Reading Comprehension is not Required for Microsoft

Sometimes, it's clear that people have difficulty reading, other times it's clear they have difficulty writing. A lot of the time, people who suffer in both these cases write on blogs, and call themselves some kind of expert. Of course, the very worst of these, are those that are computer programmers. Have you looked at programs these days? They're sometimes ten times the size equivalent programs were a decade ago, and run generally about the same speed as those equivalent programs did on the computers of the time, and they certainly don't do even four times as much as those programs of the Win98 era did. The only area which has kept up with the bloat, has been bugs (and the associated patches and fixes). Why I have brought this up, is due to a 'writer' called John Carroll, who 'blogs' for ZDnet.

In this article, he supposedly goes through the Pirate Party of the US website, and looks at their issues. It is here that he shows those very values of a writer I stated at the top.

The Pirate Party defines copyright as only being suitable to recoup costs. After that, companies and individuals should not be able to control the distribution of their intellectual work.

I looked at the issues page, and indeed the entirety of the website, and couldn't find any such definition. It would appear that his definition is based on the following statement (taken from the first paragraph of their copyright page).

As such, the Framers instituted copyrights for “limited times” only; once an opportunity to recoup costs had passed, open distribution could once again be in an open manner.

In short, Mr. Carroll sees "once an opportunity to recoup costs had passed" and reads "as soon as costs have been recouped". It is exactly that kind of poor linguistic comprehension that has put the US in the terrible state it's in. Furthermore, it's clear that only the littlest of effort was made in researching this, and even the multitude of other articles that have appeared in the past week about the Pirate Party were ignored. Had he read more than the first paragraph, he would have seen just how far his assumptions, and their resulting arguments, are from the mark. Let me refer to Variety, for instance, which is pretty much the news source for the entertainment industry. In their latest issue, they include an interview with a spokesman for the US Pirate Party. he says "But in an age of massive distribution, it should be easy to recoup investment and make money in 14 years."

Of course, he then makes the classic argument, that copyright infringement is theft. There are many varied definitions of theft, but the general theme is that it is the taking of property from one person, by another without permission, depriving the original owner of the property. Copyright infringement however, can best be described as the reproduction of a piece of copyrighted work without the permission of the rights owner. The main difference is that the original owner still has their item, and is not deprived of it. I'm not even going to go into the whole shoplifting is the same as downloading analogy (I will just say that the movie studios still get paid for shoplifted DVDs, its just the retail stores that lose out). He is reinforced in this by the CEO of a pre-press company, who says “How many members of this new Pirate's Party do you think make their living as artists, musicians, writers, programmers, designers, or journalists. I think I already know this answer.” I know there is at least two, but then I actually bother to look up facts. A little research gave me the answer that the spokesman quoted before, is writing a book (and has a patent, as well as worked on TV shows, including one for ZDTV/ZDnet, back when John Carroll was still just an angry forum user) whilst the 'interim administrator' in Utah is a journalist. Want more? Rick Falkvinge, the head of the Swedish Piratpartiet, used to work at Microsoft (as a project leader, no less) and a smaller software company. It might seem that the CEO would be better off playing golf, that trying to play at political pundit.

Of course, dealing with people who have their own agenda, and Carroll's may be for his job. With the success of Joost (created by the same people that brought you kazaa), and other IPTV projects, perhaps he fears that he'll be left to misread websites, and spout poorly-reasoned (and worse researched) drivel.

3rd Annual Fair Use Day Arrives

The 3rd annual Fair Use Day Is about to start, July 11 to be exact. A day to celebrate and learn about things is not new. There are similar days and even months for everything from “black history” to trees and even talking like a pirate, but it is not common for something that governments are attempting to legislate out of existence.

“I’m just an average guy with a common interest in the rights we are all losing.” said Fair Use day’s founder, Eric Clifford, speaking exclusively to TorrentFreak. “The ability to access and interact with our culture is being stripped away and it’s will only get worse if the public doesn’t do something about it soon.”

Eric says his idea for a day to celebrate and raise awareness of fair use came about from a Linux support group IRC chat. “[It was] the usual problems with copy protection and DVD’s. A group of us were ticked off about the lack of fair use and the “day” thing just popped into my head.” Whilst it had a fairly impressive start (they were ‘boingboinged‘ the first year) he says it’s been difficult to get any sort of attention brought to it.

That does appear to be changing, however, as this year, the Pirate Party of the US has issued a press release in support of the day. “It is important the people are aware of what they can legally do with regards to copyrighted material.” said a spokesman for the party.

Fair use is in dire straights in the US right now, at least according to GNU founder and copyright critic Richard Stallman: “With laws laws like the DMCA in the US, and the DADVSI in France, corporations have bought our governments and turned fair use into a sham. Nominally, you still have the right of fair use, but any tools that would let you use it are forbidden. Government of the people, by the people, for the people - it isn’t.”

However, things are not all bad. Virginia Congressman Rich Boucher has proposed a bill, dubbed ‘The Fair Use Act’ which may go some way to restoring fair use rights restricted by the DMCA. The EFF has a page detailing it, including a form letter to send to your representatives here.

US Pirate Party Press Release

Originally posted on TorrentFreak

Lessig moves on from Copyright fight

Lawrence Lessig, author of “Free Culture”, and CEO of Creative Commons, has announced his plans to scale back his work in Intellectual Property (IP) fields, including lectures and talks, to work on a new project – the 'corruption' of the political process.

Ten years ago, Lawrence Lessig started in the fight for fairer and more culturally sound IP laws. He gained great prominence for his work in Eldred v. Ashcroft, and is viewed by many as a true cornerstone on the fight to opposed the absurd copyright laws being implemented and enhanced worldwide.

His statement today (itself a clarification of what he had earlier announced at iCommons) about his stepping down and the redirection of his aims might come as a surprise to many. He claims it was brought about from a combination of Barack Obama's decision to run for the US Senate (described as “up or out”) and what Al Gore calls the corruption of the political system.

He'll continue to be CEO of the Creative Commons, and on the board of iCommons, but he'll be withdrawing from other similar groups in the near future. Lets hope he has as much success at his new area of conquest, as he has in highlighting the current problems in the area of “intellectual property”

IFPI claims piracy is ‘Made in China’

If you were to take press statements made by the anti-piracy lobbyists, everyone in South East Asia is busy camcording movies, working in ‘illicit replication factories’ or smuggling people across borders to sell counterfeit CDs, DVDs, and VHS tapes. They’re also responsible for global warming, the fall of society in general, and most importantly, the drop in profits by the media companies.

Being only able to milk Billions when they feel they should be making Trillions seems to have given them tunnel vision when it comes to reading reports such as the “Summary of Community Customs Activities on Counterfeit and Piracy Results at the European Border - 2006” (link) by the European Commission.

Reading the statement by the IFPI, for instance, gives you a certain sense of deja vu, in that you know what’s going to be in the press release, before its even been opened. It’ll include some few choice statistics, which may or may not be presented in context, and say how this “points to the increasing damage that piracy is doing to the creative industries in Europe and the European economy”. Of course, at the same time, it’ll take great care to avoid linking to such a damming document, because that will then put the figures in context.

A claim that 23 Million counterfeit CDs, DVDs and cassettes were seized at the EU borders might be a big story, if you write it that way. If you write that the report says that this is actually only 9.18% of all the goods we seized in that time period, it doesn’t quite have the same impact. To contrast, over 150 million packets of cigarettes, or their equivalent, were grabbed in the same time period, and accounted for some 62% of the haul.

Similarly, claim that its grown by 137% since 2005 also looks impressive, and then you contrast that with clothing, which was the number 2 biggest item which grew by 175%. More revealingly, the statistics in the report are broken down in the clothing and accessories category, into sportsware, other clothing, and accessories. More items of clothing accessories (such as bags, sunglasses, hats etc.) were stopped than CDs, DVDs, and cassettes – 24,887,263 versus 23,216,560, and which had a staggering 570% jump. Most telling of all though is the fact that overall, the total number of items seized went up by 234%, so in terms of percentage of goods, CD/DVD/Cassettes fell. Even the number of cases grew by 136%

Of course, no press release on this subject would be complete without a target. In this case, it’s China, claiming that since 93% of the relevant confiscations originated in china, that they’re the source of all this evil and must be stopped. Whilst the origins of the confiscated packages might be china, the report doesn’t give the actual location where the goods were created. It may be china, or it may be another country with China an intermediate point for warehousing.

Most telling of all, though, page 13 of the 15 page report, where it lists the rights broken as to why the goods were taken. It lists trademark violation as the reason for 87.13% of the cases, and patent violation for another 12.32% - leaving copyright infringement, designs and models, and unknown all fighting it out for the last 0.55%. Clearly, copyright infringement isn’t the big problem everyone claims it to be.

ben Jones