Boing Boing is a co-signatory to an open letter (PDF) to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, calling on them to fix the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on jailbreaking and unlocking your devices. This laudable effort was spearheaded by Public Knowledge:
"It is important for Congress to remember that people are waiting on them to solve this problem once and for all. We've seen that Congress wants to ensure that consumers can unlock their phones, but consumers, entrepreneurs, academics, and public interest organizations all agree that we need lasting solutions to make sure that people can use their wireless devices without fearing copyright laws.
"A minor change to the law is all it would take to end this controversy for good. Beyond that, though, this situation shows there are deeper problems with the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA, and the time is ripe for hearings investigating the harms that come from this law."
Public Knowledge Asks Congress for a Permanent Fix to Cell Phone Unlocking
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Gus the hacker puppeteer writes, “Many of us hoped the Internet would disrupt the music industry along with all other media industries, giving more power — and more pay — to musicians and songwriters. And yet, somehow the amount musicians get paid each time their songs stream is a tiny fraction of a cent.”
The trademark was granted to discount eyewear company Specsavers, whose slogan is “should’ve gone to Specsavers.” If you object, you have until October 12 to file with the IPO.
Since March, the unnamed genius behind Paperback Paradise has been remixing the often dreadful covers of vintage paperback novels, refining their base material into golden lewd, hilarious new work. (via Richard Kadrey)
We’re always searching for, borrowing, and losing Lightning cables, and that’s why we are loading up with the Apple MFi-Certified Lightning Cable: 3-Pack.These Apple-certified USB cables let you charge your iPhone, iPad, or iPod via any USB port—whether you prefer your computer or the Apple USB Power Adapter. And since there’s three of them, you never […]
Mophie’s gadgets are reliable, minimalist, and stacked with all the right features. We use these two gadgets to keep our phones, tablets, e-readers, and other electronics charged.Recharge on-the-go with the Mophie Powerstation XL External BatteryThe Mophie Powerstation XL ($39.95) packs enough power to re-charge your phone eight times over. It has three levels of charging, so […]
Earlier this spring, Salesforce announced that Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. Salesforce developers and AWS developers are already in-demand and paid very well for their expertise, but this partnership opens up the opportunity to become an extremely valuable asset by mastering both. Below are two in-depth courses to help you start or progress […]
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Congress too busy counting money from lobbyists and media organizations to read open letter
Copyright law in general is broken. That the words to “Happy Birthday” are still copyright protected boggles the mind.
“The Chicago-based music publisher Clayton F. Summy Company, working with Jessica Hill, published and copyrighted “Happy Birthday” in 1935. Under the laws in effect at the time, the Hills’ copyright would have expired after one 28-year term and a renewal of similar length, falling into public domain by 1991. However, the Copyright Act of 1976 extended the term of copyright protection to 75 years from date of publication, and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 added another 20 years, so under current law the copyright protection of “Happy Birthday” will remain intact until at least 2030.”
In Congress-speak, “fixing a bad law” means “make it worse.” Seriously. Open the DMCA to renegotiation and every special interest group that thinks the current law is too weak will jump into the game waving campaign contributions around as incentives to make the law worse than what it is now. So you might well get jailbreaking legalized but find a whole lot of other less welcome stuff coming with it.