On this week’s A Series of Tubes podcast with Richard Chirgwin, you can hear me talking about Telstra’s HFC upgrades, copyright, and (yeah, I know) still more Twitter.
Links for 15 February 2009 through 16 February 2009
Stilgherrian’s links for 15 February 2009 through 16 February 2009, gathered with fresh rainwater and love:
- What is the biggest problem in your life? | GOP Problem Solver: “Utilizing the latest and greatest of Republican economic thought to improve your life.” Ahem.
- Phone call to Minister Conroy’s Office | NOCENSORSHIP.INFO: Steve Johnson has posted his fruitless attempt to get Senator Conroy’s office to answer his question about Internet “filtering”.
- Internet filtering and censorship forum | Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre: The first of these workshops at UNSW on 27 November 2008 was excellent. The second will be on Wednesday 4 March 2009 and I’ll definitely be liveblogging it.
- Five barriers to journalists using Twitter | Sarah Hartley: What’s stopping journalists using Twitter? Here’s five excuses journalists use, and the rebuttals.
- The Prisoner 1960s | AMC: The entire 1967-1968 TV series The Prisoner is available for free streaming viewing here — if you happen to be in the United States or can appear to be so.
- Vic Govt limited Google’s bushfire map: News | ZDNet Australia: Google produced a brilliant live map of the tragic Victorian bushfires. However Crown Copyright provisions, which assign copyright over all government-produced information to the government and prevent its use without explicit consent, meant the couldn’t use data from the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE). Crown copyright is well established in Commonwealth law, but runs contrary to data protection provisions in countries like the US, where data produced by government agencies is held to be in the public domain.
- Citizen-journalism’s rulebook | guardian.co.uk: It’s nearly a year old, but it’s still an interesting discussion about the “rules” of [cough] Citizen Journalism.
Bonus Link Megamix for February (so far)
Stilgherrian’s links for 01 February 2009 through 09 February 2009, collected in a great big lump because… well, just because.
There’s lots and lots of good material to read here, but I don’t want it to dominate my home page so they’re all over the jump.
Crikey: The inflated cost of illegally copied DVDs
[This article was first published in Crikey on Monday. I’ve also added the comment and additional material which were published yesterday.]
Hurrah! The War on Terror is over! Well, at least it seems we’re no longer afraid of terrorists, because when Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus warned that illegally copying DVDs costs the industry $1.7 billion, for a change terrorism didn’t get a mention.
Major distributors have been trying to scare us off illegal copying for years. Australia’s laws were “harmonised” under the US Free Trade Agreement so copyright infringement became a crime. Gloomy doom-music-laden messages play before every movie. Serious people tell us that “piracy funds terrorism”.
“The Abu Sayyaf — blamed for the worst terrorist attacks in the South-East Asian country — are likely behind the illegal copying of movies onto DVDs,” reckons Edu Manzano, chairman of the Philippines’ Optical Media Board.
“The Yakuza are behind them in Japan and the Hezbollah are involved in the Middle East,” though he admits they lack “documentary evidence”.
Bob Debus’ weekend media release omits the “piracy funds terrorism” trope, saying instead that it funds “a range of criminal activity like drug trafficking and money laundering”. (Hang on, isn’t money laundering self-funding?) But by the time the story hit the ABC the government’s current bogeyman had been added to the list: child pornography. Ooh err.
Continue reading “Crikey: The inflated cost of illegally copied DVDs”
Links for 17 June 2008 through 19 June 2008
Stilgherrian’s links for 17 June 2008 through 19 June 2008. gathered automatically:
Continue reading “Links for 17 June 2008 through 19 June 2008”
Stilgherrian Live Alpha: episode 1 tonight!
I’ve just organised by first guest(s) for tonight’s inaugural episode of Stilgherrian Live Alpha. And, as you can see, we’ve spent half the night playing with graphics too.
I’ll be speaking with Adam Purcell and/or Jared Madden from Emerge.tv about tune-out.com campaign — their counter-campaign to the music industry’s propaganda film, Australian Music In Tune, which I wrote about the other day.
How can the music industry respond to the dramatic changed happening around them? Is it actually too late for them to change? And it’s interesting to note that the film on their website right now isn’t quite the same as the one originally released…
Since it’s the first program, I’ll probably tell you a bit about myself and what’s been on my radar this week. If there’s anything you’ve wanted to ask me, now’s the time.
Stilgherrian Live Alpha is recorded live at stilgherrian.com/live at 9.30pm Sydney time (1130 UTC), and I’ll be talking “talkback” via audio and video.
If you turn up early, you’ll probably see us doing some last-minute technical tests. And once the program is recorded, I’ll turn it in a podcast — details later.