Nothing and Some More

The UNU in New York is having a talk Access to Knowledge Issues in Medicine and Open Source on the 13 April 2006. It's free and open to all.

My notes from eGovernance and Free Software: How They are Changing Developing Countries , last month UNU panel.

In Mother Jones Intellectual Property Run Amok (and their sources)

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.’s estate charges academic authors $50 for each sentence of the “I Have a Dream” speech that they reprint.

The CATO Institute publishes Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders - and the technology companies that distribute their content - the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.

Let's rename Digital Rights Management (DRM) Content, Restriction, Annulment, and Protection (CRAP)

The Singapore Treaty on the Law of Trademarks has been adopted at the Diplomatic Conference for the Adoption of a Revised Trademark Law Treaty (TLT). All the working documents are online.

IPKat - fishing for IP stories for you: Back from Singapore

I can say that it's a Treaty that replaces the 1994 one, modernizes it due to eg electronic communications, more multi-class countries, more unusual marks etc; however it has no substantive law, it's entirely procedural about the MAXIMUM any Patent Office may demand from applicants and right-holders when applying for registration, renewing, recording licences and assignments, changes of register details generally; plus the info that may be demanded from representatives.

An extensive report on reverse-engineering of Skype at BlackHat Europe: Silver Needle in the Skype (via Hack the Planet). All their python tools are online too: SecDev tools.

There are more presentation papers on the BlackHat site

The speech accent archive (currently 520 samples)

The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.

Douglas R. Hofstadter: Masters of Deception: Escher, Dalí & the Artists of Optical Illusion, the website that complements the book (via a comment on Amazon)

Unfortunately, the publisher was unwilling to produce a CD to accompany the book. I have created this web site, therefore, to augment and enhance the reader's experience by presenting those works and interviews that I could not present in book form.

Nature has a web-only special on the Future of Computing

What is A.I.: Google Magic (a special for La Grande Rousse)

While I'm at pinging old webloggers, Jean-Louis Gassée has a blog (via JY)

NetLabel board, the net audio community. With a section for the French online labels.

LeMonde: Le Net ne tuera pas les labels. Dommage!

Des milliers de groupes autoproduits distribuent gratuitement leur production musicale sur des sites Web comme MySpace.com. Mais, il faut bien le dire, la très grande majorité d'entre eux ne rencontrent pas le succès d'un groupe comme les Arctic Monkeys. Travailler avec un label est plus que jamais une nécessité pour les artistes. Non seulement parce que la maison de disques investit dans la production artistique du projet, sa promotion et sa distribution, jusque dans 70 pays. Mais aussi parce que c'est le métier d'un label d'aider un artiste à voir les différentes facettes de son travail rémunérées à leur juste valeur.