Friday, July 09, 2004

The Olympics network: faster, stronger -- and redundant. ATHENS, GREECE -- A steady stream of taxis grinds up the hill to the headquarters of the Athens Olympic Committee headquarters, on the northern edge of the city. In the lobby it's all bustle as visitors mill around the accreditation desk and pass through security controls. But on the second floor the glass-walled technology operations center sits idle -- most of the 135 seats in the control room are empty, and all but one of the screens on the video wall are dark. [InfoWorld: Top News] 5:48:37 PM    comment []

Microsoft's 1994 consent decree: Boon or bust?. Ten years after Bill Gates and Janet Reno shook hands, the jury is out on the real impact of their agreement. [CNET News.com] 4:44:48 PM    comment []

Lynda Barry. Paper doll fun! [Salon.com] 4:44:33 PM    comment []

3 from BNA News: LAW FIRM ACCUSED OF HACKING ARCHIVE.ORG A federal court in Pennsylvania has refused to add a law firm to a civil dispute in which one party argued that the firm violated copyright and computer crime laws by hacking into Archive.org. The party claimed that it asked Archive.org to keep its archived content confidential and that the firm hacked into the site to retreive the content. Case name is Flynn v. Health Advocate. Online soon at U.S. Courts GERMAN CT. ORDERS EBAY TO ALTER USER FEEDBACK RATING A German court has ordered eBay to remove a negative feedback rating of an eBay seller. The court ruled that the rating was objectively unjustified. German language coverage MPAA STUDY SHOWS FILMS BEING DOWNLOADED The MPAA has released a new study, claiming that one in four people online has illegally downloaded a feature film. A survey of 3,600 Internet users in eight countries showed that as many as 50 percent had downloaded copyrighted content in the last year. CNET News.com story (I gotta say that the claim that a quarter of Net users have downloaded a feature film seems pretty implausible, and I regard the study methodology as suspect before I even investigate further.) 3:37:38 PM    comment []

op/ed: RULES. --humdog rules seem easy enough for people to talk about -- at first. everybody thinks they know what rules the rules are for a given... [The Second Life Herald] 6:10:11 AM    comment []

Fair Use and Advocacy Strategies. Donna Wentworth at Copyfight writes "Fair Use It or Lose It" about a fair use request to Siva Vaidhyanathan: The story in a nutshell: a professor at a Northeastern college asked Siva for permission to distribute a copy of a chapter of "Anarchist in the Library". [SF - elided, but perhaps critical, is an aspect of "to the entire incoming class"] "Of course," Siva replied, adding that [the professor] really ought not to have asked. The professor responded by forwarding to Siva a note from the college librarian, which warns firmly that "educational purpose is only one of the four determining factors, and that the courts have weighted one of them, the impact on the potential market, heavily in recent cases." Siva, horrified, runs the use of the book chapter through the four-factor test to show that the professor has a slam-dunk "case." After thinking about it for a while, and checking a few fair use references, (particularly the book interviews case cited there), I decided Siva's analysis was probably right. But ... not so right that it couldn't reasonably be contested by an "aggressive" plaintiff. That is, I could see a publisher arguing that copying a whole chapter was too much, it'd be distributed to too many people, the book itself is quite new, digital copies even of a chapter could be hurtful to the book's market, and so on. I don't think it would be a "silly" lawsuit. A risk-averse person, or institution, would not be ridiculous to be feel they had a non-negligible chance of losing. The professor definitely wasn't wrong to ask. In fact that was the objectively right thing to do (i.e., I don't mean that in terms of morality, I mean there is enough doubt so they should indeed check about usage permission). Note, regarding any irony of asking copyright reformers about using material, I strongly dissent from the concept that anyone should put too much stock in an author's good will or general policy advocacy. In the face of a prospective lawsuit, there is very little consolation in being able to say to a few friends, but-he's-a-hypocrite! (heck, some years ago, Mike Godwin had a habit of both arguing prominently that "Maybe libel law is obsolete", and at the exact same time, saber-rattling libel lawsuit at items which particularly offended him - and he'd happily explain why it wasn't a contradiction, why this time was different - every time!). As to how to attack the problem, education, advocacy, assistance, reform, all are good ideas in themselves. But I'm afraid that my own experiences fighting for fair use make me even more pessimistic than Lessig. [Infothought] 6:10:08 AM    comment []

Winwood: Roll With P2P, Baby. Grammy-winning rocker Steve Winwood took an unusual step to promote his latest album when he voluntarily released a song over peer-to-peer networks. So far, the experiment has enhanced record sales. By Katie Dean. [Wired News] 6:09:37 AM    comment []

Blame It on Google Okay, this is dopey even by my standards, but my first response on hearing ('scuse me, reading) about the veep selection was to think about how little the Kerry campaign has been on my mind lately. The news was almost like a little memo popping up in my consciousness: hey, remember this?   . . . . . . Google encourages impulse-shopping for news. It quickens the speed with which old news grows stale, it reinforces our boredom with the already-known, and it disrupts slowly-evolving stories -- somewhat in the manner of that Vonnegut fable we all read in school -- with bursts of sensation and information.  I love it, but I'm not sure if it's healthy. [Global Suburb] 6:09:32 AM    comment []

Wrap it up!. My husband has been working on his dissertation for years and now I'm supporting him while he doesn't finish it. Help! [Salon.com] 6:08:38 AM    comment []

Patriot Act Wins House Vote. The Republican-led House stands by the Patriot Act, fending off an effort to roll back a section of the controversial law allowing authorities to investigate people's reading habits at bookstores and libraries. [Wired News] 6:08:28 AM    comment []