To my surprise and delight, the good folks at Duke Law have produced this comic book to explain the law of fair use and how expanding copyrights is producing lots of “collateral damage” in the free speech department. Back when I was in law school I had an idea for an entire series of comic books dramatizing the law school curriculum. Happily for the world, I can’t even draw stick figures as well as Jim Snider did in his Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy.
Stay tuned . . .
Yet another study finding that P2P filesharing is not the reason people stop buying CDs, and that most music people listen to on their computers and MP3 players is legally obtained. More information here. Michael Geist, on of the genius people you never hear about in the U.S. because he’s like, you know, Canadian (actually, he’s from the U.S., but he lives and works in Canada) offers an excellent analysis here.
Of note, the study was conducted by the Candian Recording Industry Association, the RIAA’s Candian cousin, so one can assume that any bias toward result was in favor of finding that P2P is tantamount to theft.
Stay tuned…..
I want to flag two important conferences in the next few weeks where I’ll be attending.
First, the Second National Summit for Community Wireless Networking. The last of these was in August 2004, and was excellent. For anyone interested in any aspect of community wireless broadband, whether it is the future of CWN as a movement or simply the nuts and bolts of setting one up in your neighborhood, this conference should be on your “must attend” list. The Summit is scheduled for March 31-April 2 at Lynnewood University in St. Charles, MO (easily accessible from St. Louis Int’l Airport). I’ll be speaking and generally making a nuisance of myself.
The second, much closer to home, is Dave Isenberg’s Freedom 2 Connect 2006. Again, last year’s was excellent, and it has the advantage (to me, at least) of being half a mile from my house. Dave has drawn together some of the top thinkers and respected pioneers in internet development to discuss the future of the internet in a world where the “freedom to connect” is no longer guaranteed. Speakers include such luminaries as Muniwireless.com founder Esme Vos, net personalities and pioneers Om Malik & Doc Searls, political heavyweights such as Congressman Rick Boucher and former FCC Commissioners Michael Powell and Reed Hundt, etc., etc.
Sadly, yr hmbl obdnt is not quite “A List” enough yet to make the schedule, but it will still be a good conference and I expect I will manage to make my presence known (those who know me understand I am not generally a quiet person).
Stay tuned . . .
A few weeks ago Cory Doctorow, major-domo of House GeekZeitgeist, stopped by for a chat with Wetmechanics John and Gary. Earlier installments of our conversation can be found here and here.
Highlights from this episode:
You’ll get to hear Cory ignore my rambling introduction to my soon-to-be revealed novella The Pains as he paws Gary’s iAudio X5, the mp3 player used to record the interview. (Which, as Gary points out, is much more politically correct than a iPod, since it supports the open-sourced Ogg Vorbis audio format, and doesn’t contain any stinkin’ drm.)
Most tantalizing of all, you’ll get to hear Cory’s enthusiastic reponse to the killer illustrations from The Pains, soon to be appearing in a Wetmachine entry near you!
Sure, ’tis a great day for the wearing of the green. And a good thing it was, too, how Saint Patrick drove the serpents right back into the sea.
But let’s not neglect that other saintly colusus, he who drove the grasshoppers out of Finland, whose name-day we also celebrate today. (Although some people observe St. Urho’s Day on March 16th, the 17th is also an acceptable day for observance, kinda like how going to Mass on Saturday night counts just as much as going on Sunday morning.)
As the grandson of Jakob Sundman from Minas, on the coast of Finland, and his good wife Lillian Hudson, from County Roscomon, I shall do my level best to preform the rituals associated with these two spritual icons of my ancestral heritages. To wit: anybody seen my green food dye? I need to doctor up my Lapin Kulta.
This latest Notice of Proposed Rulemaking shows how far in the wrong direction the FCC has come on spectrum issues. Funny thing is, I don’t think FCC Chair Kevin Martin hates unlicensed or is in the pocket of the licensees. I think this is an example of WHEN STAFF ATTACK!!! (specifically the wireless bureau staff).
Yesterday, the Federal Register turned 70. While unknown to most normal folks, the Federal Register (or “fed reg” as we admin lawyers like to call it) is the official publication for the U.S. Administrative state. Just about all major administrative undertaking such as rulemakings, inquiries, and consent decrees become official and/or final when published in fed reg. Many a young associate or paralegal has the unenviable task (albeit made easier by electronic databases and online access) to keep a watch on fed reg for publication of any documents of potential relevants or to track administrative deadlines.
So happy birthday Fed Reg!
It’s because the server that hosts the little “linkbox” that normally sits on the right-hand side of the page is down.
I’ve been meaning to convert that app to a stand-alone “SOLO” app for some months now but I never seem to get around to it. I’ll take this as one more strong nudge in that direction. No time to do so this morning, however and alas, as I’m off to the airport soon with a ton of things to do first (including putting up the link to Part Three of our Cory Doctorow interview. . .).
But if you happen to be the Wetmachine webmaster and you’re reading this, feel free to comment out the linkblox. The server that hosted it got rooted on a php exploit and it may be down for a while.
In the spring of 1997 I spent a week as a parent chaperon with my son’s 7th grade class at an ecology-themed camp in Sharon, Massachusetts. There I met this guy, who was a 7th grade math teacher, but more interestingly, the illustrator of the graphic novel version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass.
Now, as you may know, Auster writes austere post-modern metafictional stories about the nature of reality and our inability to use language to apprehend or transmit it.
Anyway, I got along really well with Karasik and we spent a lot of time walking in the woods together, talking philosophy and deep bullshit, when the students were in class. On the last afternoon that we were to spend together, we found ourselves silently sitting side by side on a fallen tree in the woods. Neither of us spoke for a long while. It was a beautiful day with not a cloud in the sky and not the least bit of wind. Then, somewhere nearby, a tree fell over, crashing to the ground with an incongruous roar. Soon afterwards all was again silent.
Karasik and I looked at each other.
Just a quick thank you to all those spammers out there who tried to use Wetmachine’s trackback feature to pump up the ratings of your worthless “hold ’em poker” web sites in search engines. While not a single one of your trackbacks were allowed through (thanks to the space-age technology of regular expression pattern matching), your rejected trackback submissions, all 16 thousand of them, take up space in our database.
So, thanks to you all, I’ve had to disable the trackback feature. I don’t think this hugely cripples the site, since we had only 5 legit trackbacks out of the 16,000+ in the database (leading to what has got to be one of the worst signal-to-noise rations I’ve ever seen).
It’s just bottom feeder greed, as usual, dumping shit in our communal water supply.
But while the uproar has swayed much of the public to Johansson's defense at a time when #genAI is increasingly under scrutiny, this may not quite be an open-and-shut case should she decide to sue . Read the breakdown from @M_F_Rose in her latest article:
The release of @OpenAI's new digital assistant "Sky" stirred controversy after actress Scarlett Johansson alleged that the company had infringed on her rights by using a soundalike voice of hers after she'd declined to voice it herself.
Just saw @MargotSusca fantastic interview with @adamconover about the death of local news at the hands of hedge funds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA A theme I have written about *a lot*. Like this blog post from 2018: https://wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/we-need-to-fix-the-news-media-not-just-social-media-part-i/ This has been a long time in the making.
I wrote yesterday on the terrifying escalation of antisemitism in Canada, citing events just over past week. Now there is more: last night a firebomb attempt at a Vancouver synagogue. Daily antisemitic incidents is who we are now.
https://www.jewishvancouver.com/important-community-updates-may-20-2024
https://x.com/mgeist/status/1796233336203194446
