Hi. I'm Joe. I like law, tech, and stuff for geeks. I'm an Associate Editor at Phillyist and a contributor to Geekadelphia. I judge people loudly in public but other than that I'm a nice guy.
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Yup, sure does look a lot like a Palm Pre.
BlackBerry 6 also got announced. Read the full Engadget post for some more deets on the Torch.
Source: Engadget
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I mentioned earlier today that updated rules from the Library of Congress mean it's okay to jailbreak phones, use brief clips from movies in your own mashups, and drag your unlocked phone to any carrier you want.
Engadget Managing Editor and recovering patent attorney Nilay Patel offers some great insight on the opinion (a PDF of which is included in this post), from the Fifth Circuit. The decision limits the restrictive power of digital rights management (DRM) constructs aimed at preventing unauthorized copying of copyrighted works, but it doesn't invalidate them.While on the one hand, as my headline suggests, the restriction is narrower following the ruling, Patel's analysis focuses on reminding everyone of a very important distinction, and the whole post is worth a read, for background facts and more of Patel's cogent reading of the opinion. His main point, as I read it, is that yes, people in Fifth Circuit jurisdictions (Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) could theoretically rip a movie clip from a DVD for use in their own video mashup (something also okay under the aforementioned Library of Congress rule change) BUT:it's still very much illegal to strip copy protection DRM off a video in order to transfer it to a portable media player, for example, since you're making an unauthorized copy. It's a subtle, but extremely important distinction.
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Source: Engadget
Video: Wall Street Journal
Previously: "Thoughts on Flash" by Steve Jobs
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Engadget reported tonight that Boxee's much-anticipated Box isn't showing up until the month in which many Americans give thanks for their legally indemnified raping and pillaging of Native Americans.
The leading gadget site (and a personal favorite of mine) inferred that the recent release of Adobe's Flash 10.1 may be behind the push-back, saying that Boxee relies heavily on it for the Box's functionality.That's something I admittedly hadn't read about before, and it's kind of scary. After all, the HTML5 hubub is ever-accelerating and one has to wonder how long-term obedience to the Flash gods can make any sense.Hopefully, though, Boxee will be able to deliver firmware updates with the same ease as their more experienced home-theater hardware/software counterparts like Microsoft and Sony, and move with the punches in the event that Flash kicks the bucket sooner than we think.Source: Engadget - Boxee Box delayed until November TweetComments [0]
The FCC's plan to rework how it regulates the internet just got a lot more solid today, as the agency officially announced its "third way" approach to classifying broadband services and opened it up for public comment. We've broken the entire thing down for you -- we're not kidding when we say this will affect how the internet works for all of us in the future, so grab a snack and head past the break for the whole story.
More good stuff from Nilay Patel at Engadget:
http://www.engadget.com/editor/nilay-patel
Follow him on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/reckless
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There’s a crucial difference between “open” and “free” here. Although H.264 is an open standard, in that it was developed by a consortium of companies and anyone can make and sell an encoder or decoder, it’s not free — you’ve got to pay for a royalty fee to use it, and the rates are set by the MPEG-LA, which collects payments and distributes them to its members.
Engadget's Nilay Patel offers a great breakdown of the patent issues surrounding changes in web video delivery.
