Archives de l’auteur : Seek

Creative Commons

Publié le par

Everyone and their dog is blogging about Creative Commons. A (primarly, for the time being) build-your-licence website sponsored by a whole bunch of interesting people. I really like the slogan, « legal code »

In a way, it reminds me of P3P, as it is a way to standardize contract terms. P3P aimed to allow people to act on standardized terms for the management of personal info. This does it for copyrightable content, without the automation and integration dreamed of by P3P. Most people have a fairly good idea of the rights granted by the GPL. Now well have different, if less concisely named, nuances of standard licenses.

Under what license is the content of this site provided? I worry more about my use of other people’s content that other people’s use of my stuff. No jokes about the value/originality/creativity of said stuff please. I would lean towards the Attribution-ShareAlike License.

I wonder what license are the licenses released under. Can I modify them slightly? Translate them? I’m sure the answer is on the website but I couldn’t find it. Given the recent fuss over the copyright on court papers, it’s a valid question.

QoS

Publié le par

Quality of Service is unnecessary? Is throwing more bandwidth at the issue really a solution?

I care because QoS is a form of technological norm that is very potent. It does have the capacity to shape the environment and influence the actions of people (or their effects). I can’t wait for my ISP, who is owned by a content provider, to throttle competitors, err… ensure proper QoS, to selected resources.

On the other hand, I find reasonable that there could be the Internet equivalent of a emergency siren for certain packets.

Would « official » and public implementation of QoS make it harder for people who control the infrastructure to implement opportunistic QoS-like schemes? Should Internet connectivity declared a public service and regulated as such from a competition point of view? In that last hypothesis, could QoS be implemented in a more productive way?

I find it hard to believe that bigger pipes will solve all QoS issues, but is it a good enough solution to reduce the annoyance level low enough that people won’t bother to elaborate on the issue?

[via… damn… can’t find it anymore… NetNewWire really needs a « find » function]

Update: Well… this issue made a few people react. Should I be surprised that it seems it was all started by Lessig?

La CAI frappe encore

Publié le par

Monsieur le Ministre,
La Commission d’acès à l’information du Québec a entrepris une étude concernant le projet de loi sur l’accès légal au Canada, plus précisément axée sous l’angle de la protection des renseignements personnels.

En voici la lettre introductive. Le rapport est ici. Il y a aussi le communiqué de presse pour gens pressés.

Ah oui, pour ceux qui en douteraient, ce n’est pas très positif. Il semble que certaines dispositions découleraient d’obligations auxquels nous nous sommes engagés par traités, la Convention sur la cybercriminalité (utilisation de cyber, -1) du conseil de l’Europe. J’imagine que si ce n’est pas harmonisable avec la tentaculaire Directive Européenne sur la vie privée, ca se serait su, non? Alors qui a fait du zèle?

Bill on Internet Retransmission Passed

Publié le par

OTTAWA, December 13, 2002 — Minister of Canadian Heritage Sheila Copps and Industry Minister Allan Rock today announced the passage of Bill C-11, an Act to amend the Copyright Act. This Bill is the first in a series of initiatives to update Canada’s copyright legislation.

It dismisses the compulsory license option that was proposed by certain groups for internet retransmission.

[Via BNA ILN]

Private copying in France

Publié le par

It seems that France is keeping on track with the adoption of a tariff similar to the canadian tariff 22 regarding blank digital media. They also tax hard disk in Tivo-like devices.
I think those tariffs are generally a good thing since they provide some form of compensation for usage of copyrighted works.

It’s not quite compulsory licensing, it’s a bit of a stretch to raise a tariff to compensate uses of works that are most of the time allowed under the law and it is quite unfair to put a tariff on CD-R when I know most of my use these days goes to back-ups of my own data. Yet, it seems like an acceptable compromise on both sides of the issue. Now, the shocking thing is the amount of the tariff. In Canada, it amounts to a 50% tax on media (0.21$ per data CD)…

[via BMCK E-Law]

I had a (weird) dream

Publié le par

I woke up last night. and I had an thought on mind. I doesn’t make anymore sense now than it did 6 hours ago though. I was wondering why there isn’t the equivalent of the Dewey decimal system for supermarkets.

A couple things: first, why was I thinking about something like this in the middle of the night? Secondly: will not happen because it’s actually profitable to have clients helplessly wandering through the aisles foraging for a specific item.

It would still be nice if shelves and rows in a supermarket had numbers. I could check my grocery list against the store catalog and get a little map with the required stops in the most efficient order.
There already are those little bar code scanners in most stores so they don’t have to mark the prices on individual items, is it such a big deal to do some sort of a reverse lookup and search for an item by name and have it output the location?

Wouldn’t be too good for customer retention, but I’d love it. And since I can get the necessary stuff done with faster, I could spend more time looking at the bakery stuff or the beer section, to which I never give the attention they deserve. I don’t think I’ll ever buy into the online grocery shopping thing but this would be an interesting in-between.

Chinese pics revisited

Publié le par

I just realized that somehow the URL for the pictures I took in China got quite popular with my travel partners. In fact, both for bandwidth used and visitors served, it dwarfs this site.

I did mention the pictures here before[update: it moved, so did this site, so they are not on the same machines anymore], but since then I regenerated the pages with a smarter script and moved the site to my machine at work. I doubt I’ll ever host it anywhere else since it’s over 850Mb of stuff… It would be nice to make some sort of photoblog out of it though where people could comment on the pictures and add their own. I don’t think I have the time (or skills) to put that together though.

Downtime

Publié le par

MS Word is literally eating though my thesis. I have plenty of backups, but I am not happy about the whole thing. I would think I’m having a font conflict, except that my only fonts are the standard OS X install and the Office font pack. Maybe there is an issue between my french Office and my primarly english OS X.

But I suspect the mini MS world on my machine: now IE won’t launch. Anyways, this little break will give me a change to run a couple updates which insists asking for a reboot.

And here’s a list of domains I was thinking about..

pagaille.com
perplexe.com
bobards.com
boniment.com
boboche.org

As you can see, I’ll probably switch back to french soon.

Southern Building Code v. Veeck

Publié le par

Law Meme has coverage of an decision that will be reviewed by the Supreme court of the US.

Why do I really care? The decision is about builing codes. Ok, I don’t care, but Fleecy might! The decision is about web publication. Bonus points, but not really that much of a big deal for me (or for the court I think). It deals with copyrights on public texts, law and judicial decisions. Getting closer, and Pseudo will most certainly be interested

The deal for me is that it shows a different aspect of the practice of law making using private norms than the ones I focus on in my thesis. It is also reminiscent of the W3C and ITU patent policies problems.

Anyways, hopefully this is a good test case to get a sound policy conscious copyright decision from the US Supreme Court.

Ramen recipe database

Publié le par

I had a certain period in my life where high cost of living, co-location of a small kitchen and limited personal time made me a rather satisfied advocate of Ramen and tuna as the basis of one’s alimentation (with Lindt chocolate and gruyère). (forget Atkins, I lost 20 pounds on that stuff)

If I’m ever nostalgic, there is a database of Ramen noodles recipes. Quite imaginative. And I do have to try the Ramen Trail Mix next time I need Gorp. Other imaginative recipe titles? What about Ramen & Chicken in Vodka Sauce or Death Valley Ramen Treat?

[Via Metafiler]

Oldie but a goodie on « modern » copyright

Publié le par

Cla pointed me to this LawMeme article about AOL’s view on the bathroom break during commercials. I remember reading about the article in the spring, but I didn’t blog and I forgot about it.

Quite a gem. LawMeme suggest 10 new copyright infringements, including changing radio stations when a commercial comes on or arriving late to the movies and missing the previews.

BIlly Joel explained

Publié le par

This does a pretty good job in illustrating the song « We didn’t start the fire ».

It has always somehow fascinated me that this song does indeed fast forward through 40 years of american history.

The little flash thing isn’t perfect. Or maybe it’s my player. It seems to miss a couple verses though. Maybe it’s my permanent-beta flash player

Anyways, is this a copyright infringement? It does contain the whole song… and quite a few of these images are also copyrighted. Enjoy while it’s still up. As far as I’m concerned, it’s pretty educational though.
There was an great page on AOL that hyperlinked the lyrics with relevant web pages but it’s 404 now. Fear not, here’s the Wayback machine to the rescue.

[don’t know who to credit for this, I saw it all over the place last week and this w-e I remembered about the hyperlinked lyrics web page (that I originally saw on Memepool) which made this a somewhat value added post]