Sound advice - blog

I don't currently support a direct commenting mechnism, but I encourage and welcome feedback. The best way to comment is to respond in your own blog, and to let me know you've done it. If you are a member of technorati I should notice your entry within a few days.

Another alterntaive is email, and when I want to comment on blogs that don't support comments I will usually do both. A recent example is this entry which I first sent as an email to Rusty, then posted the content of my email into the blog. You can see my email address on the left-hand panel of my blog. You'll need to substitute " at " for "@", which I hope is not too onerous.

The main reason I don't accept comments directly is history. I use static web space provided by my ISP and don't have much control over how the data is served and the kind of feedback that can be garnered. I also have a mild fear that comment spam will become a significant adminstration overhead as I have to keep up with the appropriate plugins to avoid too much hassle in this regard. Blogging is an easy and fun way to publish your thoughts, and I hope that a network of links between blogs will be as effective as a slashdot-style commenting system for the amount of interest and feedback my own blog attracts.

Thanks! :)

Benjamin

Rusty recently had an exchange with the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. He is worried about the lack of online music stores in Australia, and that the big record companies may be stifling competition in ways that the law has not caught up with. Here is the email I sent to Rusty, reformatted for html.

Hello Rusty,

I wonder if a less radical suggestion from the Minister's point of view would be to try and redefine what copying means for a intellectual property distributor. Instead of "you can't make what I sell you available for download" it could essentially mean "you can't permit any more copies of what I sold you to be downloaded than you actually bought from me":

(Number of copies out (sold, or given away) = Number of copies in (bought)) -> No copying has taken place with respect to copyright law.

If this approach was applied to individuals as well as distribution companies then fair use may not need any further consideration. If there is a feeling that this can't be applied to individuals then the major hurdles, I think, would be:

1. How do we define an IP distributor, as compared to a consumer of IP?
2. Who is allowed to define the mechanism for measuring the equation? Is it a statutory mechanism, or do we leave it up to individual contracts?

Just a happy sunday morning muse :)
I'm sure you've already thought along these lines before.