Susy Frankel teaches and researches copyright at Massey University and in other roles she’s also current head of the Copyright Tribunal (she was appointed by Tizard). Earlier this year in her inaugural lecture at Massey she talked about the role of copyright in our culture,

We’ve transcribed part of the speech here:

“Because of the pervasiveness of intellectual property in our culture the right way to discuss the limits of intellectual property is to understand and try to articulate the relationship between intellectual property and culture. We know it’s there, but what does this relationship really tell us, and how can we use the understanding of the relationship in a practical way? One of the phenomenons that we see is that there have been certain products and brands that have become boom industries. The question I’m interested in is not whether cultural and creative industries are goodies or baddies, whether Barbie has less or more artistic merit than Renet, but whether if the law overprotects these kinds of cultural products do we do damage to culture itself?

The law is too protective if it becomes too constricting on the types of artistic, literary and musical works that can be made. It becomes too restricting if people will not make these works because they’re not sure if they can, if they can’t, if they can’t find out the [licensing?] information and so on.

The problem with the incentive and reward approach to intellectual property is that it loses sight of the public interest in the structure of the law as a whole. The public interest is almost taken for granted; that the reward and incentive formula will capture that interest. In essence the rights of individuals appear to have trumped whatever that collective interest in intellectual property law is. Those collective interests include its effect on culture. This includes what we might call expressive values, free speech values, but it’s not just those values at play — society as a whole of course has a vested interest in supporting individual rights. The appropriate balance between collective and individual rights is not an easy balance to achieve.”

(emphasis mine)

Read more at the inaugural lecture website and download the mp3.

RadioNZ points out that today Minister Simon Power will take the revised Section 92A proposal to Cabinet. Robert Smith has a timely piece in the NBR about downloads, “Despite widespread bleating about the rise of piracy, there are still plenty of people who don’t bother downloading. If there is one glimmer of hope out of those ubiquitous warnings, it’s that cinema admissions are holding strong in the face of piracy. Sky City Entertainment recently revealed admissions to its New Zealand cinemas for the first quarter of the year were up by 17% and the industry is looking to 3D films for further growth [...] If, for some odd reason, somebody in New Zealand needed to see Guy Ritchie’s movie Revolver, the only way is to import it from overseas [..] It is possible to purchase a copy of the movie through an international web retailer, or the Ritchie fan could wait until it showed up on television at three o’clock on a Sunday morning, or they could just download it in less than an hour. If it’s that easy and simple to do it illegally, why is it so difficult to do legitimately?“

Read more at the NBR.

For as long as I can remember I haven’t heard a good reason to think that there was a supernatural aspect to our natural world. We live in a natural world where the machinery of nature is indifferent to humans and our narcissistic desires for special meaning and purpose. Don’t like the way the universe works? Go find another one.

When I was very young I realised that religion was rather provincial. People aren’t born believing but instead they get it from their surrounding community and family. Immigrants came with their own religion. I had friends who were religious and they would talk to me about their invisible friends. There were gods, faeries, spirits, ghosts, and so on. I was particularly curious how they chose their religion and what they thought of other competing religions. Were they decoys made by a devil, a simple human delusion, or did they perhaps have a new-age belief in a unified god beneath any and all religions?

My friends were generally quite honest about how they were born undecided but then later chose to believe in a particular supernatural idea because of being taught by grown-ups. They were all thankful to have been taught the correct religion. All said their religion made them feel good, and I didn’t doubt their sincerity for a second. Most of them reconciled the variety of religions by saying that other people were delusional and ignorant while citing obvious examples of manufactured religions like Cargo Cults or Scientology. Surprisingly they very rarely invoked tricks from the devil as a reason. I thought that devil decoys would have been far more popular; a supernatural war with human souls as the currency was a rather spectacular and appealing idea.

According to my friends anyone who worshiped the wrong gods was delusional or ignorant of religious evidence, but what I wanted to know was how they were so sure they weren’t delusional themselves. They answered by way of talking about their feelings and how they just felt a connection to something special and supernatural. So did the follower of every other religion. I’d ask them whether people can fool themselves into feeling false gods? They’d always agree, but they wouldn’t apply it to themselves. They demanded a special place in the universe.

For a long time I was unconvinced by the supernatural and so I called myself an Agnostic, a fence-sitter. It took many years to realise that I was giving religion a privileged position by not also sitting on the fence when it came to the issue of unicorn existence, homeopathy, psychic powers, or whether water dowsing works. There is no good evidence for any of those supernatural phenomena but I wouldn’t waste time by saying that I’m agnostic about unicorns.

Or, in other words…

The typical understanding of the term Atheist is that it’s someone who says there is no god, but I don’t make that claim. Being that sure about what I couldn’t possibly know makes no sense, and no Atheist I know claims to have that kind of certainty. Instead Atheism is not a rejection but rather an absence of gods until it’s proven otherwise. Fundamentalist it is not.

Unfortunately the term Atheist has a stigma about it in some parts of the population, and this means that non-believers worry about the reaction of making their views public. There is a feeling that atheists need to ‘come out of the closet’ (so to speak) and that’s why I’m glad to see that the Humanist Society of NZ has launched their atheist bus campaign.

“There’s probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life”

In the 1901 Census approximately 1 in 30 people did not give a religious affiliation. One hundred years later 4 out of 10 people did not specify a religious affiliation (source). These 40% subsidise churches through taxes and these churches often have large adverts proselytising their ideas, so rather than just proclaiming a world-view (as claimed by some) I see this bus campaign as speaking up for a part of society that is underrepresented.

So, please consider donating to the campaign to help atheists come out of the closet, because we’re just like Christians who don’t believe in Thor, Wotan, Banaitja, Xemu and Rangi and Papa. Atheists just go one god further.

With the goal of concluding ACTA negotiations next year we’ve just learnt that New Zealand will host an international ACTA meeting in April. The CFF will be joining a new coalition on ACTA focusing initially on bringing more transparency to negotiations, “The treaty has caused concern to a number of organisations and individuals, in New Zealand and internationally, because the content of the negotiations have been kept secret (unlike many similar ‘intellectual property’ treaties)” The Ministry of Economic Development is holding an update meeting on ACTA next Wednesday and we’ll be there.

Kiwiblog comments on ACTA saying “I was pleased the Government suspended the introduction of the “guilt upon accusation” S92A. I was also pleased with their proposed policy replacement, that came out on 7 August. Didn’t agree with everything in it, but it was a lot better than the law passed by Judith Tizard. So far so good. Submissions closed on that document on 7 August – that is four months ago. Most of the submissions were supportive. So why I wonder has the Government not released its final proposed policy?” Read more at Kiwiblog

LibraryTechNZ summarises the state of cultural heritage collections and the copyright challenges posed to them, “There are many fine institutions collecting New Zealand’s culture and heritage; to keep it safe and then make it available so others can create new knowledge and experiences. Often this is made possible through the generous donations of material from members of the public. These institutions know it is important to share the treasures in these collections, but there is a fear some users may not treat the material with the respect it is due [...] firstly a quick (though lengthy) round up on what all the different kinds of rights are, and then next a look at a suggestion for how the Creative Commons licences could be extended so they meet the needs of cultural heritage institutions.” One minor comment about the article however,

The article says,

When authors/creators can’t earn a living by selling their work (because anyone can get a copy for free) then they are forced to stop creating new works (to earn a living some other way), and this loss is detrimental to society

I think this is perhaps too simplistic. Selling copies is but one business model, and there are many other business models that don’t depend on scarcity of information (advertising in general, open source companies, musicians that earn more from touring, authors that release their book free online but sell paper copies, etc.).

The internet is simply the world’s most powerful copying machine, and it has reduced the costs of copying to practically nothing. Selling copies is one model, but it woudl be fair to say that the internet has facilitated new business models that benefit from mass and unregulated distribution.

For more information visit:

http://www.openbusiness.cc/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open_source_software

(download media release as PDF or ODT)

International media conglomerates trying to capture popular culture and to take away our right to internet access didn’t reckon on the power of individuals standing up to be counted. Now a new short documentary, Kiwiright, by Josh Davidow charts the course of the 2009 Internet Blackout that made news around the world and stopped a law in its tracks.

Kiwiright tells the story of the Internet Blackout, spearheaded by the Creative Freedom Foundation. Hundreds of thousands of people protested against the controversial law change, Section 92A of the Copyright Ammendment Act, that would allow copyright holders to seek disconnection of Internet users’ accounts simply on accusation of a breach of copyright law without a trial.

The campaign made waves worldwide and the uproar led to newly elected Prime Minister John Key suspending that section of the law. He described the law as “draconian” while saying “If New Zealand was to sign a free-trade agreement with America for instance, we would need an equivalent of Section 92A”.

Kiwiright takes a look at how New Zealand copyright law is dictated by foreign corporations, with a Free Trade Agreement carrot dangled in front of bureaucrats if they gave the rights holders the disconnection stick.

Davidow says: “The Internet is a civil right these days, no different to having phone, TV and postal service. Yet, the draconian law would see people disconnected for being accused of accessing files that may or may not be under copyright.”

The documentary features interviews with politicians, artists and technologists, explaining the deeper issues around the copyright controversy.

Kiwiright can be viewed on the web at www.Kiwiright.com

Quotes from Kiwiright

Creative Freedom Foundation co-founder Bronwyn Holloway-Smith: “I was really concerned that the people pushing for this law were claiming to represent artists, but really they had other corporate interests in mind.”

Hon Peter Dunne, leader of United Future and Revenue Minister: “… I can certainly see that there would be people saying ‘better not do that, we don’t want go there, because we don’t want to upset the USA.’ Not because we’re timid little Kiwis but because our bigger objective is getting this free trade agreement.”

Tech journalist Juha Saarinen: “New Zealand is a testing ground for all these weird things…We’re giving a whole lot of power to the corporations that don’t have the public good as their interest.”

Public screenings of Kiwiright are planned for December, in Auckland and Wellington – please go to www.facebook.com/kiwiright for dates, times and further details.

Josh Davidow is the director of “Kiwiright” and a graduate student in screen production at the University of Auckland.

For more information on copyright issues, go to Creative Freedom Foundation’s website: www.creativefreedom.org.nz

Contacts

Josh Davidow
021 128 3687
josh@fyminc.com

Bronwyn Holloway-Smith
Creative Freedom Foundation
021 107 5747
cff@holloway.co.nz

(download media release as PDF or ODT)

UPDATE (26 Nov 2009): for the latest info on this patch see my thread on the Zarafa forum.

—-

By replacing one file in Zarafa you can get Unicode support in the web client. Replace client/layout/js/dialog.js with this file.

Just to be clear on what this fixes and what it doesn’t:

• It adds Māori macron support to the body of the email in the web client (but not subject lines, or calendar events). Basically any plain-text input won’t support it but any rich-text area should.
• We’ve tested viewing these Macrons in the Zarafa web client, Evolution, Thunderbird, Microsoft’s Mac Entourage, and Outlook and they look fine.
• Athough the patch infact adds support for all Unicode characters each email client will have different capabilities. Eg, support for Thai or Sanskrit will be a bit iffy, especially (it seems) in Microsoft’s Mac Entourage.

Be sure to clear all of your browser cache because the patch modifies JavaScript that your browser would typically cache.

For the techies this patch is based on using Numerical Character References to get Unicode support in HTML. It’s not UTF-8 support, though apparently that is due from Zarafa in Q1 2010.

UPDATE (26 Nov 2009): for the latest info on this patch see my thread on the Zarafa forum.

The population of countries negotiating ACTA is 1,178,504,491. The members of public with access to the text of ACTA: 42. Perhaps with this in mind PublicAddress.net features a well-timed editorial on ACTA today by Colin Jackson that’s well worth reading, “There is now no cost to distributing information. That’s not rhetoric – it’s an indisputable fact. It means that people who rely for their income on being a toll-gate on the flow of information don’t have a business model any more. Artists can still create and charge people for appreciating their work directly, but those who make their living from recycling imperfect copies of what others do are going to find it more and more difficult from now on. This is the context for the innocuously-named Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an international treaty being negotiated by the governments of New Zealand, the EU, Canada, the US and a few other countries. Rumours have persisted for some time that [ACTA] is really about controlling copying on the Internet, as well as, or perhaps instead of, controlling the flood of fake Prada handbags and Rolex watches filling our shops. And rumours are what we have to rely on because no-one has seen the text of ACTA. The government officials negotiating it have told us that it’s far too commercially sensitive for the people it would affect to be able to actually see it before it’s all signed off by Obama, Gordon Brown or his successor and John Key.”

“We don’t have to think too hard to figure out which side of this debate will be employing lobbyists. The people who stand to lose from an attack on the Internet to prevent people copying things are ordinary folks, run of the mill Internet users, not just those who like to download copyrighted music and movies. The people want that attack on the Internet, because it is destroying their business models, are a handful of very well-resourced industry associations and big companies. The same people who claimed that the very existence of recorded music would cause human vocal chords to atrophy, or that the popularity of the VCR (remember those?) would be “as dangerous as the Boston Strangler was to a woman at home”.”

Read more on ACTA at PublicAddress.net .

A modern myth spread by those who want to discredit evolution itself is that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection provided the scientific basis for the Nazi eugenics programme.

This is false on many grounds,

By definition Darwin’s theory of natural selection couldn’t be implemented by humans because that would be human selection, not nature’s selection in the sense that Darwin meant it. While humans are a part of nature the type of nature that Darwin was talking about was clearly not intentional human intervention and direction.

The knowledge that human children were a result of mixing their parents traits such as height, skin colour, and so on has been common knowledge since the birth of humanity and controlling this process was advocated as far back as Plato.

The Darwinian theory’s primary metaphor of a Tree of Life with branching species was unused by human breeding conducted by the Nazis, they just wanted to kill and breed within the human species which was an old idea. As I understand it the eugenics program wasn’t trying to cross the species boundary, though the same couldn’t be said of Stalin. That the Nazis labeled other humans as lesser species is a separate issue and more about semantics than the evolutionary tree described by Darwin.

A less mechanised form of racist human breeding was practiced before Darwin in most cultures that preferred relationships within races. These cultures tried to control who could have a long-term relationship, and with whom, which would affect offspring (Eg, interracial marriage was illegal for a long time). Some backwards people still believe this, but thanks to Darwin we now know that race doesn’t exist in any significant way, especially not in the way that Nazi’s talked about.

The idea of Darwin’s theory providing the scientific underpining for the Nazi breeding program is nonsense on scientific grounds when you consider that (1) it was done by humans not nature, (2) eugenics was an old idea advocated by Plato, (3) it wasn’t based on the Tree of Life or non-human breeding, (4) it was a mechanised version of cultural racism that was common at the time.

Darwin’s theories have as much to do with nazi eugenics as Copernican theories have to do with ballistic missiles.

Update November 18th 2009: a final word from Hitler himself who — not content with burning books on Darwin — spoke against Evolution and Atheism,

“Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law–one may call it an iron law of Nature–which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind.”

“I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.
We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.”

“”Christ was the greatest early fighter in the battle against the world enemy, the Jews . . . The work that Christ started but could not finish, I–Adolf Hitler–will conclude.”