Why Our Future does not need Firemen (Fahrenheit 451)

The Providence Journal's Edward Achorn has just won my heart! His column on February 27, "Tossing Print onto the Digital Fire," considers the movie Fahrenheit 451. In that movie, based on the novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury, the government employs firemen, not to put out fires, but to start them -- with books and all other print! Achorn begins by considering that dystopian future, and comparing it with our current world. He says:

the film’s vision of the future looks rather silly these 40 years later. For one thing, there’s too much leisure time, walking and public transportation in it! And though giant, flat, wall-mounted TV screens have come to life in our age of plasma high-definition sets, the government requires no squads of Men in Black to keep a stupid and “happy” citizenry from reading books and newspapers.

We’re doing it ourselves.

The love of print on paper — the magic many of us felt in holding, touching, smelling books, and then reading, disappearing into a world of imagination, or learning about the past, or sounding out beautiful phrases, or meeting some of the smartest and most interesting humans who ever lived — seems to be vanishing right before our eyes.

Computers are providing our information now — in little snippets that, because of human neurology, fail to convey information the way the printed word does.

The brains of homo-sapiens react to pulped wood differently than to electronic light. A computer is great at giving us segments of sorted information at a quick speed. But reading print requires a special form of thinking, an ability to focus for long periods of time, to retain information, to pause and reflect. Print can be underscored with a finger, marked up with a pencil, carried easily under a tree or into a nook. I think that’s why even today’s college students print out computer material onto good old-fashioned paper.

Achorn notes that librarians, rushing to meet the perceived demand of their public, are pushing music, movies and computers. He considers the problems with this trend:

* People don't know they want or need something until they stumble over it by serendipity. Serendipity is finding a book on the shelf, or coming across a fascinating article on the way to the page you thought you wanted.

* Context is easily lost when you search in databases. For instance, you know where a statute fits into the structure of the code, because you had to look at the whole set of statutes to pull off the single volume that has your citation. You lose that physical marker of the structure when you search a database. Or, you use a table of contents to browse for the statute (or section in a treatise), and locate other relevant items as well (this is sort of like serendipity, but it's also context -- it matters WHERE in the subject-ordered universe things sit). You can browse the shelves of a library and find books you never find through the OPAC (maybe that means we need to improve our catalog further, but I think it also means physical location still carries meaning if you visit live).

* Achorn makes a fascinating argument, one I don't think I've seen before. He thinks that reading in print will become the purview of the power elite, and maybe an age-demarker, too. This is so much the other side of our long-time arguments about "information illiteracy" and the "digital divide" where the have-nots lack access to computers! Here is what he says:

This anti-print trend, naturally, sends tremors of terror through my industry. Newspaper circulation is in decline as older readers die. Many young people can’t be bothered. In the early 1970s, 70 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds read a daily newspaper. Today, the figure is 35 percent, and falling.

That’s a disaster for journalists, but it’s an even bigger disaster for our society. Printed papers offer something of incalculable value: context. It is easier to see how important something is by its placement on a page, something even a newspaper Web site cannot easily duplicate. Often, by means of turning a page, I stumble onto an important story about some topic I might never have clicked onto, or “called up” on a Web site’s search engine.

The elites will continue to read print, including history and fiction, because intelligence often translates to power and money. Books will survive, as will specialty periodicals. But, if our culture continues in its rapid flight from print to digitized information, many citizens will lose the ability to ponder seriously, to vote intelligently, or to understand the world around them.

Many in government would like that just fine. And just think: It can be done without the messy drama of burning anything!

Ironically, the image is of an audiobook of Bradbury's novel, at http://www.bestwebbuys.com

I have an idea! Let's design Librarian Insignia!

I had a conversation the other day with a former student and a former LR&W instructor. They commented first on how students needed to learn to respect librarians (Yay! gotta love these folks!), and then the conversation turned to how confusing it was for students who did not know if they were speaking to a professional librarian, a full time staffer or a student working part-time at the desk. This is a serious problem! How can students learn to genuflect to librarians properly if they don't know which of us are the librarians?

So, I had a brainstorm. Let's design something to set librarians apart. You could go modest and have a name tag. How boring! Nurses get those cute little hats (I don't think I've seen a nurse's hat for years, but you still see them in cartoons). Why couldn't there be a librarian uniform?

You could take off on the Order of the Coif (for top law students at school that belong to the Order; kind of like Phi Beta Kapp keys. But the coif means a little wig or bit of cloth like a hair-do:

In England of the medieval period, serjeants-at-law wore, as a required mark of their station, a close-fitting hood covering all but the face. As a consequence of this special headdress, they were known also as serjeants of the coif and their corporate society as the Order of the Coif. When wigs came into fashion,
the symbol became a circular piece of white lawn fastened to the top of the wig. What gave significance to the Order was the fact that for centuries only its members were appointed judges of the Court of Common Pleas or, later, of King's Bench.

Librarians could have the Order of the Bun.

Ooh, that's so stereotypical! No, no, no! How about black leather and whips? That would put some oomph into the Pop Cop routine! "You aren't allowed to have a disposable or open container drink in the library, sir. {CRACK!}" Or the Conan the Librarian outfit? Actually, I don't think that one would be very attractive on most of us. Hmm. Ideas, folks? How can we design some kind of insignia or uniform to mark us a librarians?

McCain and Kennedy set to file changes to immigration bill

The title above links to an article in today's Boston Globe written by Rick Klein.

Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John McCain are set to introduce a revised version of their sweeping plan to overhaul the nation's immigration laws, in a bill that's likely to restart a tense debate in Congress.

The measure, which is being drafted in consultation with the White House, will largely mirror the immigration bill that stalled last year, according to lawmakers and aides involved in the process. That measure was blocked primarily because House Republican leaders were adamantly opposed to provisions that would have allowed undocumented immigrants to become US citizens.

Though negotiations are still ongoing, this year's bill will most likely leave in place the 700-mile border fence, the creation of which was signed into law last year. It would also double the size of the US Border Patrol and add new means to crack down on employers who hire undocumented immigrants, a further attempt to assuage concerns about the nation's porous borders.

But the bill is likely to enrage advocates of a get-tough approach to immigration by allowing most of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants already in this country to earn legalized status. Early drafts of the bill would allow them to become citizens after about 12 years if they meet requirements such as learning English, passing a criminal background check, and paying back taxes and a $2,000 fine. (snip)

The bill, set to be introduced in the House and Senate as soon as next week, will also include a "guest worker" program for immigrants to work in the United States under temporary visas -- an oft-stated goal of President Bush. (snip)

The bill's sponsors are looking to jettison the three-tiered approach to citizenship included in last year's measure, which allowed undocumented immigrants who have been in the United States the longest to take a far easier path to citizenship than newer arrivals.

That system would have made it all but impossible for anyone with fewer than two years' residence in the country to gain citizenship -- a circumstance that some officials warned would probably have kept the status of a substantial number of immigrants unclear.

The bill's sponsors are still discussing whether to require undocumented immigrants to register at a US port of entry in order to qualify for citizenship. Though some immigrant-rights groups warn that meeting that qualification would be a burden for low-income families, many conservatives insist the so-called "touch back" is legitimate and should be a part of the citizenship process.

"It's a way to avoid the amnesty concerns, and avoid people breaking in line ahead of those who have been waiting outside of the country to enter legally," said Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican with ties to the White House.

Since the bill has not been filed yet, there is no link yet to a text of the bill.

Death of the Desktop

The main article in the Information Tech section of the March 2 Chronicle of Higher Education, titled and link above, looks at a fascinating survey at the University of Virginia, running frmo 2000 to now. They asked incoming freshmen about their computers and other digital paraphernalia. There is a dandy chart showing that vastly more freshmen come with laptops and only very few (90 compared to 2,993 laptop holders) are coming with desktop computers. The survey also shows that Macs are gaining steadily on Windows machines, rising from 2.8% in 2000 to 19.6% in 2006. The excellence of the Mac notebooks is undoubtedly driving the surge in popularity. But the survey also looks at "digital music devices," and IPods may also be giving the MacOS a halo effect increase in popularity. IPods seem to be by far the most popular brand, and 77% of freshmen at UVA are coming in with some kind of digital music player. Maybe I'll have to break down and get an IPod to listen to Jim's Check This Out programs!

Here are links to the UVA's own posting of the results of their survey, both in graph form: Computers
and More graphs. Thank you, UVA, for doing such an interesting survey over time, and then sharing the info! This age group is becoming our students, and will be our students in the future. Here at Suffolk, we feel increased pressure from our students to support the MacOS as well as the Windows system. I guess the pressure is just going to grow!

The beautiful drawing of an apple (edible kind) is by Boyd Purdom.

DMCA Takedown Notice vs. Fair Use

Visiting Professor Wendy Seltzer, while at Brooklyn Law School, posted a snip of the NFL standard copyright statement from the Super Bowl on YouTube. She wanted to show how exaggerated can be the claims of copyright holders. Alas, when the NFL sent a complaint to YouTube, they caved immediately and removed the snip. How's that for irony? The link in the title is to a brief article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2, 2007, Information Technology section, p. 32 in print. (more irony; I don't know if my readers will be able to link to the article without a Chronicle password).

Microsoft new attack on open source

Hiawatha Bray, in today's Boston Globe reports on the uproar in open source circles over a clause in the agreement whereby Microsoft purchased Novell, a Linux distributor.

Last year's surprise partnership between software titan Microsoft Corp. and leading Linux distributor Novell Inc. was supposed to be a kind of peace treaty. Instead, it's brought the open-source software community to the brink of civil war, over a provision that could help Microsoft sue other open-source software companies for patent violations.

As part of the deal, Novell agreed to compensate Microsoft for features in Linux that Microsoft claims to have patented. Critics say Novell has betrayed other Linux vendors and made it easier for Microsoft to threaten Linux companies with patent infringement suits.

"Anybody who has not signed a deal now . . . is somehow under a cloud," said Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, a group that oversees the creation of most Linux code. "When will Microsoft act against them?"

But for renowned open-source programmer and former Novell employee Jeremy Allison, the deal came at too high a price. Allison helped develop Samba, a popular program that lets Linux computers interact with machines running Windows. In December, Allison quit . "I left Novell over the deal because I felt it was not consistent with the responsibilities of an open-source company or an open-source programmer," Allison said. (snip)

But it's Novell's $40 million patent payment to Microsoft that infuriates open-source specialists. That's because Novell's SUSE Linux, like all versions of Linux, is made up of hundreds of pieces of software produced by the GNU Project, an open-source development group led by the Free Software Foundation in Cambridge. Linux companies like Novell and Red Hat compete by selling support for their Linux products. Meanwhile, the Free Software Foundation insists that no version of Linux violates patents held by Microsoft or anybody else.

Brown, the foundation's executive director, said that those who buy Novell's version of Linux will be shielded from Microsoft patent litigation. But people who buy from other Linux companies are still exposed to patent lawsuits, even though all versions of Linux are nearly identical. (snip)

within days of signing the deal with Novell, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told guests at a software industry conference that Linux contains Microsoft intellectual property. "In a sense you could say that anybody who has got Linux in their data center has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability," he said, suggesting that Microsoft might demand compensation from Linux users not covered by the Novell agreement. Microsoft agrees that Novell did not concede any patent violations in Linux, saying that the companies have "agreed to disagree" on the issue.

Leaders of the open-source movement are at work on a legal strategy that could let Novell retain the benefits of the deal, while preventing Microsoft from using it to attack other open-source firms. They're drafting a new version of the General Public License or GPL, the Free Software Foundation's legal rulebook, which governs how Linux and other open-source code can be used.

Under the new license, called GPL3, if a company waives its patent rights over GPL software distributed by one company, that waiver will apply to all other companies distributing the software. If the provision had been in place when Novell and Microsoft struck their deal, the patent protection won by Novell would have applied as well to Red Hat, Ubuntu, and other Linux versions. Microsoft would have forfeited its patent infringement claims against all Linux distributors.

The foundation hopes to have the new license completed within a couple of weeks. It can then issue future versions of Linux code under the license. As they're upgraded over time, the hundreds of programs that make up Novell's Linux will be covered by the new license.

Brown said GPL3 would ensure that no other Linux company will be able to make a separate peace with Microsoft. "We want to attempt to stop these type of deals being struck," he said.

Here is a link to a story on ZDNet/Australia, reporting Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer's talk to financial analysts in which he states

... the company's partnership with Novell, which it signed in November 2006, "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open-source world." (snip)

In a clear threat against open-source users, Ballmer repeated his earlier assertions that open source "is not free", referring to the possibility that Microsoft may sue Linux vendors. Microsoft has suggested that Linux software infringes some of its intellectual property, but has never named the patents in question.

Ballmer said: "I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal, but I do think it clearly establishes that open source is not free, and open source will have to respect the intellectual property rights of others just as any other competitor will."

And IT World Canada reports here on an interview with programmer Allison, about his leaving Novell in protest:

Don Marti, LinuxWorld.com: You’ve been in the news lately for leaving Novell over the controversial Novell/Microsoft patent licensing deal.

Jeremy Allison: That’s true.

LinuxWorld: Now, when I talked to you a while ago, you said, "I don’t give away my software. I cooperate with people who cooperate with me. How does that relate to what’s going on here, patent licensing-wise?"

Allison: Well, kind of peripherally really. Essentially, this is going back to the misnomer of "free software." A lot of people, corporations included, hear the word free, and they don’t think about the second meaning of the word free. They just think, "oh, it’s without cost." And, of course, it isn’t. And the cost is you have to reciprocate. You have to give exactly the same terms to people you give it to that you get yourself. It’s the share and share a like kind of license.

So, when somebody violates that essentially by negotiating favorite terms for themselves, that they don’t want to give to other people, then that I object to strenuously, up to and including leaving a company because of it. (snip)

LinuxWorld: Now the reason that you left Novell has to do with Microsoft and Novell setting up a deal to in effect pay Microsoft a patent royalty on copies of Linux sold.

Allison: That’s right. I mean essentially, it’s a patent cross license. They don’t call it that. They call it a covenant not to sue with customers. But when you boil it down, and you look at it really closely, it is a patent cross license. And section seven of the GPL specifically states that you can’t cut yourself a special patent cross license deal. Essentially it’s one of those situations where everyone has to hang together not separately, as it were. So, in other words, you can’t cut yourself special deals. And as I said, I wanted to like the deal. I had no objections. People were claiming, "oh, we just hate Microsoft." And this is not true. I actually had no objections whatsoever to any of the parts of the deal other than this one. But this one just killed it for me -- totally and completely I’m afraid. (snip)

LinuxWorld: One of the persistent rumors that’s going around is that certain large IT customers have already been paying Microsoft for patent licensing to cover their use of Linux, Samba and other free software projects. And the Novell deal -- isn’t it just taking that and doing the same kind of thing wholesale?

Allison: Yes, that’s true, actually. I mean I have had people come up to me and essentially off the record admit that they had been threatened by Microsoft and had got patent cross license and had essentially taken out a license for Microsoft patents on the free software that they were using, which they then cannot redistribute. I think that would be the restriction. I would have to look quite carefully. So, essentially that’s not allowed. But they’re not telling anyone about it. They’re completely doing it off the record.

The problem with the Novell deal is -- Novell gave Microsoft what Microsoft dearly wanted, which is a public admission that they think that Linux violates the Microsoft patent. So, that’s the difference between this and the sort of off-the-record quiet deals. This one is public. This one is Novell admitting, "yes, we think that Linux violates Microsoft patents." Now, of course, Novell has come out and said, "no, that’s not what we said at all. We don’t think that." To which, of course, Microsoft publicly humiliated them and said, "oh, yes, that’s really what you were saying." It’s kind of funny. They couldn’t even wait until the press conference was over to start threatening users with a Linux system.

There is more interesting and detailed stuff covered in the full article, which I recomend, but this is a long entry already, so I quit here.

Cheney and Scooter Libby -- wait - has Jim already dealt with this in a podcast?!

I want to share with non-Boston Globe subscribers the excellent op-ed by H.D.S. Greenway that ran today. Link to full above, and here is an excerpt:

What the perjury trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby really revealed was the astonishing lengths to which Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration went to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson for his 2003 claim that the administration had been dead wrong about Saddam Hussein trying to buy material from Niger to make nuclear weapons. The intensity and single mindedness of this pursuit leapt out from the testimony.

The decision to "out" a covert CIA officer, Wilson's wife, which is a federal crime, showed a kind of desperation. The concept that she had sent her husband to Niger on some kind of boondoggle, instead of to investigate the Saddam sale, is bizarre in the extreme. With all due respect, Niger is neither Wilson's, or anybody else's, ideal boondoggle destination.

Second , the intensity of the Wilson smear campaign, long meetings with favored reporters in hotels and on the phone, even the using of classified information, seems obsessive.

As The New York Times put it: The evidence shows Cheney and Libby "countermanding and even occasionally misleading colleagues at the highest levels of Mr. Bush's inner circle" as they pursued a "covert public relations campaign ," not only to protect the case for going to war, but also Cheney's connection to flawed intelligence.

There you have it. In the most dysfunctional administration of our time, the vice president's office felt free to use classified information to bolster a false impression of Saddam's nuclear capabilities -- going to absurd lengths to keep the truth from the American people and perhaps even the White House. According to testimony, Cheney got Bush to declassify secret material, but the president was not told how Cheney was going to use it.

Here is a nice summary of the case on Scooter Libby's trial from the New York Times, and this is a link to their handy Diary showing all the dates and witnesses laying out who knew what, when. Of course, the trial is with the jury, now shortened by one, but continuing with their original deliberations. Meanwhile, Cheney's shadow looms large:

... White House Watch reader Joseph Britt of Sun Prairie, Wis., writes in response to yesterday's column about Cheney's omnipresence: "It's interesting that very expansive claims of Presidential authority have over the last few years been made on behalf of a President so weak that he has done what none of his 42 predecessors ever did -- assign vast responsibilities for making and implementing policy to the one official he cannot fire. . . . I wonder that this aspect of the Bush administration has been so little remarked on; one would think that something that had never happened in over two centuries would attract more notice."

(from Dan Froomkin's White House Watch column in the Washington Post at http://tinyurl.com/2jzpsc .

The political cartoon above is by R.J. Matson. You can link to more political cartoons at Adam Zyglis' cartoon archive, http://tinyurl.com/yvzmn9

Bar-Bri, a monopoly? Who would have guessed!?

A New York Times article over the weekend covered a class-action federal law suit by law students who felt that Bar-Bri has been abusing them and competitors to maintain its monopoly. See the link in the title.

Crime-fighting with YouTube!

An AP story by Eric Tucker (link in title above), reports the growing use of YouTube by police departments. While the story notes that YouTube also gets used to record and publicize excessive police force in making arrests, the focus is a new and growing adoption by police to post videos of suspects. They ask the public to help them identify the people in the video. Sometimes it works really well, as in the incident

in Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada, where police in December posted a 72-second surveillance video to locate a suspect in a fatal stabbing outside a hip-hop concert. Det. Sgt. Jorge Lasso sent messages on Web sites frequented by hip-hop fans alerting them to the clip. He said the video received around 35,000 "hits," and police had enough information within two weeks for an arrest.

Other times, it has not been so quickly successful.

The article briefly mentions the issues of privacy that may be raised by this use of Internet technology. It's hard to analogize this posting of videos to the old "Wanted" posters. Can you say, "Ripe for a law review article?"

Congrats to Fred Shapiro!

Fred Shapiro, Associate Law Library Director at Yale, has an new book out, Yale Book of Quotations link. He receives a lengthy, entertaining and favorable review from Louis Menand in the current issue of The New Yorker, here. The Yale University Press site linked above, shows that the book was voted Book of the Year at Amazon.com, and received many more great reviews from all over the world. Fred is the only law librarian I know to have been auditioned for "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." He says he wasn't fast enough with the button and didn't even make it to air time. I think Fred may have found another way to fame and fortune, with this excellent, and popular, book! Well done!