Category Archives: Legal

The most important post on this blog…ever

Unsurprisingly, Senate screws up broadband policy.

Techdirt points out that the Senate have yet again done something without doing anything.

By passing the Broadband Data Improvement Act the Senate has taken a step that makes it looks like it’s doing something about the United States miserable broadband penetration numbers. The problem with this law is that, it’s all for show. The Senate stripped the law of it’s most important parts…funding to measure broadband penetration and the mandate to generate a mapping solution to graph the data.

Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it to?

The Ridiculous History Of The Job And Dollar Loss Numbers Cited By IP Proponents

The industries throwing hissy-fits about intellectual property (software industry and record industry, mainly) have managed to get multiple laws passed in their favor. When they’re out fighting their favorite fight, one number brandished about quite often is that IP theft costs 750,000 jobs. This number is apparently gospel not only to these industries, but now to various government agencies as well. Where did this number come from? Ars Technica did some research on this magical number.

The 750,000 job number actually dates back to 1986, when then-Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge, in promoting a stronger copyright bill from the Reagan era

lol, RIAA, lol

I decided I’m going to keep track of all the bone headed moves that the RIAA and MPAA make. To start off this grand journey let’s take a look at this.

So some people set some footage they took in a video game to some music for the enjoyment of their friends. The RIAA sees their music being used and BAM IT’S TIME TO SUE!!!!11!111one

As Mike at Techdirt notes, this sort of usage of the RIAAs product is going to do nothing but help promote music sales. But then again the RIAA has never been any good at understanding anything that falls out of the purview of their old business models.