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"Overview This Flash-based tool was created by Michael Brewer and the Office for Information Technology Policy. It provides information on determining whether or not a particular reproduction or other use of a copyrighted work is covered by Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Code, the Library & Archives exemption. While the interactivity of this tool is not available to those using screen readers, such as JAWS, the following text provides all the information provided by this tool. For the fulltext of Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Code, go to: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#108. Please provide any feedback or address any questions on this tool to Michael Brewer, or to Carrie Russell at the Office for Information Technology Policy."

Airmac is a free application what turns you Macintosh into an Airplay receiver. Now you can stream your movies and pictures to your Mac. Audio is using the Airtunes protocol, this is coming in a next release.

"ClamXav is a free virus scanner for Mac OS X. It uses the very popular ClamAV open source antivirus engine as a back end and has the ability to detect both Windows and Mac threats. ClamXav can be setup up as passive or active: scan only the files you tell it to or choose to activate Sentry to monitor your hard drive and scan new files as they arrive."

"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

Whilst listening in on normal telephone calls over landlines or mobile phone networks has become a routine procedure, Voice over IP connections frequently present a problem for investigators, especially when the persons being monitored use Skype via foreign servers or call direct from PC to PC and encrypt their data. The Swiss Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (UVEK) is therefore examining the use of spy software to allow it to listen in on conversations on PCs.

Alex explains that the goal of Google Books was to make books easier to find. He references an article in the New York Times in which librarians lamented that people were only searching online materials, not printed books. He references a story in which a research assistant was asked by Larry Lessig to come back with "everything Senator X said about topic Y" and returned only with results after 1996… which is to say, only results from the web.

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.

MediaMosa is a Full Featured, Webservice Oriented Media Management and Distribution platform. MediaMosa and VP-Core model MediaMosa is a state-of-the-art, scalable Middleware Media Distribution Platform and facilitates access to, and usage of (shared) storage capacity, metadata databases, transcoding- and streaming servers.

The Swiss government agency for Building and Logistics (BBL) has signed a software licence agreement with Microsoft worth 42 million CHF (about 27,8 million euro) without a request for tender, the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported on Tuesday.

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).

We are starting to see objections to the Google Book Search SettlementL2 this month in advance of the May 5th deadline set up by the court. The firstL3 comes from the consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog (foundL4 by way of the American Libraries news feed). They have submitted a letter to the U.S. Justice Department asking the antitrust division to delay the settlement until the "'most favored nation' clause favoring Google is removed and the deal's 'orphan works' provision is extended to cover all who might digitize books, not only Google." The letter in PDFL5 is available on the Consumer Watchdog website. The objections revolve around the provision that require the Books Rights Registry to give Google the same terms as anyone else who enters into agreements with the Registry (noting that more favorable terms might be required by a new party in order to compete with Google) as well as the fact that the copyright infringement protection for digitizing orphan works only extends to Google.

In preparation for WIPO's initiative on Exceptions & Limitations to Copyright, the US Copyright Office is currently soliciting comments on the topic of "facilitating access to copyrighted works for the blind or persons with other disabilities". Written comments are due next week (April 21st, 2009), and there will be a public meeting in Washington on May 18th. EFF will be sending our own submission, as will many other IP and disability groups. But if you've worked on software or hardware to overcome your own visual or other disabilities, or co-operated informally (perhaps in an open source project) to provide wider access to content for users with disabilities, or have dealt with a publisher regarding the accessibility of texts, we'd like to encourage you to send the copyright office your own stories - and cc: us at accessibility@eff.org.

A great help indeed - also towards learning a different keyboard.

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."

Listening to the examples demonstrates that nobody non-blind and non-masochistic would use the Kindle 2 text-to-speech feature. And as blind people can't use the Kindle 2, what is the point of that feature - and of the Authors' Guild ruckus about it?

February 25, 2009. Text-to-speech (TTS) programs have been in use for a number of years, and they're improving. As Roy Blount says in an op-ed in today's New York Times, Kindle 2's TTS isn't Jim Dale reading "Harry Potter," but it's listenable. There's no need to take our word for it; have a listen to the sample below.

If you've been hurt by a poorly designed or manufactured product, sue the company through our Atlanta defective product lawyers. Any damages caused by a product you used, you may have a defective product liability claim.

If you've been hurt by a poorly designed or manufactured product, sue the company through our Baton Rouge defective product lawyers. Any damages caused by a product you used, you may have a defective product liability claim.

A wonders about free networks being stull online. Exchange with Thunder X. Eric Suesz:\n"Hi, Alex. All free Ning Networks are now locked and can't be accessed. At some point, the space the data takes up on our servers will be overwritten. There's no plan to send you an email when that happens."

A very odd affirmation by Ning's Eric Suesz

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular format to publish formatted text and documents. There are several different versions of it, some qualifying as an Open Standard, some certified by ISO and some encumbered by software patents. You might want to promote the versions that are Open Standards, because Open Standards guarantee interoperability, competition and choice