In this recording of the October 13, 2020 EFF-Austin meeting, Ritika Gopal discusses the current state of copyright law, and its ability to address modern-day forms of artistic expression.

In a time when brick-and-mortar venues are closed, consumers rely on digital platforms for entertainment, communication, and human connection. Streamed content from DJs and other artists, through platforms such as Twitch and Facebook, play an increasing role in our consumption of media.

Can the current copyright regime address the collage art forms of the internet era — e.g., mixes, mashups and memes? Should it?

Ritika Gopal is an in-house lawyer at WP Engine. She specializes in transactional, IP, and privacy law. Her past work experience includes stints at the Wikimedia Foundation, The Walt Disney Company, and most recently, SXSW.

She is deeply fascinated by the uncharted growth of copyright, IP, privacy, and free speech law in the context of emerging technologies and online communication. She’s also interested in budding tech policy issues — particularly those stemming from the democratization of knowledge and open access to information. Outside of tech-law, Ritika enjoys disco/funk music, film photography, and diving into spicy ramen on a chilly night.

The post Ritika Gopal: Copyright Law and the Internet first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Photo: Jordan Reznick

Sandy Stone is a cultural theoretician, audio engineer, computer hacker, filmmaker and performance artist; founding director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) at the University of Texas at Austin; Fellow of the University of California Humanities Research Institute; a founder of the academic discipline of Transgender Studies; and recipient of the State of California Lifetime Achievement Award. She has been interviewed in various publications and films such as ArtForum, Wired, Mondo, Gendernauts, etc. Jon Lebkowsky has described her as “a force of nature.”

On becoming an academic: “I had a vision in which I saw my life pass before me like a circus train, and each car was painted as a different career that I’d had in my life. And they went by – you know, the computer person, the performance person – all of those things, the recording engineer, the fiction writer, on and on. And when the caboose went by, there was a clown, standing on a little platform on the back of the caboose with a red nose, and as that went by, the clown waved at me, and I waved back, and I said ‘Bye-bye, bye-bye’ to my previous life. This is my new life now. And the train went off into the distance, and disappeared. And I was an academic. That was my moment. And I never looked back.”

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Robert Matney is Managing Director of Government Affairs at Yonder. Yonder was originally called New Knowledge, and was known for its role in developing the authoritative report on Russian influence operations targeting US elections from 2015 forward for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). The report leveraged data from Alphabet (Google), Twitter, and Facebook.

In his role at Yonder, Robert has become a thought leader in disinformation analysis, online authenticity, and the influence mechanics of the internet. Robert has also worked as a social media analyst and practitioner, web developer, actor (stage, voice), theater director.

We asked Robert to speak with us following the January 6 siege on the US Capitol. In his role at Yonder, Robert had been keenly aware of social media disinformation and planning prior to the siege.

We operate within what is often called information warfare. And we’re in it whether we want to be in it or not. And the only way we can do something positive about it is to become aware of it. Just become aware that there is a complex set of dynamics within which we operate which are largely opaque that are intended to divide us against ourselves, and some of the problem is international, sure, but lots of it is domestic. And if we don’t start acting like vigilant information consumers, and always seek a path that is less fragmenting, then we’re going to be in a lot more trouble than we’re already in, and we’re already in a lot of trouble. The best we can do at this point is kind of earn the right to fight the next battle, and the stakes are high.

Photo: Nick Youngson

The post Robert Matney: Disinformation and Insurrection first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

In this episode, we discuss complexity, post-Covid foresight, climate change, and building capabilities to evolve and survive with Zaid Hassan. Zaid is a strategist, facilitator, social innovator and writer. He is the co-founder of several ventures, most recently 10-in-10 and Complexity University.

Zaid has 20 years of experience tackling complex social challenges, working all over the world. His experiences range from working in rural India on reducing acute child malnutrition to tackling racism, violence and youth unemployment in inner city Chicago.

He has helped pioneer a new approach to tackling complexity involving people learning how to tackle their own challenges in partnership with experts.

He is best known for his work building a practice for effective response to complex social challenges. He’s currently working on Complexity University and specifically the Gigatonne Challenge, a bold bottom-up, at-pace and at-scale response to the climate crisis.

He has supported and advised many organizations over the years including the World Bank. the UN, the Climate Action Network, WWF, Oxfam, as well as several governments. Zaid regularly teaches, guest lecturing at universities across the world including the New School in New York, the University of Bergen in Norway and the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Social Labs Revolution: A New Approach to Solving Our Most Complex Challenges, as well as numerous published essays and papers. He lives in Oxford.

Links:

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Justin Hall has a two decade history pushing the limits of networked media. His website Justin’s Links from the Underground launched in 1994. The site grew to thousands of hand-coded pages. The New York Times referred to Justin as “perhaps the founding father of personal weblogging,” and he was the focus of the Doug Block documentary “Home Page.” He’s worked on web and game projects. As a journalist he’s written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, South China Morning Post and other leading international publications.

Find Justin:

Featured photo by Jon Lebkowsky (2006)

In 2015 Justin made a documentary about himself making a web page about his life, it’s called “overshare: the links.net story.” He’s currently cofounder of bud.com, a business that facilitates access to and delivery of legal cannabis.

Here’s “overshare”:

Stream audio of our interview with Justin, below:

The post Justin Hall: Links and Buds first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Dr. Sharon Strover discusses how disinformation has mushroomed in the U.S. around a variety of subjects and from a variety of sources. Her research group at TIPI has looked over some of the Russian-placed social media disinformation and investigated the possible tactics behind it. They have analyzed why some people in the U.S. responded to propaganda messages, and how the press has dealt with those same messages. She shares those results and more in this talk at EFF-Austin’s monthly meeting on December 8, 2020.

Sharon is the Philip G. Warner Regents Professor in Communication and former Chair of the Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas, where she teaches communications and technology courses and directs the Technology and Information Policy Institute. Some of her current research projects examine local and statewide networks and broadband services; the relationship between economic outcomes and the Internet; misinformation; the digital divide; and rural broadband deployment.

Dr. Strover has worked with several international, national and regional government agencies on telecommunications policy matters, including the U.S. Department of Agricultureís Rural Utilities Service, U.S. Federal Communication Commission, the government of Portugal, the Center for Rural Strategies, the European Union, The Appalachian Regional Commission, the Office of Technology Assessment, the Rural Policy Institute, the Ford Foundation, the European Union, the Texas Public Utility Commission, the Department of Information Resources and Department of Health and Human Services, and the Aspen Institute. She has published several articles and chapters on subjects related to technology and telecommunications, and has been the editor or co-editor of three books, edited journal issues for The Information Society and Government Information Quarterly, and serves on the editorial boards of several major publications. She is currently working on a book addressing economic development and the spatial distribution of telecommunications resources.

The post Sharon Strover: Online Disinformation first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Alexandra Alvarez, also known as Alex, found she has a talent for finding talent. She’s from Austin originally, but she currently lives in Los Angeles and works as a casting coordinator for Walt Disney Studios and 20th Century Fox. She’s also an independent casting director for CBS television. Her previous work includes extras casting and both studio and post production. In her Plutopia interview, Alex discusses how she realized her movie buff’s dream of working in the film business. We also get a glimpse inside the process of casting films and television.

Alex thinks the most important things about casting are having an open mind, and considering all races, ages, and types of people even for roles that are predominately stereotyped. Breaking stereotypes in the industry is really important, as is exercising nontraditional ways of finding new talent. She says some of the most talented people can be found on social media. She and her colleagues recently found a very talented set of twins on Tik Tok and Instagram that had exactly what they needed. They didn’t have an agent or a manager, which in the past would have been a pre-requisite for being “discovered.”

Alex on Instagram

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“We live in a paradox in which digital tech alleviates social isolation in some ways even as it worsens it in others. It may be fashioning wholly new brain pathways for good or ill in ways we neither notice nor can predict. While we are technically more connected to one another than ever before, we bond on media platforms engineered to make outrage and indignation infectious. They exploit the psychological principle that emotion, like yawning, is highly contagious.” ~ Richard Cytowic, “Digital Distractions: Energy Drain and Your Brain on Screens”

Plutopia’s Maggie Duval interviews Richard Cytowic. Richard is best known for having rediscovered synesthesia — the automatic cross–coupling of the senses — and returning it to mainstream science after decades of obscurity. His work bridges the gap between art and science. His book Wednesday Is Indigo Blue received the Montaigne Medal and is a book Oliver Sacks called “a unique and indispensable guide for anyone interested in how we perceive the world.” Dr. Cytowic is Professor of Neurology at George Washington University in Washington DC. This Plutopia interview is a fascinating discussion of the brain, including the impact of contemporary communications technologies on thinking, perception and attention.

Other Resources:

Other books:

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Joe Nick Patoski has been writing about Texas and Texans for 40 years. He’s written about Texas music, and hosts the weekly Texas Music Hour of Power on Saturday nights. In this episode of the Plutopia podcast, we talk about the Fort Worth 60s-70s blues scene and his latest book, The Ballad of Robert Ealey and his Five Careless Lovers, an oral history of Fort Worth blues in the 70s.

Joe Nick has authored and co-authored biographies of Willie Nelson, Selena, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and the Dallas Cowboys, and collaborated with photographer Laurence Parent on books about the Texas Mountains, the Texas Coast, and Big Bend National Park. He wrote essays for the 2015 book Homegrown: Austin Music Posters, 1968-1982 and Conjunto by John Dyer with Juan Tejeda. He has covered conservation in the book Generations on the Land: A Conservation Legacy and the state religion of Texas in the book Texas High High School Football: More Than the Game.

Patoski’s byline has appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic, the Texas Observer, Oxford American, TimeOut New York, Garden and Gun, and No Depression magazine, for whom he was a contributing editor. He recorded the oral histories of B.B. King, Clarence Fountain of the Blind Boys of Alabama, Memphis musician and producer Jim Dickinson, Tejano superstar Little Joe Hernandez, and 15 other subjects for the Voice of Civil Rights oral history project sponsored by AARP and the Library of Congress, some of which appeared in the book My Soul Looks Back in Wonder by Juan Williams.

In 2015, Patoski directed his first film, the music documentary Sir Doug & The Genuine Texas Cosmic Groove, which premiered at the South By Southwest Film Festival.

He hosts the Texas Music Hour of Power, broadcast on KRTS FM Marfa www.marfapublicradio.org Saturdays 7 – 9 pm central, and lives near the Texas Hill Country village of Wimberley where he swims and paddles in the Blanco River.

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Participatory Medicine is a movement in which networked patients shift from being mere passengers to responsible drivers of their health, and in which providers encourage and value them as full partners.

In 2006 Tom Ferguson, MD asked Plutopia’s Jon Lebkowsky to attend a retreat with a group of physicians and others. This group, referred to as the e-Patient Scholars Working Group, had been working with him on a white paper, published in 2007 as “e-Patients: how they can help us heal healthcare.” Tom died not long after that retreat, and Jon continued to meet with that group. They went on to found the Journal of Participatory Medicine and the Society for Participatory Medicine. The group continued to meet regularly over the years, and to stay in touch via an email list. Plutopia News Network invited several members of the group to introduce themselves and talk about how they became involved with participatory medicine. We also talked about participatory medicine in the era of Covid-19.

Society for Participatory Medicine Founder’s Circle

Photo by Jon Lebkowsky: Tom Ferguson with Danny Sands at a the 2006 retreat and meeting of the e-Patients Scholar Working Group.

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