Browsers are free to ignore…

“…The Web is a system that allows users to consume content in any combination and presentation that user-chosen software can achieve…Browsers are free to ignore, rearrange, mash-up and otherwise make use of any content from any source.”
— Brave Software, in response to a Newspaper Association of America complaint that its web browser is “blatantly illegal.”

Brave’s web browser replaces ads that use 3rd party tracking with ads that give users more privacy and security—and it it then returns up to 70% of ad revenue back to the publishers. https://brave.com/blogpost_4.html

The full quote:

"…The Web is a system that allows users to consume content in any combination and presentation that user-chosen software can achieve. 

Browsers do not just play back recorded pixels from the publishers’ sites. Browsers are rather the end-user agent that mediates and combines all the pieces of content, including third-party ads and first-party publisher news stories. Web content is published as HTML markup documents with the express intent of not specifying how that content is actually presented to the browser user. Browsers are free to ignore, rearrange, mash-up and otherwise make use of any content from any source.

If it were the case that Brave’s browsers perform “republication”, then so too does Safari’s Reader mode. The same goes for any browser with an ad-blocker extension installed, or the Links text-only browser, or screen readers for the visually impaired."

“The costs were tremendously high. Just one image could cost several hundred dollars, and even that would only buy us clearance for a limited period of time.”
— Merete Sanderhoff, curator of digital practice at the National Gallery of Denmark, writing about the difficulty of getting digital images from other Danish museums. From her book Sharing is Caring: openness and sharing in the cultural heritage sector

The whole quote:

A third major challenge concerns clearance of photo rights. This became evident when we began to request image files from other museums in order to show them side by side with our own works within the new Art Stories universe. The costs were tremendously high. Just one image could cost several hundred dollars, and even that would only buy us clearance for a limited period of time. The labor involved in writing to each rights holder, asking for files, describing the intended usage, and so on, turned out to be a major drain on our manpower. What is more, the use of images from other collections prevents us from posting Art Stories videos on YouTube, where they could gain much wider exposure than when shut in and restricted to the museum'ss own website..

“The vision of presenting art history on the terms set by the Internet had made good sense to us. It looked like the perfect medium for unfolding the paradigm of diversity. But then we came up against something that limited our options: copyright.”
— Merete Sanderhoff, curator of digital practice at the National Gallery of Denmark, in Sharing is Caring: openness and sharing in the cultural heritage sector

Merete continues,

The costs were tremendously high. Just one image cost several hundred dollars, and that would only buy us clearance for a limited period of time. The labour involved in writing to each rights holder, asking for files, describing the intended usage, and so on, turned out to be a major drain on our manpower.

"And I was just, like, why would anybody pay $35 for 11 sheets of paper?"

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— 15 year old Jack Andraka, at the White House Champions of Change event on June 20, 2013.

Jack said,

Essentially, what I did was, In 9th grade I created a new way to track pancreatic, ovarian, and lung cancer that costs 3 cents and takes 5 mins to run. It’s 168 times faster, over 126,000 times less expensive, and over 400 times more sensitive than current methods of diagnosis. And, currently, it has close to 100% accuracy in diagnosis, and it can detect the cancer in the earliest stage when the patient has close to 100% chance of survival. [applause]

I did my first science fair when I was 11 years old. I had a bowl cut and glasses… And that was the first time I ran into open science, because I ran into these pay walls, and I was just, like…it asked me for $35. This was the first time ever. And I was just, like, why would anybody pay $35 for 11 sheets of paper? And it turned out that that would be me, because I couldn’t find it anywhere else. And then it asked me for my login info, so I typed in my email login and it said it was invalid. And then my 7th grade self took immediate offense and thought “you’re invalid.” And eventually I begged my mom and my dad to finally pay for that article and it turned out it had nothing to do with the research I needed. And the unfortunate thing is that these articles don’t have return policies.

(Jack is second from the left in the photo.)

http://youtu.be/a26cEwbyMGQ?t=1h2m11s

Open data badass

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Exchange between me, @arkland_swe, and @jacob_wang about Swedish open data/open heritage work

Lars: Well, we try to *do* thing. And surprisingly often you become a badass by just trying to do things

Jacob: Blablabla. You DO stuff some of us are merely talking about. Soon though, we’ll join the ranks.

Mike: Jacob - - tell us one specific badass-y thing our Swedish Humanities brothers and sisters have done that you admire.

Jacob: They have aggregated 4.2 million objects from 40 ors, content that is available through their open API - - BOOM!

Jacob: Lars, tell him how many objects you have delivered to Europeana - it’s like 100 times more than DK [Denmark] have.

Jacob: And Lars, tell Michael how many views you’ve had on Flickr…

At the Rijksmuseum, knowledge needs to be shared

From a 2012 interview with Taco Dibbits, Director of Collections, Rijksmuseum

[Starting around 2:50]

The Rijksmuseum is all about images. We want to share these images with everybody using the Internet. The technology is in fact about sharing. Of course, you design your own websites, create your own Facebook account, but in the end it’s all about sharing.

That’s why we have decided to put free to use, up to date information in the best available quality on the Internet. So whatever forum you’re on or what you’re looking for, you can download and use it as you like. The museum is about inspiration, learning, and knowledge. The Internet provides inspiration, when you are able to zoom in and touch the screen. In the museum, you’re not allowed to touch the collect, but on the Internet you are. On your iPhone you can magnify or reduce the  museum’s collection, which is very inspiring. You can print them in the highest quality on your bedcover or in a booklet; the possibilities are numerous.

Knowledge needs to be shared. The Rijksmuseum connects people to art and history and that connection, that exchange of knowledge, is of the utmost importance to us.

We have over a million objects in our collection, of which 200,000 can be found on the Internet. We employ over 450 people so it’s impossible for them to know everything there is about our collection. We invite people to have fun with our collection, to get inspired, but also to share their knowledge with us. If a person in India has information that is important to us, he can share this with us and at the same time with the rest of the community. This is why the Internet as provider of knowledge and source of inspiration is crucial for humanity and as such one of the most important inventions in history. 

via @LizzyJongma 

“So how are things different today? If you are a person who routinely uses computers, the Internet, or digital media, imagine a day when you do not create–intentionally and unintentionally–hundreds of temporary, evanescent copies. (If you doubt this, look in the cache of your browser.) Is there a day when you do not “distribute” or retransmit fragments of articles you have read, when you do not seek to share with friends some image or tune? Is there a day when you do not rework for your job, for your class work, or simply for pastiche or fun, some of the digital material around you? In a networked society, copying is not only easy, it is a necessary part of transmission, storage, caching, and, some would claim, even reading.”
— James Boyle on the inevitability of copying and reworking digital content in a networked society, from The Public Domain: enclosing the commons of the mind, page 51. (Boyle himself cites Jessica Litman’s Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet in support of these assertions.)
“Like other museum institutions SMK is used to being seen as a gatekeeper of cultural heritage. But our collections do not belong to us. They belong to the public. Free access ensures that our collections continue to be relevant to users now and in the future. Our motivation for sharing digitized images freely is to allow users to contribute their knowledge and co-create culture. In this way, SMK wishes to be a catalyst for the users’ creativity.”
— Karsten Ohrt, Director of The Statens Museum for Kunst (“SMK”, The National Gallery of Denmark), From a Creative Commons Case Study about the SMK’s pilot project in which they put 159 works online, in high-resolution, under a Creative Commons “Attribution” license.

Open Science

“A crucial aspect to this project [the Allen Institute for Brain Science] –and others the Allen Institute has pursued over the last eight years–is an “open science” research model. Early on, we considered charging commercial users for access to our online data. From a strictly financial standpoint, it made sense to reap front-end fees and, down the line, intellectual property royalties. The revenue could cover the high costs of maintenance and development to keep the resource current and useful.”
— Why We Chose Open Science by Paul Allen, Wall Street Journal, Nov 30, 2011

Allen continues,

But our mission was to spark breakthroughs, and we didn’t want to exclude underfunded neuroscientists who just might be the ones to make the next leap. And so we made all of our data free, with no registration required. 

Our facility is neither the first nor the last to use a shared database to embrace ‘open science’ and reject the competitive, single-lab paradigm. Traditional research incentives — where journal publications are the coin of the realm — tend to discourage vital sharing. What I’ve concluded is that foundations and other private funders who support scientific research also can help promote wider sharing of scientific data. Before funders write a check to a university, they should ask about the researcher’s policies and track record on sharing.

“The most satisfying proofs are existence proofs. A platypus is an existence proof that mammals can lay eggs. The Internet is an existence proof of the remarkable information processing power of a decentralized network of hobbyists, amateurs, universities, businesses, volunteer groups, professionals, and retired experts and who knows what else. It is a network that produces useful information and services. Frequently, it does so at no cost to the user and without anyone guiding it. Imagine that energy, that decentralized and idiosyncratically dispersed pattern of interests, turned loose on the cultural artifacts of the twentieth century. Then imagine it coupled to the efforts of the great state archives and private museums who themselves would be free to do the same thing…”
— James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, 2008. p. 13
“Arguments concerning the opportunity cost of open access (giving away potential revenues, for example) are based less on specific examples than on hypothetical opportunities — “the magic app” — that frankly never materialise.”
— From The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid: A business model perspective on open metadata (PDF), Europeana, 2011. (quote is from a case study about Yale University // an interview with Meg Bellinger, page 23)
“The non-commercial clause that has governed use and re-use of the Museum’s metadata is rooted in the belief that non-profit academic charities should enable free use only for non-profit purposes. But in the digital age, with evidence that use and re-use can increase knowledge when it is openly linked across the entire web, the new view is that data funded by the taxpayer should have the broadest possible distribution.”
— From The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid: A business model perspective on open metadata (PDF), Europeana, 2011. (quote is from a case study about the British Museum; an interview with Dominic Oldman, page 24)
“It turns out to be surprisingly hard to convince (some) people that the very best thing to do with the treasures of the world is to give them to the world.”
— From a comment on The Great Digitization Or The Great Betrayal? Techdirt

The comment continues,

It turns out to be surprisingly hard to convince (some) people that the very best thing to do with the treasures of the world is to give them to the world. So many of them [museums and other collecting institutions] are so fixated on ‘ownership’ that they just can’t let go. Hopefully, they’ll all die off soon and the generation now growing up will take a more mature approach — that is, they’ll realize that everything from academic papers to great art belongs to everyone, and that anyone attempting to claim them for themselves is a hoarder — to be despised, shunned, and overruled.