A few hours ago, the MIT faculty adopted a resolution that makes our scholarly articles freely and openly available to the entire world, though the MIT DSpace Institutional Repository. The policy applies to all of MIT:

Passed by Unanimous Vote of the Faculty, March 18, 2009

The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs MIT of the reason.

To assist the Institute in distributing the scholarly articles, as of the date of publication, each Faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the Provost’s Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office.

The Provost’s Office will make the scholarly article available to the public in an open- access repository. The Office of the Provost, in consultation with the Faculty Committee on the Library System will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty.

The policy is to take effect immediately; it will be reviewed after five years by the Faculty Policy Committee, with a report presented to the Faculty.

The Faculty calls upon the Faculty Committee on the Library System to develop and monitor a plan for a service or mechanism that would render compliance with the policy as convenient for the faculty as possible.

I chaired the committee that drafted the resolution and led faculty discussions on it throughout the fall. So I’m particularly gratified that the vote was unanimously in favor. In the words of MIT Faculty Chair Bish Sanyal, the vote is ‚Äúa signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas.”

Our resolution was closely modeled on similar ones passed last February by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and by the Harvard Law School, also passed by unanimous vote. Stanford’s School of Education did the same, as did Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government just last Monday.

Harry blogged last month about the execrable “Fair Copyright in Research Act” introduced by Rep. Conyers of Michigan, which would repeal the National Institute of Health mandate on open-access publishing and forbid government agencies from imposing similar mandates. This act is harmful to the progress of science and should be scuttled. Now that there are unanimous votes supporting open access by faculty at world-leading institutions, Rep. Conyers should recognize what everyone else does, and deflate his ill-conceived trial balloon.

Jury trials are a carefully managed game of information control. The jurors are screened to try to weed out people who know too much ahead of time. Only certain kinds of information are admissible, and whatever is presented by one side can be challenged by the other. The jurors are supposed to isolate themselves from other sources of information — when they go home to their families at night, they are supposed not to talk about the ongoing events or to try to find our more about them. In extreme cases, when it is just too likely that information will assault them by accident, they may be sequestered.

The digital explosion makes such information quarantine an unnatural condition at best, and perhaps an impossible one. And indeed, the New York Times reports today that jurors are routinely using search engines to find out more about the events they are adjudicating. (As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials are Popping Up) In a recent trial, a judge at first hoped that only a single juror had been using Google to check things out — in that case, he could throw the juror off the jury and continue the trial.

But then the judge found that eight other jurors had done the same thing — conducting Google searches on the lawyers and the defendant, looking up news articles about the case, checking definitions on Wikipedia and searching for evidence that had been specifically excluded by the judge. One juror, asked by the judge about the research, said, “Well, I was curious,” according to Mr. Raben.

Mistrial. But the impulse is so easy to imagine. I myself was once on a jury trial in a reckless driving case, in which the defendant was charged with careening down residential streets at high speeds. A crucial piece of evidence was a hubcap coming off as he screeched around a sharp corner. The jury deliberations lasted overnight. Were the trial taking place today, I could use Google Street View after I got home to see what that corner looks like.

Did anyone see this coming? Not the attorneys in the case, apparently.

“We were stunned,” said a defense lawyer, Peter Raben, who was told by the jury that he had been on the verge of winning the case. “It’s the first time modern technology struck us in that fashion, and it hit us right over the head.”

Hit over the head by the force of the digital explosion. One minute you have a stable, reliable social institution that is the descendant of centuries of experience, as good and as fair a system as democratic societies know how to create. A minute later, you have to wonder if it can survive at all, since it is premised on conditions that no longer exist.

The Obama administration is invoking “national security” to prevent the American people from knowing what is in the intellectual property protection treaty it is negotiating with foreign governments. (That page has a wonderful morph of Bush to Obama. Other coverage of this story is aggregated by Jamie Love here.) That’s right — the administration has turned down flat a Freedom of Information Act request for the details of the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA), which has nothing to do with making phony money, but instead deals with peer-to-peer file-sharing and other forms of digital copying. With a straight face, the government is claiming that our national security would be endangered if American citizens were to know what deal is being cut with other industrialized countries about monitoring music and movie downloads. Yes — we actually do know a bit about what is in the draft treaty, because of a leaked document, which appears on Wikileaks. You can download it there — it’s a summary sent by a US ambassador to interested industry folks, but not to the public interest groups who generally are vigilant about the downside of high IP protection barriers. According to the Wikileaks digest,

The document reveals a proposal for a multi-lateral trade agreement of strict enforcement of intellectual property rights related to Internet activity and trade in information-based goods hiding behind the issue of false trademarks. If adopted, a treaty of this form would impose a strong, top-down enforcement regime, with new cooperation requirements upon internet service providers, including perfunctionary disclosure of customer information. The proposal also bans “anti-circumvention” measures which may affect online anonymity systems and would likely outlaw multi-region CD/DVD players.

For shame, Mr. President. This is government of the people, by the people, for the people? Tell us what is up.

On page 216 of the book, we joke that DMCA might stand for “Digital Millennium Competition Avoidance” rather than “‚Ķ Copyright Act.” The idea is that if a company puts a digital lock on any interface to its equipment, then the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA makes it illegal for an maker of accessories to reverse-engineer the lock to figure out how to make a compatible accessory. Apple Computer has given us a classic example of this technique.

If you walk into any electronics store or any WalMarts, you’ll find lots of earphones that you can use with your iPod, in case you lose the ones it came with, or they don’t fit your ears, or whatever. The earphones are on the racks with slipcovers and lots of other non-Apple stuff that accessorizes iPods. Of course you can buy Apple earphones, but maybe you’d rather buy the ones that fit better.

Well, Apple wants you to buy Apple earphones. The way the capitalist world is supposed to work, Apple is supposed to achieve that by making better earphones, or by cutting its prices. Everyone else has the same incentives, and the consumer wins from the competition.

Oh, not in the America of the DMCA. Apple has engineered the new iPod Shuffle so that the replacement headphones won’t work unless they have built into them an “authentication chip” the headphone maker can get only from Apple. Now the headphone maker is prohibited by law from trying to figure out what the “authentication chip” does so it can make headphones you can just plug into the Shuffle without, in essence, asking Apple’s permission and paying Apple money. So Apple winds up controlling the headphone market.

A classic case of copyright law being put to a use that has nothing at all to do with the protection of books or music or images — just to kill competition, to the advantage of one company and to the plain disadvantage of the public.

Thanks to Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for raising a stink.

That’s a key claim in President Obama’s health care plan — actually, it was a key claim of John McCain’s plan as well. It doesn’t take any acute powers of observation as a patient to notice the places where data has to be re-entered by a new doctor or hospital, or where important data isn’t available and the patient is asked to report it instead. (I was once asked about the results of a cardiac stress test I had had three years before, of which I had only the vaguest memory.) It’s reasonable to hope that computerized medical records could do for delivery of medical care what, say, computerized parcel records have done for parcel delivery.

But it’s also easy to dream of a perfect world that is unlikely to be reached or to look like the dream once we get there. And that is the bottom line on a good Wall Street Journal column by noted physicians Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, Obama’s $80 Billion Exaggeration. The $80 billion number, they report, comes from a four-year-old RAND Corporation study with a lot of wishful thinking and not a lot of data. The doctors raise a privacy concern, too — not that the data will be mishandled and leaked, but that the entire enterprise is in part designed as a monitoring program by the federal government.

Some have speculated that the patient data collected by the Obama administration in national electronic health records will be mined for research purposes to assess the cost effectiveness of different treatments. This analysis will then be used to dictate which drugs and devices doctors can provide to their patients in federally funded programs like Medicare. Private insurers often follow the lead of the government in such payments. If this is part of the administration’s agenda, then it needs to be frankly stated as such. And Americans should decide whether they want to participate in such a national experiment only after learning about the nature of the analysis of their records and who will apply the results to their health care.

The suggestion that the government will want to chew on the data to try to figure out what works is unsurprising. But it surely hasn’t been highlighted, and it raises some fundamental questions. What is the data in my medical record going to be used for, how long will the data be kept, and can I be sure it won’t be repurposed?

Twitter is the the new hip tool with which you can blast all your friends with quick updates on what you are doing. The messages must be short and only text, but type a few characters and hit the button and there they go, onto the screens of a hundred of your closest friends. The standard use is to invite people into your daily life: What are you doing RIGHT NOW?

Different folks may have different views about the social thrill of learning that their friends are eating donuts in Walla Walla or are enjoying the view of the Grand Canyon (except they aren’t watching at all since they are thumb-typing instead). But sometimes you really, really shouldn’t twitter, no matter how excited you are to share with a few special friends the wonderful news about what’s happening to you.

Like for example if you are a US Congressman on a top-secret diplomatic tour of Baghdad. No, bad idea to twitter then. You see, when you twitter, what you say isn’t secret. In fact, do I really need to explain that the reason for twittering is to tell lots of things to lots of people, which then pretty much inevitably become not secrets? You can read the rest of the story, including the tweets of Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI),¬†here. He even announced the time he would be entering the Green Zone. A big help to the soldiers charged with keeping this genius safe on his trip.

I wouldn’t want to suggest that the Republicans are having more trouble than the Dems, but it’s less than a 1 in 4 chance that both Congressmen involved in spilling the beans via Twitter today are members of the GOP. Jeff Frederick of Virginia announced in an elated tweet that State Senator Ralph Northam was switching from Democrat to Republican. Except that, oops, the tweet fell into Democratic hands, and Northam’s colleagues waterboarded him until he changed his mind about changing parties. (OK, that last part about the waterboarding was just a metaphor, but the rest is true.)

Guys, tweets are public. Don’t get carried away by the metaphor that because it’s so easy and quiet it’s a neat way to share secrets. You aren’t whispering into the ear of a trusted confidante, you are screaming it from the mountaintop! Or to put it more succinctly: Grow up.

Thanks to MIT student Xiao Xiao and to Hal Abelson for these pointers.

Well, not the moose itself, but the author of the book about it, will be speaking at Harvard this coming Tuesday at 5pm, in Austin Hall. As I blogged earlier, David Post’s book is a wonderful rendition of the ways in which the dilemmas that faced the founding fathers about how to empower the people without having everything decided by mob rule are being revisited because of the Internet. Should be a great talk.

A standard philosophical posture taken on privacy issues is that choice is what counts. If you have a choice between sharing information and not sharing it, the burden of responsibility shifts to you from the entity (usually a corporation) that collects the information. If you don’t like the way your information is being shared, you have only yourself to blame.

Hogwash. It all depends on the default: Do they share UNLESS you tell them not to, or do they share ONLY IF you explicitly tell them it’s OK? Almost no one ever changes the default — because, practically speaking, almost no one ever reads the fine print in which the default is stated. So most people have to depend on the ethics and good taste of the company, and that is rarely enough.

Though these are old saws — read the part of Blown to Bits where we discuss Sears Holding Company — rarely does one ever see a case quite as egregious as what David Weinberger describes about Verizon. Not only is the opt-out barely whispered, it is almost impossible to find and to make functional, even if you follow Verizon’s instructions exactly. A short, quick, funny, and infuriating read. And maybe I’m wrong about this being rarely seen — maybe it’s just that few of us have the patience to do what David did to chase it down.

Cable television networks are beginning to experiment with targeted advertising. Cablevision is trying out an indirect method. They buy data about their customers from Experian, which aggregates data about individuals for use in credit checking, etc. Once Cablevision knows that there’s no one over 30 at your address, or that you’re a single woman of 45, it can avoid showing you the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” ads. As Marc Rotenberg of EPIC agrees, there isn’t really any privacy breach here, yet. But the article continues,

[A competing technology] uses data from remote controls to follow what a person is watching, then matches that with ratings information and program guides to infer that person’s gender and age. It can use census data or data sources like Experian for further refining. Then, it shows an appropriate commercial.… Eventually … the company will be able to identify who is watching based not just on what they are viewing, but also how they watch it: whether they channel change frequently or not at all, or immediately turn to CNN or to Bravo. That will help it show the right ads in households where multiple people watch television.

Watching me watching you, as the song says.

Debit cards are just like cash, right?

So a guy goes into a convenience store in West Virginia, gets a soft drink and waits until the store is empty except for the cashier. Then he tells the cashier he has a gun, and demands that the cashier turn over the money in the cash register.

Then a customer comes in, interrupting the robber’s plan. The cashier tells the hold-up genius to pay for his drink. The guy turns over his debit card, the cashier swipes it and hands the slip to the “gunman” to sign. Being no dope, he protects his identity by signing “John Doe.”

The guy is under arrest. He says it was just a joke.