Friday, April 01, 2005

The Grokster Case's Silent Majority. The same tools that allow you to easily copy and share music and video also allow you to make your own. [unmediated] 8:04:12 AM    comment []

Study of Social Interactions Starts With a Test of Trust. Scientists are reporting that they have succeeded in visualizing feelings of trust developing in a specific region of the brain. By HENRY FOUNTAIN. [NYT > Science] 8:01:09 AM    comment []

More from Dave (re: other recent posts): Cory Doctorow responds. I got an email from Cory Doctorow saying that my theoretical republishing of his book -- giving myself authorship credit, offering it for sale, and seeking distribution -- would be "fraudulent." So we know that Cory has a line. We're making progress. (Note I'm not going to publish his email, he can do that if he likes, and I'd like it if he would.) Now, as I've said so many times (one more time won't hurt), I don't like it when a big heartless company takes my work and modifies it in a way that makes it hard to tell what they wrote and what I wrote. I'm concerned that if I let this company do it, then another company is going to, and another and pretty soon they're going to be competing on the basis of how "useful" they make my work, again without my permission, and with no compensation to me. I'm concerned that they may make changes I don't agree with, or even worse, change the meaning of what I wrote so as to confuse people about what I think. I quit working for a big publication because they were doing this, I went independent so my writing could have integrity, so it could truly represent what I think, to the best of my ability. Cory, Google crossed my line. To use your terminology, they're doing something fraudulent by passing off their derivative work as mine. BTW, I say "I think," when stating an opinion. Cory and his colleagues (who mostly are not lawyers) state their legal opinion as fact. He also says "As you know" before saying something that I don't even agree with. That's just plain disrespectful, and makes discourse more difficult. [Scripting News] 8:01:08 AM    comment []

Keeping Online Daters Honest. Before your next internet date, see how your intended has been reviewed by previous dates. No, it's not Amazon. It's TrueDater.com. Commentary by Regina Lynn. [Wired News] 7:59:24 AM    comment []

Shirky: stupid (c) laws block me from publishing own work online Clay Shirky tells Boing Boing: Welcome to the Copyfight. So, at Etech this year, I gave a talk entitled Ontology is Overrated. I want to put a transcript up online, and Mary Hodder, who recorded the talk, graciously agreed to give me a copy of the video. When she came by NYC last week, she dropped off a DVD, which I then wanted to convert to AVI (the format used by my transcription service.) I installed ffmpeg and tried to convert the material, at which point I got an error message which read "To comply with copyright laws, DVD device input is not allowed." Except, of course, there are no copyright laws at issue here, since I'M THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER. Got that? I am in possession of a video, of me, shot by a friend, copied to a piece of physical media given to me as a gift. In the video, I am speaking words written by me, and for which I am the clear holder of the copyright. I am working with said video on a machine I own. Every modern legal judgment concerning copyright, from the Berne Convention to the Betamax case, is on my side. AND I CAN'T MAKE A COPY DIRECTLY FROM THE DEVICE. This is because copyright laws do not exist to defend the moral rights of copyright holders -- they exist to help enforce artificial scarcity. Copyright holders in my position, who want to use Creative Commons licensing to share material, are treated as pathological cases, because we're not behaving in the extortionate manner that current regulations are designed to protect. I've gotten the copy another way, and the transcript will go up, but this is the state of the world, circa 2005: I can be prevented from copying my own words from my own devices, precisely because I want to share them freely, a use the law is perfectly prepared to regard as irrelevant. [bOing bOing] 7:45:35 AM    comment []

March 31, 2005. Part Four: Out of every 100 calories expended by the Fog Creek team, just 2 calories are spent on actually writing new lines of code that ship to a customer. By spolsky@panix.com (Joel Spolsky). [Joel on Software] 7:45:04 AM    comment []