A Swarm of Angels has released The Unfold trailer.

I’m proud to release the first open source film trailer created for A Swarm of Angels. World’s Will Shatter sets the scene for The Unfold, a contemporary sci-fi thriller being made in a revolutionary fashion; by a global community of members participating in its creation, and contributing their unique talents and skills.

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The trailer and all accompanying source files are released under a Creative Commons CC-NC-SA-3.0 license, allowing full non-commercial remixing and sharing (embed codes for Youtube, blip.tv & hi-def Vimeo). Join the Swarm to help make the film and get further details for the open source package (register here, full member details here).

Haha…this isn’t really different than the teaser.  It’s just longer.

• A Swarm of Angels

In a case between adult entertainment sit Io Group and Veoh, a California court has ruled in Veoh’s favor, saying that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act does not make sharing sites solely responsible for their content.

The adult entertainment site Io Group sued Veoh for not doing enough to prevent 10 of their videos from being posted on the site. But Io did not notify Veoh of the infringement before filing the suit, and Veoh had already banned all sexual content and taken down the videos in question.

“The DMCA was intended to facilitate the growth of electronic commerce, not squelch it,” Judge Howard Lloyd of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said.  “The court finds no reasonable juror could conclude that a comprehensive review of every file would be feasible.”

The ruling could provide significant fodder in a testy and far-from-resolved fight between content owners and media sharing sites, in which third parties (you and me) take from the former, feed the latter and sometimes share things we don’t own with everyone. At issue is whether hosting sites should or even can proactively monitor all uploaded content, and whether, if uploads of illegal content cannot be prevented or at least quickly taken down, they are a legally responsible entity.

I guess this will help out Google with the Viacom case.  Both Google and Viacom have released statements.  You can check out the Wired article if you want more info.

• Wired
• EFF
• Recording Industy vs. The People
• Ars Technica

The Quebec government is buying MS products directly from the vendor which is only allowed by law when there are no other options available. FACIL, a Quebec FOSS association, thinks that there are other options available.

The lawsuit by Facil was lodged with the Quebec Superior Court on July 15 and made public on Wednesday. In it, the group says the provincial government has refused to entertain competing bids from all software providers, opting instead to supply public-sector departments with products bought from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle Corp.

Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused and goes against other legal requirements to buy locally.

“It shouldn’t be the rule,” Facil president Mathieu Lutfy told CBC News. “It goes against the public markets policy of the government, which requires them to stimulate competition and look for local alternatives. It’s really an absurdity.”

Between February and June, the Quebec government spent $25 million on software from Microsoft, Facil said. The group estimates the government is spending more than $80 million a year on licences for Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system alone.

I’m optimistic about this case. I hope it goes well. I really hope that governments switch to free software. After the geeks, governments are second priority.

• CBC
• FACIL
• Slashdot

University of Michigan has created a new system called BAYU (Be Aware You’re Uploading).  It emails students that are uploading content, and does not do anything to enforce the law.  In fact, students who know what they are doing may opt-out of the notices all together.  The program is open source.

Be Aware You’re Uploading (BAYU) was developed at the University of Michigan, where it has had some real success at bringing down both P2P usage and DMCA takedown notices. The University open-sourced the entire program, including the software and the documentation, and wants to make it widely available to other schools. Not only is it good for the schools (fewer legal problems to deal with, less bandwidth consumed), but it’s good for content owners (less material swapped online), it fits with a school’s educational mission, and such a solution could be enough to show regulators and legislators that universities are taking the problem seriously and don’t need to be burdened with new filtering mandates.

The system is simple enough. Deep packet inspection gear sitting inside the network scans all traffic for P2P signatures. While not foolproof, DPI can be generally effective, especially with frequent signature updates. Instead of using the hardware to throttle, block, or inspect the content of the traffic, though, Northwestern will use it simply to generate e-mail notices to the student in question, alerting them to their machine’s behavior. It is up to students to decide whether or not to continue their P2P activities, and the school provides additional material on using P2P legally, copyright, and uninstalling unwanted P2P software.

Students who know what they’re doing are free to opt out of the notifications completely, though in any case, no more than one notification in a 24-hour period will be sent. The BAYU approach does not require end users to install software, and it puts no new controls on the network.

Can someone verify the code exists and what license it’s under?

• Ars Technica

GamePark Holdings hopes to take advantage of the community with their new handheld, Wiz.

Homebrew and open-source applications often offer utility unrivaled by the more mainstream units, and that’s something GPH is hoping to take advantage of with this new handheld. The Linux-powered device (running its own GP2X distribution) sports an Arm9 533MHz processor with a 3D accelerator, 64MB of RAM, 1GB of built-in NAND flash memory, an external SD card slot, and a single USB 2.0 connection. The display is a 2.8″ OLED touch screen panel with a resolution of 320 by 240 (QVGA). The unit is powered by a 2000mAh Lithium-Ion battery that nets an advertised five hours of play time.

Official commercial games, launching alongside the unit, are a strong focal point. While previous devices in the line have been host to for-pay games, the Wiz will debut with a full suite of official games from third-party developers. Launch titles Asura Cross Wired, a fighting game, and Her Knights, a side-scrolling action game, will come alongside the release of the handheld and future titles that are slated for release through 2009, including puzzlers, rhythm games, shooters, and even RPGs.

My opinion on this one is the same as the previous. Sure there’s some commercial stuff that is supposed to be driving this one, but it’s not going to go mainstream enough.

• Ars Technica
• GP2X

Pandora is a community developed in progress gaming handheld that will run on GNU/Linux.

Powered by a lithium-ion battery, Pandora measures 5.5 x 3.3 x 1.1 inches — slightly smaller than Nintendo’s DS Lite, or GamePark Holdings’s Linux-based GP2X player, from which it arguably evolved. In terms of processing power, its designers claim Pandora will compare to Nintendo’s GameCube, a non-mobile gaming platform.

OpenPandora.org was launched last year by “CraigIX” and “EvilDragon,” both members of Gamepark Holdings’s GP2X gaming community. The two launched the site and began working on Pandora after GamePark Holdings released its second-generation handheld gaming platform, the GP2X F-200. Thus, the Pandora appears to be positioned as a more powerful successor to the GP2X, a leading (and one of the only) Linux-based game platforms.

Since few games are available for native Linux, GP2X supports a variety of game emulators, including MAME, SNES, Genesis, and PC Engine. This lets users enjoy a variety of game titles originally written for other platforms. Pandora will initially offer full-speed PlayStation 1 emulation, says the group, with N64 emulation planned in a later release.

It’s good to see more people doing this kind of thing, but I’m not optimistic about its success. I’m going to be posting about a similar handheld in a minute.

• Linux Devices
• Linux Games
• Free Gamer

After Apple sued Pystar for their mac clones, Psystar has counter-sued Apple with an antitrust suit.

It’s definitely not over for Mac-copycat Psystar, either. After Apple filed a lawsuit against Psystar alleging copyright infringement, the small company announced its plans Tuesday to turn the other cheek by filing a lawsuit of its own alleging that Apple engages in anticompetitive business practices.

Psystar’s attorney told CNET that Miami-based Psystar will sue Apple for allegedly violating laws discouraging monopolies. Apple’s end-user agreement reads, “You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so.” Psystar, which started selling computers hacked to run Mac OS X Leopard in April, believes Apple’s prohibitive end-user agreement constitutes “an anticompetitive restrain of trade.”

Things are looking grim for Psystar, but I’m glad they have the guts to try this.

• Wired
• ZDNet
• Slashdot
• CNET

Ubiquity introduces human-language driven commands to make firefox do whatever you want.

Ubiquity 0.1

• Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.
  
• Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism
  
• Read about Ubiquity In Depth, or see a number of the commands in action (with screenshots) in the Ubiquity Tutorial.

All of the code underlying the Ubiquity experiment is being released as open source software under the the GPL/MPL/LGPL tri-license.

Go to the link and check out the video…it’s pretty cool.  I’m still not a fan of Mozilla because of trademark stuff, but this could keep me hooked on FF for a while if I can’t figure out how to get this to work with Konqueror.

• Mozilla Labs

The Dead Sea Scrolls which have historically only been open to a select few, will be photocopied in high quality and placed on the internet for all to see.

Equipped with high-powered cameras with resolution and clarity many times greater than those of conventional models, and with lights that emit neither heat nor ultraviolet rays, the scientists and technicians are uncovering previously illegible sections and letters of the scrolls, discoveries that could have significant scholarly impact.

The 2,000-year-old scrolls, found in the late 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem, contain the earliest known copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible (missing only the Book of Esther), as well as apocryphal texts and descriptions of rituals of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus. The texts, most of them on parchment but some on papyrus, date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D.

I’m stoked. We need more people doing this with old texts.

• New York Times
• OA News

After the RIAA killed Muxtape, Opentape has appeared.

Muxtape let its users upload as many as twelve MP3s to a user-assigned Muxtape subdomain (”username.muxtape.com”) that was publicly searchable and “tradable.” In hosting all the MP3s, Muxtape established itself as the responsible party if artists, labels, or the RIAA had complaints.

Opentape provides exactly the same through an open source program to let users create their Quasi-Muxtape that must be hosted on their own domains. This places copyright responsibility squarely on the user.The site says, “We believe there is no reason [mixtape sharing] has to end with the shutdown of a single site, so we’ve created a free tool to make this possible.” Indeed, the Tumblr-based Opentape site, the program’s UI, and song rearrange tool all appear to be direct clones of Muxtape’s.

The main question is, will users still be as eager to pick up the service now that the RIAA’s shadow could be cast directly upon them?

Cool beans yo.  (I say that a lot when I have nothing else to say, don’t I?)

• BetaNews
• Opentape
• Wired