Group items tagged

This conference has been designed by school leaders and others in the Open Source Schools' community to showcase to school leadership teams the best of educational free and open source software whether used alone or blended with proprietary software.

"Moodle is very easy to navigate. Each new course is set up with a default course front page as shown here, to which you (as the instructor) can make changes. This course front page is what you and your learners will come to every time you log into the Moodle course. Familiarize yourself with it, and explain all features to your learners."

Beim Gespräch ging es mir vor allem um die Möglichkeiten, die nicht kommerzielle Unternehmen wie Blogger usw. betreffend der Gebührenabgaben haben. Immer mehr Schweizer Musikgruppen möchten beim kulturtv.ch mitmachen. Doch wenn sie bei der SUISA angemeldet sind, ist bei mir die Türe leider zu. Das wird allgemein nicht verstanden. Poto Wegener hat meine Fragen alle aus der Sicht der SUISA beantwortet. Damit ist die rechtliche Situation klar, nicht aber die Zukunft.

"As presently drafted, the Proposed Settlement does not meet the legal standards this Court must apply," the DOJ said in a 32-page filing (click for PDF) with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. "This Court should reject the Proposed Settlement in its current form and encourage the parties to continue negotiations to modify it so as to comply with Rule 23 (a federal law governing class-action settlements) and the copyright and antitrust laws."

Official misuses are bad enough, but the unofficial uses worry me more. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don't. (...) But that's not the most serious misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure. In Greece, between June 2004 and March 2005, someone wiretapped more than 100 cell phones belonging to members of the Greek government -- the prime minister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice. Ericsson built this wiretapping capability into Vodafone's products, and enabled it only for governments that requested it. Greece wasn't one of those governments, but someone still unknown -- a rival political party? organized crime? -- figured out how to surreptitiously turn the feature on

Die Sonntagszeitung malt heute schwarz: Schweizer Strafermittler und das Departement für Umwelt, Verkehr und Kommunikation (Uvek) prüfen den Einsatz von Spionagesoftware zum Abhören von Internettelefonaten. Telecomfirmen und Internetanbieter sollen die als Trojaner bezeichneten Programme auf die PCs von Verdächtigen transportieren, um bei VoIP-Gesprächen mitlauschen zu können.

Structure Guidelines for DAISY 3, officially, the ANSI/NISO Z39.86 Specifications for the Digital Talking Book

In 2005, the Authors Guild filed a lawsuit against Google arising from the Google Books project. In October 2008, the parties announced a proposed settlement. Academics and rightsholders have criticized the Settlement terms on grounds ranging from antitrust to privacy. The Settlement sets forth non-privacy terms, including provisions regarding royalties and book advertising, in great detail. However, it does not contain meaningful privacy protections for readers or authors. Various entities and individuals have filed comments, objections, and amicus curiae briefs concerning the proposed settlement.

Cette société savante publie depuis sa création en 1986 un bulletin bisannuel offert aux membres et vendu 15€ à l'extérieur. Or, nous avons eu il y a quelques mois la surprise de voir nos articles distribués par l'INIST (Institut national pour l'information scientifique et technique), sorte d'entité interne au CNRS assez autonome et aux missions pas toujours bien définies par la tutelle (voir rapport Salençon-Moatti mai 2008 sur l'IST). Voici comment cette distribution se passe. L'INIST demande à l'éditeur de la revue un abonnement gratuit. Puis il décortique chaque numéro et met chacun des articles en vente, avec une description sommaire (exemple pour un article de 1999 consacré au polytechnicien Paulin Talabot) (voir aussi la liste de tous les articles SABIX disponibles sur INIST, moteur Google interne au site INIST).

So I buy a Kindle book for my Kindle 2. It downloads to my machine. I open up the book -- it has no relation (except the relation of "not") to the book I ordered. Three emails, 4 days later, Amazon has still not responded to the problem. I wonder how they begin to discover/fix such a problem.

Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction writer, was perusing the Web site Scribd last month when she came across digital copies of some books that seemed quite familiar to her. No wonder. She wrote them, including a free-for-the-taking copy of one of her most enduring novels, "The Left Hand of Darkness."

In today's Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) there is a elaborated report on the questionable procurement of a 42 million CHF contract with Microsoft (publication in the Schweizerischen Handelsblatt SHAB).

Der Bund hat einen 42-Millionen-Auftrag an Microsoft vergeben. Konkurrenten von Microsoft sehen sich vom Wettbewerb ausgeschlossen. In der Tat ist der Auftrag nicht öffentlich ausgeschrieben worden. Nun droht eine Beschwerde an das Bundesverwaltungsgericht.

This column argues that the proposed settlement of this lawsuit is a privately negotiated compulsory license primarily designed to monetize millions of orphan works. It will benefit Google and certain authors and publishers, but it is questionable whether the authors of most books in the corpus (the "dead souls" to which the title refers) would agree that the settling authors and publishers will truly represent their interests when setting terms for access to the Book Search corpus.

1.1: Purpose and Scope In order for electronic-book technology to achieve widespread success in the marketplace, Reading Systems need to have convenient access to a large number and variety of titles. The Open Publication Structure (OPS) Specification describes a standard for representing the content of electronic publications. Specifically: * The specification is intended to give content providers (e.g. publishers, authors, and others who have content to be displayed) and publication tool providers, minimal and common guidelines that ensure fidelity, accuracy, accessibility, and adequate presentation of electronic content over various Reading Systems. * The specification seeks to reflect established content format standards. * The goal of this specification is to define a standard means of content description for use by purveyors of electronic books (publishers, agents, authors et al.) allowing such content to be provided to multiple Reading Systems and to insure maximum presentational equivalence across Reading Systems.

Non boycottate gli e-book per il Kindle di Amazon che costano più di $9.99. Boycottate Kindle, il lettore di e-book di Amazon.

Time and again, the Author's Guild has shown itself to be the epitome of a venal special interest group, the kind of grasping, foolish posturers that make the public cynically assume that the profession it represents is a racket, not a trade. This is, after all, the same gang of weirdos who opposed the used book trade going online. I think there's plenty not to like about the Kindle -- the DRM, the proprietary file format, both imposed on authors and publishers even if they don't want it -- and about Amazon's real audiobook section, Audible (the DRM -- again, imposed on authors and publishers even if they'd prefer not to use it). But if there's one thing Amazon has demonstrated, it's that it plans on selling several bazillion metric tons of audiobooks. They control something like 90 percent of the market. To accuse them of setting out to destroy it just doesn't pass the giggle-test.

A coalition of organizations representing people who cannot read print will protest the removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 at the Authors Guild headquarters in NY City at 31 East 32nd Street on April 7, 2009, 12 to 2:00 p.m. Join us there! Manon

Closely aligned to the DRM issue is that there are a multiplicity of e-book formats, many of which cannot be read on other devices. As with DRM, consumer frustration is bound to arise if readers have to jump through hoops to read legally purchased books. This is perhaps not a problem at the moment, when the bulk of e-reader owners are early adopters, yet it will become more acute when the devices are more widely disseminated among less tech-savvy users. As Kassia Krozser, co-founder of medialoper.com who writes widely on digital entertainment issues, blogs on her publishing site Booksquare.com: "DRM, as implemented now, does not deter piracy. It does deter reading." She later reminds publishers that "your customers (again: the ones who give you money) don't read on one device, on one operating system, in one location. As you move forward with your digital initiatives, think about how real people read books."