Posts by Russell Brown
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It appears that the IDF used white phosphorous in the attack on the UNHCR compound in Gaza.
If you're looking to accidentally burn down warehouses full of food and medicine, you couldn't pick a better munition.
The excuses so far have been: 1. it was a mistake, followed by 2. two Hamas fighters fired on our guys then fled into the compound, it's their fault.
Neither really washes. The degree of callousness here is astounding.
Gordon Brown has described the attack as "indefensible" ...
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__I'm not offended by Rob. He's a very passionate sort of guy, and mostly in the right direction. It's all good.__
thank you simon.
You're very gracious Simon, but you were clearly pretty pissed off with the nature of the exchange by the time you signed off yesterday, and from my point of view it was the kind of thing that can kill this place.
It works here because we all respect each other's knowledge and experience, and that wasn't being done.
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For better or worse, McGoohan will be remembered for The Prisoner. If you ever get to Wales (Ceregion, North Wales), do pay a visit to Portmerrion--a fascinating and odd place.
One of the most enjoyable days of my life was spent at Portmerion, on acid.
We had a marvellous time chancing across the carefully created vantage points, which, on inspection, turned out to be mere architectural confections. It wasn't at all crowded, but there was a mysterious dark-haired young woman with a cat who kept appearing.
And then I had a special moment walking out across that estuary ...
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Yes, well done on arguing that point 15 times, that no one else particularly cares about.
Er, I do. The distinction, and what it says about the origin of copyright, is actually central to the debate.
And this is our forum as much as yours Mark, so no not 'tough'. Take a chill pill.
Yes. I've pulled up Mark on this upthread.
But, really, what a bunch of geeks: coming near to blows over copyright!
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This shouldn't be read as to imply that it's not a good read. I meant to add that I've yet to read it [in part because I think it may be a better view than read].
That seems to be the view of people who've both read and viewed The Ascent of Money.
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Very well, then. Since society developed copyright law, let's devise a way of enforcing it that deals with the digital domain and be done with it.
As I explained earlier, we do do that -- and until the politics came down on the copyright amendment bill, we were doing it in a pretty good way. Copyright isn't an absolute property right -- it is subject to the public good.
There are even occasions when real, physical property is subject to the same obligations. Most of us thought it was a good thing for Telecom to be forced to surrender some control of its own network as part of telecommunications reform. Rodney Hide said it was theft. It kind of was.
I'll join the RIAA presently.
They're a bunch of pussies these days.
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__Wow, that's unhelpful.__
Tough.
Actually Mark, it is really unhelpful. I'm struggling to know how to rein in robbery after his pathetic and insulting comments to Simon Grigg yesterday (he pretty much did every single thing I'd asked to refrain from doing), and I don't need someone else acting up.
You don't have the right to kick anyone else out of the pool.
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The same goes for tv business models, the value of a program and the model they use to achieve that value is based on potential viewers that advertisers can indoctrinate with their products in return for free to air, and or subsidised by taxes and lisense fees.
No need to teach me to suck eggs, Rob. I work in TV production these days. The point is that these programmes will never screen here. There is no other way of seeing them.
If anything -- The Daily Show on C4 being the most prominent example -- people downloading these shows sometimes actually creates a local market for them.
If you've ever watched copyright material on YouTube, you don't really have any moral authority on this. The principle is exactly the same: you've made a copy without permission and watched it.
When we watch it without 'paying' the fee (watching ads, license fees taxes etc) then we are 'stealing' from the potential pool.
We don't like to think about it but that's the underlying structure of whats going on.I've talked to the programmers at both the Documentary Channel and TVNZ 7 about potential acquisitions, based on stuff I've copied and thought was great. The odd thing that might be picked up will probably appear five years late, but most if it is just too hard to acquire because of the way that business operates.
BBC Worldwide, the Beeb's commercial arm, has some serious questions to answer in that respect -- it's just too hard for public broadcasters in particular to acquire a lot of the programmes the corporation produces.
And even if BBC iPlayer does become available for a fee (which I would pay in an instant) to international viewers, it's still not an ideal solution.
The BBC's blanket policy of retiring programmes after a week or two to meet "rights issues" is just stupid -- there are no relevant rights issues to Niall Ferguson's Briefings lecture; it's a couple of BBC cameras pointed at a lecturn for a public-good lecture. And yet, you get this when you search for it.
I'm not about to deprive myself of information those circumstances.
And I don't file-share box-office movies or music. I can pay for those.
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@russell, @danielle and @giovanni
you are now not only conspiring to theft, according to the good folks at MED creating the ACTA agreement you are in the same bucket as terrorists, arms dealers and drug smugglers.
Dude! You're harshing my buzz!
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@Pat:
As draconian as these measures sound, the illegal downloading of copyrighted content is theft. There's no simply justification for doing it, period.
I think you're wrong legally and morally, Pat.
Mark is correct; copyright is a legal construct devised 300 years ago to serve the public good, by establishing a limited monopoly right distribution etc, to encourage the creation of new works.
It's not an absolute right. We've found it prudent to make all kinds of exceptions -- for libraries, for classrooms -- and, unlike a physical property right, copyright expires eventually (and that's a very good thing). By comparison, we don't amendment the Crimes Act to define ways in which it's permissible to take physical property without permission.
Often, the law must catch up with what people are doing in the real world. We were format-shifting music long before that exception entered the law, and using VCRs years before an exception was made for those. For a while there, we were breaching copyright every time we loaded a web page and made a transient copy of all its files.
We make these exceptions on an assessment of the greater public good. Which does sometimes mean copyright interests fall on the wrong side of the line -- like when RIANZ demanded in the copyright amendment act submission that libraries be prevented from making digital copies of works for archiving purposes , a position innately hostile to the public good.
Morally? I download quite a lot of BBC TV, documentaries in particular. I know these programmes will never screen here, I can't watch them in BBC iPlayer and there is frankly no other way I'll see them: except possibly in degraded form on YouTube or Google Video.
(Question: Is watching copyright content on YouTube the same as watching a higher-quality torrented file? If it is, there are a hundred million thieves abroad.)
There is no cost to the copyright owner in me having access to this information.
If a programme actually does come on the telly, in timely fashion, I probably won't bother to download it. C4 really nailed it with The Daily Show -- nightly, straight off the satellite. It was the internet that created a constituency for that (I do confess to personally getting in Andrew Szusterman's ear about it). Quite often, consumer piracy drives innovation in the commercial world.
So I guess my point is that copyright is something we have , to be able to have a conversation about, and absolutes don't really facilitate that.
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