If you need to check the Copyright status of an American book published 1923-1976 then you should use this resource
Category: Earliest posts
The Attorney General’s Dept has posted a discussion paper on the implementation of ‘fair use’ in Australia post DMCA/FTA.
Categories
Broadband Reality
Broadband uptake is still woeful.
From Whirlpool –
“OptusNet announced today that its subscriber base has passed the 350,000 mark after adding 63,000 subscribers in the last three months. Optus Consumer MD Allen Lew attributed the growth to the bundling of Optus landline, mobile and ADSL products. The company’s success “stems from the increasing strength of the company’s bundling strategy which now sees more than 95 per cent of OptusNet DSL customers taking up multiple Optus products,” Lew said. He also noted the importance of broadband in future strategic planning. “With the trend across our industry for consumer fixed line voice revenue … flat to declining, broadband revenue is key to the future of integrated telcos like Optus,” he said. Despite this recent growth, OptusNet remains just under half BigPond’s size. Six months ago BigPond claimed 533,000 broadband subscribers and OptusNet 250,000. BigPond’s latest available figures, confirmed today, claim 718,000 broadband subscribers. ”
Siva Viyahadyanathan wrote an excellent introductory book to US Copyright, the DMCA etc a few years back titled Copyrights & Copywrongs. Here he is again with an article on Open Source.
“Abstract: The Open Source model of peer production, sharing, revision, and peer review has distilled and labeled the most successful human creative habits into a techno- political movement. This distillation has had costs and benefits. It has been dif cult to court mainstream acceptance for such a tangle of seemingly technical ideas when its chief advocates have been hackers and academics. On the other hand, the brilliant success of overtly labeled Open Source experiments, coupled with the horror stories of attempts to protect the proprietary model of cultural production have served to popularize the ideas championed by the movement. In recent years, we have seen the Open Source model overtly mimicked within domains of culture quite distinct from computer software. Rather than being revolutionary, this movement is quite conservatively recapturing and revalorizing the basic human communicative and cultural processes that have generated many good things.”
from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=713044
This pdf reports on a pilot project and makes recommendations regarding the use of mobile phones, text messaging, etc in a learning program for disadvantaged youth. It includes numerous links to further research.
http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/projects/media/txt_me_recommendations.pdf
A little while back I was appalled whilst attending an Adobe product launch (for education priced premier elements and photoshop elements for schools) as the adobe education manager was going through the fabulous new features of pshop including the bundled image management system – photoalbum. The system has the feature to auto send images direct to mobile phones capable of receiving mms. The attitude of the presenter was that mobile phones were the scourge of the school yard and should be confiscated on sight.
Gara sent me this earlier in the week.
“From CNI – Project Briefing: Spring 2005 Task Force Meeting
Public Domain Art in an Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility
Kenneth Hamma
Executive Director, Digital Policy & Initiatives J. Paul Getty Trust
Instead of asserting intellectual property rights in images of public domain works as nearly every art museum does now, it is argued here that publicly and pro-actively placing these images in the public domain and clearly removing all questions about their availability for use and reuse would likely cause no harm to the financial position or trustworthy reputation of any collecting institution and would demonstrably contribute to the public good. As those images have become digital assets and as the preferred delivery venue has become increasingly an electronic network, the ante has been raised to do so. The manner in which this might be done may require consultation with legal counsel. The fact of doing it, however, is not a legal decision but a business decision that can be evaluated by non-profits in measuring success against the mission.”
Welcome to the first post of our new cross-departmental blog.
The purpose of this blog is to create a place where we can all centrally post articles and aggregate links, comments, discussions and other stuff.
The photo above was taken when Pete and I were in Berlin presenting at Transemdiale 2004. The location where we were drinking beer was an all-automated bar – no human staff. Beer vending machines which only took old Deutschmarks, a conveyor belt for empties, a series of audio servers generating music, and various spy cameras to toggle between.