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Month: September 2002 (Page 1 of 5)

The new copyspeak

Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Assn., writes on c|net about the new “copyspeak”.

Why copyrights aren’t “property” — “Real property is subject to ownership taxes. Real property lasts forever and can be owned forever. A copyright can be owned only for a limited period of time.… Read the rest

Googling blogs: A proposal

As much as Google rocks, there is one area where it really sucks: Searching weblogs. That’s because it’s not particularly intelligent about separating or summarizing weblog entries, making it a pretty blunt tool for finding specific information on a blog.… Read the rest

IP lockdown

David Weinberger has a very eloquent, pointed comment on the most recent academic plagiarism scandal. I love the disclaimer at the end.

One comment, however: When you use the term “intellectual property,” you’ve already lost the argument. That term, by likening copyrights and patents to real property, gives them an implicit permanence, concreteness, and totality that they’ve never had, until now, either in the Constitution or in subsequent legal history.… Read the rest

Sitting bulls and rung jumpers

New workplace terminology, from “outplacement firm” Challenger, Gray, and Christmas:

Righteous CEO (Chief Ethics Officer): Executive selected to review corporate operations and practices to ensure that ethical standards are being met.

Sitting Bull: Retirement-age worker who, due to stock market and other savings losses, will not leave, thus blocking younger workers from advancing.… Read the rest

4,000 editors on the same page

Online media watcher Steve Outing says that Google News is “the best implementation of the global newsstand to date.” And he goes on to say: “I would argue that the service does use human news-editing intelligence. It collects and analyzes the news publishing decisions of the human editors at 4,000 news organizations.”… Read the rest

Intellectual “property”

Gary Shapiro on Intellectual property: “This term is so well established and that there is virtually no chance of rolling it back. But its usage serves to strengthen the position of the content business vis-a-vis information consumers (i.e. society as a whole).… Read the rest

Google news flaws

Nick Denton has a smart critique of Google News: “It discriminates against an exclusive, which is perverse. A story exclusive to one source — the New York Times scoop on US war plans, for instance — will rank low. While a standard calendar-driven wire service story — reported everywhere, without any great enthusiasm — scores highly.”… Read the rest

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