Google and the historian
Dan Cohen gave an interesting talk at the American Historical Association meeting recently, where he discussed the benefits Google brings to historical research, as well as some pointed criticisms.
How to write attributions for the Creative Commons licensed images you use on your blog
I’ve found that pictures shared under a Creative Commons (CC) license (of all flavors) are a great resource for bloggers who want artwork to accompany their posts. I’ve also realized that not everyone, myself included, has always done an adequate job of meeting the attribution requirements of CC licenses. To help remedy this, here are my recommendations for doing this properly in a blog.
Why should we keep others from selling our work?
Techdirt discusses why you shouldn’t be concerned if someone “steals” your work and sells it, noting that “it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
The new Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is... problematic
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad
How does fair-use law work?
This is an excellent write-up about how fair use works, along with its complexities (and areas where it is more straightforward, generally where courts have already ruled on a very similar use previously).
Modern media centers: the hard 20% is socio-legal
Cory Doctorow points out that the first 80% of creating a media center is easy: a decent computer (I used an old Pentium III and an old PowerBook, but you can use newer tech if you’re not a poor student), video out (S-Video to an old-school TV, VGA or HDMI to a new HDTV), big hard drives, maybe network sharing (I used an Airport Extreme I inherited) so you can access media from multiple rooms. But what about content — “the other 20 percent”?
Court transcripts and copyright awards
Should a court reporter own the copyright on his or her work product, and be able to force everyone to pay for it into the future. “No,” says an appeals court, overruling a lower court decision to the contrary.
Google Books adds open-standard downloads
For anyone using any kind of electronic reader — including a regular computer — this addition to Google Books may well prove quite useful: EPUB as a download format.
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