The Zero Room

Is it just me, or is everything anybody writes these days really just marginalia for Wikipedia?

The good news: it is will soon be legal to use a VCR in Australia. The bad news: only if you promise to watch what you've taped no more than once. It's called striking a balance between sanity and insanity: sane enough to know what's real and what's not, but insane enough to ignore everything you know.

I can't bring myself to comment on this wonderful step forward, so I'll let the readers of the SMH do it:

According to WIPO (everybody's favourite UN angency with a name like a cleaning product from the 1960's), tomorrow is World IP day, a day when people are encouraged to "think about the role played by intellectual property in everyday life”.

Linux Australia's Pia Waugh is encouraging people to do just that, although probably not in the way WIPO intended.

Meanwhile the heinous Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US (the Australian equivalent is the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act) is slated for further amendments that restrict even further the freedoms of people who are not infringing copyright at all.  Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, with a straight face, justifies this by saying that "large scale criminal enterprises" are using "intellectual-property theft" to - wait for it - "fund terrorism activities"!  Large scale criminal enterprises like the family who are the latest in a series of people who don't even own a computer to be sued by the RIAA for file sharing.  That's how clever these terrorists are, you see.  They don't even need a computer.

The 137-year-old prince of pop (presumably that means he really likes soft drinks), Cliff Richard, is arguing that performers should get copyright "parity" with songwriters, and that they should continue receiving royalties for an additional twenty years beyond the fifty currently awarded in the UK.

The Committe for Economic Development, an eminent American conservative think tank / lobby group / nexus of sinister conspiracy to rule the world, has released a new report entitled Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness.  This conclusions of this report are highly supportive of open standards, lukewarm but generally approving of free and open source software, and quite keen on "open innovation", which might be more informatively labelled "free data" (projects such as Wikipedia and open courseware projects are cited).

It is heartening to see that even an organisation representing the biggest of big business recognises that "Digital Intellectual Property" is a "Special Problem", to paraphrase an earlier report.

Canadian academic Dr. Michael Geist has examined the findings of a poll commissioned by the Canadian Record Industry and drawn some interesting conclusions.