German court mandates more screening by YouTube

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German court deals YouTube a blow in copyright case – SiliconValley.com.

HAMBURG — A German court in Hamburg dealt Google (GOOG) a blow on Friday, saying its YouTube online video-sharing site needed to prevent its users from posting copyrighted music clips without permission.

The suit was brought against YouTube in 2010 by German royalty collections body GEMA and several other groups handling music rights for allegedly infringing copyrights.

The test case concerns seven music clips and could be a step toward YouTube and other operators of websites publishing user-generated content having to pay large sums in royalties.

China is stealing software? Yes, but it’s not as useful as it sounds.

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Inside the Chinese Boom in Corporate Espionage is the headline in a recent article in Businessweek (now named Bloomberg Businessweek). It reports an 007ish tale of software theft by a Chinese windmill company. American Superconductor Corp (AMSC) had a profitable partnership selling control systems to Chinese wind turbine company Sinovel. As for all expensive industrial equipment, software plays a vital role in wind turbines. So when stolen/edited copies of their software turned up in Sinovel machines, and Sinoval stopped accepting equipment from AMSC, it was a calamity for AMSC.

   The Business Week article implicitly blames high tech “Chinese espionage,” which has been getting a lot of coverage in the US press recently. But as a very interesting blog post by Steve Dickinson points out, the actual theft was very traditional. An insider (one of the software’s chief developers) was bribed  to turn over the source code. Nothing high-tech about the theft, unless you still call email “high tech.” And according to Dickinson, the theft was predictable, and was facilitated by lack of low-tech protection measures by AMSC. 

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Information overload – some personal actions

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I attended a conference, Overloaded 2012, last week in San Francisco. Here’s a summary from one of the directors of the Information Overload Research Group (IORG). IORG is small, but addressing deep issues of how constant information deluges flows affect our working and thinking.
My “immediate action” conclusion was to start using #hashtags in my email. Examples: #invite, #meet #teach (for messages to colleagues about teaching). Also to provide longer subject lines in my emails – “6 words” is one suggestion.
And, I’ll take a look at a book by Jonathan Spira, an IORG director, who I’ve talked with but never met. Overload! book by Jonathan Spira

Why LightSquared failed: It was science, not politics

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Why LightSquared failed: It was science, not politics.

Good summary of the battle between LightSquared, and GPS users/makers. On the political/interest group side, it shows that established industries have ability to protect their regulatory interests, even against a well-financed lobbying campaign. (LightSquared) Perhaps it also shows that the FCC is also able to make technically appropriate decisions, at least when the two sides are approximately balanced in political power.

 
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Roger Bohn – Google Scholar Citations

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Roger Bohn – Google Scholar Citations.

Google does its usual amazing job of organizing information. They have a “scholar” page for every academic, with their best guess of all the papers written, and how many times they were cited. In some cases, they found web-accessible versions of academic articles  that I was not aware of.

Rather than trying to keep my own list up to date, I may come to rely on Google to do it for me.