● 10.17.09

● Links 17/10/2009: Parsix GNU/Linux 3.0 Released; Mandriva Summons Community

Posted in News Roundup at 8:04 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• All in all, Athens schools are a picture perfect example of how you don’t need expensive proprietary hardware, big powerful machines, or even proprietary software to create the perfect learning environment, or to properly run a school. As I said, the bigger schools would be wise to learn from Athens and use the example they’ve set as a guide to create their own Open Source learning environments.

• Why do we love Linux so much? What is it that draws so many of us into the tinkering, experimenting, and everything else?

• In the Linux world, we blur the line between applications software and the operating system. This is important. It allows us to have more flexibility than any other operating system on Earth.

• Even if you’re not dressing up in costume this Halloween, you can still get in the spirit of the holiday. Trick out your computer with some creepy skins and plugins or treat yourself to a few ghoulish movies and desktop themes.–By Lisa Hoover

• KDE-Look has plenty of scary, silly, and spooky Halloween themes for your desktop. Choose from a variety of pumpkins, skulls, ghosts, and even a Trick or Treating Pacman.

• GNOME-Look also has a few Halloween themes to choose from. From dressed-up scarecrows to cinematic scary guy Michael Myers, you’re sure to find something you like at this site.

• The Linux operating system offers an excellent learning opportunity for children, whether for educational software and games, programming, or general computer skills. Charles Profitt, a K-12 systems administrator, shares with SmartBean the nuts and bolts of introducing kids to Linux. His guidelines for the why, what and how of getting going with Linux and open source computing at home are lucid and helpful.

Audio

• On this week’s Linux Outlaws: Fender-styled Android phone, OSI loses corporate status, robotic submarine running Debian, German magazine CHIP spreads FUD about Linux, a PulseAudio rant and much more…

Applications

• If the memory of humans could be measured in removable media and the best would be a BluRay disc, mine would be somewhere around a floppy. Needless to say, I use my phone’s reminder function a lot, especially for important stuff with set deadlines.

• When Cairo Dock v2.0 was out, it instantly became my favourite dock for Linux.

• When you need to offload photos from a digital camera onto your computer, you can do this using the default browser, a photo management application, or a dedicated tool like Rapid Photo Downloader.

• Bombono DVD is a DVD authoring program for Linux. It is made easy to use and has nice and clean GUI (Gtk).

• The main features of Bombono DVD are:

• * Excellent MPEG viewer: Timeline and Monitor * Real WYSIWYG Menu Editor with live thumbnails * Comfortable Drag-n-Drop support

• The desktop email client Thunderbird 3, which is currently available as a beta version, comes with many exciting new features and options. One of these new features is the email archive which can be used to store emails in specific folders in the folder structure. Emails that are archived will be moved from their original folder into the archive folder. The default button to move emails into the archive is [a]. The archive will be divided by years only by default which could be problematic for accounts that receive many emails on a regular basis.

• The Helix Player is an open source media player for Linux, Solaris, and Symbian based on the Helix DNA Client media engine. More operating system versions are currently in development. This site is where you can download the latest version of the player, find answers to questions about it or even get involved with improving it.

• Helix DNA is a project to produce software that can play audio and video media in various formats, aid in producing such media, and serve them over a network. It is intended as a largely free and open source digital media framework that runs on numerous operating systems and processors (including mobile phones) and was started by RealNetworks which has contributed much of the code. The Helix Community is an open collaborative effort to develop and extend the Helix DNA platform.

• The Couturier Mono program merges multiple PDFs into a single file. It follows the old UNIX policy: one program for one task.

• For those who always feel that gaming is not suitable in Linux OS and it is always an hassle to install and get games to run in Linux platform, then DJL will definitely change the way you think.

Conferences/Expos

• The conference adjourned with the announcement of the venue for next year’s event. The Real Time Linux Workshop has tended to move around more than most conferences; past events have been held all over Europe as well as China, Mexico, and the US. The 2010 Workshop will continue that practice by moving to Nairobi, Kenya, in the latter part of October. That should be an interesting place to discuss what’s happening in the rapidly developing realtime Linux area.

• October 24th, 2009, will be Linux Day in Italy. You may think that such events are only relevant for software geeks, but that’s not the case at all.

• [...]

• Serena’s words perfectly explain why understanding the real role of ICT in our lives is a duty that all parents and teachers have towards their kids and students.

• Although the 8th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) isn’t until February, 2010, a Call for Papers has already been announced. If you’ve got something you want to discuss with the FOSS community, head over to the registration page and submit your idea for a talk. There are five speaker tracks to choose from including two specialized tracks — one for beginners and one for developers.

Desktop Environments

• While the European Linux scene has been busy with KDE and Qt, a relatively unnoticed but important gathering occurred in the U.S. to determine the future of the GNOME desktop: the GNOME Boston Summit 2009.

• During the conference, we spotted many of the new N900 Maemo based devices. Developers were largely happy about this new piece of hardware, and were excited to see good progress on this front. With Maemo having announced official support for Qt on Maemo 5, the Qt ecosystem showed great interest in this new platform. Less than 24 hours after getting their hands on it, the KDE team attending the Maemo summit which was held last weekend in Amsterdam, the hackers around Marijn Kruisselbrink showed Plasma running on the N900. Maemo 6 (Harmattan) is already planned for the fourth quarter of this year, leaving the impression that Maemo’s transition to Qt is progressing quickly, opening exciting opportunities for Qt developers to dive into mobile development and open and hackable phones. Lucky guy of the conference was definitely KDE’s Sandro Andrade who won two contests in a row. Sandro will be going home with an N900 and a new T-shirt. Daniel Kihlberg who handed over the prizes suggested Sandro should play lotto that same day.

• What these blog entries are usually comparing is not “KDE 4″ with “GNOME 3″ but two of the KDE 4 workspace components, Plasma and KWin, with gnome-shell. Little more than that is compared in most of them when the topic is “KDE 4 or GNOME 3?”. This is unfortunate because KDE 4 is a lot more than just the KDE Workspace, which is just one product that comes from KDE, just as GNOME 3 will be more than just gnome-shell.

• Both projects have seen a lot of rewriting of code they inherited from their predecessors. Stefan began a direct port of LabPlot from KDE 3 to KDE 4 “but soon realized that it would be less work and produces cleaner code to start from scratch”.

Distributions

• The Parsix Linux distribution is derived from KANOTIX, based on the Debian testing branch, and developed by a team in Iran. The distro comes as a live CD with English and Persian languages installed by default and many others available. According to the release announcement features of the new Parsix 3.0 include GNOME 2.26.3, Linux 2.6.29.6-based Kernel, the installer supports separate /home partition, ext4 file system and GRUB 2, SquashFS+Lzma compression for the live CD and much more. After seeing the amount of changes to this release and remembering positive reviews of Parsix 1.0 and 2.0, I burned the .ISO to CD and got started.

• So we had our monthly pqlug.org meeting last night. So I brought the Dell 8100 to the meeting and showed everyone my running version of Puppy. We all decided that we were going to place it on the Dell 5000 so I just ejected the CD and away we went with the install. In about 5 minutes it was on her laptop and configured to work on the internet with a wireless USB key. All was well and she was very happy to have a light weighted Linux running on her older machine.

• In conclusion Puppy Linux 4.3 works great! I am leaving the CD in my Dell 8100 and will be using it to browse the web and check my gmail account while I watch TV…

• Kahel OS is a remastered version of Arch Linux. Arch Linux has a bit of a reputation as not being particularly friendly to average desktop users. Kahel OS is an effort to change that perception and make it easier for people to use Arch Linux.

Mandriva

• There is a multitude of ways of contributing to Mandriva whatever your technical level. And there’s no need to be a code wizard.

• There is no question of reviving the Club: any contribution would go directly to funding projects whose output is already and would always be freely available for all.

Red Hat Family

• We are pleased to announce that Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) ’s Data Services Platform, specifically MetaMatrix 5.5.3, has achieved Common Criteria certification at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 2. This is a significant milestone for Red Hat’s data services solutions and adds another Common Criteria certification to the Red Hat portfolio, in line with the goals we set in November 2007.

• One of the real benefits of Red Hat as well is we are a very, very solid company financially. So, we have a significant base to work from and so when we think about uncertainty out there we can look at our customers, we can look at our employees, we can look at our partners and say, “if you are going to make investments, if you are going to make bets around companies we’ll be there and you know we’ll be there”, which gives us both the ability to attract communities, again these are either employees or customers or academics or from all walks of life, we can attract these communities to us because there is a general sense that Red Hat will be there and has the staying power to be there.

Debian Family

• And I am a member of the FTP team today which is a great honour. It is quite some extra work but we are now closer to the 1 week waiting time for NEW processing (on average). Processing NEW is another place where I could see that times are changing: this week I accepted a package (c) Microsoft Corporation into Debian main what seemed to be impossible ten years ago.

• Less than 13 days and Kubuntu 9.10 will be released. It is based on Ubuntu 9.10 packages which means it will get: Linux kernel 2.6.31, ext4 filesystem by default,GRUB 2 boot loader and a lot more.

• I read on the internut tubes the other day that Ubuntu is really pushing to break into the enterprise business market. Trekkie fans can relax that it is the business enterprise market and not the ship Enterprise which Ubuntu is gunning for. I just thought I would add my two [insert local currency here] worth.

Devices/Embedded

• Rerolle: With PC-based use cases you don’t know what’s going to happen, so you need a very large Linux. Our approach is that we allow our embedded customers to optimize what they want to put in the device, and let them optimize the kernel, userspace, and file system to match use cases and power consumption profiles. So it’s less of an issue for us. Linux is absolutely meeting our needs.

• Wind River announced that Belgium-based Fifthplay has selected Wind River Linux for its FG4000 Gateway home-automation system. The Fifthplay FG4000 Gateway and Home Monitor builds on Wind River Linux to offer a customizable platform for developing home automation applications, says the Intel subsidiary.

Phones

• During Google’s third quarter earnings conference call today, one message came out loud and clear: Google’s mobile strategy is starting to pay off. “Android adoption is about to explode,” declared CEO Eric Schmidt, explaining that all the “necessary conditions” are set for growth: There are now 12 Android phones out there (most recently the Motorola Cliq) across 32 carriers in 26 countries.

Sub-notebooks

• Today brings a new release of F11 for the XO-1. This build contains both the Gnome and Sugar desktops. The build which can be downloaded here, now uses Midori for web-browsing. If you still want to use Firefox all it takes is a “yum install firefox” from the command line.

Free Software/Open Source

• Many people have wondered whether running a company using Open Source software is possible. The answer is “yes we can”. Does it make sense though? Well, it depends.

• There are good alternatives for almost every important commercial software available today. Are they able to beat the commercial proprietary software? Maybe yes, maybe no. Are they good enough? Most of the time, yes. But of course it depends on the actual requirements.

• I came across Clipperz while I was still at Bungee Labs. I was doing some research on open source licenses, especially the Affero GPL (AGPLv3). I spoke about AGPLv3 in several posts around that time.

• Clipperz is a perfect example of a product that should be licensed under AGPLv3. First, open source has big advantages for security-related software so that flaws can be identified and fixed quickly. Second, since Clipperz is essentially Software-as-a-Service, AGPLv3 provides the creators with protection against the SaaS Loophole (that is, someone taking their source code, replicating their service, making improvements, and choosing to keep the source code closed). Third, it means that if you’re the deeply paranoid type who doesn’t trust having someone else host your passwords, you can use the software to host the your own service. And if you have the technical chops for it, you can examine the code and determine whether it meets your standards for security.

• If the time wasn’t ripe for this revolution, news of an open-source camera from a university wouldn’t have made it past the campus science journal. But Stanford’s Frankencamera project is popping up all over the radar. The idea is simple – take the principles of open-source software and apply them to a low-cost assimilation of off-the-shelf camera parts tied together with a Linux-based OS that’s available to everyone for modification. Forget proprietary APIs and SDKs, this is the holy grail for people that spent their school breaks soldering radios.

• First, some background. Astricon, hosted by Digium, attracted roughly 620 developers, customers and partners focused on the Asterisk open source IP PBX. N-able Partner Summit attracted roughly 350 managed service providers running N-able’s remote monitoring and management (RMM) software. Cisco had a major presence at both events.

• [...]

• Cisco will have three choices:

• * Cisco could ignore and dismiss Asterisk, asserting that it isn’t a business option. Microsoft made this mistake in the early days of Linux and is now paying the price. Cisco’s presence at Astricon suggests Cisco won’t make the same mistake in the Asterisk market.

• Today we are happy to report that we are ready for the next phase in our mission to establish a more effective voice supporting the use of free and open source software in the U.S. Federal government. Since our launch more than 1,250 individuals and organizations have joined OSFA and that is what we would like to discuss with you today.

• As open source software, OpenClinica is free for organizations to use and modify.

• Sun Microsystems claims OpenOffice.org, its free office productivity suite, is downloaded 100,000 times a day. A year ago, Sun saw just half that number of downloads. Sun also claims that downloads of Glassfish, its open source application server, have doubled in the last one year, and that of MySQL, the open source database, have increased by 30 percent. All the Fortune 500 companies are now using free software.

• But it’s not just about the savings. An Indian organization deployed Linux and Asterisk, a solution that converts a PC into a full-fledged EPABX system. This not only helped it reduce costs, but also allowed the company to add new features easily by just installing additional software modules rather than purchasing additional hardware.

• Open source enterprise content management firm Alfresco Software has launched Alfresco Records Management Module, extending its open source records management and retention tools to support the governance, retention and compliance strategies of federal agencies, government bodies and commercial organisations.

• German open source developer Open-Xchange is promising a a lower cost alternative to Microsoft Windows Server, Exchange and Sharepoint for educational institutions, public administrations and small- and medium-size businesses.

• An incentive or rebate scheme by the government for small medium businesses (SMBs) to adopt technology into their business is very timely in light of the current uncertainty ahead, said Red Hat Asia Pacific.

• Its country sales manager, Basheer Mohd Ali said technology remained a key enabler for SMBs to remain competitive and relevant in today’s modern business world where business opportunities are available around the clock and not bounded by physical borders.

• Tennesssee’s technology students will enter the same competitive landscape as graduates from MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and other technology education superpowers, yet because of budgetary concerns, often Tennessee students’ access to IT thought leaders working on bleeding edge projects is limited.

• Interestingly, all these changes are for the better and all, without exception, rest on one aspect: introducing greater rigor. This rigor is the quality often missing from OSS projects, in part because it’s difficult to impose it on contributors who are donating their time. But OSS projects that want to stand out from the crowd or are entertaining thoughts of eventually going commercial can help themselves significantly by establishing a pattern of this rigor early on.

• A preference for open source is based on a simple, easy to understand premise.

• An open source code base is your asset. A proprietary code base is someone else’s asset.

• Open source alternatives to proprietary technologies have been proven in many mission-critical deployments, and the cost savings that can be achieved by switching to these open source technologies are significant. Using the money saved to fund new innovations could mean the difference between surviving and thriving in this difficult climate.

• Serna Free is a lightweight XML authoring solution with intuitive behaviour and a unique WYSIWYG approach for those who wish to smoothly adopt the XML technology and freely author XML documents in a familiar environment

• Software licences are a fiction, and open source is ready for use by every consumer, says Jeremy Ruston, BT’s head of open source innovation.

• We’re on a roll with universities using Drupal! Portland State University (PSU), with more than 24,000 students, is using Drupal for their main website at http://pdx.edu.

OpenOffice.org

• We are now well in the middle of October and this means it’s our usual time of celebration at OpenOffice.org . OpenOffice.org is now 9 years old, which is no small accomplishment for a Free Software project. We will soon all gather to celebrate this event in Orvieto, where the OOoCon will take place between the 3 and 6th of November. (Don’t forget: we have an ODF plugfest at the same place on the 1st and 2nd of November!) Last year has been a good year.

• The Renaissance UI improvement project for OpenOffice has rendered a click chart in Impress based on usage feedback data.

FSF/GNU

• Do you know someone who’s made an important contribution to the advancement of free software?

• Help the community recognize those contributions by nominating a worthy person or project for a free software award.

Licensing

• According to Harald Welte, the source code for the Palm Pre GSM model, currently being sold in Europe is now available from the opensource.palm.com site. Earlier this week, Welte pointed out that the source code for the new model of the Palm Pre was not available to the public, as it should be to comply with the terms of the GPL. An email to Welte from Palm has now confirmed the availability of the code for WebOS 1.1.2 and 1.1.3.

• Like most buzzwords, Open Core has no real agreed-upon meaning. I’m using it to describe a business model whereby some middleware-ish system is released by a single, for-profit entity copyright holder, who requires copyright-assigned changes back to the company, and that company sells proprietary add-ons and applications that use the framework. Often, the model further uses the GPL to forbid anyone but the copyright-holding company to make such proprietary add-on applications (i.e., everyone else would have to GPL their applications). In the current debate, some have proposed that a permissive license structure can be used for the core instead.

• I know that there’s nothing to stop people charging for Free Software. It says as much in the Selling Free Software article on the GNU web site: “Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.”.

• Apparently there is no requirements about how much can be charged for Free Software, except “The one exception is in the case where binaries are distributed without the corresponding complete source code.”.

• Second Benefit: You can learn how the program operates and share this information with anyone. This is great if you want to learn how to write your own software. But even more, if you are the kind of person that likes to learn as much as they can about something, benefit 2 will aid you. Even more, because this benefit is available to everyone, you get to learn from their experiences too! You can take what you learn and publish it to the web, make a movie or even write a book! Sure you can do this with non-free software but there are no limits, no restrictions when it comes to freesoftware.

Openness

• So far, attribution hasn’t really been a problem, since everyone who contributes is acknowledged – for example through the discussions around the code. Similarly, preservation is dealt with through the tools for source code management and the discussion lists. But there are crucial questions of long-term preservation – not least for historical purposes – which are not really being addressed, even by the longest-established open projects like GNU.

• Eigenlabs is a start-up company founded by John Lambert in 2001 and based in Devon UK. In an interview on the Create Digital Music blog, Lambert said of the Eigenlabs software that it’s “written in a mixture of C++ and Python. It’s quite scary code, but very clean and pretty, with little ‘cruft’. I think the open source community are going to have fun with it. Its a big system too, 8 years of R&D in one huge release. I don’t think that there’s been anything quite like this open sourced before in the music world – it is a bit as if Logic or Ableton were GPL’d tomorrow.”

• I think the sooner it becomes generally recognised that free software is a digital knowledge commons – one of many that are being created through open collaboration – the more people’s attitudes to it will change, and the more impact it will have. It is no coincidence that one of the people awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics, was Elinor Ostrom, “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”. I look forward to reading next year’s 2020 roadmap, in the hope that it might explore more deeply this important concept.

• Thanks to some great work by Grant Slater and Andy Robinson all those people who mistake openstreetmap for openstreetmaps will now get directed to the right place.

• Scanning 12 million pages makes more than 110 000 EU publications available free of charge for download in the EU Bookshop Digital Library. It offers all publications ever edited by the Publications Office on behalf of the EU institutions, agencies and other bodies since 1952.

• Vanity journal domination is not occurring, nor is it likely to occur, among OA journals. Vanity journal existence will and does happen among both OA and subscription-fee journals, but at least for OA journals is a benign phenomenon. As subscription-fee journals more and more charge author-side fees, including hybrid open-access fees, one can only hope that the baseless vanity press recrimination against open-access journals will fade away.

• One of the great knock-on benefits of Elinor Ostrom sharing the Nobel prize for Economics is that the concept of the commons is getting the best airing than it’s ever had.

Programming

• Java underwent a sea change in 2006 with the releasing of the source code and opening of the development process. Java and the JVM should be championed by Libre software developers and users alike!

• Linux (and indeed Unix) has long held the philosophy of “one tool for each job, and one job for each tool.” This can lead to quite a paradox for newcomers to Linux: Why are there so many tools that do similar things?

• Part of the reason for this is the open-source approach. As soon as a great open-source application is available, all the hackers of the world (and here I use “hacker” in its more noble form) are able to start “messing around” with the code. Improvements to the code may appear in the original application, or they may appear in a new application based on that original application. Soon there may be dozens (or even hundreds) of choices—whatever happened to “one tool for each job”? Well, welcome to Linux.

• The rapidly changing nature of the Web makes it necessary for web developers to constantly be on the lookout for new, shiny tools. This post will hopefully show you some cool tools you didn’t already know about.

Leftovers

• Of course, this is good news for equity investors, given the tight inverse correlation between stocks on the dollar. A surprise move higher, rather than a continued drift lower at the current pace is what would really sucker-punch this market.

• Eager to attract digitally savvy patrons and capitalize on the growing popularity of electronic readers, public libraries across the country are expanding collections of books that reside on servers rather than shelves.

• OpenInkpot (or OI) intends to be a full alternative, free software stack for e-ink based readers. It comes with a “bookshelf” menu to handle your collection of e-books and brings the popular FBReader and Cool Reader to display most e-book formats, among them epub, fb2, txt, html, rtf, pdb, plucker and mobipocket. PDF files are handled by OI’s own locoPDF and madeye is a simple viewer for images. A sound player application for audio books will join the OI software collection soon.

Google

• Monash is not the first university to migrate email accounts over to Google. NSW-based Macquarie University signed up 68,000 students for Gmail in September 2007.

• Today, we’ve added 285 new languages to Google Translator Toolkit, bringing the total number of languages supported by this product to 345 — and making it possible to translate between 10,664 language pairs. Google Translator Toolkit is a language translation service for professional and amateur translators that builds on Google Translate and makes translation faster and easier.

• ‘This is the greatest explosion of access to information, the potential for creativity and the ability to connect and communicate the world has ever seen.’

AstroTurf

• Seelye’s defense is alarming; does a reporter at the New York Times really believe that single-payer has been covered “many times” by the paper? The Times, like the rest of the corporate media, has given the issue scant attention (FAIR Media Advisory, 3/6/09). FAIR is encouraged by Hoyt’s acknowledgment that the argument deserves fuller coverage; let’s hope the editors of the Times see it that way, too.

• Calling it the “American Free Enterprise” campaign, the Chamber’s TV ads use beautiful images of farmers, mothers, flags, small businesses, football, flags, steelworkers, lemonade stands, flags. You get the picture. Amusingly, they sneak in a few pictures of Wall Street banker-types shaking hands over and over again.

Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights

• A proposal by the motion picture industry to use “selectable output control” to hobble the functions of set top boxes won’t stop movie theft but will harm consumers, Public Knowledge told the Federal Communications Commission

• In an Oct. 14 letter to William Lake, the chief of the Commission’s Media Bureau, Public Knowledge responded to arguments filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) that such control was needed to bring movies to the public faster than they otherwise might.

• YouTube may pay less to be online than you do, a new report on internet connectivity suggests, calling into question a recent analysis arguing Google’s popular video service is bleeding money and demonstrating how the internet has continued to morph to fit user’s behavior.

• In fact, with YouTube’s help, Google is now responsible for at least 6 percent of the internet’s traffic, and likely more — and may not be paying an ISP at all to serve up all that content and attached ads.

• The Twitter vs Trafigura case continues though it really is the Guardian newspaper and Wikileaks who have been driving this amazing story that illustrates the total lack of freedom of expression granted to the citizens of Britain.

• For those who haven’t been following the case: The Guardian was attempting to report on Trafigura, a multi-national oil and commodity trader, but received legal threats from Carter-Ruck. This led to an injunction stopping them from publishing their findings. Yet not only were they prevented from publishing their article but the injunction also prevented them from reporting about the injunction!

Intellectual Monopolies

• We’ve been hearing from more and more movie makers who are recognizing how treating their fans right, while giving them a reason to buy is a much more effective means of reaching an audience than starting off on the assumption that everyone is a criminal. The movie business has always been based on selling ancillary products.

• Morality is used in the Copyright Wars as a way to cover up the inability to justify expansion of rights on economic grounds.

• A California county’s three-year battle to prevent a nonprofit group from obtaining public mapping data has ended disastrously for the county after it was ordered by a court to pay the group $500,000 in legal costs.

• Among the three who were quietly ushered out of their posts at the Motion Picture Association of America three weeks ago was Greg Goeckner, the MPAA’s general counsel. The others were the MPAA’s director of worldwide antipiracy operations and its deputy director of Internet antipiracy. Goeckner will remain with the MPAA until the end of the year.

• When your co-worker’s ringtone constantly fills the air with the latest auto-tune hit, it is most definitely annoying, but is it also a violation of copyright?

• The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) claims that when someone’s cell phone rings and one of its members’ songs plays as a ringtone, the wireless provider should pay performance fees for the right to use that song.

• Songwriters and publishers won’t be able to collect royalties each time a cellphone plays an annoying musical ringtone in public, thanks to a federal judge’s ruling that ringtones aren’t public performances.

• Like many other people, it used to bother me that The Pirate Bay was being sued for distributing hashes of copyright-restricted material whereas Youtube could distribute the material itself without fear of punishment.

• The other reason I picked the nickname “FLOW-IT” for this idea, though, is that works licensed in this way “flow” will flow in a fairly reasonable time from the traditional copyright zone into the free culture zone. It’s a way to merge more traditionally-funded artist works into the free-culture “Commons.” This is something that half-way solutions like the Creative Commons “NonCommercial” licenses just can’t do on their own (because they never really make it into the Commons).

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