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new media and technology, copyright, media theory

new media and technology, copyright, media theory

Digital Filmmaking

June 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

professional advice on embracing new technology

Mike Figgis is the director of one of my favourite films, Liebestraum, as well as the much better known Leaving Las Vegas. He’s multi-talented as a director, a musician, and a writer; but like most film directors (most recently David Lynch) he’s now embracing the new possibilities of digital filmmaking. Suddenly, all the laborious paraphernalia of the Hollywood film-making process can be concentrated into a cheap hand-held digital camera that we could buy from Amazon for less than the price of an entry level laptop.

Digital FimmakingFiggis has taken on the new possibilities that these technological developments have made available. And in this book he’s sharing his reflections on the art of film-making in a way which is addressing both an amateur YouTube enthusiast or a serious film school would-be at the same time.

And none of his advice is theoretical: he’s actually using the new technology in making his own films. It’s not so much a book of practical tips: this is more the philosophy of film-making. But he’s acutely anti-snobbish about using the new equipment available. His emphasis is on the love of your equipment – get to know it, use its features, and don’t imagine your talent is being held back by lack of access to the latest kit.

It’s a terrific insight into the consciousness of a creative person: he thinks out loud concerning the creative process – all the time keeping in mind the practical matters of the medium in which he is working and how much it costs.

As the story progresses from one level of film technology to the next, you can feel his creative hunger coming off the page. Instead of telling camera and lighting technicians what you’re looking for, why not do it all yourself? Which is what he did – even after being enmeshed with Hollywood. Indeed, as he argues, especially after being so. The new technology puts more control into the hands of the director.

He goes into a lot of interesting professional detail on such matters as lighting, camera movement(s) and dealing with actors – on all of which issues it seems he likes being in control, but with a sympathetic respect for the professionalism of others.

I was interested to note that when it got to the point of post-production editing, he dealt with the problem of having so much, in fact too much material – and the solution to this problem is what’s called in the IT world ‘meta-tagging’ – that is, you need to name and log what you’ve got, in order to control the architecture of the final product.

His two final topics are music on soundtracks and film distribution – on both of which he knows whereof he speaks. He’s a qualified music teacher and a former keyboards player with Roxy Music. It was his soundtrack for Liebestraum which first alerted me to the quality of his work. He has lots of ingenious suggestions for independent filmmakers and ideas galore for anybody who is prepared to engage in new digital technology.

It’s a pity the book isn’t illustrated – because from the text it’s quite clear that Figgis makes a detailed record of his work process, and it would have been useful to see a few screenshots of the effects and techniques he’s talking about. But as a guide to the new possibilities of film-making, it’s truly inspirational.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Mike Figgis, Digital Filmmaking, London: Faber, 2007, pp.158, ISBN: 0571226256


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Filed Under: Media Tagged With: Digital Fimmaking, Film, Media, Open Sources

Dust or Magic

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

secrets of successful multimedia design

Dust or Magic is a book for people who want to know about or work in the new media. It takes the line of revealing the truth about how multimedia projects really work – pointing to both successes and complete turkeys. Bob Hughes has been active in the field over its last decade, and he discusses a fascinating range of examples – from websites and CD-ROMs to kiosk programs and interactive video.

Dust or MagicHe starts with an account of digital technology from Alan Turing onwards – but the chronology darts backwards and forwards from Russian constructivists to Greek theatre and back again to Richard Wagner. Later, he settles down to a slightly smoother chronology, but without sacrificing his wide range of reference. He offers Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, and Ted Nelson as key pioneers and presents excellent accounts of their work.

This is followed by detailed sketches of the pioneers of Virtual Reality, Interactive Video, and early hypertext programs such as Guide, Toolbook, and Hypercard – including developments which have been passed by which he claims could be revived with the development of new technology.

There’s something of an intellectual dip in the middle of the book when he compares English revolutionaries of the seventeenth century with the Guerilla Girls, and he celebrates web sites and Hyperstacks which are not much more than collections of idiosyncratic enthusiasms. Fortunately, the level rises again with a whole chapter devoted to Voyager, which he claims made innovations with the bare tools [Hypercard] available at the time.

The latter parts of the book are devoted to accounts of working on multimedia projects – one for the Nationwide Building Society, of all people – and he covers the disaster of the Microsoft ‘Sendak’ project, before passing on to discuss theories of ‘creativity’ and report on forays into the world of advertising. He discusses the psychology of idea-generation, its relation to programming and the world of computer games, the advantages of motion and sounds on screen, and there are some interesting observations on the need for visual ‘transitions’ between one screen of information and another.

Reading all this, you get an invigorating sense of intellectual excitement, the downside of which is that no single idea is pursued to any depth. This is a weakness occasionally reinforced by a surprisingly cavalier attitude towards his readers – ‘sorry – I’ve lost the URL’.

And yet he’s actually gone to the trouble of locating the original authors of some of these programs – an admirable trait in an age when a lot of software has a lifespan of five years or less. He’s very fond of using metaphors to explain his arguments, and there are lots of interesting historical anecdotes woven as side-bars into the text. At its best, he throws up novel connections from different media and sources of technology; at its weakest, he flits from one unexamined generalisation to another.

Apart from concluding that projects are best carried out by small teams, he never seems to get round to explaining the ‘secret’ in his sub-title, but this is a lively and stimulating introduction to the history of software development which should go onto the reading list of anyone who wants to know what happens on real-life projects. It’s a revelation of the costly disasters as well as a celebration of the often unsung heroes of new technology during the last thirty years.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Bob Hughes, Dust or Magic: Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design, London: Addison-Wesley, 2000, pp.264, ISBN: 0201360713


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Filed Under: Information Design, Media, Online Learning Tagged With: Communication, Media, Multimedia, Online learning, Technology

Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights

July 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

guide for businesses, innovative and creative individuals

Anybody involved in a creative project – particularly where a number of people are involved – knows that an early question will always be raised: “Who owns the intellectual property rights?” Or you could be selling widgets, only to find that another company has started doing the same thing. Can you sue them – or are they more likely to sue you? The product can be a manufactured object, it could be a service, or an ‘intellectual asset’. It could be designing a company web site, running a training course, writing a product guidance manual, devising a manufacturing process, or putting on a television programme.

Enforcing Intellectual Property RightsHistory is littered with cases of people who assumed that they had the rights to something they had written or produced – only to find the profits from their labours taken by somebody else. This book is a straightforward guide to all the information and legal advice you will need to guard your rights to intellectual property. It’s written by a practising barrister who specialises in giving advice to individuals and small businesses. Jane Lambert is obviously committed to helping people in the creative industries, and this is even reflected in the fact that she takes the trouble to write a book on legal matters in a style which is readily understandable – and quite entertaining.

She starts with two useful glossaries of intellectual property terms – moral rights, passing off, intellectual assets, and the differences between copyright and patent. These are followed by quite an engaging scenario in which someone seeks legal advice on the copyright to household decorations which are being made in China and imported.

The explanations being given illustrate how an apparently simple case is fraught with all sorts of legal complexities. It’s amazing to learn how different laws and conventions apply to different types of product. Copyright for imaginative fiction is seventy years after the author’s death for instance, whereas for industrial design it’s twenty-five years, and a patent only lasts for twenty.

Jane Lambert is a big fan of the Internet, and full web addresses are given for all her sources of information. She explains the common cases of protecting brands and domain names, as well as trademark infringement – against which the UK legal system offers quite strong protection. However, it’s important to realise that the law may differ in countries outside Europe and the USA, and that in some places copying somebody else’s work may not be regarded as illegal.

Having explained the rights in IPR, she then goes on to cover the resolution of disputes which arise in the courts over issues of ownership. And even though she earns her living in a practise which specialises in such cases, she warns against using the system unless it is absolutely necessary – both because it is so expensive and because disputes can often be resolved outside it. She also explains how the whole system of civil procedures was reformed ten years ago (by Lord Chief Justice Woolf).

But if you really do want to prosecute a case she explains the procedure – which usually begins with a ‘cease and desist’ letter. It should not begin with any form of threats or bullying – because such actions can themselves result in prosecution.

The legal system now requires both claimant and defendant to show that they have done everything to seek resolution and not made matters worse. In the event that agreement cannot be reached, there are a number of forms of arbitration and adjudication which can be followed.

And if all else fails, and you end up in a court of law, she explains how court cases are conducted, who decides what, and how the best cases can be made. As she explains as an aside, many people falsely believe that the success of a case depends up some form of brilliant court room oratory (as in movies). But the truth is more prosaic: it depends largely upon a well-researched and carefully prepared case – which costs time, money, and skill.

But in the event that you might need them, she also offers some templates for standard letters used in making claims and defences – as well as tips on preparing your strongest case. This is a sane, humane, and very readable account of a very complex set of issues. Anyone contemplating an entry into this arena would do very well to prepare themselves by taking her advice.

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Jane Lambert, Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights, London: Gower, 2009, pp.164, ISBN: 0566087146


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Filed Under: e-Commerce, Media Tagged With: Business, Copyright, e-Commerce, Intellectual Property Rights, IPR, Media, Publishing

Essays on the History of Copyright

August 4, 2010 by Roy Johnson

This is a collection of academic essays that seeks to establish legitimacy for a relatively new intellectual discipline – the study of the history of copyright. The editors in their introduction maintain that new academic disciplines arise when it generally becomes felt that there is need for them. It is certainly true that many of the technological advances of the last twenty years (in the digitization, reproduction, re-purposing, transmogrification, and distribution of various media) have brought issues of copyright, ownership, and intellectual property rights into sharp focus. And it’s important to realise that this does not only affect the printed word: films, photographs, music, paintings, even simple trademarks and branding logos have all been the subject of amazingly expensive legal disputes recently.

Power and Privilege: Essays on the History of CopyrightThe essays as you might expect take a long historical perspective. Issues of copyright (indeed, even of authorship itself) did not arise as a problem until the invention of the printing press made the mass production of an important cultural object (the book) available in the fifteenth century. So, the collection begins with the granting of the first patent in 1469 for a five year printing monopoly in Venice. It’s interesting to note that since many of the first books put into general circulation were versions of Greek and Roman classics, it was their formal appearance, font design, and physical shape that was protected, not their intellectual content or authorship.

It was only later, as the number of original published works started to rise, that individual authors began to apply for what we would now call copyright; and in their cases it was permission to print and sell a single edition of a work over a long enough time span (five years) to give them a chance to cover initial costs.

In 1644 Milton issued his Areopagitica as a protest against state censorship and in favour of freedom of the press. The important point to stress here is that he was explicitly championing the free circulation of ideas. The licence-free period that followed saw the establishment of English newspapers, with sales by 1711 of up to 70,000 per week.

Meanwhile, in America, the arrival of the first printing press in Massachusetts was greeted with prohibitions, censorship, licensing, and colonial control. It was only after the War of Independence that authors successfully applied for copyright to their work.

There are chapters tracing the slight variations in law that sprang up in France, Italy, and Germany. All sorts of different systems were tried, from temporary arrangements affecting only a single work, to ‘perpetual copyright’.

There are (understandably) quite a lot of legal and even philosophical issues at stake in some of these battles over rights and regulations. These become even more complex as the first attempts were made in the late nineteenth century to establish international agreements. It should be remembered that authors such as Dickens were forced to struggle to establish their rights in the USA.

Many of today’s commercial strategies were already in play in previous centuries – so long as the technological means to create copies and profit were available. The painter Benjamin West made £400 for his famous 1771 depiction of The Death of General Woolfe, but almost one hundred times more from the engravings that were made from it.

It is also worth noting that two other factors complicated the drafting of legislation on these matters. One was the fact that the law (in Britain) was also being framed to protect the interest of the owners or the public against possibly unscrupulous artists. The second was that the idea that a work of art should be ‘new and original’ was a surprisingly late consideration, introduced only to the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Bill.

There was also separate legislation covering copyright in works of dramatic art and performance rights. Amazingly, the nineteenth century world of theatre was rife with stenographers in the audience recording the text of new plays as they were acted out on stage. These were then sold on to other theatre managers, who often claimed copyright, rather than the original author.

What this impressive collection of articles does not do is bring the arguments up into the digital age. That is understandable when its very objective is to establish a long history on which to build a new discipline. But anyone with the slightest interest in these issues of copyright and intellectual property rights will be keen to know how digitization and ease of reproduction are changing many of the traditional assumptions. Mashups, print-on-demand, open source software, file-sharing, and the new ‘hybrid economies’ of eCommerce are changing the face of copyright, ownership, and commercial rights. To keep up with these issues, you will need to look beyond the traditionalists to the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow.

It’s an interesting book production in its own right. OpenBook Publishers are a new business supplying academic print on demand (PoD) titles. The books they publish are available, free to view on line as searchable PDFs – but a file can quickly be turned into a conventionally printed and bound book for those who wish to pay for it. This title, I must say, is a handsome volume you would be pleased to have on your shelves.

History of Copyright   Buy the book at Amazon UK
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© Roy Johnson 2010


Ronan Deazeley et al (eds), Power and Privilege: Essays on the History of Copyright, Cambridge: Open Book Publishing, 2010, pp.438, ISBN: 190692418X


Copyright links

Red button Content: Copyright and DRM

Red button Intellectual Property and Open Source

Red button Plagiarism, Copyright, and New Media


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Filed Under: Media, Publishing Tagged With: Copyright, Cultural history, History of Copyright, Intellectual Property Rights, Media, Publishing, Writing

Essential Blogging

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

writing for the Web – a popular revolution

Blogs (it’s a contraction of Web Logs) are a form of personal diary kept as Web pages. They can record anything from the trivial details of your own life to online political manifestos. But why would anybody want to read them? Well, some people have transformed the personal diary into an art form, most sprinkle their pages with useful links, others develop what amounts to a one-person daily newspaper, and a few manage to spin out an entirely new form of instant journalism.

Essential Blogging It’s so easy, you see. All you need to do is register with a Blogging site, type your thoughts into the templates they provide, and press the Go button. A few seconds later, you’re published on the Web. Of course there’s a little more to it than that – but not much. This book offers a tour of the best blogging sites, how to upload and maintain your pages, and how to configure the options to get the best effects.

A series of chapters, clearly written by enthusiasts, takes you through which Blog sites and software are available – from Blogger, Radio Userland (free software), Moveable Type, and WordPress. Some of these have developed rapidly beyond mere blogging tools into small-scale content management systems.

All this is expanding at a breathtaking rate. Some people even have blogs running alongside serious Web sites. When you come to look at the thousands upon thousands of blogs, you will be amazed at the variety and the skill of the best.

There’s an element of evangelical fervour in all this. Many bloggers seem like techno-Hippies, but the most thoughtful, such as Meg Hourihan, have made claims for blogging as a new form of writing:

Freed from the constraints of the printed page (or any concept of ‘page’), an author can now blog a short thought that previously would have gone unwritten. The weblog’s post unit liberates the writer from word count.

And just in case you think this might all be a little trivial, these blogs are real Web pages. So they are tracked by search engines – and if enough people read them, they might therefore become ‘famous’. Many are already joining affiliate programmes and even attracting advertising.

If you want to join in this frenzy of personal expression, build your own soap box, or develop your own one-person newspaper – everything you need by way of instructions is in this one book.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Cory Doctorow et al, Essential Blogging, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2002, pp.244, ISBN: 0596003889


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Flickr Hacks

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

tips and tools for sharing photos online

Photo blogging is one of the most expansive parts of the Internet and online media just at the moment. You take a picture with your digital camera or your mobile phone, and blog it straight onto a public site. Flickr is owned by Yahoo! They allow you to upload your photos into a web space, and you are given 20MB per month, which is quite generous. Instead of keeping your snaps just for yourself and family members on your hard disk, you can store them, share them with the world, tag them, and make them available for worldwide consumption. You can even make money out of them if you play your cards right.

Flickr HacksAlthough your photos are in the public domain, you can control who is allowed to see them. There are full instructions here for setting your privacy options. Tagging and meta-data are fully explained (that’s giving titles, categories, and links to your photos) and there are also tips on resizing photos to save on your allotted storage space.

When extra information in the form of meta-tags is added to the images, all sorts of new possibilities are created. Paul Bausch shows games involving comparisons with similarly tagged photos, and he demonstrates how geo-tagged images can be mapped.

With so many of these images being viewed and viewed across the web, it’s good that he also explains issues of copyright and licensing, including the relatively new Creative Commons licences.

He also show how you can subscribe to a news feed which will notify you when other people upload new images. Then the later part of the book offers some fairly simple scripts for constructing screensavers, tracking your friends’ favourites, and even plotting your personal contacts using Google Maps.

Assuming you eventually end up with a large collection of photos, the next more advanced level shows you how to back up the collection, then how to store and sort them.

Finally, for those who might wish to interact with Flickr and operate at an administrator level, there are some advanced scripts which allow you to act as a moderator, create custom mosaics and collages, and mash up your photos to produce all sorts of special effects.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Paul Bausch, Flickr Hacks, Sebastopol: CA, O’Reilly, 2006, pp.335, ISBN: 0596102453


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Hamlet on the Holodeck

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

reflections on hypertext and story-telling

Janet Murray has an intellectual background which will be common to many who have passed through higher education since the 1960s. She is rooted in her training in the humanities (English Literature) – but she has been touched by developments in computer science, and wishes to combine the two disciplines. She holds simultaneously a deep reverence for post-Renaissance book-based traditional learning and an appreciation that digitised texts, non-sequential narratives, and multimedia effects might produce new artistic forms. Hamlet on the Holodeck is an exploration of what has been done to develop these new forms – and what might be done in the future. It is a study which has become a central text in the required reading on hypertext. As a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – the home of research and development in multimedia – she knows the field well.

Hamlet on the HolodeckHer examination starts with a survey of science fiction and various modern narratives which explore the possibilities of parallel universes or alternative realities – including 3-D movies and virtual reality simulators. She describes the existing technology with enthusiasm – although in each case she ends up in the realm of ‘Imagine if this could be put to use in …’ rather than what has been done. But this is understandable. After all, we are considering an extremely new technology. When printing was first invented, books were produced which imitated written manuscripts, just as in our own age cinema and radio first imitated the live theatre. Maybe the new digital narrative forms have not yet emerged.

She discusses videogames, virtual dungeons (MUDs and MOOs) and literary hypertexts, including the best known – Michael Joyce’s Afternoon and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden. She also considers the advantages and weaknesses of Web-based narrative experiments. These include the complex worlds which are generated around TV soap operas for instance – which have archives of back footage linked to fan-generated materials.

The main problem is that she doesn’t really confront the most fundamental philosophical principle of fictional narratives. This is that consumers usually want and appreciate a series of events which has been artfully conceived and structured by somebody else. Such narratives represent, in no matter how diffuse a form, a distinctive point of view or perspective on the world.

There is much discussion of journeys through mazes, fantasy quests, dragon-slaying, and all the usual clichés of games with names such as Pong, Zork, and Doom. However, when it comes to predicting what the new forms might be, these tend to be simply different ways of telling the same story – multiple viewpoints – a strategy which has been adopted in most art forms, and which is not intrinsically connected to computers or hypertext. Her arguments and exposition seem more fruitful when she is discussing the rapidly merging world of the Web and television.

Her examination of current multimedia productions is wide-ranging and thorough, although there are one or two assumptions about what is likely to develop which seem open to question. The first is that computers will somehow participate in the generation of basic narratives. The second is that readers will be invited to participate in the story. The third is that a video games or MUDs are likely to be the most likely form to be developed. These are certainly interesting possibilities, but whether they are necessary elements of the new forms or not, only convincing evidence will tell.

However, these are reservations of a rather theoretical nature. At a practical level, anyone interested in the future possibilities of story-telling using computer technology should read this book. Its comprehensive survey of current practice is an inspiring starting point for what might be achieved in the digital future.

© Roy Johnson 2001

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Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp.324, ISBN: 0262631873


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Here Comes Everybody

October 22, 2010 by Roy Johnson

how change happens when people come together

Clay Shirky’s basic argument in Here Comes Everybody is that the advent of social media (email, FaceBook, MySpace, bulletin boards, Flickr) has fundamentally changed people’s ability to form and act in groups, because it has reduced the cost of doing so effectively to nothing. This is a similar argument to Chris Anderson’s in The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price – that modern digital technology has created a new set of tools and zero-cost opportunities for people to do things that hitherto were the province of small, rich elites.

Here Comes EverybodyThe classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, as the tide of ‘citizen reporters’ grew, the newspapers started their own blogs – written by paid journalists (which is not the same thing of course). Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. And that’s where they’re at now. Almost all national daily newspapers (in the UK anyway) make a loss. They are what blogger Guido Fawkes calls ‘vanity publishing’. The Guardian newspaper for instance has a daily circulation of only 280,000 copies, and operates at a loss of £171 million per year. It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader.

A propos ‘professional’ journalists complaining that bloggers are not really ‘citizen journalists’ Shirky makes the perceptive observation that a) none of them claims to be, and b) they are something else that’s new, which the mainstream media hasn’t yet recognised.

There is very little difference between a paid journalist who blogs (such as Iain Martin for the Wall Street Journal) and Guido Fawkes (libertarian individual blogger) except that Guido is more likely to take risks in exposing political corruption and scandal fraud, whilst Iain’s column is largely amusing and well-informed comment on the same events after they have been exposed.

The other general point Shirky makes is that all technological revolutions (such as the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century) are followed not by immediate change, but by a period of uncertainty and confusion whilst the new replaces the old. At first the old continues, and the new may go unrecognised. But as soon as the new is ubiquitously adopted, it displaces the old. In the early Renaissance scribes were highly regarded practitioners of book production – but the press made them redundant within fifty years.

The same is happening now. We don’t know clearly yet what form the outcomes of fully developed social media will take, but it’s quite obvious already that they are displacing older media such as fax machines (remember those) printed newspapers, film cameras, and handwritten letters.

Shirky has a very good chapter on Wikipedia in which he explains why it is so successful, even though it is written by unpaid, self-selecting volunteers. The reason is that it has self-correction built into its system, and it appeals to people’s altruism. Anybody can add their two pennorth, and if they get something wrong somebody else will correct it – often within a matter of minutes.

There’s more to it than that of course. He produces the now familiar hockey stick graph to show that some systems (as in the Long Tail argument) are more successful because a lot of small instances can add up to more than one big one.

The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.

The other basic philosophic argument at work here is that of difference in degree (more of the same) and difference in kind (something new).’What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. That sharing is coming from relatively simple but profound technological devices such as email, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and other social media.’

Every stage of his argument is backed up with practical examples – from the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests organising self-support groups to thwart the Vatican, to pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt, China, and Belarus using Twitter to organise demonstrations.

He makes the excellent point that the success of open source software comes from the fact that because it is based on voluntary contributions of labour, it can afford to fail. For every Linux success story, there are thousands of OSS projects that don’t get off the ground. Commercial software developers can’t afford that degree of failure: they have to choose workable projects in order to pay their own wages.

His study is a very engaging mixture of technology, sociology, politics, and anthropology. He delivers case after case of successful group-forming, and to his credit he also analyses why many groups fail and a few succeed spectacularly. This is an engaging and vigorous polemic with thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. It ranks alongside the work of Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow as a significant gear-shift in the thinking on new technology, new media, and the social changes that are happening in online life before us right now.

Here Comes Everybody   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, London: Penguin Books, 2009, pp.344, ISBN: 0141030623


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Hypertext in Hypertext

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

hypertext essays on literature and literary theory

This is a two-disk hypertext version of Landow’s 1992 print publication, Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. For those who are not acquainted with the original, Landow sets out a case for hypertext which looks at issues of textual authority, intellectual ownership, and the philosophy of a writing which can never be ‘finished’.

Hypertext in HypertextHe notes the similarities between the new technology and contemporary critical theory which seeks to undermine the authority of texts and authors. So what’s new in the electronic version? Well, Landow has included many of the texts from which he quotes in the earlier printed book. There are also essays on Barthes, Bhaktin, and Foucault. He includes reviews of the original book, as well as some (typically feeble) parodies by Malcolm Bradbury.

There are mini-essays from students explaining and often criticizing some of the arguments. Landow observed in the original version that hypertext was ripe for exploiting this all-inclusiveness, and he has been as good as his word by adding material which even undermines his own work in this way. This might be seen as a courageous move from someone who could easily have insisted on absolute textual authority. Alternatively, you could say that it reflects his impregnability in the academic hierarchy. Would someone without tenure dare risk such a venture?

Some material has been added for this hypertext edition. For instance, it includes the text of the original proposal to Johns Hopkins Press: “This project will include …” and so forth. But I’m not so sure that readers want to know about these details of the planning stage. It’s one thing to have the early drafts of “King Lear”, but presenting the outline plans for a book of cultural argument (even an interesting one) is another matter. We warn students against discussing the process of composing their essays. All that’s required is the finished product – not the means by which it arrived.

The bibliographical jump-links are good. This is technology which works more efficiently than a printed book. Strangely enough though, there are not as many notes or pop-up screens as one might expect. Perhaps this is because the basic text was conceived and executed in the Old Days of sequential writing?

What he has done is split the original into smaller sections – but they’re still not small enough. On my 17-inch monitor screen there are ‘pages’ which require so much scrolling that one craves for the start of a paragraph. The fact is that even with a knowledge of the original printed text, reading this version on screen is not easy. It’s difficult to keep any sense of structure in mind. This experience supports the notion that writing for screen and for print require quite different skills.

He argues fairly persuasively that Hypertext is useful in learning the
culture of a discipline, because we can switch easily from the principal text to supplementary readings of it:

hypertext materials provide the student with a means of experiencing the way an expert works in an individual discipline … such a body of electronically linked material also provides the student with an efficient means of learning the vocabulary, strategies, and other aspects of a discipline that constitute its particular culture

Anyone interested in the potential relationships between hypertext and cultural theory should try to see this program in action. It may well be that sustained and continuous arguments made in prose are not actually suitable for this format, but one can hardly blame him for trying out his theories. He could be a little more inventive with his titles, though, couldn’t he?

© Roy Johnson 2000

Hypertext   Buy the book at Amazon UK
Hypertext   Buy the book at Amazon US


George P. Landow, Hypertext in Hypertext, Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, ISBN: 0801848695 (Windows version) ISBN: 0801848709 (Mac version)


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Filed Under: Literary Studies, Media, Theory Tagged With: Electronic Writing, Hypertext, Hypertext in Hypertext, Literary studies

Intellectual Property and Open Source

July 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a practical guide to protecting code

The Open Source movement makes software available free for people to use or even to pass on to others. This flies in the face of normal commercial practice, where people jealously guard their intellectual property rights. Traditional laws support these rights – so when new open source projects come into being, often as a result of work done collectively, it can be difficult to disentangle issues of ownership and control. This is equally true for the written word as well as for digital code.

Intellectual Property and Open SourceVan Lindberg’s new book is an amazingly thorough guide to the whole business. He explains the legal niceties without resorting to too much jargon, and supplies practical support materials in the form of sample licences and agreements. The first part of the book has eight chapters giving an introduction to intellectual property law, then the second part is six chapters offering an intellectual property handbook for developers, particularly those working in the field of open sources.

He warns that it’s a book of general principles, not specific advice, for the very good reason that cases of copyright, patents, and intellectual property rights are very case specific. Nevertheless, he does discuss lots of instructive individual cases, and I imagine that anybody with a need to know in this complex field of legislation will find what he has to say both instructive and chastening.

He explains the law on copyright, patents, and inventions by comparing it to computer programming, which it turns out to resemble remarkably closely. One new ruling (or code) is bolted on to that which already exists, and the whole statute grows by a process of accretion.

As a layman, it’s interesting to learn that you cannot patent an idea – no matter how original an invention it might be. You can only patent the proof that it can actually be realised and turned into something useful. And even the term ‘useful’ is coded – as his example of a patent dust cover for dogs illustrates. It can be used – even though the idea itself is quite barmy.

On Open Sources he explains that software is free as in ‘free speech’, not ‘free beer’ – but this distinction will mean little to everyday users who are happy to download a program that works well without having to pay for it.

The picture becomes clearer when he explains the success of various Open Source projects – FireFox, Linux, Apache – many of which have formed the basis for successful business ventures. The software itself is free to use and distribute, but companies have legitimately made money from offering services in support of its use.

He’s very good at explaining the complexities of rights developed whilst you are in somebody else’s employment. In brief, you’ve very little chance of succeeding, and he even includes some tragic cases of people who have lost lawsuits on works patented before and after they have been in somebody else’s employ. If there’s a barely-hidden message here, it’s ‘stay away from legal contests’.

As a rule, employees should assume that any intellectual output they produce whilst employed will be considered proprietary information and subject to the company’s proprietary information agreement (PIA). It doesn’t matter if the invention is in a completely different area of technology, or completely unconnected with your work; it still may be covered.

Even if you wish to make your work available free to the public, there are a number of different licenses to choose from, offering a sliding scale of ownership and control – such as public domain, open source, and reciprocal. The general advice he gives is not to attempt writing your own.

One thing is for certain. It’s potentially a very complex area both technically and legally. The law works on a basis of precedence, and you can bet that if a legal tangle emerges, it will be judged on similar occurrences in the past, even though your technology might be brand new.

All sorts of additional complications arise because of the special nature of software development. Does the author of a ‘patch] (a small-scale solution to a problem) have copyright over it when it is added to a big project? Can you combine two open source programs and claim copyright over the result? What about reverse engineering?

I would have welcomed a glossary and a webliography, but it’s to O’Reilly’s credit that they publish books like this – because although it might have a fairly limited readership, it raises lots of important issues and simultaneously makes available the information for dealing with them.

© Roy Johnson 2008

Intellectual Property and Open Source   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Intellectual Property and Open Source   Buy the book at Amazon US


Van Lindberg, Intellectual Property and Open Source, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2008, pp, 371, ISBN: 0596517963


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Filed Under: e-Commerce, Media, Open Sources Tagged With: Copyright, e-Commerce, Intellectual property, IPR, Open Sources, Publishing

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