Episode 211 – Biggest Flush Wins The Pot!
(direct link to mp3)
Preamble
- Thanks to Google you can now yell at your TV.
Cana-duh
- Bill C-11′s shortcomings, explained through ebooks.
Copyfight
- Draconian downloading law takes effect in Japan, with predictable results.
Going Mobile
- BlackBerry 10 launching next January.
- As expected, Nexus 4 sells out in minutes.
China Watch
- Great firewall blocks Google.
Tired Old Media
- Google has officially eaten the newspaper industry.
Khaki Pants
- Firefox turns eight.
Pew-Pew
- Antivirus pioneer wanted on murder charges?
- South Korea’s toiled-themed theme park.
- GIF trumps YOLO for word of the year. Now here’s a bunch of GIFs as filler.
Shout-outs
- Time-stamped show notes, you say?
Music
- TdotBEAR rips up the radio reddit charts with his free track 8-bit Grenade.
Dyscuss
- Something to say? Leave a comment below.
- Come hang in our irc channel anytime — #dyscultured @ irc.zeronode.net.
Stay in Touch
[Copyfight] One interesting study done by Sean Leonard at MIT claims one big reason Japanese anime spead throughout the US is because of the hardcore anime fans & “fansubbers” in the country working against the copyright restriction to evangelize and convince people to watch Japanese anime, despite Japanese copyright holders’ abandonment of the American market.
Progress Against the Law: Fan Distribution, Copyright, and the Explosive Growth of Japanese Animation
http://web.mit.edu/seantek/www/papers/progress-columns.pdf
I’m not a big anime consumer but one anime I watched a few months ago (Death Note) was because my Canadian friend tried very hard to get me to watch it (I’m glad I did), so this study is convincing to me on a personal level too.
I’m ok with very limited form of copyright for non-practical creative works (maybe 3-5 years, like Stallman argues) but I want almost all other forms of so-called “intellectual properties” including patents to be abolished, simply because it doesn’t seem to be serving the public interest.