Why Our CopyWrong Laws Suck (so does Ralph Lauren)!

Okay, it's bad enough that Steamboat Willie, a cartoon released by Disney in 1928 is still under copyright protection 43 years after the death of old Walt, and not scheduled to enter the public domain until nearly 100 years after its release. Increasing political and financial pressures have convinced western governments to all but ensure that nothing ever will pass into the public domain, which is a problem for educators seeking content to use in the course of their work.

This Ralph Lauren ad, if it had been around when I was teaching the "Computer Impact on Society" course, would most definitely have been part of my presentation. In that course I have a unit on captology, or the study of the computer as a persuasive device. For this we zero in on the subject of what happens when you can no longer believe your eyes because AP news photographers fudge, stage and/or Photoshop their images? How is it that Marilyn Monroe was considered attractive 50 years ago but today would be sent to a fat farm? Why is it that eating disorders are occurring as early as the elementary school years (my own son likes to taunt his twin sister, 8 years of age, with the charge that she is "fat")?

I believe part of the answer is the irresponsible ad images projected by companies like Ralph Lauren and this ad in particular. But what happens when you point this out as a fair use defense of reproducing the image for public consumption for the purposes of criticism? Ralph Lauren threatens your ISP with a DCMA take-down notice.

Cory Doctorow, who writes compellingly of the repressive uses of new technologies against the individual and against individual freedoms (see in particular Little Brother) notes of the Ralph Lauren threat, instead of responding to their legal threat by suppressing our criticism of their marketing images, we're gonna mock them... So, to Ralph Lauren, GreenbergTraurig, and PRL Holdings, Inc: sue and be damned. Copyright law doesn't give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings. You should know better..

It's nice to know that not all companies are as reprehensible. Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty produced this very nice video and apparently has not issued any DCMA takedown notices to YouTube for posting it!


UPDATE

Ralph Lauren issues apology the next day.

The Waste, Fraud & Abuse Line-Item: Take Deux

From Slashdot:

"Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is threatening to move Microsoft employees offshore if Congress enacts President Obama's plans to curb tax avoidance by US corporations. 'It makes US jobs more expensive,' complained billionaire Ballmer. 'We're better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the US as opposed to keeping them inside the US.' According to 2006 reports, Microsoft transferred $16 billion in assets to secretive Dublin subsidiaries to shave billions off its US tax bill. 'Corporate tax is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland,' acknowledged Ballmer in 2005. 'It would be disingenuous to say otherwise.'"

This isn't the first time Micro$loth has made this sort of threat. The last time was when they were lobbying Congress to allow them to import more cheap labor and avoid paying US wages for programmers, and I was ironically looking for this story just last week. I should have known that I wouldn't have to wait long for them to do a repeat performance.

What, aside from the tax money that Microsoft is obviously trying to avoid paying for such things as, oh, education, does this story have to do with education? Unfortunately, plenty.

With internet delivery of course content being very much in vogue, most higher education institutions utilize some sort of courseware management system. I personally use Moodle, and I've repeatedly been asked why by my students (everybody else on campus seemingly uses Blackboard, which swallowed up its competitor, WebCT, and brought a predatory patent suit against the Canadian firm Desire2Learn, thus effectively locking D2L out of the US market). I was once specifically told by an education faculty member that, basically, all courseware management systems suck, so why criticize the university's adoption of Blackboard?

I'll tell you why: Even if Moodle sucks as much as Blackboard, Moodle sucks for FREE. That's right. Free. As in $0. Unlike Blackboard, which sucks with a pretty impressive licensing price tag. I'm betting my institution pays somewhere between $80,000 and $250,000 per year to license Blackboard. You can read more on the fees here (yes, it's an old story, but gives you some idea as to how much this stuff must be costing us now!). For an insight or three into Blackboard's morally questionable business practices, see here.

Hmmm... let me think about that again... pay $250,000 a year or pay nothing... I don't know about you, but I choose to pay nothing. I don't need any support contracts -- I'm renting server space from someone; I paid him to install the program; I administer it. For NOTHING, zip, nada, nichts... You have an all-PC infrastructure? Moodle runs on that. All *nix? It runs on that too. The odd all Mac configuration? Ditto! Unlike Blackboard, the user experience for which is positively craptacular on any browser not made in Redmond. So, can someone please explain to me why, when in the midst of a severe state and national economic crisis, my institution feels the need to pay big bucks when they could just use something different and pay nothing? Ahhh.... but, mine is but one campus of a 23-campus system (not counting satellite campuses). If you thought that $250,000 a year is but chump change, multiply it by 23; looking more substantial now?

What does this have to do with Micro$loth again? Well, in addition to licensing Blackboard when instead we could be paying nothing, we're also paying to license a boatload of Micro$loth apps when, again, we could just pay nothing and use Free Open Source Software alternatives to the Office suite: There's OpenOffice (Windows, Mac and Linux) and NeoOffice (a nice Mac OpenOffice port).

And we have to wonder: if we could be saving all this money, why aren't we? In the case of the CSU and PeopleSoft, a state auditor summed up the corrupt relationship between technology vendors and education administrators fairly concisely; the State Auditor's Report for 2002 found that the CSU's headlong rush to embrace Oracle's PeopleSoft Common Management System (CMS) "has higher than reported costs, less than optimal functionality, and questionable procurement and conflict of interest practices."

Did we need it? The state auditor says this was never established; Did it come in under budget? Nope; costs ballooned from the 1998 estimate of $332 million to $662 million as of 2002. Did we purchase this system because of some rational need and rational bidding process? Indeed, not; the auditors found that two senior administrators for the system may well have personally benefitted from the purchase of the project. You can read more about it here and here and here.

And, just ask anyone who's had to use it: it sucks! And, like Blackboard and Micro$loth products, not for free.

All this stuff adds up -- $600+ million for a system nobody ever really needed; $250,000 x 23 campuses for software functionality they could instead find in the free variety, forcing us all to pay for proprietary common software types forced down our throats by a behemoth that doesn't want to pay its fair share in US taxes -- and you've gotta wonder how many state employee jobs could be saved, how many students wouldn't be looking at losing their transportation services, how many fewer tuition increases we'd be looking at if only we weren't so entirely inept!

Following Alice Down the Rabbit-Hole

I went to campus last week; it was quite possibly the first time in a year that I'd set foot on the main campus.

What a difference a year makes.

I've spent the last week internally processing a series of contradictions that became obvious after my visit. On the one hand, I've been stranded at the satellite campus in the middle of nowhere, a place where we don't own the land, (we currently do not even have a signed lease for the land I hear) and the computer network is of sub-third-world status. But the main campus has shiny new buildings with construction taking place for even more -- new dorms, new parking structures -- despite the fact that the state that owns us is bankrupt.

How is it that we blithely go on with new construction projects despite facing massive budget cuts? How can we begin to afford to construct classrooms on land we don't own that we plan to introduce to the wrecking ball in a year or three? So that we can go lease even more expensive land in the midst of a budgetary downward spiral?

I should mention the good news: Engineering finally has running water, something the 5-building complex did not have for the better part of the last semester. Yupp. That's right. No hot or cold running water, no toilets, and, probably also no fire sprinklers either. I hear they went without electricity for a week as well.

And at least they presumably now have hot running water, something my building has never had, which made the Swine Flu posters in the restrooms all the more ironic as they advised people to wash their hands with warm water for 20 seconds or more. To do that, we'd have to microwave it. Given the managerial calls for cutbacks on electricity usage (such that last semester my department's office clocked in at something like 50-odd degrees), I'm betting that those microwaves are likely to become as contraband as the surreptitiously-used space heaters have become.

My mind keeps coming back to the shiny new buildings and new construction in the midst of a system that seems to be collapsing on itself. How is this even conscionable when we've got buildings without hot water, without running water, without electricity, with computer networks that would embarrass a developing nation?

We're Screwed....

We're screwed.


Let me introduce myself: I am an educator. I work in Orange County, one of the wealthiest counties in the State of California. And, regardless of how you voted this last Tuesday on the issue of whether you'd like to see a financially solvent state, I'd like to personally address two key bugaboos that WILL result in the further disintegration of a state public school system that was already in the proverbial toilet.

How often do we hear that the “real” problem with public education is that teachers unions possess massive clout, making it nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher? Given the massive numbers of good ones receiving layoff notices, I'd like to suggest that any such union clout is perhaps a gross mischaracterization of what ails public education. But, for the sake of discussion, let's grant the argument. Now – quick pop-quiz: who considerably out-earns said bad teachers and is even more difficult still to eliminate from the budget? Bad management.

Or, for that matter, any management. And, of course, the problem with management of any type is that it tends to procreate most prodigiously. Who prepares and presents financial plans to governing agencies? It's not teachers or groundskeepers or cafeteria cooks. For the sake of transparency and fairness, it'd be nice to see an employment audit of public education, from K-12 through higher ed, charting the growth in management/upper-level staff versus educator positions over the last 30 or 40 years. I'm betting there's a reason we haven't seen one already.

Management makes some incredibly dumb decisions, sorry, impositions, when it comes to creating new jobs. At my institution, for instance, it was decided we were short on funds; management decided we needed glorified fundraisers who made nearly 6 figures each and who, in the early years at least, managed only to bring in a small fraction of their own salaries, let alone costs of benefits and support staff (remember my earlier comments about management-spawning practices). Those awful public employee unions? They absolutely opposed the creation of these positions. Guess who won? (hint: it wasn't the unions). And when layoffs come to my institution, as they most assuredly will this fall, as they have semester after semester in a precipitous free-fall, guess who has zero chance of receiving a pink-slip? (hint: it's not me). So, please: yes, there are bad teachers, but we're grossly outmanned and out-maneuvered by management, bad or indifferent, but always well-paid and everlasting.

Let's move on to my next pet-peeve: Government can't be expected to trim its budget because the public foolishly thinks that there is such a thing as the “waste, fraud and abuse line-item.” I'm gonna let you in on a little secret the politicians and management don't want you to know: this beast exists; I've seen it. While the fraud and abuse line-items are well-typified by management spawning practices (see above comments), it doesn't take much introspection to find the waste line-item. You probably know it as “the technology budget.”

How many billions (yes, that's billions with a “b”) have we spent at the federal, state and local levels to put computers in K-12 classrooms that go almost entirely unused? Nearly a decade's worth of research shows that teachers don't trust technology, don't want to use technology, and, largely, ignore technology in the classroom. The only thing my children have ever used a computer for in their three years in public school was to read a story online. You know, because that's so much more cost effective and easier to maintain than a physical library with paper-based books. When considering computers in the schools, we should remember that physical libraries don't require the hiring and management of entire IT departments. They don't need e-rate money. They don't consume anywhere near the amount of electricity used by computers and computer networks. They don't become obsolete every couple of years and result in the dumping of incredibly toxic chemicals into the landfills and water tables. They don't require the purchase of operating systems or routers; they don't require retrofitting entire buildings and require much less air conditioning than does a datacenter. And, as an added benefit, humans have pretty much known how to use them for a good 500 years AND we can still read some of those 500 year old books.

Try that with a computer sometime...