The streams of the recently held copyright symposium at the Berlage Exchange are now available, unfortunately only in Windows Media format. The videos are distributed using the Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial Creative Commons license, which may mean that subtitles are Verboten!
Called up a company that wanted to sell me something. Got a message: “Het nummer is bezet. U kunt gratis de vijf toetsen.” (This number is busy. You can press the five for free.) I did not dare press any of the other keys on my phone.
I managed to acquire a ticket for the Bits of Freedom/XS4All organized symposium on Alternatives to Copyright after all. The two main alternatives named were levies, which already exist in the Netherlands, and DRM, which is more or less the road the E.U. wants to take. The day was closed with a debate among four … Read More
First let me point you to a very thoughtful essay by Cory Doctorow on the evils of DRM. (It’s called “Microsoft Research DRM talk”; in case the link is broken, you can probably find it elsewhere.) When copyfighters hear about DRM, they are supposed to start foaming at the mouth, as a sort of pavlovian … Read More
The volatile nature of blog entries makes me cringe. I am someone who gets physically ill if he has to throw stuff out. “But it is still useful!”, I cry, while friends pry useless crap from my hands. Because most bloggers live for the day, their archives (one wonders why they even have such things) … Read More
Leon Krijnen of daily BN/De Stem gets all grandfatherly and talks about the good old days (Dutch), when the internet was young, the air was clean and sex was dirty. (Well, perhaps not the two latter things but … ah well, you get the point.) He recounts how “Every Saturday morning, round about 9 A.M., … Read More
Sears, what I presume to be the Bijenkorf of the US, used to sell pre-fab houses for around two-thousand dollar from the 1900s through the 1940s. You would get your IKEA-type catalog, pick a house, order it, and all the materials would be delivered to what would at one point in time become your door. … Read More
“They say that all that’s required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. If only it were that easy. I spent October eating nachos and playing Kingdom Of Loathing in my duvet, yet still no sign of several-headed whores of Babylon waving triumphantly from Buckingham Palace’s balcony. Evil must try harder.” … Read More
Today, I am proud to be one of the Distributed Proofreaders. We just posted a bumper crop of unique etexts to Project Gutenberg. Everything from “The Psychology of Sex” to “Slave Narratives”, from the “Poems” of Jonathan Swift to “Historie de la Révolution française”, from “Punch” to “Scientific American”. Most of these are hard texts, … Read More
Coltan is probably something you have never heard of, but it would change your daily life if it got taken away from you. It is a mineral used in many electronic devices, such as cell phones and laptops. Eighty percent of the world’s supply comes from Congo, although apparently you do not want to know … Read More