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Copyright Expert Uninvited From Canada Policy Forum
earthforce_1 writes "The vested interests of restrictive copyright are stacking the deck in Canada. The Public Policy Forum Symposium on intellectual property reform has bowed to pressure from certain interests and dis-invited noted copyright scholar Howard Knopf. The forum's stated mandate is '...to strive for excellence in government — to serve as a neutral, independent forum for open dialogue on public policy, and to encourage reform in public sector management.' For some reason, the US Ambassador to Canada and the former head of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry Association have been invited — apparently they are perceived to have a more neutral view of what Canadian copyright laws should be? More information at Howard Knopf's blog."
They know that they have more 'rights' in their copyrights than they deserve. They've spent a lot of money to make it that way. They know that if things were rendered "fair and balanced" that they'd lose a LOT of money -- not just the money they spent buying laws that favor them, but undeserved income these laws yield.
I can't hold these jackasses completely responsible for their greed. We've all got some greed in us and corruption is a problem of opportunity, not of character. I blame the legislators that make themselves available to the highest bidder and the character flaws that prevent them from correcting the circumstances that enable corruption.
It's pretty simple if you have a good agenda to keep, make sure you don't invite people who oppose said agenda.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
...It's like you never read parent's comment at all.
Wow, I applaud you. Everybody on Slashdot has already stopped doing the unnecessary task of RTFAing*, but you, young man, you're ahead of the times. You don't even RTFC! You, sir, will set the standards for the hive-mind in the years to come!
(* Or is it R'ingTFA?)
Have you stopped beating your wife: [ ] yes I have stopped [ ] no I still beat her. So how do you answer if you've never beaten her?
All I can see here is that he tried to answer a broken set of questions.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Maybe a country that is based on equality of opportunity (Canada / USA) should put less focus on crafting incentives that involve passing family fortunes down.
- John
"Its the reason people believe that 100 years of industrial evolution on this planet can corrupt over 4.5 billion years of naturally occuring weather cycles."
No, robust science is the reason I (and I dare say most people here) accept the message that has come from the IPCC and every other national science body on the planet.
It is intellectually lazy (at best cynical) to disagree with something just because some random lobbyist uses it to push an agenda. The problem with "for hire" lobbyists is they are members of the old boys club, expert liars, and schooled in the art of manipulation, they belive what they are paid to belive. If anything lobbyists (and in many cases politicians) have tried to hide and discredit the science in exactly the same way tobbaco lobbyists did in the 80's.
In fact if you look up one Fred Singer you will find a "fossil fuel lobbyists" and a "tobacco lobbyists" all wrapped up into one person, decorated with ancient qualifications and honarary degrees. Until the last couple of years Fred and other like-minded lobbyists had been very successfully spreading mis-information that is then repeated ad-nauseum on slashdot by geeks who often have sufficient education in physics and chemistry to know better. I also belive much of that derision on slashdot was due to the messenger, ie: people heard the IPPC's message coming out of Al Gore's mouth and instinctively started taking pot shots at what they percieved to be "Al Gore's crackpot theory".
However in the interests of "fair and balanced", I will point out there are still a tiny minority of scientists who disagree with some parts of the IPCC consensus, here is a list of them. You will find that their arguments have been debunked many times over, a good place to start looking for such mythbusting and the shenanigans of anti-science lobbyists is here
If you don't want to go through the pain of educating yourself on the science and politics of climate change then I have one simple question that may clear things up for you. Since CO2 is known to trap heat and we are pumping 10Gt/yr of it into the atmosphere, how is that trapped heat disipated back into space, or alternatively what absorbs the excess CO2 so that it unable to trap heat in the first place?
BTW: Please don't take the above as a personal attack, your only human and we are all vunerable to well crafted bullshit from outside our sphere of expertise (which incidently is the reason why the scientific method is considered usefull).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
other side wanted more balance
I agree, it should be more balanced.
We live in a democracy; one person, one vote.
Copyright affects everybody. The population of Canada is 33 million. The industry is only a tiny fraction of the total population. A representative panel should have maybe ten representatives from the general population for every one industry representative.
Note: Industry representatives should get no special treatment simply because they're rich or because they might be excessively affected by changes in copyright law; companies are just groups of people and should have no special privileges compared to the general population.
Yes, it's tyranny of the majority. Problem is, the only thing worse than that is tyranny of a minority.
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Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest.
-- Judge Frank Easterbrook, Coleman v. CIR (7th Cir 1986) 791 F2d 68 at 69 [and quoted in several subsequent court decisions]
...and during those 100 years we have dug up and burned a significant proportion of the fossil fuel deposits that originally built up over a ~ 100 million year period ~ 300 million years in the past (ballpark figures) - when the climate was considerably different to today. That's a geological-scale intervention - you have to be pretty blinkered to deny even the possibility that it could have geological-scale consequences.
And no, that's not intended to be an evidence-backed scientific argument - just a plausibility argument, responding in kind to the parent's (im)plausibility argument.
PS: the state of the climate isn't caused by either CO2 or the Sun or algae in the sea or continental drift - its caused by all those factors and many more interacting in a complex and poorly understood equlibrium - changing any of those factors can shift the equilibrium, and in some types of equilibrium changing the wrong factor by just a little bit too much can destroy that equilibrium.
The human race is now so large and has such power to change the environment that we need to stop assuming that our activities are insignificant until proven otherwise. Trees affect the climate (you think that's air your breathing? its tree fart!) and they just sit there doing nothing.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.