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On copyright

Sitting now in a session at the CTI Conference at the Danish Technical University near Copenhagen where presenters from various interest groups are educating us on the problem of copyright violation on music and movies. We've heard from
Morten Madsen of the Danish Musician's Union, who is pleased that copyright infringement is treated as theft under Danish law because that means fans of his members can be sent to prison for three years, and he hopes that the shift to a six year maximum sentence will also carry.
We've heard from Jesper Bang Olesen how the reason why all culture should be policed and restrained is because there are too many rights holders for each performance to be able to allow it to be traditionally consumed and appreciated in the new media - we have to sort out how to recognise theose rights before we can be allowed to enjoy the music again.
We've heard from Else Helland of Johan Schlüter, the Danish music industry's enforcement law firm, how because they can't effectively pursue the big criminals they have instead decided to treat the ordinary citizen as the real criminal.
At no point has anyone up to now mentioned culture, either its appreciation now by people or its cherishing by future generations.

Finally Christopher May has stood up and made some points in the opposite direction - thank goodness. He said that the problem with the whole discussion of copyright is that it considers the private rights of the enforcers and forgets that copyright is the limited grant of rights to individuals in return for the enrichment of the public.

In the discussion, I repeated David Weinberger's point about 'leeway' - that all the real rights we enjoy may be found in the acts of discretion on the periphery of the law ("you may download that file because you are a music fan, but you may not becuase you intend to defraud me"). Leeway can't readily be expressed digitally, so it's completely missing from all the DRM schemes considered to date. Another point made by richard Hawkins was that the need in the case of those wishing to ruthlessly enforce rights is to prove that harm is being done. He suggested that the only reason it looks like the music industry is in decline is that it had an unrealistic period of growth as it re-sold music people already owned during the introduction of CDs. With that bubble normalised out, he asserted that actually the music industry is seeing reasonable straight-line growth and thus all the hatred of fans who use digital means is misplaced and does way more harm than good.

In all this the panellists seemed not to hear. They were surprised the audience applauded those who criticised them; they continued to repeat dead party-lines and didn't respond to genuine and insightful points. All very depressing and a bad omen for the future of the debate.

posted at 11:13 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Thursday, December 4

Wednesday, December 3

Officially old

I am now, officially, old. I knew the day was coming but being a perpetual technology-powered Peter Pan I have been able to live in denial up to this moment. No longer. My eldest son, Timothy, celebrates his 18th birthday today and being blessed as a citizen of the UK is free to drink alcohol, drive cars (not together though), marry, obtain a credit card, move out and so on. Hopefully he'll exercise his usual discretion and caution over when and where to exercise those rights.

As for me, my mother tells me having a child of 18 pales into geriatric insignificance compared with having one over 40. And I'm not that worried really. I am blessed with a son who is a pleasure to know and who has not exposed me to the teenage horrors of which I was warned and who I can weepily confess to loving deeply. Happy birthday, Tim, I'm proud to be your Dad!

posted at 6:23 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Goths, Visigoths and CNet

I have been receiving sleazy offers to rehost the Highfield Choir's music with the closure of MP3.com, but nothing really was going to save this unique remnant of the Bubble. Maybe the season itself is best forgotten, but not since the burning of the library of Alexandia has so much hard work been destroyed so thoughtlessly as C|Net has just achieved. Between C|Net, Microsoft's work to lock up the written word, the RIAA's work to defeat the love of music generally and the MPAA's work to render the moving image closed, it seems likely that future historians will find 21st century culture as opaque as the Dark Ages. Last time it was through lack of culture; this time it will be because of the victory of greed over civilization.

posted at 3:05 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Tuesday, December 2

3D Desktop

One of the cool things I've had the chance to play with lately on JDS has been a project codenamed "Looking Glass" which aims to provide a 3D desktop environment. It's largely written with Java (proving for once and for all that there's no inherent performance gap for Java applications) and makes good use of the integrated Java support in JDS.

At one level it provides a 3D windowing environment for existing X applications (interesting enough in its own right), but at another it introduces the ability to create 3D applications where you interact spatially to explore data. In the demo video (starts a little way in, persist or fast-forward ;-) you can see the CD selector from the screen-shot to the right in action, and I can imagine all the other experimental 3D apps I've enjoyed using (photo gallery browsers, SQL database explorers with 3D visualisation, etc.) finally making it to the real world.

Update: There's another, better demo online now.

posted at 6:21 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Monday, December 1

Things you have to believe to be Republican

More US politics, sorry. Looking forward to the equivalent list for Democrats, but Cory Farley's list [via Charging the Canvas] is so close to the bone it's almost not funny - for example:
Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.
Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.
A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.
Could have been written by Michael Moore (you have got his book, yes? [US | UK | CA])...

posted at 2:45 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Sunday, November 30

Software

All quiet on the ßlogging front as I tangle with various bits of software:
I am really pleased with Mail.App in the Mac OS X 1.3 (Panther) - the junk mail filtering seems to be just right, currently giving a maximum of 1 false positive and 2 or 3 false negatives each day (still getting 50 or so spams per hour on my private domains)
The new X11 on Panther has a great side-effect. I found that Xquartz allows me to run a remote X desktop for any of the Linux machines in the house (just type "Xquartz -query hostname &" in Terminal using the desired hostname); now under Panther it is able to run full-screen and I can switch back and forth using Option-Command-A.
I have MySQL up and running on the main server and have been happily connecting to it with OpenOffice.org 1.1 using the JDBC connector. I'm transferring the Christmas card mailing list over to it. I had quite a bit of trouble finding decent generic instructions so have a mind to write some.
I've been getting Sun Java Desktop System (aka MadHatter) up and running on my old Thinkpad after I trashed it hacking. Running sweetly now, love it.
Amazing how time just evaporates when I get to doing this stuff, always has.

posted at 11:58 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |