K12 Open Source

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).

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.

A landmark study by the Institute of European Media Law (EML) found that a levy on internet usage legalising non-commercial online exchanges of creative works conforms with German and European copyright law, even though it requires changes in both. The German and European factions of the Green Party who had commissioned the study will make the "culture flat-rate," as the model is being called in Germany, an issue in their policies. The global debate on a new social contract between creatives and society is getting more pronounced by the day. Two models are emerging: a free-market approach based on private blanket licences and voluntary subscriptions, and a legal licence approach based on exceptions in copyright law and mandatory levies, that now has been proven legally feasible and appropriate by the EML study.

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.

This is the home of the CC-Monitor online platform, which contains automatically collected data, graphs, research and collectively written commentary on the global adoption of Creative Commons licenses.

I am putting my letter of objections to the Google Book Search Settlement on SCRIBD as an encouragement to the many authors who are directly hit by this Settlement and don't like it, to also object formally - even though the Settlement is very complex and if they possibly have scarce familiarity with law - like me. Because this is precisely one of the many problems of this Settlement. For explanations on how to object, see FAQ "24. How can I object to the Settlement?" on www.googlebooksettlement.com , the site of the 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.

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.

The DAISY Pipeline is a liberally licensed open source framework for document- and DTB-related pipelined transformations. The DAISY Pipeline is a project of the DAISY Consortium - creating a better way to publish and a better way to read, for everyone, everywhere.

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."

Maximum Prophet recommends a NY Times piece on the growing phenomenon of unauthorized digital versions of copyrighted books showing up online. The problem has been growing exponentially, fed in part by the popularity of reading devices such as the Kindle and the iPhone. The article features the odd photographic juxtaposition of Cory Doctorow and Ursula K. Le Guin, who take opposite views on electronic editions, authorized or not. Ms. Le Guin: "I thought, who do these people think they are? Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?" Mr. Doctorow: "I really feel like my problem isn't piracy. It's obscurity."

Interactions, March/April 08

Openmoko's Neo FreeRunner may be the open-source world's answer to the iPhone