Richtig said Fred!

An association named “Canadian Music Creators” has just voiced its opinions on different hot subjects, namely they say:

“Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical”

“Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive”

“Cultural Policy Should Support Actual Canadian Artists”

This association has among its members: Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan.

There is also a recent news about 6 independant Canadian music labels leaving Canada’s equivalent of the RIAA (the CRIA) and it seems the group of 6 labels says the CRIA does not represent the interest of Canadian Artists but wants more money for the major labels (read American).

It appears that both Canadian labels and Canadian artists do not share the same views after all as major american labels.

You can visit the “Canadian Music Creators Coalition” to read their views on these topics.
You can read the article “CRIA falling apart” on Slyck News.

You can also read my article on the analysis of CD sale slowdown.

What is worse than a bad movie, the sequel to that bad movie. And guess what? The DMCA now has an infant from hell, some lawmakers in Washington think that 10 years of jailtime for downloading something illegally is a decent punishment. So before pirating a movie think about it carefully because you could go to jail. They are also diverting 20 million $ from criminal enforcement to copyright enforcement in the FBI.

It is already the 7th birthday of the DMCA 1.0 and the EFF also has a good article on its Unintended Consequences.

Read about the DMCA 2.0 on the IPac Blog.
Read an excerpt of the DMCA 2.0 on News.COM.
You can also read the whole DMCA 2.0 (PDF) on IPac.

What do you do when you get bad press because your soldiers die in combat? Simple: ban all medias from covering the return of the dead soldier’s coffins from Afghanistan.

It is not the first time Stephen Harper bans media from events, he did it in the first week he was in power at Meech Lake where all medias had to be 2 kilometers away from the meeting place instead of being right on the doorstep interviewing ministers coming in or going out.

And then there is the reporter’s access at the House of Commons where press conference are held, now the government can select which reporters get to ask questions avoiding the more troublesome reporters.

Why not simply pass a law censoring medias alltogether? Wait, maybe that’s part 2 of his plan… …it is definitely a sad day for democracy.

You can read about the ban of media for Soldier’s coffins on the Globe and Mail.
You can read about Stephen Harper’s media ban at Meech Lake on CTV.CA.
You can read about the reporter’s access to the House of Commons on the Ottawa Citizen.

It would appear that according to a Judge in New York that surfing the Internet for personal reasons is equivalent to using a telephone for personal reasons and I quote him: “For this reason, city agencies permit workers to use a telephone for personal calls, so long as this does not interfere with their overall work performance. Many agencies apply the same standard to the use of the Internet for personal purposes.”

The Judge also mentions in his decision: “It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work.”

There you have it. A judge has realized what many managers have yet to understand… The Internet is ubiquitous, like airmail letters 100 years ago or the telephone 20 years ago. If you don’t have access to it all the time you are simply living off the grid. Now who exactly would question someone’s work ethics because “he’s checking out the white pages too often” or “sometimes he even checks a dictionary”…

Read the article on MSNBC.

There is apparently an advertisement of Maxim magazine’s cover that is located in a desert. Nothing is special about that except that it’s viewing (and size) was optimized for satellite imaging as it is a 75 feet by 100 feet AD located in the middle of nowhere and facing toward the sky!

If you want to see it click here.

It seems a virus writer managed to created a multi platform virus that is cross compatible with BOTH Linux executable format (ELF) and Windows .EXE format… It is indeed an incredible feat, done 100% in assembly. According to Computerworld this virus was written as a proof of concept and is not very dangerous. But then again, I do recall that the first few computer viruses were pretty much all proof of concepts… ….then they evolved and became freed of physical media because if the Internet. All that is missing right now is a multi-platform-code-generating-toolkit, my bet is that someone is already working on that…

You can read Computerworld’s article about this virus.

Paul Graham has just published a great essay on Software Patents. He writes: “One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you’re against software patents, you’re against patents in general.” Paul Graham also does a fair comparison of the laws passed that gave Hollywood Studios fairly strong enforcement power over copyrighted works:

The most memorable example of medieval industrial secrecy is probably Venice, which forbade glassblowers to leave the city, and sent assassins after those who tried. We might like to think we wouldn’t go so far, but the movie industry has already tried to pass laws prescribing three year prison terms just for putting movies on public networks. Want to try a frightening thought experiment? If the movie industry could have any law they wanted, where would they stop? Short of the death penalty, one assumes, but how close would they get?

He ends his essay by concluding:”they don’t affect innovation much, one way or the other.”

I think software patents are probably granted too easily and too overly broad which means they do not function as intended and on the same topic of dysfunctional laws I would like to point that since new laws like the DMCA have passed they have brought new kinds of lawsuits that were inexistent before. If software patents do not work as expected right now in the USA, thus not preventing anyone from copying software patents and yet only get used in cases like NTP Software suing RIM for a lot of money, then what improvements have software patents brought us? My guess would be very little, I would also like to mention something I heard from Richard Stallman last year in a presentation he gave in Montreal (Canada), he compared software to cooking and when you think about it it makes a lot of sense, take something like bread, or pies or word processors and you will see it it applies in most cases.

1.- Everyone can purchase a commercial product or try to make his own similar product using the same ingredients.

2.- Everyone has access to the same “ingredients”: flour, oil, eggs, code examples, FAQs, white papers, RFCs

3.- Everyone has access to the same “tools”: oven, bowls, pans, compilers, google searches, code libraries

4.- Everyone can tweak a “recipe” & try to improve it: adding butter, spices, changing icons, adding options

And yet, you would not like to have your Grandma collect 10% of the flour and butter you are using in your recipes because she was making bread years before you… …accepting that software patents can exist in their present form is a bit like promoting individual WMD, since everyone is potentially dangerous now, now one dares using it!

To read Paul Graham’s essay on Software Patents click here.

You can read Wikipedia’s article about the DMCA here.

There is also another important article from Paul Graham: “A Plan for Spam”, it has started the Bayesian Filtering trend among ANTI-SPAM Circles. You can read “A Plan for Spam” here.

It appears that cellular phone do not cause planes to crash after all, because Air France has announced they will allow SMS (short text messages) as well as DATA calls starting in March 2007 and actual voice calls at a later date… It is expected to be a 6 months trial and it may become permanent (if it is profitable enough).

I guess they will now suggest to turn off the phone when they start the in flight movie only…

You can read more about this on The Register by clicking here.

Yahoo has a frightening story about a teacher at Englewood Elementary who apparently asked plain clothed officers from the Department of Homeland Security to move their car because they were parked in a school bus unloading zone. The result was that this teacher was handcuffed and slammed against a car, he was then released after 30 minutes.

There is an article on Wikipedia about the DHS here.
You can read Yahoo’s article about this story here.

Now it appears you can legally buy a Town on eBay, before you had to be a Crime Lord or something, now all you need is 1 750 000$.

Check it out on eBay, the city can also be renamed if you wish. The link to the auction is here.