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Honolulu city council member Charles Djou has proposed a bill that would ban text messaging and video gameplay while driving. See the Honolulu Star-Bulletin article, No driving and texting, and the Honolulu Advertiser’s article, Honolulu City Council considers ban on texting while driving, for more information.

A few of the comments on these articles suggested that police officers would encounter problems enforcing a text messaging ban. It’s unlikely that a driver will be pulled over for texting, especially if there is no state or Federal law on the books. A city law would be enforced on city streets.

It’s much more likely that these laws will be used to file additional charges related to a traffic or pedestrian accident.

Every mobile phone carrier also keeps a record of the time, date and content of each text message. The carrier’s logs may also note the cell phone tower that received the text message. That information is enough to link the message and the device to a specific time and location.

Carriers still include on the monthly invoice a time/date stamp and phone number for every text message. All the police have to do is subpoena the accused’s mobile phone carrier for these records.

It’s easy enough to spot someone who is text messaging. They’re hunched over their phone. Video game usage isn’t tracked by mobile phone towers if the device has no radio, but officers and eyewitnesses can still testify that they saw a distracted driver using a device.

When I lived in Florida, there was a state law that banned headphone use by drivers. This was in the early 1980s, when Walkmen tape players and radios were popular.

When I’m walking, I try to count the number of drivers who are wearing earbuds or headphones. I see too many people who drive with their ears covered, especially on scooters and mopeds. It’s amazing how little common sense some people have.

Image courtesy of bradleygee on Flickr through a Creative Commons license.

I love Gmail. I like its clean, elegant user interface. 

Today, Gmail rolled out themes, so users can make their Gmail screen look as ugly as they’d like. The ASCII theme is nice enough. Green text on a black screen reminds me of PINE.

See Spice up your inbox with colors and themes on Gmail’s official blog for more details.

The November 2008 issue of Hawaii Business magazine has a cover story called How Wez Made Millionz Wit Dis Foto, on icanhaszheezburger.com and the site’s cofounders Kari Unebasami and Eric Nakagawa. The article coincides with the publication of their web site’s first book, I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun. The book contains 200 pictures selected from the site’s collection of captioned photos.

Kari used to work at Hawaii Business magazine’s parent company, Pacific Basin Communications, so the cover story is the usual “locals make good” puff piece that is a staple for Honolulu publications.

There’s no discussion of the intellectual property issues involved in licensing and publishing these photographs. I heard Eric briefly mention this issue at the Manoa Geeks on 1 August 2008, and I’d wondered if the publisher wanted photographs that were the sole property of the site.

That would have been an interesting discussion, especially since icanhascheezburger.com has a copyright tips page that advises users to post pictures they took themselves. Many of the images on icanhascheezburger’s companion site PunditKitchen.com are captioned versions of news service photos. The sites’ terms of use page includes the standard DMCA notice, but also assigns copyright for every image that users contribute to the site to Pet Holdings.

It makes me wonder what Reuters, Corbis and the Associated Press might say regarding the fair use of their photos by these web sites. I’m not a lawyer, but I am curious what Larry Lessig or other Creative Commons advocates would say about this.

Last week, Pet Holdings released an iPhone app that lets users browser through the sites’ recent images. Upcoming versions will let iPhone users submit their own captioned photos to the sites. For other mobile phones, there’s icanlol.com/iphone/. See iPhone App for taking Cheezburgers To Go for more details.

Barack who?

When I saw the magazine on the newstand, my first reaction was “Why isn’t Barack Obama on the cover?” It is the November 2008 issue, and the Honolulu’s most famous high school graduate. Kari and Eric have a great story to tell, but wouldn’t Obama’s picture on the cover sell more copies? Sure, it’s a bit of a gamble to put a presidential candidate’s picture on a monthly magazine during Election Day, but the potential benefits and revenue seem to outweigh the risks.

Then again, the cat book was published in October 2008, so the article is more of a promotional piece than anything else. There is some discussion of Kari and Eric’s roles as entrepreneurs, but Kari admits that she and Eric got lucky with a well-timed idea:

“It was for fun,” says Unebasami. “Then it got popular and we had to adjust to that.”

The Hawaii Business article also mentions that Kari and Eric sold their site to Pet Holdings, a company owned by Ben Huh, for an “undisclosed sum”. The article does list Time Magazine’s estimate of US$2 million as the sale price. I found Time magazine’s article, The Master of Memes, in the reference list for Wikipedia’s article about icanhascheezburger.com. That explains the title of the Hawaii Business magazine article. Two million pre-tax dollars meets the minimum copywriting definition of “millions”. 

What about 4chan?

Still, it’s a surprise that the Hawaii Business article doesn’t mention 4chan at all. It’s almost as if that Lev Grossman never wrote that article for Time. Grossman’s article isn’t about Eric, Kari or Ben at all. It’s about a man called Christoper Poole, better known as moot, and his web site, 4chan. 4chan is an image board where users post and comment on pictures. Some 4chan members believe the LOLcat meme, including the catchphrases Caturday and “Do not want!” began on 4chan’s boards, and that icanhascheezburger.com is profiting from the meme. Wikipedia’s article on 4chan has some additional background.

Instead, Hawaii Business writers Jolyn Okimoto Rosa and Scott Radway report the following story behind Kari’s relative anonymity:

[icanhascheezburger.com] started as a lark and Unebasami wasn’t sure she wanted to be known as one of the founders of that quirky cat Web site. So she asked for anonymity.

As I pointed out in my billso.com article of 26 April 2008, Honolulu LOLcats founder Kari Unebasami reveals herself, Kari had claimed that she maintained her anonymity because of rude email messages and perceived threats from unidentified 4chan members.

Thus, articles such as BusinessWeek’s piece from 13 July 2007 called Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks don’t mention Kari by her real name. She’s just called tofuburger in these articles.

It’s a bit hard to keep all of these stories straight, especially since the home page of Ben Huh’s blog lists his wife as tofuburger.

Images appear courtesy of lawgeek and J.G.L. on flickr through a Creative Commons license.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• Copyright and fair use
• Creative Commons
• 1 August 2008: Last night’s Manoa Geeks meeting
• 15 June 2008: The Associated Press and fair use on the Web
• 26 April 2008: Honolulu LOLcats founder Kari Unebasami reveals herself

I’m using two new textbooks for my IS 6700 Technology Strategy course this spring: one of these books is IT Strategy in Action by Jim McKeen and Heather Smith.

I’ve also compiled a custom collection of technology readings and cases for the course. This collection is not available on Amazon.com or in other bookstores.

Many of the assignments will rely on these cases, so students in the course need to buy both books.

The textbook I have been using, Strategic Dynamics by Bob Burgelman and Andrew Grove, is a great book. But it is time to make a change. Of course, students should not try to use the Burgelman book in the Spring 2009 course.

These two volumes will be sold as a shrink-wrapped bundle in the HPU Bookstore. The bundle will be available in January 2009. This bundle is less expensive than bound versions of the books, and it’s punched for a three-ring binder.

There’s a preliminary syllabus and schedule for this course at the billso.com page for this course, IS 6700 Spring 2009. If you have questions, contact me via email.