An open letter to her Maj

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if you’re not already sick to the back teeth with all the Jubilee goings on then may I recommend that you hop over to Katabsis and read thier open letter to Her Maj – it’ll be time well spent honest.

“Dear Maj,
So it has been sixty years. It is time for us to have a chat. I usually steer clear of collectivist language but today it seems appropriate. For today it is clear that any beneficent collective identity has been ripped away from us under your stewardship and what I have come to claim as positive and peculiarly ‘British’ in the demeanour I yet share with so many of my countrymen and women is now looked upon as an evil anachronism, whilst you somehow are not.”
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Thought for the day

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I was pondering something walking through my local meadows earlier today, which I may write about if I remember and get round to it etc.. But in the meantime the Punk Rock Libertarians posted a quote which is very much along the lines I was thinking, so I thought I’d share.

“I believe in communism, or a community of people working together and sharing resources in a manner of their choosing.

I believe in laissez-faire capitalism, or a recognition of property rights and free trade.

I believe in a free society with a government by the people and for the people.

I believe in anarchy and agorism.

I believe in all of the above at the same time, because each one of them is essentially the same thing being said with different language. What I do NOT believe in is the use of force to achieve any of the above.”
-Jeffrey Swann

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ACTA vote tomorrow

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This is terribly late to press for which I apologise but tomorrow (Thursday 31st) MEP’s will
vote on ACTA, this has already been rejected by the Dutch government (though possibly just as an electioneering gimmick). Despite my tardiness if you haven’t already done so there is still time to e-mail your MEP. You could even use WriteToThem, which makes it terribly painless. If you’ve not heard of ACTA you may be wondering what the problem is then the OpenRightsGroup* explains it rather well here.

But in summary it’s yet another piece of legislation dreamt up between the EU and big business with no thought for ordinary people or the laws of unintended consequences. Beyond that it’s yet another reheating of the various anti-privacy laws our government has tried to introduce where by a business says “Joe Bloggs stole our picture” at which point your ISP pulls your website, if you’re lucky they’ll ask you first if not the first you’ll know is your website is gone. That is bad enough, and lets ignore the potential for false claims, but if you’re making any sort of money out of that website then you could be liable for criminal measures. The ISP could also be liable for criminal measures as they make money from hosting your content, so they’re really not likely to put up a fight.

Still not talking about false claims if you were to use an image to say criticise the artist, the artist could complain and demand that the ISP identify you, or more precisely:
“disclose expeditiously to a rights holder information sufficient to identify a subscriber whose account was allegedly used for infringement”
Emphasis mine, so before it’s even been proven that you’ve infringed anything your details get handed over to some third party, unless your ISP fancies a fight. to give you an idea of the scale of problem ISP’s might be facing and so why they’re really unlikely to put up a fight consider this Google get 250,000 take down notices a week. So I think we can safely expect that for most of us the process will be that of rubber stamping and swift take down. Though I doubt that the same will apply when the mainstream media rip off our ideas and content.

If that’s not bad enough it’s yet another EU self amending bill, an unelected committee will be formed with the powers to amend it as the need arises.

So quick get writing to your MEP, and if you miss this time it’s got more stages to go yet so there is still time, and to think so much of this started from Godfrey Vs. Demon

*N.B. The Open Rights group is sadly an organisation that’s mor ethan problematic to support whole heartedly for reasons recounted by Katabasis

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