My boy Liam has been working real hard getting his music career off the ground and I am very happy to post a link to his first video clip “Until You Fall” which is fresh off the press and now up on youtube.
In case you haven’t heard enough bad things about Sony (root kits on cds, crippled music players etc) here is another example of their complete disregard for their customers. Despite their unwillingness to sell the PSP in europe they are (successfully) suing the importer Lik-Sang for filling this hole in the supply demand chain. I am unwilling to hand over any more of my cash to sony and would call on you all to look at your own spending in a similar manner.
“Thanks to Sony’s heavy handed tactics, popular game importer Lik-Sang is closing its doors. All Lik-Sang customers are having their orders cancelled and refunded. Any attempt to place a new order redirects your web browser to the news of Lik-Sang’s demise.”‘Today is Sony Europe victory about PSP, tomorrow is Sony Europe’s ongoing pressure about PlayStation 3. With this precedent set, next week could already be the stage for complaints from Sony America about the same thing, or from other console manufacturers about other consoles to other regions, or even from any publisher about any specific software title to any country they don’t see fit. It’s the beginning of the end… of the World as we know it’, stated Pascal Clarysse, formerly known as the Marketing Manager of Lik-Sang.com. ‘Blame it on Sony. That’s the latest dark spot in their shameful track record as gaming industry leader. The Empire finally won, a few dominating retailers from the UK probably will rejoice the news, but everybody else in the gaming world lost something today.’
This guy is finally standing up to the bully-boy tactics employed by the MPAA and RIAA. I say all power to him, lets hope that by upgrading from suing clueless parents to a wealthy technology enthusiast they have bitten off more than they can chew.
Last November, Shawn Hogan received an unsettling call: A lawyer representing Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America informed the 30-year-old software developer that they were suing him for downloading Meet the Fockers over BitTorrent. Hogan was baffled. Not only does he deny the accusation, he says he already owned the film on DVD. The attorney said they would settle for $2,500. Hogan declined.
Hogan, who coded his way to millions as the CEO of Digital Point Solutions, is determined to change this. Though he expects to incur more than $100,000 in legal fees, he thinks it’s a small price to pay to challenge the MPAA’s tactics. “They’re completely abusing the system,” Hogan says. “I would spend well into the millions on this.”
What a great weekend, splendour was a blooody great time!!! Although a fairly reasonable case could be made to officially change the name to “splendour in the mud” – there was an incredible amount of water on the ground in some places. Thankfully though by sunday the organizers had done some great work to pump out water and put down extra gravel and wood chip so it wasn’t too much of a problem. Once your shoes and pants had a certain level of mud on them it wasn’t really worth worrying about anyway, still will def be packing the welly’s for next year.
Highlights for me were:
Went out today and picked up a new AV receiver for the living room. Thanks to Frank for coming along and helping me get a good deal from JB-hifi on a Yamaha RX-V359 – it is now all plugged in and running input from my
The next step is to get some good surround sound speakers for the thing and to get the universal remote to control it… don’t really want to have to have 3 remote controls on hand just to be able to watch a DVD.
As part of the Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the US it is a requirement that Australia pass into law very similar legislation to the highly unpopular (with consumer groups anyway) Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).
There are a number of reasons that I think this is a bad idea, firstly that in Australia we already have fairly counter intuitive copyright laws such as TV networks retaining the rights to the program guides (so you can forget about having a TiVo record shows automatically) and I don’t think that we need extra layers of legislation which make fair-use of media we’ve already purchased more difficult while doing effectively nothing to dimish piracy.
Some of the things which would be threatened by the new legislation include:
- "Unauthorised" DVD players which ignore region-coding and the ever lengthening "compulsory viewing" areas of DVDs which were so rare when DVDs were introduced, and growing longer and longer now they are entrenched.
- Programs which transfer “copy-protected” CDs onto your computer/iPod/mp3 player. See iownmymusic.org.
- Any device or software which does something the manufacturer doesn’t like in future. See Cory Doctorow’s ABC interview on this. The rumours that PlayStation3 games won’t be resellable are probably untrue, but we know they’d delight in having that control. It could be implemented today, and activated (or not) at their discretion, similar to the increase we’ve seen in use of "compulsory viewing" zones in DVDs. Similar restrictions could be applied to other media in the future, and if noone can create alternative players and readers, you’ll have no choice.
- Innovation: the best article on the effects of similar laws in the US was from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the world’s largest professional technology association. This month’s Spectrum article: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun06/3673
- Competition: you can’t compete if you have to get authorisation from your competitors or other parties to do so. This particularly applies to small industries, such as Free and Open Source software. No competition means no consumer choice.
- Free/Open Source Software: Australia has a strength in this area, and yet we don’t know if Open Source DVD players, or Linux clients to buy music off iTunes (SharpMusique) are legal. As a result, given the massive, aggressive and litigious nature of our competitors, they are not supplied with our otherwise-full-functioning Microsoft Windows replacement, restricting business opportunities for our growing Free/Open Source service and deployment sector.
- Our international leadership in Free/Open Source: Australia has a disproportionate number of FOSS developers, a history of groundbreaking Open Source work, one of the three key Linux conferences worldwide, and a reputation for government understanding at the state level. Yet this reputation can be scuttled if we show that the highest levels of government don’t care and don’t understand. We will not get this lead back, once we lose it.
More information is available from http://www.linux.org.au/law/ and there is a petition you can sign against this. There is also an interesting writeup on the topic from IEEE’s spectrum magazine – yes I stole their graphics for this post, I guess that would probably be illegal too.
