Amanda Palmer Unleashes The Voice Of The People About Health Insurance Via Twitter

from the it-all-comes-together dept

As mentioned, last week, we held an all day brainstorming event, bringing together artists and entrepreneurs to talk about the challenges and opportunities that we all face, and to see if there are ways to help each other. I'll have a full writeup on that later this week, but one point that was raised by some of the musicians at the session was that "success" can mean different things to different people, and one full-time musician pointed out that just being able to afford her own health insurance was a kind of "success," in that it showed she'd been able to earn enough to cover that bare minimum of "necessities." So it's interesting to see, just days later, that Amanda Palmer is making a lot of news today with her fascinating #InsurancePoll campaign, which she started after reading Nicholas Kristof's story about his college roommate, who has prostate cancer and is in bad shape -- in large part because he put off going to the doctor since he didn't have health insurance. In response, Amanda realized that many musicians, similarly, do not have health insurance, and she tweeted about it:

most small-to-mid-level musicians i know don't have health insurance. some musicians find tricky ways, some pay, most take the risk & pray.
when i was in my early twenties, buying my own insurance would have been equal half my rent. it just didn't seem like an option. my parents had just watched the death of my step-brother (uninsured when stricken with a disease) almost destroy the family bank, and so they DEMANDED i get insurance.
we fought.
they offered to pay half.
i agreed.
i was lucky.
many aren't.

From there, lots of other people responded with stories about their own health insurance situation, and she decided to ask people more directly about their own health insurance situation with a quick poll question:

quick twitter poll. 1) COUNTRY?! 2) profession? 3) insured? 4) if not, why not, if so, at what cost per month (or covered by job)?

— Amanda Palmer (@amandapalmer) October 14, 2012

The end result was tons of people responding, most using the #InsurancePoll hashtag. That seemed quite interesting to Amanda, who got a volunteer to start tallying up all of the info. And she noticed some of the commentary, which noted that people in various countries were somewhat unaware of how things were elsewhere:

people OUTSIDE the US were looking at all the tweets from the US and feeling really, really, really bad for us. and some younger tweeters (teenagers, i can only assume) were shocked that we americans don't have what they have (the NHS was getting a lot of love and support from the brits, especially seeing as it's under threat).

people INSIDE the US couldn't believe what people OUTSIDE the US didn't KNOW. this is the amazing power of twitter sometimes. we all think we share common knowledge, and then something like this pops up and BAM – you see a whole bunch of people in different countries shocking the hell out of each other. we all know that lance armstrong doped, that lady gaga gained weight, , etc….but tons of people in the UK/Finland/Australia/etc don't know the extent to which US people FREAK OUT on a daily/monthly/yearly basis about insurance. how much it changes our lives. and how EVERYbody has a story.

No matter what your stand is on health insurance or healthcare, you can't deny that this bit of information sharing is both powerful and impressive. Amanda and the volunteer are going to tally up all the data and release it when it's ready, which should be interesting as well. While this is hardly a scientific or randomized survey, it is interesting information that is making more people aware of the situation that others are in. When you think about the power of social media to even create such a discussion (outside the normal realms of political fighting), it's really amazing.

Filed Under: amanda palmer, education, health insurance, information, people, sharing, social media

New Research Shows How Copyright Law Is Keeping Useful Info Off Wikipedia

from the too-bad dept

The Atlantic has an interesting article about some forthcoming research from MIT PhD student Abhishek Nagaraj (though, oddly, the article never introduces him, never mentions his first name, and just refers to him throughout by his last name only). It's the latest in an increasingly long line of evidence showing how copyright is stifling content and keeping it from reaching the public in useful ways. Nagaraj found a particularly useful natural experiment in the archives of Baseball Digest "the oldest and longest-running journal of matters baseball-related," which has been published continuously since 1942. For various reasons (sounds like they didn't renew...) the issues from 1942 until 1964 are in the public domain. Everything after that... not so much. Google's book scanning project scanned nearly every issue from July 1945 until 2008.

Nagaraj realized that Wikipedians were using this as good source material for Wikipedia pages -- especially on the profiles of older baseball players. He noted that there was little stopping the text from being rewritten, but the real issue was around images. People could use the scanned images to illustrate the profiles, but clearly they could only use the public domain ones without permission.

But Nagaraj found was that the availability of public domain material dramatically improved the article's images. Before the digitization, players from between '44 and '64 had an average of .183 pictures on their articles. The '64 to '84 group had about .158 pictures. But after digitization, those numbers dramatically changed: there were 1.15 pictures on each of the older group's articles -- but only .667 in the new group. More recent players, covered by privately-owned parts of Baseball Digest, had half as many images on their pages as did old-timers.

And, yes, the article notes that he put in place various controls to correct for unrelated differences. Basically, the only observable difference in why the pages have more images is the public domain status of some of those works vs. others. Some might argue that this is no big deal, but he found a second bit of useful data s well:

And the effects of this -- of just having an image on the page -- cascaded to other metrics. "Out-of-copyright" players's pages saw a significant boost in traffic. Articles from the pre-'64 that were already in the top 10 percent saw their hits increase more than 70 percent. Articles from that group in the least-popular ten percent saw traffic to their articles increase by 25 percent. Those pages were more frequently edited across the board, too. And this makes sense: Google rewards updated content, and it rewards images. The out-of-copyright players provided more of both.

I'm reminded, yet again, of that chart of the now infamous gap in books under copyright that you can't find any more -- even though older books in the public domain are widely available. Once again, we're seeing not only the massive value of the public domain, but how much useful content is being locked away by excessively strict (and excessively long) copyright law.

Filed Under: baseball digest, copyright, information, learning, public domain, wikipedia

Kopimism Approved As Official Religion In Sweden: File Sharing Now Protected Under Freedom Of Religion Laws?

from the probably-not... dept

Last year, we poked some fun at the folks in Sweden who were trying to create the religion of Kopimism, in which "copying and the sharing of information is the most beautiful thing in the world." While there were some bureaucratic problems, and at least one rejection of the plan, it turns out that at the very end of the year, Kopimism became an officially recognized religion in Sweden.

"Being recognized by the state of Sweden is a large step for all of kopimi. Hopefully, this is one step towards the day when we can live out our faith without fear of persecution", says Isak Gerson, spiritual leader of the Church of Kopimism.

Of course, while some are claiming that this may effectively legalize file sharing for members of the "religion," I doubt that's accurate. There are plenty of religious practices that are deemed illegal. It can create some legal fights, but it certainly doesn't automatically legalize all religious practices (think: bigamy, human sacrifice, etc.).

To be honest, while this is amusing and does a nice of job of pointing out the ridiculousness of trying to clamp down on culture, I'm not sure it does much beyond being a little publicity stunt. For those who think stronger copyright laws are a good thing, this certainly isn't going to convince them of the error of their ways, and will simply reaffirm the belief that those opposing the excessive nature of copyright laws today are not to be taken seriously. Of course, the flip side of that argument is that today's copyright laws are a complete joke themselves, so perhaps the most reasonable response is to make an even bigger joke out of them...

Filed Under: file sharing, information, kopimism, religion, sweden

Twitter Wishes 4.5 Million Osama Bin Laden-Related Tweets Into Their API Cornfield

from the tweets-or-it-didn't-happen dept

Considering Twitter was instrumental in breaking the story of Osama Bin Laden's death, it seems somewhat strange that they would also be instrumental in limiting access to one of the biggest stories of 2011, if not the decade. (Of course, we're barely into this decade so we probably shouldn't be building these "best of" lists quite yet...) At the center of this unfortunate situation is a dataset constructed from public tweets using either "osama" or "bin laden," which was compiled using Twitter's own API.

Shortly after hearing of Bin Laden's unexpected mortal coil shuffling, Rob Domanski, who blogs as The Nerfherder, was informed of an archive of Osama Bin Laden-related tweets, all packaged up in handy XML format for use with DiscoverText software:

The datafiles were samples taken from live feed Twitter imports starting shortly after the announcement that Osama bin Laden’s death.

• Twitter searches for "bin laden" (647,585 documents, 505 MB)
• Twitter searches for "osama" (586,665 documents, 451 MB)

This was all for research purposes, however Twitter quickly shut down the project citing their Terms of Service (TOS) Agreement.

Stuart Shulman of DiscoverText had compiled the documents "using an authorized connection to Twitter via their API" which is apparently a violation of Twitter's API Terms of Service. He received an email from Twitter asking him to remove the datasets:

I'm writing about Twitter data being offered for sale on DiscoverText. Scraping the Twitter service is prohibited by our site Terms of Service, and furthermore, resyndicating data obtained through the Twitter API is prohibited by section I.4.a of our API Terms of Service (http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms).

As such, we request you remove the datasets listed at http://discovertext.com/osamabinladen.aspx and any other datasets containing Tweets offered on your site.

Shulman responded:

Let’s be clear. We have never sold a Tweet. The data collected through the Twitter API and shared through our system is the same publicly available data other users capture with screenshots and share on blogs, Facebook or Twitter itself. Nonetheless, the datasets we have assembled and similar samples are being taken temporarily off the Web site pending a resolution of this issue with Twitter.

Well, "temporarily" has turned into "indefinitely." As of June 1st, Shulman's dataset contained 4.5 million Osama Bin Laden-related tweets, all of which can only be marveled at as a REALLY BIG NUMBER but not shared in any usable fashion thanks to Twitter's complaint.

If it's just a "policy first" decision on Twitter's part, it seems a little short-sighted. This information was (and is) of great interest to people worldwide. Perhaps some sort of warning could have been issued instead of a full takedown, thus allowing Twitter to assert its position on API usage without locking up the dataset. Once the dataset already exists, why block it? It's disheartening to see something with as much potential as Shulman's project getting thrown under the TOS bus.

Filed Under: api, data, information
Companies: twitter

Why The Wikileaks Document Release Is Key To A Functioning Democracy

from the the-difference-between-democracy-and-the-state dept

As various politicians and bureaucrats freak out and get the wrong message from the latest Wikileaks document leak, the Economist has an excellent explanation of why the leak is actually a very good thing in preserving American democracy. Will it make some diplomats jobs harder? Absolutely. But diplomacy isn't supposed to be easy. And what the documents reveal is that the US has a history of doing things it's not supposed to do. The really key insight in the Economist piece is that there's a difference between elected officials and "the state" made up of career bureaucrats, who are not necessarily subject to democratic pressures -- allowing them to make moves where they are not, in fact, answerable to the American public. And that's a problem:

The United States is nominally a democracy, but it's sadly ridiculous to think this means very much. To get at the value of WikiLeaks, I think it's important to distinguish between the government--the temporary, elected authors of national policy--and the state--the permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus superficially but not fully controlled by the reigning government. The careerists scattered about the world in America's intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices largely operate behind a veil of secrecy executing policy which is itself largely secret. American citizens mostly have no idea what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is working out well. The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America's unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it.

As Scott Shane, the New York Times' national security reporter, puts it: "American taxpayers, American citizens pay for all these diplomatic operations overseas and you know, it is not a bad thing when Americans actually have a better understanding of those negotiations".

...

I'd say providing that information certainly would have been a socially worthy activity, even if it came as part of a more-or-less indiscriminate dump of illegally obtained documents. I'm glad to see that the quality of discussion over possible US efforts to stymie Iran's nuclear ambitions has already become more sophisticated and, well, better-informed due to the information provided by WikiLeaks.

A better informed public is not a bad thing... except if your entire job is based on trying to keep people in the dark. Look at who's complaining the most about Wikileaks and you realize that it's the people who benefit from not being held accountable for their actions.

Filed Under: democracy, free speech, information, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

Tim Wu Insists That Market Domination Is A Monopoly

from the um,-no dept

So we recently posted about Tim Wu's claims that the internet is filled with "monopolies," by noting that just being successful and dominating a market does not, in fact, create a monopoly on that market. Wu himself appears to have stopped by and made the following comment, which he asks us to "post... somewhere visible." Hopefully a new post will do the trick:

A firm that dominates a market is a monopoly. End of story. That is the definition of a monopoly. It is not necessarily an illegal monopoly, or a problem, but that's a different issue. It is, however, clearly a monopoly by any standard definition.

Now, I like Tim and agree with a lot of the stuff he says. But sometimes he goes out on a limb, and this is one time where I think he's just wrong. If we look at the basic definition of monopoly, you see that it's about having an exclusive situation -- being the only seller in the market, or having exclusive control. If that's the definition of monopoly, then Wu's claims that Google and Facebook are monopolies is clearly wrong. Neither company is the exclusive seller or has exclusive control over the markets they're in. And yet, I think most people agree that both companies "dominate" their markets.

In looking through some other definitions of monopoly as well, I only found one that included the word "dominate" and it's from Wiktionary, stating: " To dominate something by excluding everyone else." So that's a case where dominate is in the definition of monopoly, but it's conditional. It's not saying all domination of a market is a monopoly, but if you dominate by excluding everyone else. Again, I don't see how Google and Facebook are excluding anyone.

There are plenty of "monopolies" to be concerned about these days. But I think Wu is making a mistake in claiming that these services are monopolies.

Filed Under: competition, information, monopolies, tim wu

Success, By Itself, Is Not A Monopoly

from the don't-make-this-mistake dept

Lots of folks have been sending in Tim Wu's Wall Street Journal opinion piece about the rise of "internet monopolies." As with many of Wu's works, it's a worthwhile read, that I think gets some things quite right -- and others quite wrong. For example, Adam Thierer correctly notes that Wu is redefining "monopoly," in a way that does not make much sense. Basically, Wu is pointing out that certain firms seem to dominate certain markets: Google for search, Facebook for social networking, Amazon for shopping, etc. But (and while folks in Europe would likely disagree), domination of a market, by itself, does not create a monopoly, nor does it necessarily create a problem.

The problem with monopolies is when they limit the ability of others to compete overall. But there is little to stop serious competition from entering most of the spaces that Wu talks about. Yes, Google dominates search, but just a decade ago, people talked about how Google was ridiculous for entering a market so dominated by Alta Vista and Lycos. For years, Yahoo and Microsoft dominated webmail, until Google introduced Gmail. And Wu plays down just how dominant Friendster was in the early days. He claims there were lots of other social networks at the time -- but there are lots of other social networks today too. When Friendster was on top it was totally dominant. The fact is these markets change and most of the services that Wu talks about involve situations where the cost for users to move elsewhere is not that high. Yes, inertia keeps many people still, but if things really got that bad, it would just open up an opportunity for others to jump in.

Wu's larger concerns are that, in the long run, those dominant in these spaces today will then seek to hinder competition. They'll run to the government and seek to pass regulations favorable to them:

Declining information monopolists often find a lifeline of last resort in the form of Uncle Sam. The government has conferred its blessing on monopolies in information industries with unusual frequency. Sometimes this protection has yielded reciprocal benefits, with the owner of an information network offering the state something valuable in return, like warrantless wiretaps.

And, indeed, that could be a potential problem, if the government gives in to them. Certainly, watching the telcos and the entertainment industry embrace regulatory capture and abuse the regulatory process to protect their own businesses suggests this does happen. But the answer isn't to condemn the mis-identified concept of "information monopolies," but to increase openness and diligence against such abuses of the regulatory process.

The downsides to market domination are when those who are dominant abuse their position. We shouldn't condemn dominance for the sake of dominance, and we shouldn't automatically assume that dominance must equal abuse. Conflating the two makes it more difficult to detail actual abuse. When there is abuse -- it should absolutely be called out, but we need to be careful to focus on actual abuse, rather than pretending that success automatically means abuse.

Filed Under: information, monopolies, regulatory capture, tim wu
Companies: facebook, google

Clueless Commentators Think That It's Possible To Stop Wikileaks

from the good-luck-with-that dept

Marc Thiessen is a former Bush speechwriter, who seems to have tried to make a second career out of saying really clueless things as loudly as possible. Lately he's been on a rampage against Wikileaks, first suggesting that it somehow made sense to use US military power to track down and capture Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. This resulted in a reporter pointing out that Thiessen's response to Wikileaks is like the RIAA's response to Napster: destined to backfire due to a basic misunderstanding of the internet.

Apparently Thiessen either didn't read or understand that response. Or, perhaps in the business of being loud and wrong, he just doesn't care. He's since written a few more pieces attacking Wikileaks, including directly blaming it for an Afghan tribal leader being killed... though in the very next sentence he admits he doesn't know if that had anything to do with Wikileaks. Accuse first, find out the truth later, huh?

But, last Friday, Thiessen moved things up a notch on the RIAA-repeatifier, and suggested that with Assange's recent promise to release the remaining 15,000 documents in the recent collection -- after scrubbing them of identifying information -- the US should somehow "shut down" Wikileaks. Yeah, good luck with that. Kevin Poulsen, over at Wired, does a nice job educating Thiessen once again on what a clueless statement that is. You can't just shut down Wikileaks, and any attempt to do so would only get the material in question significantly more attention.

First of all, a US court once tried to shut down Wikileaks over a minor issue which, in turn, got the documents in question a lot more attention and eventually resulted in a dropped lawsuit. But, more importantly, for the brief time that the site was supposed to be blocked, it didn't take long for many, many, many people around the world to make sure it was not blocked at all. Just imagine the response if the US federal government tried to shut down Wikileaks? It would get a tremendous amount of attention, and would do absolutely nothing to stop the dissemination of the files in question.

It's amazing that anyone can claim to be knowledgeable about these things and suggest a brute force solution that would so obviously backfire. But, then again, the RIAA did do the same sort of thing for nearly a decade, and still is so dizzy from the backlash that it hasn't figured out what it did wrong.

Filed Under: information, marc thiessen, wikileaks

Rather Than Considering Information 'Property,' What About Looking At Productive vs. Destructive Uses?

from the one-path dept

A few folks sent over Larry Downes excellent recent analysis of both Google's moves in China and its lawsuit with Viacom over YouTube. He notes that the key similarity in both stories is how property rights don't make much sense for information, and how using a traditional property analysis in both cases leaves you coming up short. Specifically, with China, he points to a lack of interest in a marketplace of ideas, and with Viacom the problem is that intent is never taken into account. That is, with traditional property analysis, "theft" is done to take something away from someone else for your own good. But in the case of people posting videos to YouTube, the opposite is the case. People are trying to better share Viacom content, to better promote it. As such, Downes wonders if there's room for an "intent" mechanism in judging certain actions, with a question of whether the use is "productive" or "destructive":

Both these cases highlight why traditional property ideas don't fit well with information uses. What would work better? I present what I think is a more useful framework in the book, a view that is so far absent from the law of information. That framework would analyze information uses not under archaic laws of property but would rather weigh the use as being "productive" or "destructive" or both and determine if, on the whole, the net social value created by the use is positive. If so, it should not be treated as illegal, regardless of the law.

What do I mean? Since information can be used simultaneously by everyone and, after use, is still intact if not enhanced by the use, it's really unhelpful to think about information being "stolen" or, in the censorship context, of being "dangerous." Rather, the law should evaluate whether a use adds more value to information than it takes away. Information use that adds value (reviewing a movie) is productive and should be legal. A use that only takes value away (for example, identity theft and other forms of Internet fraud) is destructive and should be illegal. Uses that do both (copyright infringement in the service of promoting the underlying content) should be allowed if the net effect is positive.

Of course, there's nothing really new about this framework. In fact, with copyright at least, it takes us back to the Constitution -- which clearly set up copyright to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" (science, really, when talking about copyright). And, thus, the founders intended for it to be judged on the standard of whether or not it "promoted the progress," which meshes nicely with Downes' "productive" use of information that "adds more value to information than it takes away." Unfortunately, over the years, the definitions and regulations around copyright have been taken hostage by those who seek to use it as a pure monopoly right that only benefits them, rather than "promoting the progress." The whole attempt to pretend it's "property" is a result of those efforts. Hopefully using a more reasonable framework will bring us back to a more useful way of dealing with these issues.

Filed Under: china, copyright, information, property rights
Companies: google, viacom

Eric Schmidt On How To Encourage Innovation

from the don't-see-anything-about-stronger-copyright-laws dept

A bunch of folks have been sending in Google CEO Eric Schmidt's recent op-ed on how to encourage more innovation in the US. The suggestions make perfect sense and there's nothing in there that I disagree with. He says Congress should encourage more competition, and be careful not to pass legislation that favors incumbents over upstarts. This is absolutely true, but the likelihood of that happening is pretty dismal, given how big a role big company lobbyists have in drafting legislation, and given how campaign contributions work today. He also talks about more open information access and the importance of keeping talented skilled workers here, rather than pushing them to other countries.

Of course, it's notable that he says nothing about intellectual property. I'm guessing this is on purpose. Technically, the lever that the Constitution supposedly gives Congress to encourage innovation is intellectual property policy -- but these days, that clearly conflicts with Schmidt's first point about not passing laws that favor incumbents. These days, that's exactly what copyright and patent policy have become: protectionist measures to prop up incumbents at the expense of real innovators.

So, on that note, it's really refreshing to see recommendations for what Congress can do to encourage innovation that doesn't include ratcheting up IP laws -- though, it's disappointing that he didn't go so far as to suggest moving those laws in the other direction.

Filed Under: competition, eric schmidt, information, innovation