Wow! In this vid, sure to ruffle a few feathers, Neil Gaiman lays out the argument for piracy, explaining that piracy is free advertising.
[via the inimitable Cynical-C]
Posted by Jesse Willis
Tag: copyfight
James Moore, MP (and Minister of Heritage) on digital locks: He Says He Doesn’t, But He Does
As a former junior employee of The Province, Vancouver’s morning daily newspaper, I know how hard working in the news business is. First you have to get up at five o’clock, six days a week. You have to walk the half-kilometer, or so, to where someone from just up the totem pole has dumped the bundles. Next, you have to peel the all the bale bindings, shove their inky contents into your shoulder bags and schlep the damned things from door-to-door, up and down hills, in rain and ice and snow.
When you think about it, it sounds like an ennobling profession!
As a newspaper delivery boy I brought the news, sports and a little entertainment to the citizens and residents all along on my route. At the time I was mostly only interested in The Province for Hägar the Horrible, but I presume the people I was delivering the paper to wanted to learn about all the important goings on in the society all around them.
I’m pretty sure that they don’t hire kids to deliver newspapers anymore.
They ALSO don’t seem to hire much in the way of investigative journalists or journalistic editors either.
For more than a year I’ve been scouring The Province daily. There’s been hardly a mention of the one issue that affects every single British Columbian:
—>Bill C-32, Canada’s proposed copyright legislation.
Have a look for yourself! A search of TheProvince.com‘s website turns up just a couple OP-EDs and and a couple of Postmedia News pieces.
I was willing to let it go, but then they ran one Postmedia News piece. It’s a particularly annoying article, as it features Heritage Minister James Moore claiming:
“I can say for myself, in terms of my own personal digital media consumption habit, that I personally choose to buy products that don’t have digital locks.”
Now as unbelievable as that sounds it also contradicts the facts. Moore has been trying his damnedest to keep the digital lock provisions in this bill. And now he’s turned to outright lies! Nobody that I’m aware of has called him on it. I will.
According to this Maclean’s article, Moore owns two X-Box 360s (one in his riding and one in Ottawa) and has multiple copies of his favorite games including Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. That’s DRM folks, those games have TPMs in them – he’s buying media with built in digital locks and he’s having to buy multiple copies of those games precisely because they have digital locks.
I can’t believe a professional editor, working at The Province, and running that story would be unaware of such glaringly obvious bullshit, or that an editor at a professional news-gathering newspaper would run a story that put such unbelievable guff out unchallenged – or at least, followed it up with a Google search and another story. It’s been nearly a month now with no follow up story.
I must therefore conclude that the editors aren’t reading the stories that they are buying, and that The Province is no longer capable of being Vancouver’s newspaper of record.
I would love to tell you that I’m going to give up my subscription to the The Province – but I can’t. It comes free with the purchase of a cup of coffee, and I’m not willing to give up the coffee just yet.
Apparently investigative journalism and editorial comment will be increasingly found on blogs and YouTube. Here’s some:
Posted by Jesse Willis
CKNW: The Mike Smyth Show talks to the leader of the Pirate Party of Canada
The first eighteen minutes of this |MP3| file is the only mention, that I know of by a Vancouver based radio program), about copyright reform in 2010. In the podcast CKNW‘s Mike Smyth (he’s also a Province columnist) talks to Mikkel Paulson, the leader of the recently created Pirate Party of Canada, and Carmi Levy, a Toronto Star journalist and blogger, about Canada’s current copyright legislation, Bill C-32, media levies and the ethics of torrents.
Here’s the relevant section from the official description:
“IS THE NEW COPYRIGHT LAW ‘FAIR’?
MIKKEL PAULSON
PARTY LEADER AND DIRECTOR, PIRATE PARTY OF CANADA
CARMI LEVY
TECHNOLOGY JOURNALIST
Re: if you download music, movies or television, listen up. Canada is in the midst of copyright reform, how can you protect the rights of artists, while not handicapping consumers in their use of digital technology?”
Posted by Jesse Willis
The SFFaudio Podcast #086 – TALK TO: Ben Aaronovitch
The SFFaudio Podcast #086 – Jesse talks to Ben Aaronovitch. Aaronovitch is an SFF author, a former Doctor Who scriptwriter, and the lead writer of the Blake’s 7 audio drama series.
Talked about on today’s show:
the original Doctor Who, how to break into TV (in the mid 1980s), Andrew Cartmel, the price of VCRs in 1985, Caroline Aulton, Remembrance Of The Daleks, big budget BBC, Geoffrey Palmer, do it again with 40% more fear, Ben Aaronovitch’s blog Temporarily Significant entitled: I shall eviscerate you, Daleks and An Unearthly Child, racism, The Hand Of Omega, two sets of Daleks, proto-U.N.I.T., Battlefield, what killed the original Doctor Who?, the BBC!, the fetishization of the writer, Russel T. Davies, Queer As Folk, “a Doctor Who shaped whole in the British psyche”, Jon Pertwee, KVOS-TV, the abortive FOX Doctor Who reboot, Doctor Who as an episode of The X-Files, Paul McGann, The New Adventures of Doctor Who:Transit by Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers Of London by Ben Aaronovitch (aka Midnight Riot), Moon Over Soho, Whispers Underground, Peter F. Hamilton, “extruded fantasy product”, Michael Moorcock, Charlaine Harris, Diana Gabaldon, Harry Potter meets The Sweeney (the British version of Kojak), The Dresden Files (is “Gandalf noir”), reviews of Rivers Of London (aka Midnight Riot), Midnight Riot on GoodReads.com, negative reviews are very helpful, The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan, Morgan’s screed against J.R.R. Tolkien, Joe Abercrombie and China Miéville are good because they are good not because they are grim, the Blake’s 7 audio dramas started on The Sci-Fi Channel UK, Andrew Sewell, Rebel, Traitor, Liberator is an SFFaudio Essential |READ OUR REVIEW|, “Star Trek: British or Robin Hood in space”, Terry Nation, Chris Boucher, Avon’s one liners, Firefly, Farscape, the Blake’s 7 prequel series, Cally: Blood & Earth and Flag & Flame |READ OUR REVIEW|, Alistair Lock, the quality of the actors on Blake’s 7, Colin Salmon, Michael Praed, B7 is real Science Fiction ideas in a space opera setting, the internet is a huge echo chamber, the effect of torrents on Blake’s 7, B7 is on Audible.com (and Audible.co.uk), Bernice Summerfield, Big Finish, Blake’s 7: The Early Years: Zen: Escape Velocity (Volume 2.1), Series 2 of Blake’s 7 is already written, the rebooting of Battlestar Galactica, the Pegasus episode of BSG, landing a Battlestar was badly though through, Ronald D. Moore‘s Cylons didn’t have a plan, Lost, J. Michael Straczynski, television is like life, Dexter, detective shows can run longer, The Mentalist, Law & Order, why Doctor Who need never die, the Pertwee years, Doctor Who as the “universal television format”, Frankenstien = The Brain Of Morbius, Greek myth = The Myth Makers, there’s no end-game in Doctor Who, writers are used as a crutch by British TV executives, the credit given to writers by UK television, USA TV vs. UK TV, the writer’s room is very attractive, the homogeneous end product, Castle is beautifully written fluff, the psychic episode of Castle was soul-deadening, HBO, True Blood, Downton Abbey is kind of like Upstairs Downstairs, the problems of USA and UK TV, DaVinci’s Inquest, Intelligence, Downton Abbey, Highlander, Seacouver, The 4400 lake (is Buntzen Lake), “Caprica city is decaying”.
Posted by Jesse Willis
Update:
Here’s a photo I took of Buntzen Lake this morning.
The SFFaudio Podcast #085 – TALK TO: Gregg Taylor
The SFFaudio Podcast #085 – Jesse talks with Gregg Taylor (aka Martin Bracknell aka Red Panda) of Decoder Ring Theatre about The Red Panda Adventures and Black Jack Justice.
Talked about on today’s show:
Decoder Ring Theatre, Gregg is not as famous as Cher yet, something the same and something different, Girl’s Night Out, telling the mystery man’s story, World War II, Vancouver, secret identities, The Grey Fox (Vancouver’s own superhero), were there Japanese spy rings in Vancouver circa 1940?, Margo Lane, espionage, Nazi masterminds fomenting fifth-columns, Nazi Eyes On Canada |READ OUR REVIEW|, buying war bonds, Toronto, She’s secretly Japanese and secretly a superhero, Japanese-Canadian internment, Attack on Pearl Harbour, details from upcoming Red Panda Adventures episodes, the Dieppe raid, single-handedly defeating Hitler seems un-Canadian, augmented-dinosaurs, Professor von Schlitz, Captain America, Indiana Jones, how Gregg Taylor handicapped himself, “the man with an identity so secret even the audience doesn’t know it”, weaving a tangled web of lies, Superman was 4F, The Spirit, would static-shoes actually work?, Garth Ennis’ The Boys, what superhero you like tells us about you, the Martian Manhunter‘s kryptonite, Justice League: The New Frontier, Batman‘s superpower is a strength of will, Kit Baxter’s superpower is moxie, Trixie Dixon, creating dynamic female leads, CBC TV, the gender bending episode of Black Jack Justice (Justice In Love And War), Steven J. Cannell‘s Scene Of The Crime, gender switching, Black Jack Justice Hush Money, Cyrano de Bergerac, Roxanne, the formation of Black Jack Justice in opposition to The Red Panda Adventures, writing detective fiction vs. writing superhero fiction, Richard Diamond: Private Detective, the self-narrating hard-boiled post-war detective, The Adventures Of Sam Spade, paying your actors in corn, Philip Marlowe, writing drama in the half-hour format, Red Panda and retroactive continuity, an alternative universe that isn’t much different just a lot sillier, Baboon McSmoothie, the prime minister’s talking dog, the Moonlighting moment, flashback episodes, the Red Panda novels, Thomas Perkins, beautiful cover art helps, that repeated line: “It’s an interesting point.”, Aaron Sorkin, J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5, Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, Gregg Taylor’s Decoder Ring Theatre, The Maltese Falcon, Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow, Orson Welles, a good TV show is like a play, The Green Hornet, “the MP3 revolution saved old time radio”, Gregg’s most frequently ignored piece of advice (write and record several shows before you release), might Decoder Ring one day adapt Cyrano or a Shakespeare play?, theater people are wonderful, Gregg would love to do cartoons (call him!), the Black Jack Justice comic, Gregg loves comics too!, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the continuity of stories makes them more real, the nearly static Black Jack universe, Robert B. Parker, Spenser, the Jesse Stone tragedy, if Gregg gets crushed by a cement mixer…, The Old Testament God vs. New Testament God.
Posted by Jesse Willis
CBC Spark: Nora Young interviews David Fewer about Bill C-32
Yep, it’s another post on Bill C-32, Canada’s upcoming copyright legislation. Perhaps you are already aware that C-32, as currently written, exists to enshrine legal punishments for the circumvention of “technological protection measures [TPMs].” TPM, by the way, is a less sullied acronym for the widely opposed DRM (Digital Rights Management) – which is another word, in turn, for copy protection. Here is CBC’s Nora Young interviewing David Fewer, the director of The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, for an upcoming Spark radio broadcast (and podcast).
The Canadian government is taking another crack at reforming our nation’s extremely outdated copyright laws. Two previous bills died when Parliament dissolved. But Bill C-32 is bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and before committee. How necessary are these changes? The current legislation includes mention of Beta Max machines. Meanwhile, Bill C-32 would finally make it legal to record a program on your VCR to watch at a later time. Yes – a practice that is technically illegal in Canada.
|MP3|
Or, as one of my friends put it, “It has to be simple Jesse”. Maybe this simple…
Related posts: Bill C-32 |HERE|, copyfight |HERE|
Posted by Jesse Willis
P.S. find an unrelated protest HERE.