I’ve just come across a lovely New Yorker cartoon by Alex Gregory.
One dog is saying to another: “I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking”.
Monthly Archives: December 2007
Copyright thuggery takes a new twist
Interesting report in the Washington Post…
In an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.
The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.
“I couldn’t believe it when I read that,” says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. “The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation.”
The piece attracted 283 comments, one of which usefully pointed to the RIAA’s own FAQ page. This says:
11. How is downloading music different from copying a personal CD?
Record companies have never objected to someone making a copy of a CD for their own personal use. We want fans to enjoy the music they bought legally.
Quite so. But later there’s a link labelled “for more on what the law says about copying CDs, click here”. This leads to the MusicUnited.org site and the following claims:
# It’s okay to copy music onto an analog cassette, but not for commercial purposes.
# It’s also okay to copy music onto special Audio CD-R’s, mini-discs, and digital tapes (because royalties have been paid on them) – but, again, not for commercial purposes.
# Beyond that, there’s no legal “right” to copy the copyrighted music on a CD onto a CD-R. However, burning a copy of CD onto a CD-R, or transferring a copy onto your computer hard drive or your portable music player, won’t usually raise concerns so long as:
* The copy is made from an authorized original CD that you legitimately own
* The copy is just for your personal use.
What this highlights is that there is no limit to what the copyright industries will seek to extort from consumers unless they are constrained by law. It’s only a short step from the RIAA’s apparent position as revealed here (that being allowed to rip a CD onto your hard drive for your personal use is a privilege which “won’t usually raise concerns”, rather than a right) to arguing that merely looking at a web page constitutes making a copy — because a computer can only display a web page after a copy of the page has been loaded into the video RAM of the user’s computer.
If these industries were allowed to get their way, they would reduce the web to a shambles of permanent ongoing micro-payment negotiation.
Thanks to Chris Walker for the original link.
We’re in this together, Mervyn. Do stay, please, and get us out of it
From a letter to Mervyn King from Gordon Brown (as imagined by my colleague, William Keegan).
…The great thing about the tripartite system of financial regulation (I know I shouldn’t say this!) is that everyone blames everyone else and the public gets confused. I agree with you that our strategy must be to learn the lessons and try harder.
Nevertheless, before all this hit us for six, you were rightly seen as a highly successful chairman of the monetary policy committee. I also note that while I thought balance-of-payments and sterling crises were things of the past, you persistently warned that the economy needed ‘rebalancing’ and that the exchange rate was too high.
Well, the balance-of-payments figures for the third quarter were horrendous. We may now be on the verge of a full-scale sterling crisis. I need you to handle this, Mr Governor, and many other little local difficulties. Please stay. All is forgiven.
Good news and bad
This morning’s Observer column…
That’s the good news. The bad news is that spam will continue to increase and we may finally discover what the Storm ‘botnet’ – the colossal network of compromised Windows machines someone has been covertly building over the past year – is for. My hunch is that the net is headed for its own version of 9/11. So enjoy it while it lasts. Happy New Year…
Huckabee Hound on the Bhutto business
Good to see that the crisis in Pakistan is occupying candidates for the Republican nomination for President. Mike Huckabee, for example, sees Pakistan as a reason for a border fence.
DES MOINES — Mike Huckabee used the volatile situation in Pakistan Friday to make an argument for building a fence on the American border with Mexico and found himself trying to explain a series of remarks about Pakistanis and their nation.
On Thursday night he told reporters in Orlando, Fla.: “We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there’s any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country.”
On Friday, in Pella, Iowa, he expanded on those remarks.
“When I say single them out I am making the observation that we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities except those immediately south of the border,” he told reporters in Pella. “And in light of what is happening in Pakistan it ought to give us pause as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders.”
Fact: according to the Department of Homeland Security, far more illegal immigrants come from the Philippines, Korea, China and Vietnam.
Huckabee’s first response to the assassination, btw, was to express “our sincere concern and apologies for what has happened in Pakistan.”
And now?
Sombre New York Times assessment of the implications of Benazir Bhutto’s murder.
The assassination highlighted, in spectacular fashion, the failure of two of President Bush’s main objectives in the region: his quest to bring democracy to the Muslim world, and his drive to force out the Islamist militants who have hung on tenaciously in Pakistan, the nuclear-armed state considered ground zero in President Bush’s fight against terrorism, despite the administration’s long-running effort to root out Al Qaeda from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
The assassination has brutally highlighted the inability of the United States, despite its wealth and power, to manipulate the internal political affairs of a small but complex society.
“We are a player in the Pakistani political system,” said Wendy Chamberlin, a former United States ambassador to Pakistan, adding that as such, the United States was partly to blame for Mr. Musharraf’s dip in popularity. But, she added: “This is Pakistan. And Pakistan is a very dangerous and violent place.”
There’s a lovely quote later in the piece, referring to the US policy of trying to force an alliance between Musharraf and Bhutto as a way of pushing the former onto a ‘democratic’ path. Trying to get them to work together was, one Bush official acknowledged, “like putting two pythons in the same cage”.
So, now we’re one python down, and one to go. I can’t see Musharraf containing the crisis. Which means another military coup. What’s astonishing about the Bush administration is that it never seems to have a Plan B.
Concepts at dawn
Stuart Jeffries has a nice piece about the public spat between Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn.
The feud is escalating into philosophy’s equivalent of a prize fight between two former colleagues who are both among the showiest brawlers in the philosophy dojo. In one corner is McGinn, 57, West Hartlepool-born professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, and the self-styled hard man of philosophy book reviewing. In the other corner is Honderich, 74, Ontario-born Grote Professor Emeritus of the philosophy of mind and logic at University College London, and a man once described by fellow philosopher Roger Scruton as the “thinking man’s unthinking man”. They are using all the modern weapons at their disposal – blogs, emails, demands for compensation from the academic journal that published the original review, an online counter-review, and an online counter-counter-review…
Facebook overtakes MySpace
[Source]
Major Internet incidents of 2007
See here for the list.
Bricks ‘n Mortar 2.0
Katie Hafner has some interesting stats on Apple’s retail venture. She visited the Apple Store in Midtown Manhattan at 2am and found it humming.
The party inside that store and in 203 other Apple stores around the world is one reason the company’s stock is up nearly 135 percent for the year. By contrast, high-flying Google is up about 52 percent, while the tech-dominated Nasdaq index is up 12 percent.
The popularity of the iPhone and iPod and the intended halo effect those products have had on sales of Apple computers are behind Apple’s vigor. But the company’s success in retailing, as other competitors struggle to eke out sales growth, has been the bonus.
Apple now derives 20 percent of its revenue from its physical stores. And the number is growing. In the fourth quarter in 2007, which ended Sept. 30, Apple reported that the retail stores accounted for $1.25 billion of Apple’s $6.2 billion in revenues, a 42 percent increase over the fourth quarter in 2006.