This afternoon I arrived in Mountain View. After a walk to my hotel from the Caltrain station I felt that this town is not made for pedestrians. Tomorrow the ELC 2008 conference starts and I don’t intend to pay for a taxi every day. And a local public bus system exists, but it would take hours to cross the relatively short distance to the Computer History Museum.

I thought that a bike would be cool. The hotel concierge called a bike shop in Stanford which rents bikes, but they would charge 60 Dollars for three days and this definietly exceeds my budget. So I went to my hotel room, googled for ‘used bike mountain view‘ and the first hit brought up the Bicycle Exchange | Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition.

The Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition helps needy families and individuals by repairing and donating used bicycles to our partner community service organizations. A warehouse and workshop is fully outfitted with storage, repair stands and tools for year round operation.

Well, I am an individual and I need a bike for three days… so I called Dave, who’s phone number can be found on the website. I reached him in the middle of a meeting - later I learned that he is a physicist conducting research on solar energy - but anyway he told me that of course he could lend me a bike and I should pick it up at his garage later that day.

So now I am a proud cyclist of a mint green Koga Miyata bike from the 80ies that purrs like a cat and speeds around the corners of Mountain View. It seems that through a link between the physical space and the digital space the White Bicycle Plan has been revived by some activists in the Silicon Valley. It’s not the old Provo dream to give away bicycles to the public. Dave gave me a lock and I deposited some money. The new concept is that likeminded people build communities and share goods - not only data in the digital space but also bikes in the physical space.

Wikipedia writes on Communalism:

In many parts of the world, communalism is a modern term that describes a broad range of social movements and social theories which are in some way centered upon the community

The Bicycle Exchange is a good example that Communalism works, because it proves that a community of people which is connected through the digital space can really change the physical world for the better.

I discovered an interesting blog posting by Yihong Ding, a student from the Brigham Young University. The article is noteworthy because it shows that even in the blogosphere there are good reasons for asserting and protecting the copyright of data.

Yihong mentions the initiative of Data Portability and introduces the new concept of “Resource Portability”:

As we have discussed earlier, the central issue is how to allow users managing their “owned” resources properly. Improving the portability of Web data is a very important step towards this general request; but it is not the general request yet. To reach the eventual goal, we need to implement a new mechanism that well manages ownership, beyond portability, of data. Moreover, this ownership management issue is not only about data, but also about other resources such as services. Thus I am more favorite to the term “resource portability” than the “data portability.”

The key of resource portability is the switch of ownership over resources instead of the deployment of resources. For instance, when a user make a comment on a blog, who should own this comment, the commenter or the blog owner? By default, the current mechanism is that the one who owns the physical storage space of the comment owns the comment. Most of the time, the comment belongs to the blog owner. Many other times, however, the comment may actually be owned by a third party who provides the space for the blog owner. In very few extreme cases, the commenter actually owns the comment. This reality theoretically contradicts to the comment logic that the one who makes the comment (i.e. the commenter) should be the unquestionable owner.

So why is it important that a commenter owns his blog comment? Yihong suggests that “the commenter has the full control of updating or even deleting the comments based on their own interest”. In my opinion this makes a lot of sense, because for several reasons an author might want to revise or even withdraw what he wrote in public. Ownership over Resources means that the author keeps the copyight of his content, even if he has to publish it on a technical platform he can not control.

Of course, Resource Portability reminds me of many ideas we discussed on the DMP mailing list.

The Autry National Center is a museum in Los Angeles that “explores the experiences and perceptions of the diverse peoples of the American West, connecting the past with the present to inform our shared future”.

Today I visited this place together with Phil and Bud. A map in the exhibition displays that North America was colonized in the form of communities sharing common interests and beliefs. This map made me aware of the parallels between American colonialism and the recent developments of the web. As a matter of fact, more and more companies spend money to build web communities around certain topics - on recent example is dove.msn.com.

These commercial Web 2.0 communites may serve as another example for a process called Electronic Colonialism, a term that was coined by Tom McPhail:

Electronic colonialism theory explains how mass media are leading to a new concept of empire. It will not be one based on military power or land acquisition but one based on controlling the mind. It is a psychological or mental empire. It is an evolving global “Empire of the Mind”. The global media are collectively influencing the minds, attitudes, values, and languages of individuals around the globe.

On the blog Rosenblumtv I discovered a brilliant article on Electronic Colonialism through TV. Projects like dove.msn.com prove that this form of colonialism has finally entered the Web. As I wrote in a previous posting, brands can dominate communities. Maybe I am the last one who got it but I found it really enlightening to understand that it’s the brands and the Web 2.0 companies building commercial Web communities which are powering the development of the Web towards Electronic Colonialism.

Last June I wrote about my objections to Creative Commons recommending Adobes’s Extensible Markup Platform (XMP) as the preferred format for embedded metadata.

This article from Bill Rosenblatt’s excellent DRM Watch called my attention to Adobe’s next step of introducing their new DRM system: the Flash Media Rights Management Server.

One of their marketing people wrote:

Adobe is driving a fusion of TV and the Internet with Adobe Media Player, Flash Media Server, content protection technologies, and a broad and powerful ecosystem of partners providing key solutions from content creation through delivery and monetization.

Wow… this sounds promising and the architecture of their system looks interesting (see this diagram from their datasheet).

Of course I am curious. I want to play with it. Lets have a look… first I need to download their Adobe Flash Media Development Server 3. There is a version for Linux available, so at least there is a chance that I can run it on my computer. Then I need to grab the Adobe Media Player which requires Adobe AIR.

Finally, I need the Rights Management Server, but unfortunately this component isn’t available for download - I have to fill a form to be contacted by a Flash Media Rights Management Server specialist.

Hmm… maybe I will contact them another time.

Anyway, this article by one of Adobe’s product managers provides some interesting insights about Adobe’s strategy.

To be sure, content owners and developers can continue to deliver high-quality video without any protections or limitations to access of any kind (such as with Creative Commons licensing) through Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Media Player, and Adobe AIR. You can deliver video either embedded into your SWF, as a separate video file progressively downloaded from a web server, or through Flash Media Server. Considering that Flash Player has achieved over 98 % penetration on the desktop, this is the easiest way to get your free videos to the largest audience.

Moreover, content owners enjoy additional options with Flash Media Server to help protect where and when their videos are viewed, such as domain access control, authorization adapters, SWF verification, and RTMPE. Flash Media Rights Management Server introduces a new set of options for developers and content owners to protect their content.

In other words Adobe’s strategy is:

• User generated content e.g. published on Youtube resulted in a nearly 100 percent penetration of Adobe’s Flash Player
• Creative Commons actively promotes Adobe’s XMP standard
• One day content creators may wish to be paid for their work. Adobe’s document Using digital rights management suggests that this can be easily done through identity-based licensing, using the same Media Player that was previously given away for free
• However, the Adobe Rights Management Server, which is a key component of this platform will not be given away. Whoever wants to set up commercial video distribution services will have to pay license fees for Adobe’s server software

I don’t claim that Adobe’s strategy is immoral. Actually, it’ quite common. What I don’t understand is that the Creative Commons developers support a development that will lead to a situation where content creators will have to pay license fees to an intermediary software manufacturer if they want to be paid for their work. Open Source developers should rather support the development of the Chillout platform, which will be the foundation of a free platform to conduct content related business on the internet.

I just discovered that two technologies we implemented in the context of our Berlin based company Convergence Integrated Media are offered by a manufacturer of chipsets for Set-Top boxes. Our LinuxDVB API and DirectFB are part of the development environment customers can order together with the evaluation board. Alternatively to Linux Set-top box manufacturers can order a Windows CE developer kit.

Note that the architectures of the two alternative developement environments are very similar (see the figure quoting the STB development kit)

The fact that ten years after founding Convergence our concepts are deployed by major manufacturers of CE devices proves that our plan to regain control over television and other user interface based appliances was successful.

Since the implementation of open standards (e.g. DVB) was licensed as Open Source software (GPL) many independent software developers could learn and understand the technologies of digital television devices and services. Thus the old media cartels jeux casino gratuibonus de casino en lignejeux de planche a roulettejeu gratuitesvideo poker en lignecasino jeucasino achat en lignefree crapsjeu baccarat en ligne gratuitesjeu de hasardloterie en lignejouer stud pokerle meilleur poker en ligneseven card studjeu poker gratuijeux frle poker t�l�chargement gratuitesapprendre texas holdemt�l�charger le jeu de poker gratuitesregles poker ouvertjeu poker macstrip poker virtuelapprendre a jouer au pokerla r�gle du jeu de pokerregles du poker texasjeu poker internetcomment jouer au pokerjeu de poker gratuitstournoi de poker gratuitespoker en ligne gratuites texastelecharger poker texastournoi poker gratuitespoker a telechargergagner poker onlineworld poker tournamentsites poker en lignejeu flash gratuitesplay 7 card studpoker texas holdem en lignejeu video pokerpoker en ligne gratuitesjouer poker tour gratuitespoker holdemregles du jeu du pokerjeu poker freewarejeux tour de pokermalette de jeu de pokerjouer poker en ligne gratuitespoker tour reglesjeu online poker tour (studios, broadcasters, cable network providers) are losing their monopolies to create, produce, distribute and receive television content and services.

I predict that sooner or later an open payment platfrom for television related content and services will establish itself. It remains to be seen how long the cartels manage to survive by operating proprietary payment platforms on top of the open standards based receivers.

Claude Le Berre’s investigations on the nature of memory and especially on the question how moving images are affecting our minds have yielded an impressive result: Core Memory is a collection of scenes that were extracted from movies and reconstructed using the average colours of the still images.

Much in contrast to my wife’s my memory of movies is not good at all. I can hardly remember the faces of the actors, nor the dialogues or the scenes. However, sometimes I can remember a mood that was transported by a movie while I was watching it

I don’t know how my memory stores knowledge and experiences, but I am sure that it is not stored in the form of pictures. Two years ago I read Ferdinand Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916). I think that Saussure knows a lot about memory. He claimed that our minds store words acoustically - which reminds me of Claude’s Core Memory samples.

On the other hand I am pretty sure that the stories transported by moving images affected my memory. And the moving images consist of still images consisting of coloured shapes and patterns. Extracting the colours to analyze the memory is not bad, although for the scenes I remember I would have expected more brilliant colours. One idea could be to play with the colour extraction algorithm - just google for “dominant coulour extraction”.

on the Kendra mailing list I read an interesting posting about the OpenCalais system, developed by Reuters.

According to their website the Calais initiative seeks to help make all the worlds content more accessible, interoperable and valuable via the automated generation of rich semantic metadata, the incorporation of user defined metadata, the transportation of those metadata resources throughout the content ecosystem and the extension of it’s capabilities by user-contributed components.

Let’s have a look how the Clearforest Web service works:

• A User publishes an article on his/her blog (e.g. a Wordpress blog)
• A Wordpress plugin creates a Semantic tag cloud of the article (to be done)
• the Semantic tags are sent to the Calais system
• the Calais system stores the Semantic tags and returns a unique RDF identifier

The article that was published by a User is information. According to the DIKW model information becomes knowledge when it is put into context. The Calais system creates knowledge by putting User Generated Content into context. The example on the Calais website illustrates how this works:

• many Users write in their blogs: person ‘z’ was appointed chairman of company ‘y’ on date ‘x’
• as a result of natural language processing, machine learning and other methods the Calais system “knows” that person ‘z’ IS chairman of company ‘y’.
• the Calais system issues and maintains the RDF identifiers pointing to different creators of similar Semantic tag clouds.
• since the information is confirmed by different sources the quality of the Calais system’s knowledge is good

Information (content) is useless if it is out of context. Putting information in context creates value. Thus Clearforest adds value to user generated content. By comparing information from different sources and creating a measure for the validity the Clearforest service adds further value.

Which are the benefit of Clearforest for web users?

Imagine a User wants to know who is the current chairman of company ‘BASF’.

He can search google for BASF + chairman.

• the first hit yields Juergen Hambrecht appointed new BASF Chairman.
• but when the user looks at the URL google has referenced as the source of this information - www.basf.com/corporate/news2002/newsinfo_board_071802.html - he will notice that this article has been created 7 years ago.
• So the user may ask himself if this information is still valid in the context of the year 2008

Once a search engine (let’s call it ClearSearch) will be connected to the Clearforest service a user may enter the (natural language) question: who is the chairman of BASF?

• the Clearforest system “knows” that person ‘z’ IS chairman of company ‘y’ (Dr. Jürgen Hambrecht still is chairman of BASF).
• This knowledge has been verified by Reuters correspondents and probably has been confirmed by hundreds of articles published by independent bloggers - so the chance is good that ClearSearch’s answer is correct and always up to date.
• By analysing User Generated Content it’s even possible that Clearforest will “know” about events Reuters correspondents haven’t heard of.

This raises an interesting question:

Who owns or has the right to control the access to the knowledge generated from User Generated Content.

Publishers of web pages (e.g. bloggers) have the right to control the access to their information, because they own the copyright of their articles. But do Web users also have the right to control access to their collective knowledge? And even if it is technically possible to control access to public knowledge, is it ethical to support technologies aiming at this goal?

Wikipedia proves that Web users have developed working processes to create knowledge from User Generated Content. According to the official policy the Wikipedia knowledge is licensed under the GFDL - so everybody can modify or use this knowledge for free.

The passage on Intellectual Property Rights in the Clearforest Terms of Use depicts quite a different conception about the ownership of public knowledge:

ClearForest’s Intellectual Property Rights. You acknowledge that ClearForest owns all right, title and interest in and to the Service, including without limitation all intellectual property rights (the “ClearForest Rights”), and such ClearForest Rights are protected by U.S. and international intellectual property laws. Accordingly, you agree that you will not copy, reproduce, alter, modify, or create derivative works from the Service. You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service. The ClearForest Rights include rights to (i) the Service developed and provided by ClearForest; and (ii) all software associated with the Service. The ClearForest Rights do not include third-party content used as part of Service, including the content of communications appearing on the Service.

Your Intellectual Property Rights. ClearForest does not claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload, transmit or store in using ClearForest SWS.

In other words: Users still own the Copyright of User Generated Content, but ClearForest will own the Intellectual Property Rights of the Service based on User Generated Content. The knowledge that person ‘z’ IS chairman of company ‘y’ will be the Intellectual Property of Reuters. As a consequence Reuters will have the (legal and technical) power to decide whether or not knowledge exists.

The Calais initiative reminds me of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. On their portal they call for developers to incorporate their service in web applications. I am not in favour of privatizing public knowledge and therefore I would not recommend developers to support Calais. Instead they should think about an open and decentralized alternative (e.g. OpenDover) based on Open Source technologies (e.g. UIMA).

Last weekend I gave a presentation at the 8th Linux Party by the Ecole Mohammadia d’ Ingenieurs in Rabat (see here for my slides). The students of the Club Informatique had organized everything on their own without any support by their professors. The organization was perfect. Thank you so much (special thanks to your hospitality, Amin and Youssef!). This was an unforgettable experience.

Right now I am sitting in a room of the Queen Mary University in London attending the DMP’s 17 General Assembly. Originally I was planning to present a shortened version of my Rabat speech for tomorrow’s DMP event. However, I just learned that some members suspect that my speech could be misunderstood by the attendees of the event (somebody used the ugly word ‘propaganda’). Therefore I should rather give another presentation.

Well… judge yourself if what I have to say is propaganda.

In his Comments on the European Commission’s paper on Creative Content Online in the Single Market Leonardo Chiariglione writes:

DRM is primarily a “management”, not a “protection” technology.

Creative Commons licences provide the means to distribute content preserving some rights. The very User Generated Content (UGC) phenomenon proves that there are many more ways of distributing content that does not rely on “protection” versions of DRM.

In a second comment Leonardo points out that consumers do not “wish to protect their content and suspects that they are more interested in monetising it. He writes that “Consumers want interoperability, they want to be able to play the content of their choice on the device of their choice”.

Some time ago I read the term ‘Rights Management Information‘.

The 1996 WIPO “Internet” Treaties (WCT and WPPT) define ‘rights management information’ (RMI) as ‘information which identifies the work, the author of the work, the owner of any right in the work, or information about the terms and conditions of use of the work, and any numbers or codes that represent such information, when any of these items of information is attached to a copy of a work or appears in connection with the communication of a work to the public.’

It seems that not only Leonardo but also other people (e.g. Nicholas Bentley, Henrik Ingo and of course myself) think that DRM related ‘open standards’ should be judged quite positive.

Let’s assume that DRM = RMI * Rights Enforcement:

• An open source implementation of an open standard for an RMI system has valuable uses (e.g. expressing copyright)
• An open source implementation of an open standard for a system for content Rights Enforcement is possible, but it will be possible to hack it. However, depending on the license terms, such a system could encourage or discourage users to share content
• if someone is going to use DRM, it is clearly better that they’d use an open standard - then at least there is a chance that the DRM is not a reason to make the content locked into a proprietary one-vendor/one-platform solution.

Richard Stallman would probably disagree with this opinion, saying that DRM is always a form of oppression and producing a good system of oppression is actually worse than a bad system.

I would reply that it is unlikely that a system of oppression will not be introduced becasue it’s opponents ignore it. A better strategy is to get involved with the people who design the systems (e.g. standardisation projects, standards bodies). Since copyright law provides exceptions it should be possible to design some loopholes (e.g. the ability to copy content for private use).

We are back in Berlin. After two years in Ludwigshafen and three years in Luebeck I found interesting paid work at Telio AG. Since 1st October we live in Prenzlauer Berg close to the places where we lived in the 90ies. The city has changed a lot. I have the impression that life is more expensive and Berlin became quite fashionable. Compared to other cities it’s still affordable - perhaps this is the reason why you meet so many people from other countries. The best thing is that most of our friends still live here. Life in Berlin is great. Within a few weeks I have met about 50 of my old friends. Our new flat is still a mess, since Vanadis also has found a job and we don’t have time and energy to install the lamps and furniture after work. Anyway, we are confident that we will be ready before christmas. So this time you will have a guest-room in Berlin if you visit us.

Last week I attended the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) Embedded Linux Conference in Linz. I met many interesting people (e.g. the guys from NXP) and I did my best to promote DMP. Apparently most chip manufacturers (e.g. TI, NXP) consider Linux a cheap and reliable alternative to proprietary embedded operating systems. If somebody implements a DMP Device on such a system I see a good chance that many CE manufacturers will be able to use it.

Obviously DirectFB is becoming a graphics standard. Dok just released the TI Davinci driver - the development was sponsored by my new employers. I am more confident than ever that our old vision of an open platform for creating, distributing and receiving television will become true.

The week before Linz I presented Roberto Garcia’s and my paper “Promoting Music Sampling by Semantic Web-enhanced DRM tools” at the Virtual Goods conference in Koblenz. The slides of my presentation can be downloaded here.

I see an interesting application of Roberto’s Copyright Ontology in connection with the Fair Use Principles for “UGC” recently proposed by the EFF. To me the Copyright Ontology plays the role of an “electronic lawyer”. A User who is not sure if the Actions he performs on a piece of Content can “consult” the Copyright Ontology. He will receive a professional judgement by an Agent. Then the User can decide what to do with the Content (e.g. Publish). We should start exploring possibilities to implement Quote in a way that would be compliant with the EFF Principles for User Generated Content. We could explore the Agree action in our Model for the “Quotation Right” (see Fig. 2 in dmp1010) and propose that “Agree” automatically results if the test of “Three Strikes before Blocking” is negative. The Copyright Ontology could act as an Agent that performs this test for a User who wants to Quote a Work.

So I am back in the physical space of Berlin and I am also back in the digital space of my blog. And I promise that still I will upload expressions of my ideas from time to time .