Pouring cold water on competition, The News its heating up

Another piece of disturbing news about how  Germany wants to extend copyright to cover giving newspapers the right to control their headlines. I was first alerted to this article Intellectual Property: Political Excesses - Or: Let Schumpeter's Creative Destruction Do Its Work. The article like the last two posts on the media  that I have written highlights the scary propositions put forward by the old established media players that have by their actions or as the case my be inactions indicate that they are not willing to compete in the new landscape created by the internet let alone adapt or change.  ""It looks as if publishers might really be lobbying for obtaining a new exclusive right conferring the power to monopolise speech e.g. by assigning a right to re-use a particular wording in the headline of a news article anywhere else without the permission of the rights holder. According to the drafts circulating in the internet, permission hall be obtainably exclusively by closing an agreement with a new collecting society which will be founded after the drafts have matured into law. Depending on the particulars, new levies might come up for each and every user of a PC, at least if the computer is used in a company for commercial purposes.

Well, obtaining monopoly protection for sentences and even parts of sentences in a natural language appears to be some kind of very strong meat. This would mean that publishers can control the wording of news messages. This comes crucially close to private control on the dissemination of facts.""

Exactly and this is what has me concerned Techdirt also did a very good commentary on this issue as well that you can read here I specifically agreed with this extract of their analysis.

"Mr Castendyk concludes that even if the envisaged auxiliary copyright protection for newspaper language enters into law, the resulting additional revenue streams probably would be insufficient to rescue the publishing companies. He then goes a step further and postulates that publishing companies enjoy a quasi-constitutional guantee due to their role in the society insofar the state has the obligation to maintain the conditions for their existence forever. As I'm not a constitutional lawyer I won't comment this here but, with all due respect, I would not be very much surprised if such sentence turns out to be lobbyist speech. Utilising the leveraging effect of this postulated quasi-constitutional guarantee, Castendyk demands to amend cartel law in order to enable a global 'pooling' of all exclusive rights of all newspaper publishers in Germany in order to block any attempt to defect from the paywall cartell by single competitor as discussed above."

So as you can see my concerns over excessive and over zealous state imposed sanctions of what we and other can do and report in regard to the news is not just peculiar to myself.

related posts

The Doctrine Of Hot News and why it troubles me , 

political lies and the NBN again

So Australia has a new Prime Minister, I have to admit Julia Gillard has something special, twice now we have had a leader in Julia that Australia did not choose outright, rather some one forced upon us by others  The Labor party's major project the NBN is the different between the two major parties that the experts and most importantly the independents have identified.

Well not everyone agrees as these great articles one from the CNET Australia and the other from the Melbourne Age show why.

The NBN may now have gotten the go-ahead, but it's probably going to be years until fibre-optic cabling passes your house. In the meantime, the only way you're going to see NBN-like speeds in the 100Mbps range will be over cable infrastructure — if you can get it. But whether it's delivered over fibre or cable, what does the increased speed rating really mean in everyday usage? We set out to find out. 

read the whole story here but the answer is not the speed in Australia but the international links and the faster it is here the slower the world seems. So point one the NBN is not the Snowy Mountain Scheme.

Fast broadband: hands on at 100Mbps   

The other story details the myth that regional Australia is missing out 

So, we're back to worrying about RARA - rural and regional Australia. Thanks to the newly acquired political leverage of the two country independents, we're now being told the regions haven't been given their fair share and, in future, ''equity principles'' should prevail.

There's a lot of righteous indignation on the part of many country people and, I suspect, quite a bit of sympathy on the part of city folk. But there are also a lot of misconceptions.

Many people have the impression there has been a continuous flow of people leaving the country for the big city. It's not that simple. The capital cities' share of Australia's population hasn't been increasing.

read the whole article here but point two it is nothing but a myth that country Australia is missing out and that the NBN will do nothing to alter this as since it's a falsehood the silly and untrue claims will continue. 

Our highly taxed and deprived country folk, and other myths

the solution is irony

Frustration-free packaging' slow to catch on

From Yahoo News

Just the other day, I got bitten by one of those hard plastic clamshell cases that retailers still seem to love. Even with a pair of heavy-duty scissors, it took me several minutes to pry the stubborn thing open, and as I sawed away, a jagged piece of plastic tore at my finger and gave me a good scratch. At least I didn’t bleed on my newly purchased USB hard drive (this time).

Oh, how I hate thee, army of plastic clamshells — and judging from this gallery of "wrap rage" injuries over at Amazon, which has led the charge in recent years for hand-friendly, "frustration-free" packaging," I’m not the only one.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ytech_gadg/20100909/tc_ytech_gadg/ytech_gadg_tc3585

Conroy's net filter still alive and kicking

Asher Moses

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, is ploughing ahead with his internet filter policy despite there being virtually no chance any enabling legislation will pass either house of Parliament.

Independent MP Rob Oakeshott, the Opposition and the Greens have all come out against the policy, leaving it effectively dead in the water.

The Greens communications spokesman, Scott Ludlam, has called on the government to end the facade and drop the internet censorship scheme once and for all, as it was wasting time and taxpayers' money.

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/conroys-net-filter-still-alive-and-kicking-20100910-1540s.html

Senator Quixote deserves to be told off

by Colin Jacobs

The Labor government's plan to censor the Australian internet has entered the realm of farce. Despite scraping back into government by the barest of possible margins, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has returned without delay to trumpeting his doomed scheme to anybody that will listen.

As we have said (for years, now) the filter will not help parents, nor will it help police crack down on illegal material. It's a worst-of-all-worlds approach that is a case study on the fundamental incompatibility of a classification-based system with the internet. Fortunately, most people are able to see this - not just nerds and civil libertarians think the plan is crazy, but industry, academia, the media, all the other major political parties and the vast majority of internet users do as well. With even children's rights groups criticising the scheme, you'd think any government would love an excuse to tow this old scow of a policy out to sea and scuttle it.

http://www.efa.org.au/2010/09/10/tell-conroy-off/