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Below is the text of a letter that I emailed and mailed (first time I’ve sent anything other than cheques by regular mail in a long time), to Jim Prentice, Gary Lunn (my member of Parliament), and Prime Minister Harper. I was inspired by a BoingBoing post I read this morning.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper
e-mail: HarpeS@parl.gc.ca
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

December, 8, 2007

Prime Minister Harper,

I have voted for the Conservative party my whole adult life, so I hope the rumours that my party is about to introduce a version of the DMCA in Canada is not true. I work in at the University of Victoria Library, so I know how important fair use is for creativity to flourish.

DRM systems do little to protect intellectual property right holders works, and criminalize fair use behavior that most people would consider reasonable. Most people are honest, and want to pay for the digital content they use. DRM makes those digital harder to transfer between devices, and encourages people to look for non illegal non DRM sources for digital content.

Thank-you for your time.

Rich McCue
1813 Penshurst Rd.
Victoria, BC
V8N 2N6

I saw a post on TechCrunch last week about this software, and I’ve finally got around to testing Screencast-o-matic, and I’m glad I did. Not only is the software free to use, but it is very easy and intuitive to use. In fact it is so easy that I’ve used the software to create a screen cast (or visual tutorial) to show you how it works.

As a systems administrator who also supports a number of end users on PC’s, I see how a tool like Screencast-o-matic could make my life easier by allowing me to quickly create a tutorial (like how to add a new printer). I can then post it on Google video, and the next time someone asks me how to add a printer, I simply send them a link to the video. You also have the option of hosting the screen cast on the Screencast-o-matic web site if you sign up for an account (no account is necessary to do screen casts though).

You also have the option of recording audio with your screen casts (or not). This can make the process of creating a screen cast much quicker, which is what is probably the most important feature for me. For people looking for full featured screen cast software, you’ll probably want to keep looking. Here are some of the things that Screencast-o-matic cannot currently do:

• Add labels to the screen cast.
• Visibly indicate when a button has been pressed.
• Bookmark different points in the screencast for fast forwarding

While not for everyone, Screencast-o-matic is great for people who want to try out screen casting. Commercial screen cast software pricing starts at about $400, so you can’t beat the price / performance ratio of Screencast-o-matic. The software is also cross platform, and will run on all Windows, Mac and Linux computers that have Java (or JVM) installed. One other good opensource option is CamStudio, but unfortunately it is windows only software.

If you are not a geek, you probably have no idea what the head line for this blog post means. If I were a citizen of the United States, living in the US, I would have just broken the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by simply having posted the following jumble of numbers and letters:

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

Why you ask… Well, that jumble of letters and numbers is the hexadecimal key needed to decrypt and watch the new HD DVDs. According to US law, because I am publishing information that could help someone circumvent copy protection software, I am breaking the DMCA. The knowledge and software tools to break the copy protection of regular DVDs has been widely known for some time now.

So why would I want to circumvent the copy protection of a HD DVD, or a DVD for that matter… unless I were a criminal wanting to steal the contents of the DVD? There are a number of reasons why:

1. If I want to play a HD DVD on my laptop, there is currently no way to do it unless I circumvent the copy protection and copy the contents of the DVD on to my laptop. Currently there are very few laptops with HD DVD drives.
2. If I want to play a HD DVD on my Linux computers at home I will have to circumvent the copy protection. There are no legal HD DVD players for Linux. If I want to play a HD DVD on my Linux computers I will have to use "illegal" software to do so (using the above key).
3. If I want to play a HD DVD on my iPod I will have to circumvent the copy protection to do so.
4. If I wanted to take a small piece of video to play as part of a class presentation (which is perfectly legal under the fair use doctrine in copyright law) I would have to break the DMCA in order to capture that little bit of video.

The copy protection built into HD DVDs severely limits how and where I can watch the movies. In the case of the iPod, I could pay for another version of the movie so I would watch it on my iPod, but I don’t really want to pay double just to watch the movie on another device. Buying multiple copies of the same movie would make the Movie Picture Association of America (MPAA) happy though; and richer. Somehow I think greed and the buying of politicians votes are part of this long and sordid story.

In any case, once the hex key had been discovered (The person who cracked the key said he did so in order to watch movies on his laptop), someone posted the key to the Digg.com social web site. Shortly after, Digg received a DMCA take down notice from lawyers representing the group who created the HD DVD encryption technology. Digg took down the posting, but it was immediately posted again, and promoted to the home page. Digg tried to take down all the postings, but by Tuesday evening they had given up. Every single page promoted to the home page of the web site had the offending key in the posting. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, wrote on his blog:

After seeing the hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Kevin and the Digg community know how moronic and unfair the Movie industry is behaving. Real criminals will not be stopped by the DMCA or copy protection. They only hurt people who want to have some choice in how they consume their digital content.

Canada does not yet have an equivalent to the DMCA, but it looks like it might be coming. Michael Geist, a law professor, talks about the "Canadian DMCA" which will probably be introduced in Parliament this spring, in the guise of copyright reform. Write your federal politician, and let’s make sure we don’t get our own version of a very bad law.

I’ve been doing a bit of research lately for a project I’m working on at my day job. The project is a program to help law students learn how to effectively do legal research. The program is call the "Legal Research Record".  The first version of it was written in Java, and runs on Windows (I haven’t tried it on a mac).  As alpha software it is quite buggy, but it serves a valuable purpose as a proof of concept.  I personally would like to see it moved over to a web interface, and it sounds like I’m not alone in that setiment.  Much easier to maintain and update that way, and for students, they can use it on which ever computer they happen to be using at the moment (in the computer lab, on their laptop, or at home).

The draw back to this is, that any practicing lawyer would not want to host any client research information on a 3rd party web server.  A couple of options I’m exploring to get around this problem are XAMPP, and UniformServer. What both of these software packages allow you to do is to install a LAMP, or WAMP software stack on a computer or even a thumb drive, and run the web application on a desktop PC.  This stores the data on the PC or USB thumb drive, getting around the reluctance of lawyers to use 3rd party services.

From the UniformServer web site:

The Uniform Server is a WAMP package that allows you to run a server on any MS Windows OS based computer. It is small and mobile to download or move around and can also be used or setup as a production/live server. Developers also use The Uniform Server to test their applications made with either PHP, MySQL, Perl, or the Apache HTTPd Server.

It will be interesting to see how well this works in practice. In particular, I’ll be interested to see how easy it is to upgrade the web application, and maintain the data in the database.  For the record, XAMPP will run on Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX computers.

Here are some great, inspirational web designs for anyone needing to re-do their web site. All use CSS, so the look an feel can be changed independently of the site data.

read more | digg story

It’s not just people who steal software who have to worry - when you buy a Microsoft product, you’re buying a lifetime of fear of audit and legal persecution. So says the new recruitment campaign by OpenOffice.org, "Get Legal - Get OpenOffice.org", launched today. Why pay $150 if you are a student, or $400 for everyone else for a word processor and spread sheet program? OpenOffice is free, and works just as well for 99% of the population!

read more | digg story

I just finished writing a paper on Personal Knowlege Management for Researchers.  You can find a full copy of the paper here.  Here the Executive Summary from the paper:

The increasing volume of digital information with which researchers’ work is making the task of finding, capturing, organizing and eventually collaborating with digital data more difficult.  Electronic information in multiple formats sitting in multiple silos of data present a challenge to researchers who have difficulty finding a specific piece of information in a timely fashion.

The two major benefits that come from effective knowledge management and knowledge sharing are an increase in the speed and quality of the research being performed. Less time is spent looking for information that has already been identified or created, so that more time can be spent in analyzing and associating disparate pieces of information. Modern electronic tools make possible collaboration between colleagues that in the past would have been difficult, expensive, or impossible.  Voice and video conferencing over high speed research networks can facilitate real time collaboration at a fraction of the cost in time and money of flying members of a research team to a central location. On line collaboration tools can greatly facilitate group document creation and editing, and when it comes time to polish the final product, real time document editing makes it possible for groups scattered around the world to review a document together and make edits together.

Once researchers have the appropriate software to manage their data and help them collaborate, they need to make sure that they also have the appropriate hardware and infrastructure to take full advantage of the benefits the new software will give them. Access to high speed research networks is a must for video and voice conferencing, as well as real time document editing. An average desktop computer with two monitors, instead of the traditional single monitor, will give researchers a 10% + boost in productivity. Finally a web camera and good quality head phone/microphone rounds out a well equipped research workstation.

Whether they realize it or not, most researchers are struggling with the mountains of digital data that they have accumulated during their careers. If shown the tools available to them to find, capture and collaborate,  many, if not most, will start to use some of these knowledge management tools to increase their productivity and effectively manage and collaborate with their data.

I came accross an interesting posting about the Geek Corps .  Basically experience IT people who volunteer their time to go to developing countries to help make the benefits of technology more accessible to the population.  They are typically looking for people to help take a four month sebatical to help out, and they pay airfair and basic living expenses while abroad.  Here is some text from their web site:

Geekcorps, a division of IESC, promotes economic growth in the developing world by sending highly skilled technology volunteers to teach communities how to use innovative and affordable information and communication technologies to solve development problems.

This looks like a wonderful way for IT to give back. 

I was looking for some info on mind mapping software this past week (preferably open source), and I found an article that references me of all people.  The article was in the American Law Librarian Association’s Comptuer SIS magazine.  You can see it here. The article in question starts on page 13. From the beginning of the article by Eric W. Kistler of Ehrhorn Law Library at Liberty University School of Law in Lynchburg, Virginia:

Back in October, Rich McCue, from the University of Victoria, posted to Teknoids
a list of his favorite Open Source software packages for law students. I became
intrigued by an item near the end of his list called “FreeMind.” In Rich’s words,
FreeMind “is a mind mapping software that is great for brain storming, and
organizing projects, or your thoughts . . . Give it a try, it is a wonderful
product.”

The e-mail Eric references is here. 

Very interesting article on the relative accuracy of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica by he scientific magazine "Nature". They compared 42 articles in both the encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Experts in their field were given the task to check for factual errors. To the surprise of nature, both encyclopedias were containing similar amounts of errors. The verdict? Almost no difference!

read more | digg story

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