Canada spends billions of public dollars on research funding each year and the government has been increasingly focused on how best to commercialize the results. While there are several possible approaches to doing this, the government and some universities have been focused on building patent and IP portfolios as part of a conventional commercialization strategy. The alternative could be an open access approach – encourage (or require) much of the intellectual property to be made broadly available under open licences so that multiple organizations could add value and find ways to commercialize. The universities might generate less income but would better justify the public investment in research by providing the engine for larger economic benefits.

Voici une sélection de liens importants pour bâtir une compréhension du droit d’auteur canadien. Les ressources sont en ordre de titre et la sélection vise à renseigner les intervenants du milieu universitaire du Québec.

Rapport de l'Université du Québec à Montréal (Incluant le Télé-université) présenté à la Commission de la culture et de l'éducation de l'Assemblée nationale et réalisé dans le cadres des exigences de la Loi sur les établissements d'enseignement universitaire. Université du Québec à Montréal, 21 mai 2010.

This design transforms mundane electrical pylons into statues on the Icelandic landscape by making only small alterations to existing pylon design.

Academics are misunderstood. Almost by definition. Pretty much any academic eventually feels that s/he is misunderstood. Misunderstandings about some core notions in about any academic field are involved in some of the most common pet peeves among academics. In other words, there’s nothing as transdisciplinary as misunderstanding.

StatusNet, a microblogging service with similarities to Twitter but designed for businesses, on Tuesday announced that it had secured a second round of financing for $1.4 million. The financing will be used to support and grow its sales team and continue aiming at the world’s 1,000 largest businesses, it said in an announcement.

Rapport de la firme AON Conseil sur la rémunération des chargées et chargés de cours de l'UQAM (pdf).

What if we make every URL a sentence?

Le NPD veut des réponses du ministère de la Défense nationale à la lumière de révélations que des employés de la Défense nationale auraient utilisé des ordinateurs gouvernementaux pour modifier un article de Wikipédia sur la décision controversée du gouvernement de dépenser des milliards de dollars sur des chasseurs à réaction.

En discutant avec un autre client et en racontant qu’un client a eu sa page bani de Facebook (sans le nommer) mon client m’informe qu’il a eu la visite d’un représentant commercial de Facebook qui les a avisé qu’il n’était pas permis de faire un concours sur Facebook, à moins d’y acheter de la publicité.

Earlier today we published an analysis of the top traffic drivers in social media, based on data from Web analytics company Woopra. The biggest traffic driver was StumbleUpon (51%), followed by Digg (30%), Hacker News (12%) and Reddit (5%). Surprisingly, tech news community Slashdot was not in the list of top referrers. In fact, according to Woopra CEO John Pozadzides, Slashdot "drives close to 0% of traffic to the sites Woopra measures."

A couple of months ago we collected some data on how many WordPress-powered sites we host. We knew it had to be a pretty large amount because we see them constantly. It turns out that we are hosting nearly 500,000 WordPress websites! Out of about 1 million total domain names hosted, that means that almost half of them have at least one WordPress blog.

Now that Facebook has amassed more than 500 million users, a growing number of open source social networking developers are wondering if Facebook's photo sharing, status updates and other features wouldn't work better as Internet-wide standardized services. At the OSCON conference last week, the head of Identi.ca, an open source Twitter-like microblogging service, likened today's social networking services to the enormously proprietary online services of the early 1990s, like AOL or Prodigy. He suggested that just like SMTP and Sendmail standardized what were previously propriety e-mail services, so too could open source social networking stacks, like OStatus, render walled garden services like Facebook obsolete.

The Swedish Pirate Party, who are at the forefront of anti-copyright lobbying in Sweden, are planning to shake up the country’s ISP market. After taking over the supply of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, Piratpartiet will now partner in the launch of Pirate ISP, a new broadband service that will offer anonymity to customers and provide financial support to the Party.

Likewise, we’d like to see the field blossom and take advantage of resources such as Google Books that are becoming increasingly available. We’re pleased to announce that Google has committed nearly a million dollars to support digital humanities research over the next two years.

A military watchdog organization filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday against the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and a US Army major, on behalf of an Army soldier stationed in Iraq. The suit charges the Pentagon with widespread constitutional violations by allegedly trying to force the soldier to embrace evangelical Christianity and then retaliating against him when he refused.

Ces dernières années, Google a parcouru les villes du monde pour alimenter en photos son outil Google Street View. Le hic: en plus de prendre des photos, l’entreprise a aussi collecté de l’information sur les réseaux sans fil résidentiels et commerciaux. […] L’approche d’entreprises comme Google et Facebook, qui procèdent par essai et erreur avant de corriger le tir au besoin, a été vivement critiquée. «Ces compagnies doivent considérer la protection de la vie privée plus tôt dans le développement de leurs produits, affirme Elizabeth Denham, commissaire adjointe à la protection de la vie privée au Canada. Lancer des produits en version bêta ne permet pas aux entreprises de contourner la loi.»

Copyright law's grip on film, music and software barely touches the fashion industry … and fashion benefits in both innovation and sales, says Johanna Blakley. At TEDxUSC 2010, she talks about what all creative industries can learn from fashion's free culture.

Le Conseil d'administration de l'UQAM a approuvé hier le budget de l'Université pour l'exercice 2010-2011. Ce budget de 350 M $ présente un déficit anticipé de l'ordre de 16,7 M $. Le gouvernement du Québec ayant dorénavant fixé l'année financière de toutes les universités du 1er mai au 30 avril, le budget de cette année couvre exceptionnellement une période de onze mois.

RoCoCo 2010

Marc-Antoine Parent, RoCoCo 2010

La puissance du signal pourrait ainsi chuter de presque 20 décibels (dB) quand un utilisateur place son doigt au-dessus d’une fente située sur le côté inférieur gauche de l’appareil, ce qui «est assez pour interrompre un appel», explique le magazine dans une vidéo.