Recent example, which I wouldn’t know about except I follow @DJKidAV (great DJ at Indigo here in town) on Twitter. Remix Report posts that some sites that are quite useful to DJs are being taken down, possibly because of a deal the RIAA and MPAA are making with ISP providers like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. Additionally, the ad agency GroupM has created a 45-page “blacklist” of sites that it forbids companies from advertising on. (GroupM services many record labels.) I like DJKidAV’s video response he made tonight:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1O3sGgRYQ0

This on top of Congress considering the PROTECT IP Act, which would allow the government to force IP providers to block access to sites that have been accused of copyright violations. Eek.

Starting Wednesday, I am teaching FYC as part of Penn State’s Learning Edge Academic Program, or LEAP. The program brings in first-year students early, and as a cohort, they take two courses that will spring-board them into college, generally gen-ed courses. My English 015 course is paired up with a Communications Arts and Sciences course, and I’m excited about this. My fellow teacher is awesome, and also a friend of mine, so it should be a fun time working together, teaching rhetoric, writing, and public speaking, and engaging with students.

So, I’ve got to finish a few things for the course, but first, I want to catch up on all that stuff I missed by being in a workshop and meeting so many awesome people over the weekend. Here’s a few interesting tidbits from the Internet.

• According to Daily Kos, a gay bar in Forth Worth was raided Saturday night (Sunday morning), on the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in NYC. It seems the story is unfolding. (h/t slewfoot at the Blogora.) Towleroad has more.

• Joseph Orosco shares his thoughts on Twitter, Iran, and revolutionary possibilities.

• CNN, in an article whose title is worthy of the Onion: yep, there is.

• XKCD today is awesome: “More harm has been done by people panicked over societal decline than societal decline ever did”

• Sweet! University of Kansas is going open-access for all journal articles written by their faculty.

• Via someone on Twitter: I LOVE these clowns, who confronted a KKK rally with their own responses and parodies of KKK chants. Fantastic!

• Howard Rheingold at SFGate discusses Twitter literacy. Pretty good read, and he doesn’t (thank god!) make up a neologism for Twitter literacy.

• I meant to post this awhile ago: Mark Simpson has an interesting discussion of the sexuality/gender play between Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. Very very interesting! (Thanks, Lani, for the link!) Here’s one of the videos Simpson shares:

• In case you missed it, Danger Mouse might release a blank CD-R with cover art because of a copyright battle over the music with EMI. So, the point is, download the music somewhere and burn the CD. Interesting idea, since with free music downloads everywhere, you are often buying the packaging and artwork when you buy a CD.

But Dmitri Vrubel, who never agreed to his artwork being destroyed, is not happy with this explanation. “I’ve got no problem with a restoration,” he told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “But now it will be a new picture. I can’t simply repeat my first painting.”

The Russian painter first heard about the renovation from a newspaper report. After contacting officials in Berlin he was sent an agreement, entitling him to expenses of €3,000 euros. “But why €3,000 euros? Why not 30,000 or 300?” asked Vrubel, who has seen his image put to commercial use adorning mugs, postcards and plates in Berlin. “It is being sold, but I have never seen a cent of the profits.”

Alavi of the artists initiative confirms that problems persist today with the marketing of the East Side Gallery. “Under German law, art that is created in a public space does not enjoy copyright protection. But he says his group may go to court in order to raise public awareness of that problem.

Horacio Potel, an Argentine philosophy professor at Universidad Nacional de Lanús,, faces criminal charges — and possible jail time — for posting unofficial translations of seminal Jacques Derrida texts to his site where his students could see them. Most of these texts were out of print, or had never been translated. Now a publisher is bringing a few of these books into Argentina, and they’re trying to get this prof imprisoned for supporting Derrida while he was unavailable.

(El turno de los profesores, prisión por subir obras protegidas a Internet)