Posts by izogi
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Speaker: Losing cultural treasures under…, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
I’d agree with Stephen on this. Copyright has its benefits, but it isn’t in any way a natural right. It’s an artificial legal compromise on free speech, where society decides to grant the creator of a work a temporary monopoly on stuff they said first, so that nobody else is allowed to repeat it (without permission). This was conceived as an incentive for people to create works which would eventually be returned to the public domain, most commonly by letting a creator profit from every copy of its distribution within that time-frame. But the intent has nearly always meant to be that society gets those works back in the public domain where others can use them freely and uninhibited, and build on them to create new works.
If you grew up in a society more than a few hundred years ago, sometimes even more recently, it probably wouldn’t seem natural at all that others shouldn’t be able to reproduce something you’ve done, simply because you did it first.
Even US copyright began as a term of only seven years, after which works returned to public domain, but that term has been repeatedly extended. The last couple of times, the across-the-board extensions to prevent copyright from expiring have effectively been a consequence of lobbying mega-corporations who want to continue earning money on things they’ve had in the bank for decades, even if they’ve created nothing since, and now there’s talk in the US that it might happen again. Even with life+50 years as in New Zealand, non-expiring copyright has become so embedded in society that many people now expect it to last forever, and get surprised when they discover it’s not meant to.
The irony is that the corporations most active in preventing copyright from expiring also benefitted hugely from expired copyright. Most, if not all of Disney’s extremely popular movies were built from old stories in the public domain.
In honesty I don’t personally care much about having the rights to make copies of old movies and books owned by mega-corporations if they’re at least generally available, but the less obvious loss to society with absurdly long, or infinite copyright terms, is with many less prominent works. There’s lots out there which has never been republished, and which nobody’s able to practically preserve noncommercially because the copyright owners, whoever they might be ~80+ years after creation, either can’t be found or don’t even know they own it, or don’t care. Many of those types of works will simply disappear before anyone has an opportunity to rediscover them. I’d quite happily return to a much shorter automatic term if international treaties would allow it, at least unless creators asserted a specific interest in retaining the copyright on something for longer.
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Hard News: CWC 2015: Contains graphic horror, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
and why couldn’t on-screen players be replaced by CG animations on the fly – imagine the NZ team all replaced by Hobbit-related avatars – fun times
I wouldn’t be too surprised if Cricinfo, or some third party app which feeds off it, manages to come up with something like this in future, given how much ball-by-ball info is already filtered through it. :)
On Danny and friends, I normally find that a mute button combined with a radio works wonders on the few occasions I have any TV coverage. Even before Sky came along, though, I reckon NZ television’s had a history of picking dreadful commentators, but maybe that’s just me. -
It is believed the ICC’s document on safety for broadcast crew is three pages long; its document concerning the protection of image and ICC branding rights is 60 pages long.
Without trying to judge whether this whole thing is good or not, or comment on the appropriateness of the contents of these documents, “number of pages” seems a very poor metric to compare them. Safety briefings have different goals than legal mumbo-jumbo about intellectual property. Could you imagine trying to reliably digest a safety document that’s spread over 60 pages if it only needs 3?
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to simon g,
overall, a global report from the OECD is given less prominence than any press release by the “Taxpayers’ Union”.
Don’t worry, I’m sure the Taxpayer’s Union will come out to discuss this report soon enough.
And here it is (scroll down for the full media release). It basically seems to be attacking the opposition argument’s use of the term “trickle down economics”, claiming that the Taxpayer’s Union and “centre-right politicians” have never argued for a trickle-down theory, and so it’s a big giant straw-man being used as an evil debating tactic by Grant Robertson and Russel Norman to distract from the actual issues.
Apparently our taxes are in good hands with this government.
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Tumultuous.
I'm starting to cringe ever time I read or hear it in the MSM, as if they've been running some kind of inside competition to slide it into as many reports as possible.
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Hard News: Incomplete, inaccurate and misleading, in reply to matthew,
Is there really such a thing as permanently deleting an email. Surely there is at least some forensic IT capacity somewhere in our state apparatus that could recover deleted correspondence.
My first thought on reading that was "don't most email conversations involve at least two participants?"
Has someone else been deleting things besides Jason Ede?
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Hard News: Garbage in, garbage out, in reply to Andre,
To say the alternative is worse is not a fact. To repeat that mantra is playing into the hands of the liars and cheats.
Is NZ shifting towards a Fox News style of journalism? I don't follow Fox (so correct me!), but what I've heard of it is that the news is often straight-out facts but it then gets clouded with highly partisan comment that often masquerades as news.
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Hard News: Garbage in, garbage out, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
What you get on PAS is not an average persons interest.They seem to like Slater scum or so the figures are supposed to be (although debatable I’m sure) RB is one of the few people asking questions.
The wider range of ‘average’ people I encounter still aren’t representative of everyone, but they’re definitely more average than me (and strong Nat voters). I don’t think it’d be fair to them to say they like Slater scum. Mostly they don’t even know or care about what Whale Oil is, and a conversation about it which I listened in on was just riddled with misunderstandings.
It’d be closer to say that they either don’t care about it, or are sick of it, or just don’t have an appetite for any of the wild complexity and detail that’s been blasted at them by journos in a short space of time when there are so many other things they have to work through in life besides politics. If you don’t follow blogs, or even just don’t follow political blogs, there’s a whole new level of understanding to grasp before being able to “get” how and why this is all significant in the wider scheme, and how it affects you. Without that, it comes across as insignificant people playing stupid insignificant games.
I’ve heard plenty of complaining about how ultra-sick of politics they are in general. Nicky Hager was seen as a left wing nut-job even before he was in the news recently, but I did actually explain some of what was in the book to people. It wasn’t challenged so much as used to confirm existing simplified perceptions that all politicians are slimy and untrustworthy. They won’t bother to read it themselves because it sounds like nothing new and there are other more important things to worry about.
They’ll still vote National because the alternative is perceived as worse.
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which will see the decommissioning of its Wellington outside broadcast truck, the one that brings you Back Benches.
Does this mean the likely end for Back Benches, or just a transition to whichever entity buys the truck and gives it a new paint job? I've often thought of Back Benches as one of the more impressive news and current affairs shows that TVNZ developed, even though it ended up on Prime, because it shows politics and politicians from a different perspective than what's often shown in other media.
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Speaker: David Fisher: The OIA arms race, in reply to Angela Hart,
The trouble is that the way things are works wonderfully well for those in power. Unless that changes, why should they fix it?
How did we end up with some of the existing stuff, like the original OIA and the culture that followed before all these efforts to sidestep it, and the Bill of Rights Act, and MMP? (That's a genuine question.) All of those things have tended to reduce the influence of those in power, or at least contradict it.
Does it take a strong opposition party to pick it up as a policy so much that they're obliged to implement it if elected?