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I hope she does something interesting | Feb 02, 2007 11:34

As it happens, I was talking with a mate over the holidays what Theresa Gattung should do next. We agreed that it would be great if she actually departed the national governance club, stopped hanging around with old men in suits, and found a start-up to head. We also decided that she'd probably stick with what she knew, pick up a few directorships and spend more time at the beach.

That would be a shame. She's only my age, after all, and there must be a 10 million dollar company she could have a crack at turning into a 50 million dollar company. It would certainly be more fun than running Telecom, which she inherited at a time when the Deane doctrine - drive out costs, defer capital spending, pay heroic dividends, defend market dominance - was running out of steam. Her failure to see the writing on the wall regarding regulation certainly suggests she needed to get out more.

Anyway, from the occasional contact I had with her, in person or by email, she has struck me as intelligent and approachable. I hope she does something interesting.

I'm off to Kiwi Foo for the next few days, hauling up the contents of a small café and a Sky decoder for the rugby. So I'll leave you with a couple of reasons to be cheerful.

C4 has started screening the actual daily Daily Show, four nights a week in pretty much real time. You can save your monthly data cap for some other torrents.

A US study may have identified a cheap, safe drug that kills most cancers. And it's not under patent.

Perhaps y'all could suggest a few more …

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Bob each way | Feb 01, 2007 09:58

Here's the good thing about John Key's speech this week: it highlights genuine need rather than, as those of his predecessor did, targeting latent resentment. If its content drifts into the banal sometimes - Key's evocation of "the Kiwi way" is spectacularly shallow - it is certainly an improvement.

More canny, on the other hand, was Key's invitation for Helen Clark to accompany him to McGehan Close in Owairaka, the street the National leader described in his speech as a "dead end" and a place "where rungs on the ladder of opportunity have been broken." It was not an accident that Key chose a street in Clark's own electorate.

Clark can't accept such an invitation - and let Key set the agenda - of course, and she has spent vastly more time as a politician in poor neighbourhoods than Key has. But her inevitable refusal can easily be made to look churlish.

NB: From Mark Easterbrook in the discussion for this post: "I'll agree they've put Helen in a bit of a spot, but if John Key wants to use McGehan Close to score political points, he better stop refering to it as being in "South Auckland", as he did when talking to Havoc on bFM this morning."

Yikes.

The commentary since has been interesting: in its editorial, the Herald had even more of a bob each way than Key did in his speech (the Northern Advocate's effort was much more interesting), while John Armstrong mused on the new leadership's differences from the old:

To forestall criticism that he is not offering solutions either, Mr Key suggests as a starter that business and the Government work together to help low-decile schools feed deprived pupils who turn up every morning on an empty stomach.
This sounds like 19th-century philanthropy, rather than the welfare state. It illustrates Mr Key's inclination for pragmatic solutions. Dr Brash would have looked at sanctions against the children's parents.

But eventually concluded: ho-hum.

The Herald was doing its best to lend the speech some gravity and relevance this week, visiting McGehan Close, where residents agreed that it is a scary place to live, with street crime and fighting between youth gangs. Perhaps part of the answer is to continue to break away from the slum model, and to place public housing tenants in more diverse neighbourhoods. If you asked John Key now, I suspect he'd agree.

But if he did, he'd be saying something quite different from what he said last year, when he slammed plans to place 500 new Housing New Zealand properties in a housing development on the old Hobsonville air base land as an act of "economic vandalism" that could create a ghetto amid $500,000 sections. He said Hobsonville was a pristine piece of land and there was the opportunity to build "something pretty good there." But only if those pesky poor people aren't allowed to spoil it, right?

As the Greens' Sue Bradford said at the time: "There is no reason that state house tenants should not be able to live near the water on prime real estate. Why should they be bundled off to the back blocks like second class citizens - out of sight and out of mind?"

A subsequent interview with Scoop's Kevin List didn't really clear things up: apparently Key is for "pepper-potting" of state housing except where he's against it.

So while Key's concern for the underclass might usefully prick Labour's conscience, he would be more personally convincing if he could keep a political idea in his head for more than a few months.

I'm not saying this idly. A third of the properties in the street where I live are public housing, and that has led to real difficulties at times (we had more than our share of former jailbirds and crazy people for a while), but it's a better way. And while he's evoking his childhood, Key would do well to recall that Burnside High School had quite a varied catchment when he attended it: I had friends who lived in state houses in Bryndwr and friends who lived in big, flash houses off Memorial Ave.

Anyway, the two major parties' research units have been duelling with statistics: Labour's pointing to the gains of recent years, National's highlighting deficits. Labour's data are more substantial - some of the National facts are simply a recitation of the last few weeks' headlines - and the numbers on employment and housing costs are quite compelling, but one does function as a critique of the other: a notice that not everything is rosy yet. I will find John Key's critique more convincing if and when he offers more convincing solutions.

Update: Anyway, after posting this, I thought I might as well take the opportunity to take a five-minute drive and visit McGehan Close before John Key does. It's a pocket of state housing in a cul de sac in Mt Albert: mostly modern well-kept townhouses, with a 60s-vintage block of pensioner flats at one end. The pensioner flats are being upgraded at the moment, as are the footpaths. It doesn't look like a slum: I lived in far worse places in London, and the houses are in much better nick than the older Housing New Zealand properties in my street. OTOH, there was broken glass crunching under my wheels as I turned around, which might be testament to the local youth crime problem.

Meanwhile, one of our readers, who knows the area well, is taking strong issue with the "street of shame" idea.

PS: I'm sad to hear about the Rising Sun pub on K Road suffering serious fire damage this morning, but glad that it has now been established that everyone is safe. I had some great times in that place. Update: Not as serious as first feared, and only the top floor damaged - they're talking about being open again by the weekend. Yay.

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We're Blending again | Jan 31, 2007 12:00

We have a new round of Karajoz Great Blend events - and it's next week! We've had a couple of details to iron out, which has delayed the announcement but we're ready to go in both Wellington and Auckland and we'd love to see y'all there.

The details are as follows:

WELLINGTON, Thursday Feb 8
The Boatshed
http://www.theboatshedvenue.co.nz/
Rough running time: 6.30pm - 10.30pm

All the way Back of the Y: Trash video monkeys Matt Heath and Chris Stapp of Back of the Y join us for a stroll through their chequered career, accompanied by video stretching from their earliest work in Dunedin, through their British TV appearances to their forthcoming feature film debut, The Devil Dared Me To. We'll focus on production stories and how they do stuff without budgets.

Digital Democracy: A panel discussion with Chris DiBona, head of the open-source software programme at Google and a former editor at Slashdot; Rob McKinnon, the British-based Kiwi behind theyworkforyou.co.nz, and Alastair Thompson, founder of Scoop.

I'm also teeing up an interesting briefing for anyone who is interested in the establishment of a New Zealand Creative Commons.

Music: To be confirmed.

AUCKLAND, Sunday Feb 11
Events Centre, Auckland War Memorial Museum extension (south entrance)
Rough running time: 6.30pm - 10.30pm

Yes, we've scored the awesome room at the top of the new museum extension. It's very nice.

The Matt and Chris show again, but perhaps with an added surprise.

Panel discussion: Online Media: With Kristine Garcia, who recently moved here from New York to become publisher of the Herald Online, Rob McKinnon, and Ben Goodger, the lead developer on Firefox and current Google employee.

Chris and Ben are here for Kiwi Foo Camp this coming weekend, and depending what comes out of Foo I may add another panellist, an additional feature in the programme, or both. Let me surprise you.

Music: Isaac Aesili from OpenSouls doing his funky thing.

As usual, the drinks will be cheap, the coffee will be free, the company will be good and the vibe will be warm.

We're indebted to the Great Blend sponsors, Karajoz Coffee Company, Idealog magazine, Hatton Estate wines and Monteith's Brewing Company - there's a page here with links and additional information for all of them. Go have a look.

As ever, The Karajoz Great Blend is free (although there'll be a koha box and we'd be quite grateful if you chipped in on arrival). If you want to come, just click the RSVP link for Wellington or Auckland - and on past form, you'd be best to do so promptly.

NB: Okay, if you tried for Auckland and got a message saying it was full, don't fret. We figure we can fit more this time, so try again in a few minutes (ie: about 2.15) and you will be served.

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Land-grab in the Magic Kingdom | Jan 30, 2007 09:10

If you follow these issues, you will doubtless be familiar with the US Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which saw the Walt Disney Company successfully lobby for a law that prevented various of its works coming out of copyright. You probably are not aware that earlier this month Disney applied to the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand for sweeping trade mark protection around works that Disney did not create.

The upshot of the Copyright Term Extension Act - dubbed by various wags the Mickey Mouse Protection Act - was that Mickey Mouse, whose copyright protection had been due to expire in 2003 (the 75th anniversary of Steamboat Willie), was placed back under protection until at least 2019, along with Donald Duck, Pluto and the rest of the gang. In the process, tens of thousands of works were prevented from entering the public domain.

You might argue - as Disney did - that people are living longer these days, and Disney deserved longer protection for its own creations. But what about other people's creations?
Disney's application to IPONZ for a trade mark on Alice in Wonderland. The specification of goods and services for which trade mark protection is sought is very lengthy: from furniture to food, clothing to CDs.

You may be astonished at the breadth of the application being lodged by a company that has done no more, in this case, than produce adaptations of classic works of children's literature. Ditto for Snow White, Peter Pan, Pinocchio and a list of characters from those works.

This is not trivial. It would be understandable for Disney to try and protect its interpretations of existing characters, but its application for so-called "word marks" implies something much more than that: it implies exclusive rights to use all those characters. There have been at least 14 English-language films based on Carlo Collodi's 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio (which itself drew on classical sources), and many more in other languages. If Disney was to obtain such trade marks (which cover "motion picture films"), would it then become impossible to make - or at least market - another one without Disney's permission? Would it be a copyright lockout via the back door?

Fortunately, the claims are still under examination and it appears that IPONZ won't simply wave the rubber stamp. Disney is being asked to prove its original rights in the characters and their names. One would hope that Disney is not allowed to annex stories that are out of copyright (in some cases, that's precisely why Disney was able to make movies of them) merely because it adapted them. That would be creepy.

In a related vein, ZDNet's Mitch Ratcliffe declares that intellectual property laws are "besnargled beyond recognition". He also links to a law.com article about how copyright lawyers breach copyright all the time.

Must-read from the Techsploder: Juha covers Peter Gutman's rebuttal of Microsoft's rebuttal of his critique of Windows Vista DRM - and then bravely seeks to play some HD video content on his own PC, running Vista. Ouch.

And finally, tech commentator and developer Paul Reynolds has finally decided to give this blogging fad a go.

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