Blogs

October 20-22, 2011

David Meurer will be attending and presenting a paper at the 2011 Second International Conference on Culture and Computing at Kyoto University, Japan, Oct. 20-22, 2011. The paper is entitled "Towards a Dialogic Archive: Canadian Copyright Law, Digital Archives, and Fair Dealing." He will be part of a session on Digital Archives chaired by Geoffrey Rockwell.

At present, it has become increasingly difficult to determine between news and documentary programs. As Howard Knopf has pointed out, “[i]n many cases, documentaries become news because the content is first brought to light in the documentary.”

The Canadian ISP Tucows recently commissioned David Weinberger to articulate their position as part of the Canadian Copyright Consultations, which ended yesterday.

The original can be found here - http://tucowsinc.com/news/2009/08/copyrights-creative-disincentive/ - and is reproduced in its entirety here.

Being creative on YouTube is becoming increasingly harder due to their Content ID system and the intimidating DMCA takedown notices sent out by copyright owners. The Content ID system was created to give rights holders control of their content. However, as EFF writer John Doe has noted “these systems are still primitive and unable to distinguish a tranformative remix from copyright infringement…these filters end up sideswiping lots of fair uses.”

Bill Kennedy and I had the opportunity to meet with archivists from around the world at the 2009 Association of Canadian Archivists conference "Rights, Responsibilities, Trust: Archives and Public Affairs".

Google is defending users rights in response to New Zealand's proposed section 92A amendments.

Statistics provided by Google suggest that the erosion of users rights is occurring in a multitude of ways at the intersections of business and communications technologies. The ease with which allegedly infringing uses are surfaced, and unsubstantiated takedown notices issued for the purpose of advancing a commercial position demonstrates the perils of an information culture oriented around restrictive interpretations of copyright and intellectual property law.

An engaging interview with Marissa Mayer, VP of Google.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/06/marissa-mayer-on-charlie-rose-the-f...

Google had a lawsuit on their hands because of their book scan project (entire content available, not just fair use). Now, Google released their site for the settlement they made with the author guild.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/11/google-book-settlement-site-is-up-p...

Google's claim site http://www.googlebooksettlement.com

For those of you interested in ICT policy here is an interesting investigative news story. GoDaddy (the biggest domain name company) uses "Standard Tactics LLC " to farm domains.

http://domainnamewire.com/2008/12/03/standard-tactics-llc-how-godaddy-pr...

The YouTube ratio has changed and old content is blackframed inside the new ratio now.