Should We Keep Letting the MPAA Fib
And an Ars Technica article points out that US box office doing its biggest year of business ever in 2007, growing 5.4 percent over 2006 and bringing in $9.63 billionSo the question is, how much longer are we going to let the MPAA concoct a "truth" that allows them to push new crappy laws that erode our freedoms? Read more [...]
A Message to a Friend Explaining My View on Intellectual Property
I think that IP is one of the largest issues going and to make it worse, people don't know anything about it. IP is used to create artificial monopolies, like MLB saying people can't disseminate the facts (which are currently not part of IP) of a baseball without authorization. Read more [...]
Like Free Speech? The Entertainment Instdustry Doesn't.
Follow the money: Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) Top four campaign contributions for 2006: Time Warner $21,000 News Corp $15,000 Sony Corp of America $14,000 Walt Disney Co $13,550 Top two Industries: TV/Movies/Music $181,050 Lawyers/Law Firms $114,200 I suggest everyone take a moment and write to the folks in charge to let them know this whole things stinks. Read more [...]
2012 Olympic Games
This message was not brought to you by the real Olympic Games, but is instead a demonstration of the free speech which the folks who run Olympic Games are trying to kill. David Edgar puts it pretty well: By declaring images, titles and now words to be ownable brands, these various organisations and individuals are contributing to an increased commodification and thus privatisation of materials previously agreed to be in the public domain. Read more [...]
A Demonstration of How Copyright is Being Used in America
Greedy people without any ideas are abusing a poorly designed system meant to protect people with ideas from greedy people without ideas. Lawyers have convinced doctors to patent medical procedures, convinced accountants to patent tax-strategies, and of course didn't even need to convince large incumbent companies from using patents to stamp down rival startups. Read more [...]
Where is Capitalism Anyway
The concept of the free market is that those who can't survive in business are pushed out of the market, however through intellectual property management any company that has established itself can remain on artificial life-support by abusing the system through lawsuits that either give failing businesses a cut of their competition's income or by blocking that competition altogether. Read more [...]
