We are back in Berlin. After two years in Ludwigshafen and three years in Luebeck I found interesting paid work at Telio AG. Since 1st October we live in Prenzlauer Berg close to the places where we lived in the 90ies. The city has changed a lot. I have the impression that life is more expensive and Berlin became quite fashionable. Compared to other cities it’s still affordable – perhaps this is the reason why you meet so many people from other countries. The best thing is that most of our friends still live here. Life in Berlin is great. Within a few weeks I have met about 50 of my old friends. Our new flat is still a mess, since Vanadis also has found a job and we don’t have time and energy to install the lamps and furniture after work. Anyway, we are confident that we will be ready before christmas. So this time you will have a guest-room in Berlin if you visit us.

Last week I attended the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) Embedded Linux Conference in Linz. I met many interesting people (e.g. the guys from NXP) and I did my best to promote DMP. Apparently most chip manufacturers (e.g. TI, NXP) consider Linux a cheap and reliable alternative to proprietary embedded operating systems. If somebody implements a DMP Device on such a system I see a good chance that many CE manufacturers will be able to use it.

Obviously DirectFB is becoming a graphics standard. Dok just released the TI Davinci driver – the development was sponsored by my new employers. I am more confident than ever that our old vision of an open platform for creating, distributing and receiving television will become true.

The week before Linz I presented Roberto Garcia’s and my paper “Promoting Music Sampling by Semantic Web-enhanced DRM tools” at the Virtual Goods conference in Koblenz. The slides of my presentation can be downloaded here.

I see an interesting application of Roberto’s Copyright Ontology in connection with the Fair Use Principles for “UGC” recently proposed by the EFF. To me the Copyright Ontology plays the role of an “electronic lawyer”. A User who is not sure if the Actions he performs on a piece of Content can “consult” the Copyright Ontology. He will receive a professional judgement by an Agent. Then the User can decide what to do with the Content (e.g. Publish). We should start exploring possibilities to implement Quote in a way that would be compliant with the EFF Principles for User Generated Content. We could explore the Agree action in our Model for the “Quotation Right” (see Fig. 2 in dmp1010) and propose that “Agree” automatically results if the test of “Three Strikes before Blocking” is negative. The Copyright Ontology could act as an Agent that performs this test for a User who wants to Quote a Work.

So I am back in the physical space of Berlin and I am also back in the digital space of my blog. And I promise that still I will upload expressions of my ideas from time to time .