The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today announced that it has won three critical exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anticircumvention provisions today.

You now have the right to:

• Rip and remix DVDs for non-commercial purposes;
• Jailbreak your iPhone, or other cell phone, and load up any apps you want; and
• Use your iPhone, or other cell phone, with any carrier you like.

“By granting all of EFF’s applications, the Copyright Office and Librarian of Congress have taken three important steps today to mitigate some of the harms caused by the DMCA,” said Jennifer Granick, EFF’s Civil Liberties Director. “We are thrilled to have helped free jailbreakers, unlockers and vidders from this law’s overbroad reach.”

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YouTube has announced a new option for video embeds, designed to support HTML 5 and to fall back to Flash where HTML 5 is not supported.

According to YouTube, “If you use the new embed code style, your viewers will be able to view your embedded video in one of our Flash or HTML5 players, depending on their viewing environment and preferences. In instances where HTML5 isn’t supported (e.g. our HTML5 player can’t play videos with ads), we use Flash.”

This new style uses <iframe> and looks like this:

<iframe type=”text/html” width=”640″ height=”385″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID” frameborder=”0″>
</iframe>

An additional benefit of the new embed style is that it will eventually allow embeds to work on mobile devices, which typically use a built-in player instead of Flash or HTML5.

Note: The new embed code is currently for developer testing and hasn’t replaced the default embeds – but it looks like YouTube may be moving to marginalize Flash sooner rather than later.

I’ve embedded a video both ways below so you can compare them.

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flakjakt (Steve Fallows) calls his Cascades music video the “first official iPhone 4 music video”.

There are rivals to that title, but at least this is the first one with hipsters and flamenco dancers.

Fallows says:

In a fun weeklong experiment, my friend Marty and I collaborated on this video for an original song I wrote specifically for the iPhone 4 shoot. The overall goal was to produce a music video you can get down with – first and foremost – regardless of what camera we were shooting with. I think the end result turned out fantasmic! I hope you do too.

The results are surprisingly good – it’s not immediately apparent that this was shot on an iPhone, and it’s hard to tell what’s a video defect and what’s a hipster visual effect.

iPhone 4 video quality is great for a phone – but is limited by the fact that light hand-held video cameras deliver shaky video.

While Tiffen has announced an iPhone Steadicam, you can also build your own.

This video, by Spencer S. Watson, demonstrates how he built a DIY iPhone Steadicam out of a modified Nerf gun handle and $40 of parts from Home Depot.

Check out the demo video, below, to see how it works!

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UK radio industry research firm RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) has released the findings (pdf) of its sixth survey on Internet delivered audio services.

According to the organization’s research, audio podcasts now reach about half as many people as Internet radio. 31*% of those surveyed listen to radio via the internet and 16% listen to podcasts.

The RAJAR Measurement of Internet Delivered Audio Services (MIDAS 6) was conducted during June 2010 by Ipsos MORI.

Highlights of the survey below.

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Several readers were incensed last week when we highlighted InfoWorld’s early negative impressions of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

InfoWorld’s take was scathing – suggesting that Microsoft should kill the project.

Now Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky has offered his in-depth preview of Windows Phone 7, and he’s also skeptical about the viability of the platform:

What we’ve been presented with here doesn’t exactly feel like a complete mobile operating system in many ways.

On one side, we’re still really excited by the prospect of Metro as a viable, clean-slate approach to the mobile user experience, and there are lots of smart moves being made that could lead to greatness. On the other side, Microsoft has to turn this into a viable retail product that can hang with the fiercest competition in the history of the cellphone in just a few months’ time, and there are some serious issues that need to be addressed. Frankly, it’s a little scary.

By any measure, Microsoft’s got its back against the wall in the mobile game, and becoming competitive quickly is vital to the company’s success — and in that regard, we understand why they’ve been so adamant about getting Windows Phone 7 on shelves in time for Holiday 2010. The thing is, putting out a product that’s half-baked risks alienating early adopters at the worst possible time, especially considering that we see a clear-cut (and pretty painless) path to fixing the most egregious shortcomings. Seriously, if the WP7 team put their heads down and added a clipboard and some rudimentary multitasking, Microsoft could have an exceptionally solid version-one product in Windows Phone 7 — especially when coupled with the company’s fierce outreach to developers.

While Topolsky’s preview uses a lot of negative language, he does see Windows Phone 7’s Zune media player capabilities as one of the platform’s key features:

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Do you need proof that Old Spice may be the first brand to really “get” new media?

Then look no further than this video of the Old Spice man explaining how to defeat pirates and ninjas.

Or his personal response to Rose McGowan:

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You gotta love this – Boxee Chief Product Officer Zach Klein offers an introduction and demo of the first Boxee Box off the assembly line.

Compared to the typical stiff demo or the hyper-prepped Apple intros, it’s sort of refreshing to see Boxee do this lo fi, even taking out time to nom on the Wheat Thins.

The Boxee Box is an Internet set-top box that is being created in conjunction with D-Link. It’s expected to retail for about $200 and to be available by Halloween.

Developer Humble Daisy has announced a temporary price drop for ProfCast, the company’s flagship lecture recording and podcasting solution. For remainder of the month of July, ProfCast will be half priced.

“We wanted to try something a little different. Rather than have a ’sale’, we thought we would just simplify things and drop the price across the board.” explained David Chmura, CEO of Humble Daisy, Inc. “We’ll try it for a month and see how it goes. If it’s a success, we’ll make the change permanent.”

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Will Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 7 smartphone be the next Zune?

Could be – based on the latest Windows Phone 7, InfoWorld says Microsoft should just kill the project now:

There’s no kind way to say it: Windows Phone 7 will be a failure.

Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money. It’s a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with. Microsoft should kill it before it ships and admit that it’s out of the mobile game for good.

Windows Phone 7 is a pale imitation of the 2007-era iPhone. It’s as if Microsoft decided in summer 2007 to copy the iPhone and has shut its developers in a bunker ever since, so they don’t realize that several years have passed, that the iPhone has advanced, and that competitors such as Google Android and Palm WebOS have also pushed the needle forward. Microsoft is stuck in 2007, with a smartphone OS whose feature checklist might match that era’s iPhone but whose fit and finish would look like a Pinto next to a Maserati.

InfoWorld’s take on the Windows Phone 7 is scathing – but it mirrors the Zune’s failure to impress when it was introduced.

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