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Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
May
13
tales from the offtopic #34: RIAA karma
Tagged with business, community, corruption, law, offtopic, ubuntu | Comments Off
Today, I learned through twitter and CNET that LimeWire did not steal $75 trillion from starving artists after all. They settled with the RIAA for pocket cash worth $105 million instead. The sum is still probably big enough to stop you from copying that floppy. Or not. Who knows!
The funny thing in the CNET article was a photo of the RIAA’s victorious (I suppose) legal team exiting the honorable (I guess) United States Federal Court, lead by RIAA’s Senior Vice President of Litigation, Jennifer Pariser. Here they are, courtesy of CNET, photo blatantly stolen linked to:
Ms. Pariser congratulating her team, "Great work boys, let's go to the Bermudas."
I was amused by the fact that the RIAA has a litigation officer at the VP level, and wondered out loud on #ubuntu-offtopic whether or not they have an any artistic execs that high up the corporate ladder. Faithful to modern journalistic ethic, I can’t be arsed to check but instead I’ll just say: probably not. You can quote me as saying I think “the lawyers are more high than the artists in the RIAA.”
bazhang also noted a nice symbiosis between government and the Hot Air industry:
Very deep.
Mar
26
The best part of free software is community support of course. Whatever your problem, someone will surely be able and willing to help. However, not all problems can be helped in support channels. Most importantly, almost no problem has been successfully fixed in #ubuntu-offtopic! mc44 disagrees with topyli and gord, but that’s just what he does.
Jul
27
topyli’s law and topyli’s second law
Tagged with community, design, law, life, support | 4 Comments
On technical IRC channels, mailing lists, Usenet groups (remember those?) and Web forums, you often learn a lot of interesting and useful stuff. If you hang in there for long enough, you’re going to learn some more universal truths as well. I have learned a couple of things that I think i may have tweeted about some time or another, but would like to document here too, for future application.
topyli’s law:
When a user asks for help on a problem (s)he is having with $PROGRAM, another user will immediately suggest they switch to $ANOTHER_PROGRAM and use that instead.
topyli’s second law:
When you add an “Advanced” button or tab in the configuration dialog for your $USER_INTERFACE, all your users immediately become advanced.
The second law is actually a special case of mahen23′s law, which I learned on #ubuntu-offtopic. Here it is:
If you create a button, people will press it.
Nov
7
Hats off to Telenor and Norwegian sanity
Tagged with communication, freedom, internet, law, politics | 1 Comment
Via Torrentfreak:
The IFPI (read: Hollywood) is increasingly pushing for placing the onus of prosecuting infringements of their imaginary property to internet service providers. I am happy to see Telenor refuse to do someone elses business. If I build a road, I should not be responsible for drunk drivers who might drive on it. Or as Telenor puts it,
“This would be the same as demanding that the postal service should open all letters, and decide which ones should be delivered.”
The court ruled in favor of Telenor’s sanity, against IFPI’s distorted view of society, property, justice, and business. The ruling is not about whether or not the Pirate Bay may remain online in Norway, it is about Norwegian and every other country’s critical infrastructure.
Applause!
Update: now the Danish Antipiratbyron is throwing in the towel, for another reason: courts in Denmark still require evidence before convicting anyone, and they remain unable to acquire it. This is a good move as well. Let’s spend the money to producing some good art instead of suing fans.
Jun
28
I stumbled upon an idea by Judge Richard Posner on how to save the newspaper industry: let’s extend the copyright law to “bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent”. Therefore, I’m linking to his blog while I can! There are a couple of benefits for him in this.
- His blog gets traffic via my blog. Not much but hey, someone might click. Now they can.
- He is properly referenced so that my readers can check what I’m disagreeing with, and also read his point of view.
It seems (at least the under the current legislation) also appropriate to mention that I found Posner’s blog via TechCrunch. Therefore, I’ll also link to their article.
Neither copyright owner was asked for consent before I linked to their content. That’s how the Web works. If someone doesn’t like the Web and the way it works, maybe they shouldn’t use it to publish their copyrighted content in the first place.
In the very same sentence, Posner also suggests we should extend copyright law to “bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent”. I don’t understand why a copyright law extension would be necessary for this. As one of Posner’s readers notes (in case this isn’t obvious enough), we already need the copyright holder’s consent. The thing is, if you upload your materials onto the Internet and make it freely available to Web surfers, certainly everyone already has your consent to access it.
UPDATE Jul 6 – Simon Owens emailed with some figures on how much traffic he got from a single link on the notorious “leecher” of news content, the Huffington Post. One link, 37,000 eyeballs. ‘Nuff said.