My Timeline

Were you intrigued by “The $8 Billion iPod,” Rob Reid’s short TEDTalk about the new science of Copyright Math (TM)? We were. We needed to know more. More numbers, Rob! we said. And Rob (whose comic novel Year Zero comes out in July) sent us this treatise, a master class in creative mathematics: A few weeks back, I gave a short TED talk about “Copyright Math.” Since TED draws both Hollywood and Silicon Valley bigwigs, I thought it would be a great venue for raising certain rights issues that have been a sore point between the two industries for years. But January’s brawl over the proposed SOPA law was a raw and recent memory. So I decided to make my talk playful, rather than sermonizing. Everyone can laugh at silly infographics. And who DOESN’T want to deface a Leave-it-to-Beaver-like Christmas scene with pirate-and-Santa graffiti? Since the talk was so short, I couldn’t dive deeply into the numbers and sources that I based it on (which would have shattered the whimsical tone anyway). But even my silliest numbers were derived from actual research, performed by an actual Copyright Mathematician (me, that is). So I thought I’d use this blog post to put my sources and calculations out there for anyone who’d like to nerd out on the details. First, the Motion Picture Association’s claims of $58 billion in actual US economic losses and 373,000 lost jobs came from this press release[1] (which can also be found on Scribd[2]). These numbers originated at a think tank called the “Institute for Policy Innovation” – an organization that Businessweek once profiled in an article called “Op-Eds for Sale.”[3] In it, an IPI analyst freely admitted to taking payoffs from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff[4] in exchange for writing “op-ed pieces boosting the lobbyist’s clients.” The [...]

Most people think about their own protections when they sign/encrypt their email, what people don’t consider is the privacy and protection of their friends and family. If your mail is intercepted or someone spoofs your address to send an email to your friends, your lack of signed/encrypted email puts you both at risk. via Stop Being Lazy: Encrypt/Sign Your Email – Falkvinge on Infopolicy.

As Rick pointed out in a recent post, the United States Government has declared war on trade, making its attack through the DNS system: one of the most critical and forgotten pieces of infrastructure on the Internet. Governments all over the world are destroying access to information by the corruption of local DNS systems. It’s time we reclaim our Internet by taking back our DNS. via Reclaim The Internet In Under A Minute – Falkvinge on Infopolicy.

Here are some local apartment buildings. 

Our primary area of corruption? Politicians. 

This is awesome, a guy chatting with his cat over IM

A nice long exposure picture I took of Vancouver

My website TUEBL has generated the MP3 for Cory Doctorow’s new book “The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. http://travismccrea.com/Cory_Doctorow_-_The_Great_Big_Beautiful_Tomorrow.mp3

This is why we shouldn’t let America or an industry decide our laws… We should also put a 10c tax on each gallon of gas which goes to what remains of the stagecoach industry. 

I and a small team of others will be working together to setup a booth to help spread the word of the Pirate Party to people within Vancouver at the Art Gallery starting October 15th and going forward.