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Singers and musicians should earn royalty fees for 95 years — almost double the current 50-year limit, a European Union official said Thursday as he promised to draft new copyright protection rules.

“If nothing is done, thousands of European performers who recorded in the late 1950s and 1960s will lose all of their airplay royalties over the next ten years,” said EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, the union’s internal market chief. “These royalties are often their sole pension.”

People are living longer and 50 years of copyright protection no longer give lifetime income to artists who recorded hits in their late teens or early twenties, he said.

So fucking what? Copyright wasn’t created to give artists a pension. Besides, when are you going to start lobbying to give me money for work that I did all my life? I only got paid once, that’s blatantly unfair!

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Hoe vervelend ze ook zijn, reclames die dwars over het beeldscherm dansen terwijl je een webpagina bezoekt, zijn - althans op korte termijn - erg effectief.

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Critici gaan er doorgaans van uit dat dergelijke advertenties minder effectief zijn, omdat ze veel ergernis oproepen. Het nieuwe onderzoek wijst echter anders uit. Bij een experiment bleek dat proefpersonen zich de logo’s van bedrijven in opdringerige reclames veel vaker konden herinneren dan bij rustige banners (85 om 23 procent). Ook werden de beeldmerken vaker herkend.

Daar stond inderdaad tegenover dat de proefpersonen de bewegende reclames veel irritanter vonden. Die ergernis had volgens de onderzoekers echter geen effect op de houding van proefpersonen tegenover de adverteerder.

*zucht*

Zo langzaam maar zeker lijkt het er op dat de enigen die nog reclame bekijken (dat wil zeggen, geen AdBlock hebben geinstalleerd) de echte schapen zijn, die niks erg vinden…

To think that this guy wanted to run the entire US budget…

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A Bush administration plan to crack down on contract fraud has a multibillion-dollar loophole: The proposal to force companies to report abuse of taxpayer money will not apply to work overseas, including projects to secure and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan.

For decades, contractors have been asked to report internal fraud or overpayment on government-funded projects. Compliance has been voluntary, and over the past 15 years the number of company-reported fraud cases has declined steadily.

Now, the Justice Department wants to force companies to notify the government if they find evidence of contract abuse of more than $5 million. Failure to comply could make a company ineligible for future government work.

[..]

“I hate to sound cynical, but what lobbyist working for a contractor in Iraq wanted this get-out-of-jail card?” asked Patrick Burns, spokesman for the government watchdog group.

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Low interest rates, falling prices and promises of government relief were not enough to slow the pace of Southern California’s housing downturn, which hit a new bottom last month.

Fewer than 10,000 homes were sold in the six-county region, DataQuick Information Systems said Wednesday. That’s the first time that has happened since DataQuick began keeping records in 1988.

What’s more, nearly 1 out of 4 homes sold — 23% — had been foreclosed, which is putting downward pressure on home values.

The median home price in January was $415,000, 18% below last year’s peak and the lowest since January 2005.

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FBI and military interrogators who began work with the suspects in late 2006 called themselves the “Clean Team” and set as their goal the collection of virtually the same information the CIA had obtained from five of the six through duress at secret prisons.

To ensure that the data would not be tainted by allegations of torture or illegal coercion, the FBI and military team won the suspects’ trust over the past 16 months by using time-tested rapport-building techniques, the officials said.

[..]

An unanswered question is whether the FBI and military interrogators could have extracted the same information without a road map from the CIA indicating what they might say. It also remains unknowable whether the detainees would have responded to a friendly approach without first receiving more aggressive treatment.

Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents one of the detainees charged and many more at Guantanamo Bay, said the cases are “essentially show trials, as President Bush is leaving his tarnished legacy to the next president.” He added: “They are being used to justify six years of lawlessness and barbarity this government has been doing.”

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JAPAN’s whalers are going broke and have been forced to slash prices because no one wants to eat their growing mountain of whale meat.

The farcical truth of Japan’s whaling industry was exposed yesterday by Japanese media reports that the Institute for Cetacean Research is struggling to repay $37 million in government subsidies.

The report came as Japanese embassy officials made a stern protest in Canberra over the Federal Government’s release of shocking whaling photographs.

The ICR, responsible for Japan’s lethal “research operation”, is flooding Japan with cheap whale meat that it cannot sell, according to the reports in respected newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

Meat and other parts of whales killed during ICR “scientific research” in the Southern Ocean is sold to a private fisheries company Kyodo Senpaku, which manages the sale of whale meat in the Japanese market. But while ICR has consistently increased the number of whales it kills – by 30 per cent between 2005 and 2006 – there has been no rise in domestic demand for whale meat or products.

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Captive Long-eared Owl (confiscated human imprint, Nemo) reacting to a Halloween toy bat.

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At a high school in Montana, a group of high schoolers played a prank on the school.

They let three goats loose in the school. Before they let them go, they painted numbers on the sides of the goats: 1 ,2, 4.

Local school administrators spent most of the day looking for #3.

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The U.S. economy is faltering. Family debt is on the rise, benefits are disappearing, the deficit is skyrocketing, and the mortgage crisis has worsened. Conservatives have attempted to deflect attention from the crisis, by blaming the media’s negative coverage and insisting the United States is not headed toward a recession, despite what economists are predicting.

The Bush administration’s latest move is to simply hide the data. Forbes has awarded EconomicIndicators.gov one of its “Best of the Web” awards. As Forbes explains, the government site provides an invaluable service to the public for accessing U.S. economic data:

This site is maintained by the Economics and Statistics Administration and combines data collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, like GDP and net imports and exports, and the Census Bureau, like retail sales and durable goods shipments. The site simply links to the relevant department’s Web site. This might not seem like a big deal, but doing it yourself–say, trying to find retail sales data on the Census Bureau’s site–is such an exercise in futility that it will convince you why this portal is necessary.

Yet the Bush administration has decided to shut down this site because of “budgetary constraints,” effective March 1

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A new bill proposed at the legislature would allow for police to withhold misconduct reports from the public. Supporters of the bill believe that police misconduct should be kept secret from the public so to not discredit police testimony.

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Hillary Clinton will take the Democratic nomination even if she does not win the popular vote, but persuades enough superdelegates to vote for her at the convention, her campaign advisers say.

The New York senator, who lost three primaries Tuesday night, now lags slightly behind her rival, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, in the delegate count. She is even further behind in “pledged” delegates, those assigned by virtue of primaries and caucuses.

But Clinton will not concede the race to Obama if he wins a greater number of pledged delegates by the end of the primary season, and will count on the 796 elected officials and party bigwigs to put her over the top, if necessary, said Clinton’s communications director, Howard Wolfson.

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Kansas activities officials are investigating a religious school’s refusal to let a female referee call a boys’ high school basketball game.

The Kansas State High School Activities Association said referees reported that Michelle Campbell was preparing to officiate at St. Mary’s Academy near Topeka on Feb. 2 when a school official insisted that Campbell could not call the game.

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy’s beliefs.

Campbell then walked off the court along with Darin Putthoff, the referee who was to work the game with her.

“I said, ‘If Michelle has to leave, then I’m leaving with her,”‘ Putthoff said Wednesday. “I was disappointed that it happened to Michelle. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

Fred Shockey, who was getting ready to leave the gym after officiating two junior high games, said he was told there had been an emergency and was asked to stay and officiate two more games.

“When I found out what the emergency was, I said there was no way I was going to work those games,” said Shockey, who spent 12 years in the Army and became a ref about three years ago. “I have been led by some of the finest women this nation has to offer, and there was no way I was going to go along with that.”

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Five British muslim students jailed for downloading extremist material from the internet were released today, after the Appeal Court ruled their convictions were unsafe.

The Lord Chief Justice said that although the evidence was clear that the five had accessed the jihadi websites and literature there was no proof of any terrorist intent, the BBC reports.

“Difficult questions of interpretation have been raised in this case by the attempt by the prosecution to use [anti-terrorism law] for a purpose for which it was not intended,” he said.

I read instructions on how to operate an incendiary device (*) and I was safe to assume I would not be arrested for potentially committing future arson.