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Submission + - Exemptions to DMCA announced (copyright.gov)

Submitted by
Kirijini
Kirijini writes: "The US Copyright office has announced new six exemptions to the DMCA's anticircumvention rule. A regulation to be issued on Tuesday, July 27th will make it legal to circumvent DRM for noninfringing purposes in certain situations. Notably, the exemption would allow jailbreaking and switching wireless carriers; it would also allow breaking DVD encryption for some fair use situations. The exemptions the result of a review the Copyright Office is required to undertake every three years; the exemptions will last until at least the next three year review. The Librarian of Congress has also issued a statement explaining the review and exemption process.

The six announced exemptions are 1) making copies of DVD video for educational, documentary, and noncommercial uses; 2) interoperability of applications on mobile phones (i.e., jailbreaking); 3) interoperability of mobile phones on different wireless networks; 4) testing security vulnerabilities in video games; 5) bypassing hardware dongles when the dongle is broken or obsolete, and no replacement is available; and 6) to enable "read-aloud" functions and specialized formatting of ebooks."
Google

Submission + - Google releases VP8 video codec

Submitted by atamido
atamido writes: Google has released On2's VP8 video codec to the world, royalty free. They are packaging in with Vorbis audio, in a subset of the Matroska container, and calling it WebM. It's not branded as an exclusively Google project — Mozilla and Opera are also contributors. Builds of your favorite browsers with full support are available here.

Submission + - Beautifully Rendered Music Notation with HTML5 (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This is incredible. This guy has built a music notation engraver entirely in Javascript, allowing for real-time music editing right in the browser. Here's a demo: HTML5 Music Notation Demo. The library has no external dependencies, and all the glyphs, scores, beams, ties, etc. are positioned and rendered entirely in JavaScript.
Linux

Submission + - Linus is a happy camper with his Nexus One! (androidandme.com)

Submitted by wesw02
wesw02 writes: Linus Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer best known for starting the development of the Linux kernel. He generally hates phones, but he just blogged that he purchased a Nexus One and is a happy camper so far
Google

Submission + - Nexus One first phone Linus Torvalds "doesn't hate (washingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel, has an absolute disdain for mobile phones. All of the ones he has purchased in the past, the man writes on his personal blog, ended up being "mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights" even though they were naturally all phones run on open source operating systems.

Things have changed now, he adds, now that he has caved and bought Google's Nexus One a couple of days ago.

Torvalds has owned a number of phones before, including Google's G1 device and 'one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones', but it took for Google to add multi-touch capabilities to the Nexus One before he finally broke down and bought one from the company's web store.

And he's loving it, "But I have to admit, the Nexus One is a winner. I wasn't enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge. I've wanted to have a GPS unit for my car anyway, and I thought that google navigation might finally make a phone useful.And it does. What a difference! I no longer feel like I'm dragging a phone with me "just in case" I would need to get in touch with somebody now I'm having a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget instead. The fact that you can use it as a phone too is kind of secondary."

Comment Re:Here's what Stallman, et al, said (Score 2, Insightful) 212

by dkgasaway (#29842507) Attached to: Brian Aker Responds To RMS On Dual Licensing

I'm assuming that hell has frozen over, because the first argument is that forking won't work because the GPL does not let the forker use the dual licensing model to make money

It's *copyright* that prevents the forker from using dual licensing, not the GPL. Where does Stallman blame the GPL for that?

Comment Re:Err.. (Score 1) 326

by dkgasaway (#28380197) Attached to: Harvard Study Says Weak Copyright Benefits Society

Instead of some rich aristocrat, you would have donation from thousands or millions of people asking for new songs, et voila...

Isn't that essentially what copyright provides? It enables the artist to spread the costs of production over a large audience of individuals rather that relying on a small groups of patrons. With a couple of added benefits: the artist doesn't have to deal with managing and collecting individual donations; the buyer doesn't have to put up the money until the product is available (commissions usually require some kind of payment upfront). There's a reason why copyright is so popular. The problem is how far it's been carried and how it's been abused.

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