BB reader zestypete was among many who wrote in to point us to this bit of news:

Since Cory's not immediately available to kvetch about this, here's an annoying bit of news from today's Times Online in the UK:

"People who illegally download films and music will be cut off from the internet under new legislative proposals to be unveiled next week. Internet service providers (ISPs) will be legally required to take action against users who access pirated material, The Times has learnt.

Users suspected of wrongly downloading films or music will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their internet contract if caught a third time, under the most likely option to emerge from discussions about the new law."

Now there's a bit of entirely unenforcable legislation that they're likely to push through regardless.

Link.

Breaking cover from my paternity leave again with an important bit of news: Neil Gaiman's publisher HarperCollins have given him the green light to do a free (as in beer) web-release of one of his books and Neil's running a poll to see which one he should put online -- go vote! They'll leave it up for a month and track sales -- if the experiment succeeds, they'll do more.

What I want you to do is think -- not about which of the books below is your favourite, but if you were giving one away to a friend who had never read anything of mine, what would it be? Where would you want them to start?

Link (Thanks, John!)

I'm still on paternity leave, but a couple of matters have come up that are too important to wait (important enough to blog while my daughter naps on my chest!). Here's one from Michael Geist:

The fight over the Canadian DMCA is heating up as the Industry Minister Jim Prentice prepares to introduce one-sided, dangerous copyright legislation despite thousands of letters and protests against the bill. Nearly 40,000 people have joined the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group to fight the bill, but lobby groups and the U.S. government are responding with misleading opinion pieces and behind the scenes lobbying.

Copyfighting law prof Michael Geist takes apart a Microsoft editorial that claims that the Canada has no copyright law even after it received the largest award for copyright infringement in Canadian history. Meanwhile, the Canadian Recording Industry Association has been caught lobbying the Canada's Ambassador to the United States in an effort to convince the U.S. government to increase the pressure for a Canadian DMCA. If that weren't bad enough, Prentice is about to overrule the Canadian Foreign Minister who wants to have a debate on the WIPO copyright treaties before the Canadian DMCA is introduced just like the Conservative government promised in the last election.

Ready to fight back for your digital rights before it's too late? Check out the list of Copyright MPs who are particularly vulnerable on copyright, join the Facebook group, attend a talk this week in Calgary with Prentice, and write to your Member of Parliament and Industry Minister Prentice.

Clayton sez, "This awesome game company is releasing their second title using a blissfully elegant DRM free system. The game installs from the DVD, then you play the game. No DVD required in the tray, no internet connection. The Code Key that comes with the games allows you access to updates, patches, extra content, and the free ability to simply download the game to any computer should you lose your disc. Considering the crappy DRM on BioShock last summer, this is a huge step forward. The link containts their no nonsense understanding that to truly avert piracy, you must make your product worth buying, not loaded up with non user friendly DRM. These guys really deserve some credit. The game, a Turn Based, RTS strategy hybrid set in space, looks fantastic too."

With Galactic Civilizations II, we put no copy protection on the CD. But to get updates, users had to use their unique serial # in the box. That’s because our system is backed by TotalGaming.net’s unique SSD service (secure software delivery) which forgoes DRM and copy protection as we know it to take a more common sense (I think so anyway as a gamer) approach of just making sure you are delivering your game to the actual customer.

Any system out there will get cracked and distributed. But if you provide reasonable after-release support in the form of free updates that add new content and features that are painless for customers to get, you create a real incentive to be a customer.

Link, Link to buy Galactic Civilizations II

Stephen sez, "The Sony 'Connect' DRM-tastic music store is closing shop on March 31, 2008. Another failed experiment in DRM is leaving its paying customers out in the cold with soon-to-be unusable content (unless you violate the DMCA) in the form of audio files DRM locked to Sony's ATRAC media players. Yet another in a seemingly endless stream of examples of how media companies are punishing their paying, legitimate customers for the RIAA's own infuriating technological shortsightedness."

What will happen to my library (content I own)? You will continue to be able to play, manage, and transfer the music in your SonicStage library and on your ATRAC player. For music purchased via CONNECT, this means you may continue to enjoy it as usual in your current PC configuration in accordance with our terms of use.

To ensure continued access to your content, we strongly recommend that customers archive their library to audio CDs and/or make a backup using SonicStage.

Translation: You can continue to "enjoy" "your" music until you get a new PC or a new music player. And really, why would you want a new PC or a new music player ever again? Surely your three-year-old ATRAC player will never be truly obsolete! Link (Thanks, Stephen!)

This kick-ass "DRM: Don't Restrict Me" was apparently given to Amazon employees to coincide with the launch of the DRM-free Amazon MP3 store. Link (Thanks, Terence!)

See also: Amazon buys Audible, promises to kill DRM if we complain

Amazon's just bought audiobook provider Audible, the exclusive provider of audiobooks to iTunes, Amazon's rival for audio downloads. Even though Apple says it prefers that its suppliers deliver non-DRM media (and even though Audible's DRM does nothing to prevent piracy), Audible has a mandatory DRM policy for the books it sells. That is to say, even if they author doesn't want DRM on his or her books, Audible will only deliver those books with DRM on them. As part of the deal, an Amazon spokesman said:

Audible's audio books are wrapped in a layer of DRM, which Amazon does not plan to remove unless customers start to complain.

Mike adds, "Audible audio books are the last source of media I purchase that includes DRM I can't easily bypass. Books, of all things, should be open and protected. I shouldn't have to wear special glasses to read a particular novel - nor should I need a special player to listen to a particular novel. What do people recommend we do to show Amazon the advantage of releasing audiobooks without DRM?"

It's a good question. I'm an audiobook junkie -- I've spent thousands of dollars on Audible books over the years, hoping that the problem of DRM would never bite me in the ass. Of course, it did -- when I switched away from iTunes, I had to spend a solid month, running two Powerbooks, full time, to get the DRM off my Audible audiobooks by playing them back in realtime while capturing the audio with Audio Hijack Pro. Since then, I've learned my lesson: I order my audiobooks on CD and rip them manually, which is a huge pain in the ass, but way more future-proof than Audible's products.

Let's hope that Amazon does the right thing here, following the DRM-free ethos in its music store -- and the DRM-free ethos in the CD audiobooks it sells (I've diverted all the money I used to spent on Audible audiobooks to buying audiobooks on CD from Amazon anyway). Link (Thanks, Mike!)

Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels around the world, this electronic noticeboard from the UN's Palais des Nations in Geneva, advising delegates on which rooms to go to for meetings of the "Working Group on Arbitrary Detention" and "Committee Against Torture." I was at the Palais (which used to be a Rothschild family home and still has their peacocks roaming the grounds -- the home was given to the UN on the condition that the peacocks got to stay) to give a press conference to the UN press corps about the goings-on at WIPO, the copyright treaty body down the street. Link

Pam Samuelson, one of the world's foremost copyright scholars, is podcasting the lectures from her UC Berkeley Information Law and Policy course. Samuelson was one of the first people to criticize the DMCA, serves on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has the respect of people from all sides of the copyright debate. I've learned something every time I've spoken to Pam. There's an RSS feed for the audio, too. Link (Thanks, Mike!)

See also: Proposal to reboot and de-cruft US Copyright Law

Eirikso sez, "NRK, the Norwegian state broadcaster, just made one of their most popular TV shows available for free through bittorrent. Without any DRM or restrictions. Free for the planet to watch. Because this is a completely legal download people seems to seed it happily. Making the bittorrent technology work exceptionally well, giving the audience very high download speeds. The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation will keep on with experiments like these and try to make more content available through this technology in addition to the more traditional channels of streaming, podcasts and DVD sales."

The very popular series called “Nordkalotten 365″ has been aired on traditional TV in Norway and is now made available for download. In this series the experienced hiker Lars Monsen has traveled alone through the north of Scandinavia for one year. The first episode is already published and the next episodes will be made available as they are encoded.

The files are MPEG4 H.264, 1024×576 25fps, 3 Mbit/s. No DRM.

Link (Thanks, Eirikso!)

In my new Guardian column, "Copyright law should distinguish between commercial and cultural uses," I argue for a new kind of copyright law, one that mirrors the "folk copyright" that individuals have lived by for decades -- the alternative is to try to get kids and fans to participate in the "real" copyright, a system of industrial regulation so complex that it can barely be understood by full-time copyright attorneys.

This is a genuinely radical idea: individuals should hire lawyers to negotiate their personal use of cultural material, or at least refrain from sharing their cultural activities with others (except it's not's really culture if you're not sharing it, is it?).

It's also a dumb idea. People aren't going to hire lawyers to bless the singalong or Timmy's comic book. They're also not going to stop doing culture.

We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what's fair and what isn't at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.

Link

CJ from Utilikilts writes: "I am responsible for receiving and cataloging all the images customers send in to our web site. We use the images on our web site, in our marketing literature, etc, so we need to inform our customers about this and get a release from them. So I wrote a release they would WANT to sign! I thought you guys might get a kick out of it, after looking at all the completely asinine legaleze foisted off on unsuspecting customers... So here is our Release Form boilerplate: (note that it is also editable on our site... unfortunately nobody has edited it yet, but I look forward to someone creative doing so!):"

Disclaimer and Release: By sending this email to the Utilikilts Company LLC, I grant the Utilikilts Company LLC full rights to use the entire contents of this email for any purpose whatsoever, until the end of the universe. I understand that the Utilikilts Company LLC might use the text and images enclosed in this email on their web site, in printed or online marketing materials, or as a target on the dartboard in the executive bathroom, and I am fine with that. I mean it. I am flattered that my image or words might be used by the company in any way, shape or form.

I own a Utilikilt myself -- and cut a fine figure in it, if the strangers who've complimented me on the street about it are to be believed. Link (Thanks, CJ!)

Chloe from Portland's Reading Frenzy zine emporium -- publishers of the brilliant and highly irregular found art zine CRAP HOUND -- has sent along several interior pages from CRAP HOUND 7: CHURCH AND STATE, which goes on sale tomorrow. Enjoy! Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4, Link 5, Link 6, Link 7, Link 8, Link 9

Amazon's just announced that its DRM-free MP3 store will go global this year, selling tracks outside of the US. This is majorly good news -- as was the creation and expansion of the store. I still hate the terms of service (I'd be much happier with a ToS that said, "Do not violate copyright law," as opposed to one that said, "We've made up a bunch of additional copyright laws, like the one that says you're not allowed to loan this or give it away, and you have to obey those too"), but there are some major chinks in the record industry armor appearing here as the industry execs get scared into rationality by the twin spectres of P2P and a single-vendor-dominated music market.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that in 2008 the company will begin an international rollout of Amazon MP3, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 digital music store where every song is playable on virtually any digital music-capable device, including the PC, Mac(R), iPod(R), Zune(R), Zen(R), iPhone(TM), RAZR(TM), and BlackBerry(R). Amazon MP3 is the only retailer to offer customers DRM-free MP3s from all four major music labels as well as over 33,000 independent labels.

Link

The RPM Challenge begins on February 1 -- just a few days off -- and all over the web, musicians will work to produce an entire album in just one month. This is the music version of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and inpsires the same passion and creativity. I've had numerous writing students who participated in NaNoWriMo and used it as a way to surgically burn away their self-doubt, destructive reliance on "inspiration," and cherished illusions about the process of writing, acquiring in a mere month the kind of discipline that often takes writers many hard years to arrive at.

The rules of RPM Challenge are simple: write and record 10 songs, or 35 minutes' worth of material, in the 29 days of February, using anything and anyone you can shanghai into your project. Last year, over 850 records emerged from the competition. The RPM site will connect you with other challengers and let you offer support to one another as you go.

This is the challenge: record an album in 29 days, just because you can.

That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.

Don't wait for inspiration - taking action puts you in a position to get inspired. You'll stumble across ideas you would have never come up with otherwise, and maybe only because you were trying to meet a day’s quota of (song)writing. Show up and get something done, and invest in yourself and each other.

Anyone can come up with an excuse to say “no,” so don’t.

Link (via /.)

DeviantArt's Thumper-001 is a brilliant visual mashup artist who specializes in combining imagery from Disney and Star Wars. This stuff is inspired -- especially the notional vintage Mickey Star Tours images, Snow White and the Seven Stormtroopers and Darth Valice in Wonderland (shown here). Link (Thanks, John!)

Issue 7 of Sean Tejaratchi's seminal clip-art zine CRAP HOUND is just about to hit the stands, thanks to the good folks at Portland's Reading Frenzy, a zine store par excellance. CRAP HOUND plunders its graphics from hundreds of sources and then features them in gorgeous, endlessly fascinating mosaics and layouts. Issue 7's theme is CHURCH AND STATE, and judging by the cover, it looks like a doozy.

Crap Hound #7: Church & State, 96 pgs., 2 color cover, b/w interior, offset printed, suggested retail price of $12. This is the first all new issue of Crap Hound in 9 years! A pure but lucky coincidence makes this issue particularly apropos, as we're in an election year with a candidate declaring his intention to rewrite the constitution according to "God's standards"!

Link

See also:
Crap Hound -- seminal clipart zine -- is back!
Crap Hound No. 6 - clip art magnificence

Siva sez, "In cooperation with the Media Education Foundation and La Lutta, Free Culture @ NYU is screening Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property at 9pm on Thursday, January 31. Narrated by Naomi Klein, the film features interviews with Stanford Law's Lawrence Lessig, Illegal Art Show curator Carrie McLaren, Negativland’s Mark Hosler, UVA media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Free Culture @ NYU co-founder Inga Chernyak, among many others. This 53-minute documentary will be preceded by selections from Negativland’s new DVD, Our Favorite Things, and it will be followed by a Q&A; with Freedom of Expression® author and director Kembrew McLeod and co-producer Jeremy Smith."

Freedom of Expression Screening and Q&A; with Creators
Sponsored by Free Culture @ NYU, NYU ACM, and WiNC
Free and Open to the Public (bring ID if non-NYU)
Thursday, January 31, 2008
9:00pm
NYU's Courant Institute
Room #109
251 Mercer Street b/w Bleecker and W. 4th

Link (Thanks, Siva!)

Earlier this month, I blogged about The Black Mustang Club -- a fan-club for owners of Ford cars -- being told by CafePress that they weren't allowed to publish their calendar because Ford had contacted CafePress and demanded that the calendar be removed on the grounds that it infringed their trademarks.

A few days ago, I heard back from Ford, with a different side to the story. According to them, they hadn't said anything of the kind to CafePress -- rather, Ford had taken the opposite tack, releasing tons of pictures and bric-a-brac under generous Creative Commons license to encourage Ford fans to do cool stuff with their work.

So what happened? After a few rounds of correspondence with CafePress, here's where I've netted out:

* Ford had previously sent very stern letters to CafePress about similar projects, warning them in no uncertain terms that CafePress had better not produce projects similar to the Black Mustang Club Calendar

* CafePress contacted the Black Mustang Club and either said "Ford told us that you can't do your calendar, because they control all images of their cars" or CafePress contacted the Club and said "Ford told us that we can't can't do projects like your calendar, because they control all images of their cars" (I haven't been able to reach the Black Mustang Club people to confirm which it was, though they certainly wrote that it was the former)

* Ford has since contacted CafePress and The Black Mustang Club to say that this project and future fan-run projects (that don't imply an endorsement by Ford) are OK -- this is consistent with trademark law and a reasonable position for them to take

There's a couple of interesting lessons for Ford and CafePress to take away from this. For Ford (and companies like it), the lesson is surely to tighten the reins on your legal department. When they send stern letters to online service providers that threaten legal action, the natural outcome is that OSPs are going to get gun-shy -- and they'll tell your fans that they can't do anything and blame it all on you. The usual overkill approach from corporate counsel will come back and bite you on the ass.

For CafePress, the lesson is to take your customers' side when the law is with them. Even if Ford did tell CafePress to kill the BMC calendar, they'd have been wrong. The BMC calendar is legal -- even without Ford's blessing -- and when you protect yourself from legal liability by shutting it down, you incur PR liability by seeming like a bunch of candy-asses who can be bullied into submission by a memo from some white-shoe legal goon from a Fortune 100. Word gets around.

I don't know that we'll ever be able to find out whether CafePress told BMC that Ford was down on their specific calendar, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. Ford's earlier letters on the subject clearly scared the hell out of CafePress, and CafePress's lawyers clearly need a refresher course in trademark and liability.

There's one very good piece of news to come out of this, though: Ford's program to let its fans do whatever they want with high-quality shots of the cars is a damned forward-looking and decent bit of strategy.

For the record, here's what Ford and CafePress had to say about this:

Interesting stuff afoot in the Congressional shuffle: "Hollywood" Howard Berman (who once proposed a law immunizing the entertainment industry for hacking innocent peoples' PCs while undertaking vigilante anti-piracy activities) looks set to leave the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property and chair the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (where the pork makes the money you get from entertainment giants look like small potatoes.

Likely to replace Berman is Rep Rick Boucher, who once proposed the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA), which would have reformed the DMCA to make it legal to break DRM in order to do lawful things. He's the closest thing to a copyfighter in Congress, and you can only imagine that putting him in charge of the House Committee that handles the Internet and copyright will certainly change the game.

God knows what Berman will do once he's running Foreign Affairs, though.

There's no guarantee yet that Boucher will get the job, and he and Berman still need to win their respective elections this fall, but even the prospect of a Boucher-controlled Internet and IP subcommittee in the House feels like an early Christmas present. As the Hollywood Reporter correctly notes, though, the full Committee is still chaired by John Conyers (D-MI), who comes from the Berman School of Thought on such issues.

Link

The fantastic Atlantic Monthly magazine has dropped its paywall effective today, switching its archives (which stretch all the way back to 1857!) to an ad-supported model. First the New York Times, then the Atlantic -- as someone who's spent the past eight years linking to stuff, I love this -- MORE STUFF TO LINK TO. Thanks, Atlantic Monthly!

Beginning today, TheAtlantic.com is dropping its subscriber registration requirement and making the site free to all visitors.

Now, in addition to such offerings as blogs, author dispatches, slideshows, interviews, and videos, readers can also browse issues going back to 1995, along with hundreds of articles dating as far back as 1857, the year The Atlantic was founded.

We're pleased to bring The Atlantic before a broader online audience. We hope that the quality of its writing, the trenchancy of its insights, and the depth and thoughtfulness of its reporting will inspire many of our online readers to join the Atlantic family by becoming print subscribers.

Let the archive mining begin -- post your best Atlantic archive gems to the comment thread. Link (via The Consumerist)

(Image: ellisparkerbutler.info)

Yesterday, I blogged about an Amazon service rep who told a customer who was having problems working with Amazon MP3 files that "we are unable to release any information on how we run our ID3 tagging as it's proprietary."

Shortly thereafter, a Boing Boing reader who worked on the Amazon MP3 program said, "we don't use 'proprietary' anything," and vowed to get to the bottom of it

Now the mystery is solved!

It turns out that the user had a file-permissions problem with his Amazon MP3s -- and that there's nothing proprietary on Amazon MP3s after all:

Thanks to some help from an Amazon employee in the Boing Boing comments, we figured the initial customer service rep who told me "it's proprietary" was misinformed. This led me back to poking around on my system, at which point I discovered the mp3 files only had read permissions for my user account, when I made them readable for other users, both mpd and mt-daapd were able to find them.

This is totally awesome -- thanks to all the BB readers (and especially "AmazonMP3") for getting to the bottom of this!

Over on the Boing Boing Gadgets blog, our Joel spots a delightful solar-powered, movie-playing, game-emulating handheld computer:

This knock-off "MP4 Player" not only plays music and video, it can emulate the NES and Game Boy Color. But even better, it can be recharged with built-in solar panels. That's right: you can play Faxanadu until the sun explodes.

It comes with 2GB of memory built in, which is plenty for NES and GB ROMs, although perhaps not music and movies, and can be expanded up to another 2GB with an SD card. Oh, and it's got a USB out to which other gadgets can be connected—not for data, but to be recharged from the solar panel.

Link Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

One of the coolest things about using Creative Commons licenses on my work is how they allow readers to try stuff that I'd never be able to do on my own -- like the fan-translations of my stories.

This week, I've got news of four more fan-translations of my Radar story Scroogled, which tries to paint a picture of what the world would be like on the day that Google turned evil. The story has been translated into sixteen languages now, including the latest additions:

Japanese translation (Takashi Kurata)

Japanese translation (Yutaka Ohshima)

Slovak translation (Pavol Hvizdos)

Turkish translation (Dördüncü Göz)

Additionally, Pavol Hvizdos (who previously translated my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and my story Truncat into Slovak) has also translated my story 0wnz0red into Slovak, where he's translated the title as 0v1adany.

The MPAA study that showed that students were responsible for 44 percent of film downloading? A big old lie. And now the MPAA has admitted it:

In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus.

The MPAA has used the study to pressure colleges to take tougher steps to prevent illegal file-sharing and to back legislation currently before the House of Representatives that would force them to do so.

But now the MPAA, which represents the U.S. motion picture industry, has told education groups a "human error" in that survey caused it to get the number wrong. It now blames college students for about 15 percent of revenue loss.

Link (via /.)

As Canadian copyfighters gear up to fight the reintroduction of Industry Minister Jim Prentice's new copyright bill -- which imports the American-style Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law, despite the DMCA's widespread abuse and total failure to reduce piracy over the past ten years -- Michael Geist has given us all a powerful weapon.

Geist has produced a list of Members of Parliament in "unsafe seats" (seats won on narrow margins) whose electoral ridings include a university or college, where one might expect to find a lot of opponents of a copyright law that makes research, development, and scholarship into legally risky activities.

As Geist points out, it's one thing for Prentice -- who has a very safe seat indeed -- to introduce legislation on behalf of American entertainment industry giants without even consulting Canadian stakeholders, but it's another thing entirely for Members like Rod Bruinooge, who owes his seat to 111 voters, and who represents the 30,000 students at the University of Manitoba.

When push comes to shove, Prentice is going to have a damned hard time getting his bill through if he doesn't talk to Canadians about what they want before he crams EMI, Universal, Sony and Warner's agenda down our throats.

Want to get involved? Join the tens of thousands of Canadians who've signed up for local Fair Copyright for Canadians groups and let your MP know what side you're on. Link

See also: Canadian Privacy Commissioner rejects DRM: don't give spyware legal protection!

Sun's Adam Leventhal has made a disturbing discovery about Apple's version of DTrace, a free/open debugging tool that Leventhal helps to oversee: Apple has deliberately broken DTrace to prevent it from being used to examine the inner workings of iTunes. This is presumably in place to stop people from figuring out how to break iTunes's DRM, and as Leventhal notes, it is completely contrary to the purpose and spirit of debugging tools and open source:

Wow. So Apple is explicitly preventing DTrace from examining or recording data for processes which don't permit tracing. This is antithetical to the notion of systemic tracing, antithetical to the goals of DTrace, and antithetical to the spirit of open source. I'm sure this was inserted under pressure from ISVs, but that makes the pill no easier to swallow. To say that Apple has crippled DTrace on Mac OS X would be a bit alarmist, but they've certainly undermined its efficacy and, in doing do, unintentionally damaged some of its most basic functionality. To users of Mac OS X and of DTrace: Apple has done a service by porting DTrace, but let's convince them to go one step further and port it properly.

To paraphrase Warren Buffet, DRM is the gate to hell: once you enter, you can't leave. Apple, having committed itself to preventing users from using their computers in certain ways, must now take on a further and further-reaching set of restrictions in service of that -- locking down APIs, shipping updates that downgrade the software, exposing user privacy, breaking core development tools. No end in sight -- not until Apple decides that what you do with your computer is your own business. Link (via /.)

Chris from Biblio File sez,

This Sunday, I'll be hosting a live interview with Phil & Kaja Foglio as part of my podcast The Biblio File. Not only will the guests be live, but the audience can participate live as well, via phone, VOIP, or text chat. (A guide to how to connect is in my linkback URL.) It will be downloadable or syndicable as an MP3 afterward, per podcast usual.

The main interview topic will be a discussion of why they stopped publishing individual issues of their comic book Girl Genius and instead started giving it away free on-line, and the effect this has had on their popularity and the sales of their trade paperbacks.

However, after I finish that topic, I'll be taking questions from the live audience about anything they'd like to know, for as long as the Foglios have time to answer. (Or people can post questions here if they know they can't make it; I'll pick the most interesting ones.)

I always loved the Foglios' What's New? comics in Dragon magazine when I was a kid. Just this week, I tried my hand at painting D&D; miniatures again for the first time in nearly two decades, so it's only fitting that Phil and Kaja should come back into my life. Link (Thanks, Chris!)

Update: A reader writes, Though Dragon Magazine is no longer published (it's a paysite now), gamers have done a DIY publishing project called Kobold Quarterly. It's pretty sleek, with contributions from all the D&D; heavyweights. They just hit subscriber #1000 a couple days ago.

A recent episode of Public Radio International's To the Best of Our Knowledge dealt with remix, reuse, and plagiarism, talking to some of my favorite people on the subject:

Author Jonathan Lethem talks to Jim Fleming about his "Harper's" Magazine essay, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism." As the subtitle indicates, Jonathan Lethem appropriated the words of many authors to cover the subject of plagiarism, although he provides full attribution of his sources at the end of the essay. Also, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid) talks to Anne Strainchamps about his book, "Rhythm Science," and how the art of music sampling relates to plagiarism. We also hear a DJ Spooky/TTBOOK interview mashup.

MP3 Link (Thanks, Brett!)