Free - Credit: alicepopkorn on Flickr (CC BY)

January 1st was Public Domain Day.  Many works from authors who have died a long time ago have just entered the public domain.

Australian politician (and sheep breeder) James Guthrie (“A world history of sheep and wool”)
American film composer Edward H. Plumb (“Bambi” and many other Disney films)
American hymnist George Bennard (“The Old Rugged Cross”)
British painter and illustrator Lucy Kemp-Welch (the original edition of “Black Beauty”)
American screenwriter Jack Henley (“Bonzo Goes to College”)
American writer J. P. McEvoy (“Dixie Dugan”)
American author Betty MacDonald (“Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle”)
British poet Robert Service (“The Cremation of Sam McGee”, etc.)
English poet Alfred Noyes (“The Highwayman”)
English music scholar Percy Scholes (“The Oxford Companion to Music”)
American artist and author Marjorie Flack (“The Story About Ping”)
American writer Johnston McCulley (creator of “Zorro”)
British aircraft manufacturer Alliott Verdon Roe (as in Avro, as in the Arrow)
Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milanković (early proponent of ice ages)
British author and translator Lionel Giles (translator of the most widely-published English edition of Sun-Tzu’s “Art of War”)
Romanian-British rabbi and scholar Shulem Moshkovitz (the Shotzer Rebbe)
American financial analyst John Moody (of Wall Street fame)

…

Danish bacteriologist Hans Christian Gram (of Gram staining fame)
British-Canadian author, conservationist, and literary fraud Archie Belaney (Grey Owl)
Latvian-born ethnologist and musicologist Abraham Zevi Idelsohn (to whom the lyrics to “Hava Nagila” are attributed)
American cartoonist E. C. Segar (creator of “Popeye”)
American illustrator Johnny Gruelle (creator of “Raggedy Ann”)
American lawyer Clarence Darrow (of “Scopes Monkey Trial” fame)
American songwriter James Thornton (“When You Were Sweet Sixteen”, written in 1898)
Japanese martial artist Kano Jigoro (founder of judo)
American industrialist Harvey Samuel Firestone (of tire fame)

Sorry that this is late and that there has been no activity lately.  Remember, all the posters here are currently students, so when break rolls around, a lot of us lose touch with our computers.

• publicdomain

Rockhopper Penguin - Credit: suneko on Flickr (CC BY)

The Linux Foundation has announced an “I’m Linux” video contest.  Contestants will submit their best parodies of the Mac/PC commercials, including Linux, and the winner will receive a free trip to Japan.

If you’ve been alive and aware of mass media over the last twelve months, you’ve probably seen television commercials from Apple and Microsoft touting their operating system. From Apple’s ubiquitous “I’m a Mac” to Jerry Seinfeld to Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” retort, operating system commercials have been flooding the airways. Except one OS has been notably absent – Linux.

While the Linux Foundation would love to spend millions promoting Linux on TV, it’s simply not our style (or in our budget). Even more importantly, Linux isn’t a top-down, commercially controlled operating system. It’s a grassroots product of mass collaboration. That’s why we’re sponsoring a community contest to create a Linux video that showcases just what Linux means to those who use it, and hopefully inspires many to try it.

Sadly, PCs and Macs are hardware, while Linux is software.  In fact, Linux isn’t even an OS, it’s a kernel.  I would like to see a commercial hit TV.  The world would be a better place if every Joe Shmoe had at least heard the term Linux (or GNU/Linux).

• Linux Foundation
• Slashdot
• Gizmodo

Beware of the Gavel - Credit: brymo on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

Ray Beckerman of Recording Industry vs. The People, with the help of other contributors, has done some research and found that the RIAA’s press release in the Wall Street Journal was not entirely truthful.  The article said that the lawsuits had ended a while ago, while Ray claims that they continued all the way up to last week.

According to a report on Wired.com, the RIAA spokesman claims that the RIAA has not filed any new lawsuits “for months”; according to the Wall Street Journal report the RIAA stopped filing mass lawsuits “early this fall”; and the Associated Press was apparently told that the RIAA had stopped bringing new lawsuits in August.

Being very familiar with the RIAA’s penchant for “misspeaking”, even when under oath, I investigated the matter a bit, and learned that a large number of suits have been brought by the RIAA quite recently, one as recently as this Monday.

I knew that there was something suspicious about that article.

• Recording Industry vs. The People
• Slashdot

Kota Kinabalu - Credit: angela7 on Flickr (CC BY)

In Malaysia, it is estimated that the number of companies opting for Linux-based solutions will ­experience about a 15% ­compounded average growth rate between now and 2012, said Daniel Ng, director of marketing for Red Hat Asia Pacific.
“Even now, there is a total of 936 implementations of open-source solutions in Malaysian Government agencies,” he said in a press briefing in Kuala Lumpur recently. Government support

In a country where pirated software is still rampant, buying a copy of an open source distribution like Fedora Core (4CDs) could cost more than the average commercial OS that comes on 1CD! Pressure is being added to protect intellectual property and reduce piracy, which all seem to point in the direction of a boon to the FOSS world in Malaysia as more companies take it up on the desktop.

In developing countries, piracy is very common. And piracy is well supported (ignored) by these big (closed-source) giants, because forcing IP laws will mean that people will think of cheaper substitutes. And hence comes Open Source.

• Tech Central
• Truth Happens
• Red Hat

Border - Credit: tobin on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

The Paris ACTA meeting has concluded, and Ars is reporting that the biggest news is that the treaty will most likely be delayed until March.

The big news was that future negotiations will include a March 2009 meeting in Morocco (one of the participating countries); barring some sort of bureaucratic miracle, we’ll have at least four months before the treaty could be ready.

In the meantime, new President Obama will have appointed a new US Trade Representative, the official who oversees the US side of the ACTA negotiations. This could affect the process, obviously, though Obama’s initial choice of LA Congressman Xavier Becerra (who has since declined the offer) suggests that Obama isn’t opposed to someone backing the interests of the movie and music industries. The two groups have real and important concerns about piracy and counterfeiting, but they have also pushed hard to stuff everything from ISP filtering to graduated response rules into ACTA.

I’m sorry, but I’m not really counting on Obamarama to make this all better.  I hope that is the case though.

• Ars Technica

Music - Credit: shankarmenon on Flickr (CC BY)

The Wall Street Journal reports that the RIAA has announced that it will no longer be using lawsuits in its attempts to end infringment on the Internet. It will instead request that ISPs implement a “three-strikes” policy with regard to those that they catch.

The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003. Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.

Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider’s customers making music available online for others to take.

Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

So what happens if the RIAA accuses the wrong person? Will the ISP still punish him or her, or will it actually try and see if the accusations are true before proceeding? At least with the lawsuits you could, in theory, defend yourself. Given how quickly ISPs comply with DMCA takedown requests, I can’t see them sifting through logs to see if infringement actually occurred when it would be much easier to just assume that it did and penalize the subscriber regardless.

• The Wall Street Journal [Print Version] (JavaScript required for print version)
  
• Slashdot

Hasbro, which owns the North American rights to the word game, sued Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, brothers from Calcutta, India, this summer. The brothers developed the unauthorized version, called Scrabulous, after they couldn’t find an online version they liked.

The court documents did not specify a reason for the withdrawal of the case.

RJ Softwares, the Agarwalla brothers’ company, said in a statement that it has agreed not to use the term “Scrabulous” and has made changes to different versions of the game it created after the lawsuit was filed.

The article points out that Mattel, which holds the rights for Scrabble outside of North America, has not dropped its lawsuit.

• The New York Times [Print Version] (cookies required)
• Slashdot

Fulton Street Dock, Manhattan skyline, Manhattan. Source: http://flickr.com/photos/nypl/. Public Domain.

The New York Public Library has uploaded images to Flickr Commons, a project to share pubic photos from cultural institutions.

We are delighted to be the latest institution to join in this endeavor, with an initial contribution of 1,300 images culled from various areas of our diverse photographic collections.

We think of this as a sort of appetizer course, a sampler of collections accessible in greater breadth and depth on the NYPL Digital Gallery, and on-site in our network of libraries. Lush images of modern dance pioneers; haunting early cyanotypes of algae (the first photographic works to be produced by a woman); majestic geographical surveys taken along the Union Pacific Railroad, iconic Depression-era images taken under the Farm Security Administration’s famed photography program; Berenice Abbott’s epic documentation of 1930s New York for the Federal Art Project; stunning 19th century vistas of the Egypt and Syria; scenes and portraits of Ellis Island Immigrants, the Statue of Liberty under construction… These and more are now available to view, tag and discuss in the Flickr Commons, and are offered as an invitation to explore further on our own site or in our actual libraries. After this initial road test, we expect to post many more images into the Commons pool.

The NYPL asserts that the images are in the public domain.

• The New York Public Library
• Boing Boing

After a UK government-led commission said that the current 50-year term for musical copyrights was fine, and the government last year publicly agreed that there was no need to extend the term, culture minister Andy Burnham yesterday made the logical follow-up announcement that yes, the government would now push for a 20-year extension on copyright. Turns out, it’s the moral thing to do.

Actually, by framing the issue as a “moral case,” Burnham gets to sidestep the entire issue of logic. Critics have already begun to charge that he is ignoring actual evidence and the well-regarded conclusions of the Gowers Report, not to mention previous government policy. But when the issue becomes a moral one and the livelihood of aging performers is at stake, it’s suddenly easier to avoid cost/benefit analysis. Doing the right thing isn’t always logical or economical.

Apparently nobody told them that copyright is about incentives and not morality.

• Ars Technica
• Slashdot

DRM. Source: http://flickr.com/photos/71715246@N00/ License: CC-BY 2.0

Engadget HD reports that new Blu-Ray discs from 20th Century Fox have updated the BD+ DRM scheme.

The latest BD+ application has already successfully locked down 16 new Fox releases (not all in the US) and according to a SlySoft developer, it’ll probably be February before the latest version is defeated. Of course by then Fox will probably have a new version and it will all just start over again. Really sheds some light on why SlySoft’s new subscription model was a necessity.

Sooner or later either the movie studios or the DRM hackers will not be able to go on anymore. With AACS it was the movie studios. Not sure who it’s going to be with BD+.

• Engadget HD