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.

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.

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.

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