December 23, 2024

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Archives for 2004

New, Unauthorized Sloganator

April 6, 2004 by

I wrote previously about how the remix culture will affect political discourse.
A great example is the new, unauthorized version of the Bush/Cheney “Sloganator”. The original, you may recall, was on the Bush/Cheney website. It allowed you to make a campaign poster with the candidates’ names and (almost) any slogan you liked. After much hilarity at the campaign’s expense, mainly in the form of parody signs with disparaging slogans, the Sloganator was retired.

Now it has been resurrected, appearing in a new, apparently unauthorized, version at http://www.bushsloganator.com. In the remix culture, it’s hard to undo your mistakes, because other people will just copy them.

[link credit: Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing]

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U.S. Drops Ban on Editing Some Foreign Papers

April 5, 2004 by

The New York Times reports that the U.S. government has dropped it objection to U.S. people copy-editing scientific papers whose authors come from countries that are under U.S. trade embargoes. Previously, the government had interpreted such copy-editing as a violation of the trade embargoes, an offense punishable by up to ten years in prison. Though nobody had been prosecuted for copy-editing, the harsh penalty had a significant chilling effect. The policy change comes in a letter from the Treasury Department to the IEEE.

The IEEE, in a much-criticized policy, had previously shunned papers from embargoed countries, most notably Iran.

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NYT on Oberholzer/Strumpf Filesharing Study

April 5, 2004 by

Today’s New York Times has a great story by John Schwartz on last week’s filesharing study and the reaction to it. There’s a nice summary of the study itself, and some discussion and criticism of it.

The criticism seems to fall into two categories. One category is the appropriate scholarly caution toward a new result that hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. Although economists who have seen the study say its methodology looks reasonable, there may be other unknown factors yet to be discovered that will cast doubt on the study. The other category of criticism comes from people who don’t criticize the study’s methdology but just point to other types of studies that give different results.

The article notes that these other studies haven’t been peer-reviewed either, and that some of their sponsors have agendas. Anybody who has been around for a while knows to be very skeptical of certain kinds of studies done by certain kinds of consulting firms.

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More on the UNC/Harvard Filesharing Study

April 2, 2004 by

Eric Rescorla offers two interesting posts on the recently released study on filesharing. First, Eric summarizes the study’s methodology. Then he discusses the implications if the study turns out to be correct that filesharing does not reduce sales.

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In the News Today

April 1, 2004 by

Avi Rubin Joins Diebold (via Avi Rubin)
RIAA Sues Google; Internet Doomed (via James Grimmelmann)
Valenti Condemns Avian P2P (via me)
EFF buys Department of Justice (also note: Valenti To Join EFF Board) (via EFF)
Omniscience Protocol Specification Published (via Scott Bradner)
Duke Buys the Public Domain (via ibiblio)
Google Staffing Lunar Office (via Google)
WalMart Buys Record Company (via Ernest Miller)
EZBake Oven For Your PC (via ThinkGeek)

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