Author: vanevery

Clay’s talk about games, rules, code and the real world

Shirky: Nomic World: By the players, for the players
In this talk (edited version online), Clay Shirky discusses code as the rules and structure of virtual worlds (online multiplayer games). Much is stated about the structure that these worlds might assume if control was given to the players and what the out-comes might be. In the end he states: “We should experiment with game-world models that dump a large and maybe even unpleasant amount of control into the hands of the players because it’s the best lab we have for experiments with real governance in the 21st century agora, the place where people gather when they want to be out in public. “

Wow! Japan copyright laws worse than ours..

Japanese website closed after screenshot-related arrest – Ferrago
From the story:
Reports this morning inform us of the rather troubling news from Japan that the owner and Editor of popular online gaming site Gamesonline, one of Japan’s most popular news sites, has been arrested for alleged breach of copyright concerning screenshots used on his website.

Documentating a defense of open source

Welcome to the Grokline Project: Grokline’s UNIX Ownership History Project
From the site:
This is an open, community-based, collaborative research project, a living history, designed to carefully trace the ownership history of UNIX and UNIX-like code with the goal of reducing, or eliminating, the amount of software subject to superficially plausible but ultimately invalid copyright, patent and trade secret claims against Linux or other free and open source software. If there is any code out there that represents a conceivable risk of that kind, we’d like to identify it and mitigate the litigation risk now. If there isn’t any valid claim that can be made, we’d like to be able to prove it.

RIAA: We must not allow any use, let alone fair use

Mindjack – Will Digital Radio Be Napsterized? by J.D. Lasica
From the article:
The Recording Industry Association of America has discovered that digital radio broadcasts can be copied and redistributed over the Internet.
The horror.
And so the RIAA, the music business’s trade and lobbying group, has asked the Federal Communications Commission to step in and impose an “audio broadcast flag” on certain forms of digital radio.

Clear Channel using patent to keep bands from selling concert CDs

“>RollingStone.com
Another example of patent abuse.
From the story:
Artists net about ten dollars for every twenty- to twenty-five-dollar concert CD that’s sold, no matter which company they use. But with Clear Channel pushing to eliminate competition, many fear there will be less money and fewer opportunities to sell live discs. “It’s one more step toward massive control and consolidation of Clear Channel’s corporate agenda,” says String Cheese Incident manager Mike Luba, who feuded with Clear Channel last year after promoters blocked the band from using CD-burning equipment.

More evidence of video based networks turning to Flash

Streamingmedia.com: Flash Powers Comcast.net’s Innovative Video Browser
The interface is a bit funky but the review is glowing. Sounds a lot like what a dot bomb company I was working for a few years back was trying to develop. I would like to see Flash open up a bit more and see some better authoring tools but it does seem as though they got some things right with the video streaming. All in all, pretty interesting, too bad it is the same content that can be found on TV.

No need for Napster when you can just grab the songs from a stream

Replay Music
Although I have appreciated this type of functionality in software such as FreeAmp, I am not sure that I like this as a commercial product. Not only does it add fuel to the music industry’s assault on online music services it deals a major blow to streamers who don’t encrypt their streams (allowing greater player and platform choice) or do it just for fun without any hope of profit.
From the site:
Just play music from your favorite online radio station or streaming music service, and every song is saved on your PC as a high quality MP3 file, automatically tagged with the artist and song title, and perfectly separated into individual tracks.