Month: July 2005

  • Liveblog: Lori Watrous-deVersterre on LibraryCity

    Library City Talk: (power point is here). A brief introduction to a library consulting project to help libraries access public domain and creative commons works: Paradigm shift in banking: Banks used to be separate locations, and it seemed counterintuitive to put banks in supermarkets. “supermarkets is where you spend money, not get money…” Similarly for…

  • Liveblogging: Let’s Go Library Expo: Books, eBooks, and Audiobooks

    I’m attending a planet library teleconference. I’m jotting some things that struck me: Mark Beatty from WiLS (Wisconsin Library Service) says that the PDA has won the ebook battle, quoting a librarian saying, “reading experience on the PDA is suprisingly not terrible.” Advantages of PDA: owners are used to syncing content between PC and pda.…

  • Here’s what You’re Missing!

    Thanks to Sonny Bono Act, here are the films that won’t go in the public domain this year. We’ll have to wait until 2025. I can’t even begin to think about music and text and visual arts.

  • Go Here for the Copyright Debate

    I’m organizing a debate, Copyright, Technology and the Arts tonight. Now it has a new website, so go there for information about the event. I’ll be blogging there mainly. If you are liveblogging, let me know and I’ll post it on the Copyright 1922 weblog

  • Ebooks and Voluntary Payments

    I must have missed this, or perhaps I didn’t read it well enough, but here’s a piece by Chris Meadows about charging people on a voluntary basis for fiction or digital content. Quite well written and reminiscient of my own thoughts about tipjars 2 years ago. Dave Spaulding on What Really Happens in a Gunfight

  • Wed July 27 Debate: Copyright, Technology & the Arts

    Update: Latest information is found on a site I created for tonight’s event called Copynight 1922. You can ask questions, make comments or keep up with the debate by going to this site. Also, I’ll be putting resources for today’s discussion on the website. Remember that there is wireless at Nexus Cafe! Be sure to…

  • “De Minimis” and Infringement

    Funny comic about public domain/Sonny Bono. Too bad the reality didn’t turn out that way. Here’s a nice article about what to do if you can’t find the copyright owner to get permission. Nice article about fair use by Mary Minow, J.D., A.M.L.S., which unfortunately doesn’t go into the judicial history of each of the…

  • Recording Cover Songs

    On Getting the Rights to Record versions of cover songs. Here’s an article about getting rights to perform cover songs in a venue. In summary, make sure the venue has blanket ASCAP/BMI licenses (I assume most do).

  • Dumb & Smart Critiques of Creative Commons

    Joe Gratz rebuts one technology columnist’s misconceptions on Creative Commons. This is an excellent response to a particularly dumb article, but there are valid criticisms to make about the creative commons licenses. Here are some criticisms I made a few months ago. Fortunately, I see that Creative Commons seems to be updating their licenses to…

  • Irreconciliable Stances, Small World

    Guide to Portable Recorders James Wood vs. Dan Green et al. More here. Congrats on Dan Green for keeping the debate up, although the original post of us was perhaps incendiary. At some point, the argument devolves into a reputation of irreconcilable stances, but when? Crazy coincidence. At last weekend’s wedding the father of the…

  • Railing Against Establishment Writers

    I’ll be out of town for a few days to attend a wedding of an Albanian student of mine. I’ll be back next week. Romanian Poet Renata Dumitrascu on the the corruption of Ismail Kadare by the regime he served: Kadare is irritated that people are claiming they could have been writers but were prevented…

  • Kathy McCarty (Surreptitious Rock Star) in Houston!

    Kathy McCarty on being a surreptitious rock star: “Would you like a dinner salad? Caesar or garden? We have five different dressings for the garden salad, they’re all house dressings, and they’re all really good!” It feels weird to write that down. As many times a day as I’ve said it, I don’t think I’ve…

  • Let’s Go Library Expo July 27 (Free!)

    Here’s an online conference about ebooks, audio books and digital libraries. The schedule is here, and the talks run all day (with long breaks). It will take place on Thursday, July 28, 2005 and registration is free . David Rothman and Jon Noring from OpenReader are going to give talks, so it should be interesting…

  • Too many commercials!

    Dave Taylor answers: what questions can be legally asked at a job interview? Zopecast about Zope3 developments. A new weblog about zope/plone from Malaysia. Movie moguls are unhappy about commercials: As head of production at New Line Cinema, Toby Emmerich is not your typical moviegoer. So when he wanted to see “War of the Worlds”…

  • Motives for Reading

    Kathy Sierra on creating a (nonfiction) bestseller . The main problem is this: the more focused you are on demonstrating how smart YOU are, the less likely you are to help the READER feel/become smart. And that’s a formula for hurting sales. The more you make the book about how much you know, the less…

  • Odds and Ends

    Design Cliches. Readers suggest more. Blogging Software Comparison A daughter tells a mother: “Mom, your degree was exercise physiology. You spent your first five years out of college as a glorified aerobic instructor. Then you taught yourself programming, took a few night classes at UCLA, and made a huge career switch into computers, and found…