Free Culture @ NYU

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A wonderful error message greated me today in my “Personal Information” section on BlackBoard: Oracle does not fully support CLOB manipulation (inserting or updating) using a PreparedStatement. Instead you must manipulate the CLOB through the [...]

Steven P. Job’s heart to heart about DRM certainly drew the ire of some in the recording industry;  but perhaps it is a bit premature to assume all of the big 4 would really react in concert to calls for the end of copy protection. There are now rumors that EMI is considering selling its [...]

In what is as close to a blog post as you’re going to get from Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO outlines what will certainly become the company’s official stance on DRM: “Don’t blame us, blame the music industry.” The letter is a worthwhile read, but I’ve excerpted some of the juiciest bits below:
However, a key provision [...]

In a press release dated February 1st, 2007, Blackboard has announced what they are calling a “Patent Pledge” stating that they will “never assert its issued or pending course management system software patents against open source software or home-grown course management systems”, that the pledge “is legally binding, irrevocable and worldwide in scope”, and that [...]

From the Washington Post:
…Dezenhall told the association’s professional and scholarly publishing division, he could help — in part by simplifying the industry’s message to a few key phrases that even a busy senator could grasp.
Phrases like: “Public access equals government censorship,” and “government [is] seeking to nationalize science and be a publisher.”
The publishers liked [...]

For any of you Free Culture @ NYU fans who missed the last two talks we sponsored: don’t despair, there is hope. First you should sign up for our e-mail list so you don’t miss any future presentations, and then you should watch the media that has been diligently recorded for us by the kind [...]

Following up Cory Doctorow, next Wednesday we’ll be hosting Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. The lecture will be held during a class of Evan Korth’s Computer’s and Society course and is also co-sponsored by NYU’s ACM and NYU’s WinC chapters.
Jimmy will be giving a talk entitled “Free culture, transparency, and search.” Read more about Jimmy [...]

First there was the breathless and incompetent FOX news report; facts were sketchy, but it seemed like a DJ was arrested for producing “illegal” CDs.
Then the NYTimes clarified, the CDs weren’t counterfeit, or pirated, but they were mixtapes:
The [RIAA] makes no distinction between counterfeit CDs and unlicensed compilations like those that DJ Drama is known [...]

Free Culture @ NYU friend and critically acclaimed American writer Jonathan Lethem (Wikipedia bio here) has just launched “The Promiscuous Materials Project” that invites authors and remixers to use short works he’s created:
These stories are for filmmakers or dramatists to adapt. They’re available non-exclusively — meaning other people may be working from the same material [...]

The Zyprexa scandal has had some interesting developments in the last week or two.
The NYTimes covers the EFF filing on behalf of a John Doe for the rights to publish information related to the case to a wiki anonymously. The EFF has also setup its own Zyprexa case site where you can find copies of [...]