Yes, in red, that’s Richard Stallman, free-software advocate and lover of dance, serving up Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat,” a little ditty that celebrates “supermanning dat ho.” Odd, since Stallman’s dislike of rap music is well-documented.

Source:Valleywag

newVideoPlayer(”Cracked_Internet_Party.flv”, 475, 376,”");
OK, so Ask.com is no longer Ask Jeeves, and you’ve never heard of Cracked.com. And really, the Internet isn’t that much like a bad college house party at all. But still, parts of the humorous short “The Internet Party,” from which we briefly excerpt above, ring true. Like the perky, plucky “Google,” who’s played by a much less pretty but equally nerdy version of Marissa Mayer.

Source:Valleywag

The recording and motion-picture industries have hounded broadband providers to police their pipes for file-sharing pirates. These advocacy groups want service providers to monitor and stop the illegal trafficking of files. AT&T has a filtering plan that Slate calls “baffling”; it would scan all emails and downloads for illicit content. But Time Warner Cable has found a much simpler way to deter film and music pirates — make them pay for bandwidth.

The cable provider is preparing to test a new billing scheme in Beaumont, Texas that would charge customers based on actual Internet usage instead of a flat monthly fee. This means BitTorrent downloaders would pay a premium for all those packets they seed across the net. Pirated content is far less appealing when it isn’t free.

iJustine, the videoblogger who’s almost as clever as she is blonde, flails about in an attempt to parody herself. The videoblogger mimics her viewers’ invasive demands: taking her top off, poking out her eye with a fork, throwing herself under a truck. Don’t bother watching — she doesn’t deliver on any of it. But is she self-aware, or should we just be wary?

This time Ezarik isn’t lip-synching to Randi Jayne “Yes, Mark of Facebook’s sister” Zuckerberg’s vocals. “I wrote, sang, shot and edited this one,” she tells us. Ezarik is trying to showcase the range of skills needed to break away from the low-tech, unscripted, and unpromising format of lifecasting.

She bemoans how lifecasting is changing, as if people wanting the lifecaster to do foolish things, “begging for money and girls taking off their clothes for the cam” is a new development. Jennifer Ringley should have disproved that a decade ago.

Unfortunately for Ezarik, who got her start in lifecasting, that’s always been and also will be the nature of the business. Perhaps it’s really her career that she wishes would get crushed under the wheels of a truck; her viewers’ eyes, poked out with a fork. In every jest, there’s a grain of truth. And in every lifecast, something revealing.

Source:Valleywag

Starting a 12-step Scrabulous-recovery plan may be a lot easier than all you addicts think. Hasbro wants to make it impossible for the Facebook app’s 2.3 million users to fall off the wagon by shutting down the Scrabble copycat. It sent a notice to Facebook two weeks ago. Jayant Agarwalla, half of the two-man team behind the Web and Facebook apps, says he doesn’t get Hasbro’s deal. It obviously wouldn’t have anything to do with using its intellectual property to score “over $25,000 a month.”

Today’s Examiner features a front-page story on Moose’s, the recently remodeled North Beach bar-with-a-very-nice-restaurant-attached that Valleywag has taken over as our Friday happy hour spot. Co-owner and bar dominatrix Valen “rhymes with Van Halen” West lets Owen park his PowerBook right where 20th-century gossip legend Herb Caen’s typewriter used to be. I’ll be there, too, with a couple extra pairs of sunglasses in case you forgot yours. 4 p.m. until Owen’s corporate card maxes out. 1652 Stockton Street on Washington Square. Valet parking for Valley people, or the 9X/30/45 lines for Munitards. (Photo by Jason Steinberg/San Francisco Examiner)

Source:Valleywag

A constant thorn in copyright-holders’s sides, The Pirate Bay is finally taking on water. Swedish authorities, aided by evidence gathered during a 2006 raid, are preparing legal battle against captains Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm for “conspiracy to breach copyrights.” Although Pirate Bay doesn’t actively host files, it indexes shared BitTorrent files, which in Hollywood’s eyes makes it equally culpable. The founders are confident they’ll win. The prosecutor, Hakan Roswell, is confident that even if they lose, it “wouldn’t stop the service.” Of course. If Sweden cracks down, the pirates will just seek less-hostile waters.

Drew Schutte, the longtime publisher of Conde Nast’s Wired, will now run the sales side of The New Yorker and its website. David Carey, publisher of Portfolio, is adding Wired to his responsibilities. [BusinessWeek]

Source:Valleywag

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After warning me that he was coming to the CES Press Room and to “stay out of his face,” blog blowhard Jason Calacanis stormed over to me to “introduce” himself and slam my boss and brag about how much money he has. Money can’t buy you a snappy comeback, however.

When Calacanis was almost out the door, I yelled across the room, “Google’s better!” — than Mahalo (there’s your link, now quit your bitching), that is, the “human-powered” search engine that’s currently keeping Calacanis off the street. Having no response, he slunk out the door to peels of laughter.

Source:Valleywag

Can you legally create MP3s from your CD collection, or not? That’s all we want to know. News has circulated since early December that the recording industry believes it is illegal to rip your music library . The genesis of this waas an RIAA lawsuit against a chap for tossing ripped files into his Kazaa sharing folder — not, mind you, for actually ripping the files off a CD. We ridiculed the Washington Post for making this mistake, and were prepared to laugh derisively when it ran a correction. But a Wired blogger argues, at length — 745 agonizing words — that the RIAA still thinks CD ripping is illegal. Here are the 100 most essential words.

The RIAA does not recognize that you have a legal right to rip your CDs into MP3s. The RIAA will not say that ripping MP3s for personal use is legal. That’s why the Sony executive said ripping a song was the same as stealing one. To sum up, the RIAA does believe a majority of American music buyers are thieving criminals, but it’s not going to sue anyone over ripping MP3s because a) it’s not really a big deal b) there’s no way to find out and/or c) it would be terrible publicity to sue someone for using an iPod.

The Washington Post has reported that the RIAA views the ripping of CDs to MP3s as illegal. Not quite so. The RIAA isn’t thrilled with the practice, but that’s not why they’re suing Jeffrey Howell. His offense against the recording industry was “putting those ripped files into a shared Kazaa folder,” notes Techdirt. You know, the sort of thing one would do if he would want to participate in file sharing.

In a $3 million lawsuit against eBay, Tiffany has called the online auction house a “rat’s nest” of counterfeit goods. Maybe the blue-boxed retailer is grumpy because Tiffany had to send eBay 135,000 takedown notices in 2006. As Eric Goldman points out on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog, that’s 370 notices per day, 15 an hour, or 1 every 4 minutes. The suit itself, by the way, basically comes down to who should pay for investigating counterfeiting claims; eBay says Tiffany could fix the problem by hiring one more paralegal.

Google is cracking down on copyright-infringing videos uploaded to its site. Sort of. Click through to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire ” on YouTube and you’ll see a yellow box which reads, “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.” This is bad news for Songza, the Web jukebox which rips the audio track from YouTube videos.

If there’s no audio track to rip, Songza will go silent. But after so many obnoxious parodies using BIlly Joel’s song in the past few weeks, we’re not so sure that, in this particular instance, Google’s ban isn’t actually good news for the rest of us.

I don’t compare Creative Commons licenses to the Codex Seraphinianus just to be cruel. True, cruelty is part of the fun, but I’m honestly confused. It comes down to one word I don’t grok. Here’s your chance to explain it to us idiots.

Creative Commons is supposed to be easy. As commenter cowsandmilk put it, “You learn 4 words and you’re set.” But watch where I run into trouble with these four mouthful-of-letters words:

Noncommercial: This one’s easy. No making money off the work. Don’t even try.

No Derivatives: Use the work as is only. No remixes, mashups, or 100-word-versions.

Sharealike: Um, I smell GPL here. This means if I use the work in another work, I have to license my work the exact same way. Which probably means forget it, but understood.

Attribution: The problem word. penguin07 summarized the confusing wording in the license for the above comic:

The comic itself is on a website that says, ‘Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.”
What’s that? You click the words and it goes to a page on another site that says,
—
You are free:
to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to Remix - to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author’s moral rights.
—
[But] nowhere does it say what “the manner specified by the author” to “attribute the work” is.

So, how am I supposed to attribute the work in the manner specified by the author, if the author doesn’t specify a manner? Does that just mean I link to the same CC license page, and everyone’s supposed to know that? It’s the best guess, but if I’m wrong I could expose Gawker Media to exciting courtroom opportunities. I could email the author to ask, but one of the comic’s main points is that CC saves everyone from having to do exactly that.

I went to the Creative Commons website and found this description:

Attribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.

See the problem? There’s no default value for the way you request for works where the author doesn’t actually request a way. You CC people need to come up with a default “manner of attribution” and then, just as important, spell it out in the default license. Do that and I’ll happily promote outstanding CC works on this 100,000-pageviews-a-day site without wincing. Except those also marked “Noncommercial,” “No Derivatives” or “Sharealike.” Simple!

Apparently someone told Joseph Smarr, Plaxo’s chief platform architect, that he’s a “rock star.” Joseph, Joseph, Joseph. They were referring to your programming skills. Smarr does have the rock-and-roll look down, if not the sound. Here’s a pic of him striking a hot pose.

Source:Valleywag

It’s always the coverup, never the crime. The popular BitTorrent-indexing site TorrentSpy.com, which helps users find shared “torrent” files to download, sabotaged its chances of escaping from a legal tangle with the Motion Picture Association of America. TorrentSpy had beensued by the MPAA in February 2006 for copyright infringement. The Los Angeles District Court asked it to start tracking its users. TorrentSpy did the most idiotic thing it could: Destroy evidence.

After TorrentSpy’s operators directory headings and forum posts, withholding names of moderators, and concealing IP addresses of users, the Los Angeles court slammed the site with a $30,000 fine and found it guilty of the copyright charges, saying its actions made a fair trial impossible. Founder Justin Bunnell plans to appeal the ruling, saying, “It’s not like they proved that TorrentSpy infringed copyright.” True enough. But TorrentSpy’s data-deletion rampage meant that the MPAA didn’t even have to.

Source:Valleywag

Why is it so hard to figure out Creative Commons? A paranoid explains:

At some point in 2009, the Creative Commons people are going to reveal that every single one of their licenses actually forbids any use at all, even LOOKING at a CC web page, and does so in such a way that it indemnifies Disney, Microsoft and Google for every page on the Internet. The resulting $463 billion settlement will make Boing Boing’s editors the wealthiest 4.5 people in the galaxy.

All I ask is that they kill us last.