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26 May 2010
For us authors who have been writing paper books, e-books are the savior
of the industry, or a a disastrous pact with the devil, or maybe both
at the same time.
The splashy launch of the Apple iPad, of which there are now over
a million in users' hands, has coincided with a power struggle among
Amazon, whose Kindle makes them the dominant retailer of e-books,
Apple, who wants to muscle in using the iPad, and the major book publishers.
Google also plans to enter the market this summer
through their Google Editions store, selling copies of
many of the books they've scanned in Google Books.
There are two main problems with the e-book market--e-books are not much
cheaper for a publisher to produce than paper books, but they are for
the buyer a far inferior product.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/ebook.html
22 May 2010
Earlier this week in a
press release,
Verisign said that they are selling their SSL certificate business
to Symantec.
Verisign is the dominant player in this market, having absorbed competitor
Thawte in 1999, and Geotrust in 2006.
Three years ago, when Verisign decided to divest its non-core businesses,
they kept the certificate business.
So what's changed?
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/vrsnssl.html
16 May 2010
Last month the American Society of Media Photographers and other
professional photographers filed
a class action suit
against Google
that bears a startling, dare I say, near photographic resemblance
to the Authors Guild vs. Google class action.
The latter case came to a proposed settlement that,
in the opinion of many people including me, would be a breathtakingly
aggressive rewrite of global copyright law in favor of Google and
the members of the Authors Guild.
(I'm a member, but they've never asked me or any other member whether
we want them to do so.)
The settlement has been in and out of court for the past couple of years,
having provoked objections from parties ranging from the US Department
of Justice to the State of
Connecticut to the Federal Republic of Germany to the Open Book Alliance.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/pileon.html
15 May 2010
Last year, Russ Smith of consumer.net filed a
most peculiar suit
against Comcast (his home ISP), Microsoft, Cisco, and TrustE,
pro se, claiming a long laundry list of malicious behavior
and privacy violations.
Last week the judge threw out the entire suit, but gave him one more
chance to refile and try to correct the flaws.
Among Smith's claims are that Comcast and Microsoft's Frontbridge subsidiary
have blacklisted him personally. To
the
surprise of many observers, the judge did not accept Comcast's defense that
47 USC 230 (the CDA) gives them blanket immunity for good faith spam
filtering.
Smith claimed that Comcast said they'd unblock his
mail if he paid them more money, which he interpreted as pay to spam,
which if true would mean the blocking was in bad faith.
While Comcast may well have said something like that, it didn't mean
what Smith claimed.
Having exchanged some mail about the suit with Smith last fall, I think
I understand what was going on, which was that despite having some
sort of certificate called a CISSP, Smith fails to understand
the way that e-mail works, and he has imagined a vast conspiracy
to explain what was really configuration errors, a poor choice
of server hosting, and perhaps malware infecting his mail server.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/consumer.html
14 May 2010
In our last installment we learned
that most of the cost of a paper book is in spent the editorial process,
not the physical printing and binding, so even though e-books cost
nothing to produce physically, the cost to the publisher is nearly the
same, so they can't afford to sell them for much less than paper books.
Today we'll look at the reasons that, even though they have some
undeniable advantages, e-books are worth a lot less to book buyers than
paper books. Assuming you already have a reading device like a Kindle,
an iPad, or a Sony reader, you can store hundreds of e-books in it. In
some cases you can share the books, along with your bookmarks and notes
between devices, e.g., a Kindle and an iTouch or Blackberry
running the Kindle app.
The problem is that the "book" you buy to read on your device is not
really a book, it's what publishers wish books were.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/ebook2.html
08 May 2010
Way back in 2004, ICANN invited applications for a round of new TLDs.
They got quite a few. Some were uncontroversial, such as .JOBS for the
HR industry.
Some were uncontroversial but took a long time, such as .POST which took
five years of negotiation, entirely due to the legal peculiarities of the
registry being part of the UN.
But one was really controversial, .XXX.
By 2005, the applicant, ICM registry, had satisfied all the criteria
that ICANN set out in the 2004 round to get .XXX approved, and ICANN has
been stalling them ever since, including an ICANN board vote against approval
in 2007.
Most recently, ICM used a reconsideration process specified in ICANN's bylaws
to review the board's actions, and the report not surprisingly said that
ICM had followed all the rules, and the board had not.
Before discussing what the issue with .XXX is, here are some things that the issue
isn't.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/dotxxx.html
06 May 2010
The CAN SPAM act has been in place for five and a half years. Compatible
state laws have been in place nearly as long. Anti-spam laws in the EU,
Australia, and New Zealand were enacted years ago. But the number of
significant anti-spam lawsuits is so small that individual bloggers can
easily keep track of them. Considering that several billion spams a day
are sent to people's inboxes, where are all the anti-spam lawsuits?
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/spamsuits.html
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