Boundless has an article on the moral issues of piracy (via A Blog Apart).
“Theft is taking a person’s property against his rational will. It simply doesn’t matter that if you hadn’t stolen, you wouldn’t have purchased either. The thing was his, and you took it without his consent.”
…
“The next time someone calls you a thief, don’t bother to be offended. It’s merely what you are.”
I enjoy the second quote a lot. Seriously though, take a look. It’s got some good arguments.
Slashdot has an interview with Department of Justice lawyers regarding Intellectual Property laws.
The questions are of interest especially to people concerned with copyright laws and how the American government is approaching the issue. This is a detailed response to 11 questions submitted by Slashdot readers.
Here’s a few interesting bits:
By statute, a person convicted of one felony count of copyright infringement faces up to 5 years in prison (or 3 years, if convicted under the NET Act when the piracy was not done for commercial advantage or private financial gain).
That shatters one of my former beliefs regarding piracy. Not making money only gets you two fewer years in jail, but doesn’t make it okay.
One thing to remember though is that the DoJ is on the federal level. The lawsuits involving the RIAA vs. file-sharers are civil lawsuits.
Rob Cockerham is creating The Ultimate Shopper by giving copies of his Safeway Club Card bar code to anyone who emails him and asks for it. Whenever these people use their club card, the Safeway system thinks it’s him using it. By creating this army of clone cards, he’s not only getting more frequent flier miles, he’s attempting to protect his and others’ privacy from corporate eyes. For more information and a full article, read the following sources.
Sources
• Wired: Gaming the Safeway Club Card
• Cockeyed - Ultimate Shopper…
An article about MP3s at A Blog Apart - a weblog I’ve newly begun to frequent that offers interesting articles and debate.
A new version of SharpReader is available. SharpReader is an RSS aggregator that allows you to keep track of multiple weblogs via their RSS feeds.
Update: This code is way old and hasn’t been tested in a while. As such, I have removed it. I’m fairly certain it didn’t work with the newest versions of PHP and MySQL.
I use this code to do my random quote generation. It’s just PHP and works in the newest version (4.3.whatever). The code should still work with older versions, but I used to have some code that doesn’t work on the newest version so I modified the random function. The table I’ve got set up in the database for quotes is called “quotes” and includes a field called source (varchar 80) and quote (text).
Remember to change the spots where it has _db_host, db_user, db_pass,_ and _db_name_ to the correct values for your site.