Tuesday, March 30, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Raising money to advertise against the Digital Economy Bill on vote-day

Posted: 30 Mar 2010 04:46 AM PDT

38 Degrees is running a fast fundraiser to raise £10,000 to run ads against the Digital Economy Bill in the UK. Parliament has refused to schedule a full debate on this controversial, 24,000+ word bill, and are planning to rush it through via the secretive, undemocratic "wash-up" procedure. 38 Degrees wants to show Parliament that Britons want this bill subjected to the full scrutiny and debate it deserves. I've put my hand in my own pocket for this. I hope you will too: "On the day of the key vote they'll see our opposition over their cornflakes, on their way in to work and over tea in Parliament. If we have enough money we could even make sure their staff see our opposition by placing ads on keys websites."

Update: Having blown through the £10K target in a few hours, they've upped the goal to £20K. Nicely done!

Stop The Digital Economy Bill (Thanks, Jim!)

Previously:


Philip Pullman on censorship and free speech -- pithy and wonderful

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 10:32 PM PDT

Philip Pullman, addressing an audience at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, was asked about whether his latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, was offensive. Here's his reply:

"It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don't have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read. That's all I have to say on that subject."

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Thanks, Brian!)

Previously:


ACLU prevails: US Fed Judge invalidates gene patent

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 10:17 PM PDT

United States District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet has invalidated Myriad Genetics's infamous "breast cancer patent" -- a patent on genetic mutations that cause breast cancer, which Myriad has exercised in the form of a high lab-fee for analysis on samples (Myriad threatens to sue any independent lab that performs the analysis).

The suit was brought by the ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation, who argued that US Patent and Trademark Office was wrong to grant patents on genes, as these are not patentable subject matter. The judge agreed, saying that gene patents are patents on a "law of nature" and called the isolation of genes and filing patents on them "a lawyer's trick that circumvents the prohibition on the direct patenting of the DNA in our bodies but which, in practice, reaches the same result."

Which sounds to me like a precedent against all patents that rely on isolated genes. Of course, this isn't over: the pharma/biotech stalwarts interviewed in the linked NYT piece are talking appeal, and I'm sure they'll try to go all the way to the Supreme Court.

I think that the problem here is in the untested idea that imparting exclusive rights to the genome will incentivize more research than allowing anyone to build on discoveries in the genome. It's clear that some exclusive rights provide an incentive so some people to do work. But these exclusive rights also scare off people who have good ideas but are worried about being bankrupted by someone who beat them to the patent.

Combined with that is the natural abhorrence many of us feel at the thought that genes might be patented. Genes aren't a good subject for propertization. Your genes aren't even yours -- you didn't create them. Your parents didn't really create them, either. You're your genes' steward, as are we all, and so many of us have a strong intuition that when someone else claims to own something from our genome, they're being ridiculous, or evil, or both.

Myriad Genetics, the company that holds the patents with the University of Utah Research Foundation, asked the court to dismiss the case, claiming that the work of isolating the DNA from the body transforms it and makes it patentable. Such patents, it said, have been granted for decades; the Supreme Court upheld patents on living organisms in 1980. In fact, many in the patent field had predicted the courts would throw out the suit.

Judge Sweet, however, ruled that the patents were "improperly granted" because they involved a "law of nature." He said that many critics of gene patents considered the idea that isolating a gene made it patentable "a 'lawyer's trick' that circumvents the prohibition on the direct patenting of the DNA in our bodies but which, in practice, reaches the same result."

The case could have far-reaching implications. About 20 percent of human genes have been patented, and multibillion-dollar industries have been built atop the intellectual property rights that the patents grant.

ACLU Challenges Patents On Breast Cancer Genes: BRCA

Judge Invalidates Human Gene Patent

(Thanks, Gimpy!)

(Image: Dna rendering, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from ynse's photostream)

Previously:


Robot seder

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 10:32 PM PDT



In celebration of first night of Passover this evening, I present to you this now-classic video of a robot seder. (Thanks Lissa Soep and Zahavah Levine!)

UPDATE: Apparently the people who own the song used in this video have a thing against robots, resulting in a copyright infringement claim and takedown of the previously embedded clip on YouTube.

UPDATE #2: Glenn Lambert kindly points us to other copies of the video here and here!

Previously:


Scarface, re-enacted by children as a school play (or not)

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 08:58 PM PDT

scarfaceth.jpg Video Link. Spotted on Dangerous Minds. Truth squad: It's not really a school play. Perhaps someone in internetlandia knows. Update: The LA Times is actin' like they know who's behind it. (thanks, Tara McGinley)

Hutaree suspect is fond of gel shoe insoles (He's gellin' like a felon!)

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 08:40 PM PDT

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow may have ID'd a Hutaree arestee: "Found on the Hutaree militia site, 'The End of the World as We Know It' Man. When the apocalypse comes, TEOTWAWKI Man recommends using insoles &mdash 'Gels or what-have-you' — and generally taking care of your feet." Oh dear, I imagine REM isn't any happier about the appropriation of their song title than the Sisters of Mercy will be about providing the soundtrack to the widely circulated Hutaree Jesus-jihad video.

Ratmobile kit and mushroom puzzle in the Boing Boing Bazaar!

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 08:40 PM PDT

Ratpuzzzzz
System Product Images 2880 Original Img 0238-20 Andrew and Michele (aka Xylocoopa Design) are selling several lovely laser-cut items in our Boing Boing Bazaar at the Makers Market. Above is their Build-Your-Own Ratmobile Kit, $18.95, which unlike the above specimen comes unpainted and unfinished. Just add glue! And at left is the Mysterious Mushroom Puzzle, available for $38.95. The engraved shrooms only fit into the 6" square in one configuration. Each piece is based on a real species of fungus.

An honest person, or a very convoluted scam: You be the judge

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 12:48 PM PDT

Now on New York Craigslist Lost & Found: One suitcase containing $78,383.

National Geographic Explorer: LSD

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 12:48 PM PDT

Staticfiles Ngc Staticfiles Images Show 40Xx 409X 4094 Explorer-Inside-Lsd-05 04700300
In a recent episode, National Geographic Explorer tripped out on acid. Or rather, they explored the science and culture of LSD. A series of online clips from the show look at the science of the molecule, a fantastic gallery of blotter art, and a young lady turning gummy candies into psychedelic treat for a friend. The narration isn't too far down the sensationalism path, but still, it is TV. From the program description:
LSDs inventor Albert Hofmann called it "medicine for the soul." The Beatles wrote songs about it. Secret military mind control experiments exploited its hallucinogenic powers. Outlawed in 1966, LSD became a street drug and developed a reputation as the dangerous toy of the counterculture, capable of inspiring either moments of genius, or a descent into madness. Now science is taking a fresh look at LSD, including the first human trials in over 35 years. Using enhanced brain imaging, non-hallucinogenic versions of the drug and information from an underground network of test subjects who suffer from an agonizing condition for which there is no cure, researchers are finding that this "trippy" drug could become the pharmaceutical of the future. Can it enhance our brain power, expand our creativity and cure disease? To find out, Explorer puts LSD under the microscope.
National Geographic Explorer: Inside LSD (Thanks, Xeni!)

Science of cocktail shaker vacuum

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 12:31 PM PDT

Ever notice that cocktail shaker cans get vacuumed together when you shake a drink? The encoldening of all the stuff inside is doing it, creating enough vac that you need to apply about 13.6 pounds of force to pull a small shaker apart.
First, the air that's in your shaker starts off at room temperature. As you are shaking, this air gets cooled just like your drink does. Cooling the air causes the pressure to go down, which causes a vacuum. That isn't all that's happening, though. Ice is less dense than water. When ice melts, it actually contracts in volume. When the volume of liquid plus ice in the shaker contracts, the volume of air in the shaker increases. Since you aren't adding more air molecules, increasing the volume decreases pressure, causing more vacuum. Third, as your liquor gets colder, its density increases, again shrinking in volume and creating more vacuum. A third factor may be a small amount of expelled air when the bartender slams down on the cans before the shake.
More Cocktail Science: Why Do My Shaker Cans Get Sucked Together? (via JWZ)

(Image: Cocktail Shakers, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from walkn's photostream)

Previously:


Tim O'Reilly defines "the Internet operating system"

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 12:23 PM PDT

From Tim O'Reilly, a major essay explaining what he means when he talks about the "Internet Operating System." It's all about abstraction -- about being the company that provides the infrastructure that everyone else uses when they want to write code or produce services that doe "internetty" things, like payments, location, time, social graph, access control and so on. Tim makes a provocative comparison to the early days of personal computers, before OS vendors produced the services that allowed app writers to hand off device drivers, file-systems, and other messy, low-level junk to Microsoft and its contemporaries. This gave an enormous amount of power to the OS companies.
This is the crux of my argument about the internet operating system. We are once again approaching the point at which the Faustian bargain will be made: simply use our facilities, and the complexity will go away. And much as happened during the 1980s, there is more than one company making that promise. We're entering a modern version of "the Great Game", the rivalry to control the narrow passes to the promised future of computing. (John Battelle calls them "points of control".)...

The breakthroughs that we need to look forward to may not come from explicitly social applications. In fact, I see "me too" social networking applications from those who have other sources of identity data as a sign that they don't really understand the platform opportunity. Building a social network to rival Facebook or Twitter is far less important to the future of the Internet platform than creating facilities that will allow third-party developers to leverage the social data that companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL - and phone companies like ATT, Verizon and T-Mobile - have produced through years or even decades of managing user's social data for communications.

Read the whole thing. It's long, smart and important. I only took one exception to it: Tim talks about access control as "providing streaming but not downloads." I don't think that streaming (in this context) exists -- it's the phlogiston of the 21st century, just a disingenuous way of saying "downloading" used to convince luvvies and entertainment execs that it's possible to "show" someone a file over the internet without sending a copy of it to them.

The State of the Internet Operating System

Previously:


Apartment building exorcism

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 12:54 PM PDT



Exorcismsmsmsmsms1222
Nichole East posted this video on Flickr documenting an exorcism performed by her neighbors last week. She also snapped the above photo of the friendly note she left them. (Thanks, Greg Long!)

Airplane repo men

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 11:57 AM PDT

Nick Popovich is a repo man, but not of cars. If an individual, or a company, falls too far behind on their airplane payments, the bank may call Popovich to bring back the bird. He's the proprietor of Sage-Popovich, whose repo pilots have repossessed some 1,200 planes. From Air & Space Magazine:
In Russia and Colombia, where foreigners can be kidnapped, the company rolls with bodyguards. The extra muscle is strictly for self-defense, however. If repo resistance escalates to the physical, "you just have to walk away," Popovich says.

Well, he says that now. During a repo in the mid-1980s, both sides got physical. A U.S. financier had hired Popovich to snatch a Boeing 720 from a tour operator in Haiti who was in default. Though the aircraft had a book value of only $600,000, an airport manager refused to release it unless a million dollars was deposited in a Swiss bank account. Having made arrangements with an entrepreneurial Port-au-Prince airport employee, Nick showed up around midnight with an air starter (720s lack an onboard auxiliary power unit to start engines). The field had been closed for hours when the team fired up the big turbofans. As he began adding power, Popovich says, "I saw the first tracer rounds streak over the top of the airplane."

He veered to a stop and Haitian troops swarmed the airplane, bayonetting fuel cells in the wings. "I got out and shoved one of them," Nick says with a sigh. "The rest of them beat the hell out of me and threw me into the national penitentiary in downtown Port-au-Prince. A dirt-floor cell with no roof and 35 people in it." In addition to the million-buck drop in Switzerland, the Haitians wanted $150,000 to release Popovich. "The American embassy did nothing for me," he grumbles. A week later, however, the regime of dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier collapsed. The prison gates were thrown open. "Everyone ran out into the street," Nick laughs. "But that plane is still down there today. The only commercial aircraft that got away from us."

"Grab the Airplane and Go"

Previously:


Christian militia group accused of seditious conspiracy, attempted use of WMDs

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 11:36 AM PDT

hutaree.jpg Nine members of a Christian militia group known as Hutaree (website Google cache) were today indicted on multiple charges involving an alleged plot to attack police, including seditious conspiracy and attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, announced the U.S. Attorney in Michigan. Reports: New York Times, Talking Points Memo. No coincidence they're in Michigan, it would seem: the group reportedly planned attacks on Muslims in Detroit and elsewhere. The state is home to some of America's largest and most densely populated Muslim communities.

"I wonder if these fundamentalist extremist terrorists will be waterboarded and held without trial indefinitely," quipped a friend of a friend.

Above, while it lasts, what is purported to be a Hutaree-produced video grabbed from hutaree.com. The video features guys in camo traipsing through the forest, over a Sisters of Mercy track (Christian militias are into goth? Okay.)

The website makes much reference to a "Christian Republic," "end time battles," and the voices of "Christian martyrs," "Jesus warriors," and talk of "Jesus and the ten virgins." If you translated this website into Arabic, you'd have the sort of stuff that's presented to America as the reason we're in Afghanistan and Iraq.

While the homepage is inaccessible, some portions of the site are accessible at the publish time of this blog post, including details about a training camp planned for April 24, and their rank taxonomy. The top guys in the organization are known as RADOK [RD], BORAMANDER [BM], ZULIF [ZL], and ARKON [AK], and the lowest guys are "gunners." The Hutaree doctine is spelled out here. From the "About us" page:

Christ is our king of kings and top general of all things, for we are not of this world but we live in it. The Hutaree will one day see its enemy and meet him on the battlefield if so God wills it. We will reach out to those who are yet blind in the last days of the kingdoms of men and bring them to life in Christ. (...) Oh and don't forget that you can write us through the contact us link on the Hutaree homepage. Once again thanks for visiting Hutaree.com and may Christ bless you widely.

(Thanks Sean Bonner / Guav)

What the Hell is Sissy Bounce?

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 12:37 PM PDT

sissycrowd.jpg Sean Bonner has published a must-read post on an underground black musical and cultural phenomenon out of New Orleans known as "Sissy Bounce." Must-hear and must-watch, too: Sean included lots of embedded video and sound. Snip:
So what the hell is Sissy Bounce? Sort of depends who you ask. Katey Red [myspace], arguably the creator of the genre, suggests it doesn’t even exist and instead insists it’s just "sissies" producing Bounce. Other artists such as Big Freedia [myspace | twitter] fully embrace the term. Take some of the most hypersexual bump-and-grind you can imagine, remove everything but the sexed-up chorus, speed it up, and then remove the sexual identity of the artist performing it. What, what? That’s right. Sissy Bounce artists are purposely androgynous, sometimes referred to as queer, sometimes transgendered, a very direct intent is to fuck with people’s heads about sexuality. It’s easy to relate, or be offended when you see one sex singing about the other. But with Sissy Bounce you have no idea. This makes the performances just as important as the music itself, which is perhaps why it’s stayed locked down for so long.

I needed more info, and Scott Beibin had it. His friend Alix Chapman had just spent a great deal of time researching the genre and I asked him to do an interview to try to lay the real truth on the line before people start jumping to conclusions. Here’s that interview...

The interview with Chapman (that's him in the thumbnail below) is fascinating stuff. Snip:
alixth.jpg Sissy Bounce is really not all that different [from the more widely known genre of "bounce."]. It incorporates call and response, the triggerman and brown beat, and a lot of the same dancing and sexually provocative lyrics associated with the rest of Bounce. There's a lot of social critique and explanation throughout Bounce music, just like any other form of hip-hop. The only difference is these "sissies" are commenting and explaining a way of life that is not usually heard. I'm sure if you gave anybody marginalized by their sexuality or gender the chance to speak from their lived experience you're gonna hear something different.
You must see the videos. As Chapman says in the interview, "The pop and whobble moves you see in Bounce are not specific to to the genre, yet all the movement that goes into the pelvis region is somewhat common to black folk and can be seen in everything from Batuko —the forbidden dance in Cabo Verde—to Crunk in California. It's just Africa."

Sissy Bounce, a taste of the real underground

(PHOTOS: Top, crowd at a Sissy Bounce show; bottom, Big Freedia; both shot by Aubrey Edwards)

sissyfreedia.jpg

Angry man throws chihuahua off a bridge

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 10:35 AM PDT

In a strange case of misdirected anger, a 35-year old Maryland man threw a chihuahua off a bridge after its owners asked him to get off their property — he had pulled into their driveway to make a phone call. He pled guilty to animal cruelty and faces 4.5 years in prison.

Blindness cure was actually LSD pickles

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 10:31 AM PDT

Alex Pfeffer of Fehmarn, Germany, paid £20,000 to Patrick Baecker, an out-of-work barber, to cure his blindness. The "cure" was gherkins laced with LSD. Baecker is now serving 8 months in jail. 'You are a hairdresser, not a shaman,' Judge Markus Faerber ruled. (Thanks, Chris Arkenberg!)

Sweet song about evolution and love

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 07:45 PM PDT

babyitledtoyou.jpg <a href="http://jonathanmann.bandcamp.com/track/baby-it-all-led-to-you-197">Baby, It All Led To You (#197) by Jonathan Mann</a>

"How we met" is a pretty common theme for love songs. This one, by song-a-day musician Jonathan Mann, just takes the concept back a bit further in time—staring in amazement and wonder at the bacteria, early mammals and proto-humans that all led up to the birth of that special person. I'll admit it, I teared up a little. (Even if the lyrics are a bit heavily weighted toward humans, contrary to the actual amount of time we've been around. /pedant moment)

Side note: Jonathan Mann is looking for animators to help bring "Baby, It All Led to You" to life. If you've got skillz/ideas, email him.

Image courtesy Flickr user Joelshine_mk2, via cc

Alleged human "Holocaust soap" for sale

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 12:02 PM PDT

Abraham Botines is selling a bar of soap that he claims may have been made from the fat of people who were murdered in the Holocaust. According to CBC News, the soap, "inscribed with a swastika and displayed in a glass case with a card that says 'Poland 1940,'" was displayed in the window of Botines's curiosity shop in Montreal, Canada. A controversy erupted and Botines has since removed the item from the shelf, making it available only to potentially serious buyers. From CBC News:
On Friday, Abraham Botines, a Spanish-born Jew who has operated the quirky boutique since 1967, admitted he has no idea whether the soap is really made of human remains.

"I'm 73 and I was collecting things from the Holocaust and from World War II because I belong to that period," Botines told The Canadian Press in an interview Friday in the cluttered shop...

Most Holocaust experts say the stories that have circulated over the years about Nazis mass-producing soap from the remains of Jews and others who died in concentration camps are largely untrue although there is evidence the Nazis experimented with soap-making using human remains...

Fake or real, the soap is outrageous, and "this individual, and others like him, are not preserving history in any way," said Alice Herscovitch, director of Montreal's Holocaust Centre. "The sale of objects which glorify Nazism and hatred, to me, do nothing. They certainly don't help us remember."

The idea is also disgusting, she said.

"These are items that should not be out there in a promotional, sales kind of way."

"Shop owner defends sale of 'Holocaust' soap"

The US government's war on Wikileaks

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 09:10 AM PDT

Glenn Greenwald in Salon: "It's not difficult to understand why the Pentagon wants to destroy WikiLeaks. Here's how the Pentagon's report describes some of the disclosures for which they are responsible: The Pentagon report also claims that WikiLeaks has disclosed documents that could expose U.S. military plans in Afghanistan and Iraq and endanger the military mission, though its discussion is purely hypothetical and no specifics are provided.' " The war on WikiLeaks is not so much about opsec, in other words, it's about avoiding embarassment.

Gadget and video game-themed baked goods

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 09:02 AM PDT

2725220759_199231391f_b.jpg Geeksugar has a fun and delicious-looking photo gallery of geeky baked goods, including this chocolate cupcake with an Apple logo on it. Yum.

Sweet treats from around the web

UK record lobby has vehement feelings on Digital Economy Bill debate, won't say what they are

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 08:00 AM PDT

My latest Guardian column, "Does the BPI want MPs to debate the digital economy bill properly?" addresses the British Phonographic Institute's weird, vehement silence on Parliament's debate on its pet legislation, the dread Digital Economy Bill. Vehement silence? Oh yes.

Last week, the BPI sent me a vehement denial after I published a report that its spokesman had said that there was no need for further debate over the 24,000+ word bill, claiming he'd said no such thing (Parliament hasn't debated the bill at all, and at present it seems like it'll be rammed through with a mere afternoon's debate). But when I asked whether the BPI believed the debate to date had been sufficient, they just ignored the question.

One long-serving MP told me that under normal circumstances, "a bill of this size would probably have a one-day second reading debate and then about 60 to 80 hours in committee, where it would be scrutinised line by line, clause by clause". However, under the current accelerated schedule, "it will receive one day for second reading and at the very most, two hours in a committee of the whole house. The government will programme the debate so huge chunks of the bill might not receive any scrutiny at all..."

The BPI's member companies stand to gain enormous power and wealth from this Bill - including the power to decide which British families are allowed to participate in digital society. They've written sections of it. They produce a weekly, in-depth status report on the bill's progress (albeit these reports are somewhat loony: the leaked one suggested that the MI5 were behind the opposition!).

Are we to believe that they have no opinion on whether this bill has seen enough parliamentary debate?

Does the BPI want MPs to debate the digital economy bill properly?
Previously:


Microsoft trying to gut EU IT policy, replacing open standards with proprietary junk - your letters needed!

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 07:41 AM PDT

Computerworld's Glyn Moody has been tipped off to a lobbying campaign by Microsoft to get free/open source and open standards excluded from the EU's digital "framework" -- the policy that will determine Europe's IT strategy. Microsoft's been trying to pervert this for months now -- last November, we caught them replacing the definition of "open" (as in "open standards") with a bunch of meaningless drivel that suggested that "closed" was just another kind of "open," only less so.

Glyn's sources tell him that a concerted letter-writing campaign to the European Commissioners responsible for the project would make a difference, and provides links to reach them.

The battleground is the imminent Digital Agenda for Europe, due to be unveiled by the European Commission in a month's time, and which defines the overall framework for Europe's digital policy. According to people with good contacts to the politicians and bureaucrats drawing up the Agenda, Microsoft is lobbying hard to ensure that open standards and open source are excluded from that policy - and is on the brink of succeeding in that aim.
Open Source and Open Standards under Threat in Europe (Thanks, Glyn!)
Previously:


Apple acquires Fujitsu's iPad trademark.

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 06:14 AM PDT

With only days until launch, the trademark dispute over the iPad name, used by Fujitsu since 2002, is resolved without legal fireworks.

Leaked doc: EU wants to destroy and rewrite Canada's IP laws

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 06:11 AM PDT

Michael Geist sez,
Late last year, a draft of the European Union proposal for the intellectual property chapter of the Canada - EU Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement leaked online. The leak revealed that the EU was seeking some significant changes to Canadian IP laws. Negotiations have continued and I have now received an updated copy of the draft chapter, complete with proposals from both the EU and Canada. The breadth of the demands are stunning - the EU is demanding nothing less than a complete overhaul of Canadian IP laws including copyright, trademark, databases, patent, geographic indications, and even plant variety rights.

While there are some Canadian requests - for example, Canada plays Hollywood North by asking the EU to introduce an anti-camcording provision - virtually all the changes would require Canadian reforms. In fact, while the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement garners the bulk of the attention, CETA would actually involve far more domestic change. In some sections, the EU simply takes its own directives and incorporates them into the treaty. For example, provisions on the liability of ISPs is taken directly from EU law, including the use of terms such as "information society service" - something that is defined under EU law but is meaningless in Canada.

Notably, the draft includes many new rights for broadcasters. These rights form part of a proposed Broadcast Treaty at WIPO that has failed to achieve consensus. The EU is seeking to build support for the treaty by requiring Canada to implement many new provisions that would give broadcasters a host of new rights and force public places to pay additional fees for carry broadcasts.

Given the magnitude of the proposed changes, the price of a trade agreement is clear. The EU is effectively demanding that Canada surrender its sovereignty over intellectual property law and policy.

EU Demands Canada Completely Overhaul Its Intellectual Property Laws (Thanks, Michael!)
Previously:


Junkbots galore!

Posted: 29 Mar 2010 05:38 AM PDT


Dark Roasted Blend has a fantastic roundup of junkbots and other robotic ephemera and goodies. I'm really taken with Ultrajunk's creations, which really take advantage of the decay and use-marks on his found-object materials to make robots that have a lot of texture and implied history.

Utterly Irresistible Robot Sculptures (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Previously:


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