From BoingBoing:

YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox plugin that nukes comments with too many spelling mistakes, weird capitalization or punctuation, and too much cussin’. It works pretty damned well, too.

Sure, you’ll miss some worthy comments that happen to be misspelled or contain some bad language. But in an age of abundance, you’ll find plenty of other worthy comments to read.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous youtube ]

Here’s how the DMCA has worked so far: A copyright holder (henceforth “publisher”) notices an instance (henceforth “video”) of what it thinks is a violation of its copyright on a site such as YouTube (henceforth “YouTube”). The publisher sends YouTube a notice that the video infringes copyright. YouTube then has a choice: It can disagree that the video infringes, and leave it up, or it can take it down and let the video’s poster know that it’s done so. If YouTube chooses Door Number One, it becomes liable if a court decides the video really was infringing. So, inevitably, YouTube takes it down. The video’s poster can then counter-notify YouTube that the video is not infringing. (In this one example, YouTube’s lawyers will actually take a look to decide whether they think it infringes or not. But YouTube is very special in this regard.)

On paper, this seems reasonable. And maybe if the whole thing were done with paper, it would be. But the claims of infringement can be compiled digitally — publishers like Viacom automatically generate lists of every instance of, say, “jon stewart” in a video’s title and submit lists of over a hundred thousand URLs, obviously without having actually reviewed any of the videos — while the response is analog, and thus hard, time-consuming, and risky.

Now there’s been some good news.
A federal judge has ruled that before a publisher submits a DMCA takedown notice to a site like YouTube, some human being has to look at it to decide if it actually infringes, or if it is protected by Fair Use. If this ruling is maintained, it will help re-balance the insanely pro-publisher, pro-protection, pro-restriction copyright regime by taking away the incentive to take down anything and everything that looks like it might maybe perhaps upset a publisher’s delicate sensibilities.

PS: Did you remember to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help protect your online rights? [Tags: copyright dmca youtube copyleft eff ]

There’s an excellent story on the front page of the Boston Globe today, by Carolyn Johnson, about scientists who just go ahead and blab about their data before the village elders have given them permission.

Yay.

The article says:

Scientists who plunge into openness also risk giving a competing lab a leg up.

“Maybe somebody has discovered some interesting gene and doesn’t want to blab to the whole world about why it’s interesting,” said Michael Laub, an assistant professor of biology at MIT. He says his lab is not overly secretive, but does not post “all the gory details of what someone is working on, because I don’t want my grad students necessarily to be scooped by someone else.”

Laub is just saying what everyone knows.¹ But the fact that everyone knows it and we’re ok with it is a sign of the problem with the system: The system we want maximizes knowledge and innovation, but the system we have swerves in order to preserve credit for individuals. From the discovery of the shape of DNA to AIDS research, we’ve seen some of the problems with the competitive model of science. But we also routinely see the benefits, as scientists work overtime in order to get credit for a discovery.

And yet, the mix seems wrong. The competitive model made more sense when it was more difficult to share data anyway. The collaborative model is proving itself in unexpected places. It’s clear that a mixed model works — some competitive, some collaborative — but it’s not clear how far we can push the slider toward the collaborative side. My hunch, and my hope, is that it’s way further than we would have thought, especially since experience shows that the satisfaction of being recognized as a continuously generous member of a network can at least equal that of authors of intermittent, officially-sanctioned publications.

[Tags: science open_science collaboration ]

¹I’m totally guessing about his, but I suspect that Laub actually talked with Johnson, the reporter, mainly about the virtues of open science, but noted that his group doesn’t give away absolutely all of its data…and it was only the last part of the sentence that made it in. As I say, I’m totally making this up, but the quotation had that sort of ring to it.

The University of Nottingham has a Periodic Table of Videos, with one video for each element. For example:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/nxZBZQaMcoI&rel=0&color1=3815994&color2=10066329&hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/nxZBZQaMcoI&rel=0&color1=3815994&color2=10066329&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Thanks to LaughingSquid for the link.

HuffingtonPost today announced that, in addition to its usual front-page layout, it’s aggregating its content around 75 (so far) top-level topics. For example, here’s the Barack Obama page. This takes a page (so to speak) from the NY Times Topic pages, which pull together the NYT’s topic on something like 3,000 topics. The NYT Topic pages not only give a centralized place to read about something, they also give people a place to link to, which apparently happens a lot given the strength of those pages in Google rankings. Likewise, the Huffpo “Big News” pages can be linked to and are widgetized.

I’m not sure how the new HuffPo pages differ from the old pages you’d see when you clicked on a tag. Presumably, there’s been some level of hand editing, but I’m not sure

[Tags: huffington_post huffpo ny_times media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

When I read something like today’s news that only 10% of American newspaper editors consider foreign news to be “very essential” to their coverage, I instinctively turn to the bloggers who I know will have something enlightening, thoughtful and sometimes profound to say. And that by itself says a lot about how news is changing.

Of course, I did read that particular news in a newspaper, although I was referred there by a blog aggregator. So, I’m not saying that professional news media are unnecessary or add nothing. Not at all. But the news ecology in just a few years has become 100% mixed.

Tags: news media participatory_media ethan_zuckerman

Mygazines.com is an interesting idea. Currently in beta, it’s designed to let anyone upload any magazine or magazine article, and then share the content, using the familiar elements of content-based social networking sites (or, more accurately, the social networking elements of content-based sites).

The site unfortunately has little information about itself, so I don’t know what they think they’re going to do about the obvious copyright issues. The existing content includes the magazines’ ads, so maybe the site hopes publishers will see some benefit in being scanned ‘n’ read. (As an example, here’s a link to the complete contents of the current issue of The New Yorker.)

While the tool for reading is pretty slick, the process of posting to enable said slickness seems pretty onerous.

I’m interested to see what becomes of it… [Tags: copyright magazines publishing media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Nick Sly has taxonomized the month’s best posts on “biodiversity, taxonomy, and systematics.” Some great stuff in it.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy biodiversity nick_sly ]

I’m enjoying my Amazon Kindle ebook reader, albeit while accidentally pressing the “next page” button as often as everyone else (did they beta test this thing all on the thumbless?), and whining about the rest of the annoyances about which you should not even get me started. Nevertheless, it works fine for pleasure reading and I like carrying a whole bunch of books among which I can switch rapidly. And despite its ugly DRM heart, you can upload books from the Net in PRC, MOBI, or text formats.

But, when it comes to books I read for research, it’s about as effective as it would be as a boat anchor.

First, the note-taking and highlighting are jokes.

Second, it (usefully) lets you repaginate on the fly, but (annoyingly) doesn’t know the original page numbering. How am I supposed to cite a page in a reference? It should let us ask nicely about which physical page the current text came from.

Third, there’s no bibliographic tool.

Obviously, Kindle was not designed for researchers. I understand that, and I would have made the same marketing decision. But for Kindle 2.0, it’d just take some software. (Well, and a change to the Kindle book format to capture the original page numbers.)

There’s a bunch of skeptical Kindle links here.

[Tags: ]

Jacob Kramer-Duffield at the Berkman Center explains the significance of Google’s new ability to search the copyright renewal notices for books published between 1923 and 1963. Publishers of those books had to file a renewal notice to hold on to their copyrights. It’s been very difficult to determine whether those notices were ever filed, so, when in doubt, we’ve assumed that they’re protected, even though most of them undoubtedly are not. This is known as the “orphaned works” problem.

But, thanks to a gargantuan effort by a whole bunch of people — thank you! — that information has been digitized and Google can search it. Google Book Search and The Open Content Alliance will use this list to provide open access to works that otherwise were kept out of the hands of the public because their copyright status just couldn’t be determined.

Project Gutenberg, The Universal Library Project, and the Distributed Proofreaders deserve a lot of credit, praise, and hosannahs for accomplishing this task. [Tags: open_access copyright google open_content_allilance project_guetnberg universal_library_project distributed_proofreaders ]