Onlineability news feed

YouTube Blocks Non-Partner Device Syabas as Allegations Fly

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:12 GMT

YouTube has begun enforcing a 16-month-old change in its terms of service that requires device manufacturers to become "strategy partners" in order to display YouTube videos on televisions.

To Shoot An Elephant, CC BY-SA Documentary, Wins Award at Festival dei Popli

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:41 GMT

Last week To Shoot An Elephant, a CC Attribution-Share Alike licensed documentary on life in the Gaza Strip, won the award for “Most Innovative Filmmaker” at Florence's Festival dei Popli. From the voting committee:

“After we watched this film we engaged in a long passionate discussion. This film never left us. We want to award the filmmakers for sharing with us an emotional, physical and stressful experience for being there and witnessing the horrors and destruction of the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip earlier this year.”

It is wonderful to see open source cinema receive these types of accolades, solidifying its place in the larger film landscape. Congratulations to film-makers Alberto Arce and Mohammed Rujailah on their win! You can learn more about To Shoot An Elephant at their website.

Listen to 'World's First Twitter Album'

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:35 GMT

Digital music students create a crowdsourced album within the 140-character confines of Twitter by writing short strings of code that can be translated into songs.

Of God and Money

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:29 GMT

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into an economics lab. Which one is most likely to increase contributions to the public good?

WikiEducator, Connexions, and MediaWiki join forces in OER Remix Project

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:48 GMT

In case you haven't heard, WikiEducator's Wayne Mackintosh announced earlier this week that they were joining forces with Connexions “to provide educators with greater freedom of choice to mix and match the best of two OER worlds, namely “producer-consumer” models with more traditional work flow approaches and commons-based peer production.” WikiEducator and Connexions are two collaborative OER projects that use Creative Commons licenses. While WikiEducator, licensed CC BY-SA, focuses “on building capacity in the use of Mediawiki and related free software technologies for mass-collaboration in the authoring of free content,” Connexions, licensed CC BY, focuses on the collaborative development, sharing, and publishing of modular educational content that can be easily integrated into larger collections or courses. According to the announcement, the two projects will partner “to build import export capability between the Connexions and WikiEducator/Mediawiki platforms.”

It's definitely exciting to see these two OER projects working together, especially since the collaboration is being generously funded by a grant from one of our own biggest supporters, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. There are various ways you can tune into its progress, including visiting the project planning node, subscribing to the Connexions mailing list, or helping them develop use case scenarios.

Panel power

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:04 GMT

Solar power technology comes of age.

5 Copyright Verification Services Compared

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:33 GMT

Last week I covered a new startup in the copyright verification field, Myows, which stands for “My Own Works” and even produced a short video about how to use the service.

However, Myows is far from the only service that that is providing instant, unofficial verification of ownership of created works. The non-repudiation field has exploded in recent years. Gone are the days of expensive registries that rivaled the Copyright Office in price (while still being unofficial in nature) as now we have fast, cheap, services that offer to preserve your work and your claim on it.

But even there these services have grown, no longer merely providing a certificate of ownership, but branching out to provide help with licensing and even with infringement resolution.

So which service should you use? It's a tough question that depends heavily upon what your specific needs and wants are. To help make the process a little bit easier, I've created a chart, which I've embedded and linked to below, to help you decide which of the services are right for you.

The Companies

Specifically, I decided to compare the services provided by five different sites. Myows, SafeCreative, Numly, MyFreeCopyright and Registered Commons. They are five of the biggest and best-known services in this field and all have been covered on this site in the past.

A notable omission is C-Registry.us, which is more of an orphan works protection service than a non-repudiation one, though it has some functionality as such. Also, since C-Registry is targeted almost entirely at artists and photographers, making it much less useful to bloggers and other types of creators.

However, if you are a visual artist, it is likely a service that is well worth looking into, especially if you sell stock photos.

I then took a look at the companies based up on some of the most popular and requested features. The results are embedded below.

The Chart

Click for Full Size

Link to Google Doc

*Extension is out of date.

Definitions

Very quickly, I want to clarify the meaning of the elements in the chart and what they mean.

Cost: The cost of the service.
Types of Work: The kinds of files/content that can be uploaded. If a service allows “files” there is no separation between different content types.
Works Fingerprinted: Refers to creating a hash of a file that can be compared against later. This is often how works are verified or identified at a later date. It does not involve any visual mark on the work (watermarking) or additional tag. It's just a unique hash of the file or work's content that will match other copies of the work.
Works Stored: Are the works themselves stored on the service for backup and/or later viewing.
Certificate Provided: Whether or not the service provides a printable certificate for easy verification.
Barcode Provided: Refers to a machine-readable barcode, commonly used on physical objects.
Public Verification: Refers to the ability of someone unsure of the ownership of a work to submit a copy of it (or other known information about it) and see who owns or created the work.
Custom License/License to Individuals: A custom license is your ability to draft your own license or set new restrictions on use. The ability to license to individuals is the ability to give a person or company a license to use the work and track that license in the system.
Creative Commons Compatible: Whether or not users can select CC licenses.
Contact Author: A means to contact the author within the system, not just a profile used by the author.
Detection/Resolution Assistance: A Means to detect copies of the work and assistance in bringing about a resolution.
API Available: A means for programmers and other service providers to interact with the service, including submitting works. Some may be in private beta at this time.
Firefox/WordPress Extensions: Add-ons for the Firefox browser and WordPress blogging platform.
RSS Integration: The ability to read content from a site's RSS and automatically register it, very useful for bloggers.

Beyond the Chart

Though the chart does an overall decent job at comparing the various features to one another, there are a few things that aren't displayed on the chart that are worth mentioning.

Myows is a clear winner on the ease-of-use front, having designed a system that is both attractive and easy to use. Great for those who aren't familiar with these kinds of services.
Safe Creative has a robust API and, through it, has partnered with music sharing site Jamendo to protect the works uploaded to the site.
Registered Commons is extremely difficult to use and is targeted mostly at creators of larger, more involved works, as the pricing strategy indicates. It also has a very powerful system for verifying author identities to provide further proof of ownership.

In the end, all of the services have their separate strengths and weaknesses. Myows, for example, is the only service to provide resolution assistance and has great handling of licenses. However, there is no public verification of works. Safe Creative is extremely feature-rich, having at least some capability on all fronts but can be confusing and intimidating to use.

Numly, on the other hand, focuses on speed and simplicity though some of its best features, its extensions, are dated and it does cost money to use it with an account large enough for most creators. MyFreeCopyright is the only one with RSS integration, which makes it invaluable for bloggers, but only has minimal licensing features and doesn't provide certificates for content other than Web-based ones.

Finally, Registered Commons has a very robust hashing system and very powerful user identification service but all of it comes at a high cost and with a very difficult interface.

All in all, it seems every service has a great deal to offer users and a great deal to learn from others.

Bottom Line

So it all comes back to the question of which service should you use. The answer is obvious: It depends.

From where I'm sitting, both Myows and Safe Creative are clear leaders in this field. Myows is well-aimed at novices and those interested in copyright enforcement where Safe Creative is more aimed at veteran users and those who need public verification and in battling the orphan works problem.

However, I use MyFreeCopyright on this site due to its RSS integration (no reason not to) and have used Numly in the past through its WordPress plugin. Finally, Registered Commons would likely be best used by those creating works that may be considered valuable financially as their identity verification program and strong hashing may provide greater security, but at a price that isn't practical for most.

On that front though, I am interested in your thoughts. Which do you think is the best and why?

Disclosure: Chris Matthieu, the owner of Numly, is a long-time friend and former co-host of the Copyright 2.0 Show.

jonb1324cdr

A Few Questions for Belle de Jour, Call Girl and Scientist

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:30 GMT

In 2003, a young American woman in London studying for her PhD. ran into money trouble. To support herself while writing her thesis, she joined an escort service. Under the assumed name Belle de Jour, she started to blog her experiences. That blog led to a series of successful, jaunty memoirs beginning with 2005's The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl. The books were adapted for television in the U.K. (where she is portrayed by Billie Piper) and later in the U.S.

Why Do We Hate?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:21 GMT

"What makes hate tick? How can we stop it?" These are the questions that Jim Mohr, director of Gonzaga University's Institute for Action Against Hate, asks himself every day as he develops a new field of study around hate. Mohr believes that despite all the devastating examples of hate in the world, no one really understands why one person hates another.

3 Count: Who’s Next?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:43 GMT

Got any suggestions for the 3 Count. Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Hollywood Takes OpenBitTorrent’s ISP to Court

First off today, now that The Pirate Bay's tracker has shut down, though in its case to force users to use decentralized methods of downloading, the movie studios have turned their attention to other prominent trackers including OpenBitTorrent, which has had its hosting company receive a lawsuit from the various movie studios.

OpenBitTorrent is a different kind of tracker in that it is not connected to a site or search engine, but is rather just a service that connects peers based upon has values. The site also has a DMCA-style notice and takedown procedure that enables copyright holders to disable access to copyrighted files.

Their hosting company, Swedish outfit Portlane, was sued by Hollywood studios, who claim that it is merely a “rebranded” version of The Pirate Bay.

More to come on this lawsuit in the future.

2: Judge Sets February Hearing for New Google Books Deal

Next up today, the judge in the Google Book Search case has given tentative approval to the new settlement, which was unveiled last week, by laying out a schedule for the approval process.

The original settlement, which would have allowed Google to scan, display and sell copies of in-copyright but out-of-print works, was shot down following criticisms from the U.S. Department of Justice. The revised settlement, which loosens restrictions on scanned works, has greater consideration for international authors and changes to scope of the class action lawsuit, has done little to appease the harshest critics but still seems to have been widely welcomed.

The new timetable puts a deadline of January 28th to file objections to the settlement and sets a date for a final hearing on February 18. Those who wish to opt out of the settlement and retain their right to sue Google will need do so by January 28.

It is worth noting that these deadlines are much faster than the ones given the first time around, largely due to the fact that the case has been ongoing for so long.

3: Japan Set To Extend Posthumous Copyright

Finally today, newly-elected Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has vowed to extend the posthumous copyright protection on compositions from 50 to 70 years, as he had promised to do during the campaign.

The announcement came at a speech to the Japanese composers and authors' society during an event celebrating the 70th anniversary of the group

There was no timetable announced for passing this extension.

Suggestions

That's it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

jonb1324cdr