The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann sez, "Hearings for the DMCA triennial rulemaking are going on this week in DC, where the educational community is asking for an exemption to rip DVDs to take clips for classroom use. The MPAA responded with a video showing how to camcord (!) movies from a flat screen monitor, arguing that educators and students should do this instead of ripping DVDs.
In the words of media literacy researcher Martine Courant Rife, that's like typing up a quote from a book, taking it outside, chiseling the words in a rock, photographing the rock, scanning the photo, and running OCR on it. And for what?"
Last year, the EU adopted the incredibly controversial Copyright Directive (it passed by only five votes, and afterwards 10 MEPs said they'd got confused and pushed the wrong buttons!): now, EU member states have to create rules that require online platforms to filter all user-generated content and block it if it matches a secret, unaccountable […]
Back in 2017, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) approved the most controversial standard in its long history: Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME, which enabled Netflix and other big media companies to use DRM despite changes to browsers extensions that eliminated the kinds of deep hooks that DRM requires.
If there’s any knock on most smartwatches, up to and including the industry-leading Apple Watch, it’s probably that the bands aren’t…well, they aren’t usually the greatest. While Apple is certainly making strides in the watchband game, most models are just as black, boring and nondescript as you’d expect from a tech company. And where many […]
For all their obvious similarities, language learning apps will often each take unique approaches to teaching a foreign tongue. Or, in the case of many services, a whole bunch of foreign tongues. While some providers give you access to training across overwhelming menus of more than 150 different languages, the people behind the Busuu Language […]
Example no. 3,225 why the real world isn’t like The Brady Bunch: your home office. Mike Brady was able to turn his den into a truly groovy cool home office for his architectural work. Mike had a wife, six kids and a live-in maid, yet still had a spare room he could devote to his […]
