derivative work

One of the best articles I’ve read on the math used to estimate Gulf Oil Spill quantities: Jenn Kepka’s “Putting the Gulf oil spill in perspective”, Salon.com, 5/28.

American Needle v. NFL is out ….

Some interesting commentary on Sotomayor and the First Amendment from Paul Levinson: * http://paullevinson.blogspot.com/search/label/Sonia%20Sotomayor * http://paullev.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=497539 * http://paullevinson.blogspot.com/search/label/Sonia%20Sotomayor I haven’t had time yet to dig into Sotomayor on intellectual property, telecomm, and other information law issues, but this is discouraging. Franken of course I have hopes for: After Fox News sued him for trademark infringement [...]

Yes, yes, the Inauguration is a big deal. And I am soooo glad that our long national nightmare is finally over. But. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our politics, fellow Horatios. Recent physics results help stitch together a number of findings, unexplained phenomena, and the usual bizarre [...]

This is great news. The Open Humanities Press (OHP) aims to be for the humanities what many similar archives and endeavors have been for the sciences. It will begin including the following journals: Cosmos and History, Culture Machine, Fibreculture, Film-Philosophy, International Journal of Zizek Studies, Parrhesia and Vectors. link from peter suber @ open access [...]

The current New Yorker (2008/5/12) is chock-full of good stuff: * Malcolm Gladwell, In the Air, New Yorker. link from MC on closed mailing list Invention is part of zeitgeist. Many people come up with the same ideas at the same moment — true in her field, my partner says, and it looks true from [...]

New Jersey’s Supreme Court has recognized that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their email communications — thus, law enforcement has to get a search warrant or grand jury subpoena. This was under the New Jersey Constitution and applies only to New Jersey. It’s the first major case finding a state constitutional privacy [...]

Although it feels weird to talk about Colombia without addressing the political issues, I nevertheless present this io9 link + pictures of a beautiful and strange library in Casanera.

That’s a paraphrase of what an Illinois state Rep. Monique Davis told a man who was protesting the state of Illinois’ $1M grant to a church. Read more at Eric Zorn’s Chicago Tribune blog. link from an David S-J on an atheist mailing list 4/11 update: Rep. Davis apologized, sort of, after being excoriated in [...]

A friend‘s FaceBook entry pointed me to an amazing article in Bitch Magazine: “Hard Times” by Sarah Seltzer. Seltzer defines and describes the pattern and statistics of the reviews of books by women, describing both the gender disproportionality, and an editorial pattern of assigning writers who are likely to dismiss feminist works.

The awesomeness of Miro Miro is the awesome successor to the Democracy TV player. It’s open source and supports open content. It’s being developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, whose president, NAME, was recently interviewed at Groklaw. Reville had this to say about DRM: [Miro is] not [compatible with DRM], and we don’t support DRM. [...]

This rant about sexism in open source communities brightened my day.

The large Australian book chain Angus & Robertson has apparently decided it would be a good idea to send invoices to small presses for the lower profit that A&R received from their books (described as a “profit gap”). Not only is this extortionate, clueless, and bad business management, it’s also hilarious reading. the Sydney Morning [...]

The Thai police are requiring delinquent or troublemaking cops to wear “hello kitty” armbands as a badge of shame. [nyt 8/7] i wonder if that would work here in the US ….

why? because i keep seeing interesting things but don’t have enough time to get all discursive on ‘em. in the realm of stupid, check out ASCAP’s contribution to the “let’s teach our kids the copyright corporations’ view of copyright” animated video wars: “Donny the Downloader“. spam subject of the day: apocalyptic daze dinnerware. i like [...]

Over on Dan Savage’s blog I caught this video with Australian comic John Safran sharing his thoughts on Mormon missionaries — and then making his point in person to assorted Salt Lake City residents by knocking on their doors to talk to them about atheism. Hilarious.

A perfect example of how copyright paranoia can be used as an excuse to stifle the very uses which copyright law ought to foster: KSFO asks liberal critic to stop using audio clips

In an interesting twist on press subpoenas, Army prosecutors have subpoenaed journalists to get them to vouch for published quotes — not source information or unpublished information. [SFgate 12/18.] The prosecutors hope to use the quotes to prosecute First Lt. Ehren Watada, who denounced the war on Iraq as illegal and refused to deploy. Sarah [...]

Or at least those who stuck around for the drug tests. After Gainesville, Florida, implemented drug testing for its library volunteers, the number of volunteers, most of whom were senior citizens, dropped from 55 to 2. Bill Maher gave this story the fisking it deserves, and radref at Radical Reference pointed me to it to [...]