DMCA Rulemaking

We didn't have a chance yet to discuss the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), so in addition to the book chapter on  "Balance Toppled: Who Owns the Bits?", I wanted provide a more recent take on this rather controversial law.

The DMCA came about because there was a shift towards the distribution of copyrighted materials in digital form (copyright) accompanied by new methods of protection. Through the use of "digital locks," technological systems behind which these copyrighted materials are protected, producers and manufacturers are able to automate fine grained control over who can access, use, and/or copy their works and under what conditions. Producers insist these "digital locks" are necessary to protect their materials from being pirated or misappropriated.

But, these new technological systems, and the DMCA provisions making it a crime to bypass them, undermine individuals ability to make "fair use" of digital information, and essentially replace the negotiation of the terms of use for those products with unilateral terms dictated by copyright owners. These self-help technical protection mechanisms are generally not evident to the purchaser or user until after the sale. In some cases, producers who use these technical locks to enforce limits on access and use of their works fail to disclose the terms of use to the purchasers or licensees of their products.

Technological protection systems are already in place in DVDs, eBooks, video game consoles, robotic toys, Internet streaming, and password-protected sections of web sites. The fact that a digital protection may be really weak and easy to circumvent has not prevented courts from applying this law to punish those who bypass them.

As a result, the legitimate activities of scientists, software engineers, journalists, and others have been chilled. The DMCA has been used by copyright holders and the government to prevent the creation of third-party software products, silence computer scientists, and prosecute journalists who provide hypertext links to software code.

In the article I posted for this week, The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits "circumventing" digital rights management (DRM) and other "technological measures" used to protect copyrighted works. While this ban was meant to deter copyright infringement, the law is misused to chill innovation, free speech and fair use. The one ray of light: every three years the U.S. Copyright Office convenes a "rulemaking" to consider granting exemptions to the DMCA's ban on circumvention to mitigate the harms the law has caused to legitimate non-infringing uses of copyrighted materials. The Copyright Office pores over exemption proposals submitted by the public, weighs the pros and cons, and then offers recommendations to the Librarian of Congress, who ultimately grants or denies the exemptions. At the end of the article, the authors suggest:

• The Register of Copyrights and the Librarian of Congress would do well to go back to the drawing board and come up with a process, and a standard, that will help a broader array of concerned users to make their case for legitimate exemptions.


• The Register should revisit the long-standing policy of making the proponent of an exemption demonstrate the need for it every three years, no matter how obvious the need for the exemption is, or how many times it’s been granted in the past. It’s absurd to automatically put the burden of proof on the people seeking an exemption under all circumstances, and it's not required by the DMCA. Once the Librarian grants an exemption, the burden should shift to those who oppose it to show in future rulemakings why it isn’t needed anymore.


• Finally, the Copyright Office should be more receptive to granting exemptions for innovative uses of new and emerging technologies. The fact that an exemption was granted for smartphones but not tablets, even though they are virtually interchangeable devices with increasingly similar functionalities, shows that the rulemaking process doesn’t track the ways consumers are using those devices today.

To see what was granted and was denied, read the 2012 DMCA Rulemaking article.

Are you aware of other examples where the DMCA has been used to stop people from using products they buy and change because of weak controls or fair use assumptions?  What about product developers that allow people to circumvent their products (e.g., Google Glass, X-box Kinect - see http://openkinect.org/wiki/Main_Page)?

SXSWedu & Blended Learning

I found the SXSWedu site in a roundabout way, as I often do.  I was reading the disruptive innovation blog from the Clayton Christensen Institute (Prof. Christensen is the man noted for inventing the definition of disruptive innovation):

The theory of disruptive innovation describes a process by which a product or service transforms an existing market by introducing simplicity, convenience, accessibility, and affordability.

Anyway, the blog I was reading, "Could local innovation networks be a key to adopting blended learning?" which provided an example of blended learning at Reynoldsburg City Schools. 

Blended learning involves leveraging the Internet to afford each student a more personalized learning experience, meaning increased student control over the time, place, path, and/or pace of his or her learning. The definition of blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns:

1. at least in part through online learning, with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace;
2. at least in part in a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home;
3.  and the modalities along each student’s learning path within a course or subject are connected to provide an integrated learning experience.

Here is a short video of blended learning from The Learning Accelerator. 

I found this notion of blended learning similar to topics we discussed on how to create new learning environments in the classroom that offers collaborative (affinity) spaces, as well as taking into account different learning skills of individual students.

The SXSWedu.com site that I found is pushing the envelope in designing many new innovations in education.  You can see a video there of some examples.  But what impressed me most was the 2014 Features Session by Jack Andraka.  Here is a HS kid (some kid) who took on the challenge of finding a better, cheaper way to scan for cancer cells.  It's worth watching.  

Some things to think about:  

• What do you think of the blended learning idea?  Investigate other new learning innovations either at SXSWedu.com or other sites and comment on them.

• What did you take away from Jack Andraka's talk?  

Video Game Questions

The readings for April 8 focus on video games and gamers. At issue is whether the real world can measure up as "the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments" or whether "reality, as compared to games, is broken" (McGonigal, p.3).

According to McGonigal (based on mostly 2008/2009 data so assume the numbers are larger now), hundreds of millions of people worldwide, including 183 million active gamers in the US -- as well as "4 million in the Middle East, 10 million in Russia, 104 million in India, 10 million in Vietnam, 10 million in Mexico, 13 million in Central and South America, 15 million in Australia, 17 million in South Korea, 100 million in Europe, and 200 million in China" play video and computer games.

The questions to consider are many:

• McGonigal thinks we should "use everything we know about game design to fix what's wrong with reality" by solving real-world problems like computer and video game theorists (p.7). 

• According to James Paul Gee, "Lots of young people pay lots of money to engage in an activity that is hard, long, and complex. As an educator, I realized that this was just the problem our schools face — how do you get someone to learn something long, hard, and complex, and yet still enjoy it?"

• Alternatively, are gamers missing out on reality by spending too much time in digital games? 

• Are games too violent and lead gamers to become violent themselves? 

• Are games designed for boys, leaving girls behind? Are only the affluent gamers? 

• And what about job prospects?  Are avid gamers more likely to get better jobs because of their problem-solving skill game mentality? That is, what are the educational benefits to video game playing? 

Here are the readings on video games, as well as the questions. Read the CQ Researcher article, as well as the the Intro and Chapter 1 of McGongigal's book, Reality is Broken, and comment on these issues here, or on our class wiki.

Learner Lectures

Here is the list of students and topics as discussed today, Mar.6 (order is random):

• Online Education
• David Celaya
• Online Dating (e.g., Tinder)
• Riley Brennan 
• Bitcoin
• John Campbell & Tyler Peterson 
• Google Glass
• Alfred Jimenez
• Crowdfunding (e.g., Kickstarter)
• Fletcher DellaGrotta
• Rebaz Ahmad & Victoria Barry
• Internet Streaming & Net Neutrality
• Slow Internet & Infrastructure
• Robert Pfluger
• Privacy Security & Raytheon's RIOT
• Whitney Bruns
• Music Piracy Software
• Alexis Copeland
• To be decided 
• Eric Gun Ho Bae 
• Colton Cray

Five Tips to Incorporate Mindfulness Into Your Daily Routine

1.  Notice, don’t think.

Pretend you are a traveler or student encountering this activity for the very first time. Don’t judge, label, and think about what you’re doing. Just notice. Notice every detail with an open, beginner’s mind.

2. When in doubt, check your breathing.

If you feel your thoughts wandering from the present task, take a minute to hear and feel yourself breathe. Just paying attention to a few breaths will bring you back to the present moment. 

3. You have 5 senses, use them.

Mindfulness means truly experiencing what is going on right now. This is more than just noticing what something looks like. What does it smell like? Feel it with your hands. What is the texture? Temperature? What do you hear?

4. Have a strategy to handle nagging thoughts.

Occasionally we all have thoughts that won’t go away—so you need a strategy for how to handle them. I like to have a notebook with me at all times to write any nagging to-dos, ideas or issues. If you write them down, your mind can relax because it knows you can go back to them later.

5. It is what it is.

You don’t need to analyze your mindfulness experience. Don’t worry about what it all means or if you’re being mindful enough. Just try to be mindful every day. Come more fully into the present moment. Let the experience be what it is.

Tiny Buddha ™ 

Copyright © 2013

Rethinking Blogs

I was looking for a blog post for this class and ran across this article, "Rethinking Blogs at The New York Times."  The New York Times have redesigned their blogs last month, which was really a re-platform.  It meant moving from WordPress-only service to a WordPress as an app inside of the NYTimes platform.

In addition to learning about the re-platform (a behind the scenes look), the article discusses "how blogs used to work." 

In the past, article pages were generated into static HTML files when published. This was good because it was lightning fast, but bad because those files and assets were very difficult to change once they were published.

to how they work now.

The new platform has two main technologies at its center: a new PHP rendering framework and Grunt. Our codebase is a collection of repos that get built into apps via Grunt and deployed by RPMs/Puppet.

It's pretty technical, but some of you might find it interesting to know how large blog sites figure out how to move from old to new blog techniques.

U.S. 'Falling Way Behind' High Speed Internet

I mentioned this in class.  I heard an interview with law professor, Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the Gilded Age, who explains how we got to this point. "The [Federal Communications Commission] in the early 2000s really thought that competition would do the job of regulatory oversight — that that would protect Americans." [You can read the summary or listen to her interview - I recommend the latter.]

The idea was that cable, telephone and wireless companies would battle it out, which would yield low prices for American consumers. "As it turns out, they were wrong and we've come into an era where these markets have consolidated and for most Americans, their only choice for high-speed, high-capacity Internet connection is their local cable monopoly."

In her book, Crawford reminds us that the U.S. had some of the fastest speeds and lowest prices in the world for high-speed Internet access.

The nation was poised to be the global leader in the new knowledge-based economy. Today that global competitive advantage has all but vanished because of a series of government decisions and resulting monopolies that have allowed dozens of countries, including Japan and South Korea, to pass us in both speed and price of broadband. This steady slide backward not only deprives consumers of vital services needed in a competitive employment and business market—it also threatens the economic future of the nation.

"Americans aren't quite aware of it," says Crawford, "because we don't look beyond our borders, but we're falling way behind in the pack of developed nations when it comes to high-speed Internet access, capacity and prices."  At issue is whether the new jobs, new innovations, new services of the 21st century will come from the United States or they'll come from Stockholm, Seoul, Beijing, where there are kids already used to and playing in these very high capacity networks.