oldelpaso - Slashdot User

Submission + - National Portrait Gallery testing copyfraud

Submitted by UKNeedsAPirateParty on Friday July 10, 2009 @10:01PM

UKNeedsAPirateParty writes: The National Portrait Gallery, London has sent one of the users of Wikimedia Commons, who had uploaded a bunch of NPG website images to the Commons website a legal threat, after Wikimedia refused to remove the images of many Public Domain portraits from their website. Since NPG apparently couldn't get their way with Wikimedia, they now seem to have decided to go after an individual. Wikimedia seems to assert that due to Bridgeman v. Corel, the copyright claim over these photographs is weak at best due to lack of originality. NPG on the other hand claims that this US court decision is not relevant in the UK and also claims their database rights. This practice of claiming (copy)rights on anything and everything build around works that themselves are in the Public Domain, has been described as copyfraud, but defended by others as required to maintain the financial health of museums.

Comment More on Goldacre's blog (Score 1) 219

by oldelpaso on Sunday June 07, 2009 @02:57AM (#28239619) Attached to: Lies, Damned Lies, and the UK Copyright Industry

The version of TFA on Goldacre's blog is slightly longer (the Guardian version must have been subedited for dead tree format), and contains links to the sources of the material he's talking about.

Submission + - The Pirate Bay founders found guilty

Submitted by arkhan_jg on Friday April 17, 2009 @06:47AM

arkhan_jg writes: The Pirate Bay founders have been found guilty of being accessories to copyright infringement. Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were sentenced to a year in jail. They were also ordered to pay 30m kronor ($3.6m or £2.4m) in damages. The damages were awarded to a number of entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and Columbia Pictures.

The news was broken early by Peter Sunde aka brokep via twitter, from a "trustworthy source". Sunde is also insisting "nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or file sharing what so ever. This is just a theater for the media." The men have already stated that would appeal the verdict if they lost, and given the distributed nature of The Pirate Bay servers outside of Sweden, the site itself may well prove difficult to shut down. A round-up of the arguments in court has already been discussed on slashdot, and the BBC has some thoughts on what happens next.

The Pirate Bay staff intend to hold a streamed press conference at 13:00 CET (GMT+1) today, Friday 17th April.

Comment Re:The sting in the tail (Score 1) 437

by oldelpaso on Sunday February 08, 2009 @06:52PM (#26777045) Attached to: The Deceptive Perfection of Auto-Tune

Looks like someone else already pointed that out. That'll teach me not to browse at a high threshold.

Comment Re:The sting in the tail (Score 1) 437

by oldelpaso on Sunday February 08, 2009 @06:48PM (#26776993) Attached to: The Deceptive Perfection of Auto-Tune

Nelly Furtado is one of the few pop artists with a rep for *not* using auto-tune, at least if this article is to be believed. A pretty good primer on spotting auto-tune was posted on Hometracked a while back.

Comment Re:Rad. therapy (Score 1) 594

by oldelpaso on Monday March 24, 2008 @08:15AM (#22843760) Attached to: Nuclear Scanning Catches a Radioactive Cat On I-5

It is almost certainly gamma emissions which are detected in this case, not beta. You are not taking into account the full mechanism of beta decay. The beta minus decay of iodine-131 has an associated gamma emission, which occurs immediately after the beta emission when the daughter nuclide goes to the ground state. In terms of other isotopes, technetium-99m is a gamma emitter, albeit a low energy one at 140keV. Nuclides used in PET all emit 511 keV gammas.

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