Darknet

145 million works under CC licenses

Reblogged from Peter Black's Freedom to Differ:

From the New York Times, reporting from the iCommons iSummit in Rio de Janeiro:

Since the introduction of the Creative Commons concept in 2003, some 145 million "creations" have been registered. More than 100 million of those licenses have been issued in the last six months. Mr. Lessig said that blogs accounted for the largest number, followed by images and then music, although the video sector is growing.

Read more here. This shows that the Creative Commons licenses are definitely making an impact and potentially reshaping how people view copyright and the creative process.

One year after Grokster, file sharing remains popular

San Jose Mercury News: Despite Grokster ruling, illegal file sharing remains popular.

Committee vote on Net neutrality Wednesday

mcjoan at the Daily Kos: Committee to Vote on Net Neutrality.

Group offers compromise on net neutrality

San Jose Mercury News: Group offers net regulation compromise. Private services that don't afect other Internet traffic endorsed by the Center for Democracy and Technology.

France to ease bill criticized by Apple

Associated Press: France to ease bill criticized by Apple. Mandate to force the sharing of iTunes technology to be softened.

What youth culture wants

CBS News: The 'Mash Up' Culture. Teens Use Technology To Mix, Match And Create Their Spheres.

According to the Horatio Alger Association's State of our Nation's Youth 2005 report, the percentage of Internet-using teens that downloaded music for free dropped from 44 percent to 40 percent between 2004 and 2005, while the percentage that paid to download rose from 17 percent to 24 percent in the same time period.

TV reruns, movie clips aid church sermons

The Los Angeles Daily News has this story today: TV reruns, movie clips aid church sermons.

Oddly, the story makes no mention of the fact that these pastors are almost certainly committing a felony by violating the DMCA -- as recounted in my book Darknet.

Pointblog interview

When I was in Paris last month, I was interviewed about citizens media by Pointblog, a leading French blog. Here's the interview -- a video and accompanying text entry in French.

i personal media entrano a far parte del quotidiano

The Italian translation of Darknet hits bookshelves next week. Meantime, Vernardo Parrella conducted an interview with me at Vloggercon and just posted it on the Area 51 blog. It's in Italian (not bad, since I don't speak it!).

Bernardo also has this: Ora in onda: la rivoluzione dei personal media.

E-book project to offer free access

Associated Press: E-book project to offer free access.

Electronic book devotees may want to set aside some extra screen time this summer, as two non-profits are preparing to provide free access to 300,000 texts online.

Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library plan to make ``a third of a million'' e-books available free for a month at the first World eBook Fair. Downloads will be available at the fair's Web site from July 4, the 35th anniversary of Project Gutenberg's founding, through Aug. 4.

The majority of the books will be contributed by the World eBook Library. It otherwise charges $8.95 a year for access to its database of more than 250,000 e-books, documents and articles.

But the book fair won't be the last chance for e-bookworms to devour works ranging from ``Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' to ``Old Indian Legends,'' not to mention dictionaries and thesauruses, without paying for them.

Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart said the partners are on track to make 1 million books available for the annual fair's one-month run in 2009, with more appearing in subsequent years. About 100,000, he said, will be permanently available at the handful of Project Gutenberg sites on the Internet.

``We want to give the most books to the most people,'' Hart said. ``It has been our goal since the dawn of the Internet to break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy.''

The Gutenberg books, typed and scanned into computers by thousands of volunteers, mostly are those that are no longer protected by copyright. They include fiction, non-fiction and reference books and will be available for worldwide readers in about 100 languages.

While the commercial e-book market remains tiny, Hart said electronic books have ``caught on without getting a lot of publicity'' and are being widely read on handheld computers, cell phones and even special programs for use on iPods.

``These people that grew up on GameBoys -- to them a GameBoy screen is the standard size,'' he said. ``To us old folks, it's too small. But they don't care.''

Based on fast-increasing demand, he predicted there will be 10 million e-books available by 2020.

``I've gotten notes from people who said they would have never, ever read Shakespeare if I hadn't put it on the Internet,'' Hart said.

Studios turning blind eye to fan sites

NY Times: 'Star Trek' fans, deprived of a show, re-create the franchise on fan sites. Excerpt:

Fan films have been around for years, particularly those related to the "Star Wars" movies. But now they can be downloaded from the Web, and modern computer graphics technology has lent them surprising special effects. And as long as no one is profiting from the work, Paramount, which owns the rights to "Star Trek," has been tolerant. (Its executives declined to comment.) ...

James Joyce's heir: impeding scholarship

In the June 19 New Yorker, D.T. Max has this article: The Injustice Collector. Is James Joyce's grandson suppressing scholarship? The piece recounts how Stephen Joyce, who lives in France, has destroyed some of the papers and letters his grandfather wrote, and now attempts to impede scholarly works by rejecting every request to quote from unpublished letters that comes his way.

Unconscionable.

Meantime, Lawrence Lessig reports:

The Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s Fair Use Project has filed a law suit against Stephen Joyce, who claims the right to control access to the papers and letters of James Joyce. The context of the suit is described well in this article appearing in the New Yorker by D. T. Max. The complaint in the case can be found here.

This is the first in what we expect will be a series of cases defending the boundaries of fair use. Stay tuned.

Europe presses for access to iTunes

Associated Press: Groups press for access to iTunes.

House rejects net neutrality bill

The San Jose Merc publishes an op-ed piece with a contrarian view of the net neutrality debate.

Meanwhile, bad news in Congress (as always), with the House yesterday voting down Rep. Ed Markey's net neutrality bill, 269-152.

Meantime, at PublicKnowledge, Art Brodsky assesses the latest on Capitol Hill, and guest blogger Jonathan Taplin sees a new net neutrality opening.

Inside the Spyware scandal

In the May-June Technology Review, Wade Roush had the best wrapup I've seen of the Sony rootkit scandal: When Sony BMG hid a "rootkit" on their CDs, they spied on you and let hackers into your computer. What were they thinking?

Plus, Wade blogs about it.

Interviewed on NPR's 'ATC'

I'm briefly interviewed on today's All Things Considered from NPR. It should be online after 7:30 pm EST.

The old cliche "politics makes strange bedfellows" is proving itself true: The liberal advocacy group Moveon.org is fighting on the same side as the Christian Coalition. That may be the most headline-catching part of an issue with a notably dull name: Network Neutrality.

Advocates on both sides of the issue say the neutrality bill pending in Congress will have far-reaching implications for all Internet users.

That's an understatement. I give a perspective on how a dual-tier Internet would adversely impact video-intensive nonprofits like Ourmedia and the Internet Archive.

Art Brodsky of PublicKnowledge.org adds this update:

Last night, the Rules Committee met and determined which amendments would go to the House floor. There are eight. You can read them here.

For our purposes, the big one is No. 7, the Markey etc. amendment which establishes a real Net Neutrality policy.

What Netflix could teach Hollywood

NY Times: What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood.

People in the copyright wars

At Mac TidBITS, founder/editor Adam C. Engst has one of the most thoughtful reviews of Darknet I've come across: Darknet: People in the Copyright Wars. Excerpt:

As much as I've participated in innumerable online discussions in which theoretical situations showing the inanity of the current copyright regime are batted back and forth, I've never actually collected real-world stories in which copyright, the DMCA, and the tactics of the Content Cartel impinge upon the media-related activities of normal people, activities that meet the common sense standard of fair use.

Luckily for me, well-known blogger J.D. Lasica spent two years amassing those stories, and he's woven them into a book, "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation." Lasica does a fine job of explaining the DMCA and other efforts to clamp down on any use of media the Content Cartel doesn't want to see, and I'd recommend that anyone who is unsure of the harm being done in those ways read the book for that reason. But what made it a compelling read for me were his stories of the real people who have run afoul of the copyright regime in various different ways. ...

FAQ on Net Neutrality

Prof. Susan Crawford offers a FAQ on Net Neutrality.

The MPAA, RIAA and viral videos

Billboard: Viral video sharing is new headache for music biz. Excerpt:

One source close to the situation says that the recording industry is lobbying YouTube and other viral video sites to implement content-filtering technologies to identify and block unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works.

Among YouTube's competitors, early attempts at filtering solutions are bearing out in various ways. A search on Google Video for clips from commerce partner Sony BMG yields only video-for-sale offers, while searches for videos from other labels' artists produce unauthorized video postings. MTV's viral video unit iFilm allows only music videos that it can monetize through promotional deals or ads. Meanwhile, MySpace -- which has promotional and ad-supported music videos with the labels for a designated music video area of the site -- also is seeing unauthorized videos pop up in its viral video area.

The major labels are taking the position that these sites are responsible for policing their own communities. But in the meantime, they have been targeting individuals who use these sites to share popular music videos, alerting them that they are distributing unauthorized works.

Those efforts have produced decidedly mixed results thus far. Many of the videos that labels have requested be removed have quickly resurfaced on the site in a matter of days -- a fact that industry sources suggest supports the need for more stringent filtering by all viral video specialists.

Viral video sharing would not have been an issue just 18 months ago, when the labels still viewed music videos as a promotional tool for selling albums. But today videos are a rapidly growing money-maker for the music business. The RIAA estimates that sales of music videos topped $3.7 million in three months, after being introduced in October. Meanwhile, the major labels also are sharing in the profits of ad-supported video-on-demand offerings from AOL, Yahoo, Music Choice and others. ...

Russian download site is popular, perhaps illegal

NY Times: Russian Download Site Is Popular and Possibly Illegal.

Rising consumer popularity is turning AllofMP3.com, a music downloading service based in Moscow, into a global Internet success story, except for one important detail: The site may well be illegal. ...

Operating through what music industry lobbyists say is a loophole in Russia's copyright law, AllofMP3 offers a vast catalogue of music that includes artists who have not permitted their work to be sold online — like the Beatles and Metallica — at a fraction the cost of services like Apple Computer's iTunes service.

Sold by the megabyte instead of by the song, an album of 10 songs or so on AllofMP3 can cost the equivalent of less than $1, compared with 99 cents per song on iTunes. ...

JD Lasica présente son livre 'Darknet'

Daniel Kaplan from FING wrote up a summary of my recent talk in Paris about the differences between Media 1.0 and Media 2.0. It's in French.