Tinkering with the Tyranny of Copyright
Grok Headline matches for Tinkering with the Tyranny of Copyright
The Tyranny of Copyright?
The Tyranny of Copyright?
01/24/2004 02:49 PM"The Tyranny of Copyright?"
"The Tyranny of Copyright?"
01/26/2004 10:21 AMThe Tyranny of Copyright? [The New York
Times]
The Tyranny of Copyright? [The New York
Times]
01/25/2004 04:10 PMonline already
nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25COPYRIGHT.html
track
this site | 5 links
Tinkering With Tiger
Tinkering With Tiger
06/05/2005 10:47 PM By Jim Dalrymple, Macworld
New Design Tinkering
New Design Tinkering
04/17/2005 04:38 AMI'm playing with a new design for this site. My old site was
basically a "temple of ego" that covered just about everything I was
doing online and when I stripped it all away to start over, I knew
eventually I wanted to bring back a bit of the clutter.
I just started working on this CSS monstrosity and it's only
applied to the main index page at present, but I hope to refine it
over the following week and mold it into something more attractive and
orderly. For now, I figured I might as well redesign in public, warts
and all.
Oh, and be sure to use Firefox or Safari to view it, IE/win can't
understand any of the first-child, first-line CSS nor any of the png
backgrounds.
Tinkering with tech
Tinkering with tech
03/23/2005 12:44 AMnull
tinkering with TinyURL's
tinkering with TinyURL's
11/18/2003 06:59 AMVanity
tinyURLing
boingboing.net/2003_11_01_archive.html#106907599680296302
track this
site | 5 links
Microsoft still tinkering with security
Microsoft still tinkering with security
05/07/2004 01:59 AMCFCN Plus May 7 2004 5:42AM GMT
The Tyranny of Labels
The Tyranny of Labels
02/10/2004 02:53 AMJust about two weeks ago, Robert Boynton wrote a great piece for the
Times about the free culture movement. It's not available for free
from the Times anymore, though if you run this
Google search, you'll find lots of places where
it is archived.
The
Progress and Freedom Foundation
has now launched an
attack on "the movement." So let me note two important quibbles I have with
an otherwise great article.
First is scope: There is no complete history of this movement that
does not mention Pam Samuelson, Jessica Litman, Eben Moglen, and more
recently, Julie Cohen. Harvard's an important place in this, no doubt.
But it is not accurate to speak as exclusively about Harvard. Litman
and Samuelson made these issues salient. Moglen has been guiding the
Free Software Foundation since the start.
Second is spin: I know the world loves to simplify, but it is totally
misleading to frame this issue as left vs. right. The name "Copy Left"
is silly both because it is not true to the real "copyleft" movement
-- started by RMS, et al., and because this movement is not a movement
of "the Left." Look at the
briefs in the
Supreme Court in the Eldred if you want a flavor of this. Phyllis
Schlafly and Milton Friedman are not leftists.
It is important and great that Boynton's article made these ideas
clearer to the world. But for those who read no more deeply than
headlines, I'm afraid the real meaning of the Free Culture movement
will be lost.
UPDATE: Turns out there is a
free link
to the Times article still available, but you have to find it using
Aaron's amazing
tool (which I had
stupidly missed before).
UPDATE v2: Tim Phillips comments that the list should include
Dennis Karjala and Neil Netanel. Well, actually the list of people who
have been writing in this field is extremely long, and Neil's writing
-- both about the importance of copyright and the importance of limits
to copyright -- is very important. But I didn't mean to describe all
of them. Dennis does deserve special mention for the extraordinary
work he did at the beginning of the battle over term extensions, and
throughout the life of the Sonny Bono Act.
The tyranny of TiVo
The tyranny of TiVo
11/12/2003 01:06 PMWell, not the tyranny of TiVo specifically, but rather how the rise of
the digital video recorder, in perfectly dialectical fashion, has
resulted in people feeling both more and less in control of their
television watching. On one hand DVRs let you take control of what you
TV shows watch and when you watch them, but on the other it also
creates a massive backlog of television shows that some people begin
to feel buried underneath and that they have a frantic, desperate need
to catch up on. Read [Thanks, Eric]...
Microsoft still tinkering with 'secure'
design
Microsoft still tinkering with 'secure'
design
05/06/2004 02:49 AMhttp://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winhec/images/2004/winhecHead.gif
PVR anxiety: the tyranny of the to-do
list
PVR anxiety: the tyranny of the to-do
list
11/12/2003 01:29 PMI ditched my TV and my cable and my beloved TiVo a couple months back
(saving money, saving time), and one of the first things I noticed is
that I lost a huge amount of unconscious anxiety that I'd been lugging
around: every time I turned on my television, I'd be confronted with a
"to-do" list from my TiVo, all the shows it had captured that I hadn't
watched yet.
When I first got my TiVo, having a lot of programming on the drive
felt like someone had done me a large favor; but over time, it felt
almost like a nag: here's all this "work" I've got piled up for you to
do.
Of course, this isn't specific to TiVo -- any PVR has this effect, as
does an RSS reader, mail reader and so on: the
unread/unwatched/undealt-with flags that define my life multiply, and
my personal time does not.
I'm not the only one: Sign on San Diego has a piece on other PVRs
owner who're drowning.
"For something that is supposed to be relaxing and unwinding at the
end of the day, you (think) 'Wow! I have a lot of shows to watch,'"
said Scott Bedard, technology director at an online media company in
San Francisco...
"I get to the point now where I skip going to the gym so I can keep up
with watching "Dawson's Creek" reruns," which are broadcast for two
hours each day, he said. "I look forward to when they end so I won't
be stressed."
Link
(
via Gizmodo)
Microsoft still tinkering with
secure-computing design
Microsoft still tinkering with
secure-computing design
05/05/2004 03:24 PMZDNet May 5 2004 8:05PM GMT
"Iraqis are grateful to the US for
liberating them from tyranny."
"Iraqis are grateful to the US for
liberating them from tyranny."
06/12/2004 03:16 AMTinkering with insides of the
PlayStation console deemed illegal
Tinkering with insides of the
PlayStation console deemed illegal
07/22/2004 09:57 PMNews.bbc.co.uk - Thu Jul 22, 09:45 am GMT
Vatican ponders moral implications of
biotech tinkering
Vatican ponders moral implications of
biotech tinkering
11/11/2003 06:52 PMSiliconValley.com Nov 11 2003 4:33PM ET
broadband » News » Get More From Your
Router - Tinkering with modified WRT54G
firmware
broadband » News » Get More From Your
Router - Tinkering with modified WRT54G
firmware
02/14/2004 08:03 PMhttp://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/38267
Written by Karl BodeA fairly common VoIP complaint (depending on
configuration) has been choppy communications when users are
throttling their broadband connection. To that end, users are
tinkering with modified router firmware upgrades to incorporate
bandwidth management and a host of other free improvements. This
thread in our VoIP forum outlines how one user obtained the quality of
service he was looking for with a Linksys WRT54G and...
Canadian Copyright Board allows
downloads, copyright levies
Canadian Copyright Board allows
downloads, copyright levies
12/14/2003 12:27 PM
The
Copyright Board of Canada
issued a ruling on
" private
copying ", largely via peer-to-peer computing, with several
components. First, downloading is acceptable, but uploading is not
(presumably to target hyperpirates). Second, new mechanisms for
levies were described, freezing current ones, allowing new
charges.
the Copyright Board said uploading or distributing
copyrighted works online appeared to be prohibited under current
Canadian law.
However, the country's copyright law does allow making a copy for
personal use and does not address the source of that copy or whether
the original has to be an authorized or noninfringing version, the
board said.
John Shirley comments on Scientific
American article about "Tyranny of
Choice"
John Shirley comments on Scientific
American article about "Tyranny of
Choice"
04/26/2004 01:00 PMWriter John Shirley has some interesting things to say about a new
Scientific American article called "
Tyranny of Choice"
(paid subscription required to read article, you can read more about
the article on
Alternet.)
They suggest there are two basic types of choosers,
Maximizers and Satisficers. The former aim to make the best possible
choice in a near obsessive way, the latter tend to settle for 'good
enough'. Maximizers spend a long time shopping, can't make up their
minds what to buy for a gift, channel surf like a cokehead searching
through the rug for fallen powder...
Maximizers in particular
are prone to unhappiness in our society--there are too many choices,
just too damn much input in general, and they can't deal with it.
Satisficers are having a hard time too; they tend to go to lower
stress options--and those are harder to find. But they're less likely
to be depressed and suicidal.
LinkOpinionJournal - Democracy and the
Enemies of Freedom - Even after Saddam's
capture, the forces of tyranny remain
strong
OpinionJournal - Democracy and the
Enemies of Freedom - Even after Saddam's
capture, the forces of tyranny remain
strong
12/29/2003 08:30 AMprospects for some form of democracy in the Middle East ..
OpinionJournal
opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004478
track this
site | 4 links
Dismantling the Axis of Evil: A New
Battle for Control and Total Conquest Is
Underway - AirG Launches Art of Tyranny
- World’s Latest Mobile Multiplayer Game
Dismantling the Axis of Evil: A New
Battle for Control and Total Conquest Is
Underway - AirG Launches Art of Tyranny
- World’s Latest Mobile Multiplayer Game
03/14/2005 05:55 PMAfter months in development AirG, the global leading in developing and
distributing cutting edge multiplayer mobile entertainment
applications, announces the launch of Art of Tyranny (AoT). This
highly sought after game is now available through mobile operators in
North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. [PRWEB Mar 5, 2005]
...Ditto Iraq. Why have the U.S. forces
never gotten the ovation they expected
for liberating Iraq from Saddam's
tyranny?
...Ditto Iraq. Why have the U.S. forces
never gotten the ovation they expected
for liberating Iraq from Saddam's
tyranny?
11/10/2003 11:36 PMThe Humiliation Factor, By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN .. he would be called
one: .. New York Times
oped
nytimes.com/2003/11/09/opinion/09FRIE.html
track this
site | 6 links
THE TYRANNY
OF STRUCTURELESSNESS
THE TYRANNY
OF STRUCTURELESSNESS
12/22/2004 01:16 AM
 Several of my key
solutions to making our world better -- Natural Enterprises, True
Collaboration and Model
Intentional Communities
most notably -- rely on the ability of groups of people to self-manage
more effectively than large hierarchical organizations are, or can be,
managed top-down. Derek Woolverton over at Technical
Difficulties... commented on my post on
WL Gore ("no ranks, no titles, no
bosses")
that self-managed organizations, if they don't have any rules, can be
much worse than badly-managed ones. He sent me a link to a manifesto
written back in 1970 by Jo Freeman called The Tyranny of Structurelessness,
lamenting how the women's liberation movement of that day had
degenerated into anarchy, cliquishness and petty politics for exactly
that reason. Her article lays out these seven principles of democratic
structuring for self-managed organizations:
- Delegate specific authority to specific individuals for
specific tasks by democratic procedures, after they've expressed an
interest or willingness to do it. Don't just let people choose their
own jobs.
- Require all those to whom authority has been
delegated to be
responsible to all those who selected them. The group retains the
ultimate say over
how the power is exercised.
- Distribute authority among as many
people as is reasonably
possible, to prevent monopoly of power and encourage learning and
consultation.
- Rotate tasks among individuals often but not too
often, so people learn many jobs adequately and to avoid turf
wars.
- Allocate tasks using objective criteria: competency,
interest, responsibility, and opportunity to learn new things with
appropriate mentoring.
- Diffuse information to everyone in the organization
as frequently as possible. The more one
knows about how things work, the more politically effective one can
be.
- Provide equal access to resources (equipment, skills and
information) needed by the group.
Freeman's manifesto is dated, but these principles make sense when
dealing with the proclivity (I think it's learned, so I won't say
'natural tendency') of people in groups to dominate, bully, gang up,
hoard, compete, take perverse pleasure in others' failure, and do
things without adequate consultation.
My question is whether you can get people to follow these principles.
If you have to impose them on the group, haven't you already made the
group less democratic by that imposition? And can you impose them on a group?
My (admittedly idealistic) proposal in Natural Enterprise is that self-selection
of the group should prevent these problems from occurring in the first
place. Those who are disinclined to work for someone who tends to want
to dominate will select the dominant types out of the group. Those who
want to be dominated, to be told what to do and how to do it, will
self-select into groups that include that type of individual.
Furthermore, in Natural Enterprise, the self-selecting group's first
task is to set out the mutually agreeable principles by which it will
operate. Of course, this is a learning process, one that will be very
new to most of us, so it should not be surprising that it takes some
time for the self-selection process to work. In its early days, every
Natural Enterprise will be expelling those who didn't work out,
allowing others who didn't understand what they were getting into to
select themselves out, and others to be invited or opt in in their
place. Every system is messy when it first begins. And I have a great
belief in instinct -- it is rare when my first instinctive impression
of a work colleague, positive or negative, has proven dead wrong.
Nature has given us this marvelous gift of instinct to make the
process
of group self-selection easier and more reliable.
In the aforementioned article on collaboration I described a four-step
program for True Collaboration: teaching it as a core skill,
recognizing and rewarding its successes, self-assessing our competency
at it, and practice, practice, practice. I have seen domineering
people
humbled by this process, but I have also seen egotistical, inflexible
and unimaginative leaders completely ignore brilliant collaborative
work-products. I'm the first to confess that collaboration is not
currently something most of us do well, but I believe strongly that it
works, makes us stronger and more resilient and adaptable as a
species,
and that for that reason the ability to do it well should be in our genes.
But I have also seen petty despots and cliques who have ruined the
communities and organizations they preside over, even though some of
them were elected by a majority and believe fervently that they're
acting in the majority's interest, by minimizing their diversity (in
every sense of the word) and essentially expelling anyone with
different views. And I've seen dictators and cult leaders who rule
with
an iron fist, some of whom are extraordinarily popular, even revered,
despite flagrantly violating these principles of democracy,
egalitarianism and collaboration.
Are these behaviours -- excessive dominance, bullying, ganging up,
hoarding resources, competing instead of collaborating, and doing
things without consulting others -- unlearnable?
And how about the behaviours that make these foolish behaviours
possible -- others' submissiveness, cowardice, self-victimization,
self-isolation, passivity, meekness, resignation -- can they be
unlearned too? Is it naive and unrealistic to think that we all have
something valuable to contribute, we all instinctively seek and belong
to communities, and, given a chance, we could and would all
participate
as equals in every community and organization to which we belong?
I appreciate that nature has endowed us with dominant and submissive
genes, to establish a natural pecking order so that, even without
language, we can maintain order in our groups. But in nature there is
enormous collaboration and sharing of resources, infinitely more peace
and equality and less suffering than we find in most human
institutions. I'm not saying we need to learn to be exactly equal,
just
that by 'ousting the egos and outing the wallflowers', we need to
learn
to be more egalitarian.
I'd love to know more about how WL Gore really works, and how it
doesn't work (Derek suggests the power vacuum spawns horrendous
political infighting and undemocratic decision-making). Anyone know
people working at Gore, or other organizations with 'no ranks, no
titles, no bosses', who could share their lessons learned?
|
Ads and Copyright
Ads and Copyright
02/10/2004 02:41 AMNever thought I'd say this, but the Super Bowl got me thinking.
Why shouldn't every advertiser release every print, audio, or
multimedia ad they create under a Creative Commons license? Choose
BY-NC-ND, and make clear you're protecting your trademark. Forget the
cultural effect -- I'm talking pure business: What principle drives
someone to enforce the full copyright in a work they'd normally pay
millions to get in front of people's faces? Isn't it irrational NOT to
free up distribution completely? Or am I missing something?
The Copyright Gap
The Copyright Gap
08/01/2004 03:20 PMHere's the hypothesis: Today's telecom and copyright laws often
regulate similar subjects, but with a big difference. The telecom laws
slightly favor market entrants, while the copyright laws favor the
incumbent disseminators. The result is a "copyright gap" that grows
larger every day....
The FCC wants out of copyright
The FCC wants out of copyright
08/06/2004 06:18 PMThe Broadcast Flag regime is, I think, something of an embarassment
for the FCC. Many of the commissioners came to the FCC to deregulate
telecommunications law, not to regulate the electronics industry. Yet
they find themselves in mission creep mode, issuing
command-and-control rules for the design of consumer products,
surely...
Copyright - what right?
Copyright - what right?
10/29/2003 12:09 AMThis slashdot posting was really interesting. its brief look at the
history of copyright, and the misuse of it. Slashdot: Copyright The
scary stuff for...
Copyright Out of Balance
Copyright Out of Balance
02/01/2005 09:12 PMCory Doctorow on the disappearance of important documentary films
because filmmakers can't come up with continuing payments for rights
to archival footage. Case in point: The legendary Civil Rights Era
documentary "Eyes on the Prize". Footnote: When I was the CEO of Lotus
in the mid-1980's, the company provided critical...
3G Copyright Heavyweights
3G Copyright Heavyweights
02/10/2004 06:56 AM3G Feb 10 2004 9:46AM GMT
Camping out for copyright
Camping out for copyright
04/07/2005 10:12 AMCanadian Press via Canada.com Apr 7 2005 1:58PM GMT
Copyright and attribution
Copyright and attribution
12/17/2004 06:33 PMCrooked Timber has a post today on
copyright and
attribution that cites Creative Commons:
In short, the informal economy of academic attribution is
much more like the kind of alternative economy that, say, Creative Commons
is trying to create than it is like the copyright industry. Academics
are usually happy when others rip, remix or even parody their work -
as
long as the remix artists acknowledge them by name. Similarly, the Creative
Commons licenses now include a requirement for attribution as standard
(it used to be optional, but 97-98% of Creative Commons users wanted
it
in their licenses, so that the CC crowd decided that it was easier to
make it the default). The requirement that people not plagiarize (i.e.
that they not use others’ work without attribution) presents no
problems whatsoever for ‘free culture.’
"US Copyright Office"
"US Copyright Office"
06/03/2004 12:21 PMHow not to be a copyright putz
How not to be a copyright putz
08/11/2004 05:14 PMDan Gillmor lists the ways his book is making its way into our
intellectual bloodstream. Go Dan! Go We the Media! Here's an interview
of Dan by Xeni Jardin....
Wagner on copyright
Wagner on copyright
02/13/2004 03:58 PMMitch Wagner's written a very lucid essay about DRM and file-sharing
that strikes me as one of the better formulations of the problem that
I've seen to date.
It's rather appropriate that the logo for Disney is a mouse, because
The Walt Disney Company this week announced its intention to throw
money down a rathole. Disney became the latest company to license
Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. DRM doesn't work and
consumers don't want it, so of course it's very appealing to big
business, who are also in a big rush to sell other, equally practical
products, such as anchovy flavored ice cream and bicycles with square
wheels.
LinkCopyright in Eight Years
Copyright in Eight Years
08/05/2004 01:50 AMSo today copyright scholar Joe Liu at Boston College asked a room full
of law professors an interesting question. What did we think copyright
would look like in 8 years? Here were some of the main categories of
predictions (some contradict):...
RSS feeds and copyright
RSS feeds and copyright
02/01/2005 08:40 PMThis dumb ass (also known as Martin Schwimmer of Trademark Blog, has a
problem with Bloglines picking up his public RSS-feed and
redistributing it. Because they might at some stage serve ads together
with the content. For those of you...
Can you copyright a typeface under US
law?
Can you copyright a typeface under US
law?
12/26/2004 06:33 PM
Xeni Jardin:
[
NSFNLG warning: Not Safe For Non-LawGeeks.] A
recent post on BoingBoing sparked debate among some readers about
whether or not U.S. copyright law makes it possible to protect
typefaces. Digital music guru
Jim Griffin maintains that
the answer is no. He points to Volume 37 of the Code of Federal
Regulations (
Link) as one
of several portions of US law that back his assertion. Snip from the
text of the law, with his comments:
"The following are examples of works not subject to copyright and
applications for registration of such works cannot be entertained:
(...) typeface as typeface" 37 CFR 202.1(e).
House of Representatives report accompanied the new copyright law when
passed in 1976:
"The Committee has considered, but chosen to defer, the possibility of
protecting the design of typefaces. A 'typeface' can be defined as a
set of letters, numbers, or other symbolic characters, whose forms are
related by repeating design elements consistently applied in a
notational system and are intended to be embodied in articles whose
intrinsic utilitarian function is for use in composing text or other
cognizable combinations of characters. The Committee does not regard
the design of typeface, as thus defined, to be a copyrightable
'pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work' within the meaning of this
bill and the application of the dividing line in section 101." H.R.
Rep. No. 94-1476, 94th Congress, 2d Session at 55 (1976), reprinted
in1978 U.S. Cong. and Admin. News 5659, 5668.
It's also in accordance with a court case that has considered the
matter: Eltra Corp. V. Ringer, 579 F.2d 294, 208 USPQ 1 (1978, C.A. 4,
Va.).
The U.S. Copyright Office holds that a bitmapped font is nothing more
than a computerized representation of a typeface, and as such is not
copyrightable:
"The [September 29, 1988] Policy Decision [published at 53 FR 38110]
based on the [October 10,] 1986 Notice of Inquiry [published at 51 FR
36410] reiterated a number of previous registration decisions made by
the [Copyright] Office. First, under existing law, typeface as such is
not registerable. The Policy Decision then went on to state the
Office's position that 'data that merely represents an electronic
depiction of a particular typeface or individual letterform' [that is,
a bitmapped font] is also not registerable." 57 FR 6201.
Link to previous BB post.
Iraq's copyright law
Iraq's copyright law
05/21/2004 02:14 PMJamie Knox sent along Iraq's newly amended copyright law (as if THIS
was where we needed to worry about rule of law in Iraq). I've just
begun going through
it, but there are favorite tidbits so
far: collections of data can be protected; readings of the Koran are
protected; and collections of government documents can be protected.
But significantly, the term is life plus 50! More disharmony...
How Copyright Stifles New Art
How Copyright Stifles New Art
04/12/2004 07:32 PMJD Lasica: The Killing
Fields. In the film, artists, writers, musicians, scientists,
and others parade across his lens. Many of them have been threatened,
sued, fined, and put out of work in the name of copyright. Horowitz
captures it all in a video vérité style popularized by
Michael Moore in Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine. At various
points, the iconoclastic Horowitz appears on camera, appearing
dumbfounded at the tales of a preschool director who said she received
letters warning that the school could not show videos to her young
charges without a license or hang protected cartoon characters on the
walls without permission. He also interviews members of a Rolling
Stones tribute band who perform under a legal cloud and
husband-and-wife party clowns in Anaheim, California, who were warned
not to create balloon animals for kids that looked too much like
Tigger, Barney, or the Aladdin genie.
Grok Description matches for Tinkering with the Tyranny of Copyright
GrokA matches for Tinkering with the Tyranny of Copyright
Tinkering with the Tyranny of Copyright
