derivative work

Following an action at my own BPL, the anti-DRM organization Defective by Design is calling for libraries to boycott products that use DRM.
The Open Letter to Libraries is posted @ DBD’s website, and they have also made a sample letter / template available for us to send our own letters.
Link via cory @ boingboing

Surely some enterprising plaintiff-side attorney can generate a lawsuit from the reasonable expectations of consumers to continue to have access to the music they paid for:
Customers who have purchased music from Microsoft’s now-defunct MSN Music store are now facing a decision they never anticipated making: commit to which computers (and OS) they want to authorize [...]

I was checking out Tor’s new wallpapers and thinking about the uses of provenance in the art world. Tor is a science fiction publisher, and they’ve been doing one of those Publisher Experiments with the new digital world. (In fact, Tor released this week Farthing by Jo Walton for free — this was an [...]

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 [...]

A NYT blog is reporting that Radiohead is making digital copies of its next album available for pick-your-own-price amount — and the best part is they’re DRM-free.
Commenters on the post were almost all positive. A few salient points pulled out of comments:
* This will generate fans for and interest in its nice physical artifact [...]

I’ve been following the news about Wiley Drake and if you haven’t, you should too. Drake endorsed a Republican candidate (Huckabee, whose campaign has distanced itself from Drake) using church stationery and resources, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State did what it does in such situations — call for an investigation [...]

A friend just sent me a link to this fan video about the TV series “Supernatural”. What an awesome demonstration of the power of technology to enable media criticism. A thousand feminists could comment about exploitative or graphic visual depictions of violence against women in a series or on TV generally, and it would [...]

I’ve written before about the ways in which criminalizing specific medical procedures — e.g., the “partial birth abortion act” — is a technological mandate. As a technological mandate, bans on specific abortion procedures are subject to all the same flaws, overreaches, underreaches, definitional problems, and obsolescence problems that mandates involving technological protection measures for [...]

Well, Steve Jobs certainly looks prescient, what with EMI dropping DRM for its iTunes sales. Why do I suppose they were already in negotiations when Steve Jobs wrote his editorial?
Never mind, it’s still good news. (As is the decision from the Supreme Court on EPA’s responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases, a case that worried [...]

(edited & corrected as I learn more)
According to MacObserver, the French legislation opening DRM (like that on apple’s ipod) has now passed into law. Presumably, this was supposed to open up Apple’s scheme to competitors so music purchased at iTunes store will play on other devices. According to consumer groups this portion was quite weakened; [...]

questionable authority reviews a pro-’intelligent design theory’ entry that describes a future history of the fabulous medical and scientific breakthroughs generated by ‘intelligent design theory’ and the abandonment of ‘Darwinism’. While the whole post is highly recommended, it was one of the commentors who really tickled my fancy. Responding to the future history’s [...]

Up early for my spouse who caught a red-eye. Now she’s resting peacefully and I of course can’t get back to sleep. But that’s okay, because there’s the Internet!

Positive outcomes of BlogHer: Mary Hodder at Napsterization is establishing a Speakers’ Wiki.

In response to publisher anxieties & thinly-veiled threats of litigation, Google is [...]

cory doctorow writes about SFWA’s ongoing campaign against copyright infringement (Why writers should stop worrying about “ebook piracy”– boingboing 5/14)
cory also cited from & linked to john scalzi writing about the same thing (The Stupidity of Worrying About Piracy 5/13).
personally, i much appreciated john’s description of how he feels about readers who [...]

chortle. ButtUgly: Main_blogentry_210904_1:

We lied to you
(Inspired by Cory Doctorow’s DRM speech.)
Dear Content Producers and Owners:
We lied to you. In the golden 80s and 90s we told you micropayments and content protection would work; that you would be able to charge minuscule amounts of money whenever someone listened to your music or watched your movie. [...]