Restraining Monks

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The Bible didn’t survive until the 21st century by accident. It took the commitment of thousands of monks who chose to study the scriptures over the centuries by hand-writing new copies of the manuscripts. The process was tedious and time-consuming, but for these monks it was an act of devotion. It wasn’t until Gutenberg’s printing press that the Bible could truly be distributed to the masses.

Today, monks are no longer needed to ensure the Bible’s availability, but there are scholars that continue to study the Word and find new interpretations to share with others. One of those people is Sean Boisen. In addition to maintaining his blog, Boisen takes information about the Bible from a variety of sources, analyzes it, converts it into modern, standards-compliant formats, and distributes the results at no charge on his web site, Semantic Bible. The beauty of his work is that it extracts concepts from the text and formats them in a way that computers can use to draw conclusions and find patterns.

Boisen has lofty goals, but in a blog entry he posted yesterday, he expresses his frustration with a license on an e-Bible that prevents him from developing anything based on it.

I understand his disappointment. I’ve also found that copyright has become a stumbling block rather than a means to encourage innovation. With the exception of large companies, I think many people who create find ourselves stymied when we want to share or improve on the ideas of others. It’s sad, but society in this age compartmentalizes information through laws like patents and copyrights to such an extent that improving on them is usually out of the question.

One of the underlying causes for the problem is the length of time that copyrights are valid. While copyright has a purpose, it’s been abused and lengthened far beyond what’s needed to stimulate progress – and arguably, progress has been eliminated altogether because very few copyrighted works have expired in the last 70 years. I think that it’s very disappointing that books written in the 1930’s still can’t be used freely today, and yet the ideas contained in them are being lost forever due to damage, theft, and other causes.

We are fortunate to have a plethora of English translations of the Bible that make it accessible to everybody. The publishers of these translations provide a useful service, and they should be paid, but 100 years is too long to keep a translation locked up. (I blogged my thoughts about Christian commercialism in 2003.)

The irony of all this is that the original texts these scholars worked from would probably be inaccessible today if copyright law prevented the monks from hand-copying them over hundreds of years.

Gutenberg was extremely excited about the possibility of using the printing press as a tool to enable copies of the Bible to spread:

Religious truth is captive in a small number of little manuscripts which guard the common treasures, instead of expanding them. Let us break the seal which binds these holy things…

I won’t be surprised if Gutenberg’s trend of “breaking the seal” reverses itself very soon. We’re already beginning to see lots of content, including Bibles, protected by digital restrictions management that threatens to take the bits that hold our culture and faith together as hostages.

I truly consider Sean Boisen a 21st century monk. Our society needs to loosen the chains of copyright law so he can accomplish the work he’s been called to do.

Telegrams Stop

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In a move that marked the end of an era, Western Union discontinued all of their telegram and commercial messaging services on Friday, January 27, in an effort to complete their transition to a financial services company. New telecommunications services such as telephones, fax machines, and e-mails contributed to the end of the service.

Modern telegraphy (I suppose “modern” is relative) dates back to 1844, when inventor Samuel Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought” between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. According to Western Union’s history, the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company was formed in 1851 to take advantage of Morse’s invention. The company was renamed to Western Union in 1856, and continued to develop the telegraph and other innovations well into the twentieth century.

According to the United Kingdom’s Independent,

The company said the last 10 telegrams sent included birthday wishes, condolences on the death of a loved one and the notification of an emergency. They also included messages from several people trying to be the last telegram sender.

Despite intense competition from the modern telecommunications industry, which benefited from modernized technology and ubiquitous among customers, the telegram survived throughout the 1900’s, mainly for the novelty value and as a way to send relatively inexpensive messages in real-time from the edges of civilization.

While other companies will be happy to send a telegram for you, purists are still disappointed by the loss of what many feel is the canonical telegraphy company.

STOP.

The Return of Ma Bell

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2005 was a big year for the telecommunications industry – a year in which the number of competing players got smaller. Over the past year, SBC purchased AT&T, changing AT&T’s iconic logo in the process, and Verizon acquired MCI to form Verizon Business. Wireless carriers got involved, too: Sprint purchased NEXTEL, and in October 2004, Cingular (a joint endeavor of BellSouth and SBC) completed their purchase of AT&T Wireless.

The irony about all these mergers is that the United States is only a couple of mergers away from seeing the “Ma Bell” of most of the 20th century reappear. The Justice Department settlement of 1984 broke AT&T up into eight Regional Bell Operating Companies, under the expectation that the new competition would lead to increased customer choice and cheaper phone bills. Since then, the number of players has narrowed significantly due to mergers. Today, of the eight “Baby Bells,” only one, BellSouth, has not merged back into a larger company.

Despite the mergers, we’re fortunate to have a little more choice than we originally did. In addition to a variety of smaller, more independent phone companies (including Hawai’i’s own Hawaiian Telcom), cable companies are starting to offer data and voice transmission services. Even Google is getting involved, to an extent – they are purchasing unused “dark fiber” that can connect their data centers together, possibly leading to some sort of ISP service in the future.

I hope that this game of corporation musical-chairs doesn’t end up hurting consumer choice, but I’m not optimistic. I can’t imagine a better way to make money than collecting tolls on the information superhighway.

Waileia Re-Launches

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After a nearly one-year hiatus, I’m pleased to announce that Waileia has officially re-launched. Welcome back! The world hasn’t stopped changing since my last post in February, 2005, so there’s clearly a lot of catch-up work to be done.

I’m excited to announce that after many months of debating, designing, and coding, I’ve officially switched to WordPress, an open-source weblog engine that I think will provide me with more flexibility in getting my thoughts from my brain to the world.

Unfortunately, few changes come without downsides, and this is no exception. If you’re one of the many incredibly cool people that have linked to me through a previous permalink, you’ll want to update the link to the new format. It’s not too difficult to do – just delete any zeros in front of the file name and erase the “.html” extension at the end. If you do use an old link, I’ll provide a direct link to the new location in the 404 error message. (I may decide to make this a permanent redirect, but for the moment, it’s not.) As long as you’re using a recent version of a mainstream feed reader, you’ll have no problems with the new RSS 2.0 feed – I’ve set up permanent redirects on the old feed URLs to make it easy to find.

Thanks to all of you for your support of Waileia over the years. It’s truly you that motivates me to share this journal with the world.

Power Outage Takes Wikipedia Down

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Wikipedia, a well-known service that provides an online encyclopedia anybody can edit, is down due to a power failure in their network facility. Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia as well as a number of similar services, is in the process of backing up the 170 gigabytes of data they host, and getting the servers up and running.

The power failure bears a striking resemblance to a similar outage at LiveJournal, a well-known blogging service recently acquired by Six Apart. Both interruptions have a lot in common: both are in state-of-the-art colocation facilities that provide redundant power with on-site emergency generators, and 24/7 on-site security and monitoring staff. LiveJournal is in the process of preventing future outages by purchasing smaller UPSs for their servers, in addition to the building-sized one provided by their host, Internap.

The Wikimedia failure is right in the middle of their most recent fundraising drive; you can help by donating here. All proceeds go to beefing up the servers that run the service.

Aside: Despite me shutting off my comments and trackbacks, I really do want to hear feedback from people on my posts. Please use the “feedback” link on the right side of the page. I’ll even post non-spam comments manually! :)