...by the inmates...for the inmates...
Sunday, August 25, 2002Ford Testifies to Stop Ride Sharing
Just the tip of the iceberg. Go read the entire article. Sound familiar?
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2002/08/ride_sharing.html
"Washington DC - William Ford Jr., CEO of the Ford Motor Company testified before Congress about the nationwide problem of ride sharing. Ford cited ride swapping as the number one reason for the the company's declining revenue. "These 'pool pirates are depriving Ford of rightful income. Three sometimes four people are sharing rides. Less wear and tear on the cars means fewer new car purchases. That's revenue that's being robbed from Ford."
A recent study by the Gartner Group supports Ford's claims that ride sharing runs rampant across the US. The study showed showed that children under the age of 16 were the biggest offenders. Almost 99% of children in that age group said they had shared a ride in the past week. The study also showed that ride sharing had spread to the Internet in the form of "Car Pool" message boards where the "Road Robbers" set up their swaps...."
Fair Use Is Dead, Killed By Congress. Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.
Jenny, the Shifted Librarian, posted this at the end of July. Her excerpt is a great introduction. I recommend you read the entire Chronicle piece.
Copyright as Cudgel (emphasis is Jenny's)
[The Shifted Librarian]""When Congress brought copyright law into the digital era, in 1998, some in academe were initially heartened by what they saw as compromises that, they hoped, would protect fair use for digital materials. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Recent actions by Congress and the federal courts -- and many more all-too-common acts of cowardice by publishers, colleges, developers of search engines, and other concerned parties -- have demonstrated that fair use, while not quite dead, is dying. And everyone who reads, writes, sings, does research, or teaches should be up in arms. The real question is why so few people are complaining....
Back in the 20th century, if someone had accused you of copyright infringement, you enjoyed that quaint and now seemingly archaic guarantee of due process. Today, due process is a lot harder to pursue, and the burden of proof increasingly is on those accused of copyright infringement. For the copyright act, in essence, makes the owner of every Internet service provider, content host, and search engine an untrained copyright cop. The default action is censorship....
Besides prompting such censorship, the act has another major provision, which upends more than 200 years of copyright law that has, until now, served democracy well: the principle that what copyright law does not specifically protect remains available to all to use, for whatever purpose the user sees fit. The DMCA bars the circumvention of electronic access controls that protect online works, a provision that seems to block the use of even those portions of works that might be in the public domain....
As a result, course packets that used to be easy to assemble and affordable to students are now a hassle and a big expense. Professors are abandoning them in favor of prefabricated published readers or less-convenient library reserves. Getting permission to quote from a song or to include an old photograph in a scholarly publication is getting to be prohibitively expensive. Some professional journals are demanding that academic authors assign all rights in all media in perpetuity to them, then gouging subscribers and libraries for the right to read materials that academics weren't compensated for in the first place. Online journals are replacing paper volumes, allowing publishers to extort all sorts of user restrictions from libraries. And those are just the micro-horror stories, the short-term costs of current trends....
The second rhetorical strategy involves focusing on users of copyrighted material -- everyone who reads, writes, watches, photographs, listens, or sings. This is a more pragmatic approach, intended to warn people that the harmless acts they have taken for granted for years, like making a mixed tape or CD for a party, or 'time shifting' television programs and skipping commercials, are threatened by recent changes in law and technology. The organization digitalconsumer.org is promoting 'The Consumer Technology Bill of Rights,' which makes private, noncommercial uses positive rights instead of weak defenses to accusations of infringement....
We must be blunt about the current system's threats to free speech, intellectual freedom, and the free flow of information. We must be careful not to be trapped in nihilistic rhetoric about the 'end of copyright.' Copyright need not end if we can rehabilitate and rehumanize it. Our jobs depend on it." [The Chronicle, via LISNews.com]
Garden, Wedding Food and Day After
Watered hillside. Repaired hand on garden angel, which deer broke several weeks ago.
After reviewing finger sandwich costs with potential vendor, we've decided to make these ourselves. The vendor wanted $2.00 each for tiny croissants filled with various meats and cheeses. We expect about 200 people, so we'll need to make about 400 of these on Friday and stash them in the commercial refrigerators at the church. We'll use visiting family members to form a production line.
Crystal and Nate will not take a honeymoon. Instead, they will open presents at our house the day after the wedding. Since we would not let Crystal have the hamburgers and hotdogs she wanted for her reception, we will have a barbecue Sunday afternoon. This will be as small a group as we can manage. Hopefully just people staying at our house, the Shermans, the Kelseys, and the few people who might come from out of town.