K12 Open Source

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?

What's really at stake with Kindle is Amazon's desire to re-invent itself as a company where the buying and selling of retail goods is not an end in itself but also a means by which to obtain valuable client data. In a more abstract sense, Amazon.com is actively producing laboring subjects in and around an everyday practice-the reading of books and periodicals-which to my knowledge has never shared as direct a relationship to economically productive activity as it does with Kindle.

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:

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

Amazon's new world-beating gadget isn't the savior of the e-book, genre. It's a proprietary, market-protecting anomaly in a world of increasingly open standards and accessible media. Shame on you, Amazon. (...) The thing that e-books need, I'm convinced, is PDF. Secure, reflowable, customizable PDF. The reader devices need to be easy on the eyes, lightweight, and allow users to shunt any PDF to it, whether it's a specially formatted e-book or not. If I am paying $300+ for essentially a document storage device on steroids, I need to be able to put my own junk on it, too. (...)You might be lining your own pockets and making a few sales, Mr. Bezos, but you're also promoting confusion in the marketplace and causing division in the e-book space at a time when everyone else is pushing for convergence and open standards. Thanks for nothing.

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.

Fair use is the right, in some circumstances, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying for it. Fair use enables the creation of new culture, and keeps current copyright holders from being private censors. With the Washington College of Law, the Center for Social Media creates tools for creators, teachers, and researchers to better use their fair use rights. Explore your fair use rights by clicking on one of the tabs above.

Creative Commons vice president Mike Linksvayer accepted the award saying, "It's an incredible honor. Creative Commons should be giving an award to the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman, because what Creative Commons is doing would not be possible without them."

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.

Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license.

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.

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.

By not supporting medium-sized deployments of, say 30 to 5000 laptops (a typical order from a school or an educational authority) the OLPC Foundation betrays an instinct for paternalism. We have too much paternalism in education already, and the technologies in Sugar were designed to give children democratic access to education.

So, you build on a BY-NC work and register your copyright. You license your new work also BY-NC. Someone violates the copyright on your work. You sue. You are entitled to statutory damages right? You collect. Are you now guiilty of violating the NC licneses of the works yours built upon?

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education helps educators gain confidence about their rights to use copyrighted materials in developing students' critical thinking and communication skills. Check out these exciting additional resources:

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.