Author Archives: Brock Read

June 19, 2009, 12:25 pm

24 Songs Shared, Nearly $2-Million in Fines

Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s 2007 trial didn’t end well. That fall Ms. Thomas-Rasset, the first peer-to-peer-piracy suspect whose case reached a civil trial, was found guilty of sharing 24 songs on KaZaA, the once-popular file-sharing service, and ordered to pay $220,000 to Capitol Records. Then she got a second shot: The judge who had heard that case called a mistrial, explaining that he had given the jury improper instructions.

But for Ms. Thomas-Rasset, trial No. 2 turned out far worse than the first one. Yesterday a federal jury again found her guilty of sharing those 24 songs, this time adding charges of “willful infringement,” and hit her with a $1.92-million penalty.

That’s $80,000 per song, a rate that even the RIAA might not have dared to expect. Ms. Thomas-Rasset called the figure “kind of ridiculous,” according to the Associated Press, but she didn’t say whether she would appeal the …

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April 30, 2009, 8:35 am

Have Wikis Run Out of Steam?

By Brock Read

Just a few years ago, it seemed nearly everyone, in academe and out, was hailing the wiki as the next great transformative technology — or, at the very least, a tool worth getting a bit excited about. Fast forward to 2009, though, and much of the enthusiastic talk has died down.

So says Renay San Miguel in an article for Linux Insider, and he’s got something of a point. Wikipedia aside, there really aren’t many heavily hyped wiki projects, and social-networking tools like Facebook and Twitter seem to have stolen the spotlight. So Mr. San Miguel wants to know: “Have wikis lost their mojo?”

It’s worth noting that plenty of wiki-friendly concepts and innovations have been absorbed into other formats, as anyone who’s participated in group editing via Google Docs can attest. But there are other reasons that wikis never took the world by storm, according to some analysts. “I always thought they …

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April 14, 2009, 2:11 pm

Microsoft’s Encarta, Rendered Obsolete by Wikipedia, Will Shut Down

By Brock Read

Microsoft has announced that it will soon euthanize Encarta, the onetime encyclopedia-of-the-future that has lost much of its luster in the last decade. But the company really didn’t have much choice in the matter: For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia had fatally shivved Encarta some time ago.

And Microsoft admits that. In recent years, “the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed,” the company said in a statement on the shutdown. “People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.” So there’s really only one question left to be answered: Should Encarta be mourned?

Christopher Dawson of ZDNet certainly doesn’t think so. The demise of the encyclopedia, he argues, should simply galvanize educators into teaching the research skills students need to wade through “brutally powerful knowledge sources” like Wikipedia an…

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April 1, 2009, 12:28 pm

A Wikipedia Administrator Tells the Web Site’s Story

By Brock Read

By now, if you’re even moderately interested in Wikipedia, you’ve probably had the chance to read any number of lengthy articles on the Web site’s meteoric rise. So why bother with a whole book on the topic? In the case of Andrew Lih’s new tome, The Wikipedia Revolution, the answer is simple: The author is a longtime site administrator, and he has enough pull in the community to get Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, to write a foreword. So, for all intents and purposes, this is Wikipedia: The Authorized Biography.

Let’s get this out of the way now: The Wikipedia Revolution (subtitled How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia) paints a reasonably rosy view of the open-source encyclopedia. In Mr. Lih’s telling, Wikipedia’s neutral-point-of-view policy “has worked remarkably well,” its “clinical, just-the-facts style” is “endearing,” and the site itself is “a…

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March 9, 2009, 10:35 am

The Open-Source Encyclopedia, Now in Hardcover

By Brock Read

Need a gift for that open-source enthusiast in your life who happens to have some bookshelf space to fill? A German company called PediaPress has come to the rescue: For a not-unreasonable fee, it will create a book that compiles your favorite Wikipedia articles.

PediaPress has been at this since January, when it started printing volumes drawn from Wikipedia’s German-language edition, but late last month it added to its repertoire six new languages: French, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Simple English (from a version of the encyclopedia written for children and for adults learning English as a second language). Regular English is on its way soon. It’s taking longer to work out the kinks, though, since that encyclopedia is so massive.

Assembling a book is pretty easy: Wikipedia has set up a Web site that lets you drag-and-drop your way through the process. A 100-page book will set…

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March 6, 2009, 3:51 pm

Wikipedia and Twitter Drive a Web 2.0 Whodunit

By Brock Read

When Jeremy Boggs, a graduate student in history at George Mason University, stepped away from American Idol to look up Langston Hughes’s Wikipedia page Tuesday night, he could scarcely have imagined that he’d end up helping to inform police about a threatened school shooting in St. Louis. Then again, the Internet can be a strange place, as an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch points out.

The Post-Dispatch has a complete blow-by-blow of Mr. Boggs’s unusual evening, but here’s the quick version: The page on Langston Hughes, it turned out, included a strange and threatening piece of vandalism (“I GO TO LIFT FOR LIFE ACADEMY… I’M GOING TO SHOOT EVERYBODY AT THAT SCHOOL…”). Unsure whether it was a prank or something more sinister, Mr. Boggs posted a message on Twitter, the instant-blogging service, asking his colleagues what to do.

The first response came from Marjorie McLellan, a history…

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February 20, 2009, 3:10 pm

What Does Wikipedia Mean for the Future of Expertise?

By Brock Read

The rise of Wikipedia seems to have afflicted some scholars with a mild case of existential panic. And understandably so: When the world’s most popular reference tool is such an egalitarian outfit, that can be interpreted as a fairly stiff challenge to the value of expertise, right?

It most certainly can, writes Larry Sanger in a new article on “The Fate of Expertise After Wikipedia.” But fear not, scholars: Expertise, he says, will win out in the end.

Seasoned Wikipedia watchers are already familiar with the saga of Mr. Sanger: He was there with Jimmy Wales when the online encyclopedia was founded (and, in fact, when its predecessor, Nupedia, was conceived), but he left Wikipedia in 2002 because he felt the site’s credentials-be-damned approach benefited vandals and kept away scholars. In 2006 he unveiled Citizendium, a competing encyclopedia that entrusts editing power to approved…

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October 29, 2008, 12:41 pm

The New Face of Piracy Prevention?

By Brock Read

Colleges that want to fight piracy without resorting to draconian peer-to-peer clampdowns might be intrigued by an Ars Technica report about a new project that aims to turn illegal downloaders into legitimate consumers.

But there’s no way to know yet whether Brilliant Digital Entertainment — a venture started by an Australian music-industry official and a former employee of KaZaA — will have a hit or a flop on its hands. Here’s how the service, called the GlobalFileRegistry, is supposed to work: It intercepts illegal attempts to download music, movies, and software, and then redirects would-be pirates to online stores that sell the same content. If all goes as planned, writes Ars Technica, “the new customer has legal software, piracy has been averted, and everyone goes home happy.”

But there are a couple of potential sticking points, as the Web site goes on to point out. For starters,…

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October 20, 2008, 2:50 pm

Where Have All the Legal Downloading Services Gone?

By Brock Read

In its new report, “The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance,” the Campus Computing Project makes clear that many colleges are spending a lot of money — more than they’d like — to keep students from downloading pirated music and movies. But one of the report’s most interesting findings concerns what colleges aren’t paying for: legal alternatives to peer-to-peer piracy.

Just three of the 321 institutions surveyed for the study reported spending money on a legal music or movie library, says Kenneth C. Green, the Campus Computing Project’s founding director. That number would almost certainly have been higher in 2005, when dozens of colleges had purchased licenses to use commercial services like Napster, Cdigix, and Ruckus. According to an Educause survey from that year, nearly one in five institutions were considering signing a contract with a legal downloading service.

So what happened in the…