Index of category lawpoli

Death Note witch trials

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:39:32 GMT

There's a popular anime series called Death Note whose plot revolves around a magical notebook (the "Death Note" of the title). Humans whose names are written in the Death Note, die. The book falls into the hands of a high-school student who uses it to go on a killing spree - starting with criminals he thinks the world will be better off without, but quickly moving on to killing the police too in order to protect himself from discovery. This series is currently being shown on US television in translation, and it's already been very popular in the original Japanese, and as happens with popular anime series, there've been licensed products based on it. Including notebooks styled to look like the Death Note. [478 words...]

C-506: ISP licensing is back again

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:06:25 GMT

On 14 February 2008, Hon. Karen Redman (Kitchener Centre, Lib.) introduced Bill C-506, the "Internet Child Pornography Prevention Act". This seems to be the latest incarnation of the same ISP licensing bill that has been coming around periodically for over ten years. I may go through and do a detailed comparison with previous versions at a later date, but for now, here's a summary of what's in the current one. Some of my old notes on other ISP licensing bills are in the relevant category on my Web site. Some of the links in there are broken because of design changes on Parliament's site; these issues have been spread out over a number of years, an eternity in Internet time. [598 words...]

Search engine optimism and "IFOLLOW"

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:55:11 GMT

It's been a couple of years now since the introduction of the nofollow attribute. As I expected, comment and referrer spam remain scourges. It's not clear to me that nofollow has really done anybody any good. However, I've seen a couple of things of interest related to it recently. [2143 words...]

Six Apart determined to destroy itself in blaze of idiocy

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 15:58:50 GMT

The new owners of Livejournal have done some very stupid things in the last year or so, but the new "adult content" feature is one of the stupidest. I'd almost think they are deliberately trying to force the business to fail for the tax loss or something. [1713 words...]

News on the Eastern Front

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 04:04:12 GMT

It recently hit Anime News Network that the Japanese government was asking the US government to crack down on illegal distribution of anime. As usual, fans on the ANN Web-BBS thread attempted to make plenty of excuses for why this item should be discounted or ignored, usually attempting to draw distinctions that the law (and the request) doesn't. For instance, some attempted to draw the usual bogus line between "legal" fansubs of unlicensed material, and fansubs of licensed material; someone else wanted to know whether the request included "raws" or just fansubs; and some said it wasn't anime, just copyrighted material in general (even though the request specifically mentioned anime, and no other form of Japanese IP is routinely infringed on anything like a comparable scale). Those distinctions matter to fans. Those distinctions don't matter to the bureaucracy, which only sees copyrights and infringement. It's similar to the attempts fans of underage-sex fantasies routinely make to draw a line between themselves and the "actual perverts" who are completely different in some way not instantly obvious to outsiders. [635 words...]