We who linkspam salute you - 12-18 February 02012

Hello, everyone. We begin with the basic rules of good health, whose most important rule ties the whole thing together.

Out in the world today, concerns abound about the undeclared war between Israel and Iran escalating to being an obvious undeclared war, or even a declared one.

Domestically, it's been a bit of a theme for women's issues... a spokesperson for the National Organization for Marriage lied on TV. Repeatedly. And was then called out on it. Repeatedly. And this is why I sometimes feel that journalism lives in some pockets.

The United States military will allow women to move closer to the front lines, although they still will not be allowed to take part in direct combat operations as infantry, armor, or special operations troops. Remind me again of the reason why women aren't allowed to be part of frontline operations?

Female passengers at Dallas Fort Worth airport say they were required to go through the backscatter scanning device several times because the male agents on the other side wanted a clearer picture of their nude bodies.

The state of Virginia is poised to require that women be raped before they can get an abortion. By an ultrasound probe, but nonetheless, the previous statement is accurate. Of course, where the opinions are focused are on accusations that the administration has a "death panel" that gets to demand by fiat what's covered by insurance and what isn't, or that the administration is proclaiming that it knows what is religious and what isn't in its regulations requiring coverage. Or that by requiring contraception be covered by insurances, including the ones that religious organizations buy, the administration is violating the Free Exercise clause of the Constitution by forcing the religious to go against their teachings about the sanctity of life. In doing so, they do point out the flaw in their reasoning - if the people employed or served by these institutions are not of the same faith as the institutions that employ them, then what right does the employer or caretaker have to impose their religious faith on them without similarly being in violation of the Free Exercise Clause? These arguments are the kind of things that should have people pushing for universal coverage that's not employer-based, or finding a way for each individual to be able to own their own health plan, rather than giving that power over to insurance companies, employers, or the government. Things that were Republican ideas, until the Democrats thought they could manage that much instead of some other universal plan.

But, no, instead we have opinions claiming that Planned Parenthood's primary purpose is to provide abortions to women (it isn't), and that Planned Parenthood will threaten everyone who crosses them with their incredible might, as evidenced by the outpouring of criticism against the Komen Foundation for withdrawing their funding from Planned Parenthood based on the presence of investigations from anti-women crusaders determined to find any excuse they can to try and hurt Planned Parenthood.

Distractions and misdirections away from the real issues. It's a specialty when it comes to women and their bodies.

And then, a private prison corporation wants to privatize state prisons for 20 years, with an assurance that the prison will stay at least 90 percent full during the time. That will mean making sure that even the smallest of offenses have prison sentences.

After all that, it's almost a relief to get to politics. The current administration unveiled its budget plan for the next fiscal year, with a full budget total approaching $4 trillion USD, and significant deficits of more than $900 billion USD as well. The administration projects a $4 trillion USD savings over ten years, while the opposition claims it will create more than $11 trillion in deficits over those same ten years. Cue up the accusations that the budget numbers are lies, at best. And that the President should be blamed for not doing anything when his own numbers say that major entitlement programs will run deficits within a decade. Excepting for that part that says "all bills requiring appropriations shall originate in the House of Representatives", of course.

We have another unfavorable comparison between the Clint Eastwood pro-Detroit Super Bowl ad and the president's policies, for which the conservative world appears to still be caught in the strange delusion that the ad was pro-Obama. Bah. That ad was for American autos. If you want to read in an endorsement of the Administration's policy that bailing out automakers was a good idea, you can, but it's not there. Barack Obama will point that out in his re-election bid, most certainly, but Clint Eastwood was not making the case for him. He was making the case for optimism about the economy, nothing more.

That's probably something that the grassroots effort the administration wants to build to check facts, refute attacks, and promote their accomplishments will want to take on.

Looking in at technology, ever wonder what a grain of sand looks like really, really magnified? Answer? Like the crystals and stones that they were one part of. They're quite beautiful.

A nearly-infrared spectrometer device claims to be able to tell what liquid is inside plastic bottles based on the light reflection pattern. If successful, one could submit all liquids for scanning. The difficulty is, of course, that it's still chasing the last possibility, instead of thinking about the next one.

In opinions, the curious case of Colin Powell being right about when to go to war...and why he's up against just about everyone in politics determined to prove him wrong.

Mr. Laskin talks about the a conservative blog's accusation that Media Matters is a leftist cabal that has influence on the liberal media and the Presidency. Although, the accusations leveled at Media Matters are more of "Hey, you guys are liberals and putting out liberal-leaning media on liberal-leaning networks. That's not fair or balanced. Aren't you supposed to be fair and balanced?" To which the response is "Aren't you guys the ones claiming to be both fair and balanced, despite everything that Fox does to be all-conservative, all the time?"

Mr. McGurn believes the message of a "do-nothing Congress" is a smart one for the Republican party to adopt, because of the Democratic majority in the Senate. A majority, we note, of one. And it's not the Democratic Party that seems to always have a reason to filibuster a bill...or that decides their own ideas and policies are anathema once the other side thinks they might be a good idea. They're not the Party in the House that likes to lace all their bills with political poison and then pass them, knowing full well they'll get nowhere in the Senate. They're not the party committing the egregious offenses against workers' rights and women's rights (mostly). Those "pro-growth" bills usually translate to cutting revenues and then screaming about the deficits and debts needed to finance the running of the government. Or to cutting regulations and using that unfettered nature to make lots more profit at the expense of people. If serious proposals came through the Congress that weren't diverted or packaged with destructive amendments, then the government might function. Maybe.

Mr. Brownfield accuses the President of stepping outside the boundaries of the Constitution with his shift of the contraception requirement to be funded by insurance companies, rather than requiring religious institutions to carry such coverage, and also believes that recess appointments done by the President are invalid because the Congress was not in recess, in his opinion.

Mr. Bell believes he was drummed out of Daily Kos simply because he made an ableist remark in the title of one of his pieces, and then defended it as being a perfectly good title. And he has a bla-- mentally ill commenter that vindicated his title, too, but all of those PC lunatics just went to town on him without reading his post. There's something to be said for shocking titles, but generally speaking, if you're going to go that route, the content behind it had better be first-rate, and you really have to have no other way of expressing that sentiment.

Last out of opinions, Governor Perry expresses his confusion at the decision not to build the Keystone XL pipeline, believing it strengthens China at the expense of the United States.

Last for tonight, the power of fictional characters to effect real change in our opinions of others. Which has always been the hallmark and domain of the science fiction genre since its inception. As a coda to this idea, the power of fanfic to expose the shortcomings of their source materials and provide possible solutions that would make their fans love the source all the more. (I think it's not just fanfic that occupies this role, but all commentary on a work, loving or no, but that's just me.)

Shadow Idol, Prompt 15: On the problem of focusing attention on all the wrong things.

Penguin (publisher) rescinds its agreement with Overdrive (intermediary that sells e-book access to libraries) because Overdrive offered wireless delivery of Penguin e-books to Kindles through Amazon, something that Penguin says was not in their agreement with Overdrive when they let Overdrive use their books. The American Library Association, the Authors' Guild, and several other companies all provide their input, wanting to have a good model come out of it that makes everyone happy.

While they talk, though, there's a bigger problem that the media is ignoring, even if librarians aren't. Most major publishers aren't signing any access deals for libraries to get their e-books at all. It's not that they're saying "No, we don't like that platform", it's "No, we don't want to let libraries have access to our e-book and e-audiobook catalogues at all."

We have enterprising librarians developing scripts on how to have staff talk to users about the new restrictions as a stopgap measure, but all the focus is in the wrong place. We shouldn't be preoccupied with fighting over whether one vendor should have access to everything. That's just asking for something monopolistic, which will then turn around and bite someone in the ass when the monopoly decides to screw everyone else over for their own profits (looking at you, media cabals).

As things are right now, a lot of library e-book users don't like their current interfaces, and a lot of people who would use library resources, except they find them too difficult to access. Which suggests that there's a giant gap just waiting to be filled.

As Internet Wisdom goes, "Cheap and Easy beats Free and Difficult". As things are right now, we haven't managed easy in anything, only difficult. If, as libraries, we want to get into the e-content delivery, be it academic research journals, back issues of newspapers, or the latest in popular fiction, and we want to be able to send it to devices that people have that are built specifically for reading content (or listening to it), then it falls on us to try and find or design the simplest systems that we can. This gets complicated when you realize that most e-content is not sold, but leased - the owners of the copyright reserve the right to change the terms, add DRM, change DRM, and otherwise hold anyone who wants their stuff over a barrel for access.

How did we manage this sort of thing? Well, we can blame the software companies and their End User License Agreements. You see, with them, when we bought a copy of a program, we didn't actually buy the program. Instead, we shelled out a lot of money for a license to use the program - no reverse-enngineering, no improving, no using it for purposes other than what was spelled out in the agreement. In one notable case, no selling your copy to someone else if you don't want it any more. Thus, we don't own any of the software on our computers. (Mostly. Things like the GNU GPL and other F(L)OSS-type licenses do grant the ability to improve the underlying code, fork it, or manipulate it in ways that most commercial EULAs don't.)

That turned out to be pretty cool for the software companies. People still bought their software, and they retained the ability to dictate how the software was to be used. And then, I'm guessing, someone in another media realm thought "What if we could do this with other types of content? What if I could license people to be able to use music, but not to be able to make copies or share it with others, and to only be able to send it to approved devices that will do what we tell them to?" And thus, DRM music sites came into being. And crashed spectacularly. And DRM video sites came into being. And crashed spectacularly. And then resurrected as "streaming" sites where you not only had the DRM, but the would only play under certain plug-ins that didn't offer the ability to make copies or save. (Theoretically.) Which are doing okay in their own right, partially because their revenue streams are not primarily focused on subscription fees, but advertising at all possible places.

Now, however, we find ourselves in a world where, well, as an astute alien mentioned in My Teacher Glows In The Dark, "as technology advances, the technology to fool it advances as well." Technological measures like DRM are confronted with technological measures to strip or break the DRM out and leave perfectly usable files. Through technologies like BitTorrent, legally purchased music, films, and books can be traded across the Internet in relative anonymity. (And with the possibility that those people who want to stop such infringement have to participate in it to be able to see who is infringing.) The digital representations of content are proliferating in ways that their physical counterparts had to deal with decades to centuries ago. (The printing press and the idea of translating into the vulgar language meant everyone could own a cheap copy of the codex of Torah and the Christian Foundational Writings, and thus interpret for themselves, instead of having a priest interpret for them, what it meant. That was a big scandal, remember.) The world out there has both Free and Easy, If Illegal.

Which positions libraries in the place where we were before - as the purveyors of Free and Easy and Totally Legal, Too. How easy would it be for you to check out an e-book from the library, transfer it to your device, and return it if your authentication method was "enter your library card, and we'll send this wirelessly to your device using our public wi-fi." With the added bonus of "Keep it as long as you need to read it, and delete/check-in it when you're done." because the library actually owns the content and can send it out to as many devices as it wants. No waiting list for the latest thriller, because you download it from the library's servers. Content the library buys from magazines and journal archives is always there, even if the library eventually discontinues buying that content, because it's on the library's servers and we handle the authentication methods. Digital music content, movies, and albums available for checkout to your player device - keep as long as you need or until you buy your own copy. (Obviously, some limits would be imposed, but they would be of the nature of "only so much you can check out from us, sorry" and each library could set those limits themselves, rather than being forced to a certain amount by an outside vendor.)

I can see this being more expensive - after all, the publishers want to make a profit, knowing that the library is going to share their content with people who couldn't/wouldn't otherwise pay for it individually. So we negotiate site licensing for content, DRM-free, using our consortia and point out that we do have authentication methods. If need be, we share in the cost of buying server racks, content, and the IT people needed to maintain them, so that small libraries get access to all the big stuff, too. We develop apps and programs to make it easy to get the content, easy to track how much people have, and easy for them to check it back in so they can get something else. And we educate our users on what publishers are doing to them, and we educate publishers about the giant user base, possible sales, and trainloads of money that they could potentially get by licensing to us on our terms and our prices.

Instead of being preoccupied with how we're going to work with what's already out there, why aren't we designing the system we want from the ground up? Why aren't we hammering on the point that Neil Himself makes when he asks "How many of you were introduced to your favorite author by someone sharing a copy of one of their books?" Substitute movies, albums, bands, just about any creative endeavour - how do you know it's good unless you've already experienced it? How do you get more people to experience it? You have to let people share it. Instead of thinking of piracy as lost sales, think of it as the cost of introducing new people to your work. Some of them won't like it and will pass. Some of them will like it, but not enough, in their opinion, to pay whatever price you're setting for them to own it, so they'll borrow and/or steal. Some people will be introduced to something they've never seen before, that they really like, and that they're willing to throw money at to keep it alive and producing more. We have studies that point out people who actively share stuff with others also translate into owning more content legally. In some ways, it's a bit of a code of honor. F'rex, fansubs. It goes something like this: Watch fansubs until the series is licensed. Then, if you like it, go buy the officially licensed series so there's a better chance that more series like it will be licensed and so that the companies that are paying for the licensing can continue to do so. It's a feedback mechanism, and I suspect a lot of licensing companies do actually look at what's being fansubbed, even though they can't/don't admit to it.

Or, for an example that's entirely on the level - Cory Doctorow releases all his books under a Creative Commons license. That means they're free to read on Craphound. And thus, you know what the product is before you choose to buy it in a codex form...or you tell your selectors that this author is dynamite and we need to order copies for the whole library system. He gets sales of his books from people who would not have picked it up in a bookstore, sight unseen. He gets sales to libraries and schools, where people can pick up his book, sight unseen, evaluate it, and then decide whether they want to buy it.

When it comes to digital content, we're preoccupied in all the wrong places, and many of them have to do with a desire to stop someone else from sharing or improving upon what we have done. How much better would everything be if we decided to embrace the idea that people share things, like to improve upon them, and will circumvent stupid ways of stopping this, law-be-damned? For people who are all about The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), isn't this idea of unleashing the creative force what you want? The products will compete, and the best will be funded and sold, and then someone else will improve, and the wheel turns again. For those of us who are about making sure that we leave a rich pool of ideas for the next inspiration, and that inspiration isn't stomped on by restrictive licensing and corporate greed, well, copyright is intended to be a limited monopoly. If we can return it to that idea, we can ensure fertile ground for new ideas. And for those of us in the business of providing to people what they couldn't or wouldn't normally afford, what we've got to do is make things as simple as possible to deliver that content from publishers to the people that want it, and negotiate for fair pricing and ownership so that we can achieve those goals. Let's not get tangled in What Is, excepting as a stopgap measure to What Should Be.

(This is an entry for Shadow Idol, prompt 15: preoccupied. How much of what we do has been shaped and limited by forces that we don't notice, because we're too busy looking at something else?)