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The Swiss government commissioned a study on the impact of copyright-infringing downloading. The independent study concluded that downloaders use the money they spend to buy more legitimate entertainment products. So they’ve concluded to maintain Switzerland’s extant copyright law, which makes downloading for personal use legal. It’s a rare victory for evidence-based policy in a world dominated by shrill assertions of lost jobs and revenue, backed by funny-number "statistics" from industry-commissioned researchers.

Update: while there is a Chatswood in New Zealand, this particular one is in Australia. Thanks to the sharp reader mailing me this!

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The founding of the Pirate Party in Sweden in 2006 was regarded by many as a joke. After all, the argument went, who would want to be associated with "pirates" or vote for such a narrow platform? This overlooked the fact that the traditional political parties had consistently ignored the concerns of voters who understood that the Internet raised important questions about areas such as copyright and privacy. By focusing on precisely those issues, the Pirate Party gave disaffected voters the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with the old political parties and their outdated policies.

[..]

Among those most threatened by the rise of the Pirates are the German Greens, a party which has traditionally appealed to precisely the voters that the Pirates are drawing their support from. The risk for the Greens is that the Pirates could take over as the main “alternative” option in German elections, turning the former into an anachronistic throwback to pre-digital times.

To head off this threat, the German Green party has drawn up a 16-page proposal entitled “Openness, freedom, participation – Exploiting the opportunities of the Internet – Making the shift to digital green”, which aims to position the Green party as a defender of all those things that make the Pirates attractive to some voters (German original.).

There is support for a shopping list of digital-friendly ideas like Internet freedom, Net neutrality, privacy, data protection, online anonymity and pseudonymity, free software, open access, open data, open government, CC licenses – even for things like free public wifi and DDoS attacks, which the Greens regard as “civil disobedience”. There’s also a list of things that the Greens don’t want: Net censorship, “three strike” exclusions, data retention, online surveillance, software patents and the export of surveillance tools.

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A board member of rights management company Buma/Stemra which represents composers and music publishers has stepped down amid allegations of corruption, the Volkskrant writes on Thursday.

Broadcaster Powned recorded a conversation between Jochem Gerrits and the lawyer of composer Melchior Rietveldt who claims the organisation owes him at least €1m in lost copyright fees.

Rietveldt wrote a piece of music for an anti-piracy ad which was widely distributed without his knowledge. In spite of numerous requests he was never paid for the reproduction of his music.

During the conversation Gerrits offers to bring up the matter during a board meeting on the condition that a third of the proceeds will be paid out to him.

When the lawyer points out that handing over a third of the money for something that rightfully belongs to his client, Gerrits, who denies wrongdoing, says: ‘You have to look at it positively, he could otherwise end up with nothing.’

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Nearly two weeks after claiming that child labor laws are “truly stupid” and implying that poor children should be put to work as janitors in their schools, he now claims that poor children don’t understand work unless they’re doing something illegal.

As I read this article http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/opinion/will-china-stumble-dont-bet-on-it.html?hp and this quote stood out

“The country pulses with energy and success, a caldron of economic ambition larded with understandable self-confidence. Visit the General Motors plant on the outskirts of Shanghai and watch Buicks churned out by steadily moving assembly lines almost indistinguishable from those in plants in Michigan.

That shouldn’t surprise, as G.M. strives for uniformity across its Chinese facilities. Perhaps more startling is that G.M. achieves American levels of productivity, quality and worker safety — with pay that is a small fraction of levels in the United States.

This illustrates China’s great strength: its ability to relentlessly grind down costs by combining high labor efficiency with wages that remain extraordinarily low. At Foxconn’s largest plant, in Shenzhen, 420,000 Chinese earning about $188 per month assemble electronic components for megacustomers like Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.”

Then he goes to say

“The other evident stresses, like the indisputable property bubble, are manageable and far short of what brought down the American economy. ”

My comment

While I do not dispute the property bubble (or more accurately predatory lending) had its affects, the blindness to the fact that de-industrialization is having the U.S. and other nations because of the low labor in China being exploited by corporate moguls is telling. I guess another way of looking at the op. ed. piece is – nothing but pure propaganda by the 1%.

But that is to be expected from the author, robber baron http://stevenrattner.com/ and a more accurate assessment http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/10/steve-rattner-card-carrying-member-of-top-1-tells-us-we-should-lie-back-and-enjoy-much-lower-wages-resulting-from-globalization.html

And of course remember he settled an SEC issue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/14/business/14rattner.html

which was the cause of his shortened tenure in the Obama Admin

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This bill, passed late last night in a 93-7 vote, declares the entire USA to be a "battleground" upon which U.S. military forces can operate with impunity, overriding Posse Comitatus and granting the military the unchecked power to arrest, detain, interrogate and even assassinate U.S. citizens with impunity.

Okay – take a guess what causes the brain activity in the above movie. Then, visit this to see if you’re correct.

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Among other bad news, BlackBerry maker RIM announced today that it would take a $485 million write-down for its November quarter because it has too many unsold PlayBook tablets in inventory.

How many? Probably about 1.4 million, Morgan Stanley analyst Ehud Gelblum estimates in a report today.

So stay tuned for the PlayBook fire sale.

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A simple Google search unlocks the supposedly secret completion page to GCHQ’s code-cracking competition.

The signals snooping agency launched a codebreaking competition this week, promoted via social networks, that aimed to find would be code breakers that conventional recruitment efforts might miss. The canyoucrackit.co.uk challenge involved making sense of a 16×10 grid of 8-bit hexadecimal numbers to figure out a password, and then developing a virtual machine to execute code that would lead to the final page.

Puzzle-solvers had 10 days to crack the codes. However instead of solving this puzzle, which was not trivial to conquer, at least if some of the emails we’ve received are any guide, the completion page could be reached via a simple Google search.

Oops.

"All it takes to find the page is to use the site: command in Google, as the ‘Can You Crack It?’ webmaster seemingly didn’t hide the success page from search engines," Graham Cluley of net security firm Sophos explains.

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the Cartel’s expenses included $2,500 per month for rubber bands for bricks of cash.