explodedlibrary.info

my rant on the afr.com fiasco

[6 October 2007 update: This post has been followed up here]

The Australian Financial Review, nicknamed the Fin and sometimes AFR, is perhaps the newspaper of record for the Australian business sector. It used to have arrangements with aggregators such as Factiva, Media Monitors and NewsBank. At some point, it decided that it wasn't making enough money from licensing its content online in this way. In addition, the head of Fair Business Media, Michael Gill, was convinced that AFR content needed to be locked down, "because because one bank used an AFR article to support a prospectus." So AFR decided to develop its own platform for online access to its content and abruptly ended licenses with Factiva and the others.

There's was more information about the afr.com debacle in the second article by Stephen Mayne in Crikey called "Remember the glory days of AFR.com", but sadly that's in the pay section of Crikey and I can't link to that. So I thought I'd add my impressions of afr.com and thoughts about the whole process. I am the first to admit that what follows is not a thoughtful objective review, but a rant. The afr.com fiasco has been a major inconvenience to me and many of my co-workers and faculty and students at MPOW.

I tried out the new afr.com both in beta and since its release on a trial subscription. My first impressions of the beta product was that it was an absolute dog. The current release is better than what I saw in beta, but I still think the product is a dog.

The product has a flash-driven interface. This has a number of effects. It makes afr.com a real memory hog. For example, when I'm running Firefox for Windows I don't use it lightly. I have multiple tabs open, I have various web apps running and maybe the Firefox application is using 90 MB of RAM. When I'm running afr.com in Firefox, that number jumps to 250 MB. The other thing is that the application is very slow. Don't bother trying to do anything quickly in afr.com, especially typing or scrolling or clicking on buttons. The other "feature" of the flash-driven interface is that it's impossible to copy and paste text from afr.com. This is a part of their strategy to eliminate copyright infringement by treating paying customers as if they were thieves.

Even if one pays for a monthly subscription (the cheapest being $A 25/month), it is not an all you can eat package. Usage is metered with credits. It costs one credit to open an article. What struck me as tremendously stingy - or clueless - is that if you do a regular search on afr.com, you do not see any page numbers in the list of results. That exclusive information only appears once you choose to spend a credit to open the article. Don't they realize that page numbers are needed in most citation systems?

I was expecting that afr.com would, if nothing else, be a good way of reading the Fin online, similar to wsj.com, the digital edition of the Wall Street Journal. But there seems no good way of browsing the current issue of the Fin in afr.com. The home page on afr.com seems to contain some articles from today’s paper, but it also contains links to other non-premium publications like Reuters or the Sydney Morning Herald – both of which can be viewed for free elsewhere. I've since learned that afr.com is different from the Digital Edition of the Australian Financial Review. The digital edition is only included with afr.com when people subscribe to the spendy ($A 150.00/month) advanced markets package. Compare that with wsj.com, that's available for $US 9.95/month [yesterday, that amounted to approximately $A 11.92].

I have one positive thing to say about afr.com. At least they bothered making it compatible with Macs. The product does work with Firefox and Safari, except that mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work in either Mac browser.  For some reason, they use the most unreadable font for full-text articles in the Safari browser.

And what's with the advertising? I don't mind ads on products I use for free, e.g. Google or smh.com.au. But afr.com is priced as a premium product. I think that somebody paying for a clunky product should be spared from ads.

I doubt that this going to be a huge problem for me, seeing that I don't intend to use the product again, but the online help in afr.com is very poor. They are large glossy-looking slow-loading pdf files which look and read more like marketing pieces than online help. It's a microcosm of the problems with all of afr.com, they go for bling and end up with something slow and unusable.

Afr.com’s major flaw as a product is that it provides all sorts of miscellaneous research tools, as if it’s aspiring to become its customers new research portal, but it doesn’t provide cost effective (or effective in any shape or form) access to the frickin' newspaper, which is only thing that I think 95% of likely subscribers would care about. But that’s not the only flaw in play here. An esteemed colleague of mine is convinced that in a few years from now, there will be books and business case studies about this afr.com fiasco. How could a supposedly smart company get it so wrong in so many different ways?

I wonder if they thought they could get away with it because they thought, “we’re the Fin, the paper of record in the Australian business community, people will put up with this crap, because they need us.” The answer is no, if you make life too difficult and expensive for your customers, we’ll adapt to life without you. Some day you may realize that actually, it was you who needed the goodwill of your customers and suppliers – and try to win us back. That may work, but maybe by then we’ll have got used to not using the AFR at all.

[14 June 2007 edit: I wrote something else about afr.com here]

format-shifting in Australia

I guess this is good news. It's not so much a victory for consumers, but an acknowledgement of common-sense and pragmatism. All this decision does is legalize behaviour which people have been doing any way for over 30 years, since the adoption of the analogue audio cassette recorder. Now that this useless legal absurdity is likely to be removed, it will be that much easier to justify the creation of more modern absurdities in intellectual property law.

With the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, Australia is obliged to harmonize its intellectual property laws with the US. There was no way of justifying that harmonization only goes in one direction.  - adopting US copyright doctrine in all its 21st century post-DMCA glory - while retaining counter-productive anachronisms which even the US had abandoned.

I have been wanting to link to something more official on this, but so far, all the information seems to be on this seems to be from the print media and other blogs commenting on it. As yet, there is nothing on the Department of Attorney-General's website. I will link to this official information when it appears.

Update: I have just found via Kim Weatherall that there is information about this on the Attorney-General Philip Ruddock's website

using Gmail as a research cache

For some people, the process of research is very organized and methodical. For me research is something creative and instinctive, slightly chaotic and usually a bit messy. I am not saying that one way is better. I know that there are distinct disadvantages to my method, such as the possibility of finding a really good source through some odd combination of luck and insight - only to lose it, never to find it again because of being disorganized. So I've been looking at better ways to be organized - but not in a way which slows me down and causes me to lose my momentum. For me, research is the closest that I'll ever get to hunting. One of the things I like about it is the chase, which is why I hate things which slow me down

I have set up a separate Gmail account for my work and use it as a cache of my research. As I come across articles and sources which seem promising, what I do is compose a new email, paste in the full text and citation/URL of the article and then save it as a draft. It's a very quick process, and so I'm able to move on. The nice thing is that because Gmail is searchable, everything in this research cache is searchable - making it easy to return to the documents to dig more deeply and hone in on what is useful. It doesn't work so well with pdfs, but I can still upload the pdf and store the citation and/or URL. The other nice thing is that I can add to and search this cache whether I'm in my office or at the shared computer on our reference desk.

I am quite confident that because this research cache is personal - and can only be used by me - and because it's do with my work which is for academic purposes, that in most cases, it would be all right. To be absolutely sure, I would need to check all of the license agreements of all of the database which I am likely to use.

Currently playing in iTunes: Benzin by Rammstein

revisiting linking rights

I have discovered a little contradiction within myself. On the one hand, I am a zealous believer in the right to link. Links have been and remain the lifeblood of the web. The anti-linking policies which seemed fashionable a few years ago were invariably flouted and led to the wide-spread ridicule of the things which they were meant to be “protecting.”

That’s only one aspect of the right to link. In 2005, the issue of the linker’s liability for linking to copyright infringing material hosted by third parties has received some judicial attention in Australia. But I would argue that even the Universal Music Australia v. Cooper case doesn’t yet endanger the right to create a bare link to infringing materials, provided there’s no question of “authorizing” copyright infringement.

A bare link does not provide any endorsement, agreement or authorization of the material being linked to. A bare link to a web site is just a statement of a fact - that at a certain place on the web this information exists. While there is any strength left in the ideas and expression of ideas dichotomy, US National Public Radio (a past offender) can't prevent a blogger from linking to them, no more than it can copyright any other fact, such as 2+2=4. For NPR to prevent anybody linking to them is like claiming copyright in their own physical address.

To use a different analogy, anti-linking policies make as much sense as an author claiming that merely being cited in a journal article infringes on her/his copyright.

It might be different if there’s more than a bare link happening. For example, if I linked directly to a certain image on the illegal-art website and wrote, “Check out this hilarious parody of the Starbucks logo!” That might get me into trouble, so I’m not going to do that.

I believe in the right to link and that if somebody chooses to make their website or blog available to the world, anybody has the right to link to it. On the other hand, in my own personal conduct I had decided that I would prefer being courteous over exercising this right. For example, with the list of Australian librarian blogs on my sidebar, I have often requested permission before adding blogs to this list.

Courtesy is very good and nice, but I have now decided that it is too much of a good thing if it gets in the way of adding new blogs to this list. It has even caused me to temporarily lose some of the blogs which I intended to add. I know, losing a blog is a very embarrassing and silly thing to do.

From now on, I’ll just add the blogs as I find them. If anybody has a problem with being added, they are welcome to email me about it and we can talk about it.

still no comment from Apple about the opening of iTMS in Australia

Of course, it would be some consolation if the Kazaa decision might speed things along with the Australian iTunes Music Store, but I think that is extremely wishful thinking.

Apple Australia yesterday refused to comment on a launch date for its iTunes music store, which would allow the legion of Australians who own iPods to legally purchase songs, rather than rip, burn and swap.
[Kristy Needham, Music industry banks on opening of online store, Sydney Morning Herald (7 September 2005)]

still no iTunes Music Store in Australia - a casualty of squabbling between Apple and Sony

[7 September 2005: This post has been followed up]
[15 May 2006: The portion about Australian intellectual property law has been followed up]

An Australian iTunes Music Store (iTMS) was supposed to open in May 2005. This unexpectedly fell through. At the time, there were rumours in Slashdot that one major record company (possibly Sony) was the cause of this delay. Three months later, there is still no iTMS in Australia and there is more confirmation that Sony is the company which has been stone-walling in negotiations with Apple over licensing rates. Joshua Gliddon, "Burning issue", Bulletin (7 June 2005).

In Today's Australian Financial Review there was another article about this, "Apple's turn to bite the download bullet" (9 August 2005). I'm not linking to it, because the AFR has a nasty pay-per-view system. The gist of this article was that the Australian iTMS store has become collateral damage in the larger competition between Sony and Apple. Although Sony did not block the original iTMS in North America, or its other expansions, this time it is putting its foot down and insisting that Apple give some ground over licensing rates and access to Apple's FairPlay DRM system. The Australian market isn't that vital to Apple, and it's not going to make these concessions to Sony, and if that holds up the Australian iTMS, so be it. At this rate, it's possible New Zealand will have its iTMS before Australia. Good on them too (my Mum's from NZ, so I have major respect for the country and its people).

Meanwhile, because of an absurdity in Australian copyright law, there is still no legal way of using an iPod in Australia - unless your iPod is filled with music which you have yourself created. So I'm a law-breaker if I buy a CD and format-shift by ripping the music onto my iPod. So are two other Australian bloggers whom I know (I promise not to turn you in, F & S), so are the dozens of people I see everyday in Sydney with some sort of iPod, whether it's a big one or a mini or a shuffle. We're all law-breakers on this issue, even the lawyers. I'm waiting for the day when police will stop me in Martin Place, "Oi, you with those white earphones, what do you think you're up to?"

taking a nuanced view of the Federal Court of Australia's anti-linking decision

[20/12/06 update: The decision in this case has recently been upheld by the Full Federal Court of Australia. For information about how this case was treated on appeal, see this commentary by Kim Weatherall]

In no shape or form do I approve or agree with the "anti-linking decision" recently handed down by the Federal Court of Australia in the Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd v Cooper [2005] FCA 972 (14 July 2005). Having read the decision for myself, I do think that there is some hyperbole in some of the criticisms of this case. People were all too happy to take a nuanced reading of the Grokster decision. My argument is that the Cooper case deserves a similar nuanced reading. The respondent Cooper lost one key point, but the applicants – Universal Music Australia and the other members of Australia’s Content Cartel – didn’t get everything which they wanted either.

Most importantly, Tamberlin J rejected the applicant’s contention that merely linking to copyrighted material on the web infringes copyright.

The Federal Court held against Cooper for a different reason, that his website was designed to facilitate and enable its users to infringe copyright. The site, mp3s4free.net, fell afoul of the rule prohibiting authorization of copyright infringement which exists in Australian copyright law. The fact that mp3s4free.net had many deep direct links to infringing copies of sound files on third party sites hurt their case. Who knows that would have happened if mp3s4free.net’s links had been to htm or similar regular web pages, and not directly to the sound files.

The Content Cartel wanted to make it illegal for anybody to provide links to infringing material. That argument failed. Instead the Court has held against the practice of linking to files in such a way that facilitates and encourages other people to infringe. One of the cited High Court authorities states that authorization “connotes a mental element.” (see para. 79 of the decision)

I don’t like this decision, I think it has some disturbing implications and hope it is appealed and overturned by the High Court of Australia. But hysteria and hyperbole aren’t helpful responses to it.

Excerpts from Tamberlin J's opinion:

57 The applicants allege that Cooper has directly infringed the applicants’ copyright in the music sound recordings by communicating these recordings to the public. …

the National Library of Australia's PANDORA archive

For reasons that should become apparent, I plan that this will be my first and only post about the National Library of Australia's PANDORA archive.

I received an email from the National Library of Australia (NLA), requesting permission to archive the exploded library in its PANDORA archive of Australian online publications. I agreed, and so now the archived version is available here. I thought that people should know, if only because comments and trackbacks will also be preserved.

Look at these links for some basic information about the PANDORA archive: Editing our future, Sydney Morning Herald (4 May 2005) [requires free registration to view]; Margaret E. Phillips, Selective Archiving of Web Resources: A Study of Acquisition Costs at the National Library of Australia, 9 (3) RLG DigiNews (15 June 2005); FAQs from the NLA about PANDORA.

Yes, there are some in the library and media establishments who might think that blogs are worthless ephemera*, but I’m glad that the National Library of Australia takes a different view.

I’m no historian, but I gather that it’s quite common for writing from outside the establishment to be of interest to people trying to understand what’s been going on at a particular time period.

I doubt that there would be very many bloggers out there who would take offence to have their blog selected as an online publication of “national significance” and being preserved in (presumed) perpetuity. Just this week I was wondering how long this blog would stay around on the web if I happened to get hit by a bus during my perilous crossings of McEvoy St.

I still can’t believe this blog has had that sort of recognition. I wonder if it helps that the people making these selections are librarians and I have one of the more prominent Australian library blogs.

One of the weird things is that I’m going to need to resist the urge to be more self-conscious, now that I know that my words here will be preserved in this manner. I feel kind of inspired to keep this blog going and may end up trying to improve the quality and quantity of my posts, which is a good thing … I guess ;) That's the reason why I don't plan on writing any other posts about this. In fact, the less that I think about it, the better.

I think it’s unfortunate that because of a flaw in Australian copyright law the NLA has to ask permission to archive online publications in this manner. Blogs are different from books in that they are never really finished or fixed (in the copyright sense of the word). A book can only be collected and archived after it has been completed and published. I think it would be better if the NLA were just able to do what they needed to according to legal deposit laws, because that would reduce the extent to which the act of observation (or in this case, archiving) influences the behaviour of the thing being observed. 

In the short-term nothing will change. Before this I was aware of the Google cache and the fact that the practice of googling exists. This is just another level of preservation.

Like many Australians, I don’t have much time for patriotism. I love the land and most of its people, but I am frequently embarrassed by the nation and its leaders. So it’s odd and feels kind of nice, to know that in this area, Australia is leading the way, and that I’m involved in it.

* I’m sure critics of blogs would appreciate the irony of blogs being collected in the PANDORA archive, seeing that in the myth, Pandora’s Box contained “the sorrows and evils of mankind within it.” But PANDORA contains many other Australian online publications, not just blogs.

my IOU to Fiona Apple

[This post was followed up on 2 November 2005]

Dear Fiona,

I owe you approximately $US 10 for downloading your album “Extraordinary Machine” which has been suppressed by your record company Sony. I will pay for this as soon as Sony decides to respect your artistic ability and release this record. If you haven’t done so already, I would suggest that you speak with Aimee Mann, who also suffered at the hands of tyrannical record companies. Aimee Mann seems a lot happier since she decided to go it alone and ditch her record company which had such a fundamentally different vision of what makes good music.

On the off-chance that Extraordinary Machine has been leaked deliberately as part of an unconventional marketing campaign, I would be extremely surprised and slightly disappointed, but I would forgive you, because it is a very good album.

using the shift key to rip certain copy-protected CDs

Today I had my first experience of a seriously copy-protected CD, Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, released by EMI. I didn't have much luck ripping it onto my Mac - I ended up having to force quit out of iTunes. Apparently there are a number of different copy-protection methods. One method can be circumvented with a magic marker. I didn't think that this method would work on this particular CD, so I looked for other methods. Then I saw this reference to hold down the shift key on a Windows computer for 5 seconds after inserting the CD. This stopped the CD from automatically launching the program which would interfere with the copy protection. I then copied the CD with iTunes, and soon I'll have it in my iPod.

As I've written before, I believe that creators should be fairly compensated for their work, but that copy-protection technology goes way too far, and I have no moral qualms about circumventing it. I've never been interested in downloading music from file-sharing sites. The only thing which would tempt me would be if I wasn't able to rip a CD which I had lawfully purchased. Then I would feel entitled to download an illicit copy.

When will the record companies realize that people like to listen to music on their computers and mp3 players, and it is manifestly unfair to prevent this from happening? It is simply such a stupid thing to do - piss off your paying customers and drive them into supporting your real target, the file-traders.

I'm about to really start ranting, so instead I'll link this detailed explanation of how the shift method works.