Law X.0

Blogs and Wikis and 3D, Oh My!

Interesting article from Inside Higher Ed: "At Web 2.0 conference, participants delve into academic blogs (are they worthwhile or a waste of time?) and Second Life (is it worthwhile or a waste of bandwidth?)."  [RJ]

Associated Press vs. Bloggers

Check out Mehan Jayasuriya's post on Public Knowledge, Associated Press Declares War on Bloggers, Fair Use. In it he calls attention to the fact that under the Terms of Use Agreement you may not criticize either the AP or the author of the article in your post or article after you have purchased a license to quote AP content. See also: Citizen Media Law Project's coverage of the AP-copyright controversy. [JH]

New Edition of Visual Blueprint Guide to HTML, XHTML and CSS Published

Great guide for novice HTML coders! [JH]

HTML, XHTML, and CSS: Your visual blueprint for designing effective Web pages
by Rob Huddleston

List Price: $29.99 
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Visual (June 3, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0470274360
ISBN-13: 978-0470274361

Description: This edition of the bestseller-previous editions have sold a combined 110,000 copies-has been thoroughly revised and expanded to include modern, standards-compliant design principles and best practices.

• Offers visual learners a solid reference packed with hundreds of screen shots and straightforward examples so they can learn to create and design Web pages that will have an impact on their audience
• Step-by-step, two-page lessons show how to set up a Web page, reduce image resolution, create radio buttons, add a hit counter, add an embedded sound, include content from other sites, and more
• The companion Web site contains all the necessary code to learn HTML

Everything is (and Remains) Beta

The Museum of Modern Betas, which track Web 2.0 beta launches, reports that over 90% of the sites reviewed are still in beta. The top five most popular betas from their list of Most Popular 100 Betas are

1. flickr
2. netvibes
3. kuler
4. zamzar
5. delicious

See also Hot 100 Betas (as measured by the number of bookmarks at del.icio.us added within the last 14 days). Google, by the way, has launched more beta services than Yahoo and Microsoft combined.

Hat tip to Web Worker Daily. [JH]

Investigation of P2P Copyright Enforcement

Michael Piatek, Tadayoshi Kohno and Arvind Krishnamurthy (University of Washington, Department of Computer Science & Engineering) have published the results of their study of P2P copyright enforcement actions.

From the overview:

As people increasingly rely on the Internet to deliver downloadable music, movies, and television, content producers are faced with the problem of increasing Internet piracy. To protect their content, copyright holders police the Internet, searching for unauthorized distribution of their work on websites like YouTube or peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent. When infringement is (allegedly) discovered, formal complaints are issued to network operators that may result in websites being taken down or home Internet connections being disabled.

Although the implications of being accused of copyright infringement are significant, very little is known about the methods used by enforcement agencies to detect it, particularly in P2P networks. We have conducted the first scientific, experimental study of monitoring and copyright enforcement on P2P networks and have made several discoveries which we find surprising.

Practically any Internet user can be framed for copyright infringement today. By profiling copyright enforcement in the popular BitTorrent file sharing system, we were able to generate hundreds of real DMCA takedown notices for computers at the University of Washington that never downloaded nor shared any content whatsoever. Further, we were able to remotely generate complaints for nonsense devices including several printers and a (non-NAT) wireless access point. Our results demonstrate several simple techniques that a malicious user could use to frame arbitrary network endpoints.

Even without being explicitly framed, innocent users may still receive complaints. Because of the inconclusive techniques used to identify infringing BitTorrent users, users may receive DMCA complaints even if they have not been explicitly framed by a malicious user and even if they have never used P2P software! Software packages designed to preserve the privacy of P2P users are not completely effective. To avoid DMCA complaints today, many privacy conscious users employ IP blacklisting software designed to avoid communication with monitoring and enforcement agencies. We find that this software often fails to identify many likely monitoring agents, but we also discover that these agents exhibit characteristics that make distinguishing them straightforward.

Hat tip to Christine Corcos (LSU), Media Law Prof Blog. [JH]