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Thursday, December 5, 2002

New Sci-Fi Today News Feed

Sci-Fi Today.

Sci-Fi Today. Drog just alerted me to a relatively new collaborative news site that I hadn't seen before, in the tradition of Slashdot and Kuro5hin: Sci-Fi Today. The users are the creators. Good stuff -- check it out, especially if you're a fan of science & technology (75%) or science fiction (25%). [JD's New Media Musings]

And they have a syndication feed at http://www.scifitoday.com/backend.rdf for those of you like me who want your news to come to you, instead of having to go out and hunt it yourself. Isn't that what computers are for? [McGee's Musings]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 11:34 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Atlanta Schools to Lose Millions

Schools look for ways to cut spending. AccessAtlanta Dec 5 2002 9:21PM ET

The two districts [Clayton Co. and Henry Co. ISD] could lose as much as $8 million as the state seeks to slash $165 million from the allowances due school systems across Georgia.

This latest wave of spending reductions to Georgia's $16 billion budget applies to all state agencies and is expected to continue through the next fiscal year. [Moreover - Atlanta news]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 11:17 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

R.R.Bowker and BookSurge to Offer Sales Kiosks to Libraries

book vending kiosk. R.R.Bowker and BookSurge will be introducing their library based book vending kiosk at ALA mid-winter. This will bring libraries into a retail service sector and may well leverage an important new relation between the library collections and PoD technologies. [future of the book news]

Librarians might use the Books-In-Print kiosk to purchase print copies of backlisted or OP items, but I wonder how much appeal this will have to the general public. How different is it from ordering via the Internet on a library PC? I don't see much here but I will be interested to see what reaction Jenny Levine at TSL has to this latest kiosk effort.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 10:49 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Body By Swingline

BODY STAPLER KIT

$22.99 plus shipping and handling from
Cabela's, One Cabela Dr., Sidney, Neb. 69160,
phone: 800-237-4444, fax: 800 496-6329,
Internet: www.cabelas.com

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 7:07 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

I Can Hear You Now

Rick Klau decries the rising cacophony of cell phone use in airport bathrooms.

Can You Hear Me Now?

I've flown close to 100,000 miles this year, and am alarmed at a trend that I've witnessed in dozens of airports: men talking on cell phones while in the bathroom. Do women do this too?

It's bad enough that you have to hear their conversation echoing throughout the walls of the bathroom - but I can just imagine the poor folks on the other end. Surely they're catching at least part of the cacaphony surrounding the caller? [...] [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Now a study, conducted by Wirthlin Worldwide, has found that the percentage of American cell phone users who think it's appropriate to talk on a cell phone in the bathroom has risen from 39 percent in 2000 to 47 percent in 2002. Thankfully, they seem to find cell use less acceptable everywhere else.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 6:53 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Congressional e-Mail Works

I've used the e-mail forms for my Senators and Congressman dozens of times. Almost every time I've gotten a response -- sometimes an e-mail response, sometimes a written response via USPS. But I've always gotten some sort of response. The e-mail queries do not go off into a black hole. The complainant should try the system before whining about it.

Congress makes it even harder to reach out and touch 'em. Congresscritters are sick of hearing from their constituents, so they're shutting down or obscuring their email addresses and replacing them with forms that route the mail to god-knows-where. Of course, physical mail and Congress don't get along -- that's thraxpanik for you -- and their fax machines are usually out of paper. [Boing Boing Blog]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 12:09 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

RosettaBooks 'Wins' e-Book Case with Settlement

Lawsuit Over E-Books Settled. Washington Post Dec 5 2002 2:08AM ET

[...] RosettaBooks began issuing the e-books in early 2001 and was quickly sued by Random House, the world's largest English-language trade publisher.

But a federal judge rejected the request for a preliminary injunction. U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein ruled that the publisher was "not likely to succeed on the merits of its copyright infringement claim and cannot demonstrate irreparable harm."

Last March, an appeals court reaffirmed that decision.

Under the agreement reached today, Random House will grant Rosetta exclusive e-book rights to "mutually agreed-upon titles," both old and recently published. Random House Inc. authors include Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, John Grisham, Anne Rice and Donna Tartt. [...] [Moreover - Book publishing news]

But I'm left wondering just how Random House granted exclusive e-book rights when it failed to prove in court it owns such rights. I suspect this isn't over, but the total dollars involved have turned out to be so small it just isn't worth fighting anymore.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 11:35 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Wednesday, December 4, 2002

Copyright Fails to Make 93% of Films Available

The trouble with pesky data.

chaos II -- these numbers are AMAZING!. Jason Schultz has done more amazing work calculating any "chaos" that would come from striking the 1976 Act. Using the Internet Movie Database, he confirmed the Copyright Office's numbers that about 37,000 movies were released in the period 1927-46. (IMDb reports 36,386). Of those, only 2,480 are currently available in any formay, or 6.8%. 93.2% of the films during that period are are commercially dormant. Another way to put this: Jack Valenti's crowd says exclusive rights are the only way to assure content get's distributed. So we have a nice experiment: For the films between 1927-46, exclusive rights fails to make available 93.2% of the content produced. Does anyone really doubt the public domain wouldn't do better? Jason's email is here. [Lessig Blog]

Don't you just hate it when the data gets in the way of such a nice rhetorical argument? Arguments over the impact of Napster and its offspring on music sales are in the same vein .

One of the most useful little books I've read in the past few years has been Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent by Garrett Hardin. Hardin is an emeritus professor of ecology at UC Santa Barbara and is perhaps best known as the originator of the Tragedy of the Commons meme. In Filters, Hardin argues eloquently himself that we're all responsible for thinking critically about the incomplete arguments put forward by those claiming to be experts, whether those arguments are wrapped up in words, numbers, or systems. 

It probably wouldn't hurt to spend a few minutes with Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics and John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy : Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences as well. Or you can simply decide to trust what the experts tell you. [McGee's Musings]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 11:37 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

The Value 0f Offline Publishing Tools

I could achieve the same ends by creating offline files in other, separate, apps and handling the publishing to an online system with cut-n-paste, etc. But isn't that the point of these tools -- not to have to do that anymore? I haven't really experimented with the on-line tools yet so I may be missing something. I'm just now really getting past the novice stage with Radio (a program designed to be used by people with no web publishing skills.) New on-line experiments starting soon. Film at 11:00.

Online vs. Offline publishing.

Carol Tucker brought up an interesting scenario (see below for a quote). A similar thing happened to Jim McGee at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management recently:

http://www.kellogg.nwu.edu/faculty/mcgee/htm/blog/

Luckily Jim was using a desktop K-Log tool. That allowed him to keep posting even when the publishing conduit (the University's network) was down due to an attack. When it went back up he could publish everything that he had entered into the system while disconnected in one easy step. BTW, Jim is a pioneer in the use of K-Logs, having taught a course at Kellogg this spring (Kellogg is often ranked the #1 business school in the nation by Business Week) on knowledge management with Radio on each student desktop.

This scenario could also become a disaster if you are using a K-Logging service and it either suddenly goes out of business (as we have seen with many Web companies) or has a catastrophic failure. While the site itself may be saved if it is published to a third party or safe location, the fact that the data and logic used to build your K-Log is stored in a database that is now unavailable would make your work a stranded artifact. The solution is either to publish from the desktop and keep a back-up of the files on CD, tape, or back-up drive -- or -- to set up your own hosted solution on a server you own in order to make sure the database is back-up (this is easy to do). Keep it in a place you can control.

This also brings up another note I saw recently from Dody Gunawinata. He is running a K-Logging vertical community for AIESEC (an organization of 50,000 members devoted to cultural exchange through global internships). He is using a mix of Manila hosted sites -- and -- Radio sites published from the desktop. This allows people to select the type of tool they feel most comfortable with. You can see his community here:

http://www.aiesec.ws/

Dody brought up the fact that for 80% of the world, per minute Internet access is too expensive for extended time online. That means that if you are working with individuals in countries were cost of Internet connections are expensive relative to income, the best way to extend K-Log publishing to them is through an online/offline publishing. This will allow them to keep costs down (I know there are lots of NGOs and non-profits out there that are looking at this, this info may help). For example: a person working in the Philippines can work for hours on several K-Log posts offline and then connect for a couple of minutes to publish them and collect news items from subscriptions. Dody expands on this with:

"Any software that allows offline-online usage will do well in this type of environment. That's why the rest of the world can afford to use email (POP). Radio will do well."
[John Robb]

I agree with most of the things that are said in this post. John Robb only fails to mention that downloading an entire Manila database is rather quick and simple, thus making it possible to save locally the "data and logic" of your site. What I don't understand is the lack of integration of Manila and Radio. Why can't we really use Radio to feed posts to a Manila site? The Radio tool that was presented a couple of months never got beyond beta and simply didn't do the trick in my point of view. My dream scenario would be a Manila site with all its power of shared content management and design for the more static parts, and Radio managed news feeds where posts can be categorized using shared Manila departments... or something like Matt Mower's liveTopics. [Sebastian Fiedler] via [Seblogging News]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 11:51 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Tuesday, December 3, 2002

Collaborative EduBlogs

Collaborative Posting.

Will mentions writing up documentation on what posting is and what it is supposed to accomplish for those new to using weblogs at his school. As a few more class weblogs (including some poetry sites) get started at my school this week, teachers and students at my school are in need of something along these lines.

After almost exclusively posting to students' own weblogs, I'm trying some group posting on my Spanish-American War site. Charlie Lowe's course blogging procedure proved useful as I drew up my own. As usual time plays a critical factor here. As a group product, these posts will take longer to produce though the writing should be better. Nothing will really get done outside of class so I'm really pushing them along this week to do research, draft and edit their posts, and publish. I'm assigning commenting as homework for the week instead of posting to their own sites.

Our project took a step forward today as our guest historian joined us in her first post. [Joe Luft]

It is great to read more about the integration of outside experts via a course Weblog. And from what I have gathered... the students like the idea, too. [Sebastian Fiedler] via [Seblogging News]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 11:16 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Sen Cleland on Homeland Security

Dear Terry:

Thank you for contacting me regarding your concerns about the recently approved homeland security legislation, and reports of the new Total Information Awareness program administered by the Department of Defense.

The Total Information Awareness program, administered by the Pentagon as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is ostensibly designed to improve the government's ability to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists. However, many have raised concerns about the methods this program may employ, such as the possibility that bank accounts, e-mails and other personal records of average citizens could be examined. Moreover, controversy has arisen from the choice of John Poindexter to head this program. Poindexter, a Reagan Administration official, was convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal. I share many of these concerns, and hope and expect that the Pentagon and President Bush will give the American people a more thorough explanation of the Total Information Awareness program. It is imperative that in our efforts to improve our homeland defenses we remember that our aim is not just to save lives, but to save a way of life.

As you probably know, on November 19 the Senate, in a 90-9 vote, overwhelmingly approved the creation of a Department of Homeland Security before adjourning for the year. I was proud to support this landmark legislation, despite my concerns with certain eleventh hour special interest provisions added by the House. You will be heartened to learn that the legislation does not provide funding for the Total Information Awareness program. I certainly believe that future Congresses must scrupulously monitor the implementation of this program.

Again, thank you for contacting me. It was good to hear from you.

Most respectfully,

Max Cleland
United States Senator

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 5:40 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Get A Headset

FAST FORWARD
The Cell Phone Safety Disconnect
A new study and a new lawsuit bring up an old question: Does radiation from cell phones cause brain tumors?
FORTUNE
Wednesday, August 28, 2002
By David Kirkpatrick

At last year's Nokia analyst meeting in New York, the scene in the hallways was telling. At every break, hordes of analysts and pundits rushed out to make calls. Nothing unusual about that. But more than half of these callers were using a headset wire with their cell phones. When the wireless experts make calls, they play it safe. [...]

Some have called the use of cell phones the biggest biological experiment in history. Of course we all get marvelous efficiencies from our phones that could even be worth some minor health risks. But we ought to know what we're getting into. It's shameful that the U.S. industry doesn't have even one leader like Bill Ford in the automobile industry--someone who will step up and admit that there is a credibility gap between users and the companies that must be addressed. The way to address it is through more and aggressive research. In the meantime, those little headsets are inconvenient but reassuring. [Fortune.com] via [AudioTech Business Briefings]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 12:24 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Trademark Search Basics

Dear Abby: Should I Retain a Trademark Lawyer?.

A business owner wrote a small business advisor in the Sacramento Bee:

As a new home-based business owner, I would like to find out more about searching and registering a trademark for my new Web service. I plan to sell ethnic food over the Internet and want to ensure my brand as well as avoid infringement on others. Should I work with a law firm or perform a trademark search on my own using the the U.S. Trademark and Patent Online service? What kind of costs would I incur using either vehicle?

The advisor, Alice Jacobs replied in part:

. . . you may find it easier and safer in terms of avoiding legal troubles down the road to shell out the money to pay an attorney who does this type of work on a daily basis and knows the ins and outs of trademark and patent searches and registration.

I've edited out any hedging on her part, but you can read her entire response here.  A comprehensive Google search could not reveal any responsble businessperson urging that trademark counsel not be used (dry humor indicator on).

I want to emphasize and expand on several points she made. 

First, it wasn't clear from the column that searching the U.S. Trademark Registry is insufficent for clearing a mark, simply because of common law rights - mere use of a trademark creates protectable rights. 

Second, while it's great that deadhit searching is as freely available as it is, it is not a reliable tool for clearing a trademark for availability, because:

 (1) the underlying databases can be incomplete;

 (2) it is difficult to manually search all confusingly similar marks (N-R-G, ENERGIEE and ZENERGY may all be confusingly similar to ENERGY); and

(3) only the outside search firms presently have the databases sufficient to conduct a comprehensive common law search.  Google is not enough.

 

As to filing trademarks, a trademark application is a document filed in order to perfect legal rights.  It is conceivable that a layperson could locate free legal advice online or elsewhere, but in any event, legal advice is required to maximize those rights.  In worst case scenarios, I have seen laypeople simply lose rights through avoidable mistakes.

As to costs, the outside search firms such as NameProtect and T and T, charge several hundred dollars for a full search.  I have seen website-based search firms essentially re-sell Dogpile as a common law search.  Small obscure usages can come back to haunt you.  Amazon had a lawsuit when a tiny bookstore named Amazon came out of the woodwork.  Comprehensiveness of the common law search is worth the money.

As to evaluation of the search, I evaluate searches so of course I think they're essential.  The person who reviews a search must perform a small likelihood of confusion test for each 'hit' in the search.  Trademark lawyers are trained to perform likelihood of confusion tests.  Some lawyers charge by the hour for this, some bundle the analysis with the search.  The large NY firms will charge several hundred dollars for the evaluation.  I cap my opinion letters at $300.  The trademarkguru.biz (who bought a sponsored link which shows up when you search for Trademark Blog on Google) charges $350).

As to filing, the large trademark firms (like my old Mother Firm), tend to charge approximately $600 as a standard fee, with additional charges for additional classes.  Sometimes there are multiple filing discounts.  Litman Law (who also have a sponsored link for a Trademark Blog Google search) appear to charge approximately $600.  Some of the online trademark firms appear to charge less.  I charge $395, with no additional charges for up to two additional classes.

Bear in mind that standard fees usually cover only what is referred to as "routine prosecution."  One application may sail through the PTO while another might require hours and hours of argumentation.  I have only seen firms agree to let set fees cover extensive responses to office actions when the client gives the firm sufficient work so that it all evens out.

I would be happy to answer more questions on this topic.  Email me at marty@schwimmerlegal.com. [The Trademark Blog]

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 10:52 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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