b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Book Reviews
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NewzCrawler
Getting Conversant with Easy News Topics
Scientific, Medical, and Engineering Texts Online
Scare Tactics
Gay Bar
Summary of Hawash Case
Will the RIAA Pursue Individuals?
Monday, May 5, 2003
Canadians Have Too Much Liberty to Suit U.S.
Damn Canadians! Where do they get off placing personal liberty ahead of surveillance and police issues? Don't they know we're at war?U.S. says Canada cares too much about liberties
"The [U.S.] State Department report on global terrorism for 2002 suggests that while Canada has been helpful in the fight against terrorism, it doesn't spend enough on policing and places too much emphasis on civil liberties." (5/1/03) [Canada.com]
NewzCrawler
Rick provides a short review of NewzCrawler in the context of his daily usage. Very helpful. Take a look at the feature/function list he provides. I may be looking for a new aggregator myself pretty soon, so this sort of overview is always helpful.
NewzCrawler as Aggregator. In making the switch from Radio to Movable Type, I needed to find a replacement for my News Aggregator. I tried several - including Amphetadesk and NewsGator - before deciding on NewzCrawler. Some of the key features that make NewzCrawler... [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
Getting Conversant with Easy News Topics
There was some great discussion last night in one of the Conversant beta-test groups regarding Easy News Topics and the inclusion of metadata into RSS datastreams. I'm looking to have an ENT-compliant capability in my Conversant-based intranet/extranet.It looks like a pretty straightforward (though not necessarily simple) project to include basic ENT-style metadata into a Conversant system. The folks on the beta list grokked the ENT concept right away after looking over the spec and saw some interesting possibilities for their own KM/KS activities. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.
Scientific, Medical, and Engineering Texts Online
I had high hopes when I saw Jim McGee's pointer to this collection of quality scientific reference material. Having recently read The Next Fifty Years, edited by John Brockman, I've grown more interested in reading the works of scientists who "are writing for, and engaging, their peers in other disciplines" and "attempt to make the latest scientific research understandable within science itself as well as to a wide audience." The Next Fifty Years has 25 great essays along those lines, if you like this sort of thing.A quick browse through the National Academies Press categories page indicates a number of interesting possibilities, but trying to view any of the titles online quickly squelches any enthusiasm. The books are all presented online as scanned TIFF images -- images that were quite blurry on my 19", 1152x864 monitor screen. I tried a couple of different resolutions to make it better but it didn't help. Looking at any of these for very long will give you a headache.
The books are also presented one page at a time -- similar to what you see in an online book store where the intent is to give you a chance to check a few pages before buying. There are printable PDF files available for every page -- but they are individual, single-page files.
I really thought the NAP listing would be similar to the Open e-Journals in Education project, but I was disappointed. The NAP does some nice things, like provide pointers to similar books, but their intent is clearly to sell the hard copy versions of these papers and to make it as inconvenient as possible for online readers.
After having already paid for this stuff with my tax dollars, I'd like a little more consideration as an online reader.
Online texts from National Academies Press.Free Science, Engineering and Medical Books Online. I am not lying. The National Academies Press which was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States, has more than 2,500 free, searchable, high quality books online. Some random examples: The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling the Unity of Life Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response [kuro5hin.org]
A useful resource to have handy
[McGee's Musings]
Sunday, May 4, 2003
Scare Tactics
Very interesting. RIAA spreads rumors of it's "malicious" programs for ruining the computers of college students. I dunno. Would they do this? Could they?They might give it a shot -- legal or no. They're practically insane over their loss of control. And they really only pay attention to the law when it works in their favor anyway. But it sure could get ugly if they start stuff like this. There's no evidence they're smart enough to pull it off, and you shouldn't get into a battle of wits when you have no ammunmition.
Mean Tech For Thwarting Music Piracy. CBS News May 3 2003 5:37PM ETSome of the world's biggest record companies, facing rampant online piracy, are quietly financing the development and testing of software that would sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people who download pirated music, according to industry executives cited by The New York Times in a story on its Web site prepared for its Sunday editions.
[...] A program the Times describes as "more malicious," dubbed "freeze," locks up a computer system for a certain duration minutes or possibly even hours risking the loss of data that was unsaved if the computer is restarted. It also displays a warning about downloading pirated music. Another program under development, called "silence," scans a computer's hard drive for pirated music files and attempts to delete them. One of the executives briefed on the silence program said to the Times that it did not work properly and was being reworked because it was deleting legitimate music files, too. [...] [Moreover - IP and patents news]
Saturday, May 3, 2003
Gay Bar
Not what you think... (Link) (requires QuickTime.)
Gay bar. I wish I had as much free time as the guys who did this. [Greg's Home Space]
Summary of Hawash Case
The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has a good article on the Mike Hawash case. It's as good a summary of the case as I've seen, noting the difficulty the government faces in identifying and prosecuting domestic terrorists, as well as looking realistically at both the results and consequences of those efforts.
[...] As with the detention of Mr. Hawash, the case against the Portland Six also has drawn criticism from civil libertarians and others who feel that the government has been overly zealous. When the six were arrested in October, Attorney General John Ashcroft called the event "a defining day in America's war against terrorism," and said that "a suspected terrorist cell within our borders" had been "neutralized." Evidence that has emerged so far, however, appears to give little support to the contention that the group was a real terrorist cell. Despite months of intensive surveillance of the defendants by the FBI before their arrests, no allegation has been made that they were plotting any violent action after they returned home from China. Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said that the department views sleeper cells to be any group that "conspires to support terrorists," regardless of whether it was planning any violent action here.The criminal complaint and lengthy affidavit in the Hawash case offer little actual evidence of what Mr. Hawash's intentions were. The sole exception is a partial transcript of a conversation recorded by a confidential FBI source with one of the other defendants in the case, Jeffrey Leon Battle. In it, Mr. Battle said a "Palestinian" who was "married to a white woman ... left with us to go fight." [WSJ Online]
Terry Frazier at 11:15 AM
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Will the RIAA Pursue Individuals?
I've been thinking about this RIAA/college student settlement and just what it means for the RIAA. There are a couple of points in this Yahoo! News article worth examining.
Students Sued by Record Companies Settle Download Case. Yahoo! May 1 2003 6:24PM ETIt's clear the RIAA wasn't interested in going to court, and neither were the students. It's also clear the RIAA wasn't interested in proving, or recovering, damages:[...] Daniel Peng at Princeton University in New Jersey and Joseph Nievelt at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Mich., agreed to pay $15,000 to the recording companies, while Jesse Jordan and Aaron Sherman from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., agreed to pay $12,000 and $17,500, respectively. The students will make the payments on installment plans over the next several years.
The settlements resolve the first phase of what could be a risky legal gambit by the major record labels, including AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music, Sony Corp (news - web sites).'s Sony Music Entertainment, Vivendi Universal SA's Universal Music Group and Bertelsmann AG (news - web sites)'s BMG, to combat online music piracy, a phenomenon the labels blame for declining music sales. Recording industry executives said the lawsuits have resulted in at least 18 campus-wide file sharing networks being taken down, adding that they may ask for stiffer settlement terms in future legal actions. [...]
[...] But in suing individuals, particularly university students, analysts and attorneys believe the recording industry may risk alienating a wider swath of music fans. [...] [Moreover - Online legal issues news]
[...] Mr. Jordan added that his son's $12,000 settlement "happens to be the same amount of money that is the total of his bank account. That is money he has saved up over the course of working three years to save money for college." [...]Looking at Title 17, Sec 504 says the copyright owner can request statutory damages of between $750 to $30,000 per infringement. In cases of willful infringement the court may, at its discretion, increase statutory damages to not more than $150,000 per infringement. A kid trading tunes from just a handful of CDs could face as much $4 to $6 million in statutory damages. But there is more, if you are a willful infringer:
Title 17, Sec. 506 Criminal OffensesAmong other things, Title 18 Sec. 2319 lists prison terms of 1 to 10 years for first offenders, plus fines (additive to any damages awarded under Title 17.) The remedies in the code are clearly written to curtail large-scale criminal infringers, particularly with regard to profiteering. In fact, Sec. 2319 refers repeatedly to the infringer's profits.
(a) Criminal Infringement.-Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either-shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code.
- for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
- by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,
So what we have here is a game of legal chicken. The criminal code views copyright infringement as a criminal endeavor of significant proportions. Its remedies never anticipated the occurrence of common, everyday file trading among lowly students with no profit motive or criminal intent. But if the RIAA ever gets a kid in court it is not clear just how it will play out. There is a risk of having the hammer fall on some hapless student and putting a very human face on the whole situation.
It's one thing to go after some high profile file trading company in Antigua, or a couple of venture capitalists that can afford really good lawyers and big settlements. It's entirely another to be seen winning million dollar awards and locking up college kids for doing something most people aren't even sure is wrong. There is simply no public perception that file trading justifies the kind of remedies in the code, especially when there is no profit motive.
I think this is why the RIAA has been so slow in going after individuals and why they are focused on getting lots of PR and then settling for small amounts. There is risk of a serious public backlash if they push too hard. It wouldn't take but one outrageous court case to bring home the ludicrous nature of current copyright law to the parents of every college student in America. Next thing you know, some politician is grandstanding on the idea of legalizing file trading, and the RIAA is in deep shit.
Given their pathetic track record at PR this could certainly happen. In the end it could well be the human face they create that ultimately leads to changes in the copyright code that so desperately want to maintain.
Terry Frazier at 12:35 AM
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