Reasonably Logical

One of the strengths/weakness (depending on whom you ask) of copyright law has long been that the government had no real roll in enforcing it. If someone was misusing your copyright, it’s your job to find them, sue them, and prove your case. The only real help the government provides is the court room.

However, this may soon change. There is a bill being introduced in the Senate that would grant the US Attorney General the ability to file civil law suits and the responsibility to enforce copyright. While there are some pluses to the bill (mostly to copyright holders like music labels and movie studios) the consequences of the bill are quite scary.

First, the government has significantly more resources than even the richest company. And since the government is not out to make a profit, there’s no “it’s not worth it financially” incentive to restrict suits. As a result, were likely to find the number of enforcement suits going way up. Personally, I don’t like that idea much at all.

More importantly though, this is breaking into some significant new legal ground. Traditionally, the government has been (in theory at least) a neutral party in the battle* between consumer rights and corporate profits. This bill would bring the government down strongly on the “wrong” side of that battle. It sets the government up as the enforcer of corporate policy and profits. Equally importantly, the government has traditionally had no roll in the enforcement of civil law. This bill will be opening a while new legal arena in terms of government involvement and possible prosecution. Do you really want the government suing you for libel? (Say of George W Bush or Hillary Clinton?) We’re heading in that direction folks.

* Yes “battle” is a slightly inflammatory term, but can you truthfully tell me its become anything less?

Further Reading:

Senators Announce New Intellectual Property Enforcement Bill
Posted by Richard Esguerra of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Some of the articles best quotes are:

The real “problem” may be that some so-called “offenses” can’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard for any crime. This new provision would allow the AG to sidestep that high burden of proof — a burden that gives the average citizen an important measure of protection from the overwhelming power of the government.

If the bill is passed, something as simple as taking your iPod to Mexico could be considered an infringement of the copyright owners’ distribution right.

Civil law (legal system)
From Wikipedia

Lawsuit
From Wikipedia

Never heard of Seth Godin? Neither had I until a few days ago. Now, I’m getting seriously addicted to his blog. The man can write. Every one of his posts make an interesting succinct point and does it in an enjoyable read. Here are some of my favorite quites so far. You’ll probably be seeing more in later posts.

Updated (7-27-08): Added extra quote and corrected grammar in post title

Most people, most of the time, steadfastly refuse to pay attention.

The tragic mistake of demographics and media planning is that they overlook the single most important issue: is the person you’re talking to ready to listen?

– From “Are they ready to listen?”

If you want to enrage customers, just sit idle while they rage against a broken system at your organization.

– From “What do you do when your systems break?”

The world needs fixed-price web podiatrists.

Podiatrists, not doctors.

Doctors do surgery and prescribe expensive drugs and stuff. Podiatrists can just make it easier to get around.

– From “Two simple web businesses”

Here’s my number one fiduciary rule for big brand marketers: The executives involved in approving a sports or entertainment promotion should not be permitted to attend the event.

– From “Promoting the promotion”

A few days ago, the folks over at the Business of Software blog posted an article on how the human minds tends to jump to conclusions. For me, this turned out to be a fairly timely article that I kept coming back to over the last couple of days.

This artificial experiment is an interesting illustration of a couple of human tendencies. First of all, we jump to conclusions. Secondly - more important, but also far more subtle - we tend to seek out evidence that confirms our hasty conclusions, rather than evidence that might contradict them.

At work, I often find myself trying to make educated guesses from very little information while trying to debug issues found in either QA or released code. One of the things I’ve gotten burnt by several times now is exactly the type of failure to test my initial conclusions that this article describes. I’ll be fairly convinced of my initial conclusion, mention it to someone else, and have them shoot (what were in retrospect) very obvious holes in my theory. As a result, I’ve been trying to apply a much more systemic approach to confirming my initial theories before taking them to anyone else. It’s been helping so far; at least when I remember it that is! Overall, I highly recommend this one for anyone who has to solve problems with insufficient information.

As for the Business of Software conference itself, man do I wish I could afford to attend. Sounds like it’ll be a blast, but at “only” $1495, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

As some of you may have noticed, earlier this afternoon I attempted to upgrade the software that runs this blog. I made backups before starting, but didn’t bother to do a beta run on a clone first. After all, this was going to be an easy upgrade right? Wrong. Thank God I made backups before starting.

Turns out there are some significant bugs in the upgrade process having to do with some of the new tagging and taxometry features in Wordpress 2.6. Essentially, the upgrade of the categories tables got royally screwed up. This site describes the problem and a hackish work around to fix it.

I thought about editing my database tables manually, but you know what? I just don’t care that much. Instead, I reverted back to my backups and have the site up and running again. I may upgrade once 2.6.1 comes out if they fix the upgrade problems, but frankly I’ll be much more reluctant to do so in the future.

If you insist on trying to upgrade to Wordpress 2.6, I recommend two important steps:
- Backup your database and complete wordpress installation first
- Install a complete copy of your site (using the backups you just made) and test the upgrade there. The upgrade brought my entire blog down for a little over 30 minutes before I could revert. While that isn’t a big deal to me with the low traffic this site receives, I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone else.