EFF: Teaching Copyright (2009)

There’s a lot of misinformation out there about legal rights and responsibilities in the digital era.
This is especially disconcerting when it comes to information being shared with youth. Kids and teens are bombarded with messages from a myriad of sources that using new technology is high-risk behavior. Downloading music is compared to stealing a bicycle — even though many downloads are lawful. Making videos using short clips from other sources is treated as probably illegal — even though many such videos are also lawful.

This misinformation is harmful, because it discourages kids and teens from following their natural inclination to be innovative and inquisitive. The innovators, artists and voters of tomorrow need to know that copyright law restricts many activities but also permits many others. And they need to know the positive steps they can take to protect themselves in the digital sphere. In short, youth don’t need more intimidation — what they need is solid, accurate information.

EFF’s Teaching Copyright curriculum was created to help teachers present the laws surrounding digital rights in a balanced way.

Teaching Copyright provides lessons and ideas for opening your classroom up to discussion, letting your students express their ideas and concerns, and then guiding your students toward an understanding of the boundaries of copyright law.

Published by Electronic Frontier Foundation, May 2009
Creative Commons Attribution license 3.0 US

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Anne Laforet: La conservation du net art au musée. Les stratégies à l’œuvre (2009) [French]

“The preservation of net art is a complex topic which requires the construction of a specific approach to look at internet artwork, one that takes into account the material dimension of the artwork. Preservation does not deal only with aesthetics, not only about the way the audience experiences artworks, but needs to have access to these types of information so the preservation process can take place.

This research presents an overview of works created by and for the Internet. The artworks which are described in this work are chosen specifically as examples for preservation purposes, and not according to a typology created for different purposes. This research also presents an overview of the institutions (based in Europe and in North America) that have developped specific preservation strategies. It takes the form of case analyses, which stem from observations, readings, and interviews.

This thesis also looks into the interaction between preservation and the other functions of the museum (collection, exhibition, research). Preservation cannot be tackled independantly, because it deals with the artwork’s life cycle within the museum. Every art work has to be treated in a way which is specific to itself. The issue of notation also arises then, as it’s necessary to find ways to describe artworks, especially as their technological environments will eventually be obsolete. This research explores the ways to compensate obsolescence: emulation, migration, score, re-interpretation, self-archiving, automatic archiving, etc (which can be also combined).

The attention to net art work as material socio-technical object means to find a way to look at those works : the code which composes the artwork, the files, its different files and the way they are organized, what happens on the screen, the interactions between the artward and the audience that experience it. The notions of code performativity and activation are useful in this approach.

Preservation happens only when value is attributed to what is preserved. Two categories of actors outside of the museum take part into this process: the art market on the one hand and art critics and art historians on the other. Both influence and get influenced by the museum.

All these elements allow the composition of a pluridisciplinar cartography on the topic of net art preservation.”

The preservation of Net Art in museums. The strategies at work
PhD thesis, University of Avignon, France
Supervisor: Jean Davallon

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Laura DeNardis: Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance (2009)

The Internet has reached a critical point. The world is running out of Internet addresses. There is a finite supply of approximately 4.3 billion Internet Protocol (IP) addresses—the unique binary numbers required for every exchange of information over the Internet—within the Internet’s prevailing technical architecture (IPv4). In the 1990s the Internet standards community identified the potential depletion of these addresses as a crucial design concern and selected a new protocol (IPv6) that would expand the number of Internet addresses exponentially—to 340 undecillion addresses. Despite a decade of predictions about imminent global conversion, IPv6 adoption has barely begun. IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, and the ultimate success of IPv6 depends on a critical mass of IPv6 deployment, even among users who don’t need it, or on technical workarounds that could in turn create a new set of concerns.

Protocol Politics examines what’s at stake politically, economically, and technically in the selection and adoption of a new Internet protocol. Laura DeNardis’s key insight is that protocols are political. IPv6 serves as a case study for how protocols more generally are intertwined with socioeconomic and political order. IPv6 intersects with provocative topics including Internet civil liberties, U.S. military objectives, globalization, institutional power struggles, and the promise of global democratic freedoms. DeNardis offers recommendations for Internet standards governance, based not only on technical concerns but on principles of openness and transparency, and examines the global implications of looming Internet address scarcity versus the slow deployment of the new protocol designed to solve this problem.

Publisher MIT Press, 2009
Information Revolution and Global Politics series
ISBN 0262042576, 9780262042574
270 pages

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