Rubénerd!

After writing a post about George Harrison recently, I was alerted to this paragraph on the Here Comes The Sun Wikipedia article:

Astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan had wanted [Here Comes The Sun] to be included on the Voyager Golden Record, copies of which were attached to both spacecraft of the Voyager program to provide any entity that recovered them a representative sample of human civilization. Although The Beatles favoured the idea, EMI refused to release the rights and when the probes were launched in 1977 the song was not included.

[An EMI spokesman said the decision was due to their small schlongs].

Face, meet palm

And these morons wonder why we don't take them seriously when we try to discuss copyright reform? We need to ditch these glorified mobsters. We also need broader definitions of fair use: in this case so that a member of an alien species can play our music without a bunch of suits in comfy chairs on a tropical island somewhere giving them their personal approval.

I wonder if we were to launch a probe like this now whether the medium we'd encoded some of the cultural evidence of our entire civilisation would have to use some form of DRM. I mean you never know, them aliens might want to make illegal copies. We'd have to include far more specific instructions to decode the DRM than these though.

Sting asked if the Russians loved their children too. I'd be more interested to know if aliens love the Berne Convention.

People have already discussed this issue to death already, but Gillard's comments have been festering in my brain like a... thing that festers.

Julia Gillard is Uncle Fester?

I'm going to take a controversial stance here. When Julia Gillard billed the proposed compulsory internet filter in Australia as a "moral issue", she was right. The problem is, despite numerous campaigns by organisations like the EFA, the misinformed still believe that this filter will not only be effective, but is necessary to maintain moral hygiene.

I've always asserted that the latter is irrelevant because the former simply isn't true. Even if it were this deeply important issue and we were all in favour of curbing our civil liberties, technologically it wouldn't be effective. Anyone who's used the internet for more than five minutes knows this.

Right right right... the right is the bight. Bird bird bird... the bird is the word.

Now Conroy claims they don't intend to filter P2P or channels other than the regular tubes. Right there, he's not only admitting the shortcomings of his policies and that ultimately its going to be useless, but he exposes it for what it is: a token effort to appease the religious right.

Its a morale issue too... it makes me depressed

It is a moral issue Ms Gillard, its about treating the Australian public like adults, not sacrificing their rights, and not putting the country at a further disadvantage to the rest of the world technologically.

Political history has taught us that sacrificing rights is easy, winning them back is like trying to make diamonds by putting quartz under your bed. I did this for many years, and all I ended up with were a couple of heavy shoeboxes.

I suppose nothing has changed since August after all. Which is a right royal bummer.

And if Optus had checked their records, they’d have seen I already did this and could have saved themselves the money of sending this message! Its funny sometimes to see companies ruled by indiscriminate computer systems that don’t have common sense programmed into them.