Category: Life

Digital Consumer’s FAQ:
http://www.digitalconsumer.org/faq1.html#faq_1_1

Making up for March’s skipped litigation, the RIAA filed a second round of April lawsuits this week against 725 file sharers for copyright infringement. Perhaps answering my question from earlier this month, the latest press release no longer mentions that only university students are being sued.

The total number of file sharers sued has now broken the five-digit barrier, coming in at 10,037 people sued by the RIAA since September 2003. This is an astounding figure. I just checked the Federal Judicial Caseload Statistics and found that this one wave of litigation represents 2.3% of all civil cased filed in federal court. (The average number of civil lawsuits filed per month for 2003 and 2004 was 21,363; in the 20 months since the RIAA began suing file sharers, the recording industry filed 502 lawsuits on average each month.) And given the news reports of $3,000 average settlements, this means the RIAA’s probably collected over $30 million from individual file sharers.

These lawsuits must be moneymakers for the RIAA or else they wouldn’t have gone on for so long. But will they become a standard feature of our online society for years to come? Or will the RIAA give it up some day? I mean, given that there will always be some file sharing, at what point does the RIAA say that it’s won?

http://sharenomore.blogspot.com/

OVERLY-CYNICAL RANT ALERT! READ AT YOUR OWN PERIL!

“Blame Piracy” is the new mode du jour amongst corporations. No less for the RIAA and MPAA (Record/Movie Industry). Unfortunately, it would appear that their own minions are starting to believe the propaganda as well, as evidenced by this beauty at my local theatre:

Anyone who knows anything about the underground will realise that “filming in theatres” almost always necessitates the aid of a theatre employee (to get the sound feed). Even so, the activity itself is pretty rare in North America; occuring ususally in disadvantaged nations.

Why is that sign there? Because the manager (or his higher ups) believe the RIAA/MPAA lies that Canadian pirates go to theatres with a movie camera, film, leave, and spread their finds on the Internet. It simply isn’t so.

Furthermore, I do believe it is legal to tape movies in Canadian theatres. After all; the Americans whom we usually follow in this instance only explicitly passed a law banning such activity 2 months ago with the passing of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005. There were prosecutions before then using the DMCA; but it remains unclear if the act of filming (without distributing) was itself illegal.

Either way; we don’t even have the DMCA in Canada. You may believe that I’m writing this as to say “praise our lack of Intellectual Property enforcement!”. This is an incorrect assumption. I’m for IP protections (where valid), but I’m against screwing up our rights in the process.

Making filming in a threatre an offense worse than killing another human being (via manslaughter, sentences according to the FEC Act) is definitively what I consider a screw up of priorities and rights.

Just spent 2 hours re-editing the script for EYNTO’s second portion. I simplified much of the matters, removed references to unexplained content, etc. I’m really trying to keep the amount of new computing vocabulary down as to not lose the lesser computer-familiar audience, whilst still conveying the same amount of detail.

Tomorrow I’m going out to re-shoot some of the footage.

1. WOHOO!!!!

Okay so my math exam (Calculus & Matrix Algebra) is over. I feel extremely confident that I did well.

In the next few days I’ll be putting my life back in order. I should be informed Monday as to whether I have a job or not. Furthermore, school being over now means that I have spare *conscious free* time. EYNTO, which was on hold for a month, can now progress and hopefully be completed soon (within weeks).

It feels good duh-da-duh-da-duh-dada…