Why Open Education Matters: new video competition launched
To celebrate Open Education Week this week, the US Department of Education, the Open Society Foundations and Creative Commons have launched a high profile video competition to highlight the potential of open educational resources (OER). The competition invites people to create a short video explaining the benefits of OER for teachers, students and schools in the US and globally. This week, the New York Times ran two features highlighting the growing role of OER in America’s schools and colleges, focussing on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which they call a “tool for democratising higher education”, as well as emerging responses to the challenge of online certification for students of such courses.
Video competition | MOOCs | Online certification

France: Twitter censors accounts unfavourable to Nicholas Sarkozy
Internet Without Borders reports that Twitter appears to have censored four accounts parodying French president Nicholas Sarkozy. Although Twitter cited its impersonation rules when contacting the owners of the suspended accounts, archives show the accounts did not break Twitter’s rules.

Mexico: Alarming new surveillance powers granted
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports that “the Mexican legislature today adopted a surveillance legislation that will grant the police warrantless access to real time user location data”.

UN Human Rights Council rallies on right to internet freedom of expression
IP Watch publish a detailed report on a meeting of the human rights council dedicated to discussing the importance of maintaining citizens’ right to free expression online.

Call for support for reform to EU access to documents law
Access Info have issued a call to civil society groups to support their campaign to reform laws governing access to documents at the EU.

Prizes With an Eye Toward the Future
This feature in the New York Times charts the resurgence of interest in prize funds dedicated to stimulating innovation around specific science and technology problems: “The change has come in part because of a flood of new philanthropic money (a lot of it from the tech sector) wielded by people looking for different ways of doing things, and because of a growing impatience with the limitations of in-house research and development”. The article quotes a report from Knowledge Ecology International, who have been raising awareness about the greater role prize funds should play in medical research.

Surveillance Inc: How Western tech firms are helping Arab dictators
The Atlantic publishes an in-depth report on the sale of surveillance technology by Western companies to repressive regimes: “These companies seem fully aware of what they’re doing… but far less concerned about the implications”.

Race for the South Atlantic
Steve Song provides an update on the under-reported African connectivity revolution.

Interview: Elevating the Discourse
The Boston Review interview Robert C. Post about the ideas set forth in his new book “Democracy, Expertise, and Academic Freedom: A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern State”.

Paper: The new ambiguity of “Open Government”
Harlan Yu and David G. Robinson analyse how recent interest in opening up government datasets, most notable in the international Open Government Partnership initiative launched last year, threaten older understandings of what open governments – and open societies – look like, to the detriment of campaigns for transparency and accountability. Miller McCune publish a useful summary of the paper.
Paper | Summary

Fixing online identity and reputation
ReadWriteWeb reports on a three-day workshop organised in San Francisco Bay to prototype a tool called Hypothes.is, a “reputation filter” for the internet that aims to arrest the web’s journey towards becoming an “all-out popularity contest”, and turn it into a meritocracy instead.

Drawing by Numbers
The Tactical Technology Collective have launched a new website, DrawingByNumbers.org, which provides resources for activists and data journalists with free advice, training and resources for creating beautiful and effective data visualisations to help in campaigning, advocacy, education and analysis.

The Body Counter
Foreign Policy magazine profile the work of human rights statistician Patrick Ball.

Syllabus: Digital Media and Privacy
Helen Nissenbaum is a Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication and Computer Science at New York University and an expert in privacy and privacy law. This syllabus from her 2010 course in Digital Media and Privacy includes readings from Bruno Latour, Karl Marx, David Brin, Richard A. Posner and Daniel Solove, as well as extracts from her own book, “Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life”.

Jenny Diski on Second Life
Jenny Diski’s wry 2007 takedown of the once-extremely-fashionable Second Life for The London Review of Books: “A virtual money-market currency and built-in obsolescence is a perfect world indeed”.

US lobbying waters down EU data protection reform
Euractiv reports that, following “intense lobbying” from authorities and firms in the US, “the overhaul of data protection rules proposed by Viviane Reding, the European Commission vice president in charge of fundamental rights, was substantially modified before it was published”.

India: Government to track locations of all mobile users
The Indian Express reports on changes being made to mobile network operating licenses that require mobile network operators to provide the Indian Department of Telecommunications with real-time details of users’ locations: “Documents obtained by The Indian Express show that details shall initially be provided for mobile numbers specified by the government. Within three years, service providers will have to provide information on locations of all users.”

MIT launches free online course – with accreditation
The BBC reports that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will begin offering an electronics course in March, its first free course which can be studied and assessed completely online: “In this prototype stage, the online assessment will depend on an “honour code” in which home students will commit to honest behaviour. But in future, the university says, there will be mechanisms for checking identity and verifying work.”

“ACTA is part of a multi-decade, worldwide copyright campaign”
Based on an interview with Michael Geist, this feature for Ars Technica explains why intellectual property enforcement provisions that go beyond internationally agreed norms are being drafted in secretive trade negotiations: “Rather than making their arguments at the World Intellectual Property Organization, where they would be subject to serious public scrutiny, the US and other supporters of more restrictive copyright law have increasingly focused on pushing their agenda in alternative venues, such as pending trade deals, where negotiations are secret and critics are excluded.

Africa: Beyond the Frontiers of Science Fiction
In this short piece, Jonathan Dotse shares his experience growing up as a science fiction fan in Accra, and makes a compelling case for why today’s best science fiction writers are increasingly setting their work in the developing world: “Youths from Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa represent the single largest subgroup of the human population, and with the aid of advanced technology they will go on to shape the geopolitical destiny of our civilization”.

How Target knew my daughter was pregnant before I did
This long feature for the New York Times examines how large retail companies use detailed purchasing data to influence their customers’ habits, and why they’re not keen to talk about how they do it.

Internet freedom fighters build a shadow web
This (paywalled) feature for Scientific American provides a surprisingly good overview of the resurgence of interest in wireless mesh networking and the issues and challenges that face grassroots enthusiasts for re-instating the internet’s original, distributed architecture.

Does the NSA think Anonymous is the new Al Qaida?
Alexis Madrigal examines the rhetoric about Anonymous that is increasingly being used by US intelligence officials, and warns what it might mean in this piece for the Atlantic.

What we don’t know, and why, about incentives to stimulate biomedical R&D
James Love of Knowledge Ecology International takes on what he calls “strategic ignorance” about the effects of government policy on medical innovation in this short essay.

Copy Culture and the children of the web
Joe Karganis of the American Assembly at Columbia University gives a talk on his latest research into social attitudes towards copyright infringement and enforcement measures. Meanwhile, the Atlantic publish an English translation of an essay by Polish writer and commentator Piotr Czerski entitled “We, the web kids”, which gives a more individual perspective on the attitudes of the next generation: “We know how to compete and we like to do it, but our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, on the ability to interpret and process information, and not on monopolising it”.
Karganis (video) | Czerski

ACTA protests take place across Europe
Last weekend, thousands of people took part in pan-European protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a multilateral treaty negotiated largely in secret that threatens to take intellectual property enforcement standards beyond internationally-agreed norms. Lobbyists for rightsholders groups have written to the European Parliament, which will begin considering whether to accept the treaty at the end of this month, urging members to to ignore popular concerns about ACTA and dismissing criticisms as “misinformation”. European Digital Rights (EDRI) have issued a factsheet detailing major flaws in the information the European Commission is giving to the Parliament about the treaty.
Report | EDRI factsheet | Lobbyists’ letter

Iran: Internet access cut
Reuters reports on news that Iranian authorities “switched off” secure connections to websites hosted outside Iran over the weekend: “Many Iranians are concerned the government may be preparing to unveil its much documented national internet system, effectively giving the authorities total control over what content Iranian users will be able to access”.

Chile: Pressure on government to open up TPP negotiating process
(via Google Translate) The government in Chile have responded to mounting concerns raised by citizens that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a proposed international treaty with implications for access to knowledge and health, is being negotiated in secret and without input from civil society groups. Derechos Digitales reports that 3,500 Chilean citizens got in touch to express their concerns to the Chilean President and his advisers, just 12 hours after the launch of their campaign highlighting the TPP, “SOPA in Chile?”.

Thailand: Criminal trial of Chiranuch Premchaiporn resumes
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports on the resumption of the trial of Chiranuch Premchaiporn (commonly known as Jiew) in Thailand this week. The free speech advocate and director of one of Thailand’s most popular alternative news sites has been charged under the country’s Lèse Majesté law, which criminalises defamation of Thai royalty, following allegedly defamatory comments left in the website’s comments section. Global Voices reports on civil society efforts inside Thailand to reform the law.
EFF | Global Voices

EU: Commissioner moves forward in favour of right to read for the blind
In a speech to the European Parliament this week, EU Commissioner for Internal Market and Services Michel Barnier has committed to seeking a mandate from EU Member States to negotiate a Treaty for the Visually Impaired (TVI) at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). The development is significant since the European Commission had thus far opposed the idea of a binding instrument to ensure minimum standards for exceptions to copyright law that allow the reading-impaired to freely share adapted materials. The campaign for the TVI has been led by the World Blind Union (WBU) in collaboration with other civil society groups.
Link to this week’s speech (begins at 20:59:52) | Previous 2011 Commission position | More info on the TVI

India: “The war on the web is a war on us”
In this editorial for Tehelka magazine, Rishi Majumder uses two legal cases against Facebook and Google that are currently making their way through the Indian court system to warn that trends around regulation of content on the Indian web threaten citizens’ fundamental rights to liberty and due process.

Africa: Mobile Phones Will Not Save the Poorest of the Poor
This article for Slate magazine argues that mobile connectivity needs to be extended to the poorest regions of Africa in order to stay the growth of a widening digital divide: “While the technologies for dramatically lowering the cost of connectivity already exist, politicians and regulators have been unwilling to enact bold policies that would deploy innovative solutions and promote meaningful competition”.

Interview: Eric King
Privacy International’s Eric King speaks to me on the soros.org blog about his year spent sneaking into arms fairs to find out about the latest in digital surveillance technology being sold to authorities in repressive regimes.

Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development
The World Economic Forum have released a discussion note exploring the potential of big data to inform development projects, highlighting the need for “concerted action to ensure that this data helps the individuals and communities who create it”.

Syllabus: News and Participatory Media, MIT
Full syllabus of a new class taught by the head of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, Ethan Zuckerman: “Rather than exploring the history of journalism and challenges to existing models of news production, this class will consider the news as an engineering challenge”.

“The Meme is the message”: A curated history of the Grass Mud Horse song
Bloggers at the China-focussed design blog 88-bar provide a useful summary of the subtly subversive “Grass Mud Horse” Chinese internet meme: “On the heavily censored world of the Chinese internet, memes are often the only way to get a message out there”.

Academics vow to boycott Elsevier over Research Works Act
The Economist reports on the rapid growth of signatories to a petition calling out Dutch academic publisher Elsevier for their high prices, bundling practices, and support for the Research Works Act, a proposed US law that would deny public access to publicly funded research. The petition has been signed by over 5,000 researchers, many of whom have pledged that they will refrain from publishing, refereeing and editorial work. Elsevier requires these services, which are performed without remuneration, in order to function.
Report | Petition

Russia: Prices of popular bloggers’ posts leaked
The Guardian reports that “A pro-Kremlin group runs a network of internet trolls, seeks to buy flattering coverage of Vladimir Putin and hatches plans to discredit opposition activists and media, according to private emails allegedly hacked by a group calling itself the Russian arm of Anonymous”. The emails, sent between people involved in the Kremlin-sponsored youth group Nashi, detail payments to journalists and bloggers. Slashdot provides more background to the story.
Guardian | Slashdot

Reporters Without Borders creates mirror sites to fight censorship
Reporters Without Borders have announced they will create mirror websites that host content from organisations taken offline by cyberattacks, or blocked by censors. They will begin by mirroring content published by the Chechen magazine Dosh (which was taken offline by cyberattacks during the Russian elections last year) and the Sri Lankan online newspaper Lanka-e News, which has been blocked inside Sri Lanka since October 2011.

Privacy, free expression, and the Facebook standard
In the week of the Facebook IPO, CEO of Human Rights First Elisa Massimino encourages potential investors to examine the values of the company in this piece for Forbes: “If Facebook really were a country, its foreign policy would be on a collision course with that of the Obama administration, which has made Internet freedom — including protecting the privacy rights of users — a foreign policy priority.”

WSJ debate: Is extending patents on pharmaceuticals simply more of a bad thing?
The Wall Street Journal has published a debate on the role of patents in encouraging innovation in the pharmaceutical sector, and whether calls to extend the length of time for which a patent is granted have any merit. Josh Bloom, director of the American Council on Science and Health argues for a patent extension, while Els Torreele of the Open Society Public Health Program argues that extending patents on pharmaceuticals will do nothing to increase medical innovation.

Africa should be wary of US propaganda on intellectual property
This blog post by Open Society Public Health Program’s Brett Davidson highlights the rise of free trade agreements promoting intellectual property enforcement measures that go beyond established norms, and the threat they pose to health and education in the developing world.

We are the media, and so are you
In this editorial for the Washington Post, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, together with Kat Walsh, asks readers to recognise the stake they have in a fere and open internet, and the power they have to defend that stake.

Report: Rise of the silent SMS
European Digital Rights (EDRI) look in-depth at the increasing use by police in Europe of “silent SMSs” to track suspects using their mobile phones.

Interview: Brewster Kahle
The LA Times interview “evangelical librarian” and Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle about his various projects to preserve public access to the world’s knowledge.

Data visualisation: How Africa tweets
The Atlantic publish a data visualisation based on analysis of more than 11.5 million geolocated tweets posted during the last three months of 2011.

Audio: Rebecca MacKinnon on her new book “Consent of the Networked”
CBC’s Spark podcast interviews Rebecca MacKinnon about her new book “Consent of the Networked”, which urges its readers to stop arguing about whether the internet is good or bad for people, and start finding ways to maintain people’s rights in what is essentially a corporate-owned space.

I went into this project to get attention for myself as a writer of books, and to make something of a work I realised was unlikely to get mainstream sponsorship in the timeframe it needed. As such, the bottom line was not my primary target. While I was writing and publishing the book, I was earning enough money part time to make myself a living (I moved out of London to a small village in Cambridgeshire, where rents are about a quarter the price), and to fund the book’s research, promotion and (scant) publishing costs, which totalled just over £2,000.

Nonetheless, I didn’t go into this intending to lose money, and I hope that by the end of the project, I will have made back most of the money I invested (discounting labour). I’ve put up a spreadsheet detailing sales figures and profit margins, as well as some of the headline costs. I suggest you open that up while you read the rest of this post, which goes into some heady detail about the different decisions I could have made, decisions that might have ended up with me making more money than the roughly £1,000 I have made so far.

Paid-for versions of the book were made available in print or Kindle format. The print-on-demand partner, Lightning Source, offered the book at a wholesale discount to booksellers, including Amazon, or at cost price to me. Although I could set my own wholesale price, Lightning Source recommended I set it at a 55% discount on the cover price. Around the web, authors who had used Lightning Source to get their books into mainstream channels recommended taking Lightning Source’s advice, or risking unfavourable treatment from booksellers. Although I couldn’t see quite how Amazon et al would go about discriminating against authors who had set a higher wholesale price, I didn’t want to risk jinxing the project, and so I took this recommendation.

This wholesale price explains why Amazon are able to offer such deep discounts (at one point, Barefoot was offered for around £6). If you buy a copy of the book via Amazon for the full £8.99 cover price, the income to each party is massively disfavourable to the company I set up to publish the book (Barefoot Publishing):

Booksellers cut: £4.94
Lightning Source cut: £3.16
Barefoot Publishing cut: £0.89

Conversely, if you buy a copy of the book direct from me, the Lightning Source cut remains the same and Barefoot Publishing gets the remaining £5.83. The difference in cut is pretty astounding, and there are two ways I could have improved on the net revenue from print sales: upped the cover price, and encouraged people to buy direct from me.

For example, I could have upped the cover price to £12.99 – this is the cover price for Heather Brooke’s book, The Revolution Will Be Digitised, which touches on many of the same topics as Barefoot, and in a similar, reportage-like style. This would make the revenue through booksellers shake out like this:

Booksellers cut: £7.14
Lightning Source cut: £3.16
Barefoot Publishing cut: £2.69

It would also have increased my cut from direct sales to £9.21 per unit sold, taking my overall net revenues (print and Kindle) from £1,057 to £1,834 (see Scenario 1, on the spreadsheet).

Rop Gonggrijp aka the White Rabbit, as imagined by the book's illustrator, Christopher Scally

So how about encouraging more people to buy from me direct? A few close friends with an inkling of how the book trade works contacted me over email to buy from me direct, but most of my direct sales came face-to-face at the launch party, the Chaos Communications Camp, and at various speaking events.

To encourage direct sales would have meant setting up my own e-commerce platform. In the week before the launch it was touch and go whether I would get listed on Amazon in time, as there’s quite a lag time between when Lightning Source add you to their catalogues and when you get listed on the Amazon website, and the flash-publishing process meant I was sailing pretty close to the wind, time-wise (there’ll be more on timing in a subsequent post). I therefore put a bit of time into creating my own e-commerce “pop-up shop” using Shopify, something I could point people to if they wanted to buy the book online. Shopify takes a 2% cut of all transactions, with a further 3% going to Paypal – still a long way from Amazon’s 55% cut. In the end, the Amazon listing came through, and to avoid incurring monthly hosting fees I deleted the Shopify platform.

I had two reasons for not taking Barefoot Publishing down the bespoke e-commerce route. The first was that, if I could help it, I didn’t want to burden myself with the hassle of fulfilling orders during the initial promotional phase of the book. And the second was that I felt that being available through Amazon would give me a kind of credibility that being available through a custom e-commerce platform wouldn’t. Because I was publishing the book outside of the traditional process, I was very sensitive to issues of credibility. Looking back, I think these latter concerns were just me being over-sensitive.

Order fulfilment would have basically meant taking details from the Shopify orders and plugging them into Lightning Source’s back end (if I had used Lulu, which has its own e-commerce platform built in, instead of Lightning Source, there would have been almost no hassle). Lightning Source charge a flat £1.25 handing fee per order, which is easily swallowed when you’re ordering 50 copies to sell at events, but has an impact when you’re making one or two unit orders. If I had increased the cover price *and* sold all my POD copies on a Merchant platform I controlled, I would have made £7.93 per POD unit, taking my total net revenues up to £2,644 (Scenario 3 on the spreadsheet).

Turning to the Kindle revenues. Selling books on Kindle is altogether much simpler than selling books on dead trees. Amazon’s Kindle desktop publishing platform makes it very simple, and I can really see how Kindle is making millionaires out of a few lucky self-publishers. Amazon offers two levels of royalties, 35% and, in some territories including the US and UK, 70%. To qualify for the higher rate, you have to pay for the bandwidth it takes to deliver the book, and you have to conform to certain pricing conditions. I chose the 70% royalties option in those territories where it was offered. The UK Kindle version had a cover price of £2.05, and the revenue distribution broke down like this:

Amazon cut: – £0.62
Delivery costs (bandwidth) – £0.26
Barefoot Publishing Cut – £1.18

I think the low cover price on the Kindle was a key sales driver. But, assuming for a moment that an increased cover price would not have dragged down sales, upping the price to the maximum allowed under the terms of the 70% royalty rate, £6.99, makes me an extra £869 (Scenario 2 on the spreadsheet).

In total, if I had increased the cover price of the print and Kindle books, and sold all print copies direct (Scenario 4), I could have made almost £3,500 – 3.5 times my actual net revenues from the project so far.

Postscript: The RIAA/unicorn double rainbow scenarios

Of course, the versions of the book that reached the most readers, by an order of magnitude, are the free versions I licensed CC-BY-SA. There will be more reflections on my choice to offer CC versions in a subsequent post. In the RIAA’s world, where every free download is a lost sale, I missed out on total net revenues of over £30,000 (Scenario 5). This is, of course, pure fantasy: there is no way to calculate the effect, positive or negative, that offering a free version has on sales of the paid-for versions.

Note that the RIAA’s view of these figures still maintains a healthy bottom line for the intermediaries in this project (but of course!). The unicorn double rainbow version of the figures (Scenario 6 on the spreadsheet), where every reader buys the book at a maximum margin for me, makes me over £100,000. Sa-weet!

Book signing at the launch party, July 2011

Overall, I’ve been pleased by the critical response the book has received (see these three posts for a taster), and by the fact it has reached over 10,000 readers. My goal with this project was to get attention for myself as a writer of books, and to make something of a work I realised was unlikely to get mainstream sponsorship in the timeframe it needed. If you know nothing about me, or my book, you might find reading the post I wrote about why I decided to flash-publish Barefoot Into Cyberspace offers some useful context. The bottom line was not my primary concern, but as I said, publishing is changing, and there are now lots of opportunities to make money publishing your own books, some of which I took full advantage of, and others of which I missed or mishandled.

My first post takes on this topic. The series, which I plan on completing over the coming weeks, will run as follows:

1. Pricing and Distribution – the bottom line
2. Licensing – or giving stuff away for fun and profit
3. Marketing and Publicity – or how to throw a great party
4. Book poetry/book plumbing – or “what do you mean, html doesn’t know what a page is?”

Enjoy!

Photo courtesy of paul_clarke@Flickr

Guatemala: National Police Archive now online
The Benetech blog reflects on the recent online publication of the Guatemalan National Police Archive.

EU: Open Knowledge Foundation software will power new EU data portal
The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) have announced their success in winning a joint bid to build the EU’s official open data platform. Their open source software package, CKAN, will power the platform.

US: White House releases responses to open access consultation
The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has published the responses to their Request for Information on public access to publicly-funded research.

Special: Lessons from SOPA/PIPA and the coming fight against ACTA
Draconian proposals to address the issue of intellectual property infringement continued to dominate the news this week. Yochai Benkler presents his “Seven Lessons from SOPA/PIPA and Four Proposals on Where We Go From Here” in this long feature for TechPresident, while Forbes asks “Who Really Stopped SOPA, and Why?”. Meanwhile, Michael Geist outlines what’s at stake in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and how citizens can get their voices heard on the issue.
Benkler | Forbes | Geist

The Chronicle of Higher Ed on altmetrics
The Chronicle of Higher Education takes an in-depth look at the forces moving the academic community to find alternative metrics for the impact of their research, ones that respond better to the online environment.

Private data, public rules
Following last week’s news of a review of the data protection framework, The Economist publish a good review of global data privacy regulations.

How Russian technology provides the eyes and ears for the world’s Big Brothers
This article for openDemocracy.net examines Russia’s contribution to the global trade in surveillance technology.

Why Twitter’s new policy is helpful for free-speech advocates
Zeynep Tufecki calls on those condemning Twitter for its announcement this week that it is now able to block Tweets on a country-by-country basis to look at the company’s new policy in greater depth.

Social Media & Protest: A quick list of recent scholarly research
A useful list of recent research papers taking in the influence of social media on phenomenon such as the Arab Spring, the UK riots and the Occupy movement.

Activist Guide to the Brussels Maze
European Digital Rights (EDRI) have produced this accessible and comprehensive guide for activists working in Brussels.

Book: Sharing – Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age
“Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age”, by Philippe and Suzanne Aigrain, is published this week. The book explores the dissemination of digital culture, offering a counterpoint to the dominant view that file-sharing is piracy and exploring models for creativity that marry remuneration and openness. A percentage of profits from the print book will go to digital rights campaigners La Quadrature du Net, an organisation Phillipe Aigrain co-founded.

Audio: Lawrence Lessig on how money corrupts Congress
In the 100th edition of the Long Now Seminar series, constitutional scholar Lawrence Lessig presents a plan to stop the corrupting influence of money in American politics.

“The internet spoke and, finally, Congress listened!”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) celebrates the halt to progress of SOPA and PIPA, two controversial proposed intellectual property enforcement laws with traits very similar to ACTA (see above), through the US legislative system. An internet blackout, led by Wikipedia last week, is thought to have directly influenced the decision of US legislators to rethink the two proposed laws.

Iran arrests wave of bloggers, writers and programmers
Deutsche Welle reports on a wave of arrests in Iran, thought to be timed ahead of Parliamentary elections to be held in early March.

Apple enters US textbook market
CNET TV reports on Apple’s announcement last week that it would be entering the US K-12 market for textbooks, offering them through the iPad, and releasing a free app – iBook Author – that allows anyone to create a textbook for the platform. Philipp Schmidt, co-founder of the Peer 2 Peer University, analyses the impact the endeavour will have on the Open Educational Resources movement.
News | Analysis

EU proposes revisions to Data Protection law
EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding announced proposed revisions to Europe’s Data Protection laws this week, including tough penalties for firms which break the law, a data breach notification requirement, and the right of citizens to demand that data held on them be deleted if there are no legitimate grounds to keep it (“the right to be forgotten”). The European consumer organisation BEUC welcomed the new proposals.
News | BEUC statement

US Supreme Court issues important privacy judgement
In a case originally brought to dispute the warrantless use of a GPS tracking device on the car of a man suspected by police of involvement in drug-dealing, justices at the US Supreme Court have issued an overlapping set of opinions which, the New York Times reports, indicate that they “are prepared to apply broad privacy principles to bring the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches into the digital age”. The case is of particular interest given the increasing use of sophisticated, privacy-invasive technologies by law enforcement.

ITU Member States urged to guarantee free flow of information
As a meeting of the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) begins this week in Geneva, Reporters Without Borders have issued a statement urging the ITU “to firmly condemn countries that do not respect the fundamental principles of the free flow of information”.

Google user data to be merged across all sites under contentious plan
The Guardian reports on an announcement this week by Google that it intends change its privacy policies to allow the company to merge data it collects about a user across several different services, creating a single profile that will be used to refine search results and target advertising: “Users will have no way to opt out of being tracked across the board.” The Atlantic carries a good article about what the changes will mean for Google’s users.
Guardian | Atlantic

DDoS attacks: protest? direct action? terrorism?
Gabriella Coleman kicks off an engaging debate on the Concurring Opinions blog that explores how to interpret and respond to politically-motivated DDoS attacks.

Should the World Bank be partnering with Google?
The New York Times publishes an editorial by the World Bank’s Caroline Anstey that argues that their recent partnership with Google – which gives World Bank partners free access to Google’s Map Maker platform – is a step towards plugging crucial information gaps about public infrastructure in the developing world. Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier is less optimistic about the partnership, fearing most of its benefits will accrue to Google.
Anstey | Meier

Book review: Standards
Evgeny Morozov precises Lawrence Busch’s new book “Standards: Recipes for Reality”, in which the author sees standards as “complex technical and moral devices that can be abused as easily as they can be put to noble causes”.

Video: Beth Kolko on Hackademia
In this video from the Berkman Luncheon series, Beth Kolko examines the conflict between expertise and innovation, and what it has to teach those in academia.

Philosophers and lawyers, encouraged and occasionally funded by the military-industrial complex, are swarming around the issue. The questions raised are manifold. Do drones lower the threshold of war, encouraging those who deploy them to be more bellicose? Can they or their operators sufficiently discriminate combatants from civilians in order to comply with international law? Are they proportionate, or so horrifically cruel as to qualify, along with anti-personnel landmines and cluster bombs, for prohibition? Does their cybernetic nature make them a biological weapon? What effect does their deployment have on the “hearts and minds” of civilians, or the morale of soldiers? Should we worry that Iran appears to have assumed control of a US drone, having kidnapped it out of the sky? And who is to blame when drones go wrong? The question of responsibility becomes even more central as scholars consider the implications of a future featuring autonomous drones.

You can read the rest here.

Publishers speak out against Research Works Act
The Scientist magazine details emerging dissent from academic publishers including MIT Press, Rockefeller University Press, the University of California Press and the Pennsylvania State University Press, aimed at draft legislation – the Research Works Act – that could jeopardise public access to publicly-funded research. This week Nature Publishing Group (NPG) also spoke out against the bill, which is being supported by the American Association of Publishers.
The Scientist | NPG

US: Supreme Court rules against public domain
The US Supreme Court has ruled in favour of a 1994 law extending the term of copyright protection on foreign works, which took works that had entered the public domain and put them back under copyright protection. The case had been brought on free speech grounds by a coalition that included orchestra conductors, educators and performers. The ruling marks an unhappy ending to a ten-year campaign.

Europe: Leaked documents show Data Retention Directive in sorry state
European Digital Rights (EDRI) reports on a leaked document which “shows that the [European] Commission can neither prove necessity nor proportionality of the Data Retention Directive – but still wants to keep the it”. The legislation – brought forward in response to the London bombings of 2005, has been found unconstitutional, on privacy grounds, in several EU member states.

Our weirdness is free: the story of Anonymous
Triple Canopy publish an essay by Gabriella Coleman on the history of Anonymous, who have captured the attention of an incredible variety of admirers and skeptics “by unpredictably fusing conventional activism with transgression and tricksterism”.

Argentina: Mass surveillance as a state policy
Katitza Rodriguez warns of the threats to civil liberty posed by Argentina’s plan to expand its national identity database in this piece for Global Voices: “Argentinean law enforcement will have access to mass repositories of citizen information and be able to leverage existing facial recognition and fingerprint matching technologies in order to identify any citizen anywhere”.

The prospects of Facebook activism in Uzbekistan
Transitions Online’s East of Center blog identifies the potential social and political pressures that affect online participation in political discussion in Uzbekistan.

Study: Open Data Kenya
The World Bank has published its evaluation of the ongoing development of Open Data Kenya, “one of the first Open Data initiatives in Africa”.

Towards an internet free of censorship: Proposals for Latin America
The Centre for the Study of Free Expression and Access to Information at the University of Palermo has published a study of several laws proposed in Latin America to regulate the internet, examining the responsibility of intermediaries, the management of private data, content filtering, and situations of applicable jurisdiction.

Cracking open the scientific process
The New York Times publishes a long feature charting the evolution of the open science movement, and the threat posed to it by the Research Works Act.

Book Review: “The Digital Origins of Dictatorships and Democracy”
Evgeny Morozov praises Philip Howard’s nuanced and “meticulously-researched” approach to the effects of digital technology on dissent in Muslim countries, in this review for Perspectives on Politics of Howard’s new book “The Digital Origins of Dictatorships and Democracy”.

Interview: Professor Anita Allen
The Concurring Opinions blog interviews Professor Allen about her new book “Unpopular Privacy”, which poses the question “How can a society enthralled by technology-aided revelatory communication give privacy its ethical due?”

Video: “Network”
This short animation by graphic designer Michael Rigley eloquently articulates the role internet users are playing in creating a future of information distortion, control and surveillance.

Video: “The machine is us/ing us”
The optimism of this animation about the web and the role users play in creating it, made just five years ago by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch, stands in stark contrast to the pessimism expressed in “Network” (see above), even as it makes almost exactly the same point.