Future of the Web

Separately, Microsoft and Apple have announced that both company's browsers will boycott VP8 in favor of H264, which is encumbered by more than a thousand patents.. But if VP8 becomes ubiquitous on the Web, that's a hard position to maintain.  

[...Paley avoided traditional film distribution deals and instead released the film under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, writing: You don't need my permission to copy, share, publish, archive, show, sell, broadcast, or remix Sita Sings the Blues. Conventional wisdom urges me to demand payment for every use of the film, but then how would people without money get to see it? How widely would the film be disseminated if it were limited by permission and fees? Control offers a false sense of security. The only real security I have is trusting you, trusting culture, and trusting freedom]

"RESUMEN: Los intentos de control de Internet y los constantes ataques a su integridad han sido la tónica general por parte de poderes políticos, empresariales y mediáticos, desde su consolidación a principios de este Siglo XXI. La respuesta social ha sido tan contundente como reprimida. Los defensores de la Libertad de Acceso y de Expresión en Internet son, frecuentemente, acusados -de manera absolutamente infundada- de cómplices de piratería, promotores de abusos a menores y de difusión de pornografía, así como de colaborar con las redes mafiosas y el terrorismo global... Se olvidan (tal vez, deliberadamente) de las Campañas de Concienciación contra la Pena de Muerte o la Tortura, de la Solidaridad ante Catástrofes o, simplemente, de tod@s l@s Usuari@s que comparten, desinteresadamente, creación artística, literaria, técnica o científica en Internet...

Conferencia de Apertura del Area de Gobierno de Internet en Mundo Internet 2.0: XI Congreso Nacional de Internet, Telecomunicaciones y Sociedad de la Informacion. Málaga 2007.

Power for The Public Services... For The Public Media... For Every@ne's Voice.

NEW YORK - The country's five silos of public radio and television are spilling into each other with a joint program that will allow them - and eventually the public itself - to build apps, stations, websites and other media services combining audio, text and video content from every public radio and television outlet in the country. NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller appeared at Wired's Disruptive by Design conference Monday morning to announce the new Public Media Platform, a partnership between American Public Media, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Services (PBS), Public Radio International and the Public Radio Exchange distribution network. The Public Media Platform is "a series of platforms that will allow all of the content from all of those entities - whether news or cultural products - to flow freely among the partners and member stations, and ultimately, also to other publishers, other not-for-profits and software developers who will invent wonderful new products that we can't even imagine," said Schiller.

This strikes me at first blush as a potentially disruptive move by public radio and television stations and networks, somewhat akin to the disruptive free and open source software movement. I.e., because the content is free and will apparently be freely available to the public for recycling, we may see the emergence of a viral free meta-network of the kind that content providers stuck behind paywalls can't imitate. Potentially a significant content commons counter-balancing force to paywall content providers. The devil is in the details and implementation, of course.

A company called The US Copyright Group have started targeting illegal movie downloading, picking up where the RIAA left off in 2008. Ars Technica senior editor Nate Anderson says that these lawsuits could be an attempt to create a new revenue stream for the movie industry rather than to curb piracy. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/06/25/05

June 29, 2010 Dear College or University President: We write to express concern on the part of the Department of Justice and the Department of Education that colleges and universities are using electronic book readers that are not accessible to students who are blind or have low vision and to seek your help in ensuring that this emerging technology is used in classroom settings in a manner that is permissible under federal law. A serious problem with some of these devices is that they lack an accessible text-to-speech function. Requiring use of an emerging technology in a classroom environment when the technology is inaccessible to an entire population of individuals with disabilities - individuals with visual disabilities - is discrimination prohibited by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (Section 504) unless those individuals are provided accommodations or modifications that permit them to receive all the educational benefits provided by the technology in an equally effective and equally integrated manner. ... The Department of Justice recently entered into settlement agreements with colleges and universities that used the Kindle DX, an inaccessible, electronic book reader, in the classroom as part of a pilot study with Amazon.com, Inc. In summary, the universities agreed not to purchase, require, or recommend use of the Kindle DX, or any other dedicated electronic book reader, unless or until the device is fully accessible to individuals who are blind or have low vision, or the universities provide reasonable accommodation or modification so that a student can acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use. The texts of these agreements may be viewed on the Department of Justice's ADA Web site, www.ada.gov. (To find these settlements on www.ada.gov, search for "Kindle.") Consisten

This event speaks loudly to how little interest browser developershave in interoperable web solutions. One-way compatibility wins and the ability of web applications to round-trip data loses. For those that did not realize it, the Compound Document by Reference Framework not only allowes but requires that more featureful implementations round-trip the output of less featureful implementations without data loss. See http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/CR-CDR-20070718/#conformance ("A conformant user agent of a superset profile specification must process subset profile content as if it were the superset profile content"). 

* By Ryan Singel Email Author * July 20, 2010 | * 6:58 pm | * Categories: Social Media * Facebook is primed to announce this week that it's amassed a half billion active friends, a milestone reinforcing its status as the king of social networks - a company to be regarded with the seriousness and power (if not revenue) of Google, Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft. Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/five-things-totopple-facebooks-empire/#ixzz0uM4KGGQc

By Megan Tady, August 5, 2010 You called, you emailed and you signaled your outrage as the Federal Communications Commission continued to meet behind closed doors with Internet companies, and Google and Verizon hatched a side plan on how to manage the Internet. And then, you prevailed. Amidst a tidal wave of public pressure, FCC Chief of Staff Edward Lazarus called off closed-door negotiations with major ISPs and Internet companies, pledging "to seek broad input on this vital issue."

good article about google and verizon's take on an open net -->>