Holland America Line is using shipboard art tour podcasts to showcase the art, antiques and collectables on each of the line’s 13 vessels. The podcasts are provided in Apple’s enhanced podcast format, which lets the company include images of the artworks along with the audio tour.

Each tour begins with a welcome message from Holland America Line President and CEO Stein Kruse and includes comments from ship architect/designer Frans Dingemans, as well as others associated with the line’s art program. Artists Susanna Holt, known for her bronze animal sculptures, and Stephen Card, who creates maritime paintings, are among the artists who provide insight into their work.

“The podcasts of our self-guided art tours offers guests — and potential guests — a deeper appreciation of the extensive collections we present on board our five-star ships,” said Richard D. Meadows, CTC, executive vice president, marketing, sales and guest programs, Holland America Line. “We’re very proud of our art and archive. These tours showcase of our collection of livable art that gives the viewer a taste of the onboard collections.”

Holland America’s podcast is a bit too saccharine at times, but it’s nevertheless a good example of how a company can market itself by providing content that its target audience is likely to be interested in.

U.S. Representatives Rick Boucher and John Doolittle have proposed the FAIR USE Act [PDF], which would remove some of the limitations on innovation and fair use that the entertainment has used (and many would say, abused) over the last few years. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling on people to tell Congress to help restore balance in copyright now.

Technology companies play a game of Russian roulette whenever they create products with both infringing and non-infringing uses. Current “secondary liability” standards don’t provide enough certainty, and if innovators guess wrong, they can be hit with statutory damages as high as $30,000 per work infringed.

When it comes to mass-market products like the iPod or TiVo, damages could run into the trillions of dollars — more than enough to bankrupt anyone from the smallest start-ups to the biggest companies.

The FAIR USE Act would limit the availability of statutory damages for secondary liability and allow innovators to make more reasonable business decisions about manageable levels of legal risk. Meanwhile, copyright owners could still get injunctions and actual damages for harm suffered, putting them in no worse a position than civil litigants in most other areas.

The bill would also codify the Supreme Court’s “Betamax doctrine” as it pertains to hardware devices, making clear that manufacturers cannot be held liable based on the design of technologies with substantial non-infringing uses.

Finally, the bill would loosen the grip of the DMCA, which restricts circumvention of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions even for lawful uses. The FAIR Use Act adds 12 exemptions, including the ability to circumvent for classic fair use purposes like news reporting, research, commentary, and criticism.

For more information, read the bill here, and check out this EFF article discussing statutory damages and proposing their elimination in secondary liability cases.

via EFF

Gay rapper QBoy (“like Eminem but less camp,” according to accolades on his website) will be introducing two podcasts for Channel 4 that offer support and advice to gay teenagers.

The podcasts, which are part of Channel 4’s gay teen Sexuality Awareness week, will focus on the issues of coming out.

The first will discuss the family, comparing the motivations and experiences of three young teens coming out to their families. The second will examine coming out at school, with contributors sharing advice on how to create a supportive environment for gay teens.

QBoy supplies many of his own views on the issues gay teens have to contend with. He said: “A lot of gay people are rap-phobic… brought up in a culture where gay people are supposed to like Kylie Minogue or going to G.A.Y., doing all that stereotypical bullshit.”

Channel 4 is dedicating this week of its morning Education schedule to programming about gay issues for teenagers. The Channel 4 podcasts are available at http://www.channel4radio.com.

via PinkNews

Veteran broadcaster, musician and jazz afficionado Jason Crane has announced the launch of The Jazz Session, a weekly interview program with jazz personalities. The first episode features an interview with saxophonist Grant Stewart.

Crane promises upcoming interviews with Bob Sneider, The Respect Sextet, and Pat LaBarbera.
Crane also writes about jazz at All About Jazz and recently produced podcasts about the arts and activism as The Jason Crane Show.

BCS, the 58,000-member “professional body for those working in IT,” today announced the debut of its podcast, the charmingly titled oddIT. The weekly podcast discusses interesting, funny, and strange IT stories from recent headlines.

“Listen to the podcast in its pre-award winning days,” quipped managing editor Brian Runciman. “The idea is to show that IT is more than just spreadsheets and C++. It can be amusing, engaging, life changing and earth shattering.”

The podcast fits in with British Computer Society President Nigel Shadbolt’s mission for more public engagement from the BCS, who hope to draw more people to the society as a result.

Winners of a Canadian national video podcast competition have been announced. First place went to students from St. Jospeh Catholic High School in Ottawa (Ontario). Three students from Argyle Alternative High School in Winnipeg (Manitoba)  have won second and third place.

The contest, organized by the Media Awareness Network, was designed to help young people consider ways in which certain members of society are portrayed in the media and how audiences perceive and respond to these representations.

Using camcorders, digital video recorders, Web cams or cell phones, youth from across the country submitted two-minute video podcasts on the topic of media representation.

via Winnipeg Free Press

College admissions testing concern ACT has recently debuted a podcast for high school students and their families.

The Prep Talk podcast section of the “ACT Student Blog” covers a variety of college planning topics. The latest podcast, about financial aid, features Cathy Wilcox, Senior Associate Director in the Office of Student Financial Aid at the University of Iowa (go Hawks!).

Other editions of Prep Talk cover topics such as taking the right courses for college, preparing for the ACT, visiting a college campus and planning for college.

For college-bound listeners (and their financial backers, er, parents) interested in exploring financial aid topics in more depth, Podcasting News also recommends the long-running Financial Aid Podcast.

Hosts of the London, U.K., Corporate Podcasting Summit have commissioned a 3-part podcast series on the value and application of podcasting. Presented by yada yada productions, the podcasts feature contributions from Simon Waldman, Head of Digital Strategy at the Guardian Media Group, Adam Rutherford, web editor at Nature.com and Steve Olechowski, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of FeedBurner.

The Corporate Podcasting Summit series outlines the basics of what podcasts are, how they are implemented, and how they can become a key part of an organisation’s marketing and communication activities.

You can listen or subscribe here at Podcasting News or at FeedBurner. It is also available through iTunes.

The Corporate Podcasting Summit takes place on March 19-20, 2007. [Disclaimer: Podcasting News will be covering the event from London, and will also be presenting a session there.]

Dates for the second annual North American summit will be announced in the coming months.

Northern Voice, the Canadian personal blogging conference, just wrapped up at the University of British Columbia over the weekend. For this third edition of the annual gathering, an estimated 300 participants met for one day of “MooseCamp“, a BarCamp- unconference- Open Space workshop, followed by Saturday’s more traditional conference offerings. The blogging conference was held at the University of British Columbia February 23 – 24.

Alberta-based Paramagnus Developments, parent company of Podcast Spot, has volunteered to record and host the sessions for this year’s conference. The company is making audio and video recordings of the 2007 Northern Voice conference sessions available free of charge at http://northernvoice.podcastspot.com.

A federal jury’s ruling that Microsoft infringed on two MP3 patents and must pay Alcatel-Lucent SA $1.52 billion in damages may turn into problems for Apple and other technology companies.

Microsoft said it paid for the technology from Germany-based Fraunhofer Institute, which licenses it to hundreds of companies, including Apple Inc. and RealNetworks Inc.

Companies “have been relying on the fact that they thought they had critical licenses necessary to practice the technology,” said Michael Dever, a chair of the intellectual property group at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a Pittsburgh law firm.

The Microsoft victory could lead Alcatel-Lucent to pursue claims or seek royalties from other companies.

This may take years to play out, though; Microsoft plans to appeal the decision.

via Chicago Tribune