Podcasting shakes up local media | csmonitor.com

It was good news for NPR, which has become a major player in the podcast world. Not so for the 350 NPR member stations that broadcast "Wait Wait." They're worried that making the program available to iPods could mean a loss of listeners - and consequently the donations and ad dollars that keep the stations afloat.

Bloglines | My Feeds (169)

In the real system, where the secret vectors have forty entries, not four, it takes a conspiracy of about forty devices, with known private vectors, to break HDCP completely. But that is eminently doable, and it’s only a matter of time before someone does it. I’ll talk next time about the implications of that fact.

EFF: DMCA Archive

* This document collects a number of reported cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been invoked not against pirates, but against consumers, scientists, and legitimate competitors.

Lawrence Lessig

Yochai Benkler’s book, The Weath of Networks, is out. This is — by far — the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this. The book has a wiki; it can be downloaded as a pdf for free under a Creative Commons license; or it can be bought at places like Amazon.

Smart Mobs: How Kerry campaign ditched Dean campaign p2p tactics

The key was that the Dean campaign, like the Clinton Gore campaign in 1992, trusted us to communicate amongst ourselves in a true, symmetrical, peer-to-peer model. As a result, both Clinton and Dean enjoyed powerful benefits created by their supporters. In contrast, the Kerry campaign did not.
SNIU?

Slyck News - Spanish Police Target 15 Indexing Sites

The global campaign to stomp out BitTorrent and eDonkey2000 indexing sites continued today, this time in the P2P stronghold of Spain. In raids conducted this morning, Spanish Police arrested 15 administrators/owners related to 17 BitTorrent and eDonkey2000 indexing sites.

Open Access News

This is where the "Request eprint" button comes in. Whenever record of a stored eprint tells a would-be user that an OA version of the full text copy is not accessible, a dialogue box appears inviting the user to paste in their email address and send a request to the author for a copy of the paper. This request is emailed automatically to the author, offering three choices in return: to email the requested eprint, to reject the request, or to make the eprint OA in the repository. Since the requested eprint is already in the repository, and merely invisible, a simple process enables the author to make a selection and activate that choice with a single click....
This is brilliant, particularly the third option.  By providing a useful service (handling reprint requests) even to those who don't want to self-archive yet, and then making it easy to self-archive from there, the incentives are all in the right place to make for much quicker adoption of SA.  It's all about lowering the cost to near-zero.

The Tale of the Tapes - New York Times

After all, mixes aren't bootlegs at all— they're advertisements. Here's how mixtapes work: Record companies release hip-hop artists' new songs as both finished products and separate musical and vocal tracks. These tracks are made available to D.J.'s, who piece them together to create remixes. These mixes, distributed largely through retail stores, thus give fans the latest music available — and whet consumers' appetite for official releases issued later. So record companies (aware of the promotional power of these tapes) provide music to D.J.'s specifically for mixes, and the rappers themselves — who are often the copyright holders — endorse the mixtapes by appearing on them. Are we to really believe that the recording industry doesn't want these mixes distributed to fans? Of course it does.

Furdlog » The *Other* Side of (Software) Piracy

The proliferation of pirated copies nevertheless establishes Microsoft products — particularly Windows and Office — as the software standard. As economies mature and flourish and people and companies begin buying legitimate versions, they usually buy Microsoft because most others already use it. It’s called the network effect. “The first dose is free,” said Hal Varian, a professor of information management at UC Berkeley, facetiously comparing Microsoft’s anti-piracy policy to street-corner marketing of illicit drugs. “Once you start using a product, you keep using it.”

Promote the Progress® ::: What would you pay for a "Gold Plate" patent

Under the Lemley proposal, "gold plate" patents would be entitled to the presumption of validity, while those receiving standard examination would carry a weakened or non-existent presumption.

--Ari