spriteleigh

Timothy from Creative Commons writes in about CC's contribution to the Copyright Office's copyright reform effort: "Creative Commons has always been slightly reticent about its role in the copyright debate, even though many of its greatest supporters are vocal in the copyright reform movement. Today, we're adopting an unambiguous position: open licensing is a fantastic tool, but it's not a substitute for substantive improvements in copyright law worldwide." (Thanks, Timothy)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a challenge with the patent office against the notorious "podcasting" patent of patent troll Personal Audio, which has been shaking down podcasters for money for a vague "invention." Podcasting fans raised over $75,000 to fund the challenge.

"As we show in our petition, Personal Audio is not the true inventor of this technology and should not be demanding a payout from today's podcasters," EFF Staff Attorney Daniel Nazer said. "If you look into the history of podcasting, you won't see anything about Personal Audio."

Today's petition shows that Personal Audio did not invent anything new, and, in fact, other people were podcasting years before Personal Audio first applied for a patent. In preparation for this filing, EFF solicited help from the public to find prior art, or earlier examples of podcasting. In the petition, EFF cites three examples: Internet Pioneer Carl Malamud's "Geek of the Week" online radio show and online broadcasts by CNN and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

Members of the public donated $76,160 to fund this campaign, an amount more than double what EFF originally requested when it launched its "Save Podcasting" fundraiser in May. EFF partnered with attorneys working pro bono and the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to craft the petition. The donated funds will be used to pay the fees and costs associated with the petition, which are primarily Patent Office filing fees. Any funds remaining after the fees are paid will go towards EFF's ongoing patent reform work.

EFF Files Challenge With Patent Office Against Troll's Podcasting Patent

In a crowded field of talented practitioners, MPAA piracy figures are standout examples of misleading, silly, outright BS. No wonder then, that the MPAA has asked a judge to exclude any data on losses due to piracy from its lawsuit against Isohunt.

“To permit consideration of actual damages under these circumstances would be perverse – and particularly unfair – given that Plaintiffs elected statutory damages precisely because their actual damages are not capable of meaningful measurement,” the MPAA’s legal team writes.

The MPAA argues that since the court has decided to award statutory damages, it is irrelevant to what extent their revenues are negatively impacted by online piracy.

“Defendants should not be permitted to exploit the inherent difficulty of proving actual damages in a case such as this as a basis for lowering the statutory damages award, especially when the very purpose of statutory damages was to provide a remedy that is not dependent on proof of actual damages.”

MPAA Says Piracy Damages Can’t Be Measured [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]

Video Link.

"Theme park manager Eddie Stark has one week to whip his lackluster group of employees into shape before the park's grand opening." The folks at Bad Lip Reading have outdone themselves.

(YouTube link)

A bad lip-reading of Game of Thrones turns it into a comedy! Supposedly a trailer for the upcoming Medieval Land Fun-time World, it actually has a plot -sort of. From the YouTube page:

Theme park manager Eddie Stark has one week to whip his lackluster group of employees into shape before the park's grand opening.

Good luck with that -they entire cast is distractible, incompetent, and downright weird. Well, that last part is something this has in common with Game of Thrones. No spoilers, because 1. no one gets killed, and 2. it doesn't make a bit of sense. But that's not all: see another video with more clips from the project.  -via Buzzfeed

The game Facebook Security Simulator from Usvsth3m is a satire on the ever-changing privacy and security settings on Facebook and other social networks. Honestly, their desire to sell your personal information sets up a cat-and-mouse game in which you must hustle to keep things the same. In the simulator game, you really have to hustle to answer the often-confusing questions because there's a timer! Remember, the aim is to keep your information private and thwart Zuckerberg in his goal to sell your data. I might have made it past level two if I had the time to keep trying. -via Metafilter

Dave from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "What we don't want to see is massive tracking using RFID chips (or any other easily trackable or hackable technology) in badges, whether that's real-time tracking or requiring check-ins at every panel entrance. Obviously, these are very public events and an attendee can't expect a lot of privacy -- they're likely to pop up in the background of hundreds of photographs posted to social media. At the same time, there is a certain anonymity in crowds, and it's an anonymity built into the culture of cons."

"Limitless" is not a word we like to see associated with locational tracking. There should absolutely be limits. Newsarama's piece discusses the possibility of 1-to-1 person tracking, a technology that could theoretically allow a controller to follow say, Stan Lee, as he makes his rounds along a convention floor. That, indeed, would be an astonishing development for the pop-culture-razzi, but only if Stan the Man agreed to it himself. And by "agree," we mean a fully-informed permission, not the fuzzy consent that happened this year with Twitter access.

What we don't want to see is massive tracking using RFID chips (or any other easily trackable or hackable technology) in badges, whether that's real-time tracking or requiring check-ins at every panel entrance. Obviously, these are very public events and an attendee can't expect a lot of privacy—they're likely to pop up in the background of hundreds of photographs posted to social media. At the same time, there is a certain anonymity in crowds, and it's an anonymity built into the culture of cons.

How many fans would steer clear of controversial graphic novels or manga tables (or even cheesy guilty childhood pleasures) if they knew someone was creating a log of every booth where they lingered? Think about the young LGBT artists who have yet to come out to their parents, but are finding the courage through sitting in the back of a queer comics panel. Would they still enter if they had to scan their personally identifiable badges at the door? Once you open the gate to this technology for third-party marketing, businesses outside the convention hall will be able to track your attendees. Won't that chill the tradition of proudly wearing a badge every moment, from the pre-preview night happy hour to the last after party?

An Open Letter to All the Comic Cons: Protect Our Secret Identities

Writing in Wired, Richard Stallman -- founder of the Free Software Foundation, which puts the GNU in GNU/Linux -- writes about the relationship between software freedom and a free society. Proprietary software -- opaque to its users, liable to subversion for the purposes of governments and corporations -- is incompatible with a free, democratic society. The temptation to collect data, and, once collect it, to abuse it, is irresistible for the fallible humans who make up the state. Systems have to be designed to keep their users free and private -- there is no way to make people secure unless their tools are secure, too. Stallman sets out the various forms of surveillance and control, from no-fly lists to web-tracking, and proposes ways to make them safe for a free society.

For the state to find criminals, it needs to be able to investigate specific crimes, or specific suspected planned crimes, under a court order. With the internet, the power to tap phone conversations would naturally extend to the power to tap internet connections. This power is easy to abuse for political reasons, but it is also necessary. Fortunately, this won’t make it possible to find whistleblowers after the fact.

Individuals with special state-granted power, such as police, forfeit their right to privacy and must be monitored. (In fact, police have their own jargon term for perjury, “testilying,” since they do it so frequently, particularly about protesters and photographers.) One city in California that required police to wear video cameras all the time found their use of force fell by 60%. The ACLU is in favor of this.

Corporations are not people, and not entitled to human rights. It is legitimate to require businesses to publish the details of processes that might cause chemical, biological, nuclear, fiscal, computational (e.g., DRM) or political (e.g., lobbying) hazards to society, to whatever level is needed for public well-being. The danger of these operations (consider the BP oil spill, the Fukushima meltdowns, and the 2008 fiscal crisis) dwarfs that of terrorism.

However, journalism must be protected from surveillance even when it is carried out as part of a business.

Stallman: How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? [Richard Stallman/Wired]

Noelle Stevenson's "Nimona" is a great, lighthearted (but full-throated) serial fantasy webcomic about the complex relationship between heroes and villains. It's well into its ninth chapter, and is slated for collection in a graphic novel in 2015.

Lord Ballister Blackheart has a point to make, and his point is that the good guys aren't as good as they seem. He makes a comfortable living as a supervillain, but never really seems to accomplish much - until he takes on a new sidekick, Nimona, a shapeshifter with her own ideas of how things should be done. Unfortunately, most of those ideas involve blowing things up. Now Ballister must teach his young protégé some restraint and try to keep her from destroying everything, while simultaneously attempting to expose the dark dealings of those who claim to be the protectors of the kingdom - including his former best friend turned nemesis, Ambrosius Goldenloin.

Nimona | Gingerhaze

(YouTube link)

Of course, it's a fake trailer. No movie studio thinks Aquaman would be worth the trouble of a feature film! Aquaman gets no respect, even though he puts up with more difficulty than other super heroes. And that's the entire gist of this trailer that traces the origin story of the super hero plus his first big adventure helping a sea creature we all know and love. But then again, this video by Ryan Higa may give Hollywood an idea or two! -via Viral Viral Videos

Craig sez, "This is an unofficial music video for 'The Darlings of Lumberland' by They Might Be Giants, from their 16th album 'Nanobots' (2013). It was created using both famous and obscure silent horror films found on Archive.org, and photos from the vintage photo site Retronaut. TMBG is giving away a free MP3 of 'Darlings.'

TMBG - The Darlings of Lumberland (a Halloween music video) - from Nanobots (2013) (Thanks, Craig!)

(Video Link)

Poor Cinderella just wants to live a normal life, but her wicked and fanatical stepmother treats her like a prisoner.

Cinderella has a power that she’s only beginning to understand. A power that, when connected to her rage, will make her unstoppable.

YouTube member Cracker76 mixed scenes from Disney’s Cinderella with the audio of the trailer for the 2013 remake of Stephen King’s Carrie.

-via 22 Words

Charlie Stross really, really hates Microsoft Word. So much so that he's written a 1600-word essay laying out the case for Word as a great destroyer of creativity, an agent of anticompetitive economic destruction, and an enemy of all that's decent and right in the world. It's actually a pretty convincing argument.

As the product grew, Microsoft deployed their embrace-and-extend tactic to force users to upgrade, locking them into Word, by changing the file format the program used on a regular basis. Early versions of Word interoperated well with rivals such as Word Perfect, importing and exporting other programs' file formats. But as Word's domination became established, Microsoft changed the file format repeatedly -- with Word 95, Word 97, in 2000, and again in 2003 and more recently. Each new version of Word defaulted to writing a new format of file which could not be parsed by older copies of the program. If you had to exchange documents with anyone else, you could try to get them to send and receive RTF — but for the most part casual business users never really got the hang of different file formats in the "Save As ..." dialog, and so if you needed to work with others you had to pay the Microsoft Danegeld on a regular basis, even if none of the new features were any use to you. The .doc file format was also obfuscated, deliberately or intentionally: rather than a parseable document containing formatting and macro metadata, it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures used by word, with pointers to the subroutines that provided formatting or macro support. And "fast save" made the picture worse, by appending a journal of changes to the application's in-memory state. To parse a .doc file you virtually have to write a mini-implementation of Microsoft Word. This isn't a data file format: it's a nightmare! In the 21st century they tried to improve the picture by replacing it with an XML schema ... but somehow managed to make things worse, by using XML tags that referred to callbacks in the Word codebase, rather than representing actual document semantics. It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and [usually] competently-managed as Microsoft making such a mistake by accident ...

Why Microsoft Word must Die

buy this print!

Of course the metalheads would be into it!

Rock on, rock on always.

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud is publishing the world's safety codes. Some governments disapprove. He writes, "Upon receipt of a Certified Letter of Takedown from the Special Assistant Attorney General of Mississippi, Public.Resource.Org prepared a 67-page response, enclosed a Trodart Professional-Grade Self-Inking Rubber Stamp inscribed with a revolutionary saying ('If it isn't public, it isn't a law.'), packed it all up with a Mississippi flag made of crinkle-pak, and dispatched the parcel back to the sender. "

tl;dr: "We respectfully decline."

We're trying to convince the state officials that the Internet is really there to help them. If they make their codes available, all sorts of innovation happens. They don't need to lock up their laws.

Boxing Day in Mississippi!

A leaked Amazon ebook contract [PDF] shows that Amazon's default terms for ebook publishers is that they must use DRM, unless they can convince Amazon to leave it off.

Like most DRM vendors -- Apple and Google, for example -- Amazon spends a lot of time implying and flat-out stating that it only uses DRM because the big dumb media companies require it of them. The reality is that DRM's primary beneficiary is the DRM vendor. Once your book is sold with Amazon's DRM on it, only Amazon can give your readers permission to move them out of the Kindle jail and onto another device of your choosing. Of course Amazon wants to force copyright holders and creators to use its DRM -- it's a one-stop way of converting the writer's customer into Amazon's customer. Forever.

Remember: Any time someone puts a lock on something of yours and won't give you the key, that lock is not there for your benefit.

Please note that this is an Amazon contract and that Amazon is the one who is insisting on the DRM. That makes this an interesting contrast, IMO, with Bezos’ statements that “If the rights owner wants DRM, we do DRM. If the rights owner doesn’t want DRM, we don’t do DRM.”

The contract clause mentioned above is by no means agnostic on the topic of DRM. It unequivocally tells us that Amazon is the one who gets to decide whether the ebooks have DRM. It also tells us that Amazon _will_ be adding DRM to Kindle ebooks unless the other party can talk them out of it.

Amazon’s position (on DRM) in this contract is far from agnostic, and it is in fact much closer to their stated position for audiobook DRM.

A Leaked Contract Reveals that Amazon Insists on DRM [Nate Hoffelder/Amazon]

(Image: DRM PNG 600 2, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from listentomyvoice's photostream)

Watch comedian Sam Hyde take the piss out of TED talks at Drexel University's TEDxDrexelU. From Philadelphia Magazine:

The event concluded with Sam Hyde, billed as a “video documentary filmmaker and journalist from Brooklyn” who “recently returned from Mogadishu, the most dangerous city on earth, where he shadowed the heroic al-Mahamud women on their quest to clean up their streets and restore humanity to their war-torn country.” TEDx organizer Dhairya Pujara introduced Hyde’s presentation, titled “2070 Paradigm Shift.”

Hyde, 28, is not a journalist; he’s a member of the Massachusetts-based comedy troupe Million Dollar Extreme, which employs a type of shock-value comedy along the lines of a more goalless version of Yes Men sabotage.

"TEDx Drexel Got Pranked This Weekend" (Thanks, Debbie Hampton!)

Yes, the GOP is taking a bath in its poll numbers recently thanks to plunging the government into chaos due to a foot-stomping hissy fit. But Nate Silver (i.e., the dude who correctly called the electoral result in all 50 states last year) is on hand to throw cold water on anyone tempted to read too much into the long-term electoral effects of the shutdown, presuming it is, in fact, coming to a close sometime relatively soon. If you’re the sort currently salivating at the prospect of the Democrats taking back the House in a year, you should probably give it a close read.

I think what Silver has to say here is probably pretty close to reality, although I would branch off from his point six here to note that I think where the real action will be in 2014 is within the GOP itself, and whether the establishment GOP folks are going to finally attempt to punt out the Tea Party GOPers in the primaries. Whether or not the shutdown will have a large electoral impact in 2014, the actual constitution of the GOP’s legislative host (and how well they can be controlled) is going to matter to the people running the party, which is to say, the ones who would probably like a little organization in their organization.

I’m not going to lie when I say that’s probably going to be fun to watch, in the “get the popcorn, people whose politics I largely disagree with are thumping on each other” sort of way. I’m also not going to lie when I say that on balance I think it’s probably better for everyone if the GOP establishment does, in fact, shove the Tea Party types back into a hole. Regardless of their politics, their process boils down to destruction. Indeed, in a very real sense, it doesn’t matter what your politics are, if your process is to grind the world to a halt if you can’t get everything you want.

Which is to say that if what we end up with in 2014 is the House still in GOP hands, but the House GOP comprised of more people who understand and actually care about governance than exist in it today, that’ll count as a victory in my book. The GOP likes to say it’s the party of grown-ups, but unfortunately that’s not true, nor has it been for a while. It would be nice if it started walking toward that direction again, however.

Even toys like to dress up for Halloween! Redditor OdoWanKenobi took his collection of Hot Toys Avengers action figures and converted them into Star Wars characters -just for Halloween costumes, you know. Some are head swaps, some are wearing clothes from Star Wars figures, and the Hulk has Photoshop ears to make him look like the only green main Star Wars character, Yoda. Excellent casting choices! Too bad he doesn't have a Fury action figure. -via Geeks Are Sexy

We do traditions out of habit, but few of us actually give any thought to the reasoning behind them. In fact, it's only when we look at those things from another perspective that we realize how odd they just might be.

For example, what happens when you switch out a bride's bouquet for a cat? You can see just how strange it seems to throw anything at a whole crowd of eager women. Sure, flowers makes a little more sense than a cat, but still, they both seem odd when you think about it.

That's why the new Tumblr Brides With Cats is so entertaining...that and it's utterly hilarious to look at.

Via Laughing Squid

Full Screen Mario is Josh Goldberg's complete remake of the classic Super Mario Brothers in HTML5. You can play re-creations of the original levels, make your own in an HTML5-based level editor, or play any of an infinite number of randomly generated levels. The code is on GitHub for your happy hacking, too. It's a pretty impressive example of what HTML5, in-browser functionality can do.

Full Screen Mario is a purely HTML5 remake of the original Super Mario Brothers. You can play the original levels, play through some of literally millions of possible random maps, or create your own using the level editor. This whole project is open source and free - if you would like to use the code, check out the Github or email me.

Full Screen Mario (via Waxy)

Alan sez, "A 'sock puppet network' is a set of seemingly independent accounts on Wikipedia that act in concert because they are (or at least strongly appear to be) all controlled by the same entity. The accounts are sock puppets for the true entity, which uses the network to effect changes it wants on Wikipedia."

In true open Wikipedia fashion there's even a talk page that lays out the investigation details and supporting evidence for what appears to be a massive network of hundreds of these sock puppets. Although the investigation is still ongoing it appears that this network was primarily interested in creating and promoting pages on Wikipedia as a way of gathering attention and influence. The root cause may go back to a group of paid editors in Silicon Valley who have been hired by small companies looking for a cheap way to gather attention and a reputable air.

The battle to destroy Wikipedia's biggest sockpuppet army [Simon Owens/Daily Dot] (Thanks, Alan!)

(YouTube link)

In the latest movie supercut from Slackstory, we see a string of scenes in which tension builds until something jumps out at you, screaming like a banshee! It's just a cat. Never mind that cats sometimes harbor murder in their hearts and can mess you up more than a ghost or gremlin ever will.

The cat trope is a way to add more tension and more scares to a story without having to reveal the actual evil entity too soon. Read more about it at TV Tropes, if you don't mind diving down the TV Tropes wormhole. -via Laughing Squid

(YouTube link)

Who would have thought you'd ever see a mashup of Pokémon and King of the Hill? That would be El-Cid and Hans Van Harken. The entire description at YouTube:

HansandIwereeatingpizzaandchickenanditwa­sgoodItellyouwhhatandthenwesaidwhatifthe­mpokiemansandkingofthehillmetandwelaughe­ddaggumpizzawasgood

I guess that explains it. Credit the magic of the internet when a random weird thought can be turned into entertainment for us all. -via Daily of the Day

You like free retro games, don't you? Ones with downloadable chiptune soundtracks, brutal difficulty curves and perfect NES aesthetics? Null Divide + should be good to ruin your productivity this fine Wednesday morning.