We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Every Thursday I do a posting for this blog about intellectual property rights etc., and I am getting paid for this, so this is a commitment that I take seriously. It means that I tend to follow up anything (this link trail started here and went via here) with words like “copyright” or “patent” or “intellectual property” in it with less than my usual level of casualness about internet chitchat.
The Eiffel Tower’s likeness had long since been part of the public domain, when in 2003, it was abruptly repossessed by the city of Paris. That’s the year that the SNTE, the company charged with maintaining the tower, adorned it with a distinctive lighting display, copyrighted the design, and in one feel swoop, reclaimed the nighttime image and likeness of the most popular monument on earth. In short: they changed the actual likeness of the tower, and then copyrighted that.
As a result, it’s no longer legal to publish current photographs of the Eiffel Tower at night without permission…
So far so depressing, and I will probably do my next Thursday’s CNE-IP posting about this, unless something more compelling of an IP-related sort comes my way. Suggestions for that, and for my IP postings generally, are of course very welcome.
The bit that got me wanting to write about this for Samizdata comes immediately next:
…Technically, this applies even to amateurs. When I spoke to the Director of Documentation for SNTE, Stéphane Dieu,…
I love that surname.
…via phone last week, he assured me that SNTE wasn’t interested in prohibiting the publication of amateur photography on personal Web sites. “It is really just a way to manage commercial use of the image, so that it isn’t used in ways we don’t approve,” said Mr. Dieu.
In a way this is fair enough, if the property rights in question are not in any way controversial or even confusing. I let people into my flat and can still then control their behaviour by not allowing them in any more. But Intellectual Property rights with regard to something like open-air photography of architectural monuments, followed by Internet display, are hardly a model of clarity and certainty. What bothers me about this is the sense I have that the French Official Mind is not making very nice distinctions here between what is simply private property, and that which is public property, but still supposedly in need of protection. The protective methods they are using suggest a definite preference for benign tyranny over clear definitions of what is and what is not allowed. There is an air of “everything is prohibited, so that in practice most of it can still happen, but can then be arbitrarily interrupted whenever we feel like it”, about this.
It is surely not a good sign when things are described as “technically” illegal.
I will certainly regard myself from now on as entirely entitled to photo the Eiffel Tower at night, and to display my pictures of it on the Internet in any way I like that does not insult it or severely misrepresent its shape or nature. Yet I have the feeling that if Mr Dieu took against me for some other reason (perhaps for also photographing something more definitely forbidden than the Eiffel Tower at night), my Eiffel Tower pictures might still be used against me.
I would welcome comments on any of that, and also on the even more potentially fraught matter of the rights and wrongs of taking (interesting word use that) pictures of strangers and putting those up on the www, which is something I have already done quite a lot of, and hope in due course to do a lot more of.
A link to a reasonably simple explication of the legal facts in, on the one hand, Britain, and, on the other hand, on the Continent (my understanding being that the law is very different on either side of the Channel), would be especially welcome. Plus: will this contrast soon be ironed out of existence by the EU? Something tells me that if it is, it will be in the form of tighter prohibitions in Britain rather than any relaxation of the law on the Continent.
Maybe my fellow Samizdatista and more to the point fellow CNE-IPer David Carr has already written about all this, here, or here, and I either missed it or forgot about it.
Relieved as I am temporarily am of my Cultural and Educational obligations, I have resumed contributing to Ubersportingpundit, which is bossed by Scott Wickstein. Yesterday I did a somewhat belated piece about the first weekend of the Six Nations rugby tournament, on the Saturday of which Wales beat England 11-9. Wales had not beaten England in Wales in this fixture since nineteen ninety something, and the Welsh were very eager for their side to win, and more to the point, they rightly sensed that this year, they had their best chance for years.
Just how eager they were for a victory I had not realised, until I followed up this link, from a commenter at UbSpPu:
A Welsh rugby fan cut off his own testicles after his team beat England, police confirmed today.
Why did he do that?
It was reported that the man told his friends: “If Wales win I’ll cut my own balls off.”
Perhaps his idea was that when England duly won, again, he would be able to console himself by saying: “Well, if Wales had won I would have had to cut off my balls, so thank goodness they did not win.” If so, the plan went badly wrong.
After the 11-9 victory in the Six Nations clash, the man is reported to have gone outside and severed his testicles before bringing them back into the club to show fellow drinkers.
So much for the Welsh desire to win rugby matches. The story ends with the voice of typical killjoy Welsh puritanism:
A local was reported as saying that the man was on medication and should not have been drinking.
As Dave Barry would say, under a headline about creeping fascism: “What, suddenly you’re not allowed to chop you own balls off?” Amazingly, Samizdata now has a link to this severed testicles report, and, as yet, Dave Barry seems not to.
If England beat France next Sunday, I intend to celebrate by cutting my toe nails.
We curse and rage at the BBC here, a lot, but you have to admit that this is a great story.
Even Ghana’s director of tourism may have to admit that Accra has its work cut out competing with other tourist destinations in Africa. Yet just outside the capital, is the suburb of Teshi and it is here that tourists are coming to look at a relatively new tradition – the fantasy coffin makers.
So how did this happen?
The story goes that in the first half of last century one Ata Owoo was well-known for making magnificent chairs to transport the village chief on poles or the shoulders of minions.
When Owoo had finished one particularly elaborate creation, an eagle, a neighbouring chief wanted one too, this time in the shape of a cocoa pod. A major crop in Ghana.
However, the chief next door died before the bean was finished and so it became his coffin.
Then in 1951, the grandmother of one of Owoo’s apprentices died.
She had never been in an aeroplane, so he built her one for her funeral.
And a tradition was born.
The only bit of what might be BBC politically correct boringness that I could detect in this report came a few paragraphs before that last quote, where it said:
Many of their clients want to bury loved ones in something that reflects their trade.
Even if that means being buried in a Coca-Cola bottle.
Even? I suppose if you are the BBC, that is the ultimate horror. But, if being buried in an airplane or a car or a cockerel or a cocoa pod is okay, then what on earth is so wrong with being buried in a Coca-Cola bottle? (Not Diet Coke obviously. That would be stupid.)
Something tells me that in these post-Christian times, this might spread to other parts of the world. Our boring British death industry could certaionly do with a shake-up. What kind of giant object would you like to be buried it?
It is good to read some good news coming out of Africa. True, African people are dying, but they are mostly dying of natural causes and are going out in style.
This is beyond the pale. It is completely insensitive and at a time like this, what idiot would shoot an advertisement for TV that used suicide bombers? Appalling…
…Yeah. But I must confess, I howled with laughter.
He moves amongst us… in a Celica?!
Well, a couple of weeks have gone since the usual festival of excess generally known in these parts as Christmas. When I turn on the television, the radio, or look at the adverts plastered on the walls of the London Underground, it is hard to escape the messages urging us all to lose weight, give up X or Y, go to the gym, blah, blah. Well I do my best to stay in some form of shape by attending a gym fairly regularly, but I must admit there is almost something rather reassuringly predictable about this annual burst of puritanical preaching about the need to turn over a healthy leaf and get into shape. It is like the passing of the seasons.
However, I realise that many of the fine Epicureans who read and write for this blog take a more robust view of these matters and have no time for such asceticism. Well, I have great news. Medical research reveals that you can lose weight by sleeping longer.
That is what I call good news.
Here is another health scare to add to the pile. It seems that Pakistani cricketer Abdul Razzaq has been overdosing on … spinach:
Abdul Razzaq’s mysterious illness, that he suffered during the Melbourne Test, may be related to his curious addiction to spinach. Razzaq suffered a bout of vomiting, dizziness and breathing difficulties on the third morning of the Boxing Day Test and though he batted in the second innings, he hadn’t recovered fully in time for the final game at Sydney.
Razzaq had experienced dizziness and nausea during Pakistan’s tour of New Zealand, in early 2004, and he was put on a diet of spinach by a medical guru in Pakistan. “Somebody told him to have spinach all the time,” Zakir Khan, the Pakistan board’s operation manager, told The Melbourne Age. “So he loves spinach and wherever he goes he says spinach should be part of the diet, in Pakistan particularly. The other team-mates tease him and call him Popeye the Sailor Man.”
It is with such stories at this that I am now consoling myself for this fiasco.
… certain people who need to know.
This was too good to pass on… while browsing the Telegraph pages and stumbling across their Review of 2004, I must have caught one of the billion monkeys at work!
You need to click on the thumbnail and read the image title.
Lt. Charlie William of the British Army survived a 3500 foot fall with minimal damage to his person after his parachute rigging tangled upon exit from the airplane during training over Kenya.
He broke through a corrugated iron roof and gave some Kenyans a bit of a start. I have heard of dropping in for tea unexpectedly, but Charlie seems to have taken it a bit farther than most.
It does not appear to have been reported whether the home owners supplied their guest with a hot cuppa as he awaited assistance.
This is an excellent story. I got to it from here.
A bag of bills stolen from a casino was snapped up by beavers who wove thousands of dollars in soggy currency into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek in eastern Louisiana.
“They hadn’t torn the bills up. They were still whole,” said Maj. Michael Martin of the St. Helena Parish Sheriff’s Office.
The money was part of $70,000 to $75,000 taken last week from the Lucky Dollar Casino in Greensburg.
Is there not some kind of law saying that you are not allowed to do this kind of thing in the USA? No doubt the beavers have by now appointed a lawyer to represent their interests. An eagle perhaps? Never mind.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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