25 March 2002

Twincities.com plugs Radio8 and euro.weblogs.com You can switch to the European server in Radio by clicking here with Radio running. Of course you can ping the updates page in the same ways you do with www.weblogs.com. Just point to the server which is running at rcs.datashed.net [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] 5:27:57 PM

Article in the Spectator has rather changed my mind on Brian Paddick. Two key paragraphs: It is very tempting, in our age of performance league tables, for police forces to concentrate on soft targets where arrests and convictions are much easier to achieve. If the aim is to secure as many drugs convictions as possible, there is a simple option open to police forces: send bevies of officers to surround nightclubs on a Friday night and empty the pockets of middle-class recreational drug-users. Admirably, Commander Paddick has rejected this option in favour of concentrating on violent drug-users who rob to fund their addiction, and on dealers in hard drugs. Of course, this approach is contrary to ‘zero tolerance’, which has succeeded in New York and many would like to see repeated in London: the theory runs that if you cast your net wide and apprehend people for minor offences you tend to catch major criminals in the process. But as Commander Paddick makes clear in his much- criticised contributions to the website urban75.com, zero tolerance is not an option open to British police, who, unlike their New York counterparts, have not been able to double the number of officers. Paddick has simply been using his limited resources in a way that ensures policemen do not get bogged down pursuing cannabis-users. PS Urban75 whence paddick posted. 4:07:16 PM

Moral RIghts   I was looking at When elephants dance.   Its about copy protection and the entertainment industry. The fallout from Napster burning CDs etc, but it also says:   Interestingly, the act of using the copy protection technology is much more prevalent in Europe. Most European countries, unlike the United States, recognize an artist’s “moral rights” in the work they create. Moral rights are a package of intellectual property rights granted to the original creator of a work, and include: The right of integrity; The right of attribution; The right of disclosure; The right to withdraw or retract; and The right to reply to criticism. These moral rights are separate from the economic copyright that these days generally transfers from an author to a publisher and they can survive the author. The idea originated with the French, who believe that any creative work, by definition, includes the personality and character of the author. Where copyright is a property right that can be transferred, moral rights are part of the author’s personality and character and non-transferable. The first two moral rights—the right of integrity and the right of attribution—are especially important because they are codified as international law in the Berne Convention. The United States claims its intellectual property law complies with the Berne Convention, but this is just two instances where it doesn’t. The most important of these rights is the first, the right of integrity. Basically it prohibits an author’s work from being distorted in any way that would harm the author’s reputation and dates to the 1957 French law of “droit au respect de l'oeuvre.” It’s a safe bet that a cross-reference over which the author had no control would be seen as a distortion of the work. Is it possible given the right of integrity and the right of attribution the law of “droit au respect de l'oeuvre” mean that the “Barthes, Foucault and Derrida” take on authorshio of which Sean wrote have written is actually illegal in France. I do hope so. 3:57:51 PM

Headstrong : http://www.redherring.com/vc/2000/0915/vc-headstrong091500.html http://www.tlg.com/about-tlg/prele-00d.htm http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2000/12/11/daily5.html http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article/0,,5401_532411,00.html 3:00:34 PM

looks like we'll be bringing out a new version of virtual bumblebee soon. 2:47:58 PM

England beat Wales out of sight at Twickenham on Saturday. We watched it from the pub. Scary article by Stephen Jones in the Sunday Times about the parlous state of rugby in Wales the next day. 11:32:56 AM

Handpainted resin statues on a solid wood base are the perfect gift for every young Catholic athlete. 11:23:09 AM

kid geniuses. "William Doherty, a sociologist, calls this frenzied rush to capitalize -- er, nurture -- our children's potential not parenting so much as "product development" 9:44:23 AM

© Copyright 2002 Nick Browne.