A little over exactly a year after starting Free Culture News, we slowly lost steam and let this blog suffer.  While we originally saw it as a burdenless way of keeping track of the news, it has become clear that it still takes a reasonable amount of effort to keep this alive.  From our mission statement:

Keeping our posts minimal and frequent, and pointing to other sources, we try to bring the news as efficiently as possible.

While our posts were fairly minimal, they were not minimal enough.  Adding images made them even less minimal, and navigating around wordpress, putting up a single post, took as long as 20 minutes, which was not the kind of efficiency we were looking for with this project.  We still want to continue this, but we need a new medium to let that happen.  We’ve decided to bring you the news via a microblog.  Posting news has changed from taking 20 minutes to taking 20 seconds.  So, please check it out.

• http://identi.ca/fcnews
• http://twitter.com/freeculturenews

Also, you should go to Free Culture X in DC because all the cool people are (and me as well).

Free Culture X, a conference of Students for Free Culture, will be held February 13th at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Keynote addresses will be given by Harvard Berkman Center co-founder Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of the public interest group Public Knowledge, Gigi Sohn, and the director of American University’s Center for Social Media, Pat Aufderheide.

The conference is focused on developing greater openness among institutions of higher education by specifically investigating:

• The politics of open networks,
• Global access to knowledge, and
• Open education.

Attendees have the option to pay-what-you-want with prizes (such as signed copies of books by Lawrence Lessig and Henry Jenkins or custom voicemail recordings by Jonathan Zittrain) awarded for sizable donations. With only a few weeks left, register today! http://conference.freeculture.org/register/

Red Fox - Credit: mikebaird on Flickr (CC BY)

Firefox 3.5 has been released.  Of much importance to free culture, it supports the HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags.

Originally envisioned as a quick follow-up to 2008’s release of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla ended up packing in quite a few extra features into its flagship browser and spent months making sure that Firefox 3.5 was the fastest, most powerful Firefox yet.

Firefox 3.5 brings with it entirely new and much faster rendering engines for both static web pages and the JavaScript code that powers today’s complex web-based applications. There are new privacy features, new capabilities for playing video and audio files and improved search tools. There are also a handful of other new features that should prove useful for both Firefox devotees and newcomers alike.

Yay FF.

• Web Monkey

Blu-Ray Player

Epix, launched by major motion picture companies MGM, Lionsgate Films, and Paramount, is a free streaming service. The website allows users to stream pay-per-view and 720p-encoded (blu-ray quality) films gratis. The innovative new business model will not charge users a cent. This will allow users to replace their DRM-encumbered blu-ray players with a free web browser.

Three major movie studios are about to try an interesting experiment. They are launching a new TV network called Epix that will show their own recent films in HD, but they’re going a step beyond by bundling it with an online, on-demand service that offers HD streaming of the same films over the Internet. Think of it like Hulu for movies that aren’t yet out on DVD. Oh—and did we mention that the service will have no advertising and won’t appear on your cable bill?

A new business model

The music industry was never much good at being a digital retailer—anyone remember MusicNet and Pressplay?—but TV networks and movie studios now seem to think they have learned the lessons of the past.

Like Hulu, the Epix movie service is a joint venture formed by the content owners; in this case, the service is powered by the movie studios Lionsgate, Paramount, and MGM. The Epix TV network will air movies that are in the “pay-TV” window, those weeks before a film appears on DVD in which it is available on pay-per-view or HBO, among others.

That doesn’t sound so new, but Epix will be bundled directly into cable packages; under the current business model, it will never appear as a separate charge on the bill and will never have to be added to a package. If Epix can convince enough cable operators to sign on (it isn’t yet announcing partners), the service will have an immediate competitive advantage over pay-TV channels with an additional monthly fee.

Source: Ars Technica

Cory Doctorow recently appeared before book publishers at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference to explain to leaders of the publishing industry why DRM on digital books is bad for customers, bad for authors, and bad for business.

… Customers especially don’t like it when they wake up one day and find that their legally purchased products will no longer read — as Fictionwise customers discovered when DRM provider Overdrive ended its licensing deal with Fictionwise…

But the message the publishers really needed to hear was one Cory delivered loud and clear: DRM is not about stopping piracy, it’s about locking customers and businesses into a proprietary platform.

The music industry has already gone down this (walled) garden path, and discovered too late that DRM did nothing to stop or even slow piracy — but it did manage to alienate customers and give Apple an enormous amount of leverage over their businesses. It’s not too late for the publishing industry to avoid this deadly mistake….

Source: EFF

Over the past several years, the French Gendarmerie has been gradually testing out and switching over to Free Software. At first switching over to OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird and now letting go of Windows licensing costs in favor of Ubuntu, the police force has found Free Software to better fit with their IT policy of open standards. Vista was the biggest reason to switch over, but in hindsight, they have found that updating anti-virus software and other administration that used to take a year of travelling around through their colonies can now be done in two weeks with standard remote administration capabilities that GNU/Linux offer.

Guimard says the Gendarmerie since 2002 found out that open source applications usually are better at handling open standards than proprietary software. Moving to centralised Imap servers for email, lead the organisation to deploy Mozilla Thunderbird on the desktops. Making all the web applications work equally well,resulted in the roll-out of Firefox across the organisation. “Users need no training to use a web browser.”

In 2007 the Gendarmerie decided to replace even the desktop operating system. Guimard: “Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users. Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”

Story picked up from coverage on Ars, original article from the EU Open Source Observatory and Repository.

Why Copyright - Credit: michaelgeist.ca (CC BY-SA)

A short documentary, “Why Copyright”, has been released about Bill C-61, the bill that is often called the “Canadian DMCA”. It’s licensed under CC BY-SA.

In June 2008, the Canadian government introduced Bill C-61, new copyright legislation that closely followed the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The public response to the bill was both immediate and angry – tens of thousands of Canadians wrote to the Minister and their local Members of Parliament, leading to town hall meetings, negative press coverage, and the growing realization that copyright was fast becoming a mainstream political and policy issue. This film, produced by Michael Geist and Daniel Albahary, asks Canadians from across the country and from a wide range of sectors the question – “why copyright?”

It’s pretty informative, but it’s a little dry.

• Michael Geist
• Ars Technica

Cablevision files amicus brief

Networked DVR maker Cablevision files an amicus curae in a case that may redefine cable television licensing.

The Copyright Alliance worries that this summer’s appeals court ruling, which legitimized the product, “validates a well-worn stratagem for evading responsibility and undermining licensing.”

The dispute centers on Cablevision’s RS-DVR, which locates all the necessary DVR equipment in the company’s central office, not in the customer’s living room. Cablevision pays a license fee to broadcasters in order to stream their content directly to users, but it does not pay anything extra for its new system, which creates a 1.2-second content buffer of all outgoing content to make recording possible the moment the customer presses the button. In essence, the entire cable network becomes a long-distance remote control device that is operated by the customer sitting comfortably on a couch, telling the system he or she wants to record some new episode of Lost.

Source: Ars Technica

TextBook Torrents

TextBook Torrents has closed for good in response to legal threats.

Now, just 2 months later, visitors to the TextBook Torrents site this week were faced with the grim reality that the site has gone. “TextBook Torrents won’t be coming back,” Geekman told TorrentFreak. “I’ve been at it for two years and it has been an awesome two years, but i’m ready to step back and hopefully allow somebody else to rise up in our place.”

Geekman told us that he felt that when it became clear to the copyright owners that simple threats to the site and its host wouldn’t be sufficient to close down the tracker, he himself became the next logical target: “We got word from several credible sources that there was a lawsuit in the works against myself personally,” he explained.

Buying textbooks is lame.  People should do what I do and just not buy them (or torrent them either).  Although, I did actually buy my combinatorics book this year.  That puts me at about $90 I’ve spent on information this year.  I’m going to try to keep it under $100.

• TorrentFreak

Jammie Thomas and Lawyer - Credit: mightyomedia on Flickr

U.S. District Judge Michael Davis of Duluth, Minnesota, has declared a mistrial in the case of Jammie Thomas. This (at least temporarily) gets rid of the $222,000 penalty 24 tracks she made publicly available on Kazaa.

“Jury Instruction No. 15 was erroneous, and that error substantially prejudiced Thomas’ rights. Based on the court’s error in instructing the jury, it grants Thomas a new trial,” the judge ruled (.pdf).

Still, Judge Davis’ decision does not derail the RIAA’s case against Thomas on retrial or any other pending or future case. Davis ruled that the downloads from Thomas’ open share folder that RIAA investigators made, 24 in all, “can form the basis of an infringement claim.” The RIAA’s investigators make downloads in every case.

This is a pretty big deal. I’m not getting too optimistic yet though.

• Wired
• EFF
• Recording Industy vs. The People

Introducing:

The CK-12 Foundation’s solution to the age-old problem of uneven shoulders. The Flexbook is a free and open source textbook platform where one can build and edit collaborative textbooks. This is the textbook of the next generation:

CK-12 allows one to customize and produce content by re-purposing to suit what needs to be taught, using different modules that may suit a learner’s learning style, region, language, or level of skill, while adhering to the local education standards. Flexibility + Textbook = Flexbook.

All CK-12 content will be licensed CC BY-SA!

Key Benefits:

• Access to free textbooks
• High quality educational content created by educators
• Content customized to reflect “today” and the different needs of students
• Quality ensured by CK-12’s Community of Educational Practitioners
• Increased pedagogic choice for all teachers, aligned to state standards as well as developmentally correct content
• Supported by publishing tools that facilitate quick and easy content creation and distribution
• Collaborative learning via a community where authors, teachers, and students create, access, share, rate, recommend, and publish

In related news:

Commonwealth of Virginia announced their partnership with the foundation to build an open physics flexbook for all of Virginia.

This post was remixed from CC’s post on Flexbook by Jane Park