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Saturday, August 21, 2004 |
Who Cares about Innovation?. Technologists are divided in some ways, but united by a common faith. Stated simply, we worship innovation. Openist, deregulationist, libertarian, or cyber-anarchist all take innovation as the goal. Our battles are mostly internecine warfare, fights about how best to achieve that common goal. But how often do we ask ourselves:... [Lessig Blog]
10:41:03 PM 
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Archival browsing to increase serendipity.
Anne Eisenberg, How can a Web browser become more like a bookshelf browser? International Herald Tribune, August 19, 2004. Excerpt:
"At the Berkeley campus of the University of California, a professor and her students have created a search program called Flamenco that lets users browse a digitized collection in ways that are similar to a stroll among the shelves of a library. 'It's for when you are not quite sure what you want,' said Marti Hearst, an associate professor at the School of Information Management and Systems, who led the research. 'It's meant to help people find things, in part, by serendipity.' To create Flamenco, Hearst started with one archived collection of art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 35,000 images that were identified by written descriptions. She used the descriptions to classify the items in a variety of ways, including the medium, the date, the artist and the content of the image. The categories were cross-linked so that when people clicked on one, they saw not only the images within it - say, of landscapes - but those in related categories, like other artists working on landscapes at the same time. The effect, Hearst said, is like walking down a library aisle and finding related books on a subject." [unmediated]
9:31:28 AM
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RIAA CDs Start Landing at MLS.
Our CDs from the RIAA settlement have started coming in. We received 367 boxes yesterday and 503 more today. We're not sure if there will be more, but it seems likely since someone said we're supposed to get 30,000 CDs. We're still debating the best way to distribute them to our 86 public libraries, so I took the opportunity to browse through some of the boxes.
For the BMG boxes, I didn't have to open them at all. Each one has a label on the outside with the titles of the contents on the outside, 30 CDs to a box. If there was ever any doubt that libraries are receiving bargain bin CDs that couldn't even be sold through "12 for the price of 1" clubs, let them forever be dispelled now.
Several of the boxes are literally cut on the side, and the cut goes into the jewel cases themselves. Hence my declaration that we received a ton of "cut-outs." Some of the boxes even have dates of 2001 and 2002 posted on the labels, which I hope doesn't mean the date they were boxed up and put into storage. There is no way these boxes were packed by mistake as the result of a computer glitch. Some of the labels very clearly say 30 copies of this or that title, and I highly doubt the labels were supposed to cut the boxes after boxing and labeling them. I posted some pictures of the boxes and CDs as proof on The Shifted Librarian Moblog (specifically, here and here).
I'm not sure we're going to do an actual accounting of what we received, and the record labels certainly aren't providing us with packing lists (must have been too difficult when you're just shoving stuff out the door to the UPS truck), so we may never know the extent to which we helped clean their warehouses of excess stock. I'm not in on the decision for doing inventory or distribution for our shipment, so I'll post more when I know how it's going to play out.
<sarcasm>But hopefully we'll have at least a few libraries that need Whitney Houston's version of "The Star Spangled Banner," Denyce Graves' "American Anthem," and Jefferson Airplane's "The Roar of Jefferson Airplane." Yeah, that definitely makes up for cheating libraries out of money for all those years.</sarcasm> [The Shifted Librarian]
9:31:15 AM
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The Grokster Decision - Where It's At.
Ernie Miller has a comprehensive round-up on the decision, plus additional analysis of its possible impact on --you guessed it -- the push for the Induce Act.
Later: Fred von Lohmann has more @ Deep Links:
The Ninth Circuit's ruling in MGM v. Grokster today clarified four points of incredible importance to innovators of all stripes, including peer-to-peer developers:
- The Court made clear that, for purposes of the "Betamax defense" announced by the Supreme Court in 1984, the important question is whether a technology is merely capable of a substantial noninfringing use, not the proportion of noninfringing to infringing uses. The opposite rule, urged by the entertainment industry, would kill off new technologies prematurely, as infringing uses tend to be common until the incumbent entertainment industries adjust their business models to take advantage of the new opportunities created by the new technology. (When there were no pre-recorded videocassettes, the VCR was doubtless used for more infringement than it was after there were Blockbusters on every corner.)
- The Court also explained that, in order to trump the Betamax defense, a copyright owner must show that the technology developer had (1) knowledge of specific infringments (2) at a time when it could do something about those infringements. The entertainment industry, in contrast, had argued that it should be enough to simply deliver a pile of "infringement notices" to the technology developer after the fact. Such a rule would have imperilled all kinds of companies. (Imagine Xerox receiving a pile of infringement notices about photocopiers that it had sold the year before -- should it be liable for infringing activities at every Kinkos in America?)
(Continued at Copyfight)
[unmediated]
9:30:52 AM
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