Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

So, I’m doing a talk today over at HBS, talking about how cool where I work (the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School) is. Instead of making up a slide deck, I thought I’d just use a web browser to walk people through the coolest stuff we do. And since my blog is the easiest way to publish HTML right now, hey… welcome blog readers to my pseudo-slide deck for my talk :)

• Global Voices- aggregating and editing bloggers from the third world and working with first-world media (mainstream, non-mainstream, whatever) to get those bloggers heard here. Led by the very awesome Rebecca Mackinnon (ex-CNN Tokyo, fluent in Mandarin) and the very awesome Ethan Zuckerman (founder GeekCorps and Tripod, back when Tripod was cool.)
• OpenNet Initiative- fighting the bad guys by studying and exposing internet censorship all over the planet.
• Digital Media Project- The most obvious confluence of law and the internet, to most people, remains the clashes over music and video, and we’re right there, studying it and doing it. The project is led by Prof. Terry Fisher, whose Promises To Keep is incredibly thought-provoking writing on the subject.
• StopBadware- where I spend a lot of my day these days. On the surface, the goal is almost a Consumer Reports-style cataloging of badware, with a very pro-consumer slant. More deeply, it is a pre-emptive attempt to figure out how the internet can govern itself without depending on traditional monopolies- either traditional kinds or newer ones.
• Center For Citizen Media- we believe strongly in the collaborative energy that the internet has enabled, and the Center for Citizen Media is how we’re getting involved in the ground-up news and media movement.
• H2O- H*cough* 2.0, our educational technology experimentation project.

Looking forward, we’re doing really interesting stuff with wikis, hosting Wikimania; we’re getting involved in research into virtual worlds; we’re continuing to help Harvard by hosting a Harvard-wide blog server. We have a slew of fellows working on their own projects, like David Isen’s Freedom To Connect on network neutrality and David Weinberger’s writing. And of course we teach, both through our professors and through our clinical program.

So, that’s where I work. Anyone want to come join us? :)

For a variety of reasons I’ve been looking into Sun’s ‘open source DRM’ scheme at work. Architecturally, it seems like a pretty solid solution. If you’re going to do CRAP, you might as well do it with open standards for interoperability between the different layers of the CRAP stack, so that people aren’t locked into specific implementations/tools/etc. So, it has that right; has it so right, in fact, that I could concievably even drop my unqaulified opposition to DRM assuming that the certification system did not require a locked-down kernel for software at the top of the stack to run. [This is an assumption I'm almost certain I'll be wrong about.]
That said… man, do they get a lot of things wrong. Some of the most egregious:

• In their whitepaper, they have the most anti-cluetrain sentence in the history of sentences:
  

  [W]e see important and even more promising markets for DRM systems in the categories of “business” and “life”.

  I know what they’re trying to get at, but c’mon… life is not a business category. Don’t put quotes around it. Don’t tell me about how DRM is going to help me market to life. That’s just… eww. If that sentence doesn’t make you ill inside, you’re broken.

• I could detail the other white paper cluetrain violations, which are numerous. But that would take too much of my life away. Go read it yourself- it is otherwise a good whitepaper, in one of those ‘so close yet so far’ moments. Particularly fun is the ‘architecture diagram’ that consists nearly completely of non-overlapping ovals, and the ‘cartesian graph of DRM Usage Models’, also promiently featuring a blob for ‘life’.
• They require registration, including phone number and street address, to view the draft specifications on “open”mediacommons.org. Again, lack of clue about how you build a meaningful community, or about how you’re supposed to behave when you’re doing ‘open’- minimal interference, maximal opt-in.
• They have source for many bits of a reference implementation here. Great stuff, except for the detail that when you read the README, you note that to actually encode anything to test it with requires… unreleased code. And a closed-source database server.

Anyway, it seems evident the industry is going to shove DRM down our throats, so I’m happy someone is creating a DRM stack that is potentially based on open standards and open interoperability. That at least is something, and I do honestly congratulate Sun for doing it with more clue than anyone else out there right now. Sadly, that isn’t a very high bar.

The lazyweb (via the excellent Boris Anthony) coughed up a wordpress plugin that does exactly what I want, and a service called feedblitz that looks pretty close. Also got email about Feedlinx, another similar but not-quite-what-I-want service.