According to the Associated Press, a lawsuit filed in Dallas yesterday has named Virgin Mobile USA and its Australian counterpart, Virgin Mobile Australia, as defendants in a charge of libel and invasion of privacy of Allison Chang, who was unknowingly featured in an Australian advertising campaign ‘Are You With Us Or What?’. Captioned ‘Dump Your Penfriend’, the Virgin billboards and Website ads are alleged to have caused the Texas teenager grief and humiliation.
Interestingly, the suit names Creative Commons, the Massachusetts-chartered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable corporation, as a co-defendant in the action, given that Virgin has been able to use the images because of CC licensing available on the Flickr website, where the image (titled ‘alison for peace’) is hosted. (It is to be noted that the image is now licensed under full copyright, although prior CC terms will persist.) The suit argues that Virgin Australia has not properly acknowledged the photographer, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, on its advertising, thereby not complying with the ‘BY’ attribution terms. As can be seen in a copy of the billboard also hosted on Flickr, there has been attribution made to the stream: http://flickr.com/photos/chewywong. Discussion has ensued about whether individuals should be informed that images are being used under CC, whether model release forms should be sought, and moral rights accrue to those photographed. Fundamentally, the mistake being made here is that this is NOT a copyright issue. It is an issue of defamation, and in certain jurisdictions, privacy. (See Lawrence Lessig's and Joi Ito's posts about the differentiation.) CC is not a scheme which contends with issues other than copyright. However, this will again be a major decision for the success of the flexible copyright scheme, as CC is alleged to be accountable for the actions of advertisers seeking to abide by their terms.
Creators may now come to question licensing under CC, as they may fear where their images ‘end up’. It is an unfortunate episode that the IP and issues of identity have been conflated. More commentary to come as Virgin Australia responds to the charges. In the interim, see more discussion on Slashdot, and on Flickr Central, where photographers are debating the merits of licensing.
Showing posts with label Australia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Australia. Show all posts
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Monday, September 17, 2007
The Great Google Election '07
Is YouTube ‘more important to Mr Rudd than the national parliament of Australia’?
Liberal Party Minister Alexander Downer yesterday tagged Kevin Rudd’s plans to debate election issues on the Internet with PM Howard as ‘phoney’. Of three election debates, Rudd proposes to host one on YouTube. Downer retorted: ‘There'll be an election, and when there is an election, it won't be about YouTube debates, it will be about substance.’
This sentiment sits in direct contrast to Howard’s assertion that the Internet is ‘not some sort of gimmick’, as he sits primed for a conversation with voters through the tubes. Clearly, Downer needs to do a bit of searching for substance in Wikipedia himself, as he declared Australia’s parliamentary term as being three years and three months, rather than the Constitutional stipulation of three.
The world (including the Foreign Minister…) can now watch the news from the comfort of their Google homepage, with the launch of the 2007 Australian Federal Election site, an opportunity to ‘explore the Australian political landscape’ through YouTube videos and electorate-by-electorate announcements, overlaid on Google maps. At the site’s launch, ALP MP Peter Garrett notioned that this would probably be a ‘Google election’. All major parties have a presence on the web.
In addition to this, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is today launching a dedicated election page, which will feature the insightful graphics and new electronic pendulum tool of commentator Antony Green. With his usual astute observations and enviable manipulation of online tools, Antony analysed today’s Newspoll figures on Lateline, comparing Labor’s current standing to the equivalent election-lead-up in 1993, where the fall-off was earlier and their margin not so large. Whether swings will be consistent across the country is the great debate currently.
More news of this, and a summary of last weekend’s Crikey events to come!
Liberal Party Minister Alexander Downer yesterday tagged Kevin Rudd’s plans to debate election issues on the Internet with PM Howard as ‘phoney’. Of three election debates, Rudd proposes to host one on YouTube. Downer retorted: ‘There'll be an election, and when there is an election, it won't be about YouTube debates, it will be about substance.’
This sentiment sits in direct contrast to Howard’s assertion that the Internet is ‘not some sort of gimmick’, as he sits primed for a conversation with voters through the tubes. Clearly, Downer needs to do a bit of searching for substance in Wikipedia himself, as he declared Australia’s parliamentary term as being three years and three months, rather than the Constitutional stipulation of three.
The world (including the Foreign Minister…) can now watch the news from the comfort of their Google homepage, with the launch of the 2007 Australian Federal Election site, an opportunity to ‘explore the Australian political landscape’ through YouTube videos and electorate-by-electorate announcements, overlaid on Google maps. At the site’s launch, ALP MP Peter Garrett notioned that this would probably be a ‘Google election’. All major parties have a presence on the web.
In addition to this, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is today launching a dedicated election page, which will feature the insightful graphics and new electronic pendulum tool of commentator Antony Green. With his usual astute observations and enviable manipulation of online tools, Antony analysed today’s Newspoll figures on Lateline, comparing Labor’s current standing to the equivalent election-lead-up in 1993, where the fall-off was earlier and their margin not so large. Whether swings will be consistent across the country is the great debate currently.
'If the swing was only 4 to 5 per cent, you could say that a marginal seat could help the Government hold on. They would actually hold on to some of those key marginals, make it harder for Labor to win. If the swing is still 6 to 7 per cent, then it's much harder for the Coalition to hang on to some of those marginals, and any they do hang onto maybe compensated for Labor by winning a seat beyond the uniform swing. So on these polls it's very hard to see how the Government can possibly win, but if they can claw back another two to three points and get the swing down to about 5 per cent, then you starting an election which will be much closer.'
More news of this, and a summary of last weekend’s Crikey events to come!
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Queensland Judge Appointed to High Court
Queensland citizens and advocates today celebrate the appointment of Justice Susan Keifel to the High Court of Australia. Justice Keifel is the third female to be appointed to this position, and will share the bench with Justice Susan Crennan, appointed in 2005. Her Honour replaces Queenslander Justice Ian Callinan, who is retiring on 31st August, one day short of his 70th birthday.
In an interview conducted with ABC television news, the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC Chief Justice of Queensland commented that it was important for Queensland to maintain its position on the High Court, to illustrate the on-going role to be played by the State in federal affairs.
Moreover, this appointment, albeit widely considered to fit with the Howard Government’s conservative agenda, illustrates the importance of female presence on the bench.
Justice Keifel famously left school when 15, going to work as a legal clerk at a ‘prominent law firm’ Messrs Fitzgerald, Moynihan and Mack. Keifel gained no ordinary legal training: in 1984 she was awarded a Master of Laws from Wolfson College, Cambridge, with the CJ Hamson prize in Comparative Law. Excelling at her bar exams, she was the youngest female to make silk in Queensland in 1987, whereupon she was appointed to the Supreme Court of Queensland in 1993, and to the Australian Federal Court in 1994.
At a recent lunch-time address to the Australian Academy of Law, of which she is a foundation fellow, reported by The Australian, Keifel J stated:
We wish her all the best for her appointment.
In an interview conducted with ABC television news, the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC Chief Justice of Queensland commented that it was important for Queensland to maintain its position on the High Court, to illustrate the on-going role to be played by the State in federal affairs.
Moreover, this appointment, albeit widely considered to fit with the Howard Government’s conservative agenda, illustrates the importance of female presence on the bench.
Justice Keifel famously left school when 15, going to work as a legal clerk at a ‘prominent law firm’ Messrs Fitzgerald, Moynihan and Mack. Keifel gained no ordinary legal training: in 1984 she was awarded a Master of Laws from Wolfson College, Cambridge, with the CJ Hamson prize in Comparative Law. Excelling at her bar exams, she was the youngest female to make silk in Queensland in 1987, whereupon she was appointed to the Supreme Court of Queensland in 1993, and to the Australian Federal Court in 1994.
At a recent lunch-time address to the Australian Academy of Law, of which she is a foundation fellow, reported by The Australian, Keifel J stated:
"Perhaps the time has come for judges to give detailed consideration to their concerns and articulate them. I am not sure solutions will be obvious but clear statements about what is unacceptable in presentation must be a starting point. Case management is not itself the solution."
We wish her all the best for her appointment.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Tools for Humanities Researchers
Yesterday several heads of research gathered at QUT Creative Industries to discuss tools for humanities researchers. This discussion follows an ARC-funded national survey administered by the Australian Academy of the Humanities to acquire detailed knowledge of the current practices and future requirements of researchers in Australia. Questions asked encompass:
‘What kinds of technologies do you use in your research? How do you use them? What is the impact on your research? Does technology change the kinds of questions you can ask? Why don’t you use more?'
As a corollary to this Learned Academies Special Projects linkage program, the Academy is about to conduct a digitisation scoping study to identity materials most useful to have digitised for researchers in the humanities. The aim of both projects is to compile a substantial evidence base to identity resources and tools to guide investment in these areas.
My contribution to the discussion is as a recent participant in the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme, held at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Being involved in Internet studies, researchers often confront the problem that there aren’t established ways of undertaking qualitative or quantitative analysis. We are always already bricoleurs, mashing previous methods and modes of study to innovate when and where required. (On ethnography, Bryman (2004) comments that it is ‘generally recognized that the method entails a wide range of methods of data collection and sources’ (p. 292).) Do we still need a composite suite of tools to facilitate easier data collection and analysis? Those who are tracking the blogosphere appear to be saying so – colleagues have variously used IssueCrawler teamed with Technorati rankings, but feel that further tools could facilitate analysis. Some have been inspired to work on their own tools, such as OII SDP guest John Kelly, who presented interesting visualised slices of the blogosphere at Harvard.
A much–referenced portal is visualcomplexity.org, which lists over 500 projects, filtered into ‘pattern recognition’ and ‘social networks’, amongst others.
Here is a selection of other tools currently being employed by OII SDPers:
* A useful blogging bibliography tool from Ismael Peña-López, as a database employing two main classes, ‘Contacts’ and ‘Works’, to which five attributes are attached, ‘categories’, ‘types of authors’, ‘types of projects’, ‘languages’ and ‘countries’.
* In the Psych domain, Ralph Lengler of visual-literacy.org (recently rated highly with TED) introduced Tools for Internet-based data collection, and the Web-Experiment-List.
* Daithí Mac Síthigh employs YEP as a Mac-based (and unfortunately not-yet FLOSS) file management tool for pdfs, in which documents can be tagged and annotated. Note the subsequent alert to Skim! which appears to have improved annotation capability, to appease my concerns.
* Peter Ryan introduced TAPoR, a text analysis portal for research based at McMaster University, from a project contributed to by six of the leading Humanities computing centres in Canada. In particular, Peter spoke of HyperPo, a text analysis tool to examine the frequency and senses of words. I believe it outputs nice graphic distributions as a visual model of authors’ arguments.
* One way to track information online is through dapper.net, started with the vision of allowing users to extract and reuse data from nominated sites. Two services employing dapper are blotter, which graphs a blog’s popularity over time, and snag, a social network application which aggregates a user’s presence across the net.
* Marcus Foth mentioned two tools which have been of great use to him recently: dopplr, which displays colleagues’ travel plans, recently reviewed by the Guardian as a British dotcom to watch, and LinkedIn’s capacity to request connections.
* Alla Zollers, given her interest in tagging, commented about ma.gnolia, opining that it has a better interface than del.icio.us and emphasises the power of social networks. That said, there are probably more people using del.icio.us, and for that, the wisdom of the crowds may be… wiser? over there?!
‘What kinds of technologies do you use in your research? How do you use them? What is the impact on your research? Does technology change the kinds of questions you can ask? Why don’t you use more?'
As a corollary to this Learned Academies Special Projects linkage program, the Academy is about to conduct a digitisation scoping study to identity materials most useful to have digitised for researchers in the humanities. The aim of both projects is to compile a substantial evidence base to identity resources and tools to guide investment in these areas.
My contribution to the discussion is as a recent participant in the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme, held at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Being involved in Internet studies, researchers often confront the problem that there aren’t established ways of undertaking qualitative or quantitative analysis. We are always already bricoleurs, mashing previous methods and modes of study to innovate when and where required. (On ethnography, Bryman (2004) comments that it is ‘generally recognized that the method entails a wide range of methods of data collection and sources’ (p. 292).) Do we still need a composite suite of tools to facilitate easier data collection and analysis? Those who are tracking the blogosphere appear to be saying so – colleagues have variously used IssueCrawler teamed with Technorati rankings, but feel that further tools could facilitate analysis. Some have been inspired to work on their own tools, such as OII SDP guest John Kelly, who presented interesting visualised slices of the blogosphere at Harvard.
A much–referenced portal is visualcomplexity.org, which lists over 500 projects, filtered into ‘pattern recognition’ and ‘social networks’, amongst others.
Here is a selection of other tools currently being employed by OII SDPers:
* A useful blogging bibliography tool from Ismael Peña-López, as a database employing two main classes, ‘Contacts’ and ‘Works’, to which five attributes are attached, ‘categories’, ‘types of authors’, ‘types of projects’, ‘languages’ and ‘countries’.
* In the Psych domain, Ralph Lengler of visual-literacy.org (recently rated highly with TED) introduced Tools for Internet-based data collection, and the Web-Experiment-List.
* Daithí Mac Síthigh employs YEP as a Mac-based (and unfortunately not-yet FLOSS) file management tool for pdfs, in which documents can be tagged and annotated. Note the subsequent alert to Skim! which appears to have improved annotation capability, to appease my concerns.
* Peter Ryan introduced TAPoR, a text analysis portal for research based at McMaster University, from a project contributed to by six of the leading Humanities computing centres in Canada. In particular, Peter spoke of HyperPo, a text analysis tool to examine the frequency and senses of words. I believe it outputs nice graphic distributions as a visual model of authors’ arguments.
* One way to track information online is through dapper.net, started with the vision of allowing users to extract and reuse data from nominated sites. Two services employing dapper are blotter, which graphs a blog’s popularity over time, and snag, a social network application which aggregates a user’s presence across the net.
* Marcus Foth mentioned two tools which have been of great use to him recently: dopplr, which displays colleagues’ travel plans, recently reviewed by the Guardian as a British dotcom to watch, and LinkedIn’s capacity to request connections.
* Alla Zollers, given her interest in tagging, commented about ma.gnolia, opining that it has a better interface than del.icio.us and emphasises the power of social networks. That said, there are probably more people using del.icio.us, and for that, the wisdom of the crowds may be… wiser? over there?!
Thursday, August 9, 2007
IceTV Baby
In a decision handed down by Bennett J of the Australian Federal Court, Sydney’s IceTV has succeeded in proving that its electronic program guide (EPG) ‘does not reproduce a substantial part’ of the Nine Network’s program guide. The decision supported Nine’s claim to ownership of the copyright, but upheld that IceTV’s guide was compiled independently. From the instigation of proceedings in 2006, IceTV had asserted that ‘IceGuide is independently compiled by the company from a suite of sources in the public domain.’
This decision allows users to continue to schedule television recordings on a number of devices, including PCs, video recorders, and mobile phones. The IceTV service currently has 6500 fee-paying subscribers and an additional several thousand on a trial basis. The service is pitching itself as a viable alternative to TiVo, whose official introduction into Australia still remains unclear.
The Sydney Morning Herald observed that many viewed these actions as a traditional media vs. new media battle. Undoubtedly, the service will see increased success in the wake of this decision.
This decision allows users to continue to schedule television recordings on a number of devices, including PCs, video recorders, and mobile phones. The IceTV service currently has 6500 fee-paying subscribers and an additional several thousand on a trial basis. The service is pitching itself as a viable alternative to TiVo, whose official introduction into Australia still remains unclear.
The Sydney Morning Herald observed that many viewed these actions as a traditional media vs. new media battle. Undoubtedly, the service will see increased success in the wake of this decision.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Exteriors: Suburbia's Subtle Satirist
Howard Arkley Retrospective
Queensland Gallery of Modern Art
Nick Cave (c) Howard Arkley 1999, Commissioned with funds provided by L Gordon Darling AC CMG. Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
The airbrushed lines of Australian artist Howard Arkley (1951-1999) reveal an urban landscape in which multiple layers converge to portray a darker side to the duplex and its dainty décor. Arkley does not shatter the suburban surrounds in the manner of David Lynch (no ears in the grass Blue Velvet style), but there is something decidedly unhomely in the homely. In a repetition of roofs and kempt corners familiar from real estate catalogues, Arkley employs a palette that is slightly overemphatic, skewed, to emphasise a different perspective on the domestic. Despite their instant pop appeal, his works reward the ‘slow look’, an examination of colour and form, pattern and patina which surrounds us on a daily basis and may otherwise be overlooked.
The National Gallery of Victoria’s comprehensive retrospective of Arkley’s work opened at the Ian Potter Centre in Melbourne’s Federation Square in November 2006, and has now reached Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) (6th July – 16th September 2007). The exhibition coincides with the launch of John Gregory’s monograph Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley. Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University, Dr Gregory presumably has great insight into this subject, in being Howard’s brother-in-law.
The curation of the exhibition, undertaken by Jason Smith, chronicles the early fascination of Arkley with the tools of his trade, showing exercises which work through the different effects to be achieved with the airbrush. We progress past the intricate iron work of front doors, ruminating on Guimard’s Parisian Métropolitain gates, to extensions into the ‘real’ in 3-dimensional seating which plays with perspective, form, and function in inimitable style – what is real, what is model? how do utilitarianism and art coincide? The outside walls of the exhibition explore Arkley’s exteriors (his ‘bloody house paintings,’ said in a moment of exasperation that this would be his legacy), and his fascination with masks. The inside walls perhaps mirror his concerns more closely: the interiors show different settings on the familiar, along side his famous, and thought to be autobiographical work on heroin use, an addiction which brought about his untimely death in 1999, months after world-wide recognition at the Venice Biennale, La Biennale di Venezia.
The centrepiece of the exhibition could be said to be the collaborative piece ‘Blue Chip Instant Decorator’ (1990/1991), completed with Juan Davila for an exhibition in Tolarno Galleries, South Yarra. Whereas Davila’s politics are brutally obvious, Arkley’s are embedded, folded in the patterning and vanishing behind the veneers. Yet, there is a clear statement about commodification of art here and the evacuation of all socio-cultural meaning at the hands of art dealers.
We circle in recombinations and reorderings across a range of visual stimuli in this exhibition, where types are elaborated upon and memes mesmerise. Arkley offers a panorama of immersive entertainment and enlightenment as settings unsettle. These are the landscapes of the twentieth century, where we reflect upon identity and belonging. Arkley positions us to re-evaluate the great Australian dream, served over tea and scones. The back corner is dedicated to a powerful industrial landscape which will no doubt find particular resonance with those who think globally. What is it to be local? As politicians wend their way through marginal electorates, now is certainly the time to recast our gaze.
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