links for 2010-08-24

  • Amid ongoing budget woes, LA unveils nation’s most expensive school with $578M price tag – latimes.com There are so many goofball facts in this piece about the country’s most expensive school (named after RFK) being built on the site of the Ambassador Hotel. The talking benches line killed me, and the fact that Trump wanted to put the world’s tallest building on the site is hilarious.
  • [Anti-Piracy Failure Takes Down Creative Commons Videos TorrentFreak](http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-failure-takes-down-creative-commons-video-100812/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Torrentfreak+(Torrentfreak)) An apparent case of copyright being used incorrectly and explicitly for censorship, where an anti-piracy group issued takedown notices to political videos over which it had no rights. The embedded video, “Du bist Terrorist” (“You are a terrorist”, includes English subtitles) is a good example of the strong anti-surveillance and pro-privacy sentiment in Germany; it was one of those taken down.
  • Copycats vs. Copyrights – Newsweek There are a couple of nitpciky points I’d make here — teachers advocate copying all the time, that’s how we learn; the “incentive” justification for copyright and patents is primarily associates with common law countries and isn’t universal — but all in all this is a pretty good mainstream analysis of the fashion copyright proposals. Brings common sense to the table, which is always welcome.
  • From the Desk of David Pogue – Three Unknown Features of the iPhone 4 – NYTimes.com Pogue points out that the new iPhone, as a (slightly) more general purpose computer than the Kindle, can do text-to-speech with its iBooks. Exactly the same feature Amazon got sued over. No mention of this yet by the Author’s Guild.
  • Samsung Blu-ray players won’t play Warner, Universal movies after firmware update, require a rollback — Engadget Updates to Samsung Blu-ray players, which like all Blu-ray players require constant updates to play new movies, broke playback of Warner and Universal movies. Ladies and gentlemen, DRM!