DigitalKoans

What was new and interesting during the week of 5/28/07? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.)

• "Apple’s DRM-Free AAC Files Contain More Than Just Names and Email Addresses"
  

  A couple of recent posts on Ars Technica and TUAW pointed out that Apple is embedding personal information, such as the name and email address of the purchaser, in all of their AAC files (including the DRM-free ones). We got curious, and wondered whether Apple might also be watermarking the underlying audio data in these tracks.

• "Copyright Protection for Successive Versions"
  

  Thus, libraries really cannot rely on donated earlier manuscript versions of published works as freeing them from copyright concerns. The only exception is if the earlier version is so different from the published version that it truly is a separate work.

• "Copyright’s Authorship Policy: How to Make an Art-Neutral Copyright"
  

  Tim’s point is that copyright ends up choosing what kind of authors are allowed to make art, and which ones aren’t. . . . Tim goes on to suggest a simple and cunning mechanism for minimizing copyright’s impact on authorship, a method that will allow the largest variety in art and expression.

• "Copyrights That No One Knows About Don’t Help Anyone"
  

  When some librarians at Carnegie Mellon University tried to request permissions to digitize a collection of out-of-print books, they were unable to find more than 20 percent of the rights holders, despite persistent efforts.

• "Cornell Library Lands Grant To Document Founding of HBCUs"
  

  Thanks to a $450,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Cornell University Library will help produce a digital collection chronicling the founding of America’s black colleges and universities, by "sharing its expertise in digital imaging, preservation and management" with librarians and archivists from the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Library Alliance.

• "Cyberattack in Estonia—What It Really Means"
  

  As senior security researcher at Arbor Networks, Nazario closely monitors network attacks. . . . He spoke with CNET in the wake of the events in Estonia.

• "Digital Photos Piling Up"
  

  The average U.S. household has almost 1,000 digital photos stored on CDs, DVDs, Web sites and hard drives, according to a Photo Marketing Association survey of digital camera owners in 2006 that was published Monday.

• "Google Gears Brings Offline Functionality to Web Apps"
  

  Google has released a new Javascript API this morning dubbed Gears that adds offline support for web applications.

• "Google Photos Stir a Debate Over Privacy"
  

  Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google’s map service called Street View.

• "Internet Radio Companies and NPR File Legal Appeal against New Music Royalty Rates"
  

  National Public Radio is teaming up with online radio broadcasters to appeal new music royalties that they say would put smaller operators out of business and force others to sharply scale back their online music offerings.

• "Microsoft Adds In-Copyright Books & New Features to Live Search Books"
  

  Today Microsoft announced that they have added in-copyright books to Live Search Books. Microsoft said they have only included books that their publishing partners have given permission to include.

• "More Bandwidth Than You Can Use?"
  

  Companies such as Verizon are starting to offer Internet connection speeds that are 5 to 30 times faster than standard cable or DSL lines.

• "New AACS ‘Fix’ Hacked in a Day"
  

  The ongoing war between content producers and hackers over the AACS copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs produced yet another skirmish last week, and as has been the case as of late, the hackers came out on top.

• "New iTunes Steals Your Ability to Turn Apple Music into iPod-friendly MP3s"
  

  If you’re thinking of downgrading to the new iTunes, stop! The new iTunes breaks the ability to convert the music you’ve bought—even "DRM-free" songs sold at a 30 percent premium—into MP3s that will play on your iPod.

• "Planet Cataloging, the Ultimate Blog Resource for Cataloging and Metadata!"
  

  Planet Cataloging is an automatically-generated aggregation of blogs related to cataloging and metadata designed and maintained by Jennifer Lang and Kevin S. Clarke.

• "Public Domain and Smithsonian Images"
  

  If the image is produced by an employee of the Smithsonian, why does it claim copyright?

• "Reed Elsevier Most Obvious Buy-Out Candidate?"
  

  The Times is reporting that Deutsche Bank called Reed Elsevier the publishing sector’s "most obvious buyout target."

• "The REST book Is Out!"
  

  The eagerly anticipated (by me, anyway) O’Reilly book on REST by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby (as previewed by the authors here) has been published.

• "Take Note: Computing Takes Up Pen, Again"
  

  His new company, Livescribe, which he plans to introduce today at the D: All Things Digital technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., has taken some of those technologies several steps further. It has created an ambitious new type of pen-based computer system that, if successful, could bridge the gap between paper and the digital world and perhaps even change the way millions of people interact with the Internet.

• "The Virtual World Just Got a Little More Real"
  

  Second Life may face a new threat, the need to apply and enforce real law in its virtual world.

• "Visual Amazon Browser"
  

  The interface design firm TouchGraph recently released a free visual browsing tool for Amazon’s books, movies, music and electronics inventories.

• "What Lurks Below Microsoft’s Surface? A Brief Q&A with Microsoft"
  

  Minority Report meets the kitchen table in the new Surface from Microsoft.

• "What Next? Part 2: The Open Source ILS"
  

  Libraries and open source are like peanut butter and chocolate to many people. Our altruistic nature, penchant for openness, and shoestring budgets make libraries a virtual Petrie dish for open source experimentation.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 10:12 am and is filed under Flashback: Weekly News. Comments closed here. Read and add comments at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/.