Cody Taylor

Hugh Pickens writes “Erick Schonfeld has an interesting story in TechCrunch about a consortium of publishers including Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, and Politico that plans to take a new approach towards the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites which republish the entire feed of news sites and blogs, often without attribution or links. For any post or page which takes a full copy of a publisher’s work, the Fair Syndication Consortium thinks the ad networks should pay a portion of the ad revenues being generated by those sites. Rather than go after these sites one at a time, the Fair Syndication Consortium wants to negotiate directly with the ad networks which serve ads on these sites: DoubleClick, Google’s AdSense, and Yahoo. One precedent for this type of approach is YouTube’s Content ID program, which splits revenues between YouTube and the media companies whose videos are being reused online. How would the ad networks know that the content in question belongs to the publisher? Attributor would keep track of it all and manage the requests for payment. The consortium is open to any publisher to join, including bloggers. It may not be the perfect solution but ‘it is certainly better than sending out thousands of takedown notices’ writes Schonfeld.”

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “The RIAA has requested permission to file a response to the amicus curiae brief filed by the Free Software Foundation in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, the Boston case against a Boston University grad student accused of having downloaded some song files when in his teens. In their proposed response, the RIAA lawyers personally attacked The Free Software Foundation, Ray Beckerman (NewYorkCountryLawyer), and NYCL’s blog, ‘Recording Industry vs. The People’. The 9-page response (PDF) — 4 pages longer than the document to which it was responding — termed the FSF an organization ‘dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, and modifying computer programs’, and accused the FSF of having an ‘open and virulent bias against copyrights’ and ‘blatant bias’ against the record companies. They called ‘Recording Industry vs. The People’ an ‘anti-recording industry web site’ and stated that NYCL ‘is currently subject to a pending sanctions motion for his conduct in representing a defendant’ (without disclosing that plaintiffs’ lawyers were ‘subject to a pending motion for Rule 11 sanctions for their conduct in representing plaintiffs’ in that very case).”

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dragoncortez writes “According to this Deseret News article, University classrooms will be obsolete by 2020. BYU professor David Wiley envisions a world where students listen to lectures on iPods, and those lectures are also available online to everyone anywhere for free. Course materials are shared between universities, science labs are virtual, and digital textbooks are free. He says, ‘Higher education doesn’t reflect the life that students are living … today’s colleges are typically tethered, isolated, generic, and closed.’ In the world according to Wiley, universities would still make money, because they have a marketable commodity: to get college credits and a diploma, you’d have to be a paying customer. Wiley helped start Flat World Knowledge, which creates peer-reviewed textbooks that can be downloaded for free, or bought as paperbacks for .”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.