This site is very interesting. An online library, full of useful and not so useful information (care to know all there is to know about ancient archery?).
Called the Universal Digital Library, it purports to have over 1.5 million works in its collection. As the functionality of digital books, like Amazon's new product, become more user friendly, this site may become much more popular than its creator's envisioned.
The works are available in HTML, TIFF, and DjVu formats.
Happy reading.
Here is a video. I warn you, it is 19 minutes long, but it is worth every minute.
The speaker is Larry Lessing, a law professor at Stanford University. The essential point of his presentation (which you really should watch) is that copyright has evolved in the past to adapt to changing technologies. Ditto with other long standing principals of law (he cites, as an example of the latter, the long held principal that the owner of land owns the column of air above the land to infinity and the ground beneath the land to the centre of the earth). This principal met its match with the arrival of the air plane, and no one mentions it any more.
Similarly, Prof. Lessing believes that we need to use common sense to dictate how copyright will be used in the future in a world where virtually everything a person does on the internet involves the material of other people. This creativity should not be stifled, indeed his argument is that it cannot be stifled. It should be encouraged and allowed to compete along side the copyrighted material produced and sold by everyone.
I must make clear that he does not believe copyright should be abolished. Indeed, he calls it one of to untenable extremes (the other being that any content which contains even a snippet of copyrighted materials should be crushed and eliminated by the copyright owner).
A worthwhile 19 minutes in my view.
Well, first we had a real murder over virtual property. A chap in Hong Kong was obviously very annoyed when another person "sold" a virtual sword he had borrowed from the first person. The sword only existed inside the virtual world.
And now we have the alleged theft of virtual property. This article discusses the purported theft of some sofas from within a social networking site called Habbo. The theft occurred when the accused allegedly tricked other users of the site into revealing their user names and passwords to the purported thief, who then "moved" the furniture into his "room" within the Habbo virtual world.
The sofas cost real money by the way.
it will be interesting to see how the authorities frame the charge against the accused, whether as "theft" as we think of it or as something related to the fact the accused set up a false website to trick the owner into revealing his/her user name and password.
Virtual worlds are expanding so rapidly, it can boggle the mind. There are now virtual law firms, virtual courts and the like, all to go along with the virtual sex, theft, and other myriad activities. It sounds alot like the real world....
Virtually un-reported (as with many success stories arising from Atlantic Canada - and Canada to a lesser extent) is the recent (October) award given to Dr. Abbey Kirumira and Hermes Chan. The former is now the head of Biomedica Diagnostics Inc. and the latter is now the head of MedMira Inc.
What did they do and what sort of award did they receive? The answer to the first is that they developed a rapid HIV test capable of producing results within 30 seconds. The award? The prestigious Economist Innovation award. Yes, the Economist - as in the magazine that forever to read.
This is no lightweight award and the mere fact that the recipients are based in the Atlantic region should be trumpeted - and I am trying to make my small contribution to the effort.
All of which reminds me of a book I am reading now called "Why Mexicans don't drink Molson" by Andrea Mandel-Campbell - in my mind one of the best books ever written about this country. if I had enough money I would send it out to everyone I know as a Christmas present.
In any event, I will not delve into the details of the books - sufficed to say that it does not paint a very flattering portrait of much Canada and its business culture/environment.
Why do I mention it? Well, for two reasons. One, I think everyone should read it. Two, the lack of fanfare Dr. Kirumira and Mr. Chan received reminds me of several points the author makes in her book....but I will leave that for you to discover.
Oh yes, the rest of the crew mentioned in this article's header - the inventors/business owners all received the same award.
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