The documentary filmmaker, Errol Morris, interviews Hany Farid, a Dartmouth professor and an expert on digital photography, on using photography as a weapon.
Of course, we all know that doctoring (photoshopping) photographs to make them dramatic, misleading, or politically controversial is a widespread issue (problem?), but what about using captions to influence?
The photographs presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 provide several examples. Photographs that were used to justify a war. And yet, the actual photographs are low-res, muddy aerial surveillance photographs of buildings and vehicles on the ground in Iraq. I’m not an aerial intelligence expert. I could be looking at anything. It is the labels, the captions, and the surrounding text that turn the images from one thing into another.
via Schneier on Security
The rise of university textbook piracy: the scourge of the textbook publisher, a blessing for students.
All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.
Compared with music publishers, textbook publishers have been relatively protected from piracy by the considerable trouble entailed in digitizing a printed textbook. Converting the roughly 1,300 pages of Organic Chemistry into a digital file requires much more time than ripping a CD.
Time flies, however, if you’re having a good time plotting righteous revenge, and students seem angrier than ever before about the price of textbooks.
MathWorld—a division of Wolfram Research, the creators of Mathematica—was temporarily shutdown in late 2000 due to a copyright dispute over a book based on the website.
Eric Weisstein’s commentary on the shutdown reveals a lot not just about being on the receiving side of an unfounded lawsuit, but also about publishing and its apparent change from a book-lovers’ business, to one run by people “unashamed to treat information as a commodity”.
It is no secret that one consequence of the explosion in the popularity of the internet and related electronic technologies is that many battles will be fought over how information is created, stored, and accessed. It is equally clear that we all have a stake in how these battles are decided.
Trying to discover whether a work of art (book, movie, song, etc.) is currently in the public domain? The American Library Association’s copyright slide rule, should help.
[This] simple tool tells you whether or not you need to hunt down a rights owner to use a book, movie, song, or other work in a project. The surprising part? Often times, you don’t—not if the work was made before a certain year, and if the author didn’t follow through. Quick tip: Feel free to go nuts on anything published before 1923
Outside the US we have different laws, natch, though we are subject to these laws if we sample works that have a US copyright. It would be interesting to see a UK/EU version of this.
via Lifehacker
Neatorama on media ownership – The Big Six of US media (via Link Banana).
Last year I linked to a similar chart, from 1991, showing the media ownership of The Big Ten multinational conglomerates.
Mother Jones has an appealing visual representation of 25 years of media mergers and how the biggest media conglomerates in the US came to be.