Finally, some good news, though it’s sad that the trial even happed at all.
A jury cleared a former Galveston County Daily News photographer Wednesday of a charge that he interfered with police during 2007’s Mardi Gras.
The case raised questions about whether police destroyed evidence, and prompted debate about the rights of journalists and ordinary citizens to monitor the actions of law enforcement.
Read the full story at KHOU.com.
Read the full article: Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web on ReadWriteWeb.
TorrentFreak has a great post explaining some of the most common misconceptions about anti-piracy enforcement today. They are:
- There have been very few actual legal cases, as yet, that have involved torrents.
- The majority of copyright cases are CIVIL, not criminal
- What most people think of as being the law, often isn’t.
- The RIAA and the MPAA never get involved in anti piracy evidence collection directly.
- Most of the time, people are going from what someone they have met on a forum had read in an IRC channel.
Each of these are addresses in detail on TorrentFreak.
Yet another "photographers are considered terrorists by default" story. This time from the blog of the Spokane County Transportation Department.
I was out taking pictures this morning of sites of transportation projects to be completed over the next twenty years. One of those projects is to move of the weigh station near Stateline further east along I-90. I stopped at the pretty much deserted weigh station and took a couple pictures, then drove off. About 10 minutes later I received a call on my cell phone from Washington State Patrol asking why I had been taking pictures of the weigh station!
The blogger’s final comment is the most interesting:
I guess it makes me feel a little better to know that someone is watching the people who are watching our infrastructure. On the other hand, it kind of scares me that they could track me down that fast.
Read the whole story on the SRTC Transportation Blog.
In Cory Doctorow’s latest Locus column he discusses the reproduction methodology of the dandelions (something I’m currently fighting in my own back year, literally,) and relates it to artists in the Internet world.
Dandelions and artists have a lot in common in the age of the Internet. This is, of course, the age of unlimited, zero-marginal-cost copying. If you blow your works into the net like a dandelion clock on the breeze, the net itself will take care of the copying costs. Your fans will paste-bomb your works into their mailing list, making 60,000 copies so fast and so cheaply that figuring out how much it cost in aggregate to make all those copies would be orders of magnitude more expensive than the copies themselves.
You can read the full article on Locus Online.
Contains a lot of adult language.
Read the transcript at MSNBC.com.
