While hardly surprising that the MPAA misrepresents its own figures, claims losses that aren’t theirs, and tries to convince us fair use doesn’t exist (the last one courtesy of Jack Valenti, invited guest to the Roger Ebert movie festival a few years ago when he spoke in the Pine Lounge of the Illini Union), it’s [...]
When you use The Internet Archive to host your video files, it will offer to make derivative files in alternate formats. Recently, Ogg Vorbis+Theora was added to the list of formats IA will make for you. This means you can get all sorts of videos in a format anyone can play anywhere using a variety [...]
An excellent framing of the debate around challenging Blackboard’s patent (local copies of the news announcement, patent re-examination request, and USPTO’s order for re-examination) which stifles educational software. Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:27:28 -0600 From: Nathan Owens To: cio@uiuc.edu CC: provost@uiuc.edu Subject: unethical practices by Blackboard Dear CIO Kaufman, A copy of this e-mail [...]
BoingBoing has the scoop: Viacom did a general search on YouTube for any term related to any of its shows, and then spammed YouTube with 100,000 DMCA take-down notices alleging that all of these clips infringed its copyright and demanding that they be censored off the Internet. YouTube made thousands of clips vanish, and sent [...]
The 9/11 report is a US government work and therefore is uncopyrighted. It was born into the public domain and should remain there forever. You may deal in the document fully without any restriction due to copyright law. Some bloggers (Techliberation.com, BoingBoing.net) noticed that the 9/11 report distributed from 9-11commission.gov has Digital Restrictions Management applied—copying [...]
Bizjournals.com reports that Alcatel-Lucent told a jury it is owed almost $2 billion for Microsoft Corp.’s use of the standard technology for playing music and audio files on a computer…If Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent wins, the way could be cleared for legal actions against the many other companies that rely on MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 technology, commonly [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley