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The commission did not assess a fine, but it ordered Comcast to stop cutting off transfers of large data files among customers who use a special type of file-sharing software. [(free) registration needed to read the whole article]

Check out the digital copyright slider. The tool itself is pretty simple. You basically slide the arrow up and down the years starting from "Before 1923″. The boxes on the left (Permission Needed? and Copyright Status/Term) tell you whether a work is still copyrighted or whether it's now in the public domain, free for you to use and repurpose any way you like. Unfortunately, actually figuring out the copyright status of a work isn't so simple as dragging your mouse-most of the years seem to be marked by a fuzzy period of "Maybe".

"ETAN provides a forum for educators and others to engage in the political process and project a unified voice in support of a common cause - improving teaching and learning through the systemic use of technology. ETAN's mission is to influence public policy-makers at the federal, state and local levels and to increase public investment in the competitiveness of America's classrooms and students."

In the last few years, traditional collaboration-in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center-has been superceded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.

Mahara is an open source e-portfolio system with a flexible display framework. Mahara, meaning 'think' or 'thought' in Te Reo Māori, is user centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. Mahara also features a weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online learner communities.

Parafrasando una frase del Colonnello Kilgore (Apocalypse Now) sono estremamente felice di apprendere che la Corte di Cassazione, così come testualmente si legge nel comunicato stampa dello Studio Legale Sirotti Gaudenzi "ha posto la nota sentenza "Schwibbert" (emessa dalla Corte di Giustizia delle Comunità' europee, in data 8 novembre 2007) a fondamento del principio in base al quale sono inapplicabili le norme penali che prevedono l'obbligatorietà' del "bollino" SIAE". In parole povere il famigerato bollino ha esalato gli ultimi respiri ed è passato a migliore vita. Diamogli degna sepoltura senza neppure spargere una lacrima.

Parafrasando una frase del Colonnello Kilgore (Apocalypse Now) sono estremamente felice di apprendere che la Corte di Cassazione, così come testualmente si legge nel comunicato stampa dello Studio Legale Sirotti Gaudenzi "ha posto la nota sentenza "Schwibbert" (emessa dalla Corte di Giustizia delle Comunità' europee, in data 8 novembre 2007) a fondamento del principio in base al quale sono inapplicabili le norme penali che prevedono l'obbligatorietà' del "bollino" SIAE". In parole povere il famigerato bollino ha esalato gli ultimi respiri ed è passato a migliore vita. Diamogli degna sepoltura senza neppure spargere una lacrima.

Few things must be more emotionally paradoxical for the anti-patentistas of the world than to see Microsoft get clobbered on a patent infringement action. Do you rejoice because one of the great advocates, and enforcers, of software patents has gotten a strong dose of their own medicine? Or do you fret at yet another example of a patent system gone mad?

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.

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.

The Authors Guild is pressuring Amazon to modify the Kindle 2 so that the synthetic speech function can only be used with the express authorization of the owner of the copyright of a work. A coalition of organizations that represent or work with persons with reading disabilities is organizing a protest to persuade the Guild to change its position. KEI supports the protest, and makes this statement on the Kindle 2 issue:

This isn't a new issue. George Kerscher and I wrote a major essay on the topic seven(!) years ago entitled the Soundproof Book. In it, we pointed out the irony that the first generation of ebook readers being inaccessible to blind people. This irony continues: it's a terrible shame that Amazon (and other ebook device vendors) keeps putting out ebook products that are inaccessible to the blind! More on that in another essay. The essence of the Soundproof Book essay was the dueling moral high grounds: author's rights vs. the right to access. Since these are both generally good from society's standpoint, how do you handle the conflict between them?

The blind and other readers have the right for books to be presented to us in the format that is most useful to us, and we are not violating copyright law as long as we use readers, either human or machine, for private rather than public listening. The key point is that reading aloud in private is the same whether done by a person or a machine, and reading aloud in private is never an infringement of copyright. Amazon has taken a step in the right direction by including text-to-speech technology for reading e-books aloud on its new Kindle 2". More details are available on the Forbes website.

Amazon's Kindle, the first eBook reader that has really started to catch on with the public, deals almost exclusively with eBooks that have DRM. According to Ian Fried, the vice president of Amazon Kindle, customers don't seem to mind: "We've had very few if any customer responses that the choice we made with DRM was a problem." But DRM could become a problem if the Kindle goes bust - then all those people who bought Kindle eBooks with DRM will have no way to read them because no other device can open the files. Beyond that, not everyone agrees that DRM is a good business strategy. Publishing consultant Michael Shatzkin says it's tough to make the case that file-sharing reduces sales. He cites science fiction writer Cory Doctorow who, he says, "does the best he can to give away as much of his content as possible." And by giving it away, Shatzkin says, Doctorow's sales have skyrocketed.

The author of the software in question, titled Kindlepid.py, is listed as Igor Skochinsky, a hardware hacker who performed a remarkable analysis of the Kindle and described in December 2007 how he was able to gain access to the device. It's unclear why Amazon waited so long to respond with a legal threat, and why the company targeted MobileRead.com: Skochinsky's original blog post about Kindlepid.py is dated December 2007, and the copy of the Kindlepid.py software hosted at the Googlepages.com Web-page posting site is still available for download at http://skochinsky.googlepages.com/azw-0.2.zip

Just found myself having a long argument/discussion with my agent over the Amazon Kindle text-to-speech capability. I'm going to summarise it here. Her point of view: The Kindle reading you the book-you-just-bought infringes the copyright (or at least, the rights) to the audiobook. We've sold audiobook rights and print book rights as separate things. We must stop this. My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.

"Mr. Braben has developed a very small USB stick PC that has an HDMI port in one end and a USB port on the other. The machine, which runs on a version of Linux, is designed to help get programming and the general knowledge of how computers work back into the educational curriculum."

A site advocating use of Open Source Solutions in UK Schools

Open Source Schools is here to share information about open source software in schools. Our aim is to help you decide whether open source software might offer benefits for learning, teaching, engaging pupils and parents, managing information and resources, or school administration. The website provides information and articles about open source software, advice on getting started, case studies of its adoption in schools, a directory for exploring what is available, and a glossary.

When it comes to digitizing books and offering readers and writers a business model, Google has planted the wheat, harvested it, threshed it, ground it, and baked it. Now Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo think they each deserve a big slice of bread. They are taking the hen to court in order to get it. The effort, led by attorney Gary Reback, to challenge Google's deals with writers and publishers for digitizing "orphaned works" that are copyrighted but no longer published is less lawsuit than business by another name.

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.

ARIS is a user-friendly, open-source platform for creating and playing mobile games, tours and interactive stories. Using GPS and QR Codes, ARIS players experience a hybrid world of virtual interactive characters, items, and media placed in physical space.