I've read several articles the last couple of days that show how there is no black-and-white to the copyright issues that the entertainment would-be-monopoly (along with the politicians they bribe) is forcing. Obviously, piracy is an issue - I wouldn't disagree with that at all. In terms of importance, the piracy involving the entertainment world is a minor issue - but what happens here may set many different precedents in the future for other areas. It's disappointing that the various judicial systems throughout the world refuse to hear or decide on any cases involving the disruptive technologies of the last ...
Archive for the ‘Cultural’ Category
No Clear Sides
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012DO Mess with credit!
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012Just seeing the article to this post was enough to irritate: Don’t mess with credit: Why the future of payments is already in your pocket. I read one article from this blog before (and even linked to it in a posting of mine) and thought I would return to that site later. It turns out the level of writer there is hardly consistent. The author of the post I quoted that time had some real life experience in the area he wrote about. The writer of the above-linked article clearly has no experience in the subject he writes on, other then ...
What RIAA Won’t Tell You
Thursday, February 9th, 2012LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law. - The Devil's Dictionary This is a deconstruction of a NY Times op-ed written by a shill for RIAA... THE digital tsunami that swept over the Capitol last month, forcing Congress to set aside legislation to combat the online piracy of American music, movies, books and other creative works, raised questions about how the democratic process functions in the digital age. No, the question that's really raised is will there be democracy in the digital age? Or will it be a new form of feudalism that's based on intellectual property and culture, instead of land. Policy ...
Public Knowledge Writes to Congress
Wednesday, February 8th, 2012A group of 70 organizations, consisting of both non-profits and for-profit companies, sent a letter to Congress explaining why Congress should stop working on SOPA& PIPA. (YES, they are still going at it, despite many internet prognosticators claiming, with the wisdom of crowds, that this particular battle is over!) Congress cannot simply accept industry estimates regarding economic and job implications of infringement given the Government Accountability Office’s clear finding in 2010 that previous statistics and quantitative studies on the subject have been unreliable... Finally, any future debates concerning intellectual property law in regards to the Internet must avoid taking a narrow, single-industry ...
The BBB: Part of the Problem
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012I've now moved from a web hosting provider that offered "unlimited" resources (I'd name and shame because they suck so bad, but I won't even give them that publicity to the search engines) to one that has specific monthly limits. As a result, I've been going through two-and-a-half years of apache logs and implementing various filters to cut down on spammers, scrapers, bots, and snoops. There are two major groups of pests: there are the "illicit" ones, the comment spammers, script kiddies, and so on. And there are the "legitimate" ones - corporate/government entities, and the ones who do the ...
The Biggest Gang
Monday, January 30th, 2012In a sign of how little it matters to the US Dept Of Justice to follow the letter of the law, the MegaUpload lawyers “received a letter...from the US Attorney that declared there could be an imminent destruction of Megaupload consumer data files on this coming Thursday." This as a result of MegaUpload's assets being froze. Apparently destroying evidence is acceptable practice, as long as it's the government doing it. This behavior from the DOJ isn't surprising, given the head honcho there lies like Judas about breaking laws to make new ones (and getting his own employees killed in the process). ...
Enslavement by Culture
Thursday, January 26th, 2012This quote opens an op-ed titled "I Don't Want To Own Music, I Want To Listen To Music." (which is well worth a read): "Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the coarse of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved” —Andre Malraux I'm not sure how true this is - think of the many ways different religions have been used to influence and control cultures (including music, art, and the written word) throughout history. Regardless, the future that the music industry envisions, as well as the one pictured by software patent trolls, ...
Justice For Who?
Thursday, January 26th, 2012From "Joint complaint of those affected by the closure of Megaupload service" The FBI has caused incalculable damage, far in excess of the losses claimed by the content lobbies, in a fruitless attempt to prevent access to the media content hosted on Megaupload, some of which they claim to have been infringing copyright under US law. ... The widespread damage caused by the sudden closure of Megaupload is unjustified and completely disproportionate to the aim intended. For this reason Pirates of Catalonia, in collaboration with Pirate Parties International and other Pirate Parties [including the Pirate Party of the United Kingdom], have begun investigating ...
Well – Pardon Mah Ignorance!
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011The other night, while mentioning how some big players in the financial world are waging economic warfare on Wikileaks, I was corrected about Mastercard. I was informed that they couldn't have stopped donations to Wikileaks being processed, as Mastercard is a private non-profit organization, whose sole purpose is to issue credit cards to customers in the name of banks - like some kind of financial dating service matching borrowers to banks - that they don't process transactions for merchants, and that even if they did they wouldn't charge a fee for it (being the altruistic non-profit that they are). And ...
Partisan Bigotry
Thursday, September 30th, 2010I just saw this in someone's profile in Second Life [mispelling not corrected!]: Freedon of relegion and speech does not equal freedom from responsibility or consequences. Every Day Republicans PROVe they HATE people of the US Conservitives => HATE GROUP and should be treated as one I could include quotes - and more importantly, acts in the form of legislation passed into law - by members of both parties, yet I don't believe all "Liberals => HATE GROUP" anymore than I believe all "Conservatives => HATE GROUP". It's a collectivist thought, and there is no practical humanitarian use for those (unless you believe ...