists from companies profiting off of their work without compensation. Say, to stop a publishing company printing copies of your book and selling it without giving you any money, or to stop a theater from charging tickets to see your film without compensation. This should be the extent of copyright. It isn’t. In fact, it’s totally backwards. Massive media companies have all of the power and the people and the artists have very few. By paying for lobbyists and buying candidates with campaign finances (don’t think for a second that your hero Barack Obama is any exception, look at the Consumerist’s list of politicians who have received money from the RIAA), the media companies can sue anybody they like into complete financial destitution, make them drop out of school, simply for copying some bits. Nobody is profiting off of that copy, but the companies have enough influence (read: money) to make it so that the money that they might have made if that copy didn’t take place is enough to constitute criminal damages. Ridiculous.

After that, a lady from the Boston Globe interviewed me, but I acted kind of weird because I was frazzled and frustrated and I think she got scared and she ran away.

Then there was lunch. Wraps and fruit and stuff, very nice. I met a guy from UMass who got kicked out of BU in the 80s for political activism (uhoh). Not surprising, though.

The second working group was better. Open Access at UNIVERSITY - OpenCourseWare and Beyond was facilitated by Anne Margulies , head of MIT’s OpenCourseWare program (Wikip link), Joel Thierstein of Rice University’s Connexions and Elizabeth Stark form Harvard Free Culture. Everybody in attendance was pretty much in agreement that Open Access school is a good thing, and it’s good that more schools are beginning to become open. The OCW Consortium has more than 150 schools worldwide with Open lessons (although only 12 of these are in the US, and there is only 1 in the UK, which an open distance-learning only school). The working group participants noticed some unexpected benefits of OCW, such as students being better prepared for class and an overwhelming amount of interest from non-students. Most interestingly is the unexpected benefit to the faculty, who are able to learn the best teaching methods from each other, stop redundancy across classes, and even collaborate to make new courses.

The big issue in the room seemed to be the value of a degree. Apparently, there are online courses which use MIT’s OCW materials as the basis for their own, non-MIT certification at discount price. Assuming these services are truly vigorous in their testing, then this is a very good thing, but it could significantly change the job-hunting process. Although the value of an MIT degree isn’t inherently lowered by having open content, perhaps its value is lower relatively. Employers will have to stop looking just at the name of the school on the resume and perform their own independent evaluations of the skills of applicants, which will ideally result in better hiring choices, although at the cost of higher initial investment in an employee. This results in an obvious social benefit, but could actually be damaging to the MIT folk who have come to accept that an MIT degree will result in near automatic employment. Eek.

Also mentioned were an idea for a Redhat-style, “support” funded type university with OCW and the need for a scholarly journal on the study of the social impact of Open Access, which actually sort of exists already as The International Journal of Open Educational Resources. When time was up, I met Elizabeth Stark, who was very nice, and the nice boy from Brown, who seemed to be the only other person there who shared a radical viewpoint. I remember him saying he wouldn’t mind seeing the downfall of the motion picture industry, which made me smile.

Harvard Law Shield
After that was another presentation, this time by David Weinberger, Berkman Center fellow. I don’t remember him saying anything new, other than that the internet should not be TV, and a Danish(?) “joke” that Wikipedia works in practice, not in theory. At this time, they served fruit and snacks and tea and stuff. I stole more than 20 Nature Valley Oat and Honey bars, which, along with wasabi rice crackers, have become a primary staple of my diet. (Arrrgh, WordPress just lost a whole section. Again.)

More of my photos of the event are here and the rest of Flickr’s are here.

Some other blogs covering the event are here, here, here, and a good one here.

That’s about it! Sorry this post isn’t copy edited. It took my a long time to write and I’m very tired. Also, I’ve finished Zelda and don’t have a job yet, so I can finally start writing fun, stupid programs again. I got a book on ActionScript 3.0 and I’ve got a couple of ideas to play with, so look out for some flash toys.

Phew.
Rich!