BPN1077 Amsterdam World Book Capital

From today onwards, Amsterdam will be the World Book Capital for one year. It will be celebrated with many events, with the publication of a book to start with; but with one of the largest open-air book market containing more than 1,000 stalls on 18 May, 2008. But before the official kick-off, there was the Copyright Symposium The Book in the Internet Era: Copyright and the Future for Authors, Publishers and Libraries on April 21 and 22, 2008. Of course there were international celebrities, but in the time preceding the symposium the National Library of The Netherlands put a hot potato on the table. Books and articles of the 20th century might be the missing link in the digital library of tomorrow.

The National Library has been in the forefront of digitising books, newspapers and magazines. It was one of the first national libraries instituting an e-Depot. But the National Library has increasingly problems with the strict criteria of the Dutch copyright law. Re-use of material is only possible after 70 years upon the death of the authors or after 70 years of publication if the author was employed. In order to re-use the material before the transfer of the material to the public domain consent of rights holders is needed. But these are usually not easy to trace.

In fact localising the rights holders is a tracing action of mythological proportion. Of many book authors from the thirties the heirs are known. But tracing authors of magazine articles is an enormous problem, as one edition already will have contribution of some ten authors. It costs more time and money to trace them than all digitising projects together, while no fee has been paid to the heirs yet. For this reason Google has limited the only big digitising project of 300.000 Dutch language books in the university library of Ghent to 1867. Just to be sure Google took two times 70 years for its deadline in order to exclude any risk of a copyright claim.

Of course one could say that it is no problem to go and get the physical book in the library. Yet the experience is already that if a book has not been digitised, it does not exist. If a library does not have a retrospective index, it will find out that mostly books or articles, registered in the digital index, will be looked up. Besides slowly digitised books and articles become common in the library.

The National Library of the Netherlands pleads to adopt a combination of the Anglo-saxon and Scandinavian models. In this combination extended collective licenses will be closed, but on the basis of the opt-out principle. There will be no search for rights holders in this model, while on the other hand cultural heritage institutions have insight in the financial consequences beforehand. On the other hand there remains a right to a fee and a possibility to refuse permission to reprint or digitise. A real problem in this model is the need to pay ahead for license agreements, which would create gold mines at collecting societies.

Yet this model is the best of both worlds. But this needs legislation by the Dutch and eventually the European legislator. The definitive solution will be a special internet paragraph in the Author law for non-commercial usage. Yet making laws takes time. The National Library proposes that rights organisation indemnify cultural heritage organisation for not-linked and untraceable heirs. If it appears impossible to re-insure the financial liability, the government should guarantee the liability.

Blog Posting Number: 1077

Tags: copyright, digital book

2008: Year of the fibre breakthrough

Amsterdam got its Christmas present from the European Commission. The municipality of Amsterdam was cleared from unfair state competition in the matter of the fibre project of the Cityring from the complainants the cable operator UPC and cable operators’ association VECAI (which changed its name to NLkabel recently). Amsterdam had never doubted the positive outcome of the EC investigation.


(c) 2007; Houthoff Buruma Solicitors

The Directorate General of Competition, headed by Ms Neelie Kroes, decided to start an investigation, acting on the complaints of UPC and VECAI. The municipality of Amsterdam had invested 6 million euro as equity with private companies in the passive level the proposed Cityring. Amsterdam did the investment in order keep control on an open fibre network. UPC have been closed out of the bidding process early, lodge a complaint of unfair state funding with the DG Competition. The DG started a voluntary and non obligatory investigation. A lot of documents went back and forth, confidential documents had to be cleaned up due to corporate details and draft documents were held up due to court cases. Even a case before the Court in Luxemburg was under consideration. In May the DG Competition was ready to start the final leg of the investigation, which ended in December with a ruling favourable for the municipality of Amsterdam.

The DG Competition looked at three items:
a. does the municipality act as a market conform investor, in other words does the municipality not support the foundation of a company unfairly with state support;
b. Is fibre to the home a achievable business case;
c. And some specific sub-items.

Already in December 2006 UPC and VECAI had the draft text, clearing the municipality of unfair support. UPC decently kept its mouth shut as the investigation was not yet final. Remained left the business case and the specific sub-items. Helped by the timeframe, the business case was not an item any longer either. In the Netherlands FttH initiatives mushroomed: Nuenen, Hillegom, Geldrop-Mierlo, Deventer, Enschede as well as abroad. Besides the projects various companies competed for these projects; in the Netherlands notably Reggeborgh and KPN. Last October, the Amsterdam municipal project manager Dirk van der Woude has published an updated list on Dutch and foreign FttH projects. The last sub-items have been cleared by the municipality of Amsterdam successfully.

So Amsterdam can continue its project to bring fibre to more than 450.000 Amsterdam homes. In the meantime more initiatives spring up, besides the already mentioned one. As ambitious as the Amsterdam Cityring is the living lab Almere project where 70.000 will be connected to fibre before 2010.

From the updated list it is clear that 2008 will be the year of the fibre breakthrough in The Netherlands. Not in the list is yet the Fibre to the Farm (FttF) project, a project where rural areas will be linked up to urban networks. Difficult areas will be bridged by leading cables through trees in woody areas; besides farmers will dig the ducts with tractors instead of calling in a cable laying contractor with urban experience. Also internationally fibre will break through with large urban areas in 2008. Fibre will no longer be in a pilot phase, but will be in a project phase.

Cable projects will have to prove in 2008 that they can reach the same type of speeds by cable. So far UPC has demonstrated speeds of up to 100Mbps, but has not started marketing it. It looks like UPC and other cable operators will have to stick to lower rates over against fibre operators. I look forward to the battlefield in Almere.

The usage of higher speeds will have consequences for content. We have seen the usage of video grow fast. Also the social networks have grown with movies and twitter-like services. But with higher speeds, services will have more freedom to compose services with live video. This will for example be a challenge for newspapers and broadcast services. But it will also have consequences for bloggers. So far the majority of bloggers have worked with text. But I would not be surprised, when we see more bloggers go into audio or video interview blogs.

Blog Posting Number: 964

Tags: FttH, FttF, Fibre to the Home, Fibre to the Farm, Fibre to the Home, Fibre to the Farm, FttH, FttF

Flash: City of Amerdam EC eGovernment Award

Yesterday the winners of the European eGovernment Awards were announced at the EU Ministerial eGovernment Conference in Lisbon (Portugal). The City of Amsterdam from The Netherlands picked up one of the awards, celebrating Europe’s most innovative public services in the first category For Better public services for growth and jobs.

The project: Horeca1

Description: One-stop-shop for Hotel Restaurant Café licences" submitted by the Economic Development Department, City of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Evaluation: Horeca1 helps entrepreneurs and SMEs to easily find out which governmental documents they have to obtain for the seven local licences required in the City, by answering questions on-line and filling out a single form.

Amsterdam buildings in 3D on Google

No less than 170.000 buildings in Amsterdam are now available in 3D on Google Earth. So far it was possible to look at Amsterdam and recognise places and buildings, but now the department Geo and Real Estate of the municipality of Amsterdam has made 170.000 buildings available to users of Google Earth.

The department has a completely object oriented registration of real estate in the city. This implies that every building can be modelled digitally and in such a way the whole city can be constructed in a digital way. The 170.000 buildings have now been offered to Google Earth and are visible by clicking on the 3D buildings option. Within a few weeks all buildings will be available in 3D Warehousing of Google. Users can then download a building from the warehouse and adapt it with free program Google SketchUp. Ten of the most interesting buildings in the city such as the Royal Palace at Dam Square, Westertower (see illustration) and Central Station have been detailed in 3D and these are also available as a standard set in Google Earth.

3D Amsterdam in Google is now part of city marketing. Sometime ago SecondLive was part of city marketing for some municipalities, but now 3D is the new fashion. Immediately all kind of purposes are linked to it. One of the aldermen of Amsterdam saw a democratic use in it. People would be able to download the buildings now and be able to build on the future of the city. This sounds good and politically correct. But I do not see more than half a million people now running to their computer in order to construct their Amsterdam. But in a short time people will be able to download their own house and detail it with SketchUp and put photographs to the model. This model can then be placed back for viewing. In this way the city can be dressed up. As such it will be possible as a tool in (re-)construction projects for you can show the history with archived photographs and new proposals with the 3D program.

3D Amsterdam is collaboration between the municipality of Amsterdam and the Google subsidiary located in Amsterdam. It is just one of the links Google has as there are many parties in Amsterdam and in The Netherlands linking in with photographs, background information and visual additions to buildings. It all fits in the mission of the municipality to be a creative hub in the Netherlands and Europe.

There is now a tour of places and objects of interest available as well as a movie of the tour on http://www.blogger.com/www.amsterdam.nl and for Google 3D the following links are available:
Google Earth - http://earth.google.com/
Google Earth and 3D - http://earth.google.com/intl/nl/3d.html
SketchUp - http://www.sketchup.com/
3D Warehouse - http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/

Blog Posting Number: 756

Tag: amsterdam, 3D, citymarketing

Aussies and Kiwis sampling Dutch broadband (5)

Especially the civil servant in the Aussies and Kiwis trade delegation were eager to hear about the involvement of the government in the pushing of Fibre to the Home (FttH) networks. The first that they arrived they already upset the program set up by Paul Budde and Fred Kappeteijn. While in Amsterdam they wanted to know everything about CityNet and how do you get it off the ground. Also on Tuesday it remained a subject of interest. And when they were in Almere they still were eager to learn how to set up an FttH network and keep it an Open Net.

Of course Amsterdam is the most interesting case as the city has invested 6 million euro and is now under scrutiny of the European Commission. The municipality of Almere has not put any money in it the FttH network, which will be laid from 2007 till 2010. Also the municipality of Nuenen did not put money in the network.

(c) Elaine Sullivan

The Netherlands is not the only country working on FttH networks. IN Japan 300.000 FttH connections per month will be realised by 2008. In Europe the battle for Paris is on. The Iliad network will go after 1 million homes at 1 billion euro. Neuf Cegetel wants to have 250.000 FttH connections at 50Mbps for 29,90! The incumbent France Telecom starts FttH connections at 100/10 Mbps for 44,90 in Paris, Poitiers, Marseille, Lille, Toulouse and Lyon. Noos Numericable puts in a massive investment. In the department Haute-de-Seine 1,5 million household connections are aimed at as well as 100.000 SME connections at 50 to 70 million euro. All in all no less than 100 broadband projects are under way in France. In Cologne in Germany a broadband project is going on as well as in Schwerte, Norderstadt, Hamburg and Gelsenkirche. But there are also projects in Vienna (Austria) and Zurich (Switzerland), while in Denmark an FttH network project has been taken up by an energy company, which will connect 35 percent of the homes and reach 50 percent of all Danish people. In the UK there is a project in Oxfordshire. In the rest of the UK the slogan is: 12/1 Mbps is enough for all and ever. Of course FastWeb in Milan is the most operational project in Europe.

Essential to the Open Net is the three layer model. There is a point to point connection for an unbundled local loop; this provides the largest capacity for future growth. The active layer has active Ethernet. On top of that is the application service layer. Any service provider can use the application service layer against the same conditions.

In Amsterdam the municipality is represented in the board of network. And Amsterdam has invested 6 million euro. Amsterdam claims that it did so under company conditions. In Almere the municipality is also represented in the board, but it will not invest in the network. In fact the municipality does not have to do this as an investor has been found and an operator, most likely KPN, will take care of the operations.

In all cases people ask, why an open network is the option. The answer comes from economics. A closed network will give a return upon investment of 8 percent, while an open network will yield 10 percent return upon investment.

Blog Posting Number: 696

Tags; Open network, FttH