#postsbyashley

[dmnyu2014]

The Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division is very proud to announce the release of more than 20,000 cartographic works as high resolution downloads. We believe these maps have no known US copyright restrictions.*

A quick rewind back to our Copyright unit: Back in March, the NYPL made available their digital collection of more than 20,000 maps to the public domain, allowing them to be viewed in high resolution, downloaded, and used "in the broadest possible ways by the largest number of people." Their decision to distribute these potentially valuable resources under a Creative Commons CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication -- outside copyright and database restrictions -- was in anticipation of seeing these maps "inspire all kinds of creativity, innovation and discovery...in works of art, historical publications, movies, archaeological reports, novels, environmental remediation efforts, urban planning studies and more." I was curious about the public's reaction and came across a nice point by "C Y": "It is so easy for information to be lost over long periods of time...and the best answer to that ever-present threat seems to be redundancy - making sure copies of historical records exist in as many places as possible. NYPL's release of these maps with both high digital image quality and open licensing is a stellar example of using modern technology to achieve that end."

[dmnyu2014]

Audio engineer Young Guru points out how hip-hop and other forms of culture have been made: 

"When we study hip-hop we are actually studying the history of piracy. If we go back and study all piracy, we see that most things that were created in the world are a remix of something else.”

He then ponders on the meaning of ownership ("What do we really own?") and where to draw the line that marks intellectual property, issues that have been complicated by the digitization of traditional forms of culture.

"Are we talking about the physical paper, or are we talking about the ideas of the words in the paper? How do we value those ideas? How do we monetize those ideas?"

(via PopTech)

[dmnyu2014]

The upshot of Tuesday’s ruling is that it could open the door for internet giants like Verizon and Time Warner to cut deals with large content providers — say Disney or Netflix — to ensure that their web content was delivered faster and more reliably than other sites. This could not only restrict consumer choice but also provide a threat to smaller websites that do not have the resources to pay for any “express lanes” that the broadband providers but choose to create. The ruling, however, may leave latitude for the FCC to reassert its authority over the broadband providers by rewriting the rules once again.

In 2011, Verizon challenged the anti-discrimination and anti-blocking policies defined in the FCC's 2010 Open Internet Order. In January of this year, a federal appeals court declared that while the FCC could not enforce such net neutrality policies on wireless service providers because they were not formally established as nondiscriminatory "common carriers," Verizon would have to disclose to its subscribers about favoring certain content and services while throttling others. 

[dmnyu2014]

If you are not paying for it, then you are the product being sold. What we all wanted, a few years ago...was access by everyone, that ‘always on’ and a vibrant sense of community-building. Free of the threat of government intervention or government shutdown. And that yes, it would be 'free' also in Net Neutrality sense. But mainly, that the 'top layer' would be full of vibrant, individual sites, personal sites, sharing sites. Civic-minded sites. Now the Internet resembles more 'an upscale shopping mall.'

Sue Gardner of the Wikimedia Foundation during a panel called "Remember When the Internet Was Free?" (which also featured Tim Wu as a speaker) at this year's SXSW Interactive, an annual music, film, and tech conference and festival. 

[dmnyu2014]

The post-Fordist workplace makes more porous the barrier between personal and professional, and therefore the boundaries between work and home...Even after every job is done for the day, one updates Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter. Free time is enclosed for an uncompensated personal branding exercise important to a corporate world eager to use up workers’ personalities alongside their skill sets. Users may not perceive their experience this way, but social media companies profit directly from clicks and the impetus such sites create to “keep up” are a form of subtley imposed labor. And it means that there is absolutely no time that cannot be dedicated to work.

This essay by Sarah Leonard examines how Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer's much-publicized story as a successful (and sleep-deprived) woman in the tech industry becoming a mom mid-career reflects the far-more subtle agenda of a traditionally sexist industry to blur the distinction between work and personal life and to make "an inhumane work ethic look progressive, innovative, feminist."

[dmnyu2014]

But the danger is that these deals could result in a kind of two-tier system, where there are preferred partners whose offerings get heavily promoted, and small app publishers whose offerings get lost in the rest — if they even make the jump on the platform of their choice at all. And consumers are left in the dark about all of this, bound to make their content choices based on the apps that their device maker agreed to carry or promote.

This article on the consumer electronics (the middlemen) that host online video services is a fitting example of what Felix Stalder argues in "Between Democracy and Spectacle": "There is a structural imbalance between the service providers on the one side, who have strong incentives to carefully craft the infrastructures to serve their goals, and the users on the other side, who will barely notice what is going on, given the opacity of the back-end."

[dmnyu2014]

There's a great Neal Stephenson line where he says that wired people should know something about wires. And we should know...where our Internet comes from, and we should know what it is that physically, physically connects us all.

from Andrew Blum's (who wrote one of our readings, "Where Data Sleeps") TED talk

[dmnyu2014]

I came across a London-based designer named Mark McKeague and as someone who is interested in how art and technology can suggest new ways of thinking about our lives, I was thoroughly entertained by one of McKeague's projects - the Twitter radio. Using an Arduino microcontroller to connect an old radio's tuning dial and speaker to a male computerized voice reading tweets, McKeague brought together, perhaps reconciled a relatively obsolete and a current means of communicating information.

I usually get anxious trying to catch up with my Twitter feed so a Twitter radio would be a much less overwhelming way to tune into what the 400+ accounts I follow are up to. It would also amuse me very much to hear certain tweets being spoken out loud...

From McKeague's website