I am still trying to wrap my brain around the continuing GCSB illegal spy ring, as well as John Key's mind-mongingly incredible statements on reform. Local Bodies and Dim Post have covered much of the shaky ground, but I still have a few points in mind that haven't been addressed.
Sloppy paperwork at the GCSB as described in the Kitteridge Report means that there's a lot of possibly illegal activity that has been overlooked simply because no record of it exists. The intelligence services have a serious legitimacy problem.
GCSB worked in good faith with police with warrants. As the Tuhoe Terror Raids demonstrated, these warrants were issued by judges and JPs more like fishing licences that would be later tested in court for proportionality and admissability. The spooks might need some quality control there.
Were the police the only government sector getting grass from the NZSIS and/or GCSB? Was there any time, for instance, when the Serious Fraud Office used warrants to inspect Cook Islands financial transactions or gather evidence against HSBC for corrupt banking practices? I bet not. Some collars are whiter than others.
It is getting lemon difficult to tell the state defence actors from Intellectual Property trolls. Can't the IP pimps hire their own damn security?
10:27, Restate my assumptions; 1) Muppets are the language of human nature.
2) Everything around us can be represented and understood through muppets.
3) If you graph muppets of any system, patterns emerge.
Therefore, there are muppets everywhere in human nature.
If so, muppets cannot be the exclusive preserve of Disney. Nor, for that matter, can the 19th Century works of Lewis Carroll or AA Milne. There's a piece of Pooh in everyone, and it doesn't belong to Disney.
Both authors would be spinning in their graves at the hollow extortion that their characters have become. Exhibit A: Johnny Depp's Alice in Wonderland. Exhibit B: the trite crap Pooh and Friends spew on the Murdoch/Disney Channel. Milne was a painstaking wordsmith, editing each sentence many times to distil clarity and lyricism. Now it's all cross-promo po-mo platitudes and homogenised homilies.
The US Republicans are coming around to this Muppet Pi logic on copyright, dialling down their branch of mad hatters and presenting a respectable copyright reform paper. Cory Doctorow sez:
Three Myths about Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix it
(PDF) is a position paper just released by House Republicans,
advocating for a raft of eminently sensible reforms to copyright law,
including expanding and clarifying fair use; reaffirming that
copyright's purpose is to serve the public interest (not to enrich
investors); to limit statutory damages for copyright infringement; to
punish false copyright claims; and to limit copyright terms. This is pretty close to the full raft of reforms that progressive types
on both sides of the US political spectrum have been pushing for. It'll
be interesting to see whether the Dems (who have a much closer
relationship to Hollywood and rely on it for funding) are able to muster
any support for this.
You don't have to wait for Karl Urban as Judge Dredd to see a bit of 3D instant justice around these parts. David Fisher continues his gripping look at the MegaUpload saga, this week looking at the military assault on the Chrisco Mansion. Last week's episode here.
The Special Tactics Group, helicopters and a refusal to use door handles characterises the largest domestic assault team since the Ruatoki raids. If it's worth killing, it's worth overkilling, eh. Reasonable force is for commies.
John Key today stood by the government's decision to declare a War on Clouds, after reports of a military exercise in Coatsville, outside of Auckland last Friday.
"Every Kiwi loves a summer in the sun. Clouds cause interference, blocking full access from the Sky," said Key. "Even a small cloud can block the full dominance of Sky. Therefore, it is in this country's best interests to remove any clouds."
The prime minister released details of the military exercise, which used a top secret piece of US equipment called a cloudbuster or Orgone Device.
"The USOD J. Edgar Hoover was kindly loaned to us by the United States government," said Key. "It is the same class of machine used to keep the sky above Hollywood free from clouds for years, and we are happy with its deployment here in New Zealand."
"Specially trained agents from Langley, Virginia were flown in to demonstrate the Orgone Device. These men were specially chosen for their highly repressed sexual energy, which is channelled through the J. Edgar Hoover and converted into Orgone. Clouds are eliminated without due process by the Orgone," explained Key.
When challenged by media on the bias of strict cloud regulation while Sky remains an unregulated monopoly, Key defended the government's stance by saying that you can't build a brighter future with clouds, but you can with a Sky portfolio.
This story was proudly brought to you by our sponsor:
This site would be blacked out in support of the anti-SOPA/PIPA, but the HTML hurts my head. So instead, I'm raping The Oatmeal's Intellectual Property below:
Please don't shut my blog (or Blogger) down because of my harmless IP cloning. Stop SOPA/PIPA. While you're at it, can you kill the IP trolls in the TPP too?
The people in Whangarei are safe from the mortal dangers of fake adidas goods. I just hope I don't have to shut down the 2012 goNZo Freakpower Summer Collection. I've got dozens of black singlets ready to roll off the Pook Farm presses...
The mouse who drives the small tractor over the singlets might have to be let go.
It's the first day of spring and P2P in NZ is now "illegal". The troll farmers are sowing their infringement notices as we type. Not that the hardcore will get them. It'll be the public libraries, the wifi hotspotters and completely innocent Mums and Dads who'll get the nastygrams in the mail.
Circumvention measures have already been taken by those with half a clue. The torrents will flow. Hell, I'm almost tempted to torrent today for the hell of it and do the finger to the troll farmers. After all, mobile networks are immune to trollers until 2013.
Nope, it'll be the naive who will be cross-subsidising John Key's dinners with Warner Brothers, the unsecured wireless home and business networks who will help pay Rupert Murdoch's legal fees through the guilt-before-innocence copyright notices.
I mean, it's not as if the copyright trolls are balancing things out with making Hulu or Netflix or even the BBC feed available here. And I'm with Aarvark on Labour's cheap shill at the Zeitgeist:
As a footnote -- the headless Labour party has announced this week that it would repeal the 3-strikes provision of the new law. What a bunch of tossers. Much of this stupid law is their doing and they actually voted for it back in April. It seems this is a political party that really has lost the plot and is grasping at any straw in the lead-up to the November elections.
Will the trolls take on the wrong goat? Methinks the troll farmers and lawmakers will reap what they sow.
In two days' time, P2P software will be illegal in New Zealand. Dub Dot Dash has a good summary of why everyone should uninstall all P2P software before August 11. Troll farmers aren't going to discriminate on who they milk, and the government doesn't give a monkey's about innocent until proven guilty.
The copyright provisions in the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement are becoming clearer, and it's no thanks to Trade Minister Tim Groser nor Prime Minister John Key. Slashdot points to Techdirt with the nitty gritty:
Some key points:
It would require that countries participating ban parallel import for any copyright holder who wants it. That is, if a copyright holder says no, countries would have to block your ability to purchase legal and authorized products in one country and import them into another. This is the so-called "grey market" which should be perfectly legal, but which many companies would like to block so they can price things much higher in some countries.
It would require criminal enforcement for certain cases of circumventing DRM even when there's no copyright infringement, going beyond existing treaties even when there's no copyright infringement. There are some exceptions, but rather than allow countries to determine their own exceptions, it defines the exceptions and actually says countries cannot go beyond those.
It would impose liability on ISPs for dealing with infringing works that goes well beyond the DMCA. Yes, Hollywood may finally be able to force ISPs to act as their personal business model cops -- something they've been unable to do in the US.
Along those lines, there would be "legal incentives" for ISPs to go above and beyond that in helping copyright holders.
Forget privacy. ISPs would be required to identify users on request, going well beyond existing law.
Expand what is considered patentable, going in the opposite direction of what's needed. Most troubling, it would allow patents on inventions even if the inventions do "not result in the enhancement of the known efficacy of that product." This seems to go against the very purpose of patent law, but the USTR has already shown it couldn't care much less than actually obeying the Constitutional underpinnings of patents or copyright law.
Continues the troubling and problematic idea that patents must be assumed valid, even if they were only briefly reviewed.
A requirement to forbid third party opposition of patent applications. This is particularly ridiculous. Allowing third parties to oppose patent applications (as is allowed with trademarks) would certainly help prevent some really bad patent applications from getting through. How can the USTR justify not allowing such a basic concept of letting third parties point out bad patents before they're approved. Especially when you combine this with the "presumption of validity" in patents once granted, it looks like the USTR is trying to increase the rubber stamping of patent approvals.
Can a government be accused of treason, I wonder? I mean, it is increasingly clear that the Nats are making it all up as they go along. John Key is still a long way from understanding what he can and can't blurt to the nation, as well as what he can and can't promise on our behalf to the US corporate raiders.
You've got to have serious doubts on the TPP when Gordon Campbell and Eric Crampton are in agreement. So sez Bernard Hickey, Jane Kelsey and me too. If the Nats sign on to this, they'll have a bigger Blackout protest on his hands than last time.
UPDATE: Here is the link I was thinking of during this post. Technically Alex Tarrant, but Bernard Hickey is complicit.
Mix and Mash: The Great NZ Remix and Mashup Competition was launched last night at the Mix & Mash Mini, and we’re thrilled to announce that a total of $30,000 in prizes is up for grabs including cash prizes of up to $10,000, and great gear including a Macbook Pro & MinoHD Flip video cameras.
Mix & Mash is the biggest push ever to get people using NZ digital content and data, and is being run to assist New Zealand organisations to release their content and data for reuse, and to encourage the creation of new tools, services, experiences and artworks using this material – from iPhone apps to digital stories to things the organisers haven’t even thought of yet.
I remember back in 1979 when I was nine years old, my father took my sister Uptight Rodriguez, then 16, on an around the world tour. A large part of her character was built on that trip; the incentives of what money could buy were fused into place, as well a crash course in a foreign culture. The old man left her lost in Rome for over a day, her without one word of Italian to her credit. She lived.
The old man always had a habit of disappearing at inconvenient moments that would make the guy who left his kid outside Mermaids look positively parental. While my mother was popping out Uptight in the Palmy Hospital Maternity Unit back in '64, the old man had disappeared into the bush without warning for over a week; hunting was his alibi. He once rationalised his actions, saying that he was a better father than Barry Crump. For overseas readers, it's a bit like saying George W Bush was a better president Nixon. Not a high hurdle, capito?
Among the treasures brought back from this world tour into Fortress NZ, as it was back then, were a few pirated tape cassettes picked up for bugger all in Bangkok by my sister. She got something like a dozen tapes for the price she'd pay for one in NZ. The cassette case for Abba's Arrival was plain white cardboard with a small photo of the original album cover glued onto it.
I'm not sure whether they lasted shorter or longer than the legitimate copies. The Range Rover's tape deck liked to snack on either, chewing through songs so often, you'd be listening to each song as if it was for the last time. I think the Abba carked it later that year at a race meeting outside Fuck Knows. The Range Rover doubled as a Child Care Centre back then too. My favourite toy was the cigarette lighter. We were at racecourses for so much of our non-school hours, if thirteen year olds were allowed to bet, my brother Randy would have made a fortune. He knew the form.
Damnit, this post is supposed to be about copyright, but it keeps veering off into Dad. He's creaking around upstairs louder than normal, what with him dead nine years tomorrow and all. I never took my chance to bury him out behind Matata back then. He was never as accessible as the Wellington Botanic Gardens. Besides, Matata needs the phosphate. I hold him partly responsible for the Matata landslips in 2005 though. I imagine him tunnelling beneath the ground with his artificial hip bone, searching for just one more rabbit to kill.
Screw it. I'm not deleting any more paragraphs. We'll just have to see where this one goes. The plot is copyright.
Back to those Bangkok pirated cassettes. Those dodgy tapes saved a little of me and my brother's sanity. It saved us both from high-rotation Pat Benatar, which was Uptight's sole music tape before the pirates delivered their booty. The mobile childcare centre (ie the Range Rover) was ruled by the eldest, and besides, neither of us boys owned a tape between us. We only had vinyl, and at the time my collection consisted of one Star Wars LP, so Uptight played pedantic DJ in the cage.
It's not Guantanamo Bay, but put me in a room with non-stop Pat Benatar, the effect is similar. So, let's hear it for the cheap knock-offs of South East Asia! Variety at unheard of prices. And where was the harm? Second World citizens (NZers) helping to fund the Third World (Developing Countries in NowSpeak) through commerce.
It's not as if the four Abba artists were missing out on a lot. There's not much change between three quarters of fuck all (royalties) and nothing. In fact, seeing as how Uptight already had the LP of Abba's Arrival, the pirate tape was just a pre-internet version of format shifting. Abba and the label lost nothing. They has already grabbed their skim.
Abba don't feature in this Four Note Medley (HT HuffPost), but they quite easily could have:
The point of all this ranting and tangents is entirely due to the entertaining (and freely observable) blog fight between the subjective objectivist NotPC and the realistic economist Offsetting Behaviour over copyright. In the 1D binary RandWelt of NotPC, copying is theft. Meantime, Crampton entertains the trade-offs.
According to Cresswell, the Axis of Awesome featured above should be paying a craptonne of licensing fees for pointing out the pop folly of four notes. How anyone can entertain a copyright on a musical progression in perpetuity is a nonsense. It's like claiming copyright on the alphabet. Nat Torkington pointed out the absurdity of this position at PublicACTA, when he said that every time someone sang Happy Birthday, they should be paying their due royalty.
According to Cresswell's creed, Lady Gaga (who does feature in the medley) should be paying due credit to all the many and varied music and fashion tropes she based her success on. Which is bunkum. She is due credit for a limited time, novelty value if you will, before it enters freely into the public domain, where it will be masticated into something else. That's life.
On a wider front, NotPC's dogma bears little resemblance to reality. Life is not fair. Creators have never got their just dues. Johnny Depp got more money from his Alice film than Lewis Carroll ever saw from his original work. Van Gough and Picasso never saw any of the money that the art wankers now charge for their works. Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, two men who changed the world for the better more than any dozen US presidents, died in poverty. Vulcanised rubber guy went the same way. Socrates was poisoned.
The McDonald brothers were conned out of a proportionate cut for inventing the industrial fast food model. It was milkshake maker salesman Ray Kroc who grabbed the idea, after wondering how the brothers were chewing through his deluxe 5-spindle milkshake model so quickly, and bought them out for a million bucks a piece. Here's the same fact strained through The Wire:
Suffice to say that copyright is an illusion and that copyright holders aren't always right, no matter what the law says. Common usage counts too. More recently, we have witnessed changes in ACTA process with the penultimate lifting of secrecy today, as well as the surrender on Three Strikes. But I don't quite think the Very Large Rights Holders are prepared for free yet. And neither is NotPC.
There's a lot of noise out there about the Wellington Declaration. Bang, Crash, Blammo, Boing, Fnard, Choing, Whizz, Oi, etc. I was fortunate enough to be part of the day that produced such a coherent, concise and basic language public treaty on the dire threat to freedom that is the Top Secret Copyright Treaty ACTA. I urge everyone to sign the petition in support of this declaration.
By happy happenstance, PublicACTA was held on the 300th anniversary of the first copyright law, the Statute of Anne. My interest in ACTA has been more focused on the not-so-distant past. The last really big technological leap before the Internet that disturbed the copyright barons was the Xerox copying machine. The Copyright Act 1976 was a direct consequence of the photocopier. That breakthrough introduced the idea of Fair Use, where various limited non-commercial uses were excluded from persecution. After all, they couldn't really regulate what a photocopier copies. Reality prevailed.
One effect of the Internet is to create an Infinite Xerox machine. Instead of responding to the new reality, the Very Large Rights Holders spent time and money on DRM, or lobbying the US government into passing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The general public ran rings around these restrictions, the former with DRM crackers, the latter with sheer numbers.
Not content with duping the supine American public, the US media giants tried pushing the World Intellectual Property Organisation into a global DMCA. When WIPO refused to do everything the American way, the Yanks walked out and decided to do it their way instead, unilateral pressure disguised as multi-lateralism and called it ACTA. The Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement that isn't.
There is no quid-pro-quo within the ACTA treaty, at least from what the leaks have implied. On the contrary, the Very Large Rights Holders have been litigating elsewhere to maintain exclusive use of many copyrights that should naturally have been released to the public commons.
One example springs readily to mind; Disney's monopoly on Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, and others. Disney refuses to stop milking Mickey Mouse. Matter of fact, they've even got NZ Customs doing their enforcement work. Only Disney can make derivative works from these old characters, which is a great shame. Anyone who has seen Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland could knows the truth of this. Failing that, spend a few minutes watching the mindless crap on the Disney Channel, where the new dead-eyed ghosts of old classics spout over-processed drivel. All the carefully chosen words of AA Milne have been forgotten in a miasma of nothing. Lewis Carroll's insanity rendered sensible, profitable.
The top secret ACTA circus is coming to town next month. Prior to these cone of silence meetings that intend to cripple the internet, InternetNZ is putting together PublicACTA. The guy who has done more to shed light on this dark ACTA material, Michael Geist, has been confirmed as a keynote speaker.
Don't let the lawyers, hucksters and business pimps win. Register your place for this vital, public and open forum on April 10th. HT Creative Freedom Foundation.
At the end of the day, it might not matter what politicians agree to in the Green Room. There's always the courts to protect the rights of the people. This just in from Michael Geist:
Australian Internet users are today celebrating a landmark decision in which an Australian court ruled against the film industry in their lawsuit against iiNET, Australia's third largest ISP. The industry had asked the court to hold the ISP liable for infringing BitTorrent activities of its users. The court soundly rejected that demand, holding that the ISP could not be seen to have authorized the infringement.
Here's the guts of it:
Firstly, in the law of authorisation, there is a distinction to be drawn between the provision of the ‘means’ of infringement compared to the provision of a precondition to infringement occurring. The decisions in Moorhouse, Jain, Metro, Cooper and Kazaa are each examples of cases in which the authorisers provided the ‘means’ of infringement. But, unlike those decisions, I find that the mere provision of access to the internet is not the ‘means’ of infringement. There does not appear to be any way to infringe the applicants’ copyright from the mere use of the internet. Rather, the ‘means’ by which the applicants’ copyright is infringed is an iiNet user’s use of the constituent parts of the BitTorrent system. iiNet has no control over the BitTorrent system and is not responsible for the operation of the BitTorrent system.
Secondly, I find that a scheme for notification, suspension and termination of customer accounts is not, in this instance, a relevant power to prevent copyright infringement pursuant to s 101(1A)(a) of the Copyright Act, nor in the circumstances of this case is it a reasonable step pursuant to s 101(1A)(c) of the Copyright Act. The reason for this finding is complicated and lengthy, and is not suitable for reduction to a short summary for present purposes so I shall refrain from attempting to do so.
Thirdly, I find that iiNet simply cannot be seen as sanctioning, approving or countenancing copyright infringement. The requisite element of favouring infringement on the evidence simply does not exist. The evidence establishes that iiNet has done no more than to provide an internet service to its users. This can be clearly contrasted with the respondents in the Cooper and Kazaa proceedings, in which the respondents intended copyright infringements to occur, and in circumstances where the website and software respectively were deliberately structured to achieve this result.
Whatever happens with the Top Secret ACTA crap, there's always the courts.
