Electronic Waste (Credit : takomabibelot on Flickr CC-BY)

Top mobile telephone suppliers have agreed to back an EU-wide harmonization of phone chargers, the European Commission said on Monday, hailing the pact as good news for consumers and the environment.

“People will not have to throw away their charger whenever they buy a new phone,” said EU Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen, estimating that unwanted phone accessories accounted for thousands of tons of waste in Europe each year.

What about the data transfer and headphone? Doesn’t every second mobile buyer buys/gets a headphone?

• Reuter
• Slashdot

Freedom of Speech (CC-BY Credit : danstrange on flickr)

In a dangerous judgment for British bloggers and whistleblowers, a British court has ruled (absurdly) that because blogging itself is a public activity, bloggers have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their identities, and newspapers are allowed to publish their identities if they can find them by fair or foul means

Something similar happened in India few months back. The question remains should internet really be anonymous?

• Slashdot
• Times Online

Olympics (Credit : cmaccubbin@flickr, CC-BY)

“My primary driver here is to deliver the Olympics and that means using proven applications software and by and large that application software does not run on open standards – there are some exceptions to that we are running a little bit of Linux but by and large it is Windows orientated,” he said.

Pennell added that although he had no plans to use significant amounts of open source software, he didn’t believe that servers running Linux would be more efficient than proprietary platforms. “I doubt it drives any huge difference in terms of the number of servers involved,” he said.

Ouch!! Someone needs to have a proper IT team.

• eweekeurope
• opendotdotdot

Creative Commons NonCommercial Icon. Source: Creative Commons and Wikimedia Commons. License: CC-BY 3.0

Creative Commons is starting up a second survey on the NonCommercial provision of their licenses, this one aiming at non-authors.

During the first phase of the study, which took place last fall, we focused on talking with and surveying creators, using a questionnaire that was fielded to a sample of US-based content creators, and also made available (in an expanded version) to anyone interested. See 1, 2, 3.

Now we want to hear about noncommercial use from the user’s perspective — recognizing of course that the creator/user distinction is itself worthy of study! Whether you consider yourself a member of the Creative Commons community, or are interested more generally in copyright, we hope you will respond. While answering all the questions can take a while, particularly if you have a lot to say, many people who participated last time found it an interesting and useful experience.

Even though the provision is still not a free one, I hope this will clarify a few things about it. Note that the survey takes a while to complete, so set aside some time before starting.

• Creative Commons
• NonCommercial Survey

Licensing Sanity - Credit: Brianna Laugher (CC BY)

Wikipedia is voting to switch to CC BY-SA from the GFDL.

To qualify to vote, one must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15. Make sure you’re logged in to the project on which you qualify, and you should see a site notice at the top of each page that looks like the image below (red outline added around notice).

…

Click on “vote now” and you’ll be taken to the voting site.

For background on the migration process, see Wikimedia’s licensing update article and the following series of posts on the Creative Commons blog:

• On being a creative commoner
• Wikipedia and attribution
• Wikipedia licensing Q&A posted
• Wikipedia/CC news: FSF releases FDL 1.3
• Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses released
• DRAFT Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses
• Approved for Free Cultural Works
• Wikipedia and Creative Commons next steps
• Progress on license interoperability with Wikipedia

Do it.  CC BY-SA FTW.

• Creative Commons

Creative Commons - Credit: creativecommons.org

CC has published a questionare on what “NonCommercial” means.  This has been the subject of much debate.

As previously announced, we’re running a questionnaire on understanding “NonCommercial” use. The questionnaire runs through December 7. It takes 15-25 minutes to complete.

Click here to start the questionnaire.

Check out why non-commercial may not be the best idea and fill out the survey.

• Creative Commons

The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Act of 2008, which recently went through the Senate Judiciary comittee may be fast-tracked soon.

Now, the bill’s backers are pushing to have it pass the Senate as early as today via a streamlined procedure, without the full Senate voting on the measure. Tell members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that you don’t want your tax dollars spent on DOJ’s civil enforcement of copyright, and to put a hold on the bill.

Go to the Public Knowledge link to fill out a form that will make a fax for you.  Do it!

• Public Knowledge
• EFF