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In preparation for an upcoming workshop on “organization as communication“, I have engaged more deeply with the phenomenon of Anonymous (see also “Anonymous Attacks German Collecting Society GEMA“). Specifically, I am interested in questions such as how to theoretically grasp this online “collective” and how its organizational identity and boundaries are created and (re-)produced.
In this regard, those incidents are of particular interest, where the attribution to Anonymous is contested. In August 2011, for example, a group claiming to be part of the hacktivist collective declared a “war on facebook”, which was soon countered by another Anonymous activist via twitter, stating that “#OpFacebook is being organised by some Anons. This does not necessarily mean that all of #Anonymous agrees with it.” (see Washington Post). In November 2011, when the takedown of facebook was supposed to happen, activists of Anonymous even exposed the originator of the threat to demonstrate that “#OpFacebook” was in fact not supported by Anonymous, as cnet reported:
“One skiddy queer chap named Anthony [last name redacted] from the US in Ohio decided to take it upon himself to have some lulz with creating an imaginary opfacebook and pawning it off as a legit anon op,” the statement said. “Despite us telling this mate several times we did not support his op, he continued to push his agenda for lulz. This op is phony but he continues to say it’s an anon op.”
In other words: Anonymous decided to expel wannabe activists by lifting the veil of anonymity and exposing their identity to the public. In a way, expelling by exposing is the logical boundary practice of an organized informality under the lablel “Anonymous.”
While the dust of the SOPA and PIPA battle in the US has not settled yet, we quickly approach the next showdown around an acronym in the realm of intellectual property regulation. This time the main battleground is Europe, the acronym is ACTA. The “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” had been negotiated secretly for years until in early 2010 a draft of the agreement was leaked (see Michael Geist; for a critical and more up to date overview see the ACTA info portal of La Quadrature du Net (LQDN)). Since this leak, the draft had been substantially reworked and, last week, the treaty was signed by representatives of the European Commission and 22 member states in an official signing ceremony.
However, the political controversy is far from being over. For one, the treaty needs to be approved by the European Parliament, which is now the main target for mobilization of both supporters and opponents. For another, the signing of ACTA has sparked surprisingly strong protests in some EU member states, above all in Poland (see video below). The intensity of the Polish opposition has in turn raised attention in neighboring states, most importantly in Germany, as well.
We are late with posts on the issue that dominated the web over the last couple weeks, namely the two bills in the U.S. congress on SOPA and PIPA. Even Wikipedia, for the first time in its history, decided to join the protest blackout on January 18 to protest against the bills. (Which was, by the way, also exemplifying the difficulties of Wikimedia making decisions involving the community due to the absence of accepted and routinized participation structures within Wikimedia governance, see also “Redrawing the Borders of Wikimedia Governance“).
Nevertheless, this might not be all that much of a problem. Because if NYU’s Clay Shirky is right, SOPA and PIPA will come back with new acronyms but similar content. But see for yourself in Shirky’s 15 minute TED talk on the issue:
(leonhard)
Two days ago, Sigrid and I have submitted a paper on community governance in the realm of Creative Commons and Wikimedia to this year’s Academy of Management Annual Meeting. Today, I have learnt about major upcoming changes in governance of the latter of our two cases. Wikimedia is at the brink of abandoning its decentralized and geography-based network of Wikimedia chapters and replace it with a much more centralized network of different types of movement organizations.
Logo of the Wikimedia Foundation
The current governance structure of Wikimedia, the formal organization behind the global community of volunteers responsible for Wikipedia, had emerged comparably unplanned. The focal Wikimedia Foundation itself was founded two years after Wikipedia had been launched as a side-project of the quality-controlled “Nupedia“. And while Wikipedia had been transnational from the very start with versions in German, Catalan, Japanese, French and Spanish only two months after its launch, the Foundation was not. The first local Wikimedia branch in Germany was founded independently from Wikimedia headquarters and only formally recognized as a formal Wikimedia chapter after the fact. Following the German example, so far 38 membership-based chapter associations have been founded and formally recognized. Together, these chapters nominate two members to the Foundation’s Board of Trustees.
With the exception of two US chapters in New York City and in the District of Columbia, all these chapters are related to countries. One of the main reasons for tying local chapter organizations to countries is a financial one. Many Wikimedia chapter organizations such as the German, the Polish or the Swiss chapter receive tax exempted donations. This is one of the big advantages of local chapter organizations and even a rationale for founding them as grassroots organizations in the first place. The same time, however, this also restricts the flow of funds within the organizational network. Donations to the German Wikimedia chapter, for example, cannot easily be transferred to the focal Wikimedia Foundation in the US due to legal restraints.
In the history of copyright law, legislation in Europe and the US have wound each other up more and more. Everytime when there was a copyright term extension on one side of the ocean, lobbyists on the other side started finger pointing, demanding the same rights to protect artists and the industry. A recent example for such regulatory inspiration has been the EU database directive, which created a sui generis right for the creators of databases which do not qualify for copyright. Ever since this directive had been passed in Europe, lobbyists in the US have tried to introduce a similar provision into US copyright law (see Boyle 2008: 207 ff.). Such regulatory inspiration is neither new nor surprising nor restricted to the domain of copyright.
However, what has been leaked in the Wikileaks cables on the influence of the US on the new Spanish copyright law is way beyond mere inspiration for lobbyists. As reported by the Guardian, in this case the lobbyist has been the US government itself:
The US ambassador in Madrid threatened Spain with “retaliation actions” if the country did not pass tough new internet piracy laws, according to leaked documents. […] In his letter, Solomont [i.e. the US ambassedor] issued veiled threats, reminding its recipients that Spain is on the Special 301, the US trade representatives’ list of countries that do not provide “adequate and effective” protection of intellectual property rights. Spain risks having its position on the list “degraded”, and could join the real blacklist of “the worst violators of global intellectual property rights.”
After their surprising election success in the German capital Berlin, the pirate party continues to surge in the polls. In all recent federal polls the German pirates have been above the 5 percent election threshold and there is no end in sight.
When a TV crew from Russia Today had visited Berlin to film a short report on the pirate phenomenon, they also approached me as a “talking (research) head” on the issue. Unsurprisingly, only one sentence of the half an hour long interview made it into the segment featured below.
The reason the Russian TV crew had found me was this post-election blog post.
(leonhard)
One of the things that make blogs particularly interesting are series. The “series” series recommends series at related blogs. This time I am recommending the series “12 for 2012” over at the 1709 blog, whose name refers to the first purpose-built copyright law, i.e. the Statute of Anne of 1709.
In spite of several term extensions over the last century, copyright law is still temporally limited. After the copyright protection term expires, works enter into the public domain (see “The Digital Public Domain: Relevance and Regulation“). In Europe, copyright protections terms are very long, lasting 70 years after the death of the creator. When a work finally enters the public domain, anyone is free to reproduce, distribute and remix it without asking for permission.
Celebrating prominent bodies of works that fall into the public domain on January 1 2012, fellow blogger Miriam Levenson has recently started the series “12 for 2012“:
During each of the twelve days of Christmas, the 1709 Blog is bringing readers some information concerning an author, composer, artist or creator who died in 1941 and whose works fall into the public domain in 2012 in countries which operate a “life plus seventy years” term for copyright in authors’ works.
Today, for example, Miriam Levenson features Virginia Woolf: Read the rest of this entry »
Wikipedia provides an extensive list of plagiarism controversies, with examples ranging from Ciceros speeches against Mark Antony (1st century BCE) to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (see also: “Some Reflexions on Originality, Plagiarism, Intertextuality, and Remix“). What is still missing is a list of self-plagiarism controversies. In academia, the most recent self-plagiarism incident that received substantial attention was the case of the economist Bruno Frey (University of Zurich). The case has been meticulously documented by Olaf Storbeck, International Economics Correspondent with the German business daily Handelsblatt.
Today, I stumbled upon an article in the Austrian weekly profil, dealing with another field of alleged ‘self-plagiarism’: architecture. They juxtapose several buildings by famous architects such as Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind or Zaha Hadid. Due to copyright issues I cannot simply provide all the examples below, but with the help of Wikimedia commons I managed to reproduce two examples of alleged ‘self-plagiarism’ and one of mere ‘plagiarism’ presented in the Article:
Frank Gehry
Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
