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Podcast licensing, my arse

And you can shove your RFID up your...

Letters Sadly, it appears that RFID chips are not going to go away and die the miserable, lonely death they so clearly deserve. Still, let's look on the bright side, eh? They give eggheads plenty of hours of amusement working out where they can stick 'em. That's in your mouth, btw:

Whilst the obvious problems with putting a RFID into a tooth are clear to most, it also raises the issue that it is not considered ethical by the vast majority of dentists to go drilling holes in perfectly healthy teeth. Not without good reason too: A filled tooth is more likely to decay than an untampered with one.

Trevor Watt


"However, Dr Thevissen believes teeth are - as the strongest and longest-lived parts of the body - the best place to store information."

Having had a couple of my teeth knocked out in misc. childhood accidents, and having seen plenty of people having had teeth removed over the years for various reasons, I have to question the logic of storing information in the teeth. They're only long lived if you take care of them and if you don't knock them out with softball bats. And that's not even accounting for age-related problems such as baby teeth that are meant to fall out.

Then again, should tooth-stored identity RFID tagging become manditory in some freakish sci-fi nightmare of a future, I can't imagine a much better place to put the RFID tag if you're looking at it with a 'criminal' mind.

Sincerely, Arah Leonard


Identification by dental records is one thing but this is just taking the piss.

Richard

Yes it is.


More polemic now with the The Mechanical Copyright Protection Society and the Performing Right Society's licensing scheme for music podcasters:

I would just like to point out that this license is esentially a complete waste of time as PPL do not offer a comparable license to cover the copyright in the sound recording, so you would be still in breach of copyright by putting music in podcasts. PPL have only recently introduced an Internet only radio license, despite the fact that internet radio has been around since the 1990s. Don't expect any action from PPL, on podcasts, any time soon.

Ben Robinson


I read your article on the new MCPS-PRS Podcasting agreement, but was wondering where the actual record labels are with all of this. What has been the label's feedback in Europe as to how they will be paid for these? Even with the above agreement in place, a podcaster couldn't use a song without the label's permission. Correct?

Thanks..jeff


It seems to me that the following clause:

"take all reasonable steps to ensure that individual tracks within a podcast are not capable of being ripped and that metadata or other information or data transmitted or downloaded by the podcaster is not used to identify recordings for download from unauthorised databases or sites."

is far too open to enterpretation. To me I read it as stopping a podcaster mentioning the name of a track or the artists name as this is all the information needed to download any track. Is it intended to be this restrictive?

Duncan.


I'd just like to draw your attention to an interesting podcast site I came across a while back, which is now defunct. It seems that it's down to those rules or something version of them that the guy has been forced to cease & desist. The site is called vinyl podcast (fair use of forgotten music is the tagline iirc), and here's the obituary:

http://vinylpodcast.com/?p=62

I think it's a great pity that this particular site has to go. It seemed like a very reasonable way to present music without being antagonistic to the rights holders... it's all OOP stuff, it's bookended by talking, and it really wouldn't matter whether half the planet downloaded the MP3s since the artists/rights holders weren't going to make any more money on the tracks anyway (kind of like abandonware in software terms).

I think it's indicative of a fundamental flaw in record company thinking: they think that they know marketing, and so they're trying to shoehorn any creative project (read: podcasts, in this case) into how *they* see it working *from their perspective*. Maybe copyright laws (or their state of flux) are ultimately to blame---rights holders have to make some effort to protect their rights, even if there isn't a use it or lose it clause in effect. I can understand why their position of first resort is to grasp what's theirs as tightly as possible, but it's just sad that they don't realise how much more they could benefit by loosening their grip, even if only a little, and even if it's on a case-by-case basis.

Thanks for reading, dec


How about the MCPS try liscencing my arse!

Do they really think they will be able to police this sort of thing? To many questions are raised by this... what are the punishments for not complying for a start, what happens to podcasts hosted outside the UK etc.

the crazy world in which we live eh?! it really does baffle me sometimes

cheers eddy


South Park is now officially at war with the Church of Scientology. Ho hum:

Tell Tom Crusie to get over himself...What kind of role model is he supposed to be for the rest of us OR for Scientology? If that is a religion who upholds Cruise as an upstanding member, they better be glad he has a lot of money, because that is ALL he has going for him. I admit I am a South Park fan, who does NOT allow my children to watch the program. I am untypical since I am 50 and a "soccer mom". I also wonder why the rest of us have to have a sense of humor about satire, and Cruise does not. The first time I decided to boycott him entirely, was when he attacked Brooke Shields about her postpartum depression. Bold move for someone lacking a uterus. Now I will take my boycott to my friends and aquaintences and my spending habits. No more for Cruise.

Shame on Iassiac" Chef", he caved to pressure and only has a sense of humor when he can take shots at others. Hope he saved up his checks from South Park. He's on the boycott list too.

d traub


Scientologist Hayes said: "There is a place in this world for satire but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry toward religious beliefs begins."

Well, as a Scientologist, Hayes should know. After all, the "Church" of Scientology is the only religion currently active which was created as a joke. It does certainly epitomize the depths of desperate superstition which still exist among the human race - and proves that we certainly aren't ready to take on the Lizard Army in a battle of wits.

Isn't it odd that the Pope had no issues with the Catholic Church being satirized by the Monty Python gang, but Scientology can't stand to be ridiculed by a bunch of cartoon children? Perhaps that's the difference between someone who deeply believes in his religion, and someone who's only in it because it gives him an "in" with influential people in the entertainment industry. After all, Jesus is said to have laughed. I expect L. Ron Hubbard is snickering in his grave, as well, but for a different reason.

Morely Dotes


On the issue of South Park and Scientology, one can hardly imagine how pulling of the show or the resignation of Hayes is a victory. The show has been seen, and will be continued to be seen, both on the internet and on DVD release. The publicity provided by the church of scientology just insures that even more people will see it. As far as Hayes, he is just another performer to be cast into the South Park waste bin. As the wonderful Sally Struthers learned, it is better to endure the ridicule than whine about the unfairness. Trey and Matt will now be free to ridicule Hayes as they do to any other arrogant and self centered celebrity. In the end, the thing that confuses me the most is how Hayes would have such a problem with a satirical depiction of his faith, but be perfectly willing to participate in the depiction of the mass murder of hippies.

R Cox

Well, Hayes wouldn't be the only one to be willing to participate in the depiction of the mass murder of hippies. Word on the street has it that Chef will exit South Park by "falling off a bridge and being burned, stabbed and mauled by a lion and a grizzly bear". And that's the least of it. More on the BBC here.


Quark has rerebranded following a bit of a mix-up with the Scottish Arts Council logo. Oh dear, oh dear...

I wonder if the brand boys happened to have a Sony Ericsson mobile to hand when they were thinking that one up...? Not quite so "uncanny" as the Scottish Arts Council "coincidence", but even so...

Adrian


The new Quark Logo does however bear a passing resemblance to Pacman. Maybe they should raid the wastebin again :-)

dc


What a load of old bollocks! Typical canned PR Speak! Change customer to 'reader' and Q to R and guess what! It's the new logo for El Reg. and people get get payed more than me for producing this stuff! That is what really pisses me off! I have some graphics training and the second logo is 100 times better than the first one

Ian Yates


Moving on to matters of far greater import, did lack of kip kill the dinosaurs?

So lack of sleep killed of the dinosaurs. Ri-i-ght!

And I suppose when they finally fell off on their feet with exhaustion they crushed the other 50% of all species to disappear in the K-T extinction beneath their slumbering bulks? Then perhaps all the world's ammonites had their shells shattered by an immense chorus of saurian snoring?

I guess by publishing in the 'Brain Research Bulletin', Rattenborg avoided the minor problem of having his work peer-reviewed by paleontologists.

David B.


This does tie in nicely with the theory that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Perhaps some dinosaurs did manage to evolve this sleep pattern and their new tricks meant the start to a long evolutionary trip to birds.

I personally don't believe dinosaurs turned into birds however they could have had a common ancestor.

Robert Neve


Does this mean all those sci-fi films got it wrong and we wont be meeting highly evolved space ship flying reptiles because they didn't get enough sleep to invent them in the first place?

How does the Lizard Alliance feel about this theory?

Does it mean we still stand a chance?

Simon


stop printing this retarded bullshit.

it's not that dinosaurs couldn't learn because they didn't sleep right. right... because hundreds of millions of years of mamallian evolution all went to figuring out how to sleep right. dinosaurs didn't need to sleep deeply BECAUSE they couldn't learn anything.

alex dubinsky

Right, gotcha. Sorry about the retarded bullshit...


What the fuck did you say?? This article is impossible to follow unless you were born and raised on that little Atlantic Island.

Bob Gleason

To our knowledge no-one has ever been born and raised on Rockall. Regarding the Brit lingo, we'll be sure and offer an alternative version in future, purged of all slang and with big pictures you can color in using your crayons bearing captions like: "While Darlene the dinosaur was asleep, Mike the mammal developed so much he soon had the ability to send electronic communications. Sadly, though, he couldn't think of anything intelligent to say and soon went back to hitting skulls with a thigh bone."


Penultimately, the open source community was shaken to the very stack of empty pizza boxes on which it rests this week with news of the first Firefox-provoked relationship crash-and-burn:

You forgot to include the work around.

Wife v1.0 will conflict with Girlfriend v2.0 unless polyamory V3.1 is installed.

This will allow multiple instances of girlfriend to run, communicate and it is even possible to merge sessions, however this is a complicated procedure and may take some time. For legal reasons only one instance of Wife is allowed but Girlfriend instances are only limited by available run time and paid license fees.

Oh, almost forgot, be sure to be patched up to date to avoid losing runtime to child processes

Simple.

Simon


And finally, Aussies have been encouraged to take the cricket bat to cane toads:

I spent my youth in Oz and can assure you that none of the kill methods suggested in the piece actually work. Please bear in mind that all the following actions were long before anybody started thinking of PCness and being kind to dumb animals. Hitting them with a piece of 4x3 resulted in knocking them unconscious for a maximum of 3 hours. A shot to the back of the head with an air rifle embedded the pellet in the skull but they would still get up and walk away, sometimes as quickly as 5 minutes. Even after skewering a series of them on a garden fork and leaving the fork upright in the garden for a week resulted in them hopping away when you eventually levered them off. Running over them with a car sometimes worked, although quite often they would just swallow the squishy bits that came out of their mouth and again hop away. An HGV would usually cause irreversible damage but not everyone has access to one of those.

Julien Waring

It's official, then: time to dust off the nuke-bearing stealth aircraft. Our prayers are with you. ®

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