Techdirt has an interesting article about the severe disconnect between the current copyright laws and the daily activities of a normal law abiding person. Every day, normal people break hundreds of laws without even meaning to. They do it just by going about their normal activities and jobs. Most of those laws are not enforced, or are only enforced in specific situations, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is hard to do anything without breaking copyright laws anymore.
The article is based on a paper by John Tehranian, called Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap. In the paper John tallies up a list of daily activities and the fines and penalties assigned to each of them. The things he does are not things we normally think of as copyright infringement. Things like taking pictures of people in different settings, responding to emails, singing, reading out loud, quoting a public figure or movie. All things we do every day. But when he tallied up the potential fines for all of these infringements, fines specified in the law, he came up with a figure of 12 billion dollars! And he didn’t do anything that most people would consider copyright infringement!
The focus of the article is the US, but the truth is that its is a global problem. An entire generation of people has grown up breaking laws every day, simply because they cant possibly obey all of them.
Watch this video by Larry Lessig, the chair of the Creative Commons organization.
Chris Harrison has created an interesting map of the world showing the density of Internet connections. really shows you how much of the world is still not really reaping the full benefits of the Internet.
Check out a full size map at his site, where there are several other maps that are just as fascinating.
Michael Wesch has put together this amazing video illustrating the power of the Internet for information retrieval and organization. It shows how the Internet is changing and overturning everything we know and believe about information.
Watch it and pay attention to the cues of information organization in the old paper based systems as compared to the new digital systems.
It’s based heavily on a book called “Everything is Miscellaneous” by David Weinberger. I haven’t read the book yet, but I have ordered it from Amazon and plan to read it soon.
If you are into following any of the popular Internet memes, you will probably recognize a bunch of the people in this animation.
The video is meant to be a tribute to the internet people of the world. And it is fitting that it starts off with the Dramatic Prairie Dog.
Animated by Dan Meth, with music by Dan Meth and Micah Frank. Completed and published by Meth Minute 39.Via Neatorama: Internet People
A blogger has gone through the trouble of tracking down the first 100 .Com domain names registered. So if you were wondering which companies were the first to jump on the Internet bandwagon your in luck. The list is pretty interesting, both because of who is on it, as well as who isn’t.
I found this essay on the Internet troll over at drewspeak. It’s a complete analysis and commentary on the practice of trolling. If you haven’t encountered the trolls, then you really haven’t spent much time on message boards, or at least don’t bother reading the comments sections of some of the bigger blogs. Trolls are those people who deliberately start arguments for no reason other than that they can. They purposefully go around insulting and attacking people from behind their partial Internet anonymity. The statement “don’t feed the trolls” means don’t respond to their comments and attacks. By responding, you are giving them exactly what they want. Here is a quote from the essay:
“The troll comes to the door of a new forum and sets down his bag of tricks. If he has a grudge against the people inside discussing and debating their passions with a certain degree of amicability, peacability and decorum, he does not show them. He has the cracked, stoic smile of Robin Goodfellow, a Puck with the simple desire to disrupt peace itself. He loves chaos; his bag is full of golden apples he can lob to set the masses squabbling. He has also many masks, smoke bombs, straw men, cloaks, puppets, matches, ethanol, knives, dust, sand, and magicks of the most arcane sort. He knows what he is about - causing trouble. Why? This is the troll’s darkest mystery - if any one knew his secret, he would die. For all trolls, their motive power is this: without contraries, they cannot progress.”
The OpenNet Initiative is an organization that tracks and monitors Internet censorship. On their website you can test individual URLs for blocking, and also see interactive maps of censorship throughout the world. Each country and region is rated and what type of content it censors is laid out in detail. The methods and agencies by which the censorship is enforced are also described in detail. All in all, a pretty useful site if you are interested in Internet censorship.
Matthew Hurst, a scientist at Microsoft Livelabs, has collected data on how Blogs interconnect. He used that data to generate maps showing the different ways that news and people travel from blog to blog. The map above represents data collected over six weeks. The maps are pretty cool looking. The white dots on the map above, are the most active blogs. As you can see, most of the other blogs connect to the active ones in some way.
It seems that women now outnumber guys online. The percentages are 48% to 52%. So the difference isn’t huge, but it is significant. Especially when you look at the growth statistics. Since 2000, female Internet usage has risen 12% and male usage has only risen 3%. According to the research, the difference also likely to remain that way in the future. I find this is interesting, mainly because the IT and gaming industry is still so male dominated. That means that unlike in previous years, the use of the Internet is no longer centered around IT and gaming. So what is it centered around?
Techdirt has an interesting article about the severe disconnect between the current copyright laws and the daily activities of a normal law abiding person. Every day, normal people break hundreds of laws without even meaning to. They do it just by going about their normal activities and jobs. Most of those laws are not enforced, or are only enforced in specific situations, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is hard to do anything without breaking copyright laws anymore. 
