Accept no substitutes

Category: Information Commons (Page 22 of 26)

Information Commons, Copyright, Censorship and/or withdrawal of public information, Libraries: Digital and other

Wireless in Laurinburg and the Triangle

Doc was nice enough to pick up on my references to Fiona’s stories over at his IT Garage, but he got a few things a bit off. First the article that has all of the links to Fiona’s stories on Muni-nets wireless and other is here.

Next, that’s Laurinburg, NC! Once called MacLaurinburg, it’s now called Laurinburg. The town is close to the South Carolina line — just above the famous South of the Border — but it is definitely in Nawth Cakalacky.

IP talks at Duke Law upcoming

Jennifer Jenkins of Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain writes to tell us of their upcoming events.

What: Hot Topics in Intellectual Property Law Symposium
Date: Friday, April 1, 2005
Time: Registration/breakfast at 8:15 am, presentations begin at 9:00 am
Location: Duke Law School, Room 3043 and breakout rooms
Full Schedule: http://www.law.duke.edu/student/act/intprop/Symposium2005/sympinfo.htm

The day begins with experts from Red Hat, the European Union, and other major Software IP players discussing their views with one another in a topical panel debate entitled Software: Patents vs. Open Source.

Then, attend prolific author George Gilder’s exciting keynote presentation,
Patents vs. Latents – Invention and the Law.

This will be followed by informative breakout sessions given by IP experts from private practice, government, and academia.

View the full schedule and register at http://intprop.law.duke.edu.
Students attend free. CLE Credit available.

What: “Patenting Life and Its Parts: Ethics and Rights in the Political Economy of Intellectual Property”
Who: Professor Daniel Kevles of Yale University
Date: 04/07/05
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Location: Duke Law School, Room 3043
Lunch will be served

Since the late 1970s, patents have been issued on living organisms and their parts, including microrganisms, plants, animals, and genes. These developments enjoy strong support in a number of quarters, including the biotechnology industry, university technology transfer offices, and the patent bar, who hold that such patents guarantee to inventors the natural right to the fruits of their labors. However, they have also stimulated widespread dissent in the academy and among patients’ rights groups, religious groups, and social activists. Part of the dissent is ethical, a consideration that has no place in U.S. patent law but does explicitly appear in European patent law. Professor Kevles will discuss these and other issues during his lecture.

What: “Working Knowledge: Ownership of Workplace Knowledge and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930”
Who: Duke Law Professor Catherine Fisk
Date: 04/14/05
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Location: Duke Law School, Room 3043
Lunch will be served
(More details to come)

Professor Fisk is currently writing a book on intellectual property rights in the nineteenth-century employment relationship. Her recent publications include “Knowledge Work: New Metaphors for the New Economy,” Chicago-Kent Law Review (2004); “Authors at Work: The Origins of the Work-for-Hire Doctrine,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities (2003); and “Working Knowledge: Trade Secrets, Restrictive Covenants in Employment, and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1920,” Hastings Law Journal (2001). Prior to entering law teaching, she was an attorney for the Civil Appellate Division of the United States Department of Justice in the District of Columbia; an associate at Rogovin, Huge & Schiller in the District of Columbia; a law clerk for the Honorable William A. Norris, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; and a staff attorney for the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Podcaster Con – Help Make It So

Anton, who as MisterSugar created our Triangle Bloggers Con and the local blogger meet-ups, and Brian, who as AudioActivism was just featured on Voice of America’s story on podcasting, have come up with a plan (in the planning stage) for a Podcaster’s Convention.
You can get in on the planning now. Just go on over to the Podcastercon.org site and contribute to the Podcastercon wiki. Already some very good folks signed up and contributing.

Mark Cuban defends Grokster

Mark Cuban made serious money on the mysterious (to me) Broadcast.com. He also made the Dallas Mavericks into something serious when they once were a joke.
Now Cuban has a lot to say about digital content and innocation on his BlogMaverick.com. Even more to the point, Cuban who sees himself as a content man (I see him as a distribution guy more tho) is standing up for Grokster in the MGM v Grokster challenge and is even offering to finance the EFF’s supoport of Grokster.

The whole article is well worth a read, bur I won’t be giving much away by giving you the final paragraph:

Thats what is ahead of us if Grokster loses. Thats what happens if the RIAA is able to convince the Supreme Court of the USA that rather than the truth, which is , Software doesnt steal content, people steal content, they convince them that if it can impact the music business, it should be outlawed because somehow it will. It doesnt matter that the RIAA has been wrong about innovations and the perceived threat to their industry, EVERY SINGLE TIME. It just matters that they can spend more then everyone else on lawyers. Thats not the way it should be. So , the real reason of this blog. To let everyone know that the EFF and others came to me and asked if I would finance the legal effort against MGM. I said yes. I would provide them the money they need. So now the truth has been told. This isnt the big content companies against the technology companies. This is the big content companies, against me. Mark Cuban and my little content company. Its about our ability to use future innovations to compete vs their ability to use the courts to shut down our ability to compete. its that simple.

Wirelessness round here

Fiona Morgan has a long cover article in this week’s Independent about local wireless access. My favorite access place, Weaver Street Market, gets great coverage (yes Jeff that’s an intentional pun).
Back in January, I noticed an oddity in an Nextel advert. Fiona uses that same oddity to begin her story.
Also of note and also by Fiona is a sidebar about a Philly-like tale being played out in the smaller town of Laurinburg, NC (16,000 and once my home) between the town and BellSouth.

Pam Samuelson at Duke Thursday

Jennifer Jenkins of Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain sends us this announcement:

Professor Pamela Samuelson, an extremely influential expert on intellectual property in the information age, will be delivering the annual Meredith and Kip Frey Lecture in Intellectual Property at Duke Law School this Thursday, March 24, at 12:10. You are invited to attend. Details are below.

Please feel free to forward this announcement to anyone who may be interested in attending.

Professor Pamela Samuelson of the University of California at Berkeley

Enriching Discourse on the Public Domain

Date: 03/24/2005 Time: 12:10pm Location: Duke Law School, Room 3041 Reception to follow

Pamela Samuelson is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Pamela Samuelson is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, with joint appointments to the School of Information Management Systems and the School of Law, where she is a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. An internationally renowned expert on intellectual property in the information age, she teaches in the areas of intellectual property, cyberlaw and information policy, and has written extensively about the challenges that new information technologies pose for legal regimes, especially for intellectual property law. Professor Samuelson is an advisor for the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is a Fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The Meredith and Kip Frey Lecture in Intellectual Property is a lecture series that was established in 2000 by Duke Law School alumnus Kip Frey ’85 and his wife, Meredith, to increase discussion about emerging issues in the areas of intellectual property, cyberspace, and science and technology law. Noted intellectual property law scholars Lewis Branscomb, the Aetna Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management emeritus at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford University, and Yochai Benkler, professor of law at New York University, delivered previous lectures in this series.

West-ern Culture

Spent yesterday with Jessamyn West. She spoke to my class of graduating seniors and later to a larger group of mostly grad students and faculty. The slides from her talks are online and have some links that she didn’t have time to follow during the talks.
Jeff Pomerantz’s class came over to the later class and Jeff has some good notes on that talk on his blog.
Locked in the Library
Jessamyn and I took a quick tour of some of the collections in Wilson Library including the North Carolina Collection, the Rare Book Room and the North Carolina Gallery. In the Gallery, Keeper Neil Fulghum gave us a tour of the collections and restored rooms, especially the private library from the Hayes Plantation once the largest private library in the state (in the late 1800s). We were so caught up the talk and in the presentation of the Siamese Twins, Eng and Chang Bunker, that we ended up locked inside the building! We were not alone. University Librarian Sarah Michalak and two visitors as well as a family touring the campus were stuck there with us. Luckily the Keeper appeared and didn’t keep us there.

Jessamyn West at UNC Tomorrow!

NOTE TIME CHANGE! NOW at 2:00

Jessamyn's got the answers
Who: librarian.net’s rarin’ librarian Jessamyn West
When: Monday March 21 2:00 (Vernal Equinox)
Where: Freedom Forum Conference Center, 3rd floor, Carroll Hall
What: Postcards from the Other Edge of the Digital Divide. Political Choices and the Information Poor

About the talk: While we read blogs, tag content and swap lifehacks, people in rural areas are still learning to type. Public libraries are making many more technological choices just to provide basic information and Internet resources nowadays, yet the paradigm for learning to work well with technology differs dramatically from learning to work well with books. Jessamyn West will be talking about being a tech-savvy librarian in a profession struggling into the 21st Century.

More about Jessamyn West:
Jessamyn West is wrapping up her job as an outreach librarian at a rural public library in Vermont. She has worked in public, special and college libraries and done stints of on-the-fly reference at Burning Man, the WTO and the Democratic National Convention. She has maintained librarian.net, a weblog for radical librarians and other interested parties, since 1999. She is fascinated by the intersection of technology, the public sphere and politics.

Is That Legal? War on Freedom of Information

Sally, blogging for Eric Muller at isthatlegal.org, reports on the FOI restrictions as interfered with Dan Carter’s work on his bio of George Wallace and his book on the Scottsboro Boys. Carter goes on to talk about increasing restrictions on public record access (as described by Sally).
Then Sally notes a story in today’s paper. Legislation has been proposed to allow a town to sue its citizens who ask for public records. All the town would need do is assert that those records are not public afterall. Talk about a chilling effect.

Fetishizing the Original

Dropped in on the 75th Anniversary of the Southern Historical Collection this evening. Dropped in only on the last session of a day and a half long symposium. Sally had been to the whole conference. I did get to drop in on two great talks.
One by John Hope Franklin who talked about his experience as a young African-American historian coming to work in the archives of North Carolina, Louisiana and Alabama during the 1940s.
One by Ed Ayers who talked about digital projects including his famous and wonderful Valley of the Shadow project.
So far not obvious fetishizing or at least not as pertains to the title of this post.
In question time, one concerned audience member spoke of the feel of the paper, the scrawls on the back of a photograph (never mind that the photo had faded so far from the state in which it was seen in the past), the smell of the archive (this the smell of the archive rotting like a slow compost), etc.
This impassioned talk reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction. An essay in which Benjamin worries that photography will completely replace painting and that the value of the original, the aura, will be lost as seamless reproductions are made generally available.
Of course, we now see that Benjamin was completely wrong. That we rush to see the Mona Lisa because we are familiar with that painting. Our desire to see the “real” Mona Lisa is increased at each viewing of a reproduction, a surrogate.
What painting would we go to see by Grant Wood? Most likely the one we know from surrogates, from parodies, from endless reproductionsAmerican Gothic (it’s at the Art Institute of Chicago).
The ultimate fetishizing of the original resulted in the daring and somewhat bizzare theft of Edvard Munch’s Scream. Desire may have led to destruction of the desired and we will have been left with its many many many surrogates.

IBM Emerging Technologies Tool Kit and Portal

The Emerging Technologies Tool Kit may have already existed, but the Portal seems to have been announced only yesterday (March 18) according to the IBM ET Blog/.

The ETTK Portal says of itself:

The Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK) is a collection of technologies from IBM’s software development and research labs that have special relevance to IBM’s emerging software strategy. An ETTK technology indicates that IBM has attached importance to the emerging technology area, and is dedicated to giving it appropriate incubation and exposure.

These technologies are bundled to help technologists learn about a subject area by providing tools, example code, documentation and executable demos that illustrate IBM’s current approach on these topics.

The technology list below has links to the latest ETTK technologies. On-line demos or presentations are also available that show what each downloadable package has to offer. A Laszlo-powered technology navigator helps to get a quick sense of each ETTK technology (Macromedia Flash viewer required). Please be sure to subscribe to the ETTK RSS feed to receive notifications as new ETTK technologies are added and updated.

eTech announcements

Chris DiBona, who is now OpenSource Project manager at Google, announced http://code.google.com. Note that Google is using SourceForge to host their open projects. Chris named SourceForge back in the day. We still run a SourceForge download mirror on ibiblio.org

Larry Lessig announced that his book, Code, will be available for update via wiki beginning today (hosted by JotSpot)

Odeo the podcasting company presented (but not live or even in Beta quite yet).

BBC’s Paula Le Dieu will be heading up the Creative Commons International efforts from London.

Jeff Bezos announced and demoed A9.com’s openSearch.

Yahoo Tech Labs announced the Tech Buzz Market Game.

O’Reilly announced their new Where Conference to take place June 29 – 30 in SFO. It will:

explore the emerging consumer and enterprise ecosystems around location-aware technologies–ecosystems that increasingly impact the way we work and play. Location-determining technologies like GPS, RFID, WLAN, cellular networks and networked sensors enable an ever-growing array of capabilities from local search, mapping, and business analytics to enterprise integration, commercial applications, and software infrastructure.

Bloglines/Ask Jeeves purchase explained. (in more details that the article that I linked to there).

eTech – day one

I wasn’t on the elevator when it stalled with Doc, Steve Gillmor and Justin on board. That was definitely an upside of the conference. Each of them had an amusing version of the maybe 15 minutes of terror.

I was there to see Jeff Bezos click on YES when his computer prompted him that “Software update available install now?” I was amongst the ones shouting NO! Jeff went on to announce A9’s open search.

I was there when the folks from Yahoo! and O’Reilly announced the release of the Tech Buzz Game “a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends.”

I was delighted by Danny Hillis’ (of Applied Minds and founder of Thinking Machines) robots, maps, and highly modified H2.

There is more to say about today, but I’m competely pooped and others have some good initial takes down here.

Spooky Rebirth

DJ Spooky
Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, was on The Connection yesterday talking about his movie/show/music remix of the DW Griffith movie “Birth of a Nation.” Spooky aka Paul’s version is called “Rebirth of a Nation.”
I caught a very early version of the show at the first Creative Commons Launch party/gettogether in SFO a while back. Sally and her mother saw Spooky put it on down at Spoleto in Charleston, SC last spring.
Spooky uses video software to highlight the different aspects of the film, the racism, the stereotypes, the false heroism, etc while making a pretty damn good party mix.
On the Connection, he talked a lot about remix culture, remaking, and about reserving some rights. As usual, Miller is articulate and fun the listen to and not bad to dance to either.

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