Top Pirate Party Member Has DMCA Takedown Notices Issued In Her Name

Julia Schramm is one of the rising stars of the German Pirate Party: in April, when she was just 27 years old, she was elected to the national party's executive committee. No surprise, then, that she is against copyright: in a podcast she described intellectual property as "disgusting" (original in German.) More surprising is that, despite this, she signed a contract with Knaus-Verlag, part of the publishing giant Random House group, to write a book. Perhaps the $130,000 advance had something to do with it. 

On Techdirt.

Grokking Green IT - and why Open Source Helps

One of the pardoxes at the heart of computing is that for all its power to improve the world, in one respect it is doing the opposite, thanks to its apparently insatiable appetite for electricity. As we are becoming increasingly aware, most electricity produced today has serious negative consequences for the environment, and so the more we use and depend on computers for our daily lives, the more we damage our planet.

On Open Enterprise blog.

E-book Industry Gets E-diotic

Learning nothing from the decade-long series of missteps by the music industry, publishers want to repeat that history in all its stupidity:

Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books. And as electronic reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook, smartphones and Apple's much-anticipated "tablet" boost demand for e-books, experts say the problem may only get worse.

Gosh, the sky is falling.

"Textbooks are frequently pirated, but so are many other categories," said Ed McCoyd, director of digital policy at AAP. "We see piracy of professional content, such as medical books and technical guides; we see a lot of general fiction and non-fiction. So it really runs the gamut."

Er, you don't think that might be because the students are being price-gouged by academic publishers that know they have a captive audience?

And how's this for a solution?

Some publishers may try to minimize theft by delaying releases of e-books for several weeks after physical copies go on sale. Simon & Schuster recently did just that with Stephen King's novel, "Under the Dome," although the publisher says the decision was made to prevent cheaper e-versions from cannibalizing hardcover sales.

In other words, they are *forcing* people who might pay for a digital edition to turn to unauthorised copies: smart move.

And it seems old JK doesn't get it either:

Some authors have even gone as far as to shrug off e-book technology altogether. J.K Rowling has thus far refused to make any of her Harry Potter books available digitally because of piracy fears and a desire to see readers experience her books in print.

Well, I'm a big fan of analogue books too - indeed, I firmly believe it is how publishers will survive. But I wonder if JK has ever considered the point that reading digital versions is rather less pleasant than snuggling down with a physical book, and so once you've got people interested in the content - through digital versions - they might then go out and buy a dead tree version?

But no, instead we are going to get all the inane reasoning that we heard from the music publishers, all the stupid attempts to "lock down" texts, and the same flourishing of publishers despite all that.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

O'Reilly's Got Bookworm(s)

To my shame, I'd not come across Bookworm before:

Bookworm allows readers to add ePub books to their online library and read them on their web browser or mobile device. If you have a portable device that supports ePub (such as the Sony Reader or iRex iLiad), you can download your books to put on your e-reader. Bookworm is specially optimized for use in the iPhone and can export directly to Stanza.

More to the point, it's open source, available under the BSD licence (and thus suitable for all commercial use, too).

Bookworm is now under the aegis of O'Reilly books, which seems appropriate. It's a good time for the project to receive more resources and a higher profile: ebooks are beginngin to take off, and it's important that there be a free reader that can benefit from that, and that we in the free software world can support.

Andy Updegrove on the War of the Words

The ODF/OOXML struggle has been one of the pivotal stories for the world of open source, open data and open standards. I've written about here and elsewhere many times. But the person best placed to analysis it fully from a standards viewpoint - which is what it is all about, at heart - is undoubtedly Andy Updegrove, who is one of those fine individuals obsessed with an area most people find slightly, er, soporific, and capable of making it thrilling stuff.

News that he's embarked on an e-book about this continuing saga is therefore extremely welcome: I can't imagine anyone doing a finer job. You can read the first instalment now, with the rest following in tantalising dribs and drabs, following highly-successful precedents set by Dickens and others. With the difference, of course, that this book - entitled ODF vs. OOXML: War of the Words - is about fact, not fiction, and that the events it describes have not even finished yet.

A Library of Open Access Digital Libraries

If you're a fan of digital libraries - and, let's face it, who isn't? - you'll find this mega-list useful, especially because:

The sites listed here are mainly open access, which means that the digital formats are viewable and usable by the general public.

That's not to say it's anywhere near complete, not least because it has it's own, self-confessed biases:

This list contains over 250 libraries and archives that focus mainly on localized, regional, and U.S. history, but it also includes larger collections, eText and eBook repositories, and a short list of directories to help you continue your research efforts.

(Via DigitalKoans.)

Turbo Wizpy

A long time ago, TurboLinux was a cool company with a turbo-charged CEO, Cliff Miller. As I wrote in Rebel Code:

Born in San Francisco, he had lived in Australia for a year as a child, and then went to Japan for two years, where he stayed with a Japanese family and attended a public school. After he moved back to the United States, Miller attended college, and spent a year in Macedonia, then a part of Yugoslavia, to further his studies of the Macedonian language. "I finished my BA when I was nineteen," he explains, "and then a year later got my MA in linguistics as well," and adds with what amounts to something of an understatement, "I tend to be pretty intense, and just get through things as fast as I can."

But that was in another land; Miller moved out, TurboLinux moved on.

And now here it is, with a dinky little object that sounds, well, cool:

It's an MP3 player. It's an FM radio. It's video and photo display device. It's an e-book reader. It's a sound recorder. It's a Linux-based personal computer ready for web, email and office usage. Yes, it's Wizpy, the Swiss Army Knife of handheld gadgets announced by Japan's Turbolinux this week.

I particularly liked this feature:

Just plug it into a PC's USB port, restart the host machine and it'll boot up into the open source operating system so you can surf and work and be sure nothing's being recorded on the hard disk.

Digital Libraries - the Ebook

It seems appropriate that a book about digital libraries has migrated to an online version that is freely available. Digital Libraries - for such is the nicely literalist title - is a little long in the tooth in places as far as the technical information is concerned, but very clearly written (via Open Access News).

It also presents things from a librarian's viewpoint, which is quite different from that of a your usual info-hacker. I found Chapter 6, on Economic and legal issues, particularly interesting, since it touches most directly on areas like open access.

Nonetheless, I was surprised not to see more (anything? - there's no index at the moment) about Project Gutenberg. Now, it may be that I'm unduly influenced by an extremely thought-provoking email conversation I'm currently engaged in with the irrepressible Michael Hart, the founder and leader of the project.

But irrespective of this possible bias, it seems to me that Project Gutenberg - a library of some 17,000 ebooks, with more being added each day - is really the first and ultimate digital library (or at least it will be, once it's digitised the other million or so books that are on its list), and deserves to be recognised as such.