Interesting Links for 25-1-2011

[andrewducker]

• Coalition, Government and the Lords
  (tags: government uk)
• Bullied by Gays- A catalog of pupils driven to suicide by gay bullies
  (tags: lgbt suicide satire)
• Five Emotions Invented By The Internet. I have experienced all five of these.
  (tags: internet psychology emotions funny)
• The downward spiral of ownership and value (It's happened to music, it's happening to books.)
  (tags: books copyright ebooks)
• Wolfenstein 1-D: The Game That Changed Everything, Converted to a 1-Pixel Line
  (tags: videogames wolfenstein funny)
• The economics of Net Neutrality
  (tags: internet economics markets)
• Why the Cornish hotel ruling should worry conservative Christians - digs into the details of the actual ruling.
  (tags: christianity homosexuality law religion sex society)
• Genetically modified crops are the key to human survival, says UK's chief scientist
  (tags: environment gm food)
• BBC to cut online budget by 25% - close 180 websites.
  (tags: bbc online)
• Why Africa needs an agricultural revolution
  (tags: africa agriculture technology poverty government)
• Government scraps Labour plans to scrap the Common Travel Area between UK, Ireland and Isle of Man.
  (tags: government uk travel)

Comments

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

I say this as a hooker (er, crochet-er) who loves the Rav: there's not a huge demand for knitting/crochet patterns, at least when compared to things like mainstream fiction, so your sharing options are basically a) send the file to a friend you know, or b) create a torrent that no one's going to know to go looking for to download. It seems to me like if I wanted the pattern and I didn't know a buddy who had it to share, I'd be better off just coughing up the few bucks than trying to magic some free version of it.

I think the 'few bucks' part of that statement is important, too, because I'm disinclined to pay $30 to someone I perceive as a rich and famous author (especially if I know a lot of it will be going to the publishing company), but I'm very pleased with the idea of giving the price of a coke or two to a fellow crafter directly.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - it seems to be the "niche" thing I mentioned earlier. Which is fair enough - it looks like niches will be safe from mass copyright infringement.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Depends upon the niche - I know lots of authors of role-playing game pdfs for whom piracy is a big issue/ I think you hit the knitting needle on the head when you said that knitters just aren't the kind of people who break copyright. I fear that role-players (at least some of them) just might be.

[andrewducker]

I think that roleplayers skew that was an unusual amount. As we're a massive bunch of geeks. Knitters less so, but they'd probably still have problems if they were mainstream.