Author: Maëlys McArdle

I got up at 5AM this morning to study for a Climatology midterm some more. All day its been straight work, from 6AM pretty much to 10PM. Now it’s 2AM and I’m continuing work on 2 labs due tomorrow.

Back to the climatology:
– Spent 8 hours studying. Mostly reading the whole textbook in the concerned area, reading notes.
– This midterm was worth 20% of my final mark.

AND I BOMBED IT!!! I DID HORRIBLY!!!

Uuuughh… Sucks. Anyways, I’m still a tad drunk from a liiiiittle break I took from 10-11PM. And tomorrow, it doesn’t end either. Right after the long school day I got to work my job at night.

Anyways, for those in my GEO2334 class, I’ll have some pictures of this last ‘fun’ fieldtrip on later. Right after I recover from the drinking, the labs, the sleeping, the everything. On a side note: my bandwidth shoots up the roof every night right before a lab is due… I wonder why :p

Came home by 3AM. Had a fun night 🙂
Thanksgiving was basically a work day spiced by the events of the night.
That is to say if I’m right in assuming Thanksgiving is on a Sunday (and not Monday) O_o

Apart from that, not much new. Well that’s not true. There’s alot new, I just can’t share it here because it would end up insulting someone or other. That’s the inherent problem with a blog: the more popular it is, the more impossible to upkeep its original integrity and purpose without first making sacrfices. Eh well.

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m a huge proponent of the other side of the copyright battle; the one against the RIAA and MPAA. They wish to appeal the US high court decision that makes fileswapping networks legal. The thing that the RIAA wish to make people ignore is the fact that from a general standpoint, filesharing networks are extremely beneficial. It is an extremely efficient system with which to transfer data, reguardless of what the data is. If the RIAA existed in medieval times, they would wish to make sailing illegal because the oceans [filesharing networks] also allow pirates to go on them as well. Now if we look on a less idealistic standpoint of the current major use of filesharing networks, one would say that piracy is rampant.

Yet if it wasn’t for that piracy, I would not own a tenth of the music collection I have now. How so? This is better answered through another question:
With radio and TV only playing the most mainstream pop music, with music stores refusing to allow you to taste-test music, how is one expected to try music from a lesser known band?

Answer: They Can’t. And given the currently exhorbitant and artificially inflated price of music CDs, how is one even expected to dabber in the unknown? The price payed for getting something that they might not like is simply prohibitive. Now the RIAA is responsible for this inflated pricing and thus the dilema, but they rather choose to blame and sue their fans (and then after suing them: still blame them).

So how does filesharing fit in? It is the perfect system to allow people to taste-test music. Once they like it, they go buy the CD. It’s a risk free environment that brings the RIAA great revenue despite them ignoring this facet. There is also payed filesharing, but thanks to the RIAA again, the pricing is much more infuriously expensive for each track (therefore too expensive for the taste-testing bit). If it wasn’t for filesharing, I would of never listened to ACDC, Tragically Hip, U2, Coldplay, Nine Inch Nails, Blur, Dave Matthews, etc. If it wasn’t for filesharing, I would not have bought all the CDs/DVDs I did.

What about the losses we’ve been hearing about? They’re lies! Well by any reasonable person’s definition that is. Despite all that the RIAA has done against its customers, they’ve made more money last year than any other. What they meant by the losses is that in fact the sales have decellerated from the years before. Piracy? Hardly. The decelleration is due to the slowing economy, the fact that less original records have been released last year than any other.

Classic example of RIAA’s greed: The demise of the single. A single. It costs here $8. For one frickin song. The RIAA blames piracy, but c’mon: who in their right mind would pay $8 for a 2 minute song when they can go see a much more fulfilling 2 hour movie for the same price? And speaking of price: despite the production costs, a DVD movie costs less on average than a music CD. They make money from theatres you might say. Well then: take videogames. All their immense production costs must be had from the product they place on retail shelves. They don’t have the luxury of cash-cow concerts like music groups. And yet, they often charge the same. So really: who is truly ripping who off? The RIAA.

Now let’s look at the RIAA as an organisation:
– They’ve been charged of artificially boosting prices of CDs, despite the dramatically falling production prices.
– They give virtually none of the royalties to the musicians they supposedly cater to.
– They’ve sued 6000 customers and settled all of the cases at $3,000 each.
– They’ve pushed congress to make laws that:
>> Make any infrastructure that could hamper their sales illegal.
>> Make any tool could hamper their sales illegal. [INDUCE Act]

Think its ok? Take it from this perspective: had the RIAA shown up 10 years earlier in their current states, it is highly probable that they would of pushed congress to make the internet as a whole illegal. Back when no one cared but geeks (sound familiar?). So if they can destroy such an ultimately good technology then (because it may hamper sales), think of the damage they can do today with future advancements. This cannot be allowed. This isn’t about just music. It’s about out-of-control corporations. It’s about the politicians in their pockets. It’s about the mass of people out there who have no clue about this because the techno-war is supposedly too complicated for them.

Why my emphasis on the United States? Because it is the principle front where these horrid actions are taking place. Once things set in action there, other nations will follow. Therefore, its critical that the right thing be done there.

You might notice on the right navigational bar the addition of a nifty new ‘Server Load’ display. It was devised as a means to display the current strain on my server after noticing the large amount of bandwidth spent lately (due to the popularity of the Geology lab photos). The ‘System’ tab displays the current amount of RAM in use, which judges how hard the 200MHz machine is crunching the PHP/MySQL requests. The ‘Bandwidth’ tab is supposed to measure the speed of upload over the last 10 seconds; however; it does not seem to be functioning correctly at the present time.

The tab is displayed via the use of a great [free] program called Samurize Server. It basically takes data that I configured it to check up on, puts it on a nice pre-rendered photochopped picture I designed, and finally saves the whole as an image somewhere onto the root of my HTTP server. The webpage then makes use of the image.

From a common sense point of view: what is the purpose of a copyright?
It is to protect the innovations of an author, so that the due benefits may be rewarded.

The beauty of the system in its original phase was that it was not actually designed to protect the author from his/her gains, but rather protect the viability of public creativity. By having such a system in place, one could share their works with others without fear of intellectual theft. Both author and public gained from this. Then, after a certain period of years when the due proceeds were gained, the work was no longer in the author’s control, but in the public domain. The people could now fully use the original work for their purposes, further promoting creativity. The author was happy and rewarded, and now the public was equally rewarded and happy.

A perfect system for promoting the human will.

Unfortunately, as the recent Kodak vs. Sun case has demonstrated, the copyright system we now have in place is failing the public miserably, and completely destroying the value of creativity it originally set out to protect. I would say “author” as well, but in these cases they are literally non-existent. The copyright protects no one from monetary loss due to their creativity, and ruthlessly stifles that of others.

That leaves the question: then what works is the copyright protecting? It is becomming practice that in fact they protect no works at all, but rather overgeneralised concepts for works. There is a very dangerous distinction to be made here: A concept is not a work at all, it is simply at its most elegant a rough description of an idea. Someone may spend years of research and effort culminating into a unique work. However, if the work falls into a general definition of a category protected under copyright, the author may be required to pay hefty fines and punished for his creativity. Those owning the copyright will gain not for their efforts, but that of others. They will have gained because of the evergrowing fluke in the copyright system which lets people patent concepts and not works.

For example, someone may patent the modern equivalent of “shapes on pages”. Now should someone go out and spend years writing a book, under our current system they would have to pay crippling royalties to the people owning the patent. Crippling is an understatement: under current practices, an author would have to spend his last 4 year’s worth of income to pay off the fact that he/she wrote a book. Those who create and work to create are punished by those who spent nothing more than a few words on a form. This evidently cripples any will to create, and destroys future innovation.

One would think that the above analogy is an extreme. Yet it is not. It is our present. It happens everyday, most falling into a branch called “software patents”. Copyrights for books and movies have settled long ago in a wake, for the most part, of common sense. The front has shifted and moved to that of technology. Unfortunately, because of the gap in knowledge of those implied, no one sees the new copyright debacle going on. Many consider the technicalities of the technology beyond their heads and ignore it, though it indirectly affects them deeply. This lack of caring by the public has permitted large corporations such as Kodak to do the most unethical actions under the copyright laws. The lack of caring has prevented barriers to be set in place.

We cannot let the greed destroy creativity, as it is in our best interests.
We must protect the true authors, and revise the copyright laws.
Get involved!

So I’ve updated my desktop to a new “look”, but I’m seriously debating whether it looks worse or not. Comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

My “new” desktop: