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Finally China Drafts Law to Empower Unions and End Labor Abuse (New York Times)

SHANGHAI, Oct. 12 — China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers’ rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980’s.

The American business lobby are out saying this will be the end of business in China. Tim Costello from Global Labor Strategies (NOT the brother of Australian federal treasurer Peter) pointed out that “You have big corporations opposing basically modest reforms.” It’s really quite disgusting, didn’t these people watch Oliver? How can they justify the millions of dollars that they pay their managers and celebrity endorsements and argue that the actual producers of their products can’t have anything more than slave labour wages and conditions or else their business won’t be profitable.

He also went on to say, “This flies in the face of the idea that globalization and corporations will raise standards around the world.” But in a way, if these laws are passed, they may have. China, much through globalisation, has become a booming economy that now wields considerable power. I doubt very much that Beijing would be considering these laws if it wasn’t so powerful. But China with its mega population was really just a mega-market waiting to explode, smaller Asian markets, until they start high-teching up like Japan, are much less likely to be in the position to start creating these laws. Unless maybe they act as a block, then where will the world’s slave labour come from? Well, there’s still Africa and South America (and Australia if our current labour law keeps progressing down the current path).

I have made myself a yahoo avatar:

It’s really great to see that you can also get “plus sized” avatars unlike Stardolls Medoll app where you can go as far as slightly curvy (albeit somewhat breasty) as the maximum setting on body type. Apparently, the Stardolls service, social networking via paperdolls, is growing in popularity and has recently attracted an extra US$6million from venture capitalists. Its main selling point is that you can dress celebrities like Orlando Bloom and Paris Hilton as paperdolls.

I like this one from PostSecret:

What I don’t like so much about them is their awful submission rules. Basically, you send them free content (your clever and charming postcards) and they won’t share it with it anyone. You are allowed to post ONE image as a link only, which is pretty stupid because it means that once you’ve linked to them once, you’re outrightly banned from giving them any further publicity (other than text links which are nowhere near as appealing), however much you might like a future postcard. They have made a book from it and I suppose plan future ones but it’s simple enough to attach a Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial license to it and then maybe it would feel a lot less like exploitation.

By submitting information to PostSecret, you grant PostSecret a perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, and otherwise exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to that information at its sole discretion, including storing it on PostSecret servers and incorporating it in other works in any media now known or later developed including without limitation published books.If you do not wish to grant PostSecret these rights, it is suggested that you do not submit information to this website. PostSecret reserves the right to select, edit and arrange submissions, and to remove information from the PostSecret website at any time at its sole discretion.

No image from this site may be used for any purpose without expressed written authorization, with one exception; you may post one image as a link to this site.

Screaming mobiles to deter thieves - Phones & PDAs - Gadgets - Technology

A UK firm is hoping a mobile security system it has developed which sets off a high pitch scream, permanently locks the handset and wipes all data if stolen, will halt the spiraling rise in phone theft.

I’ve wondered how long this would take. I’ve always thought that car alarms would be more effective if they were a little bit more human. They could scream or maybe actually say something, like “excuse me, I think someone is trying to steal me, if you can’t see anyone in my near proximity then please accept my apologies, but if there is, they are no doubt up to no good so could you kindly shoo them away or call the police.”

It will be interesting to see if this UK system does get picked up anywhere. There have been a few stories about how Australian mobile providers/sellers do nothing to prevent theft even though they already quite a few means at their disposal.

Well, at least the US economy if you believe the latest report funded by the US entertainment industry. Not content with previous estimations of $6billion in lost sales, they have now examined the “ripple effect” and found that:

movie piracy causes a total lost output for U.S. industries of $20.5 billion per year, thwarts the creation of about 140,000 jobs and accounts for more than $800 million in lost tax revenue.

Fortunately, Jason Shultz from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (one of the major free use/digital rights activist organisations) was on hand to make the perfectly valid point that all because Hollywood doesn’t get the cash/jobs, doesn’t mean it gets taken away from the economy:

“In other words, let’s say people are forgoing paying for $6 billion in movies by downloading or consuming illegal goods but end up spending that $6 billion on iPods, computers and HDTV sets on which to watch the movies, which leads to $25 billion in job creation in the computer/software/consumer electronics field,”

But for the moment, it does look like US politicians are being taken in by Hollywood’s scaremongering.

The University of California, Berkeley has made a number of lectures freely available online through a partnership with Google: UC Berkeley on Google Video A number of courses are available, but perhaps more interesting are videos from guest lecturers in Global and Public Affairs:
Graduate School of Journalism Presents Distinguished guests discuss their role in global affairs and the media.
Goldman School of Public Policy Presents Prominent speakers discuss vital policy issues.

Diana Eng*, Emily Albinski and Audrey Roy won the top Yahoo Hack Day prize with a project called Blogging In Motion which “combined a camera, a handbag, a pedometer and the Flickr API to create a device that takes a picture after every few steps and then automatically blogs those pictures.” The most amazing thing is that they haven’t got some stupid team name and they haven’t made a glamour calendar (yet). Wow, women can be involved with computers and still be relatively normal!

*I think she was a contestant on Heidi Klum’s Project Runway (a reality show where fashion designers vie for some fashion design prize, it was pretty funny).

This is hilarious, it’s Jarvis Cocker’s “Running the World” video… “A personal message from Jarvis along with the words to sing along..”

Was found at Jarvis’ My Space, which he does actually write instead of palming it off to a PR underling like many of the bigger stars. Here’s a snippet of his latest post…

Forgive me Cyber-sisters & Binary-brothers - I haven’t been in touch for ages, I know. Truth is, I’ve been proper poorly - I would like to think it was due to working so hard on bringing you the album of the Millennium (so far) but it’s more likely to do with licking too much loose change (see my last communication). 

It really does annoy me when people sue search engines and aggregators for copyright infringement, talk about biting the hand that feeds you. It’s hardly as if they are getting a free ride, I don’t want to even think about the many millions it costs to keep the Google servers going. Fact is, they provide an essential service and make the internet a much easier place to navigate.

Google in Tussle for Digital Rights

In early September, a Belgian court ruled that the search giant could not reproduce certain copyrighted titles and summaries on its Belgian Google News or Google.be Web site, throwing into question the entire concept of online news aggregation, and even search indexing… No question, portals and search engines funnel huge amounts of traffic to editorial Web sites. But there’s growing concern among publishers that they’re getting eyeballs but little or no revenue from news aggregators. At worst, their material is being expropriated and reproduced outright, with no return whatsoever to the copyright owner.

Maybe these publishers are jumping the gun a little soon, products such as Feedvertising (Text Link Ads) are now starting to provide the opportunity to monetise RSS feeds. Though it is depressing to think there are even more places for advertising to creep.

Not that I’m necessarily a huge fan of Google, I think you always have to be wary when a company is that big and powerful, however good its original start up philosophies might have been. There are a couple interesting posts on ZDNet (Google speak on copyright: content owners beware and Google: Web friend or Web foe) following on the above Belgian case and Google’s blogpost “Our Approach To Content”.

How did we get to a place where the debate on copying copyrighted materials is seen primarily from an owner’s infringement viewpoint? How did we get to a place where our ability to preserve our history and freedom of speech are actually at risk from intellectual property laws? In the latest round of copyright attrocities: Britain’s Sound Archives are finding that they are “facing the loss of a significant portion of its music collection due to stringent copyright laws and obsolete recording formats.” They have recordings that are decaying but the current laws do not allow copying for preservation. This has major implications for our ability to pass on our culture to future generations. It is ironic how a few years ago people were talking about being overloaded with information because everything was theoretically preservable, yet now we face the greatest losses of cultural works in history*, much due to intellectual property laws that were created (originally) to encourage the preservation and creation of works.

British music archive faces copyright risk

The British Library has been unable to begin transferring audio from obsolete formats to modern digital recordings because of prevailing copyright laws and that could ultimately end access to a portion of the archive`s collected recordings, the BBC reported. ‘Currently the law does not permit copying of sound and film items for preservation,’ said the British Library. ‘Without the right to make copies, the UK is losing a large part of its recorded culture.’

An article by ZDNet UK explores specifically the dangers of DRM raised by the British Library which, according to Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, “can impose restrictions on copying content that go beyond the requirements of copyright law” and “can’t be circumvented for disabled access or preservation, and the technology doesn’t expire (as traditional copyright does).” Suw Charman, executive director of the Open Rights Group, talked about the dangers of DRM to academic research:

“If we allow companies to create their own licenses, we undermine copyright law. If we say contract law is more important than copyright law, it allows publishers to write whatever license they like, which is what is happening now.”

In the ZDNet UK article, British Library also raised the problem of orphaned works, “There’s an enormous amount of material locked up because we can’t trace the copyright holders.” Which reminded me of the old US system of copyright law where you couldn’t get protection without registering with the national library actually had some value in that you could at least trace the copyright owners to ask their permission to use the work. I was once at a conference where James Boyle, a legal professor at Duke University (and the coolest legal academic ever) suggested an elegant system. All works were protected automatically for a set number of years, say 25, and then after that period, you could register your copyright for $1 to have another 25 or 100 or whatever years, if you don’t then it falls into public domain. His argument was that most of the lobbying for tightening up copyright laws are really due to a very small percentage of high earning works, but this is what is “locking up” all the other works which nobody wants and is not being saved because no one can find the original copyright owners.

*If only because we are creating the greatest numbers of cultural works in history.

[Edit: Boing Boing picked up the story: here is the Boing Boing story, Link to Counterpoint guide to Creative Commons IP rethink and Link to British Library report (pdf)]