Category Archives: good code

I’ve been a fan of dotSub for sometime. The site enables collaborative subtitling of video. So far, the subtitling is just different languages. Very cool would be subtitling as commentary (think Pop-up video). Watch a CC video, or the infamous “my pirate kid” video from ARTE.de:

Sony has launched its YouTube competitor – eyeVio. By default, uploads are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. You can read about it here. We in the CC community will be celebrating about it around the world tonight. Yesterday was IP Day (really, no joke). Today is Sony Day! Continue reading →

As reported at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, Shloss v. Estate of James Joyce has settled. As you can read in the settlement agreement, we got everything we were asking for, and more (the rights to republish the book). This is an important victory for a very strong soul, Carol Shloss, and for others in her field. I am grateful to our team for their hard work. (Contrary to some news reports, while I was instrumental in bringing this case and in setting its strategy, the settlement was effected by Anthony Falzone and David Olson.) (Press Release).

But this is only the first in what I expect will be a series of cases defending the rights of academics against improperly aggressive copyright holders. I hope this is the last case against this particular defendant. But we’ve already seen others that may prove as egregious as this. One important part of the mission of the “Fair Use Project” is to defend the rights of scholars and academics, drawing more clearly and practically the boundary that “fair use” is intended to defend in theory. Stay tuned. Continue reading →

Don’t miss Congressman Doyle’s comments about the artist, Girl Talk. Continue reading →

I couldn’t resist a second round on Orphans. This one’s very short (about 8 minutes). It was inspired by the comments/debate about the first Orphans post.

You can download/stream it here.

Or watch it at Google Video below.

So these are taking longer than expected, and now I’ve added a topic I didn’t originally flag (though in 1984-fashion, I’ve hidden this fact by simply changing the original blog entry).

The subject here is spectrum policy. The argument is that we deregulate spectrum. “Deregulate” not in the sense that we auction spectrum. Auctions require a gov’t created property right; that’s a form of spectrum regulation. “Deregulate” in the sense that we set off large swaths of spectrum for unlicensed use. Congress has made this impossible in the short term for any significant chunk of spectrum. But we do have an important opportunity to set free “white space.”

The argument might be best introduced with the following hypothetical:

Imagine the government nationalized the hotdog market, and then sold to the highest bidder the “right to sell hotdogs” at in a particular place for a particular period of time. These rights — the right to sell hotdogs — could be structured to be a kind of property. The market would thus allocate them to the highest valued use. And the initial sale would raise lots of money for the federal treasury.

Are you in favor of that? And if not, then why are you in favor of spectrum auctions? “Because certain uses require regulation,” you say. But then why not push towards uses that don’t require regulation?

Download or stream the video here (27 minutes).

Watch it on Google video below:

My argument builds upon a point I made in a piece published in Cato’s Regulation. You can download that piece here. Continue reading →

“Using detailed records of transfers of digital music files, we find that file sharing has had no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample,” the study reports. “Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album’s weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero.”

Study here.

(Thanks, M.David!) Continue reading →

As reported on BoingBoing: This is extraordinary. Watch it. Share it.

(Thanks, Neil!) Continue reading →

You’ll remember Roger Ailes’ view of Robert Greenwald’s film, Outfoxed. As reported in 2004, Ailes said:

Any news organization that doesn’t support our position on copyright is crazy. Next week, we could take a month’s worth of video from CNN International and do a documentary “Why does CNN hate America?” You wouldn’t even have to do the hatchet job Outfoxed was. You damn well could run it without editing. CNN International, Al-Jazeera and BBC are the same in how they report-mostly that America is wrong and bad. Everybody should stand up and say these people don’t have the right to take our product anymore. They don’t have a right to take a year’s worth of Dan Rather or Ted Koppel and edit it any way they want. It puts journalism at risk.

Well, it seems Fox has now gotten religion. According to this LA Times report, Sean Hannity will air excerpts that had been removed from ABC’s controversial “Path to 9/11.” The excerpts “depict then-national security advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger refusing to approve a CIA request to attack Osama bin Laden” – an event Berger said never happened.

I can understand Fox’s “fair use” argument — though of course its tougher with work that’s not been published. But it’s really good to see that Fox now understands the importance of “fair use.” Continue reading →