Photo used in Music 2.0 book

Posted on 29 February 2008
Filed under Creative Commons, DRM, Florida, Gainesville, Music, Personal, Students for Free Culture
1 comment

This photo I took, of Florida Free Culture’s protest on Defective By Design’s “Day Against DRM” in October 2006, has been used in the book Music 2.0 by Gerd Leonhard. (It’s a photo of the 34th Street Wall in Gainesville, Fla.) He used the photo under the terms of its Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. I received a courtesy copy from the author in the mail today. The book is available for purchase or free download from its Web site.

1 comment | Add yours

Obama now organizing in Florida

Posted on 29 February 2008
Filed under Florida, Politics
Comment on this post

I heard an interesting item tonight: now that Florida’s primaries are over, the Obama campaign is coordinating with its supporters in Florida. Apparently, the campaign asked supporters to host election night house parties on the evening of the March 4 primaries. The Obama campaign now has a 305 phone number and an address in Miami Beach. I heard the latest goal was 200 house parties statewide — a revised goal after the earlier target of 100 was quickly achieved.

To be fair, these house parties are framed as fundraising events. But let’s be honest: looking ahead to the general election, Obama needs to connect with Florida voters more than he needs their money. Before the nomination is settled, Obama is already investing in his activist base in Florida.

This seems like the counterpoint to worries (such as these) that the Democratic nominee may be at an insurmountable disadvantage due to the Florida primary blackout. I think Democrats are clearly at a disadvantage, but I’m not certain it’s insurmountable. Republican head start vs. Democratic momentum is a toss-up in my book.

Update: Also, I wonder if the Clinton campaign is doing the same thing. Clinton came to Florida on election night, but I wonder if she’s followed up with base-building, or if she’d be starting from scratch with the nomination.

Comment on this post

CopyNight Orlando, Feb. 26: FOSS licensing

Posted on 24 February 2008
Filed under Copyright, Florida, Orlando, Personal
Comment on this post

The February meeting of CopyNight Orlando will be Tuesday, Feb. 26 at 7 pm at Stardust Video & Coffee (1842 E. Winter Park Rd., Orlando). Our topic for the month is open source licensing — or whatever else comes up. Learn more at copynight.org or my CopyNight page. Hope to see you there!

Comment on this post

Mr. Thatcher, tear down this (pay)wall

Posted on 21 February 2008
Filed under Open access, Publishing
1 comment

From the Chronicle, via Open Access News:

Sanford G. Thatcher, director of Penn State University Press and president of the Association of American University Presses, calls Harvard’s [open access] policy “shortsighted” because it might result in the loss of subscription and reprint income to humanities and social-science journals. His own press receives two-thirds of its journal income through royalties from Project Muse, an online collection of journals. “If that were to collapse,” he says, “so too would our journals disappear from the face of the earth.”

Mr. Thatcher: Tear down this (pay)wall.

Whose side are you on? You represent university presses. Remember, it was the university’s own faculty who voted to adopt this policy. Yet you are spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the potential impact of green OA on subscriptions — when no causative link has ever been shown.

In fact, Johns Hopkins, the university which hosts Project Muse — whose revenue, you fear, could “collapse” under the weight of self-archiving by responsible authors — this week opened its own institutional repository.

University presses, and the authors and universities they serve, should tell Mr. Thatcher that his statements don’t represent them. Tell the AAUP to stop spreading FUD about open access.

Scholarly publishers need help adapting to the open access era — not fighting it. The AAUP can serve its constituents by helping them adopt sustainable open access models. Fighting the tide — and universities’ own faculty — isn’t serving anyone.

Update: I should add, for those readers who aren’t also mind-readers, that I am aware the AAUP has been involved in open access initiatives. That’s why I was so taken aback by this statement, which borders on willfully misleading and does little to move the discussion forward.

I also recognize that sometimes, journalists select a quote from a context other than one the speaker would prefer. (Been there…) So, for all I know, the quote was immediately followed by a comment that “…but there’s no evidence yet that self-archiving will damage this revenue stream, and I hope that libraries and faculty will join publishers in seeking responsible ways to preserve and enhance journals’ value proposition.” But I can only know what’s in the paper, and what’s in the paper ain’t pretty.

1 comment | Add yours

(Don’t) Draft Lessig [UPDATE: Yes, do]

Posted on 19 February 2008
Filed under Politics
Comment on this post

Update: The premise of all this is made irrelevant in the announcement video posted at lessig08.org.

The campaign to draft Larry Lessig to run for Congress in California’s 12th district has grown markedly since I first blogged about it. The Facebook group has grown to more than 2200 members. On Monday, the campaign set a goal: to sign up 1,000 donors or volunteers within a week. (If he doesn’t run, the donations will go to Creative Commons.) The deadline to declare for the race is next Monday, so we’ll know soon.

I’ve already said why I’d be enthusiastic about a Lessig candidacy. But there are good reasons not to be enthusiastic, too. First, we might not win: there’s already a strong candidate in the race, who seems to be generally liked by progressives, so a campaign would be hard-fought and expensive (especially in such a compressed time frame — the election is in April). But even if Lessig won — what if he storms the Capitol, only to be politically neutered, demoralized, and/or diverted from his other work? These aren’t reasons not to run, but they’re enough to make you think twice. I wonder if there’s not a way to hedge our bets here.

Whether or not Lessig intends to run, I hope he’ll try to meet with Speier. Lessig can use the momentum from the draft effort — and the threat of a competitive race — to talk about the issues he’s so strong on. If they see eye-to-eye, he could ask her to adopt his agenda, and endorse her. If they don’t agree, and Larry wants to run, then we rally behind him.

I hope Larry will consider it. If we can keep Lessig in his current work, avoid a primary between two good candidates, and win an advocate in Congress, that’s a “win-win” to me. As Matt Stoller wrote of a Lessig candidacy:

There might be no better way to energize and overtly politicize the free culture world and combine their energy with the liberal blogs to create a movement for change.

Hopefully, we can mcarry that momentum forward, whether Lessig runs or not.

Update: Whoops, typo.

Comment on this post

Echoes from history: W. J. Bryan v. evolution in Florida

Posted on 18 February 2008
Filed under Florida, Politics
Comment on this post

Florida is in the midst of a hullabaloo about whether to add evolution explicitly into the state’s teaching standards for science. Sadly, there is opposition, and as you might expect, most of the opposition appears to be premised on religious objections. (Aside: In addition to stepping up our science education, maybe we need to improve the way we teach the First Amendment as well.)

Unrelated to all this, I was doing some reading on University of Florida history, and I stumbled upon an uncanny analogue from Florida history, involving a nationally-renowned politician — from more than 80 years ago:

When [William Jennings Bryan] published his famous pamphlet, “The Menace of Darwinism,” he sent two hundred copies to [University of Florida president] Dr. [Albert A.] Murphree to be distributed to the Florida faculty and to the students taking sociology courses. On February 21, 1922, he lectured on evolution to the students in the University gymnasium. His talk, which he called “Tampering With the Mainspring,” condemned the spirit of mind-worship which, he said, was threatening the universities of the country. This problem had not become quite so serious on southern campuses, he thought, as it was elsewhere in the country. An “hypothesis,” according to Bryan’s definition, was “a scientific equivalent for a guess,” and if this was true then Darwin’s hypothesis was not fact but only a guess. It was hardly, from Bryan’s point of view, an acceptable substitute for the word of God. He told his student audience that Darwin’s “guess” had “absolutely no evidence to support it,” and that in all the fifty years of scientific research the evolutionists had “not yet been able to find one single instance of a change from one species to another.”

Bryan seems to have carried his audience with him throughout the lecture. The students, according to a newspaper account, were “completely under his spell throughout the entire evening, laughing or serious, thoughtful or jubilant, just as he pleased. Applause interrupted the discourse throughout, and a ‘long Gator’ was lustily given at the end.” Bryan believed that President Murphree endorsed this stand on evolution, and he congratulated him on being “the head of a great university who has not been carried away by the ape theory.” Perhaps at the time he was remembering his dispute with the President of the University of Wisconsin who had said that Bryan’s lectures were more likely to make atheists than believers. The Great Commoner answered this with the claim that Wisconsin was teaching the theory that men had “brute blood” and were descended from apes.

Bryan kept Murphree informed of his plans to have the Florida legislature pass laws to prohibit teachings which were contrary to the Bible. Such legislation, Bryan thought, should “prohibit the teaching of atheism and agnosticism and teaching as true, Darwinism or any other evolutionary hypothesis that links man in blood relationship with the animals below him.” In a speech in Tallahassee, he denied that he was trying to “stifle freedom of conscience,” or curtail academic freedom. He said: “We only ask that if you will not permit Christianity to be taught in public schools that you do not allow the atheists, agnostics, or the Darwinists to spread their doctrine.” With the passage of such legislation, Bryan’s agitation against teaching evolution in Florida schools subsided somewhat.

He gave a series of talks on the campus in February, 1924, including one on evolution. President Murphree said: “His foolish notions on evolution came in for a round, though he was not so bitter and not quite so unreasonable. Most of his talks were on Government, Economics, Public Speaking, Religion and the Bible.” Bryan actually knew very little about the technical aspects of evolution, and the Vice-President of the University said that he had “made himself ridiculous to the students.”

Samuel Proctor, “William Jennings Bryan and the University of Florida“, Florida Historical Quarterly 29 (July 1960 - April 1961).

Comment on this post

Lessig for Congress — I hope

Posted on 15 February 2008
Filed under Politics
2 comments

I didn’t want to say anything about this — after the DailyKos diary, even after Joi blogged it — but now that it’s all over Slashdot (Zittrain jumps in, too), I won’t hold back any longer.

Larry Lessig for Congress. Please.

We would be so lucky — to have such a friend, a leader with such integrity, an advocate with such courage, in Congress.

2 comments | Add yours

Harvard faculty say yes to OA

Posted on 13 February 2008
Filed under Academia, Open content, Publishing
3 comments

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences yesterday adopted a mandate for open access to the college’s peer-reviewed research publications.

Already, there’s quibbling from others about whether the details of the policy are good or bad. But I want to focus on the fact that the faculty, through their own governance process, themselves approved this mandate. Despite earlier evidence of the willingness of faculty to comply with OA mandates, and the support of researchers for public access legislation, this is the strongest indication yet: Yes, Virginia, scientists do want open access.

So when Allan Adler of the AAP says

Publishers don’t oppose open-access plans per se, Adler said. It is mandates they take issue with … With Harvard’s opt-out provision, he said, there’s still “some degree of choice.”

– then he will be well-served to remember what dastardly external force imposed such an onerous requirement on the researchers. Oh, right: it was the researchers themselves.

3 comments | Add yours

keep looking »