Archives mensuelles : décembre 2002
A Lawyer Licenses Her Weblog
The joys of saying IAAL and the selection process of a Creative Commons license explained.
NetNewsWire Pro public beta
This 1.0b1 release of NetNewsWire pro includes a weblog editor, notepad, Find command, AppleScript support, and more. [Ranchero]
Mhh, nice new weblog editor function. I think Kung-Log still has the edge for the feature set and the flexibility (categories, allow comments option, custom HTML tags), but having a Weblog editor that’s aware of my RSS feeds is a nice concept, just like Radio does I think.
Now maybe a Applescript to call Kung-Log from NNW would do the job just as well. Most important though: it includes a Find feature.
There is also an outliner built-in there, the « notepad ». I think an outliner is some sort of an epiphany that software developpers get. Dave Winer was the first case I remember witnessing, with MORE and Frontier, the outliner that kept on giving. The Tidbits crew has been saying good things about outliners for a long time too. Now Brent Simmons is at it too.
I’m curious to see if I’ll use it. I’m a big user of Word’s outline view but I tried a couple stand alone outliners over the years and even though I’m always impressed by the software itself, I never really got hooked on using them for any length of time.
Oh, I wanted to post this with NNW, but I’m getting a /CFSStreamFault. I usually get this with Kung-Log when I try to download a list of posts, it is apparently caused by a bug in the XML parser of OS X with accented caracters, dixit K-Log author’s. Thanks anyways for the early present.
I gotta get one of those
[via Boing Boing]
Hollywood wants to outlaw crowbars
Copy-paste post, as I really don’t have time to edit anything this morning. Afternoon. Damn. You get the point.
Great quote from Patricia Benson, an attorney for the movie studios suing 321 Studios, who make DVD copying software that can be used to make personal backups:
« It’s like somebody selling a digital crowbar. »
As Ed Felten notes, « …the crowbar analogy pretty much speaks for itself. Ms. Benson would doubtless be shocked to learn that an outfit calling itself ‘Ace Hardware’ is selling crowbars openly, right here in sleepy Princeton, New Jersey. »
In other words, general-purpose technology can be used for general purposes — good and ill. Hollywood’s increasingly shrill and nonsensical demands that technologists only make gear that can be used for good are comparable to insisting that crowbar companies design crowbars that can only be used to jemmy open doors whose owners have lost their keys, and go limp when inserted into the jambs of all other doors.
[via Aaron Swartz and Boing Boing]
Broken by design
No no, I’m not talking about everyone’s favorite operating system. Next time maybe.
To me it is almost an urban legend that MiniDisc devices, consumer level ones at least, did not allow digital output. It seems it is still true, even for audio recorded via a microphone and to which you could presumably be assumed to own the copyrights.
I guess the author of the article above will have to export analog audio and redigitize it. No big deal but it goes against the whole point of using such a device, doesn’t it?
In any case, many pissed off people here. Caveat Emptor.
Yes yes… coded architecture, private norms enforced by technological means…
[via lawrence’s notebook]
Short and sweet
Bill Clinton: America should lead, not dominate
Well, giving the Marshall plan as an example maybe isn’t the most positive reference, but I feel the article is rather sincere. Was that an implied reference to the inadequacy of the UN there at the end? Interesting.
What’s wrong with the war on ‘Net piracy?
Ken Hertz’s 2002 ACLU Bill of Rights Award speech: What’s wrong with the war on ‘Net piracy?
Here‘s a copy of the acceptance speech given by entertainment industry attorney Ken Hertz (of the firm Goldring, Hertz, Lichtenstein and Haft, LLP) at last week’s ACLU Bill of Rights Award dinner. ACLU press release about the award is here.
There are a couple good quote from someone who is usually acting out the expected rights’ owners policies. A very recommended read.
[…] Treating the symptoms and ignoring the underlying problem can allow the problem to fester — and worsen.[…]
How do the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism and my personal War on Obesity, relate to the entertainment industry’s War on Internet Piracy?
Our point is that treating the symptoms without addressing the problem will only worsen the problem and generate more daunting symptoms.
[…]
He does support blanket compulsory licensing, which as far as I know would give a very similar regulatory framework to the one we have in Canada with the tariff on blank audio media to compensate for private copying. Yet it seems that even here, record companies are just too eager to brush off that fact and label file sharing of musical works as a crime.
[via Boing Boing]
Pulling the DMCA blanket away from CSS.
DMCA Harms and CSS as an Access Control Device: regarding an eventual exemption to the DMCA for CSS, the wonderful and lovable companion to DeCSS
[via LawMeme]
Creative Commons
Everyone and their dog is blogging about Creative Commons. A (primarly, for the time being) build-your-licence website sponsored by a whole bunch of interesting people. I really like the slogan, « legal code »
In a way, it reminds me of P3P, as it is a way to standardize contract terms. P3P aimed to allow people to act on standardized terms for the management of personal info. This does it for copyrightable content, without the automation and integration dreamed of by P3P. Most people have a fairly good idea of the rights granted by the GPL. Now well have different, if less concisely named, nuances of standard licenses.
Under what license is the content of this site provided? I worry more about my use of other people’s content that other people’s use of my stuff. No jokes about the value/originality/creativity of said stuff please. I would lean towards the Attribution-ShareAlike License.
I wonder what license are the licenses released under. Can I modify them slightly? Translate them? I’m sure the answer is on the website but I couldn’t find it. Given the recent fuss over the copyright on court papers, it’s a valid question.
QoS
Quality of Service is unnecessary? Is throwing more bandwidth at the issue really a solution?
I care because QoS is a form of technological norm that is very potent. It does have the capacity to shape the environment and influence the actions of people (or their effects). I can’t wait for my ISP, who is owned by a content provider, to throttle competitors, err… ensure proper QoS, to selected resources.
On the other hand, I find reasonable that there could be the Internet equivalent of a emergency siren for certain packets.
Would « official » and public implementation of QoS make it harder for people who control the infrastructure to implement opportunistic QoS-like schemes? Should Internet connectivity declared a public service and regulated as such from a competition point of view? In that last hypothesis, could QoS be implemented in a more productive way?
I find it hard to believe that bigger pipes will solve all QoS issues, but is it a good enough solution to reduce the annoyance level low enough that people won’t bother to elaborate on the issue?
[via… damn… can’t find it anymore… NetNewWire really needs a « find » function]
Update: Well… this issue made a few people react. Should I be surprised that it seems it was all started by Lessig?
La CAI frappe encore
Monsieur le Ministre,
La Commission d’acès à l’information du Québec a entrepris une étude concernant le projet de loi sur l’accès légal au Canada, plus précisément axée sous l’angle de la protection des renseignements personnels.
En voici la lettre introductive. Le rapport est ici. Il y a aussi le communiqué de presse pour gens pressés.
Ah oui, pour ceux qui en douteraient, ce n’est pas très positif. Il semble que certaines dispositions découleraient d’obligations auxquels nous nous sommes engagés par traités, la Convention sur la cybercriminalité (utilisation de cyber, -1) du conseil de l’Europe. J’imagine que si ce n’est pas harmonisable avec la tentaculaire Directive Européenne sur la vie privée, ca se serait su, non? Alors qui a fait du zèle?
Bill on Internet Retransmission Passed
OTTAWA, December 13, 2002 — Minister of Canadian Heritage Sheila Copps and Industry Minister Allan Rock today announced the passage of Bill C-11, an Act to amend the Copyright Act. This Bill is the first in a series of initiatives to update Canada’s copyright legislation.
It dismisses the compulsory license option that was proposed by certain groups for internet retransmission.
[Via BNA ILN]
Private copying in France
It seems that France is keeping on track with the adoption of a tariff similar to the canadian tariff 22 regarding blank digital media. They also tax hard disk in Tivo-like devices.
I think those tariffs are generally a good thing since they provide some form of compensation for usage of copyrighted works.
It’s not quite compulsory licensing, it’s a bit of a stretch to raise a tariff to compensate uses of works that are most of the time allowed under the law and it is quite unfair to put a tariff on CD-R when I know most of my use these days goes to back-ups of my own data. Yet, it seems like an acceptable compromise on both sides of the issue. Now, the shocking thing is the amount of the tariff. In Canada, it amounts to a 50% tax on media (0.21$ per data CD)…
[via BMCK E-Law]
I had a (weird) dream
I woke up last night. and I had an thought on mind. I doesn’t make anymore sense now than it did 6 hours ago though. I was wondering why there isn’t the equivalent of the Dewey decimal system for supermarkets.
A couple things: first, why was I thinking about something like this in the middle of the night? Secondly: will not happen because it’s actually profitable to have clients helplessly wandering through the aisles foraging for a specific item.
It would still be nice if shelves and rows in a supermarket had numbers. I could check my grocery list against the store catalog and get a little map with the required stops in the most efficient order.
There already are those little bar code scanners in most stores so they don’t have to mark the prices on individual items, is it such a big deal to do some sort of a reverse lookup and search for an item by name and have it output the location?
Wouldn’t be too good for customer retention, but I’d love it. And since I can get the necessary stuff done with faster, I could spend more time looking at the bakery stuff or the beer section, to which I never give the attention they deserve. I don’t think I’ll ever buy into the online grocery shopping thing but this would be an interesting in-between.