Yesterday, I blogged about the upcoming vote in the EU's CULT committee on a proposal to extend copyright for sound recordings for another 45 years, and to force ISPs to block sites that "infringe copyright," to spy on their customers to block suspicious traffic.
Today I have good news -- thanks to your phone calls and emails to the right MEPs, the proposal was defeated! The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Danny O'Brien sez,
Just got word from the European Parliament all three of the filtering/copyright extension amendments were defeated or withdrawn in the committee vote. We're still waiting on the official record, but if that's true, it's an amazing victory -- one was originally proposed by the original author of the report, Guy Bono himself, one was voted in by the powerful industry committee, and one was drafted by an EPP-ED member, the largest bloc in the parliament.
We're sure copyright extension, ISP snooping, and any number of foolish policies will pop up again in the EU process or national governments: but together we'll kick them out every time.
billstewart writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft will be announcing a virtualization strategy on Tuesday. Of course there's plenty of focus on the competition with VMware, including the obligatory reference to Microsoft's entry into the browser wars prior to cutting off Netscape's air supply. The pieces of the picture will include: an alliance with Citrix Systems, owners of XenSource; acquisition of privately held Calista Technologies of San Jose, which has software that speeds up the performance of applications running in a virtualized environment; and lower price for Windows Vista used on virtualized computers. Microsoft also reversed its earlier position and will now allow the Home Basic and Home Premium versions of Vista to run under virtualization. The company confirmed its plans to deliver its Hyper-V hypervisor within six months of the launch of Windows Server 2008 (betas available now), which is expected this quarter."
The first-ever Creative Commons-licensed electronica album that is backed by a collecting society has just been released. This means that the artist will get paid for radio-play and live performance (which the collecting societies get money for), a major breakthrough since many collecting societies have been hostile to CC, telling members that if they adopt CC licenses, they can kiss their radio-play money goodbye.
Henrik sez, "I am really excited about this release - it's a FABULOUS album (the best CC licensed music I have ever heard) and finally a break for serious musicians trying to make a living off their art - collecting societies still play a large role around here, and no sane musician would pass on their checks."
Today marks the release of Small Arm of Sea, the debut album by female indietronica singer, songwriter and producer Tone (Sofie Nielsen). While the album itself is unique in its style and substance, seamlessly combining abstract electronic composition techniques with a clear pop sensibility, it is equally as intriguing in terms of distribution. Small Arm of Sea is available both in stores (on both combined CD/DVD w/ visuals or vinyl) and online (for free, non-DRM download), with physical copies containing the text “Copy this album for your friends, please!”.
The most interesting aspect of the album’s distribution is that Small Arm of Sea is both CC-licensed (BY-NC-ND) and backed commercially by KODA, Denmark’s music collection society. This means that not only is Small Arm of Sea available for free and open sharing, but also operating within in the traditional Danish commercial structure, in which KODA collects royalties for commercial uses. This is the first album of its kind to be released in such a way, and label Urlyd, who are releasing the album, are understandably ecstatic.
The Australian Attorney-General's department is inviting submissions from the public on copying of movies and images in different formats for private use.
These were sections of the Copyright Amendment Act introduced in December 2006 that made it legal for Aussies to do things they'd been doing for decades, such as recording a tv broadcast to tape or disc, but illegal to watch such recordings more than once!
The Minister is required by the Act to review these exceptions after two years and is now inviting comment.
This is a good opportunity to argue for the exceptions to be expanded (not contracted!) to come into line with general consumer behaviour.
Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels over the years -- this wrecked, rusting cargo ship off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, as seen from the deck of the Spirit of Freedom. Shot this on the same trip where I came up with the idea for my post-Singularity coral-reef story, I, Row-Boat. The ship wrecked in the sixties and has been rusting out ever since. Down below, in the shallows around the reef, there's a propeller and shaft so long that you can't see one end from the other end. We were chased by a school of 1.5m parrotfish in formation around us -- they executed a series of coordinated right-angle turns, then turned their backsides to us and emitted a cloud of sand, reducing visibility to zero. When the water cleared, they were gone. The wreck really does look like the Parthenon in this shot, I think -- apparently it's all but gone now, washed away in last year's storms.
Link
My buddy Roger Wood, the mad assemblage clock-sculptor, continues to wow me with his email newsletter featuring his latest creations. This pair of handsome fellas are the most recent products of his workbench.
Link
The European Green Party -- which controls about ten percent of the continentwide vote -- has put together a PSA in support of file-sharing and new laws that legalize the activity. Called "I Wouldn't Steal," it's an answer to the terrible "You wouldn't steal a car" nagware ads that run at the beginning of your store-bought DVDs (Hey, MPA, here's a hint: if I went to the store and bought the DVD, you don't really need to lecture me on the evils of downloading. I bought the DVD).
Whenever you rent a movie, the multinational media industry forces you to watch their propaganda. They claim that [downloading movies is the same as snatching bags, stealing cars or shoplifting]. That’s simply not true – making a copy is fundamentally different from stealing.
The media industry has failed to offer viable legal alternatives and they will fail to convince consumers that sharing equals stealing. Unfortunately, they have succeeded in another area – lobbying to adapt laws to criminalize sharing, turning consumers into criminals. They argue that their laws are necessary to [support artists], but in reality all they’re protecting is their own profits.
Cyberlawyer Denise Howell sez, "As far as I could tell, the same parents driving themselves to distraction with fear over their evening chardonnays about MySpace and FaceBook are willingly helping their kids fork over a slew of personal data when they visit Build-A-Bear. It's hard to fault them too much though, as the computers there masquerade as anything but a corporate info-racket."
You see, each Build-A-Bear critter is issued a "birth certificate," which is generated after the kids -- and hopefully their parents, though that didn't seem to be making a bit of difference on the common sense front -- visit a bank of computers. These are big orangey-purple affairs, sort of Dr. Seussian in presentation. The keyboard buttons include stars and other colored shapes to make data input all the easier and more intuitive for youngsters. In fact, the computer-plus-keyboard experience is very close (no doubt intentionally so) to something children and their parents might have experienced in a kids' museum, library, or school. Before their new friend can get its birth certificate, the kids are prompted to enter a host of very personal personal information: birth date, home address, gender, phone, and email among them. Along the way is the option to "skip" some of this input, but unlike what we're used to in the world of online retail forms, there's no effort to communicate what data is "required" for the transaction to proceed, and what's "optional." The overall effect is to sideline the privacy-savviness that might otherwise accompany the parent and/or child. I sat there and watched parent after parent prompt their kids to flex their memory muscles and practice their computer skills: "Ok Timmy, now, what's our address? What's your birthday? Do you remember our phone number? Good typing!!"
wikinerd writes "Following an online petition in November 2007 by members of an OS/2 online community to open-source OS/2, IBM answered by sending a letter via FedEx making it clear that OS/2 is going to remain closed-source, citing business, technical, and legal reasons. An earlier petition in 2005 that had attracted over 11,000 signatures met a similar response. Both petition letters to IBM Corp. can be viewed at the OS2World.com library. The End of Support period for OS/2 passed by in December 2006, and the given IBM's response the future for OS/2 doesn't look bright, unless re-implementation projects such as Voyager or osFree attract the necessary critical mass of operating system developers."
Feint writes "I'm working on an business platform for inter-company collaboration based on an open source software stack. As part of that platform I would like to integrate some sort of digital rights management for the documents in the system. The vast majority of articles about DRM are focused how good or evil it is to apply DRM to digital music or video. I haven't seen many articles address open source solutions for protecting business data like CAD / MS Office / PDF / etc. documents, which is a real need in business today. Can the Slashdot readership suggest some open source DRM offerings other than the Sun DReaM initiative, which hasn't had a release since Jan. 2007?"
A Swedish university will investigate how much methane a cow releases when it belches. Methane, a greenhouse gas believed to contribute to global warming, will be measured in the air around the cows in the study by special collars.
Microsoft announces steps it says will help business customers take advantage of a technology called virtualization, including a change in policy to allow all versions of Windows Vista to be virtualized.
Microsoft announces steps it says will help business customers take advantage of a technology called virtualization, including a change in policy to allow all versions of Windows Vista to be virtualized.
hedley writes "A prior article on the damage Java does to CS education was discussed here recently. There was substantial feedback and the mailbox of one of the authors, Prof Dewar, also has been filled with mainly positive responses. In this followup to the article, Prof. Dewar clarifies his position on Java. In his view the core of the problem is universities 'dumbing down programs, hoping to make them more accessible and popular. Aspects of curriculum that are too demanding, or perceived as tedious, are downplayed in favor of simplified material that attracts a larger enrollment.'"
The Soviet authorities have had enough of Andrei Sakharov, their troublesome nuclear weapons designer and moral conscience. He's too famous to shoot or imprison, so they banish him to a closed city on the Volga.
Sarah Silverman loves technology. Although she's not cynical when it comes to tech, her arch perspective on the world makes her the perfect pitch person for our explanations of why things don't work the way they should.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Ars Technica has up a nice article on why security consultant Ed Giorgio's statement that 'privacy and security are a zero-sum game' is wrong. The author reasons that, due to Metcalfe's law, the more valuable a government network is to the good guys, the more valuable it is to the bad guys. Given the trend in government to gather all of its eggs into one database, unless more attention is paid to privacy, we'll end up with neither security nor privacy. In other words, privacy and security are a positive-sum game with precarious trade-offs — you can trade a lot of privacy away for absolutely no gain in security, but you don't have to."
A columnist for Wired has an interesting look at how telecommunications are actually making it more interesting to reside in populated areas instead of allowing the complete disregard for distance. "Technology makes it more fun and more profitable to live and work close to the people who matter most to your life and work. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an expert on city economies, argues that communications technology and face-to-face interactions are complements like salt and pepper, rather than substitutes like butter and margarine. Paradoxically, your cell phone, email, and Facebook networks are making it more attractive to meet people in the flesh."
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Today marks the release of Small Arm of Sea, the debut album by female indietronica singer, songwriter and producer Tone (Sofie Nielsen). While the album itself is unique in its style and substance, seamlessly combining abstract electronic composition techniques with a clear pop sensibility, it is equally as intriguing in terms of distribution. Small Arm of Sea is available both in stores (on both combined CD/DVD w/ visuals or vinyl) and online (for free, non-DRM download), with physical copies containing the text “Copy this album for your friends, please!”.
