For many years, Google has published a "Transparency Report" with the number of non-copyright-related takedown notices it receives from governments, police, courts, individuals and corporations. Now, the company have added copyright takedowns to the mix. Sadly (and weirdly), this part of the report isn't searchable, as Alan at Copyfight notes: "I cannot search to see if someone has requested that, say, material owned by me be removed from any domain. This is important because in the past organizations that didn't actually own copyrights sent takedown notices. Only a copyright holder should be entitled to do that. Like any other 'big data' source the uses to which these data could be put are varied, but lack of search will hamper most efforts."
Today we’re expanding the Transparency Report with a new section on copyright. Specifically, we’re disclosing the number of requests we get from copyright owners (and the organizations that represent them) to remove Google Search results because they allegedly link to infringing content. We’re starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason. So we’re providing information about who sends us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which copyright owners and for which websites. As policymakers and Internet users around the world consider the pros and cons of different proposals to address the problem of online copyright infringement, we hope this data will contribute to the discussion.
For this launch we’re disclosing data dating from July 2011, and moving forward we plan on updating the numbers each day. As you can see from the report, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly. These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009. In the past month alone, we received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results. These requests targeted some 24,000 different websites.
As TechDirt points out, many of the takedown notices that Microsoft sent to Google were for sites that were not removed from Bing, Microsoft's competing search engine.
Stewart Brand sums up Susan Freinkel's Long Now talk: "What Common Objects Used to Be Made Of," a history of the world before plastic:
“Bakelite was invented in 1907 to replace the beetle excretion called shellac (“It took 16,000 beetles six months to make a pound of shellac.”), and was first used to insulate eletrical wiring. Soon there were sturdy Bakelite radios, telephones, ashtrays, and a thousand other things. The technology democratized consumption, because mass production made former luxury items cheap and attractive. The 1920s and ‘30s were a golden age of plastic innovation, with companies like Dow Chemical, DuPont, and I. G. Farben creating hundreds of new varieties of plastic for thrilled consumers. Cellophane became a cult. Nylons became a cult. A plastics trade show in 1946 had 87,000 members of the public lining up to view the wonders. New fabrics came along—Orlon and Dacron—as colorful as the deluge of plastic toys—Barbie, the Frisbee, Hula hoops, and Silly Putty.
“Looking for new markets, the marketers discovered disposability—disposable cups for drink vending machines, disposable diapers (“Said to be responsible for the baby boom“), Bic lighters, soda bottles, medical syringes, and the infinite market of packaging. Americans consume 300 pounds of plastic a year. The variety of plastics we use are a problem for recycling, because they have to be sorted by hand. They all biodegrade eventually, but at varying rates. New bio-based polymers like “corn plastic” and “plant bottles” have less of a carbon footprint, but they biodegrade poorly. Meanwhile, thanks to the efficiencies of fracking, the price of natural gas feedstock is plummeting, and so is the price of plastic manufacture.
Quebec is in the throes of mass protests. A prolonged student strike over tuition hikes triggered a law placing broad restrictions on the freedom to protest, and giving the police the power to arbitrarily declare even "approved" protests to be illegal. Over 500 were arrested in a single Montreal protest, after a prolonged and totally unjustifiable kettling incident. Kate McDonnell of the Montreal City Weblog was on that march, and she's graciously written us a piece on the experience:
Downtown Montreal midday Tuesday, thousands upon thousands of people
poured into Place des Festivals and the surrounding areas to begin a
march. Montrealers march more readily than most Canadians, but this
was a special day – the 100th day of the student strike against the
tuition increase ordained by the Quebec government under Jean Charest.
Charest has been premier of Quebec since 2003. A Conservative at the
federal level, he jumped for the chance when the Quebec Liberal Party
needed a new leader. He has nudged the party steadily rightward ever
since. In recent years his government has been rocked by multiple
charges of corruption and collusion, but it was the party's planned
increase in university tuition fees that sparked the real furor in
Quebec.
Early 2011, Charest announced his intention to end a tuition freeze
with an increase of $325 per year until a university year (two terms)
ends up costing $3,793 in 2017. Sporadic protests were held, but the
demo of February 17, 2012 was the beginning of daily protests, mostly
in the evenings, most peaceful but with occasional outbreaks by
"casseurs" breaking windows, throwing rocks and bottles at police,
painting things red.
Concerns about access to education were foremost: yes, Quebec still
has some of the lowest tuition fees around, but Quebec taxes are very
high, a fact that's tolerated because Quebecers have nearly European
expectations for collective health care, education and other services.
Statistics show that fewer
Quebecers progress to higher education than other Canadians,
probably the legacy of a time when the Catholic Church dominated the
culture (a hegemony that only ended with the Quiet
Revolution of the 1960s). Pundits are in disagreement whether
rising tuition rates will lower university attendance.
The most recent ratcheting of tension was last week's passage of a new
law, Bill 78, the
loi spéciale which limits freedom of assembly, protest, or
picketing on or near university grounds, or anywhere in Quebec without
prior police approval. A more vaguely worded part of the bill would
criminalize the act of encouraging people to demonstrate.
The Cussing Channel has produced a Dark Knight Joker supercut, featuring all the on-camera Heath Ledger scenes. It rather stopped me in my tracks -- Ledger really put in an astounding performance, something that is underlined three times in red by ten straight minutes of Ledger doing his thing.
Rules: Just The Joker, just the on-camera dialogue. Now, there are many shots in this film over the Joker's shoulder, with the focus on the character he's talking to... those lines didn't make it... only the clips where the Joker is the focus of the shot (otherwise this becomes a 30-minute affair).
Here's an undated ad from "Sugar Information, Inc" (our old friends), warning mothers that if they include their kids in their sugar-free, dieting lifestyles, they will be depriving the poor kiddlees of vital sugar and exposing them to "exhaustion." Obviously, this was before the cancer scares and other stuff about artificial sweeteners, because surely that's the major reason to keep your kids away from artificial sweeteners. I love the fact that they recommend sugar for dieters, too: "gives you the va-va-voom you need for all those exercises!"
Robert sez, "Azerbaijan is hosting the final of this Saturday's Eurovision song contest. Amidst the absurdity and kitsch, human rights groups are worried that Azerbaijan's autocratic government will use the occasion to airbrush its appalling treatment of journalists and activists. Index on Censorship is asking Boing Boing readers to make the President of Azerbaijan face the music during #Eurovision, by signing a petition demanding he end the persecution of writers and artists who speak truth to power."
My father was born in a refugee camp in Azerbaijan -- to Russian/Polish/Belarusian parents -- and I've always felt a distant kinship to the place, enough so that I take this sort of thing more personally than I would if it were in another post-Soviet Asian dictatorship. I signed.
The Eurovision Song Contest is a guilty pleasure for millions across Europe. But this year the competition has a dark side – it’s being hosted by Azerbaijan, a country whose people face violence, prison and persecution for exercising their right to free speech. On 18 April, Idrak Abbasov, an investigative reporter who won the Guardian/Index Award, was beaten unconscious by private security guards while the police looked on.
Other journalists have been attacked, abducted and tortured. In November 2011, writer Rafiq Tagi was attacked outside his home and later died. No one has been brought to justice for his murder. In fact, in the last seven years, there have been no arrests or prosecutions related to violence against journalists.
But it’s not just journalists – musicians, gay rights campaigners and political activists are also under attack.
Here's Paul Joachim's 80 oz. monster cake from 2007, as featured on Evil Cakes:
Made for a halloween party, this cake came out quite scary and realistic! I used 4 deliciously moist chocolate cakes along with a TON of ganache, 80 ounces of chocolate and 8 cups of heavy cream to be exact ;) The engineering on this wasn’t easy considering how thin the neck is. It really held up well! The head is a 3 layer cake. There are NO dowels, NO rice krispies for this cake.
Dish Networks, the satellite TV provider, is being sued by Fox over its "AutoHop" feature, which automatically skips commercials. Fox alleges copyright infringement, which is a repeat of the claims over ReplayTV, which was bankrupted in similar lawsuits in the last decade. The networks claimed then that the whole program, including the commercials, were a single copyrighted work, and that by automatically enabling the skipping of certain sections, the device manufacturers were making derivative works. It's a really dumb theory of copyright and it's hard to imagine that it would hold up in court -- and if it did, it would mean that, for example, allowing screen-in-screen, or changing aspect ratios, or even custom color balances or audio mixes were also copyright violations, and that these violations took place when the feature was enabled by the manufacturer (who would therefore be liable) and not when the customer turned them on.
A more likely claim from Fox is breach of contract -- it's easy to believe that Fox put a "no skipping the commercials" line in their deal with Dish (and if they didn't, you can bet they will). Moreover, the DRM used in satellite receivers is controlled by the big rightsholders, and the license agreement for that DRM (much of which is a secret) allows them to demand arbitrary control over features in devices that can decode it.
Here's more from the LA Times and Meg James and Joe Flint:
Fox filed its copyright violation and breach-of-contract suit against Dish on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Dish filed its suit in U.S. District Court in New York.
"The suit asks for a declaratory judgment that the AutoHop feature does not infringe any copyrights that could be claimed by the major networks, and that Dish, while providing the AutoHop feature, remains in compliance with its agreements with the networks," the Englewood, Colo., company said in a statement.
While consumers with digital video recorders can fast-forward through commercials of recorded shows, Dish's AutoHop takes it a step further. The screen goes black when a commercial break appears. A few seconds later, the program returns. The service can't be used on live programming, such as a sporting event, even after it has been recorded.
With more than 14 million subscribers, Dish Network Corp.'s new technology may threaten the networks' ability to continue to charge premiums for their commercial time.
Tor.com reports on Pulitzer Winning novelist Jennifer Egan's latest project: a tweeted science fiction story in the New Yorker's fiction feed:
This is part of the launch of the forthcoming first-ever science fiction issue of The New Yorker. The installment will appear starting tonight between 8pm-9pm EST, and will last for ten nights. The entirety of “Black Box” will appear in the next issue of The New Yorker, which will release this coming Monday. The story involves a character from A Visit from the Goon Squad and will be a kind of spy narrative.
Richard Katz, a NYC lawyer, has lost his breach-of-contract lawsuit against a pricey healthclub that changed its breakfast menu. Katz was a member of The Setai Wall Street Club and Spa, and he was upset when the yogurt and cereal normally provided by the club was discontinued. He sent a series of upset emails to the club's manager, who cancelled his membership. Katz sued, citing damages in excess of $100,000, and an additional $5,000 in damages for an alleged libel from the manager, who wrote an email in response and is alleged to have shown it to a third party. Lowering the Bar has more:
To me, the great thing about this email is not that a lawyer got furious over somebody failing to dish up the yogurt and cereal. It's that even in the grip of this fury, he still wrote "two (2) weeks." Why do people do this? Maybe it made sense when things were written in longhand, but now that we have email and printers and whatnot there is generally not much controversy over what "two" is supposed to mean. If you haven't picked up this habit yet, don't...
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Ellen Coin dismissed the case this week, according to the New York Daily News. While there seems to have been no written opinion, according to the manager's attorney the judge told Katz at the hearing that "he should be ashamed of himself" for filing the suit. That's hearsay, but the judge did order Katz to pay $440 in costs, which suggests what she thought of the case. The manager's attorney praised the decision for throwing out a case that was "embarrassing to the profession."
If you've got a major-brand camera with a built-in GPS, don't plan on taking any geotagged photos in China. Chinese law prohibits mapmaking without a license, and most of the large camera manufacturers have complied with this regulation by quietly slipping a censorship function into the GPS -- when you take a picture, the camera checks to see if it's presently in China, and if it is, it throws away its GPS data, rather than embedding it in the photo's metadata. On Ogle Earth, Stefan Geens looks at how several different manufacturers handle this weirdness -- how they phrase it in their manuals, and what their cameras do when they run up against this limitation. It's a fascinating look at the interface between consumer electronics, user interface, and the edicts of totalitarian regimes. In some Nikon cameras, for example, the GPS does work, but all its measurements are shifted about 500m to the west (!).
Why does all this matter? Wherever local laws prohibit the sale or use of a personal electronics device able to perform a certain function, manufacturers have traditionally chosen not to sell the offending device in that particular jurisdiction, or — if the market is tempting enough — to sell a crippled model made especially for that jurisdiction.
For example, Nokia chose not to sell the N95 phone in Egypt when the sale of GPS-enabled devices there was illegal before 2009, whereas Apple opted to make and sell a special GPS-less iPhone 3G for that market. Early models of the Chinese iPhone 3GS lacked wifi, while the Chinese iPhone 4/4S has firmware restrictions on its Google Maps app.
The risk to consumers in freer countries is that personal electronics brands might be tempted to simplify their manufacturing processes by building just one device for the global market, catering to the lowest common denominator of freedom — especially if the more restrictive legal jurisdictions contain some of the most attractive markets, such as mainland China.
Still, in the absence of more information from Panasonic, Leica, FujiFilm, Nikon and Samsung, I can’t decisively say whether this is the business logic behind their decision to cripple the GPS in their cameras. And yet uncrippled GPS cameras from Sony and others are freely available for sale in China, for example on Taobao, China’s eBay...
Anniina ("Scholar, Writer, Mother, Dreamer. Editor of Luminarium, an online library for English Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance") produced these delicious-looking and awfully lovely illuminated initial cookies:
I wanted to share with you some Medieval manuscript cookies I made for my friend and colleague, Risa Bear, creator of Renascence Editions. I chose historiated initials from several manuscripts, printed them on edible paper with edible ink, attached them to square cookies and gave them gold edges. Who says love of literature and art can't fill a belly?!
The other day I noticed that on the back of the one dollar bill, there is a phrase:
The Great Seal of the United States.
It is split into two circles.
When you fold the dollar so that the two half circles meet exactly, a new phrase is revealed.
James Losey from the New America Foundation writes, "I wanted to share New America Foundation's president Steve Coll's reasoning as to why he is leaving the Facebook. He analyzes a range of concerns including privacy concerns, a chaotic IPO, questionable corporate-governance system, mixed with a lack of user rights. "
I established a Facebook account in 2008. My motivation was ignoble: I wanted to distribute my journalism more widely. I have acquired since then just over four thousand 'friends'--in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, the Middle East, and of course, closer to home. I have discovered the appeal of Facebook's community--for example, the extraordinary emotional support that swells in virtual space when people come together online around a friend's illness or life celebrations.
Through its bedrock appeals to friendship, community, public identity, and activism--and its commercial exploitation of these values--Facebook is an unprecedented synthesis of corporate and public spaces. The corporation's social contract with users is ambitious, yet neither its governance system nor its young ruler seem trustworthy. Then came this month's initial public offering of stock--a chaotic and revealing event--which promises to put the whole enterprise under even greater pressure.
I quit FB a few years back. I felt like it took a lot more from me than it gave me.
Today we’re expanding the Transparency Report with a new section on copyright. Specifically, we’re disclosing the number of requests we get from copyright owners (and the organizations that represent them) to remove Google Search results because they allegedly link to infringing content. We’re starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason. So we’re providing information about who sends us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which copyright owners and for which websites. As policymakers and Internet users around the world consider the pros and cons of different proposals to address the problem of online copyright infringement, we hope this data will contribute to the discussion.
“Bakelite was invented in 1907 to replace the beetle excretion called shellac (“It took 16,000 beetles six months to make a pound of shellac.”), and was first used to insulate eletrical wiring. Soon there were sturdy Bakelite radios, telephones, ashtrays, and a thousand other things. The technology democratized consumption, because mass production made former luxury items cheap and attractive. The 1920s and ‘30s were a golden age of plastic innovation, with companies like Dow Chemical, DuPont, and I. G. Farben creating hundreds of new varieties of plastic for thrilled consumers. Cellophane became a cult. Nylons became a cult. A plastics trade show in 1946 had 87,000 members of the public lining up to view the wonders. New fabrics came along—Orlon and Dacron—as colorful as the deluge of plastic toys—Barbie, the Frisbee, Hula hoops, and Silly Putty.
Dish Networks, the satellite TV provider, is being sued by Fox over its "AutoHop" feature, which automatically skips commercials. Fox alleges copyright infringement, which is a repeat of the claims over ReplayTV, which was bankrupted in similar lawsuits in the last decade. The networks claimed then that the whole program, including the commercials, were a single copyrighted work, and that by automatically enabling the skipping of certain sections, the device manufacturers were making derivative works. It's a really dumb theory of copyright and it's hard to imagine that it would hold up in court -- and if it did, it would mean that, for example, allowing screen-in-screen, or changing aspect ratios, or even custom color balances or audio mixes were also copyright violations, and that these violations took place when the feature was enabled by the manufacturer (who would therefore be liable) and not when the customer turned them on.
This is part of the launch of the forthcoming first-ever science fiction issue of The New Yorker. The installment will appear starting tonight between 8pm-9pm EST, and will last for ten nights. The entirety of “Black Box” will appear in the next issue of The New Yorker, which will release this coming Monday. The story involves a character from A Visit from the Goon Squad and will be a kind of spy narrative.
Why does all this matter? Wherever local laws prohibit the sale or use of a personal electronics device able to perform a certain function, manufacturers have traditionally chosen not to sell the offending device in that particular jurisdiction, or — if the market is tempting enough — to sell a crippled model made especially for that jurisdiction.
I wanted to share with you some Medieval manuscript cookies I made for my friend and colleague, Risa Bear, creator of Renascence Editions. I chose historiated initials from several manuscripts, printed them on edible paper with edible ink, attached them to square cookies and gave them gold edges. Who says love of literature and art can't fill a belly?!
