The internet has survived the great SOPA blackout, and we’re still talking about the fallout. Apple made a major announcement of plans to support textbooks on iPads, but there are concerns about the implementation. But the first story this week is about a free service geared towards teaching people how to program with weekly lessons throughout 2012.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. New this year is that Pinboard has replaced FriendFeed as my primary aggregation service. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my Pinboard bookmarks (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Items posted to are also sent out as tweets; you can follow me on Twitter. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Code Year: Learn to Code in 2012

Sign up for Code Year to start receiving a new interactive programming lesson every Monday. You’ll be building apps and websites before you know it!

- Code Year

Code Year is a project of internet startup Codecademy, a service that teaches people how to code (JavaScript only, at the moment). There have been three classes posted already, and the website says they are still accepting registrations at the homepage. Code Year is free, and it sends an e-mail at the beginning of each week with a link to that week’s course. More questions? See the frequently asked questions.

What I think is really cool about this is that a group of librarians has self-organized themselves to support each other through the year. There is a community area on ALA Connect and a list of resources on the catcode wiki that includes examples tailored to cataloging challenges. (“catcode” is a unique story onto itself. It is a wiki created to “help support dialogue between catalogers and coders.”)

Apple Introduces iBooks Author

Educators so far seem excited about the potential promise of a learning “revolution” enabled by Apple’s new iBooks Author app. However, not everyone is feeling that same level of enthusiasm: e-book publishing experts have concerns about the formatting that iBooks Author can output, which isn’t fully ePub 2 or ePub 3 compliant. Furthermore, Apple has added a clause to iBooks Author’s end user license agreement that prohibits selling e-books created with iBooks Author anywhere but the iBookstore.

- Enthusiasm for iBooks Author marred by licensing, format issues, by Chris Foresman, Ars Technica

Last week saw the big introduction of iBooks Textbooks for iPad and iBooks Author ebook creation utility. The combination were billed as a promising new way to have students interact with course materials and to have teachers build their own content. There were some not-so-nice surprises in the implementation, though. First, the ebook format is close to that of ePub standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum, but strays in enough important ways that the iBooks Textbooks themselves won’t be usable on non-Apple devices. Second, included the End-User License Agreement for the iBooks Author software are terms that says content created with iBooks Author can be given away freely but can only be sold through Apple’s iBookstore. Apple also reserves the right to determine if your work is sold at iBookstore with no recourse for rejected works. The article above has more details, and the press coverage of iBooks Textbooks and iBooks Author has been generally negative so far.

Update on 6-Feb-2012: Apple released iBooks Author version 1.0.1 with the only change being clarifications to the End-User License Agreement: “If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple… This restriction does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format.”

SOPA and Protect-IP Are Dead

Graphic from Talking Points Memo

Leaders in Congress on Friday effectively killed two pieces of anti-online piracy legislation following the increasingly vocal protests of tens of thousands of websites and millions of Internet users.

That’s right, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate are, for all practical purposes, dead in the water.

Sure, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) used the word “postponed” in their announcements, saying that Congress would only take a breather, but would certainly not give up for good on its goal of passing some sort of legislation designed to combat overseas “rogue” websites hosting pirated American content.

But whenever Congress decides to re-engage the online piracy fight — and it could be a while, given just how acrimonious the debate over the bills became in the last week — it’s almost certain that SOPA and PIPA won’t be revived in any recognizable form.

- How The Web Killed SOPA and PIPA, by Carl Franzen, Talking Points Memo Idea Lab

Who would have thought — grass roots organizations convince major internet presences to “black out” or otherwise inform users of ill-considered provisions (at best) in legislation, and in turn those users bury both houses of Congress with so much anti-SOPA and -PIPA feedback that they effectively kill the bills. Is this the closest we’ve come to direct democracy since ancient Athens? Perhaps! The article quoted above goes into great detail about the formational elements of SOPA and PIPA and the forces that gathered to stop them.

The response to Wikipedia being blacked out in particular was interesting. The Washington Post, The Guardian and National Public Radio announced that they would answer questions posted to Twitter with the hashtag #altwiki. Closer to the library community Credo Reference announced that free access for a day.

One could say it is an all intellectual property edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. How could one miss the outpouring of opposition to SOPA/PROTECT-IP? If that was an overwhelming story you might have missed the introduction of the Research Works Act that could end the open access mandates now at the National Institutes of Health and coming elsewhere. And because we need some good news, Internet2 announced a new electronic textbook pilot that could be really interesting.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. New this year is that Pinboard has replaced FriendFeed as my primary aggregation service. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my Pinboard bookmarks (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Items posted to are also sent out as tweets; you can follow me on Twitter. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

Support for Web Bill Wanes as Protests Spread

When the powerful world of old media mobilized to win passage of an online antipiracy bill, it marshaled the reliable giants of K Street — the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Recording Industry Association of America and, of course, the motion picture lobby, with its new chairman, former Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat and an insider’s insider.

Yet on Wednesday this formidable old guard was forced to make way for the new as Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts and cascading criticism, sending an unmistakable message to lawmakers grappling with new media issues: Don’t mess with the Internet.

- Support for Web Bill Wanes as Protests Spread, By Jonathan Weisman, New York Times

The population of the internet became very familiar with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT-IP Act (a.k.a. PIPA) today with major internet services like Wikipedia blocking access to its articles and Google placing a black rectangle over its logo. Advocacy sites like americancensorship.org and blacklist.eff.org and www.google.com/landing/takeaction sprang up to prompt U.S. citizens to call their Senators and non-U.S. citizens to petition the U.S. State Department to set in motion opposition to bills that once seemed inevitable. And all sorts of people took to Twitter to protest the fact that they couldn’t use Wikipedia to answer their homework.

It wasn’t all a one-way street, though. Former Senator Chris Dodd (and now MPAA chairperson) denounced the protests as “an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on [the sites] for information and [who] use their services.” House Judiciary Committee Chairperson Lamar Smith announced that his committee will resume consideration of SOPA in February. And PROTECT-IP Act sponsor Senator Leahy released a point-by-point rebuttal to some of the claims made by opponents.

At the end of the day, the protest clearly had an effect on the legislation as co-sponsors dropped their support of PROTECT-IP and others made statements opposing the bill. As this is being written on the evening of the 18th, the ProPublica lists 41 Senators supporting and 19 Senators opposing or “leaning no” (OpenCongress’ whip count lists it as 34 to 35 versus last night’s OpenCongress count of 39 to 16), so it is unclear whether there the 60 votes required to end debate and move for passage of PROTECT-IP in the Senate as promised by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

I’ve stated my objections to SOPA and my objections to PROTECT-IP, and reiterated them today by putting up an anti-SOPA/PROTECT-IP splash page on DLTJ. I also still think there is more to learn a few levels deeper than the anti-SOPA/PROTECT-IP advocacy. ProPublica has a project called Who in Congress Supports SOPA and PIPA/PROTECT-IP? that offers a variety of ways to categorize supporters and opponents of the legislation including an accounting of campaign donations by industry. On my own Stop-SOPA/PROTECT-IP page, I ask readers to look into Laurence Lessig’s #Rootstrikers movement. A big part of the disconnect and dysfunctional nature of public office holders is the role that campaign contributions play — or, at best, have the appearance of influence — in the public policy decision making. So while SOPA/PROTECT-IP opponents may have won the battle, there is much to do to win the war of undue influence that created SOPA and PIPA in the first place.

More Legislative Shenanigans: Research Works Act

In case SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, hasn’t given you enough heartburn, here’s another development on the legislative horizon to be concerned about–H.R. 3699, the Research Works Act. The Association of American Publishers has provided a summary of what they hope the bill will accomplish, which is a frightening read for those of us committed to the principles of Open Access. It appears that H.R. 3699 would seriously threaten public access to federally funded research and deal a critical blow to the Open Access movement, which has been buoyed by exactly the kind of activity H.R. 3699 seeks to curtail in the AAP’s view, namely public access mandates and the development of repositories for publicly funded research.

- More Legislative Shenanigans: Research Works Act (H.R. 3699), by Meredith Kahn, University of Michigan’s MPublishing blog

Yes, that’s right — more intellectual property legislation in front of the U.S. Congress. This time it is a bill that would protect the business interests of academic publishers by preventing the U.S. government from mandating open access to federally funded research. An article in The Guardian (U.K.) paper says academic publishers have become the enemies of science. The twist here is that one of the sponsors of the Research Works Act is none other that Representative Darrell Issa, one of the leading opponents to SOPA in the House Judiciary Committee. As you might guess, campaign donations are involved and so there is a call from #Rootstrikers to help fight “SOPA v2″.

Internet2, McGraw-Hill, Courseload, and Five Universities Implement eText Pilot in Spring 2012

Participating universities in the pilot get McGraw-Hill eTexts, the Courseload reader and annotation platform integrated with their Learning Management System, and can be part of a joint research study of eText use and perceptions. Through the Courseload software, students can print, use social annotation with classmates and instructors, and access their eTexts on any HTML5-capable tablet, smartphone, or computer. Students will receive their eTexts at no cost as the institutions are subsidizing the study, and students who prefer a full hardcopy book may optionally order a print-on-demand version of the eText for a $28 fee. Faculty interest at the pilot institutions has been very strong.

- Internet2, McGraw-Hill, Courseload, and Five Universities Implement eText Pilot in Spring 2012, Internet2 Press Release

This is good news for students and etextbooks. It sounds like a good experiment and I’m eager to see the outcomes of the pilot. And something that might make next week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads? The rumor that Apple is expected to delve into textbooks in an announcement today.

This blog will be present first-time users with a warning page on January 18, 2012 — the day that many internet sites are using to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — and January 23rd, 2012 — the day before the U.S. Senate may vote on the PROTECT-IP act. DLTJ is proud to join many other sites in this demonstration of solidarity for an open, transparent internet.

Thought you heard that SOPA was dead? Or was modified to be acceptable? Or that PIPA is on the ropes? As of January 17th, these statements aren’t true:

• Representative Lamar Smith, House Judiciary Chair and sponsor of SOPA, issued a statement that said committee discussion of SOPA will continue in February.
• Although proponents have said they will remove the DNS redirection provisions, there are still dangerous and unprecedented parts of the bills.
• There are still more Senators in favor of PIPA (39) than not (16).

This legislation is bad for the health of the internet, bad for companies — those that exist now and those that would otherwise come — that make their living on the internet, and bad for the standing of the United States in the global community supporting freedom of speech and due process principles.

Looking for something to do to make your opinions known? Try one more more of these:

1. Use the Contact Congress form on the OpenCongress site to send an e-mail to your Senators or use the OpenCongress Find Your Senators and Representatives to look up their phone numbers. The Wikipedia SOPA Initiative page has some good phrasing of things to say based on your concerns. If outside the United States, use the Petition the U.S. State Department form on americancensorship.org.
2. Look into the #Rootstrikers movement. A big part of the disconnect and dysfunctional nature of public office holders is the role that campaign contributions play — or, at best, have the appearance of influence — in the public policy decision making. This certainly seems to be true for the current SOPA debate.
3. Watch the Learn to Be a Better Activist webcast on January 18th (or the recording after that day). It is a full day of talks from people who know something about making voices heard in Congress.
4. Add a banner to the bottom of your Twitter profile picture to spread the word of your opinions.
5. Read the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s list of about a dozen other things you could do.

Welcome to the new year! Threads this week include a brief analysis of the legal problems in store if SOPA and PROTECT-IP become law, what an analysis of the problems with Best Buy might teach libraries, and why open source licensing of clinical tools is important.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. New this year is that Pinboard has replaced FriendFeed as my primary aggregation service. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my Pinboard bookmarks (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Items posted to are also sent out as tweets; you can follow me on Twitter. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

A Look at the Legal Aspects of SOPA and PROTECT-IP

Two bills now pending in Congress—the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House—represent the latest legislative attempts to address a serious global problem: large-scale online copyright and trademark infringement. Although the bills differ in certain respects, they share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression.

- Don’t Break the Internet, by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post, Stanford Law Review

In case you missed the dramatic events in the last days of 2011, SOPA and PROTECT-IP Act, just before Congress recessed for the year lawmakers concerned with the provisions of SOPA offered and debated enough amendments to the draft legislation that they effectively stalled passage through the House Judiciary Committee. At the end of the last committee meeting, the sponsors of SOPA acknowledged that there were significant issues and seemed to agree that they needed a confidential briefing from the Department of Homeland Security on the possible effects on DNSSEC — a highly technical but very important consideration. (Why it needs to be confidential when DNSSEC is an open specification stretches my imagination, but there you go…)

This paper by Lemley, Levine and Post describes the legal implications of enforcing the key provisions of SOPA and PROTECT-IP as drafted. The authors say “the bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure” and describe how it is a bad prescient and why it won’t work in the end. In more positive news, there is an effort underway to draft legislation that would accomplish much of what SOPA and PROTECT-IP say they want to do without many of the downsides.

Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually

Electronics retailer Best Buy is headed for the exits. I can’t say when exactly, but my guess is that it’s only a matter of time, maybe a few more years.

- Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually, by Larry Downes, Forbes

The authors tell a story about how as a Best Buy customer he was approached by a salesperson wanting to sell him an on-demand video package of some sort, and that reminded me just a little bit from my academic experience of trying to push bibliographic instruction on students rather than solving the problem they had at hand. The article goes on to describe how online retailers like Amazon are more in tune with customer needs and demands. I couldn’t help but wonder if our library processes and procedures and polices are more like Best Buy or more like Amazon. From what I hear at my consortial perspective we are trending towards Amazon, but are we going to get there fast enough?

By the way, I can highly recommend a recent 51 minute audio interview with Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad and now Chief Technology Officer of Best Buy (after Best Buy purchased and integrated the Geek Squad electronics service chain early last decade. It is a fascinating view of how customer service must trump all other concerns, and how efficiently executing customer service is the true path to survival. There are some lessons in there for libraries as well.

Open Source Licensing Defuses Copyright Law’s Threat to Medicine

Enforcing copyright law could potentially interfere with patient care, stifle innovation and discourage research, but using open source licensing instead can prevent the problem, according to a physician – who practices both at the University of California, San Francisco and the San Francisco VA Medical Center – and a legal scholar at the UC Hastings College of Law.

- Open Source Licensing Defuses Copyright Law’s Threat to Medicine, News service of the University of California, San Francisco

Here’s something to think about. What if new medical advances where suppressed because the diagnostic instruments used were protected by copyright. The doctor in the above article goes on to say that clinical tools tend to resemble one another “not because their creators are unoriginal, but because the tools are based on the same research and the same science.” That is a legal grey area where clinics decide to err on the side of caution and not use something that could be protected by copyright. It sort of reminds me about the unsettled law surrounding orphan works — just enough grey to stifle innovation.

Another “by the way”: I can also recommend a 16 minute recording of Karen Sandler speaking at the recent O’Reilly Media Open Source conference on the need to publish the source code of embedded medical devices under an open source license so the programs could be independently inspected. It, too, comes by way of the IT Conversations podcast. Two podcast mentions in one DLTJ Thursday Threads? What can I say…I listened to a lot of podcasts over the December break.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the House Judiciary Committee markup session for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that have happened over the past two days along with the tweets that have been going out in reaction to the proceedings. One of the running threads in the commentary has been the theory of a correlation between campaign contributions from media creators and a desire by representatives to push SOPA through the committee. (Disclosure: I’ve come out publicly against SOPA.) By tabulating the roll call votes and using data from OpenSecrets.org, there does appear to be a correlation, and one that gets tighter the higher the percentage of contributions from media creators. I’ll show my work below.

Gathering Data

• Vote 1 (discussion ongoing at the start of the video) roll call at 13:53
• Vote 2 (discussion starting at 17:41) roll call at 36:55
• Vote 3 (discussion starting at 40:10) roll call at 54:59
• Vote 4 (discussion starting at 58:00) roll call at 1:16:58
• Vote 5 (discussion starting at 1:43:28) roll call at 2:05:11
• Vote 6 (discussion starting at 2:21:56) roll call at 2:40:42
• Vote 7 (discussion starting at 3:13:49) roll call at 3:34:28
• Vote 8 (discussion starting at 3:38:30) roll call at 4:23:24

For campaign contribution information, I relied on the OpenSecrets.org site, and I was specifically looking at two categories of contributions: those affiliated with TV/Movies/Music and those affiliated with Computers/Internet. For each category, I looked at contributions for the 2011-2012 cycle to a representative’s campaign committee and leadership PAC (where applicable). There are probably other industry categories that could be included on each side and one could certainly look at history beyond the current year, but I think this slice of information is enough to see if the correlation holds true.

Based on the above, my data table looks like this:

(Available on Google Docs and downloadable as an Excel file.)

Now for some assumptions. First, all proposed amendments (and consequently all roll call votes) were for language that weakened SOPA in some way. Second, the difference between contributions from the TV/Movies/Music industry category and the Computers/Internet industry category is a measure of how those industries feel about SOPA. (In other words, there aren’t significant contributions from the TV/Movies/Music industry that are opposed to SOPA and vice versa.)

Results

Contributions versus Votes

Another interesting point, given today’s hyper-polarized political climate, is that the pro-SOPA and anti-SOPA divide was not along party lines:

Party versus Voting Percentage

Commentary

I had heard in news stories that the TV/Movies/Music industries has been courting the members of the Judiciary Committee for a number of years, while the Computers/Internet industries have been relatively late to the game. That might explain why there is a higher voting affinity between supporters of SOPA and votes supporting SOPA as proposed.

A Plug for Rootstrikers

In a blog post last month, Lessig offers an explanation on why he is not visible in the SOPA fight.

I am not at the center of the SOPA fight (though obviously a strong supporter). Here’s a couple sentences why.

First, and again, this is a critical battle to wage and win. SOPA is just the latest, but in many ways, the most absurd campaign in the endless saga of America’s copyright wars. It will be yet another failed attempt in a failed war, and I obviously believe it should be opposed.

But second, and as you describe, this isn’t my war anymore. Not because my heart isn’t in it, but because I don’t believe we will win that war (or better, win the peace and move on) — even if we can win battles like this one — until the more basic corruption that is our government gets addressed. That’s the fight I have spent the last 4 years working on. That’s where I’ll be for at least the next 6.

Lessig goes on to describe and cheer for the efforts inside Congress and outside to make sure SOPA doesn’t become law. Then he ends with:

For this is what I know: We will never (as in not ever) win the war you care about until we win the war against this corruption of our Republic.

The corruption he speaks of is the undue influence of campaign contributions to American politics. He and other similarly-minded citizens have formed Rootstrikers to start a movement in this country to eliminate that influence. To learn more about Lessig’s Rootstrikers project, watch his recent interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, or — for a longer version — his Republic, Lost lecture screencast.

I think Lessig is onto something. If nothing else, the appearance of corruption is enough of a reason to address the fundraising needs of politicians. It would seem, though, that the fundraising need is indeed an unhealthy influence on the daily schedules (if not decisions) of politicians and we need a way to remove that influence. The Rootstrikers proposals seem like a reasonable solution to this problem.

Update

BREAKING: Judiciary has scheduled the rest of #SOPA markup next Wednesday, Dec. 21 at 9 AM EST. #stopsopa #open #dontbreaktheinternet #ip

— @DarrellIssa Darrell Issa December 16, 2011 at 4:48pm EST

What do you suppose the conversation was like after the the meeting ended. I imagine it went something like this:

Media lobbyist:

Hey! You said you were going to run this legislation through your committee and get it to the house floor before the end of the year! What happened?!?

Judiciary Committee Chairperson Lamar Smith:

Well, yeah, that was the plan, but all of these facts kept coming up about how the bill was going to break things and be unenforceable and not actually fix the problem. It was looking bad — I was looking bad — so in the end I said we would wait until the new year when hopefully things will have cooled off.

Media lobbyist:

You can’t do that! I promised my clients to give them SOPA for Christmas. If you know what is good for you you’ll get back in there and make it happen.

Chairperson Smith:

Alright, alright…I’ll call everyone back to the the committee room three days before Christmas Eve and wear down the opponents.

Media lobbyist:

That’s better. By the way, how ’bout I host another fundraiser for you in January. Is the evening of the 6th good for you?

Somebody — please prove me wrong!

Earlier this month there was an amazing groundswell of opposition to SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. I participated in a 1-day anticensorship campaign designed to bring awareness to the proposed law, as did thousands of others around the country. It has been reported that this groundswell of opposition caught many in Congress by surprise.

In an interesting turn of events, SOPA’s parent — the PROTECT-IP Act in the U.S. Senate — may come up for vote on the Senate floor this week. (PROTECT-IP, in case you are wondering, is an acronym for “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011″.) This bill still contains many of the same troublesome definitions and technical issues of SOPA, and it deserves to be blocked as well. Senator Wyden of Oregon submitted a statement to the U.S. House hearing on SOPA warns of severe repercussions to a free and open internet if SOPA and PROTECT-IP were passed, and he has said he will filibuster an attempt to pass this in the Senate.


You, too, can use the form on the Stop Censorship website to ask Senator Wyden to read aloud your name as part of the filibuster act and/or have your name submitted into the official Congressional Record. (I’ve done this myself and have tweeted about it.) I have also used the Contact Congress feature of OpenCongress to register my opposition with my U.S. Senators, even though one is a co-sponsor of the legislation.

Why I Oppose PROTECT-IP Act and SOPA

This is a tough battle, though. OpenCongress has a blog post from last week about Why SOPA and PROTECT-IP Are So Hard to Kill that points to a graphic from the end of a Politico article where writer Jennifer Martinez outlines the careful lobbying and spending by the film, music and TV industries over the past few years to grease the wheels for their goals behind SOPA and PROTECT-IP. These are strong forces behind the passage. I hope the voices of Americans are enough to cause senators to back off passage. If you feel the same way I do, I encourage you to let your state’s senators know of our opinion.

This blog will be participating in the American Censorship Day awareness campaign on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 to show opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R.3261). There is an effort in the U.S. Congress to give power to the Department of Justice to disrupt the domain name service (DNS – the bit of internet infrastructure that makes human-readable things like “dltj.org” meaningful to machines) and order websites and search engines to remove links to targeted services (among other things). This legislation is supported in large part by the content creation industries to “address today’s gravest threat to the American film industry workforce: the illegal distribution of content online.”¹

The Center for Democracy and Technology has as a 2-page overview of why this is bad a bad law:

Why I Oppose SOPA

Footnotes

1. From the Motion Picture Association of America. Citation: IFTA: Jennifer Garnick, NATO: Patrick Corcoran, MPAA: Howard Gantman, Deluxe: Cathy Main, (2011, October 26). Creative Community Hails New Bipartisan House Legislation to Shut Down Rogue Websites that Steal American-Made Content. Retrieved October 31, 2011, from MPAA.

This week of DLTJ Thursday Threads covers a wide range of topics. First, from a public policy perspective, is news that the U.S. Senate has a bill proposing the study of an internet “kill-switch” that some are speculating could behave like what happened in Egypt last week. Next, from a technical perspective, is the fact that we’re running out of IP addresses, which is going to make some engineers’ lives pretty messy before it is ultimately fixed. Lastly, from a research perspective, is a paper that characterizes the demographics of users using peer-to-peer for piracy.

Continuing last week’s sidenote, I think I have found the fundamental problem of why Thursday Threads hasn’t been coming out via e-mail on, well, Thursday. Although the underlying issue still remains, a workaround has been put in place that will hopefully eliminate the symptomps.

Internet ‘Kill Switch’ Legislation Back in Play

Legislation granting the president internet-killing powers is to be re-introduced soon to a Senate committee, the proposal’s chief sponsor told Wired.com on Friday.

The resurgence of the so-called “kill switch” legislation came the same day Egyptians faced an internet blackout designed to counter massive demonstrations in that country.

The bill, which has bipartisan support, is being floated by Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The proposed legislation, which Collins said would not give the president the same power Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak is exercising to quell dissent, sailed through the Homeland Security Committee in December but expired with the new Congress weeks later.

The bill is designed to protect against “significant” cyber threats before they cause damage, Collins said.

Wired.com has this article about proposed legislation to “direct the Department of Homeland Security to undertake a study on emergency communications” (the bill’s title). The text of the legislation is not available at this time, but when a similar topic was debated in the last congressional session, the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs — chaired by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman with Senator Susan M. Collins as ranking minority member — issued a four-page Myth-v-Reality document [PDF]. That bill also seemed to do more than simply request a study — it actually established in the Executive Office of the President an Office of Cyberspace Policy. The bill died before coming up for a vote in the final days of the session. At the time, the American Library Association joined with dozens of other groups to send a letter [PDF] to the committee expression concerns with that version.

There is some really wacky stuff going on here. For instance, the Wired.com article reports on an aide to the Homeland Security committee gave an example when the limited power given to the President would be used: “An example, the aide said, would require infrastructure connected to ‘the system that controls the floodgates to the Hoover dam’ to cut its connection to the net if the government detected an imminent cyber attack.” This, of course, begs the question of “Is the system that controls the floodgates of the Hoover Dam connected to the public internet?” followed closely by “If so, why?” I think this one is going to be worth following to see what happens.

No more IPv4 addresses

The Internet has run out of IPv4 address space.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigned two of the remaining blocks of IPv4 addresses – each containing 16.7 million addresses – to the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) on Tuesday, as predicted.

This action sparks an immediate distribution of the remaining five blocks of IPv4 address space, with one block going to each of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIR).

Internet Protocol (or “IP”) addresses are the unique identifiers that direct traffic from one computer on the network to another. When the experiment that we now know as the Internet was created — known as IP version 4 or “IPv4″ — the number of possible unique addresses was set as 4,294,967,296¹. It was thought that such a number would be sufficient for experimental purposes. The internet, of course, has taken on a life of its own, and with the assignment of unique addresses to home computers and cell phones, it was only a matter of time before we ran out.

Well, as stated in the article from Network World where the above quote came from, that time is quickly coming. The very top layer of the IP address bureaucracy assigns addresses in blocks of about 16.8 million to five regional registries that correspond to roughly continental boundaries. Those registries then assign smaller blocks to various internet services providers to use. How long it takes for each regional registry to run out of addresses varies from months to years, but with the exhaustion of the top-level registry the internet engineers know that we have reached the first milestone on that path.

There are various techniques that can be used to stretch the number of addresses, but the end-game is going to be the adoption of IP version 6. IPv6 will give us 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 unique addresses. That’s 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456 addresses. Think that will be enough?

A research study identifies who uploads the majority of the content to the P2P piracy networks

Users who publish contents on BitTorrent dedicate a large part of their own resources (bandwidth, storage capacity) and assume the risks involved in publishing contents that are protected by copyright laws. So, is this altruistic behavior or is there some type of economic incentive at work? “The success of BitTorrent is due to the fact that a few users make a large number of contents available in exchange for receiving economic benefits”, explain the authors of a study carried out by the Telematic Engineering Department of the UC3M, Professors Rubén Cuevas, Carmen Guerrero and Ángel Cuevas. Their analysis demonstrates that a small group of users of these applications (around one hundred) is responsible for 66 percent of the content that is published and 75 percent of the downloads. In other words: the great success of a massively used application like BitTorrent depends on a few users.

This quote comes from a summary of a research study presented at 6th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT) late last year. It would seem to suggest that if one wanted to shut down piracy on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks such as BitTorrent that it would only take convincing or eliminating “a few users” to make it happen. That this hasn’t happened perhaps points to the difficulty in locating and stopping those users, but still I thought this made for an interesting read none the less. [Via ACM TechNews from January 26, 2011]

Footnotes

1. Okay, when one takes out the reserved private addresses and the multicast addresses, the number is somewhere around 4,006,000,000, but who is counting?

The fact that the Higher Education Opportunity Act (Public Law 110-315) — otherwise known as HEOA — was signed into law last year is probably not big news to anyone. One of the parts of the bill that I have been following and commented on here in DLTJ is the textbook disclosure rules. I haven’t posted follow-up commentary here because I’ve been expecting that the U.S. Department of Education will be forthcoming with new regulations regarding the implementation of the disclosure rules. As it turns out, a sentence was added into the legislation between the time I last read it closely and when it finally was made law: “No Regulatory Authority- The Secretary shall not promulgate regulations with respect to this section.” It would appear the language of the law stands on its own.

In December, Vincent Sampson in the Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education wrote a 219-page “Dear Colleague” letter that provides summaries of provisions of HEOA. One summary covers the “Textbook Information” section (from pages 34 and 35, in its entirety):

The HEOA supports the academic freedom of faculty to select high quality course materials for their students while imposing several new provisions to ensure that students have timely access to affordable course materials at postsecondary institutions receiving Federal financial assistance. These provisions support that effort and include the following:

• When textbook publishers provide information on a college textbook or supplemental material to faculty in charge of selecting course materials at postsecondary institutions, that information must be in writing (including electronic communication) and must include
  • the price of the textbook;
  • the copyright dates of the three previous editions (if any);
  • a description of substantial content revisions;
  • whether the textbook is available in other formats and if so, the price to the institution and to the general public;
  • the separate prices of textbooks unbundled from supplemental material; and
  • to the maximum extent possible, the same information for custom textbooks.
• To the maximum extent practicable, an institution must include on its Internet course schedule for required and recommended textbooks and supplemental material
  • the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and retail price;
  • if the ISBN is not available, the author, title, publisher, and copyright date; or
  • if such disclosure is not practicable, the designation “To Be Determined.”

  If applicable, the institution must include on its written course schedule a reference to the textbook information available on its Internet schedule and the Internet address for that schedule.

• A postsecondary institution must provide the following information to its college bookstores upon request by such college bookstore:
  • the institution’s course schedule for the subsequent academic period; and
  • for each course or class offered, the information it must include on its Internet course schedule for required and recommended textbooks and supplemental material, the number of students enrolled, and the maximum student enrollment.
• Institutions disclosing the information they must include on their Internet course schedules for required and recommended textbooks and supplemental material are encouraged to provide information on
  • renting textbooks;
  • purchasing used textbooks;
  • textbook buy-back programs; and
  • alternative content delivery programs.

The HEOA also requires the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to study the implementation of this section and report to Congress (See Non-institutional Studies, Reports, and Summits, U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) Studies and Reports, Textbook Information)

The Secretary is prohibited from regulating on this section of the HEA, but will monitor institutions and review student complaints relating to these provisions.

The law says that this provision “shall take effect on July 1, 2010″ so schools have a little less than a year now to adjust their internal data gathering and reporting systems. I haven’t been able to find further guidance on the Department of Education website or at other sources. This effects Ohio’s efforts in promoting lower-cost, highly-effective course materials, so if anyone knows of other information, please let me know.

Update

Unbundling of college textbooks from supplemental materials.– A publisher that sells a college textbook and any supplemental material accompanying such college textbook as a single bundle shall also make available the college textbook and each supplemental material as separate and unbundled items, each separately priced.

New legislation was introduced in the U.S. Senate last week to support the publication of federally-sponsored research results under open access terms.
Sponsored by Senator Lieberman of Connecticut and co-sponsored by Senator Cornyn of Texas, it mandates open access to author pre-print versions with peer review changes in federally-run repositories within six months of publication. Called S.1373, it is a nearly identical version to the bill of the same name that these two senators introduced in 2006, which ultimately died in committee. The 2006 version was supported by a wide variety of organizations including the American Library Association, as tracked by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA).

In his statement on the floor of the Senate introducing the bill, Senator Cornyn described the benefits of the legislation:

Our bill will ask all Federal departments and agencies that invest $100 million or more annually in research to develop a public access policy. Our goal is to have the results of all government-funded research to be disseminated and made available to the largest possible audience. By speeding access to this research, we can help promote the advancement of science, accelerate the pace of new discoveries and innovations, and improve the lives and welfare of people at home and abroad.

The practical reality of the legislation would be to endorse the NIH open access policy, apply it to a wider array of departments, and run counter to the U.S. Representative John Conyer’s proposed “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act” (discussed earlier on DLTJ). The differences between the two bills are described below. The major change is the exclusion of progress reports at meetings or conferences from the open access provisions, plus oversight by additional committees in the U.S. House and Senate. ATA released a statement that supports this version of the bill.

Gavin Baker at Open Access News has some things to watch as the bill makes its way through the legislative process.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/Release09-0625.html to http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/news/news_releases/Release09-0625.shtml on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://cornyn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ForPress.NewsReleases&ContentRecord_id=1959bcce-802a-23ad-4dbe-e2aece171fb3&Region_id=&Issue_id= to http://cornyn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=NewsReleases&ContentRecord_id=1959bcce-802a-23ad-4dbe-e2aece171fb3&ContentType_id=b94acc28-404a-4fc6-b143-a9e15bf92da4&Group_id=24eb5606-e2db-4d7f-bf6c-efc5df80b676&MonthDisplay=6&YearDisplay=2009 on February 12th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.govtrack.us/congress/record.xpd?id=111-s20090625-50&bill=s111-1373#sMonofilemx003Ammx002Fmmx002Fmmx002Fmhomemx002Fmgovtrackmx002Fmdatamx002Fmusmx002Fm111mx002Fmcrmx002Fms20090625-50.xmlElementm90m0m0m on February 12th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/frpaa/ to http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/issues/frpaa/index.shtml on June 9th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/frpaa_2006/ on June 9th, 2011.