Doc Searlsposts an excellent review of the US Supreme Court’s decion on Grokster. His parting shot suggesting that this is a far more complex ruling than I originally perceived it to be.
Still, Grokster has turned out to be the kind of friend that assures the worst enemies. Among those enemies is a Supremely false distinciton between creativity and technology. I don’t know how we’re going to unf**k this one, but I’m sure it will take a very long time. And that tech can’t do it alone.
The most worrying point I have seen is one made by Cory Doctorow:
…what today’s decision will kill is American innovation. Chinese and European firms can get funding and ship products based on plans that don’t have to comply with this decision’s fuzzy test, while their American counterparts will need to convince everyone from their bankers to the courts that they’ve taken all measures to avoid inducing infringement. This is good news if you’re an American corporate lawyer but not if you’re an inventor creating a new way to enjoy content.
Its not that I don’t support European firms (or Chinese ones for that matter) however innovation breeds innovation. Anything that could slow this down is bad news.
Marc Canter isn’t too happy either:
This totally effects the fuure of DLAs (digital lifestyle aggregators.) I want to store my music, video and photos - the content I BOUGHT and access it from anywhere I go.
We want to provide the tools to do that.
We’ll ask all our users to agree to terms which say “I understand that the copyrights laws forbid me from illegally distributing content I haven’t paid for.”
But we sure as hell will protect our fair use rights!
So to what limits can our customers ’share’ the music they’ve legally purchased?
That’s the question.
Legal and political arguments are all interwoven in this decision, not to mention aspects of the right to intellectual property versus the commons.
I wonder if this decision will ultimately affect blogging and user created content?
I try and read Marc Canter on a regular basis. Not only because he is a software guru, not just because he is passionate funny and inventive, no, because he believes. And when Marc Canter believes, he starts to shape the world around him to make that belief become reality. And that’s really why I listen. This latest post had me moving to the edge of my chair:
Marc’s Voice: Open Source Infrastructure: A World of Possibilities
But without a doubt the MOST exciting developments are in the area of micro-content standards. Open Source Infrastructure is coming into being! The mesh of islands of functionality are forming into an archipelago - and the standards are the causeways and bridges!
both Adam Curry and Dave Winer alluded and contributed to - this burgeoning world of open standards and user uptake.
Both Adam and Dave speak eloquently of a world of possibilities - where open standards and cooperation create bottom up swell in the world of distribution, viral uptake and new compelling experiences.
Marc goes on to outline the progress in these different standards and how everything is flowing together - a world of possibilities indeed.
So while the technology itself may not float your boat the possibilities for co-creation should.
Its worth taking a look at the Broadband Mechanics website too for more possibilities about digital lifestyle aggregators or a piece of software that glues and enables your online presence in one place…
Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends
DNA Computer Plays Tic-Tac-ToeScientists have built a DNA computer to play tic-tac-toe. MAYA, the DNA computer, is the brainchild of Milan Stojanovic, from Columbia University, and Darko Stefanovic of the University of New Mexico.
This was announced both by the Baltimore Sun in “A twist on artificial intelligence: DNA” and by Knight Ridder Newspapers in “Scientists build DNA-powered tic-tac-toe game.”
This almost stunned me into silence. I hve’nt quite worked out the implications, so I’ll say no more…
Marc’s Voice
OK -I admit it. We have a secret weapon. His name is Eric Sigler and he’s about to go get married. But when he returns, THEN we’ll be able to tell you all about the PeopleAggregator. And let you play with it.
Okay, so I bought into the Meme and Marc’s about to use FOAF in the PeopleAggregator - with a little help form his secret weapon :0
I am really excited to see how this application is going to work and what it can be used to do (although I have some ideas).
Its the first time in quiet a while that a release has me desperate to see the results - I think the last time was Big Country’s ‘The Seer Album’…. and the single releases like “Look Away”.
Joi blogs about Netomat
netomat beta [ Social Software (wiki) | Wiki (wiki) ]
I met Kris and Maciej of netomat at Supernova and just got around to downloading and playing with the beta. It looks interesting. It’s like an email/wiki/link sharing tool. It’s written in Java and runs on Mac and Windows. It’s pretty easy to use and is more “rich” than a wiki because it has things like drawing tools that let you annotate pages in a way similar to a white board. You create pages with your netomat client. You can publish it with editing enabled so anyone can modify it. It keeps a history of changes. You can email pages to people. You can include lots of things in pages including audio, images, links, etc.
If anyone else is running the beta, send me netomat mail so that we can mess around. I am jito on netomat. My first netomat page is here.
I have been having a play with this and it looks really good. It could be really useful as a collaboration tool. I’m wondering how I wold make use of this within an organisation. Haven’t quite gotten there yet given the existing infrastructure that i work with but I’m going to give it more thought.
BBC NEWS | Technology | US snooping plan blocked
Data-mining tool
The widely criticised programme, which was previous known as Total Information Awareness, was the brainchild of John Poindexter.
He is a key figure from the Iran-Contra scandal, who is now at the military research institute, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, (Darpa).
Critics said the plan would create a Big Brother state
The TIA project would collect as much information about every single aspect of everyone in America as possible, from doctor’s records to bank deposits, e-mail to travel tickets, phone conversations to magazine subscriptions.
The aim was to used advanced data-mining tools to look for patterns of terrorist activities in the electronic data trails left behind by everyone.
How can a country be at one time so pro-freedom and yet so paranoid about its own citizens? I’m glad that the Senate actually took a stand against this, it feels exactly like Big Brother and all that Orwell meant by that. Maybe I’m being alarmist but doesn’t this feel almost totalitarian in its intent?
Up2Speed: Amazon to Start Payment System
Amazon is going to let you use their payment system on your site to handle payment for other goods besides the one they sell. The news had leaked from a recent Amazon conference for developers, but I hadn’t seen an official mention in writing yet. In the just-received Amazon Web Services Newsletter #2, one can read:
“We are almost ready to kick off the beta for our payment system. The payment system will allow visitors to your site to use their Amazon account to pay you for any product or service. You can also offer subscriptions and controlled access to content. You will be able to verify the status of any transaction to make sure that the user has not rescinded it. We will provide you with a base-level API and you can construct your business logic on top.”
This is going to be in direct competition with Ebay’s Paypal Developer Network.
I was going to get an Amazon key to make use of the API (at a very basic level). I don’t think I’ll have a need for this payment syetem at least in the short term but its a really clever step by Amazon. A good way of tying customers in further, a new revenue stream and a wider collective of Amazon users…
Matt.Blogs.It
Deploying Google Viewer. Greg reports that some of his search results contain a “View results as slide show” link, presumably using Google viewer. Have you seen this?… [Google Weblog]
The interface has an interesting CD player like styling to it. But in IE6 I got a script error that prevented it from doing anything more than look interesting. Bummer.
Google Viewer worked fine for me (also in IE 6) - I searched on Broadband and Me (vain I know) and got a great taster. I actually thought ‘Wow!, that’s a great idea!’…(that’s 3 times this week…)
Marc’s Voice
Anyway the Living Directory is an example of how a single sign-on system can be used for activists - who might be members of the same organizations. Separate groups - such as the Identity Commons, Venture Collective or the Planetwork conference - can all share the same directory of people, but maintain separate web sites or portals.
The Chaordic Initiatives is a joint-venture between Socialtext, the Living Directory and Dale McGrew’s GoLightly. Each ‘initiative’ can have its own Wiki and the basic social network allows you to keep track ‘who’s your friend’.
More posts from Marc on identity or at least the sharing of directories between sites.
I’ve been trying to research more on social software and am already interested in ideas around complexity and Chaos; so this fits in well. More reading for me…
Scripting News in Manila
Feedster now can index your entire weblog if you have an RSS archive of it. I have one for much of 2002, and all of 2003.
Isn’t it obvious that either Google or Yahoo will buy Feedster so their search engine can understand RSS. Then the other guy is going to wonder why they missed the boat. After that, they can make their search engines understand OPML and throw out the antiquated centralized directories and let the amateurs compete to create the best directory for a given topic, the same way we compete for page rank. No more one guy controlling a category. That just doesn’t work. It’s cool that Google has competition from a highly regarded company like Yahoo. Now search is a market. Before it was a company town.
Dave Winer on the new search market. Will Feedster become a target. Part of me hopes so, at least if not in name then at least the development of alternative technology to do the same job. After all are we ever going to get to this semantic web stuff?
Probably but I don’t really understand it well enough. Another action to me - understand Semantic web.
Recent Comments