The latest salvo in the so-called copyright wars came two days ago as the US president George Bush signed into law the Pro IP Act,
much to the dismay of progressive copyright law advocates and those who
back the idea of a ‘remix’ culture allowing innovative artistic works
using digital media.

Erick Schonfeld writing for TechMeme sums up: "Chalk this one up as another victory in the copyright wars to the
reactionaries who don’t want anything to change. They think that
copyright law written in the pre-digital age needs to be reinforced
instead of rethought."

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Lawrence Lessig
calls for an approach that encourages creativity amongst amateurs
without threatening the professionals’ profits, and indeed that
appreciates the far-reaching impact of social media on our society’s
development: "[This] ‘remix’ culture could drive extraordinary economic
growth, if
encouraged, and properly balanced. It could return our culture to a
practice that has marked every culture in human history — save a few
in the developed world for much of the 20th century — where many
create as well as consume. And it could inspire a deeper, much more
meaningful practice of learning for a generation that has no time to
read a book, but spends scores of hours each week listening, or
watching or creating, ‘media.’"

Go Larry. 

All the news that’s fit to mix and mash

From the blinkered to the clear-sighted, we move to news that the New York Times has launched its first application programming interface – with a little help from San Francisco startup Mashery – which opens up the paper’s presidential campaign finance data from the US Federal Election Commission.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb
is thrilled by the news, saying: "Reporting is no longer a scarce
commodity. It’s hard for these huge
news organizations to do it faster, cheaper or even as well as a whole
web of new media producers around the world. They may be among the top
sources for original content still today, but considering the direction
technology is moving in – that’s not a safe bet for the future. [...]
We believe that steps like this are going to prove key if big media is
to thrive in the future."

Kirkpatrick gives props to The Guardian as "the best example
of a newspaper that understands the opportunities in becoming a broker
of machine-readable data, instead of just human readable content. [...] The times are changing and if you’re not publishing for
those readers of yours who happen to be robots – you’re missing out on
an important constituency."

All this innovation in
preparing content for the web is matched by similar strides in refining
the way we browse said web. While humanity’s striving has yet to
produce the perfect browser (IMNSHO), let it not be said that people
aren’t trying. Between the launches of Firefox 3,  Chrome and now Flock 2, it’s been quite a year for web browsers.

Touting
itself as ‘the social web browser’, Flock has since its launch been one
of those weird bits of tech that sounded great but just didn’t hit the
spot for a lot of people used to the idea of stripping functionality
out of a browser just to speed it up. But the 18-34 year
old-users-of-at-least-two-social-services demographic which Flock has
its sights on might well swing the other way now that Flock 2 sports
Firefox 3 technology under the hood and MySpace and media RSS feed
support built in.

TechCrunch’s Mark Hendrickson says the only missing feature in this release is instant messaging support, though he reports it’s in the works: "No word yet on when it will launch
but it sounds like Flock’s most important feature at this time,
especially now that MySpace support has been released."

ReadWriteWeb says Flock adoption is still niche: "Given our current obsession with social media, not to mention the issues of fatigue, burnout, and noise,
you would think that a Firefox-based web browser like Flock would have
seen greater adoption among social media fans. Yet the numbers for
Flock still dwarf those of Firefox. Flock has seen 6 million downloads
in total (3.8 million since its 1.0 release), but Firefox is killing
them with with well over 500 million downloads. It’s possible that
without MySpace support, Flock’s would-be fans simply saw the browser
as incomplete. We wonder if that will change now."

CenterNetworks‘ Allen Stern describes Flock 2 along the lines of a new couch: "At first it’s hard and a bit uncomfortable but after you sit on
it a few times, you find the sweet spot and life is grand. Flock
requires a lot of setup but once it’s customized to your needs, it
works well. The key for Flock is figuring out how to get users to their
sweet spot as quick as possible."

- Basheera Khan