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October 15, 2007

EFF Compliance Bootcamp Notes

This past Wednesday, Chris and I were in San Francisco to attend the EFF's Compliance Bootcamp. It was a great event that covered many of the aspects of federal law that might be relevant to contemporary web startups from privacy to trademark infringement to evidentiary procedure. The EFF staff and the attorneys of Vogele and Associates (who hosted the event) brought a highly concrete, practical-minded approach to their topics, focusing tightly on the effects these laws can have on the day-to-day operations of web-based business.

The relevant session for Grabb.it, the session that brought Chris and me the 600 miles down to the bay covered compliance with everyone's favorite federal law, 17 USC 512, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Hosted by Colette Vogele, the founder of Vogele and Associates, Jonathan Band, and EFF Senior Staff Atorney, Fred von Lohman, the session covered all the major issues around the DMCA including explaining each of the four scenarios that have to be in place in order for it to apply — the so-called 'safe harbor' conditions — as well as the procedures involved with receiving takedown notices and how to respect user rights in the process (See my notes on the session for all the gritty details).

Beyond getting to pick the brain of Fred von Lohman (council for the defense in MGM v. Grokster and one of the two or three foremost experts in American copyright law) about Grabb.it for ten minutes, the best thing I took away from the session was a real understanding of the functional purpose of the DMCA takedown process.

Before the DMCA, copyright holders discovering infringement online had basically no legal recourse other than suing the site hosting the infringing content. Now, the DMCA provides for an intermediate action: issuing a takedown notice.

Say MGM discovers a clip from one of their movies on YouTube. They send an official takedown notice to Google who removes the clip and makes note of the event on the account of the user who uploaded it (purging repeat infringers is required to ensure continued DMCA coverage). Google also informs the user of the action and offers them a chance to issue a counter claim if they believe MGM acted in error or their upload is covered by Fair Use doctrine or some other copyright exception.

This process allows the hosting site to act as an intermediary between the copyright holder and the user — the two parties between whom the conflict actually exists — rather than having to absorb the full wrath of the copyright holder themselves when it should rightfully be aimed at the uploading user. The copyright holder gets their content removed from the web and the site owner can continue to operate without having to deal with crippling, expensive, time-wasting lawsuits. Of course, if the copyright holder is not satisfied with the process for whatever reason (for example if they object to the very existence of the site itself, like Viacom seems to do with YouTube), they can still sue. But, in most cases they can get what they want with a lot less cost and effort.

Rather than worrying about the Doctorow-ish pound-your-fist-on-the-table gross inequities that the DMCA might bring to national and international information and technical policy, this perspective lets us focus on the concrete dangers and opportunities it presents for our business — the things we can do to make it easier for copyright holders not to sue us and the ways in which we can help users do what they want while staying within the confines of the law.

Thanks to the EFF what was previously a source of confusion and fear for us is now one of operational confidence and new strategic ideas. Quite a lot to get out of a one day session!

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Posted by Greg at 1:04 AM | Comments (1)

October 7, 2007

Rules of Engagement: 9/11 is Over

Our country tortures. It conducts raids on hospitals. It flies false flags. It makes "wanted dead or alive" pronouncements. It posts rewards. It attempts (and sometimes carries out) assassinations. International law and military law do not put endless restraints on national actors. The sections on perfidy and treachery in the air force, army, and navy handbooks are in each case extremely brief — they put only three rules in front of us…We have violated, or have come perilously close to violating, each of them.

In her essay, Rules of Engagement (collected in this year's volume of the Best American Essays), Harvard Professor Elaine Scarry manages an amazing feat. By carefully examining the international accords that govern conduct during wartime and the specific ways in which America's prosecution of the War on Terror has violated those accords, Scarry manages to turn the shapeless malaise arising from the inchoate belief that America's agents have committed some nameless evil in our name into concrete knowledge of both the abuses themselves and — more importantly — the legal and ethical framework that makes them evil.

The insidious power of these violations stems from the fact that their perpetrators don't consider them violations at all. To their minds, the actions Scarry outlines are perfectly righteous having been conducted under a new set of rules that govern a post-9/11 world that is somehow categorically different from that which proceeded it. The facts of this new world, they imagine, somehow negate the great political and ethical wisdom embodied in the monuments of international law that oversaw the earlier one, chiefly the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners and the Hague Convention on the use of weapons.

Scarry systematically undercuts any reason for maintaining this belief, establishing without question the continued relevance of such root ethical principles as the respect for the hors de combat status that protects prisoners and medics. This has the immeasurable benefit of restoring the rational, coherent, and convincing bases of civilization that these abuses had so muddied and — in the process — revealing them not as new rules for a new world, as their proponents claim, but as the crimes they are.

As Thomas Friedman put it in his most recent column, 9/11 Is Over:

I will not vote for any candidate running on 9/11…I will not vote for any candidate who is not committed to dismantling Guantanamo Bay and replacing it with a free field hospital for poor Cubans. Guantanamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.
Scarry and Friedman both point out just how much work we have to do to bring America back into its proper place within the community of civilized nations. That work cannot begin until we let go of the 9/11 exceptionalism that led us so far afield in the first place.

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Posted by Greg at 7:41 PM | Comments (2)

October 3, 2007

What's Wrong with Google Reader

A few weeks back, having ditched my dying beer-stained PowerBook for a shiny slightly-used MacBook Pro, I found myself trying out news readers for the first time in a long time. I've been a NetNewsWire 2.0 man for nearly ever, but I thought: it's a new computer, a new architecture, heck, practically a new century since I last looked at the competition.

I took a cursory look at Vienna (too ugly) and NewsFire (too pretty). I took a serious look at NetNewsWire 3.0 (too familiar). I asked around on Twitter.

Google Reader kept coming up. There's a massive migration towards it going on now in the geekosphere. And I could see the advantages to an online subscription experience: access from any machine, truly native re-publishing, etc. Maybe it was mostly peer pressure, but I was sold.

I'm only a week in at this point, but I think I'm starting to settle on a verdict that's taken me quite by surprise: Google Reader is shockingly schlocky. Don't get me wrong, it has its upsides including a surprisingly smooth and snappy reading UI (for a browser-bound app), and all the cool Google-y features like search, recommendations, stats, et al.

And the problem isn't the look: I've tried it in its natural state and with Jon Hicks' beautiful Mac-ish mod. I like both pretty well.

The problem is the details. With an app like a news reader that you use everyday -- heck, that you practically live in -- the details make or break the experience. With repeated use, any slightly sharp or awkwardly-shaped bits are going to leave scars and sprains; any especially slick or well-made bits will make your whole day better.

And Google Reader is covered in sharp bits. Here's my running list:

  • OPML import doesn't respect folder structure. This meant that when I imported my existing 700-ish subscriptions, they were just thrown in chock-a-block. After a week I still don't have them all categorized so I can't just read, say, my batch of watch feeds from various wikis or anything else I might want to scan for urgent changes.
  • Entries in imported feeds get the wrong dates. At least for me, on importing those 700+ feeds, all unread items displayed with the date I did my import. This made for a disastrous time trying to follow ongoing threads and conversations.
  • Feeds display most recent first only. This is subtle, but it's a big one. Its effect is to force you to read feeds in the reverse of the order they were written, preventing you from following any continuity.
  • Paging through items jumps the current item around on the screen. Another biggie. In both list and combined views, hitting 'j' to cycle through unread items jumps the expanded item around on the screen depending on its length and position in the list. Unlike the three-column view seen so commonly in desktop browsers which allows you to keep your eyes still in a single spot on-screen through which items cycle, this jumping causes major eye fatigue and confusion.
  • Scrolling through items marks them as read too early. If you want to avoid the jumpiness of hotkey paging through entries, you might try scrolling down feeds as I did. If you do that you'll soon discover that feeds below the one you're currently reading will get marked as read before you're ready for them to be, i.e before you've even glanced at them.
  • No ability to mark something unread. If a post does get accidentally marked as read, there's no way to restore its unread status so you can remember to come back to it later. (UPDATE: Thanks to trusty reader, Will, I now know that hitting 'm' toggles an entry's read/un-read status. Check out his comment below for some other great tips on hidden Reader hotkeys.)
  • Feeds with one unread entry require a click to mark as read. If a feed or folder only has one unread entry, it will be show on the screen when you select it, usually allowing you to read the full entry. However, the entry will remain as unread until you click on it.
  • Poor support for increased font size. When you plus-up the font size in your browser (an essential prerequisite for reading large swaths of text like you're constantly doing in a news reader), all of the Google Reader menus go a little haywire and become pretty unusable. Also, being trapped in a browse, obviously Google Reader can't remember your font size preferences between sessions.
  • Bad Safari support. Running Safari 2.x on OS X, at least, scrolling is all kerflooey. Sometimes the whole page scrolls when only the subscription or entry list should. Sometimes the subscription list jiggles as you click through entries. Sometimes the currently-selected entry jumps off the bottom of the screen. Ugh.
  • No way to see all feeds/folders at once. Another big one. Whether you're in 'all' or 'updated' mode, the subscriptions panel only shows about 25 feeds or folders at a time. If you have a lot of feeds this will be only a small fraction. There's no way to tell which feeds or folders have the most unread entries or if any feeds or folders you especially care about have new items. It's impossible to get a handle on your whole world of feeds.
  • No podcast support. Maybe this one is a lot to ask of an online feed reader, but given the excellent experience I've been having the last few days with AmazonMP3.com and its download tool it no longer seems impossible or unreasonable. And podcast downloading is a lot of what I do with a feed reader, so it makes a big difference.

Believe it or not, this is an abridged list.

Taken together, at least for me, all these relatively small problems add up to a death of a thousand cuts. While I still think I'd like some of the features of an online news reader, I don't think I can give up the usability of an honest-to-goodness Mac app with its (even partially implemented) Human User Interface guidelines, rich dependable UI, etc. I think I might try NetNewsWire 3.0. Its NewsGator integration is a baby step towards getting comfortable with an online reader, I'm familiar with the UI and the most recent improvements (especially the previews in the tabbed browsing) seem significant.

Here's hoping Google Reader's OPML export support is better than its import...

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Posted by Greg at 2:41 AM | Comments (6)