This article brings up a lot of stuff that I think is fundamentally wrong with the copyright system as it is.
Most crucial among these is that governments are negotiating in secret to intensify copyright laws and punishments. They are doing this without any mandate from their citizens, without any regard for the wishes or interests of their citizens.
For Australia, the grossly excessive nature of these negotiations won’t have much effect on our laws… because we already implemented a ton of the worse measures when Howard was so desperate to include a free-trade agreement with the US. But there is one measure that hasn’t yet been implemented here, but which could be, and that is worrying.
Without being a legal expert, I’ll say my understanding of the nature of suing is that someone has to have actually harmed you before you can sue for damages. So you know, if you haven’t lost any money through someone else’s actions, you’re not allowed to demand that they pay you tons of money. You would have no reason to demand lots of money, that that would basically be stealing. However. Among the secret provisions of this treaty, that could all change.
The current situation in the US has lead to ordinary American citizens being ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in punishment for illegally downloading music — sometimes amounting to $22,000 per file.
How much is a music track? In Australia, single tracks can be bought through iTunes for $1.69. I’m sure they can be bought elsewhere for less.
Does it harm giant, sprawling corporations for people to not spend LESS THAN TWO DOLLARS on a certain track? Even if an individual downloads a hundred different tracks, what the hell does $170 matter to a corporation worth billions?
Answer: it doesn’t matter. These companies will get on by without your $170 quite nicely, thank you. An individual downloading a track for free is basically equivalent to an individual who has never heard that track in the first place. The notion of “stealing” doesn’t work when individuals are supposedly “stealing” digital files that can be copied and copied and copied again and again. The people who do pay more than compensate for those who don’t.
Since corporations would look ridiculous suing ordinary American people for, say, twenty bucks, lawmakers have decided they’re allowed to sue for THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS instead. I believe that people who “pirate” tracks are not harming corporations, and even if they ARE harming corporations, they are harming corporations to the value of two dollars. Not $22,000. Under no circumstances, ever, should a corporation be allowed to extort $22,000 per song downloaded from individuals who have not even harmed them.
What this demonstrates is that our lawmakers think corporations and lobbyists are more important than people. And why should that be? What a backwards system.
Fri, 29.01.2010, 1am • 1 Comment • Tags: news, politics, rights, Internet, technology, USA, Australia
Until two years ago, I had always been a faithful Linux user. Well, excluding the fact that when I was really little we had this ancient machine running Windows 3.1 that liked to devour itself from the inside (it’s kind of a long story, but when I was little — like six or seven — I liked to learn about geography1 by reading an atlas and summarising the information on all the countries in a .doc file… it got corrupted so often that it was up to copy #17 before I finally gave up). But, after that machine finally managed to devour its own important system files, we got a new one, and it ran Red Hat Linux. At some point Red Hat became Fedora, so we used that, and we upgraded it periodically until at the end of 2007 I finally got a new laptop with Vista pre-installed and decided to stick with Vista.
Sure, there are advantages to Vista. iTunes is incredibly useful for a lazy person such as me who still loves finding new and slightly not-mainstream music. So convenient! Then there are the games… even though The Sims 2 is the only one I play, if I went back to Linux, I couldn’t play it.
But the problem is… I hate Vista. I LOATHE it. I DESPISE it with a FIERY PASSION. Vista hates me too, which is why it’s so slow, and why it crashes at the most irritating times, and… is really, really slow. Read More »
I’m one of those people who loads up Firefox with umpteen extensions, all of which slow down my browser, and yet all of which seem utterly indispensable the second they’re installed. A few months ago I wrote about the extensions I installed to make Firefox more like Chrome (only in the good aspects, of course) but just in recent days, I think I’ve found my favourite extension. Ever.
It’s Tree Style Tab. Basically, it displays the tabs I have open in a sidebar down the side of the screen, rather than in the conventional bar across the top. Furthermore, it allows tabs to be children of other tabs.
I’m one of those people who always has plenty of tabs open. My “home page” is actually five pages. One of those pages is Google Reader, from which I go on to open plenty of blog posts and news items to keep myself up to date. Another site that is almost constantly open (although it’s not one of my home pages) is Twitter, from which I inevitably click on plenty more news items and blog posts.
If the tabs are all across the top of the screen, that limits my ability to multitask really badly. I can’t open ten items from Google Reader then go and explore the links that have just been posted on Twitter, or else the tabs bar will start scrolling sideways. I hate it when the tab bar starts scrolling horizontally. Also, before it even gets to that point, the tabs get so small that I can’t read what’s on that page any more.
Enter Tree Style Tab. With its vertical tab list, I can read just as much of any page’s title no matter how many tabs I have open.
I am able to have a lot more tabs open — at this moment I have 21 open, and there’s still room for another five or six first-level tabs. If I collapsed all the Google Reader tabs, you could make that room for 15 more.
It’s more effective use of “screen real estate”. My laptop’s screen resolution is 1280x800, which is fine, except that any website that actually made use of all 1280 pixels of horizontal width would drive me mental. Lines of text can only be so long before they get awkward to read, you know. By moving the tabs to the side, that liberates at least 25px of vertical space, in return for 150px of horizontal space I don’t use anyway.
Okay, the main value of that is when I visit sites that don’t set max-widths. WHY SITES DON’T DO THIS, I DON’T KNOW. But for instance, my entry-writing screen in Chyrp? The textarea is as wide as the window, less ~80px of margin either side. 1120px of horizontal space is too wide, dammit. With Tree Style Tab that becomes 950px wide or so, which is just that much more bearable.
Anyway, that’s enough gushing from me! What tricks or extensions do you use to make your browser more useful?
Today, Iran once again erupted in protest against their theocratic, undemocratic regime. It must be a sign of the world today that I first heard about this when Twitter went aflutter with the news. Some tweets in English, others in Farsi, and I even saw one in French. The page to which I’ve linked is a page which was linked several times by several Twitterers. Essentially, it describes the events of the day (at present, only up to 2pm) in two languages — English and Farsi.
In addition to being an example of people power working against an authoritarian regime — and I can only hope it succeeds — I found this interesting in a couple of ways.
Firstly, I like the use of technology to document events such as these. It’s democratisation of the historical record, in a way. No longer will events become known as “that failed protest that didn’t achieve anything” or “the beginning of our glorious revolution”, because it’s become easier and easier for ordinary people, who may not win their immediate struggle, to pass on their thoughts. I like that. It shouldn’t be the victors who write history, but everyone. And it’s good that people won’t be forgotten as easily as they once might. Would the image of Neda dying on the streets of Iran have become so ingrained in our consciousnesses — even all the way over in Australia — if not for technology?
Secondly, I find it interesting that this a lot of this information is bilingual, in English as well as Farsi. Clearly this is a movement aware that there is more to the world than the borders of one country, and courting the sympathy of the outside world as well as that in Iran. I suppose one could speculate on the motives behind this move, but I won’t because I’m sure others could do a better job than me. But it strikes me as an interesting example of the internationalisation of the world right now. Studying Revolutions, it strikes me as ridiculous a lot of the time that people put so much energy into examining only one place. Now this may work in events like the French Revolution, but clearly it can’t work in the modern era, where everyone influences everyone else and reaching people all over the world requires some cables under the ocean and electronic gadgetry. And a common language.
So, events like this strike me as interesting because they seem to signify a huge change in how events take place in the world. The increasing availability of information, the increasing speed at which information can be disseminated to even the furthest corner of the world, and the existence of an international, global audience seem to be big changes. I know these changes were taking place during the twentieth century (and probably earlier), but there were still far more closed societies then, and change seems to be escalating now.
But let’s not forget what’s important here. People in Iran are fighting for greater democracy and greater freedom, and clearly that’s a cause to support.
Thu, 05.11.2009, 12am • 0 Comments • Tags: politics, news, Internet, technology, Iran
# #1 reason I prefer computers to paper: I was cleaning my desk today, and SO MUCH PAPER. Worse, so much paper I potentially wanted to KEEP but didn’t know where to FILE. If only my desk were a computer, I could just leave it on the desk (i.e. on the hard drive). What am I supposed to do with this crap?!