Out of Cheese

I’m off to Philadelphia for the weekend, so blogging (and email, and any other communication) will be sporadic.

Scott Rosenberg gets the story wrong regarding Apple’s use of the DMCA to prevent the fine folks at Other World Computing from providing some software for third-party DVD drives on the Mac. The issue as I understand it is that OWC was patching Apple’s iDVD application, which would fall under the copyright protection portions of the DMCA.

Whether Apple was right to do this is another matter entirely, but the portion of the law that allows them to do so has nothing explicit to do with copying movies, and it is definitely allowing Apple to protect its intellectual property. The DMCA could not be used to prevent OWC from producing its own movie-making software that worked with third-party DVD drives, for example, but it can allow Apple to prevent OWC from modifying Apple’s software.

Larry Lessig notes that the Constitution explicitly states that copyright protection should be time-limited. The debate is therefore not a question of whether to protect (apologies to Richard Stallman), but rather how long is appropriate. That’s what Eldred v. Ashcroft is all about — has Congress overstepped the meaning of the Constitution’s “for limited Times” intent through its unceasing extension of copyright protection?

Lessig’s piece mentions a Rutgers Computer Technology and Law Review article from 1996, “Economically Efficient Treatment of Computer Software: Reverse Engineering, Protection, and Disclosure”. I’d love to read that. I’m just not sure how I’d go about getting a copy.

I’m an uncle (again)! My first nephew was born last night in a suburb of Paris. Mom, Dad, Sheina, and baby are all doing well as far as I know.

Lilly understands much more than she gives herself credit for.

Oh, and her birthday was Tuesday. Happy 22nd, Lils!

CNN reports that New York and San Francisco are the finalists for the U.S. bid for the 2012 Olympics. I’d love to see San Francisco win the U.S. bid and have it go on to host the Olympics. Opening ceremonies at Memorial Stadium at Stanford would be incredible. In the 1996 Olympics, Stanford-affiliated athletes won more individual gold medals, 12, than all but six countries in the world. It’d be great to see them put forth a similar performance on their home turf.

Bill Bumgarner notes that California’s ban on smoking in bars and restaurants hasn’t hurt bars’ revenues and has improved the health of bartenders statewide. I’m glad to hear that — the smoking ban is one of the reasons why I liked living in California. Since that ban, it’s been a little odd (and disturbing) whenever I walk into a restaurant and am asked, “Smoking or non?” Of course non, and hopefully no smoking anywhere around me either, thanks.

Weblog referer links are very entertaining at times. Tonight, for example, I learned through my referer logs that searching for People Who Have Made a Difference in 2002 via AOL lists my blog as the sixth result. That’s impressively silly.

Along similar lines, I’m frustrated that Radio’s referer logs (which you can access here for my page) get reset at midnight every day. I’ve been contemplating writing a program to check the logs before midnight, store them, and produce pretty totals, but I haven’t gotten around to doing it yet.

Jim Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room is extremely amusing.

I was in California over the weekend to play in the YABA Treasure Hunt. More on that later. I stayed with a friend who lives on University Ave. in Palo Alto, and Friday night we happened to drive by the Apple store around 10 p.m. It was just as James Duncan Davidson describes it — massive numbers of people crowding around the store and onto University Ave. It would’ve been a lot of fun to stop by and join the party.