Prof “Lessig”:http://www.lessig.org/ gave another barnstorming performance in a visit to a small, packed room full of LSE media and regulation students. I had heard much of his presentation before last year at a presentation he made in Oxford but there were some interesting new factoids in the latest version – notably:

* The average time a book remains in print is about one year.
* There are 100k titles “alive” in Amazon but 26m titles that have been printed and are available in the Library of Congress.
* Products from one part of a big corporation tend to get used in movies and other programmes made by that company not necessarily because of straightforward plugging but simply because the process of copyright clearance is easier with products from inside those corporations than outside.
* Before the 1976 copyright act in the US, copyright holders had to re-assert their copyright periodically. Only 10-20% of them did so.
* Whoever managed the ebook distribution of his book “The Future of Ideas”:http://the-future-of-ideas.com/ set the DRM flag in Acrobat not to allow anyone to copy text from, print or even have the book read aloud. Talk about an own goal!

A report in the Guardian says little new support was offered by the developing world to close the digital divide and suggests governments and NGOs didn’t really interact. Tellingly:

While the government leaders made their speeches in main auditorium, other people and organizations showcased their projects in a separate hall on the floor below… There was relatively little interaction, with government officials using their own entrances, restaurants, lounges and even toilets.

A local paper claims the Independent Media Centre that started it all in Seattle closed partly because of its decision to have a downtown location costing $3000 a month so that it could be at the heart of the Seattle WTO protest (which was four years ago) and so it could offer its multimedia services to other left-leaning groups.

More controversially the paper’s ‘obit’ suggests classic problems of left splintering were also partly to blame – “the core group running the IMC was cliquish and inaccessible; at one point, nonwhite media activists discussed starting their own competing local IMC” and it also pointed out one of the drawbacks of the open publishing model – readers had “to sort out for themselves the solid, well-researched, well-presented stories from the jargon-laden, factually incorrect anarco-leftist rants”.

Of course Seattle Weekly is part of the alternative press themselves so it may be they had an axe to grind – and the Seattle Indymedia website is still running, with a front-page explanation of their status that is “dismayingly revealing”:http://seattle.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=36723&group=webcast …

I just read that Demos – an influential UK thinktank – has now put almost all of its catalogue up online for free download (using a “license”:http://www.demos.co.uk/aboutus/openaccess_page296.aspx derived from the “Creative Commons”:http://www.creativecommons.org/ license).

Worth a browse if you are a UK-based policy wonk…

Salon’s Farhad Manjoo recently produced an interesting piece on the battle between cable companies and big tech companies over equal access to content over broadband cable.

As I commented on Eszter Hargittai‘s blog entry this issue appears at first to be a straightforward one – cable industry bad, free access good. But there are sound business and technical reasons why some forms of discrimination between different forms of content may be useful. For example, for good video quality cable companies want to put stuff in servers directly connected to their networks. But they can’t afford to put all streaming video content there so they may want to cut deals with certain providers. Is that unfair to the other providers? Internet users would still be able to see their stuff – just not as well.

Cable companies might also want to charge users who want to stream stuff from their “non-preferred” suppliers but keep “preferred supplier” content free (or lower cost). But while discriminatory the practice would also be fair, since the cable cos would be incurring different costs depending on where the content they were streaming came from.

Perhaps all legislation should do is demand open bidding for content deals and that per-Gb charges should have some proven relationship to the cost of providing bandwidth.calculator loan table amortizationestate ag real loansloans amortization bankmortgage get amc loan outhome loans guardian americanok loan sacramento cash payday advance$88 car loansbaltimore loans 100 investoradversary proceeding student loansexpert loaned servant alabama issues doctrinealpena alcona unions creditcredit rating advantis union financialcredit abc warehouse appliance storeaenima creditscredit card blogspot com accept e2for accreditation center detention youthon abet accredited lineabc card credit appliance warehouse Map

Good to have more hard figures and particularly useful to have demographics. It’s interesting that the writer at Cyberatlas spins the story to make them seem more democratic. If it was me I would have used the same figures but said something like, “despite receiving quite a bit of media attention, only two percent of people who are online have created weblogs [does this include ones that are no longer active?] and these are heavily skewed towards a wealthy demographic – almost half have a household income greater than $60,000. According to this census report US median income in 2001 was $42,000.”

I was surprised that only 4 percent of the Internet-using population reads blogs, but if you consider that they tend to contain 1) personal stuff aimed at a circle of friends and family 2) political stuff at a level of detail most people don’t need or 3) technology-related stuff at a level of detail most people don’t need it becomes less surprising.

The US Senate has voted to stop funding for the Terrorism Information Awareness programme (once known as the even more alarming “Total Information Awareness” programme). It was only in the early research stages but its eventual goal was to gather information about Americans from a variety of public sources and look for patterns of behaviour similar to those of known terrorists. It’s hard to imagine this could have been done without generating a lot of “false positives” – innocent people who the statistics said were likely terrorists – and the potential for misuse of the collected and cross-referenced data would have been vast. See the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s report for more information about this programme and be thankful it seems to have had a stake put through its heart.

Wired News reports an appeal court ruling in the US that ruled a person forwarding an email containing libellous statements to a mailing list is not themselves guilty of libel. It was suggested that this protection may also extend to webloggers who report stuff that is sent to them.

Of course the truly litigious will simply choose a court jurisdiction that is more favourable to them – the UK for example…

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.wachovia accept creditcardamex bank cards credit of canadaonline lpn accredited degreeinquiry credit allowedunion education credit amarilloexpress monitoring credit program americantax eligibility new credits 2007high test equivalency accredited school Map

Howard Rheingold via Smart Mobs alerted me to an unusual case where an SMS operator in India broadcast a request for donors of a rare blood type to give blood to help save the life of a patient in Delhi. It appears to have worked. I wonder if other similar public service messages might start to be officially distributed (this appears to have been done “unofficially” as a favour). It just goes to show that even spam doesn’t always have to be a bad thing…granny oma erolog sex sex nlteen gushing orgasmscartoon pharrell createblack women pussy fattits emma watsonshairy open pussies wideunderage asian picslactating breasts men suckingwives cheating black white cockgay videos suck self

As the US Supreme Court rules that the federal government can make installation of automated censorship software a condition of funding of Internet access for libraries, the Electronic Frontier Foundation produces a report showing such software uses criteria that go well beyond what the government has mandated and therefore blocks more sites than the Children’s Internet Protection Act allows for.

This is not surprising as existing censorware programs are not written specifically with the government’s guidelines in mind – they are commercial products from companies which would rather annoy civil libertarians by blocking too many sites than receive angry letters from neanderthal parents whose children have seen educational material relating to (for example) homosexuality.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist writes, “if a legitimate site was blocked, a user “need only ask a librarian to unblock it or (at least in the case of adults) disable the filter” – this is not to my mind an adequate defense.

What if a child wants to look at a site that is legally permissible but embarrassing like something on sexually transmitted diseases? Are they really going to go and ask their librarian to see it? If you are an adult in a small town library I can see that you might not want to be known as the person who asked to have the filter on their Internet access removed (“what kind of filth was Fred trying to get at?” they might ask down at the barber shop…)

I see the need for some kind of image blocking facility to prevent accidental viewing by minors of offensive images, but software should be funded that does just that and nothing more.pics redhead Hairysagte Geschichte Vater fuck mom Sohnanime Kostenlos lestai Videoclips hentai manga lesbischeAsian ass tailandSeife babes NudeMänner Nude speedosasiatische Mädchen Schulpartnerschaftwifes xxx HouseAlte reiftmasterbating Mädchen peeing