NewsScan Daily, 3 November 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 3 November 2003 ("Above The Fold")
***********************************************************
NewsScan Daily is underwritten by RLG, a world-class organization
making significant and sustained contributions to the effective
management and appropriate use of information technology. NSD is
written by John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas, [email protected].
***********************************************************

"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        MIT Music-Sharing Scheme Silenced
        Amazon Turns Over a New Leaf on Book Searches
        Microsoft Plays Catch-Up with Google
        Number Portability Could Trash Millions of Cell Phones
        Web Littered with Abandoned Sites
        Sendmail Enlists Cloudmark in Spam Battle

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: Sugarcoating

MIT MUSIC-SHARING SCHEME SILENCED
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has temporarily shut down its 
Library Access to Music System, which made headlines last week for the 
ingenious way it dealt with sticky music copyright issues. MIT's move was 
prompted by complaints from music companies that they had not granted legal 
permission for their songs to be piped over the school's analog cable TV 
network. The students who created the service -- Keith Winstein and Josh 
Mandel -- protested the industry's claims, noting that they had purchased 
the songs "fair and square" from Loudeye, a Seattle-based music 
distribution firm that described its library in a news release as 
containing "approximately 48,000 licensed digital music tracks." The 
students had even double-checked with the Harry Fox agency, which licenses 
music for the National Music Publishers Association, and which initially 
had concluded that no extra licensing was necessary. It has since changed 
its mind, and a Loudeye spokesman says, "We provided content to MIT, (but) 
we did not provide licenses for them to issue that content." Harvard 
University professor Jonathan Zittrain says this latest brouhaha simply 
illustrates the increasingly arcane nature of copyright law. "It doesn't 
seem that MIT was trying to steal anything, but rather to simply hew to the 
letter of the law in an incredibly Byzantine area. Good faith and technical 
genius alone doesn't make it work." (New York Times 3 Nov 2003)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2003/11/03/technology/03mitt.html

AMAZON TURNS OVER A NEW LEAF ON BOOK SEARCHES
Amazon says its new "Search Inside the Book" feature does not allow users 
to print pages from within books, allaying authors' fears that unscrupulous 
readers might use it to print out recipes, hotel recommendations or other 
such reference material. Amazon VP Steve Kessel refused to confirm that 
Amazon had changed the feature to prevent such abuses, citing security 
concerns, but acknowledged that 15 authors had requested their books to be 
removed from the Search the Book database. Up until Friday, according to 
Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken, the Search Inside the Book 
tool allows users to search the complete text of a book for words or 
phrases and print out pages where the phrases appeared. That feature 
appears to be disabled, said Aiken, who praised the feature but said "we 
just think it needs a little work." (AP 31 Oct 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20031101/D7UHG5SG0.html

MICROSOFT PLAYS CATCH-UP WITH GOOGLE
Microsoft is beefing up its search services and has recruited Paul Ryan, 
former chief technology officer at Overture Services, to help it compete in 
fast-growing field. Search engines have become a powerful starting point 
for many Internet users and a major focus for advertisers. MSN now ranks 
fourth in the Web search market, where Google reigns as No. 1. According to 
a report by the New York Times Friday, Microsoft executives have approached 
Google about the possibility of a takeover, but Google was not interested. 
Some observers say the combination would be a poor fit -- Google's 
corporate culture features a strong independent streak and a preference for 
non-Microsoft software, particularly the Unix and Linux operating systems. 
(Wall Street Journal 3 Nov 2003)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106781727175496100,00.html

NUMBER PORTABILITY COULD TRASH MILLIONS OF CELL PHONES
Some industry experts are predicting that the new cell phone number 
portability rules that go into effect November 24 could result in millions 
of discarded phones heading toward landfills, leaking toxic metals and 
chemicals into the ground. As many as 30 million wireless customers are 
expected to switch companies within the first year, and they'll all need to 
buy new phones. And while the industry has launched an effort to supply 
recycling bins in stores and refurbished phones to charities, the problem 
of toxic components will persist until handset makers change how they make 
their devices. The European Union is already on the case, issuing a new 
directive this year to require makers of phones and other electronics to 
eliminate lead, mercury and brominated flame retardants from new products 
by mid-2006. Most of the toxic substances are found in the circuit board, 
the LCD display and the battery. "We need to work with industry to change 
the design of phones to make them more reusable and recyclable and less 
toxic," says the director of the solid waste prevention program at Inform. 
(AP/CNN.com 31 Oct 2003)
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/10/31/sprj.ws.cellphone.garbage.ap/index.html

WEB LITTERED WITH ABANDONED SITES
The Web is cluttered with pages and whole sites long ago forgotten by their 
creators -- political campaigns from yesteryear, personal projects that 
lost their pizzazz, and even Y2K sites that commemorate a catastrophe that 
never happened. And while it's easy to imagine losing interest in the 
effort required to update and maintain a Web site, the same phenomenon is 
evident among the Web's latest obsession -- blogging. One study of 3,634 
weblogs found that two-thirds had not been updated for at least two months 
and about 25% hadn't changed since the day they were launched. "Some would 
say, 'I'm going to be too busy but I'll get back to it,' but never did," 
says Jeffrey Henning, chief technology officer with Perseus Development 
Corp., which conducted the study. But while some users resent slogging 
through out-of-date content, others complain that sites disappear too 
quickly. "I do hear pretty frequently not so much that there's deadwood, 
but that sites go away without a trace," says Steve Jones, a communications 
professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (AP/Tampa Bay Online 2 
Nov 2003)
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA72KGMJMD.html

SENDMAIL ENLISTS CLOUDMARK IN SPAM BATTLE
Sendmail, whose open-source software routes corporate e-mail to and from 
the 'Net in 90% of Fortune 1000 companies, is dropping Elron Software in 
favor of Cloudmark's antispam filtering tools. The deal is a boon for 
Cloudmark, which could see its revenues increase by 50% next year, 
according to Sendmail CEO Dave Anderson. Sendmail chose Cloudmark after 
testing 42 antispam products over the past several months, says Anderson. 
The deal signals further consolidation among e-mail software companies in 
an effort to provide one-stop-shopping for corporate clients. "This is a 
sign of the rampant partnering in the e-mail hygiene market," says Meta 
Group analyst Matt Cain. (CNet News.com 2 Nov 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5101065.html

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Being defeated appears to be an inexhaustible wellspring of 
intellectual progress." (Reinhart Koselleck)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: SUGARCOATING
      "One of the secrets of Lincoln's success as a communicator was his 
skill in the use of figurative language, of which metaphor is the most 
common example. To be sure, a number of Lincoln's metaphors were dead on 
arrival. He complained of dealing with people who had axes to grind; he 
said more than once that he wanted everyone to have a fair start in the 
race of life; he referred to the ship of state and its navigational 
problems during his presidency. But Lincoln could neatly turn a seemingly 
dead metaphor into a live one. In a message to a special session of 
Congress, he critically reviewed the long and, as he put it, sophistic 
attempts by Southern leaders to legitimize their actions with arguments for 
state sovereignty and the constitutional right of secession. 'With 
rebellion thus sugar-coated,' said the president, 'they have been drugging 
the public mind of their section for more than thirty years,' and this war 
was the result.
      "The government printer objected to the phrase about sugar-coating 
the rebellion, telling the president that 'You have used an undignified 
expression.' Lincoln replied: 'That word expresses precisely my idea, and I 
am not going to change it. The time will never come in this country when 
the people won't know exactly what sugar-coated means.' Lincoln was right: 
People knew exactly what he meant then, and his metaphor retains its 
pithiness today."
                                 ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0425184587/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for James M. McPherson's "How Lincoln Won the War with Metaphor" in the 
collection "With My Face To The Enemy (ed. By David Herbert Donald) -- or 
look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book 
recommendations to adult literacy programs.)

SUBSCRIPTION INFO FOR NEWSSCAN DAILY:
      To subscribe or unsubscribe to the text, html, or handheld versions 
of NewsScan Daily, send the appropriate subscribe or unsubscribe messages 
(i.e., with the word 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line) to 
the addresses shown below:
      Text version: Send message to [email protected]
      HTML version: Send mail to [email protected]
      NewsScan-To-Go: http://www.newsscan.com/handheld/current.html

TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT NEWSSCAN DAILY! Send them our little frog: 
http://www.newsscan.com/newsscan/newscup.html

***********************************************************
Please visit the site of RLG, the great organization that makes NewsScan 
Daily possible. (RLG has no influence over, nor any responsibility for, our 
editorial content.) Created in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group, RLG is 
a not-for-profit membership corporation of more than 160 universities, 
national libraries, archives, museums -- and other institutions with 
remarkable collections for research and learning. Its major initiatives are 
long-term retention of digital materials, resource sharing among member 
institutions, and improvement of researcher access to primary source 
material. RLG supplies online research resources worldwide. Visit RLG at 
http://www.rlg.org.

*********

To subscribe or unsubscribe to the TEXT version of NewsScan Daily, send an 
e-mail message to [email protected] with 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' 
in the subject line. To subscribe to our HTML version of NewsScan Daily, 
send mail to [email protected], with the word 'subscribe' as the 
subject. (Subscribing to the HTML version won't automatically unsubscribe 
you from the text version; please unsubscribe yourself as explained above.) 
Please note: To unsubscribe from an account to which you no longer have 
access, send mail to at [email protected].

*********

We call our news section "Above The Fold" to honor the tradition of the 
great "broadsheet" newspapers in which editors must decide which news 
stories are of such importance that they should be placed "above the fold" 
on the front page. The NewsScan Credo: Be informative, have fun, and get to 
the point! See http://www.newsscan.com/, and send us mail: John Gehl 
<[email protected]> and Suzanne Douglas <[email protected]>, or call 
770-704-7517.

*********

Get a free 6-week trial subscription to Innovation Weekly, an executive 
summary of trends, strategies and innovations in business and technology. 
Send mail to [email protected] with the word 'subscribe' in the 
subject line.

What customized news and information services do you need for your company? 
Get in touch with us at [email protected] or call 770-704-7517 to talk 
over the possibilities.

Copyright 2003. NewsScan Daily (R) is a publication of NewsScan Inc.
***********************************************************