Posted on Sunday, 20 June, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
HIstorian rock star Howard Zinn
People’s historian Howard Zinn has given permission to the folks at History Is A Weapon to put his classic A People’s History Of The United States, online, but that hasn’t stopped HarperCollins from chasing after the website’s developers with threats of a lawsuit for doing so. Last month HIAW published its response to the publishing giant.
While HarperCollins claims both they and the author have not given permission, but the person writing the Cease & Desist order didn’t seem to check her or his facts with Zinn, who had met the HIAW crew in advance and and also gave positive feedback after seeing it online. Download your archived copy here (while supplies last).
The online copy is far from an identical experience to the dead trees version . The site creators scanned the book’s some 650 pages and coded it via hand to correct scanning mistakes, missing some here and there. A lawsuit seems a little ridiculous. The site developers have said they’ll take it offline if and when they ever are asked to do so by Zinn or his family, so HarperCollins could quickly ascertain whether permission was given.
Posted on Friday, 19 February, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
Some pissed off DVD watcher really wanted to just get to his Matrix, I guess. Can’t give an attribution here, because I don’t know who did it, but this thing has been floating around the webosphere all day it seems, and I love a good graphical display of an issue. Marketing bloat is to DVDs what software bloat is to Windows.
Posted on Wednesday, 2 December, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
Lily Allen used to pretend to be an independent pop star, made a bunch of cash and is now working with Peter Mandelson to stop others from pulling themselves up by their bootstraps by siding with stronger controls to limit what artists can do with their content and how you can use it.
Posted on Thursday, 22 October, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
Possibly the best definition of so-called digital ‘piracy’ was recently provided by Channel 4 Television’s Commissioning Editor for Education, Alice Taylor at Creative Scotland Perspectives.
Alice is also a founding member of the Open Rights Group. While it would be interesting to hear what Channel 4 executives thought about all this, it’s at least good to see it has staff that are up on the use of content in a way that one would hope the BBC would be.
Good snips:
““Piracy” – as done by teenagers, all my friends, pretty much everyone I know, is simply demand where appropriate supply does not exist. Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies – in other words, anti-copying, anti-fair use – are also anti-accessibility. They attempt to block and restrict, and they fail every time. Every single time. To be accessible, work needs to be available, always and to everyone. No delineations, no restrictions: it’s too messy. Too expensive. Too dull.”
And…
“Attention is our scarcest resource. Time ticks on, but there are still and will forever be 24 hours in a day. Attention is everything. We pick out signals from the noise by listening to trusted sources: friends, and favourite authors, bloggers, tweeters, journalists, broadcasters, remixers. Curators, all of them. They spread the word, we investigate, to revel in the shared experience.”
Posted on Tuesday, 25 August, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
Posted by Jim Killock at the Open Rights Group:
According to the Guardian and reports this morning, Government officials today have announced that they intend to put in place a strong clamp down on illicit file sharing to ‘support’ record and film industries they wrongly believe are threatened.
This is the wrong moment to go in this direction. Online music revenues are going up, illicit filesharing is going down.
Instead of letting the market solve the problems, the government seems intent on heavy-handed intervention, that could include disconnection and other account restrictions. This would be in direct contravention of their own goal of universal broadband access, as well as a curtailment of people’s freedom of expression.
Yet again, we see knee-jerk reactions and policy swerves, this time in direct contravention of the government’s own consultation guidelines. Those guidelines are there for a reason: to make sure government policy is balanced and considered. We will be making a formal complaint.
The result of these proposals is likely to be protest, challenges and public arguments in the run-up to the General election. Popular movements in France, Sweden and elsewhere have kick-started over similar measures.
That will do nobody any good, neither politicians nor rights-holding industries, as copyright’s reputation suffers further damage.
Copyright is under threat: from heavy handed business lobbying and simplistic enforcement proposals.
BoingBoing: Glyn sez, “People accused of breaking copyright over the internet will have their internet connections cut off under tough new laws to be proposed by the UK government today. The decision is noteworthy since it was ruled out by the government’s own Digital Britain report in June as going too far. The Open Rights Group believes the government is breaking its own consultation guidelines by bring in the proposals in the way they have and asks people to write to their MPs.”
Posted on Wednesday, 24 June, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
I recently contacted the administrators of parliamentlive.tv to see about getting access to about five minutes of footage from a House of Commons session I wanted to include in a video project.
Being that this was a public proceeding, lacking any sort of national security concerns and having to do with the common good, I thought this should be a fairly simple process. After all, the footage is openly available on a government website. It’s already been filmed, edited and posted. Getting the raw file should be no big deal. As it turns out, however, UK Parliament keeps about as tight a control on its content as the BBC does an episode of Doctor Who.
The response I got back cautioned me that “The situation relating to the use of Proceedings of Parliament on website is very complex.” And while I could freely link to any recording on the Parliament website I wanted to, should I actually choose to host and play a clip anywhere else or combine it with a video project, “this would be possible subject to a number of conditions.”
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
