I’ve just finished reading No Safe Harbor, an excellent collection of essays by the United States Pirate Party. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was a United States Pirate Party until I found out about this book.

Available for free in a variety of electronic formats, or as a physical volume from Amazon.com, No Safe Harbor features essays from the likes of Cory Doctorow, Rick Falvinge, Lawrence Lessig and some outfit that calls itself The United Nations. My personal favourite is Falkvinge’s piece on the history of copyright — I now know it made its unlikely debut in the 16th century at the behest of Queen Mary I of England, for the express purpose of quashing criticism of the Catholic Church:

She devised a monopoly where the London printing guild would get a complete monopoly on all printing in England, in exchange for her censors determining what was fit to print beforehand. It was a very lucrative monopoly for the guild, who would be working hard to maintain the monopoly and the favor of the Queen’s censors. This merger of corporate and governmental powers turned out to be effective in suppressing free speech and political-religious dissent.
The monopoly was awarded to the London Company of Stationers on May 4, 1557. It was called copyright.

If this doesn’t float your boat there are nineteen other chapters, on topics ranging from self-publishing for authors (like me) to the forward-thinking idea of fluid democracy.

Last week plans for No Safe Harbor 2 were announced, for release later this year. This time around they’re seeking submissions from Pirate Party members around the world. If you’re a member, keep an eye on the book’s companion blog; more details to come!

[left to right: Jonathan Zittrain, Scott Rosenberg, Tim Wu, Evgenie Morozov, some yutz...]

So the bad news is that my publishing schedule here — previously every weekday, currently every week — is going to be disrupted once again. The good news is that I’m writing a book!

My new year’s resolution for 2012 is to try my hand at long-form writing. Considering that a book inspired this blog in the first place it kind of makes sense. My Phone Book is the working title for my first tome; as you might expect I’m writing it out in the open on a WordPress blog, and will offer it for free as an .epub file when it’s all edited and done.

As of this writing I’m already three chapters in, and I’m starting to find that with the podcast I do and the comedy troupe I direct, well… something has to give, at least for the moment. Let’s not call it the end, just a hiatus. I’ll still be posting relevant links to this site’s Identi.ca and Twitter accounts; if you’re not following me on either of those networks now would be a great time to do that.

WordPress has made a nice visual summary of Oa data for 2011; you can see it here. Some thanks are definitely in order to Ghabuntu, Jade Bryan Jardinico and Kevin Neely for their many and thoughtful comments. Thanks too, to Dennis Bournique of WAP Review; along with his comments he helped me get the mobile version of my site sorted out early on. I’m also quite thrilled that Kevin, along with Anthony Marco and Leo, wrote guest posts here. You should definitely check those out if you haven’t already.

And thanks, of course, to all my readers — ok, this is really starting to sound like a goodbye and it’s not, necessarily. I just need to focus on something else for a bit. I’m hoping that by removing any self-imposed posting schedule I’ll be free to write here whenever I please.

This particular endeavour was never about money for me. I’m proud to say that I’ve never had advertising on this site, only some Amazon Affiliate links for books and a Flattr button. My goal with Open attitude was to be taken more seriously as a blogger, and thanks to your feedback both here and around the web I’m satisfied that I’ve accomplished that.

And like I said I might well be back, I’m just not entirely sure when. So until my next post here (to borrow a phrase from The Linux Outlaws) stay free and stay open…

I’ll not mince words here; Evgenie Morozov has fundamentally changed how I see great swaths of the Internet. You might find that his scholarly text The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom belabours the same few arguments (I did), but they’re fairly compelling ones that you’ll not soon forget.

I came away from The Net Delusion in agreement on three major points:

1. Twibbons aren’t enough.

Right out of the gate Morozov sets to work on debunking Twitter’s overstated role in the Iranian protests of 2009. Long story short, while social media is a fantastic tool for organizing people around a cause, it’s whether or not those same people are willing to step away from their screens and actually do something that makes the difference.

As it was not so long ago I can remember the irrational exuberance with which Twitter users turned their avatars green and changed their location to Tehran. But last time I checked, that particular country was in the same sorry state as it was before Twitter made it a cause célèbre.

2. Social media is not the great liberator.

Here in the west we cry foul every time we hear about social media censorship in some far away place — not just oppressive regimes like Iran but also India and Thailand. Thing is, we see Facebook and Twitter as tools of democracy; they see it, perhaps more clearly, as a commercial service with a decidedly U.S. agenda.

We cyber-utopians, as Morozov dubs us, need to understand and appreciate that (1) other countries have their own domestic social networks that do quite well, thanks very much, and (2) that cultures around the world are just plain different. An example of the latter that maybe hits closer to home is something I remember from Adam Cohen’s The Perfect Store — specifically, eBay’s troubles when they started up in the U.K.; more stringent defamation laws there made user feedback a real problem for the company.

3. The Internet is not a dumb pipe; it’s a loaded weapon.

Before you raise your fist in the air and yell “right on!”, hear me out. What Morozov contends, and what I’m coming to grips with, is that the Internet is not a neutral space — but rather, like a cocked pistol, it’s as dangerous as the person with their finger on the trigger.

Consider that blogs and social media can be tools for propaganda and protest alike. In the same way that television makes everybody famous — giving equal time to Hollywood celebrities and  serial killers — truth, lies, even hate speech propagate the web with no discernible difference, at least on the surface. Thus dissenting voices under oppressive regimes can not only be effectively squelched; through clever manipulation of online content the conversation can be fundamentally changed.

And if all else fails the Internet can just be shut off altogether, as it was in Egypt this time last year.

Now don’t get me wrong — I still believe that our Internet, dangerous as it may be, is a wondrous thing. But Morozov has effectively shown me its limitations as a herald of western-style democracy. It can provide those in the west with a precious, candid peek at the plight of others. But it’s going to take more than a Twibbon to actually help them.

Today I’m reposting something from reddit in its entirety. You’ll see why soon enough. Like any good reddit thread there’s a lot of high-level discussion by some very smart and passionate people, so I urge you to check in on the original post after you’ve read this…

—

As a film student in early 2001, I was a juggernaut. I was making a lot of short films that were garnering moderate acclaim, and I was always pushing ahead, making bigger and bigger projects. For my senior thesis, I wanted to base it on a short story by Isaac Asimov, which was part of the compilation that made up the book “I, Robot”. Isaac had died a few years previous, but after a lot of badgering to the publishers, I was finally awarded with the home phone number of his wife, Janet.

I figured that the number I was given was just another publishing associate, so I dialed with thinly veiled skepticism. To my surprise, the voice that answered was a feeble, elderly woman. I struggled through my initial shock to explain that I was a student; I wanted to use her husband’s story as a basis for my project, and could I get her permission. She said that it sounded like fun, and gave me the number of the estate attorney, so I could get a written form that gave me the go-ahead. I called, I got permission, and they faxed the form to my professor’s office.

It’s important to note that the film was based on one of Asimov’s short stories, “Reason”, but was not a direct interpretation. It was not titled “I, Robot”, and barring the inclusion of the laws of robotics, was almost wholly original.

2 weeks later, 30 people showed up to help build sets, sew costumes, and make a little bit of history. Sadly, I let them all down.

In our last week of shooting, 3 months after I received written consent to use the short story, one of the crew brought in a copy of Variety, which mentioned that a major studio purchased the book rights to I, Robot, and planned to make a film. Initially, I thought, “Awesome – free promotion!” Alas, that’s not what was looming on the horizon.

Part of the project was to make posters, trailers, and a website for the film. We even went so far as to create our own production company, as to look professional. Somehow the legal team from the studio found out about a student project, in a small private college in the Midwest, with no budget, being shot in a warehouse basement, and decided to issue a cease and desist order. Basically, what that means, is that the studio’s lawyers said to us, “You’re using our property. Stop, or we’ll sue you into the stone age.” I responded by sending them the consent form from the Asimov estate, and explained that it was a student project, not a commercial venture worth litigating. I turned over our script, our shooting notes, our shot list, copies of our tapes and even the concept art drawings.

Instead of the letter recognizing our valiant efforts as students that I expected, I found myself on the tail end of a phone call that changed my life. I was contacted directly by the lead of the studio’s legal team, who explained my situation to me very clearly. He told me that I was technically in my legal right to use Isaac Asimov’s material. However, if I chose to proceed, they would file multiple lawsuits totaling over 2 million dollars against me. In the end, I might win, but it would take hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees just to fight it, but would cost them nothing more than the salaries they already pay their lawyers. It would be 10 years before any type of verdict could be levied, and by then it wouldn’t matter what the outcome was, since their film would be long since released.

I was 22. I was working 2 jobs, making about $9 an hour, in addition to attending school. I had taken out every student loan I could get to finance my film, which totaled about $10,000 in debt. I had spent my last dollar to buy breakfast for the crew on the last day of shooting. I was properly fucked. I caved.

In the end, my professors had sympathy on me. They had visited the set, seen the dailies, and recognized my talent and dedication. I graduated with honors, without ever turning in a senior thesis project. I guess that they assumed I had learned the most valuable of all life lessons.

Looking back, I can recognize that the lawyers were only doing their job; I was only worth a couple of hours of an intern’s time, and a 10 minute phone call. To me, they completely pulled the rug out from underneath the career that I’d been trying to carve out for myself. Without a thesis project, I wasn’t equipped to apply to grad schools, and by the time I’d recuperated from the costs I’d incurred, I’d already been forced to accept a different career path, and rearranged my life to fit. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a fairly successful career designing web sites for major entities, and I make a decent living. I was willing to pick up and start over, but I can’t help but harbor resentment for having my wings clipped so early, and so unjustly.

It’s been ten years since this all went down, and even though I want to share my film, show my work and risk the consequences, I cannot. As my wife reminded me, we have a home, careers and our livelihoods. I’m not just putting myself in harm’s way, but her as well, and that’s not a fair sacrifice regardless of the honest intentions. Please note that I don’t condone any illegal activity of any sort.

My story is not unique, nor is it very interesting. I’m one of many that have had a short end of the stick handed to them by a big faceless monster, and I feel that it’s my right and responsibility to take that short bit and fight back – one download at a time.

I’m forced to watch the studios systematically destroy the art of film. One download at a time.

I defy the system in my own petty way. One download at a time.

I want to watch it burn. One download at a time.

Some of you saw a portion of the film clip, and I want to thank everyone for their kind sentiments. However, by posting it, I might have been in violation of the original cessation order, so I had to unfortunately take it down of my own volition. I’m forced to consider that my actions no longer affect only myself, but my family, my company, and my employees, and am no longer in a position to make a stand and risk their futures, as well as my own.

“Those who like it, like it a lot”. That pretty much sums up MIUI, a Far East take on the Android mobile OS by Chinese company Xiaomi. I’ve been fairly faithful to CyanogenMod myself, but with the news of MIUI going open-source I figured I should give it a try.

As an added incentive the MIUI ROM for the Nexus S is based on the latest and greatest Android 4.0 — and unlike the (still very usable) alpha of CyanogenMod 9, MIUI ICS is a release product.

Critics of MIUI tend to write it off as a cheap iPhone clone — probably because, like Apple’s iOS, there’s no app drawer; instead, icons are strewn across however many homescreens it takes to hold them.

Fortunately, just like iOS, you can minimize the mess by organizing apps into folders — just drag one icon onto another. Note that I discovered this quite by accident.

Fans of MIUI will surely hold dear the extensive theming that can be done with a device running it. It’s much more than wallpapers and lockscreens; fonts, menus and even app icons can be customized as well. And while the number of available themes is certainly impressive, it’s how good so many of them look that impresses me. I’m pretty sure this is where MIUI gets its name. If you must bastardize the Chinese pronunciation (MI=”me”), think of it as “my UI”.

Keeping MIUI’s Chinese audience in mind. you might find yourself facing some Chinese characters here and there — like on the dialpad, for example. There are apparently more English-centric themes available on the XDA-Dev forums; I’ll have to put that on my to-do list.

MIUI also sidesteps Android 4.0′s MTP problem by allowing its file manager to act as an FTP server. Just turn on the WiFi, then point your FTP client (or web browser, even) to the IP address indicated on your phone’s screen.

I really like MIUI and I’m going to keep it on my Nexus, at least until official release of CM9 comes out. Xenophobes will whisper in your ear that MIUI is actually a secret plot by the Chinese government to track mobile phone users in the west. This from people who use a phone with software made by Google. Talk about glass houses…