Monday, May 13, 2002
CD copy protection
Mark Pilgrim
New copy-protected music discs that look like CDs (but aren't, technically, CDs) won't actually stop professional piracy, since they can be copied by off-the-shelf CD duplicators. However, they will break your Mac horribly if you insert them into your Mac's CD drive. Now, rumors (and they are just rumors at this point) abound that the copy protection can be broken with a felt-tip pen. I guess this is what the past will look like someday: professional pirates selling perfect illegal copies, and consumers with legally purchased discs inked up with Magic Marker just so they can use them safely.
"Special" Networks
Bob Franskton
It is far more valuable to just give us the means to solve our own problems. Generic connectivity is one part of it.
A New Direction for Intellectual Property
Amy Harmon
A group of law and technology scholars are setting up Creative Commons, a nonprofit company that will develop ways for artists, writers and others to easily designate their work as freely shareable.
Gilmore On Hardware-Restricted Content
John Gilmore
Intel's chips have no way to tell what permission that individual chip owner has under the copyright law, for many reasons. (The laws change, copyrights expire, individuals or companies get more rights than the general public does because they signed licenses, there are things that everyone has the legal right to do with data whether or not it is copyrighted, etc etc etc.)
I especially liked this comment at Slashdot.
Dan Gillmor
I've been thinking that Intel was taking a lead among technology companies in recognizing the danger posed by the control freaks in Hollywood. It seems that I was thinking wrong.
Adam Curry
Then it hit me. I live in Holland. US laws don't apply. We make computers here too.
John Robb
This is part of the USG's attempt to destroy next gen tech dev in the US. Between bans on cloning and potential mandatory DRM, we are poised to kill the golden goose.
Monoculture, an Artifact of the 20th Century?
Dave Winer
Maybe what's happening now, but it's hard to see, is that each of us is taking more responsibility for getting our own information, for creating our own entertainment, and not giving that power to the centralized entertainment and information industries.
Skywalker: The Family Tree
Brad King
Luke and Leia are related. No problem. Anakin and Padmé are their parents. Still got it. So who the heck is Bail Organa, why does it matter who Qui-Gon Jinn was, and what is a stormtrooper? The answers are here.
Tacit knowledge and software usability
Jon Udell
When we narrate, we externalize what we know. We convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge.
