This is me, ConnorP, and the contents of my brain when it doesn't belong anywhere else, or even if it does. Various topics, various thoughts, various degrees of seriousness, but all me.
Every few years, the MPAA’s lobbying power, rhetoric, and immense campaign contributions succeed in purchasing a bill in Congress to advance their agenda in a way that’s hostile to the technology industry and consumers.
Their bills have had mixed success and usually die before being brought to a vote, but SOPA and PIPA came frighteningly close to becoming law. The internet-wide protest this week seems to have stalled their progress and probably killed them for now.
But what will happen when the MPAA buys the next SOPA? We can’t protest every similar bill with the same force. Eventually, our audiences will tire of calling their senators for whatever we’re asking them to protest this time.
Eventually, we will lose.
Such ridiculous, destructive bills should never even pass committee review, but we’re not addressing the real problem: the MPAA’s buying power in Congress. This is a campaign finance problem.
We can attack this by aggressively supporting campaign finance reform to reduce the role of big money in U.S. policy. This is the goal of groups such as United Republic and Rootstrikers.
It’s also worth reconsidering our support of the MPAA. The MPAA is a hate-sink, a front to protect its members from negative PR. But unlike the similarly purposed Lodsys (and many others), it’s easy to see who the MPAA represents: Disney, Sony Pictures, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Brothers. (Essentially, all of the major movie studios.)
The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.
Yet when we watch their movies, we support them.
Even if we don’t watch their movies in a theater or buy their plastic discs of hostility, we’re still supporting them. If we watch their movies on Netflix or other flat-rate streaming or rental services, the service effectively pays them on our behalf next time they negotiate the rights or buy another disc. And if we pirate their movies, we’re contributing to the statistics that help them convince Congress that these destructive laws are necessary.
They use our support to buy these laws.
So maybe, instead of waiting for the MPAA’s next law and changing our Twitter avatars for a few days in protest, it would be more productive to significantly reduce or eliminate our support of the MPAA member companies starting today, and start supporting campaign finance reform.
A very interesting problem, and a very interesting article.
NPR:
What do you do with a 1,000-foot wreck that’s full of fuel and half-submerged on a rocky ledge in the middle of an Italian marine sanctuary? Remove it. Very carefully.
The wreck of the cruise liner Costa Concordia, which ran aground last week, is not unlike a car accident. The first order of business is determining whether it’s worth repairing or it gets junked. Then there are the questions of how best to go about it — and who pays.
Stuck on a rocky shoal off the Tuscan island of Giglio, the ship is in Italy’s territorial waters, so the country will likely have a major say in deciding the Concordia’s fate. But leaving the wreck where it is probably isn’t an option, says Martin Davies, the director of Tulane University’s Maritime Law Center in New Orleans.
“I think it very unlikely that the Italian government would regard that as a viable option,” Davies says.
Removing a massive ship that’s run hard aground and incurred major damage to the hull, however, involves logistical and environmental issues that are just as large.
GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been, as have other GOP candidates, castigating President Obama for presumably wanting to “Europeanize” the United States. On January 6, 2012, for example, Romney asserted that the President was “dragging ‘the soul of America’ toward a ‘European-style welfare state’.” Romney and others have accused the President of loving America too little and loving Europe too much. One question that this line of criticism raises (whether it does or it does not correctly reflect Obama’s views) is: What’s so bad about Europe?
In this post, I compare life for Americans to life for Europeans on a variety of dimensions. To simplify matters, let us look just at the U.S., Sweden (the country that most represents to Americans the European welfare state), and a large nation that conservatives also dislike, France. And then, let’s ask how the three nations stack up. Perhaps there are some things European that America might actually want to emulate. (I drafted this post before recent columns on the Europe question by Nicholas Kristof and by E.J. Dionne — both worth reading.)
While we were all busy protesting SOPA and PIPA, the Roberts Court decided to slide this nasty decision down in the background. This is not a good thing.
Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.
In a 6-2 ruling, the court ruled that just because material enters the public domain, it is not “territory that works may never exit.”
The court, however, was sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ argument. Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Ginsburg said “some restriction on expression is the inherent and intended effect of every grant of copyright.” But the top court, with Justice Elena Kagan recused, said Congress’ move to re-copyright the works to comport with an international treaty was more important.
For a variety of reasons, the works at issue, which are foreign and produced decades ago, became part of the public domain in the United States but were still copyrighted overseas. In 1994, Congress adopted legislation to move the works back into copyright, so U.S. policy would comport with an international copyright treaty known as the Berne Convention.
In dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito said the legislation goes against the theory of copyright and “does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work.” Copyright, they noted, was part of the Constitution to promote the arts and sciences.
Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University and a plaintiff’s lawyer in the case, called the decision “unfortunate” and said it “suggests Congress is not required to pay particularly close attention to the interests of the public when it passes copyright laws.”
NPR:
If patients and doctors both have easy access to the notes the doctor takes during their office visits, will it change their behavior?
That’s a question that an experiment called OpenNotes aims to answer by letting patients of more than 100 primary care doctors in three states see the notes online.
In December, researchers reported the results of surveys taken before the project started in 2010 in which patients and physicians were asked about their attitudes toward making such information available.
Published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the study found that while patients were very gung ho to see the notes — more than 90 percent expected them to be helpful — physicians were much likely to think that notes sharing was a potential Pandora’s box of trouble.
“Notes are the things people never see,” says Jan Walker, a nurse at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and the study’s lead author. “Yet if you have a lab result or a radiology result, the notes are the information that provides context for why this was done in the first place.”
OpenNotes is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which also is an underwriter of NPR.
Researchers are still analyzing the results of the year-long study. But Walker says what’s beginning to emerge is that the effect of seeing physician notes in black and white can be huge. A notation describing a patient as “obese,” for example, may be much more effective than a physician’s verbal instruction to lose weight at bringing home the seriousness of a problem and the need to do something about it.
Brazilian workers who find themselves answering work emails on their smartphones after the end of their shifts can qualify for overtime under a new law.
The new legislation was approved by President Dilma Rousseff last month.
It says that company emails to workers are equivalent to orders given directly to the employee. Labour attorneys told the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper this makes it possible for workers answering emails after hours to ask for overtime pay.
This issue has come up in the United States as well. In May, Chicago policeman Jeffrey Allen filed a class-action suit against the city, asking for unpaid overtime compensation.
