 Monday, June 27, 2005
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Zombie dogs...
SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans.
US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.
Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.
The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.
But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.
But can it sing "Putting on the Ritz"?
(Via Slashdot)
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An historic decision from the Supreme Court today ruled that file sharing services such as Grokster can be held liable for illegal downloads of copyrighted content.
Now, there's a fair amount of hysteria floating around the web today about its implications - eWeek for example says the decision overturns a famous case about VCR's: in this earlier case the court ruled that Sony couldn't be held liable for people recording movies onto tape. (How lame that sounds today.) But in fact the Court specifically and explicitly upheld Sony today.
I think the Court's decision was reasonable, prudent and balanced. Basically it says that if you create a technology with the specific intent of enabling its users to infringe copyright, then you're liable. This is very different from the VCR case in which VCR's are (were) used for lots of other quite legitimate purposes.
What makes this so fascinating (to me, at least) is that there were great points to be made on both sides. As a content creator myself, I certainly want to enjoy the fruits of my creative labors (if any!), and so I favor copyright on principle. Conversely, as Larry Lessig likes to point out, restricting copyright and "freeing" content allows culture to more quickly build upon itself.
Still, I imagine people will be interpreting the Court's decision for a while. Does the question of intent mean that the Court can subpoena notes from engineering meetings, as Fred von Lohmann of the EFF suggests? Where does TiVo fall in all this? (No more fast-forwarding past commercials, maybe.)
UPDATE: The other question this raises is what about foreign file-sharing services? The fact of course is that the Internet respects few national boundaries and so one could imagine that p2p companies could, in fact, transplant themselves into countries whose intellectual property rules vary from ours. This is something I don't think the Court came to terms with.
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