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Wednesday, August 18, 2004 |
Copyright and Cultural Damage.
Just before Tim Wu resumed his excellent blogsitting at the Lessig Blog, Rep. Rick Boucher asked a simple question that sparked many a complex response: "In thinking about the future of my information availability in our society, am I right to be concerned about the emergence of pay per use as the norm?"
The question brings to mind a central difficulty with explaining why the copyfight matters the larger sense -- e.g., why society as a whole should care about whether the Internet becomes "pay-per-use." The major problem is that it's tough to quantify cultural damage. The recording industry has plenty of numbers to quantify its guestimated loss. But how do you explain what is lost from our culture when access to "information goods" is determined by whether you can pay the rental fee?
(Continued at Copyfight.) [unmediated]
8:51:53 PM 
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RNC War of Smart Mobs?.
Smart-mobbing is a tactic, not a strategy, a means of using technology to organize collective action that does not guarantee that the collective action will be good, evil, effective, counterproductive, or noticed at all. According to this Indymedia report, protestors and counterprotestors are including smart-mobbing via mobile device and Internet in their arsenals.
(Thanks, Sam!) [Smart Mobs]
8:45:44 PM
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>From BNA News, word that
MALAYSIA CONSIDERS IP COURT
Malaysia's Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Minister
plans to set up a special court to speed up disposal of
back-logged intellectual property cases.
3:46:14 PM
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You, Too, Could Be A Suspected Terrorist (The Washington Post)
By Anthony D. Romero
Antonio Romero is what my mother calls me. Antonio Romero is also how I am known to many of my friends and family members. Unfortunately, the name Antonio Romero also appears on a U.S. Treasury Department list titled "Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons." The government provides only this name, some known aliases and a date of birth for Antonio Romero. No further attempt is made at delineating one Antonio Romero from the next. A quick Internet search found no fewer than 10 of them in New York, not to mention four Anthony Romeros.
The proliferation of government watch lists is a troubling development in the war on terrorism. I recently learned more about this list because my organization, the ACLU, had signed a funding agreement with the Combined Federal Campaign in order to receive $500,000 it gathers from federal employees. The agreement required the ACLU to affirm that it would not knowingly hire individuals named on various watch lists. We believed that we were not required to affirmatively check employees against any list. But when we later were told that indeed we would have to check all current and potential employees, we withdrew from the CFC.
. . .
While the ACLU has never checked any of its employees against any government watch list, nor asked job applicants for their dates of birth or national origin before hiring them -- we may not under federal law -- we find ourselves in a true Catch-22: Disregard the watch lists and thereby risk breaking the law, or comply and possibly violate employees' civil liberties.
The ACLU has challenged similar watch lists in the context of airport travel. We have litigated against "no-fly" lists on behalf of ACLU clients who do not belong on these lists but have no way to get their names off. When our clients travel, the "false positives" make their experiences at airports difficult. Imagine if these same problems extended to all people whose names appear on government watch lists and to all aspects of our lives.
As we debate the need to reorganize our intelligence system, we must have an open dialogue about what measures truly make us safer. Blacklisting innocent people from employment does not make us safer. Making lengthy and ambiguous watch lists that employers do not know about but are nevertheless liable to observe only serves to undercut public confidence in the government's efforts in the war on terrorism. The proliferation of these lists could threaten many basic rights while leaving little recourse for those affected.
We all have to shoulder our responsibility if we want to keep America safe from terrorists. But we don't want to live in a country where every company, large and small, for-profit and nonprofit, must ask every Antonio Romero, including me, to prove every day that he is not a terrorist because his name happens to appear on a list.
6:50:00 AM
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Academia's information sharing future.
Grant Buckler, Open access: Academia's information sharing future, Information Highways, July/August 2004. A very good survey. Excerpt: "From the writer's viewpoint, though, academic publishing is quite different. Where journalists and novelists are paid for writing and many live on this income, academic journals pay neither the authors of the papers they publish nor their peers who review them.... Meanwhile, the Internet removes the printing and distribution costs from the equation.... The benefit to researchers is wider readership and more citations, which enhances their reputations. 'People go for what is easily available,' says Andrew Odlyzko, director of the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota, 'and we now have evidence from various studies that papers which are readily available on the net tend to have wider readership.' " |
MovieOut.
 MovieOut takes your movies and streams them to a DV device such as a DV camera (with firewire/i-link). It can stream with most Quicktime-compatible formats/codec including DV & MPEG-4. Included are editing features and ability to export to many other movie formats (i.e. AVI, MPEG-4, DV, etc.)! [Mac OS X Downloads - Video]
(If you're interested in this app, you might want to check out the free SimpleVideoOut, part of the sample code in Apple's FireWire SDK. -kc.)
[unmediated]
6:41:41 AM
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