Archives quotidiennes :

RSS feed for individual entries

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Some feeds I subscribe to put comments in their main news feed. (e.g. Unsanity or Toomuchsexy) I can understand why this is good in some cases. Most often though, it results in posts I don’t care about being marked as unread/updated in my aggregator of choice each time a comment is added. This bugs me.

A good compromise seemed to add the comment count in the main news feed (CFD does this). I thought about doing that but it does not solve the issue of posts being marked as unread in my aggregator.

There was a debate about the issue of updated or modified posts on the NNW beta mailing list. Brent’s (NewNewsWire’s author) original position was to set a threshold for modifications/differences to a post below which the post would not be marked as modified. Arbitrary rules were voted down by most people. This was around the time the defunct Winer Watcher was making noise and Aaron proposed his HTML diff program to highlight specific changes to posts, thus making pretty much everyone happy.

So now I see Brent’s wisdom (although I really like the HTML Diff highlighting: check it out in the latest public beta release of NNW) and I’m still trying to find a good solution to my original problem.

I think I found a good solution and I just added Phil Ringnalda’s technique for creating a RSS feed for every post that will include their respective comments.

Yes yes, a separate feed for every single entry. Is it overkill? Probably but the computer does all the work. Will it be used by anyone? We’ll see. Will it increase the number of comments? Hopefully. For this post, here it is.

The idea is that if a post is of interests to you, you can subscribe to it, add it to a special temp group in your aggregator or something, and monitor it separately. Hopefully this will add the convenience of being able to know if someone commented on an entry while not messing with the global feed. I like the idea of keeping a certain control on what goes out of to the public at large, same goes for the home page.

The links for the feeds are present both in the individual archives and in the comment windows in the other kind of archives, including the home page: find the text You can subscribe to comments on this page via RSS.

Ahem.. and for those if you who don’t use an aggregator, well… move along, nothing to see.

Consumer law and EULAs

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Chris Barton: Microsoft security flaws trampling on consumer rights. The article’s conclusion I agree with:

For far too long users have accepted that software is different from other consumer products. And that the End User Licence Agreement you buy indemnifies the vendor against any claims, losses, or problems resulting from its use – even if the vendor knew about the problem before it sold the product. Our consumer protection law is supposed to stop that sort of cop-out.

Private copying

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It seems someone discovered Part VIII and the associated Tariffs (current and proposed) : Jay Currie at Tech Central station wrote a piece titled « Blame Canada » which I was kindly directed to by Frank Field and Matt Morse.

Well, without getting into too much details, while downloading music might be covered by the Tariff, as it does not specify any source or support requirements for the sound recording , uploading without a proper licence is not.

The actual provision in the Copyright Act is

Copying for Private Use

80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of

(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,

(b) a performer’s performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or

(c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer’s performance of a musical work, is embodied onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer’s performance or the sound recording.

As you can see, it’s a fairly narrow exception. One interesting thing though is that it is an accepted use: rights holders can’t assert a right over private copying. Hence it is not presented as defence to infringement. It is obviously not « expressly legal to share music » in Canada. And the Tariff does not make everyone happy either.

I must admit that since I use way way more CD-R for backup purposes than for copying music, I do feel I contribute more than my fair share to SOCAN and the CPCC. Therefore, the whole legitimizing file-sharing argument is tempting. But I’m also aware that my music tastes are very different from SOCAN’s pie sharing methods and I would very much prefer a better metric to evaluate right’s owners compensation if it becomes a de facto way to deal with file-sharing issues. After all this is about compensating the artists and my tastes over time do not follow Soundscan.

In the meantime, I feel like CDs are taxed like cigarettes or gas and that the « incumbent industry » is benefiting from a system that might otherwise foster a more diverse and rich offering than what this industry is ready to offer.

I am not generally opposed to compulsory licensing and/or tariffs but they are a delicate regularoty exercise that requires a clear policy vision and many checks and balances to be productive.

Another interesting nugget of Canadian copyright law is the Tariff 22. Controversial and challenged in court, it applies mainly to webcasting but might have an incidence on general filesharing.

[Update: Greplaw has a similar post]