Oblomovka

2002-12-17»

Here, I think, is the key quote, from the jury foreman, Dennis Strader:

The defense argued that the program merely enabled owners of Adobe eBook Reader software to make copies of e-books for personal use. If an owner makes a backup copy of an e-book or transfers it to another device he owns, they argued, that is permitted under the “fair use” concept of copyright law.

Jury foreman Dennis Strader said the argument made a big impact on the jurors, who asked U.S. District Judge Ronald M. Whyte to clarify the “fair use” definition shortly after deliberations began.

“Under the eBook formats, you have no rights at all, and the jury had trouble with that concept,” said Strader.

(From the Associated Press story)

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The excellent Creative Commons animation I mentioned is right here. It’s brilliant. But what license is it? I’m worried that Junell’s Web server will get killed by too many people linking to it, and I’d like to co-host it here. Hmmm…

Okay, I’ve watched it right through to the end, and it looks like it’s under an attribution, sharealike, non-commercial license. So I can mirror the movie with a clear conscience! Excellent. This really works!

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2002-12-16»

I got to the Creative Commons launch late (Q and I had to apply CPR to a dead server in Portland), and had to stand near the back, near the avocado dip. My summary of the speeches, therefore, has to be “Mumble mumble mumble (LOUD CRUNCHING NOISES OF MY OWN MOUTH) (APPLAUSE)”. Some elements I gathered through the static: Lessig, to follow up on his triumph of getting Milton Friedman and Ursula Le Guin to join forces in Eldred, got video pledges of support from John Perry “Intellectual Property is an Oxymoron” Barlow and Jack “I 0wnz0r Y0ur C0mm0nw3al” Valenti. Together – AT LAST. DJ Spooky spoke, then played something Quinn described as “19th Century Koyaanisqatsi” and therefore I liked. It is under the MUMBLE MUMBLE CRUNCH license. Aaron Swartz managed to explain RDF well, even as his presentation AV morphed behind him into /dev/random piping into video memory. The Creative Commons team also showed a fantastic Flash movie that explains the whole concept far better than any echo-mumbling I could muster. I can’t find it on the site, but oooohhh when I do, it is so getting redistributed. The brie was nice.

Our replacement Roomba (the previous one died in protest of our lifestyle) arrived. We’re looking for someone else in the area to play Two Robot Vacuum Cleaners Enter, One Robot Vacuum Cleaner Leaves. This is where two Roombas are placed back-to-back in the middle of a room, and set running. First to escape through the one open door wins. Also, when we’re drunker, we’re tying pens to them and making automatic art on the kitchen floor.

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Matt‘s amazing warchalking meme makes it into New York Times Idea of the Year list (I am so proud I got to be the first to rub my hands in glee). It’s a great list, incidentally – as it would have to be, with “Pokemon Hegemon” as one of the headings.

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2002-12-14»

One more thing I’m going to have problems explaining to my daughter: what “cc:” stands for.

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2002-12-13»

Hmmm. Some buzz going about Ronald Rivest’s new startup, a cryptographically secure micropayment protcol. My spider-sense is tingling about online payment systems in 2003. Oh, boy, another opportunity to look stupid in twelve month’s time. Scott Loftesness is a good news-aggregating blogger on this topic and quite a few others.

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2002-12-12»

So, last week’s ST column was about RSI (I’m slowly crippling myself with mouse shoulder, so I’m trying to stop doing Bad Things). Gary Marshall wrote a very kind mail listing all the trick he’s been doing to fend it off. I said that it’d be great if he through it up on the Web, and he did, so I’m linking to it: Gary Marshall’s Guide to RSI.

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Great short piece from the New Yorker wondering what Philip K. Dick would make of the Total Awareness Office. I came because the title of the piece – Too Much Information – which is fun. I blogged because of the fantastic payoff in the last paragraph. Sometimes you suspect people write whole columns just to be able to finish them on flourishes like that. Or, as in this case, you just know they did.

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Small tweak to the bookmarklet below – I’ve stuck in an escape function call to cope with news URLs with GET parameters. The bookmarklet will still have problems with URLs that willfully stick in user information into the URL (like MSNBC), but it’ll do much better with quite a few others.

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Here’s your Google News bookmarklet, courtesy of the amazing (and currently not quite as lazy) Rod Begbie.

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