The top 10 list to see if you have an extremist, radical anti-copyright agenda

Did you know you might have an extremist, radical anti-copyright agenda?

I have put together a top 10 list of the positions taken by these groups that I will define as their extremist, radical anti-copyright agenda.

No. 10: They support changing the law to reduce damages for copyright infringement.

No. 9: They support the elimination of statutory damages for secondary copyright infringement.

No. 8: They favor rolling back copyright extension; in some cases, radically.

No. 7: They favor the elimination of the songwriter and publisher rights for server, cache and buffer copies.

No. 6: They oppose efforts to obtain the identities of individuals engaged in massive copyright infringement.

No. 5: They support extreme versions of orphan works legislation.

No. 4: They have filed legal briefs supporting anti-copyright positions of Grokster, Napster, LimeWire, Cablevision, Google, YouTube and Verizon.

No. 3: They oppose graduated-response protection for copyright owners.

No. 2: They oppose treaties that support copyright enforcement like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

No. 1: They actually argue that illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic helps the economy and doesn't hurt songwriters.

This list is from here.

I guess I can see where Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore got his talking points, eh? Love how they spout this stuff in the same breath as saying that we're working on a "made in Canada solution."

(You might also want to see Michael Geist's extensive commentary on our proposed copyright bill, starting here, or try listening to Jesse Brown's Search Engine podcasts on the subject. Basically, it is almost clever, but then shoots itself in the foot, because, you know, the Americans jumped off a cliff, so we have to do that too... grr.)

Coming to an understanding with WebKit

So, WebKit and I seem to have come to a temporary understanding. I will use xcode to edit things and take advantage of nice features like being able to right click and go to the definition of the property I'm inspecting. And then I will compile things using the build-webkit script and debug using debug-webkit (which is really just gdb). It's just not worth tracking down all the generated things that aren't quite being generated correctly when I use xcode right now.

This is not exactly ideal, but it'll do. I used to do a lot of debugging with gdb on the command line, so I'm perfectly capable, just pretty rusty.

On the bright side, I added some minor code and successfully stepped through it with the debugger, so things should be moving forwards again. And, bonus, I chatted with my supervisor and he had perfectly clever suggestions of other useful things I should be doing in parallel while my compiles are happening. (Changing a header results in a fairly lengthy recompile in webkit, so I've been trying to decide how to split my work day into two parallel tracks, and divide my attention accordingly.)

My other possible parallel project for this week may turn out to be rewrites on a paper. I'm supposed to find out today if it was accepted. I'm not sure how I feel about it -- I definitely want the paper to be accepted, but I've taken the work in a different direction since I wrote it, and I've got a weird time conflict that may see me giving two presentations in three days, in different cities, on entirely unrelated topics to very different audiences. So it makes my life a bit more weird if it gets accepted. It could be fun, though!