Plan to extend copyright on pop classics – Sunday Times – Times Online
They justify the move by saying that the industry needs money to “find talent?” Wow! What have music fans been doing through MP3 exchanges, Podcasts, shows, festivals, etc.? Plus, how do you define talent, in this context? It seems to be “the ability to generate record sales” as opposed to any specific musical ability, whether inborn or learned.
Weird.
These people (the recording industry) really have a peculiar perspective on music. They will transform themselves eventually. But in the meantime, they seem to react pretty badly to changes in the world of music.

Dell makes car analogy with launch of new PCs:

for the majority of everyday applications, a two- or three-year-old system is just fine

Did they just realize this?

Macworld: News: Companies adopt activation as software piracy tops $33 billion
Somewhat elaborate article on software piracy. Well, it skims over several issues and doesn’t go into any depth. Still, it’s interesting to look at some ideas of those associated to the Business Software Alliance and compare them with the recording industry’s stance.
One interesting/insightful quote:

“I tend to be somewhat dubious about so-called lost sales estimates, because it’s not reasonable to assume that every pirated copy is a lost sale,” said Jupiter analyst, Joe Wilcox. “Additionally, the estimates assume that nobody pays, which isn’t the case.”

So the question of software piracy might be analyzed in a slightly more clueful fashion than that of music transfers. Although, the “loaf of bread” fallacy is used by the BSA too:

Software piracy is a relatively anonymous experience that can be done from the comfort of your home, but the BSA said it’s no different than walking into the local Best Buy and stealing something from them. While most people would have a problem stealing from a store, downloading a piece of software seems much easier for them.

Still, software developers quoted in this piece (or, at least, their representative) seem much more clueful than the BSA lobby group:

Adobe has heard of workarounds available at some piracy Web sites that [Adobe senior manager Licensing and Anti-Piracy] Nanavati said do appear to work. However, as with the other companies, Adobe’s first concern is for its customers, not stopping every person that wants to steal its software.

Sure, these all contrast with the ideals of the Free Software moverment/groups/philosophy. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that Bill Gates was one of the first to propose a business model on selling PC software. Like music becoming a commodity (as opposed to, say, an art), software code has become the basis for a huge economy. Sure, some people got rich through both processes. But how did humanity become richer through software has little to do with end-user license agreements.

Ah, well…

Times: CIA outrages UK academics/anthropologists

The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (Prisp) funded anthropology students by up to $50,000 each through undergraduate courses if they agreed to work for the US intelligence services when they graduate

The only thing that surprises me: didn’t we expect this to be done anyway? We’re being told that the CIA reads our work and that they’ve taken anthro classes. Aren’t people allowed to take our classes even if their goals clashes with the goals of the discipline?

Comme le dit le proverbe arabe: «Remercie ta femme une fois par jour. Si elle
ne sait pas pourquoi, toi, tu le sais.»

Creative Commons: Education
Interview with Sahlins on “Prickly Paradigm Press” which publishes pamphlets under Creative Commons licences.
Sahlins isn’t necessarily known to mince words and he seems to like controversy. In this case, though, it’s mostly a well-articulated version of views that appear to be quite common in academia.

Two excerpts:

My position is that once we’re even, it can go free. None of our authors and none of our publishers and certainly not me, above all, are in this business for gain. I mean, I write a lot of things for academic journals for which I never see a penny. And I’ve written books that I do see a penny for, but it’s literally about a penny for an hour of hard labor. None of us is making a living off of this. Most of us feel that our ideas for the most part come from other people, and it’s certainly the case that we want them to be disseminated among other people. So free distribution seems to me correct. The only constraint I put on it is this one that I would like to be able to break even so that we can continue to function.

You know, this seems to run counter to the old “I’ve worked a lot on this (album, software, book) so I think I deserve money for its use by you, the lowly listener/user/reader.”

I truly support the idea of the free dissemination of intellectual information, and that I truly lament the various forms of copyrights and patents that are being put on so-called intellectual property. I also lament the collusion of universities in licensing the results of scientific research, and thus violating the project of the free dissemination of knowledge that is their reason for existence. So I consider it an important act to release these books under a Creative Commons type of license. I’m happy, and also a little proud, to do so.

More polemic and underlining a real issue with contemporary academia. Some research institutions aren’t so much about creating the ideal context for reflection, thoughtful communication, or innovative ideas, but markets for intellectual property. This could be expected from “R&D” groups in corporate contexts but the contemporary university is becoming less and less of the place where ideas and knowledge are thriving.
It’s probably one of the most pernicious problems in the whole Publish or Perish scheme. Well, along with the academic version of payola, the dramatically rising costs of academic publishing, the abuses on author rights, the reliance on publication prestige instead of usefulness, the new barriers to dissemination of ideas, the effects of publish-oriented profs on the teaching role of universities, the diminishing advantages of the tenure-track system, the tendency not to replace retiring faculty, the view of tenure as sinecure, the linear ranking of universities, the reliance on test scores, the obligation for faculty to “produce” even while exploring new possibilities…
P. or P.? Nah! P2P? Sure!

Now, if it were possible to convince academic departments that relying on the old model of academic publishing is detrimental to academia as a whole and that there should be better factors of academic success, we’d be on the way to a much better academic situation overall.

Ah, well…