Copyright laws prevents release of historic jazz recordings In the 1930s an audio engineer named William Savory (above) made a lot of high-quality recordings of live jazz performances of Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Lester Young, Bunny Berigan, Coleman Hawkins and others. The National Jazz Museum in Harlem acquired the collection after Savory died. Steven Seidenberg of the ABA Journal reports that "jazz experts were stunned," by the recordings. "The extent and quality of the Savory collection was beyond anything they had imagined." Unfortunately, we will probably never get to hear the recordings, thanks to current copyright laws. Among the treasures: Coleman Hawkins, the first great tenor saxophonist in jazz, playing multiple ad-lib choruses on the classic "Body and Soul." A Trove of Historic Jazz Recordings has Found a Home in Harlem, But You Can't Hear Them
BitCoins: Four Objections In response to my recent blog post about BitCoins, several commenters offered responses to my objections. Today I will address these considerations as well as others I came across during my research. Objection: My refutation was circular or my refutation was just an assertion that BitCoins are worthless. This isn’t the case. I suspect many people interested in BitCoins may have some training in computer science, so I’ll use an analogy from that field to briefly restate my argument. I am not asserting that BitCoins are “worth nothing.” Objection: Some people do accept BitCoins, so they can’t be a poor currency. There are several possible explanations for this. Objection: Subjective value theory means that value only exists in the minds of people, therefore there is no reason BitCoins couldn’t be as valuable as gold or any other commodity. This objection misses the point of my argument. We have already mentioned that paper money never spontaneously emerged on the free market.
Wikipedia is giving away its old servers Wikimedia, the foundation that oversees Wikipedia and related projects, is upgrading a lot of its servers, and cycling out some of the old hardware. But rather than selling it or throwing it away, they're donating it to other, worthy projects -- maybe even yours. Most systems (but possibly not all) have the following specifications: * Dual CPU 2.5 GHz * From 3GB to 24GB of RAM, depending on role. * Most have 80 GB or larger HDD (some have two hard drives, some drives are 160GB or possibly even 250GB) If you are interested, please provide the following information in your email to us: * Registered non-profit name and information. * Your contact information, including email address, phone number, and relationship with requesting non-profit. * Information on the non-profit, their charter, mission and goals. * Shipping address information for a FedEx Ground delivery (i.e., the shipment destination)* * How the servers will be used. (We like to know and share with folks!)
Golden Cyberfetters Over the past few months a number of people have asked what I think of Bitcoin, an attempt to create a sort of private cybercurrency. Now Alexander Kowalski at Bloomberg News directs me to this Jim Surowiecki article on Bitcoin, which is very interesting. My first reaction to Bitcoin was to say, what’s new? We have lots of ways of making payments electronically; in fact, a lot of the conventional monetary system is already virtual, relying on digital accounting rather than green pieces of paper. But it turns out that there is a difference: Bitcoin, rather than fixing the value of the virtual currency in terms of those green pieces of paper, fixes the total quantity of cybercurrency instead, and lets its dollar value float. So how’s it going? But does that make the experiment a success? And because of that, there has been an incentive to hoard the virtual currency rather than spending it.
Recording industry lobbyist appointed head of copyright for European Commission Maria Martin-Prat, who took a leave from her job at the European Commission to work as Deputy General Counsel and Director of Legal Policy and Regulatory Affairs for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI -- thee international version of the RIAA, CRIA and BPI, though they're all basically the same companies), has returned to the EC to run its copyright unit. While Martin-Prat was enjoying her holiday as a lobbyist for the industry she now regulates, she took a number of extremist copyright positions, including lobbying against the private copying exemption (part of European Fair Dealing), and arguing that it should be illegal to break the DRM on the media you buy, even if you don't violate copyright in doing so. Christian Engström, Pirate MEP, writes, "Welcome to the European Union, where the big business lobby organizations are calling most of the shots at the Commission, and where citizens are just seen as a nuisance to be ignored.
Censorship Executive Jobs - JB1628725 | Dubai, UAE Job Description Intigral is a Media/Telecoms company that aggregates, develops, and promotes digital content to the consumers of regional telecom operators. That includes all digital content offered on IPTV, the mobile, and the web. Intigral is seeking Censorship Executives with the following responsibilities: Majority of this role is to ensure that programming is within the compliance guidelines. Skills Computer literate and MS office proficiency Excellent communication skills Must work well under pressure Exposure to market trends (Gulf/Saudi Arabia) Strong judgment regarding compliance Awareness to flag issues Consistency in maintaining routine tasks Fluency in English is a must, Arabic preferred Salary Range: Job Details Job Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates Company Industry: Telecommunications; Arts/Entertainment/and Media Company Type: Employer (Private Sector) Job Role: Quality Control Joining Date: Employment Status: Unspecified Employment Type: Monthly Salary Range: Gender:
Many US ISPs in epidemic of covert search-hijacking of their customers The Electronic Frontier Foundation worked with UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute to uncover a widespread program of search-hijacking by American ISPs. Many US ISPs run covert proxies that redirect certain lucrative search queries (made by customers who believe that they are searching Google or another search engine) to their preferred suppliers, pocketing an affiliate fee for delivering their customers. Participating ISPs, which include Cavalier, Cogent, Frontier, Fuse, DirecPC, RCN, and Wide Open West (Charter used to do this, but appear to have stopped), did not disclose the practice to their customers, who were meant to believe that they were getting the search results that their preferred search-engines had presented. EFF and ICSI uncovered the vendor that supplied the hijacking software, a company called Paxfire. Widespread Hijacking of Search Traffic in the United States
Wikileaks: Guardian journalist negligently published password to unredacted cables (Update: Guardian denies) Wikileaks, facing criticism after unredacted versions of diplomatic cables escaped into the wild, today accused a Guardian journalist of negligently publishing the password required to decrypt them. A Guardian journalist has negligently disclosed top secret WikiLeaks’ decryption passwords to hundreds of thousands of unredacted unpublished US diplomatic cables. Knowledge of the Guardian disclosure has spread privately over several months but reached critical mass last week. The unpublished WikiLeaks’ material includes over 100,000 classified unredacted cables that were being analyzed, in parts, by over 50 media and human rights organizations from around the world. For the past month WikiLeaks has been in the unenviable position of not being able to comment on what has happened, since to do so would be to draw attention to the decryption passwords in the Guardian book. Wikileaks also says it is in touch with the U.S. "Our book about WikiLeaks was published last February. Interesting!
Lawrence Lessig at Occupy Wall Street [Video Link] Here's Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig in Boston NYC: "If this movement can be identified as a fight against the corruption that our political system has become, then it has the potential to bridge left and right in a way that could become much more generative, much more important, because people on the left and people on the right look at the crony capitalism of this system and they look at the way in which money from Wall Street bought the regulatory infrastructure that led to the collapse of 2008. And even worse, after the collapse of 2008, the same money blocked any reform of this regulatory infrastructure. Both the left and the right can look at this and say 'there's something deeply wrong with this system.'" Open Culture: Lawrence Lessig Occupy Wall Street Could Bridge Left And Right
PC Gaming is a Donor-Supported Industry with the Pretense of Selling a Product Swarm Economy – Zacqary Adam Green In today’s world, everything digital can, and will, be made available free. They’re non-scarce goods. The act of physically purchasing PC games is going extinct. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24/7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer; and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store; then the pirate’s service is more valuable. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. So, before Steam came to Russia, piracy was apparently the only method of digital distribution without long wait times and inconvenient DRM. Except for the price tag. Convenience Here are the steps involved in getting a game from Steam, including those that a first-time downloader would need to take: And here are the steps involved in illegally downloading a game: Same number of steps. No.
White House rejects SOPA and PIPA Ranking members of the Obama administration have published a memo condemning the approach taken in SOPA and PIPA, the punishing, pending Internet bills that establish and export a censorship regime in the name of fighting copyright infringement: We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Obama Administration Responds to We the People Petitions on SOPA and Online Piracy (Thanks, James!)