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"Odd, though you are correct, that means that a live recording can be recorded live by anyone because it is not copyrighted (because it hasn't been fixed)."

Not quite. I am not sure of te full details, but you might want to check on the laws against "bootlegging." I do know there was a ruling in the US that one was unconstitutional as there was no time limit. (At least IIRC.)

all the best,

drew

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/43358

"Oh, and the telephone.

And letters.

And talking."

Works (at least in some places) don't get automatic copyrights until they are fixed. If you think about your examples, you will see that some don't necessarily have this feature.

Overall though, I agree with your sentiment. The internet is one big copyrigt violation machine, with the possible defense of fair use.

I have had someone (I think it was a lawyer even, I can't remember though) tell me that the copy that gets made in my cache when I read a company's web site constitutes a copyright violation.

all the best,

drew

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/44851

"Car companies (at least here) are _already_ banned by advertising regulations from inciting people to speed."

Where is here? In the US, it seems that is one of the big come ons. Zoom Zoom anyone?

all the best,

drew

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/44851

'I, for one, don't want to government walking around declaring contracts I've made with another party as void because something is "too far."'

I am pretty sure your government already does this:

Try entering into a contract wit someone to be their slave. I am pretty sure it is not going to work.

all the best,

drew

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/44851

I am getting to the point where I will not be giving my eyeballs to those who try and pull stuff like this.

I enjoy watching some games coverage, but I can give it up.

What, do we need to start the amateur games again?

all the best,

drew

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/43358

"which would give them all essentially the same advantage from the patents as if they had simply published the invention as prior art."

If the system was working properly, I would agree pretty much with this point. Since it isn't, publishing as prior art is no guarantee that someone else will not get a patent on it later even after publishing as prior art. Or am I mistaken in how I have read what is going on these days?

"For the plan to work, it has to be visibly in the company's best interest."

Well, I think it just may be in many companies' best interests to have a counter balance to the dominance of MS in the market. If this is so, it will be in their best interests to provide a defense for Free Software in respect to the games MS may play.

Perhaps putting all of their new patents in the pool would be too much. Perhaps just enough key ones that MS will need to cross license with the pool in order to keep playing.

A query: Does anyony know how the cross licensing agreements work? Does A generally agree to share and share alike all of B's patents, and B A's?

all the best,

drew

Yo Bahamas - silver medal in the Men's 4x400.

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/41879

there's Our Media ("We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches."). &if you want to host your own site that lets people upload tagged video and dist via bit torrent, there's BroadcastMachine.

Bruce,

I suggest a possible fix here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158939&cid=133 15572

Could you give your comments? Could it work if pursued? What are the chances of some big patent players playing along? Is the idea worth trying to refine?

all the best,

drew

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/41879
View of Atholl Island from the top of the Sans Souci Hill

Check my post here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158939&cid=133 15572

and let me know what you think.

all the best,

drew

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/40046
Nassau Bahamas seascape

I think Bruce is right, but I think some big player like IBM could probably address the issue in a constructive way if they wished to do so.

Here is my idea:

When they next have a fundamental patent to apply for, apply for it in the name of the pool and not in their own name. This patent is now not subject to the cross patent agreements it may have with others.

Now it signs a cross patenting agreement with the pool so it can use all of the pool patents.

Where does this leave players who do not wish to play with the pool?

What if all of the big patenters who sincerely wanted to solve this issue applied for all of their new patents in the name of the pool and not on their own behalf?

Does anyone see any reason why such a plan could not work?

all the best,

drew

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/40737
Rocky Road on the eastern end of New Providence (Nassau) in the Bahamas.

Yes, but does it have a key debounce issue and has it been solved. With the old TRS-80 Model I machines I used to work with, I think there used to be a program you could get that would solve this issue for you. It is probably still under copyright though and they probably never GPLed it so we may have to start again from scratch!

all the best,

drew

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/41879

also try http://ourmedia.org/

OTOH, claiming that fair use allows unfettered access to creative works with the excuse that "True art comes from creative desire, not the profit motive" strikes me as equally fallacious.

But Big Al B is also incorrect when he writes, "Fair use is media backup or transfer once you have paid for the original media presentation of a work."

I devote quite a few pages in "Darknet" to fair use in cyberspace -- and, indeed, I have to wrestle with this almost every day at Ourmedia.org, deciding what media items have to come down because they go too far.

The kind of fair use I'm interested in helping to enable involves borrowing snippets from Hollywood movies or recorded music -- for commentary in a home video that you want to share online, for inclusion in a podcast that talks about the blues, for a brief educational or artistic touch in a nonprofit digital story, for a student report on how biased network news may be (from the political left or right).

Last week, I received a pretty good set of fair use guidelines from the SF law firm Fenwick-West and posted them at Ourmedia here. It's a good, straightforward set of fair use rules for the digital age.

- jd (the author)

http://www.ourmedia.org/ is interesting and
http://www.participatoryculture.org/ seems promissing.

We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.

That's a good point - consumer electronics companies benefit from IP jsut as much as the copyright cartel. That's why they are ambivalent, at best.

I've been seeing the "market" for DRM-free content exploding recently. Our Media, dead-simple free blogs, and Wikimedia, Creative Commons is becoming downright trendy, and the library of share-alike content grows daily.

Currently, device makers are riding on the coattails of open (or at least unclosed) standards (mp3) in order to sell their DRM-encumbered alternatives (iTunes). No manufacturer is seriously going release a device that can only play closed-format content (Look at Sony)

As demand for unemcumbered content solidifies, demand for non-DRMed formats and players will likewise solidify. There's no way the market will buy a device that requires DRM, so long as there is enough popular content out there that doesn't need it.

So the solution is this: produce and release as much quality share-alike content as fast you possibly can.

"Unless you have a problem with clean room reverse engineering"

If he's got a problem with reverse engineering, he must be buying all of his PCs from IBM right? I mean, wasn't the BIOS reverse engineered?

http://www.macintouch.com/pchistory.html
http://www.macintouch.com/pchistory.html
http://www.jmusheneaux.com/01.htm

Links from a quick google sesssion.

all the best,

drew

http://www.ourmedia.org/

Your reply is offtopic...I didn't say anything that you refute, or even address. And I don't even disagree with everything you've said. But for those items I do disagree with...

First, you think nobody's taking resposibility? Look at all the people who've settled, rather than go to court over it. If paying excessive fees isn't taking responsibility, I don't know what is.

Second, Not all music is under licenses that make it illegal to download without paying. Take a look at the stuff on Ampcast, for example. Or stuff in the audio section of the Internet Archive. Or the stuff on Ourmedia.org. People have the right to make their own works available for legal free download--and some do.

Be careful with the TOS, though. Most of the stuff is the standard Draconian crap (i.e., "we can do whatever we want with your stuff"), but most notable is this bit: "If You have not designated a price for Your Authorized Content and We incur extraordinary costs and expenses in hosting, indexing and displaying Your Authorized Content, we may charge a fee in order to defray these costs." So if you release a popular free video, Google may charge you for the bandwidth? I'll stick with Ourmedia for the free media distribution, thanks.

This is great, making it harder to watch TV on the device of your choice - the Broadcast Flag (77 days till lockdown) will seem like a stupid idea now there is competition.
Now Tivo's and PVR's can really take off with RSS enclosed VIDEO AND Film.
Don't forget Ourmedia http://www.ourmedia.org/ which does a similar thing, although they don't have a noporn rule.
The http://technocrat.net/article.pl?sid=05/04/13/2254 235&mode=thread Opening Up of the BBC's back catalogue will get things started. But they are banning anyone outside the US from watching all those great Dr.Who back episodes.
The Archive.org CC http://www.archive.org/movies/collection.php?colle ction=feature_films&PHPSESSID=b0292fc08fb009353794 c2240ea8cbb6 licenced B-movie, Charlie Chaplin and 50's Superman Fleischer cartoon collection is a similar great service, but their encoding sucks.

Folks always ramp on about how low quality downloads are. A properly ripped DIVX watched on a 16.7M colour hires monitor or projector beats the pants of DVD.
And this will mess with Sony's heads, as they plan an i-tunes for movies but knowing Sony, totally crippled by DRM.
And you can charge for people watching your stuff if you like.
BTW the TOS say no porn.

Likewise...

I figured I'd give the new Our Media site a try and added this movie.

The file is located here but doesn't show up until after some sort of waiting period. I have no idea how long it will take, or if it will even show up. Maybe somebody can post if/when it does.

Yes, the title is a little dramatic, but that's the evil overlord talking.

Likewise...

I figured I'd give the new Our Media site a try and added this movie.

The file is located here but doesn't show up until after some sort of waiting period. I have no idea how long it will take, or if it will even show up. Maybe somebody can post if/when it does.

Yes, the title is a little dramatic, but that's the evil overlord talking.

Wow. Looks like Google intends to compete with the Internet Archive's Ourmedia project, which also is willing to host your video. Well, one is more about hosting and the other is more about searching, I suppose, but still... maybe there could be some sort of cooperation going on here, Idunno.

Could Google be behind Ourmedia or Al Gore's Current TV? Angela Beesley, one of the five directors of the Wikimedia Foundation, is on the Ourmedia Board of Directors. Al Gore has been a senior adviser at Google and Current TV is receiving support from Google and Google's Video Search.

I don't suppose there's any chance for an interface with, say, Ourmedia or the Wikimedia Commons as an image provider, is there? There's lots of royalty-free, Creative Commons/GFDL-or-better stuff to be had there, of various grades of quality.

Well, you could use the Internet Archive's new Ourmedia site; automagic BitTorrent tracking and distribution and the like is definitely something they've been planning and hope to release in the immediate future.

The former, I know, has explicit methods to label content as Creative Commons or other types of license.

You can watch new items come in on the Ourmedia main page, but you can't see them, because the update process is so slow. I submitted item #902, and half an hour later, the latest one is #907. So the load isn't high. Is the bottleneck a batch job, or does a real person have to look at this stuff before it goes up?

Tried again later. No response from the ourmedia.org server at all.

Tried again later. Back to the "enter password" dialog.

Good concept. Maybe someday it will work.

What the hell -- we're a free, not-for-profit, open-source media project. It doesn't get more Slashdotty than that.

We're looking for coders to help out on Ourmedia -- to make it a Slashdotter's multimedia wet dream.

The Ourmedia Project is relying on open-source developers to build new functionalities for the site -- such as media ratings, new RSS features, playlists, social networking, license searches, improved taxonomies -- and to help build a global registry connecting a network of grassroots media sites.

That means six months from now we don't want to be just a destination website -- we want open-source schemas that will let any site hook into a global network of freely accessible grassroots media.

But we can't pull that off unless more expert coders pitch in. (Here's our current project team and advisory board.) (Apologies, we're adding more servers tonight.)

See our Volunteer page for details. Pass it along. Or ignore this, as you wish. :~) -- jd (email), co-founder

What the hell -- we're a free, not-for-profit, open-source media project. It doesn't get more Slashdotty than that.

We're looking for coders to help out on Ourmedia -- to make it a Slashdotter's multimedia wet dream.

The Ourmedia Project is relying on open-source developers to build new functionalities for the site -- such as media ratings, new RSS features, playlists, social networking, license searches, improved taxonomies -- and to help build a global registry connecting a network of grassroots media sites.

That means six months from now we don't want to be just a destination website -- we want open-source schemas that will let any site hook into a global network of freely accessible grassroots media.

But we can't pull that off unless more expert coders pitch in. (Here's our current project team and advisory board.) (Apologies, we're adding more servers tonight.)

See our Volunteer page for details. Pass it along. Or ignore this, as you wish. :~) -- jd (email), co-founder

No porn, you say?

No porn. Go away.

Suposedly it's on the site rules too, but can't get on them because of the slashdotting.. :)

The rules: fair use

And their launch date has already slipped over half a year... ah well, here's hoping they'll launch Real Soon Now (tm).

http://www.ourmedia.org/
http://www.unmediated.org/

etc... just google for it... Get involved in your public access TV today.

Have a look! We're announcing the opening at VloggerCon in NYC.