Why? Why not?

About Time! The ACCC is challenging DVD region coding as ‘imposing a severe restriction of choice.’ to the Australian consumer. Apparently, there are over 5000 titles available on DVD in the US, and only ~700 in Australia. (according to news.com.au)

Statement by the ACCC: “The Commission has requested the Australian subsidiaries of United States film companies to explain why their regional restrictions on DVDs should not be deemed a breach of the Trade Practices Act 1974.” (from a seminar given by the commissioner of the ACCC.)

Hopefully, the ACCC will be able to apply some pressure and end the price-fixing, in Australia at least. If they do, it might give other countries the material they need to get rid of the region-coding for good. I mean, it’s really price-fixing, and the companies should either stop doing or openly admit that that’s what’s going on.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Well, time to test Blogger with Opera.

BTW, Opera ROCKS! Yay for gesture recognition in web browsers!

doo do dee doo…

16600 words written…

doo do dee doo…

Damn.

Douglas Adams is dead.

Official tribute page: So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Damn.

Just a small post, this time.

Shay sent me a speech about what Microsoft thinks of open-source.

I’d actually already read some repsonses to this (Richard Stallman in particuler.) Without descending too far into the murky realms of jurisprudence, I’m beginning to think that I agree with RMS on this. I’m beginning to think that the notion of “intellectual property” is utterly, utterly wrong.

I have just gone through and made sure I have no references to claiming copyright, ownership, blah, blah on anything on this site. I claim authorship of some things, and request that that authorship be acknowledged. I will also attempt to attribute authorship as much as I can. (It’s a bit hard with images from public archives.) This is how academia works, and I think it’s how the world of ideas in general should work. People who don’t attribute authorship are to be punished, but those who use something need to acknowledge the contributions of those who have gone before.

I think that’s really what Microsoft objects to. If they use any software that uses the GPL, they’re stuck having to follow it for that entire software package. As RMS says, the GPL has a propagating nature.

Anyway, I think that if I want to write any more on this, it will need a paper, which puts it in ‘after honours’ land.

Oh, and Revue went very well. Damn, the difficult jobs really are the most satisfying.

Hey ho all, apologies for lack of updates. Been exceedingly busy with stage managing Med Revue this year, and also with honours. More updates soon, I promise.