Yahoo! loses! Nazi! lawsuit! | The Register

Yahoo! has lost a lawsuit in which it claimed a French court violated its right to sell Nazi trinkets.

Förslag till principprogram – Piratpartiets Wiki

Piratpartiets principprogram börjar ta form.
via Virtuellt bondförnuft

Mia has now posted the draft guidelines (PDF) about what “NonCommercial” actually means the the CC blog and the CC Licensies list. Please read them and send them more comments.

I have just upgraded to Wordpress 2.0. It took me about 20 minutes, including backups, and seems to have been painless. Please let me know if something does not work.

I en intervju i Dagens ETC verkar Piratpartiet fundera på att förespråka copyleft i stället för fullständigt avskaffande av immaterialrätten.

Vilken är er inställning till Creative Commons (en ny form av upphovsrätt, som är mer flexibel än den totala upphovsrätten, som är praxis idag.)?
– De diskussioner som varit under veckan har gjort att vi kraftigt har närmat oss Creative Commons’ modell ”Attribution Share-Alike”. Vi kommer att sammanfatta diskussionerna i ett nytt principprogram inom kort.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, eller Erkännande-DelaLika som vi kallat den på svenska innebär, enkelt uttryckt, att du får göra vad du vill med ett verk så länge du anger vem som är upphovsman till det och licensierar dina eventuella bearbetade versioner under samma licens, dvs en copyleft-konstruktion. Detta är ju ganska långt ifrån deras ursprungliga mål, att avskaffa immaterialrätten. Det ska bli spännande att läsa det där principprogrammet när det kommer.

FreeCulture.org wants us to “Pledge to never buy a DRMed CD ever“. Here’s the form where you make the pledge.

I think this is a very good idea. Let’s face it, DRM sucks. It can take away your legal right to e.g. make copies of a CD for pesonal use and it is illegal (in many countries) to bypass it to exercise those rights. And what happens when CDs have been replaced completely by newer formats and you can no longer buy a new CD player to replace your old broken one? If DRM stops you from copying your CDs to newer media, you will no longer be able to play your CDs. You will be forced to buy them again if you want to keep them.

However, pledging to never purchase a CD that contains any form of DRM does seem a bit drastic. I would have signed immediately if the pledge had been something like “I will not knowingly buy a CD that contains DRM in 2006″ (It’s the season for that kind of thing anyway). This one requires more thought.

I absolutely detest the very idea of DRM. However, when Iron Maiden release their next album, I will not be able to not buy it. Unless it has some really unpleasant DRM that makes it unplayable, or unripable, under GNU/Linux, of course. I bought their last one without noticing that it was DRMed but the DRM was so bad (i.e. good!) that I did not even notice it. I’ve heard that the CD was difficult to rip on Windows PCs but I saw no signs of DRM myself.

But then again, Iron Maiden is a cool band with a very reasonable attitude towards file sharing.

I suppose that what I am trying to say is that while I agree with the goals of the pledge and already avoid DRM like the plague (except in special cases…), I am not prepared to sign. Those few special cases are just too hard to give up. After all, we all want music. That’s what all this fuzz is about.

So what would make me sign? Well, limits of some kind. A time limit, a possibility to make exceptions etc.

Something like Stallman’s Hollywood boycott:

The movie companies have been attacking our freedom persistently for a decade–they are no friends of ours. However, for many people the idea of a total boycott of Hollywood seems unthinkable. So I have an alternate proposal: never pay to see a movie unless you have specific reason to believe it is a good one.

This is not an absolute boycott of Hollywood, but in practice it comes pretty close.

Or maybe I just taking this all too seriously . . .

“Sverige kan börja handla med personuppgifter” skriver Dagens Nyheter och rapporterar om ett nytt förslag som skulle ge Försvarets radioanstalt (FRA) ökade möjligheter att lämna ut personuppgifter till andra länder.

I samma artikel berättar man om ett förlag från i sommras som innebär att

FRA ska få möjlighet att hämta in information med hjälp av automatiska söksystem i det fasta telenätet. Med hjälp av sökbegrepp som till exempel “terrorism” eller “sprängämne” eller “kärnvapen” kommer FRA:s datorer att kunna fånga upp telefon- och internettrafik mellan Sverige och utlandet med sådana ord.

Vi ska alltså bygga vårt eget lilla ECHELON och sedan byta information om medborgarna med främmande makt.

I while back I renamed the categories on this blog to tags. However, I did not really change the way I used them. The new year seemed as good a time as any to start using them a bit more. I do not have the energy to go through old posts but everything posted in 2006 is more heavily tagged.

I Finland har Teosto, som verkar var motsvarigheten till STIM, höjt priserna för att spela musik på restauranger etc.

Teosto (the Finnish RIAA) has independently decided to raise prices for restaurants playing music to their customers. The raise is pretty significant as for a restaurant for 800 customers open 5 days a week the price for to pay for Teosto rises from 4000€ a year to 40 000€ a year (HS). A 10-fold increase – that’s ridiculous.- Antti Vilpponen

40 000€ om året låter väldigt mycket. Vad tar STIM, tro? Och hur många krögare, caféägare med flera är tillräckligt trötta på denna kostnad för att gå över till tex Creative Commons-licensierad musik?

Well, he does not exactly sing but someone has mixed one of his speeches with music and it sounds great.

I was listening to the CC:365 Podcast and I was absolutely stunned when this came on. Great work Fourstones!