Yer OUT!

A Modest Proposal: Three-Strikes for Print

By Ed Felten - May 13th, 2009

Yesterday the French parliament adopted a proposal to create a "three-strikes" system that would kick people off the Internet if they are accused of copyright infringement three times.

This is such a good idea that it should be applied to other media as well. Here is my modest proposal to extend three-strikes to the medium of print, that is, to words on paper.

My proposed system is simplicity itself. The government sets up a registry of accused infringers. Anybody can send a complaint to the registry, asserting that someone is infringing their copyright in the print medium. If the government registry receives three complaints about a person, that person is banned for a year from using print.

As in the Internet case, the ban applies to both reading and writing, and to all uses of print, including informal ones. In short, a banned person may not write or read anything for a year.

A few naysayers may argue that print bans might be hard to enforce, and that banning communication based on mere accusations of wrongdoing raises some minor issues of due process and free speech. But if those issues don't trouble us in the Internet setting, why should they trouble us here?

Yes, if banned from using print, some students will be unable to do their school work, some adults will face minor inconvenience in their daily lives, and a few troublemakers will not be allowed to participate in -- or even listen to -- political debate. Maybe they'll think more carefully the next time, before allowing themselves to be accused of copyright infringement.

In short, a three-strikes system is just as good an idea for print as it is for the Internet. Which country will be the first to adopt it?

Once we have adopted three-strikes for print, we can move on to other media. Next on the list: three-strikes systems for sound waves, and light waves. These media are too important to leave unprotected.

Transperth "Bus"

They remind football fans at Subiaco Stadium that public transport is an alternative to the congestion and parking problems on match days.

Volvo XC60"Ski Boots"

Volvo Norway sponsors Norway's premier Alpine resorts. They are constantly looking for new ways of communicating their sponsorship. To create buzz and awareness around their premium SUV model Volvo XC60, ski boots were redecorated and turned into the car itself.

Sundown Solar Protection

Sundown Solar Protection: an ad that reacts under the sun just as your skin would. Magazine insert that invites the reader to discover an image that shows who uses and who doesn't use Sundown. When exposing the insert to the light (UVB rays), the man, that apparently doesn't use the product, becomes very red, while the woman, with Sundown in her purse and on her body, maintains a sun tan. The redness ceases once the image is taken away from the light.

Scala JWT Egg Fight

Every Easter all Romanians engage in an age long tradition, that no one seems to know, or, indeed, care, where it came from. They pick what they believe to be the strongest egg in the basket and they smash it against another, chosen by one of their friends, along with the words "Christ is resurrected", to which the opponent answers "He is resurrected indeed". It's always difficult to pick up the strongest egg for the fight and everyone has his own method or tricks. Scala JWT Bucharest decided to add a twist on another age old tradition - intricately decorating the Easter eggs - by providing their friends and clients with a set of stickers designed to pimp the unsuspecting eggs for the big battle.

Blackwell's unveils Espresso Book Machine - any title printed while you wait

It's not elegant: it looks like a large photocopier. But the Espresso Book Machine could herald the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented his printing press more than 500 years ago.

Unveiled today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch, in central London, the machine prints and binds books in five minutes.

Blackwell believes the introduction signals the end to the frustration of being told a title is out of print or not in stock. The Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton's Book of Needlework.

The company hopes to increase the catalogue to more than a million titles by the end of the summer, the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space or more than 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are out of copyright, but Blackwell is working with UK publishers to increase access to in-copyright writing. So far the response has been overwhelmingly positive, the firm says.

"This could change bookselling fundamentally," said Blackwell's chief executive, Andrew Hutchings. "It's giving the chance for smaller locations, independent booksellers, to have the opportunity to truly compete with big stock-holding shops and Amazon ... I like to think of it as the revitalisation of the local bookshop industry. If you could walk into a local bookshop and have access to one million titles, that's pretty compelling."

The Espresso can cater to a wide range of needs from serving academics keen to purchase reproductions of rare manuscripts to wannabe novelists needing a copy of their self-published novels, says Blackwell, which will be monitoring its use to decide pricing and demand. The plan is to roll out the innovation across the 60-store network, with the flagship Oxford branch likely to be an early recipient as well as campus-based shops.

The Espresso is the brainchild of the American publisher Jason Epstein and was a Time magazine invention of the year. It proved a star attraction at the London Book Fair this week, where it printed more than 100 pages a minute, clamping them into place, then binding, guillotining and spitting out the (warm as toast) finished article.

Described as an "ATM for books" by its US proprietor On Demand Books, the Espresso machine has been established in the US, Canada and Australia, and in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt.

The Charing Cross Road machine is the first to be set up in a UK bookstore. It cost Blackwell about £120,000, but Phill Jamieson, head of marketing, said: "It has the potential to be the biggest change since Gutenberg."

Taken from The Guardian and thanks for pointing this article out: David Colpitts at david@digitaljoy.ca

Zohra Mouhetta "Lose Your Belly"

The brief was to design a business card for fitness trainer Zohra Mouhetta. To stand out from all the leave-behinds people receive every day, they designed a unique, foldable business card that invites the recipient to interact with it. In a world of standardized and formatted business cards, Zohra’s card stood out and made for a memorable hand out. Its design not only complemented her profession, but also demonstrated the effectiveness of her personal training programmes by inviting the recipient to tear off excess flab. Though exact response rates were not available at the time of this submission, the number of enquiries and sign-ups, including corporate clients, increased substantially within a month.

Liu Shuang "Acupuncture"

To communicate in a very low cost way their client's Acupuncture Services, to the general public in general and Western Expatriates in particular. The latter are increasingly switching to alternative medicines and therapy. They created this small poster wich they posted on notice boards of Supermarkets and Coffee shops frequented by Western Expatriates. The big idea here was, they used tacks like Acupuncture needles to hold the poster in place. By doing so, they converted this simple poster into a demonstration of Acunpuncture. During the month when these small posters ran, bookings for our client's Acupuncture services increased by 27%.