RIAA lawsuits continued…

From the Boston Globe Online (emphasis mine):

…like many students on college campuses in Boston, yesterday, the 19-year old said she’s going to keep downloading.”I would definitely have to know someone who got one” of the subpoenas, said Bedell-Healey, who lives in Needham. ”No, definitely not going to stop until I know someone who’s getting sued.” The RIAA has not specifically said what damages it will seek. But under federal law, it can ask for $750 to $150,000 for each illegally shared song.

The industry is demanding information from Boston College about three students, including two who used the screen names ”TheLastReal7” and ”Prtythug23,” who shared music using KaZaA, a program developed by Sydney, Australia-based Sharman Networks Ltd.

In a subpoena addressed to MIT, the association is demanding the name, address, and phone number of a student who used the nickname ”crazyface” to download at least five songs, including Radiohead’s ”Idioteque” and Dave Matthews Band’s ”Ants Marching.”

”These universities have chosen to litigate this in an attempt to deny copyright holders the right so clearly granted in Congress,” Lamy said, referring to the colleges’ refusal to release the names of the students.

I’m sorry. I just don’t see copyright brokers as the people who should win out in this war. The people want to download music, but they have no way to pay for it, legitimately, online. And paying $0.99/track on an 15 track disc for the electronic download somehow implies that it costs more to provide the electronic distribution than the distribution of a physical disk with a 12 page 4-color insert.

This all stinks of Corporate America, and I’m sad Eldred v. Ashcroft didn’t clear the courts. If I thought, for one moment, that the RIAA was actually representing The Artist (a la Everyman), then I’d feel differently. But this is sad and ridiculous.

20030723 | | Tags: | 1 Comment »

Purple Polar Bear

Yes, a purple polar bear. Talk about unfortunate side-effects to medication! You can’t tell me that it doesn’t seriously mess up your internal schedule, too…

And, while I’m at it, one from my mother (just moments ago) via email:

At Heathrow airport today an individual, later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a compass, a protractor, and a graphing calculator. Authorities believe he is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. He is being charged with carrying weapons of math instruction.
20030722 | | Tags: | Comments Closed

Perl weblogUpdates server

By weird chance (really) I stumbled on a description of Paul Hammond’s implementation of the weblogUpdates interface in Perl. His 14 line solution is reproduced here for my future reference:

#!/usr/bin/perl

 
use strict;
use XMLRPC::Transport::HTTP;
my $server = XMLRPC::Transport::HTTP::CGI
  -> dispatch_to('weblogUpdates')
  -> handle;

 
package weblogUpdates;
sub ping {
  my ($class, $weblogname,$weblogurl) = @_;
  print STDERR "got ping from $weblogname at $weblogurl";
  #
  # other code goes here
  #
  return {
    flerror => XMLRPC::Data->type('boolean',0),
    message => "ping recieved"
  };
}

I just hacked something related and similar in Scheme earlier today to allow me to ‘ping’ cs-ed.org to update the “CS-ED blogs” list on the right. Useful snippet of code to hang on to, for the moment.

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Time will say nothing, but I told you so…

What a prophetic line. I went looking for two technical reports, both published in the early/mid 80′s in the Yale CS department:

Johnson, L., Soloway, E., Cutler, B. and Draper, S. (1983) BUG
CATALOGUE: L Technical Report 286, Dept. of Computer Science, Yale
University, October.

Spohrer. J.C.. Pope, E.. Lipman. M., Sack. W.. Freiman, S., Littman.
D.. Johnson, L.. and Soloway. E. BUG CATALOGUE: II, III, IV. Tech.
Rep. 386. Dept. of Computer Science, Yale Univ.. New Haven,
Conn., May 1985.

Yale replies:

Due to the dates of the requested technical reports, they are no longer available from the department. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

So will all “unpublished” work written before the WWW end up in the bin? This is why the WWW and projects like the Internet Archive are so important: ideas, unless written down (and made accessible!) disappear like sand through the fingers. But I digress: I just want some old tech reports. I’m just surprised that the shelf life of research findings from the Yale CS department is only 20 years. Plenty of papers summarizing the BUG CATALOGUEs have been written and published, but I want to get back to the source! Ah well. Technology, and time, marches on.

Update, 8:04 PM:

From Digging for Googleholes by Steven Johnson at Slate(.msn.com):

Googlehole No. 3: Book Learning. Google is beginning to have a subtle, but noticeable effect on research. More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format, which Google indexes as though they were traditional Web pages. But almost no one is publishing entire books online in PDF form. So, when you’re doing research online, Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books. Assuming this practice continues, and assuming that Google continues to grow in influence, we may find ourselves in a world where, if you want to get an idea into circulation, you’re better off publishing a PDF file on the Web than landing a book deal.

Ah! The very theme I was prepared to rant about!

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Continuous Flow Printers

A company (or individual(s)) modifying ink-jet printers to drink from a reservoir instead of aa tiny, expensive cartridge. These folks will probably get slapped with a lawsuit by Epson; modifying and reselling a product will, most likely, violate the DMCA, enrage the MPAA, and be declared an act of terrorism in 43 of the lower 48.

But, they’re a great idea nevertheless.

I’ve been out-of-country since the beginning of June, and will be wandering England for the next week and some. Regularly scheduled programming may return at some point. :)

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Next stop! Sotftware patents in Europe!

Very little of a student’s formal education in computing involves the noise that comes in from the real world: constraints, politics, economics. Software patents are a beautiful example of something that your typical computer science graduate probably has opinions on, but doesn’t know nearly enough about how they came to be, why they’re here to stay, or what it would really take to change the system.

In short, the laws surrounding software patent law were created by lawyers, and I’d suspect that many of those lawyers were not savvy to the practice of computing. They certainly were clued into big industry (software or otherwise), and true to too many American moves of late, software patent law does much more to protect the Haves, and provides little equity for the Have Nots.

Consider the closing note from Kieren McCarthy’s Register article on the subject of European patent law:

If, for example, it was explained to Arlene McCarthy that changing the rules will create more problems than it would solve; that 13,000 existing patents will effectively be wiped out, irritating European businesses; that innovation and business will be stifled by expensive legal fights; that the very existence of the open source movement points to the fact that software is a special case where collaboration is more effective that protection; that European businesses will be worse off as a result because US companies hold the majority of the patents and the patent know-how… well, then we might just have seen a different result.

In a word, techies don’t know politics. And in the Information Age, if the techs aren’t going to learn the ways of the world, then the world will have it’s way with the techs.

Good luck, Europe. If you haven’t figured it out by now, the American Way only serves one nation under God, and that’s America. I suspect Kieren’s analysis is right, and small- to mid-sized Eurpean companies will take it in the rear over this change in Eurpean software patent law. You can bet IBM, Sun, and Microsoft will do just fine, however.

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