joe, beta

This brief video is from E3 2010 and makes me cry tears of geek joy.

Real tears.

See a live stream of Microsoft's Xbox press event at 1:00 PM EST (10:00am PST). [Ars Technica]

Source: Ars Technica

TWC highlights the fact that it is not a party to this case," he wrote, "but it appears that TWC is utilizing that fact to garner public support for its position and possibly in an attempt to gain more subscribers who would value TWC's efforts to protect the privacy of demonstrated copyright infringers. To the extent TWC’s tactics are just that—letting the public know that TWC is a good ISP for copyright infringers because TWC will fight any subpoenas related to infringers’ activities—TWC exposes itself to a claim for contributory copyright infringement.

Okay, let's back it up a bit. US Copyright Group was born out of a law firm called Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver. They are in the business of suing alleged copyright infringers. By the thousands. Also, they like to get their way.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, and Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said in a joint statement that they would hold meetings in June to examine how the Communications Act meets the current needs of consumers, the telecommunications industry and the Federal Communications Commission.

Let me preface this by saying that I feel like I have a good basic grasp of the issues at play here, but I'm wide open to correction if I'm confused about something.

I posted in April about how the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the FCC in a case where the regulatory agency had sanctioned Comcast for throttling BitTorrent traffic.

Since then, there has been talk at the FCC of partially reclassifying broadband internet (PDF) to apply provisions of different sections of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Why the change? Well, among other things, it would grant the FCC the authority to impose, as Ars Technica puts it, "a stripped-down version of common carrier nondiscrimination rules" -- and would allow sanctions like the ones struck down by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to stand.

If the Congressional revisions to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 manage to move forward, those changes would, if passed, trump and likely circumscribe anything the FCC attempts to implement in the way of reclassification efforts. That, in my mind, seems to send a signal from the legislators to the FCC, suggesting that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski consider leaving this one to the legislature before investing too much time and energy in making regulatory changes that may be undercut by the revisions to the law.

Just as the 1996 revision updated the original 1934 telecommunications legislation to let telephone companies, over-the-air broadcasters, and cable companies all play in each others' sandboxes, any changes to the 1996 version would focus on the availability, administration, and pricing of high-speed broadband internet access relative to the regulatory framework already imposed on older technologies.

First, of course, they would have to add in the words "broadband" and "internet" -- which don't even appear in the act as it was passed in 1996. That means we're not looking at a timeline of weeks or even months, but maybe years.

But hey, you have to start somewhere, right?

Judge Kimba Wood has just granted summary judgment against LimeWire, agreeing with the labels that the peer-to-peer company was liable for inducing copyright infringement. Turns out that asking LimeWire downloaders to check a box marked "I will not use LimeWire for copyright infringement" before proceeding doesn't count as "meaningful efforts to mitigate infringement.

This isn't very surprising. LimeWire is one of those peer-to-peer clients from back in the day that came with baked-in media players. The intent was clear. And I have no authority to cite for this assertion, but I suspect they made a lot of money by bundling spyware with at least their earliest versions.

When an aggregator like Google News publishes newspaper headlines, is the company treading on thin ice? What about aggregators that publish headlines and a one-line excerpt? What about those that simply rewrite the facts contained in the story and publish a new account in their own words?

Let me preface this post by making it clear that I have no formal training in journalism, social media marketing (whatever that is), programming, publishing, or advertising. I have opinions, and am rarely burdened by blind adherence to the opinions of others.

Having said that...

This story from Ars hits pretty close to home, since my site is home to almost 100 posts tagged "Quote." I republish a lot of content from amazing sources--like Ars Technica--and do so intentionally, and proudly. I sift through everything i can find--215 RSS feeds (my area code, incidentally)--every day.

And the best of the best, I share on this site. I don't sell advertising and I don't take freebies. I link to the source very explicitly in both the post titles and the posts themselves. I like to think I'm doing a harmless, if miniscule, service to the content creators, by alerting my friends to their crazy-awesome stories.

The person mentioned in this Ars Technica article, the Associated Press' Laura Malone, explains why the content creators need the option of setting parameters that would control quotes and republishing by sites like my own.

And she is right.

But the problem is not that organizations like AP are wrong. Instead, the problem is that they are not taking the right steps to move forward ahead of the pack.

The wisdom seems to be that it is a good idea to restrict quotes and republishing as much as possible, in order to salvage the value of your hard reporting and editorial work.

This misses the 21st-century point.

If old media want to succeed in the digital present--and it is not the future, because it is here and now and has been for quite some time--they need to stop wasting resources trying to restrict reproduction and start expending energy promoting reproduction with appropriate attribution.

The digital news business' currency is not uniqueness or depth, difficulty of reporting or publishing, as it was in the past, but the number of eyeballs (presumably divided by two) that scrape across the words your employees have hammered out on any given day.

After all, this is the age of anything, anytime, everywhere.

You don't really need to be the only one publishing your content.

You just need to be the only one to whom that content is being attributed by the third party sources (like yours truly) that are helping you (free of charge and en masse) disseminate that content.

Given a choice between reading three sentences of an Ars Technica story on a site like joebeta.com and clicking through the citation link to read the full story on the Ars site, I invariably go for the latter. All reasonable persons will do that, choosing the source rather than the curator.

And those users are the same ones you want to present advertisements to, because they are at your site of their own volition, having determined that the primary source is profoundly more reliable and exhaustive than the secondary.

But what do I know?

Note: This is my first post since adding many more services to my Posterous auto-post syndication. I'm thinking of it as a test, and hoping for as little redundancy across social networks as possible. But I'm letting it post to all the accounts I have linked to Posterous, so it probably won't be 100% smooth. Be patient and I promise to keep interesting content coming. -- Ed. note

Most students use Wikipedia at some point during their research on a paper or project, and they usually do so early on in the process. Online peer-reviewed journal First Monday recently published the findings of its research on student Wikipedia use and said that the service often serves as a starting point for the students who use it

The research is interesting. The Ars Technica story reflects what I have heard from several professors over the years: Wikipedia is fine for a start, but don't use any information you can't find in and cite from a more authoritative source.

Recently, professors have been vocal about their knowledge of Wikipedia's popularity at all levels of education. I can tell you from experience that their legal portal is particularly robust.

But I would never pull something out of Wikipedia and put it in a paper. Even if I avoided plagiarism, I'd be citing crowd-sourced information that, while much of it is validated, isn't guaranteed by anyone as accurate.

I use it myself as a super-dictionary, a way to look up a legal word or concept and get more than the standard 20-word definition, which often contains more words I don't know yet.

What about you? Do you use Wikipedia in school? I'd love to hear from those of you with whom I share classes this semester. (<--- Pretends his classmates read his blog.)

On the surface, it may look like this patent covers techniques for censoring politically sensitive content in specific countries—a practice that Google has recently spoken out against in its ongoing feud with China. A closer look at the patent's claims, however, shows that it has little to do with censorship and may actually relate to the company's controversial book scanning initiative.

An interesting article on how Google may use a newly-awarded patent to control which regions of the world can view certain documents, similar to how movie studios release films in different DVD regions, so, for example, movies intended for US audiences do not play on DVD players manufactured for sale in Japan.