A Fitting Tribute For Aaron Swartz: Researchers Post Free PDFs Of Their Research Online

from the it's-a-start dept

As we noted earlier, one thing that Aaron Swartz would have almost certainly wanted, as a memorial for his own accomplishments, would be for others to continue that work and to do much more with it. It's a small thing, but it's been inspiring to watch one aspect of that come to life: some academic researchers suggested a bit of simple civil disobedience in asking other researchers to post their own research publicly for others to download, and use the tag: #pdftribute. Many researchers quickly jumped at the chance, leading some to set up a website, appropriately called PDFtribute.net to collect all the tweets and the links to all of that research.

It's unclear how much of that research is technically "allowed" to be published like this. If you're not familiar with the dirty sausage making of academic research, many journals claim all copyrights on research (despite not paying a dime for it -- and, in some cases, even requiring the researchers or their institutions to pay to submit the papers in the first place). Many then have policies that bar the original researcher from further distributing the work, so it's likely that some of the released research is in violation of those agreements. That said, over the past few years, more and more journals (often due to significant pushback from academics) have recognized how ridiculous this is, and many have started to allow -- either officially or with a nod and a wink -- academics the right to post free copies of their own research on their own website. A few, much more enlightened journals even encourage researchers to post the work.

Either way, if one of the legacies of Aaron Swartz's all-too-short life is to get more people interested in open access to research, and to drive that movement forward, that's a good thing.

Filed Under: aaron swartz, civil disobedience, knowledge, open access, pdftribute, sharing

New Study: Megaupload Shutdown May Have Hurt Box Office For Smaller Movies

from the makes-sense dept

TorrentFreak points us to an interesting new study from Christian Peukert of the Munich School of Management, and Jorg Claussen from the Copenhagen Business School, that looks at the shutdown of Megaupload to see if they can determine what impact it had on the box office for various movies. The findings are probably not what Hollywood wanted to see: basically, the evidence shows that taking down Megaupload didn't suddenly send people running back to the theaters. In fact, for many, many movies there appeared to be a tiny decrease in box office take, though the results are not statistically significant. The one exception to this was for "blockbuster" films that appeared on more than 500 screens. There there was a similarly tiny increase in box office. Considering that the MPAA and studio heads keep insisting that they're really concerned about indie filmmakers when they try to stamp out piracy, this suggests they may be doing it wrong.

Of course, you shouldn't read too much into non-statistically significant findings, but at the very least the data does pretty clearly show that there wasn't a sudden rush by people to go back to the theaters once Megaupload went away. Furthermore, it's possible that at least some movies -- perhaps a lot of movies -- were slightly harmed by less word of mouth. As the researchers note:

Our counterintuitive finding may suggest support for the theoretical perspective of (social) network effects where file-sharing acts as a mechanism to spread information about a good from consumers with zero or low willingness to pay to users with high willingness to pay. The information-spreading effect of illegal downloads seems to be especially important for movies with smaller audiences.

At the very least, it seems like a good area of research that deserves more study going forward.

Filed Under: box office, infringement, movies, sharing, study
Companies: megaupload

Navy SEALs Lose Their Military Careers By Consulting With EA On Videogame

from the wargames dept

The Navy SEALs, specifically SEAL Team 6, forever cemented their already laudible place in American history when they killed former public enemy number one Osama bin Laden. Since then, their notoriety has landed the special forces group in the news several times, whether it was when Disney attempted to trademark their name (and later dropped it), or the controversey over a former SEAL releasing a book about the bin Laden raid.

Now, unfortunately, seven active duty members of SEAL Team 6, including one that was on the bin Laden raid, will effectively have their military careers ended for consulting with Electronic Arts on their recently released Medal of Honor: Warfighter game without having the work authorized by the Navy.

The seven were charged with the unauthorized showing of their official combat gear and dereliction of duty for disclosing classified material after an investigation found the seven to have worked as paid consultants for two days with the video game company Electronic Arts, according to a U.S. Navy official familiar with the investigation.

The seven, all senior enlisted sailors, received their punishment Thursday at their base in Virginia. All seven were given a letter of reprimand and their pay taken for two months. The move essentially prevents their chances for promotion and ends their military careers.

Even knowing as little as I do about being a Navy SEAL, it's difficult to critique the Navy brass for being upset. The showing of gear and unauthorized consulting may not seem like a huge deal to civilians, but SEAL Team 6 enjoys the absolute front line of the latest and greatest equipment the Navy deploys. In fact, the technical name for the group is actually the US Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU). Showing off the highly classified gear they use is a big deal.

That said, it's sad to see the careers of 7 SEALs ended over this, but it will also be interesting to see if this story Streisands EA's recently released game into skyrocketing sales.

Filed Under: classified info, navy seals, seal team 6, sharing, video games
Companies: ea

Wisconsin Warns: If You Tweet Photos Of Your Completed Ballot, You Can Go To Jail

from the civic-pride-and-handcuffs dept

It's election day, of course, and with that comes some amount of civic pride among a number of voters. That's a good thing, for the most part, and in this era of social media and people sharing photos and videos about their lives, plenty of people are sharing imagery of their own ballot. Perfectly reasonable, right? Well, yes, except when that runs into laws designed to keep your ballots secret. There are, of course, good intentions behind such laws. But mixed in with all those local laws concerning camera usage inside a polling place are some that could cause trouble for people doing something quite ordinary. For example, it appears that people in Wisconsin who decide to Instagram/Tweet/Facebook an image of their ballots, have committed a class I felony, election fraud. And this doesn't appear to just be a law that the state is going to ignore either. It's been issuing warnings to people that they could face felony charges if they do post those photos. Undoubtedly, many will be unaware that they're committing election fraud when they thought they were just showing civic pride. One hopes that officials in Wisconsin, and other states, take the context into account before moving forward with any legal responses.

Filed Under: civic pride, elections, felony, photographs, sharing, voting, wisconsin

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

California To Commission 50 Open Textbooks For 2013; Finnish Teachers Write One In A Weekend

from the just-can't-wait dept

Techdirt has been following open textbooks for some time now, and 2012 looks to be a bumper year for them. Here, for example, is a major initiative in the US:

California college students hit with tuition increases in recent years will get a little financial help after Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Thursday to create a website on which popular textbooks can be downloaded for free.

Twin bills by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) will give students free digital access to 50 core textbooks for lower-division courses offered by the University of California, California State University and California Community College systems. Hard copies of the texts would cost $20.

The bill establishes a new California Open Education Resources Council, which will be required to choose the 50 core textbooks and then:

to establish a competitive request-for-proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties would apply for funds to produce, in 2013, 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks

which would be released under a cc-by license. The move is likely to be significant nationally, as an article in The Textbook Guru points out:

The ripple effect of this legislation should spread way past California and throughout the whole country. With quality publisher-grade peer-reviewed options becoming newly available in open format and competing against the high-priced publishers' textbooks, faculty will need to pause to review these and see how they can be used in their classroom.

After all, if high-quality textbooks are freely available in digital form -- or hence for low prices as printed copies -- hard-pressed universities elsewhere in the US (and internationally) would be crazy not to consider them. The cc-by license means that the text can be freely modified for local needs as necessary, or translated.

As the above indicates, those 50 titles won't be ready until next year. Meanwhile, in Finland, some teachers decided to produce something a little sooner:

A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening.

You can find the book's LaTeX source code in a repository on Github: it's under the same cc-by license as the California books, so you can adapt it freely -- if you can read Finnish....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: california, creative commons, education, finland, learning, open textbooks, sharing, textbooks

Worth Noting: Amanda Palmer's 'Free' Album Debuted At Number 10 On The Billboard Charts

from the oh,-look-at-that dept

We've written plenty about Amanda Palmer and the various cool things she's done to connect with fans and give them a reason to buy. She's stopped by on occasion to do some guest posting as well. Obviously, a lot of the recent attention has been about her Kickstarter campaign, but there was one tidbit that seemed worth calling attention to. A week and a half ago, when the album was officially released... it debuted in the number 10 spot on the Billboard charts. This is much more impressive than it might sound. You may recall when Dan Bull tried to reach the charts with his free single. It worked in the UK, but in the US, they calculate the charts in a convoluted way that includes radio airplay as well as sales. Getting airplay is very, very difficult if you're not on a major label who pays crazy money to "promoters" in the latest attempt to do payola that doesn't run afoul of the law. So to get on the charts with a totally independent album, with no label at all, is really quite amazing.

And, to do it with an album that is available for free for those who want it is just as amazing. Yes, that's right, free. While there's been plenty of talk about the Kickstarter aspect, there's also the fact that she's offering it as a pure pay what you want model off of her site, where there's even a button to click to get the album for free... and this part where she explains why it's okay to get the album for free (though she wouldn't mind if you paid too...) in which she also encourages people to share it: If you can't see that, it says:

DEAR DOWNLOADER of MUSIC

i firmly believe in music being as free as possible. unlocked. shared and spread.

i believe that in order for artists to survive and create, their audiences need to step up and directly support them. honor system.
no judgment.
if you’re broke – take it. if you love it, come back and kick in later when you have the money.
if you’re rich, think about who you might be karmically covering if you really love this record.

the store below has two versions of the record. one is totally free, and one has a minimum price of $1.00 so that i can cover the cost of covering other artists’ songs.

once you have it, SHARE SHARE SHARE! COPY COPY COPY! SPREAD THE EVIL!!!
we are the media.

LOVE, afp

But, you know, it's impossible to make money when people share your stuff, right? Maybe if you actually spend time connecting with fans, you'll discover that they're more than happy to support you, as they're supporting Amanda.

Filed Under: amanda palmer, billboard charts, crowdfunding, free, music, sharing

New Yorker Demands Licensing Fee To Repost 'Nipplegate' Comic On Facebook

from the well-how-about-that dept

Last week, we were among many who discussed the so-called "Nipplegate" scandal, in which overly prudish (or overly busy) Facebook moderators decided that a pair of dots representing nipples in a comic drawing of Adam and Eve constituted a "female nipple bulge". Such bulges have been deemed scandalous to society (or something like that) and banned from Facebook. Again, for reference, this is the comic strip we're discussing: The story at the New Yorker, in which they humorously discuss "Nipplegate", got tons of attention, of course. And lots of other publications (like ours) wrote about it -- nearly all of whom also showed the comic in question. Its kind of difficult to discuss the story without showing the comic so that people can understand it. In our case, we encouraged people to read the full article at The New Yorker, which is rather entertaining.

Either way, the reposting of the image in other articles discussing it seems like a rather classic case of fair use. Paul Levy, over at Public Citizen, has a writeup about the incident, in which he echoes the point I tried to make, concerning the danger of becoming too reliant on a platform like Facebook as your way of expressing yourself, when it's subject to the random moderation whims of staffers who think that a pair of dot nipples might arouse prurient interests.

However, Levy, in an aside, mentioned this:

Although the New Yorker demanded a license fee if I published the image on my own Facebook page, which I had in mind to do just to be in Facebook's face, I don't see how you can understand this controversy without seeing the image.

Levy was kind enough to share with me the email exchange about the "demand" for a license fee. A "Sr. Manager" for "Content Sales & Licensing" told him that Conde Nast has "license fees for all of our cartoons to be posted online" and offered to create an invoice for him. He responded by pointing out that he's not interested in paying a fee, but suggesting (correctly) that Conde Nast/The New Yorker's interests are clearly best served by having that image go viral, especially on Facebook, given the earlier ridiculous moderation.

The licensing woman would not budge:

Yes unfortunately there will be a cost. Sorry about that

Now, what Paul was asking for is slightly different than the news fair use case. He's talking about encouraging fans to repost the image on Facebook, in part to "be in Facebook's face," about the stupidity of banning that comic, and in part (I would assume) to test the consistency of Facebook's "review" process. Of course, Facebook has since apologized and admitted this was a mistake -- but you could see how it would be beneficial to have the image spread widely, not just in terms of general publicity, but also to make a larger point about Facebook's arbitrary moderation practices.

Admittedly, the person he was talking to is a "content sales & licensing" person -- so you could make the argument that her role is solely to focus on, you know, licensing and selling Conde Nast's content, and not to consider other things like the beneficial statement that could be made by having Facebook flooded with people reposting that comic, or even the fair use argument for reposting such an image. Unfortunately, this is actually a symptom of a larger problem. We've so "asset-ized" content (thanks to copyright) that people only view it through a single framework -- "what can we license" -- rather than looking at the reality of the situation and determining what's actually best for the company (possibility of making a viral statement) or the legal realities (like fair use). To its credit, I don't believe Conde Nast has reached out to anyone who actually posted the comic to get them to stop, but Paul's point is a good one: the company could have made an even bigger statement by encouraging people to share the comic -- but its natural reaction was merely to go straight to figuring out how much money it could extract from him.

Filed Under: fair use, license fees, new yorker, nipplegate, reposting, sharing
Companies: conde nast, facebook

New Documents Show That Feds Share License Plate Scanning Data With Insurance Firms

from the crony-capitalism dept

It's one thing for governments to make use of license plate scanning equipment to catalog what cars are crossing their borders. But it takes it to a whole different level to then share that data with insurance firms. However, it appears that's exactly what the US government is doing. A Freedom of Information Act request by privacy group EPIC, discovered that US Customs (part of Homeland Security) is sharing license plate scans with the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB), which is actually an organization made up of just about every insurance company.

The reasons for such sharing of info may appear to be noble. It's technically to try to spot stolen vehicles.

The purpose of furnishing LPR information is to verify that vehicles departing from and arriving into the United States are not stolen vehicles. NICB has access to unique information regarding stolen vehicles, as well as the means of exchanging information regarding stolen vehicles with member insurance company Special Investigative Units and Federal and State law enforcement authorities.

The memorandum of understanding insists that the data can only be used for these purposes, but it's unclear if there's any real way to police that, and it certainly means that the uses by NICB are not subject to a FOIA request, since they're not a part of the government. The only "remedy" presented for a firm that uses the information otherwise is to be stricken from the "shared" list. There are also some concerns that even the sharing of the info may be in violation of existing laws.

Filed Under: insurance companies, license plates, privacy, sharing
Companies: nicb