As soon as summer hits, my muse takes an extended vacation and I only write sparingly and occasionally (and somewhat painfully without the muse).

But as soon as I read and heard from a number of places, notably Savage Minds that the American Anthropological Association is lobbying against open access, I decided to work against my disinclination to write to say a few words. Rex at Savage Minds, as well as others have already covered thoroughly and thoughtfully, the basic issues as well as why it is incredibly problematic for the AAA not to endorse what is an otherwise powerful and positive Federal initiative that would require final mauscripts based on federally funded research to be accessible to the public after 6 months. So I wont be redundant here and will keep this short, but I would like to say that in an era in which government roll-backs (and in nearly every quarter of life) are simply commonplace and causing a fair deal of social problems, any initiative in which there is a push to make scholarship, *based on federal funds*, public and accessible, seems imperative to support, not squash. Many anthropologists, as probably many scholars, I imagine,like to think that some of their work has some public import and as such, we should do everything possible to make the work as accessible as possible, which will also give access to the communities and people we work with. They mention the supposed threat open access will have to peer review. First I don’t think that arguement stands up and more important, if peer review is simply a self-referential exercise, in which it can’t happen in a context of openness and accessiblity, what good is peer review??

Given the recent AnthrSource Initiative, as well as the general open/populist/ liberal/downright radical political inclinations among anthropologists, and the fact that the discipline in the last 25 years has been somewhat obsessed with the question of ethics, I was quite shocked at this move. But apparently (and thankfully) there were very few people at the AAAs behind the decision, which is somewhat comforting. What I hope now ensues is the formation and expression of a very strong response among the members of the AAA asking for a response from our elected board and an eventual rethinking of this stance.

More on this later but worth broadcasting because the following is a pretty strong example of incorporated, passionate, and embodied form of political protest in the hacker habitat.

If you have not read Jennifer Light’s amazing When Computer’s Were Women, today is the the day to read it.

update: yes, yes the Jennifer Light is not available freely. Just to show, we need more open access journal…

So, as readers of this blog know, I am deeply enmeshed and invested in a project that examines the cultural face of liberalism through such avenues as law, technoscience, and medicine. As part of this endeavor, I am interested in signaling and understanding the tensions in liberalism within one context (such as IP), one nation (as in the US) or across times and places.

Because I am going to this conference on Invention and Authorship at Case Western (am already in Ohio partaking of my family and the beautiful budding flowers of spring), I am revisiting these ideas as I chomp through all the marvelous papers that were pre-circulated.

And the theme of tensions in liberalism arose palpable during a visit at the CCA with Laura Murray an English professor who teaches at Queens College and runs the impressive Fair Copyright website, which every Canadian scholar should comb through, carefuly.

We read a her First Monday piece Protecting ourselves to death as well as another fascinating piece on Canadian copyrightTaking User Rights Seriously.

The session and her talk were quite interesting and my first real introduction to copyright’s life in Canada. Unsurprisingly, given the different role of the state as protector of certain rights (like health care) and a certain healthy suspicion of the US and its policy (and this is nicely explored by Murray), copyright is distinctly configured, with lines of similarity and diffferences. For example, IP provisions are not part of the Constitutional charter, the equivalent of fair use (“fair dealing”) is more circumscribed, universities often cower at what is perceived threat (she told us an amazing story about Simon Fraser’s draconian copyright policy that implored students to get permission for *every* citation, sigh), yet a a recent Supreme Court case came down very favorably strong for user rights and public interest.

By the end, it was clear that while there are similarities (and these will grow, I imagine, with “harmonization” via WIP0. TRIPS etc. but for reasons I state below, perhaps not), the life of IP is textured uniquely. And while there are differences in the law, point blank, some of the more interesting differences follow from non-legal conditions or legal factors quite independent of IP. And these are worth pointing out because they also give us a unique vantage point to really get at the motor behind SO much of American law, in general, and IP law, in specific.

During her visit, Laura Murray raised three (probably more but I am going by memory here) important differences, which were further elaborated during the disucssion:

1. Due to how governments congeal (through coaltions) and how they execute change, (apparently legal change/policy moves more slowly), this had led to change whose viscosity is more like molasses than oil in our country and often has worked in the favor of public interest and user rights in IP.
2. The Media still works in a more robust way than in the US in that it will shame and, shame some more, the government over things like IP so that they act as a constraint.
3. And in comparison to the US, the culture of litigation/lawsuits has a shadow of a life compared to the US.

So in fact much of the policy in Canada has little to do with the actual law of IP but with other legal factors or extra-legal factors. On top of this, it also made me realize that since things are stalled and since activists do and often compare things with their southern neighbors, I also wonder if activists are better positioned to actually intervne in this field than we are in the US, where things move quite fast, the media in general does not act as a lightning rod of shame (except for the Daily Show and Colbert Report, but I am not sure, yet, if we should count those as media) and even if the media does not shame, they rarely present IP as a pressing societal issue. Given these conditions, it will be very interesting, to the development and changes in IP in Canada following the pressures to harmonize.

Finally and this is perhaps to obvious to merit attention because it is signaled through the recognition that US law is largely case law, but lawsuits do truly generate so much of the law and are one of the central contexts underwhich we culturally understand (as I mean the proverbial citizenry “we”) the law. If anyone out there knows of any good articles/books that explores this, especially from a cultural, critical, or political perseptive, give me shout out… I would like to delve more into how this acrimonous and expensive (and potentially in some cases empowering) contextual matrix shapes US law.

So it seems like in the world of free and open source law and politics at least every 8-10 weeks there is a fresh controversy to hit the press. And the current one is over Lessig’s endorsement of DRM:

“In a world where DRM has become ubiquitous, we need to ensure that the ecology for creativity is bolstered, not stifled, by technology. We applaud Sun’s efforts to rally the community around the development of open-source, royalty-free DRM standards that support “fair use” and that don’t block the development of Creative Commons ideals.”

Already on Lessig’s blog there are a few attacks and others are starting to manifest.

For now I will just display the controversy. I see this as possibly an interesting turning point for the acceptance of Lessig’s politics in the wider world of free (note not open source) politics. In my work, I characterize Lessig as the Pasteur of the open source movement, at least as described in the work of Bruno Latour . He took what was a pretty esoteric and geeky world, and initiated a series of events, projects, and translations, that helped bring free software to a wider world and audience.

Now that this domain has been unleashed, there are now responses back and as part of these, we see stronger pockets of resistance and opposition to a Lessig-like politics. I imagine they will cohere even more strongly in the coming years, reshifting, yet again, the poltics of free and open source software.

So I get a daily ‘google’ email with the day’s psychiatry news. Rarely is there any news that touches on my hacker/Internet material but this article stuck out like a sore thumb as relevant: The Development of the Self in the Era of the Internet and Role-Playing Fantasy Games in the American Journal of Psychiatry. But I have to say there is one heck of a lot of slippery argumentation that goes on in there, an article whose progtagonist is “Mr. Aâ??s” whose “internal world had been colonized by what are termed “massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” or MMORPGs for short (11). Sometimes termed “heroinware”…”

I will just let interested parties read the rest (if you have access to the journal, which requires some sort of subscription or University access)

Anne Galloway, as usual, has a nice discussion on her blog, this time around, using Bruce Sterling’s recent keynote at the Emerging Tech Con, to get at the question of power, empowerement, and dispowerment of words

Bruce Sterling has posted his Emerging Tech talk and I’m still fixated on his fixation on words. This whole rationale behind coining neologisms interests me, and particularly how he understands terms like ‘internet of things’, ‘spimes’, ‘theory objects’, ‘everyware’, ‘thinglinks’ etc. are being mobilised to replace (with varying successes) what he considers to be no-longer-adequate terms like ‘ubiquitous computation’. I think he understands perfectly well how much this is all language games and image wars, and he’s playing for all it’s worth.

There is “soul food.” And you can eat soul food while hearing soul music. Poems and literature often direct us into the depths of soul. But academic books rarely enter that sacred territory. And being a social sciencey type of academic, it sort of makes me sad sometimes that our lot rarely spice our writings with the traces of soul. That sort of thing is discouraged, for reasons that often have to do with the “science” half of “social science.” For research, analysis, and writing, dispassion is supposed to be our guiding light and for the most part, this is not necessarily bad for it makes for more comprehensible, manageable works. And let’s face it, too much soul, and you get intractable mush.

But every once in a while a dash of passionate soul is delectable and thankfully does creep into our work to shake away the cobwebs of dispassion that cling to define our academic style of writing. The genre of ethnography, being it is so interpretive, is somewhat susceptible to such outpourings and we can find traces of soul in more daring political tracts, cultural studies material, as well as literary analysis too.

Now the study of intellectual property, being it is dry and arcane, is probably one area that seems more like a “soul-crusher” than a soul-magnet. But this week I was pleasantly surprised to find the strong currents and overtones of soul in Paul Saint-Armour’s delightful book on IP law: The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination

I guess I am just saying that alongside a really set of interesting arguments about the dynamic history of IP and literary property, the book is written really, really well. In particular, the chapter on Oscar Wilde is simply stunning and not to be missed. And given that Oscar Wilde’s writing and life are as soulful as soul can get, the chapter is doubly soulful! Take a look:

Rather than naively imagine orality as a tonic to writing, as nature to writing’s artifice, or as authenticity to the travesty of type, Wilde recognized that the longing for orality as origin, nature, or authentic prehistory may be the most characteristic thing about print culture, which thrives by manufacturing origins and measuring its distance form them in order, alternately, to wound or worship itself. His writing both embodies and inflicts an ache for the forms of orality while elaborately demonstrating their irrecuperability even their unknowability: we must return to the voice, yet as it now is, we cannot do so. (p. 94)

For a long time now, I have been interested in conceptualizing the rise of free and open source software within the context of the massive changes in intellectual property that have transpired in the last 25 years. In specific, I am trying to write a history that demonstrates how these two trends went from being distant “second cousins,” to more intimate (though acrimonious) siblings.

That is, while we can never consider the history of free/open source software irrespective of the historical changes in IP law, it is also my sense that there came a time (around 1998-2000) when it became harder to separate the two, in the following sense: in the last 5-7 years, free software users/developers have become aware of these global forces (and how they impinge on their ability to write software), while social actors who pushe to strengthen IP provisions, also are aware of the dynamics of F/OSS and the way it threatens their tactics. There is a now a mutal conscioussness of each other.

There are various events–notably those surrounding the DeCSS Protests, the
Dmitry Skylarov affair, and the anti-patent initiative in the EU–that act a concrete sites by which to claim and analyze this close relation.

But sometimes, it is nice to get a sense of the more subtle ways in which this relation is playing out and below, is a snippet from the follwing article, Free Software, You Can’t Just Give it Away (via Decoding Liberation) that reveals just this. Written by a Mozilla Foundation employee, Gervase Markham, it tells the following amusing tale:

A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).

Unfortunately, this was not well received. Her reply was incredulous:

“I can’t believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?” she asked.

“If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted.”

This is precisely what I am trying to get at in my historical account. I have written a first stab of this history for a conference I am attending next week,
Informatics goes global. Here is the introduction to my paper, which suffers from some problems but hopefully it will be whipped into better shape soon.

About a month ago, I posted an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal on The rising tide of forced treatment.

Below are a range of letters published in the Wallstreet Journal in response to the article. I have not seen the originals but got them via a MindFreedom mailing list.

The collection of letters are the mosy crystalline window into the devastatingly complex issues concerning psychiatric care, human autonomy, law, and suffering that I have seen in a long, long time. Do check it out.

Wed. February22,2006

LETTERS

MindFreedom International sends out alerts as part of our “MindFreedom
Shield” to encourage and support people who are seeking an underground
railroad to shelter them from coerced psychiatric drugging. Such
underground railroads provide support and assistance in a manner that
is completely legal and essential for these individuals. But an
underground railroad itself isn’t a program of MindFreedom, as you
reported.

You described MindFreedom as an organization of “mentally ill people
that opposes coerced drug treatment.” While many members are people who
have experienced abuse in the mental health system, or “psychiatric
survivors” as we call ourselves, we don’t refer to our membership as
“mentally ill.” In fact, many have spent much of their lives
passionately defending themselves against such damaging, false and
unscientific labels.

While you quoted several proponents of forced drugging, you ought to
have quoted even one of the many organized groups of psychiatric
survivors. After all, we are the ones who end up on the sharp end of
the needle.

David Oaks
Director
MindFreedom International
Eugene, Ore.

[other letters:]

For the Mentally Ill: Caring or Incarceration?

One of the great tragedies of modern psychiatry is the large number of
incarcerated individuals who are mentally ill or drug addicted (“A
Doctor’s Fight: More Forced Care for the Mentally Ill,” page one, Feb.
1). This is the inevitable consequence of our reluctance to use caring,
coercive approaches, such as assisted outpatient treatment. A person
suffering from paranoid schizophrenia with a history of multiple
hospitalizations for being dangerous and a reluctance to abide by
outpatient treatment is a perfect example of someone who would benefit
from these approaches. We must balance individual rights and freedom
with policies aimed at caring coercion. Our responsibility to each
other and our respect for personal rights lie at the center of our
social and moral choices as Americans.

The Treatment Advocacy Center is to be commended for its sustained
advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable mentally ill patients who
lack the insight to seek and continue effective care and benefit from
assisted outpatient treatment.

Steven S. Sharfstein, M.D.
President
American Psychiatric Association
Arlington, Va.

While forced care is sometimes necessary when a person is a danger to
himself or others, the call to expand its usage underestimates the
risks of imposing a different standard of civil liberty onto people
with mental illness than is guaranteed to the rest of us.

E. Fuller Torrey’s movement is part of an attitude of paternalism from
which people with mental illness are working hard to break free.
Moreover, his database of anecdotes on violence is misleading since
most people with mental illness aren’t violent and are more often the
victims of crime, not the assailants. There is a long history of our
country taking away the rights of people with mental illness who are
penalized merely for being “scary” and “burdensome.” It is time to go
forward, not backward.

Anthony M. Zipple, Sc.D., M.B.A.
Chief Executive Officer
Thresholds Psychiatric
Rehabilitation Centers
Chicago

My 41-year-old brother has suffered from serious mental illness since
he was 15. At times, his behavior has become sufficiently threatening
or dangerous to require involuntary hospitalization. Like many others
with this disease, he doesn’t believe that he is ill (a neurological
deficit known as anosognosia) and therefore refuses to voluntarily
comply with treatment or to take medication, even though it has proven
remarkably effective. As a result, my smart, funny and talented brother
has spent much of the past 25 years homeless, jobless and delusional. I
can safely say to the civil libertarians that this isn’t the life he
would have chosen for himself; it was chosen for him by his untreated
illness.

Before Kendra’s Law, there was nothing my family could do to force him
to obtain treatment. Although the law isn’t a panacea and the mental
health system is a disgrace, being forced to stay in treatment is the
only chance he has of resurrecting his life.

Shari L. Steinberg
New York

Dr. Torrey complains about “taking heat” for being “politically
incorrect,” but he’s not really paying any penalty for his position. A
real penalty, however, is being paid by those who are targeted by the
laws he pushes through. To force outpatient “treatment” on anyone who
has ever been on the wrong end of the mental health system because of
the actions of the criminals in Dr. Torrey’s database is as unfair as
it would be to force such treatment on all physicians because of the
actions of Dr. Mengele.

Kent Reedy
San Diego

Using the term “force” to describe state laws authorizing court-ordered
treatment overlooks the point about what these laws are intended to
accomplish. Most people with serious mental illnesses are able to make
informed decisions about treatment. In a minority of cases, mental
illness negatively affects insight and ability to recognize the need
for treatment. The greatest risk is to the individuals themselves.

A New York State Office of Mental Health report shows that the impact
of Kendra’s Law has been positive in reducing hospitalizations,
arrests, homelessness and other consequences from lack of treatment.
And most people treated under Kendra’s Law say it has helped them. When
narrowly crafted and sufficiently protective of civil liberties, laws
authorizing court-ordered outpatient treatment can be both humane and
beneficial.

Michael Fitzpatrick
Executive Director
National Alliance on Mental Illness
Arlington, Va.