Category: Technology

From the OpenACS forum: “The University of Mannheim is pleased to announce the offering a number of grants to those who provide substantial improvements to OpenACS and .LRN.”

Steve Lohr ponders the future of intellectual property on the Internet. In the article he cites an idea by William Fisher, a Harvard law professor, to apply a different economic model. Similar in spirit to the royalities paid by radio stations to copyright holders in exchange for broadcasting their music, “Mr. Fisher recommends placing a 15 percent tax on Internet access and a 15 percent tax on devices used for storing and copying music and movies like CD-burners, MP3 players and blank CD’s.” There are plenty of wrinkles here, mostly due to imperfect tracking. How do we divide up the money between the major labels? Aaron Swartz has an idea.

I agree with David Bowie on this. The economics will change. My guess is that copyright holders will ultimately be wealthier for it, as with home video.

Wired News: “In 10 years, you might be able to fax a toy car to a favorite niece or nephew. It could even be sooner than that.”

Oh God, I can see it coming. Toy car EULAs. Toy car Napster. Toy car infringement lawsuits.

New York Times: “Using one of 20 iMacs, concertgoers could not only surf the Web and send e-mail, they could also burn free custom CD’s from the 154 live Phish tracks that were loaded on each computer.”

The CDs weren’t really free, of course, because concertgoers had to pay $137.50 to get in. Think different.

Aaron Swartz: “This reminds me of an idea I had the other day: TV searching. Google hooks up a bunch of their machines to video capture cards and begins recording all the TV channels. Then, they make a full-text available using the closed captioning information.”