Another rights hoarder is about to shoot itself in the foot. As CNN reports, a company that compiles baseball statistics on the internet for sports fans who can then pretend to run their own teams, is up against Major League Baseball, who say that these statistics are their “intellectual property”. Major League Baseball has claimed Read more »
Wired has an excellent essay on anonymity by security guru Bruce Schneier: In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need anonymity. It wouldn’t be necessary for commerce, since no one would ostracize or blackmail you based on what you purchased. It wouldn’t be necessary for internet activities, because no one would blackmail or arrest you based Read more »
CCTV cameras are used for observation. The question is, what do they observe? In Merseyside, UK, three municipal workers have been convicted for using a surveillance camera to peep into a woman’s flat, The Register reports. Judge Gerald Clifton told the triumvirate: “To dismiss what was happening as laddish behaviour – something that the 21st-century, Read more »
Use restrictions management (DRM) at your own risk. According to The Register, the distributors for Steven Spielberg’s latest film Munich have managed to fsck up the movie’s application for the British Bafta awards: Steven Spielberg’s Munich has effectively been knocked out of the running for next month’s Bafta awards after a batch of DVDs sent Read more »
Nart Villeneuve of the Internet Censorship Explorer has published an article on Internet filtering on First Monday: “The filtering matrix: Integrated mechanisms of information control and the demarcation of borders in cyberspace”. As non–transparent filtering practices meld into forms of censorship the effect on democratic practices and the open character of the Internet are discernible. Read more »
Though some days have passed since, I cannot resist writing about a piece of good news. Since January 1st, the works of German writer Kurt Tucholsky are in the public domain. The author died on Dec. 21, 1935, in his Swedish exile. German copyright protection lasts 70 years after the author’s year of death. Tucholsky Read more »
This weekend, I stumbled upon the site decodeunicode.org. It lists all unicode characters and has a wiki where you can provide an explanatory entry for each one, in English and German. While some characters are already explained, others are still waiting for you to contribute historical or cultural factoids. Nice one!
Progressive copyright thinker James Boyle has published a comment in the Financial Times about the European Union’s recent study on the impact of its Database Directive. This directive creates a sort-of-copyright for databases. Now, the EU has evaluated if this protection of databases is doing the industry any good. The criteria are really quite simple: Read more »
Tom Owad on Applefritter has looked into Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists. It’s a pretty impressive project: He shows how far information that is available publicly and gratis can go in tying ideas to the people that harbour them. It used to be you had to get a warrant to monitor a Read more »
Freedom To Tinker has a bit of discussion about Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) on CDs. Now I’m not arguing here that the current copyright deal is perfect or even close to perfect. The copyright deal is under stress and we need to keep thinking about how we might improve it or how we might renegotiate Read more »