K12 Open Source

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."

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.

Serves readers, pays writers: so far, so good. But there's another thing about Kindle 2 - its heavily marketed text-to-speech function. Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.

Unless Amazon embraces open standards, the Kindle's lead will become a very short story.

Am 29 Juni 2004 gab Flickr bekannt, dass jeder der möchte, seine Fotos bei Flickr mit einer Creative Commons Lizenz ausstatten kann. Innerhalb des ersten Jahres wurden bereits 10 Millionen Fotos mithilfe der sechs zur Verfügung stehenden Lizenzmodule veröffentlicht. Nun, im fünften Jahr nach Beginn der Zusammenarbeit zwischen dem kanadischen Fotohosting-Dienst und der gemeinnützigen Organisation Creative Commons, befinden sich bereits 100 Millionen Fotos in der riesigen Datenbank.

This note discusses the issue of who should benefit from a WIPO treaty for reading disabled persons. Should it only be people who are blind and visually impaired, as some propose, or should it be more inclusive with regard to other disabilities?

Welcome to Camera Obscura, the womb without a view http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/blind.html ... (skip to detailed site map)

Twitter has changed from being a tool most people thought is simply yet another way for people on the Internet to waste time to a platform for social change, social networking and dare I say it even business. One of the aspects that Twitter has been lacking is an accessible interface to the service. Thankfully Dennis Lembrée is changing all this. Schalk Neethling sat down with Dennis to learn more about Accessible Twitter, the problems he faces in creating it and what the future will hold.

Items Implemented * All links are keyboard accessible. * Simple, consistent layout and navigation. * Works with or without JavaScript. * Large default text size and high color contrast. * Looks great in high or low resolution. * Forms are marked up for optimal accessibility. * Code is semantic, light, and adheres to best practices in Web Standards.

It is impossible for the sites to do this. There is no way to independently identify the age and identify of minors. There is no RealID system for minors! More on the infeasibility here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/isttf Seems to me to be a major opportunity for Illinois high school educators to get your students involved in learning about the legislative process. My perspective is that the only reasonable option for Facebook, MySpace and any other social networking site would be to terminate the accounts of any minors who live in Illinois because it would be impossible for them to do this. The penalties for non-compliance would be pretty tough. Many co-sponsors. You might want to alert your students. They are the ones who would be impacted.

Open source folk on twitter

Software Foundation (FSF) announced the winners of the annual free software awards during the GNU/Linux conference LibrePlanet, held on March 21-22 at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, MA. Creative Commons was honored with the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, and Wietse Venema was honored with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Presenting the awards was FSF founder and president Richard Stallman.

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.

Some publishers and agents expressed concern over a new, experimental feature that reads text aloud with a computer-generated voice. "They don't have the right to read a book out loud," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. "That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."

Copyrights and Accommodations Although there are numerous technical and financial challenges to making course content accessible, the implications of the restrictive copyright that comes along with the use of proprietary content may present challenges that are frequently overlooked. Various forms of accommodation require the creation and distribution of derivative works, which is a restriction that comes along with the default copyright license. On the up side, the materials in question may include intellectual property created and owned by the faculty member and/or educational organization offering the course, in which case you and the learner may be lucky, relatively speaking. If you had the foresight to create accessible versions of all course media, you are home free. If not, your primary questions may be simply how to find the resources and tools to create accessible versions of these items in a timely fashion, which is a technical and financial issue.

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