Archive for Media

Michael Geist – Copyright Bill’s Fine Print Makes For a Disturbing Read

Michael Geist – Copyright Bill’s Fine Print Makes For a Disturbing Read

Yesterday Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Canadian Heritage Minister Josee Verner delivered what amounts to a stinging rebuke to the Supreme Court’s copyright vision of public interest and balance. After months of internal discussions (though precious little public consultation), the government unveiled its much-anticipated copyright reform bill. Casting aside the concerns of major business, education, and consumer groups, the bill seeks to dramatically tilt Canadian law toward greater enforcement and restrictions on the use of digital content, leading Liberal Industry critic Scott Brison to warn that it could result in a “police state.”

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YouTube – The Big Bang Theory – Talk Nerdy to Me: Beautiful Minds

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Absence of Malice

Sure Harper sucks and winter is long. But I just don’t care right now. Got more important things on my mind. Ummm. I support the local sports team. I need to make sure that I know where my passport is and that it is valid. *ruffles through papers* Expires in 2012. Good.

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We have everything to fear from ID cards – Telegraph

A very quotable bit from an article in the UK’s consie tabloid The Telegraph. Just goes to show that they aren’t all neocons.

We have everything to fear from ID cards – Telegraph

The compulsory ID card scheme is a sickness born of too much suspicion and too little regard for the meaning of tolerance and privacy in modern life.

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Publisher scrubs U.S. prices from Canadian magazine covers

Publisher scrubs U.S. prices from Canadian magazine covers
I would like to see this supposed “request of Canadian wholesalers.” but I can certainly believe that they asked for it the cowardly dogs. In any case, until they are named and shamed, I am no longer buying Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, or The Oprah Magazine!

Thus is the power of my purchasing dollar maintained.

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The Invisible Primary

Ars Technica has an interesting article up: POTUS 2008: Are you ready for some football? where they cover and summarize a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy THE INVISIBLE PRIMARY—INVISIBLE NO LONGER

A new study out <snip> shows what readers of political blogs in either half of Blogistan already know painfully well: traditional media’s coverage of our political contests is dissatisfying and generally uninformative. The study, entitled “The Invisible Primary—Invisible No Longer: A First Look at Coverage of the 2008 Presidential Campaign,” also paints a clear picture of what’s wrong, laying out how the media focuses obsessively on the “horse race” aspects of political campaigns—tactics, strategy, positioning, and polling, while almost completely ignoring critical issues like the candidates’ actual records and the likely impact of the candidates’ policy positions on citizens’ lives.

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Michael Geist – Here Comes the DMCA

Michael Geist – Here Comes the DMCA

No words of balance, no words of access – simply more protection led by copyright legislation. This suggests – consistent with most speculation – that a DMCA-style bill could be coming to Canada within a matter of weeks.

Can anyone think of any way to let the people in Heritage Canada know that they are wrong about how they are interpreting our WIPO obligations? And that kowtowing to American media interests is contrary to Canadian media interests and this explains why many Canadian artists and labels have disassociated themselves from the CRIA? And that the current system that we have that is showing world record growth in digital media purchases is not symptomatic of a market that needs changing? I had no idea that the MPs on the committee and civil servants in the department were such corporate shills. UN-fricking-believable that they and the privy council have the balls to ruin Canada this way.

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How can I remember something for next year when I have already forgotten what I did yesterday?

Chris Roberson’s Celestial Empire stories promise to amuse me – but they will not be available for some time and have no entry in Amazon’s catalogue so I can’t add them to my various wish lists. I keep a text file on my desktop to note down songs that I hear on galaxie or the odd internet radio station but I am not convinced that this is a generalizable solution – if I see a piece of fabric that I would like to tag as an appropriate colour for drapes, perhaps, or a trinket that would make someone a nice birthday present or a review of a wine I would like to try. I want an add-on for Firefox that interacts with a multimedia database in which I can store references and tag them. Thing is, I don’t want to tag this particular blog page of Chris Roberson. If I like the one book that is available (The Voyage of Night Shining White) I might add it to my list o’ feeds. What I want is to extract the author name and the book titles and add them to my list, along with a tentative date of Q1 2008 to revisit their availability. Certainly this post will be tagged and categorized but a blog, and a public one at that, is not the place for it.

How do you all externalize your failing memories?

This is being posted via the FirefoxDeepest Sender” add-on and as a primarily LJ-oriented product it wants me to tell you what I am listening to as I write this. Strangely enough, 2 Front Line Assembly songs: Victim of a Criminal and The Blade. I say strangely because my current song list is 156 songs long and on random shuffle. And I am not using an antiquated copy of Winamp whose concept of random was less than perfect. I am using Quodlibet on Ubuntu Feisty. It has 2 flaws: an inability to sort songs by the file creation/modification date and an obscure preference for Union of Knives – 11 songs of 156 that are played far more often than 7% of the time.

OK, it probably is 7%, but I have the whole *album* in the list and frankly albums contain much more weak music than strong. It’s the whole white-van-on-the-corner thing. Fine. Fine. I will remove everything except “Evil Has Never” and “I Decline”. Happy now? Sheesh.

Chatty today aren’t I?

kthxbai

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Al Gore

It is my belief that the US media killed Gore’s election chances.  And would do so again, were he to run in 2008.  Perhaps to prove that they weren’t wrong in 200o or something.  Seriously, read any recent article by one of the worthy pundits at WaPo or NYTimes and as soon as they have finished mentioning that An Inconvenient Truth is interesting they’ll wander of into a discussion of his clothes or his mannerisms.

I leave actually proving any of this with examples as an excercise for the reader.

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Two other links for you to follow in the case of the Tripoli Six

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