Day: October 12, 2007

Harry Potter and the idiocy of Copyrights

Byoliveridley

No, that is not the title of the next Harri Puttar. It’s how a slavishly devotional fan base that has spent millions of rupees buying your books, watching your movies, purchasing all your assorted paraphrenalia gets repaid. By getting sued when they pay homage to you.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Harry Potter and the Hindu gods

A community group in the Indian city of Calcutta says it has been sued by JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, for breach of copyright.

The group has been building a huge model based on Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as part of celebrations for a Hindu festival.

If you want to know all the ways in which copyrights have gone amok in this society of ours, just go read Dean Baker.

Global warming wins the Nobel peace price

Byoliveridley

Well, I guess if Gore had become president of the US, this would not have happened (among other things that would not have happened). On the other hand, the U.S would have conceivably taken a leadership role in the issue (if the senate and congress would have cooperated).

Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize – New York Times

Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it.

”I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize,” Gore said. ”We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”

Gore’s film ”An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary on global warming, won an Academy Award this year and he had been widely expected to win the prize.

What does this do for climate change? Well, nothing! Unfortunately! Good for the IPCC, though. And, good for Gore. I thought at the beginning of 2007 that this was the year that worldwide perceptions about the threat of global warming would change, Gore’s movie and the IPCC report had a big hand in making that happen.