I'm listening to a presentation on the "Digital Bookmobile,"  Brewster Kahle's latest project with the Internet Archive project. Lisa Reins described how  digital bookmobiles are making the rounds in this country, India and elsewhere.  It currently has 9000 titles on line, but aspires to putting as many as it can, God and the DMCA willing.  Books are printed using on-demand printing technology.  Brewster descries the recent extensions to copyrights that put alot of works beyond the public domain for over 100 years, and observed that even many of the publications that are in the public domain are effectively not since they are unavailable in any media other than electronic - which can be copyrighted!

The Digital Bookmobile is a cool, progressive project!

4:14:58 PM    

It's amazing to see the enthusiasm by which both the feds and the stat governments are rushing to eliminate as many of our Constitutional rights as they can during the grace period post War.  There's a good report in Wired about how states are rushing to pass their own DCMA bills - as if the first wasn't draconian enough. Read about it here, and then do something about it!

3:51:37 PM    

I'm attending the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this week. I missed it last year and have been eagerly anticipating it. I'm sitting in Dan Gilmour's session on Digital Rights Management.  If you want to add a guaranteed agiprop topic to a conference, you can't do any better than adding a session that talks about Digital Rights Management and the Digital Millenium Copy Right Act. As you might suspect, I believe the DMCA is an egregious violation of our rights to fair use and fair copy. Here's a pix of the session taken with  May Woo's    Sidekick nee Hiptop phone cum organizer cum digital camera.

Check out the O'Reilly link - it is a good running account of the happenings at this event. May told me about an interesting digital photo sharing blog for folks using these ubiquitous hiphugging PDA/phone/cameras, Hiptop Nation - i haven't had a chance to check it out but here's the  link.

BTW, a good friend of mine,  Bill Rosenblatt is an authority and consultant on DRM issues. It's a complex issue cause intellectual property owners do have a right to their copyrights, but are threatening ordinary information consumer's rights by wielding the law to protect their own rights. They just don't get that the best way to beat a pirate is to take away his economic incentive to make illegal copies by implementing a useful and workable and affordable electronic content distribution network of their own. As Paul Saffo said at a Seybold keynote in 2000:

"We are in for an age of policy by piracy. This is good, because if the pirates don't do it, then lawyers will, and if the lawyers don't, then God help us, Congress will."

 

10:47:50 AM