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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Perfect 10, an adult website, sued Google last November for infringing upon its copyrighted material, its trademarks and, to get bang for their bucks, unfair competition. The original complaint was covered by Wendy Seltzer.
Now, Perfect 10 has requested that Google is prevented from showing any of their copyrighted images. Their argument is that, through advertisements accompanying these images, Google profits from their display even though it is perceived to be a free search engine:
Perfect 10 sued Google in November of 2004. It says that Google is displaying hundreds of thousands of adult images, “from the most tame to the most exceedingly explicit, to draw massive traffic to its website, which it is converting into hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising revenue.”
Perfect 10 claims that under the guise of being a search engine, Google is displaying, free of charge, thousands of copies of the best images from Perfect 10, Playboy, nude scenes from major movies, nude images of supermodels, as well as extremely explicit images of all kinds.
Dr. Norm Zada, the founder of Perfect 10, argues that the business model of Google, whereby images can be displayed and downloaded for free without accessing the original website, reduces the profitability of pay-per-view pornographic websites. Furthermore, as the majority of searches are for pornographic images, this represents a misappropriation of intellectual property, since Google depends upon lust for its profits, at the expense of companies like Perfect 10.
Overture’s Key Selector Tool indicates that most searches on the internet are sex-related,” says Zada. “Google’s extraordinary gain in market cap from nothing a few years ago to close to eighty billion dollars, is more due to their massive misappropriation of intellectual property than anything else,” says Zada.
This court case represents an attack upon the business model of Google. It also demonstrates the unresolved tensions between the perceptions of intellectual property that pervade new and old media. Zada explains why his injunction is beneficial to other traditional media outlets:
Any website publisher can sign up for Google AdSense. It’s an easy way for publishers to display Google ads – those being paid for by its AdWords customers – on their content pages. AdWords customers pay Google and Google pays a commission to AdSense publishers. So Google can maximise its revenues by maximising the traffic that it sends to AdSense affiliates. Perfect 10 does not suggest that Google is weighting its search results in favour of AdSense-supported sites; but it does argue that Google profits directly from the popularity of porn, and its particular concern is that it profits from Perfect 10’s porn that has been stolen by others.
Zada believes that the outcome of Perfect 10’s motion for preliminary injunction should have a major impact not only on Perfect 10, but also on traditional media outlets which are losing the ad revenue war to search engines, in part because of all the nude and semi-nude images search engines offer for free.
Right now, he says, consumers who want to view a nude scene involving Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, or other Hollywood beauties, can view that scene for free by visiting a search engine without purchasing the DVD. “If all an infringer needs to avoid liability is to provide some sort of a ‘search function,’ that will be the end of intellectual property in this country,” says Zada.
Is this a principled defence of intellectual property or an opportunistic front in the war against the new media?
Earlier this week there was an interesting moment in my personal history as a libertarian-activitist-stroke-blogger. I had a phone call from someone at The Times. “Millen” was the name, I think. He was asking me to contribute four hundred “headbanging” – his word – words on how the government is using the War on Terror to trash civil libertiess. I am not sure enough of the details of this story, and suspect that if I was, I might actually favour some of these alleged trashings, so I recommended that he give Perry de Havilland a ring, and Perry was happy to oblige.
For me what was interesting was that in his phone call to me the Times man used the word “Samizdata” – and what is more he was very nice about it – rather than the words “Libertarian Alliance”.
I switched to being a blogger, for Samizdata and elsewhere, from being a Libertarian Alliance person about three years ago. But because my home number used to be the contact number for the Libertarian Alliance, and because with my Libertarian Alliance Editorial Director hat on I used to do lots of little broadcasting performances and am still in their address books as that, I still from time to time get rung by media people who have me fixed in their databases as Libertarian Alliance, asking me to be on something or other. Never, until now, have they rung me up and talked instead about Samizdata. → Continue reading: Samizdata finally gets a mention
Fascinating entry in the daily email Political Journal (subscription only from the Wall Street Journal, no linkee):
How come the French all think alike?
Well, OK, the French don’t really all think alike: In May, 56% of them wisely voted “no” in the referendum on the European Constitution, which enjoyed the support not only of every major political party but also all of the major media outlets, from the leftist Le Monde to the right-wing Catholic paper La Croix. But if most French voters opposed the Constitution, why was their view reflected nowhere in the media? Surely there must have been a market for anti-Constitution sentiment, which any canny publisher or broadcaster could have exploited to boost circulation or ratings. But there was zippo.
This puzzle was recently solved for us by a well-placed French source. Part of the answer, he reminds us, is that much of the French broadcast media is state-owned, as is the venerable news agency Agence France-Presse.
But that’s not all: Even the “private” French press is massively subsidized. It enjoys lower tariffs for freight transport, a postal discount, a reduced value-added tax rate and a complete exemption from local taxes on investment. Government also subsidizes secondary printing facilities and helps pay for the distribution of French papers abroad. If you’re a journalist — or just a “journalist” — you also pay income taxes at a lower rate. And the best part: If a newspaper faces revenue losses because of declining advertising or circulation, the government will help make up the difference. The only catch is that, to benefit from this munificence, publications must officially register with a state agency (the French call it an organisme) run by a committee of editors and government functionaries.
The ostensible rationale for all this madness is that the government wants to avoid capitalistic media concentration and foster a plurality of viewpoints. The effect, of course, is the exact opposite: Unlike in the U.S. or Britain, in which various publications tend to represent some segment or other of market opinion or taste, French journalists are utterly indifferent to the views of their readers. Instead, they tend to write articles with a view to impressing their colleagues, a classic media echo-chamber that’s as conformist as it is insular. No wonder the French public tunes out: Le Monde, the biggest and most influential daily in a country of 60 million, has a circulation of only 400,000.
Who knew?
Although they have come late to this story, The Times has also noted Scott Burgess’ TKO of the Guardian regarding their employment of an Islamic extremists and subsequent firing of him once the story came to light.
It is a pity The Times did not also pick up on the bad grace in which The Guardian took their lumps, what with their snarky no-by-line remarks about how “Scott Burgess, a blogger from New Orleans who recently moved to London, spends his time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian”, recalling the “guys in pyjamas” sneer made by someone at CBS following a similar humiliating mauling they received at the hands of the blogosphere. If ever you need a clear indication you have landed a painful blow against a MSM target, you have but to look for a petulant ad hominim response.
Moreover, it is fascinating how The Guardian inaccurately (follow first link to Media Guardian) attributes this incident breaking into the mainstream media down to “rightwing US bloggers” when the truth is that whilst Scott Burgess (an American living in London) sounded the charge, he was rapidly followed by Labour supporting British blog Harry’s Place and ourselves (no great fans of the Tory party either), to name but two of many largely UK based blogs. The Guardian’s take on this is therefore either shoddy reporting or a case of seeing what you choose to see.
Still, nice to see that the broadsheet newspapers do not feel any need to close ranks over this story.
In its childish, impenitent comment (login: grauniad@stereo.lu, password: grauniad) – so dreadful that it seems no one on the Guardian staff wished to have the byline attributed to them – on having to sack a terror-supporting reporter, the newspaper attempts to portray blogger Scott Burgess as a disgruntled, rejected applicant for its trainee program. Burgess is the man who broke the story of Dilpazier Aslam’s background, and instead of being thankful to him for helping to rid their newspaper of a cancer, the Guardian is instead trying to damage his credibility.
Except, of course, that the Guardian is fudging on this one. And they know they are doing it in full view of the network that brought about Aslam’s downfall in the first place. Have they learned nothing?
First, check out the first instance on his blog where Burgess mentions applying for the Guardian’s trainee program. On June 1, 2004, he wrote:
Regular readers may be interested to know that I am applying for this job. As I’ll almost certainly be hired, readers are advised to quickly inform me of any competing employment opportunities they’d like me to consider.
Perhaps the Guardian’s journalists do not do irony, and so took this comment by Burgess at face value. But they had another chance to catch the joke, two days later, when Burgess submitted his application:
… I thought that perhaps my responses to these two consecutive questions might raise a chuckle:
“What would you add to The Guardian newsroom?”
Ideological balance and accurate research.
“Please describe issues of the moment in Britain and the world that most interest you. Why?”
…As an American living in Britain, I can’t help but also be interested in the way in which Americans, their society and their government are perceived – not only in Britain, but throughout Europe. While many of the negative opinions expressed by Europeans are no doubt valid, others seem to be based on crude stereotyping of the sort that is rightly condemned when applied to other national, ethnic or religious groups. I’d like to help bring some balance to the way Britain and the rest of Europe view my compatriots, not only through my writing, but also by presenting myself as an intelligent, articulate, and non-obese example.
Burgess ends his post with the question: When do you suppose they’ll be getting back to me? The answer seems to be: When you expose their wrongdoing, via an attempted smear on their website.
It will come as no surprise to anyone with a realistic view of how the media operate that the Guardian is in this instance less interested in the truth and more interested in limiting the damage to its own credibility. It is surprising and discouraging to see a media entity which claims to ‘get the blogosphere’ indulge in such shameless dishonesty, knowing full well that the evidence of the truth is public, permanent, searchable, and so easily passed along this network.
If the Guardian is as committed to the truth as it claims to be – more, as it is supposed to be – it will issue a correction and clarification of its disgraceful comments about Scott Burgess.
Most magazines and newspapers employ “fact checkers”, whose job it is supposedly to ensure that the content of articles is accurate and truthful. The nasty little secret however, is that the purpose of such people is not so much to ensure that the readers of the magazine receive articles that are accurate, but to protect the editors and owners of the magazine from libel law. Therefore, a lot of the time what is actually checked is the accuracy of human sources rather than the accuracy of facts and the internal consistency of articles. If an article says that “Joe Bloggs said that the moon is made of blue cheese” then it is likely to be checked that Joe Bloggs actually said this. If it is merely stated that “The moon is made of blue cheese” then this is less likely to be checked. After all, the moon is unlikely to sue.
As a consequence of this, one finds a great many factual errors in the general media, particularly about scientific and technical information. And one finds dreadful innumeracy – which is a shame given the fact that a basic knowledge of the modern world is pretty much impossible without a decent understanding of the workings of the modern world and a basic understanding of the modern world.
However, this varies by publication, or course. In the British media, The Guardian is far better at getting factual information on technical subjects right than any other paper with the possible exception of the BBC. The Times and Telegraph are worse, and in the electronic media the BBC is usually dreadful. (This wasn’t always so. There used to be a strong pro-enlightenment wing of the BBC, but the decline of this is just one general symptom in the moonbat ascendancy in the BBC that has happened in recent decades).
In any event, an example. Last week I had a long flight in front of me, and as a consequence I grabbed a couple of magazines to get me through the flight. The July/August edition of Foreign Affairs had series of articles entitled “The Next Pandemic”, which considered the possibilities as to what might happen if the world faced an outbreak of a new, nasty, influenza strain. Foreign Affairs is the trade journal of a certain kind of pompous, overly statist Washington D.C. Policy wonk. In any event, it is read by what in D.C terms are “serious” people. I find this slightly distasteful, but I have a certain morbid fascination for the subject of contagious diseases and ways of coping with them, so I bought the magazine.
The lead article in the section (and one of the others) was written by Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: : The Collapse of Global Public Health”. I have read the first of these books but not the second. I found it interesting in that it gave lots of historical information that I was not previously aware of, but I found its central argument – that standards of public health in the world is in decline and a consequence we are newly vulnerable to emerging diseases – to be unconvincing. I particularly disagree with the semi-stated corollary that the solution is the expenditure of vast amounts of public money. Certainly there are places in the world where standards of public health have declined (eg in British and Canadian public hospitals) but in a global sense sanitation has never been better, and global best practice (ie that of the United States) has clearly improved. On top of this we are in the midst of a biotechnology revolution of astonishing speed. Fifty years ago biology was largely taxonomy and medicine was largely “Try this and see if it work”, whereas today we have real understanding of how biological systems works and how diseases work, and as a consequence a much more basic understanding of how to attack them. → Continue reading: And you believe I should take you seriously?
The Guardian has finally got rid of the anti-Semitic, terror-endorsing Dilpazier Aslam from its staff. But that does not stop them from pouting about having to do so (login: grauniad@stereo.lu, password: grauniad).
Links via Marcus at Harry’s Place
…I am shocked, shocked! No, not really.
Kudos to Scott Burgess for breaking the story that the Guardian has hired Dilpazier Aslam, a supporter of a global Islamic Caliphate, to write for them, regardless of his association with Khilafah.com and Hizb Ut Tahrir. Presumably whoever hired him at the Guardian knew all about his views as all it takes is typing “Dilpazier Aslam” into Google and then pressing Search to discover what he writes.
It is really no different than if the Telegraph has hired a white English neo-fascist supporter as a ‘trainee journalist’ and invited that person to report on a riot in which Jews were attacked, even though the internet was full of articles by that person calling for violence against people based purely upon their ethnicity (say, Jews, for example). But then of course we all know that when the Guardian hires someone who has called for exactly that, well, it is just that they are being ‘inclusive’.
The silence on this issue from the Guardian itself has the making of a rather good story in and of itself. You would have thought a newspaper which was as aware of new media and blogging would realise that they do not get to pick and choose which stories are newsworthy anymore, particularly when they are the story. Even that fount of MSM idiotarianism The Independent has run with this one.
And this story could just run and run. Pass it on.
I do not believe that we have a “No shit Sherlock” category for blog postings here, but maybe we should. Here is the explanation that the Evening Standard was offering today of what made those who committed the atrocities of last Thursday in London decide to become suicide bombers:
This photograph was taken outside Waterloo Station, at about 3pm this afternoon.
To be fair to the Evening Standard, their actual reportage was somewhat more informative, and more up-to-the-minute billboards revealed that one of the bombers was a primary school teacher. That was news, to me anyway.
Overheard on Newsnight last night, from the anchor-lady person, presiding over a discussion of the recent travails of the US mainstream media. It was in connection with the Valerie Plame story, whatever exactly that is. I have not been following that, and I missed the beginning of the Newsnight report about it.
Anyway, here is what Ms. Paxman said about the US mainstream media, word for word:
The reputation of the reputable media has sunk to a new low.
This is what I love about the BBC. They have their biases, of course they do. But they also genuinely try to report the truth.
Their biases mostly impinge by determining which truths they go after in the first place, and who they then have commenting on them (to discuss this matter they had Daniel Ellsberg balanced by a guy from the New York Times), rather than in the form of pure lying. After all, when the BBC features some grotesque report put out by some grotesque gang of health fascists, or some such, rather than proper news, it is true that the health fascists did indeed say whatever it was they said. It was stupid and repellent, but they did say it, just as the BBC said they said it.
The BBC prejudice is that the mainstream US media are indeed the reputable media, and that all those pyjama-clad right wing nasties sitting at their nasty computers agreeing with President Bush are disreputable. Yet these same pyjama wearers are the ones who have caused the reputation of those same reputable media to sink to a new low. That was the story here. So, that is what popped out of her mouth.
This is definitely different to living in the USSR and I greatly prefer it to that, not least because it is so much more entertaining.
Let us return to the lost age of blogging for a moment.
I thought I would share with readers this gem of the interwebby thing: The ChildCare Action Project (CAP): Movie Ministry
I have been going there for years, and it is less well-known than it deserves. (For former connoisseurs, the tinsel aesthetic is unaltered but the disruptive popups are gone.) It is full of wonders for liberal secular types like me.
If you do not know where to start, just plunge into the movie reviews here and discover the ungodly propaganda of the Hollywood elite in your favourites. You see, they are not just coddled world-insulated champagne socialists but servants of the evil one.
As a British atheist the Christians I actually meet seem to me mostly harmless, perfectly normal people. But this stuff is by turns hilarious, mind-boggling, and spine-shivering. Which is all you can ask of entertainment. And it has a salutary moral effect, too. If not quite the one intended by its dedicated creators.
P.J. O’Rourke got something similar from visiting the Praise the Lord theme-park in the 80s:
“We came to scoff. We left converted – to Satanism.”
I am a news-junkie, so facing this morning without the Today programme on the BBC is a gruelling prospect. For BBC staff are on strike, so most live news programmes are not running today.
I was highly amused, however, that the first replacement programme on Radio 4 at six o’clock (when Today is due to start) was an In Business documentary on podcasting. Can this be entirely coincidental?
“There’s plenty of competition out there, boys. And it’s free.” Is the pretty clear message.
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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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