ALA — Page 5

This will be all over

August 21, 2000 by Michael Boyle

the place shortly, but if you haven’t heard, Deepleap is shutting down as of Sept 1. I know nothing of the story, but it seems to be related to finance problems – alas. I thought Deepleap was potentially a killer app. Just not yet, maybe.

So the new machine

August 10, 2000 by Michael Boyle

is home and all put together. I’ve been playing around with different things for a couple of hours now actually – the whole thing took less than an hour to get up to speed – software installed, the ATA drive from my old machine put in, video, SCSI, and more RAM installed, etc. What they say about G4s is true – the easiest case to crack of anything I’ve seen. It took me longer to open my old machine to grab the HD out of it – that was actually the most time consuming thing of all.

There is one problem though – my old old 2nd video card doesn’t seem to be working. It’s an old ATI VR card with just 4Mb of memory – but it should be enough to drive my second monitor. But alas it may not be compatible or something (which is a bit weird cause of course it fits in the damn PCI slot). Anyhow – should be solved soon.

Michael Sippey wrote

July 25, 2000 by Michael Boyle

a rebuttal to Nielsen’s article entitled “The Beginning of Web Design” in stating the obvious. I think it’s a much more balanced approach to things. [link via heather]

The Canadian pricing

July 21, 2000 by Michael Boyle

for the Cube is out now, and I think it’s a little too dear for me. More so because I am trying to save and invest, not spend at the moment. Plus, I don’t think I could give up my dual-monitor setup, which I can get with a low-end G4 Pro and still have it come out cheaper than the Cube. Plus a SCSI card so I can use my crappy old scanner (it’s good enough for occasional web stuff) and whatnot, and doubtless save on a SCSI CD-RW as opposed to a firewire or USB model.

If it seems like I’m obsessing, maybe that’s cause I am. I’m not a huge tech-head, but, for me, the Cube is very very cool. Alas, it’s not for me.

What if it were

July 20, 2000 by Michael Boyle

illegal to buy a copyright, if they could only be assigned for a limited time? What if, unless you were a salaried employee (hence making your work a product of the company paying you), you owned your work, period? If you were permitted to lease it, but not sell it outright?

I’m always torn in a discussion of Napster and the other digital music schemes. I have, from time to time, made my living (or an important part of it) as a writer. My brother’s a musician. Many, if not most, of my friends are writers or artists of some sort or another. These people work hard at what they do. But when I look at a particular acquaintance of mine’s CD, she doesn’t own the copyright, the record company does. When I write an article, I own the copyright – the newspaper or magazine it is published in only owns certain rights; usually the right to first publication.

I think a clearheaded study of how copyright works and a legal expression of how that system should function would go a long way to solving a lot of the current issues. It’s one of those situations, I think, when the road ahead in terms of the specifics will only be apparent when the first principles are reiterated and strengthened.

Trouble is, the pattern is clearly in the other direction – away from privileging the rights of individual copyright holders, towards rights of corporate copyright holders and other businesses involved in such matters. I have personally been involved with a number of publications that have asserted that their purchase of first publication rights includes, with no further compensation, the right to place the work in databases that, essentially, exist in perpetuity. And the DCMA points in that direction pretty clearly as well.

For the moment, I don’t have a huge problem squaring my deep belief in copyright – the right I have over my creative and intellectual work with the free distribution of songs on the net, but that’s only because of the total belligerance and seeming cluelessness of the recording industry, and it won’t hold indefinitely. At some point, I believe that copyrights should be inviolate. So my conclusion, for now, is that the whole concept of copyright must be strengthened and affirmed. Trouble is – I doubt it would be by those with the deepest pockets in this ongoing dialogue.