Archives de l’auteur : Seek

On the multiple uses of a subponea

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Once upon a time, there was a Really Bad Attitude mailing list. It was supposed to be a private place to say bad things without consequences. Thanks to MS Lawyers, it is no more (don’t worry, the subponea game works both ways).

In hindsight, complying with the company’s Document Retention Policy (which at Netscape was basically, « shred anything within 90 days unless you can’t get your job done without it ») might have been a good idea. But in any event, I sure am glad that I keep my work mail and personal mail in separate folders. I’m going to increase that separation soon, and keep them on separate machines entirely. And I encourage you to do the same.

Amen. I really should do the same.

The problem is that I love to have a digital memory. Contrary to human memory, I find it actually takes more effort not to keep a trace of something I did on a computer. Double edged sword apparently.

[via Fizzz]

This copyright class is brought to you by the RIAA

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Should you pirate music? Of course not. But what is piracy? It’s a term with a very strong and broad meaning that can apply to crimes in the high seas or to anyone with a mini-disc recorder at a rock show.

To help you untangle that complicated, delicate, subtle and beautiful area of copyright law, there is Music United « music united for strong internet copyrights ». I especially recommend their legal section. Blunt and categoric. Read and have a good scare.

Brought to you by AEC One Stop Group, Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies, Association for Independent Music, American Federation of Musicians, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, Christian Music Trade Association, Church Music Publishers Association, Country Music Association, Gospel Music Association, Hip Hop Summit Action Network, Jazz Alliance International, Music Managers Forum-USA, National Association of Recording Merchandisers, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, National Music Publishers’ Association, Nashville Songwriters Association International, Recording Industry Association of America, Recording Industries Music Performance Trust Funds, SESAC, SoundExchange, Tennessee Songwriters Association International, The Songwriters Guild of America

Jon Johansen acquitted

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The Norvegian episode of the great DeCSS witch hunt ended, for now, on an acquital on all counts. Of course, everyone already kowns.

I hope this is sound law (considering I know nothing about Norwegian law and the state of implementation of the European DMCA there) and I wonder what repercussions this will have. After all, this was not a particularly good test case: there was no smoking gun, stacks of pirated DVDs or other pirate paraphenalia on evidence. Just a coder who wanted to read DVDs without using an licensed decoder.

This said, I can’t help but wonder if the deflation of the dotcom bubble had the effect of cooling off the heads of the judiciary in those related matters.

Now that the hype is somewhat less blinding, that the image of any tech endeavor as a speeding unstoppable express freight train in front of which everything must yield is gone for good, maybe well see more sensible decisions.

[via everyone and their pet shrimp]

NetNewsWire Pro public beta

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This 1.0b1 release of NetNewsWire pro includes a weblog editor, notepad, Find command, AppleScript support, and more. [Ranchero]

Mhh, nice new weblog editor function. I think Kung-Log still has the edge for the feature set and the flexibility (categories, allow comments option, custom HTML tags), but having a Weblog editor that’s aware of my RSS feeds is a nice concept, just like Radio does I think.
Now maybe a Applescript to call Kung-Log from NNW would do the job just as well. Most important though: it includes a Find feature.

There is also an outliner built-in there, the « notepad ». I think an outliner is some sort of an epiphany that software developpers get. Dave Winer was the first case I remember witnessing, with MORE and Frontier, the outliner that kept on giving. The Tidbits crew has been saying good things about outliners for a long time too. Now Brent Simmons is at it too.

I’m curious to see if I’ll use it. I’m a big user of Word’s outline view but I tried a couple stand alone outliners over the years and even though I’m always impressed by the software itself, I never really got hooked on using them for any length of time.

Oh, I wanted to post this with NNW, but I’m getting a /CFSStreamFault. I usually get this with Kung-Log when I try to download a list of posts, it is apparently caused by a bug in the XML parser of OS X with accented caracters, dixit K-Log author’s. Thanks anyways for the early present.

Hollywood wants to outlaw crowbars

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Copy-paste post, as I really don’t have time to edit anything this morning. Afternoon. Damn. You get the point.

Great quote from Patricia Benson, an attorney for the movie studios suing 321 Studios, who make DVD copying software that can be used to make personal backups:

« It’s like somebody selling a digital crowbar. »

As Ed Felten notes, « …the crowbar analogy pretty much speaks for itself. Ms. Benson would doubtless be shocked to learn that an outfit calling itself ‘Ace Hardware’ is selling crowbars openly, right here in sleepy Princeton, New Jersey. »

In other words, general-purpose technology can be used for general purposes — good and ill. Hollywood’s increasingly shrill and nonsensical demands that technologists only make gear that can be used for good are comparable to insisting that crowbar companies design crowbars that can only be used to jemmy open doors whose owners have lost their keys, and go limp when inserted into the jambs of all other doors.

Link

[via Aaron Swartz and Boing Boing]

Broken by design

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No no, I’m not talking about everyone’s favorite operating system. Next time maybe.

To me it is almost an urban legend that MiniDisc devices, consumer level ones at least, did not allow digital output. It seems it is still true, even for audio recorded via a microphone and to which you could presumably be assumed to own the copyrights.

I guess the author of the article above will have to export analog audio and redigitize it. No big deal but it goes against the whole point of using such a device, doesn’t it?

In any case, many pissed off people here. Caveat Emptor.

Yes yes… coded architecture, private norms enforced by technological means…

[via lawrence’s notebook]

What’s wrong with the war on ‘Net piracy?

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Ken Hertz’s 2002 ACLU Bill of Rights Award speech: What’s wrong with the war on ‘Net piracy?
Here‘s a copy of the acceptance speech given by entertainment industry attorney Ken Hertz (of the firm Goldring, Hertz, Lichtenstein and Haft, LLP) at last week’s ACLU Bill of Rights Award dinner. ACLU press release about the award is here.

There are a couple good quote from someone who is usually acting out the expected rights’ owners policies. A very recommended read.

[…] Treating the symptoms and ignoring the underlying problem can allow the problem to fester — and worsen.[…]

How do the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism and my personal War on Obesity, relate to the entertainment industry’s War on Internet Piracy?
Our point is that treating the symptoms without addressing the problem will only worsen the problem and generate more daunting symptoms.
[…]

He does support blanket compulsory licensing, which as far as I know would give a very similar regulatory framework to the one we have in Canada with the tariff on blank audio media to compensate for private copying. Yet it seems that even here, record companies are just too eager to brush off that fact and label file sharing of musical works as a crime.

[via Boing Boing]