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Technology Stocks The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum

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To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (30438)	8/16/2009 6:15:09 PM
From: axial	of 46820

Boeing Halts Production of Flawed Dreamliner Part -snip- "Boeing confirmed Friday that in June it instructed an Italian company, Alenia Aeronautica, to stop making fuselage sections for the aircraft after small wrinkles were discovered in the carbon composite skin that covers them." nytimes.com --- "At present, both Airbus and Boeing have suffered significant delays in production of their latest-generation aircraft. The truth appears to be that new materials (especially composite delamination), and man-machine interaction in unforeseen circumstances are yielding unpredictable results. The point: manufacturer difficulties, recent accidents and parallel research suggest we're at the leading, bleeding edge of aircraft technology - and may be making some mistakes - despite claims to the contrary." Message 25753539 Jim

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From: axial	8/16/2009 6:25:47 PM
	of 46820

The problem: The case against PACER: tearing down the courts' paywall -snip- "The importance of public access to the law Public access to court records might seem like something only lawyers would care about, but James Grimmelmann, a professor at New York Law School, disagrees. "If there are secret laws, it's really hard to say that those are laws in any meaningful sense at all," Grimmelmann says. "There are lots of areas of law in which the statute is very short, but the case law is incredibly long and important." For example, the statutory definition of fair use is only about a paragraph long. To understand how the concept will be applied by the courts, you need to review the hundreds of judicial opinions that have defined its contours. To ensure broad public access, the courts have long held that court records are not subject to copyright. Grimmelmann also points out that public access to court records keeps courts honest. If court activities are secret, the public will have no way to verify that the court's procedures and decisions are fair and consistent with the law. Public access also promotes equality before the law by ensuring that those of limited means will not be disadvantaged by a lack of access to information. To ensure broad public access, the courts have long held that court records are not subject to copyright. That means that once a user has obtained a court document, he is generally free to redistribute it without payment. But until the rise of the Internet, practical barriers limited the dissemination of legal records. Courts produce millions of pages of documents every year, and it would have been impractical to distribute paper copies of every document to public libraries. In principle, anyone could have physically driven down to a courthouse and asked to see copies of court records, but practically speaking only practicing lawyers and a handful of sophisticated journalists and academics knew how to navigate this system successfully. Broader and more convenient access to court records allows greater public understanding and scrutiny of our legal system. As information technology makes broader availability economically feasible, public officials have an obligation to respond by using those technologies to expand public access." arstechnica.com --- The solution, in part: a Firefox extension Firefox extension liberates US court docs from paywall -snip- "As Lee explained in his previous article, the revenue generated by PACER's paywall far exceeds the amount of money needed to run the system. The operating costs could be further reduced through much-needed consolidation and other changes. The RECAP system is an important vehicle for encouraging open access and moving the system forward. It also reflects the growth of an emerging movement that seeks to boost government transparency through data availability. A number of similar projects have popped up recently with the goal of making the inner workings of the government visible to regular citizens via the Internet. An example is OpenRegs.com, a website established in June by Mercatus Center researcher Jerry Brito and programmer Peter Snyder to help people navigate federal regulations. The government itself is also pushing a number of important data transparency projects, such as the new Data.gov website that was launched in may by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra to aggregate government data sets in machine-readable formats." arstechnica.com Jim

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From: Frank A. Coluccio	8/16/2009 9:23:34 PM
	of 46820

[RockMelt] Netscape Founder Backs New Browser By MIGUEL HELFT \| NY Times Published: August 13, 2009 Snip: After its early success, Netscape was roundly defeated by Microsoft in the so-called browser wars of the 1990s that dominated the Web’s first chapter. Mr. Andreessen appears to want a rematch. Now a prominent Silicon Valley financier, Mr. Andreessen is backing a start-up called RockMelt, staffed with some of his close associates, that is building a new Internet browser, according to people with knowledge of his investment. [...] nytimes.com ------

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From: TimF	8/16/2009 9:30:31 PM
	of 46820

EFF Defends Wikipedian's Right to the Public Domain Legal Analysis by Fred von Lohmann As has been widely reported, the National Portrait Gallery of London (NPG) recently sent a legal threat to an American Wikipedian, Derrick Coetzee, over his posting approximately 3,000 photos of public domain paintings to Wikipedia. Because of the importance of this issue for the public domain and the Internet generally, EFF has taken Mr. Coetzee as a client. Here's the issue at the heart of this dispute: does something have to be in the public domain in every country on the planet before it can be posted to the Internet anywhere? According to NPG, Mr. Coetzee copied digital photos from NPG's website and uploaded them to Wikipedia (where they are still available). Everyone agrees that the photographs are of public domain paintings in NPG's collection (e.g., this portrait of William Blake painted in 1807). It's also clear under U.S. law that simple reproductions of public domain paintings are themselves not copyrightable, since they lack any "originality" beyond the "sweat of the brow" of the photographer. NPG's lawyers argue that the rule is different under UK copyright law (although there is reason to doubt that it's as clear as NPG suggests) and that Mr. Coetzee is therefore a copyright infringer. NPG also makes several other claims, including that Mr. Coetzee has violated their website's "browsewrap" terms of use, that he violated the NPG's database right by extracting the images from their website, and that he has circumvented a technological measure (apparently Zoomify, which is no longer used on NPG's website) in violation of the UK's version of the DMCA. As we explained to NPG in a letter sent on July 20, it's quite clear under U.S. law that Mr. Coetzee did nothing wrong -- as far as U.S. law is concerned, the photos are not copyrightable, the NPG website's "browsewrap" contract is unenforceable, there is no "database right," and using Zoomify on public domain images doesn't get you a DMCA claim. It's also clear that everything he's alleged to have done took place on his computer and Wikipedia's computers, none of which are in the UK. In the offline world, that would certainly be the end of the matter. If Mr. Coetzee had flown to London, purchased posters of the same paintings at the museum store, brought them home, and started making copies for his friends, it's clear he would be well within his rights in doing so. Why should the answer be different simply because he posted the photos to Wikipedia? NPG seems to think that UK law should apply everywhere on the Internet. If that's right, then the same could be said for other, more restrictive copyright laws, as well (see, e.g., Mexico's copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years and France's copyright over fashion designs). That would leave the online world at the mercy of the worst that foreign copyright laws have to offer, an outcome no U.S. court has ever endorsed. eff.org

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To: TimF who wrote (31005)	8/16/2009 10:05:12 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	of 46820

Good catch, Tim. Thanks. I'd seen this article earlier (I sub to the EFF feed) and should note that some of the embedded stories behind links are also interesting, fwiw. FAC ------

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From: Frank A. Coluccio	8/16/2009 10:26:48 PM
	2 Recommendations of 46820

Kushnick's Law From the Department of "It's About Time!" : "I propose the recognition of “Kushnick’s Law” – 'A regulated company will always renege on promises to provide public benefits tomorrow in exchange for regulatory and financial benefits today.' "If you stop and think about it this is fairly obvious. Once the company has the benefits, its financial motivation (obligations to shareholders…) is to try to escape the obligation if possible. Given the nature of regulatory politics it is essentially always possible. QED." [Signed] -- Shown above as posted earlier today to the Open Infrastructure Alliance discussion list by a well-respected comms attorney. The follow, addressed directly to Bruce Kushnick, slightly paraphrased to protect the innocent, from yet another highly respected comms attorney: "Bruce, In the foregoing, my colleague has decreed that you now have your own law. I intend to ensure it is as well publicized as Reed, Metcalf and Moore. This is well deserved. Live long and prosper, my friend." --/snip Needless to say, Bruce is quite pleased by all of this. ------

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From: Frank A. Coluccio	8/16/2009 10:52:38 PM
	of 46820

[Opinion:] Who Pays for All This? Dr. Barry Sullivan, IEC \| Aug 16 2009 We seem to live in an era of broken business models. The stress test of an economic crisis will expose weaknesses that go unnoticed in better times, which might lead one to expect a surge in the rate of bad assumptions and false premises detected in times like these. That may be true, but it doesn't answer how we pay for the things we thought we had covered. Cont.: bbwemedia.com -- FAC: So what do you think? Has the author a good point, or has he been standing much too close to the Kool Aid stand for too long a period of time? Is there a problem with the industry model that he's not facing up to? Me thinks there is. It's called the onerous overhead of back-office billing and scarcity-management systems, where tens of billions are spent annually across the sector to support a model whose time has passed, and without which new opportunities for profitability might easily, in fact I'm certain that in many cases would, emerge. But who is going to be the first large operator to risk tossing out billions of dollars worth of back office systems to see if this hypothesis holds water? Listen, it's not as though an unconstrained connectivity model would be supported gratis. Subscription fees would still be applied. It's the things that the incumbents "do" with those fees that I am mostly questioning here. Thoughts? ------

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To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (31007)	8/16/2009 11:09:34 PM
From: ftth	of 46820

I think it would be more correct to say that regulators often write unenforceable quid pro quo language into regulations, with a predictable outcome. Might consider shifting a bit of the blame, or even most of the blame, to the regulators. They get what they give. It isn't even necessarily the case that a given company itself made any promise, they just saw the language as unenforceable (whether by design or by ignorance) or inane, so they stayed silent on the matter, knowing it wouldn't matter in the end. Why focus on companies? "People" will often agree to conditions they know aren't plausible, in exchange for getting what they want.

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To: ftth who wrote (31009)	8/16/2009 11:15:31 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	of 46820

Good point, ftth the poster, although I'm not so sure that I'm any more comfortable knowing that the condition is as systemic and all-pervasive as you are suggesting, rather than just being able to point a finger to large companies that are usually top-heavy with capital ;) ------

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To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (31010)	8/16/2009 11:26:24 PM
From: ftth	of 46820

re: "I'm not so sure that I'm any more comfortable knowing that the condition is as systemic and all-pervasive as you are suggesting..." I wasn't meaning to suggest that. Kushnick was the one that used the word "always." I just used the word "often," meaning "less that always" but more than "never." That gives me a wide, unenforceable range to say I'm right ;o))

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