Creative Commons shows its preliminary metadata spec.

Anatomy of Blogging — with insight

Meg Hourihan’s lovely essay, entitled “What We’re Doing When We Blog”.

Campaign for Cambridge Science

Cambridge University, which along with MIT and Stanford, has a liberal policy on academics’ IP rights, is proposing to change it to a much more repressive regime. As usual, the people behind this have no idea of what they are effectively doing — killing the geese that lay the golden eggs — and indeed seem contemptuous of the notion that there is any connection between liberal attitudes towards IP and industrial creativity. Here’s a splendid polemic by Ross Anderson against this idiocy. For a comparison between Silicon Valley and Route 128 (the Massachussetts equivalent) see here. And here’s how MIT handles Faculty IP.

Whatever next Department

IBM buys PriceWaterhouseCoopers for $3.5 billion. Well, at least it’ll get rid of that crazy name.

The Register: Microsoft man seeks US Net Radio reprieve. A bill to protect grassroots Internet radio has been offered before Congress. The Internet Radio Fairness Act would exempt webcasters with less than $6 million in annual revenues from the additional RIAA royalty and from future royalty requirements. [Tomalak’s Realm]

A new challenge to the DMCA

According to this this NEWS.COM report, the ACLU have challenged the DMCA using an ingenious angle. A Harvard researcher investigating the encrypted block-lists used by filtering software companies wants to crack the encryption so that he can assess how effective the programs are. But that would constitute creating an anti-circumvention device, wouldn’t it? See you in court.

Ah, the poor, coy New York Times — cannot bring itself to say ‘fuckedcompany.com’

“The publisher of the Web site whose name is a vulgarism for “failed company” plans to spin off part of that site into a new unit. Drawing from a deep well of material sent by fans of corporate comeuppance, Philip J. Kaplan said he would roll out a new site, InternalMemos.com, this morning.

On it, readers can sample some of the more than 800 examples of internal business correspondence sent to Mr. Kaplan over the last three years by aggrieved employees of various companies. …”. [More.]

My Observer column — about the unauthorised fingerprinting of UK schoolchildren — is on the Web.

200,000 UK school children are finger-printed without parental knowledge or consent
Privacy International statement.

And all because they lose their library cards. PI resources page on this story here.

Gates admits to concern about Linux
“NYT” report.

“The company is as strong as or stronger than all competitors in its key markets, he added. But he said he was concerned about the Global Services division at I.B.M. and the Linux operating system, both of which have significant momentum.

“I.B.M. in Global Services has a strong asset, and they’ve managed to get Websphere out,” he said, referring to the company’s foray in the Web-based services market. Microsoft is trying to become a player in the corporate computing market with its .Net (pronounced dot-net) initiative, though analysts say it is trailing I.B.M., which has giant reach in the corporate marketplace and has adopted the Linux system.”