From Contrary Brin
– finally, everybody stop sending me clippings about supposed navy dolphins equipped with stun guns who purportedly escaped pens at a base near NoLa. even if this likely urban legend is true I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE! Anyway, they are probably ATLANTIC bottlenose dolphins. I can’t even speak Atlantic…..
I suppose you’d have to have read this to understand. But who hasn’t?
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TrackbackIn previous news, the Australian Attorney-General’s department had asked for input on potential changes to Australia’s copyright laws with a view to bring them into line with the USA’s views on fair use. Whether Philip Ruddock’s daughter owns and loves an iPod was probably not included in a submission.
Remember the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement (FTA)? The fair dealing input was the carrot part of an intellectual property law homogenisation deal.
Could it be that the FTA would be all carrots all the time?
The Australian Attorney-General’s department has had enough of carrots. It is now time to address the parts of the FTA where Australia needs equivalent legal stick.
To adhere to the spirit and the law of the FTA Australia needs to better align our intellectual property protection laws with the US. Specifically, we need to have our own version of the United States’ DMCA to protect Digital Rights Management (DRM) from being defeated.
Yow!
The Attorney-General’s department is asking for input in an: Inquiry into technological protection measures (tpm) exceptions
Here is the information paper. It is traditional for me to plead for readers to read this and send a submission, no matter how brief. Submissions are due by the 7th of October.
Let’s preview what’s in store.
Review of exceptions for circumventing technological
protection measuresIssue: Exceptions to liability in the new liability scheme for
circumvention of technological protection measures?What is a technological protection measure?
Technological protection measures1 are components, software and other devices that
are used to protect copyright material from being copied or accessed. These measures
are increasingly common as a means of self-protection for copyright owners in
response to increasing copyright infringement in the digital age.
Examples of technological protection measures include encryption of software,
passwords, and access codes such as regional coding on DVDs.
What is circumvention of technological protection measures?
Technological protection measures can be disabled or circumvented, for example, by
using computer programs, or devices such as microchips. Circumvention could also
occur by using passwords provided without authorisation by other users of the
material.What is the liability scheme envisaged by the AUSFTA?
Under the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA), Australia is
required to implement a new liability scheme for circumventing technological
protection measures by 1 January 2007. The AUSFTA requires Australia to introduce
civil and criminal remedies in relation to the following three categories of activity:
• Acts of circumvention of technological protection measures that prevent
access to copyrighted material
• Dealings with (manufacturing, selling etc) devices and services that may be
used to circumvent a technological protection measure that controls access to
copyrighted material, and
• Dealings with devices and services that may be used to circumvent a
technological protection measure that protects copyright other than by
restricting access to copyrighted material.
[...]What is the task of the Committee?
The task of the Committee is to report on what ‘other’ exceptions, within the terms of
Article 17.4.7(e)(viii) and (f) of the AUSFTA, should be included in the new liability
scheme for the circumvention of technological protection measures.
[...]Why does the review matter?
There is considerable interest in the scope of Australia’s copyright law in relation to
circumvention of technological protection measures. On the one hand, copyright
owners want to be able to “lock up” their material (eg. music, films, computer
software) as a means of controlling unauthorised use and for protection against
infringement.On the other side, copyright users do not want to be locked out of accessing copyright
material. Copyright users argue that technological protection measures prevent them
from being able to access material which they have legally acquired, or material
which they can legally copy and communicate under the Copyright Act. In addition,
copyright users are concerned that technological protection measures can be used for
illegitimate purposes such as anti-competitive behaviour.
Imagine you were entitled to fair use of material under copyright, yet you couldn’t exercise those rights without illegally bypassing a technological protection measure.
How would that make you feel?
While you are at the A-G’s site, you might also review the Unauthorised Photographs on the Internet and Ancillary Privacy Issues paper.
Here’s a quick preview from the paper:
(1) Should the taking of unauthorised images of children be restricted, giving consideration to the competing interests of privacy versus freedom to take photographs in public places? and
(a) If so, what form would those restrictions take; and
(b) What exceptions, if any, would be required?(2) Should the use or publication of unauthorised photographs/ images taken in public places be regulated?; and
(a) If so, what is it about the use that makes it worthy of regulation? and
(b) What types of ‘use’ should be regulated?(3) Should consent be required for photographs used for particular purposes?
(4) In the event that an offence to deal with unauthorised photographs on the Internet is considered necessary, what features should it contain?
(5) Should there be some enforceable civil right in relation to the use of your image? If so, on what basis?
Submissions are due by the 14th of October.
I think I’ll be cruising the A-G’s site a little more often.
Comments rss TrackbackApropos of recent recollections of school days, I was reminded of my most awkward to explain detention note.
My parents received a note from school saying that I had been given detention for “Touching a girl in an out of bounds area.”
My mother said “Detention? They should have called the police!”
I explained that holding hands in the library audio visual room during lunch wasn’t quite as criminal as the note made it sound.
Our Principal avoided administrative work and spent much of his time wearing a camoflage hat and sneaking around bushes hoping to find students smoking. His years of being at the pointy end of student discipline had allowed him to develop a system of hand signals to optimise the communication of phrases such as “pick that paper up,” “tuck your shirt in,” and “Aha! You’re nicked!”
It was the Principal who performed our “arrest” with a hybrid “Aha! You’re nicked!” and some hands-together palms-out signals we initially thought meant “I am a lonely old man looking for someone to play charades with,” but later realised was “Your actions have caused me to become overwhelmed with palsy.”
Finally resorting to verbal communication our Principal sent us to lunchtime detention with the Vice Principal.
Our Vice Principal was a calm, rational and fair man with a wickedly dry sense of humour. By default, or through choice, he was delegated most of the school’s tedious administrative, financial, operational, managerial and disciplinary tasks leaving the hard work of spying on students to the Principal. During detention our Vice Principal gave me and my hand-holding conspirator a five minute lecture on the meaning of the word “censorious” with respect to community opinion of our school. He then declared an end to our detention and gave us our notes to take home.
Comments rss TrackbackRegrets, I’ve had a few.
Someone, noted that Mark Latham was conspicuous by his absence on Brainsnorkel.
I once said that love him or hate him he’s got people interested in, and talking about, politics. Today my position is the same, but forget the stuff about people that love him.
The past week has been like watching a train crash in fast motion.
Comments rss TrackbackSeeing the post at Girtby about the first birthday of Girtby.net I remembered that it’s also approximately the first birthday of this blog.
On this day in 2004 dark thoughts of world opinion leadership began to form themselves into keystrokes on this very keyboard. On this day in 2004, two posts were written. But it was only post number two that made it to the Internet alive. In a Brainsnorkel world exclusive, I can now reveal the original post.
Subject: Test
Victory is mine. I am dominion. Bow down to me. Where are my ugh boots?
During the last year, what lasting, world-changing, concepts has this site become known for?
I’ll let the Webalizer stats for today’s search string hits at casa del Brainsnorkel speak for themselves.
# Hits Search String
1 4 5.48% capricorns
2 4 5.48% central park
3 4 5.48% wow addon
4 3 4.11% hacknot
5 3 4.11% new york city 2005
6 3 4.11% wow population
7 2 2.74% 5 metric shedloads
8 2 2.74% central park new york
9 2 2.74% drachten intersection
10 2 2.74% gates central park
11 2 2.74% http://brainsnorkel.com/2005/06/28/hacknot-is-back/
12 2 2.74% nyc 2005
13 2 2.74% what motivates you
14 1 1.37% 1-800-support kids
15 1 1.37% 2boxing wow
16 1 1.37% bmw suv photoblog
17 1 1.37% bumper sticker fish and i vote where can i buy
18 1 1.37% central city gates
19 1 1.37% chris debnam
20 1 1.37% curried prawn
I was rooting for the curried prawns too.
Comments rss TrackbackAfter lurking in the Apple support forums for a while, and not finding anyone reporting the same problem as me I am forced to perform the modern equivalent of primal scream therapy: blogging about my problems in the hope that a desperate niche of disgruntled users will flock to this post and organize an uprising against the indifference of our shiny white Apple overlords.
Rather than completely contradict my previous post on how I only have one request for Apple’s iTunes/iPod developers completely by listing all of my annoyances in one place I’ll restrain myself. For instance, I won’t mention that I don’t care that “iPod update is complete” enough to have it up on the display in iTunes such that it has to be clicked to get back to song titles all the damn time.
No siree.
I’ll focus on the bug I really care about.
iTunes 5 has neat new feature that syncs Outlook contacts and calendar with your iPod. Perfect for allowing me to eBay my Dell Axim X5. However, the calendar sync is rendered useless by a bug.
The bug is to do with syncing meetings that are created in different (over the international date line?) timezones to mine. Outlook 2003 meetings created for me (in Australia) that are created by people in the US appear in my iPod at the right time on the wrong day. I have *a lot* of meetings that are created by people in the US that invite me. Turning up on the wrong day for my meetings might do wonders for my time management, but it will get me into trouble eventually.
Background information:
An example of an affected meeting is a 7am meeting that appears on the 13th of September in Outlook 2003 and 7am on the 12th of September on my iPod. This meeting was created by a work colleague in Colorado (US MDT). All meetings created by people in US time zones sync to the wrong day on my iPod.
Meetings that are created by me and my colleagues in the local time zone appear with the correct date and time on my iPod
This seems like an obvious bug with MAPI, or the way MAPI is used, that is either fixed or worked around by Microsoft ActiveSync.
3com/Chapura never fixed this problem in the Palm sync software AFAIK, which is why I replaced the Palm V with a Dell Axim X5.
I’m considering a mini-project to write my own MAPI test software and see what the problem might be, but I’d much prefer that Apple make a fix to iTunes without me having to personally exorcise MAPI demons.
I would *really* like to replace the Axim with my iPod for calendar tracking, but until Apple provides me with a fix, or a Tardis and buxom companion, I’m going to be holding my breath.
Update:
Alastair suggested the Outlook2ical JavaScript to help isolate the problem (after disclosing his personal interest in it, of course). This script dumps your calendar into an ics (text file) format by going through the Outlook COM interface. This script was able to export the appointments with the correct local time and date. It’s looking more and more like an indictment of MAPI.
Updated: 21-Feb-2006: Typo fixup
Comments rss TrackbackI don’t know anything about Magic: The Gathering (which I assume is what this is based on) but Lum & Ubiq at Broken Toys are doing a great job cataloging the New Orleans disaster through the unusual medium of M:TG satire.
** Updated to remove the images. They keep moving around too much :) **
Comments rss TrackbackFrom an AP story:
At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush’s choice for head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had “absolutely no credentials.”
She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown.
“He said ‘Why would I do that?’” Pelosi said.
“‘I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn’t go right last week.’ And he said ‘What didn’t go right?’”
If we’re still at war with Eurasia when GWB is finished his investigation, I guess nobody will be upset surprised.
Comments rss TrackbackPeter Debnam, the new leader of the Liberal-National Coalition opposition in NSW says:
[...]we would look at closing that injecting room and diverting those funds into treatment of drug addicts.
Bravo to D. Hurst for this letter in Yesterday’s SMH.
Barely 24 hours into the job, you might have expected the new Liberal leader to make his mark by going after a policy area of great importance to the people of NSW such as transport, hospitals or education. But no, Mr Debnam has clearly nailed his hard-right colours to the mast by choosing a soft target like the Kings Cross injecting room. If this is the cardboard cut-out figure the Liberals plan to present to the electorate, Labor has it made.
D. Hurst Lindfield
Sure, nobody knows who Morris Iemma is, but with priorities like Debnam’s nobody will need to know his name when they come to vote.
Some quick talking points about the Kings Cross Medically Supervised Injecting Centre:
The Injecting Centre saves lives and minimises the damage caused by drugs to the Kings Cross community and to the human beings who are addicted. Mr Debnam seems to want to abandon the community and only treat the drug users that survive.
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