Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Daily Archives: January 1, 2019

For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain

Smithsonian.com: “At midnight on New Year’s Eve, all works first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain. It has been 21 years since the last mass expiration of copyright in the U.S. That deluge of works includes not just “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which appeared first in the New Republic in 1923, but hundreds of thousands of books, musical compositions, paintings, poems, photographs and films. After January 1, any record label can issue a dubstep version of the 1923 hit “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” any middle school can produce Theodore Pratt’s stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and any historian can publish Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis with her own extensive annotations. Any artist can create and sell a feminist response to Marcel Duchamp’s seminal Dadaist piece, The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) and any filmmaker can remake Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Ten Commandments and post it on YouTube.

“The public domain has been frozen in time for 20 years, and we’re reaching the 20-year thaw,” says Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The release is unprecedented, and its impact on culture and creativity could be huge. We have never seen such a mass entry into the public domain in the digital age. The last one—in 1998, when 1922 slipped its copyright bond—predated Google. “We have shortchanged a generation,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. “The 20th century is largely missing from the internet.”

Economists calculate the true value of Facebook to its users in new study

Corrigan JR, Alhabash S, Rousu M, Cash SB (2018) How much is social media worth? Estimating the value of Facebook by paying users to stop using it. PLoS ONE 13(12): e0207101. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0207101 “Facebook, the online social network, has more than 2 billion global users. Because those users do not pay for the service, its benefits… Continue Reading

Firm Led by Google Veterans Uses A.I. to ‘Nudge’ Workers Toward Happiness

The New York Times: “Technology companies like to promote artificial intelligence’s potential for solving some of the world’s toughest problems, like reducing automobile deaths and helping doctors diagnose diseases. A company started by three former Google employees is pitching A.I. as the answer to a more common problem: being happier at work. The start-up, Humu,… Continue Reading

Paper – Giving datasets context

Giving datasets context: a comparison study of institutional repositories that apply varying degrees of curation. International Journal Of Digital Curation, Vol 13 No 1 (2018). DOI: 10.2218/ijdc.v13i1.632. “This research study compared four academic libraries’ approaches to curating the metadata of dataset submissions in their institutional repositories and classified them in one of four categories: no… Continue Reading

​In 1983 Isaac Asimov predicted the world of 2019. Here’s what he got right (and wrong)

Big Think: “Isaac Asimov was one the world’s most celebrated and prolific science fiction writers, having written or edited more than 500 books over his four-decade career. The Russian-born writer was famous for penning hard science fiction in his books, such as that in I, Robot, Foundation and Nightfall. Naturally, his work contained many predictions… Continue Reading

CNN Poll Reveals Depths of Anti-Semitism in Europe

CNN article – includes a video: “Anti-Semitic stereotypes are alive and well in Europe, while the memory of the Holocaust is starting to fade, a sweeping new survey by CNN reveals. More than a quarter of Europeans polled believe Jews have too much influence in business and finance. Nearly one in four said Jews have too much… Continue Reading

How Apps on Android Share Data with Facebook – Report

Privacy International: “Previous research has shown how 42.55 percent of free apps on the Google Play store could share data with Facebook, making Facebook the second most prevalent third-party tracker after Google’s parent company Alphabet. In this report, Privacy International illustrates what this data sharing looks like in practice, particularly for people who do not… Continue Reading