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Interesting articles. This passage in the second one:

The Social Democrats at first had planned to hinder the passing of the law by boycotting the Reichstag session, rendering the body short of the two-thirds quorum needed for the vote, but led by Reichstag president Hermann Goering, the body changed its rules of procedure to allow the Reichstag president to declare any deputy "absent without excuse" to be considered as present in order to forestall obstruction.

Reminded me of this, from here:

Under Senate rules and tradition, a 2/3 vote is required to consider any bill on the floor of the Senate, giving 11 Senators the power to block a vote. The Republican Governor and Lieutenant Governor then determined they would do away with the 2/3 rule, and called another special session

When they changed the elevators at the Marriott Marquis Times Square, not everyone was impressed.

One of the Wikimedia Foundation board members (the only at-large elected member) serves on our Advisory Board: http://www.open-media.org/credits4.html

We're referencing a lot of Wikipedia articles throughout our site (Help pages, how-to articles).

And we'll be sharing our multimedia content (that's licensed under Creative Commons or is in the public domain) with Wikipedia -- and with anyone else who wants to host it.

-- jd

We're got a first-rate team of Drupal coders on the case. Throttle is being turned on (so blocks won't appear, but site will still function), unused modules are being removed (even unused ones contribute to load as code gets parsed) etc. etc.

There is also a *lot* of php code and mysql tables that need to be vetted. there is a ton of custom code that has been volunteer written for ourmedia - so part of the task too is assessing some of this as we move along.

one side note: as for the serving of the actual media - it all happens from archive.org which does give us some short delays here and there. but nothing unsolvable.

Remember, folks, we're an all-volunteer open-source project. People have put in hundreds of hours -- and we ain't gettin' paid for this!

So please be patient and be gentle (right!) as we work out the kinks. As the site says in bright lettering, we're in Alpha mode!

- jd, schmoozer in chief and co-founder

Here's one of the articles which talks about this case of fraud.

I can't believe they didn't require a paper trail. Simply can't believe it.

Here's one of the many instances of vote tampering. Thankfully, this one might provide enough intent to really fuck things up for Mr. Incumbent.

First, there's a public trust that goes with being the No. 1 company in any media field. As I wrote two years ago in a story that praised Google, the public is drawn to Google because it is fair, aboveboard, and won't accept secret payments for keyword searches and other payola that's now routine in the search industry. Google is holding itself out as an honest search company ("do no evil").

Second, the rights issue is irrelevant. Google News itself says it's trying to be fair and balanced, and if it isn't, it has to go back and look at its algorithms (that's what Google News' chief scientist told me this morning).

They're trying to get it right. Now they just have to figure out how to get there.

jd lasica (the article's author)

While I disagree with most everything Valenti said, his views are widely shared in the content community, and I would expect his successor to follow in his footsteps.

Valenti would undoubtedly respond to the unfortunate theft of your DVD player and DVDs this way: why should DVDs be treated any differently than other physical items that the burglar might have taken: a wallet, a purse, a jacket in the back seat? you wouldn't have the right to go out and replace those items except by paying for them again.

That's not my view -- I wouldn't see anything wrong with downloading DVD movies or CDs that had been stolen from me -- but certainly there are a lot of people who would take the opposite view.

Not just Valenti.

- JD Lasica

- Although RCA is the manufacturer of this Hollywood movie filtering technology, they had nothing to do with creating it. They're licensing it from ClearPlay, which has been in the DVD filtering biz since 2000.

- None of this has to do with fair use or derivative works (despite what Hollywood's attorneys may claim). The original DVD doesn't change; the only thing that varies is the individual viewing experience. That's the critical difference here. Hollywood shouldn't be able to control how you watch movies in the privacy of your own home.

- The Directors Guild is a lot more ticked off about this than the studios are. For the studios, it just offers another revenue stream, particularly from conservative Christians who don't want their kids watching movies laced with profanities and sexual innuendo. The directors are apoplectic about this, though, and they're still in litigation against ClearPlay.

- Europe has a tradition of "moral rights" where artists can control their works after a sale. But there's no such tradition in the U.S. See Drew Clark's article in Slate on the subject.

- More software DVD players are on the way from the parent company of TVGuardian. They'll be in Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Sears, Circuit City and dozens of other outlets within two months.

I wrote an article on this for Business 2.0 a couple of months ago, but they haven't run it yet. I'm also writing about this for a book I'm writing on the digital media revolution.

My view of all this? Directors, producers, and other traditional power centers need to acknowledge that their creative control does not extend into private living rooms. How we consume fluid digital media, how we interact with it and view it in private, should be solely our choice. -- J.D. Lasica

The giant of cyberlaw has a few prescriptions for this sad state of affairs. One is Creative Commons, the organization housed at Stanford that gives creators greater freedom over how to manage and share their digital handiworks. But a more fundamental solution lies in Lessig's call for Congress to revisit the very basis of copyright to shorten copyright terms and, importanty, to rewire its fundamentals so that everything on the Internet does not automatically fall into the regulatory black hole governed by copyright law. Lessig suggests (as others have done) remixing the law so that copyright comes into play not when someone makes a copy of something for personal use but only when someone is engaged in the true piracy of profiteering.

His final suggestion is one of his best: Fire lots of lawyers.