J.R.McHale

As described by Peter Kafka at All Things Digital, Twones is likely designed to be a legal Hype Machine, but according to Kafka it is not as convenient or usable as the Hype Machine. The Hype Machine, because it caches songs for listening, is in at best a legal grey area (which has deterred investors in the service). Twones apparently works as a Firefox browser plug-in that takes one directly to mp3 blogs to listen to songs.

Techcrunch describes Bloom Energy’s technology, which was unveiled today at a Silicon Valley press event: “Each fuel cell, which is made from sand essentially (zirconium oxide), is a square wafer about the size of a CD box. Each wafer can produce about 25 watts of energy, enough to power a lightbulb. Stack them together and you get a box that could power a house. Group them into larger units, and you get enough energy to power a building or an entire campus. [Bloom Energy’s founder and CEO] calls them energy servers because they are modular like servers in a data center. Need more energy? Add more boxes.” The downside: not yet cost effective for homes.

More on Bloom Energy’s fuel cells:
Wired compares Bloom’s fuel cell approach with solar and wind. Also in Wired, are the Bloom fuel cells too expensive?

The Citizen Media Law Project (hosted by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society) analyzes the question of whether photographing a public artwork can be fair use. The topic has come to the fore in photography circles as the result of a relatively recent lawsuit regarding a photograph taken of a woman standing near a sculpture in Seattle.

After weighing in that there appears to be a decent fair use argument in the Seattle case, the CMLP author recommends that: “Cities … should reconsider how they commission public artwork. Cities could demand that artists surrender their copyright interests in order to receive public funding … The most reasonable solution is to keep public artwork completely open to the public. Until cities do this, however, commercial photographers may want to think twice about incorporating public artwork into their photographs.”

Freedom to Tinker is running a series of posts on the relative ease of unmasking anonymous speakers online.

Also in the series: What Third Parties Know About John Doe and The Traceability of Anonymous Online Comment

According to the Times, “the results are surprising … people preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics. Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.”

A special issue of Hamish Hamilton’s literary magazine Five Dials presents “A celebration of the life of David Foster Wallace with contributions by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, George Saunders and others.” Free email subscription required in order to obtain the pdf.

From CNET: “The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which websites customers visit and retain those logs for two years … FBI Director Robert Mueller supports storing Internet users’ ‘origin and destination information,’ a bureau attorney said at a federal task force meeting”

Writing in his Blog Maverick: “The simplest way to create more jobs is to allow small business and entrepreneurs to spend less time and money on lawyers and accountants and redirect that intellectual and financial capital to the core competencies of their business. Any new government policy that requires the hiring of lawyers and accountants will not lead to new jobs, it will lead to time and money being wasted and fewer jobs being created.”

Ed Felten of Princeton and the “Freedom to Tinker” blog addressing Senator Clinton’s sort-of attack on online anonymity: “This is a common pattern: Given a difficult technology policy problem, lawyers will tend to seek technology solutions and technologists will tend to seek legal solutions. (Paul Ohm calls this ‘Felten’s Third Law’.) It’s easy to reject non-solutions in your own area because you have the knowledge to recognize why they will fail; but there must be a solution lurking somewhere in the unexplored wilderness of the other area.”

Possible? Realistic? From the Financial Times: “Evan Williams, the chief executive and co-founder of Twitter, which has been credited with helping anti-government protesters in Iran to organise resistance, said Twitter was working on ‘interesting hacks’ to stop any blocking by foreign governments.”

Horizon Group Management, of Chicago, had filed a libel lawsuit against a former tenant who tweeted “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”

According to law.com: “Other high-profile Twitter defamation cases are pending. For example, a clothing designer sued rock star Courtney Love in Los Angeles County, Calif., Superior Court in March alleging defamation, invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress because of a serious of unflattering tweets that Love wrote about her. A judge declined to throw out the suit in October.”

See also: http://www.businessinsider.com/illinois-court-rules-tweet-non-libelous-babble-2010-1

“I only know that the two extremes that are before us would, each of them, if operating alone, be awful for our culture. The one extreme, pushed by copyright abolitionists, that forces free access on every form of culture, would shrink the range and the diversity of culture. I am against abolitionism. And I see no reason to support the other extreme either—pushed by the content industry—that seeks to license every single use of culture, in whatever context. That extreme would radically shrink access to our past.

Instead we need an approach that recognizes the errors in both extremes, and that crafts the balance that any culture needs: incentives to support a diverse range of creativity, with an assurance that the creativity inspired remains for generations to access and understand.”

“The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.”

Dave Winer: “Every time a relative passes this issue comes front and center for me. Most other times it’s just lurking in the shadows. We need one or more institutions that can manage electronic trusts over very long periods of time. The institutions need to be long-lived and have the technical know-how to manage static archives.”