Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
Yesterday I encountered vintageworshiptapes.com, a site which is: A project to preserve classic worship music from the golden era of Harvestime worship music. Awake, O Zion! I should explain that in the late 70′s and early 80′s, there were a series of annual bible weeks held at showgrounds in the United Kingdom as part of the [...]
I spent some time today reading the online French translations of the poems of Sidonius Apollinaris. I was very struck by the way that the poet appeals repeatedly to the works of the early empire, to Horace and Sallust and Varro and Tacitus. I saw no mention of any later writers, indeed. This evening I found [...]
A curious report on the BBC today, indicating that the British government is pretty much owned by the music and book publishing industries. Under the plans users suspected of accessing or uploading illegally copied files will be sent letters from their internet service provider (ISP), delivered at least one month apart, informing them they are [...]
So I learn, from an article by Prof. Christopher Kelty at — of all places –aljazeera.com. Kelty’s article is required reading: READ IT! A couple of snippets: Last week a website called “library.nu” disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. Library.nu (formerly [...]
Quite by accident, I came across an interesting article which throws new light on why copyright is not quite what it is generally supposed to be. Copyright is not a moral axiom. There is no teaching in the bible that states it, nor is it self-evident. The idea behind it is that people should be [...]
Via the BBC: Football match fixture list copyright claim rejected Football authorities in England and Scotland have had a court claim over football fixtures’ copyright rejected. European judges said compiling match fixture lists needed “significant” work, but did not entail the creativity required for copyright protection. Yahoo, bookmaker Stan James and sports information firm Enetpulse [...]
An article in the Daily Mail today makes grim reading for every website author, if you pay attention and ignore the “eBook” angle: eBook pirates cash in on Kindle sales boom as thousands turn to rogue sites for cheap downloads … there are fears that their profits could be hit by a the sheer number [...]
An interesting snippet at political blog Guido Fawkes: Back in July the Sunday Times’s FOIs revealed that senior Downing Street officials have had over twenty meetings with Google since the election. Accusations of preferential treatment were thrown around when Hilton, whose wife is a Google VP, did not declare all of his meetings with the group. This is [...]
None of us object to those who create original works receiving payment for their labours. But those of us who place stuff online — usually stuff long forgotten, where the creators have never received much, and are in any case long gone — find it a real problem. The problem is that copyright has become [...]
The book is still selling well, I think. Amazon are fulfilling orders quite quickly, or so I hear, which says that they are holding stock and, pleasingly, selling them! Carol Downer and her team, who did the translation of the Coptic fragments, are thinking about translating more of the Coptic catena. I am encouraging them! [...]