January 27, 2003 – 12:00 am
[ via Allen Baki ] Bikini Kat, the Smart Sassy Stylish Pink Gigantic Cat, is the creation of San Francisco artist Flower Frankenstein. You can make your own Bikini Kat portable icon from the directions on the site, but don’t steal, or Flower’s cute, little cartoon IP attorneys will smack you down.
Frankenstein and Michael Wertz’s [...]
November 27, 2002 – 12:00 am
Seth Finkelstein wrote a HowTo on petitioning the Librarian of Congress to grant exemptions to provisions of the Digital Milleniumn Copyright Act. The act requires the Librarian to review comments and possiblity grant exemptions every three years. 2003 is the next review period.
The document walks you through the process of writing a petition, using the [...]
September 27, 2002 – 12:00 am
MS to world: All your remote methods are belong to us.
Maybe not. Dave says it’s another SOAP.
Then again, patents are defined so broadly these days that handing your spouse a grocery list might be an infringment.
September 25, 2002 – 12:00 am
[ via the alert Rick Keir ] Remember that free Elvis Costello CD I was so excited about last week? Turns out it’s primarily a way to goad you into installing a version of Windows Media Player (WMP) which turns on DRM. Of course, you’re free to run WMP, just don’t reformat your hard drive [...]
August 31, 2002 – 12:00 am
First, the 802.11b in the Fairmont’s lobby is working again, and it’s free! The lobby’s a civilized place to work and people-watch.
I finally met Cory Doctorow in person yesterday. He produced a freshly-minted copy of the O’Reilly Weblogging book from his backback. I was about to walk off with it when explained that it was [...]
Laura Quilter recommended Jessica Litman to us when I was working with ConJose on program items on Patents and Copyright. She teaches at Wayne State, and runs a newslog on cyberlaw issues.
[ via Spike the Librarian ] From the conference site: “The annual ISMIR Conference is the first established international forum for those involved in the tremendous growth of music-related contents available digitally, locally or remotely, through networks.”
The organizers want musicians, librarians, developers, industry reps, and others to attend. Douglas Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach) is the [...]
jenett.radio set up a tracking topic on MS’s Palladium proposal.
Gordon Mohr suggests that we plug the ‘analog hole’ with Digital Rights Management helmets, so if you see or hear something which you don’t have the rights for, you go blind and deaf!
This will especially teach people not to listen to unauthorized copies of music while driving.
Gordon’s joke is explored in Karl Schroeder’s novel Permanence.
Eugen [...]
Saturday at WisCon I moderated a facinating, civilized discussion of IP issues. That left the brawling to the IP panel at Baycon where Brad Templeton, Laura Majerus, and Cory Doctorow had it out with Harlan “Destroy all Pirates” Ellison.
Note to dnm: I don’t appreciate you calling my friends Stallinst b*tches.
Update: Danny O’Brian wrote in to [...]
[ via Doc Searles ] One of my old coworkers asked a list we’re on about how to keep people from playing CDs on their computers. Pigdog says what I felt about that:
Look at you. Look at yourself. Look at what you’ve BECOME. Your job is writing code to BREAK PEOPLE’S COMPUTERS if they dare [...]
April 18, 2002 – 12:00 am
[ via Tom Becker ] Marc Rotenberg at EPIC considers Bradbury’s classic:
It seemed both appropriate and ironical to review Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 at this point in time. Earlier this month the US Congress began consideration of a bill that would ban the unauthorized reproduction of digital works. At almost the same time, federal [...]
April 14, 2002 – 12:00 am
Doc links to a report that MS and IBM claim key patents over Web Services protocols. I guess HTTP isn’t dead after all.
[ via Doc Serles ] Over at Limited Pie, the editors propose a plan to beat the Entertainment Industrial Complex at their own game. This hinges on the fact that are a finite number of ways you can string together bits in a 3.5 MB file. So, let’s put the power of distributed processing to [...]
March 27, 2002 – 12:00 am
I thought Dave had a good summation of Disney Chieftain Michael Eisner’s bleatings in the press over the Hollings Bill:
We remember the days, not long ago, when our users were stupid. They thought they were giving money to the artists. We want them to be stupid again.
