What's New At Words To Web

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, was enacted by Congress in October 1998, to bring American copyright law in line with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) standards and rules. It consists of five parts, of which the following two sections are most important: Title I: WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Tries Implementation Act and Title II: Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, called OCILLA for short. Together, Titles I and II have had a huge impact on how information is published and referenced electronically, physically, and how it is cataloged and searched. For the first time, it became a crime to create any software or services that try to hack or break the coding placed into CDs, DVDs, and electronic media stored on servers that were meant to thwart pirates from stealing copyrighted work. The term used for the code that is often programmed directly into the chips or data streams is Digital Rights Management or DRM. The DMCA goes further than just criminalizing the creators of DRM hacks. It also criminalizes any person who tries to break a DRM whether they actually infringed on a copyright or not. Lastly, the DMCA increased the penalties for any copyright infringement on the Internet, correcting a missing level of protection for copyright holders.

Have You Tried Creative Commons?

Copyright is as old as printing and as new as today. As freelancers, whether writing, designing for print or the Internet, broadcasting, filming, or creating music, you should be aware of your rights as well as the downside of selling your work for a living.

You know you want to tackle that new standard for CSS you've been hearing about. Or, you know that you should understand how overrides enhance Joomla! extensions and templates. You've heard the term "MVC" or maybe "SDK" but you have no clue what they mean. Maybe you want to learn a new style of writing so you can build that personal blog. But excuses pile up, for instance: you don't have the resources, or your current work load doesn't give you the time, or the best excuse — you lack the brain power. And really, if a client isn't paying for it how can you legitimize the time?

Yet, to stay current and competitive in our cutthroat freelance environment, you must keep learning the "bleeding edge" of your chosen profession, be it design, web development, programming, or writing, or something else. The challenge is to continually keep learning while working. Otherwise, with the tools of our trades changing so rapidly we can quickly get outmoded. So, how can we at least stay on "speaking terms" with new techniques and technology?

Three Internet social networking technologies are there for our use: Twitter, RSS, and Readers. In addition, online social groups aggregate information to make it even easier to keep a handle on what's happening in our fields. Ning groups, LinkedIn groups, and Facebook groups all are our friends.

This article lists the steps you can take daily to keep yourself current. It only takes about a half hour to cull articles you want to read or keep for reference if you do it diligently. Treat this task like you treat your email time. It'll pay off in increased knowledge.

I read a series of great articles by Jaan Orvet and Andreas Carlson (“Strategy Basics: It’s Really About Having A Plan” and its follow-up, “Strategy Basics: Getting Your Clients Ducks In A Row“) on Carsonified’s Blog called “Think Vitamin” and on the importance of having a sound plan for a successful project. This is basic project management logic, but so often when we start a project the client has not fully developed what they want to do as well as many of the details of how to accomplish it.