b.cognosco

UAE Copyright Law

Interesting clause in this decree from Abu Dabi that allows anyone to petition the Copyright Ministry for reproduction rights once a work is three years old.

Authors to enjoy copyright protection. Gulf News Jun 29 2002 7:29PM ET [Moreover - IP and patents news]

Really, Really Stupid Copyright Trick

Silence is intellectual property. John Cage's 4'33", a lengthy silent track on one of his avant-garde albums, constitutes an original work for copyright purposes. This means that other composers who include silent tracks have made a derivative work from Cage's silence. Cage's representatives have served producer Mike Batt with a legal nastygram asserting that he infringed on Cage's copyright with his 60-second silent track on the latest Planets album.

As my mother said when I told her, 'which part of the silence are they claiming you nicked?'.

(via MeFi)

AmphetaDesk Integration

Radio seems to be a little persnickety about where images are located, and downright ornery about the syntax in img src tags. I have everything working properly on the Home Page, but I still don't have it right on all the category and support pages. I don't understand why.

Now AmphetaDesk users can subscribe to my RSS feed with a single click on the XML_Pill icon, the same way Radio users can suscribe by clinking on the XML_CoffeeCup. AmphetaDesk provides clear instructions on integrating AmphetaDesk into a site. I just did a cut-and-paste of the code into my Home Page template. Again, the syntax is persnickety -- especially the placement of / at the end of things. Radio couldn't seem to decide if the image path needed / in front of it or not.

I don't know Userland lingo or Frontier so this makes no sense to me. But I just looked for similar code examples, kept fiddling with it, and it finally worked. For the Home Page I did not put a / at the front of the image path.

But, like I said, the image isn't rendering on any of the other pages. That may be the problem.

It's the same with the Powells.com link. Everything works fine on the Home Page, but Category and support pages have a broken image link. I've submitted a query to the Userland Discussion group on this.

Haloo! Lawrence Lee responded already and pointed me to the radio.macro.imageref macro to solve this little instability. Thanks Lawrence!

It seems like the imageref macro may not work. I may have to point to the full path of the image on the Cloud site. A hard coded link will break when I transfer Radio to my own server because the path will change. Bummer. I don't like that but it will have to do.

Update: Doh! Somebody slap me...

The imageref macro generates the img src tag so there is no need to include it inside a tag. Thanks again to Lawrence for straightening me out.

Seek and Ye Shall Find -- PicoSearch

It was simple, painless, and quick (three of the finest words in the English language). Go to the web site, sign up for an account, point PicoSearch to the home page for your site, and let it build an index of your pages. That's it.

Once the index is built you get an e-mail with account info and you can go back to the PicoSearch site, login and administer your account. There are a variety of buttons and logos you can choose, and there are several macros you can choose to go on your site and enable your search.

I chose a simple query box. I copied the HTML text out of the window, pasted it into my Home Page template just above the calendarMacro, and Voila! I had a search engine for my pages. I had to go back to the template and enter a couple of break tags in the PicoSearch code to keep column with where I wanted it, but it was a snap. I had no problems with this one. If you don't mind having the PicoSearch logo on your site it's a no-brainer. Highly recommended.

New Addition to the Home Page -- Blogroll

First I started working with Links for Blogroll, RSS and Subscriptions. This is a way to store a separate list (Radio outline .opml file) that contains all the links to blogs (or other sources) you want to list on your site. Radio has a macro that reads the list, converts the contents to HTML, and puts it on your page.

It's easier than hand coding the links and it's easier to update than a template. The other benefit is the macro adds a Link Header in your Home Page template that points to the OPML file, allowing others to quickly grab the entire list of your links and add them to their own. Now, I haven't actually used this yet, and I'm not sure I would. But Winer says the link enables new kinds of harvesters, crawlers, and directories. I trust him.

There is discussion about some technical stuff I don't completely understand here. And Jake Savin's directions didn't work just as described.

First, it didn't work at all to replace my <%navigatorLinks%> macro with the suggested BlogRoll macro. I could never get the Navigator Links to show up. I tried several times to to include the navigatorLinks macro into the BlogRoll files as instructed but it never worked. I finally left the navigatorLinks macro in and moved the blogroll macro to another location on the template.

When I did that it worked. I got a little confused by the delay between making a modification and seeing it on the page. Sometimes I had to go to the Radio app to Radio --> Publish --> Entire Site and wait a while to get everything updated properly. But eventually it did. And it looks much better.

You can format individual lines (nodes) in the outline using HTML commands so you can control font size and color, etc. And now I can easily add new sites, or recategorize old ones by just dragging them around in the Radio Outliner. Pretty cool.

Sound Approach to Copyright Protection

In Digital Pirates Beware (subscription required), Wade Roush discusses:

the latest digital fingerprinting technology to scan public computer networks for unauthorized copies of music files, still images, movies and software. And they can watch as those illicit files spread from hard drive to hard drive—whether or not the files bear the invisible digital “watermarks” often used to identify their original owners.

My take on this, subject to some verification, is that these technologies can prowl the public P2P networks looking for specific files, generate some unique ID info based on the file, then catalog any other instances of that same file it may find. This provides content creators with an important tool to understand how much of their work is being pirated, where it's originating, and where it is spreading. More importantly, it puts the burden of proof where it belongs -- on the copyright holder -- without forcing prior restraint on honest purchasers.

While Roush's article intimates that the fingerprinters can scan my hard drive I suspect this is true only to the extent that I participate in publicly accessible P2P networks. It's theoretically possible to get past my firewall, install software on my machine, bypass my ZoneAlarm Pro monitoring and sneak packets out to some nefarious agency, but not very damned likely.

It's rather more likely that these guys are doing nothing more than scanning a directory I have voluntarily opened to public query by logging it into LimeWire, KaZaA, or similar sharing software. They have every right to scan it and that's the beauty of this approach. P2P systems only work to the extent that you open yourself up by being a peer, and once you are a peer you have given implied consent to having your "shared" files scanned by anyone who is interested.

I like this idea. If you are trafficking in pirated software the copyright owners have as much right to shut down your P2P "storefront" as they do to shutter a street corner vendor selling stolen watches. This is the sort of enforcement that makes rampant pirating of stolen material unattractive to the average user, while leaving them free to use their own files as they see fit. It also leaves the P2P networks free of overwrought regulation and ill-conceived legislation, allowing for the development of innovative -- and legitimate -- uses.

As usual, free enterprise has devised a snappy solution to a thorny problem without steamrolling users, while the bureacrats and bumbling behemoths have seen it as just one more chance to roll out a stupid world domination strategy.

I'd be interested to hear if you think I'm off base on this one.

For more info on this stuff see:
BayTSP
Cyveillance
LoudEye
Relatable

Details on TCPA/Palladium

TCPA / Palladium FAQ. [Privacy Digest]

A Dangerous Troika -- Government, Publishers, and PC Industry

Lawrence Lessig first introduced us to this foul juxtaposition in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. And in this Reason Magazine interview about his newest book, The Future of Ideas, says, "In my first book I was quite pessimistic. It turns out I was not pessimistic enough."

The problem is more than just starting down a "slippery slope". The motives for each of the three parties are quite different and, individually, their initiatives could be modified or repealed to a tolerable level. But when fate and circumstance align the goverment with two of the strongest economic powers in our nation to push for massive control architectures we have little means of fighting back save extraordinary diligence, a stoic skepticism, and an outright refusal to buy products that attempt to control our lives.

The courts are supposed to watch the government, the govermnent should be providing some limited "general welfare" oversight on business, and business is supposed to be responsive to its customers. None of that seems to be happening right now. Houston, we have a problem...

Dave Winer at Scripting News found the tweney report for 2002-06-28: Broken trust.

Windows XP has some rudimentary self-protection technologies built in, but Palladium won't appear full-blown until the next major release of Windows in a couple of years. That's because Palladium depends on specialized chips being developed by Intel and AMD, which will handle the encryption and authentication. In the early stages, this will rely on a so-called "Fritz" chip (named after Sen. Fritz Hollings, the sponsor of a draconian digital rights bill), which verifies that your computer is running an approved combination of hardware and software -- before your computer even boots up. Once Fritz certifies the system, it can pass that certification along to third parties, such as Microsoft, Disney, Sony, or AOL/Time Warner. Later, "Fritz" capabilities will be built right into the central processor, making it next-to-impossible to intercept unencrypted data. Everything coming in and out of the CPU will be encrypted and digitally signed. [...]