Thursday, April 01, 2004

The Electronic Frontier Foundation home page for April 1, 2004 -- get it while it lasts -- announces a number of interesting items, including: EFF Acquires US Dept of Justice Jack Valenti to Join EFF Board DOJ information on how to detect suspicious people 2:42:49 PM    comment []

Sad chapter for university presses, by Marilyn Gardner, The Christian Science Monitor. When Northeastern University Press prints the final books on its 2004 list later this year, the titles will have a dubious distinction: They will be the last ones bearing the university imprint. After 27 years, the respected press is shutting down, a casualty of rising costs and shifting priorities. School officials say they cannot afford subsidies that now stand at $450,000 and could reach $600,000 this year. . . . Northeastern is not alone. The University of Idaho has announced that it is closing its press July 1, when the deficit will total $385,600. And the University of Georgia Press faces a possible loss of $289,329 in state support, half of its annual state subsidy. . . . Across the country, 95 university presses publish 11,000 books a year. In 2002, these scholarly works generated $444 million in sales. Although they account for a fraction of the 150,000 titles published in the US annually, they create what Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, calls an impressive cultural entity. Even so, he says, university presses suffer from stereotypes that they are simply fossilized recyclers of dissertations. As one measure of the importance of university press books to broader audiences, Givler notes that in the months following Sept. 11, 2001, three previously published volumes quickly became bestsellers: The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama Bin Laden, and the Future of Terrorism (Northeastern); Taliban (Yale); and Twin Towers (Rutgers). It was so unusual that three university press books would be topping the national bestseller list, Givler says. There is no visible, large, national market for a lot of these very specialized books. But when something comes along - 9/11 being the most dramatic and horrible example - university presses have already published the books about it that people need to read. They're serving the public need for information, not just scholars' need for information. 11:42:23 AM    comment []

Music industry relies on data from pirate nets to hone strategy Record labels are using data gleaned from pirate P2P networks to refine their sales-strategies, to excelletn effect. Nevertheless, they still repudiate the networks themselves, and vow to go on individually suing every participating music fan until they have all learned to respect the music industry. The online data revealed that despite Story of the Year's lunar rotation, its single "Until the Day I Die" ranked among the top 20 most popular downloads, alongside tracks from Blink-182, Audioslave and Hoobastank that received significantly more airplay. And when the band performed in a city, "we didn't necessarily see the phones blowing up at radio, but we saw download requests for the song skyrocket as they went through," said Jeremy Welt, Maverick's head of new media. Armed with this data, Maverick fought for more airtime at radio, which translated into more CD sales. Story of the Year's album, "Page Avenue," just went gold, selling more than half a million copies. "I definitely don't like to spin it that piracy is OK because we get to look at the data. It's too bad that people are stealing so much music," said Welt. "That said, we would be very foolish if we didn't look and pay attention to what's going on." Link (via Copyfight) (thanks, Cory!) 7:30:16 AM    comment []

Canada's RIAA can't prove infringement by P2P uploaders, says court. Canada's Federal Court has ruled that the Canadian Recording Industry Association was not able to prove copyright infringement by the uploaders it sued. The judge also said that under that country's copyright law, downloading is not illegal. Link Chris Hoofnagle, Assoc. Director of EPIC, The Electronic Privacy Information Center, tells BoingBoing: "We have the decision online here (~670kb PDF). It's remarkable. The judge says that keeping a file in a p2p system is no different than installing a photocopy machine in a library." And BoingBoing reader Chris suggests this alternate link to a leaner PDF from the Federal Court of Canada: Link [Boing Boing] [Ted Ritzer: Free Music] 7:27:23 AM    comment []

Surprise!. This April Fool's Day, remember the gags that have gone before. By Mark Newgarden, Dan Nadel and Peter Buchanan. [New York Times: Opinion] 7:26:09 AM    comment []

Making Music With Speak & #038; Spell. The electronic guts of children's toys can make some strange and wonderful sounds. At a New York City festival, a group of hackers-cum-musicians will show off their creations. Michelle Delio reports from New York. [Wired News] 7:25:25 AM    comment []

Everyone Is A Sucker. All the major news media are buying the ridiculous gig of email from Google. Which is a freakin' April Fools joke. USA Today, Reuters, even vet tech reporter John Markoff at the NYT have bought it, hook, line, and sinker.... [Andrew Bayer is Dreaming of China] 7:24:08 AM    comment []

Webjay - Playlists. Jon Udell laments the loss of Napster, because he no longer can find interesting music. The basis for ideas to new music should be based on your presonal taste: your playlist. WebJay makes a first step in this direction. On this site user can publish their playlist. Each playlist consists of the song name and a link to a public... [Blueblog] 7:23:39 AM    comment []

Virtual-School Costs Under Siege. One of the selling points of cyberschools is the apparent savings they offer. It's not so clear that money is actually being saved, and states are seeking more accountability. By John Gartner. [Wired News] 7:21:56 AM    comment []