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Digital Culture Legal Issues Library Issues Master's Paper Personal

The Perils of Strong Copyright

CC chart

For all the talk that the American Library Association does in regards to Open Access and freely available information, here’s the truth of the matter. A chart showing how a few ALA publications compare to Creative Commons licenses. For a full explanation, read the paper. Chapters 4 and 5 and the Conclusion have the real evidence in them. HTML version forthcoming.

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Master's Paper Personal

It is done.

Amazingly and beyond all hope, I’m done. It’s been okay’d all the way around, and I’m meeting Paul in the morning to get the final signatures. Final tally is 81 pages, including the Appendix, Bibliography, and everything else.

PDF copy up on the web very soon, as well as an HTML as quickly as I can manage it.

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Digital Culture

Unique

After a long and torturous discussion, Bets and I have determined that I am a unique individual because I must be the only human alive who has seen all of the following live in concert:

Yes, I’ll admit: I saw Winger live and in concert. I was young and impressionable, what can I say?

Blog challenge: what concert combinations have YOU seen that make you unique?

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Personal

Jason’s Rules of Philosophy

Today, Bets and I undertook a massive task: to go through the accumulated papers of 10 years, and dump what needed to be dumped. We just threw out a 4 drawer filing cabinet, and it was packed with useless papers. One of these papers was the following, from my time at OU as a Master’s student in philosophy. My observed rules of the academic study of philosophy.

  1. Whenever someone says “I will show” they probably won’t.
  2. Any ethical argument that relies on a Nazi example is automatically at question.
  3. The non-philosophical default setting for metaphysics is realism; for ethics is relativism; and for logic is ignorance.
  4. Even diehard Idealists won’t step in front of a bus
  5. “Ceteris Paribus” conditions aren’t and won’t

If any of that makes any sense, you paid attention in Intro to Philosophy.

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Digital Culture

Keeeeenaaaaadaaaaaa!!!!!

Tetsuo!!!!

Man. Gotta have me one of these. Talk about serious geek.

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Master's Paper Personal

Going to bed now.

Another night of the Master’s Paper. Bibliography = check. Abstract = check. Subject headings = check. All formatting = check. All that’s missing is that seal of approval from Paul, which hopefully comes this weekend.

Master's Paper Progress

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Digital Culture

Here’s a prediction…

Someone in SILS next year will take one of these two new Open Source Social Networking systems, install it, and finally the dream of SILSter will be realized.

Peopleaggregator and Slashter

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Digital Culture

Wow…

….finally, after many, many hours of work, and countless evenings up late, finally the Master’s Paper is finished.

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Digital Culture Legal Issues Media

P2P ruled legal in Canada

A Canadian Federal Court ruled today that file-sharing via shared directories (a la P2P software) is perfectly legal and does not violate Canadian copyright law.

Story here.

Allow me to reiterate: “Screw you, RIAA CRIA, you bunch of money grubbing litigious jerkwads.”

Update: link to decision here.

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Digital Culture Media

P2P research right here at Carolina…

From BoingBoing, a story about an economics professor here at UNC that’s come to the conclusion that (*gasp, shock*) illegal downloading of music doesn’t actually affect album sales.

A quote from the paper: “Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale…high selling albums actually benefit from file sharing. ”

Allow me to translate the gist of the paper to non-academic speak for those not at a University:

“Screw you, RIAA, you bunch of money grubbing litigious jerkwads.”