Smartphone apps make it trivial to snap a photo, upload it to a host, and post a link to Twitter, sometimes in a single step. But by storing a photo on a hosting service to display via Twitter and beyond, you're assigning some subset of your copyright to that sharing site. Since the 1970s, copyright is inherent in the act of creation, no matter whether it's a snapshot or your life's work. There's a conflict when you present some license for your work to parties which you have only a slender thread of a relationship.

This came to a head last week and this due to changes made at the popular TwitPic service. On May 4th, TwitPic updated its terms of use. Before May 4th, the statement about copyright read:

All images uploaded are copyright © their respective owners.

This was modified to include a lengthy section on copyright that raised hackles because it seemed to give TwitPic an enormous grant of rights, even while assuring users that they owned their work. The motivation was likely to clarify policies after Agence France-Presse (AFP) used Haitian photographer Daniel Morel's images of the aftermath of the earthquake without permission. Morel uploaded images to TwitPic, which were then duplicated by another person, and AFP distributed them. A lawsuit is long underway. TwitPic's copyright information shown at that time was more ambiguous about who owned what.

Nonetheless, the new copyright terms raise more questions than they bury. One point of contention was a sloppy paragraph that said once you'd uploaded a picture to TwitPic you couldn't license it to the media, agencies, or other parties and have those groups retrieve it (with your permission) from TwitPic. On May 10th, the terms were revised again and that graf removed.

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Caroline Spelman. PHOTO: Reuters/Ueslei Marcelino One would think from reports today that the UK's secretary of state for the environment and rural affairs, MP Caroline Spelman, had lost her bleeding mind. Spelman has been widely quoted about a new report from her agency, Defra, about the threat to infrastructure from global climate change. It covers the extremes of temperature and the routine occurrence of heat above a normal range for the UK, and more storms and severe weather that could ravage Great Britain. The report is an analysis on what changes need be made to keep bridges from buckling in heat or cracking in cold, and nuclear and fossil-fuel plants from suffering damage from previously unthinkable conditions, as well as quotidian issues like floods polluting water supplies and spreading sewage. It's a ripping read, and, please recall, originates from the Tories, the majority conservative part of a coalition government that completely acknowledges the reality of a range of risk potential from climate change. The Conservatives are no Republicans, no matter what else you may say about them. Nonetheless the report's broader issues were overlooked because of a focus on an exceedingly tiny statement buried in it that Spelman highlighted in a speech unveiling the work. Her prepared remarks have her saying:

Our economy is built on effective transport and communications networks and reliable energy and water supplies. But the economy cannot grow if there are repeated power failures, or goods cannot be transported because roads are flooded and railways have buckled, or if intense rainfall or high temperatures disrupt Wi-Fi signals.

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Images: Shutterstock (1, 2) Siddhartha Mukherjee deftly tells you everything you need to know about the current state of knowledge of the risks to human health from use of cellular phones. Mukherjee, a doctor and professor of medicine at Columbia, does so in a few thousand words in the New York Times without dismissing concerns, and while explaining why this issue is so fraught with interpretation bias and confusion. Mukherjee's key points are well understood in epidemiological circles, and typically misstated in the mainstream press. They are: • Rates of cancer types expected to be associated with long-term mobile phone use have declined in America during the rise of cell calling. • The low incidence of such expected cancers in the general population makes it nearly impossible to conduct prospective longitudinal studies: find a large cohort of people with no disease and follow them for 5, 10, or 20 years to see in which groups normal and abnormal rates occur. • Retrospective studies that ask people to remember past usage of cell phones are deeply flawed due to recall bias. • Cellular tests examining DNA after exposure to phone emissions were found in a meta-review of papers and research to have no provable link. (Mukherjee also explains that the recently reported "cell phones make your brain light up" study showed unexplained brain activity when a silent cell phone was active in areas adjacent to the phone, which was near one or the other of a subject's ears. However, the brain activity wasn't harmful--it was similar to activity from other routine activities--just inexplicable. And the study only involved under 50 people.) I've been reading cell-phone and RF exposure studies for a decade, starting at a point where I was convinced that the industry must have known of a link and was trying to hide it. Who trusts multi-billion-dollar corporations with everything to lose, where executives might even be sent to prison as a result? Of course, they might hide evidence or fund fake studies.

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I've been obsessed with QR Codes, those 2D tags that encode URLs and other information, for the last 18 months, having penned a couple of Economist pieces, and this item about bookmarkleting QR Codes here at BoingBoing. The inflection point in Seattle, at least, appears to have hit: I spotted six at a burger joint this lunchtime. My friend Ren Caldwell knows my horrible interest in this matter, and she IM'd me a link (via several intermediate sources) to QRapping Paper. $19.95 buys you two 20-by-30-inch sheets of paper with codes that link to 50 different online videos. This includes videos like Harry Truman in Heaven, and one in which a gingerbread man torches his foreclosed gingerbread house. It's a pricey novelty gift, but clever. I'm going to co-opt this idea. This sanctioned holiday period, every one of my gift recipients is going to get an empty but suspiciously heavy box wrapped in plain white paper with a QR Code pasted on top. The code will link to Never Gunna Give You Up. That's right: I'm gunna rickroll Christmas, all y'all! (Ren's officemate Dan asked, "All I want to know is: is it pronounced 'crapping paper'?") And with that, I...am...outta here on my guestblog gig! Thanks for the love, BoingBoing readers.

I've been unable to nail down precisely why I don't like how WikiLeaks is releasing hidden, secret, classified, and other categories of U.S. government information. I don't believe the United States deserves the shroud of secrecy that protects incompetent, illegal, and malicious acts; neither do I trust Julian Assange's motives, presentation, or redaction. Every time I try to talk about the issue, it's like a life-or-death game of "paper or plastic bags" at the supermarket. Thankfully, Clay Shirky has laid bare the cognitive dissonance and teased apart distinctly different ideas that are being lumped into single categories:

As Tom Slee puts it, "Your answer to 'what data should the government make public?' depends not so much on what you think about data, but what you think about the government." My personal view is that there is too much secrecy in the current system, and that a corrective towards transparency is a good idea. I don't, however, believe in pure transparency, and even more importantly, I don't think that independent actors who are subject to no checks or balances is a good idea in the long haul.

I am conflicted about the right balance between the visibility required for counter-democracy and the need for private speech among international actors. Here's what I'm not conflicted about: When a government can't get what it wants by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is to accept that it can't get what it wants.

Photo by Joi Ito via Creative Commons.

A routine peeping-tom/self-pleasuring report in a hyperlocal blog in Seattle is enlivened by the following detail:

According to witnesses, the man looked like he was in his 30's, white, with slicked-back dark-blond hair and was said to resemble Eric Idle.

Lemon curry?

I suspect this photo will not appear odd to any of us celebrating mixed families, traditions, religions, cults, vanilla extracts, syncretic faiths, unionism, or pure unadultered atheism with presents this year. My wife erected the Christmas tree last night with my full approval (I'm recovering from hernia surgery, and thus was unavailable to help, ahem ahem), and I lit the Hanukah candles this evening. A happy juxtaposition in our home. A friend in college, on discovering I was Jewish, asked, "So you don't celebrate Christmas?" No, I said. "Not even commercially?" Photo by yours truly.

Steve Martin isn't the same wild and crazy guy he used to be, according to Manhattan's 92nd Street Y. The New York Times reports that the Y offered to refund all 900 attendees their $50 entrance fee to an interview of Martin by Times writer Deborah Solomon. Why? Because they talked about his new book, Object of Beauty, and about art. Martin has been collecting art in a studious and intelligent manner for decades. According to the story, the Y sent up a note asking for less art talk, apparently responding to emails from those watching a remote broadcast. This is odd, because the 92nd St Y is known for bringing damned intellectuals together to talk about damned intellectual stuff. Go figure. Martin noted in Twitter,

So the 92nd St. Y has determined that the course of its interviews should be dictated in real time by its audience's emails. Artists beware.

Extra points for identifying the headline's paraphrase. Update: A number of people who say they attended the event, including some commenters on this post, explain that the problem wasn't Solomon and Martin talking about art and the new book, but Solomon making a hash of her role as interviewer. Martin Schneider wrote in with a link to his lengthy analysis of the evening, which concludes with a fascinating paragraph that encapsulates the broad issue of spectatorship and reporting:

A counter-narrative has arisen that is in complete conflict with this picture of events, a narrative that serves Solomon and Martin's agenda. It would be a disgrace to let that counter-narrative become the final word on this fiasco. Do not believe it.

Kyle Durrie, a letterpress printer, wants to put a portable press in the back of a bread truck, travel the country, and teach about printing. It's a charming idea, and she's already beat her Kickstarter fundraising goal.

Who is the most-read person in the world? It's not Dan Brown nor J.K. Rowling (or God): it's likely Matthew Carter, the designer of the Georgia and Verdana typefaces, Bell Centennial used in phone books, and a host of others. I interviewed the 73-year-old type maven about his recent MacArthur Foundation Fellowship award, unusual at his age, and his continuing passion at the Economist.

Seattle police use a dedicated Twitter account to report the details of verified car thefts. It's crowdsourcing police work! Police in other cities have tried this, but Seattle has a bizarrely high car theft rate, partly due to a logistical problem in the courts in which car thieves are routinely charged with misdemeanors and released.

Kevin Bacon plays his own superfan in creepy verisimilitude in this ad for the Google TV-based Logitech Revue. It's like Being John Malkovich crossed with Misery crossed with a Fargo-like sense of wonder (before the woodchipper comes out).

I went in for surgery yesterday morning to repair a small umbilical hernia. Mildly graphic material follows. My belly button done did me wrong. Having only had a few minor surgeries before, the most recent about nine years ago, I was surprised by a number of changes in procedure, the kind of clinically tested improvements we all hope are going on behind the scenes, and we often doubt are. The operation itself was quite simple, and took under an hour. I received a mild general anesthetic, and a local was applied liberally to my belly. I don't even recall being asked to count backwards from five. The surgeon cut a small slit in my belly button and cleaned up protruding material. Then he took a small circle of polypropylene and stitched this with permanent stitches inside the muscle, a neat trick. This is relatively new: a few years ago, small umbilical hernias were merely stitched, but the recurrence rate was unacceptably high. I joked to my kids that I was being repaired like a bicycle tire tube: the doc would put a plastic patch on me and glue it on. And that was true: the incision was glued shut, and scarring, if any, will be invisible. In the future, we are all bicycle tubes.

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The streets of Seattle are no longer safe--for cute little dogs and fiber-optic cables. First, The Seattle Times reported today on the strange case of a dog being electrocuted as it walked down the street. A privately and legally installed street light lacked proper grounding, and the dog was zapped walking over a metal plate on the sidewalk. My condolences to Lisa Kibben, who lost her 68-pound German shorthair pointer, Sammy, in this bizarre event. The utility dispatched a crew immediately, fixed the problem, and apologized, trying to reassure the public that we (and perhaps our sub-70-pound children) are not in danger. This reminded me of the peculiar death of Jodie S. Lane in Manhattan (East Village) in 2004, walking down the street with her two dogs when one apparently received a severe shock, and Lane, unaware of what was happening, attempted to help the dogs. The dogs survived. Jodie's father, Roger M. Lane, received a massive amount of information about electrified Con Ed objects and shocks caused to people as part of a settlement. He created a Web site which showed the 31,900 objects found to cause electrical shocks between 2004 and 2009. Seattle has no such history, but you can imagine that Emerald City denizens will be skipping metal panels for a while. Second, local Seattle business site TechFlash reported that a bullet was fired into a fiber-optic cable owned by Comcast, severing access to 2,500 customers. The motivation is unknown, and the company isn't asking for a police investigation. Oddly enough, this is not the first time. A Comcast spokesperson told TechFlash, "About 13 years ago, someone shot a bullet into a main fiber line in Tacoma on New Year's Eve, knocking out service to about half the city." Man, I guess people are really angry about Comcast's attempting legal contractual modification of a peering agreement with Level 3. First they came for the fiber-optic cables, and I tweeted nothing. Photo by Photocopy, used via Creative Commons.

The Incomparable podcast features a bunch of serious geeks talking in alternate weeks about recent and classic sci-fi and fantasy movies, novels, comic books, and television shows. Our gang is led by Jason Snell, Macworld magazine's editorial director, and über-geek. The latest episode is available, covering Harry Potter, its borrowings from one Mr Tolkien, why Pablo Picasso and Magnum P.I. never met, and the words exegesis and tmesis.