Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Thursday, June 19, 2003

Sweden To Outlaw File Sharing, Crypto Breaking? -- Comment()
Slashdot: "The Swedish Department of Justice has today proposed a bill to be put into effect, if it passes Parliament, on the 1st of January, 2004. It is in accordance to EU directives, but will also criminalize the downloading of material from the Internet without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Furthermore, it will become illegal to break cryptos, circumvent copy protection (mod chips et al), copy books, and as I understand it, use software that is designed to help with any of these tasks, and many other things."

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More on open access to data: "The findings [...] are based on the central principle that publicly funded research data should be openly available to the maximum extent possible. Availability should be subject only to national security restrictions; protection of confidentiality and privacy; intellectual property rights; and time-limited exclusive use by principal investigators. Publicly funded research data are a public good, produced in the public interest. As such they should remain in the public realm. This does not preclude the subsequent commercialization of research results in patents and copyrights, or of the data themselves in databases, but it does mean that a copy of the data must be maintained and made openly accessible." [FOS News]

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Great architecture is great politics: "Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung have a comprehensive and powerful view of layers in network architecture, nicely linking that architecture to policy implications, in particular, how governments regulate." [Lessig Blog]

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GVU - Global Virtual University: "The Global Virtual University (GVU) is an online university for sustainable development, and has a particular objective to meet the educational needs of the developing world." [Serious Instructional Technology]

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Weblogs are ten years old: "I realized—for all the talk about weblogs these days, weblogs are actually very old. [...] In fact—I did some quick checking, and I think weblogs were invented ten years and four days ago. Check out the June 14, 1993 date at the bottom of the archive for What’s New with NCSA Mosaic. [...] More modern weblogs date back to 1997. For instance, here are the first posts for Scripting News and CamWorld." [inessential.com]

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iTunes — The "i" Doesn't Stand For Innovation: "As songs are increasingly sold one by one online, the musical creativity and risk-taking associated with the album format will decline." (Salon via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]