Alistair Henning

Ansel Adams plates found at a garage sale worth up to $200 million

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Industry Minister Tony Clement says his department is reviewing a list of copying exceptions issued by U.S. regulators. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

A ruling by U.S. regulators that allows Americans to break certain digital locks on content and devices may throw a wrench into the Canadian government's plan to reform copyright law.

The Library of Congress, which oversees the Copyright Office, issued a set of exceptions Monday to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the U.S. law that in many instances makes it illegal to break digital locks put in place by copyright holders.

Chief among the exceptions were allowances for consumers to unlock their cellphones and to "jailbreak" them, or put whatever software they like onto the devices.

The move to allow jailbreaking was strongly opposed by Apple in a 45-page letter sent to the Copyright Office last year. Apple, which maintains strong controls over which "apps" can be put on its iPhone, said its tight management was responsible for the device's success. The company also said wireless networks could suffer "potentially catastrophic" cyber attacks by hackers armed with iPhones laden with unauthorized software.

The Library of Congress, which reviews the digital copyright law every three years, sided with an argument put forward by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The consumer rights group argued that since consumers had bought the iPhone, they owned it and could therefore do whatever they liked with it.

Other exemptions granted by the Library of Congress on Monday included:

• Allowing people to break technical protections on video games to investigate or correct security flaws.
• Allowing college professors, film students and documentary filmmakers to break copy-protection measures on DVDs so they can embed clips for educational purposes, criticism, commentary and noncommercial videos.
• Allowing computer owners to bypass the need for external security devices called dongles if the dongle no longer works and cannot be replaced.
• Allowing blind people to break locks on electronic books so that they can use them with read-aloud software and similar aides.

Tony Clement, Canada's minister of industry, said on Twitter that his department is reviewing the ruling to see what the implications may be for Bill C-32, the copyright reform legislation he and Heritage Minister James Moore unveiled in June.

C-32 proposes enshrining in law a number of everyday actions, such as unlocking a cellphone, using a PVR, or making a copy of a CD for backup purposes. However, breaking "technical protection measures" or digital locks put on content or devices would trump all other rights granted by the bill, critics have said.

Moore, who has called opponents of C-32 "radical extremists," has defended the digital locks provision by saying it is necessary to bring Canada in line with its responsibilities with the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty it signed in 1996.

Prof. Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa, a chief copyright critic, said the U.S. exemptions prove that C-32's digital lock provisions go well beyond what is expected of Canada under the treaty.

The proposed Canadian rules would be "far more restrictive" than even the U.S. digital copyright act, he wrote on his blog on Monday.

The government plans to begin committee discussions on C-32 when Parliament resumes in the fall.

With files from The Associated Press

I was going to pen a little piece about the state of critical writing about photography when I came across a new post by Paddy Johnson. Paddy takes a long and convoluted paragraph of art writing and boils it down to what it actually says, which can be summed up in two short sentences. (more)

Paddy describes this kind of art writing as using

“what a friend describes as linguistic privilege — the practice of using big words as means of ensuring the reader (and typically the author) doesn’t know the essay lacks substantiated ideas.”

I suppose I don’t quite see it this way, even though Paddy and I are in complete agreement about what it does.

I’ve worked in academia long enough to know how it uses writing. In fact, I’ve written a bunch of papers (just for the giggles, here’s one), and they’re filled to the brim with jargon. Of course, there’s a reason why they’re filled with jargon. When I wrote

“We find star formation to be a somewhat stronger and tighter function of local density than BH activity, indicating some difference in the triggering of the latter versus the former”

that’s a sentence that inside the academic environment it was created in and for makes perfect sense. Outside… not so much.

The problem with art writing usually is that when it leaves academia and is taken into a non-academic context, authors typically make no effort whatsoever to account for the fact that academic jargon not only is incomprehensible for non-experts, but that it also strikes non-experts as pretentious bullshit (of course, even inside academia you can have pretentious bullshit, but there’s no need to go there). And people know that when you bullshit your way around, you got something to hide. I think this is what made Paddy write “using big words as means of ensuring the reader […] doesn’t know the essay lacks substantiated ideas.”

We don’t even have to agree on whether such academic writing is merely tone deaf in the sense of the author not realizing that non-experts don’t talk like that and thus will be unable - and/or unwilling - to deal with it, or whether it’s really just pretentious vacant nonsense. What is obvious, though, is that outside of academia such writing is bad writing, and we - the large number of people interested in art - deserve better than that.

When I write “art world” of course I’m including the photo world. A little while ago, a friend of mine offered me a copy of a magazine that shall remain nameless. He said he somehow had got two of them, and he was happy to give me a copy. I politely declined. He probably thought that I was just being polite, so said I could really have one, it was no big deal, he had two etc. This made me break down and tell him that while I truly appreciated his offer in reality I never look at the magazine because the articles for the most part are unreadable. For a split-second I thought I had committed some sort of faux-pas, until he told me he complete agreed, he never read the articles, either.

Another example. Almost two years ago, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before by Michael Fried was published. When I first heard of the book I was thrilled: A book talking about why photography matter as an art form. Oh boy! That excitement lasted until I got a copy and started reading it. Unless you’re an academic, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before is completely unreadable. It’s filled with jargon, convoluted sentences, references to obscure articles etc. The trooper in me had me read quite a bit of the book, and there are indeed some interesting ideas in it, but they’re hidden underneath a huge pile of truly terrible academic writing. Don’t believe it? Here we go. This is the first sentence of chapter 3:

“Wall’s involvement with absorption and with what, following Heidegger, I have been calling the worldhood of the world is closely related to his longstanding interest in the ordinary, the commonplace, or, his preferred term, the everyday, a topic that comes up frequently in his many interviews.”

And it’s just the first sentence, which actually is pretty harmless compared with the rest of said chapter.

Just yesterday, I had an email exchange with a photographer who mentioned the “atrocious contemporary critical art writing.” Mind you, that was just the most recent of the many email exchanges and conversations with people who complained about just that: Why is so much critical writing about art/photography so unbelievably terrible?

With ever more people getting interested in and becoming exposed to photography via the internet it really is time to have better critical writing about photography and art in general. I have the feeling that the internet is where this is going to be happening. We’re already seeing some examples - if you’ve followed this website you’ll remember them from the various links I posted. Hopefully, there will be more and more…

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Exactly. We need more discussion of photography couched in accessible, as well as truly thoughtful, terms and language.

After months of legal wrangling, one of the 10 safe deposit boxes in which documents belonging to the writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924 ) and his close friend Max Brod (1884-1968 ) were hidden for 40 years was opened Monday in Tel Aviv.

A delegation of smartly dressed lawyers arrived at the entrance to the Kikar Hamedina branch of Discount Bank at 10 A.M., holding a court order stating the safe deposit box must be opened. The contents, however, cannot be publicly revealed as the owner of the deposit box, Eva Hoffe, petitioned the court for a ban on publication. Haaretz has requested that the court, through the law offices of Lieblich-Moser, lift the ban.

A year ago the Tel Aviv Family Court, where the case is being heard, accepted the newspaper's petition that the hearings be opened to the public; until then, they had been held behind closed doors.

	Franz Kafka

The process of opening the safe deposit boxes will take a week. They are held in six different vaults in different banks in Tel Aviv, as well as four others vaults in a bank in the Swiss city of Zurich.

Witnesses who had been inside the bank at Kikar Hamedina when the team of lawyers arrived said Eva Hoffe burst into the building in an attempt to prevent the safe from being opened, shouting "It's mine, it's mine!"

The boxes are being opened in the presence of a battery of lawyers appointed by the court: the executors of the estates of Max Brod and his secretary and heir, Esther Hoffe; a representative of Hoffe's daughter, Eva; and a representative of the custodian general.

The team of lawyers will draw up an inventory of the documents they find in the boxes and present it to the Tel Aviv court. Judge Talia Pardo Kupelman will then determine the documents' status - whether they are the private property of the Hoffe sisters, who can then do with them whatever they want, or whether they constitute a literary treasure that must be transferred to a public archive.

Researchers and experts from Israel and Germany believe that some of the boxes may contain manuscripts by Kafka, widely considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, or documents that can shed additional light on the mysterious life of the artist who died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna at the age of 40 and who is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Prague.

An emotional battle

"The contents of the vaults are the private business of [Eva] Hoffe and her sister, and at this stage no one else has permission to know of their contents," Hoffe's attorney, Uri Zfat, wrote to the court.

In her deposition to the court, Hoffe articulated her fear that once the boxes were opened and their contents revealed, "they will be disseminated to the public and in this way, my property, assets, rights, privacy and human dignity will be compromised."

Hoffe and her sister inherited the safety deposit boxes from their mother, Esther Hoffe - Max Brod's longtime secretary and friend. Esther Hoffe died about three years ago; since then an emotional legal battle ensued over the Jewish National and University Library's demand that Hoffe hand over the manuscripts. At the same time, the German Literature Archives in Marbach, Germany is also interested in obtaining the documents and has been negotiating with Hoffe to buy them.

The opening of the vaults was facilitated by the executors of Esther Hoffe's estate, Shmuel Cassouto, Dan Novhari, Rami Hadar and Dan Zimmerman, who were responsible for handling the technical and bureaucratic difficulties involved in carrying out the court order.

Dr. Aviad Stollman of the national library told Haaretz: "We are happy to hear that the process of revealing the contents of the vaults in which the manuscripts were hidden for decades has begun. We were sorry to learn that a request was submitted to prevent the contents of the vault from being revealed. It is a shame that Ms. Hoffe is not prepared to let the public be party to these important literary treasures, and that she is trying to thwart the clarification of the truth."

This must be an emotional issue for the families involved, but it was a slippery slope ever since the initial Kafka material was published (against Kafka's posthumous wishes).

From July 23 – September 26, the exhibition will run in Ottawa City Hall’s Art Gallery – just steps from Parliament Hill!

The show will feature 25 images from  Beautiful Destruction – Alberta Tar Sands Aerial Photographs,  including five select images displayed as 40×60 prints.

Louis Helbig’s aerial images teeter between documentary and abstract. The tension between their beauty and what they represent — the man-made alteration and destruction of a landscape — stimulates both thought and imagination. The Alberta Tar Sands are a place of superlatives where exaggeration of scale and proportion seems almost impossible. This exhibition is one outcome of a 2008 aerial cross-country journey the photographer and his partner Kristin Reimer embarked on in their antique aircraft, a 1946 Luscombe.

Exhibition runs July 23 to September 26.

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It seems like just about everyone has run something by now about how bad the tar sands are. Will the fact that this show will be right under the Feds' noses prompt them to action? Probably not.

Lists are fun. This one's pretty good, covering most of the obvious (and less obvious but interesting) recommendations.

That this list is necessary shows just how far women have to go before achieving equality in this important field ;)

Recycled Island is a great idea for getting rid of the floating plastic dump in the Pacific.  The island would be built where the trash is located and would convert the waste onsite cutting down on cleanup and building costs.  It would be between Hawaii and San Francisco in the heart of the Pacific Ocean’s currents.

Currently, this research project is in the design phase.  The Netherlands Architecture Fund has provided the grant money for the project.  WHIM architecture firm is conducting the research and design of Recycled Island.  The project was created to look at a way to turn the floating plastic into urban habitats.

The Pacific Ocean trash dump is twice the size of Texas, or the size of Spain combined with France.  The Pacific Vortex as it is sometimes called, is made up of four million tons of Plastic.  Cleaning it up is going to cost a lot of money and require a great deal of either scooping up the plastic and shipping it back to shore, or some sort of onsite recycling for building something like Recycled Island.

One of the three major aims of the project is to clean up the floating trash by recycling it on site.  Two, the project would create new land for sustainable habitation complete with its own food sources and energy sources.  Lastly, Recycled Island is to be a sea worthy island.

 

Further aspects of the island would be: the creation of “fertile ground” from compost toilets.  The island would also be non-polluting, using natural resources.  Recycled Island would be 10,000 Km2 or the size of Hawaii’s main island.  It would be self-sustaining and not dependant on other countries.  The urban housing would be designed for future climate refugees.  These are very lofty goals but if carried out, Recycled Island would turn the trash into a money making enterprise rather than an economic sink hole.

Electricity would come from renewable resources like solar, wave, and wind energies.  Seaweed farms would serve two main purposes: habitat and food for fish; and as “’nutrient sinks’ that would take up inorganic nutrients (ammonia, nitrate, phosphate) from the water column.”  The seaweed can also be used for other things like people food, biofuel, CO2 capture and medicine.

Currently, the project is looking for samples of the broken down plastic in the Pacific dump to examine recycling possibilities.  Research is also being conducted to determine the best methods for collecting the plastic and to locate chemists and engineers to help with the best recycling methods and “construction of the floating habitats.”

If and when Recycled Island is actually created, it will be a marvelous place to live, work, and vacation.  All that and saving the environment too.

 

All photos are from Recycled Island.

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Related posts:

1. The Pacific Ocean trash dump revisited
2. Electrolux starts Vac from the Sea program
3. Ah to live in England where diaper waste is recycled
4. Take plastic out of landfills by turning it into oil
5. Old fishing gear is turned into new energy

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For as long as hot lead has been used to make metal type, the model for generating news has been top-down: editors determined what information was important and then shared it with the masses.

But with the advent of technology that allows media companies to identify what kind of content readers want, that model is becoming inverted.

The latest and perhaps broadest effort yet in democratizing the news is under way at Yahoo, which on Tuesday will introduce a news blog that will rely on search queries to help guide its reporting and writing on national affairs, politics and the media.

Search-generated content has been growing on the Internet, linked to the success of companies like Associated Content, which Yahoo recently bought, and Demand Media, which has used freelance writers to create an online library of more than a million instructional articles.

But the use of search data has been limited more to the realm of “how to” topics like “How do I teach my dog sign language?” than questions about the news of the day like “Where does Elena Kagan stand on corporate campaign donations?”

Yahoo software continuously tracks common words, phrases and topics that are popular among users across its vast online network. To help create content for the blog, called The Upshot, a team of people will analyze those patterns and pass along their findings to Yahoo’s news staff of two editors and six bloggers.

The news staff will then use that search data to create articles that — if the process works as intended — will allow them to focus more precisely on readers.

“We feel like the differentiator here; what separates us from a lot of our competitors is our ability to aggregate all this data,” said James A. Pitaro, vice president of Yahoo Media. “This idea of creating content in response to audience insight and audience needs is one component of the strategy, but it’s a big component.”

In strictly economic terms, the power of technology that identifies reader trends is incredibly potent as a draw for advertisers. Yahoo paid more than $100 million this year for Associated Content, which pays writers small sums to write articles based on queries like “How do I tile a floor?” or “How do I make French toast?”

“They have a tremendous potential power to wring higher value advertisers out of targeted content,” said Ken Doctor, a media analyst and author of “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.”

To demonstrate the power of search technology as editor, Mr. Pitaro is fond of telling a story about one of the most popular articles to appear on Yahoo’s sports news site during the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Yahoo had been monitoring search traffic patterns and noticed that its users kept trying to find out why divers would shower after they got out of the water. So Yahoo sports writers looked into the question and posted an item titled “The mystery of the showering divers.” (It turns out the warm water from the showers keeps divers’ muscles limber. Their muscles contract when they emerge from the warm water into the cool air.)

“So while our competition was covering a lot of the bigger, broader topics, we were covering topics that were a little bit more behind the scenes,” Mr. Pitaro said.

This niche approach to the news, filling in gaps in the coverage where other media outlets are not providing content, is the best way Mr. Pitaro feels The Upshot (at news.yahoo.com/upshot) can gain traction in a crowded media landscape.

“If you’re a news start-up, focusing on breadth would be the wrong way to go,” he said. “What we’re seeing is the market getting increasingly fragmented. And because of that you can survive by owning a niche category.”

The Yahoo model, which flies in the face of a centuries-old approach to disseminating the news, is certain to be viewed suspiciously by journalism purists.

“There’s obviously an embedded negative view toward using any type of outside information to influence coverage,” said Robertson Barrett, chief strategy officer of Perfect Market Inc., a company that helps news organizations make their content more detectable to search engine algorithms.

Mr. Barrett, a former publisher for the Web site of The Los Angeles Times, said many mainstream media outlets would start to come around to the idea if they did not feel pressured to let it affect their coverage.

“There’s a middle ground here in which publishers and news organizations can learn a lot about their audiences and what they want in real time and take that into account generally,” he said. “But that does not need to affect the specific story assignments.”

Yahoo news editors say they intend to be selective in using the data. The tricky question for Yahoo becomes how much it will insulate its editorial decision making from the very businesslike thinking that has made Associated Content and Demand Media successful.

“Essentially those in charge of analytics-driven content say, ‘These journalists, they only got it half right. Why produce all this stuff that doesn’t make money. Just produce the stuff that sells,’ ” Mr. Doctor said.

Asked whether he was concerned that signing up with Yahoo had rendered his career as an editor obsolete, The Upshot’s editor, Andrew Golis, laughed.

“I certainly don’t hope that,” Mr. Golis said, adding that he and Yahoo’s other journalists would use the search data as a supplemental tool. “The information is valuable because editors can integrate it into their decision making. It’s an asset. It’s a totally amazing and useful tool that we have at Yahoo. But it does not lead Yahoo editorial content.”

If such initiatives get more journalists writing more about what people actually care about reading -- whatever that happens to be -- then these initiatives should be very welcome and worthwhile.