Science and Industry

I ended up discussing with Erika Reponen, researcher at Nokia Research Center Tampere, in Facebook around the topic of mandatory supervision fee, that the Finnish Board of Film Classification is charging from publicly available videos. Well, not from all — special cases such as research and education videos are excluded.

The story presented in Digitoday discusses this from the viewpoint of hobby filmmakers, which should according to strict interpretation pay the supervision fee, 800 euros per film in 2010. The more interesting thing is, what happens to videos I film and publish e.g. Youtube.

Youtube is a public media, meaning that publishing content there is bound with the legal framework we Finns have. My video could be something that is not excluded as a special case, meaning that I must — according to law — pay the feed. And 800 euros is a big sum for a random video in Youtube, at least for me.

Let’s jump to the next topic, from social to ubiquitous media, but let’s keep the same focus, namely videos, here. What does ubiquitous media mean in practice? Let’s start from the assumption, that cameras will be everywhere — most mobile terminals nowadays have them — and they may be connected to the Internet. Forget the Google Street view, that is tiny compared to this — we can change the world!

But, there are also some problems here. Some problems are created by social norms, things such as privacy. Google Street view caused a mess, and they do an extra effort to anonymize the pictures¹. I remember a few new year’s ago, I walked in the city of Helsinki and streamed video directly to Internet². What happens when pictures of use are pushed to the Web instantly, from the spot? Am I ready to show the whole world that I walked somewhere with someone — the recording is easy now and may become popular later.

These two cases presented above mean, that two key technological changes, the Internet and mobile technology, will change how we think of certain things³. At the same time there is both legal and social frames, that bound what is accepted, but these frames must adapt⁴ to the changes information- and communication technology have brought and will bring.

How do you feel about related topics, such as the copyright, privacy and publicity? Are those ready for 2010 and the networked society of tomorrows?

Notes: Author does not hold any degree in law and thus this discussion may not be legally solid.

1. Well, most of the issues are related to the fact that Google creates an easy to search index, not separate sources of data that need to me mashed up by the user [↩]
2. I did do an extra effort not to shoot faces to the film, as I didn’t feel that would be fair. [↩]
3. Obvious cat is obvious here. [↩]
4. Or do they? Can the frames behave in same way even when context has changed? I shall argue no, as we can see from the copyright laws, which seem to be more and more hilarious when I follow up news on those topics [↩]

I’ve been working on a Javascript exercise – well, developing JS library for other users – and finding out that I’m not so good at it. But the only way to become better is to make mistakes. There has been some discussion around mobile devices and Javascript cababilities, performance and other aspects like the famous UX — but the still the documentation could be in better shape.

What I felt nasty is lack of developer tools here. Of course I had both Firebug and Safari 4 developer tools available and they do a good job on desktop. And thus, the code worked fine on the desktop, then I tested it on N97 – still working. But on S60 3.1 – namely N95 and E90, it just crashed. If a read the document right, the Javascript core of these browsers is from early 2007, so in the age of Internet they are rather old.

Thus, I got a bit lost there and started the usual debugging strategies: removing and lines until it started to work. Firstly, I found out that the parser is rather strict on old Nokia devices – my objects had a last comma

o = {

a = ‘a’,

b = ‘b’,

}

which is invalid and thus makes the whole object invalid. So, no comma in the end. The problem for me was, that on desktop browsers it works even with that comma, which makes finding bugs a bit harder. A nice tool here is JSLint, which allows you to check the syntax validity of Javascript code. Otherwise, it’s like hide and seek.

Nokia wants to be an active part of your local society and we thus have several activities ongoing to provide support. They are called some times Nokia Helping Hands-projects. This Helping Hands thing is an umberella, that allows us to use work time to do something good.

In reality this means a wide range of activities, from cleaning the environment to supporting societies during crises. My contribution this summer was on youth education, giving a nice experience for kids in elementary school. Well, as I’m not so imaginative person, I choose a topic close to me: programming. I didn’t have the guts to show Java, Python or some web technologies, so the choice was Scratch.

Scratch seemed to be easy to learn (and teach) and what’s most important, kids loved it! Some of them even said they might continue learning it at their home… So, a successful event — that pushed me to think these things once again, maybe I should try to contribute more in this field.