Saturday, April 23, 2005

French court bans DRM for DVDs Emmanuel sez, "A French appeal court just issued a ruling preventing the inclusion of anti-copying measure on DVD. This is after a man who was not able to copy a DVD he purchase to a VHS cassette so he can watch it at his mother's place. Which is considered private copying and is a consumer right in France. He got the help of a consumer protection group to sue the Film Studio that produced the DVD. Film studios have one month to unprotect DVDs (I assume it is not for DVD that you already own)." French Link (Thanks, Emmanuel!) Update: Hal sez, "Here's an automatic English translation. It's a little rough, but you get the gist. It sounds as though the judgment only applies to one specific movie: 'The Films Alain Sarde and Studio Channel have one month to unbolt the DVD.' And is it just me, or is the idea of watching Mulholland Drive with your Mom just a tad uncomfortable?" HOWTO start a fire with a Coke can and a chocolate bar So if you're ever lost in the woods with a can of Coke and a chocolate bar, you can polish the bottom of the can to a mirror finish with the chocolate and use it as a lens to focus sunlight and start a fire. Link (via Make Blog) Mysterious ship in Portland, Maine harbor This mysterious 180-foot-long supply ship, named The Sage, is tied up at the Portland Ocean Terminal. From the Portland Press Herald (photo by John Patriquin): The rumor on the waterfront is that (the two large domes are covering parabolic antennae that) will track the space shuttle Discovery, scheduled to be launched next month. But the ship's captain won't talk. He has ordered that nobody be allowed near the ship, which is tied up in a secure area at the end of Pier 1 at the Portland Ocean Terminal. The Sage has been tied up there for three weeks, at a cost of nearly $300 a day... The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram contacted several officials at NASA over a period of five days, but none could say conclusively whether the Sage is involved in the shuttle mission. Link (Thanks, Loren Coleman!) [bOing bOing] 9:09:36 PM    comment []

After PageRank, Here Comes LexRank. Today, if you want to know what's going on in the world, you can watch TV, read your newspaper or use Internet to browse news sites. But imagine a day when you just have to enter a few words on your computer, such as "Olympic Games," push a button, and be able to read an automatic -- and accurate -- summary of what appears in major sources about this specific subject. This is the goal of a project which started at the University of Michigan and is explained by Technology Research News in "Summarizer ranks sentences." This new multi-document summarization technique, named LexRank, searches similarities among sentences and rates them via a concept of 'prestige score' analogous to the one used by Google's PageRank. "In a sense, sentences vote for each other just by virtue of being similar to each other," said one of the researchers. This algorithm may also be applied to automatic translation and question answering in a year or two. Read more for other details and references. [Smart Mobs] 4:20:46 PM    comment []

HODER UNFILTERED   Hoder dropped by at BBC Television Centre yesterday and the two of us finally got to meet face to face.   For those who don't know about Hossein's place in blogging history, he single-handedly created the Persian blogosphere by developing a way for internet users in Iran to write blogs in their own language. The revolution he began has enabled Iranians to circumvent the restrictions on free speech in their country, allowing them to discuss politics, culture, sex and other subjects that are taboo in Iranian society. During Hossein's visit I recorded a long chat about blogs, Iran and censorship which I'm uploading in full in three parts. Listen, copy, share, discuss. Hossein Derakhshan Interview Part 1 (6m49s 800Kb) Hossein Derakhshan Interview Part 2 (8m12s 960Kb) Hossein Derakhshan Interview Part 3 (6m30s 760Kb) [BEYOND NORTHERN IRAQ: STUHUGHESIRAQ@MAIL.COM] 10:37:17 AM    comment []

'Infomania' more distracting than marijuana. Workers distracted by email and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers, new research has claimed, reports the BBC. The study for computing firm Hewlett Packard warned of a rise in "infomania", with people becoming addicted to email and text messages. The study, carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry, found excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence. Those distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ - more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking marijuana, said researchers. [Smart Mobs] 10:32:42 AM    comment []

James Boyle on Copyright Stupidity (Donna Wentworth). James Boyle has just delivered the pièce de résistance in his three-part series on copyright for the Financial Times: Deconstructing Stupidity. The stupidity in question is the way that governments typically make intellectual property law and policy -- that is, without evidence that it will produce the desired social or economic benefit. "If the stakes were trivial, no one would care," observes Boyle. "But intellectual property (IP) is important. These are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us. They have costs to free speech, competition, innovation, and science." Why, then, do we make these mistakes? According to Boyle, it's not only "corporate capture" that makes governments stupid about copyright. They also suffer from any number of delusions, making them susceptible to "anecdote and scaremongering." The film and music industries are tiny compared the consumer electronics industry. Yet copyright law dances to the tune played by the former, not the latter. Open source software is big business. But the international IP bureaucracies seem to view it as godless communism. If money talks, why can decision-makers only hear one side of the conversation? Corporate capture can only be part of the explanation. Something more is needed. We need to deconstruct the culture of IP stupidity, to understand it so we can change it. But this is a rich and complex stupidity, like a fine Margaux. I can only review a few flavours. The three flavors in this particular tasting: "maximalism," "authorial romance," and the legacy effects of "industry contract." As Boyle writes, IP delusions are not merely stupidity. They constitute "an ideology, a worldview, like flat earth-ism. But the world is not flat and the stupidity pact is not what we want to sign." Absolutely not. But delusions are by their nature difficult to shake. In part two of the series, Boyle pointed out that in the US, we make weather data available at cost -- yet we have a thriving private weather industry. Now, Siva Vaidhyanathan brings news that Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) wants to prevent the National Weather Service from giving away weather information because it competes with the Weather Channel. "It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products and services for free," says Santorum in a Palm Beach Post article. How many people will challenge the Senator on his assumption that the weather industry can't compete with free? I'll wager not many -- despite the fact that it already is. [Copyfight] 9:04:10 AM    comment []

Why Current Intellectual Property Law is So Wrong-Headed. Jamie Boyle: Deconstructing Stupidity. It is as if we had signed an international stupidity pact, one that required us to ignore the evidence, to hand out new rights without asking for the simplest assessment of need. If the stakes were trivial, no one would care. But intellectual property (IP) is important. These are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us. They have costs to free speech, competition, innovation, and science. Why are we making them? This important essay asks, and begins to answer, the key question of why IP law has gone so wrong. Boyle points out that there's money on the side of a less Draconian system than we have -- the technology industry dwarfs the entertainment cartel -- yet the law totally favors the entertainment side. The answers, he says, are complex and rife with mythology, pushed on all of us by the copyright interests, that skews the result. Read it. [Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.] 9:00:13 AM    comment []

Search Battle Heads to Video. After competing for your search queries, e-mail patronage and browser homepage, the next internet portal war will likely be for your video viewing time. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News] 8:59:11 AM    comment []