Hey, it's wicked, wicked, wicked to make a backup copy of your DVD, 'cause the DMCA sez so. That's the word from Chairman Jack of the Motion Picture Association of America.PC World asked: "Why can't people who legally purchase DVDs make one backup copy? How come the same fair use rights that let you make a backup copy of other media do not extend to DVDs?""That question," said Jack Valenti, "has nothing to do with fair use because a DVD is encrypted and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act says to circumvent an encryption violates that law."Oh, the glories of...

Some researchers worry that IM-crazed kids will abandon standard English usage for language in the LOL vein, according to today's New York Times.The TeleRead take: LOL ;-). The cure? Don't ban Instant Messaging. Do expose children to standard English, and what better way than a well-stocked national digital library system of the TeleRead variety?...

Again and again we've said it. Beware of e-books in proprietary formats that rely on the sustainability of any particular vendors. Now, from the the Inquirer, comes an article raising serious questions about Palm's dependence on interaction with Microsoft products. Will The Evil Empire eventually do Palm in? Writer Charlie Demerjian doesn't see any immediate risk, but he says that in the future his next purchase may not be another Palm. Why?The problem is that Palm has taken aim at its own foot, shot with deadly accuracy, and is in the process of handing the entire sector to Microsoft....

"Bookish researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Bristol, England, are working on an experimental e-book that allows users to flick through pages just as they would reading real books, magazines, and newspapers. 'We want to convince users that they are real books,' said Anthony Sowden, a researcher at HP Labs Bristol. 'The devices, dubbed Digital Media Viewers, were previewed to a group of European press this week as an example of the kind of digital-media research taking place at the company's U.K. research lab.'" - IDG News Service, May 22.The TeleRead take: The viewers are said to be "lightweight and...

Andy Oram, a veteran editor at O'Reilly, the respected tech publisher, favors a Noring-style solution to the "VHS-vs.-Beta times ten" mess, as we've called it. Offering a personal opinion in his Web log, he writes about the chaos in formats:Right now, the ebook industry is notoriously mired in a swamp of unappealing and incompatible solutions. A continuation of this trend will at best mean that publishers and users alike are trapped in questionable technologies that unnecessarily restrict them through a mixture of technological incompetence and paranoid content protection. At worst (actually, this result might be better) ebooks may not...

Jon Noring's paper drew the usual excuses from the proprietary-format crowd, or at least someone who fired back with a friendly but skeptical note on the eBook Community list. The big objection is that the encryption in Digital Rights Management will be more secure if it's proprietary. Wrong! Security expert Bruce Schneier typifies many in the security field in describing the proprietary approach as more risky. From an old Computerworld story:LAS VEGAS--Respected cryptography authority Bruce Schneier this week told a security conference that most products and systems that use cryptography are insecure and most commercial cryptography doesn't perform as...

For years, TeleRead has advocated privacy for e-library users, through use of technologies that, like anonymous digital cash, would protect identities. No perfection claimed, but if nothing else, readers would most likely enjoy more protection than the Web offers today. Doubt that privacy is a problem? Well, OSS.NET reports that Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo are using secret "Web bugs" to determine the exact identities of visitors to their pages. OSS.NET even tells how it's done. Says OSS.NET:This private information is being resold and perpetuates the spam environment these three organizations rather duplicitously told Congress and the media they were...

By promoting the right hardware--appropriate for e-forms for commerce and government, not just for reading books and other apps--TeleRead would help justify the costs of a well-stocked national digital library system. And that leads to a few thoughts on Net security, which right now, in a net.commerce context, is too often an oxymoron. The issue should be addressed in a way friendly to consumers rather than simply megacorporations. We shouldn't have to go the Faustian route and give up privacy in return for "secure computing" and access to DMCA-protected material.Meanwhile, first-hand today, I witnessed an example of the need...

It...

Let's hope that the "VHS-vs.-Beta times ten" mess will vanish as soon as possibile. Meanwhile e-book boosters might be interested in a statement from Jeff Bezos, as paraphrased by the Telegraph in the UK:The one category that does have a limited lifespan is Amazon's traditional books business. Bezos predicts that within 10 years people will be reading them in electronic form, on small hand-held devices. "E-books have been held back by the display device," says Bezos.Speaking of display devices, radio station WAMU at noon EST today will broadcast an interview with Nobel Prize winner Alan Heeger on Plastic Electronics,...

Check out Has Copyright Law Met Its Match? Access by the disabled provides challenge to controversial DMCA. Time for the Open eBook Forum and others to get the message and push for access-friendly standards--regardless of whether the loathsome DMCA stays on the books? Format mainstreaming is the best way to serve people like David Faucheux. Here's the start of the piece by Elsa Wenzel as posted to the PC World site:Electronic books should be the easiest books for the blind to "read." Software can instantly translate the digital files into sound or Braille. So why can't the 10...

"...the continuing shift in customer preference to standards-based technology--and away from expensive proprietary systems--is further reducing the total cost of computing." - Michael Dell, as quoted in the May 26 BusinessWeek.The TeleRead take: No, e-books aren't the same as corporate servers and the like. But the same concepts apply. The law in computing is "cheapest and best." If the Open eBook Forum doesn't come around, different organizations might end up setting consumer-level standards. Or, worse, the e-book business could never reach its full potential. Speaking of Dell, what if a large vendor, with an interest in moving general-purpose hand-helds...