Journal entries in the "Random" category
Law Code: a new website for a new topic
Rather than keep on posting my random thoughts about the effects of code and law, I thought it might be good to create a new website for the discussion of the effects of the adoption of code as a means of regulating behaviour.
If you have any interest in the questions of why countries filter the Internet, of why speed bumps are preferred to simple car speeding laws, of how Alex in A Clockwork Orange may be our future, I heartily recommend that you take a look at lawcode.net, a place where a few friends and myself will attempt to bring these questions into the open, with the hope that as time goes by, people from all over will contribute articles or short columns.
You don’t need to be a lawyer and you don’t need to be a technologist. All you need is an interest, however remote, in the questions that will appear there. So why not take a look and see what you think?
Law Code: choice is but a memory.
Bye Bye London
When I was twenty-two,
It was a very good year,
It was a very good year for independent life,
And nights in London town,
We rarely felt down,
And had great things to do,
When I was twenty-two
Thus Ervin Drake’s song (popularised by Frank Sinatra) would have gone, had the composer of “It Was A Very Good Year” benefited from my support as lyricist.
The academic year of 2009-2010 has now come and gone, and I believe my time in London was not only well spent but also great fun.
Between work and play, squirrels and pigeons, Irish and Indian, cuisine and grub, it was a wonderful blend of smiles and tears (well, not quite) from mid-September to end of June.
The Order of the Two Magpies
An art historian, P.C., who wishes to remain anonymous, has uncovered a plot deeper and more fascinating than any work of fiction by Dan Brown: that of the Order of the Two Magpies.
It is a tale of intrigue and mystery to which the only clues are to be found in art, in a vast collection of paintings dating back to the 15th century.
The existence of the Order of the Two Magpies was unknown to most of the world for many centuries, but on 3 June 2010, P.C. discovered an anomaly in a number of paintings exhibited at the National Gallery, London: there appeared to be a motif common to art of different eras, namely a constant depiction of two birds, generally resembling magpies. Their significance, at first deemed to be a mere coincidence, soon led to the unraveling of the greatest mystery known to man.
Thoughts on epicaricacy
A few days ago, I had the opportunity to watch the film Four Lions at the cinema. It is a British film about a small group of Muslims who decide to become suicide bombers. Watching the film, I could not stop laughing at the outrageously hilarious scenes, albeit with the nagging feeling that I should not do so: the story is one of tragedy.
Epicaricacy (also “epicharikaky”) is a little-used word, often replaced with the German “Schadenfreude”, that describes the pleasure one feels at the misfortune of others, and the term perfectly encompasses what was going through my mind as I saw the film. As I watched a scene where one of the main characters accidentally blows up both himself and a sheep, I could not help but think of the many times where I laughed at other people suffering/dying (such as the many deaths of Kenny in South Park, or the famous accident scene in Meet Joe Black). There seem to be many, many instances in which the gravest misfortune befalls a character in a story with comic effect. Yet why does this make us laugh?
My vote
The UK Parliamentary elections draw near, and so I have started looking at the different parties present and their respective policies.
It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the Liberal Democrats are closest to my views on many issues, not the two traditional parties.
Here is my analysis of the situation, based on the BBC’s “Where they stand” articles, the Conservative Manifesto, the Labour Manifesto and the Liberal Democrats’ Manifesto.
I also went through the Green Party’s Manifesto, but found it to have very few elements of general policy, so I won’t analyse it here.
Control over information
If there is one issue in our information society, where we generate information at every moment, it’s the issue of control over information.
People want their private information to remain private until made public by themselves, but once the information is made public, there is no way for them to control this information any more. On the internet, especially, it is hard to erase information that you would want to see disappear, notably if the information in question does not cause harm to your reputation.
Companies want to protect trade secrets as well as much commercial information, but while we tend to speak of information being “given”, “transferred”, “licensed for use”, the law doesn’t recognise information as being remotely similar to property, and this can lead to certain issues. Indeed, if reverse engineering is possible and if it is impossible for the company to obtain a patent, it may be easy for a competitor to find the information, and there’s nothing the company can do about it.
What can we do about it?
The cutest legal provision
My life is complete: I have found a cute legal provision. Not just cute, actually: really cute.
Four words: copyright in Peter Pan.
Normally (in the EU), copyright in a work expires 70 years after the author’s death. Previously, this tended to be 50 years rather than 70.
The author of the play Peter Pan, Sir James Matthew Barrie, died in 1937, and at the time, the rule of 50 years applied, i.e. copyright was to expire in 1987. It turns out that Sir Barrie bequeathed copyright in his Peter Pan works to the Hospital for Sick Children, later renamed Great Ormond Street Hospital, in 1929.
While copyright in the works expired in 1987 (only to be later extended to 2007, when the “70 years” regime came into force), the Brits decided to create an exception to the standard rule, and included in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 a “Section 301″ and a “Schedule 6″.
The substance of these rules? They confer on the Hospital the following:
a right to a royalty in respect of the public performance, commercial publication or communication to the public of the play “Peter Pan” by Sir James Matthew Barrie, or of any adaptation of that work, notwithstanding that copyright in the work expired on 31st December 1987
In other words, perpetual royalties, at least within the UK.
Now I dare you not to find that cute…
Intellectual property and the world today
The more I study intellectual property (IP), and the more I see its daily uses, the more inadequate I find the prevalent IP systems.
It’s frustrating, because I hope to work in this very field (I find it fascinating), and all I seem to see are the manners in which people have been slowly destroying the system by acting in a way that they believe helps the system.
A new literary favourite
In my life so far, I have read books in too great a number for me to judge, and over the years, my tastes have evolved (as with films, music, …). I have enjoyed many books, adored some, abhorred a couple (some of which I was forced to keep on reading for school), and it seemed to be firmly established that the books that most captured my imagination were Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.
But today, something strange happened: I had tears in my eyes upon reading the ending of another book, a newly discovered gem of literature.
Tears in my eyes! When faced with writing, the only time this has happened to me was while writing certain sections of the Arpia novel.
I must conclude that this book, which I found hard to set aside, has conquered my heart.
Its title? Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini (an Italian gentleman who wrote in English).
Its content? The tale of a young man who goes from the robe (lawyer) to the buskin (actor) to the sword (maître d’armes) around the period of the Révolution française.
Go read it. Now.
A poem for womankind
Our world is like a garden,
Eternally in blossom
The saplings grow,
The flowers bloom,
And no plant can be forgottenThey come in all colours and sizes,
A feast upon the eyes
As I walk among them,
As if in paradise,
It is I that each one mesmerisesAt first glance all I see is beauty
Superficial and yet so true
I draw closer and see
What they shall live to be
And behold them in all their gloryIt is like being close to a phoenix
Or an angel whose heart is pure
When they shine like the sun with goodness,
With a smile any ill they will cureBetween passion and admiration,
Both in doubt and feeling too sure,
I cannot help respecting and loving them,
These beings with the power to lureWhat would the world be without them,
With no such treasure to discover?
If we live, if we die,
These words are no lie:
We exist to serve these women.