Kelly Abbott

Jamie Zawinski has an interesting take (as a coder and as a nightclub owner) on webcasting and the music industry. I’m not certain of all the numbers he runs, but his explanations of the rules around webcasting seem like very practical advice—Webcasting Legally:

The issues of intellectual property, fair use, individual rights and the like appear to be going nuts in this country. I’m nearly at the proverbial tipping point in terms of my own activism on these issues. From the Dmitri case, DeCSS, to Scientology documents issues, the DMCA, SSSCA, and many others, I’m starting to think nobody is speaking up with effectiveness for rational public discourse on these issues.

I think if people realized what was actually happening with this stuff they’d be outraged. But we’re all so numb from other national issues that we’re missing the fact that the Entertainment business is moving to create an entirely pay-per-view culture as fast as they can.

What do you think?

In response to this, Kelly Abbott posted to websandiego a pointer to Interactive Art by way of SXSW. About it he says: The article discusses the culture of art as it pertains to the Internet. As such, it scans copyright law by way of Lawrence Lessig’s keynote address on the first day of SXSW.

Other pertinent links:
Taming the Consumer’s Computer
The Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act
a letter to your representative
ALERT: Oppose SSSCA; Support Intel’s Bravery: A Bad Law and a Sneaky Process
Anti-Copy Bill Hits D.C.
The Future of Music
digitalconsumer.org
Where Music Will Be Coming From

¡Schnikes!

Wow. A buncha new inbound links to here.

The bombastic webertainer Oliver Willis and the very talented Ben Dyer have graciously added me to their sidebars. Thank you gentlemen!

Also, folks are linking to my lindows article, which is nice. Thanks camworld, Volker Weber, and sdlug.org!

Makes me feel not-so-bad to be missing SXSW this year. Fellow WebSanDiegans Caleb Clark and Kelly Abbott will be on panels this year. As are many other web luminaries linked from the sidebar of this site. Bruce Sterling is co-keynoting, and there’s a movie about They Might Be Giants premiering.

Wowie zowie.

24 hours on and there’s still no return to normalcy. So much bitter news. Such a horror. The events of yesterday may be the most heavily documented single tragedy in the history. Instantly we have hundreds of people with personal stories, video, and especially the grisly pictures. So much news.

The sheer volume of what’s out there to look at to read is amazing. First person accounts. Photographs of attack, collapse, aftermath. Emails about those final cell phones. Reports from terrorism experts about our lack of human intelligence about this. Complaints about the shortcomings of security for air travel. Comments from structural engineers about the world trade center. The history of the world trade center. Clipart of the skyline of new york whose profile is forever altered. Calls from religious leaders to show tolerance. Cries for vengeance. Acts of incredible heroism. Words of terrible vitriol.

I feel like I’ve been reading about a 400 page magazine – chock full of data. Hard to turn off the spigot for an information junkie like myself.

Here are some urls with links to interesting content:

camworld.com…, metafilter.com/, interesting-people.org…, kottke.org…, docsearls.com…, scriptingnews.userland.com…, commons.somewhere.com/rre.

And of course news sites: cnn/, guardian.co.uk, bbc.co.uk/, msnbc, npr.org, washingtonpost.com, nytimes.com, signonsandiego.com, latimes.com.

And the tragic death of an Akamai co-founder, Daniel Lewin on board Flight 11 gave me an odd twinge of irony. Akamai is a caching outsourcing technology – especially designed to keep up with heavy server loads such as we saw yesterday. Odd sensation to see Akamai urls float into news sites with news about the events yesterday.

Kudos to google.com/ , cnn.com/ , paypal.com/ , amazon.com/ , and many other online stalwarts who leapt to action to make news and information available to the public, and provide an outlet for donations.

Best wishes to you all, and may we begin to recover.

I was going to say that we can return to normal, but we can’t. The road ahead is hard.

(and as Kelly Abbott says) – Peace.