January 5, 2004

South Africa’s the Independent Online (via Google News) reports that there are complications over the film rights to The Hobbit which Peter Jackson was expressed interest in making following he completion of the upcoming King Kong remake. The report states that while New Line Cinema which made the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy owns the movie rights to The Hobbit, its American distribution rights are owned by United Artists. My feeling is that the pile of money from The Hobbit would be certainly be big enough to split and an agreement will be reached. The next question to ask: Who owns the rights to The Silmarillion? 11:58:06 PM

The Register reports that the Israeli government is demanding that Microsoft provide it with the same $37 per seat licensee for Microsoft Office that it had sold to Thailand and plans to use OpenOffice until this reduced price is available. In addition to the high price the Mac version of Microsoft Office does not support Hebrew. The problem for Microsoft is such demands may spread to other countries and even within domestic markets drastically cutting its margins. Microsoft may find out what Netscape discovered, it is hard to compete with free. 11:46:24 PM

More, more, more Writing in The Guardian Salim Tamari states that Arabs should support the Geneva Accord in part because it makes more demands from Israel and provides less to Israel than most Arabs read from it. To start, Tamari states that the Accord does not recognize Israel as a Jewish state: On one issue, though, Beshara and al-Masri are mistaken. Geneva does not give legitimacy to Israel as the "state of the Jewish people". The text actually refers to "the right of the Jewish people to statehood and the recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to statehood", adding that this recognition does not "prejudice the equal rights of the parties' respective citizens" (an awkward echo of the 1917 Balfour declaration). Such a rejection of Israel as a Jewish state will destroy the chance for peace, there will be continued claims that the Palestinian state is too small or that Arab-Israelis are mistreated and that the also solution is for a multi-national one state solution replacing Israel with yet another Arab dominated country. However even that is not enough, there are some areas that Tamari wants to Accord to be expanded, including claming parts of the pre-1967 West Jerusalem for a Palestinian state: On Jerusalem, two further pitfalls in the document can be identified. The part of the agreement stipulating that Jewish neighbourhoods should be annexed to Israel, while Arab neighbourhoods go to the Palestinian state, seems to apply only to East Jerusalem and not to the Arab suburbs of West Jerusalem. This demand for parts of West Jerusalem is new and may be unprecedented. Overall the theme is: accept the accord because it provides Arabs with land and a state and nothing to Israel in return. 11:33:05 PM