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EU Plans To Extend Copyright; Turns Copyright System Into Welfare For Musicians

Just as we feared, the EU has now approved copyright extension of performance royalties from 50 years to 95 years. This is basically an approval to steal from the public. The public made a deal with musicians 50 years ago: give us music, and we'll give you performance royalties for 50 years. The musicians accepted that, and it was a worthwhile deal for them. Yet, now, the government has decided to change the deal, remove that content from the public domain and give it to the musicians for another 45 years. This is, simply, bad policy. It encourages the exact wrong behavior: telling people that the public will pay them for work they did many many years ago over and over again. This doesn't encourage musicians to continue working and it doesn't encourage them to be fiscally responsible and save for retirement or anything.

Best Way To Store Digital Video For 20 Years

An anonymous reader writes "My kid is now 1 year old and I already have 100G of digital video (stored on DVDs, DVD quality) and photos. How should I store it so that it's still readable 10 to 20 years from now? Will DVDs stil be around, and readable, 10 years from now? Should I plan for technology changes every 5 to 10 years (DVD->Blue-ray->whatever)? Is optical storage better, or should I try to use hard drives (making technology changes automatic)? And, if the answer is optical, how do you store optical disks so that they last?"

Exploding Asteroid Theory Gains Evidence

About 13,000 years ago, woolly mammoths roamed the North American continent and the first known human society in that region, known as the Clovis civilization, lived there as well. But geologic and archeological evidence shows they both suddenly disappeared, and scientists have long debated the mystery of the mass extinction of both animals and humans about 12,900 years ago. At that time, climatic history suggests the Ice Age should have been drawing to a close, but instead rapid climate change initiated an additional 1,300 years of glacial conditions. But scientists couldn't agree on the cause of the sudden change in climate. However, about two years ago geophysicist Allen West proposed that an asteroid or comet exploded just above the earth’s surface at that time over modern-day Canada, sparking a massive shock wave and heat-generatin

Building our own asteroid

LIFE on Earth has had its ups and downs. Over the past 4 billion years, it has barely survived five mass extinction events, each most probably triggered by a collision with an asteroid or comet. Some 250 million years ago, nearly 90% of all sea species and 70% of all vertebrate land species suddenly became extinct. About 200 million years ago, another collision wiped out roughly half of all species, and ushered in the age of dinosaurs. Then 65 million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and made room for the age of mammals — including, eventually, humans.

Building our own asteroid

LIFE on Earth has had its ups and downs. Over the past 4 billion years, it has barely survived five mass extinction events, each most probably triggered by a collision with an asteroid or comet. Some 250 million years ago, nearly 90% of all sea species and 70% of all vertebrate land species suddenly became extinct. About 200 million years ago, another collision wiped out roughly half of all species, and ushered in the age of dinosaurs. Then 65 million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and made room for the age of mammals — including, eventually, humans.

EU Proposes Retroactive Copyright Extension

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy has unveiled a plan to retroactively extend musical copyrights by 45 years, which would make EU musical copyrights last 95 years total. Why? They're worried that musicians won't continue to collect royalties when they retire and this will give them an additional 45 years during which they won't have to produce any new music. Perhaps the only good point is that the retroactive extensions won't take effect for any works which aren't marketed in the first year after the extension. Additionally, while there are many non-musical retirees wishing they could get paid for 95 years after they finish working, McCreevy has not announced any new plans to help them."

Rut Roh Shaggy, Leaked details of the Palm Treo 800w

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Contest - Win a 16GB 3G Apple iPhone

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iPhone vs. Xperia X1 vs. HTC Touch Diamond

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VistaPerfection 2.0 for the iPhone

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Exclusive Video of the Palm Treo 800w Surfaces

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Palm Treo 800W Photo!

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International Companies Require China-Specific Patent Strategies

Shanghai, China – May 22, 2008: China, one of the world’s largest and most promising markets, has seen a 20 percent annual increase in patent application filings over the last fifteen years. In 2007, the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) of China received 694,153 patent applications, an increase of 21.1 percent over the previous year. These applications included filings for all three types of patents granted in China: Invention patents (valid for 20 years from the date of filing), Utility Models (valid for 10 years), and Design patents (also valid for 10 years). With regard to invention patents (20 year patents), China is currently third in the world behind the United States and Japan. In its latest study, Evalueserve, a global research and analytics firm, forecasts that if patent filings in China continue to grow at the current r

Blackberry Owners can now Sync with iTunes

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iPhone 2.0 Apps. They are Good! But Good Enough?

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Europe's Ancestors: Cro-Magnon 28,000 Years Old Had DNA Like Modern Humans

Some 40,000 years ago, Cro-Magnons -- the first people who had a skeleton that looked anatomically modern -- entered Europe, coming from Africa. A group of geneticists, coordinated by Guido Barbujani and David Caramelli of the Universities of Ferrara and Florence, shows that a Cro-Magnoid individual who lived in Southern Italy 28,000 years ago was a modern European, genetically as well as anatomically.

NSFnet — 20 Years of Internet Obscurity and Insight

coondoggie writes "The National Science Foundation (NSF) reissued the words that started the Internet revolution 20 years ago today: 'The NSFnet Backbone has reached a state where we would like to more officially let operational traffic on.' That was the email sent to users of the NSF's fledgling NSFnet to announce that the network's backbone had been upgraded to a 'blazing T-1 speed.' NSFnet was created by NSF a few years earlier in an attempt to create a computer network similar to the Department of Defense's ARPANET. When the original six-node, 56 kilobits-per-second NSFnet backbone went into operation in 1986, NSF made the decision to allow any academic, governmental or commercial entity to hook up to this network of networks. Within a few weeks of going online, traffic on the new network began doubling every few weeks.

India needs 5 years to catch up with China in patent filings

New Delhi: Last year, India filed patents only one-seventh in number of that done by China. And now the country stands at a level that was achieved by its neighbor as long as 10 years ago, says a study by global analytics firm Evalueserve, which says the gap will remain for up to further five years, reported Mint.

Long-lost Vivaldi opera staged in Prague after more than 270 years

Argippo, an opera by the famous Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, was last heard in the early 1730s. It disappeared just a couple of years after its premiere and was believed to have been lost forever. Until, that is, a determined Czech musician discovered the piece in a sheaf of anonymous scores in a collection in the Bavarian town of Regensburg. Last Saturday the lost Vivaldi opera was performed for the first time in over 270 years in the grand setting of the Spanish Hall at Prague Castle. The man who found it - conductor and harpsichordist Ondřej Macek – was also in charge of its direction.

You, Too, Could Be Batman In 10 To 12 Years

jmcbain tips a fascinating interview in Scientific American with a professor of kinesiology and neuroscience (and a 26-year practitioner of Chito-Ryu karate-do). The question was, how much training would it take for a normal person to become Batman? The professor says: "You could train somebody to be a tremendous athlete and to have a significant martial arts background, and also to use some of the gear that he has, which requires a lot of physical prowess... In terms of the physical skills to be able to defend himself against all these opponents all the time, I would benchmark that at 10 to 12 years." The problem is, even after that amount of training, no one could remain on top of their game for more than a few years. And "Batman can't really afford to lose.

Getting Rid of Staff With High Access?

HikingStick writes "I've been in the tech field for over 15 years. After more than nine years with the same company, I've been asked to step in and establish an IT department for a regional manufacturing firm. I approached my company early, providing four weeks notice (including a week of pre-scheduled [and pre-approved] vacation time). I have a number of projects to complete, and had planned to document some of the obscure bits of knowledge I've gleaned over the past nine years for the benefit of my peers, so I figured that would give me plenty of time. That was on a Friday. The following Monday, word came down from above that all of my privileged access was to be removed — immediately. So, here I sit, stripped of power with weeks ahead of me.

is Firefox 3 that good?

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Of Late, Fewer Sunspots Than Usual

esocid writes "The sun has been laying low for the past couple of years, producing no sunspots and giving a break to satellites. Periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, but this period has gone on longer than usual. The sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, with the next cycle just beginning and expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. Today's sun, however, is as inactive as it was two years ago, and scientists aren't sure why. In the past, solar physicists observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots, coinciding with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700.

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