Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed when the car she was driving exploded in Bidnija around 15.00 on 16 October in what is thought to have been a  targeted attack..

“The barbaric murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia is an attack on journalism itself. This crime is meant to intimidate every investigative journalist,” Dr Lutz Kinkel, Managing Director of the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, said.

“Because Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and parts of Malta’s political elite were targets of Galizia’s disclosures, we strongly recommend an independent investigation of this case. The killers have to be found and put on trial.”

Investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia,killed by a car bomb on October 16 2017 (photo: daphnecaruanagalizia.com)

The blast left her vehicle in several pieces and threw debris into a nearby field. Half an hour before the powerful explosion, the journalist posted a comment about a libel claim the prime minister’s chief of staff had brought against a former opposition leader over comments the latter made about corruption.

Galizia filed a police report 16 days ago saying she was being threatened.

Galizia had conducted a series of high profile corruption investigations and has been subject to dozens of libel suits and harassment. Because of her research, in February, assets were frozen following a request filed by Economic Minister Chris Cardona and his EU presidency policy officer Joseph Gerada.

On 24 August opposition leader Adrian Delia filed a lawsuit against her over stories linking him to offshore accounts totalling to £1 million earned from alleged prostitution in London flats. On 11 March Silvio Debono, owner of the real estate investment company DB Group, filed 19 libel cases against her after Caruana Galizia published a number of articles about his deals with the Maltese government to take over a large tract of high value public land.

Galizia also conducted an investigation linking the Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and his wife Michelle to secret offshore bank accounts to allegedly hide payments from Azerbaijan’s ruling family, which were unveiled in the Panama Papers. She worked on this investigation with her son Matthew Caruana Galizia, a journalist for the Pulitzer prize winning International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who has had his posts on allegations of wrongdoing by Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and his associates censored on Facebook.

On 17 October 2017, her family filed an urgent application for the Duty Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera to abstain from investigating Caruana Galizia’s murder because of the court’s “flagrant conflict of interest”. In 2011, the magistrate initiated court proceedings against the journalist over comments she had made about Magistrate Herrera.

Seven reports of violations of press freedom were verified in Malta in 2017, according to Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project. Five of those are linked to Caruana Galizia and her family.

The murder has brought widespread condemnation from the international community including statements from Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland and OSCE’s Media Freedom Representative Harlem Désir.

We, the undersigned press freedom organisations call for:

• An independent and transparent investigation into the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia
• Protection for her family members and for other Maltese journalists who have been under threat
• Measures to protect the environment for independent and critical journalism to ensure that reporters can work freely

———————————————————————

Article 19 

The Association of European Journalists (AEJ)  

The Center for Investigative Reporting 

Committee to Protect Journalists 

The European Centre for Press and Media Freedom

The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) 

Freedom of the Press Foundation

Index on Censorship 

International News Safety Institute (INSI) 

International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) 

International Press Institute (IPI) 

Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa (OBCT) 

Ossigeno per I’nformazione 

Platform of Independent Journalism (P24) 

Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) 

South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO) 

Your instinct is to go where the most of the crowd alighting from the train goes. Success! But, does this truth discovery strategy always works? We seem to be very fond of it, not only at train stations, but also when we chose governments.

Democracy comes from the greek word Demokratia meaning “rule of the commoners”. Implicitly we equate democracy with fairness and justice, as we interpret the “rule of the commoners” to be the most common individual choice. This idea, that what is commonly held to be true is most likely to be true, is not scientifically unfounded, but terms and conditions apply.

Should you look for the truth by seeing what are the commonly shared links to articles reporting judgements on the implications of an event among your Facebook friends? We might be able to find the answer in a small but influential work known as the Condorcet’s Jury Theorem.

Condorcet’s jury theorem, terms and conditions

Marquis de Condorcet was a French philosopher and mathematician of the late 18th century who worked in political science. He was a contemporary and friend of Leonhard Euler and Benjamin Franklin, an abolitionist, early defender of human rights and equal rights for women and people of colour. Condorcet is one of the first people to apply mathematics in social sciences. He is best known from his work related to majority voting. Majority voting, or the majority rule is a collective decision method that selects the choice that has the majority of votes. Although intuitively simple, in the presence of more than two choices, or an even number of voters, it can be operationalized by different mathematical functions. Condorcet’s Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions yielded two results that we are still discussion and using today — the Condorcet majority voting method and the Condorcet Jury Theorem.

A filter bubble: the state created for a web user when a personalised search algorithm guesses which information the user would like to see. (Image: Håvard Legreid/Vox Publica)

In his Jury Theorem, Condorcet identifies how good majority voting is at discovering the true answer to a yes-or-no question. Let us say there is an unknown fact about the world, such as for example whether the weather will be nice tomorrow, or is there intelligent life in the universe outside of the Solar System. The truth of these facts exist, but it is not available to us, or it is not available to us at present, for various reasons. Condorcet proved that if we were to ask sufficiently many people for an answer of a binary question, to make a judgement on yes the weather will be nice tomorrow, or no, it will not be nice, then the answer given by the majority of the people has the highest probability of being the true answer. Further, the more people we ask, the higher the probability that the majority will “find” the truth. However, it is only under certain conditions that this theorem holds and these are rather strict conditions.

The first, implicit condition is that we are looking to establish the truth about one question, not several questions at the same time that might relate to each other. The second, rather obvious condition is that our question should be such, called value judgement in the literature (see Rabinowicz 2016), that it admits a true answer exists. Not all questions admit value judgements as answers; some are questions of preference. When you and I consider whether we would like to eat salad or pasta for dinner, that is a question of preference. I may prefer the salad, while you prefer the pasta and none of us is wrong. If, however, we were discussing which of these dishes is better for our health, then we would be making a value judgement. If I believe salad is better health-wise, and you believe pasta is better, then one of us must be wrong. There is no logical inconsistency in knowing that salad is better for my health but still preferring to eat pasta. Since there is no truth when considering preferences, no truth can be found.

Nicolas de Condorcet (1743–94) can still teach us important things. The portrait hangs in Versailles palace. (photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The third condition necessary for the Condorcet’s theorem to hold is that the sources of the value judgements must be experts. Fortunately, the definition of what constitutes an expert is rather loose in mathematics and economy. An expert is defined to be a person who can guess better than a coin toss, or formally, an expert is a person who has higher than 50% probability of giving the correct answer to a yes-or-no question. This means that if I am trying to decide whether to go left or right, and toss a coin one hundred times, even if 80 of those tosses end up saying to go left, going left is not guaranteed to be the right decision. In this case, when the reliability of the sources is less than 50%, rather than taking the majority decision, it is better to pick randomly one of the sources and hear their decision.

The fourth, and most strict condition for applying Condorcet’s jury theorem is that of statistical independence among the sources. Two sources are statistically independent if the binary (yes or no) answer from one of the sources does not affect the probability with which the second source would answer yes (or no) to the same question. Intuitively, independence requires that the sources do not confer with each other, are not swayed by some influential opinion leader, do not have the same or similar experience or training and do not share common information (see Ladha 1995).

The condition of source independence is very strict, but it was satisfied by the crowd of people alighting from the train with you. The people in this crowd were virtual strangers to each other and did not coordinate when making their decision. They also have independently learned where the exit is, by taking that train often, or having spotted an exit sign which you have not. The train crowd thus effectively behaves as independent sources of information. They are also experts, at least most of them, knowing where the exit is.

Social media and the independence of input

When it comes to your Facebook friends sharing links to articles, the independence condition is by design not satisfied.

Quite obviously your friends are people who influence each other’s opinions by virtue of being in a social network with each-other. These are often also people that share similar experiences and background. These correlations necessarily exist between their judgements and influence how opinions and views are formed among friends. This is something to which we as a society are slowly becoming aware.

The concept that slowly permeates our e‑lives is filter bubble.

A filter bubble is the state created for a web user when a personalised search algorithm guesses which information the user would like to see. As a result the user becomes separated from information that does not support her or his viewpoint. Filter bubbles can cause a user to be unaware even of widespread relevant information.

Perhaps if you should not look to your friends for the truth, you can look to strangers on the Internet. Whether the digital crowd of strangers will point to the truth depends on how they discover new content which they can later share, like or abhor.

To be sure that the majority of considered judgements point you towards the truth, you must make sure their sources do not talk to each other and take their information from different independent sources. Let us assume that news reported on the web truly are original articles rather than opinions and summaries of a handful of news reports.

The tools that preselect your Web

The Internet has accomplished an unprecedented connectivity among people. It has also given voice and opportunity to be heard and seen to many. In that sea of infinite content choice which we cannot cognitively process as a whole, how do we find what we would most likely want to consume? This is done by recommender systems.

A recommender system is software that predicts how likely it is that an item is the item you are looking for. Depending on the context where it is deployed, this means how adequate the query response is to answer your question or how likely you are to like a new product, content or service. Recommender systems are a very important tool for content discovery and, among else, the reason why we today have highly efficient search engines.

One of the first and most famous recommender systems is PageRank. PageRank is an algorithm used by the Google search engine to rank the query responses in order of relevance. It is named by Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. PageRank determines the importance of a website by counting how many websites link to it. The underlying assumption is that the more relevant a web-page is, the more web-pages link to it. The intuition behind this assumption actually comes from academia: the most relevant articles in a scientific discipline are those that have the most citations.

PageRank is an algorithm designed specifically for ranking web-pages with respect to relevance. For predicting how much you would like an item unknown to you, typically the methods of collaborative filtering are used. To decide whether you will be interested in an item, two types of information are taken into consideration. The first is, how much did you like similar items, and the second is how much customers most similar to you liked the item in question. The assumption here is that you are most likely to like what your friends and peers like.

Recommender systems and majority voting

What is perhaps not so obvious is that recommender systems, in particular PageRank and collaborative filtering have at its core majority-voting. Perhaps we overlook this because we think of voting as the once-in-four-years serious affair when we go to the polls and elect government. On the Internet we “vote” constantly by constantly choosing one from a selection of alternatives: the most promising link to give us what we are looking for, the cutest video, the most intriguing news article. But that top of the list of choices that are offered to us and we actually choose from is also determined by the choices of the strangers that are most like us on the Internet. The independent “vote” is not a reality on-line. But is this a problem for finding the truth?

Illustration: Moshanin/Wikimedia Commonscba

Example of the collaborative filtering process.

The independence condition of Condorcet’s jury theorem is very strong and difficult to satisfy in practice even off-line. Krishna Ladha, among others, explored how much correlation there can exist between voters before Condorcet’s theorem stops holding. His conclusion is that the effectiveness of majority-rule voting decreases as the correlation between voters increase. This means that the more your friends are like you, the less their aggregated judgements would be likely to point to the truth. Ladha also shows that the probability that the majority of correlated votes is the truth depends on the number of votes. Large groups are relatively robust and tolerate higher correlation coefficient averages. This means that the more history, experiences and information sources you share with your friends, the larger group of friends you need in order for their majority supported judgement to point towards the truth. The majority in a small groups of very close friends is probabilistically unlikely to find the true answer to a binary question.

Luckily there are many strangers on the Internet. This is the observation that Masterton, Olsson and Angere make. They saw the shadows of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem in PageRank: the probability that a web-page is relevant increases with the number of “votes” it receives from other web-pages. Masterton, Olsson and Angere explored how good is PageRank at finding the true answer to a query? Their answer: pretty good. More precisely, they show that PageRank has epistemological justification for link-based ranking on the web. Of course, their empirical analysis makes certain assumptions on the independence of web-pages.

How collaborative filtering contributes towards transforming the choices of the majority into the truth is an unexplored question, but one we must take seriously. Majority-voting is a very intuitive and simple way to implement democracy and it is at the core of many election procedures in the world. If a group preference is needed, the preference of the majority ensures that as few people as possible are unhappy with the group’s choice. Condorcet gave further legitimacy to majority-voting by showing that it is also good at pointing to the truth, something that we are intuitively aware of when finding ourselves on train platforms in new cities. But there are limits to the the truth-tracking powers of the majority-vote and this is also something we must be aware of.

On-line, as in real life, our instincts are to trust the views of the many, but are the many views we see truly different? Perhaps they are just carefully selected by an algorithm to reflect what the algorithm calculated that we want to see. Knowing this, perhaps we can take a helping hint from the jury theorems, the work of Condorcet and others that followed, and do better.

Literature

Włodek Rabinowicz (2016). Aggregation of Value Judgments Differs from Aggregation of Preferences. 10.1163/9789004312654_003

Krishna K. Ladha (1995). Information pooling through majority-rule voting: Condorcet’s jury theorem with correlated votes. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0167–2681(94)00068‑P

George Masterton, Erik J. Olsson and Staffan Angere (2016). Linking as voting: how the Condorcet jury theorem in political science is relevant to webometrics. Doi:10.1007/s11192-016‑1837‑1

Franz Dietrich and Kai Spiekermann (2016). Jury theorems. Working paper.

We can write about the social preconditions for this law, we can tell about the consequences, and we can talk about what it means to be a homosexual in Russia. However, words cannot give us quite the same sense of the issue – of what it is like to be a homosexual or a homophobic in Russia – that photographs can.

This is evident from the winner of World Press Photo of the Year 2014 above. This picture, “Jon and Alex”, taken by the Danish photographer Mads Nissen, shows two young Russian homosexuals at Alex’ home in Saint Petersburg. They have been making love. Nissen has caught a tender, intimate moment of affection and desire. The picture has a rare quality of being out of time and space. It gives us no sign of where or when it is taken. There are no visible clothes, no phones, no furnishing – nothing but the young naked bodies in front of the heavy drapes in the background. The colours are dark; the bottom completely black, the background obscure and golden brown. there is only darkness except for the light on the faces and upper bodies of the two men.

The spiritual sense of eternity and indeterminacy is supported by the man lying down. We know that he is alive, but he looks almost dead or in solemn ecstasy. The picture draws upon a dominant motif in the history of sculpture and painting: Christ lying in the arms of Maria in Michelangelo’s Pietá (1498–99) or Caravaggio’s Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy (1595).

Even though Nissen’s picture is about love and affection – at least on the surface of it – the feelings and the pain depicted in such historic representations, offer a way of understanding the pain that surrounds a sheltered moment of love in Saint Petersburg. This understanding gains further emotional power when seen in context with Nissen’s other photographs in his series “Homophobia in Russia”, which document the harassment and violence towards gays in Russia. The pain seemingly absent in “Alex and Jon” is lurking underneath.

Like many of Caravaggio’s baroque paintings, Nissen’s photograph of “Jon and Alex” is a creation of darkness made significant by a few areas of light, in which we can project our own sentiments and ideas. Interestingly, even though the colours are brighter, we see Caravaggio represented in a similar way in director Derek Jarman’s fictionalised re-telling of the painter’s life; in this film still showing Caravaggio lying ill in his bed.

In many ways, Nissen’s picture also has the quality of a film still tableau. The photograph is not a news shot, it is not a picture of an important event, it is not even a picture of a public event.

Through the history of the winners of World Press Photo, the most common trait has been depiction of war and violence, suffering and conflict. Generally the pictures are from areas outside Western Europe and the USA. Historically, most have been news photos shot in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Recently, more winners have been pictures from the Middle East. (I elaborate in the paper: Formulas of Prize-Winning Press Photos.)

The picture of “Jon and Alex” seems to be from nowhere – or everywhere. It is a private moment, not a public event. It is tender and loving, not violent and painful. If it’s different from the traditional winners over the years that way, however, it seems to also be part of an emerging trend among the winning photographs of recent years: a cinematic aesthetics that combines artistic compositions with invitation to storytelling.

Compare, for instance to the 2007-winner by Tim Hetherington showing a US soldier sinking onto an embankment in a bunker in Afghanistan. As in Nissens’ picture the colours and lines are not bright, crisp or clear, but rather dark, indistinct and almost blurred. Here as well the brightest point is the face of a human being.

Even though Hetherington’s picture reports on a very public event, a war, it nevertheless seems to present a private moment of an individual.

The same retreat to an intimate privacy can been seen in Samuel Aranda’s World Press Photo of the Year 2011 (submitted to the “People in the news” category). This winning picture shows a mother, Fatima al-Qaws, cradling her son Zayed (18), who is suffering from the effects of tear gas after participating in a street demonstration in Sanaa, Yemen. The photograph does not show the violent public actions we normally see in news shots; instead it presents us with the repercussions of such events for the private, personal life of individuals. It shows us the love between two people.

The picture is not as dark as Nissens’ photo, but it shares the aesthetics of the earthtone colours and the feature-like quality.

We see a parallel story-telling tendency in the Photo of the Year 2013 by John Stanmeyer. This picture depicts African migrants on the shore of Djibouti City at night raise their phones in an attempt to catch an inexpensive signal from neighbouring Somalia.

Like many of the recent winners, this could have been a film still, and like Nissen’s picture, Stanmeyer’s photo was entered for the “Contemporary Issues” category, not for the “Spot News” competition. More than reporting news, these images deal with a general issue: offering a visual interpretation of a human condition.

One can’t help speculate whether this apparent tendency to a move from spot news photos to more feature-like images might be connected to the fact that cell phones and modern photo equipment makes everyone a news photographer these days. We can all capture a moment with a camera – even in crisp, clear focus. However, exploring a subject visually, telling a story photographically, interpreting a human condition through images, is more difficult. Not many of us have the ability consciously, or even instinctively, to create photographs that allude to the masterpieces of painting, carrying on and extending their exploration of what it means to be a human being. Fortunately, we still have professional photographers with this ability.

Photo credits

photo 1: Mads Nissen
caption: Jon, 21, and Alex, 25, a gay couple, during an intimate moment. Life for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) people is becoming increasingly difficult in Russia. Sexual minorities face legal and social discrimination, harassment, and even violent hate-crime attacks from conservative religious and nationalistic groups, 2014.

photo 2: Tim Hetherington
caption: A soldier of Second Platoon, Battle Company of the Second Battalion of the US 503rd Infantry Regiment sinks onto an embankment in the Restrepo bunker at the end of the day. The Korengal Valley was the epicenter of the US fight against militant Islam in Afghanistan and the scene of some of the deadliest combat in the region, 2007.

photo 3: Samuel Arranda
caption: Fatima al-Qaws cradles her son Zayed (18), who is suffering from the effects of tear gas after participating in a street demonstration, in Sanaa, Yemen, 2010.

photo 4: John Stanmeyer
caption: African migrants on the shore of Djibouti City at night raise their phones in an attempt to catch an inexpensive signal from neighboring Somalia—a tenuous link to relatives abroad, 2013.

In 2009 former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Matt Latimer, wrote at piece in Washington Post urging Barack Obama to eliminate his own profession. “Mr. President”, he wrote,

fire the speechwriters; it might be the only way to save the presidency.

Latimer argued that “The age of the Internet and cable news has opened the world to an onslaught of ideas, opinions and information”, that is “stripping away the grandeur – and power – of the highest office in the land.”
Speechwriters, he claimed

have become enablers, manning an assembly line of recycled bullet points so presidents can serve as the nation’s pep-talk-givers, instant reactors, [and] TV friends.

Is that who you are? Assembly line workers producing recycled bullet points?

I don’t think so. On the contrary I have the utmost respect for the work you do. And I am very happy indeed that Brian [Jenner] has invited me to speak to you today. To be honest, when I got to know Brian online, whom I meet in person for the first time yesterday, I secretly hoped that he would one day invite me to this conference. He did, and I am truly thankful and honored to be here.

As a researcher and teacher of rhetoric I strive to make people better at understanding communication and more adept in communicating persuasively. I believe that I – and you – have an obligation to do so. I am not a speechwriter, but I have done speechwriting, I have coached CEOs, politicians, and professors; organized speechwriting courses for departments, ministries and parties. So, I have a sense of the challenges you are facing.

Is speech-making cost-effective?

And like you, I believe that speechmaking has a rhetorical power that is unequal to any other kind of communication. Still, I also think that Latimer may have a point: many leaders, especially political leaders, probably do too many speeches. There are plenty of reasons not to spend time on speechmaking – or to do a speech at all.

Many CEOs tell me that they do not want to do a speech; they just want to get the job done, instead of using valuable time and resources talking. Apparently they do not consider speechmaking a cost-effective activity. It is much easier, they think, to distribute information online, do a short video, send an email, or participate in an interview. Why prepare a formal speech, if you can just do an informal meeting?

The time of speechmaking is not over

If we are to save speechmaking – and our jobs – we should think more about why people do speeches at all – and why other people listen to them. What separates speeches from other forms of communication? What is the unique selling point of a speech? What role should speech-making have in the age of Internet and cable news? We should start by discarding the notion that the time of speechmaking is over. It is not.

Take the British journalist and member of the European Parliament, Daniel Hannan. When he woke up on March 25, 2009, his phone was clogged with texts, his email inbox with messages. The day before, he had delivered a three minute speech in the European parliament, calling Gordon Brown, “the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government”. Now a YouTube clip of his short remarks had attracted over 36,000 hits. It was the most watched video in Britain that day, and today almost three million people have watched his speech.

Hannan is not the only speaker experiencing his speech goes viral. Who can forget the eloquent attack that Australia’s former Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, launched on her opponent Tony Abbott, accusing him for double standards, sexism, and misogyny. Today 2.5 million people have seen this speech on Youtube.

New media is not a threat to speechmaking. It is a possibility. Internet and video are potential vehicles for the words we write. New forms of communication will never displace the good speech. Think about Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, which are probably the most advanced and technological campaigns ever carried out. The use of social media, big data, and IT-technology was unequalled to any other campaign in history.

There is no doubt that new technology helped him become president. But without the oldest technology in communication, speech making, he would never have become president. And think about the Arab spring or Occupy Wall Street. These events, many argue, could not have happened without social media as a tool for disseminating information and organizing action.

It is true that new media are excellent in creating and gathering a crowd. But, what then, do we do when we have a crowd? What did the thousands of people gathered in Zucotti Park in New York do? What did the massive crowd in Tahir Square in Cairo do? They looked for a speaker.

Every crowd needs a speaker. Because that is how we create unity and gain purpose and direction. We do it the way humans have done it for centuries: we give speeches.

A speech is an event

So, speeches still have an important place in our time, and we should all be aware why this is the case. Why do people listen to speeches? What is it that speeches do better than social media, interviews or meetings? The first and most basic thing to remember is that even though you write speeches, and many people read speeches; speeches are not texts.

A speech is an event. It is a physical meeting where one person has undisputed access to many people’s attention. Being in the same place not only makes it possible for the speaker to influence the audience, it also makes it possible to let the audience influence each other.

In a sense the media put an end to mass communication. Listeners and the viewers of broadcasting or online communication are not a mass; they are not part of a group or a crowd.

Generally they sit alone or just a few people at home – often rather inattentive. But with a speech we can make everybody in a crowd react in the same way, at the same time. We can unite them in a community.

Speakers create community

No other form of communication can create community and unity the way a speech can. Whereas media audiences are normally at home or at work, scattered in different parts of the company, the city, or even the country; a speaker’s audience is physically present as a group in front of him.

Just by being together in the same place this audience is already united as an established “we”. A leader can send out a report, an email, or any kind of text. But it does not allow him to look the audience in the eyes. Of course the leader can make a video; he can look in the camera and address the viewers as “we”. But it is very hard to make an audience truly feel as a “we” – as a community, when you are physically separated from them, and they are separated from each other. Leadership is bringing people together: emotionally, mentally – physically.

Think of us here and now. Even though I work in academia and you are speechwriters, even though we are different; you cannot but accept it, when I say “us” and “we”; simply because we are actually here, together, in the same room. We are, per definition, a group. And we are all here because we want to feel that we are part of a group. We are here because want the experience of being part of a community.

Now, some of you might think: well I am here to learn more about speechwriting, I am here to get new ideas and information. Are you sure? If you do a cost-benefit-analysis of the situation, the statement doesn’t really make sense. Does it?  If all we wanted was ideas and information, it would be much easier for everyone just to send their ideas on email, or put them online, or we could watch short videos of each other’s talks. But we don’t.

Instead we all pay lots of money to attend. We kiss our families good bye. We get on taxis, and trains, and busses; in the airport we take off our belts and our shoes, and suddenly realize that we are wearing socks in two different colors. Why do we bother with the hassle? Why do we use money and travel far? We do this because we want to be part of a group. We want to experience and feel – and learn – something together – as a community.

We want to see the speaker in the flesh, sense his presence. We want him to see us – and we want to see each other see him. No other form of communication does this as well as speechmaking. No other form of communication can more effectively create communities, and make the community see the world as you do.

The power of storytelling – or just stories?

Often the best way to create community is to tell – or create – the story of the group. This is what Barack Obama does so well. His fabulous speech to the Democratic convention in 2004 weaved his own life story into the fabrics of the United States’ history. There he was, the black man with the odd name, on the enormous stage in Boston, transmitted to millions of television screens. “Tonight is a particular honor for me”, he said:

because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.

The story of generation’s hard work and perseverance that helped bring Obama in front of this huge audience is not just the story about Obama, it is also the story about the US and the American dream.

We use stories because they turn our messages into something vivid and present. The specific, the vivid, and that which has presence, engages the audience. It makes them involved, and sticks in their memory. We remember stories, not bullet points. So, stories are good.

But we should take care, because stories also run the risk of being just stories. The audience may enjoy the story, but they are not necessarily moved in the direction you want them to. A research study of news in the US, for instance, made two versions of a news segment about unemployment: One group of viewers was shown a vivid story about the difficulty and distress of an unemployment individual, living in the suburbs of Chicago.

Another group was presented with national facts and statistics about the increasing unemployment. Now, which group do you think was more likely to be persuaded that unemployment was a problem? The group who got a story in flesh and blood? Or the group who was presented with numbers and facts? Here is what the researchers concluded:

Contrary to much conventional wisdom, news stories that direct viewers’ attention to the flesh and blood victims of national problems prove no more persuasive than news stories that cover national problems impersonally – indeed, they tend to be less persuasive. (S. Iyengar & D. R. Kinder, News that matter. Television and American Opinion, 1987: 42).

Perhaps, the authors say,

vivid presentations are generally less persuasive […] because they are so successful as melodrama. Viewers may get so caught up in one family’s trouble that they fail to make the connection back to the national condition. Overwhelmed by concrete details, they miss the general point. (ibid.).

Stories may arrest your attention and entertain you, but they do not necessarily persuade you. So, if you want to do more than entertain, if you want to persuade people, then your story should be an argument. Obama’s story was not just a story. It was also an argument: an argument about him and about the US. If this young man has come so far then he can go even further. And if a person with his background can make it, then we can all make it. Conclusion: The American dream is alive and kicking.

The power of argumentation

Arguments are at least as important as stories. I don’t know if you think consciously about argumentation, when you write speeches. But I know you should.

I am not talking about argumentation in a logical or philosophical way. What you have to use is rhetorical argumentation: you have to provide good reasons. Good reasons come not only as facts, numbers and deduction; but also as stories, images, and examples.

If you want to persuade people that unemployment is a problem, then you should combine the vivid story of the unemployed person in Chicago with the indisputable facts and statistics, because both are good reasons to do something about the problem. In a sense the personal and involved argument is even more characteristic of speech making than storytelling is. We get stories everywhere today: in films, books, games, television-series – even in the news. Stories are not special to speechmaking, but I think that the personal argued case is.

What we risk losing in our fragmented, twittered, bullet pointed, soundbite-society, is the cogent, coherent case, well-argued by an individual who wants to make a difference. Mediated argumentation is not the same as personal argumentation.

If you make an argument in a written text, the argument put down in words are now physically separated from you. In a sense it is not your argument anymore, it is just an argument in the paper, in the newsletter, or on Facebook. However, if I as a speaker actually stand before you and make an argument, then it is not just an argument. Then it is me, personally reaching out to you, trying to touch you with my ideas and values, hoping that you might accept them.

In doing so I put myself on the line much more than when I tell a story. When I make a claim, I oblige myself to back it up. I invest myself in the cause, and leave the faith of my cause in your hands. Doing that is taking a stand. Taking a stand is taking a risk. And, taking a risk in front of other people is showing character and respect for the listeners.

You may be proved wrong. But you do it anyway, because you believe in the cause and trust the audience. This is the hallmark of truly great speeches: A speaker investing himself in the cause aiming to change the world by swaying the audience. This was what Neil Kinnock did in his famous speech to the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth 1985, when he argued that you “can’t play politics with people’s jobs”. This was what Kennedy did with “Ich bin ein Berliner”, what Martin Luther King did with “I have a dream”, what Margaret Thatcher did with “The Bruges speech”, and what Barack Obama did with “A more perfect union”. And this is what you should do when you write speeches.

Create community, tell stories; but first and foremost, you should provide your speaker with persuading arguments for his cause. Helping him to find good reasons is the best way to help him make a difference. This is what good speechwriters have done since antiquity. So, my friends, roll out the parchment, grab your stylus, and write down the good reasons.

Links:
The Oxford Speechwriter & Business Communicators Conference Conference, 2014

The European Speechwriter Network

The main purpose of the Rhetoric in Society conferences is to bring together scholars sharing a common interest in the modern applications of rhetoric as involved in different contemporary social phenomena.

After the success of the previous editions, the Rhetoric in Society 5 conference is organized in collaboration with the Polish Rhetorical Society in Warsaw (24–27.06.2015). The venue of the conference is the University of Warsaw. The theme for the 2015 edition is “Rhetoric in the Knowledge Society”.

Please go to the website for more information and call for papers.

Illustrating web articles with Creative Commons-licensed photos is a widely used way of improving quality in small publications like ours. As so many others, we use WordPress as publishing system, and we have posted CC-licensed photos since our launch in 2006.

But one aspect of using CC photos in WordPress has not been as easy as it should: Giving the photographer the credit he or she deserves. Or, more to the point — the attribution that is a precondition for republishing the photograph in the first place (see “Best practices for attribution”).

Now we have done something about that ourselves. The WordPress plugin Creative Commons tagger, created by Håvar Skaugen, adds new fields to the media upload tool. When you upload a photo to WordPress, you are asked to add the relevant metadata — image title, source URL, Author, Author URL and crucially, the right Creative Commons license.

The custom fields on the media page where you can fill in the licensing information.

When you add the photo to an article, the caption is now enriched with the metadata and the corresponding CC license icons.

Foto: Elena Pérez Melgarejo cbnd

Åpen mikrofon på biblioteket?

At this point, the plugin only supports the Norwegian, US and international versions of CC licenses, but more localized licenses will be added in the future. The plugin also supports localization via the provided .mo-files.

If you have read this, you are probably interested in the distribution of content on the web. In that case, you would perhaps want to check out our other WordPress plugin: Wikipedia for tag pages automatically connects your tag page/topic page to the relevant Wikipedia entry.

“Turkey: You are beautiful when you are angry”: Cover of the weekly humor magazine Penguen.

The Gezi Park protests in Taksim spreading nationwide

Gezi Park, known as the last green spot of Istanbul, was occupied by hundreds of people opposing the urban redevelopment plan including the demolishing of the park and construction of a shopping mall instead. Occupy-style protests began on 27 May. Protestors were playing guitars, reading books, and basically “hanging out” in the park. The reaction of the police was excessive, early in the morning when people were sleeping, setting their tents on fire, showering people with pepper spray and teargas.

Soon after, the park was occupied again. This time more crowded with the backing of some celebrities, authors, and musicians. As the police dispersed the people with heavy-handed methods, protests just escalated. This time, thousands of people with diverse backgrounds gathered in the famous square of Taksim. Simultaneous gatherings occurred nationwide, mainly in the capital Ankara, Izmir, Eskisehir, and Antalya.

Supporters of the Nationalist Movement Party and Socialist Party next to each other. These two groups of people have known to be rivals (photo: Yunus Emre Sel, DHA)

Viva Social Media

Many complained about the media ignoring the growing protests. CNN Turk was especially criticized as the channel was broadcasting a documentary on penguins the night that the streets of many cities were turned into a battlefield between protestors and the police.

Political pressure on the media has been heavy the last couple of years in Turkey. The country is known to be one of the largest prisons for media.

So it was no surprise that social media became the source of information and knowledge. People have been tweeting from the streets, publishing photos, exchanging volunteer doctor and lawyer contacts for the protestors, and poking the official Twitter accounts of the mainstream TV channels for their ignorance.

Buses from Turkish news channel NTV have been the target of protestors for neglecting to cover the demonstrations. (Photo from Diren Gezi Park (Occupy Gezi Park) Facebook page.)

Concerning the issues, Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the oppositional party for provoking the masses, and lashed out at the role of social media in helping organize and co-ordinate rallies. “And now we have this menace called Twitter,” said Erdogan in an interview with Haberturk Sunday evening. In the aftermath of Erdogan’s speech, 25 people were detained in Izmir because of their tweets, on the grounds of spreading “misleading and libelous information”, Anatolia news agency reported.

A graffiti from Istanbul.

Although the prime minister, who is on a political trip to Morocco, has not taken a step beck, deputy prime minister Bulent Arinc apologized on Tuesday “for the police aggression against our citizens who were involved in the initial protests and acted with environmental concern,” as Anadolu news agency reported. He said security forces had been ordered to only use gas in self-defense. Yet, the masses have not calmed down. It is obvious that the demands are no longer merely about the Gezi Park or the urban redevelopment plan of Istanbul. Protestors keep saying it louder that it is more about democracy and the freedom of speech, freedom of lifestyle.

Here is an interview with a protestor, the well known actor Mehmet Ali Alabora on CNN International.

Invasion of the Private Sphere, Bodies, Thoughts, Tweets

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) is popular with conservative Islamic politicians and voters in Turkey. It has won three successive parliamentary elections, gaining almost 50% of the vote in 2011. Political stability has been accompanied by economic growth. According to governmental statistics, “Turkey is expected to be the fastest growing economy of the OECD members during 2012–2017, with an annual average growth rate of 5.2 percent.” In other words, Turkey does not have a serious financial baggage like its European neighbors. Of course, one should check how this growth affects the everyday life of citizens. Researchers draw attention to regional and gender disparities concerning the distribution of the wealth.

Protests in Eskisehir, Turkey (photo: showdiscontent.com)

Yet, do the confidence of the parliamentary majority of the ruling AKP and the economic growth mean that the government can play the three monkeys (not hearing, speaking, seeing) when faced with society’s demands? Last year, Erdogan provoked outrage when he likened abortion to murder. Only a month ago, a Turkish court convicted pianist and composer Fazil Say of blasphemy and inciting hatred over a series of comments he made on Twitter last year. More recently, Turkey’s parliament passed legislation curbing alcohol sales and advertising.

What we see today on the streets of Turkey is a group that is heavily concerned about their personal space where they think and act freely. They are angry at the way that the authorities try to label them as marginal or a member of an organized unit. I guess one of the best insider comments is from a bisexual blogger:

We ran and stood, aided or got aid, side by side with people who would get disgusted by my sexual preferences, who would condemn me for my religious view or criticize me for my political opinions, because we have one common quality, we are still HUMAN.

Despite the softening reaction of government members (except the prime minister himself, who seems to be the direct target of the protests), resistance is still on. People are waiting for an official guarantee of the abolishment of the redevelopment plan of Gezi Park, legal action on the excessive and abusive police intervention and further actions to ensure the freedom of speech.

It is important to remember that it all started with protecting the trees. It was a bunch of young people occupying their last green spot in the city of Istanbul. It is too early to compare the happenings to the Arab Spring. It is more like an awakening and sweeping away of the fear to raise a voice against the unjust. What Turkey is witnessing today is, apart from certain groups that have a clear political agenda, a unity of people who are basically offended by not being heard, getting beaten by the police force, and being psychologically suppressed. What is happening in Turkey indicates people’s concern about freedom. It should not be merely captured within the polarization of the secularists and the Islamism. As the well-known journalist and lawyer Özgür Mumcu wrote in his column on Radikal on June 3, there is no need to seek conspiracy theories behind the most spontaneous uprising of Turkey. The reason is the arrogant stance of the people in power who do not want to listen to the demands of the citizens. People are fed up being suppressed each time they want to publically criticize the government or display discontent of certain policies. It’s as simple as this.

Remembering the famous line from the poet Nazim Hikmet:

To live! Like a tree alone and free
Like a forest in brotherhood

However, instead of asking only if prize winning images are manipulated (and of course in some way they all are), we should also ask why are they changed to become the way they are? Or, to put it differently: what kinds of photographs win awards? When we look closer at the changing styles of the winning photographs since the beginning of the World Press Photo competition in 1955, we see that Hansen’s picture is part of a cinematic form of expression that has emerged in the last 6–7 years.

The image portrays family members from Gaza carrying the bodies of a two small children to their burial after being killed in an Israeli air strike. It is no coincidence that it has been called a movie poster. However, the photo is more like a still; a story frozen in time, but condensed with motion and movement, inviting us into a narrative of what has happened before, and what might happen next. This new trend is different from other dominant styles among the WPP winners.

Some of the winning pictures hold what we can call news moments (similar to Henri Cartier Bresson’s decisive moments). Most of the news moments are from the 1960s. A prime example is Eddie Adams’ 1968 picture of the execution of a suspected Viet Cong member, showing the exact moment of the bullet’s penetration of the brain. The impact of the picture lies primarily in capturing a certain news event in a fraction a second.

The closer we get to this century, the fewer pictures we see of such news moments. Instead we see more feature-like photographs capturing – not a moment, but a general situation or condition. Take this winner from 2004 portraying a woman mourning a relative after the Asian tsunami of December 2003.

The photo is constructed around a juxtaposition between the dead body, represented by only an arm in the left of the frame, and the bereaved, represented by a woman lying face down on the sand in the right part of the frame. This kind of explicitly artistic visual rhetoric prevailed from 2000–2004.

The 2001 winner portrays how the body of a one-year-old boy who died of dehydration is being prepared for burial at Jalozai refugee camp in Pakistan. It is a very rare example of a picture being taken in a full bird’s eye perspective, directly from above.

The picture is dominated by the white color of the draping sheets, covering the body of the little boy, so we only see the left side of his face. He seems at peace, and the picture exudes calmness, giving it an almost ethereal dimension. Combined with the angle of the arms draping the sheets, the picture is more an aesthetic moment than it is a news moment.

Hansen’s picture is neither a news moment nor an aesthetic moment – not to say, of course, that it does not have style. All images do. Instead the aesthetic tendency exhibited in this picture is a more of a kind of movie realism, a sort of photographic cinema verité. We see a similar tendency in the winners from 2007, 2008, and 2009.

The 2007-winner shows a US soldier sinking onto an embankment in a bunker in Afghanistan. The 2008 winner depicts a policeman entering a home in Cleveland, USA, in order to check whether the owners have vacated the premises. In 2009 we see women shouting their dissent from a Tehran rooftop following Iran’s disputed presidential election.

These images are not colorful, there are no close ups, no clear, simple or stylized compositions, and no conspicuous juxtapositions or an obvious use of some part to represent a whole. They give the impression of the fictional realism we sometimes encounter at the cinema.

While the beginning of the decade presented photographs that have their main rhetorical appeal in their compositional and aesthetic organization, these photographs appeal more through story-making. The first kind invites the viewer inside the frame, encouraging exploration of the elements in the visual moment, captivating us through visual design. The second kind invites the viewer outside the frame, encouraging participation in the construction of a narrative, engaging us in speculations of what has happened and what will happen.

This kind of neo-realistic press photography seems to be more open to interpretation than the more obvious symbolic photos. The strange thing, though, is that the more the pictures draw us into a story of mostly our own creation, they seem to draw us away from the events they are depicting. They are all fabulous images, but even when provided with the backstories I remain a spectator immersed in the story, in awe of the artwork, waiting for the movie to premiere.

World Press Photo award-winning photographs by Paul Hansen, Arko Datta, Erik Refner, and (clockwise from the upper left) Tim Hetherington, Paul Hansen, Pietro Masturzo, and Anthony Suau.

This text has previously been published on the site No Caption Needed. If you are interested in photojournalism, don’t miss it.

Too many stakeholders had an interest in creating conflict, not solving it. Several people were killed in violent protests, and the level of trust between our cultures decreased. In western Europe we had, and still have, a large, unsettled and confusing debate about whether or not one can hurt people’s religious feelings in the name of freedom of speech. In the Muslim world we still have large groups of people who feel hatred towards the west. In fact, on both sides, we have a deep skepticism towards each others’ values.

As the world is globalized, it is not possible to separate and delineate cultures and religions. It becomes increasingly inappropriate to make one unitary set of rules define what is “acceptable” in art or opinion. That’s why we need to protect and stand by Danish or Swedish cartoonists, or Salman Rushdie for that matter. But we must at the same time be able to state the obvious: a film like “The innocence of Muslims,” its sole purpose being to insult and provoke, does not stand in the liberal tradition of Locke, Mill or Rousseau, but is closer to the illiberal tradition of Julius Streicher and Der Stürmer.

We have freedom of speech so that we can criticize and develop our own society and culture. Not to mock people in the streets of Cairo. Because tolerance and respect for each others’ beliefs is as important an Enlightenment inheritance, as freedom of speech.

President Obama’s first response to the attack in Benghazi was appropriate, honouring the lost lives, taking action to secure other diplomats and committing himself to holding terrorists responsible for their acts. But the more pressing issue right now, as we see riots from Bangladesh to Morocco, is how he should deal with the deeper cultural conflict underlying the crisis, the conflict between conservative Muslims and the west. Can he start transforming this conflict as we approach the peak of election fever in the US?

A form of speech – the now infamous YouTube clip – started this conflict, and is at its heart. Despite all the geopolitics, economy and history which underlie the current clashes, this is a communication problem. The right speech made at the right time by the president could begin to transform the conflict. And Obama excels at this kind of decisive speech.

One place to look for inspiration, could be in what was maybe his finest speech: ”A More Perfect Union”, from the 2008 primaries.  The challenge is similar, not in the essence of the incident, but in the structure of the conflict it represents.  Many of us remember the scandal and uproar when the American public saw videos of Obama’s former priest, Jeremiah Wright, describing 9/11 as being, “America’s chickens… coming home to roost” and saying, “… not God Bless America. God damn America.”  The media, the competing Republicans, and supporters of Hilary Clinton, all tried to:

a) force Obama into denouncing his former reverend, or

b) defend him, and in that way alienate himself from the American mainstream.

The genius of Obama’s response was that he did neither.  He went to the heart of the conflict: America’s history of slavery and racism. And from that point, he was able to transcend the conflict, offering a “new politics”, where Americans could move forward step by step. He did criticize Wright’s statements, like this:

Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems (…) that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

At the same time, he placed them and his own response into context, like this:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

As the cognitive linguist George Lakoff wrote in his excellent analysis of the speech: ”The true power of the speech is that it does what it says. It not only talks about empathy, it creates it.” And empathy is exactly what we need now.

It did not work well for Mitt Romney when he tried to exploit the tragedy by saying that Obama, “apologizes for America.” But people in the west still need to hear president Obama defend the values of democracy and freedom of speech. People in the Muslim world still need to hear that the president of the US respects them and their religion.

What it takes is a speech that has the courage to delve deep into the conflict and the reasons why people are angry. A speech that is honest about how differently we look at things like “honour”, “freedom” – or “art” for that matter. And a speech that shows that it is still possible to figure out these things.

Perhaps he could start out with telling the story I‘ve heard from many Muslims, about the old lady who used to throw garbage at the prophet Mohammed every day, as he passed on his way to the mosque. One day, the lady didn’t come out to throw the garbage. The prophet‘s response was to knock at her door and ask for her. When he came to know that the old lady was ill and lying in bed, he helped her out in the house. The prophet did not set fire to her house for showing disrespect, he looked after her.

Four years ago Obama also created a story. About how a people with one of the most hurtful cultural scars in the history of the world, American slavery, could move forward together, looking after each other. The same kind of will to move forward, the will to overcome historical trauma and resentment born from powerlessness, will be necessary to end this conflict. The work will have to be done on a small scale, a change in the way our cultures communicate and understand each other. But the right speech by Obama could, as it did in 2008, help that change to begin.

It could be a history worth repeating.

Dette innlegget har også vært publisert i netttidskriftet Opendemocracy.net

The Settlement has its origins in a class action copyright infringement suit brought by the American Authors Guild and the American Publishers Association (APA) against Google in 2005. A class action, it should be noted, concerns not just the parties of the case but an entire class of plaintiffs — in this case: all authors and publishers of the millions of books digitized by Google. As the copyright owners alleged, by digitizing the entire book collections of some of the largest university libraries in the world, and making ‘snippets’ of digitized text available through the Google search engine, Google infringed the copyrights of millions of authors and thousands of publishers. According to Google however all this amounted to fair use.

Surprising settlement caused storm of criticism

In the course of 2008 and 2009 parties came to an agreement, the so-called Google Books Settlement (‘GBS’) . To the surprise of many, the settlement far exceeded the scope of the court case, and permitted Google not only to digitize books and display ‘snippets’, but also to commercialize millions of out-of-print works, by selling downloads, e‑books and institutional subscriptions. Thus from the Google Books class action case arose what can be easily called the largest book licensing deal in the world, binding not only Google and its direct adversaries (the authors and publishers represented by the Guild and the APA), but innumerable foreign authors and publishers as well.

A real Google book! (photo: Ruben Vermeersch. CC: by-nc-nd)

Not surprisingly, the GBS caused a storm of criticism, first and foremost by foreign publishers who complained that they had been left out of the deal and that their copyrights were severely comprised. At the Frankfurt Book Fair of 2009, German Chancellor Angela Merkel publicly warned against the consequences of the Settlement for European publishers. Over four hundred official objections were eventually submitted to Judge Chin of the New York District Court, who was called to approve the settlement. Apart from the foreign right holders’ protestations, the concerns expressed in the objections reflected a variety of other interests and fears. According to many, including Microsoft, Amazon and even the American Department of Justice, the GBS would result in a Google monopoly on the online sale of digitized out-of-print books. Scientific authors protested that the GBS would allow Google to commercialize scientific works that many authors preferred to make available for free under open-content licenses. Some objectors also pointed to the privacy risks of a company like Google controlling online access to the world’s literature.

Future scenarios for Google Books

On the other hand, the GBS did receive public support from the universities that had entered into library digitization agreements with Google, such as Stanford and Michigan, and from information specialists and scientists who were excited by the prospect that the world’s literature would soon become available online. Some authors and author’s rights societies also supported the Settlement, for it included a promise by Google to pay substantial royalties to the authors of digitized books.

In the end, more than a year after conducting a public hearing, the District Court decided against the Settlement. Quoting many of the concerns expressed by the objectors, the Court determined that the Settlement is not ‘fair, reasonable and adequate’, as American law requires, and refused to approve the GBS in its present form.

Does the decision mark the end of Google Books, the largest book digitization project ever undertaken — often described as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina of our time? Several future scenarios are possible.

One option is appeal. Google and its counterparts might take a second chance at getting the GBS approved, by appealing the judgment. However, decisions like these are rarely overturned, particularly if they are as well-reasoned as Judge Chin’s decision seems to be.

Another possibility is that Google and the right holders abandon the settlement altogether and resume the court case from which the GBS sprang. Ironically, this would pit Google once again against its former foes that became its best friends in the course of the Settlement: the Authors Guild and the APA. Who might eventually prevail in this suit is a matter of speculation. But even if Google would succeed in having its ‘fair use’ defense accepted by the court, this would never allow Google to make its digital books collection available online, except by way of ‘snippet view’.

A more likely scenario would be revision of the Settlement. A main concern for many objectors to the GBS was its ‘opt-out’ rule. Authors and right holders of out-of-print works who had not expressly opted out of the Settlement would be bound by it. As a consequence large numbers of unknown right holders, such as the heirs of long-dead authors of out-of-print works, would be automatically bound by the GBS, giving Google a monopoly in the market for digitized ‘orphan works’. By amending the Settlement into an opt-in agreement, the risks of a Google monopoly might be greatly reduced, while permitting foreign authors and publishers to become involved in, or withdraw from, the agreement.

For Google, however, the prospect of an opt-in agreement is not very attractive. Seeking express permission from millions of hard-to-find right holders will inevitably entail extraordinary transactions costs. Alternatively, Google would have to make large parts of its book database unavailable to the general public.

A fourth scenario would be legislative intervention. According to legal commentators, what was essentially wrong with the GBS is that it provided for a legal solution of the orphan works issue — the problem of dealing with myriads of unknown right holders in an efficient manner — to the benefit of only a single party: Google. Instead, this problem should be solved by way of legislation, allowing other mass digitization projects — whether by Google’s competitors or by non-profit institutions — to be realized on equal terms.

European and Nordic proposals for solving copyright dilemma

If the Google Books saga has taught us anything, it is that the law of copyright in many countries needs to be adapted in order to permit mass digitization of the world’s cultural heritage without denying authors and right holders fair remuneration. In the European Union, where digitization projects such as Europeana have struggled with copyright problems from their inception, the need for a legislative solution of the orphan works problem is now generally recognized. On May 24, 2011 the European Commission published a Proposal for a Directive (pdf) of the European Parliament and the Council ‘on certain permitted uses of orphan works’. The proposed directive would oblige the Member States of the European Union to allow cultural heritage institutions and public broadcasters to mass-digitize and make available online any ‘orphaned’ books, journals, newspapers, films and television programs in their libraries and archives. The proposal will undoubtedly lead to extensive discussions within the European Parliament and the Council, and is not expected to be adopted anytime soon.

In the mean time, cultural heritage institutions are placing their hopes on yet another solution to the orphan works problem: the extended collective license (ECL). An ECL is basically an agreement between a collective rights management society that represents large numbers of right holders on the one hand and an institutional copyright user (such as a broadcaster or a library) on the other. What makes an ECL different from ordinary collective licenses, is that it is extended by force of law to authors or right holders that are not represented by the collecting society. In this way, an ECL automatically allows the use of ‘orphan works’.

To scan or not to scan? (Photo: spyer. CC: by-nc-sa)

Readers of Vox Publica will be proud to learn that the ECL (in Norwegian: avtalelisens) is a Nordic legal invention that has been applied in Scandinavian countries for years to collective licensing of broadcast music and educational photocopying. In recent times ECLs have also facilitated various mass digitization enterprises in the Nordic countries, including the Bokhylla project that makes Norwegian literature available to the public in digital form. The Nordic solution to the copyright problems of mass digitization is attracting increasing interest from scholars and policy makers around the world. In the Netherlands, a recent study (pdf) by the Institute for Information Law advises the Dutch Government to follow the Nordic example. And even in the United States, where the failure of the Google Books Settlement has inspired a search for legislative alternatives (pdf), the Nordic model is becoming something of a hit.

Perhaps, like the Vikings of yesteryear, Nordic copyright law will one day set foot on American soil.

About this article

This article summarizes and updates a presentation held by the author at the symposium ‘The Google Books Revolution’ that was organized by the Institutt for informasjons- og medievitenskap (Department of Information Science and Media Studies) of the University of Bergen on March 21, 2011.