Sean’s Mental Walkabout

‘Orphan Works’ Copyright Law Dies Quiet Death | Threat Level from Wired.com
Sadly, the House isn’t going to look at this at all.

Popularity: 5% [?]

One of the constant tensions that exist is the new media age is between preservation of culture and copyrights. Personally this doesn’t get summed up any better for me than the fact that Schickele Mix is now lost to us.

Peter Schickele produced 175 episodes of a radio show that explored concepts in music in a very accessible way. I heard it by accident on our local NPR station 7 years ago, and fell in love with it. This was already during one of it’s many encores, as new shows had stopped being produced the last 90s. Even though I possess no real musical talent (or perhaps because of that), the show was facinating, and taught me incredible amounts about music. I only wished it was still running somewhere.

Because the show was about music, it played full length songs. The royalty rates for those on broadcast radio were something that was payable at the time, but those rates are substantially higher for online distribution. Hence, there are no archives, and a big piece of culture, one that could get people really excited about music, is now unpublishable due to copyright.

When I was in college, I was always fascinated by the fact that all that still remained of Ancient Greek Theater were 40 some odd plays. How could culture like that get lost? In a digital age it seems incredible that it would be possible to loose important parts of our culture.

Popularity: 24% [?]

IBM Moves Into the Virtual World
OpenSim gets a mention in a Motley Fool article. Nice.

‘At home Manekshaw was far away from an Army chief’ - ExpressIndia.Com
My friend Jehan features promiently in this article about the passing of his grandfather, India’s first 5 star general.

Uncertain Principles: Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy, by Randy Olson
Going to need to check this out

Larry Lessig says the law is strangling creativity | Video on TED.com
Really great talk

Slashdot | Second Life Faces Open Source Challenges
Nifty, OpenSim made slashdot

Popularity: 4% [?]