it.gen.nz

I bet you didn’t know! Apparently it’s true – you can see the official postcard here. I’d embed the image directly in this blog but I don’t want to infringe anyone’s IP.

Have a look at ArsTechnica for a hilarious take on what this means. My favourite part:

[According to the head of WIPO]: “What, [people] might ask, do the workings of copyrights, patents, industrial designs or trademarks have to do with the really big issues, like how to stop global warming; or with the things that add spice to life, like watching their favorite athletes perform in this year’s Olympics? The answer is that, without intellectual property rights, many new technologies developed to tackle global problems would never see the light of day and the great sporting events, which entertain and unite us, would not be broadcast into homes across the globe.”

So there you have it: without IP we’d have global warming and no Olympics (though somehow the ancient Greeks managed to have the Olympics but no global warming, and they did it without a modern IP legislative apparatus).

Quite. We can all debate the importance or otherwise of intellectual property concepts, but let’s not get carried away.

Two government stories in one day – and I just wish this one was positive. But it isn’t. Our elected politicians have voted for a complete dog’s breakfast in the form of the Copyright Amendment (New Technology) Bill. It’s been passed and it’s now an Act.

This was the law that supposed to legalise your iPod. Yes, that’s the same iPods as ministers use, as musicians use, and even as copyright lobbyists use. As it stands – or as it stood until now – the law says you are infringing copyright if you copy the CD you own onto the iPod you own. This bill was supposed to change that, but it doesn’t really.

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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about mashups – a way of joining together songs or videos to make something wholly new.

Read on for my notes and links.
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This week on Radio New Zealand National I talked about copyright and the Creative Commons. I started the item by playing “Imbube” – the first track on Renaissance, a CD by the Soweto String Quartet, which sounds oddly familiar until you realise its striking similarities to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”.

From there the discussion went on through the good and the bad of copyright, and how the Creative Commons represents a way to prevent copyright being used to lock up our culture.

I end with a link to a great video by Laurence Lessig on how copyright is being used to strangle culture. Enjoy!

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This week on Radio New Zealand National I talked about so-called Digital Rights Management. That’s the stuff which tries to stop you playing your CDs on your computer, won’t let you play specific DVDs on particular machines, and means that music bought from online download stores will only play on some kinds of music players.

Read on for my speaking notes and some links at the end.

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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about a company called SCO and its failed attempt to charge people to use someone else’s work, given freely to the community. SCO tried to assert ownership over Linux and charge people to use it. It’s finally got its just desserts.

My speaking notes are below the fold with the usual links at the end.
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Yes, I’ve not-so-subtly altered yesterday’s Herald headline for the title – but it’s almost true. The article misses the point that music companies can opt-out of letting you copy the music you have bought to the iPod you have bought. It’s not clear whether they need to put a ‘no iPods’ sticker on the CD cover to opt out, or whether some dense legalese inside to the effect that the musics may not be format shifted unless required by law would suffice. Either way, the music industry is not being required to let you use your iPod legally. The Select Committee’s analysis on this (warning, big PDF) makes it clear that they thought about this problem but decided not fix it.

The end result is: you can still be sued by music companies for copying your CDs to your iPods. That’s how they like it. Nothing changes. Sigh.

SCO has lost its legal battle to charge people for using other people’s work. You can read all about it at Groklaw. Briefly, SCO asserted that a) it owned Unix, b) Linux was illegally copied from Unix, and c) everyone using Linux therefore owed it licence fees. A few companies paid – most just ignored the demands. SCO sued some major Linux users including IBM, then Novell stood up and said we own Unix, SCO doesn’t, and we have no problem at all with Linux. SCO sued Novell and has just lost. It will therefore lose to IBM and the others in very short order as the basis of its claim has been overturned. SCO will be liable for the licence fees it has already collected, and possibly damages, not to mention huge legal fees. A longer and better description of the whole process is on Wikipedia.

This is important because SCO’s whole legal challenge has been seen as a deliberate and cynical attempt to scare people off open source. Proprietary software companies (you know who I mean) have been portraying the SCO action as a reason not to use Linux, after all, they say, how can you be sure you won’t be sued? They can’t do that any more.

Today I talked on Radio New Zealand National about digital copyright, and how Parliament could have decided to make iPods legal but now apparently isn’t going to.

The essential point here is that copyright is a form of monopoly granted by government to boost innovation, almost a property right, and that copyright holders will naturally lobby government to have their interests expanded so the worth of their property right increases. That doesn’t make it right. It’s all the rest of us who pay the price, and the continual expansion of copyright risks our whole culture and technology since everything original we do relies on work done by others.

Below the fold are my speaking notes for the radio, which I nearly stuck to, with as always some interesting links at the bottom.

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Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked about domain names on the Internet, where they came from, what they are, how you can get one and what you should pay for one. My notes are below the split, and as usual, there are some links at the end.

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