Earth: Mostly Harmless

The Parallel Politics of Copyright and Environment

Picked this up on Slashdot today. Is copyright, and perhaps digital rights issues in general, creeping up on the back of the environment as a major political issue? For my part, I hope so.

Traditionally, copyright has been firmly in the realm of ’stakeholder’ politics, but in an age where ’stakeholders’ include 15-year-olds uploading videos to SueTube (explanation), multi-billion dollar ‘content’ companies and the quasi-corporatist non-governmental organisations, isn’t it time for a proper debate?

The Parallel Politics of Copyright and Environment:

zumaya100k writes “In recent months, Slashdot has covered the rise of the Pirate Party and the battles in Europe over iPod interoperability. Canada’s Hill Times has an insightful column from Michael Geist that links these developments as the growing importance of copyright as a political issue. He argues that copyright is now tracking the environment as a mainstream political issue.” (Geist is talking about Canada here, but much the same can be said about the U.S. and other places.)

(Via Slashdot).

Lawmaker Revs Up Fair-Use Crusade

Nice work, Rick.

Lawmaker Revs Up Fair-Use Crusade:

peipas writes “Wired News has posted an interview with Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA). In it he defends his stance in support of fair use and against the DMCA and other measures sought by the entertainment industry. The interview also touches on universal broadband and the recent overturning of the broadcast flag.”

(Via Slashdot.)

And here’s the Bill itself.

Take that, xxAA!

One Torrent to bind them, one Torrent to rule them all!

Bram Cohen has posted a beta of a trackerless BitTorrent client. Once it goes final it’s expected to make the MPAA, BSA and RIAA’s elaborate game of litegation Whack-a-Mole even more difficult, as noted by ZDNet Australia. As well as that, it should speed things up, presuming that torrent files will now get wider distribution and swarms will become bigger. Here’s Slashdot’s lowdown:

Trackerless BitTorrent Beta Posted:

jgarzik writes “BitTorrent development is occuring at a furious pace. At the beginning of May, an Azureus update added distributed tracker and database features. Yesterday, Bram updated BitTorrent to include support for trackerless torrents in the new BitTorrent 4.10 beta.”

(Via Slashdot.)

UK Broadband - part 2

A couple of days after posting my previous item about the various xDSL technologies which may or may not come into usage in the UK during this century, Slashdot posted a story announcing the UKonline 8Mbps service i mentioned. Which is all fine (though a little delayed by Slashdot standards) until people start posting the inevitable “8Mbps for £40? that’s rubbish! Here in [insert Scandanavian country or Japan here] we have a gazillion gigabit connections for which the telco pays us”. Well, not quite, but it does add insult to the ‘injury’ of the utterly shitty connections we have here. Furthermore, most of the services mentioned are symmetric (same upload and download rates), and have no transfer limits. Just a few tasters:

Expensive! (Score:5, Informative) by silverz (803241) on Wednesday January 26, @09:00PM (#11487672) That is very expensive. In Japan, for example ADSL connection from Yahoo Japan costs you about 4000 yen per month (less than 40 US dollar) for 50 Mbps ADSL. And also fibre optic connection has become very common and cheaper. For example Usen Networks (one of the provider in Japan) provides 100 Mbps fibre optic connection for only 2950 per month. I use the fibre optic that comes with 5 static IPs. And it costs me about 5000 yen per month. Download cap is totally never heard in here. As far as I know, all packages come with unlimited bandwidth.

Which isn’t too bad, as you expect that sort of thing from the Japanese. But then…

France has got UK Beat: 20Mbits/sec @ 30 Euros (Score:5, Interesting) by valmont (3573) on Wednesday January 26, @09:52PM (#11488047) (http://chrisholland.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Monday September 20, @06:11PM) thanks for playing [adsl.free.fr]. You read it well: 20Mbits/sec DOWN and 1Mbit/sec UP. No cap. and that’s for 30 Euros per month. The service comes with free telephony [adsl.free.fr] to any french landline (calls to mobile phones cost something), and very cheap international rate, like 3 eurocents to europe. Once you’ve got all that, you can pay an extra monthly fee to get hundreds of TV channels [adsl.free.fr]. With 20Mbits/sec … that should do it. All of this is given to you thru Free.fr triple-play box, the FreeBox. My Mom’s been with them for a couple of years and has the original, more clunky incarnation of today’s sleek freebox. Here’s a picture of it [flickr.com].

Well thanks for that. You expect that sort of thing from the Swedish but to be beaten in terms of broadband by the French? They were playing catch-up just two or three years ago, and it seems it’s now our turn…