Court and I had our first "official meeting" for Globetrotrz…it was very productive, as can be evidenced by the pictures here. Riding, cookies, and BIG ideas…who could ask for anything more???
Maybe a milkshake. Oh, and Sushi is For Lovers, by the way
Looks good - I’m halfway there! Just need to get that over to the right hand side…but right now, I have to go get ready for a little riding (i.e. not doing schol work).
I thought I’d see what happens if I copy and paste the html text to this post using the ‘Edit HTML’ tab. (I’m a newbie! gotta try to find out!)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
I went to Gaping Void to see if I could get any better idea of how to make sure a bottle of Stormhoek gets into my hands in March and he had a new reference to a post by The Head Lemur about the problem that exists when people try to copyright stuff on the internet. For the most part, I agree with him. Yesterday, I signed up for a Creative Commons License for Debanter (now I just have to figure out if the Typepad account I have will allow me to add the code for the CC symbol to show up…all signs are looking doubtful).
Why, you ask? Well, I’m not going to bore you with details that can be more eloquently stated on his blog. I’m a newbie in this arena. But for me personally it comes down to the fact that I want people looking at my website, saving things they like, telling their friends about it and (hopefully) adding to any discussions that I provoke here. My blog is searchable in some of the big blog search engines, and I feel a sense of glee when I see that someone other than myself has taken a moment to view my little nook on the web. As the marvelous short video on the Creative Commons website says (it’s the first one, though the others are also very good), that little symbol is a green light.
One of the most fascinating things that I’ve noticed while perusing the blogsphere these last few months is the fact that good posts get comments, great posts get trackbacks, and most decent bloggers are quite dilegent about appropriately hyperlinking their text when relevent. I’ve not seen one case of "Dude, you ripped this post off of such and such blog - scumbag" though I’m sure it happens. But the influencials, and the crowds of bloggers who follow in their example are committed to giving credit where it is due. And if I plagerized an idea or argument from someone else, I’m willing to bet there’s SOMEONE out there would would probably find it. Maybe not the first time, but at some point. We police ourselves on here.
Referring back to one of my earlier posts, the internet is a powerful place where if you want to use something that is defined as someone else’s "property" there’s very little to stop you. The young girl who blogged, well, I’m sure she didn’t count on anyone let alone a journalist reading what she felt. Tough love says, get a notebook or save it to your desktop, not to a website. And in many ways, this is an accurate sentiment. If the girl had instead been sitting on the monkey bars talking to a friend while a journalist hid in the bushes…would that have been okay?
There is an insideous underbelly of the internet, where just like most things it is the capital forces that dictate what legislation is developed, and what gets covered in the media. P2P networks - we’ve all heard it: they’re bad, people are stealing music. But what about the other uses of these networks? The original intentions of these networks were good (I’ll again say it - read Free Culture). And contrary to popular sentiment, music filesharing is not the worst thing on them (though I’m sure some might debate me, and I’d be up for an argument).
Child pornography reigns supreme on these networks. This leads to the circulation of more images and a greater demand which many sick individuals are willing to meet. Worst of all, even if the offender is caught and their computers seized, the files are still out there, on the internet, forever. A few "free" songs doesn’t sound so bad.
I know this because of a very informational (and graphic) presentation done by the Toronto Police Sex Crimes Unit. This is not what gets covered often in the news and it is not a problem that is going away. But instead of funding and legislation going in this direction to help out children who are being sexually assaulted in front of the world, other children are being sued for downloading music off of the same peer to peer networks.
Do we throw the blame at the parents for this one? Well, I doubt my parents were really aware of the fact that I had a diary at that age, and I don’t think that giving their grief ridden childen a lesson on the "reality" of the internet was the first thing on their mind. And the parents of the assaulted minors are usually the ones doing the assaulting. What about the music? They tried that - courts decided it wasn’t the mom, it was the kid, which is why she is now standing trial.
I’m having a difficult time trying to conclude what I’m trying to say here, which I think speaks more to my feelings of being overwhelmed by the complexity of this quandry, rather than the fact that what I’m saying is irrelevant. If less emphasis was placed on protecting for the sake of monetary reasons, than maybe we could be a few steps closer to figuring out a more effective solution to protect what actually deserves protection.
