An interesting week in IP/Copyright law

A busy week for the fledgling Anti-Counterfitting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The controversial agreement's authors have meet behind closed doors since 2007, leaving the general public to rely upon chapter leaks to speculate what this monumental trade agreement has in store. Monday, 2/20, saw the release of the chapter regarding internet inforcement. It's a thick read, but its implications are too important to ignore. As University of Ottowa law professor Michael Geist notes, this chapter of ACTA, while not explicitly forcing countries to subscribe to the three-strikes method of inforcement, still implicitly encourages the adoption of such a scheme.

Two interesting cases involving the safe harbor statute for content providers.

• A German court ruled that RapidShare, a file-sharing service must, starting immediately, actively prevent the uploading and sharing of 148 copyrighted books. This is an almost impossible task, given that no perfect system exists for veryfying the content of a file in an automated way. RapidShare faces heavy fines and/or jail time for further infringement; we all await news on how this turns out.


• An Italian judge has convicted four Google employees for privacy violation stemming from a video uploaded to Google Video depicting the torture and injury of a child with down syndrome. Needless to say, the employees convicted were not in any way connected to the video; the employees were convicted based on the fact that Google provided a service to be used as a storing house for such material. This story is not about copyright specifically, but its outcome has a very heavy impact on the safe harbor provision protecting content providers, ISPs, and other services from punishment should a user infringe on any country's civil laws.

Finally, Facebook has been awarded a patent for their not-so-original (but well-implemented) idea of aggregating user news, filtering them by relevance, and displaying them to an end user, otherwise known as the Friend Feed. This is substantial news, given that any relevant application or service employing social networking must rely on such a structure of delivering tailored information to the user. This patent opens the doors to a surge of lawsuits aimed at application and service start-ups employing such a method to simply work, securing Facebook's grip on the social media landscape.

What's been happening

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< tag. >

Hello non-existent reader! Hello future generation!



I'm making a mobile application (Android Platform) for my Topics in Digital Media class at NYU. For our latest assignment, I posed myself this question: “How would you make the city talk by walking through it?” My answer is < tag. >: an app that allows us to collectively vote (and perhaps affect) on public art, venerating the truly noble attempts and hastening the demise of the crappy ones. This is how it works:

1. As you're walking down the street, you'll get a little ping on your phone telling you that there's some graffiti nearby.
2. If you find it, and have the time to reflect on the art you see before you, let < tag. > know in any of three ways (or a combination of all three!):
* By rating the graffiti (is it art? or is it just scrawl?).
* By taking a picture of it and uploading it to the < tag. > server.
* By calling 311 to report the graffiti and mark it for cleanup.

I made a vid explaining it in better detail:


The app is in Beta right now, and I think I'll have a few testers from my class using it by the weekend. If any of you want to test it out (Android phones only at this point, sorry!!) drop me an email! I'll be submitting this to the NYC Big App competition (It's def. not going to win!) so any feedback will be useful!

P.S. I’m totally not a designer, so the app might look kind of garish to some. I plan on submitting this app to a big contest– if someone would like to help me out with design once I get a bit past my beta phase, please let me know!!!

The Numerics of Style. Part 2: "The problem is YOU! Function U, Explicit and Implicit Preferences, and Harlo’s IDM Ghetto

This is part 2 of a 3-part article I'm writing for my Topics in Digital Media class at NYU.

Question:
What does u: C x S → R mean in terms of Last.fm and Pandora Radio?

the rest is here...

The Numerics of Style. Part 1: “Panic Algorithm”

This is part 1 of a 3-part article I'm writing for my Topics in Digital Media class at NYU.

Question:
How did the suggestion algorithm emerge as the culture industry’s main weapon in the fight to retain its legitimacy?


The industry pushes the panic button. Enter the algorithm.

the rest is here...

A week without Google

My topics in digital media class has an assignment that I might find incredibly difficult to fulfill: a week (7 days) without Google. No gmail, no maps, no blogger, no... using my phone (except for making calls & sending txts, thanks, that's generous of you, Mushon!)

So this will be the last post for a week (although i don't really post so consistently-- it guess it's not that big of a deal).

I just set up that stupid email client on my mac to receive my email (although i can't figure out how to access any email sent after 2007 for some reason-- this is bullshit!) and i hope some disaster doesn't happen where i actually go incommunicado and, you know, destroy my life.

Let's see how long this will last...


Harlo.Holmes: A loyal customer since 2/5/05

@ share.nyc!!!

YES!



give me noise! give me feedback, let me ride it! it's so good to see keiko and to participate here! this is the soul coming home, i tell ya!