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Saturday, April 09, 2005 |
His Last Name Is Scheme. Charles Ponzi, the subject of a new book by Mitchell Zuckoff, had a crime named after him, but never believed he was doing anything wrong. By DAVID MARGOLICK. [NYT > Business]
9:53:54 PM 
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Still More on the "Is Linking Legal" Question (Alan Wexelblat).
The question of whether linking is legal continues to be a source of international wrangle. According to The Reg, the BBC have sent a cease-and-desist to a Dutch site that permits users to query British sports results published by the BBC on their Ceefax teletext service.
For whatever reasons, the BBC offers only a limited version of its Ceefax pages on the continent. So Hendrik Noorderhaven created a site (Ceefax.tv) that receives uploads of data published in the UK and permits local users to search it. Noorderhaven claims (with some justification I think) that he's doing neither more nor less than Google does - capture the data source, index it, and respond to queries. The BBC disagrees.
Visiting the site does indeed give one a Google-like feel. It's a bare page with a couple of buttons and a search text box. It notes that Ceefax is a trademark of the BBC. It's hard for me to discern on the face of it how the BBC can complain about this site and not any other search engine. [Copyfight]
2:21:33 PM
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A Blog of Interesting Google Maps Pictures.
As you've probably heard, Google Maps has integrated satellite pictures into their Google Maps Web site. Do a Google Maps search and then click on the "Satellite" link in the upper right corner. You can't always get a picture; sometimes you get an error that says, "We're sorry, but we don't have imagery at this zoom level for this region."
Anyway, lots of people are looking at these pictures, and a blog at http://www.shreddies.org/gmaps/ has been devoted to capturing interesting/unusual/pretty sat pics from Google Maps. Current entries here include The Gateway Arch, Mt. Rushmore, the Uffington White Horse (neat!) and Niagra Falls.
[ResearchBuzz]
11:34:14 AM
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Communist hymn is in copyright - filmmaker fined
The Internationale is the hymn of the Fourth International Communist Party. My parents, being good reds, used to sing it every New Year's Eve at the stroke of midnight, with all the comrades at the socialist New Year's gathered round the record player to sing along with the soundtrack from Reds. It is quite a stirring anthem, and has been translated into dozens of languages, and is sung the world 'round.
Weirdly, this 19th century song is still in copyright in France, and a French filmmaker has just been fined about $1300 for letting a character in one of his films whistle the tune (you can hear a very modern synth-pop take on the tune courtesy of Maxx Klaxon here).
The irony factor here is much deeper than, say, the irony surrounded JibJab's appropriation of Woody Guthrie's This Land. Guthrie was a socialist, sure, but the Internationale is a call to arms to abolish private property, eliminate international borders, and throw off your chains and rise up to smash the state. Hard to imagine that the long-dead creator of that song is having his wishes honored by French collecting societies shaking down people who make use of it for cash.
The 19th-century revolutionary hymn was written by Eugene Pottier in 1871 and set to music by another Frenchman, Pierre Degeyter, in 1888...
Under French law, "The Internationale" won't fall into the public domain until 2014 — 70 years of post-mortem protection plus extra time to cover the world war. Degeyter died in 1932....
[The film] hardly paid its own way, opening briefly in a single Paris theater and selling just 203 tickets, Le Monde reported.
Link (Thanks, Maximus!)
[bOing bOing]
9:30:25 AM
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Cites & Insights April 2005.
Walt Crawford recently released the latest edition of his publication Cites & Insights 5:6, April 2005. I consider it my mission in value-added echoing to alert people to the hidden gems deep within and hiding under headings such as "The Library Stuff":
Block, Marylaine, "Libraries: The original `long tail'," Ex Libris 239 (February 11, 2005). marylaine.com/exlibris/xlib239.html
I've mentioned the "long tail" before--and the extent to which I believe it's a fairly typical Wired Magazine situation: An editor grabs a long-standing cultural phenomenon, gives it a cute name, generalizes, and claims it's something New and Special. The concept that most people appreciate and buy (or consume) media and other options far beyond the best-seller list should be familiar to libraries. It's certainly familiar to good bookstores, magazine publishers, book publishers, record companies, and Netflix. Calling it "the long tail" gives Chris Anderson a wonderful new discovery and most likely a book that will be one of those irrelevant best-sellers. Oh that's right: Anderson says the Internet makes the long tail feasible--which is largely nonsense but gives the concept that digital aura of greatness and newness. ...
[The article's author] goes on to quote from an email conversation between her and Anderson (who apparently knows almost nothing about libraries, another consistent Wired trait). That said, read this column. Anderson may be as tired as the rest of Wired, but Block has good things to say, particularly about the importance of libraries maintaining a commitment to deep collections (call it the "long tail" if you must) along with improving marketing savvy.
Oh, there's also many, many pages about the infamous Michael Gorman column. [Infothought]
9:21:44 AM
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Nine-Year Sentence for Spammer. Jeremy Jaynes becomes the first junk e-mailer to face hard time, but the judge agrees to postpone the sentence until an appeal can determine any outstanding constitutional questions. [Wired News]
Sentence in Spam Case. A North Carolina man convicted in the nation's first felony prosecution for spamming was sentenced on Friday to nine years in prison. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. [NYT > Technology]
9:21:29 AM
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This hack on Craigslist and GoogleMaps is amazing: the service places all the houses/apartments for rent/sale on Craigslist as waypoints on a Google Map, color-coded by price, with links to the Craigslist ads. Wow. 