This is the second, more detailed part of the readings, studies, lessons, articles and essays I have found online about the theory and analysis of the web. The first part was relatively small, I admit, but I hope this list will keep you reading for some time.

Copyright and the Commons

Free Culture [Lawrence Lessig] : A discussion on the current laws of copyright and their implication to innovation and exchange of ideas.

Free for All [Peter Wayner] : An introduction the cyberculture of linux and its results in free software development.

The Right to Read [Richard M. Stallman] : A political, ideological essay on SPA (Software Publisher’s Association).

Hacker Crackdown [Bruce Sterling] : The history of hacker subculture during the 1990s. Cory Doctorow made an audiobook of it, which I edited for better listening. You can download it here [torrent].

The wealth of Networks: How social production transforms market and Freedom [Yochai Benkler] : A look at the economical aspects of networks, property and the commons.

Communications Infrastructure Regulation and the Distribution of Control Over Content [Yochai Benkler] : With the argument, that current infrastructures of communication and distribution have a negative impact on individual autonomy and public, Benkler suggests a new model.

For more texts of Yochai Benkler, visit his homepage benkler.org.

Open University Seminars

Network security lesson : A Master’s level lesson on networks. How they function and therefore how can they be protected.

Information on the Web : An introductory lesson, teaching tactics to find what you are looking for online. As I said, introductory.

Sociological studies of virtual worlds

My tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World [Julian Dibbell] : A sort of ethnographic study on the social life of the LambdaMoo virtual world, which thrived in the early 1990s. If you have read Sherry Turkle’s “Life on the Screen“, you get the picture.

The Online World [Odd de Presno] : The structure of the online world and how to take advantage of your time and effort in it. Pretty basic.

Network Theory & Social Networks

Scale Free Networks [Albert Laszlo Barabasi] : A very good essay to understand the basics of scale free networks and how the internet is interconnected.

Taming Complexity [Albert Laszlo Barabasi] : Like “Scale Free Networks”, an introductory approach to the subject.

The physics of the Web [Albert Laszlo Barabasi] : The structure and dynamics of the Internet.

These three essays of Barabasi can give a very good overview of the way the web is connected, the role of hubs, the importance of linkage, etc. I really like his work and I definetely suggest his book “Linked” on the same thematology [not free to download].

That sneaky exponential [David Reed] : Why participation in social networks counts. The next step after Metcalfe’s Law is Reed’s Law. Very insightful and very good argumented.

The augmented social Network: building identity and trust into the next-generation internet [Ken Jordan, Jan Hauser, Steven Forster] : The six degrees of seperation seem just too many. “This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complementary capabilities across social networks.”

Virtual Interactive Communication: A bicultural Surve [Dave Ambrose] : A theoretical study on Web 2.0 and social networks such as Facebook.

Attention economy of the Web

Propaganda [Edward Bernays] : To understand how attentiveness of the collective mind works, the strategies of propaganda are certainly the foundations.

The economy of attention [Georg Franck] : A very good essay on the attention economy, from an expert of the subject.

Attention and Participation in the social Web [Jiannis Sotiropoulos] : Narcissistically enough, this is my master thesis on the attention economy of the social web. Network theory, sociology, mass psychology and emergent behavior are used in this study. I always welcome your feedback. The thesis is also in wiki format.

 

Software vs. Hardware

There is no software [Friedrich Kittler] : A complex, but very interesting point of view, why there are no software but only hardware.

On the implementation of Knowledge - towards a theory of hardware [Friedrich Kittler] : Once again why the relationship between hardware and software remain a paradox.
More works of Friedrich Kittler. His writings are very theoretical and provocative, but always interesting to read. Some texts are in German.

We are all aware with Creative Commons. Flickr photos are under CC licences, web designs are licensed, blog posts have some rights reserved and even some wikis have licenses on them. Purpose of Creative Commons is to promote sharing of information and substitute the restrictions of current copyright laws.

Creators have several good reasons to publish their work under a Creative Commons license, but there are some negative implications of Creative Commons, that we don’t observe at first sight.

From new technologies emerge new restrictions

When new technologies emerge, new ways of protecting our work come long.

Before Copyright.
Marshall McLuhan said about copyright laws that

the invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public - a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. (from the medium is the massage).

Copyright.
So, before the absolute expansion of the Web, there was copyright. For an artist to put his/her work out to the public wasn’t as easy as it is today. There were no computers to produce cheap, quality work; there was no Web with its wide public.
Artists needed someone who would finance the whole production process. And even when they did find someone and although “all rights reserved” applied the moment a work was created, sometimes artist didn’t really care. The purpose wasn’t to protect their intellectual property, the purpose was artistic expression. So copyright protected the ones caring and run obsolete in any other case.

Creative Commons.
The explosion of the Web changed the scene. Production and publication were very easy and very fast. So was copying and distributing. Awareness of self-expression rose. Every producer - regardless what he/she produced - wanted to protect his work. This needed to be done in an obvious (the web is huge) and fast (the works produced are numerous) way. So Creative Commons emerged.

 

According to wikipedia’s description

Creative commons is a non-profit organization, which provides several free licenses for the owners to use when releasing their work on the Web.

The value of Creative Commons

• Free flow of information; It is true, that the minute you create a work, it is immediately copyrighted with an “all rights reserved” license. This means, that you are the sole owner controlling who may copy, adapt, redistribute, publish etc.
  Since this perspective can be very restrictive to sharing and providing information, Creative Commons comes as a new parameter, promoting innovation and free flow of information.Creative Commons, under that perspective, combines a moral with a legal objective (although it has been argued, that the moral objective of Creative Commons is of lesser priority - at least in comparison to the Free Software Movement).

• Choice; Creative Commons provides a wide variety of licenses. There are 4 major licenses, which can be mixed, producing 16 possible combinations.

• Ease of use; Licensing your work in Creative Commons is easy. Very easy. In one step you choose your license and in the next your work has “some rights reserved”.

Criticism on Creative Commons

Over time, Creative Commons has been considerably criticized.

• It has been argued, that the legal code of the CC licenses has additional information, that people don’t read - they stick only to the Commons Deed.
• There are still several misconceptions about Creative Commons and licensing in general.
• It has even been argumented, that Creative Commons is completely pointless - although I would not go that far.

The public’s sense of ownership

For me the value of Creative Commons is undisputable. The public is too vast and the need for the protection of intellectual property is very important. Creative Commons gave developers the option to keep their work more open, than traditional, standard copyright laws do.

But the ease of use and the wide popularity of Creative Commons has also increased the awareness of the our sense of ownership. Suddenly, everything we produce - may it be a funny 5minute sketch, a blog post, a program or a whole book - is subjected to licensing.
Why do we put everything under a Creative Commons license?

• Maybe we believe, that our work might some day achieve a great financial value and we don’t want to miss the opportunity.
• Or we believe, that the web is full of malevolent individuals wanting to take advantage of our work and republish and their own identity.

I don’t want to argument why or why not one should put his/her work under a license, this is a personal decision. But just let me point out, that

• giving something for free does not necessarily mean not having any gain
• if the web were full of copyists and thieves, it probably wouldn’t be that successful.

I am not putting my work under any license, firstly because I don’t mind if someone copies my content. Secondly, I have a lot to gain from the online community and maybe that’s my way of giving something back.

After all if we only take and don’t give something back we will end up exhausting the free resources as Garrett Hardin’s theory of “the tragedy of the Commons” explains.

Do you have your work under a Creative Commons License? Why or why not? I’m really interested in your opinions.

After last.fm, the 4 big music labels (EMI, Sony BMG, Warner, Universal) are supporting a new service. This one is called Qtrax and it launches tomorrow. In comparison to similar sites (pandora, imeem, slacker), this one is a p2p network, meaning that users are able to legally download copyrighted music. Sarah Perez wrote an article about the ups and downs of qtrax.

But why would qtrax succeed?

Don’t get me wrong, I find it a step to the right direction but it provides a service users already have (they just have it “illegally”). Using last.fm is for me clear: it is streaming music and is highly community driven. But Qtrax? I think Mashable is right on this one: qtrax will not last.
I’m just a bit skeptical. Maybe RIAA must take even harsher measures to convince the wider public to use such services instead of the sweet torrents.
I don’t know, what do you thing?

Do you have any good reason, why we should prefer Qtrax over all the other services we are used to?
I mean, I have none so far. I’ll think about it and post on the comments if something comes up.

Thanks to Robert Gordon for drawing my attention on imeem.

Corry Doctorow, published a couple of days ago a series of podcasts, where he narrates Bruce Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown. He writes:

Since last June, I’ve been podcasting a weekly reading from Bruce Sterling’s 1992 classic journalistic history of the founding of the online civil liberties movement, The Hacker Crackdown, which chronicles the events that led to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer. Hacker Crackdown was the first book I ever read electronically, the first piece of “literary freeware” I ever met. It’s a fantastic book and it was a fantastic read.

If you want to download each podcast seperately (with the comments of Corry at the beginning), you can do it at ‘Podcast of Bruce Sterling’s HACKER CRACKDOWN has concluded‘.

I took the liberty to download them all and edit them, removing the introductory talk of Corry. After Sensoz’s proposal, I have put the whole mp3 file in a public torrent so that everyone can download it.

You can download the edited version here.

I haven’t listened to the whole book until now, but it is surely a great read (listen). I must say, though, that Corry’s comments are sometimes also worth listening.

Most of us got a taste yesterday of the whole Facebook-kicks-Scoble-off debate. After several hours and numerous posts on the subject from various bloggers, Facebook explained that this was a standard security process against all kinds of scripts.

When our systems detect these types of scripts, they immediately disable the account of the user responsible as a preventative measure.

The aftermath of this story brings up a series of questions:

Is there a monopoly of data?

When Facebook noticed a potential competitor (Plaxo), it did its best to block its development (in this case by forbidding the extraction of data). Plaxo’s script wouldn’t extract any data that the users kept hidden – only the ones, that were public (see Wired’s post on that).
When Scoble explained to Facebook his (not malicious) purpose, Facebook replied:

Since you contacted us and have agreed not to run the script again, we have reactivated your account. You should now be able to log in with your normal email and password. In the future, please refrain from running these types of scripts again.

So although the script wasn’t malicious, Scoble (or anyone else for that matter) is not allowed to use it.

Other social software (linkedin, yahoo, etc.) seem fine with the implementation of their services in plaxo.

It seems to me that Facebook tries to monopolize a service, with malicious ways.

[The coming war over data is a thorough post on data ownership]

Who owns the social network?

So Facebook actually implied that users (and developers) are allowed to bring data in, but not allowed to bring data out.
In other words, the contacts in your digital address book are your friends, but the data belongs to the network.
Social networks are explicitly made out of people. Without people, these networks wouldn’t exist.
Nonetheless, Facebook has clarified its opinion on that one:
Your network belongs to the service provider.

[An interesting discussion about this subject can be found at Center Networks]

Which social engine to trust?

• Do you read the Terms of Use, when you sign up in a social network? I don’t, but maybe I should. Facebook makes it clear in the Terms of Use that we have a limited access to our network:

All content on the Site and available through the Service, including designs, text, graphics, pictures, video, information, applications, software, music, sound and other files, and their selection and arrangement (the “Site Content”), are the proprietary property of the Company, its users or its licensors with all rights reserved. [...]
Except for your own User Content, you may not upload or republish Site Content on any Internet, Intranet or Extranet site or incorporate the information in any other database or compilation, and any other use of the Site Content is strictly prohibited. Such license is subject to these Terms of Use and does not include use of any data mining, robots or similar data gathering or extraction methods.

• Maybe we should take a more careful look on the protection the network provides.

After this whole story, I got the impression that Facebook is very safe. I mean it blocks any kind of scripts, no matter what.
But it doesn’t seem so.

Although Facebook tries its best to protects its users from any kind of scams, some spyware still made it through; and it gets worse with phishing scams.

Conclusion

What to do? What to do?
After such a discussion, do you still remain a Facebook member?
I mean you will lose your big, nice network of friends.
It is a moral question, i think. I never was a Facebook fan (I had a network of 10 friends), so I have nothing to lose.
But think about it. Do you really have something to lose?