PaulT's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week

Techdirt

from the talking-favorites dept

This weeks’ “favorites” post comes from PaulT, an English sysadmin living in Spain, who frequently chimes in with smart observations from his perspective.

As is becoming traditional, I’d like to start by both thanking Mike for the opportunity to write this post, but also noting that it’s a bit more work than I’d originally thought it would be!

As a foreign resident in Spain, who suffers no end of problem because of the entertainment industry’s regional policies, I found Alex De La Iglesia’s comments to be heartening. The distribution of legal content in this country is a mess, and a full decade behind the US and my native UK in many ways. It’s great that such a talented director is using his position to protest the more backward direction his peers wish to take, though it’s a shame that he’s abdicating his responsibility in order to do so.

While the music industry is a little bit ahead of the movie industry in their adaptation to the modern marketplace, they do still seem to miss the point on a regular basis. Recently, one of the things that illustrated this was Nokia’s “Comes With Music” platform, which seemed to offer very little to address piracy. I predicted that it would be a failure from the start, due to its built in content expiry date and platform restrictions. These not only make it a poor competitor to legal services such as iTunes and Spotify, as well as highly inconvenient compared to piracy. Hopefully, its failure will hammer these lessons home again so that the music industry can concentrate on more viable models.

Thirdly, we have a nacho cheese lawsuit that I’m sure will bring repeats of an ongoing argument. As Mike correctly notes in the article, the McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit from a few years ago is a dividing issue with people holding it up as both a valid suit and the epitome of frivolous actions. I’m on the side that feels it’s valid (she should have been more careful, but it should not have been served so hot), but we’ll see how this new action turns out. I feel that the parents should have been more careful, but it’s right for Disney to be punished if their cheese was excessively hot.

A little late to the game, but it was nice to read a rundown of the ridiculous Fox News claims about the videogame Bulletstorm and its supposed incitation to rape. It’s nice to see not only that such blatant lies are addressed, but also a mini masterclass in the various ways in which such things can be intelligently and effectively debunked.

Talking of ridiculous claims, we have a few stories about copyright that show how the system is being misused. Rihanna was sued due to some frankly quite generic S&M images in her new video being of some passing resemblance to a photographer’s previous images. We have the TSA claiming that copyright is the reason they can’t pass over images of their security scans. We also see the interesting question as to whether or not a recent technological marvel only succeeded by violating copyright. Such innovations may be in jeopardy (no pun intended) if the copyright maximalists get their way.

Another theme that seems to have emerged this week was the issue of internet censorship and its misuse, along with unfortunate collateral damage along the way. As the UK is apparently willing to follow the US’s lead and France implements internet censorship on the pretense of fighting child porn, there were a few stark reminders that such things tend to have a lot of unintended consequences. Hopefully, Hillary Clinton will follow through and actually enable internet users to be free from this kind of thing, but I somehow doubt it.