10 Jan 2005
US To Push Criminalisation of IP Violations

This is just nuts: copyright and patent violations have always been civil matters, and are practically defined as such in the US Constitution. There is no power for Congress to punish copyright infringement, as there is for counterfeiting, for example. Of course, such niceties haven't slowed our politicians down before, so I really see no reason to expect that it'll stop them from entering this morass. You think our courts are clogged now? Wait until every little kids birthday party becomes a felony!

Soon to be ex-Secretary of Commerce Don Evans speaks out on "piracy" just prior to his last trip to China for negotiations. "That means criminalizing the laws as opposed to (having) just civil laws...You've got to start putting people in jail." The article points out that this lust for prosecutions extends from Evans to his successor, the American Chamber of Commerce, and the US Senate.

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

US investigators frantically trying to locate mad cow shipment

Unless and until our government takes some serious action to stop this, we'll continue seeing stories like this one. And five or ten years from now, when Americans start turning up with vCJD, the slogan "Beef: it's what's for dinner!" is going to seem downright suicidal.

The mad cow disease has resurfaced again after a gap of almost four years. Soon after Canada announced on Sunday a case of mad cow disease, US government officials swooped into action and were desperately trying to locate a shipment that was delivered to US from the same Canadian herd as an animal infected with mad cow disease.

(link) [EarthTimes]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Wikipedia Faces Growing Pains

I hope they can solve these problems: Wikipedia is a great resource. But without some tighter controls on contributions, I doubt that we reasonable folks will be able to fend off the trolls and wingnuts forever. They can be alot more obsessed about a particular topic than we are, and consequently have a great deal more persistance. Just look at how many newsgroups have been destroyed by a single nutjob, continually posting his rants and drowning out the voices of the sane.

As the member-created free informational site continues to expand, more people treat it like a traditional encyclopedia. But academics caution that many of its entries receive little scrutiny. By Daniel Terdiman.

(link) [Wired News]

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link