European Copyrights

Db0

European Copyrights for works created 50 years ago are about to expire and a handful of major record labels are lobbying heavily for their extension in order to be aligned with US copyrights and in a sense make our European version of the Mickey Mouse protection act.

As expected, the only activist group that cares for our digital rights, the EFF, is starting a petition to lobby the European Commission (and other relevant groups) to block this extension that is set to rob us of our cultural heritage for the benefit of a bunch of greedy corporations.

You should sign.

Even if you’re not EU Citizen.

Like, now!

And since I’m on this subject let me just state my personal opinion (This is a blog after all).

Copyrights represent a deal, or a promise if you want, between the artist and the goverment. The artist puts some effort in creating something of “artistic value”[1] and the goverment provides him with a limited protection so that he can capitulate on his work. This protection is a form of monopoly that is supposed to spur creativity by giving artists an incentive to create more work. It is not supposed to be a welfare system, as it has ended up today where the grandchildren of famous artists are earning money from the cultural work of their forefathers (How many of you keep getting paid for work you did 50 years ago?). This is not only bad for our culture, but it is counter to the spirit of copyrights.

Not only that, but extending copyrights so much is economically unsound as far too many researches have shown.

Furthermore, if we are to treat Copyrights as “Intellectual property“, shouldn’t the owner have to pay taxes like all of us? Here’s an alternative off the top of my head:

Have automatic copyrights last for 5 years after the day of publication and after that the author has to a fee proportionate to the number of years passed since initial publication in order to keep them from passing to the public domain. This way, the fee would be modest (but significant enough) initially but would grow steeper as the time passed. Thus, the economically viable works could be retained (while also paying the appropriate tax) while the rest would pass to the public domain for the benefit of everyone.

I personally don’t agree that copyrights should last more than 10 years (more than enough to earn from the effort you invested) and only for artistic work; but the previous suggestion is, at least, a better alternative than what we have now.

The problem you see, is not strictly Mickey Mouse or other known works. It’s that the copyright holder tends to possess copyrights to non-economically viable works. He does not release them because, hey, why should he? And he doesn’t publish them because they won’t make any money. This leads to our loss as we cannot anymore share, modify and enjoy our own culture.

PS: Take a few mins to FSD or Digg this to help raise awareness.

Footnotes
  1. This idea of course excludes absurd things like threatening people posting Cease & Desist letters online from being threatened with copyrights in order to silence them.

Typos

Db0

Holy shit. So many typos in my last post I don’t believe it. Wrongly spelled “beggining”, double sentences…ugh

The Beginning of the end or the end of a beginning?

Db03 Comments

Apparently back in my homecountry, Greece, people have been finally waking up to the blogging phenomenon and as with anything new, the knee-jerk reaction is starting.

What is happening is that the anonymous blog Press-gr which has been publishing various inside stories for a while has finally drawn enough ire (and lawsuits) that the Greek goverment has mobilized to reveal who the anonymous bloggers behind it are. Apparently, they managed to track down an “author” of the blog by revealing ip addresses from his ISP. Nevermind that this is ridiculous as, without knowing from which IP addresses the authors used to connect to press-gr (which they can only get from Google) they might as well be catching any regular reader (Although without knowing the specifics of the investigation, I guess I could be wrong but I don’t see how unless they set up illegal packet sniffers).

In any case, I was reading Press-gr in the beggining, when the information seemed genuine, but when it started posting any BS that came to their hands, even things posted by anonymous commenters or obvious political propaganda, I decided to call it quits. It was just getting too unreliable (as well as being suspicious due to the amount of adverising) as far as accurate information ios concerned, not to mention annoying as the commentspam was ridiculous – A clear example that freedom of speech does not equal freedom to spam.

So what happened now is that various famous personalities of Greece are claiming that they were blackmailed from the authors of Press-gr and were threatened with defamation. Now, ignoring the fact that groundless defamation from an anonymous blog who’s quality is arguable by most sceptics, is not going to do much damage, the blackmailed people have gone public and are asking for goverment intervention. I’m actually wondering if those fighting back against an anonymous posting have ever heard of the Streisand effect

The most scary thing of all, of course, is that the goverment is now considering putting limits on free speech. This is exactly what the big media companies (and Televangelist/Telemarketers) want. Specifically, they are going to request people that blog about “informative issues” remain eponymous. If they still wish to remain anonymous then it will be much easier for the goverment to violate their rights and find out who they are.

Seeing how backwards the Greek goverment has been until now as regards to digital rights, then it’s fairly certain that things will move towards the worse case scenario. I just hope that more people will start using wikileaks which the Greek goverment cannot touch and also has a much higher standard

Generally speaking, after being sent a cease and desist myself for supposedly defaming my previous employer (although no details were given other than the scary lawyer email), I’m seeing a larger interest in the blogosphere from all the people that are set to have their skeletons drawn out of the closet.

Truly, there is nothing more that these slimy worms fear than the unedited light of truth. Blogs and the internet are the only thing they cannot control and all their secrets are finally slipping through their fingers. Don’t let them take it away from you people.

Sometimes I’m really glad I escaped Greece…

Anonymous is stealing my google juice

Db0

Nah, not really. I just found out this little blurb/signature that they are using (Emphasis mine) and which has my alias as the last phrase:

We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.
United as one.
Divided by zer0.

I like it 😀

Good to see that Anonymous are recognizing who their spiritual leader is 😛

Dynamically expanding single-post sidebar

Db0

Yay, I’ve now managed to do something I always wanted for my site. It always bothered me that when I wrote a lengthy blogpost, the right side of the screen always stayed empty when you scrolled down. Unfortunately I did not want to just chuck a few random items to expand it as it would mean that even when I wrote a short post, the sidebar would draw the post down which would have the unfortunate results of making the reader scroll down too much to read the comments (as well as look ugly)

After I used the FSD Sidebar I thought to myself that I really should find a solution to my dilemma. Initially I though to use different post templates and then just select one depending on how lengthy the post came out. Unfortunately, after I created the first, I discovered that WP does not support different templates for posts but only for pages. Unfortunately I could not find a plugin to activate this functionality. This was a bit unfortunate but I didn’t give up.

I went for my second idea: To have the single-post sidebar expand downwards with more items depending on the word count of the current post. I looked around the documentation for a way to collect the word count of a post but nothing was built in WP. Fortunately a short Googling led me to the page of someone who created a plugin exactly for this reason. Perfect!

Now I only needed to figure out how to use a php statement so that the sidebar does this expansion. Unfortunately since I don’t have any php skills to speak of, I turned to the nets again and fortunately it was easy to find what I needed. Unfortunately this statement does not accept an actual sidebar item within the brackets {} but a quick look at other themes informed me to the use of <?php if() ?> and <?php endif(); ?> statement. I still don’t know exactly how to use it properly but I did manage to make it work for me so all’s well.

All in all what I did is test if the wordcount is over a specific limit and then insert the item between the if and endif. Use four of these statements for increasing wordcounts, and your sidebar will expand only when you write an appropriate number of words. Of course this doesn’t take into account pictures or videos, or even different screen resolution that might change the size , but I don’t know if there is a way to test this unless I start checking their resolution each time and changing the word count needed…hmmm…

Ack no!

Nothing is safe anymore

Db01 Comment

Holy shit. Disk Encryption is cracked, and cracked nastily it is. You are not safe if you are using Windows, Mac or linux as all of them basically use the RAM to store the encryption key.

So currently the only way to fix this is to either use a new memory technology where the RAM is instantly lost on boot or use another place, rather than the RAM. Perhaps we could use an external key? Can DM-Crypt be modified to store the key in a usb-stick? Will that help? Techdirt also mentions that this does not work on disks that decrypt on boot but this is not said in the article…

In any case…ouch!

FSDaily Sidebar

Db01 Comment

It was proposed to me by a member of FSDaily to add their new sidebar to my site. Apparently a few of my posts have hit their front page and that drew their attention 🙂

In case you don’t know what FSDaily is, it’s a nice digg-clone which focuses on free software issues. A good alternative since now that digg is heavily sponsored by Microsoft there are fears of conflict of interests (and also digg has become way-way to popular imho).

So I said, why the hell not and dived in. I didn’t want to put it in my horizontal sidebars above and below but thought that this might be the perfect candidate to fill up my empty sidebar on single posts. Unfortunately the way the theme is formatted, it means that when I write something long, there is nothing to see on the left other than the initial information above. I was thinking of a way to fill this and as luck would have it, I got this proposal.

I think I will create special page template that I will use for short posts and in there I will not put anything in the sidebar. However on longer posts it would be worth filling that lonely and empty part with something. Perhaps I should diversify even more and create different page templates for different content. For example, on pages where I talk about religion, I could put the atheist blogroll, and on the ones I talk about Free Software, I can have the FSD along with other related stuff.

Still, I will need to ponder on this. The best thing to do would be to widgetize my single-post sidebar and have it easily updated. I just need to figure out how to widgetize.

Oh, well. Tell me what you think 😉

PS: It is ironic that, had I left this post in the original version, you would not not able to see the sidebar on this page. This is because I’ve recently modified my theme (I’ll write about it later) to dynamically expand the sidebar items depending on the word count of the current post. Unfortunately since this was a really short post and in order to see the FSD item you need at least 400 words, it stayed invisible. My solution? Write this post script 😉 . As a matter of fact, I needed a post script with at least a 100 extra words which easily makes this the largest one I’ve ever written 😀