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How copyright is killing culture. Cory Doctorow: Today's Globe and Mail contains an amazing, disturbing article about documentary films that are disappearing from the world because the filmmakers can't afford to re-clear copyrights to the archival footage they contain. The makers of the series no longer have permission for the archival footage they previously used of such key events as the historic protest marches or the confrontations with Southern police. Given Eyes on the Prize's tight budget, typical of any documentary, its filmmakers could barely afford the minimum five-year rights for use of the clips. That permission has long since expired, and the $250,000 to $500,000 needed to clear the numerous copyrights involved is proving too expensive. This is particularly dire now, because VHS copies of the series used in countless school curriculums are deteriorating beyond rehabilitation. With no new copies allowed to go on sale, "the whole thing, for all practical purposes, no longer exists," says Jon Else, a California-based filmmaker who helped produce and shoot the series and who also teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California, Berkeley. Link (Thanks, Mom, and everyone else who submitted this!) [Boing Boing] 4:36:23 PM

What's wrong with my BitTorrent Blog Posting Plugin - - - - I had tested it with Conversant and Radio Userland, but several people also wanted to use it with Movable Type and Wordpress publishing platforms. So, I set out to install those two and test my plugin. The problem is perhaps my own thinking that the MetaWeblog API was clear enough for everyone to be clear as to implementing it. The actual post of a blog post is RSS 2.0 verbatim tags... However, various platforms do not yet support RSS 2.0, let alone the exact literal method of posting with the MetaWeblog API. Dave's vision is a round-trip method of posting and reuse based on XML-RPC so as to support each tag either for posting or for consumption through the feed. It's quite a nice dream, if everyone was on the same plane. But everyone wants different things when they implement blog publishing platforms. It appears to be a mix of legacy support, greater compatibility, or an average set of compatible implementations......... in order to appeal to the most people. So, RSS enclosures, in my opinion, are where it's at. Again, RSS 2.0 ENCLOSURES ARE WHERE IT IS AT. From Podcasting to BitTorrent-powered Aggregators, to the fact that Blogdigger and others are supporting rich media through RSS 2.0 enclosures. But creating such as feed has been my intention since the inception of this project, and the community is thick with all kinds of special implementations. I've seen how much trouble, for instance, Seth Dillingham has had with Conversant (an incredible piece of software) in trying to figure out all the nuances of all the different methods of what appears to be the exact same thing. But making this stuff easy for users appears to be a ways off. Let me recap my experiences: Conversant Seth is the man. This software (based on Manilla) is a great set of content management tools encompassing everything that you could ever need to integrate a blog into any IT organization. If you are trying to get *your* work place into blogging, Conversant is so great. Kid gloves exist for those that need it, but don't worry, they come off quick. The existing protocol support is amazing (email, NNTP!!!) This was the primary testing that I did, and RSS 2.0 feeds haven't been implemented yet, but Seth's support for the < link > tag will facilitate most .torrent and mp3 downloading aggregators that look at the link tag. His enclosure system, is spot on, and works well. Radio Userland Userland was my second tool. Despite the free hosting service not supporting .torrent attachments, everything seemed to work fine, and the enclosures came back out in the RSS 2.0 feed. Then again, this is Dave's product, and so it works ;) Wordpress This is the one I wanted to work, and I wound up modifying my code (look for a new release soon) to support it, and other platforms. Wordpress seems to be in perpetual rewrite for the time being, but their support of the newMediaObject is working right now. However, the RSS 2.0 notation of those new files does not happen. So, I modified the code to update the < description > part of the post with a link to the .torrent file. Use Feedburner's media service in order to create the final RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures. Movable Type I couldn't get this working on Windows (sorry). Drupal Drupal was much like Wordpress in that it supported the uploads just fine, but the < enclosure > tags were just not there. I dug around, and they are wanting to do this bad, and I tried a few of the moduals linked here and there, but it still did not generate the RSS 2.0 feed with the enclosures. Great product for more than blogs, but again, my rewrite will now just make a blog post with the link, so you'll have to use Feedburner's service in order to generate the RSS 2.0 feed. ... So, that's been my testing experience. In a nutshell, I can see why this stuff is challenging given that there are so many platforms and so many implementations of the same standard (MetaWeblog API). With the popularity of Podcasts, and this project, I expect this to catch on, but as for now, creating a blog-post client that is to work with multiple platforms, it seems that it may be around 6 months off for total round-trip no-hassel RSS 2.0 generation of .torrent enclosures on these platforms. As a side note, I now know why no one is downloading this, but are downloading the automatic RSS 2.0 w/enclosures feed modification for the built in Azureus tracker. That one actually works! My plan is to provide the updated blog client that just provides the link in the post. That way Feedburner's service will see it. My other plan is to create an FTP upload client that will create an RSS 2.0 feed and then upload your .torrent files, but I'm not entirely sure exactly how I'll implement that just yet (how will I handle multiple files? Perhaps I can just make the last one you select the single item in the feed?) Obviously, a lot of people are now able to create Podcasts, so maybe this stuff doesn't have to be so easy. Almost everyone that blogs has jumped a hurdle of some kind, so whatever works for them is I guess how it gets done. It would be nice to have a simple blog-posting tool for BitTorrent, and I'll continue to work on, but I think some of these publishing platforms need to mature with RSS 2.0 enclosures before this works without a hitch. - Thomas Winningham [WritTorrent] 11:23:17 AM

Why P2P File Sharing Is Good: The P2P Manifesto. Marco Montemagno, an Italian new media communication expert, entrepreneur and blogger, who has worked and collaborated with some of the most established media corporations including Italy's RAI and Murdoch's Sky TV network, has just published online a notable P2P manifesto, in which he shares his un... [Learning - Educational Technologies :: Robin Good's Latest News] 11:06:45 AM