ARTS & FARCES internet

Intellectual property

More than a year-and-a-half ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) petitioned the US Copyright Office to permit “jailbreaking” mobile devices when digital rights management (DRM) is used to prevent owners from running software of their own choosing. This week the US Copyright Office agreed and also delivered two other blows to the entertainment cartel. The DRM measures on DVDs may be circumvented for the purpose of remixing; and a renewal to the rule that allows cellphones to be unlocked for the purpose of using the device with another carrier. The ill-thought-out special legal status that DRM has enjoyed—allowing corporations to rely on public subsidy to defend it—is slowly being dissolved.

Publishing

Think we’d be better off without editors? James Mathewson, editor in chief at IBM.com, dispels that notion in “A Fourth of July lesson in the value of editors” for Writing For Digital. IBM conducted a simple A/B test with edited and unedited versions of pages on its website and then measured engagement, defined as “clicks to desired links on the page” over a month. The results: A “30 percent improvement on the desired call to action for the pages across the board. ... [E]dited pages do 30 percent better than unedited pages.”

User experience

Erin Kissane has started her five-part series on the two (very, very different) kinds of content curation with the first installment, “Curating the Deck Chairs on the Titanic.” Highest recommendation. Update: Part two, “Between the Click and the Curator” is also available. So is part three, “The Curate and the Curator”

An Event Apart hit Minneapolis for the first time this week. Luke Wroblewski’s notes are required reading: “DIY UX: Give Your Users an Upgrade” (Whitney Hess); “Anatomy of a Design Decision” (Jared Spool); “Emotional Interface Design” (Aarron Walter); “The CSS3 Experience” (Dan Cederholm); “Web 2.1 The Medium Comes of Age” (Jeffrey Zeldman)

Also be sure to check out Ivan Stegic‘s “golden nuggets” from An Event Apart, Minneapolis: Day one; Day two.

Jeffrey Zeldman announces the 10K Apart contest. Create a web design under 10KB total file size, including images, scripts, and markup (you can use the jQuery, Prototype, or Typekit libraries at no cost against your 10KB). Your entry must work equally well in Internet Explorer 9 Dev Preview, Firefox, and WebKit browsers. Grand prize is registration to An Event Apart, US$3,000, and a copy of HTML5 for Web Designers.