[Filesharing] The Cost Of An Idea

David Dunham at CaPC poses the question “So is the judge making an example out of her or does this seem like a reasonable price to pay?”

I started commenting but realised it was too long and so I’ve moved my response here.

Let’s start by saying that these fines are supposed to be representative of lost sales.

Forget the fact that many people who download music tracks wouldn’t buy them anyway (and – shockingly – might even delete the crap ones).

What I think the lawmakers have glossed over is the fact that if you fine one person for *every* *lost* *sale*, then there should be no-one left to pursue for the downloading of those tracks she shared. Ie. if I had downloaded those 24 tracks from Jamie Thomas, it’s OK because she is already paying for *my* lost sale – as well as – literally – millions of others.

I’m pro-filesharing and I file-share.

I look forward to the day that these media companies grovel in the dirt – I’ll make no bones about that fact. Increasingly I’m ‘coming out’ to many friends and people I wouldn’t have before, because I see it as a revolution, a cold war, where as many people need to be recruited as possible.

I look forward to the day that we look back on these events in history and marvel at the ignorance of the politicians and industry that supported this 21st Century ‘House of Un-American Activities’.

I see filesharing as the future – setting knowledge, information and arts free – like they used to be before the 20th Century. Perhaps it’s not ‘the future’, perhaps it’s simply restoring values of the past.

Did any of those black slaves or their families who worked in the cotton fields see a ‘dime’ for their musical contribution to the blues? Intellectual Property is about as anti-creativity as I can imagine.

How do you prevent new ideas and human progress? Introduce ownership of ideas by long lasting corporate bodies to buy up and own *ideas*, then sue anyone who independently thinks up, tries to share or improve that idea for an arm and a leg.

Technorati Tags: jamie thomas, filesharing, copyright, christ and pop culture, morality, ethics, mafiaa, riaa, download, revolution, music, freedom, future, past, slaves, truth, corporates, progress, ideas

[Intriguing] Blunkett’s Guidedog?

That’s my first guess at what has caused his near U-turn on ID cards:

David Blunkett, who as Home Secretary led the government’s push for compulsory ID cards, will tomorrow call for the scheme to be curtailed, according to a report.

Instead he will propose that only foreigners be made to hold an ID card. UK nationals should only be required to hold a passport, Blunkett will argue.

For those not in the know, whilst Blunkett was in public office, flogging ID Cards and all manner of Orwellian devices to use on us, the British public, he received a nice directorship with Entrust, the company who created Spains ID card system and lobbied for the contract for the British one.

I’m sure there was no link between Blunketts cushty new job and his policy towards ID cards at the time.

A glance at the news show Entrust doing reasonably well profits wise during the recession, so what has caused Blunkett to shift his stance?

Worth watching this one, lack of sight has caused Blunketts nose to develop a keen sense of smell for money and influence.

david blunkett, id cards, government, entrust, security, recession, freedom, civil liberties, u-turns, foreign policy, immigration

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[Copyleft] Obama And The Copyright Act

From Wired:

In a few weeks, we’ll likely know the Obama administration’s position on whether it supports hefty monetary awards in file sharing litigation brought by the Recording Industry Association of America.

The Bush administration’s position was clear. It supported the Copyright Act‘s penalties of up to $150,000 per infringed song.

“Congress acted reasonably in crafting the current incarnation by ensuring that it serves both a compensatory and deterrent purpose. Congress established a damages range that provides compensation for copyright owners in a regime in which actual damages are hard to quantify,” the Bush administration wrote in 2007.

Now it’s President Barack Obama’s turn, and we’ll see how tight he is with Hollywood.

One thing I’ve thought about that I don’t see mentioned anywhere by bloggers and media, is a challenge to how the MAFIAA justify their 9-to-1 ratio cost of a single music track.

No, I don’t mean how constitutional or fair it is, I mean challenging it on the basis of lost profits. Surely, after winning* their lawsuit against Jammie Thomas, all lawsuits should have stopped right there. You see they didn’t just sue Jammie Thomas for the tracks that she had downloaded or owned (worth approximately $1 a piece) they sued her for all the other people who otherwise would have bought the shared track too**.

Therefore if the MAFIAA recovered all that lost profit from Jammie Thomas (and someone can’t own one downloaded file twice over), then the score is even and there are no further profit losses i.e. no further lawsuits needed!

Am I just stating the obvious that no-one has thought up yet, or am I missing something?

*I say ‘won’, but it’s been public knowledge for a while now that the original judge has dismissed the original trial as a mistrial and it will be heard again.
**I’m obviously ignoring the fact that ( a ) many filesharers will buy an album anyway and ( b ) many other fileshares would not even buy if it was not available for download – so no profit to be had in the first place.

mafiaa, filesharing, pirates, jammie thomas, copyright act, obama, music, downloading, freedom, wired

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[Your Data] How Often Have They Lost Your Data

Open Rights Group have a questionnaire which should tell you!

via: Ideal Government

your data, data loss, questionnaire, open rights group, ideal government

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[Heroes] Fax Off

This has to be one of my favourite stories of 2008:

OK. Fine by me. One great advantage of my VOIP provider (Primus, for anyone who cares) is that their base package includes many interesting features, including the possibility to redirect any number to another. Thirty seconds later, I had the fax number redirected to the receptionist’s number.

From: The Consumerist.

See my previous post on Culture Wars – dealing with corporate bullshit.

Technorati Tags: fax, consumerist, voip, receptionist, culture wars, corporations, 2008, junk mail, spam

[Pseudoscience] Snowball Warming

Watching news reports this week, it is appearing the man on the street that, as I predicted, global warming theory (uh, sorry, it’s a fact, because theory in science means fact… y’know like there is no word for speculation in science it’s all Feoryact) doesn’t have the ring of consistency to it as is being propagated, even before the recent snow storms.

Recent snowfall in the UK has perhaps helped the middle classes to stop and question something they are being told to believe in without question. The snowfall has managed to shut up even the loudest uninformed global alarming peddler, but it hasn’t prevented the more astute to start pedding two specific reasons, or rather, excuses for the snow.

The first one is an easy debunker. “Global Warming doesn’t mean it always gets hotter, it means more extreme types of weather!” Can anyone tell me what is so wrong with this argument? Well for starters it’s a catch all.. if you think about it, any type of extreme weather means global warming, hot or cold, dry or wet, delightful or devastating. If you’re trying to debate this logic intelligently you won’t win. Global Warming is essentially happening, regardless of the actual state of the environment.

The second one is this: Snowfall used to be much more common, but the Global Warming trend means that it’s occurring every 20 years (instead of, say, every year).

OK this is a bit more tricky, sounds believable right? But the remarkable thing about this argument is that it’s, like, almost dead on. We’re not talking about 25 years here, or 15 years, but we’re actually talking approximately 20 years. How are scientists able to predict this so accurately? Is it down to data provided by studying the global warming phenomenon or is it more like… the Zany Ones?!

Could it be scientists are stating 20 years, because, well, snow like this fell 20 years ago! A bit like if I told you house prices are going to rise this year because they’ve been rising since 1996?

I have one question for the Global Alarmists, if an unmoving linear Global Warming trend is happening despite record warmth, record cold, growing antarctic ice, receding antarctic ice, clouds affect data, clouds don’t affect data, we don’t rely on past data/history, we rely on past data/history, it’s not sunlight, sunlight fell in the Northern Hemisphere… can someone tell me how the heck we are going to know:

a) When we have succeeded in our mission to cool the earth down? and
b) If we actually do enter a Global Cooling period?

Perhaps if we start experiencing lots of freak heatwaves, this will be an indicator that we are in danger of Global Cooling and need to act fast to warm the earth up?!

global warming, global alarmists, climate change, science, debunking, global cooling, sol

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[Londonland] Police Pwn State, MAFIAA Pwn Police

Having solved all crime in London, TorrentFreak reports that the Met are now going to go after people who make poor quality cammed movies to sell to people who are too stupid to realise that good quality movies are freely available online.

Perhaps the only consolation here is that politicians and Brazilian plumbers can now safely go about their day to day business whilst the pirates eat lawful lead.

One problem I can already foresee, what does a pirate look like, and how can one avoid being mistaken for a pirate? Is there anything we can do to aid Met police in order to avoid an embarrassing accident involving several bullets and an innocent civilian who looked nothing like a terrorist?

mafiaa, piracy, met police, londonland, crime, police state, downloading, torrentfreak

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[High Noon] Bwankers vs Sheriff of Chicago

From the Consumerist:

“Chicago’s sheriff has placed a moratorium on evictions for mortgage foreclosures, angering bankers who say he’s breaking the law.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said he understood he was flouting the
law in refusing to have deputies carry out the rising number of
eviction requests, but mortgage holders must be accountable.”

Could this be a good reason to introduce Sheriffs back into the UK, Sheriffs who live in the community they work, have jurisdiction and character?

If only British bobbies and the very few (if any) honest bailiffs would step up to the plate here in the UK… unfortunately here in the UK we suffer from a disease of predatory systems and tick-box culture.

Let me explain.. the powerful (now nationalised) elite design the system, which is predatory and designed to be as inefficient and unhelpful as possible, utilizing holding actions against those they serve. They then train a portion of the monkeys that the predatory system is designed for, to abandon rational thought and follow a strict protocol of rules and tick boxes.

holding action, sheriff, chicago, debt, renters, bankers, predatory systems, mortgages, stock market crash, house price crash, police, tick-box

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Blessed is Steve Pavlina

“I’m now going to give you 10 reasons why getting an education is good, but going to school is one of the worst ways to go about it. Since Media Studies seems to be the most popular course for undergraduates these days, I’ll slant this article towards Media Studies and it’s ubiquitous failings. However, you’ll find that most of these points apply equally well to other educational courses (yes, even Management Science).”

This is how Steve Pavlina’s desultory article, 10 Reasons You Should Never Have Religion, would have started if he had been writing about education. It gets worse from there on. Setting up a field of straw men, Steve proceeds to hack away at his own ideological perception of Christianity whilst nebulously applying it to all religions, even Buddhism.

I’m not even going to attempt a debunk since there is no consistent rhyme or reason, just a bunch of ill-conceived arguments and logical fallacies coated with outright and simple prejudice.

Instead, I found a hilarious and unintended irony near the bottom of his piece. Under point 10, Faith is fear, he quotes and ad-libs the beatitudes:

Blessed are the poor (donate heavily).

Let’s ignore the fact that he didn’t even bother to reference where this quote is from (does he even know?), and also the implicit alternative to this statement, Blessed are the rich.

What caught my attention was the appended line at the bottom of the article in bold, which appears to be appended in some form to all of his articles:

If you find this site helpful, please leave a donation for Steve so you can enjoy the spirit of giving too.

Awesome! So where did Steve inherit this “spirit of giving” anyhow? Seriously, was this an article on religion or was it simply a pitch for people who are religiously minded, or considering religion, to join the religion of Steve Pavlova?

If religion, and specifically Christianity, asks people to donate and join in the spirit of giving then it’s fake and greedy, if Steve Pavlova asks you to donate, then it’s simply because he’s spiritual and truly believes in the spirit of giving!

So blessed are the rich, blessed is Steve Pavlova.

Hidden Fees

I received an email a while ago from Sue Craig of not-for-profit Hidden Fees requesting a link to their site providing genuine, free advice on avoiding hidden fees.

The site looks promising and contains many articles. I thought it was a great idea and have now added a link on the blogroll. I wrote back to Sue and advised that it needed some guides and template letters to make it really useful and she wrote back to thank me and advise it “should be on the site in the next month or so [emailed 5 Apr 08]”. For now you’ll have to have a bit of time on your hands to navigate and read the detailed but useful articles.

One thing that did concern me was their archaic and heavy-handed IP & Copyright Notice which surprises me coming from a site that purports to be helping people avoid fees and such:

Except as permitted below no part of the Website may be reproduced, displayed, copied, translated, adapted, downloaded, broadcast, used or republished in any form including (without limitation) distribution, or storage in a system for retrieval.

Considering the service they are offering it’s forgivable, but I would hope as they progress they change this not to be so drastic. Technically speaking your webpages are already downloaded and stored in the cache (physically on the hard drive) of anyone who visits the site to read the information from a library or shared computer (read ‘public’) then they are already breaking your copyright notice.

It’s something I’m willing to overlook in linking to Hidden Fees but it’s something worth bearing in mind when considering the target audience- people who seek to avoid or fight predatory and subversive systems. People who read software EULAs and seriously consider open-source. People who don’t like signing unfair contracts.