We wrote in the past about how the estate of author James Joyce tried to use copyright law to prevent a professor from quoting any works from James Joyce or his daughter Lucia Joyce in a biography of Lucia Joyce she was working on. This was, of course, ridiculous, and after many years in court, the estate didn’t just lose, but was ordered to pay attorneys’ fees as well, totaling more than $326,000. The estate then appealed that as well, but has now agreed to settle, and pay $240,000 in attorneys’ fees to the professor, Carol Shloss. While the end result was good, the fact that she had to go through this whole process just to write a biography in the first place is still quite problematic. Abusing copyright law to stifle free speech is always a problem.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →

theodp writes "At Jeff Bezos’ alma mater, The Daily Princetonian reports that less than two weeks after 50 students received free Kindle DX’s as part of the University’s e-reader pilot program, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices. ‘I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,’ said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. ‘It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.’ How about a second opinion? The device is ‘hard to use,’ added Horvath’s professor, Stan Katz."

I have to admit that I don’t quite understand the value of the Kindle DX as a reading device for schools or… anything, really. In the meantime, why are schools using closed off DRM-encrusted devices for training students anyway?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →

Post updated Wednesday, September 30 at 8:20 a.m. PDT with more information.

(Credit: TiVo)

Good news comes to TV-watchers with TiVo DVRs installed in their living rooms. On Wednesday, TiVo and BlackBerry-maker RIM unveiled a free TiVo app that will let people control their TiVos from the BlackBerry smartphone.

The app will let TiVo owners see a guide of what’s playing when, including browsing by category, popular shows, and daily picks. You can also search for shows by their title, a keyword, or by an actor’s name. Once you find your show, you can use Tivo for BlackBerry to remotely program your home TiVo to record it. The app has dominion over multiple TiVo DVRs.

To use it, you’ll need a wireless data service plan, a Series2 or Series3 standalone TiVo, 355KB memory space on a BlackBerry running v4.2 or higher of the mobile operating system.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

Continue reading →

A bunch of folks have been sending in the recent Wired Magazine article talking about how Netflix’s online streaming offering may be a disruptive innovation that takes down cable. The thinking is that, with Netflix service being built into lots of different settop devices, and the ability to watch various TV shows that are offered via DVD (and the Netflix streaming service, as well), why would people need cable any more? They can just wait until the “video” is out, and stream it via Netflix. The article may go a bit far in proclaiming Netflix as the winner of this battle right now, but it does suggest that (whether it’s Netflix or some other provider) the model that cable television has relied on for so many years is certainly facing a pretty big disruption, one way or another.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →

Brendan was the first of a few to submit the story that New Zealand is telling people that they can’t use their mobile phones for navigation purposes, even if that phone is mounted on the dashboard like a regular GPS navigation device. Regular GPS devices are fine… but a mobile phone acting just like one of those devices? That’s illegal. Why? No one seems to be saying, but you can bet the standalone GPS makers are happy about this… Update: Well, that was fast. Given public backlash, the gov’t has already decided to back down and rewrite the laws to allow mobile phone navigation systems.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →

Yahoo on Tuesday released version 3 of its Yahoo User Interface library, a software collection programmers can use to endow Web sites with fancy user interface elements written in JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets.

“YUI 3′s core infrastructure and its utility suite are all considered production-ready with today’s release,” Yahoo’s Eric Miraglia said in a blog post Tuesday. “The code we’re shipping today in 3.0.0 is the same code that drives the new Yahoo Home Page, and it goes out with confidence that it has been exercised vigorously and at scale.”

The YUI libraries are open-source, freely available, and used widely around the Internet for Web site tasks including animation, drag-and-drop, fetching data from various types of sources, and responding to events–chores that are more complicated but that often are useful as the Web moves from static Web pages toward interactive applications.

Compared with YUI 2, the new version is smaller, faster, easier to program with, and more secure, Yahoo said. It’s easier to break code into minimum-size pieces through a dependency configurator or YUI’s ability to download required components on its own. Also, Yahoo is working to add widget abilities for creating small programs.

A convenient YUI feature is that Yahoo is willing to host most of it on its own servers, saving hassle and Web server bandwidth.

The new version is the first ground-up reworking of the software since 2005. No doubt YUI will be the subject of discussion at Open Hack Day and YUIConf, both in October.

This chart illustrates the smaller file sizes of one YUI 3 libary that helps with retrieving data from various sources.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Continue reading →

MySpace has appointed Alex Maghen to the role of chief technology officer, the News Corp.-owned social site announced Tuesday. He replaces outgoing CTO Aber Whitcomb, who had been at the company since its inception.

Maghen was already at MySpace, serving in the CTO position of its MySpace Music division, a joint venture with the major record labels. Prior to that, he held CTO roles at Yahoo Entertainment and MTV Networks–the latter of which was also the former employer of current MySpace entertainment execs Courtney Holt and Jason Hirschhorn.

“The next phase of MySpace’s evolution will further empower our incredible audience of consumers, developers, artists, content creators, and advertisers with the tools they need to broadcast, discover, and express themselves,” Maghen said in a release. “The future of our technology organization will be guided by an open platform and world-class standards to create a place of invention for our technical staff as well as the world’s development community.”

MySpace has fallen out of the tech industry’s favor, surpassed both in traffic and technological innovation by once-smaller rival Facebook–even though MySpace advocated developer-friendly open standards well before Facebook came out in full support of them.

There have been some promising signs of late on the technology front: a MySpace-Twitter status sync proved popular enough to make MySpace’s URL shortener the second most popular on the microblogging service.

Originally posted at The Social

Continue reading →

Ribbit puts a conference bridge inside a Wave message.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

It’s becoming clear that Google Wave, which is slowly emerging from closed beta, has potential to be much more than a text-messaging platform. As the telecommunications platform company Ribbit shows, and as does a frothy little videoconference app from 6 Rounds, Wave’s architecture makes it a compelling platform for real-time streaming communication.

The Ribbit team recently showed me their prototype widget, which lets Wave users quickly set up a conference room inside a “wave” message on the service. Once you add the Ribbit conference widget to a wave, everyone in it becomes part of a potential voice chat. Users need to enter their phone numbers, which remain hidden from other users. Then anyone in the wave can call all the participants at once to start a conference. (Users can also call only particular people in the wave, if they wish.)

The cool thing about the Ribbit integration into Wave is how easy it is to get a conference going that’s clearly related to a document (a wave) that a team is already working on. You also get a dashboard view of your conference where you can see who’s on and who’s not, and drop callers mid-stream.

Future additions to the service will include options to record calls and transcribe them — for a fee perhaps.

6 Rounds is conceptually related to Ribbit, although with more of a focus on fun videoconferencing (with silly video effects and everything) and the sharing of YouTube videos. But the idea is the same: Within a de facto group on Wave, you can quickly add a conferencing widget to bring people into a conversation. See also Zorap from Demo, which is similar, although without a Wave widget.

It looks like both of these apps blend perfectly with the Wave experience, which is part e-mail, part IM, part groupware. They show how, in a modern communications system, the barriers between text and voice and video communication, and more interestingly between asynchronous and real-time communication, really do begin to dissolve.

What’s not clear is how or if Google will integrate Google Voice into Wave. That’s a big shoe that has yet to drop.

Click to see video demos of Ribbit, 6 Rounds, and other Google Wave extensions.

Originally posted at Rafe’s Radar

Continue reading →

There’s saying that’s been making the rounds lately, in talking about journalism, saying that “trust is the new objectivity.” The idea is that if you’re trustworthy, even if you have a bias, people are more interested in what you have to say. But, of course, that doesn’t just apply to journalists. It pretty much applies to everyone, in any business. People are tired of fake connections. They want real connections. That’s what connecting with fans is really all about. If you’re honest and open, you build trust. And that trust is valuable. So it’s difficult to understand why so many organizations work so hard to stifle that kind of openness. We saw it recently with the Washington Post’s new social media guidelines, and we’ve seen it elsewhere as well, such as with sports teams.

For example, JJ sends in the news that the Jets benched a player for a Twitter message, despite the fact that the team is actually more open to having its players use social media to connect with fans. Hearing this, I figured it must be quite a Twitter message — seeing as there was just a big controversy over a Redskins player who insulted fans via Twitter, calling them “dimwits” and saying they shouldn’t give their opinion on the team since they work at McDonalds. But what did the Jets player say that was so troubling?

“1 play in the 1st Half, 4 plays in the 2nd half,…. A bit disappointed about my playing time but very happy and satisfied about the win.”

I’m honestly having a hard time seeing how that’s a benchable offense. He was entirely honest, and not accusatory. He was happy that the team won, but wished he could have been involved in more plays. He’s a professional athlete, and such sentiments are pretty standard. It actually seems nice that he’s sharing with fans in that way. He didn’t seem to be complaining or disparaging the team or anyone. He just noted that personally he was “a bit disappointed” that he wasn’t more involved.

The fact is, the internet lets people connect with others — either one-to-one or one-to-many in much more direct and personal ways than ever before in the past. Yes, that has some risks and downsides, but on the whole, that openness and connection builds trust and a relationship, and that’s important. It makes no sense to try to stifle such communications, whether its a journalist or a professional athlete.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →