Alexandre Gamela

"Hollywood's top lobbyist is being slammed for telling the government that Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement debates over transparency are a "distraction." But we actually agree with his conclusion: open up the process more—lots more—so we can talk about substance and not procedure." - Alexandre Gamela

"So what's your strategy for the Age of Decline: brawling your way to the top of a jam-packed skyhook, scrapping over a rustier crane, or finding a brainier way to bootstrap prosperity? As a new decade breaks, here's what every decision-maker should be asking: what's the dominant logic of prosperity in our company, industry, and sector: skyhooks, cranes — or bootstraps? Because, when you think about it, there's a big problem with relying on skyhooks and cranes. They can only lift so much, and if they collapse, well — so do you. And it's usually a long way down." - Alexandre Gamela

Chris Ave, the genius behind the Politifact Song, has a new video for his song, "Copy Editor's Lament." Check out the all-star dance scene. - Alexandre Gamela

Veteran reporter Phillip Knightley knows the spy business better than anyone. This interview uncovers many facets of his illustrious career as one of the worlds foremost investigative journalists. - Alexandre Gamela

"Daniel Ek, founder and CEO of music streaming platform Spotify, has said that he is confident that the service will launch in the U.S. in the first half of 2010. Speaking at U.K. industry confab the Media Festival, where he was interviewed by media consultant and festival chairman Peter Bazalgette, Ek brushed aside criticism from certain sectors of the American music industry concerning the proposed U.S. launch of Spotify. He responded with a definitive "yes" when asked if the breakthrough would happen within the next six months. " - Alexandre Gamela

"The CD player is dead. So says Linn Products, the high-end audio specialist based in Glasgow which for 20 years has been making .. CD players. The reason: its audiophile customers have moved, with alacrity, to hard drive-based systems - its DS "streaming players" - that allow them to encode their entire CD collection in order to play any track at will." - Alexandre Gamela

"So this post explains why your gut feel is wrong. The argument comes from a paper by Daniel M. Fleder and Kartik Hosanagar called Blockbuster Culture's Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity. They simulate a number of different kinds of recommender system and look at how these systems affect the diversity of a set of choices. Towards the end of the paper they observe that some of their recommender systems increase the experience of diversity for every individual in the sample and yet decrease the overall diversity of the culture. So I wrote a program that does basically what they do in their paper and tweaked it to highlight this result." - Alexandre Gamela

"The telecom and music industry bodies in Japan will reportedly implement a system to automatically check cell phone Web sites for illegal music files, in order to prevent the files from being uploaded or downloaded in breach of copyright law. The system was designed by the Council for Countermeasures Against Mobile Music Piracy, a group set up in September, and comprised of the four major telecom operators, including NTT Docomo Inc., SoftBank Mobile Corp. and KDDI Corp., as well as music industry bodies such as the Recording Industry Assn. of Japan (RIAJ) and JASRAC." - Alexandre Gamela

"Illegal filesharers will face having their internet connections turned off under proposed legislation in the finalised Digital Economy Bill published today, however the Government stopped short of making it a criminal offence." - Alexandre Gamela

"One of the points they make is to say that the "secrecy" is no big deal, because it's "normal" for such negotiations to happen this way. This was what the USTR stated earlier this year when the question was raised, but unfortunately, the facts (and common sense) simply don't support that claim at all. If you look at the transparency level on many other international agreements, including well known ones concerning WTO, WIPO, WHO, UNCITRAL, UNIDROIT, UNCTAD, OECD, Hague Conference on Private International Law and many others, you see that they are significantly more transparent and/or have clear procedures in place for concerned parties to take part in the discussions. That is not the case with ACTA." - Alexandre Gamela

"Sony (SNE) is taking a page from Apple's playbook (AAPL). On Nov. 19, Sony said it plans to launch an online store selling music, movies, and books as well as other downloadable applications for mobile products. Sony's top executives didn't specify when the Internet store, tentatively called Sony Online Service, would go live or what it would look like. But the online storefront, announced at a management strategy meeting in Tokyo, is likely to bear some similarities to Apple's iTunes store and would be Sony's most ambitious attempt to link its products to its own vast library of digital content." - Alexandre Gamela

"Software tools of this type can be used to create open source communities for both positive endeavors (like building resilient communities) to insurgency. For example, say I wanted to run an insurgency against financial capitalism, and in particular an effort that specifically targets Goldman Sachs. The software tool approach offers a variety of entry points for this endeavor. One aggressive methodology that enables corporate targeting would involve:" - Alexandre Gamela

"This is, frankly, embarrassing. We can (and we will) argue about the best ways to enforce copyrights, and where the best boundaries of copyright are. But this non-justification, non-excuse for hiding future laws from the public they are to govern? Inexcusable. And yet the MPAA tries to excuse it, or even brush aside the need for an excuse. And how? By claiming that its particular business interests are so vital, so critical, that we cannot be “distracted” by considerations such as good government, international governance, or freedom of information. That sort of argument might play (or might have played) in matters of imminent national security, but in the self-interests of an industry that continues to do incredibly well, it’s laughable." - Alexandre Gamela

To help address this challenge, we've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they're off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time. - Alexandre Gamela

Lawyers' internet community - Alexandre Gamela

"Os termos das negociações e do próprio acordo não foram divulgados pelos governos desses países. Mas informações vazadas das negociações e publicadas na internet mostraram que um dos pontos centrais do ACTA é a repressão à troca de arquivos em redes P2P (de compartilhamento de informações na internet), com o uso de dispositivos semelhantes aos da Lei Hadopi, recentemente aprovada na França, e do Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA, na sigla em inglês, ou Lei dos Direitos Autorais do Milênio Digital), a lei de direitos de autor dos Estados Unidos. “Há uma tentativa crescente e global da indústria fonográfica (e audiovisual) de implementar um sistema chamado 'three strikes and you are out ' ou 'resposta gradual'”, explica Pedro Paranaguá, mestre (Universidade de Londres) e doutorando (Universidade de Duke) em Direito da Propriedade Intelectual e professor da FGV-Rio." - Alexandre Gamela

"O Ministério da Justiça apresentou durante o Fórum Internacional de Cultura Digital, em São Paulo, um balanço sobre as discussões realizadas em torno do Marco Civil da Internet, uma tentativa de criar uma regulamentação da internet junto com os usuários, mantendo os direitos à privacidade e liberdade de expressão. De acordo com Guilherme Almeida, coordenador do projeto de construção colaborativa, cerca de 500 comentários já foram propostos pelos internautas. "Nos surpreendemos com o alto nível da discussão, inclusive jurídico", disse. Os internautas poderão sugerir modificações e apontar problemas a serem discutidos no Marco Civil até dia 17 de dezembro. O Ministério pretende finalizar o texto de projeto de lei até a segunda semana janeiro. Em seguida, o projeto será novamente discutido com os internautas e encaminhado ao Congresso até março de 2010" - Alexandre Gamela

The rise of the critical blogosphere has challenged the authority of the mainstream media while sparking discussion concerning the proper relationship between news production and popular democracy in an Internet Age. All too often, however, this discussion is framed as a stark tension between aristocratic defenders of Old Media professionalism and democratic proponents of New Media egalitarianism. Lost in this framing is the tacit agreement, by both sides, that a solution must be found within the constraints of a corporate liberal media structure. This essay argues that if we are to make full use of the opportunities presented to us by new technologies, we must move beyond the discourse of corporate liberalism. Toward this end, I return to the philosophical debate between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century. Based both on their shared principles and their points of departure, - Alexandre Gamela

"For end users, all of this means that little is changing. You’ll still use a BitTorrent site to search for content, and your client will most likely still connect to a tracker to download it. DHT has been around for years, and it may become more important over time. Some trackers may exchange data among themselves. The overall experience, however, will be pretty much the same. Maybe that’s what The Pirate Bay folks meant when they ended their sensationalistic announcement by proclaiming: “This is the future. And the present.” And the past, one might add." - Alexandre Gamela