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BBC News – Borat anthem stuns Kazakh gold medallist in Kuwait

Posted March 23, 2012 under Government, Laughs

Hopefully he isn’t sued for copyright infringement. :(

Kazakhstan’s shooting team has been left stunned after a comedy national anthem from the film Borat was played at a medal ceremony at championships in Kuwait instead of the real one.

The team asked for an apology and the medal ceremony was later rerun.

The team’s coach told Kazakh media the organisers had downloaded the parody from the internet by mistake.

The song was produced by UK comedian Sacha Baron Cohen for the film, which shows Kazakhs as backward and bigoted.

The original Borat movie offended the Kazakh authorities
Footage of Thursday’s original ceremony posted on YouTube shows gold medallist Maria Dmitrienko listening to the anthem without emotion and finally smiling as it ends.

Coach Anvar Yunusmetov told Kazakh news agency Tengrinews that the tournament’s organisers had also got the Serbian national anthem wrong.

via BBC News – Borat anthem stuns Kazakh gold medallist in Kuwait.


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The numbers behind the Copyright Math

Posted March 20, 2012 under Little Brother, Pirate Party, The Revolution

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 IPI’s president supported this behavior, saying it was neither wrong nor unethical, and dismissing those who apply “a naïve purity standard” to the business of writing op-eds.

Via Ted Talks Blog


Sharing is Communist

Posted October 4, 2010 under Little Brother, Short Stories
“Jane, will you please step out into the hall way with me?” asks Mrs. Sanriaa.
Jane was always getting in trouble for her ability to share with other students. That is, she would get in trouble for giving her toys to other students, without asking for anything in return. Mrs. Sanriaa was her 1st grade school teacher, and was determined to remove this communist/socialist behavior that was not natural.
As they walk into the hallway Mrs. Sanriaa asks her, “Jane, why dose Trevor have the ball you were playing with?”
“Because he asked for it Mrs. Sanriaa.” Even though Jane has been told this was wrong, she always seemed to do it anyway.
“So what did he give you in return?” Asked Mrs. Sanriaa who seemed to be towering over Jane.
Jane never understood what was wrong with sharing, “There were other toys, I just got another one.”
“So you think that your time is worth nothing? You had to pull out the ball, Jane. You were playing with it and having fun, and Trevor didn’t do anything to help you. Don’t you understand that in society its important to exchange your time and effort, for something of value to you?” Mrs. Sanriaa has tried to explain this to Jane over and over again in the past, “If you start giving your time away now, then others will think its okay to give away their time to help others too, and if we do that, do you know what will happen, Jane?”
“Everyone will be happier?” Jane answered honestly, with the first response that came to mind.
“Don’t back talk young lady, you are going to stay in the hall and think about your answer.” With that, Mrs. Sanriaa walked back into her classroom to watch the students as they worked.
As Jane stood in the hallway she thought about it, truthfully and honestly thought about it. The idea that sharing her ball with Trevor could make people go homeless (as she has been told before), made her sad. It didn’t make sense though, ‘how does sharing something make someone lose their house?’ Jane wondered.
It felt like hours, though it had only been 5 minutes, when Mrs. Sanriaa had come back into the hallway, “So what do you have to say for yourself?”
“I am sorry, Mrs. Sanriaa.” Jane didn’t understand the point of an apology yet, but understood that when you said you were sorry, after doing something wrong, it usually made the teacher less mad.
“What are you sorry for, Jane?” Mrs. Sanriaa looked over her glasses as she gave Jane a look that could scare anything with a pulse.
“I…I don’t know, Mrs. Sanriaa.” Jane started to feel the tears well up in her eyes, she didn’t know why she was being yelled at, she didn’t understand. She felt bad for making people lose their jobs, but didn’t understand how making people happy, can cause people to lose their jobs. None of it made sense to her.  Maybe it was because she was only 6, that she just couldn’t understand it. Sharing her toys, makes people around her happy. She had already got the ball, so she didn’t see the need for her friend to get another ball, just to play around with it for a couple minutes. Sharing just made sense to her.  She knew, somewhere inside her that what she was doing was right, even as a first grader she knew that by sharing her toys with others, they would  share with her, that everyone had more fun, with less hassles.
Mrs. Sanriaa took away Janes recess, and she couldn’t play with toys for the next week. When she was able to play, she shared them again.


Who Benefits From Intellectual Property Laws?

Posted February 10, 2010 under Government

Honestly in the debate between the two bloggers (there is another contestant as well over at Matthews blog as well, that he references), they get down to a battle of who Intellectual Property laws were designed to benefit. One claims that Intellectual Property laws are there to aide the consumer, and was developed so that a media can eventually be released for free; and the other says that its designed to aide the artist, and allow them to grow and be able to make a profit off their work.

I fail to see how either of these points are valid or good at all. We have two extremes trying to fight for why they are right and the other is wrong and unfortunately copyright and patent laws are not that black and white… So lets look at this from a real persons point of view.

The current failed copyright system gives a copyright to its owner for their entire life plus 70 years. Clearly this is not for the benefit of the artist, because the artist will not be able to make any gains off those additional 70 years. Thats why the system is flawed, instead of allowing defunct artists music to be put into the public domain so that more people can learn, grow, and build off of it… the current system discourages respecting the late artist by not allowing there to be education based off their work. These laws are, however, in place for the artist.

Matthew also claims that because of the length of this copyright term that art should be released for free, and I feel that it was more of a creative way of twisting words and facts to gather more supporters for your cause (which is admittedly a noble one). We cannot expect artists to release music and not get paid for them, thats why I suggest copyrights, but on a much smaller scale. An artist has the right to make money, and recoup losses from the production of music. However, after a few years the artist’s primary income focuses on live tours and merchandise anyway.

I feel that the reason that drug patents are so short is because the Government realizes that we need short patents to drive innovation. While they would rather neglect artistic innovation, and only embrace being the worlds health care leader. As this shows, not only do short patent times not “kill innovation” as some say it will, but it also drives innovation and can be contributed into the United States great contributions to science.

We cannot be battling any more on black and white issues, and the time is to rally in support of real copyright and patent reform so that we can learn from our medical innovations, and apply that great system to media, and code as well. By allowing people to build off code after 7 years opposed to the rest of your lifetime… we develop better projects. By allowing music to be mixed, we create more innovation in what music is and what it can be.

Whats funny is that the answer to the question is simple:
Who does (current) Intellectual Property Laws help? Management
Who does (current) Intellectual Property Laws hurt? Anyone who wants to learn.


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