Copyright Information

It should come to no surprise that I find the current state of affairs in the area of copyright law disgusting, immoral, and opposed to what the Constitution intended. The DMCA is both immoral and unconstitutional, providing power to a thuggish band of professional criminal families (such as the RIAA, MPAA, Sony BMG and other producers).



If anyone doubts these people are thugs, read this:
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=984

I only read the first few comments to that article, but something struck me. They think the RIAA and such will be fearful of their liability if their is a lawsuit. In the ruling against Sony for planting rootkits into thousands (maybe millions) of computers, the court ruled that damages would only be about $8 for each computer that was compromised. This, despite the fact that it takes about 2 days work to successfully remove such a rootkit. Not exactly something to strike fear into their hearts. Of course the lawyers that arbitrated the case got millions (in one of their documents, they listed their fees as a "reasonable" $245 dollars an hour.



Having said this, I must tell my readers what copyright law says about this blog. Up until recently, anyone wanting to cut and paste from this blog had to get written permission from me to do so, or the FBI could come knocking at your door, unless you are one of those thuggish bands of professional criminal families mentioned earlier. And the protection against that crime of spreading information without a license from the king lasts until about 70 years after I die. Since I despise such despotism, I guess I need to correct that.



I am placing all information on this blog under Creative Commons License. I looked at other, similar licenses (many worse, and a few better), but finally decided this would be the one easiest to use. Don't know how to "install" their logo on my blog, so a couple links in the linklist will have to do.


There will be more information, including some clarifications of license rights in the near future. For now, the following will suffice:

You may use portions of this blog, under the following guidelines:
You may copy whole articles as long as attribution is given.
You may draw material out of pages only if a reference (link) to the original article is included.
Comments by others are not part of my work, but may provide context therefore, quoting comments
is permissible, as long as the entire chain of comments for an article is used.
If you use any of this blog for commercial purposes, such as a book, you must
reciprocate by providing me a copy of the work.

UPDATE: More Thuggish Behavior from RIAA
Despite collecting an estimated several hundred million dollars in P2P related settlements from the likes of Napster, KaZaA and Bolt, prominent artists’ managers are complaining that so far, they haven’t received any compensation from the labels. According to a lawyer, some are considering legal action.
RIAA keeps settlement money - torrentfreak news
and Infringement - NY Post