Posts by Russell Brown
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@Sacha
I recall reading somewhere in the lead-up that our recently-passed law makes it illegal again to avoid regional encoding of DVDs (which like staggered release dates brings only harm for consumers). Progress?
Not the filesharing bill, no. That's in the US position on TPPA. I don't think there has been any move at all to ban region-free players. MED lawyers have specifically argued that region coding should not be protect in the past. I think people are going off the deep end a bit about about this bill.
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Cracker: Send in the Clowns, in reply to 3410,
Hang on. The statistical comparison was copied, not the text, per se.
Quite. Not plagiarism. But the copying of a nonsense statistic demonstrates that the author of the editorial was just throwing around numbers without really knowing what they meant. Poor.
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Hard News: The file-sharing bill, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Yes, because Google is the Friend of the People, eh?
It's more that Google will give stuff away in return for being allowed to watch you use it. Which you may or may not find pervy.
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Up Front: Fairy-Tale Autopsies, in reply to Emma Hart,
TRIGGER WARNING
Ugh.
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Hard News: The file-sharing bill, in reply to Sacha,
As Russell noted, there are other issues right now to die in a ditch over.
I actually got a bit annoyed with Twitter exploding with people who'd found their issue, at the same time as the legal aid changes will impact very vulnerable people. The Farmer case would not and could not, I think, have been pursued by a public defender, and that's deeply worrying.
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Hard News: The file-sharing bill, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The fact is that any changes made to this bill are symbolic. It’s largely ineffective anyway, as previously discussed. Labour would have done better to propose amendments and vote against the bill when they weren’t adopted.
And then, it appears, termination would have been available to the copyright tribunal as a remedy from day one, rather than the government having to buy a fight by specifically enacting it. You don't have to like what was passed to appreciate that it could have been considerably worse.
The structure in the act as it stands -- a low-cost tribunal, fines rather than termination or damages, ISPs not having to work for free for rights holders -- is largely what the likes of the Creative Freedom Foundation argued for in 2008. In other ways -- presumption, the potential for termination to be enacted -- it's wrong.
But the battle over this has been going on for a long time, and I'm not that impressed with people who only got fired up Wednesday night demeaning people who've been working for a result for a long time.
I think Curran is sometimes out of her depth in a highly technical policy area (eg, they need Cunliffe leading the charge on UFB), but she's been highly engaged here. You might not agree with the decision, but it's simply not fair to dismiss her as an idiot.
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Up Front: Fairy-Tale Autopsies, in reply to Emma Hart,
I have to admit I’m a little disappointed myself.
Apart from the known PAS troll, what did the others look like?
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Hard News: The file-sharing bill, in reply to Jacqui Dunn,
A sell-out. Clare Curran can spin it how she likes, but it doesn’t work for me. Apologists for them are saying it was the best deal under the circumstances, because if they hadn’t worked with the Nats it would have been termination for anyone caught. It doesn’t ring true. Yellow-bellied, to my mind. I’m disappointed.
I'm in danger of getting grumpy about this. Gareth gave a stirring speech, but there's more to it than that. There's a reason that people like Jordan Carter and David Farrar weren't screaming blue murder about the final bill -- it's because they've been working on it for some time, they knew what was coming and they know they've got most of what they wanted.
Clare Curran has also been on this pretty much since the election, starting with winning the argument within the caucus about support for 92A. People might not agree with the decision she made to get a reasonably significant last-minute change to a bill that would have passed anyway, but I just don't think "yellow-bellied" is a fair or reasonable way to describe Curran.
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Hard News: Friday Visions, in reply to Peter Darlington,
Too much reggae and hefty dub in Tom’s childhood meant his chances of being a metal fan were always fairly slim. He absolutely hates metal
And yet loves Pendulum? You should tease him about that.
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Hard News: Friday Visions, in reply to Kumara Republic,
And to those who knock opera, Iva Davies (Icehouse) & Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden) are on record saying they’re operatically trained.
If I was sticking up for opera I'm not sure those would be the examples I'd choose ...