Archive | June, 2003

Petition for a return of the Public Domain – Please Sign!

Do you have one minute to web-surf for the Public Domain?. Larry Lessig needs your help to preserve the Public Domain:



“We have launched a petition to build support for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. That act would require American copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work was published. If they pay the $1, the copyright continues. If they don’t, the work passes into the public domain. Historical estimates would suggest 98% of works would pass into the pubilc domain after 50 years. The Act would do a great deal to reclaim a public domain. This proposal has received a great deal of support. It is now facing some important lobbyists’ opposition. We need a public way to begin to demonstrate who the lobbyists don’t speak for. This is the first step. If you are an ally in at least this cause, please sign the petition. Please blog it, please email it, please spam it, please buy billboards about it — please do whatever you can. And most importantly, please help us explain its importance. There is a chance to do something significant here. But it will take a clearer, simpler voice than mine.”


Click here to sign the petition.  It takes less than a minute to sign.  Thanks.

[Ernie the Attorney]

A Universal RDF browser?

The MIT Haystack project released some preliminary code. If RDF is a grand unified theory of information, Haystack is the universal RDF browser. The Eclipse-like UI eschews dialog boxes for an array of panes; this cleverly eliminaties modality. It’s also surprisingly polished for an academic research project. Potential hackers beware; I suspect much of the code is written in Adenine, the secret love-child of Python and RDF. [Hack the Planet]

Is Internet Explorer 6 the end of the line?

News.Com: Microsoft to abandon standalone IE. Dave Winer comments: “This means that to get a new version of the browser you’ll have to install a new version of the operating system? Also, what about the Mac version of IE? Again, Web developers never asked to be Microsoft developers, now they think we should be Windows developers. Oy.” from Scripting News

Slashdot erupts here.

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.