Rights wrangles dog online plans

16 September 2011 Last updated at 11:51 GMT Published in 1911, Frolic Farm is one of many works for which a rights holder cannot be traced. The cultural life of Europe will suffer unless more effort is made to clarify what libraries can do with so-called orphan works, says a study.

The British Library looked into ways to speed up the digitisation of books, journals and other printed materials held by Europe's libraries.

It considered 10 works from every decade between 1870 and 2010.

About 43% of the sample were orphan works suggesting a large part of Europe's media may never go online.

"The law does not allow us to use any copyrighted material if we cannot find the rights holders," said Ben White, head of intellectual property at the British Library. Such works where rights holders cannot be found are known as orphan works.

That meant, he said, that across Europe enormous amounts of material would have to be left on the shelf as nations push on with mass digitisation projects.

The study considered a wide variety of printed works including illustrated children's book from the 1920s, travel guides, political pamphlets from the 1960s and 1970s and early "fan fiction" from the 1980s.

Many of the orphan works uncovered in the study were published more than 50 years ago but a surprising number came from more recent times.

For instance, the 1980s produced more than half of all the in-copyright orphan works considered by the study.

The potential legal problems involved with publishing orphan works that are subsequently found to have a rights owner, has led libraries to concentrate their digitisation efforts on older and historical works they are sure are out of copyright.

The study was carried out in support of the European Arrow project which wants to automate the process of finding who owns the rights to a work.

Automation is going to be essential if Europe is to meet its targets for putting books and other printed materials online, suggests the study.

"The costs around the time it manually takes to look for rights holders could be much much higher than actual cost of the digitisation projects," he said.

Manual clearing of rights takes on average about four hours for each text, found the study.

By contrast, an automatic system like Arrow which links together rights databases can reduce the search time to five minutes.

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Gambling Builder Runs Your Online Casino for $10 a Year

Go back ten years and not too many people had their own websites. Getting your own domain name and setting up a hosting plan proved to be a costly expense. Times have changed. You can get free blogging software, hosting plans are cheap, and domain names are more than affordable. The struggle, then, is figuring out how to make money with your websites.

Online gambling is a positively booming business, but can you really own your own branded Internet casino? With a service like GamblingBuilder.com, you can… and it’s a lot easier (and cheaper) than you think it might be.

Most people assume that you have to buy expensive software and then hire a coder to customize the site for you if you want to have an online casino. That is not true at all. Gambling Builder takes care of all the grunt work for you.

You don’t need to buy a hosting plan. You don’t need to install any scripts. You don’t need to debug any code. That’s all done for you. Better still, the end product is at your own custom domain name too; you don’t get an “affiliate link” or a subdomain off of Gambling Builder. It really is your own Internet casino.

The crazy thing is that the price is just $10 a year. The basic plan itself is free; the $10 simply covers the domain registration. Surely, you can turn ten bucks of profit over the course of a year, right?

Under the basic plan, you receive an online casino under your own management and under your own domain name. Then, a full 40% of the profits generated by that Internet casino are forwarded your way as income. It’s as simple as that. How much money you make really depends on how profitable your casino is. That’s why it’s important that you work hard to refer new players to your site and get them to put their money where their mouth is.

The money is processed through several popular online payment systems, including LibertyReserve, PerfectMoney, and WebMoney. I don’t see any mention of PayPal, but this could be for any number of different reasons.

To give you an idea of what you can expect, they’ve set up a sample page with links to six example casinos. Here’s one of them.

Remember that the $10 membership that you pay each year includes all the software and coding that you’ll need to get your online casino up and running. The designs themselves aren’t terribly advanced, but the backend structure is actually quite complex and very robust. It’ll handle all new player signups, manage the payments, and run the games in a web browser. No downloads needed.

All the games powered by Gambling Builder, as mentioned, are web-based. This is a great feature for all your potential players, because many don’t want to bother installing software on their own computers.

The interface is reasonably simple, but it has everything that you need for your players to get in the game. After signing up for an account with your casino, they can then choose to play for fun or to play for money. This applies to all the games that are available in the casino, which range from baccarat and blackjack to roulette and video poker. There are several versions of slot machines too.

Yes, you can go out there and spend tons of money to set up your own custom online casino. That can be very expensive to do. With Gambling Builder, the process is much easier; basically everything is done for you on the coding, payment management, and design side. Your task is simply to drive the traffic. After that, it’s pretty much on auto-pilot until you’re ready to cash out.

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Atlantica Online Featured Towns: Manila and Davao

The world of Atlantica Online MMORPG features real world locations in an alternate world where they are blended with mythological and fantasy elements. But don’t take it literally as the cities are often geographically out of place and heavily altered apparently to makes the game more interesting.  The important thing is you can feel at home in one of those countries you live in or relate with other countries you have been before.  From time to time, we’ll be featuring different countries with its towns, cities, dungeons, and interesting stuffs we can find in them.

My Atlantica guild master “Jaanus”, from France in real life, has shared these photos taken from lush tropical country of the Philippines. Check out the breathtaking screenshots from Manila and Davao after the jump.

Manila: The capital city

Most of the civilizations represented are in different time periods. Southeast Asia resembles ancient Indian kingdoms before Western colonization and Islamic influence, so you won’t expect Spanish influenced structures in the town of Manila. But those on stilt wooded houses floating on the water are common in shanty town side of Manila and a common structures in Bajau village located at Muslim Mindanao region.

Davao: The crown jewel city

Oh wait, do I see dead skulls? Am I in Davao city or in Skull Island? I’m wondering what monsters lurks outside the town, King Kong?

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Startup Seeks to Be Online Destination for World’s Best Photography

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No sexy girls please, China tells online game fair

SHANGHAI | Thu Jul 28, 2011 11:53pm EDT

SHANGHAI (Reuters Life!) - Hemlines are a little longer at this year's annual online gaming fair in Shanghai, as companies take to heart a government directive against "vulgarity," a Chinese newspaper reported on Friday.

The ChinaJoy Expo, an annual online game showcase, is well-known for its "spicy girls" who dress up in hot pants and bras to dance and pose at company booths.

But a recent government crackdown on "vulgarity" in the online games sector is forcing the girls to cover up, the Shanghai Daily said.

"The length of my dress is longer than before," said Zhou, a model who has been a ChinaJoy showgirl twice.

The new policy prohibits costumes that show more than two-thirds of a showgirl's back and bans the girls from sticking printed logos on "sensitive positions" like over their breasts, the paper reported.

Some online games companies feared the change would lessen the attractiveness of the expo given that the girls are as much a draw for men as are the games on display, reported the paper.

"To be honest, I came here largely for spicy girls," said Xaiver Du, a college student and online gaming fan.

"I'm satisfied with the female models for this year's ChinaJoy ... I care more about them rather than only sexy clothing," Du said.

The government frequently launches campaigns against what it sees as obscene and base behavior -- including once banning "sexually provocative sounds" on television -- but to little apparent effect.

Scantily-clad women promoting drinks are a feature of many bars in cosmopolitan Shanghai and capital city Beijing, and pornography is widely available online and on pirated DVDs.

(Reporting by Melanie Lee; Editing by Ben Blanchard and Daniel Magnowski)

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