In recent weeks, the iPhone has made quite a stir because of the regulatory decisions made by Apple. Jonathan Zittrain raised this worry in his book, The Future of the Internet, where he cautioned that generativity – the nature of systems to accept input from everyone – was being traded for sterile appliances – devices which do only simple tasks (GPS, TiVo).

The iPhone has led a new way, called contingent generativity, that makes generativity dependent upon an intermediary. Apple gets to decide whose Apps are available for download and though Steve Jobs had claimed that they would only block apps that were malicious, pornographic, bandwidth hogs, illegal or threats to privacy, that hasn’t proven true in practice. As I noted at Techdirt, Apple is becoming a price-setting intermediary that decided the “I Am Rich” application wasn’t allowable even though it didn’t seem to break any rules. “I Am Rich” isn’t alone; other apps which provide additional functionality have been pulled with little to no explanation.

But being an ex-ante regulator isn’t enough. Apple, which is famously closed in character, also has the ability to regulate apps already on a user’s iPhone or iPod Touch. The so-called kill switch was not disclosed to the public until a curious user uncovered the capability. Only then did Steve Jobs admit the functionality existed, saying Apple needed the capability but “Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull.”

This position raises a number of questions, many well articulated around the web, not the least of which is why Apple thinks it needs a kill switch an the iPhone and not it’s Mac computers. The issues raised and trend shown by the iPhone’s kill switch is worrying and, as you might expect, some clever engineers have found a way to disable it for jailbroken iPhones, but a thread on the Free Culture mailing list got me wondering if there was a better way to solve this conundrum.

I think there is and I think it should draw on the scholarship of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their book I recently reviewed, Nudge. For the uninitiated, Nudge is a book about “libertarian paternalism” which aims to create situations where it is easier to make the best choice while not limiting other options. Through architecting designs that enable better decisions, or nudges, libertarian paternalism provides a middle ground between freedom and mandates.

Apple has the opportunity to do so with the iPhone kill switch. The intentions of the regulatory function are good: many users are, for whatever reason, unable to avoid or fix security compromises. Apple has experts who can help these users, but a mandatory kill switch is not the best option. It treats all users the same and removes their ability to run applications they desire, regardless of potential hazards. Asheesh Laroia suggested that Apple allow users to permanently opt-out of the system.

I would go one step further towards openness and make the kill switch an opt-in feature. Call it AppleCare Pro for iPhone or something less awkward. Heck, Apple could even charge for it! Make it a prominent decision in the set-up process and allow users to revisit the option when they desire. Provide nudges towards it when the user downloads an App which might be dangerous (similar to how Google warns searchers they may be entering a nasty page).

This would give the worried or non-experts the ability to have Apple’s paternalistic reach extend to their phones without compromising the autonomy of those who want independence. Parker Higgins of the NYU Chapter worries that those who need Apple’s protection are those likely to ignore the warnings, but I think Apple could architect a system where they are nudged towards better decision-making without a presumption of technological ignorance.

In doing this all, Apple should remain aware that openness and honesty is the best option. The fact that they hid the kill switch until outsiders found it is reminiscent of Comcast’s deceptive practices regarding BitTorrent throttling. Security is a worthy goal, but remember that those with the most at stake, the users, should be the most informed.

[(Mostly) Cross-posted at Blurring Borders]

Last weekend, Steve Jobs revealed that Apple has built a “kill-switch” into every iPhone to terminate any “malicious or inappropriate” programs that somehow got through their application screening process.  Of course, nobody but Steve Jobs knows what “malicious or inappropriate” means, or who decides what qualifies, but this is just another way that Apple is showing the possible downside of a highly centralized and proprietary platform.

(By contrast, I assure you that not only does the FreeRunner have no kill-switch, but even iPhones that are jailbroken through less sanctioned means are not subject to the same remote control.)

This revelation by Steve Jobs shouldn’t surprise anybody, as it’s in line with the traditional Apple walled-garden philosophy, but it still represents a major step in the wrong direction.  By asserting absolute central control over iPhones in the wild, Apple has solidified the iPhone’s status as a “tethered” device, and mark Jonathan Zittrain’s words, tethering is like DRM but worse.

There are a lot of things that are appealing about the iPhone for both users and developers: it’s a beautiful, shiny device, it’s in a lot of people’s hands, and it has a lot of killer features that aren’t in any other popular devices.  But really, allowing this tethering to happen without protest strongly sends the wrong message to tech manufacturers.  And if we’re quiet about tethering now, it will be a lot harder to kill it later.

One of the big issues that’s come up recently on the Free Culture national list is the desire to promote increased outreach and collaboration on international development issues. The Free Culture agenda is far from limited to the developed world issue that have been the subject of our high-profile actions in recent years, and there’s a world of possibilities for FC to create real change. Access to medicines, knowledge, and culture are an important places for activism as Free Culture plans the next step.

The ever-awesome Kevin Donovan proposed that the Free Culture National Conference planned for October should have a session on development and Free Culture, and in the spirit of building action and bringing together collaborators in advance of October 12th — we’re making an open call to chapters worldwide who want to get involved in this new push.

If there’s organizations you think we should get in touch with that might be good collaborators with Free Culture or development/IP related projects that you’d want to kickoff at the October conference, drop Tim Hwang a line at tim AT roflcon DOT org.

I’ve been listening to the new Girl Talk album, and I must say that it is effing brilliant. For the uninitiated, Girl Talk is an engineer-turned-artist named Gregg Gillis who creates music by remixing samples of others’ songs without getting permission first. If you haven’t heard his stuff, stop what you’re doing right now and visit his MySpace page for a listen.

Girl Talk is claiming his creations fall under fair use, which defines exceptions to the exclusivity of copyright. If he didn’t invoke fair use, creating his album would have been prohibitively expensive at the very least. More likely, the barriers to entry would have kept him from ever creating it in the first place. And let me tell you, that would be a damn shame. As I probably don’t have to remind everyone, there’s something wrong when this kind of creativity could be illegal.

Fair use needs to protect creative artists, and it needs to protect transformative works.  Law should take into account social norms and the public interest; if people find this type of art to be valuable, then that should factor into related legal deliberations. Likewise, Students for Free Culture should take a strong stand on fair use. We should discuss what areas of fair use are important to advocate for. We should think about raising hell if Girl Talk gets hit with a lawsuit.

UPDATE: Parker Higgins notes that Girl Talk was in the NY Times on Wednesday.

Free Culture News is a short form news blog. The format is simple: brief summary, quotes, 2cents of commentary, links to other sources – similar to Boing Boing or Slashdot. Reading it is an easy way to keep up on FC related issues. It was started by Conley of Free Culture at Virginia Tech. Their chapter use to post news up on their wiki every week, and use these stories as starters for chapter discussion. The blog is an out growth of their wiki, with a focus on sharing those stories with the larger Free Culture community. The stories are not student specific and cover everything from net neutrality and OLPC to fair use and open access scholarly publishing.  I recommend giving it a try.

Sample Post:

No Punishment for Comcast.

August 1st, 2008

The FCC has voted to not punish Comast.  There will be (some) penalty (maybe) next time.

In a precedent-setting decision, the five-member Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to uphold a complaint accusing Comcast of violating the FCC’s open-Internet principles by improperly hindering peer-to-peer traffic.

“Subscribers should be able to go where they want, when they want, and generally use the Internet in any legal means,” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said in a statement.

Comcast said in a statement that it was disappointed by the decision and was considering all its “legal options.”

The measure adopted by the FCC does not include any fines against Comcast. But it requires the company to cease impeding peer-to-peer applications, to tell the FCC how the practice has been used, and to notify customers about other network management practices it adopts in the future.

Did we really expect anything different?

Disclaimer: I sometimes post to FreeCultureNews.com . There was an open call on the SFFC list looking for writers a few months back. They may still be looking.

From the desk of Conley: Yes, we are still looking for more people to contribute.  Please email conley@freeculturenews.com if you are interested.

Map of Wesnoth

Wesnoth is a pretty neat turn-based strategy game with retro graphics.  It was my first time playing, and I really enjoyed it (except for the getting my butt kicked part).  One of these days I might actually be good at it and beat Karen and Nelson.

We’ll probably be doing another game night next week, so head over to Free Culture Gaming to keep an eye out for more free video game fun.

Turning our attention now from the problems HR 4137 raises for college students at home, we see that our government is making life more difficult for developing nations as well. There’s been some talk lately on the FC discussion list that we should broaden our focus on freedom to include issues relevant to developing nations. This is my first attempt to broach the issue.

The Doha Development Round of trade negotiations originated to directly address issues of trade impeding the world’s poorest nations. These include intellectual property issues like access to patented medicine, as well as other issues, like agricultural subsidies. Just last week, talks at the Doha Round collapsed, leaving me to wonder how long it will be until the United States starts doing what’s right with regard to these critical issues.

I rediscovered Doha by hanging around on Wikipedia: a few weeks ago I noticed a bunch of work happening on the Doha Round article. I’m a sucker for participatory culture after all. But check out the article. See anything missing? I see a dearth of images that would be nice if we rectified (the one image on there today was added just yesterday). And look, the WTO is kind enough to make a photo gallery publicly available. It would be so great if we could include those pictures on Wikipedia.

So, Free Culturites, I have a call to action:

Email publications@wto.org and ask if they would be so kind as to release some or all of their photos under a free copyright license (something like CC-BY would be fantastic). After all, it’s not like the WTO exists to make money off of its photo gallery somehow. Myself and a fellow editor are waiting to hear back from them, and I figure some support couldn’t hurt.

Oh, and if you feel like it, jump in and help improve the article. Long live participatory culture!

Well, crap, guys. How did we let this one slip by?

HR 4137, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act just passed Congress and is expected to be signed into law very soon.

Inside the bill is the Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention act, a provision which requires colleges to subscribe to RIAA-approved services like the new Napster and to install software on the network which monitors and interrupt transfers which they decide they don’t like. This is a mandate for a non-neutral internet on college campuses. Students are being targeted by a cooperation between the government and the intellectual property industry to spy on us, filter our internet and the resources of our schools by spending our tuition costs on their DRM’d service. And unfortunately, we let this slip under the radar.

For the full story about the passing is available on Ars Technica, who have done a better write up than I could do. I also wrote about this on my personal site just over one year ago. It seems the bill has been watered down slightly from the original amendment, but the effect is the same.

But where was the opposition from Free Culture? I’m not trying to blame anyone but myself, but I think that we must develop a way to constantly monitor and publicly oppose this type of legislation. Otherwise, what is the point of our organization if we continue to allow things like this to happen?! We’re going to be an absolute laughing stock if we have silly events which celebrate the death of DRM when we don’t make a sound about federal legislation which requires all of our schools to purchase products which use it. There was only one blog post about the bill, 8 months ago. Not a peep since then, no page on the front page about pending legislation. So I can’t say that we missed this entirely, but a single blog post doesn’t affect anything outside of our own community, which is where the problem lies. It isn’t working because it isn’t enough.

So what are we supposed to do in the meantime?

First, I think we should develop a page (perhaps on the wiki?) and a squad to monitor the progress of legislation which could be a threat to us.

Second, we should be supporting Lawrence Lessig’s Change-Congress Movement which will stop corporations from having so much influence over Congressmen. Particularly Democratic congressmen from California.

Third, I would personally recommend that any student should be using secure protocols for all of their data transfers to prevent their being snooped on and tampered with. One such upcoming protocol is Anomos, a secure and anonymous multi-peer-to-peer file distribution platform. I’m a lead developer on this project and I will write a post on this blog about it once our alpha release candidate is announced.

Does anybody else have any ideas about steps we can take from things like this going unnoticed again? Let’s gets some discussion going in the comments.

Rich, Boston University Free Culture

Some folks from Free Culture at Virginia Tech came up with and, more impressively, actually started a Free Culture Gaming club! Every week Free Culture Gaming will get together to play free games online with other free culture aficionados. All of the games we play will be 100% free software and free content, as per our standards.

When I asked Conley Owens, Free Culture VT founder, why he thought FC Gaming is important, he responded:

Because it’s FOSS and it’s gaming… what could be cooler?

Because gaming drives computing. It’s the reason why graphics cards are so great and cheap, because of gamers. And if gaming can drive hardware, it can drive software. Right now I have tons of computer scientist friends who only use Windows because they can’t play their favorite games on GNU/Linux. If free games were more prevalent, perhaps they would switch. If you get the software development (and game development) community switching to a free platform, they will in turn help switch the world to freedom.

Play free games, free the world!

Hopefully that is enough motivation to join FC Gaming

Free Culture Gaming will be holding its first game night this Saturday August 2nd at 8pm EDT (tomorrow night), and we hope you will join us. For this game night, we will be playing The Battle for Wesnoth, an excellent turn-based strategy game. Sadly the Wesnoth web server is currently down, but I think we should give them support anyway during this trying time for them. You can still download the game from the Wesnoth SourceForge project for Windows, Mac and Linux, and you can still play multiplayer games if you go to Multiplayer->Connect to Server and choose the 2nd (or 3rd) option instead of the official server.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please use version 1.4.4 of Battle for Wesnoth, or at least another version from the 1.4 series. Older or newer versions will not work well or at all.

Meet us in the Free Culture Gaming IRC channel at #fcgame on irc.freenode.net to coordinate with us (go here for details), or just join the 2nd alternative Wesnoth server and find us there. Hope to see you then!

UPDATE: The Battle for Wesnoth official website is now, um, sort of up again, so you may be able to download the game from there now as well. We might even be able to play on the normal official server! I guess we’ll find out tonight ^_^

Hello, I’m Parker Higgins, I’m a member of Free Culture @ NYU and on the summer team at the Participatory Culture Foundation.  Last week, with the help of many of my friends in both organizations, I launched two new video podcast feeds optimized for PCF’s Miro, the awesome open source video player and subscription manager.  (RSS feeds are available of course, but the enclosures are a mix of video files and .torrent files.)

The two new channels should be of interest to readers of this blog: one is called Free Culture TV, and it contains videos about free culture, or of particular relevance to members of the free culture community.  There is a list of the videos on the channel’s Miro Guide page, and I plan on adding many more in the coming weeks.

The second channel is called Yes, We’re Open! Free Movies, Music Videos and TV and is meant for all sorts of openly licensed entertainment.  As the name suggests, this includes everything from very short clips to feature length movies and documentaries, as long as it’s been released under an open license.  Again, the Miro Guide page has more information.

So here comes the pitch: I want all the help I can get with these.  If you know of something really great that’s not on here yet, chances are I’ve just missed it, and I’d love to include it.  You can e-mail me at parker [at] pculture [dot] org and I’ll get right back to you.  Currently, I don’t have plans to create original content for either channel, but if anybody expressed interest in making or helping to make something, I’d be happy to explore it!

Again, these channels are made for SFC and the free culture community, so if there’s something you’d like to see on it, please let me know!

Yes, We're Open! and Free Culture TV