tmalone - Slashdot User

Submission + - Book Publishers Abandoning DRM

Submitted by tmalone on Monday March 10, 2008 @01:06PM

tmalone writes: The New York Times is reporting that book publishers are beginning to phase out DRM protected audio books. This month the world's largest publisher, Random House, started offering DRM-free mp3s; Penguin has announced that it will follow suit. It seems that *gasp* DRM doesn't work:

"Publishers, like the music labels and movie studios, stuck to D.R.M. out of fear that pirated copies would diminish revenue. Random House tested the justification for this fear when it introduced the D.R.M.-less concept with eMusic last fall. It encoded those audio books with a digital watermark and monitored online file sharing networks, only to find that pirated copies of its audio books had been made from physical CDs or D.R.M.-encoded digital downloads whose anticopying protections were overridden."
Maybe now I'll be able to put audio books from my library's website on my iPod, or listen to them on my Mac or my Linux box.

Submission + - NYT Article About One of the Original Phreaks 1

Submitted by tmalone on Monday December 31, 2007 @01:17PM

tmalone writes: The New York Times is running an end of year piece about the most interesting people who have died this year. One of their picks is Joybubbles, also known as Josef Engressia, or "Whistler". He was born blind and discovered at the age of 7 that he could whistle 2600 hertz into a phone to make free long distance calls. He was one of the original phone phreaks, got arrested for phone fraud, and was even employed by the phone company. The article deals more with his personal life (he was abused at a home for the blind) than with his technical exploits, but is a very interesting story.

Submission + - Jonathan Lethem on Plagiarism

Submitted by tmalone on Saturday February 10, 2007 @06:49PM

tmalone writes: This month's Harper's Magazine includes a very interesting essay by the novelist Jonathan Lethem titled, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism", in which he discusses the public commons of ideas and the absurdity of restricting other people the right of second use. "Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work." Taking issue with the idea that any work is "untainted" by other people's ideas he states, "Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony." Later on he states that, "Contemporary copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted. The case for perpetual copyright is a denial of the essential gift-aspect of the creative act." He finishes up with simple request, "Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions." The best part of the essay is at the end when he provides a key to all of the sources he stole his ideas from.

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