Could Pinterest become the next Napster? - Therese Poletti's Tech Tales. By Therese Poletti, MarketWatch SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Kirsten Kowalski, a lawyer and photographer in the Atlanta area, has had much more than 15 minutes of fame since she wrote a blog post late last month titled “Why I tearfully deleted my Pinterest Inspiration boards.” She even got a phone call from Pinterest’s co-founder and chief executive, Ben Silbermann, after her post went viral, and she talked to him for an hour, during which she relayed some of her concerns about how the site is enabling copyright infringement. Read Kowalski’s blog post on her conversation with Silbermann. Pinterest, for those not yet familiar with this latest Internet phenomenon, is a site that lets users “pin” images onto bulletin boards that they’ve created. It’s a sort of virtual scrapbook, where users can collect ideas they run across on the Internet, such as recipes, home decor, gardening, do-it-yourself projects.
Pinterest A typical Pinterest stream. A thumbnail of an image may be acceptable. In Praise Of Piracy. I’ve had to think a lot about digital rights management lately. Not that I wanted to. But I recently did some eye-opening contract software development for a DRM-heavy media app, just as our government up here in the Great White North introduced a new and extremely DRM-friendly copyright law, and links to Don’t Make Me Steal started popping up all over the Internet. You probably don’t realize, unless you actually work on a software project laden with DRM, just how much Sisyphean effort goes into it. I estimate fully a quarter of the developer-hours that went into the app in question were devoted to building or dealing with the DRM, meaning a quarter of the total effort did not go into crafting a killer app. Similarly, the countless hours and dollars Sony spent on CD rootkits and impressively inept PS3 encryption did not go into building better products.
DRM is the barbed wire of the media world. It’s easy to see why. Ironically, it’s Apple who gives me hope. Droits d'auteur : les coiffeurs alsaciens coupent la musique | E. En Alsace, certains salons de coiffure sont silencieux depuis lundi. Pour protester contre l'augmentation de la redevance Spre (Société pour la perception de la rémunération équitable), ils ont décidé de ne plus diffuser de musique. Premiers à réagir, ils espèrent mobiliser les autres régions. Depuis hier, impossible pour les clientes de certains coiffeurs d'Alsace d'écouter tranquillement leur radio préférée diffusée sous leur casque séchoir. Car depuis le 5 juillet, ils font la grève de la radio. . « La redevance de la Spre est passée de 18,5% à 37,5% des droits d'auteurs en 2010.
Avec ce nouveau nouveau barème, un salon de cinq employés verrait par exemple sa redevance passer de 60 euros en 2010 à 235 euros en 2011, selon Christelle Pelka : « Nous payons à la fois une redevance à la Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique ( Sacem ), qui augmente tous les ans de façon raisonnable, et une à la Spre, qui ne fait pas partie du même organisme. La Sacem hors de cause. Techdirt. Commons News. CC talks with Marc Weidenbaum This guest blog post was written by Niki Korth. If you’re in the Bay Area, come see Marc read from his new book at City Lights Thursday night and come hear Niki speak at next week’s CC Salon. Marc Weidenbaum / Jorge Colombo In 1996, Marc Weidenbaum founded the website Disquiet.com, which focuses on the intersection of sound, art, and technology.
He has written for Nature, the website of The Atlantic, Boing Boing, Down Beat, and numerous other publications. He initiated and moderates the Disquiet Junto group, where musicians respond on SoundCloud to weekly Oulipo-style restrictive compositional projects. He developed the sound design with Taylor Deupree for the 2013 documentary The Children Next Door. Where does the name Junto come from?
Around the year 1727, when he was barely into his 20s, Benjamin Franklin had the desire to create a small society. Yeah, I think that registers. Something important for me happened in 2006. What about “internet”? Creative Commons. Droits d'auteur : les coiffeurs alsaciens coupent la musique | E. Why We Need To Abolish Software Patents. During my tech days, I co-authored four software patents.
Each cost my startup about $15,000—which seemed like a fortune in those days. I didn’t really expect these to give me any advantage; after all if my competitors had half a brain, they would simply learn all they could from my patent filing and do things better. But I needed to raise financing, and VCs wouldn’t give me the time of day unless I could tell a convincing story about how we, alone, owned the intellectual property for our secret sauce. We got the financing, and the plaques of the patents looked great in our reception area, so the expense was worth it. But there was definitely no competitive advantage. New research by Berkeley professors Stuart J.H. Graham, Robert P. In software, only 24% of startups even bothered to file a patent. Software executives consider patents to be the least important factor for competitiveness. Meanwhile, the U.S. patent system is clogged and dysfunctional.
Is an entrepreneur turned academic.