David Weinberger has written a really helpful overview which puts the burgeoning interest in tagging into a more general perspective.
The nub of the MGM vs Grokster case
From the Amicus brief filed by Eben Moglen on behalf of the Free Software Movement and a group called ‘New Yorkers for Fair Use’.:
“At the heart of Petitioners’ argument is an arrogant and unreasonable claim — even if made to the legislature empowered to determine such a general issue of social policy — that the Internet must be designed for the convenience of their business model, and to the extent that its design reflects other concerns, the Internet should be illegal.” Eben is not a man to mince words and he’s gone right to the heart of it.
If Apple’s on a roll…
… why then are some of its senior executives selling stock like there was no tomorrow?
Profile of Ed Felten
From his campus newspaper. Ed is one of the great figures of our time, an academic who uses ingenuity and intelligence to resist the incursions of the copyright thugs of the content industries. See for example the Amicus brief he and some other computer scientists have filed in the Grokster case currently before the Supreme Court.
Bloggers don’t have same legal protection as bona-fide hacks
Well, well. In December, Apple’s lawyers went after three weblogs which had posted leaked information about forthcoming products. They filed a lawsuit to compel the bloggers to reveal the names of their informants (who presumably are Apple employees). The defendants claimed that online publishers are entitled to the same legal protection as traditional journalists. Yesterday, Judge James Kleinberg of the Santa Clara County Superior Court was reported as saying that he was “leaning toward” granting Apple’s demands. If this leads to a solid legal precedent then we will have some interesting contradictions — for example, the right-wing crazies of Fox News will enjoy constitutional protection while intelligent, rational bloggers will not.
Note to UK readers: all this is irrelevant over here, since UK journalists don’t have this kind of legal protection, and indeed some have gone to gaol for refusing to reveal their sources in court.
The death of satire — Dubya style
Tom Lehrer famously said that satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Well, here’s a modern take on the same thought. The New York Times is reporting that the front-runners to succeed John Wolfensohn as President of the World Bank are (a) Carly Fiorina, the testosterone-poisoned ex-CEO of Hewlett Packard, and (b) Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense and the ‘brains’ behind the invasion of Iraq. Note: the World Bank was set up to help poor people in countries where dysentry is a way of life. What have the world’s poor done to deserve this fate?
Do dog owners really resemble their pets?
Lovely story in The Economist reporting an experiment described in the Journal of Ethology which appears to support the proposition.
Normal service resumed!
Memex has been offline all week, pending a move to WordPress. Now back, thanks to Herculean efforts by Quentin. We’re currently trying to find an elegant way of including archived postings since 2002. As the man said, the impossible we do right away; miracles take a bit longer. It’s been an infuriating week — lots happening and no Blog in which to rant about them. Sigh.
The Librarian and the Bloggers
The Librarian and the Bloggers
Michael Gorman, President-Elect of that venerable body, the American Library Association, doesn’t think much of Bloggers. He explains why here. It all started because he dared to write something dismissive about the Google phenomenon — which he described as “a wonderfully modern manifestation of the triumph of hope and boosterism over reality.”
As a conoisseur of invective, I particularly like this passage:
“It is obvious that the Blog People read what they want to read rather than what is in front of them and judge me to be wrong on the basis of what they think rather than what I actually wrote. Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable.”
I sympathise with Mr. Gorman, but it’s clear that he has led a sheltered life up to now. I doubt, for example, that he has ever seen a flame war in a News Group!
The practical alternative to work!
The practical alternative to work!
(Thanks to Gerard for the link.)