22 Mar 2006
Creative Commons license upheld by court

This is a very good thing, with serious implications for all manner of "open source" licenses.

European court rules a Creative Commons license is binding, in what legal experts call a "significant development" in copyright law.

(link) [CNET News.com]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Children's earliest words stem from what interests them

No shit! I guess this explains why your yearling typically talks about "Mama", "Dada" and "baaddle" rather than the impending nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula... but wait, there's even more stupidity:

"The exciting thing is that a lot of people weren't even sure that 10-month-olds were paying attention," she [co-author Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D.] said. But this study shows that not only are they paying attention, they're actually learning words.

Any parent could've told these folks that all children of all ages pay careful attention to their environments: it's called the survival instinct, and it's far more noteworthy when it fails (as in accidents) than when it operates successfully (which is most of the time). I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of dollars were wasted on this, and how many more worthy studies and projects died on the vine from lack of funding because somebody decided to pay these professional fools to hold forth on the obvious.

A recent study has found that younger babies learn words for new objects based on how interested they are in the object. Older babies attach more importance to whether the speaker is interested in the object. The study was conducted with 10-month-old babies. These findings suggest that parents should talk more about what their babies are interested in rather than what they, the parents, are interested in.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

00:00 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

CATO Institute Releases Paper Criticizing DMCA

Gee, maybe the mainstream libertarian movement is finally getting a clue. As it's developed over the past forty years, these folks have been way too supportive of practically anything a big corporation does, following Ayn Rand's famous dictum that Big Business is America's Persecuted Minority. I've often mused that the only real economic policy difference between Libertarians and Republicans is that Republicans get the big dollars from the lobbyists. Otherwise, on economic policy, they've been virtually tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum.

Perhaps they'll also come to understand that "capitalism" and "free market" are not necessarily synonyms, and we'll make some real political progress - with a real third party alternative to the statist status quo. But I'm not holding my breath.

The CATO institute has published a paper criticizing the DMCA entitled 'The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.' From the article: 'The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders--and the technology companies that distribute their content--the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.'

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link