Canada: Down on the Pharm

Someone should tell Dosanjh, President Bush and the pharmaceutical companies that support them that no one has yet found a cure for that ill. Dosanjh should drop this strange plan, and the administration should drop its support. It'll take a lot more than a border skirmish over the Internet to bring drug prices down and make healthcare affordable for all Americans, but maybe this is the symptom that could lead to some radical surgery.

Pirates and Ethics: A Case Study

Two-thirds of college and university students experience no ethical qualms about downloading copyrighted material for free. This dog-bites-man news comes from the Business Software Alliance, which also reported in a recent survey that about half of college-age respondents believe that it's fine to download and share pirated material on computers at school and work, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported.

P-I reporter Brad Wong found a good example: "University of Washington computer science student Peter Davis has his Apple iPod packed with nearly 3,000 songs and enjoys spending time at his apartment downloading television shows and movies to his personal computer with the help of file-sharing programs. The 22-year-old isn't bothered too much that the songs, television shows and movies hold copyrights or that industry executives have vowed to fight this piracy. 'There are so many people doing this that the risks are so low,' he said. 'It's like shoplifting without the risk or retribution.'"

Dude, you are so sued.

In fact, the Recording Industry Association of America announced on Wednesday that it sued 784 people for illegally sharing music files, bringing the total lawsuit count since late 2003 to more than 12,000 sued. Pretty soon the RIAA can steal an idea from McDonald's: "The Recording Industry: Billions and billions sued."

Not only that, Reuters reported that police in more than a dozen countries arrested suspected music and movie pirates: "More computers were seized on Wednesday in Australia, Israel, Germany, South-Korea, Norway, France, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Poland, Canada and Hungary, said a spokeswoman for the ministry, which is responsible for preventing economic crime."  

According to the AP, ''the Justice Department 'is striking at the top of the copyright piracy supply chain -- a distribution chain that provides the vast majority of illegal digital content now available online,' Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said." The story said the raids targeted "warez" groups -- "a kind of underground Internet co-op that is set up to trade in copyrighted materials. [They] are extraordinarily difficult to infiltrate because users talk only in encrypted chat rooms, their computer servers require passwords, and many are located overseas, the FBI has said. Such groups are believed responsible for stealing and distributing copyrighted works including films "Star War Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" and "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," and software such as Autodesk's Autocad 2006 and Adobe's Photoshop."

Ye Olde Punk Rocker

Rock n' roll goddess Patti Smith mused about BlackBerrys while performing a song-by-song tour of her debut -- and amazing -- 1975 album "Horses," Andrew Perry wrote in the London Telegraph. Smith, Perry wrote, was in town as curator of this year's Meltdown at the Royal Festival Hall .

"This penultimate concert in the two-week festival was the hottest ticket, though, because Smith returned, with band, plus guests Tom Verlaine of Television and Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers, to perform Horses ... in its entirety," Perry said. "That legendary, spellbinding sequence of music has gone down in history as the first spasm of punk rock, the bridge between the visionary 1960s rock of Smith's heroes Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix on the one hand and the manic energy of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols on the other." In the midst of the free-form fest, Smith launched an off-the-cuff polemic about expenditure on "BlackBerrys and business communication systems, when we can't communicate with our children." Gosh, why didn't someone text me about this when it happened?

And on an end-note, a contributor to the Slashdot technology news list noted that a member of the British Parliament told his colleagues that he is a Jedi . Yes, a Jedi.

The declaration prompted this comment from Slashdot contributor TripMaster Monkey: "To those misguided simpletons out there who insist on calling themselves 'Jedi knights', I offer you this chance to prove yourselves: Just build a lightsaber. A real one. That's all. What's that... you can't? Don't have suitable raw materials, you say? OK ... that's fair...how about this, then: Force choke me. From where you are right now. Go ahead ... it's OK."

That's why we call this time of year the silly season. U.S. readers, have a happy 4th.

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