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Tags: a-decent-free, a-new-calendar-, a-real-hassle, answers, browser, Education, free, learning, online, website-here, websites
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Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
 The Digital Media Copyright Act, otherwise known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or simply the DMCA, is a Federal copyright law that was meant to curb Internet piracy of digital media. The bill passed in the U.S. Senate by unanimous decision on October 12, 1998 and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton seventeen days later.
Since that time, the DMCA has been implemented in many notable court cases and heavily criticized by society. It is essentially the law that made it illegal to download copyrighted digital media such as music, movies, and software, and is what the RIAA and MPAA have used to combat piracy in the courts.
So exactly what is the Digital Media Copyright Act and what’s all the commotion about? Well, the DMCA is still a heated topic today because of its use in the fight against online piracy and its effects on Internet users. This article serves to educate those on what is in the DMCA and how it affects the everyday Internet user.
So What Is the Digital Media Copyright Act?
The DMCA is comprised of five titles and implements two treaties signed at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Geneva conference in 1996. The five titles are as follows:
- Title I: WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act
- Title II: Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act
- Title III: Computer Maintenance Competition Assurance Act
- Title IV: Miscellaneous Provisions
- Title V: Vessel Hull Design Protection Act
Now that’s a lot of legal wordiness and doesn’t really explain the key points of this document. Allow me to translate this for you. I will list the important points made in this law doctrine and cite examples of how they have influenced activity on the Web.
Circumvention
The DMCA restricts the ability to make, sell, or distribute devices which circumvent (or get around) copyright protection. This means you are not allowed to make or use programs that allow users to get by any technical measures that control access to a copyrighted work.
“It is illegal to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in a device or service which is primarily intended to circumvent copyright protection.”
Under this Act, it is illegal for you to ‘crack’ commercial software, sell or distribute any software used for cracking commercial software, or make unauthorized copies of copyrighted DVDs and CDs.
File Sharing
The illegal file-sharing of copyrighted materials is probably the most widely known and openly discussed effect of the Digital Media Copyright Act. It is illegal to host, share, or download copyrighted works, including music, movies, books, software, etc.
We have seen a lot of programs/websites over the years fall in the courts under violation of the DMCA (or its backings), most notably Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire.
There is still an ongoing debate over whether or not ‘linking’ to—that is, not hosting yourself—infringing content is illegal. This is primarily the case with torrent websites.
We have seen websites like The Pirate Bay, ISOHunt, and Mininova lose in court because they provide links to infringing material and make file-sharing very easy for peer-to-peer (P2P) users. Although none of the copyright infringing material is physically on their websites, it’s pretty much an aiding and abetting mentality.
Safe Harbor
Title II of the DMCA creates a safe harbor for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) against copyright liability if they meet the guidelines and block access to—or remove—allegedly infringing material after receiving notification from the copyright holder.
A safe harbor is a legal term that means as long as the ISPs comply with the copyright holder’s request (and take down the material) then they will not be held legally accountable for the infringing material.
We’ve seen this on YouTube. Have you ever come across a video that has been “removed at the request of the copyright holder”? Most recently, we’ve had to witness the death (and rebirth!) of the ‘Rick Roll’ on YouTube.
This provision of the DMCA has been openly criticized for making it too easy for copyright owners to take down infringing content and links, alleging that often times the material that is removed might not actually be infringing in the first place.
Conclusion
In summary, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act lays the groundwork for all Internet-related copyright law and is the basis that a lot of court cases and online activities are carried out on.
The document does have other miscellaneous provisions and sections attached to it, like the modified section in Title III, which states that those repairing computers are allowed to make certain, temporary copies of materials while working, but the three things covered in this article (circumvention, file-sharing, and safe harbor) are the primary effects of this Act and constitute the majority of actions and criticisms that this law has undertaken.
What do you think of the DMCA? How has it affected your actions online? Do you pay for digital music and movies or download them for free? Are you a pirate?
Leave your comments below!
Image Credit: Horia Varlan, everyskyline, mkwilbur
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What Is the Digital Media Copyright Act?
Tags: bankruptcy, digital, digital-media, feature, law, legal, miscellaneous, online, riaa, sharing
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Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
 Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.
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Tags: browser, cool web apps, free, online, post, receiver, resolutions, study, thoughts, websites
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Monday, March 8th, 2010
Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.
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Sunday, March 7th, 2010
 Like many of you, for the past few years I’ve been using Google Reader to subscribe to blogs and news feeds. Instead of having to go out and scan each and every one of my favorite blogs for new and interesting content, I can read; share; tag; favorite and organize my favorite posts directly in Google Reader. It saves me a valuable abundance of time.
Google Reader is not only one of the best RSS feed aggregators out there, but it can also be used as a powerful system to archive rss feed data you may want to access in the future. Anything that has an RSS feed can be backed up and archived with Google Reader for access long after the feed is gone. Here are just a few ideas on the types of data you can archive this way.
How do you know if an RSS feed is available for the site you’re browsing? Just keep an eye out for the RSS icon. Those little orange “RSS” icons are littered all over the web, and they are so common that sometimes we don’t even notice they are there. Well…start noticing them!
Archive Your Tweets
One of the primary ways I use Google Reader as an archive is for backing up my Twitter stream. If you’ve ever tried to go back and find something you tweeted last year, you’ll realize it is a slow and painful process using the Twitter interface. However, by adding it to Google Reader you’ll be able to load and browse through your timeline much quicker since the data is actually stored by Google, not by Twitter.
You can tag, search, organize, and share past Tweets exactly the same way you can with all of your other items in Google Reader. This in itself is extremely powerful. For example, maybe you’ve recently conversed with a potential customer on Twitter and you’d like to keep your statements on record and easily accessible. Simple enough: tag those Tweets with something like “prospect.” Later in time if you wish to re-visit that conversation, just go to the “prospect” tag in Reader.
Keeping with the Twitter theme, you can also archive Twitter searches. If you recently participated in a Twitter-based chat around a specific hash-tag, simply grab the RSS link from a search query for that hash-tag on search.twitter.com and you’ll be able to read the details of that chat months down the road. Anything that is search-able can be archived by Reader, not just hash-tags. You can keep a backlog of results for any search query and just archive the RSS feed of the results.
Archive the RSS Feed of Your Blog Content
Since most of what folks read in Google Reader are blog posts, it’s no surprise that it can function as an archive for your own blog. While you should always be backing up your blog database itself anyways, Reader can act as a backup to your backup. You’ll still be able to browse the content of each and every blog post you’ve written in the event of a crash.
Along with your actual blog posts, you can usually also grab an RSS feed for the comments that people leave on your blog. Once again, you’ll be able to utilize all of Reader’s features to organize, tag, search, and share past comments.
Archive Your To-Do List
In the past I’ve tried several different free “to-do” apps and recently found that Ta-Da List by 37Signals (also free) allows me to collaborate with my clients on prioritizing and completing small updates for them. This app conveniently offers an RSS feed that is updated every time a task gets added or marked as completed. Adding that feed to Reader, I am able to go back and view each and every task we’ve worked on together through time, whether it’s still listed in Ta-Da List or not.
If It’s Available In RSS, Feed It To Reader
Google Reader is free and will most likely always be free. So far there’s no limit on how many feeds you can add to it. Take advantage of that. Any RSS-enabled data that you may want to archive for future retrieval should go into Google Reader. It’s definitely an app that is useful for more than just reading blogs.
Are you using Google Reader to archive any other types of RSS-enabled data? Share your tips!
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Continue reading here:
3 Ways To Use Google Reader As An Online Archive
Tags: calendar, clients, feeds, google, google reader, google-contacts, News, online, online-services, tips, tweets, web apps
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Saturday, March 6th, 2010
 In the first part of this article, we presented various ways for you to stay social on your regular cell phone thanks to SMS. SMS services abound nowadays and can make your regular mobile phone as reliable as smartphones without even the need for a data plan. It all depends on whether you’re aware of these SMS-integrating services.
This second part of this series on SMS tips and tricks will focus on productivity services that you can reach by SMS. They can simplify your usual web activities on-the-go. You must be aware that having an unlimited messaging plan will benefit you greatly if you follow our advice here because you’ll start texting a lot. If you don’t have such a messaging plan, be ready to pay your mobile company’s extra fees.
Be Productive
- View books and documents: BooksInMyPhone and ManyBooks offer lots of downloadable ebooks for Java-enabled phones (which you probably have if you own a regular phone that you got in the last five years.) So unless you don’t prefer these methods, you can try setting up an account with DailyLit, a bonus site from the top 6 sites for free books, that sends you snippets or installments of books in the form of email or RSS on a day-to-day basis for free. To be able to view books from DailyLit on your phone, it’s recommended to go to Settings and under Your DailyLit Reading, click on Manage the books you’re reading.
Select Plaintext Unicode in Installment Text, otherwise, you’ll see ugly HTML codes in your phone message later. Now use Gmail filters to forward DailyLit installments to your phone’s email. You could also email any plain text documents to your phone for view-only so you can read them while you’re waiting in-line somewhere.
- Transcribe messages or notes: You know you can create notes by calling Reqall which will transcribe the message you leave and can then be accessed on the Reqall website.
Alternatively, you could use Google Voice’s transcription service to transcribe your notes by calling SlyDial (this site lets you head to someone’s voicemail directly) first and then your own Google Voice number. Since you get a transcribed copy of your message in Gmail, you don’t even have to go to the Google Voice page if you don’t want to. If you rather not hear SlyDial’s 10-second ads, follow the easy guide to set up your non-GVoice number in a group to which you’ll direct to voicemail right away here.
- Create and backup your notes: If you express yourself better by typing, try creating your notes in your phone’s built-in note application and then emailing your finalized notes to backup sites.
Some great note repository sites include Evernote (since you get a personalized email to upload notes) or your Gmail (with the appropriate filters to move the message to the appropriate label).
You can also text your notes to your own Google Voice number so you’ll be able to view them on the Google Voice site later.
One downside from the popular Google Voice and Evernote services is the fact that you can’t retrieve your notes. GluNote is a simple Twitter tool that saves your notes and retrieves them for you by DM. When you want to retrieve your notes, DM Glu with search keywords and it will send you back the notes that contain your words. Registration is virtually non-existent as you can easily get started by just following @Glu which will follow you back. After that, you’re ready to shoot some notes. RememberTheMilk’s Twitter bot can also help you retrieve lists (Shopping, Work To-Do’s, etc) as we will explain in the next section.
- Add to your calendar/to-do list and get reminders: Google Calendar has been featured over and over because it’s just a simple but powerful calendar app where you can create events and get reminded by text message. Heck, you can even be notified by GCal when someone contacts you on Pidgin.
Main things to remember: Set up notifications in the GCal website so that you get an SMS reminder 10 minutes (or 10 days) before the event. Add 48368 to your Contacts in your phone as GCal and text it any event or to-do with a date and time. Any time you want to know what’s in your agenda, text GCal “next” for your next event or to-do, “day” for today’s agenda, and “nday” for the next day’s.  Alternatively, RememberTheMilk lets you add tasks via SMS to your personalized email while its Twitter integration lets you direct message the service to also add tasks, get reminders and retrieve lists (e.g. shopping list). This is a great deal considering the applications for smartphones such as the iPhone app and MilkSync for BlackBerry/WinMo require you to have a Pro account.
- Get reference information, accurate translations, driving directions and answers to any question:
 Save 466453 (“GOOGLE”) in your Contacts as it will be your useful companion for any web searches you’d perform on Google.com. Just be sure to remember certain keywords for input, such as “weather,” “flight,” “movies” and even name of hallmarks and restaurants to get your information. The same contact can be used to translate words as we’ve explained before why Google’s translation service rocks. Just text “translate WORD to LANGUAGE” and get your WORD translated back in a few seconds. For some quick directions, text “directions pasadena ca to 94043.”  You can also SMS 242-242 (Chacha) to ask literally any question or 44636 (4info) for a service similar to Google.
- Save, backup and archive your text messages by forwarding your texts to your Google Voice number or directly texting to your family and friends through their GVoice-designated numbers. Or try DM @MyEN to archive your text messages to Evernote.
- Track your expenses: There are several services from our great list of expense tracking tools that are worth mentioning here. Texthog and Buxfer both excel as expense and budget tracking sites, where you can see beautiful pie chart and bar reports of your expenses, which you can input with a quick SMS to your personalized email (instructions for Buxfer/Texthog) or by sending a direct message to @Buxfer or @TextHog on Twitter.
Texthog doesn’t pull transactions from your online bank accounts so you can rest if you’re worried about privacy, but you can export/download transactions to Quicken, MS Money, etc. on both Texthog and Buxfer. Some differences are that Buxfer offers the option of uploading your bank statements manually or automatically to the site and makes it easy to add IOUs. Read more on Texthog here and Buxfer here. BillMonk is another dedicated expense/IOU-tracking service that you can read more about here. If you prefer something simpler, check out TweetWhatYouSpend.
Play
- Shopping: See a product at the store and think you could buy it online at a better price? Text your product’s name to 262966 (AMAZON’s TextBuyIt), get search results with price information and buy it!
- Entertainment: ChaCha is the service we recommended to find reference information and we second it again because it’s truly an amazingly helpful service that you can even set to send you weather, jokes, etc at a specific time daily. Here’s how you can Set Up a Fav on ChaCha.
Miscellaneous
While you’re making use of your regular phone, why not also take advantage of these bonus non-SMS tools that you can use on your regular phone? For a free call to anywhere in the world, call 1-800-FREE411 and say “Free Call” when prompted. You’ll have to wait through two short ads and you can talk for a maximum of 5 minutes, but there are no limits on how many times you can call. This service and Google’s GOOG411 number both offer free directory services.
Also, if your phone supports taking pictures and videos, that probably means you can play media on it. You may think it’s troublesome to mess with transferring files, but here’s something that will facilitate your media transferring: Use a file converter that understands your phone.
Daniusoft’s Online Converter is a free tool that elegantly describes the right video and audio file formats that your phone can take in. The user-friendly approach makes it easy for newer users to convert files to transfer to their phones, but it also features settings for more advanced users to tweak, such as frame rate, encoder, bit rate for videos and audio files, which can be as large as 100MB in size.
We weaved our way through plenty services today that we hope will generate more appreciation of the existent features in your regular mobile. Want to recommed services that I missed? If not, which ones do you find yourself using the most? You may really enlighten fellow readers who aren’t familiar with these services.
Photo credit: Sarah Jones, j0438320, j0442135, j0436075, j0439835w
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How To Make Your Regular Mobile Phone Smarter With SMS/MMS (Part 2)
Tags: android, daily, Featured, google, iphone, media, mobile, News, online, reading, sms, Videos, voice
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Friday, March 5th, 2010
 Have you heard of EtherPad? EtherPad is an online document collaboration tool which works in real time. In other words, EtherPad has allowed multiple people to work on the same document at the same time over the Internet. Real time collaboration could have many benefits such as collaborative note taking during meetings, have a team draft a document together in real time, and even allow for team programming.
Recently EtherPad announced that they have been acquired by Google in order to help develop Google Wave. One step they’ve taken is to open source the code so others can run their own Etherpad servers allowing the functionality to live on (instructions).
Well, Chris Pirillo, along with partner Jake Warner, have taken the challenge and have “frozen in time” the functionality of EtherPad and have created the site TypeWith.me which turns out to be a quick and dirty document collaboration tool. Free, easy, point and click functionality. In fact, they don’t even require any registration. Let’s take a look at what TypeWith.me can do with online document collaboration.
The front page makes beginning the process super simple and gives us one humongous button entitled “Click to Create a New Document.” To begin, click the button (obvious, right?)
You have now begun your online document collaboration process. The very next screen is the beginning of the document you will be working on. Notice that although your document is technically “public”, no one will see it unless you share the personal URL for it.
TypeWith.me makes sharing this URL very easy. You can have up to 15 other collaborators at any point but more can join as people leave.
Each collaborator chooses a color to indicate changes they have made. In the right sidebar you will see those who are currently collaborating and a chat window.
Beneath the sidebar there are buttons allowing you to hide/show the sidebar and toggle the use of the whole window. In order to get more use out of TypeWith.me, check out the tool bar along the top of the screen. The options menu allows you to enable/disable authorship colors and the line numbers and to change the font type.
There are several file formats you can import and export.
One of the cool features of TypeWith.me is that you can save the document at any time and you can revert to any point you have saved in the past.
Another cool feature is the Time Slider which lets you go back and watch a recording of the document being worked on. The stars indicate points that have been saved.
That’s it! So basically it turns out to be a no-nonsense online document collaboration tool; no frills. What makes it this way?
- No registration required.
- Point and click ease of use.
- Best of all… free!
Like I mentioned before, the previous owners of EtherPad are now working on Google Wave and have released the code so sites like TypeWith.me can use it. Right now Google Wave is in private beta and is arguably complicated. There are other services that offer online document collaboration but TypeWith.me is a quick and easy one. Check it out.
What online document collaboration tools do you like to use?
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TypeWith.me – A Quick & Dirty Document Collaboration Tool
Tags: a-quick-and, collaboration, contacts, functionality, google-wave, office worker, online, time, tool
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Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
 If you’ve got a yen for online journaling but aren’t ready to expose your innermost thoughts to the world, Penzu is worth a look. It combines a slick blogging platform with solid privacy features, offering fine-grained control over who sees your writing.
This free, web-based service has an easy-to-use interface—sign up for a free account, click the New Entry button, and start typing. You can also upload pictures to your entries on the fly from your computer or a Flickr account. Penzu’s great privacy features let you lock down individual posts, or all your entries, depending on your preference. Alternatively, you can email an entry to someone anonymously, or via your Penzu identity.
To dress up your entries with themes, or to access more robust privacy features, step up to the Pro Plan for $19 per year. You’ll also get rich text formatting, importing options, tagging, and more customization options.
Even if you already have an online journal or blog, Penzu is worth checking out. Since its accessible from any computer with an internet connection, it’s a good fit for keeping a weight loss or fitness journal, penning private notes back and forth with your sweetheart, keeping grandparents updated on what your kids are doing, or just communicating with a roommate when your in-person schedules don’t mesh.
See the article here:
Penzu Keeps Your Online Journal Private and Secure [Journals]
Tags: a-free-account, a-good-fit, a-weight-loss, computer, entries-on-the, flickr, free, loss-or-fitness, online, online-journal, penning-private, sweetheart, updated-on-what
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Monday, March 1st, 2010
So last week’s Make Use Of poll covered what your favorite office suite was. We offered up either Open Office of Microsoft Office. Open Office came out ahead and some other interesting answers popped up in the comments.
Check them out and if you haven’t voted, feel free to chime in now! So far there are 1,084 votes. 568 for Open Office and 459 for Microsoft Office.
This week we will be asking you – our loyal MakeUseOf readers if you backup your files and how? We want to know how and if you backup your computer. What software and hardware do you use, if any? You can choose multiple options to facilitate your answer. And if any clarification is needed, that is what the comments are for.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.
Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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MakeUseOf Poll: Do you Backup your Files? How?
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Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.
