Copyright fascism update

A while ago I posted about copyright fascism, reproducing an disturbing email that being circulated around Spain. The email implied that copyright law was so strict in Spain that offenders were liable for bigger punishments than rapists and thieves.

I asked around about this and received some very interesting comments back from Cory Doctorow (EFF guru), Javier Candeira (copyfight activist), Javier de la Cueva, and David Bravo (both Spanish lawyers, with expertise in copyright issues).

It turns out the email is text taken from David Bravo's e-book, "Copia este Libro" (Copy this Book). It's a free download you can pick up here.

The passages taken from the book are a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of actual Spanish law taken from the point of view of the music industry.

Apparently in Spain, the organizations representing the music industry have been holding "seminars" and "workshops" to *educate* judges about why say, downloading an mp3 is the same kind of thing as robbing a bank.

Unbelievable! We all know how special interests have become very skilled at lobbying the legislative branch of government to get unfair favours, protection, subsidies, etc. But this is the first time I've ever heard of special intrests lobbying the judiciary branch of government!

That's pretty scary. If I have to go to court for some reason, it wouldn't inspire confidence in the fairness of the law to know that the judge presiding my case could have been "educated" by special interest groups.

Thanks for the info, Cory, Javier, Javier, and David!

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The secret speechwriter for President Bush reveals all

Like it says on the page, it doesn't really matter where you stand politically. This is just very, very funny.

Link: SPEECHING GOOD

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The new Jobster

Wow.

I admit to being confused when Jobster bought WorkZoo a few months back.

WorkZoo was a jobs aggregator/search engine; Jobster was a closed, lead-referral/social-networking recruitment website.

I thought both were very innovative and interesting companies, but didn't see why they would be better off together...until checking out their relaunched website.

WorkZoo has basically helped make Jobster more open, accessible to anyone. And I think it's absolutely great. You can search for jobs, and see aggregated listings from all over the web. But Jobster ads on the right are also shown, and you can apply for those by finding a "connection" to be referred to directly.

Really good stuff.

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eBay Reviews & Squidoo: Billpoint & PayPal?

Interesting times.

eBay is trialling its own reviews & guides forum for users to create product reviews, opinions, and actual instructional guides. It's sort of like a mix of Amazon's user reviews with About.com product guides.

At the same time, marketing guru Seth Godin is about to go live with his latest startup, Squidoo. Squidoo offers users the ability to create "lenses", or pages with specific content about anything. Unlike blogs, they aren't meant to be updated or chronological. Seth expects people to create product guides and reviews, and earn adSense fees from the click-throughs.

It seems to me that the problem with eBay's (and eventually Amazon's) user-generated content systems is that they are fundamentally closed systems. The content is glued to the host platform, and that limits the utility to users of the system, no matter how well it's implemented.

On the other hand, Seth's system is much more open. It's not tied to eBay users or Amazon users, etc. If it's well-built from the UI standpoint, I think Squidoo could have greater potential to attract users.

Could this be Billpoint/PayPal all over again? (memory lane: more nimble and open PayPal beat eBay's homegrown Billpoint billing solution, and eBay ended up just buying PayPal and all lived happily ever after)

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New Europe: full-Internet elections in Estonia

Estonia rocks. Besides being the home of Skype and the 22% flat tax, this country is leading the way again by holding next week the first internet-based countrywide election in world.

One interesting innovation: you can change your vote up until the election deadline.

If it goes well, all general election will be held online by 2007.

The 37Signals people have often written about Small is Beautiful in the context of business and product development. I wonder if it doesn't also extend to nations. It just seems to me that tiny Estonia can (and do!) outmaneouver bigger countries with innovative practices like the online elections.


Link: Estonia's local elections to be settled online | The Register.

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VideoEgg is pretty good

UPDATE: I put the video link in the extended post, as many folks don't yet have Flash 8, and were getting prompted everytime they hit the blog. Sorry!

I was never really a big fan of Flash. Always felt it did more harm than good on websites. But I've just tried the much-hyped VideoEgg player and can say that I've been very pleasantly surprised.

The VideoEgg guys have made uploading and viewing video content online a reasonably painless process. There will be booming demand for this sort of service as videoblogging becomes more popular.

I submit a test below, of a certain consultant friend of mine showing off a new gadget ;)


If the video does not display properly
click here to upgrade to Flash 8

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A tale of two media, HTML versus PDF

Since the Guardian printed my humble little blog's URL, I've been happy to receive a number of new visitors.

Now, my trusty statcounter statistics tell me that they're coming from the Guardian website. The URL appeared in three places:

1- the regular, free Guardian website, in the  Technology section (sorry, this link is now broken!)
2- again in the regular, free Guardian website, in the Opinions section
3- and in the fancy, paid-for "DigitalEdition", which is a premium service- you get the newpaper in PDF format and can download it or print it, but they charge you for it.

Well, surprise- 90% of the Guardian referrals came from the free HTML site. I suppose reading a newspaper in PDF format just isn't that popular, or at least paying for it isn't.

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Welcome, Guardian readers :)

I guess someone at the Guardian also thinks the "Google hype" has gotten a bit out of hand:

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Is Telefonica making a move for KPN?

Seems to be the case, according to Enrique Dans (who is rapidly becoming the Om Malik of Spain): Link. This really is 1999 all over again, because this is exactly the same big strategic merger that Telefonica tried to do back then!

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GoogleNet: economics & fast-followers

So it's real: Google is trying to gain approval to provide free 300kb/s Wi-Fi everywhere in San Fransisco.

And we all know the repercussions: free mobile broadband, free mobile voice, will they do this everywhere, what data will they capture, telcos are screwed (again!), what will Yahoo/Microsoft do, and so forth. If Google are allowed to go ahead with this project, it could be VERY big news.

First of all, let's give credit where credit is due: Om Malik pieced together and broke this story way before anyone, and looks to have nailed it perfectly. This is great journalism, and a real leap forward in the credibility of blog-reporting.

Second, I found Mark Maunder's back-of-envelope calculations regarding the economics of the "GoogleNet" interesting. It's hard for me to comment on his assumptions, because I'm not sure how many simultaneous users can be supported by a single antenna, and what percentage of total users are on at peak time. From my days in telecoms consulting, I seem to remember that you could roughly expect 10% of users at "peak hour", which according to Mark's assumptions would mean 804 users/15 antennas*10% ~ 5.36 sumultaneous users per antenna. That sounds reasonable to me, although I'm really no expert. Any telco engineer or someone with muni wi-fi experience want to weigh in?

But what I most liked about Mark's play with the numbers was to link back the costs of GoogleNet to how many adSense clicks per user per month it would cost. Framed this way, yes, I would agree with him this starts to look like a total no-brainer move for Google.

A third comment is that perhaps these economics haven't been lost on others. Martin Varsavsky has been writing on his blog about Wi-Fi as a superior bearer (over wimax, 3g, et.al.), and more interestingly, about the possibility of Wi-Fi enabled mobile phones providing voice "at fixed line rates" (this last post is in Spanish- Martin blogs in both Spanish and English).

Martin teases readers with this interesting comment:

"Espero pronto tener un producto para lanzar al mercado y hacer con el oligopolio de móviles lo que hicimos con Telefónica cuando lanzamos Jazztel. Pero para tener éxito en este campo no solo hacen falta teléfonos sino encontrar una manera de crear una red wifi nacional. Hay que estudiar bien cómo hacer esto."

My lazy translation: I will soon launch a product that will do to the mobile phone oligopoly what we did to Telefonica when we launched Jazztel. But to succeed we need more than wi-fi phones; we need to also find a way to create a national wi-fi network. We have to study how to do this.

If you don't know Martin Varsavsky, he's a serial entrepreneur who started among other companies, Viatel, Jazztel, and Ya.com. Some of these companies have done better than others, but he's managed to start them all and cash out every time at spectacular valuations. He's Argentine, but lives in Spain, and blogs frequently. Sort of Spain's version of Mark Cuban.

Anyway, I'm very interested to see whether Google's free wi-fi for all sparks "fast follower" behavior in other markets. Varsavsky could easily get the financing (though maybe not the regulatory permission) to build up the not-Google GoogleNet in Spain, the sell it to them or others when the international consolidation starts to happen. Sort of what he did with Ya.com back in the web1.0 days.

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