The Creative Commons licenses turn five years old in December and they're having parties all over the world to celebrate! The main one, in San Francisco, is on Dec 15 from 10PM to 2AM, at the Terra Gallery at 511 Harrison Street.

My first novel was the first book released under a CC license, which means that my novel-writing career is turning five in January. Time sure flies! Link

The time-honored tradition of code scavanging has long been a way for new programmers to "break in" to a new language or task that they may not want to build from the ground up. The re-use of old code, cleaned up and tweaked to a new purpose can help developers learn many useful skills and accomplish tasks quickly, especially for small tasks that aren't of vital importance. One blogger wondered if this process could be formalized and tools could be built to help foster and enable code scavanging on a mass level. Is this a viable option, or are there just too many things to consider?

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Roland Piquepaille writes "The European Union has funded an ambitious project related to wearable technology. The project, named WearIT@work, will end in one year and invested funds are expected to exceed 23 million euros. The goal is to replace traditional interfaces, such as screen, keyboard or computer unit, by speech control or gesture control without modifying the applications. This wearable system is currently being tested in four different fields including aircraft maintenance, emergency response, car production and healthcare."

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We've noted for a while that just like every other DRM scheme, the AACS copy protection scheme at the heart of both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats accomplishes little more than irritating paying customers. The system got cracked within months of its release, and the studios have been playing a losing game of cat and mouse with hackers ever since. The AACS system is more ambitious than previous copy protection systems in that it attempts to control not just players but also any device connected with the player. If you try to play an AACS-protected disc on an unapproved TV, the player is required to reduce the quality of the video, or refuse to play the video altogether. As a consequence, there are a lot of customers out there who would like to play their legally-purchased movies on their legally-purchased TVs, but whose legally-purchased HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players refuse to cooperate.

Ed Felten notes that the limited functionality of the official players has created a market for software that will allow them to play their movies on "unapproved" hardware. And thanks to the DMCA, such players cannot be legally developed in the United States. So not surprisingly, overseas firms are taking up the slack. One of the leaders is Antigua-based Slysoft, which makes the AnyDVD HD software. It advertises that its software will allow users to "watch movies over a digital display connection, without HDCP compliant graphics card and HDCP compliant display." There's a basic lesson here about the economics of prohibition. As Hollywood develops ever-more-elaborate and restrictive copy protection schemes, those copy-protection schemes come to inconvenience more and more customers. That, in turn, creates a larger market for circumvention software, prompting software companies to invest more in developing more powerful and user-friendly tools for removing copy protection. All Hollywood has accomplished, in other words, is providing a small boost to the overseas software industry.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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I haven't heard it said in the tech blogosphere that the Hollywood writer's strike cuts right to heart of the philosophy of the entertainment industry and what goes on on the Internet. But it does. It's a classic faceoff, and in this case, the execs, the nemesis of the Internet, seem to be taking the side of the Internet. They can't promise the writers a share of the money they make on the Internet because they don't see how they're going to make money on the Internet. How can you share something that doesn't exist??

When we talk with people from the entertainment industry they explain how they can't just release stuff on the Internet, because they have agreements with the rights holders that assume the realities of the old more restrictive distribution system. Those are the writers.

Now you can see how real the concerns are, when there are real people who express them, and how the execs are in the middle.

I'm a net native (even though I've heard young people question whether anyone my age can be) and while I appreciate the human concerns, there is no meaningful way to be sympathetic. I'm not going on strike, even though I am a writer. I don't ask to be paid for my writing. I haven't been paid for writing software in a very long time, but I keep doing it. Yet I look in my bank account, and somehow the balance keeps going up. In the end, that's all that matters.

I don't hold on to a principle that I must be paid for what I do. I look at money as separate from my living. I live through my work. Some of it pays, and it's unfortunately unpredictable what that is. Welcome to the net, welcome to the 21st century.

I heard a report on Nightline how the writers of The Simpsons are producing YouTube videos, and they're funny. Of course they are -- the people who write that show couldn't possibly write something that wasn't. They should keep doing them, I suspect they will.

Never mind how you get from point A to point B, we're going there. Creative work won't be directly paid for in the future. And we're already in that future. Read my essays from the 90s to see how angry this made me. Now the anger has subsided, as a software writer, and it will subside for the Hollywood writers too. This may be the moment when the system breaks. It looks more and more like that.

- todd hido
- sara hobbs
- mused
- artcoup
- city shrinker
- cowscapes
- a plat venture
- postcard polaroid
- flickrvision
- deleted images

previously on web zen:
- photo zen 2006 pt. 2
- photo zen 2006 pt. 1

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Earlier this month, we noted the growing trend of patent holders to sue a ton of companies at once, rather than suing a few at a time. There are probably two major reasons for this. First, is that companies that sense they're about to get sued for infringement have been a lot more aggressive in filing for declaratory judgments saying they don't infringe. This matters because then the lawsuit is more likely to take place in a court that the company is comfortable with, rather than where the patent holder wants to file (which is Marshall, Texas). The second, and probably much bigger, reason is that patent holders are scared of both the pending patent reform bill in Congress and all the efforts by the Supreme Court to reel in many of the egregious abuses of the patent system. And, of course, since the latest case on that subject that the Supreme Court is checking out involves whether or not patent holders can shake down companies up and down the supply chain (meaning that it gets licenses for the same item many times over), it's no surprise to see many patent holders filing massive lawsuits of just that nature quickly.

The anonymous Troll Tracker lawyer notes that this past Tuesday alone 126 companies were sued for patent infringement, 113 of those in Marshall. However, as he notes, much of that is due to one patent holder, who sued a massive 91 or 92 companies (Troll Tracker says 91, the Inquirer says 92 and has the list if you want to count). And, of course, the patent holder in question is suing up and down the supply chain to get all of those companies included. As the Troll Tracker notes: "He sued the allegedly infringing manufacturer. And he sued every single one of the manufacturer's customers. And he sued every single one of the manufacturer's customers' retailers." Expect to see more cases along these lines in the coming months, so perhaps we should start keeping a tally to see who wins for the largest single number of companies sued for infringement in a single lawsuit.

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The Smoking Gun reveals the identify of the director of "2 Girls, 1 Cup," the internet's latest shock-meme. 2G1C's director is a Brazilian named Marco Fiorito. The 36-year-old from Sao Paulo describes himself as a "compulsive fetishist" and "an artist in the art of movie making." He started a porn production company with his wife in the mid-'90s, focusing at first on foot fetish films:

While Fiorito contends that his revolting films are not illegal in Brazil, some of his works have been branded obscene by U.S. prosecutors and led last year to the indictment of Danilo Croce, a Brazilian lawyer who lived in Florida and was listed on corporate documents as an officer of a company distributing Fiorito's films.

In his legal declaration, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Orlando, Fiorito contended that Croce, 43, had no role in his movie business, other than helping to process credit card transactions through a travel company the attorney owned. In June, Croce, who cooperated with investigators, copped a plea and was later sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation (since he was returning to Brazil) and ordered to forfeit $98,000.

In his declaration, Fiorito explained that had he known that selling his films in the U.S. was illegal, "I would have stopped because the money is not the main reason that I make these films." He then added, "I have already made fetish movies with scat/feces using chocolate instead of feces. Many actors make scat films but they don't agree to eat feces."

Link to court filings at The Smoking Gun (8 pages).

See also this essay by internet security expert Adam J. O'Donnell: Security Implications of "Two Chicks, One Cup": not a joke. Snip:

Websites have started sprouting up that claim to host the video, but actually host malware. If you attempt to search for either "Two Chicks(Girls), One Cup" or "Two Chicks(Girls), One Finger", you may end up at malware sites likes these. This is similar to the codec attacks recently described by Sunbelt Software. I am concerned that... I can't believe I am writing this... security vendors will be loathe to post warnings regarding malicious versions of the content because the content itself is so wretched.

Link.

(Image from andrewc; Thanks, Oxblood Ruffin, Jake Appelbaum, and Jota)

Previously on Boing Boing:

Two Girls 1 Cup: a grandmother reacts.

Film review: 2 Girls One Cup

Can't see the video? Click here

narramissic writes "A report released Thursday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) finds that Comcast continues to use hacker-like techniques to slow down customers' connections to some P-to-P (peer-to-peer) applications. The EFF said that Comcast appears to be injecting RST, or reset, packets into customers' connections, causing connections to close. 'The investigators say that their tests confirmed an earlier one conducted by the Associated Press that showed that Comcast is interfering with BitTorrent traffic. BitTorrent is a protocol used to efficiently distribute the online transmission of large files, and some entertainment companies have partnered with its creators to distribute its content online. Comcast has said that it doesn't block BitTorrent, or any kind of content.'" If you're the type that always looks for a silver lining, Comcast's skulduggery may be pushing Congress to reconsider Net Neutrality.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's the schedule for tonight @ the Blip Festival 2007, I'm a fan of Loud Objects, see you there! ... - Link.

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Brad Templeton notes a problem with Facebook that I have also observed: third party applications on the site are often quite annoying. I pretty regularly get messages from friends asking me to sign up for some random Facebook application that says (as Templeton puts it) "Fred Smith wrote something on your pixie wall!" and I have to sign up for the application to find out what Smith said. Most of the time neither Fred Smith's message or the app is that great, and so I end up quickly deleting it and am annoyed at both Fred Smith and the pixie wall application for wasting my time. I'm now at the point where I mostly ignore application requests. It's a bit of a sticky situation for Facebook. On the one hand, the company doesn't want to stifle experimentation by micromanaging the way applications are deployed. On the other hand, if applications make themselves too much of a nuisance, they might degrade the entire Facebook experience.

At a minimum, Facebook should revise its guidelines to make it clear that applications should, as much as possible, allow users to interact with them without formally signing up with the application themselves. Of course, applications have a strong incentive to ignore this advice in the interest of viral growth. One way to help enforce the guidelines would be for Facebook to put a complaint button right next to all application installation requests. The applications that received the most complaints could be investigated by Facebook staff and asked to clean up their act. One problem is that, as Templeton points out, Facebook itself hardly has clean hands on this issue. When you get a message on Facebook, you receive an email without the body of the message in it. Facebook ought to set a good example by switching this default.

It's true that in the short run that would moderately reduce website traffic. But that's a short-sighted way of looking at it. As I pointed out on Wednesday, one of the reasons Google has been so successful is that they almost never degrade the user experience in pursuit of other objectives like revenue maximization. That enhances their brand and increases user loyalty. By the same token, we at Techdirt provide full-text feeds despite the fact that partial feeds would generate more traffic in the short term. In both cases, the focus is on building the long-term value of the product, and sometimes that means giving up some short-term benefits in order to enhance the user experience. If Facebook doesn't learn this lesson, they are vulnerable to a competitor that offers similar functionality and a better user experience.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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TheFunded.com is a popular website here in Silicon Valley for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs alike. The site allows entrepreneurs to post comments and ratings about various VC firms and their partners. Considering how big a role a venture capitalist takes in the life of a startup having more information from those who have dealt with them in the past is tremendously valuable. At the same time, venture capitalists rarely get much feedback on how entrepreneurs feel about them, meaning that some can go on treating entrepreneurs terribly for years -- perhaps without realizing it. TheFunded has helped change that dynamic somewhat, both giving entrepreneurs a way to get more information (and share more information) about the VCs they've dealt with and for VCs themselves to get more feedback. Of course, some of the VCs who are criticized aren't happy about it. Most, however, seem to grudgingly accept the constructive feedback (while also begging their portfolio CEOs to write nice things about them). Earlier this month, the sites previously anonymous founder outed himself in a Wired article, making some wonder what the reaction from the VC community would be.

In at least one case, it appears that the reaction is to reach for the lawyers. As VentureBeat notes, Hercules Technology Growth Capital, which is actually a pretty large venture debt firm (more than venture capital), has sent a cease and desist letter to theFunded after a negative review of Hercules appeared on the site. This seems like a bad idea for a huge number of reasons -- all of which Hercules and its lawyers probably should have realized before sending the C&D. First off, as it seems we have to repeat almost weekly around here, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act very, very clearly states that a site is not liable for content its users post, and any law firm should know that. Second, and more importantly, as you would expect, the Streisand Effect kicks in. Prior to this, not a whole lot of people would see the review of Hercules. Now, however, many, many, many more entrepreneurs will not only see and remember the negative review, they'll see how Hercules responded to it, which may be even more damaging to the firm's reputation.

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Random BedHead Ed writes "Good news everyone! After a five year vanishing act the sci-fi spoof Futurama returned this week with a direct-to-DVD feature. Wired has an article about its return, including the story of the show's origins, a behind the scenes gallery, interviews with creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, and some interesting trivia. For example, did you know the ship has an overbite like a Simpson's character? Or that the show's title is taken from an exhibition at the 1939 Worlds Fair?." We just talked about this a bit the other day, too, in reference to a great interview on TVSquad.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India's Tehelka has an excellent article on the history and state of Indian science fiction:

It all began in 19th century Bengal. The first example of modern Indian SF was probably a Bengali story, Shukra Bhraman or ‘Travels to Venus’, by Jagananda Roy in 1879. Or, depending on your perspective, much before that. “Science Fiction has been a part of Indian literature since the Puranas and the Mahabharata,” says MH Srinarahari, General Secretary of the Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies (IASFS). “There was the palace of wax made by the Kauravas and Ram faced Mrigmarichika, which was nothing but an illusion.”...

INDIAN SF also often comes with a moral message. “It should have a social purpose,” says Srinarahari. “If a writer is speaking of an imaginary world or change in his environ, how can he cope with it? Reading about it will educate a person.” Deshpande agrees. “There has to be a mission,” he says. In his story, the protagonist dreams that a bacteria is speaking to him, saying that increasingly powerful antibiotics are not the way to get rid of pathogenic bacteria. Peaceful coexistence between humans and the bacteria is the need of the hour. The subtext here, says Deshpande, is about nuclear weapons and terrorists.

Link (Thanks, Partha!)

Amazon sells uranium ore, "in compliance with Section 13 from part 40 of the NRC Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules and regulations." $23 a throw. Link (via Making Light)

Ashley Hope paints from crime scene photos. The images in this gallery depict murders of women. Snip from artist's statement:

There are certain moments in life when one experiences space and time to an excruciating degree. There are seconds -- fleeting, momentous seconds -- when the world seems relentlessly clear, and the very nature of existence graspable. When the moment passes, you think to yourself, "My God, I just saw it. It. The truth. What was it?" Although you are unable to define, the sensation of knowing stays with you. Most likely, the Real cannot be set in words, it is beyond words. Human tragedy is almost always accompanied by that glimpse of the Real.

Link to her website. Image: Laundry, 4' x 5', oil on panel, 2007. A debut solo exhibition is currently on display at New York's Tilton Gallery. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin, via rileydog)