Thursday, March 30, 2006

Copyright clothes?

Another bad idea:

[T]hose inexpensive copies could be history if the Council of Fashion Designers of America has its way in a new anti-copying campaign in Washington.

Designers like Diane Von Furstenberg, Narciso Rodriguez and Zac Posen have been journeying there to lobby for copyright protections like those governing books, music and other creative arts. Mr. Posen was in Washington on Tuesday with Steven Kolb, the executive director of the council, who said a bill could be introduced in Congress as early as today by Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican. [...]

“That is the most ridiculous thing,” Mr. Schwartz said. “There is no such thing as an original design. All these designers are getting their inspiration from things that were done before. To me a spaghetti strap is a spaghetti strap, and a cowl neck is a cowl neck.”

Google subpoena: Tip of the iceberg

Information Week:

In its effort to uphold the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), the U.S. Department of Justice is leaving no stone unturned. Its widely reported issuance of subpoenas to Internet search companies AOL, MSN, Google, and Yahoo is just the tip of the iceberg: The government has demanded information from at least 34 Internet service providers, search companies, and security software firms.

Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by InformationWeek, the Department of Justice disclosed that it has issued to subpoenas to a broad range of companies that includes AT&T, Comcast Cable, Cox Communications, EarthLink, LookSmart, SBC Communications (then separate from AT&T), Symantec, and Verizon.

Asked which companies objected to, or sought to limit, these subpoenas, Department of Justice spokesperson Charles Miller declined to comment because the litigation is ongoing. He also declined to comment on utility of the information gathered by the government. [...]

The full list of companies subpoenaed by the Department of Justice includes: 711Net (Mayberry USA), American Family Online, AOL, ATT, Authentium, Bell South, Cable Vision, Charter Communications, Comcast Cable Company, Computer Associates, ContentWatch, Cox Communications, EarthLink, Google, Internet4Families, LookSmart, McAfee, MSN, Qwest, RuleSpace, S4F (Advance Internet Management), SafeBrowse, SBC Communications, Secure Computing Corp., Security Software Systems, SoftForYou, Solid Oak Software, Surf Control, Symantec, Time Warner, Tucows (Mayberry USA), United Online, Verizon, and Yahoo.

Via John Battelle.

A history of porn

From Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing:

I love how the timeline does one humongous warp-speed leap from the 1400s to Dr. Ruth. Guess there wasn’t much shagging going on for 500 years! Snip:

1st century BC - Kama Sutra was created
1440 - Gutenberg Press Invented
1928 - Dr. Ruth was born.
1953 - Hugh Hefner starts Playboy
1965 - Bob Guccione starts Penthouse
1968 - Al Goldstein starts Screw
1969 - First mainstream movie to represent the swinger lifestyle - Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Directed by Paul Mazursky
1970 - Penthouse shows pubic hair for the first time.
1970 - Notable Porn Movies - Cycle Studs - Le Salon (Gay)
1971 - Notable Porn Movies - The Boys in the Sand - Wakefield Poole (Gay)
1971 - First condom to appear in a movie - Carnal Knowledge, Directed by Mike Nichols

1972 - I graduate high school… The porn timeline continues - the iPod is included but no mention of MySpace or webcams? - after the jump.

Read the rest of "A history of porn" in the extended entry.

Child pornographers

Is this really the way to handle this?

Two teenage girls face child pornography charges after posting sexually explicit photographs of themselves on the Internet.

The pornographic pictures of Elizabeth Muller, 19, of North Smithfield, and an unidentified 16-year-old Lincoln girl were discovered on MySpace.com, a social networking Web site, said a spokesman for the attorney general’s office.

The photos of the two teenagers together were posted on each of their respective Web site accounts, spokesman Michael Healey said. [...]

A police officer assigned to Lincoln High School, where the girl was a student, discovered the photographs while monitoring the Web site.

I’ll say again and again that there are serious issues here to be dealt with. Criminalizing and arresting teenagers is not the way.

Advertising is in the toilet

Remember chic bathrooms in New York? I do. (None here.) They were often ad filled. AdFreak found one in Germany where a newspaper’s urinal mirrors deliver ‘the truth’:

We’ve got a urinal theme going this morning. First we looked at Brazil’s urinal soccer games. Now we see that the newspaper Bild has installed tilted mirrors above urinals in Germany, more or less forcing men to contemplate their masculinity while taking a leak. The headline on the mirrors delivers the newspaper’s brand message while at the same time insulting the viewer (or at least the less-endowed viewer): ”Nothing is harder than the truth.”

And in other urinal news, Falcon Waterfree Technologies got a million dollars in the Department of Defense spending bill signed by President Bush last December for a Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative.

Oink!