Julianna Yau’s blog

Historically, copyright law has existed to protect the remuneration to creators and producers/disseminators for copies of original works. How much each is protected through copyright law varies, depending on which version of the historical account you read.

Within all of those versions, the protection of user rights is close to zero.¹

And it wasn’t until personal recording technology in the form of things like audio cassettes, video cassettes, Betamax/VCRs, CD-Rs, mp3 and all sorts of other modern acronyms that users started to build a gradual concern for copyright.

So where does that leave us now?

With two basic types of users whose concerns need to be addressed by copyright legislation:

• professional users (i.e. creators)
• end-users (i.e. consumers)

Although many of their activities overlap, the primary difference boils down to our good friend Money.

The problem then becomes a horrible blurring of the line between what rights should be granted & protected and when & how those rights should be enforced. For us to move beyond the shouting matches and competitions of wit and rhetoric, I believe we need to start with looking at the two separately before bringing them together.

In Part 9: looking at the conceptual aspects of user rights.

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[1] Note that the historical treatment of performances of classical music is much different from current treatment of performances of almost anything. Income for composers used to be based on sales of sheet music, whereas now composers and playwrights generate income from both the sale of their compositions/plays and the performances. One could argue that users used to have more rights and/or that creators now have more rights, depending on where you’re standing.

Tags: betamax, copyright, user rights

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Maybe I just can’t make a decision these days.

After some second thoughts about the XO laptop being able to do for me what it was never meant to do, I thought I would buy the Asus Eee this weekend to serve as my ultra-portable sublaptop for travelling. Why this weekend? Because I bought a new camera and want to wait until after it arrives in the mail before I buy the Eee (to use it to take pictures & videos of the Eee…there’s always a reason to my madness).

Of course, this may be the worst time to decide to buy anything because of CES.

jkkmobile reported the Asus prototypes of the 8″ Eee, and now I’m left to wonder whether I should wait a potential year (by my random estimation based on no facts or review of previous market/production activity) for the production to start on those or just buy the existing model now.

For no reasons other than the aesthetic of the laptop with the wider screen, I prefer the promise of the 8″ Eee (especially because, at this point, there doesn’t seem to be any other difference between the two models). When I look at the two laptops side by side, the prototype of the 8″ has a better balanced ratio of screen-to-plastic, visually. I must hand it to Asus, though, for choosing black as the colour surrounding the screen, even for the white model, of the 7″ Eee. The black hides the awkward relationship of the screen’s length and width much better than white would. And although the white one has potential of being mistaken for an isomethingorother, the black one reminds me of a ThinkPad from the days of yore.

And where does this post leave me? Nowhere, really. Realistically, I’ll probably end up buying the Eee this weekend as planned and trying to unload it next year when the 8″ is available. That’s just what happens when you get a woman who likes gadgets instead of shoes.

Tags: asus eee, technology, xo laptop

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The Privacy Commissioner blog has a great post about privacy rights and data portability, pointing to the Privacy Manifesto for the Web 2.0 Era drafted by Alec Saunders and the Data Portability project.

Tags: Canada, facebook, google, internet, manifestos, privacy

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