"On December 16, 2002, Creative Commons
released version 1.0 of its Licensing
Project, and the first release of content
under its Founders'
Copyright. These are the first two
projects in a series that Creative Commons
will launch, all designed to help expand the
amount of intellectual work, whether owned or
free, available for creative re-use.
If you prefer to dedicate your work to the
public domain, where nothing is owned and all is
permitted, we'll help you do that. In other
words, we'll help you declare 'No rights
reserved.'
The Founders' Copyright Project will make
content available under the same initial term as
the framers of the United States Constitution
did—just 14 years. O'Reilly &
Associates is our founding contributor to
this Project.
"What's important is that my site is machine
readable, meaning it can be read by news
aggregators like the excellent Net
NewsWire Lite AND the Creative Commons
license is also machine readable, meaning it too
can be read by news aggregators. This means that
any content that gets locked up by it's owner
will be excluded from distribution (which is
kind of the point) while open content will go
forth and multiply (and
conquer)."
I hadn't thought that far in advance yet in
regards to the whole RSS thing, so tack me on as a
ditto.
Creative Commons is a great project overall,
and I'm happy to see their licensing project
officially released. If you're not familiar with
their goals and ideas, make sure you visit the
site to learn about it. Wired
also has a story on the launch. Important
stuff.
"In conjunction with the launch of my book on
wireless networking... my co-author and I have
launched a discussion forum for Wi-Fi issues, as
well as issues from the book. I've been longing
to set up a simple threaded forum for quite a
while, and finally found the right package and
approach. Join us!" [80211b
News]
There is a forum here devoted to Wi-Fi
and Academia and even though it doesn't focus
on just libraries, this could be another good
resource (in addition to The
Wireless Librarian, of course).
"The
Register is reporting
that record labels have slashed production by
about 25% over the past two years. Year-to-year
unit sales have only declined 10.3%, so there is
evidence that demand has held up quite well
despite what appears to be rising costs in the
market.
I feel dumb. All along I tended to believe
Hillary Rosen when she said it was the fault of
the pirates." [LawMeme]
"So what's the deal here? Well, the only
change to Jon's approach is that I am tinkering
with a mechanism to indicate a book's status
without leaving the web page. So for the ISBNs
below, if you select the link for either the IE version or Mozilla
version of the bookmarklet, you should get
an icon background put behind the ISBN. By
default, it's green if the item is in the
library, and red if it's not.
...Extend this to circulation status and
multiple libraries, and things start getting
really interesting. Maybe the image could say
'available at Windsor Public' or 'due at Leddy
Library on Jan 2.' and so on. The servlet uses
HTTPClient
to pull together web pages, and it is what the
bookmarklet calls to draw the image. It could
pull out almost anything that is in the web
page, for example, authentication at Windsor
Public Library is done using this method,
and the servlet could probably get the user to
any web display of an item, even if the library
system itself requires a series of links and
forms to be navigated before yielding up this
information. It could also try to use a ISBN
registry to pull together things like numbers
for the paperback and hardcover editions of
titles before moving on to the library.
This is all 'proof of concept', the
servlet needs some of the session tracking tools
built for the co-browser added in. Right now,
clicking on the image takes you to the web
display for the last ISBN, even if you have
dozens of ISBNs on the page. One way to get
around this is to use a session identifier and
pass the mouse or page position co-ordinates to
the servlet when selecting a link and it could
resolve which one you wanted. More importantly,
maybe you want to check dozens of web sites and
have a summary at the end. Drifting
Layers might be one way to keep a toolbar
available with a status toggle and summary
buttons.
Anyway, just some more possibilities, maybe
even fodder for Access
2003 in Vancouver."
Fodder, indeed! I hereby nominate this project
for the Access 2003 Hackfest! I don't know
anything about DHTML, but I'll have to see if I
can hack this for SWAN. Art also thinks this may
be a way to bring in Sirsi libraries, so it would
be interesting to pursue that angle, something Art
says he will do when time permits (hopefully in
January).
My next question remains, can we then pull
bookmarklets together in a Google-like, searchable
toolbar for each library to offer to its
patrons?
"My, how the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, the DMCA, is turning out to be a fine and
flexible friend. It extends across continents.
It reaches into computers in Norway and Russia,
which when we last looked, were sovereign
nations and not US States.
A fortnight
ago it was used to protect price lists, claiming
that these are trade secrets. And now it has
been turned onto a parody site.
The letter [78kb
PDF] spearheads a collection of copyright and
trademark claims with the DMCA boilerplate.
Many of the claims are arguable, and on
some grounds precedent favors the litigant. But
the use of the DMCA obliges the recipient to
take immediate action. And in the current frosty
climate, that is intimidation enough:
'The carrier must reply. It can state
that to best of its knowledge this does not
violate what they're citing, but it has to be in
good faith, or the carrier will lose his
exemption status,' says Robin Bandy who runs a
co-operative ISP in Oakland, CA....
Bandy advises other ISPs to check that these
robo-generated emails have been
cryptographically signed and come from the
aggrieved party, or someone verifiably
associated with them.
'In the one case
we received a complaint, all they cited was a
file name. There was no assertion of the
contents of the file therefore they were not
even making a valid assertion of copyright. It
came from a system that had no traceable
relationship to the MPAA and no reasonable
network admin would assume that it did.' " [The
Register]
How long before this type of abuse of the
DMCA hits libraries because we preserve and
circulate material that someone doesn't
like?
"The new service is being launched in
mid-January 2003 as a memorial to Eileen
Sheppard Meyer, former director of the
Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center. Using funds
donated in honor of Eileen Sheppard Meyer, the
Center will be among the first talking book
centers in the country to offer digital
audiobooks to its readers through the
Audible.com program, a private company and the
Internet’s leading provider of digital,
downloadable audiobooks....
The pilot project will offer current popular
titles in copyright secure audio formats in CD
audio quality from Audible.com on a portable
digital audio player, the Audible.com Otis. The
Otis digital audio players available for loan
from the Talking Book Center will each hold 2-3
audiobooks which will be mailed to interested,
eligible readers. Currently, the Talking Book
Center offers thousands of titles to readers on
audiotape and free playback equipment to
approximately 5000 readers in central Illinois.
This service will begin to introduce readers to
audiobooks in digital format, which is the
eventual goal of the talking book program at the
national level."
This is great news, and I hope other TBCs and
service providers for the visually impaired follow
suit. Congratulations, Lori!
BROWSERMASTER at http://www.applythis.com/browsersizer/
asks "Isn't it annoying to change your
development machine's resolution just to test
for people who haven't figured out that they can
change THEIR screen resolution?" This
application allows Web developers to see how
their Web pages look on screen resolutions of
640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 and WebTV.
BrowserMaster is shareware and works with
Win95/98/ME/2000/XP & Microsoft
NT4.
ABANDONWARE. You've heard of spyware,
adware, freeware and shareware. Here's a new
term for your vocabulary: abandonware . That's
software that is five years old or older and no
longer supported.. Take a trip back in time and
perhaps get some good old relics art Dan's 20th
Century Abandonware, http://home.pmt.org/~drose/aw.html.
06. IE COOKIESVIEW at http://nirsoft.tripod.com/
is a small - and free - download that displays
the details of all cookies that Internet
Explorer stores on your computer. You can sort
them, search by Web site, delete them, and copy
them, even on networked computers with access
permission. CookiesView works on
Win95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP with IE versions
4-6.
PANDA QUICK REMOVER. This tool automatically
repairs infections of "popular" worms and
viruses and restores original system and
registry configuration. Panda Quick Remover can
currently detect and remove the following
infections: BADTRANS, VOTE, SIRCAM, ANNA
KOURNIKOVA, HELP, KAK WORM, NAVIDAD, SHELL
SCRAP, KLEZ, NIMDA, FUNLOVE, COOL NOTEPAD, I
LOVE YOU, MATRIX, PRETTY PARK, VERONA. It's a
free download at http://www.webattack.com/get/pandaquick.shtml.
"E-mail viruses are now twice
as prevalent as they were in 2001, with one
e-mail in every 200 containing a virus.
Virus-scanning company MessageLabs said it
stopped 9.3 million viruses in 2 billion e-mails
this year, which equated to one virus in every
215 e-mails. That compares with 1.8 million
viruses stopped in 718 million e-mails in 2001,
or one virus in every 398 e-mails.
According to the company, which measured
results up to the end of the second week of
December, the most active virus this year was Klez.H,
with 4.9 million copies stopped by MessageLabs.
Yaha.E
came second with 1.1 million copies, then it was
Bugbear.A
with 842,333, Klez.E with 380,937 and SirCam.A
with 309,832. These figures represent only the
numbers stopped by MessageLabs for its corporate
customers. The actual numbers of these viruses
are much higher.
Although Klez was the most active virus,
Bugbear was the most dramatic outbreak of the
year, infecting one in every 87 e-mails at its
height in October. Its dual-mode attack saw it
accounting for 30 percent of all reports of
viruses to antivirus company Sophos in the last
month--well ahead of former top-spot incumbent
Klez, which by then only accounted for around 8
percent of all reports." [News.com]
This is another article I want to distribute to
SLS members. We're taking some steps to try and
cut down on the number of viruses that go out
through our mailing lists, but your best defense
is a good offense. If your library isn't using
anti-virus software, please get some and install
it ASAP. We'll be doing an article in the SLS
Newsletter about this soon.
