Archive for January, 2008
Copyright Now Extends To Cease-And-Desist Letters? January 27th, 2008
This is petty and a little funny. Mashable has a post titled “Copyright Now Extends To Cease-And-Desist Letters?“:
Apparently even the cease-and-desist letters sent to sites to inform them to stop violating copyrights are now - copyrighted. TechDirt is reporting an update to a case they first covered back in October where a lawyer tried to claim his cease-and-desist letters fell under a copyright, and thus no one could legally reprint them without his express permission. The people’s advocacy group, Public Citizen, saw this as a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and moved to stop it.
Yet from the look of a press release put out yesterday by the lawyer in question, it seems the judge agreed the man’s claim. The publication of a letter can now result statutory damages for as much as $150,000 per occurrence plus attorneys’ fees that can average $750,000 through trial.
The lawyer isn’t wrong but it just seems really petty to sue for copyright infringement where a cease-and-desist letter is republished. This sort of thing happens from time to time, especially when a well known blogger or blog receives one of these letters and wants to highlight the issues. Technically speaking, though, the letter the lawyer writes is probably subject to his copyright although there may be legitimate grounds to still republish that letter, depending on your jurisdiction. Even if there are no legitimate grounds, this just highlights how protective some lawyers can be over their knowledge.
Technorati Tags:
copyright, cease and desist, letters, republication, copyright infringement
Posted in Courts, Intellectual Property, Legal Community | Comments (Comments)
Amazon MP3 to the rescue January 27th, 2008
I have ranted about how decent music downloads are hard to come by here in South Africa, at least legal music downloads. There is the iTunes Store workaround but then that isn’t exactly in accordance with Apple’s terms of service. There are a couple options available like eMusic but the catalogues are rarely chock full of mainstream releases.
Thankfully there is light at the end of the tunnel. Amazon has announced that its Amazon MP3 service is going to open up to international customers sometime this year.
“We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S. They can’t wait to choose from the biggest selection of high-quality, low-priced DRM-free MP3 music downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future,” said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music. “We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year.”
Launched on Amazon.com in September 2007, Amazon MP3 offers Earth’s Biggest Selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads, which now includes over 3.3 million songs from more than 270,000 artists. Every song and album in the Amazon MP3 music download store is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software and is encoded at 256 kbps to deliver high audio quality. Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device; organize their music using any music management application, such as iTunes(R) or Windows Media Player(TM); and burn songs to CDs for personal use.
This service is currently restricted to US customers and enables them to purchase DRM-free, 256kbps MP3 files which you can play on the device of your choice. Amazon MP3 is one of the few real competitors iTunes has and if Amazon opens the store up more than the iTunes Store then I can see Apple having a tough time hanging on to its dominance in the digital music download market.
I will certainly be there with my credit card to buy music from Amazon if the store becomes available here. Songs cost between $0.89 and $0.99 and albums cost between $5.99 and $8.99. To boot, Amazon is selling music from all 4 music labels and you can be pretty sure this is partly the music industry’s response to Apple’s refusal to introduce flexible pricing for music historically.
What a win!
(Source: Engadget)
Technorati Tags:
apple, amazon, amazon mp3, music downloads, mp3, drm-free, no drm, announcement, legal music downloads, itunes
Posted in Companies, Entertainment, Media, Sharing | Comments (Comments)
XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services January 27th, 2008
I read this post on the Jive Software blog titled “XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services”. A lot of the technical stuff goes a bit beyond me so this summary on Read/Write Web by Marshall Kirkpatrick was pretty handy. As I understand the whole idea, XMPP (also known as Jabber), the protocol that powers Google Talk and a couple other IM apps/services may be better suited to many new media services and applications than the protocol that is so dominant on the Web at the moment, HTTP. The important aspect of XMPP is that it enables a two way communication process rather than the one way flow that we see with HTTP (ok, I know that isn’t strictly correct but this is how I think about it) so instead of you initiating contact with a Web service using your browser by clicking a link or something like that (HTTP), a Web service can contact your machine first, let it know there are updates and initiate an update process (XMPP). Maybe a better way to explain it is like this:
- When you want to update a page in your browser you need to click “refresh”. You initiate the process of communicating with the web server the page is on and request the updated page data; and
- When you use an XMPP IM client like Google Talk, for example, the IM server will contact your Google Talk app and send it updates without you having to do anything. This process is more efficient than constant polling the server to check for updates.
XMPP opens up possibilities for people wanting to develop services and apps that spontaneously update as and when updates are available rather than constant polling a server for updates. The one application of this that appeals to me is my feedreader. Your feedreader polls the various feeds you subscribe to for updates on a schedule and downloads new feed items when they are available. Imagine what happens if your feedreader runs on XMPP:
Ask yourself what a decentralized, open source infrastructure for real time communication could offer. A lot. As an RSS-head, I’d love to see XMPP let my various RSS clients do more faster and get bogged down in fewer unnecessary activities. RSS is all about speed for me but clients can only do so much so often when they have to pester someone else’s server every time they want to check for new information. Those delays can be of real consequence.
Receiving your feeds as and when they are published may not be a priority for you but this is a pretty good illustration of some of the possibilities. It is also pretty interesting that Google’s Android Mobile OS incorporates XMPP, at the very least because I can certainly see how XMPP could be a great protocol for widespread mobile applications, particularly where those mobile devices are constantly using a cellular connection or wifi.
I doubt very much that this is the end of HTTP but rather it could be the expansion of a generation of apps and services running on this dynamic protocol. It is probably the sort of development that could once again fuel speculation that IM (or the likes of IM) could overtake email as our dominant means of communicating across the Internet. Not sure about that but it is an intriguing possibility although I am not sure that an email replacement that shortens the already pretty quick delivery times of our messages is a good thing. It is bad enough that email creates an expectation of much faster responses to messages we receive (so much so that productivity gurus recommend you only check your email every couple hours or so to maintain some semblance of meaningful productivity) but if we start exchanging data between people using XMPP-based solutions that expectation becomes more unmanageable.
Where XMPP will probably be a tremendous benefit will be for machine to machine communications, the kind of services that are not immediately apparent to us humans and perhaps even running behind the scenes. IM is in your face, you see the updates coming in and either have to respond to watch messages pile up to be dealt with later. The feedreader example may be a good application for XMPP not because of the immediacy of the updates but because it could mean that my less powerful device can pick up updates automatically and on the fly using a more efficient update process. I can imagine that waiting for a mobile device to scan through hundreds of feeds could take time to update whereas a feedreader running on XMPP is almost always up to date so I can grab my device and run instead of waiting a couple minutes for an up to date sync.
Of course there are probably dozens of more useful applications of XMPP that haven’t even occurred to me that we could see rolling out.
Technorati Tags:
xmpp, jabber, protocol, internet, web, http, android, im
Posted in Feeds, Infrastructure, Sharing, Useful stuff | Comments (Comments)
Interview with the shy Mark Zuckerberg January 26th, 2008
In case you don’t subscribe to Scoble’s blog, here is an interesting interview he conducted with a strangely shy Mark Zuckerberg:
Yesterday morning I woke up early. Was sitting in the hotel lobby at 7 a.m. trying to check email when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Mark Zuckerberg, founder/CEO of Facebook, which now has 68 million active users (people who’ve signed on in the past 30 days).
He invited me to a breakfast with Pakistani President, Pervez Musharraf. We walked together to the breakfast, which was interesting because of Musharraf’s comments, where he defended his administration. After the breakfast Mark and I spent a bunch of time together, where he gave me permission to quote him.
In the interview Zuckerberg chats to Scoble about upgrades to the Facebook Platform, his desire to facilitate data portability (although not at the expense of Facebook’s users’ privacy), his love of Scrabulous and his hope for a positive resolution of the dispute over Hasbro’s branding and how the 4 999 limit on Facebook friends may be history soon. It is an interesting post to read (these sorts of one on one interviews generally are). I find these sorts of direct interactions are often at odds with popular perceptions and help bring balance to the Force.
Technorati Tags:
facebook, mark zuckerberg, zuckerberg, interview, scoble, davos, switzerland
Posted in People | Comments (Comments)
Interesting things about NetNewsWire 3.1 January 26th, 2008
There is some useful information about NetNewsWire 3.1 on inessential.com This item caught my eye because of a comment Stii made on Wired Gecko a little while ago about NNW not playing YouTube videos. It turns out that this feature is available, just turned off by default:
It plays video and Flash
The most common feature request in the feedback I read today is that NetNewsWire should play video, Flash, YouTube, etc.
It does. It’s turned off by default, but it’s easy to turn on.
Open Preferences, click Browsing. Click the News Items tab—to enable Flash and video, make sure the box next to Enable plug-ins is checked.
Click the Web Pages tab and repeat to do the same thing for web pages.
A couple things to know, though:
1. On some machines, you may have to enable plug-ins for both news items and web pages in order to make them work in web pages.
2. Plug-ins are off by default because they’re unstable and eat lots of memory. (Flash in particular.) So if you run into memory or crashing issues, the first thing to try is turning off plug-ins.
I have been using NNW every day and although it does seem to be a little unstable on Leopard (at least, my installation of Leopard), I am really happy I gave it another try. I have asked that a future version or update to 3.1 enable automatic downloads of images. That would really make this a true offline feed reader and make me happier than my puppy on my lap (he is only happy when he is on my lap … go figure).
I was thinking the other day that with a wide enough screen I could see myself using Safari less and less to browse web pages I connect to through NNW. I am not sure which engine NNW uses for web pages (I imagine something like Webkit?) but having everything integrated into one app is really handy.
Do you have any thoughts about NNW or its Windows sibling, FeedDemon? Let me know.
Technorati Tags:
feed reader, feeddemon, feedreader, netnewswire, youtube, flash, safari, web browser
Posted in Feeds, Useful stuff | Comments (Comments)
