Puck

Sez Cory Doctorow:

Italy’s Berlusconi regime, already known around the world as an enemy of free speech and popular access to the tools of communication, has now floated a proposal to require Italians to get an “uploader’s license” in order to put any “moving pictures” on the Internet. The government claims that this is required as part of the EU’s product placement disclosure rules, which is about as ridiculous assertion as I’ve heard this month.

via Italy proposes mandatory licenses for people who upload video Boing Boing.

If there’s one group of authors who excel at envisioning utopias and dystopias, particularly those brought about by technology, it’s the science fiction crowd. So the fact that the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America are sounding the alarm over the Google books settlement ought to give pause, at the very least.

via Is Google Books a Dystopian Nightmare? – critical difference.

Boing Boing has a great piece on copyright orphans. That’s what happens when we keep extending copyright:

Remember folks, thanks to 11 copyright term extensions in the past 40-some years, more than 98% of all works in copyright are “orphaned” — still in copyright, but no one knows to whom they belong…. the vast majority of the culture swept into this 20th century black hole was not commercially available and, in most cases, the authors are unknown. The works are locked up — with no benefit to anyone — and no one has the key that would unlock them. We have cut ourselves off from our own culture, left it to molder — and in the case of nitrate film, literally disintegrate — with no benefit to anyone.

Incredibly, Microsoft and Disney ranked very high in trust, according to the Boston College-Reputation Institute 2009 CSR Index. Disney ranked #1 in the index. Others in the top 10 were Google, Honda of America, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo., General Mills, Kraft Foods, Campbell Soup Company and FedEx. (This comes to me via Environmental Leader.)

That blows me away, because Disney is a purveyor of crap and a copyright monger. If it weren’t for Disney keeping the wraps on Mickey Mouse, we’d have sane copyright laws in this country — and likely in the rest of the world, too, which, as with drug laws, has been pressured by the U.S. to be ever more restrictive.

But that Microsoft scores so high is just insane. I mean, this is the demon tribe that makes our lives miserable with Office! Not to mention the insanely bad SharePoint (bad for business, bad for Web content management; oh, well, it just sux!). People, wake up! Here’s what Microsoft is really like, via Slashdot (and an update here from ComputerWorld):

“Windows Presentation Foundation” plugin that Microsoft slipped into Firefox last February apparently left the popular browser open to attack. This was among the many things recently addressed in the massive Tuesday patch. “What was particularly galling to users was that once installed, the .NET add-on was virtually impossible to remove from Firefox. The usual ‘Disable’ and ‘Uninstall’ buttons in Firefox’s add-on list were grayed out on all versions of Windows except Windows 7, leaving most users no alternative other than to root through the Windows registry, a potentially dangerous chore, since a misstep could cripple the PC. Several sites posted complicated directions on how to scrub the .NET add-on from Firefox, including Annoyances.org.”

Q-Burns Abstract Message is one of my favorite remix artists. He recently did a mix of Youssou N’Dour’s “Wake Up,” which you can stream or download here. I really like the on-page player; if you create an account and log in, you can post comments which show up on the player’s timeline. Q-Burns writes that the N’Dour remix project is

part of a campaign spearheaded by IntraHealth OPEN, a non-profit organization focusing on open source technology and how it can be used to advance health care in Africa.

Q-Burns is one of eight artists who contributed mixes to the project. Check ‘em all out here.

This just in from Defective by Design:

Yesterday, Viviane Reding, European Union commissioner for information society and media, issued a report sanctioning a “transparent” DRM framework for the EU. This irresponsible and senseless report comes just a day before Sony BMG announced that they would join Warner Music Group, EMI, and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group in selling DRM-free music downloads in the United States.

Help us take action now by reading and signing our open letter. Our signed letter will be sent to the commission’s office, and will add weight to the dozens of phone calls that will be made next week to her office demanding that she retract her statement and letting her know that we oppose any attempt by the EU to sanction, promote, or endorse DRM technology platforms.

And this heartbreak from Kathy at Olympic Cellars. Readers from away should know that a certain micro-continent some millions of years ago slammed into the bulk of what is now Washington state to form what we call the Olympic Peninsula. Beautiful place, and I can’t wait to get over there to sample some wine from Olympic Cellars. Read the rest of this entry »

I think the general public, that gang of knavish sprites, is finally catching on to the hell that is digital rights management. The issue appears to be slowing creeping into the mainstream press. (Other than news about kids and single moms being sued by the RIAA, I mean.)

I could be wrong. Easily. Have sales of iPods really declined? No. And if jah people were really concerned about the creative commons (and DRM is the anti-cruise of creativity), they’d stop buying iPods. (I just bought a Sansa; it’s OK; at least as good as any generation of iPod I’ve tried.) In any case, I blame DRM Hell on the Beatles breaking up and the “Sue Me, Sue You Blues.” (Copyright is an old bane, by any measure. Victor Hugo, the modern inventor, was clear that ownership should only extend through the lifetime of the creator; screw the blood-sucking heirs.) Read the rest of this entry »

You can type your own message into the placards from Pennebroker’s famous 1966 film of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” You can read Puck’s message or make your own. This is — obviously, I guess — a marketing thang, so let me help out by suggesting you buy six or seven Bob Dylan CDs. Puck could use the lunch money.

Since this Dylan thing plays on the edge of the Creative Commons (in a strictly controlled way, of course — there’s really nothing being placed in the Commons there), let me point you to the pirates over at Torrentfreak, who have leaked something like 700 megs of email from MediaDefender, a group that is playing the BitTorrent field like undercover cops. Are they collaborators, hitmen, or what for the record and movie industry? In any case, one way to keep the Commons open is to make like a hydra and propagate.

Defective By Design writes:

The BBC should have chosen free and open standards that work well and are available today—software that you can install on every major operating system including Microsoft’s. Free software.

Instead, they have given Microsoft complete control.This deal isn’t about supporting Microsoft Windows users. It’s about excluding everyone who doesn’t use Microsoft Windows. It says that everyone who does not agree to use DRM and proprietary software made by Microsoft cannot view BBC TV programs over the Internet. Read more.

review by Brian Charles Clark

Freedom of Expression
by Kembrew McLeod
Publisher: Doubleday, 2005

Novelist Michael Chabon, in a recent review of a new edition of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, concluded by stating “Every novel is a sequel. Influence is bliss.” Those lines could have been an epigraph for Kembrew McLeod’s Freedom of Expression. McLeod is a sociology professor and an expert in the study of popular culture—just the sort of academic over which right-wingers love to excoriate “liberal” universities. But Freedom of Expression justifies society’s investment in scholars like McLeod: his book is learned, ranges widely over key areas of the copyright and intellectual property wars, and (here’s something you don’t hear everyday in regard to a scholarly work) is damn funny. Read the rest of this entry »

A draft of the new Creative Commons license has just been published. According to bOING bOING, in its first 3.5 years, 160,000,000 works were released under the license.