Leamington to get a dream venue?

Gary — Wed, 30 May 2007 12:51:58 +0000

Lets hope so.

Scratch

Gary — Mon, 21 May 2007 15:11:59 +0000

Imagine, program, share

Thats the tag line of a new project from the guys at MIT:

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

“So,” I thought, “What better use could be made than a nice shooter”. Scratch Invaders it is then:

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/darkmuse/5564

On Copyright

Gary — Mon, 21 May 2007 11:03:56 +0000

I’ve had an interesting morning so far, reading various articles and arguments in the field of copyright law. Well I thought it was interesting anyway. Its something I’ve long been interested in and something that is getting talked about more and more as its starting to affect things that some people care about. The main arguments I’ve been hearing on the news lately are from the likes of Sir Cliff Richard and the families of Lonny Donegan. The only way in which I can see they have a point is that other creative works benefit from a slightly longer term, but either way they seem to be misunderstanding what copyright is for.

Copyright is not a natural state of the world. There is no natural law that ensures that someone should get paid for their ideas and art. For millennia these works were immediately entered into the public domain once they had been expressed or created. In fact the first copyright law, back in the late 17th century, was created to protect printers (not, it should be noted, the author of the works). In 1709 the Statute of Anne was reworded to grant the author exclusive ‘right and liberty’ of printing books. Of course this was usually exercised by granting a license to a printer (publisher). It should also be noted that the original writers of the law thought a 14 year term, renewable once (to 28 years total) was sufficient to reimburse the creator for their effort.

Through the centuries the law of copyright has gradually been extended to include other forms of creative endeavour and lengthened to provide a monopoly situation for longer periods of time. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works 1886 was the first time that a minimum framework of principles was produced to be observed around the world. In this, and all (most) future laws and conventions the key feature was to strike a balance between protecting the intellectual work of creators whilst also providing the public the freedom to access and build on such works. It seems to me that some current performers and artists are striving to upset this balance in the favour of a permanent monopoly on their works.

The intent of copyright law, as I currently understand it, is to give incentive to people to create works which will be a benefit to society. The people wishing to change these laws seem to think that for art and abstract ideas to have a value they need to be owned by someone. This is almost exactly not what gives art and ideas their value. Furthermore, if someone has failed to extract the value of their idea within the first 50 years of its creation then why should they expect to get more value from any future years?

It might also be useful to think off all the people that have benefited from works entering the public domain. Disney: A hugely successful company who are part of the lobbying group in the US asking for copyrights to be extended. Where did their stories come from then? Snow White for example, something Disney makes a lot of money from and tries to prevent anyone else from using. But isn’t that an old folk tale written by the Brothers Grimm? Shouldn’t Disney be paying the ancestors of the Grimms? Actually in this case the Brothers Grimm just collected that story as it is an even older tale probably originating in Asia in the middle ages. Pinocchio: I wonder if they are paying the family of Carlo Collodi? I wouldn’t pick on Disney if it weren’t that they are one of the biggest supporters of changes to copyright laws. Plenty of other people benefit from works in the public domain and I’m sure many would love to receive increased protection for their derivative works. Fortunately there are still plenty that understand why and how the current laws work. And anyway, other people have written much better pieces about Disney’s two-facedness on copyright. See here for example.

Another argument I hear is that after 50 years the creator of a house or of a car do not have them taken away from them. This is just a ridiculous argument. For one, if we are saying that physical property is exactly analogous to intellectual property then it would seem that we should remove all rights. There is no equivalent protection in the physical world so why have it in the abstract world? But more reasonably, the creator of a car or house does not get financial reward every year after he’s built it does he? The people who own that one physical object get any reward from living in it, using it or selling it on. In the mean time the builder has been paid once and perhaps used part of that money to pay into some form of pension for his and his family’s future.

More importantly than all of this is the fact that I like creations such as Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Its littered with characters from stories now in the public domain. How many more of these types of works would we see if copyrights keep getting perpetually extended?

(For another misguided article on copyright (US) see A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright? . And the wiki showing why the author is rather foolish here - Against perpetual copyright.)

Blue Sky in Games

Gary — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 09:56:38 +0000

A couple of people have sent me links to the announcement of GTA 4 today. What they don’t seem to realise is that all the GTA games are a bit rubbish. I seem to remember having a bit of fun in the top-down games (1 and 2?) but since then its gone seriously downhill and lost all its humour and fun. In fact I’m in full support of this campaign

blue-sky-in-games-campaign-launched

Yes, I know that is what’s known as a humorous page; it is from one of my favourite sites (ukresistance; see also idiottoys). However it has some serious points to make, not least of which is that I like to play games to have a bit of fun, with bright colours and a high score table preferably. What happened to those games?

Phlebotomy

Gary — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 09:58:34 +0000

I went for my first ever session of blood letting yesterday. I can’t say I feel any better (nor worse) for the experience but hopefully someone can make good use of the blood given. The first chirurgeon decided that she couldn’t find a suitably large vein in either arm so called over someone else. He simply said, this one will do here, jammed it in and said “we don’t normally use that vein” and “it might bruise tomorrow”. Nice. It didn’t hurt though and I didn’t get a bruise either. Not yet.

PM Blair emails me

Gary — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:03:59 +0000

And 26 thousand others. I’m not normally one for signing petitions and the like but in the case of a biometric national ID card I had to. That is why I signed this online petition. I cannot begin to imagine why people think it is a good idea except that they are told it’s a good idea by those in power! Here is the reply from Tony:

The petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme attracted almost 28,000 signatures - one of the largest responses since this e-petition service was set up. So I thought I would reply personally to those who signed up, to explain why the Government believes National ID cards, and the National Identity Register needed to make them effective, will help make Britain a safer place.

The petition disputes the idea that ID cards will help reduce crime or terrorism. While I certainly accept that ID cards will not prevent all terrorist outrages or crime, I believe they will make an important contribution to making our borders more secure, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism. More importantly, this is also what our security services - who have the task of protecting this country - believe.

So I would like to explain why I think it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity to use biometrics such as fingerprints to secure our identities. I would also like to discuss some of the claims about costs - particularly the way the cost of an ID card is often inflated by including in estimates the cost of a biometric passport which, it seems certain, all those who want to travel abroad will soon need.

In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card, should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life.

But first, it’s important to set out why we need to do more to secure our identities and how I believe ID cards will help. We live in a world in which people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple identities - up to 50 at a time. Indeed this is an essential part of the way they operate and is specifically taught at Al-Qaeda training camps. One in four criminals also uses a false identity. ID cards which contain biometric recognition details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much more difficult.

Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually. There is no doubt that building yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID card and matching biometric record will be much harder.

I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.

The National Identity Register will also help improve protection for the vulnerable, enabling more effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work, for example, with children. It should make it much more difficult, as has happened tragically in the past, for people to slip through the net.

Proper identity management and ID cards also have an important role to play in preventing illegal immigration and illegal working. The effectiveness on the new biometric technology is, in fact, already being seen. In trials using this technology on visa applications at just nine overseas posts, our officials have already uncovered 1,400 people trying illegally to get back into the UK.

Nor is Britain alone in believing that biometrics offer a massive opportunity to secure our identities. Firms across the world are already using fingerprint or iris recognition for their staff. France, Italy and Spain are among other European countries already planning to add biometrics to their ID cards. Over 50 countries across the world are developing biometric passports, and all EU countries are proposing to include fingerprint biometrics on their passports. The introduction in 2006 of British e-passports incorporating facial image biometrics has meant that British passport holders can continue to visit the United States without a visa. What the National Identity Scheme does is take this opportunity to ensure we maximise the benefits to the UK.

These then are the ways I believe ID cards can help cut crime and terrorism. I recognise that these arguments will not convince those who oppose a National Identity Scheme on civil liberty grounds. They will, I hope, be reassured by the strict safeguards now in place on the data held on the register and the right for each individual to check it. But I hope it might make those who believe ID cards will be ineffective reconsider their opposition.

If national ID cards do help us counter crime and terrorism, it is, of course, the law-abiding majority who will benefit and whose own liberties will be protected. This helps explain why, according to the recent authoritative Social Attitudes survey, the majority of people favour compulsory ID cards.

I am also convinced that there will also be other positive benefits. A national ID card system, for example, will prevent the need, as now, to take a whole range of documents to establish our identity. Over time, they will also help improve access to services.

The petition also talks about cost. It is true that individuals will have to pay a fee to meet the cost of their ID card in the same way, for example, as they now do for their passports. But I simply don’t recognise most claims of the cost of ID cards. In many cases, these estimates deliberately exaggerate the cost of ID cards by adding in the cost of biometric passports. This is both unfair and inaccurate.

As I have said, it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no choice but to have a biometric passport. We estimate that the cost of biometric passports will account for 70% of the cost of the combined passports/id cards. The additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan. Our aim is to ensure we also make the most of the benefits these biometric advances bring within our borders and in our everyday lives.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Blair

I was about to post my own response as to why it appears that Mr Blair and most of his government don’t know the first thing about security. About how even if the ID card was a good idea, which is a close one, we do already have a passport and driving licence ID system that most people sign up for, biometric identities aren’t the way to go. But MartinG on the slashdot thread said everything I wanted to:

We don’t need you to patrinise us by attempting to explain why we are wrong My Blair. What many of us are trying to say to you is that we fully understand your viewpoint so you can stop explaining it to us. What we are saying to you is that you are wrong. Wrong because you don’t have a very good understanding of security. Wrong because you have no ability to clearly judge the value this scheme will give us. Wrong because you have the terror threat out of proportion. Wrong because you are wasting our money on something we don’t want or need.Your job is to represent our views, not to decide what is best for your self and explain to us why you think it is right.

Honestly, I don’t think you have the understanding of security issues to grasp why biometriecs are a very bad choice for personal security, nor do I think you have the imagination to forsee the abuses that could come of this. Combine these two things with your governments record on large scale IT projects and anyone can see that we are heading for disaster.

– MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz .@adgimnoprstu

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Gary — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:27:20 +0000

Link to a Youtube vid:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&eurl=

Enjoy

More on Law

Gary — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:09:26 +0000

It appears that some law-makers do have a sense of humour:

http://blogs.walkerart.org/offcenter/?p=631

Brilliant.

Thoughts on Music

Gary — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 15:36:02 +0000

Steve Jobs has recently posted his “Thoughts on Music”.

Its very well worded; mainly, I think, to try to push any responsibility for DRM onto the big four (Universal, EMI, Sony BMG and Warner). Still it is interesting to note that Steve, and hence Apple inc., would drop DRM in a heartbeat if they didn’t feel shackled by the music companies. Obviously this is passing the buck a little. At least publicly they don’t appear to be putting pressure on anyone to change this behaviour. This open letter is definitely just the start of their response to a court case heading Apples way from Norway.

Darkmuse

iTunes - Two Faced