Short article by Richard Koman on the crazy situation in copyright if you are trying to figure out if a work is still under copyright or in the public domain. He has a link to the tree view chart on Copyright Law that can be found at CopyrightData.com.
Richard’s article can be found here at ZDNet.
Here’s an article on Wired about how the DMCA prevents fair use of DVDs, with the result that making a copy of a DVD you own is technically against the law.
As usual, the situation is complicated and the status is in doubt, depending on how the lawsuit against ReadNetworks turns out.
Santa Clara University Law School had a conference last Thursday in honor of the 100th anniversary of the 1909 Copyright Act. It was the first copyright act to protect works upon publication with notice, without prior registration; the first to recognize the right to make derivative works; and the first to recognize public domain. Since the 1909 law was in effect for almost 70 years, it had a profound impact on our society and a significant influence on the copyright law of today. Mike Masnick posts a fascinating discussion of some of the things that were talked about at the conference on Techdirt.
Mark Helprin, author of A Solder of the Great War and Winter’s Tale wrote an op-ed in the New York Times two years ago arguing for further extension of copyright protection. He wrote a book, solidifying his argument, called Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto.
If Helprin is right, then I can’t share his persuasive arguments with you, because they are part of his book and under copyright. If I thought Helprin was right, my only option, to propagate his ideas and try to gain their universal acceptance, would be to recommend that everyone in the world buy his book. You can see the problem here.
Fortunately, those of us who think some intellectual property is important enough to belong to society at large and that after some limited period of protection all intellectual property should eventually revert to the public, that fair-use plays an important role in society, etc. are not so hampered by our belief system.
See the great discussion at the Lessig Wiki.
There’s a performance going on of John Cage’s As Slow As Possible in Halberstadt, Germany. BBC’s Steve Rosenberg was there for a rare chord change, the 7th, in the concert that started in 2001.
I’d go, but the good part doesn’t happen for another couple of hundred years. I probably won’t make the ending either, in 2640.
Hear the BBC story here.
Read the debate at InfoWorld.
Great article on why upload speed matters. While cable companies continue to advertise ever faster download speeds, upload speeds are not keeping pace, are seldom advertised and may be downright difficult to find listed in the fine print. It’s the two-way nature of the internet that is revolutionary, that we can be both content providers as well as content consumers, that keeps the internet from being just another TV/CD player/DVD player.
See the article at App Rising.
The internet has been running out of addresses for some time now. Fortunately, IPv6 gives us 10 billion billion billion times as many as we had before. Yup, that’s about 5 X 10 to the 28th power addresses for each of the 6.5 billion people alive today. In practice they won’t all be used, the vast numbers allows more meaningful addresses, specialty address types (like multicast), and other refinements which allow more systematic and efficient routing of network traffic.
See the article at Computer Weekly.
“We’re going to need the rest of the world to bail us out.”
So says Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor.
See the article on Salon.
11% of Americans would be okay with implanting a device in their head that allowed them to directly access the Internet.
See the article at Broadband Reports.com.