I'm an Australian, based in the Washington, DC, area of the United States. I spend a lot of time there with Jasmine, Australia's best-known speedsolver of the Rubik's Cube. Prior to the US, Jasmine and I were based in London, UK. We have also lived previously in the United States and Australia.

I have worked for an Australian business rules and compliance company since 1999 in Australia, the US and the UK. I have also lectured in IT and Law related topics at King's College, London, and at The Australian National University.

I have some more information and a list of publications available (pop-up window).

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- February 2007
- January 2007
- All posts from 2006
- All posts from 2005
- All posts from 2004

These are a few of my favourite links:
- Jasmine's site
- Jasmine's blog
- Mikal
- Daveydweeb
- Beth
- Lyn
- Doug
- Marissa
- Lisaloha
- David (Greenomics)
- Paul's Ramblings (music)

Hits since 1 Sep 2004

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Don't copy that floppy!

Here's a badly dated 1992 video from the US Software Publishers' Association that urges people not to copy software. It features the lamest rap you will ever see or hear. There's an article about the video in Wikipedia. (Via Cruel.com.)

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Australian schools to pay copyright fees for using the web?

According to an article in Australian IT:

Schools have warned they will have to turn off the internet if a move by the nation's copyright collection society forces them to pay a fee every time a teacher instructs students to browse a website.

If this is true, it's pretty outrageous. Material is placed on the internet because it is meant to be public. If no one else has to pay for general internet use, why should schools?

Even if this were not the case, there is such a volume and diversity of material on the World Wide Web that it would be unreasonable to collect fees for all school web use and then disburse them to the quite limited author list maintained by a copyright collecting body.

I have not followed up this issue in detail -- I have just read the articles to which I am referring here -- but the supposed Australian proposal sounds quite bizarre based on what I have seen.

See also Boing Boing on this topic.

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Google and the Death of the Book

The online Sydney Morning Herald has an interesting article on the topic "A new chapter in the death of the book," by Peter Martin.

The article describes efforts by various companies -- Google, Microsoft, Amazon -- to digitise and catalogue the contents of books. The idea is that traditional book catalogues are very limited in their ability to direct readers to content within a book because they only refer the author, title and a limited number of subjective classifications. Allowing searches of the entire contents of a book would make it much easier to find content in books.

In a lot of ways, this is a good idea. When I was at university, I studied a lot of history and a lot of law. Legal research was relatively easy because of the array of commercial research tools from vendors like LexisNexis and Thomson which indexed legal material from cases to articles. Historical research was much more complicated as there was no commercial demand for serious indexing. I regularly used to grab a pile of about 35 library books and load them into a car so I could sift through them at home. Basically, the Google idea is to make books more accessible and useful by allowing us to search them as we search the web.

The problem is that the publishing industry is up in arms about the threat it sees to its copyright. Microsoft and Amazon have been sensitive to this, by only scanning books that are out of copyright or for which they have obtained permission. The Google approach is different -- it plans to scan everything:

Right now in the Oxford University Library, the New York Public Library and the libraries of three US universities, staff are busy removing books from the shelves row by row and loading them onto trolleys for delivery to special centres where their entire contents are scanned and loaded into a computer.

Unfortunately for Google, it is less than clear that current copyright law will support what it is doing.

Google's efforts have raised one of those interesting conundrums we find when digital technology challenges our way of thinking about intellectual property. According to the Herald article:

If Google loses, those of us who love looking up books will lose. But I would also suggest that books themselves will lose. If books can't be searched when other sources of information can, over time books will become less important. They'll stay unsearched on library shelves and in the back of lounge room bookcases.

It will be interesting to see how this issue plays itself out.

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Visual history of music sampling

I just found this interesting article on Boing Boing. It links to a Java application that allows you to browse through an amazing network of identified samples in recorded music.

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Google News still in beta after three years

There is an interesting article on the Wired website (discussed on Slashdot) that describes a curious legal issue for Google News. It seems that while the launch of Google News terrified online news services that spent a fortune writing their own content, the Google model of inexpensively scraping headlines from other sites ultimately hit a snag. One of the interesting passages from the article reads:

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An open letter from the software industry to content owners and producers

I read an hilarious open letter from the software industry to content owners and producers (linked from Boing Boing) today. It's very funny, but it emphasizes the way that the music and film industries in particular are suffering from their inability to devise new offerings and revenue models for the digital age. The letter suggests that this is why these industries have been so aggressive in pursuing, for example, people who download music as sales of traditional entertainment media drop. It points out the ways that the computer industry has devised new offerings that allow its revenue stream to keep growing.

The article grabs the reader's attention immediately with a very catchy opening:

Dear Content Producers and Owners:

We lied to you. In the golden 80s and 90s we told you micropayments and content protection would work; that you would be able to charge minuscule amounts of money whenever someone listened to your music or watched your movie. We told you untruths which we well knew would never work - after all, we would've never used them ourselves. Instead, we wrote things like Kazaa and Gnutella, and all other evil P2P applications to get the stuff free.

Later, it makes its substantive point:

Look at us: every year, we churn out more computer games than your entire industry is worth. You know how we do it? We like our customers. We don't treat them like potential criminals, and try to make our products do less. We invent new things like online role-playing -games, where the money does not come from duplication of bits (which cannot be stopped, regardless of your DRM scheme) but from providing experiences that the people want.

The full document is a worthwhile read.

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A CD we're meant to copy

This is a couple of days old, but I still thought it worth posting. I came across it in a blog run by Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law professor.

Wired magazine's November issue (out next month) will ship with a free CD containing 16 tracks that are intended for online copying and other uses that record companies normally try to proscribe. Lessig links to an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal that discusses the CD and its Creative Commons licence (which reserves only selected rights under copyright, rather than all rights as is normally the case; the Creative Commons approach encourages people to build on the creations of others with far fewer legal restrictions).

The Journal describes the project as follows:

Next month, songs by the Beastie Boys, David Byrne and 14 others will appear on a compilation CD whose contents are meant to be copied freely online, remixed or sampled by other artists for use in their own new recordings. "The Wired CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share." was compiled by the editors of Wired magazine, of San Francisco, as an experimental implementation of a new kind of intellectual-property license called Creative Commons. About 750,000 copies of the disc are to be distributed free with the magazine's November issue.

This makes me miss the lecturing I used to do in Information Technology Law at The Australian National University. The digital challenges to traditional intellectual property were an area we covered in some depth. Maybe I will get back to lecturing one day.