Julianna Yau’s blog

While waiting for my XO laptop to be shipped, I’ve been reading the posts at the OLPC News Forum. I’ve finally had my fill of unboxing pics, and started focusing on all of the support questions about the laptop’s actual functionality.

One user on the forum posted a very thorough review of the XO laptop, profiled the issue of Write being unable to save documents in the .doc and .odt format properly. Some more searching resulted in little information about a replacement program which would handle either of those formats (or even .rtf). This caused me to have some second thoughts about whether I really wanted to keep the laptop, or try to resell it on eBay and get an Asus eee instead. I was (and still am) fully willing to accept the trade-off of a larger device for the geek-chicness of the XO laptop. But the laptop would have been useless if I couldn’t transport any of the documents to another computer. Although something like Google Docs is theoretically an alternative, it’s useless if I can’t get access to a reliable internet connection (which is often the case when I’m travelling, even to a big city like Toronto).

After agonizing over the issue and tracking some of the auctions on eBay for the XO laptop, I decided to ask the other users if they have tried to open the Write documents in Abiword (Write is a derivative of Abiword). I’m so glad I did that, because I was directed to the problem ticket for that issue, which is supposed to be resolved in the next update for Sugar. A quick survey of the tickets for Write showed that the OLPC development team has been very responsive to all of the issues.

It’s good to know that the developers are working so diligently on future releases of Sugar. The shipping problems were a little scary, but seeing the progress of the software is entirely reassuring.

I’m going to skip over discussing how financial remuneration fits into the copyright picture for now, because I’d like to keep working on some basic categorization.

So I guess that brings us to copyright law. I’m not even sure if I’m ready to break down this part of the copyright picture, but here goes…

Copyright law is a set of legislated rights extended to creators and producers/disseminators.

Some challenges we’re facing with the Copyright Act:

• the Copyright Act is convoluted
• we’re loosing sight of who and what the Act is supposed to be protecting and supporting
• due to changes/advancements in technology and how people create and interact with creative works, the stakeholders in copyright are shifting (users, for example, have a larger interest and are impacted more by copyright now than ever before)
• copyright reform has been long overdue and the stakeholders keep pushing harder for their changes with every passing day, for fear of being overlooked
• what’s in the Act itself is being challenged conceptually due to changing views on the relationship between copyright, creation and the flow of money

Overall, I would say at this point that the challenges we’re seeing with the Copyright Act are symptoms of a larger problem with copyright and other creators’ rights…and not the problem itself. Changing the Act at this point will likely cause more problems than its worth, because the real problems are not being addressed.

So what are the real problems? I’m hoping to clear the fog around that through this exercise.