Court rules in favour of David over Goliath re copyright

"Film industry loses iiNet download case" reports ABC News.

The case against iiNet was filed in the Federal Court by a number of applicants including Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Disney and the Seven Network.

The legal action followed a five-month investigation by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft. The companies claimed iiNet infringed copyright by failing to stop users engaging in illegal file sharing.But today the Federal Court in Sydney ruled in the internet service provider's favour.Justice Dennis Cowdroy said it was "impossible" to find against iiNet for what its users did.

The case, which appears to be one of, if not the first, of its kind has already attracted a lot of international attention, not least from Boing Boing "Awesomely awesome Australian copyright news: scrappy ISP beats Hollywood fatcats".

There is of course the possibility of an appeal, as Fairfax , News.com.au and a < href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/04/2810520.htm">later ABC reportallude/

Disclosure: I am an iiNet customer/ subscriber

Fear of poetry? There must be a word for it.

Two items from New Scientist have caught my eye.

The first, about phobias, is discussed by Will Pavia in The Times (it's also reported briefly in today's Australian).

It is the fear that dare not speak its name. It is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.

Those afflicted are afraid of very long words, yet even as they attempt to lead normal lives, avoiding medical dictionaries and high-scoring Scrabble players, the very term that defines their condition hangs over their heads, terrifyingly polysyllabic.

Their irrational fear and the word that defines it has been catalogued by readers of New Scientist among a list of the most curious phobias to trouble modern man, as advertised by counselling companies promising a cure.

As readers delved deeper, a dictionary of phobias emerged that included some apparently reasonable apprehensions. There is nucleomituphobia, the fear of nuclear weapons, the fear of dentists (odontophobia) and a fear of the French (Francophobia).

.....

The dictionary of phobias appeared on the website of a US company selling alternative treatments. ChangeThatsRightNow.com details 1,500 phobias, including paraskavedekatriaphobia, the fear of Friday the 13th. It offers “one-to-one help” for about £1,200.

New Scientist was sceptical, noting that “phobias conspicuous by their absence included “fear of silly marketing” and “fear of repetitive websites”.

Yesterday, several British psychologists insisted that phobias existed for almost anything.

Robert Endelmann, a chartered psychologist and a patron of the National Phobics Society, said: “It’s not unusual for people to have unusual phobias. Coulrophobia, the fear of clowns, is surprisingly common.”

Such phobias often develop after a traumatic experience. Emma Citron, a chartered clinical psychologist commonly treats elderly astraphobics, who fear thunder. “It reminds them of the Blitz,” she said.

Then there are learned phobias, that sufferers may have “caught” from friends or family, and there are phobias that may have a deep-rooted biological trigger. “Fear of the dark, fear of high places and fear of things that move quickly, such as spiders or snakes – it would have been useful for our ancestors to be afraid of such things,” Professor Endelmann said. For all that, there are phobias on the list that remain hard to explain. Lutraphobics are afraid of otters. Octophobics fear the number eight.

Then there are phobiaphobics who are afraid of phobias, and are surely caught on the horns of a terrible dilemma. In order to rid themselves of their phobia they would probably need to acquire another one.

.....

It was left to Alexander Gardner, a psychologist, to sum up the proliferation of phobias. “I have a fear of Times reporters,” he said. “I have to go.”

The second, mentioned on the New Scientist website describes " Hitch Haiku", a Japanese computer program which can create haiku using two or three keywords.

Naoko Tosa of Kyoto University in Japan has written a program that takes two or three keywords entered by a user and creates a three-line poem related to them in the haiku's structure of five, seven and five syllables per line.

To find related words, the software searches several databases, including a thesaurus, a database that links words that relate to the same season, and one that links onomatopoeic words. Using another database on how words are ordered, it strings word combinations together. The combination that is most relevant to the keywords and obeys the syllable rules forms the poem.

The user can make changes to the haiku, which the program uses to learn the user's preferences.

The concept is explained further(in English) on a six minute YouTube video which is a tad more erudite than most of the other material posted to that estimable site.

The only verse form which I feel at all comfortable about composing is the limerick. After watching the video's explanation of the haiku's literary subtleties I wouldn't for a moment suggest that the limerick is worthy of such scholarly endeavour. A rhyming dictionary should meet most people's needs.

And the word for fear of poetry? I don't know. Can anyone help?

Perils of the information age

At a weekend barbecue the conversation, while not stopping proceedings, briefly turned to the perils of letting young people succumb to the temptations of the internet and other technology. In today's Australian Alan Gold (perhaps he was at a similar function?) picks up on the topic and asks "where will this computer generation be if they have to figure out things for themselves"?

The omnipresent mobile phone, computer screen, Google, Internet Explorer and all the other gateways to the entirety of human knowledge are all wondrous developments and will be of great benefit to us all, but each is diluting this generation's self-reliance.Why seek the truth yourself, why climb to the top of the mountain to see the view, why spend hours in a musty library, and why speak to somebody person to person when you can do everything with a mobile phone or a search engine on the internet?

He has two children, of whom his daughter is still tolerably well-acquainted with a pre-internet society. His son, however, is a lost cause: when his in-car GPS malfunctions, the perplexed young man, rather than trying to find his own way home, rings his parents for directions.

As a society, we are becoming so reliant on suckling at the breast of the internet that we are in danger of becoming helpless in the face of adversity. In previous generations, the questions whose answers we needed to know often formed a broader inquiry that was satisfied by books. The very nature of a book seduces us into browsing, cross-referencing and flicking through pages in order to find sections or paragraphs. This enables the specific to be widened into the general: unexpected knowledge is gained and inquiry skills are learned. But because of the unearthly power of search engines, today's youth are led straight to the answer instead of contextualising question and answer as part of the richer and wider tapestry of knowledge.

Increasingly this generation is losing the joy of studying books, maps, papers or other non-electronic devices: they are missing the framework of reflection and the joys of browsing and inquiry on which our society has been built. One day they will have to learn the new adage that data isn't information, information isn't knowledge, and knowledge isn't wisdom. Previous generations learned to learn through trial and error, through research, through questions and uncovering the answers. Once, students had to be like Sherlock Holmes, observing and pondering and sifting through the evidence to find the answer; today, students are more selectors than detectors, and download the answers in the absence of clues.

I worry that the instant answers of the internet might lead to some sort of Darwinian devolution of our brains and rob future generations of developing those abilities that raised us above the animals in the first place. Because if we do devolve as a species through the loss of those abilities that helped us find our way out of Africa, how on earth will we navigate our way back?

While IMO Gold overstates his case to make his point he does make me think about the extent to which some (by no means all, at least among those of my acquaintance) people seemed to be hooked, beguiled, besotted or whatever by technology, so that the devices they embrace so avidly become their master. Of course I'm not like that... but I'd be interested in what others think.

Blogger troubles

Over the weekend something went awry with my Blogger beta (claimed by many bloggers to be a great improvement upon Blogger ordinary). It's not possible for blogs to revert to the earlier version so, to reduce the risk of being left without any personal online forum, I set up another two blogs Casting a Short Shadow 2 and Nudges and Deflections 2 to mirror or, in the worst case eventuality, to replace the Blogger beta "upgrades".

Well, as you can see from this, a kind of normality has been restored, but I won't delete the no.2 blogs just yet.

For the record here's what I posted on Shortshadow 2:

Monday, October 30, 2006
Blogger beta restored...

Blogger beta has now been restored, so I'll revert to http://shortshadow.blogspot.com/ for postings but keep this for the time being as a backup in case of further interruptions.


Saturday, October 28, 2006
Back up

I've created this blog as backup for my principal one Casting a Short Shadow, which I'd transferred to beta blogger hoping and expecting that it would work better. Alas, a combination of factors, including problems Google are having with beta blogger and my own low level of technological competence, have dashed my hopes, so I'll keep this one going for the time being.

I've done the same with my mostly cricket blog, the overflow version of which is Nudges and Deflections 2

Withdrawal symptoms

Last night my computer crashed, so I'm posting this from the local library while I wait to see if the hard drive can be brought back to life. I shall return, but for now I can't say just when.