While I can’t say I like the Pirate Party getting a seat in the European Parliament, courts in the U.S. have swung in completely the opposite direction.
A U.S. court recently decided that a woman who illegally shared 24 songs over the Internet would have to pay damages of $80,000 per song for a grand total of $1.92 million. The songs she shared could have been download from the Internet for about 99 cents per title.
While I’m all in favor of punishing people who steal music (or provide it for others to be stolen) Biblical standards for restitution (such as Exodus 22) provide for damages of 4 or 5 times the amount stolen. While that is likely a general guideline and not necessarily and exact amount, 80,000 times the amount stolen seems a bit inflated
There has to be some middle ground between sharing files willy nilly and punitively penalyzing illegal file sharing.
Though kind of partial to Firefox, I really don’t pay a lot of attention to whatever the latest web browser version is. For most things you do it doesn’t really matter.
However, Opera has just released a new version of their browser that they’re calling “Unite” because it pulls a whole lot of services together. While it’s a pretty decent web browser (though it feels different from Firefox) it can also help you set up a simple webserver, chat room and a few other neat features that run entirely off your home (or possibly work) computer.
Though it’s now comparatively easy to get a good chat room, there are times I’ve hunted for one that was private and safe for my students and I couldn’t find one. Having one running on my home computer would solve that since its existence would be known only to me (and my students), hence there would be no creepy people there that I’d have to worry about.
A webserver running on your computer can also give you a bit of privacy when sharing webpages with photos, student work, etc.
The real great part with this is that it’s all designed for the non-geek. Setup time for me was about five minutes (but I’m a bit geeky so it might be longer for you). It’s really, really simple.
The two downsides to this that I can see are that the URLs for the services are ridiculously clunky. For example, for a webserver your URL might be mycomputer.user.operaunite.com/webserver. It doesn’t exactly role off the tongue. This might be fixed in a later version of the Opera browser.
The second problem is a little more fundamental. Though most people can download to their computer fairly quickly, in most cases uploading from your computer is comparatively slow. Upload speeds (which is what will matter when someone downloads a webpage from your computer, if you follow) are quite slow in most cases. This may make your webserver, or chat room, etc seem comparatively clunky.
Despite the flaws I think Opera is on to something with this new version of their browser. Good job, guys.
I like to highlight some of the cool stopmotion animations my students create. But, as good as many of them are, there’s always an animation running through my head that I can’t quite seem to show them. It’s wild, cool and totally engaging. If I could ever get it created (or get them to make it) it might look a bit like this.
The recent elections for the European Parliament have given the Pirate Party of Sweden the right to have one of their number join the Parliament. While the name of the party is intriguing (think what they must do on Talk Like a Pirate Day), their origins are even more interesting.
The party seens to have been set up in response to Swedish efforts to shut down the file exchange site, Pirate Bay. There’s no official link between the Pirate Party and Pirate Bay but the Pirate Party has expressed support for Pirate Bay as it fights the government sanctions in court.
The Pirate Party wants to see a radical reform of copyright laws where all noncommercial copying becomes legal and file sharing is encouraged.
This, if enacted, would be a seismic shift in copyright law. It seems to suggest that anything I or you create can be copied, downloaded or otherwise passed on for free as long as the person passing it on is not making money off of it.
I have to wonder how a writer, artist, producer, singer, etc could possibly make a living doing what they do if anyone could copy their work and pass it on for free? What would our the incentive to financially support singers or directors if we could have their work for free? What would an artist’s incentive to work and create new songs or movies if you could legally buy one DVD and copy it repeatedly, passing it on for free to all your friends? It would destroy any market for their work.
I can’t help buy wonder if the Pirate Party has thought out the
implications of their stand. They sound much like high school students who think they should be allowed to have everything for free simply because they are technologically able to get it for free. “The worker deserves his wages.” How will those who have toiled be paid so that the people who don’t feel like paying can have their toys for free?
