Neither you nor I are counterfeiters, so why should we care?

Hidden in this secretly-negotiated treaty are several things that will affect us all. I will try to explain these in terms that are as non-technical as possible.

ACTA has nothing to do with counterfeit money. It is about policing copyright. It will do this in ways that infringe civil liberties, privacy and free speech plus create a surveillance organization answerable to no-one.

ACTA will empower border guards to take your laptop, phone or iPod and search these for pirated music. How are you going to prove that you own every tune? They can hold these for months, and give your data to other agencies to analyse. There will be no presumption of innocence, no right of appeal, and no due process.

These excessive powers will be wielded by a proposed governing body outside of the World Trade Organization and the United Nations. In other words, the entertainment industry will have its own international police force.

Further, ACTA will introduce filtering of internet content by service providers, who will be obliged to cut off your internet access if you are accused (not convicted, just accused) of violating copyright three times. Techniques such as “deep packet inspection” will violate your privacy.

ACTA seeks to more strongly enforce Digital Rights Management (DRM), including the possibility of eliminating region-free DVDs. (I’ll write more about the multitude of problems DRM causes, and link to it from here.)

In addition, ACTA seeks to limit peer-to-peer networking (P2P). I can’t help but wonder what that will do to internet telephony - Skype runs on P2P. There are well over 100 million users of Skype, which runs on P2P. P2P has many current and emerging applications for business and society. It seems that those who have drafted ACTA, and any who sign it, have no understanding of how the internet works.

The terms of ACTA, which emanates from the USA, will be set by the initial countries that sign it. Subsequent signatories will have no say in these terms, and in most cases will have little power to resist. So the time to stop these excesses is now.

The only reason the general public knows about ACTA is that someone provided the secret discussion document to Wikileaks, and some online news publications picked it up. I think it is also relevant that we talk to our governments about the need for transparency. This was all being done behind closed doors.

In my country, Australia, which is party to the ACTA discussions, there are several respected organizations that have expressed their concern. These are the Australian Digital Alliance, the Australian Library and Information Association, CHOICE, and the Internet Industry Association. In my opinion it is urgent that we everyday citizens let the government know that we know, and that we don’t want this treaty and its accompanying private police state. Or the negotiations behind closed doors.

Yes it is a found object, a piece of recycled art. It happens to express my dilemma perfectly. [Note: I consider this title a new work of art, due to the extra layer of irony created by putting it here.]

Don’t worry, I have been thinking creatively and plan to have some serious fun during my leave of absence as my state of health permits.

Yes I know I blog irregularly and inconsistently. There is a reason for both. (Ask me if you really need to know.) Today I have been watching ooblecks, listening to my son and his dad squabble on Skype, and checking out the talks on TED.

I just found a nice performance by Vusi Mahlasela on the ted.com site. I went to a Vusi concert earlier this year, and have a signed CD. Vusi is a leading South African singer/songwriter, who was part of the struggle against apartheid. If you haven’t seen or heard Vusi before, play this video. (I had a few goes at posting this. As a Firefox 3 user I have to use VodPod to post video to WordPress. The quality of the TED videos is good - don’t be misled by this image.)

Today at the Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons conference in Brisbane I had the pleasure of meeting Henry Jenkins. Professor Kerry Raymond of QUT was talking about how the Wii had improved her global news: when the Wii is connected to the Internet with the Wii Channel active and Wii News selected, a world appears and you get news from whichever part of the world you click on.

I wanted to know if I could still keep hitting my virtual punching bag while the news came in. Kerry said no. I was disappointed. That’s when Henry Jenkins said “I want news you can shoot!”

Such fine convergent thinking. And I have to say it would be good.

The pdf is about the economics of user-generated content. Nothing top-secret. Disruptive yes, but not subversive. I downloaded it in the usual way. I use a Mac, so the default pdf viewer is Preview. I couldn’t look at it with Preview because Preview wouldn’t link to a privacy notice that I had to agree to. I couldn’t just agree without reading what I was agreeing to (well I didn’t really read it, who does, but I opened the page and skimmed it).

So I opened the pdf with Adobe Acrobat Professional, and could now access the web page with the privacy policy. It wasn’t made clear why I needed to agree to the policy, and looked like a pretty usual privacy policy, so I clicked “agree”. Pretty soon I had to agree again, so I checked a box that said “remember this action on this site”. Which turned out to be useful, because the pdf calls back to the mothership once a minute.

That is really annoying. A dialog box flashes in front of what I read, every minute. Interrupts my concentration, pisses me off. And for what?

Is this the future of “protected” pdfs? Will we need to hire a lawyer every time we want to view them?

Well, I’m about to get back into writing my term paper on Open Access journals. May they take over the world.

All my life I have felt torn in different directions by the diversity of my interests. The crucial thing I got from reading  Stephen Downes’ “How to be Heard” was to look at this from above, seeing myself at the centre with lines radiating to all those things no matter what they are - and to turn the arrows inward. Instead of being pulled apart, I am what draws these diverse things together. There needs to be no justification for the diversity of my interests, no connection between them, other than that I exist and I relate to these things. Downes says

The point here is that it is better not to focus on some specific topic, the way a university course does, but rather, to aim at some sort of intersection that touches on all of your interests. Anybody can write about e-learning, but only you can write about themes found in e-learning, romance fiction and skydiving. What would that look like? I haven’t a clue - that’s why I would need to read your blog.

So keep reading. I haven’t a clue what’s coming next either.

I am de-focussing this blog, as of now. Initially, on the advice of someone I greatly respect, I went to a lot of trouble to focus on/around a topic. That person still has my great respect, but I’m abandoning that idea.

The simple reason is, it has been a conversation stopper.

From now on I will write about whatever occurs to me, whenever.

Today is the centenary of the birth of my father. If it were possible to communicate with the dead*, I don’ know how I would begin to explain to him what I am doing now.

Dad was born in a horse-drawn cab in one of the main streets of Sydney, New South Wales. His parents were old-fashioned, and dressed him in velvet and lace, with waist-length ringlets, until he was six. (Photos of that were purposely destroyed – he hated it. The one above is the first after those ringlets were cut.) He became a double orphan at age twelve, and rather than see himself and his sisters put into orphanages he pretended to be fifteen and got a job pushing barrows at Sydney’s Paddy’s Market. After he had paid for the education of his sisters, he set about getting himself educated. He worked as a telegraph operator, translating the ticker tape messages into English at 120 words per minute. Riding out the Great Depression in the Navy as radio officer, he got his education at Duntroon Naval College. After he left the Navy he trained as a draughtsman and later became a design engineer in his forties. That’s about when I turned up. Dad died in 1982, an era ago.

Dad worked in electronics at one stage, so he would comprehend some of the science behind the technology I use. If I showed him how easy it is to use this stuff he might even want it himself – after all, I did get my late mother-in-law onto the internet. But explaining the social changes that have taken place since computers became a communications medium via the Internet would be daunting. Explaining the political issues at stake would be as difficult. As for the cultural effects – dad wasn’t really into culture, he had been preoccupied with survival - so that would be harder still.

“I’m doing Internet Studies.” That didn’t exist then. Nor did much of the vocabulary I use every day (even if I avoid using kittah). “I’m doing it because…” Communication would be lost about there.

One thing dad would understand for sure about today is climate change. He often told me that the climate was changing, based on his detailed memory of his early years. He blamed it on industry and pollution. He used to get put down for saying this, but he wasn’t wrong.

“Andy” as he was called by his Navy mates.

Image restored in MacPaint years ago by my son

* I don’t believe in that, I’m just trying to stretch my imagination across an epochal gap.

It’s almost a week since I went to MACS, short for Media and Culture Studies. A group of academics from various disciplines meet (almost) monthly, mostly at the University of Queensland but the next one will probably be at QUT. Last Friday’s meeting was another “what I did in my holidays” presentation with five speakers.

For me, the most interesting perspective was from (the bespectacled) Sal Humphreys. One of the meetings she spoke of was “Amateur Hour” at New York Law School, which was a conference about the interface between user-generated content, Web 2.0 and traditional media.

Sal says the traditional media people don’t yet understand the new marketplace they are working in (one exception: the advertising industry). Most of the CEOs and VPs couldn’t get beyond piracy as undermining their industries, yet were happy to harness user-generated content for free.  They were unable to see the contradiction in their position.

I wonder what it will take to open their eyes to that?

The sales people at various ISPs had explained to me in great technical detail exactly why I couldn’t have every one of the broadband options available.

“Definitely not cable. There is no cable in that area.” Well what’s that cable going down the street? Into a Telstra box on the neighbour’s house? Anyway they found a way out of that, by saying the installation had to be at the landlord’s expense.

“Definitely not ADSL. Too far from the exchange.” I believed them for a while.

Wireless would have needed a $300 modem plus a booster aerial, and is $120 a month for a lousy 3 GB. It wouldn’t have worked in the rain.
Unfortunately someone in another apartment fell for that. But the guy at the back didn’t. He already had ADSL. So armed with that information I got ADSL. Just plain ADSL, as ADSL2+ is out of my price range at present. I’m paying just over half the wireless rate, for four times as much in downloads.

I’m wondering if that is why they are pushing wireless as the only option. We pay a lot more for it, and get a lot less.

Anyways, more on topic blogging to follow soon.