Category: Life

Every other post.

  • Is this the message you want to send?

    I was playing the Captain Copyright quiz game for children. Captain Copyright is a new initiative launched by the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

    Among the lessons taught by the 10-question quiz:

    • A family with 3 computers should pay for 3 copies of Microsoft Office. That’s $500×3… $1500 in total.
    • A school is not allowed to do a mural of Curious George, as he is under copyright.

    While what the quiz teaches is in fact true, is this what you want kids to walk away with? Is it wise to highlight that doing drawings of “Curious George” being an act worthy of lawsuits with settlements in the tens of thousands of dollars? That a family should pay three times over for a wordprocessing application?

    In any instance, these should be the adult’s problems; not that of the children. Copyright has always been about protecting the authors from pirated competition of their own work. Where does that belong in a children’s world? Yes, they should be taught that plagiarism is bad, and that one can’t make money off of copyrighted works – but that should be it. The site is ambiguous enough that a child feeding upon its information could easily assume that using any copyrighted work without permission is wrong.

    That means that a child visiting the site will assume that making drawings of Spiderman is ILLEGAL. And that the child could face stiff penalties for drawing his favourite X-Men.

    I can’t help but feel that this is a campaign not to educate on copyright, but rather to push through the whole anti-downloading message by the BSA. That would at least explain the emphasis in the quiz questions on EULAs – and using EULAs to determine what’s allowed and not allowed with software. Though EULAs express the copyright owners will under copyright, it is itself not copyright. And therefore, one has to question why its discussed so thoroughly on a site that pretends to educated on copyright laws.

    The complete lack of discussion on fair use is also contrary to any decent education on copyrights, esp. in a context of education. That is another factor which leads me to believe that this is the effort not of a party concerned with educating copyright, but more of one concerned with pushing forth a certain narrow-minded agenda.

    PS. According to the Quiz’ website, I could be in legal danger for having put a hyperlink to them:

    Permission is expressly granted to any person who wishes to place a link in his or her own website to www.accesscopyright.ca or any of its pages with the following exception: in order to protect the moral rights associated with this site, permission to link is explicitly withheld from any website the contents of which may, in the opinion of the Access Copyright, be damaging or cause harm to the reputation of Access Copyright.

    Let it be known that I reject the legitimacy of their claims upon hyperlinking. I also reject its claim that I’m not allowed to reproduce the above exceprt, as per the following statement on their website:

    iv. You are not permitted to copy or cut from any page or its HTML source code to the Windowsâ„¢ clipboard (or equivalent on other platforms) onto any other website.

    Both these outlandish claims are available from:
    http://www.captaincopyright.ca/Ipnotice.aspx

  • Message to 2600 Ottawa people…

    I’m most likely not going to show up tomorrow.

    Friday, I work from 9AM-9PM. After work, it takes me about 30 minutes to get to the World Exchange. Sooo assuming I finish at 9, I’d get there at about 9:30… At the very tip-end of the meeting. I’ll still try to drop by, but I have a feeling I’ll have missed most of the people by then.

  • Bittorrent Links Down for “On Piracy” Documentary

    The bittorrent link/trackers for this documentary are down: Earlier today, the Swedish police raided the offices of my bittorrent host (ThePirateBay), and seized their servers. I’ll hold off finding a substitute until v1.0 of the documentary is out. More info on the raids here.

  • Starting to Hallucinate…

    Yes, editing is bad for you. After a while, I began having hallucinations of Tux.

  • Who to blame for the f$#ckup RIAA interview?

    CNET released an interview they conducted with the RIAA yesterday. The thing is though, the answers that CNET put in their story really did not match up to the questions asked.

    For instance, take the following Question and Answer:

    Q: Do your view your lawsuits, even ones where you sued a 12-year-old girl or a Boston grandmother, as a success overall and do you think the process is working?
    Sherman: Yes. We’re feeling pretty good. There will be the opportunity for business models that are consistent with P2P networks (such as demo versions or low quality). There have been a lot of conversations recently about ad-supported models.

    Bainwol: Now there is additional legal clarity.

    Q: How useful has the NET Act, which makes not-for-profit copyright infringement a federal crime, been?
    Sherman: Did it have an impact? Sure. Anything that increases risk would have an impact. The only thing that has an impact is: “What does it matter for me?” When we’ve done surveys, the lawsuits are the No. 1 or No. 2 reason for why people have changed their behavior.

    See how the answers are so disjointed to the question? I can sort of see a mild relevance, but its a stretched and confusing one at best. Now techdirt has already gone ahead and pinned the blame on the RIAA. I’m wondering whether its CNET’s reporter.

    The reporter asked very good questions, some that we’ve all been wondering (while subvertly pushing a certain point.) But I question how it collected the answers – the answers here seem like snippets of longer conversations. Nonetheless, it is premature of me to pin the blame on anyone.