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After several weeks of delays, the Balanced Copyright for Canada site which has been engaging in astroturfing on Canadian copyright reforms, revealed its funding and advisory board late on Tuesday night, hours before the Canada Day holiday. The primary source of funding is not a surprise: this is a Canadian Recording Industry Association production.

The composition of the advisory board is interesting. First, of the 13 members, more than half are either record company executives, former record company executives, or lawyers who represent record companies. No surprise given the site’s backing, but not exactly the promised "employees, unions, artists and creators." In fact, it is notable that there are very few prominent creators and not many representatives from creator groups outside the music industry such as authors, performers, directors, or artists. In fact, despite an earlier claim that Loreena McKennitt would be on the advisory board, those plans apparently changed.

The board also includes one lawyer who just three months ago argued in a paper that form letters carry little value in public policy process, yet is now on the board of a site that requires a form letter that cannot be edited in order to participate.

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His face wracked by age and his voice rasping after decades of chain-smoking coarse tobacco, the former long-time Russian Minister of nuclear energy and veteran Soviet physicist Viktor Mikhailov knows just how to fix BP’s oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

"A nuclear explosion over the leak," he says nonchalantly puffing a cigarette as he sits in a conference room at the Institute of Strategic Stability, where he is a director. "I don’t know what BP is waiting for, they are wasting their time. Only about 10 kilotons of nuclear explosion capacity and the problem is solved."

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A new United Nations report released on Tuesday calls for abandoning the U.S. dollar as the main global reserve currency, saying it has been unable to safeguard value.

But several European officials attending a high-level meeting of the U.N. Economic and Social Council countered by saying that the market, not politicians, would determine what currencies countries would keep on hand for reserves.

[..]

The report supports replacing the dollar with the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights (SDRs), an international reserve asset that is used as a unit of payment on IMF loans and is made up of a basket of currencies.

“A new global reserve system could be created, one that no longer relies on the United States dollar as the single major reserve currency,” the U.N. report said.

The report said a new reserve system “must not be based on a single currency or even multiple national currencies but instead, should permit the emission of international liquidity — such as SDRs — to create a more stable global financial system.”

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Maybe God uses even the atheist to teach us a lesson.

If you don’t get the stupidity of the author, replace every occurrence of the word “atheist” in the article with “nigger” and see if you spot the problem then.

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Testimony before a Senate investigative panel this week is expected to reveal what many have suspected about BP all along; they don’t care about the environment, the animals that are dying, and the lives that are being destroyed by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

In a shocking interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on June 29th, Allegiance Capitol Corporation V.P. Fred McCallister said that BP is deliberately sinking oil with the toxic chemical disbursant Corexit, to hide the size of the oil spill. By sinking the oil before it can be collected, BP won’t have to pay fines on it.

McCallister said, “Everybody in Europe, where the standard practice is to raise the oil and collect it, is scratching their heads, and quite honestly laughing at what’s happening in the Gulf.” He added, “Everyone is looking at us and wondering why we’re allowing this to happen.”

McCallister is set to appear before a Senate investigative panel on Thursday and testify that BP’s only interests regarding the Deepwater Horizon spill is protectimg their own financial interests. His statements explained why BP has been refusing offers of help from additional foreign skimmers.

Remember this?

Well, Dreamworks didn’t get the message.

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The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on Monday voiced its opposition to the recent decision in the YouTube-Viacom copyright infringement case.

"We believe that the district court’s dangerously expansive reading of the liability immunity provisions of the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] DMCA upsets the careful balance struck within the law and is bad public policy," Cary Sherman, RIAA president, wrote in a blog post. "It will actually discourage service providers from taking steps to minimize the illegal exchange of copyrighted works on their sites."

And that’s actually good, since they’re service providers, not unpaid RIAA enforcers. Let them do their jobs, and you do your own job.

Oh, and by the way, RIAA, your so-called “illegal exchange” is actually legal UNTIL you’ve issued a take-down notice. So kindly go fuck yourself.

The RIAA may want to look at why iTunes is successful and change their own business model accordingly – I’m pretty sure the reason wasn’t “a bunch of lawsuits”.

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Animal welfare groups sued BP for burning endangered sea turtles and asked a federal court to stop the oil giant’s "controlled burns" on the Gulf of Mexico spill.

"It is horrifying that these innocent creatures whose habitat has already been devastated by the oil spill are now being burned alive," Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) President Cathy Liss told the court in Louisiana.

The lawsuit filed by AWI, Center for Biological Diversity, Turtle Island Restoration Network and Animal Legal Defense Fund said BP was violating the Endangered Species Act and other laws with their "controlled burns" in the Gulf of Mexico.