Pedro

On Thursday, Google and five publishers settled a long-standing legal battle over whether scanning university-library books and using snippets in search results can be done without the permission of copyright holders. While the agreement lets Google continue its work, both sides deliberately avoided tackling the issue at the heart of the conflict: What does fair use mean in the digital age?

What Is Fair Use, Anyway?

Fair use is an exception to the copyright law that gives authors exclusive rights over their creative works. In passing the limitation, Congress tried to balance the rights of copyright holders with the need of academia, critics, columnists, reporters and researchers to quote other works. Google argued that the snippets it used in search results were protected under the fair-use doctrine. The company did not make whole books available without permission, but instead directed people to where the tomes were available.

But Google angered book publishers by not talking to them before scanning books. (Google did get permission from the libraries where the books were housed.) Publishers saw this brazen move as undermining their control over the books they've licensed from authors.

Google took on some of the biggest names in publishing, including McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons and Simon & Shuster. The Association of American Publishers represented the five companies in the lawsuit filed in 2005.

What We Know About The Settlement

Under the deal, publishers decide which books Google can digitize for its Library Project. Google can display up to 20% of the books OK'd by publishers and sell digital versions through Google Play. That's as much of the agreement Google and the publishers were willing to reveal. The settlement did not need court approval and the complete text has not been made public.

Over the last seven years, a lot has changed in the book-publishing world. The convenience of tablets and e-readers has turned digitized books into a real business, so it makes sense that publishers would now be more malleable. Turning the disagreement into a court battle would have placed the fair-use doctrine front and center, leaving open the possibility that a judge's interpretation could give either side much less than they wanted. As a result, agreeing to disagree on their rights under the law apparently seemed like the wiser choice.

"In terms of coming to an agreement on what was fair use, it was an agreement to disagree," Andi Sporkin, spokesman for the publishers told Wired. "We were able to get beyond that and establish business terms. Did we come up with a universal definition of fair use? No."

Despite The Deal, Little Has Changed

Google has not changed its argument that it has the right to scan whole books because it provides "enormous public benefits" by making it possible for people to find them. Because it makes only snippets available, Google argues there's no harm to copyright holders.

"Google Books makes use of works for the purpose of allowing readers to find them, not to read them directly," Google said in a court filing.

Nevertheless, having the whole book stored in Google's database without permission rankled publishers. They felt it gave them less control over their property.

The Authors Guild Fight Continues

Of course, this agreement does not end the legal wrangling. Google is still wrestling with the Authors Guild over the same issues.

Those opponents came to agreement last year, but a federal judge threw out the deal, saying the settlement gave Google more rights than those granted by Congress under the law.

The settlement, which had many of the same provisions as the deal with publishers, said Google couldn't be sued for digitizing so-called "orphaned works," which are books and papers for which there are no known copyright holders. A federal judge ruled that only Congress can decide the proper use of orphaned books and whether immunity from lawsuits is warranted.

Now that the publishers' suit is settled, people and companies with a stake in intellectual property law will be watching Google's dispute with the Authors Guild closely. For now, the Guild continues to talk tough.

"Google continues to profit from its use of millions of copyright-protected books without regard to authors’ rights, and our class-action lawsuit on behalf of U.S. authors continues," Paul Aiken, executive director of the guild, said.

Despite the no-surrender stance, the latest deal and the dramatic shift in publishing to the digital world is likely to eventually lead to an agreement. Google and the Authors Guild have done it before and they'll do it again. Like the publishers, no one is really willing to risk a court-imposed decision over the meaning and extent of fair use.

 

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Konamito • 3 octubre 2012 • 6 comentarios

Hace cosa de unas semanas me enteré de un remake del juego SD Snatcher a través de @Locomoxca.

El proyecto está siendo llevado a cabo Dangaioh, por un fanático de los RPG y más concretamente de del original de Konami. Con el programa RPG Maker VX Ace ha encontrado la manera de trasladar SD Snatcher a las pantallas de nuestros modernos PC. El remake presenta gráficos y músicas totalmente renovados, con una calidad muy alta, según se puede ver en las siguientes imágenes:

Y en este vídeo también:

Aún queda desarrollo por delante pero estaremos muy atentos a su conclusión. Para ello he abierto un hilo en el foro para que su autor pueda ponernos al día de las novedades y los usuarios puedan dar feedback, necesario para conseguir un buen remake.

Enlace relacionado: SD Snatcher Ace.

JL8 #76 by Yale Stewart

Based on characters in DC Comics. Creative content © Yale Stewart.

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Many of you have been asking, and yes, I will be at New York Comic-Con 2012! You can find me at Table E7 from Friday-Sunday! 

For those of you in the St. Louis area, I’ll be at Star Clipper Comics in the Delmar Loop this Saturday for their Artist’s Table day, when local artists gather and sketch for fans! If you’re nearby, you should come check it out!

-Yale

The idea that contraceptives prevent unintended pregnancy is, well, pretty intuitive. That’s the whole point of contraceptives.

Except that’s not how it always works: About half of all unintended pregnancies are the result of contraceptive failure, where a condom breaks or birth control pills aren’t taken at the right time. The least expensive methods of contraceptive tend to be the least effective.

That got a team of researchers at Washington University wondering what would happen if women had access to all contraceptives at no cost. IUDs, for example, are about 20 times more effective than birth control pills – but also tend to be significantly more expensive.

Over the course of three years, they gave over 9,000 women in the St. Louis area access to free contraceptives. Study participants could choose from birth control pills or more long-acting contraceptives, like the implantable IUD. Three in four women chose the latter.

The researchers published their results Thursday and saw some dramatic differences between those in the study, and those outside of it.

Teen pregnancies – 80 percent of which are unintended – plummetted. They stood at 6.3 per 1,000 teens in the study group, compared to 34 per 1,000 teens nationally.

Abortion rates were significantly lower, too. In the St. Louis area, 13.4 per 1,000 women had an abortion in 2010. Among the women involved in this study, the rate stood at 5.9 per 1,000 women. 

The study authors attribute a lot of those differences to the widespread use of long-acting contraceptives. Such birth control – used by 75 percent of the women in this study – is only used by 8.5 percent of women nationally.

The Affordable Care Act will expand this experiment nationally by making contraceptives no-cost for all insurance subscribers. The study authors estimate that could have a marked effect on abortion rates, “preventing as many as 41–71% of abortions performed annually in the United States.”

International non-governmental organizations with an interest in copyright and related issues have always been admitted to the United Nations's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) as observers (I was once such an accredited observer, working on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation). Historically, the NGO "observers" at WIPO were industry groups, such as the motion picture lobbyists from the MPA, the record industry lobbyists from IFPI, and so on. But starting in the middle of the last decade, public interest groups like Creative Commons and EFF started to attend these meetings, adding balance and an emphasis on human rights to the treaty-making debates.

Pirate Party International satisfies every one of the criteria used to evaluate NGOs for WIPO observer status. Nevertheless, WIPO's general assembly has postponed approval of PPI's application for status. According to a report by Knowledge Ecology International founder James Love, the assembly rejected the Pirates after pressure from Switzerland, the USA, France and other EU nations:

US, Switzerland [and] France raised objections in the informal consultations, and [...] some other European countries wanted to raise objections, but found it awkward given the recent success of domestic Pirate Parties in national elections. The USA said it asked for a hold on the decision until WIPO could decide if it wanted to accept political parties as WIPO observers. One delegate said European countries were concerned that the Pirate Parties would take “political action” back home when they disagreed with positions taken by the official delegates at the WIPO meetings”

PPI blocked from becoming observer members of WIPO

Wikipedia has started testing a new account sign-up page as it looks to curb the decline in the number of registrations over the past couple of years.

If you’re reading this, there’s more than a good chance you’ve used Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has evolved into a major go-to destination for those in search of knowledge, be it to swot up on the films of Laurel & Hardy, or discover what E=MC2 really means. But have you ever actually taken the time to input your own knowledge and become a fully-fledged Wikipedian?

Now, if you’re merely browsing, you don’t in fact need to sign up for a Wikipedia account. And if you want to edit pages, you don’t really need an account either, but if you save your edits your IP address is publicly recorded in this page’s edit history. However, if you create an account, you can conceal your IP address and receive other benefits such as being able to create new pages and upload photos.

With that in mind, Wikipedia is testing a new sign-up page as it looks to encourage more people to make the leap from watcher to Wikipedian. You’ll likely see this page at the moment if you go to sign up:

This wordy, clunky page is currently under review and some people will now be seeing a new design from this week, which is much more direct and less foreboding. The new look is being delivered 50% of the time as part of an A/B test…so you may see it sometimes, others not:

Wikipedia notes that the current design hasn’t been “given much love” in recent years, and could be contributing to the decline in registrations over the last few years. It says:

“We’ve updated the visual design to be far less cluttered and expose a clearer structure, and reduced the amount of instructional text that appears before the form. As a side benefit, mobile users should find the page easier to use, though our mobile team is working on further enhancements, too.”

This is currently only under review for the English Wikipedia, though it’s probably safe to assume that if successful, the new layout will be rolled out across more languages. And Wikipedia is also seeking to make the benefits of creating an account clear by listing them at the sign-up point.

Meanwhile, check out our interview with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales from last year, where he discusses censorship, the Wikipedian demographic…and why he hates the word ‘crowdsourcing’.

Feature Image Credit – Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Oregon farmer eaten by his hogs

Oregon authorities are investigating how a farmer was eaten by his hogs.

Terry Vance Garner, 69, never returned after he set out to feed his animals last Wednesday on his farm near the Oregon coast, the Coos County district attorney said Monday.

A family member found Garner's dentures and pieces of his body in the hog enclosure several hours later, but most of his remains had been consumed, District Attorney Paul Frasier said. Several of the hogs weighed 700 pounds or more.

It's possible Garner had a medical emergency, such as a heart attack, or was knocked over by the animals, then killed and eaten, Frasier said, adding that at least one hog had previously bitten Garner.

The possibility of foul play is being investigated as well.

Previously, previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Penas é um curta-metragem dirigido e produzido por Paulinho Caruso (da O2 filmes), baseada em uma história em quadrinhos do Laerte de 1988.

O enredo tem foco no “El Novato” (vivido por Fabio Marcoff), que começa a desenvolver uma plumagem em seus braços. O que a princípio parecia uma doença que o levaria a estrelar um freakshow, acaba por ser uma “marca” que o coloca dentro de uma elite emplumada. Entretanto, há mais intrigas por debaixo dessas penas que El Novato poderia imaginar.

O curta tem um ritmo bem gostoso de se assistir, além de ter um ótimo fundo musical. Há uma influência “hermana” na obra, visto que tanto El Novato quanto outros personagens parecem ser argentinos.

Algumas participações especiais também temperam a película, contando com o próprio Laerte, Angeli, Alcy e Paulo Caruso. Quem quiser conferir o curta, e ficar com um gostinho de “bem que poderia ser um longa”, é só clicar aqui!

In his 50 year career with The Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell’s cover paintings became some of the most iconic images of everyday life in America. Today, prints of the romanticized paintings of a simpler time are popular wall decor in diners and grandparents’ homes and commonly referenced in movies and TV shows. It would be nearly impossible to find an American adult who has not been exposed to at least one of these famous works, therefore it’s quite exciting to find out that the characters in each painting were, in fact, real people. The Norman Rockwell Museum revealed them all when they featured a landmark exhibition of nearly 20,000 reference photographs that inspired his collections.

See Also CURRENT ARTISTS REINTERPRET NORMAN ROCKWELL

A natural when it came to narration, Rockwell thought out the stories behind each scene down to the smallest detail- from the perfect location to appropriate props to impeccably positioned models. Each of Rockwell’s scenarios were staged to the point that the reference photographs themselves are works of art. The archive was preserved by Ron Schick, a curator at the museum, who then created and authored the perfect gift for aficionados of the artist: Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera.

↬ accidentalmysteries

My last article about the benchmark on the new GPU Cluster instances in the Amazon cloud had a large impact. One magazine wrote:

“A German hacker claims to have used cloud computing to crack passwords stored in an algorithm that was developed by the NSA.”

Well, at this point, I have to get some facts straight. What I did was benchmarking the speed of the new instance type for cracking SHA1 hashes. My first result was that it takes 49 minutes to do a 95 characters, 6 digit long brute force attack on a list of 14 hashes. The thing that was new is that, due to the new Amazon offering, everyone is able to spawn a 100-or-more node cluster in the cloud and distribute the task of cracking passwords onto these nodes. The task of cracking hashes is especially suitable for massive parallelization! An attacker could easily spawn a gigantic cluster of nodes using stolen credit card information, and it would be no problem for him to crack 8-character passwords in a nice timeframe.

The reason I said that SHA1 is deprecated for storing passwords is easy to explain: SHA1 was never made to store passwords. SHA1 is a hash algorithm; it was made for verifying data. It was made to be as fast and as collision-free as possible, and that’s the problem with using it to store passwords: It’s too fast! The speed of computers is increasing incredibly fast, so brute forcing will get faster and faster, too. And the new cloud offerings make parallelization of such tasks easy and affordable. Instead of hash algorithms, one should use Key Derivation Functions like PBKDF2 or scrypt. Some of these functions hash passwords a thousand times, which makes brute forcing them a lot harder.

I hope that this article helps some people understand the real impact of using the cloud for cracking passwords.

The infamous hacker known as TinKode has been sentenced by a Romanian court, according to media reports.

Cernăianu Manole Răzvan was arrested in January 2012, after a series of high profile hacks of government and military websites, exposing their poor security and often publishing passwords and screenshots as evidence.

Past victims have included website belonging to the British Royal Navy, MySQL.com (which ironically fell foul of a SQL injection attack) and NASA servers.

To the relief of many, TinKode appeared to be inspired more by the desire to embarrass organisations into improving web security - rather than making money.

In an interview with Network World in 2011, TinKode compared his activities to a free security audit:

Until now, no. I don't do bad things. I only find and make public the info. Afterwards I send an email to them to fix the holes. It's like an security audit, but for free.

Nevertheless, his actions were illegal and led to his arrest by Romanian authorities earlier this year. Last month a Romanian court ordered Răzvan to pay 93,000 Euros (approximately $120,000) to cover the costs suffered by his breached victims, and gave him a two year suspended prison sentence.

That's a lesson that others would be wise to learn from if engaged in similar activities.

An online petition, started by TinKode's sympathisers, failed to receive significant support (a hoped-for 5000 signatures has only reached 187 at the time of writing). It remains to be seen whether they will help the young Romanian pay his substantial fine.

It's no excuse for TinKode's criminal hacks, but if the websites had been properly secured in the first place they would have never found themselves embarrassed by the Romanian hacker.

If you haven't already done so, check out our free technical paper about "Securing websites", which discusses common ways web servers are attacked and the various ways that they can be protected.

Ever since I self-published the ebook of “Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless” — and ever since I got the print edition published by a conventional small-press publisher, Pitchstone — other writers have been asking me for advice about self-publishing, conventional publishing, and which they should pursue.

I have become a serious convert to self-publishing, and am a big booster of it. But I also recognize that the success of “Why Are You Atheists So Angry?” is something of an outlier in the self-publishing world, and that this avenue isn’t for everyone. So I want to do a bit of a public service announcement for other writers, and lay out what I see as the major advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing versus conventional publishing.

Advantages to self-publishing:

1) You get to keep most of your money. This is not a trivial matter. Especially if you have serious ambitions of being a full-time or even part-time professional writer.

2) You get to be in control. You control publicity. You control design. You get to write your product description. An editor won’t make you change that beautiful turn of phrase just because it’s not Chicago Manual of Style. You decide cover art (and this is NOT trivial: I’ve seen authors weep tears of blood and threaten to quit writing altogether because a boring or butt-ugly cover got forced on them.) If you are a giant control queen like me, this is a big freaking deal.

And you’re not at the mercy of the whims and weathers of your publisher. In conventional publishing, if your favorite editor who loves your work and totally gets your market suddenly gets fired, or moves on to greener pastures? If there’s a buyout or a change in ownership, and the new ant overlords hate your book and decide to bury it? If some dolt in the marketing department decides that your biting analysis of the history of religious apologetics can be sold to the burgeoning tween market if they just slap a vampire on the cover? If your editor goes mad and sets fire to their office because you accidentally re-wrote the Necronomicon and reading your book opened a portal in their brain to the demon underworld? (I hate it when that happens!) You’re pretty much hosed. Depending on your contract, there’s either little you can do, or nothing you can do. When you’re publishing yourself, you can publish your demonic ravings on your own timetable, and nobody can stop you. NOBODY! BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA! The world is DOOMED!

3) It is fast, fast, fast. There is no way I could have gotten “Why Are You Atheists So Angry?” out in time for the Reason Rally if it had been published conventionally. A small press will be more nimble than a big house…. but they’ll still be significantly slower getting your book out than you will yourself. If for no other reason, a conventional publisher actually has to physically print a big batch of physical books. (I know, right? Are we living in the Dark Ages or something?) And that takes time that ebook publishing and print-on-demand don’t. If you have an idea that’s timely, if there’s a wave you want to ride, self-publishing means you can get your book out like lightning. Once it’s written, you format it or pay someone to format it; you go to Kindle/ Nook/ Smashwords/ CreateSpace/ Lulu/ whatever; you hit the “Publish” button. Done.

4) Did I mention that you get to keep most of your money?

5) The weird little truth that conventional publishers are beginning to freak out about: There really isn’t a whole lot that conventional publishers can do for you that you can’t do for yourself. There are some things — I’ll get to those in a sec — and depending on your situation, they may not be trivial.

But here’s the thing. A conventional publisher can give you a promotion budget… but they probably won’t. Or they won’t give you much of one. They probably won’t even consider publishing your book if you can’t do the lion’s share of publicity yourself. A conventional publisher can get your book into bookstores and mainstream book distribution channels… but bookstore sales are an ever-decreasing percentage of the book market. Online sales and ebook sales are kicking bookstores’ asses. That sucks giant donkey dicks: I love bookstores, I want my book in bookstores, any bookstores who want to carry “Why Are You Atheists So Angry?” should contact either Pitchstone (the publisher) or Last Gasp (the current distributor). But it’s a reality that writers need to accept.

Honestly? The publishing world kind of screwed itself. The big houses especially. They kept cutting back and cutting back and cutting back on what they give to authors, and expecting authors to do more and more and more of the heavy lifting themselves. And then self-publishing books started to become cost-effective, and blogging/ citizen journalism/ other electronic self-publishing forms started getting credibility, and authors started saying, “So I’m working with you… why, again?” If you’re a writer, that’s a question you should seriously be asking.

And, of course, all this is assuming that you can, in fact, get a contract with a conventional book publisher… which has always been hard, and is getting harder all the time.

So if publishers can’t do that much for you that you can’t do for yourself… why not just do it yourself, and keep most of your money?

Advantages to conventional publishing:

1) With self-publishing, you have to pay for everything yourself: formatting, cover art, review copies, ISBNs, promo cards, etc. You may be able to get help with some of this, free or cheap: from friends, from fans, from work-trade agreements. But not all of it. If you don’t have the cash/ resources to absorb these costs upfront and take the risk that it may not pan out, it may well be worth it to you to have a conventional publisher absorb those costs instead.

2) With self-publishing, you have to do everything yourself. This is the flip side of “you get to be in control.” You have to do publicity, promotion, dealing with formatters, acquiring ISBNs — everything — all by yourself, or with the help of friends and colleagues. That doesn’t just take money… it takes time. And it takes motivation. If you’re considering self-publishing, ask yourself: “Do I really have the time and energy to deal with all that boring business bullshit?” If your answer is a horrified, nauseated shudder, conventional publishing might be right for you.

3) Having an editor is often a good thing. If you self-publish, your non-existent editor won’t make you change that beautiful turn of phrase just because it’s not Chicago Manual of Style… but they also won’t catch that horrendously stupid mistake you made. If you self-publish, it’s an excellent idea to hire a copy editor — but then you have to add that to your upfront costs. (Or do what I did, and marry one.)

4) Being a self-publisher means being a publisher. And that means understanding the publishing business. I had a big leg up when I self-published “Why Are You Atheists So Angry?”: I’d been working in the publishing industry in one capacity or another (for book publishers, book distributors, retail mail-order companies working with book publishers and distributors, magazine publishers, newspaper publishers) for decades. I knew the business — the small, quirky, indie end of the business, anyway — very well indeed, and I had a working familiarity with the bigger side of the business as well. If you’re self-publishing and you don’t have that knowledge, you’re going to have to acquire it, or learn it on the fly.

On the other hand… some publishers don’t seem to understand the publishing world very well, either. The big ones especially. The degree to which big book publishers have utterly failed to adapt to the electronic world astonishes me. Look at simple things like, “Your cover art has to look good on a computer screen in thumbnail size,” for fuck’s sake. How hard is that to get right?

5) There is still a certain cred that conventional publishing confers on a writer. And there is still a certain stigma on self-publishing, a whiff of the “vanity press” notion. This is diminishing significantly, and it’s diminishing more and more all the time, but it’s still there. The fact that a professional in the industry decided your work was publishable and sellable does give you a certain cachet. And if you’ve been picked up by one publisher, it increases your chances of being picked up by another.

On the other hand… if you self-publish and your book does well, that increases your chances with publishers, too. It shows that you have a platform, that you’re motivated and engaged in promoting your work, and that your work will sell. And the cred gap between conventional publishing and self-publishing is closing all the time. Also, you may decide that you don’t really care about that cred stuff, if it means you get to control your business and keep more of your money.

Bottom line:

If you’re a highly self-motivated, reasonably well-organized control freak, with the time and resources to put into the project and a good platform for publicizing your book (a blog, a videoblog, a podcast, connections with other bloggers and videobloggers and podcasters, lots of followers on Facebook and Twitter and whatnot), self-publishing is probably a good choice. And if conventional publishers won’t publish your book, self-publishing is an excellent choice. Definitely the way to go.

But if a conventional publisher will publish your book — and if it’s worth making less money and giving up control to have someone else absorb the upfront costs and hassles and boring business end of publishing, and if you’re not a giant control freak like me — then conventional publishing is probably worth it.

Note: “Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless” is currently available in ebook form at Kindle, Nook, and multiple formats on Smashwords, including iBooks, Sony Reader, Kobo, Kindle (.mobi), Stanza, Aldiko, Adobe Digital Editions, any other reader that takes the Epub format, Palm Doc (PDB), PDF, RTF, Online Reading via HTML, and Plain Text for either downloading or viewing. All ebook editions and formats cost just $7.99.

You can get the print edition through Last Gasp — wholesale and retail mail-order — through the Richard Dawkins Foundation bookstore, and at the American Atheists online bookstore. (The AA store website is slightly wonky, but if you go there and select “New Products” in the left sidebar [NOT "Newest Items"], it’s right there at the top of the section.) It can also be ordered directly from the publisher, Pitchstone Publishing. (You can also pre-order the print edition through Amazon — but Amazon and most other retailers won’t have the book until the fall.) The print edition is $14.95.

And the audiobook version is available at Audible, iTunes, and Amazon. And yes, I did the recording for it!

Wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Piracy is Illegal”, the movie industry sponsored anti-piracy group ACAPOR delivered several boxes full of IP-addresses of alleged ‘illegal’ file-sharers to the Attorney General’s Office last year.

The “evidence” was handed over in two batches and the group demanded the authorities act against 2,000 alleged pirates.

“We are doing anything we can to alert the government to the very serious situation in the entertainment industry,” ACAPOR commented at the time, adding that “1000 complaints a month should be enough to embarrass the judiciary system.”

However, a year later it turns out that ACAPOR’s actions have backfired and the anti-piracy group is now facing the embarrassment.

ACAPOR delivering the complaints

The Department of Investigation and Penal Action (DIAP) looked into the complaints and the prosecutor came back with his order this week. Contrary to what the anti-piracy group had hoped for, the 2,000 IP-addresses will not be taken to court.

Worse for ACAPOR, the prosecutor goes even further by ruling that file-sharing for personal use is not against the law.

“From a legal point of view, while taking into account that users are both uploaders and downloaders in these file-sharing networks, we see this conduct as lawful, even when it’s considered that the users continue to share once the download is finished.”

The prosecutor adds that the right to education, culture, and freedom of expression on the Internet should not be restricted in cases where the copyright infringements are clearly non-commercial.

In addition, the order notes that an IP-address is not a person.

The ruling explains that the person connected to the IP-address “is not necessarily the user at the moment the infringement takes place, or the user that makes available the copyrighted work, but rather the individual who has the service registered in his name, independent of whether this person using it or not”

This means that the account holders connected to these 2,000 IPs are not necessarily all copyright infringers, similar to orders we’ve seen in the United States previously.

Finally, the prosecutor ruled that even if file-sharing for personal use would be seen as illegal, the artists themselves should explicitly declare that there are not authorizing copying for personal use.

ACAPOR boss Nuno Pereira is disappointed with the decision and he accuses the prosecutor of dropping the case because it’s the easy way out.

“Personally I think the prosecutors just found a way to adapt the law to their interest – and their interest is not having to send 2,000 letters, hear 2,000 people and investigate 2,000 computers,” Pereira says.

Another way to frame it is that the prosecutor adapted the law in the interest of the public at large, which is generally speaking not a bad idea.

While the decision is hopeful for Portuguese file-sharers, it is still a matter of how the law is interpreted. For now, however, it is save to assume that Portugal is spared from the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits we’ve seen in the United States, Germany and the UK.

Source: File-Sharing for Personal Use Declared Legal in Portugal

Seria possível conceituar certos aspectos da ciência se faltasse uma língua para isso? Uma linguagem científica só se desenvolveria em um ambiente cultural do qual a ciência fizesse parte? Essas perguntas estão associadas a uma questão importante, por muito tempo negligenciada: o acesso dos surdos ao conhecimento científico e a inclusão desse saber nas línguas de sinais utilizadas por esses indivíduos.

Nossa experiência com jovens surdos no Rio de Janeiro sugere que os surdos, isolados dos avanços científicos por falta de informação, não desenvolveram sinais para esses conceitos, na maioria das vezes abstratos. Criou-se, portanto, um círculo vicioso: os sinais não existem, os professores têm dificuldade em ensinar ciência, os intérpretes de sinais têm dificuldade em conceituar e os surdos são cada vez mais excluídos cientificamente.

Os surdos, isolados dos avanços científicos por falta de informação, não desenvolveram sinais para esses conceitos, na maioria das vezes abstratos

O desenvolvimento de uma língua resulta da necessidade de comunicação. Isso é verdadeiro para qualquer língua: oral, escrita ou gestual. Nosso trabalho demonstrou que, ao vivenciar experimentos e práticas envolvendo conceitos científicos, alunos surdos, professores e intérpretes desenvolveram sinais para termos científicos ou tecnológicos que favoreceram a interação entre os alunos e facilitaram a aquisição e a compreensão desses conceitos. Após testes entre outros alunos surdos, os novos sinais aceitos foram documentados e serão disponibilizados à comunidade surda, em fascículos temáticos, formando um glossário científico em biociências.

Origens e contestações

Muitas pessoas ignoram que existem diferentes línguas de sinais. Além disso, estas são muitas vezes confundidas com mímica, ou são consideradas ‘linguagens’ e não línguas com estrutura linguística própria. Outros acreditam que a língua de sinais é a língua local soletrada em sinais. Então, o que é essa língua? Como surgiu? Onde é utilizada? Por que não é universal? Qual a origem das línguas de sinais?

A comunicação gestual é um processo absolutamente natural. Crianças, antes de aprender a falar, se comunicam apontando, fazendo gestos e modificando a expressão facial. Uma língua, porém, é mais que isso: ela tem uma organização linguística, e isso só foi constatado nas línguas de sinais há cerca de 50 anos, pelo norte-americano William Stokoe Jr. (1919-2000), em estudo sobre a língua de sinais americana (ASL, na sigla em inglês).

O projeto vem desenvolvendo, com a ajuda de estudantes surdos, grande número de novos sinais para representar termos da área da biologia, entre eles, ‘ártéria’. (fotos: JDL Traduções)

Qualquer língua é essencial não apenas para a comunicação interpessoal, mas também para permitir a organização do pensamento. Na Antiguidade, acreditava-se que as pessoas só aprendiam por meio da palavra ouvida, o que excluía os surdos. Essa noção só seria contestada na Idade Média. No século 15, por exemplo, o humanista holandês Rudophus Agricola (1444-1485) afirmou, em um livro, que uma pessoa surda poderia expressar seus pensamentos por escrito. Nessa época, porém, poucas pessoas eram letradas e sabiam ler e escrever.

Cerca de 100 anos depois, esse livro chegou às mãos do médico e matemático italiano Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), que tinha um filho surdo. Para ele, o uso de palavras não era indispensável para compreender as ideias, mas era necessária uma língua e por isso os surdos deveriam aprender a ler e a escrever.

A língua de sinais teria sido inventada no século 17 pelo monge espanhol Juan Pablo de Bonet, que criou um alfabeto manual

Não se falava ainda em língua de sinais. Esta teria sido inventada no século 17 pelo monge espanhol Juan Pablo de Bonet (c.1573-1633). Ele escreveu o livro Redução das letras e arte para ensinar a falar aos mudos e criou um alfabeto manual, semelhante ao atual alfabeto das línguas de sinais espanhola, francesa, americana e brasileira – o da língua britânica de sinais é bastante diferente. Ainda assim, o uso desse alfabeto exigia aprender a soletrar e, portanto, saber ler e escrever em determinada língua.

Os sinais que representam palavras (tornando desnecessário soletrar) provavelmente evoluíram de forma independente em vários locais. No século 18, duas iniciativas importantes ocorreram. O escocês Thomas Braidwood (1715-1806) criou em 1760, em Edimburgo, a primeira escola para surdos, recebendo surdos de famílias abonadas de várias regiões, que traziam os próprios sinais.

Em 1771, o abade francês Charles Michel de L’Epée (1712-1789) fundou uma escola para surdos, e os alunos tinham diversas origens e traziam e trocavam diferentes sinais. Com base neles, o abade L’Epée elaborou uma língua de sinais. De sua iniciativa nasceu a língua francesa de sinais, exportada depois para os Estados Unidos, onde deu origem à ASL, e para o Brasil, onde gerou língua brasileira de sinais, a Libras. Essas línguas, é claro, sofreram modificações e adições desde então.

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Julia Barral
Flavio Eduardo Pinto-Silva
Vivian M. Rumjanek
Instituto de Bioquímica Médica
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

A few years ago, crows mesmerized scientists and TED talkers when it became clear the birds knew how to produce and use tools, both in captivity and in the wild. A new study suggests another high-level cognitive skill in the avian toolkit: The New Caledonian crow may possess the power of causal reasoning, previously believed to exist only in humans. Discover’s 80beats blog offers a nice summary of how researchers tested for the elusive skill: They designed an experiment in which crows came to associate the presence of a large curtain with a threatening stick poking around near the their food box; when the birds were allowed to see a human leaving the curtain, they relaxed, indicating they were able to infer a human’s presence was responsible for the stick’s activity. The authors of the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, say that this is the first time an animal has been shown to “make inferences about hidden causal mechanisms.” It joins a list of several recent discoveries of animals performing eerily human-like functions, like the birds that conduct “funerals” for their dead peers, the apes that enjoy slapstick humor, the birds that produce art for art’s sake, and the chimpanzee that conducts rigorous studies of primate behavior. (OK, that one’s from the Onion.)

How cool can two guys be? Leonard Nimoy, yes, Mr. Spock, posted a picture of the time he and Adam West, yes, Batman, played drums together. Link -via Buzzfeed

There's something about typing your thoughts on the internet that makes some perfectly nice people act like jerks. It's not just the anonymity, because even on social networking sites where our identities are displayed to our contacts, arguments often devolve into name calling and bullying.   

According to soon-to-be-published research from professors at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, browsing Facebook lowers our self control. The effect is most pronounced with people whose Facebook networks were made up of close friends, the researchers say.

Most of us present an enhanced image of ourselves on Facebook. This positive image—and the encouragement we get, in the form of "likes"—boosts our self-esteem. And when we have an inflated sense of self, we tend to exhibit poor self-control.

"Think of it as a licensing effect: You feel good about yourself so you feel a sense of entitlement," says Keith Wilcox, assistant professor of marketing at Columbia Business School and co-author of the study. "And you want to protect that enhanced view, which might be why people are lashing out so strongly at others who don't share their opinions." These types of behavior—poor self control, inflated sense of self—"are often displayed by people impaired by alcohol," he adds.

MIT professor Sherry Turkle says we often forget that when we comment online we don't feel as if we are talking to real people, but when we receive such thoughtless comments, we take it doubly hard.

And for Facebook, its very name is part of the problem. "It promises us a face and a place where we are going to have friends," says Dr. Turkle, author of the book "Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other." "If you get something hurtful there, you're not prepared. You feel doubly affronted, so you strike back."

Read more about research into online behavior at the Wall Street Journal. Link -via The Week