In a Wired South Korea, Robots Will Feel Right at Home - New York Times

Since January, Koreans have been able to watch television broadcasts on cellphones, free, thanks to government-subsidized technology. In April, South Korea will introduce the first nationwide superfast wireless Internet service, called WiBro, eventually making it possible for Koreans to remain online on the go — at 10 megabits per second, faster than most conventional broadband connections.

Piracy hits European newspapers | MetaFilter

Major european newspapers are daily avaiable as downloadable torrents. You’ll find todays copies in full lenght of the Spanish El Pais, the Italian Liberazione, Deutche Welle and many more. These files are not scannings from print copies, it seems to be pre-press files.
Interesting that the leak is occurring from within just as in movies.

Creative Creative Commons Creation | MetaFilter

Schmap is an online/desktop travel guidebook. They are taking Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr and using them in their city guides. It is kind of like Google Maps + Flickr + Lonely Planet. [Contains some flash, and to try out the guide you have to install the Schmap Player.]
Copyright clarity and geographic metadata make for an interesting mashup.

Composing Music Using Apple Computer's GarageBand Software - New York Times

"Eventide" scored only five listens until I got five other bands to add me to their lists. Thereafter, it scored just two more. My tour of MySpace was beginning to feel suspiciously like the nonvirtual world of agents and editors, the capricious gatekeepers the Internet was supposed to usurp.
There's no question there are gatekeepers in this version of collaborative filtering.  I'm sure there will be some residual stickiness to their power--people's habits are slow to change.  But the barriers to become a gatekeeper (and to lose your status) are much lower, and consequently you should see far higher quality of filtering.  In addition, the human element allows for more challenging pieces to be brought to a wide audience.  If the piece takes a few listens to start to appreciate, that may work in this kind of situation vs. a death-by-committee approach of something like Digg.

Slashdot | Apple to Face iPod Clone Attack

speculating that significant competition from the likes of Nokia and Motorola will rapidly relegate Apple's presence in the market to a corner
I'm starting to think that all the talk of iPod killers only helps to keep Apple's image as the underdog, which certainly helps sales in an image-driven product.

Slashdot | The State of Digital Music in 2006

While the young, usually the first to adopt and adapt to new technology, have been downloading and swapping music for quite some time, there's been a ripple effect into the older, warier area of the population, one that will only increase. Thank--or blame--Apple and its iPod, or any of the many other makes selling like hotcakes in the stores.

The Patry Copyright Blog: Small Infringement Claims Proposal

There was not much enthusiasm and along with the division among witnesses this might well doom such efforts. That would be unfortunate: it was truly a good government effort by Chairman Smith to hold such a hearing and put the time in to deal with a serious problem: the effective lack of protection for individual creators of works with relatively low commercial value.

The Patry Copyright Blog: Injunctions, Patents, and Copyrights

It was, of course, the imminent threat of an injunction in the Blackberry dispute that led to the astonishing $620 million settlement. There are different issues with injunctive relief in patent than copyright cases, including compulsory licensing and whether the plaintiff was "working" the patent, and it may be that those differences are sufficient to render the Supreme Court's eventual decision in the eBay case to be of little relevance in copyright cases. Indeed, it is amusing only in a sardonic sense to read the Court's opinions, where it variously finds an historic "kinship" between the two areas, or finds them quite different.

The Open Rights Group » Guardian Changing Media: Digital Rights Management

Some control, not full control - you certainly can’t expect to put your new Britney Spears CD out and not see it online within five minutes.

Slashdot | More Music File-Sharing Lawsuits in Europe

20,000 cases in 10 countries were brought against file-sharers in Europe, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI)
Actual number appears to be 2,000.

Legal movie downloads come to the US, but limitations abound

Previously the studios were shy about licensing online stores for anything but video rental, but that looks to have changed, and it wasn't Apple's iPod that managed to pull it off, either. Pricing will be "competitive" with DVD, which is to say that pricing will be expensive for what you get.

Comments sought on copyright exemptions for libraries

For those who wonder why something named "Section 108" would possibly interest them, the short answer is that the rules will have a profound effect on the ability of archives, local libraries, and universities to archive digital information.

Now Playing on YouTube: Web Videos by Everyone - New York Times

So exactly what videos are drawing viewers to this ascendant site, which, less than a year after its launch, averages around 25 million hits each day?

Wired News: Reasons to Love Open-Source DRM

If DReaM works, consumers will be able to access their purchased songs through a number of providers, and using a wide variety of devices.
Yeah, but....

Wired News: A Pretty Good Way to Foil the NSA

How easy is it for the average internet user to make a phone call secure enough to frustrate the NSA's extrajudicial surveillance program? Wired News took Phil Zimmermann's newest encryption software, Zfone, for a test drive and found it's actually quite easy, even if the program is still in beta.
Someone proposed using Skype as a Darknet a while back.  This would be much more secure, if one were so inclined.  The bottom line is that policing Darknets is going to be a nasty business.

Wired News: Stop the Presses ... Go Online

Newspapers' online audiences are growing rapidly, according to a new industry study, highlighting a key growth area that newspapers are seeking to exploit as print circulation continues to be challenged.

Slashdot | New "Dark" Freenet Available for Testing

This is a major departure from past approaches to peer-to-peer network design, embracing a 'scalable darknet' architecture, where security is increased by allowing users to limit which other peers their peer will communicate with directly, rather than the typical 'promiscuous' approach of classic P2P networks. This means that not only does Freenet aim to prevent others from finding out what you are doing with Freenet, it makes it extremely difficult for them to even know that you are running a Freenet node at all.
Speaking of the Darknet....

EFF: Breaking News - Clear Channel patent reexamined

The patent -- for a system and method of creating digital recordings of live performances -- locks musical acts into using Clear Channel technology and blocks innovations by others.

Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Korean Music Industry Puts Negative Value on DRM

The above figures can be read in a number of ways. Most importantly, they reflect the idea that users can do less with DRM-protected tracks than with unprotected ones, including some things that provide a better user experience and/or are allowed under Korea’s copyright laws.

Furdlog » Virtual Theft in China

China has upheld a guilty verdict and fine against a man who stole and sold players’ games IDs and online equipment amid growing calls for more concrete virtual property laws, state media said on Monday.

The Patry Copyright Blog: Smithsonian Showtime Agreement

Instead, the issue centers on restrictions on access to the physical objects.
From von Lohmann's comments: We are in the midst of a debate at WIPO over a Broadcasting Treaty that would extend to broadcasters exclusive rights of their broadcasts. Under current copyright law, anyone would be free to record the programming created by Showtime, extract any public domain elements, and do with it what they like. After all, if Showtime has already acquired by contract the exclusive right of (commercial) access to the only known underlying physical copies, this would be the only remaining avenue for commercial creators to have access to these public domain works. Would this still be true after the implementation of a WIPO Broadcasting Treaty? If not, then Showtime may be on its way to effectively privatizing an important collection of public domain material.
Just as with the DMCA, non-copyright access to content is declining.  This is bad, as it denies any chance for fair use.

--Ari