Spontaneous Monotony

I just read on the BBC that – after a threefold price increase – petrol in Zimbabwe is still only 55p a litre. Perhaps that should put the level of tax Britain puts on petrol into perspective. A country under a vicious dictatorship, crippled by corruption and extreme fuel shortages, still ends up with lower petrol prices than post-1997 Britain.

See Also:

• BBC News: Zimbabwe triples price of petrol

Yet again, another tiny update to Wordpress has been released, but yet again it is available only as a ‘full install’ ie over-writing ALL of the files that need to be modified for plugins etc. I’m getting a bit (sic) annoyed about this, but luckily I was able to download WinMerge, which told me the files that had actually changed. Given that it took about 10 seconds, why the Wordpress team couldn’t have done the same, and included the changed files in an ‘upgrade’ package, is beyond me.

You might have learned by now that the United States Supreme Court has ruled in favour of the copywrong industry, and against Streamcast and Grokster (in apparent defiance of the Sony-Betamax precedent). The reason, said the Justices, was that the two actively induced users to infringe copyright, as opposed to Sony, Betamax, the people who invented CD-Rs etc. who just made a device.

However, this is not as serious a defeat as you might expect, for the following reasons:

• Grokster, Morpheus [Streamcast’s product] et al are so full of spyware (and their networks so vulnerable to fake files) that very few file-sharers actually use them any more
• The most common protocol- BitTorrent, is not ‘owned’ by one company (although Bram Cohen invented the protocol, and produces his own client, it is open source and anyone can do so), so it is probably less vulnerable to these sorts of lawsuits
• These are really the only two filesharing companies based in the US, so even if they do get shut down, we have plenty of international ones to play with
  • the infamous Sharman Networks, creators of Kazaa (Vanuatu)
  • isohunt.com, bittorrent index (Canada)
  • thepiratebay.org, another bittorrent index (Sweden)
• The all-important Sony-Betamax ruling still stands. Three of the Justices- Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Chief Justice Rehnquist- argued for a stricter interpretation that software must be ‘proved’ to be substantially used for non-infringing purposes, while the other three- Breyer, O’Connor, and Stevens- defended the current interpretation of the ruling. The two therefore cancel each other out and Sony remains, as-is [this bullet according to SCOTUSblog]

So, although the industry-friendly media such as the BBC, and even some of the technology sites are proclaiming this as a ‘major victory’ for the industry, it really isn’t all that big a deal. In the worst case scenario, we lose two insignificant players in the filesharing world, and the ‘plus point’ may be that, given that the (almost certainly) impending lawsuits against the two companies will take a long time, and lots of lawyers, the terror campaign against individual Americans may slow down a bit. Share on!

See Also:

• Pierce Law: Supreme Court overrules MGM decision
• SCOTUSblog: New challenge to file-sharing companies [please note: this blog is by a law firm, and is not affiliated with the US Supreme Court]
• Slyck: Supreme Court rules against P2P companies
• Truth Quante-fied: MGM v. Grokster Report

As you might have noticed (unless you’re using an ancient text-only browser :P), I have changed the Wordpress theme from the default (Kubrick) to the rather nice Ocadia. After a few modifications (mainly plugin-related), some of which caused the W3C validator to have a fit until I did them properly in CSS, its up and running, and offers a few benefits over Kubrick (besides looking better):

• That problem where any use of lists in comments would cause a non-bulleted/non-numbered list of items in bold text and a different font.
• Sidebar not appearing in permalink pages

Hopefully these changes will make the blog much easier to use. Oh and by the way, I’ve also made the Trackback link for posts much more obvious (will now appear on main page and search results).

Just a quick congratulations to Andy Murray, who beat fourteenth seed Radek Stepanek in his second-round Wimbledon match less than an hour ago. Considering that it was only his second senior Grand Slam match, and the calibre of opponent he faced, it was one hell of a victory. Hey, at least Scotland has one sport we can celebrate!