Flickr treads more lightly in copyright matter

Flickr has adopted a less severe way of handling copyright infringement claims after a small firestorm of controversy erupted about a photograph of President Barack Obama modified to look like The Dark Knight’s rendition of the Joker comic-book villain.

Previously, certain copyright infringement complaints were met with the removal of an image, and if the complaint was overruled, the Flickr member who posted the image was allowed to repost it. After the Joker Obama case, Flickr decided to merely replace the image in question with a message, a move that means the discussion below the image is preserved and that eases republication if the removal is overturned. Read more at news.cnet.com

Kiwi carriers not won over by mobile femtocells

Mobile operators are showing polite interest in femtocells, as manufacturers step up their efforts to sell them the “cellsites in a box”.

Femtocells are mini cellsites, often the size and shape of a cable modem, that can improve mobile phone coverage in homes and businesses while taking a load off carriers’ networks by using customers’ broadband connections for calls and data.

Vodafone UK is selling femtocells that can support four simultaneous calls for 160 (NZ$400). Customers need a 1 megabit per second broadband connection.

They can provide an efficient and secure means of networking devices in the home, they could provide mobile coverage in rural areas that are outside the range of cellphone networks, and they can boost data speeds if customers otherwise had to share access to a public cellsite. Read more at www.stuff.co.nz