TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘John Edwards’ Category

By David Rothman

For years, the TeleBlog has been on John Edwards’ case.

The now-disgraced politician, a former vice presidential candidate here in the U.S., even "earned" a special WordPress category from me.

On the positive side, Edwards has many attractive qualities and helped enlighten the public on certain issues dear to me, such as poverty. I just wish the mass media would worry less about the man’s private life and more about him as a symptom of The System.

Manna for TV ratings—but a distraction from the real issues?

Campaign cash spent on a mistress is manna for MSNBC ratings and the like. Same for speculation, true or false, on an Edwards "love child." But a more important story just might be in the rather suspicious Hollywood cash Edwards received in a presidential bid while staying mum on some major copyright and consumer issues. A true populist should have been addressing them in depth.

Relevantly, Edwards sat on the Senate Judiciary committee. Now that the media have softened up him, will they kindly start examining him as a case history and maybe force him to talk about those massive Hollywood contributions? Yes, some reporters tried. But they didn’t persist.

The e-book angle: So-called consumer crusader silent while Hollywood, D.C., screws us

Meanwhile, as Chris Meadows in effect documents this morning, the damage lives on from anti-consumer copyright laws, the very stuff on which Edwards was so persistently mum. Edwards’ silence is one of many reasons why it isn’t even legal, technically at least, to break DRM for the purpose of converting from one e-book format to another. What if he and others had spoken out? A Hollywood cash connection?

Again, however, I think the media have been far too intrusive in writing up Edwards’ private life. Such issues arise in the forthcoming Solomon Scandals, where mudslingers use personal foibles to distract the media’s attention from the larger picture. That’s the way the novel was when I started it in the 1970s, decades before the Edwards scandal. Has Washington actually changed? Definitely. It’s worse. Meanwhile my sympathy to his wife even if she, too, stonewalled me when I asked about Edwards and school-hostile copyright laws. Her silence is still no justification for the media circus now going on.

For more on Edwards, see insightful thoughts from Jim Buie, who follows North Carolina politics.

By David Rothman

Remember my warning against bug-infested e-books in the future, courtesy Big Brother in Washington, D.C.? Well, it turns out that Washington is already recording the p-reading tastes of some travelers under suspicion during airport luggage inspections. It happened to EFF cofounder John Gillmore.

The e-book angle: So does this mean that the screeners at the airport or elsewhere will systematically search your cellphone or PDAs for suspicious e-book files? Or maybe Washington will ban user-initiated encryption so you can’t hide that evil anti-Bush book? The possibilities reel the mind. Perhaps the International Spy Museum should consider building a new collection of obnoxious snooping tools that governments use against their citizens in massive dragnets on a KGBish scale.

Off-topic NOT

I’d love just to run the usual e-book blog and not worry about these greater issues, but in the present White House, we have a mix of Big Brotherish tendencies and sheer passion for corruption—with too many members of both major political parties failing to fight back. The snooping and the corruption may very well go together in the future if they are not already, with spying and gotcha laws used both to control political opponents and keep at bay the business rivals of the Bush-style cliques.

Because the prosperity of some book publishers depends in part on the ability of their customers to read in private, perhaps it’s time to consider DRM in this new light. I continue to like the idea of Social DRM (not really DRM in the traditional sense) since its approach can be mainly psychological. You don’t need to have any definitive identification via technical means. But given what the Bushies are up to, I wonder about hidden IDs and other technologies that Washington in the future could exploit in Orwellian ways against e-book readers.

An uglier new America: Student’s 50,000-volt jolt—for being uppity

If you think this is the same America as half a dozen years ago, I invite you to watch a video of a student Tasered with 50,000 volts because he asked uppity questions during John Kerry’s recent visit to Florida. Kerry, for those who don’t know, is supposedly a progressive Democrat.

Oh, well. People who’ve followed the TeleBlog in the past know our past feelings about this guy based on his ‘tude toward copyright issues. A wimp, capital W. Could copyright issues be a “canary in the coal mine” on other questions? By the way, John Edwards, too, continues to be mum on copyright matters, at least last I knew. Ideally, however, he’d have shown more backbone than Kerry did while the cops were zapping the journalism student with 50,000 volts.

For those outside the Unites States

This is relevant to you, too, alas, since America sets the political and financial tone for so many other countries.

In the financial area, one of the hottest new investments for Wall Street is stock in a company that will help the Chinese eavesdrop on citizens.

The Adobe e-book angle: Hook-ups possible with Chinese snoopsters?

Will China Security and Surveillance Technology forge alliances with Adobe and Microsoft? Unlike some, I’m willing to forget Adobe’s sins of some years ago against a Russian programmer—jailed for breaking inept encryption—if the company will change.

Hey, Adobe and others. Will you or won’t you do business with the Chinese-snooping company? Will you pledge, now, to avoid building hooks into e-books that totalitarian third parties, foreign or domestic, could use for mass surveillance? And specifically agree to avoid any other dealings, direct or indirect, with China Security and Surveillance Technology? Here’s a chance to show the moral leadership of which Kerry was so incapable during the Tasering.

By David Rothman

“Just what trade protections for nonHollywood types are U.S. officials bargaining away in the name of DMCAism?” I asked in 2003. “”Won’t anyone from the media investigate? Hollywood brags about the money it brings in from overseas, but, in the future, how much of that will be at the expense of other industries? And has anyone done a cost-benefit analysis?”

TRIPSing up the American economy

Now I’m pleased to see Cory Doctorow raising similar questions in How Hollywood, Congress, And DRM Are Beating Up The American Economy, just published in Information Week.

“In 1995,” he writes, “the United States signed onto the World Trade Organization and its associated copyright and patent agreement, the TRIPS Agreement, and the American economy was transformed.

“Any fellow signatory to the WTO/TRIPS can export manufactured goods to the USA without any tariffs. If it costs you $5 to manufacture and ship a plastic bucket from your factory in Shenjin Province to the USA, you can sell it for $6 and turn a $1 profit. And if it costs an American manufacturer $10 to make the same bucket, the American manufacturer is out of luck.

Quid pro quo

“The kicker is this: if you want to export your finished goods to America, you have to sign up to protect American copyrights in your own country. Quid pro quo.

“The practical upshot, 12 years later, is that most American manufacturing has gone belly up, Wal-Mart is filled with Happy Meal toys and other cheaply manufactured plastic goods, and the whole world has signed onto U.S. copyright laws.” (more…)

By David Rothman

In the 1930s, via the Rural Electrification Administration, electricity went into remote areas of Appalachia and other neglected regions of the United States. Is it time to use OLPC repeater technology to do the same for broadband? What are the technical and regulatory barriers at this point? Could the telecoms be kept at bay—or maybe even bought off in return for a piece of the action?

OK, any mavens on WiFi repeaters who’d care to educate us? Could it be that OLPC-refined WiFi technology, or maybe a WiMax variant, will be almost as significant as $100-$200 laptops?

The e-book angle: Even with caching, forget about networked e-books in truly widespread use if broadband isn’t ubiquitous. Broadband also makes it easier to browse libraries or shop for e-books online. Simply put, always-on broadband is a friend, not an enemy, of e-books even though plain text itself is darn miserly with bandwidth. (more…)

By David Rothman

Since November 2003, I’ve been trying to get presidential candidate John Edwards to speak out against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the current DMCA and other atrocities. It’s a canary-in-the-mine kind of thing, not just the fact he went to the University of North Carolina, my own school, and I have some Tar Heel pride.

Edwards, after all, is among the more populist of the Democratic candidates and even started a poverty center at UNC. If he can’t appreciate the damage that Draconian copyright can do schools, libraries and free speech, then who can—among the major candidates? Just why has he been so mum on important copyright issues despite having served on the copyright-related Senate Judiciary Committee, in addition to being a law school grad?

Perhaps a little progress

Well, better late than never? Perhaps Edwards, recipient of millions in Hollywood money, has made a little progress. According to a Wired-related blog, Edwards is among the candidates responding to an appeal by Larry Lessig to have broadcasts of presidential debates unencumbered by the usual copyright restrictions. Instead the resultant TV would carry a Creative Commons license. Here’s an excerpt from the blog post about Lessig’s efforts: (more…)

By David Rothman

Some Netfolks are wildly atwittter over Twitter, a new social networking tool that lets you broadcast messages by phone or IM—just the ticket for telling your friends what you’re up to at the moment. Andy Carvin, a major K-12 blogger, is excited about Twitter for serious purposes.

I myself can see Twitter as a way to share enthusiasm for various books, and in fact, if it’s here to stay, I wouldn’t be surprised to see e-book software integrated with the service, as well as growing library adoption (drop by another David Rothman’s blog for more on the library angle).

The downside

But will Twitter get out of hand? Is this one more enemy of concentration for those who would rather just read books or write them without interruptions? Do we really want to spend extra minutes each day to update our status? In some ways could this really be just a real-time executive calendar program in disguise? Another way to take the fun out of life, in some cases? (more…)

By David Rothman

I’ll explain the bizarre image—but first the main part of this post.

Over the past several years I’ve hammered John Edwards again and again for his refusal to speak out against anti-school, anti-library copyright legislation like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. That’s not out of hatred of this major Democratic Presidential candidate—in fact, just the opposite. I expect more out of him and his campaign adviser Number One, his wife Elizabeth, given their laudable positions on many other issues. If John Edwards won’t fight Bono, then who among the major candidates will?

A true Net-lover

This weekend I’ll be reviewing Elizabeth Edwards’ book, Saving Graces, from Internet and copyright perspectives. I’m convinced that Mrs. Edwards is into the Net for more than just campaign purposes—which makes it all the more unfortunate that her husband is wooing Net activists without addressing the very real threat of eternal copyright or at least the trend toward bloated terms.

Either possibility would be poison for efforts such as Project Gutenberg, which, ironically, runs out of the University of North Carolina, where both Edwards attended law school.

Stiff penalties, please

Meanwhile my sympathies go out to the Edwards campaign over vandalism that dirty tricksters committed against the campaign’s area on Second Life. Photo shows disrupted site. The fact that scum would even care about Edwards’ SL outpost says something about the increasing visibility of VR.

I hope that Linden Labs catches the villains and that penalties are stiff. An Edwards blog reports: “They plastered the area with Marxist/Leninist posters and slogans, a feces spewing obscenity, and a photoshopped picture of John in black face, all the while harassing visitors with right-wing nonsense and obscenity-laden abuse of Democrats in general and John in particular.”

By David Rothman

U.S. Rep. Mary Bono, a big advocate of eternal copyright, DRM and gems like the current DMCA, should read the Washington Post’s review of Finn—”Jon Clinch’s haunting first novel.”

Inspired by characters in the public domain, Finn delves into the twisted psyche of Huckleberry Finn’s father.

Very creative borrowing

Clinch “relies on Twain’s details, sometimes borrowing whole scenes and patches of dialogue,” says reviewer Ron Charles, “but he reorders the characters completely, setting that eager little boy and his unconscious irony far into the background and forcing us to concentrate instead on the anguished man who sired him. Admittedly, part of the dark thrill here is ‘finding out’ the back story that fans of Huckleberry Finn have long wondered about — Who would ever have had a child with Pap? How did he end up naked and dead on that floating house? — but this isn’t just a creative appendix to an American classic. Clinch reimagines Finn in a strikingly original way, replacing Huck’s voice with his own magisterial vision — one that’s nothing short of revelatory.”

Five Stars at Amazon

As I write this, Finn is #490 at Amazon.com and drawing Five Star raves from readers, at least one of whom says that Clinch, now an adman in Philadelphia, is a better writer than Mark Twain—I hope that Twain’s ghost isn’t too vain. (more…)