Kevin Schofield's Weblog
Musings on life, kids, work, the Internet, Microsoft, politics, orcas, etc.

 





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  Saturday, October 22, 2005


Cool conference coming up: the Women's Game Conference. Proudy sponsored by Microsoft Research. Looks like there's going to be a whole lot of very interesting talks.
11:15:58 AM    comment []

It was a busy week on the copyright front this week, as several book publishers drew a line in the sand over Google's efforts to scan a large number of books to improve their search offering -- and for whatever other purpose Google decides to put it to.

Eric Schmidt ran an "advertorial" in the Wall Street Journal explaining their position and making very bold claims about how what they're doing is in the public interest and completely covered by "fair use." Funny, though, how he defines fair use completely in terms of Google's customers' activities, and not Google's... even though Google is the one scanning and digitizing the books, will be serving up ads, will be tracking all sorts of usage data about the people who access that data, will probably take a cut of any book sales that ensue from people searching for a particular book, and will use the data internally to improve their own search technologies. Google profits in a big way from this, which is not something contemplated at all by "fair use" in the letter of the law and has explicitly been ruled against in case law. But Google doesn't think they need explicit permission from copyright holders to profit from their work. Do no evil? You be the judge. (yeah, I have a pretty transparent opinion of this)

John Battelle, a pundit who follows the search business closely, has revised his opinion a bit on this, after talking to the publishers. More interesting, though, is Nicholas Carr's thoughts. Carr is the (in)famous author of the Harvard Business Review paper "IT Doesn't Matter" and while I generally disagree with a lot of stuff that he says, in this case I agree with both Carr and Battelle that this is shaping up to be a defining test case for fair use in copyright law.

 


10:53:01 AM    comment []

Here's a video explaining a new user feedback mechanism at Microsoft.

And I thought they were just issuing new chairs to everyone to try to raise morale.

(watch the video... you'll understand)


10:22:11 AM    comment []

So last week when we were doing the College Tour, Bill Gates got some questions from students about the whole HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray fight. First of all, I was surprised but delighted that students would follow an issue like that so closely. Second, I was surprised that Bill's answer (about why MS is for HD-DVD and against Blu-Ray) was different than what had previously been reported in the press. It isn't an issue that I had been following closely (the only things I knew were things I'd read in the press), but it definitely caught my attention when Bill said something new and significant on the topic.

Here's Bill on the record, echoing the comments he made in open Q&A sessions during his talks. And here's Ars Technica with more background information. The bottom line for Bill is that he is trying to defend consumers' rights to make legal and legitimate copies of media for their own personal use and convenience -- which Blu-Ray does not mandate and a studio could forbid.

Interesting follow-on point: Bill suggests that this is a debate over the last physical media format that will ever exist -- after this, it will just be bits on hard disks. And if this one turns out to be anti-consumer, the current DVD standard might be the the last one that matters. Interesting point; I wonder if he's right.

But at any rate, good for Bill for sticking up for consumers' rights.


10:08:06 AM    comment []


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Last update: 11/1/2005; 5:42:06 AM.

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