Common Sense From The Swiss!!

Switzerland Won’t Criminalize File-Sharing

Unlike the Spanish government, which is going to fight file-sharing, the authorities of Switzerland are planning to protect it. Since the entertainment industry continued pressuring on piracy, the country decided to conduct a study in order to offer a better perspective on how file-sharing affects the situation in the industry.
Now the results of the study have been published, and they lead the experts to an unsatisfying conclusion for the entertainment industry: in fact, it seems that the present anti-piracy legislation is doing its job great and therefore doesn’t need any additions or changes.

The results of the study draw a very interesting parallel between some obsolete devices, like the photocopier, audio cassettes and VCR – as we know, all of the listed items are designed to make copies, – and the worldwide web – a wonder of our century, which pushed things to the entirely different level. The study claims that it was always just the fear of change that has pushed the entertainment industries to go wild about how any new device can destroy jobs and the entire industry.
This is exactly what Swiss government is agree on, indicating in their report that each time a new media technology had been released, it has always been abused by the entertainment industry. However, this is the price the society has to pay for progress. In our world, those who can use the new technology to their benefit will win, while those who missed the development in question and keep following old business models will lose.

In addition, the Swiss government is not alone who pointed at this axiom – findings extrapolated from some Dutch study confirmed that the entertainment industry hasn’t been really losing much money, though it claims billions in damaged. Despite the fact that around a third of Swiss citizens do download pirated entertaining content, including songs, films and games through the Internet, the income of the entertainment industry remains steady, according to the results of the study. Moreover, the Dutch report points out that file-sharers are more likely to visit live performances or purchase a game. And in the music industry, file-sharing is a great advantage for newcomers as a beneficial and free advertisement campaign. In other words, the government’s message to the entertainment industry is clear enough: whether it adapts or not, the country shall not change the current laws.

Heavens Above!!

Virgin Mary billboard sparks outrage in New Zealand

A church billboard showing a shocked Virgin Mary gasping as she examines a pregnancy testing kit has sparked outrage in New Zealand.

The large poster outside St Matthew's in the City, a prominent Anglican church in Auckland, was designed by an advertising agency and depicts Mary in the style of a classical Renaissance painting.
A caption competition on the church's website has already drawn some questionable responses.
Suggestions include "Yay! I hope it's a girl," "Now, which way to the abortion clinic?" and "If I say I'm a virgin, mum and dad won't kill me."
One contributor protests: "You have crossed the line! Mary should not be the object of a trite campaign, whatever your good or not so good intentions."
Another condemns the billboard: "Can it be more offensive?"
St Matthew's, on a busy corner site in the centre of New Zealand's biggest city, is no stranger to controversy.
A billboard the church posted at Christmas two years ago showed Mary and Joseph in bed, apparently naked after having sex, with the caption: "Poor Joseph. God was a hard act to follow."
It provoked such fury that it had to be taken down after being attacked several times.
Defending the latest poster, the vicar, the Rev Glynn Cardy, said: "Although the make-believe of Christmas is enjoyable, with tinsel, Santa, reindeer and carols, there are also some realities.
"It’s about a real pregnancy, a real mother and a real child.
"It’s about real anxiety, courage and hope.
"Mary was unmarried, young and poor," he said.
"She was certainly not the first woman in this situation or the last."
Lyndsay Freer, a spokesman for the Catholic diocese of Auckland, was unimpressed.
"Once again, St Matthew's shows us that they have moved away from traditional Christianity, even though their hearts might be in the right place," she said.
"It is true that Christmas is real and celebrates a real pregnancy.
"It is also true that the anxiety and needs of young solo mothers today need to be addressed with compassion and care.
"But in making this point, St Matthew's ignores the gospel account of matters surrounding the pregnancy and birth of Jesus, in which Mary is not a shocked solo mother but a young woman who has given her assent and trust to God."

Lost?

Lost pensioner Dennis Leighton spends 30 hours driving around M25

A pensioner spent more than 30 hours driving around the M25 motorway after getting lost en route to visit his daughter.

Dennis Leighton, 82, was eventually found by police still at the wheel of his silver estate after worried family members reported him missing.
The retired carpenter had set off from his home in Windsor, Berks., to see his daughter Hazel, 55-miles away in Swanley, Kent.
But after getting “a little lost”, what should have been a straightforward, hour-long drive instead became a two-day journey. Officers eventually found him still in his Vauxhall Astra in south London.
A police source said yesterday: “He had been driving around the south of the country, predominately on the M25 motorway but had also gone onto some A roads in the area.
“He had stopped to catch up on some much needed sleep - we think in a motorway service area, before setting off again.
“He is after all 82-years-old. Presumably he put fuel in the car during the service stops over the two days.”
Mr Leighton, who lives alone, set off from his semi-detached home on December 12 at 7.30pm.
After family members reported him missing, his car was spotted on a police automatic number plate recognition camera in Dartford, Kent, on Tuesday at 11.20am - six miles from his intended destination.
Yet despite an extensive search, the pensioner could not be located - sparking a multi-force missing person appeal.
However, in the early hours of yesterday (Wed), more than 30 hours after leaving home, he was found by Met Police officers safe and well in his car in South London.
Sergeant Sarah Godsmark, of Kent Police, said during the missing person appeal: “We are concerned for Mr Leighton's welfare as he is elderly and is about to spend his second night away from his home.
“He has made this journey several times before and knows the route well. I would urge anyone who has seen Mr Leighton or has noticed a silver Astra estate acting suspiciously to contact police urgently. It is likely he is parked up in a service area or lay-by.”
A spokesman for Thames Valley Police added yesterday: “He got a little bit lost but was found safe and well in the early hours of this morning.”
Mr Leighton’s adventure echoes that of Mohammed Bellazrak’s three-day ordeal last Christmas.
The grandfather hit the headlines when he became disoriented in heavy snow after driving his wife to catch a holiday flight.
The 72-year-old spent three days and nights driving up and down the M4 motorway trying to find his way home to Wiltshire from Gatwick Airport.
He had set off from his home in Trowbridge on December 23 to drive his wife to Heathrow airport where she was due to catch a flight to Morocco.
However, bad weather meant the flight was diverted to Gatwick and he was eventually found on Christmas Day, still at the wheel of his Peugeot 307, when he triggered a police camera and was flagged down by officers in Oxfordshire.

The Danish Pirates??

Streaming Service Targeted by Anti-Piracy Group

After Danish largest Internet service providers had received a court order to block access to The Pirate Bay, the country wasn’t satisfied with the result and went further. Now the American-based streaming music service Grooveshark is targeted by the anti-piracy outfit RettighedsAlliancen.
The anti-piracy outfit has sent a notice to the country’s court, where it pleads to order Denmark’s broadband providers to cut off access to the site. It explains that if someone wants to offer music on the local market, they must sign an agreement with copyright owners. Meanwhile, Grooveshark streaming service doesn’t have any and is very uncooperative.
Within the past several years such legitimate services as Spotify are more likely to be used by the country’s Internet users, and the government agrees that they must get aid to be able to operate. Anti-piracy outfit pointed out that online music market is still developing, and it should be supported by officials. However, if Grooveshark continues, the market may suffer. Of course, the industry that has been doing business in the same way over the last twenty years will be threatened by any innovation. In respond, Grooveshark argues that it complies with the DMCA and therefore can’t be targeted as a rogue service – basically, YouTube is doing the same thing.
At the same time, the country’s copyright owners argue that taking down infringed content without closing down this streaming service is inefficient and actually impossible. But they somehow overlooked the fact that the service has been licensed by many record labels, including EMI. Although Grooveshark reacts to takedown notices, the industry doesn’t consider it good enough – it wants complete control. Of course, after Spotify, partially owned by a number of record companies, was launched in the country, the time came to get rid of the competition.
It seems that Denmark is becoming less neutral and free, i.e. turning into a censoring state, just like Syria and China, which are effectively destroying the web. Fortunately, the country is currently using only DNS-blocking, which can be circumvented without much effort. In addition, if the country applies the same logic throughout the web, it would have to block Facebook and YouTube for hosting potentially infringing content until notified.

What A French Stink!!!!

Chanel Ordered Domain Seizures

During the fight against sites trafficking in counterfeit luxury products Chanel somehow managed to convince the court that it should have the authority to seize as many as 700 domain names.
The perfume overlord has filed a joint lawsuit in Nevada against almost 200 domain names that turned out to have nearly nothing in common. As a result, the court allowed the company to take them down. Moreover, it also allows Chanel to add new names to the list and seize them as well.
In fact, the court order allows the company to take control of any online location without even having to prove anything. In other words, no site identified by Chanel has a right of appeal. The services won’t be allowed to contest it either. Meanwhile, the standard of evidence that the company has needed thus far has been top of the range. Chanel hired a Nevada investigator to order from 3 of the 228 websites in question. After the orders had arrived, they were reviewed by the company’s official and declared counterfeit, while the rest of the sites were closed down on the say so of the company’s anti-counterfeiting specialist surfing the Internet.
Local judge ruled that evidence was enough and ordered the domain names seized and transferred to GoDaddy. There the domain will redirect to a page with a seizure notice. In addition, the judge ordered search engine indexing, which neither Google nor Bing have complied with so far. Still, it seems that the court didn’t realize that the websites may even be registered outside the United States, thus making a ban worldwide. Indeed, it turned out that the list of offending domains contains poshmoda.ws – a domain registered in Germany.
Although Germany didn’t hand over sovereignty (except for a bunch of war criminals that helped put the United States onto the moon) and the German registrar hasn’t yet complied with the American court order, it still might be possible. As you might remember, the government of the United States has made similar domain name seizures during “Operation In Our Sites” campaign. That time they seized domains both from the US and abroad.
American attorney have already pointed out that if someone could appeal the court decision in any other place, they’d certainly win. However, no average German website would manage to defend itself in the Texas court. Worse still, copyright owners have asked the Congress to write provisions into legislation that allows them to carry out similar events legally.

A GoDaddy Reverse!

Go Daddy Officially Opposes SOPA

For those who believe Go Daddy didn't eat enough humble pie for backing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the company's taken further measures to backtrack on on its earlier support of SOPA. Go Daddy's president issued an apology Thursday evening pledging to repair relationships with domain holders who bolted to competitors over the issue and to reiterate its opposition to the proposed legislation.
"We have observed a spike in domain name transfers, which are running above normal rates and which we attribute to Go Daddy's prior support for SOPA, which was reversed," Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman said in a statement delivered to media outlets via email.
"Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities," he added.
Go Daddy withdrew its support from SOPA on December 23 and was removed from the list of the bill's supporters last weekend, but its competitors hammered away at its past transgressions and continued to urge Go Daddy domain holders to jump ship.
Thursday, for example, was declared "MoveYourDomain Day" by Go Daddy competitor Namecheap. On that day, domain holders who switch their registrations to Namecheap can do so at below cost, $6.99 per transfer, with the coupon code SOPAsucks. In addition, $1 from every transfer will go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to help fight SOPA and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (PIPA).
Of all Go Daddy's rivals, Namecheap has been particularly aggressive in its campaign against the Net's largest domain register. Earlier this week, it charged that Go Daddy was engaging in dilatory tactics to discourage its customers from transferring their domain business to Namecheap. Those delays turned out to be caused by administrative problems between the two registers.
he campaign to encourage domain holders to desert Go Daddy began on Reddit and its success seems to have emboldened members there for more direct action against anti-piracy legislation. A thread on the social news site is calling for an initiative named "Operation Cork Screw" aimed at ousting from office Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who supports PIPA.

GoDaddy Is Gone!!

Website hosting outfit known as GoDaddy has recently joined an elite group of the entertainment industry and paid off congressmen supporting an attempt to suspend American constitutional rights under the guise of fighting digital piracy.
GoDaddy service has officially expressed its support for the recently suggested Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation, which will provide rights owners the sway to effectively take offline sites if it thinks they might so much as think about violating content. The media reports that a GoDaddy.com spokesperson applauded the authorities for taking decisive, bicameral and bipartisan action.

Executive vice-president of GoDaddy, Christine Jones, claimed during the interview that the suggested legislation would be protecting the intellectual property of hard-working US citizens, businesses and the public from the harm necessarily flowing from the purchase of fake goods. However, the industry observers believe that the service will change its mind after the entertainment industry demands GoDaddy to shut down for hosting something regarded as unauthorized material. The matter is that the new legislation doesn’t actually require anyone to provide any proof. That’s why GoDaddy is in a minority, not only of tech firms, but also public, in supporting this bill – even President Obama has said that he would veto it if it gets that far. However, GoDaddy claims that the United States can’t turn a blind eye to unauthorized conduct on the Internet.

Christine Jones explained that both businesses and consumers in the United States were getting duped, because their intellectual property was being stolen and that the online ecosystem really had a duty to help. She also added that while the United States should not be suppressing free speech, the web still shouldn’t work as the Wild West either. Meanwhile, a grassroots campaign started on Reddit has already seen GoDaddy’s clients vote with their feet. After announcing its support for the new copyright legislation, GoDaddy will be getting a great Christmas present as the sane-thinking Internet turns its back on the firm and switches domain hosting.

iPhone….Help??

Man rings 911 about broken iPhone

A US man has been arrested after dialling 911 on five different occasions to complain about his broken iPhone.
A US man has been arrested after calling 911 to complain about his broken iPhone.
Michael Alan Skopec rang the police on five different occasions and the officials eventually visited his home just before 1am in Kendall County, Illinois, and discovered he appeared to be intoxicated, according to The Smoking Gun.
The 48-year-old man didn't say what was supposed to be wrong with the gadget or what he wanted the police to do about it and he was eventually arrested for arrested for obstructing a peace officer.

!!!!!!!HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!