Hollywood screenwriter Mike Le is making productive use of his time during the strike: he's the creator of the funny, insidery webcomic Don't Forget to Validate Your Parking, which made me laugh aloud more than once. It's a kind of My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable for Hollywood.
Link
(Thanks, Liz!)
Gawker is hosting a controversial Tom Cruise Scientology video that other sites were forced to remove after legal threats from the Church of Scientology. In the Cruise video, high-energy music plays while Cruise gives forth a stream of claims about the powers and responsibilities of people who've been turned into mystical beings by the cult's teachings.
The Church has sent a legal threat to Gawker as well, alleging that hosting the video infringes copyright (amid a host of nonsensical allegations about "receiving stolen property"), but Gawker's refused to take the video down. Instead, they've taken the ballsy stance that this video is posted for the purposes of news reporting and analysis, making it fair use. I hope they stick to their guns.
(Thanks, Gareth, Ryan, and Siva!)
toxcspdrmn writes "Bad news for Spinal Tap fans. The BBC reports that researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, have produced the darkest known material by manufacturing "forests" of carbon nanotubes. This forms a surface that absorbs or scatters 99.9% of all incidental light."
Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels: this beautifully horrible mural of the Great Wall of China, fronted with rubber plants, on display in the Bank of China lobby in Dalian, China.
Link
Julian Dibbell's released the text of his ground-breaking "My Tiny Life" as a free download through Lulu.com.
Part memoir and part ethnography, My Tiny Life is about the social life of the online, text-based virtual world LambdaMOO and my own brief encounter with it in the early '90s. Andrew Leonard, in Salon, called it “the best book yet on the meaning of online life.”
Michael Geist has come up with a manifesto for the Fair Copyright for Canadians group, which has gone from a standing start to more than 38,000 members in less than two months. His "Principles for Fair Copyright for Canadians" contains seven simple, commonsense statements about what a good Canadian (or any nation's) copyright law should look like. Here's the first three:
Anti-circumvention provisions should be directly linked to copyright infringement. The anti-circumvention provisions have been by far the most controversial element of the proposed reforms. The experience in the United States, where anti-circumvention provisions effectively trump fair use rights, provides the paradigm example of what not do to. It should only be a violation of the law to circumvent a technological protection measure (TPM) if the underlying purpose is to infringe copyright. Circumvention should be permitted to access a work for fair dealing or private copying purposes. This approach - which is similar (though not identical) to the failed Bill C-60 - would allow Canada to implement the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet treaties and avoid some of the negative "unintended consequences" that have arisen under the U.S. law.
No ban on devices that can be used to circumvent a TPM. Canada should not ban devices that can be used to circumvent a TPM. The reason is obvious - if Canadians cannot access the tools necessary to exercise their user rights under the Copyright Act, those rights are effectively extinguished in the digital world. If organizations are permitted to use TPMs to lock down content in a manner that threatens fair dealing, Canadians should have the right to access and use technologies that restores the copyright balance.
Expand the fair dealing provision by establishing "flexible fair dealing." Led by the United States, several countries around the world have established fair use provisions within their copyright laws (Israel being the most recent). The Supreme Court of Canada has already ruled that Canada's fair dealing provision must be interpreted in a broad and liberal manner. Yet the law currently includes a limited number of categories (research, private study, criticism, news reporting) that renders everyday activities such as recording television programs acts of infringement. The ideal remedy is to address other categories such as parody, time shifting, and format shifting by making the current list of fair dealing categories illustrative rather than exhaustive.
John Mark sez, "A 500-page steampunk graphic novel wins the American Library Association's 2008 Caldecott award, and the 2008 Newbery award goes to a collection of dramatic monologues and dialogues from over 20 characters in an imaginary 13th century English village. Meanwhile, a bunch of the *older* Newbery awardees, including some that are long out of print, have recently been made freely available online, and we've discovered more that are eligible to go online because their copyrights weren't renewed."
The steampunk graphic novel is The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznik, which tells the story of "an orphan in early-20th-century Paris living inside the walls of a train station, trying to finish an invention left by his father. The ALA Caldecott site says 'the suspenseful text and wordless double-page spreads narrate the tale… which is filled with cinematic intrigue.'" I've just ordered my copy.
Link, Invention of Hugo Cabret on Amazon, Link to "Invention of Hugo Cabret" site
(Thanks, John Mark!)
I love this "Two dimensional vase" -- a cutout of a vase that you lean against a water-glass with a flower in it. Smart idea for small-space living.
Link
Larry Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and one of the most important figures in the copyright reform movement, will give his final address on the subject on Jan 31.
Last June, Larry announced that he was switching tacks. The problems of copyright, he said, were a subset of the larger problem of corruption: capture of the regulatory process by special interests to the detriment of society as a whole. So Larry was going to fight corruption instead.
Larry's final talk on the subject is sure to be a barn-burner:
Creative Commons founder and Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig is giving his final presentation on Free Culture, Copyright and the future of ideas at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium on January 31st, 2008 from 1pm-2pm. After 10 years of enlightening and inspiring audiences around the world with multi-media presentations that inspired the Free Culture movement, Professor Lessig is moving on from the copyright debate and setting his sites on corruption in Washington.
An anonymous reader writes "The video game industry is finally forming a PAC by the end of March to get some political clout. A story in The New York Times yesterday reports that the video game industry has finally woken up and realized that in order to stay strong going forward, it can't rely on 13-year-old pimple-faced kids to promote its agenda."
coondoggie writes "Yet another Star Trek-like device is making its way into the real world. VoxTec's Phraselator name sounds a bit like something the Three Stooges might have used long ago but no, this PDA-like device was developed through Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for use in Afghanistan and Iraq by American soldiers for communicating with locals who spoke Farsi, Dari, Pashto and other languages. It is now being used as one tool to help keep the peace between English and non-English speakers by police departments in California, Florida, Nevada. In a nutshell the $2,500 ruggedized Phraselator runs an Intel PXA255 400mHz processor that supports a built-In noise canceling microphone, a VOCON 3200 Speech Recognizer, 1GB removable SD card, 256MB of DRAM Memory and 64MB Flash Memory. It can store up to 10,000 phrases."
geekbits writes "For all those who have at one time or another been too lazy to get up off the couch and go to the fridge and get a beer, heat up some pizza, or change the channel when the remote is missing, we may be one step closer to being able to keep our tushes parked just a little while longer. There may also be some slightly more noble implications here. According to an article in The New York Times, in an experiment at Duke University, a 12-pound, 32-inch monkey made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity. She was in North Carolina, and the robot was in Japan."
The former head of the Maryland Republican Party runs the firm tasked with delivering most of the Diebold voting machines during this year's primary and general elections. He says there's no conflict of interest, but voting rights activists aren't so sure.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to a leaked internal memo, Time Warner Cable is testing out tiered bandwidth caps in their Beaumont, TX division as a way to fairly balance the needs of heavy users against the limited amount of shared bandwidth cable can provide. The plan is to offer various service tiers with bandwidth fees for overuse, as well as a bandwidth meter customers can use to help them stay within their allotment. If it works out, they will consider a nation-wide rollout. Interestingly, the memo also claims that 5% of subscribers use over 50% of the total network bandwidth."
From gold-plated hard drives to eye-popping Google demos, the exhibitor floor at Macworld 2008 is crammed with goodies -- and there are plenty of Mac users elbowing each other for a look at the latest. Wired's continuing coverage of the conference brings you the highlights from the show floor.
A federal judge sentences Gregory Reyes, former chief executive of Brocade Communications Systems, to 21 months in prison and fines him $15 million. It's the harshest penalty yet in a tempest that has rattled corporate America.
From gold-plated hard drives to eye-popping Google demos, the exhibitor floor at Macworld 2008 is crammed with goodies -- and there are plenty of Mac users elbowing each other for a look at the latest. Wired's continuing coverage of the conference brings you the highlights from the show floor.
When Steve Jobs announced the MacBook Air at Macworld, he touted its environmentally friendly construction. Greenpeace welcomed the new eco-talk, but said Apple could still be doing more.
When Steve Jobs announced the MacBook Air at Macworld, he touted its environmentally friendly construction. Greenpeace welcomed the new eco-talk, but said Apple could still be doing more.
Hugh Pickens writes "General counsel for NBC Rick Cotton and Tim Wu, professor at Columbia Law school, continue their debate about copyright issues and technology on Saul Hansell's blog at the New York Times discussing Fair Use of commercial music and video as the raw materials for new creations. Cotton says that content protection on the broadband internet is really not a debate about fair use The fact that users can 'take three or four movies and splice together their favorite action scenes and post them online does not mean that these uses are fair. There needs to be something more — something that truly injects some degree of original contribution from the maker other than just the assembly of unchanged copies of different copyrighted works.' Wu's position is that 'it is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web.' This is a continuation of the previous discussion on copy protection."
Warning: include(/var/chroot/home/content/r/a/m/ramnem/htmlgoogle_vadd.txt) [function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/content/r/a/m/ramnem/html/archives/200801/20080117_world_technology.php on line 207
Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening '/var/chroot/home/content/r/a/m/ramnem/htmlgoogle_vadd.txt' for inclusion (include_path='.') in /home/content/r/a/m/ramnem/html/archives/200801/20080117_world_technology.php on line 207
Warning: include(/var/chroot/home/content/r/a/m/ramnem/htmlgoogle_vadd.txt) [function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/content/r/a/m/ramnem/html/archives/200801/20080117_world_technology.php on line 207
Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening '/var/chroot/home/content/r/a/m/ramnem/htmlgoogle_vadd.txt' for inclusion (include_path='.') in /home/content/r/a/m/ramnem/html/archives/200801/20080117_world_technology.php on line 207
Part memoir and part ethnography, My Tiny Life is about the social life of the online, text-based virtual world LambdaMOO and my own brief encounter with it in the early '90s. Andrew Leonard, in Salon, called it “the best book yet on the meaning of online life.”
Anti-circumvention provisions should be directly linked to copyright infringement. The anti-circumvention provisions have been by far the most controversial element of the proposed reforms. The experience in the United States, where anti-circumvention provisions effectively trump fair use rights, provides the paradigm example of what not do to. It should only be a violation of the law to circumvent a technological protection measure (TPM) if the underlying purpose is to infringe copyright. Circumvention should be permitted to access a work for fair dealing or private copying purposes. This approach - which is similar (though not identical) to the failed Bill C-60 - would allow Canada to implement the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet treaties and avoid some of the negative "unintended consequences" that have arisen under the U.S. law.
John Mark sez, "A 500-page steampunk graphic novel wins the American Library Association's 2008 Caldecott award, and the 2008 Newbery award goes to a collection of dramatic monologues and dialogues from over 20 characters in an imaginary 13th century English village. Meanwhile, a bunch of the *older* Newbery awardees, including some that are long out of print, have recently been made freely available online, and we've discovered more that are eligible to go online because their copyrights weren't renewed."
