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Monday, May 08, 2006 |
Fun with plagiarism.
New York Magazine's David Edestein wrote an essay on plagiarism that was 99% plagiarized (the first and last lines are the only original things in the entire piece.) The last paragraph gave away the gag: "In this world of Google and Nexis, in which you can pick and choose among so many words written on a given subject, you can’t be sure that anything you read is original. Even this."
I feel certain he'll be accused of stealing the idea from someone.
(via: Romenesko letters) [rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog]
10:55:34 PM 
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"Let the Winds of a Civilized Internet Blow".
This IHT article says "to her fellow students,Hu Yingying appears to be a typical undergraduate,plain of dress, quick with a smile and perhaps possessed of a little extra spring in her step, but otherwise decidedly ordinary.And for Hu,in her second year at Shanghai Normal University,coming across as ordinary is just fine, given the parallel life she leads".Further,"part traffic cop, part informer,part discussion moderator,and all done without the knowledge of her fellow students,Hu is a small part of a huge effort in mainland China to sanitize the Internet.For years,China has had its Internet police,reportedly including as many as 50,000 state agents who are online,blocking Web sites,erasing commentary and arresting people for what is deemed anti-Party,or anti-social,speech.But Hu,one of 500 students at her university's newly bolstered,student-run Internet monitoring group,is a cog in a different kind of machine,an ostensibly voluntary one that the Chinese government is mobilizing to help it manage the monumental task of censoring the Web.In April,that effort was named "Let the Winds of a Civilized Internet Blow,"and is itself part of a broader "socialist morality" campaign started by the Chinese leadership to reinforce social and political control,known as the Eight Honors and Disgraces.Under the Civilized Internet initiative,service providers and other companies have been urged to purge their servers of offensive content,ranging from pornography to anything that smacks of overt political criticism or dissent.The Chinese authorities say that more than two million supposedly "unhealthy" images have already been deleted under this campaign by various mainland Internet service providers,and more than six hundred supposedly "unhealthy" Internet forums were shut down.These deletions are presented as voluntary acts of corporate civic virtue, but have a coercive aspect to them,because no company would likely risk being singled out as a laggard.Having started its own ambitious Internet censorship efforts, or "harmful information defense system,"long before the latest government campaign,Shanghai Normal University,where Hu monitors her fellow students,is promoting itself within the education establishment as a pioneer".
China campuses' Internet hall monitors [Smart Mobs]
10:54:49 PM
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Patent office will ask the public to "peer review" inventions.
The US Patent and Trademark Office has launched "Peer to Patent," a community patent peer review project. The USPTO is overloaded with patent filings, so it does little or no investigation into patnets before rubber-stamping them, expecting that the courts will sort out who invented what. This changes the patent system from something that promotes invention to something that rewards companies who aggressively sue inventors.
Peer to Patent aims to address this by encouraging the public to review patents, to determine whether they are valid based on the at-large expert knowledge about what has already been invented and what is a new, useful, nonobvious invention. IBM has agreed to have its patents vetted by the public as a guinea pig in the project.
Project founder Beth Novacek sez,
This Friday, May 12, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will hold a briefing on the community patent peer review project.
The May 12 briefing will be hosted by John Doll, Commissioner for Patents, USPTO, and Jay Lucas, Deputy Commissioner for Patent Examination Policy.
The purpose of the May 12, 2006 briefing is to provide greater in-depth analysis of the peer review pilot project as well as answer the question of what constitutes valid prior art.
The represents a kick-off of the peer review project and the effort to move from proposal to working prototype with a launch at the beginning of 2007.
Link (Thanks, Beth!)
[Boing Boing]
Hmmm. This could be something to raise with the speakers from the USPTO next Friday at our conference, Science Leadership: Patent and Trademark Law for a New Age.
10:54:22 PM
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Wes:
Jason Kottke: IndieKarma. Micropayments that work? I used to be into micropayments, but Clay Shirky changed my mind. Either micropayments have mental transaction costs or they are automatic, and automatic payments are theft. But if the micropayment people keep refining, maybe I'll change my mind again.
[Hack the Planet]
10:53:33 PM
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From BNA News:-
APPLE WINS TRADEMARK BATTLE WITH THE BEATLES
Apple Computer has triumphed in its latest court battle with
The Beatles' record label, Apple Corps, over the use of its
famous logo. The High Court in London today ruled that Apple
Computer is not liable for trademark infringement because
the use of the Apple logo on its iTunes Music Store was not
associated with the music it was selling and thus did not
breach a previous settlement between the companies.
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CHINA SEES 60 MILLION BLOGGERS BY YEAR'S END
Blogging is booming in China with the number of bloggers
expected to hit 60 million by the end of this year. China is
the world's second-largest Internet market after the US with
more than 110 million users. A survey by Chinese search
engine Baidu.com put the current number of blog, or Web log,
sites at 36.82 million which are kept by 16 million people.
12:36:22 PM
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