Branko's Weblog

Labour representative Martijn van Dam is asking questions of the Justice Secretary about the intentions and actions of the Brein foundation. This Dutch RIAA wants to do the same thing as its American counterpart and sue individual file sharers.

Van Dam is rightly concerned about in how far a private organization is allowed to perform actions that typically belong to the mandate of the government, although I don’t think he will achieve much this time. So far, Brein does not seem to do much more in the areas of privacy and law enforcement than, say, a detective agency does.

Quite frankly, I would be interested to see how far Brein gets. Not because I want to see honest citizens sued (far from it), but because I don’t think Brein will get anywhere.

AFAIK (but IANAL), there is no such thing as statutory damages for copyright infringement in Dutch law. The RIAA had a huge club to swing, because the American file-sharers could be fined 250,000 US dollar for every file they uploaded or offered; with RIAA only going after people that shared around a 1,000 files or more, the potential damages ran into millions of dollars. American teenagers may have more pocket money to spend than ever before, but I doubt most of them could pay a fine like that.

A Dutch judge will very likely only look at actual damages. Brein will have to convince the court that such damages exist. As such, they will have to argue points that have already been argued in the public arena a thousand times. A defense attorney should have little trouble convincing the court that the actual damages in most cases are negligible.

All this, in my opinion, would make it much more likely that file-sharers will actually let it come to court cases, instead of settling out of court.

Since Brein should know this in advance, any threats of legal action seem little more than a form of harrasment of people that just happen not to share your viewpoint. Isn’t there a law against this? Would the lawyers that work for Brein be open to criminal charges of barratry?

The organizers of the 2004 olympic games are nuts: Retecool and others report that according to the organizers’ Hyperlink Policy, you can only link to them under strict conditions:

“a) Use the term ATHENS 2004 only, and no other term as the text referent

b) Not associate the link with any image, esp. the ATHENS 2004 Emblem (see paragraph below)

c) Send a request letter to the Internet Department stating:
* Short description of site
* Reason for linking
* Unique URL containing the link (if no unique URL than just the main URL)
* Publishing period
* Contact point (e-mail address)”

The rift between early adopters of new technology and vested interests has never seemed so clear.

File-sharing increases the public’s exposure to new acts and new films, and works as huge free advertizing campaigns.

What do the record and film companies do? They sue the file-sharers.

Site make-overs alert organizations to the usability and accessibility problems their sites might have. What do some site owners do? They sue the make-over-makers.

Of course, it is the record companies’ right to decide themselves how and when they go bankrupt. It is the site owners’ right to get prosecuted or sued for breaking disability laws. Yet somehow I cannot shake the notion that a little bit more understanding would go a long way.

It’s tough being a parent. You’re so out of the loop with what’s hip and what’s not these days. Of course, you’re still way ahead of me, because I did not even know about http://whatacrappy present.com, even though way hipper blogs speak of it as if it has been around for ages.

In case you thought of buying your kids a CD by their favourite artist, think again, says Downhill Battle. (No, that’s not a rap group. At least, not that I am aware of.) Very funny page, whether you agree with them or not.

I came across somebody’s old blog entry that linked to the Haiku Error Messages page.

–Cass Whittington

An oldie, but there cannot be too many haiku error messages.

http://www.budtempchi.org/errorhaiku.html

The hamburger, in my experience, is a dish that has degraded enormously over time. The introduction of McDonalds in the Netherlands during the 1980s seemed to play a pivotal part in that degradation.

When I was four years old, my mother and a friend decided to go on a holiday to Spain, and they brought me along. We went to the island of Mallorca, and from what little I remember of it, it was an exhillerating experience.

I even forgot about the man who, sitting at the breakfast table next to me, apparently slapped me for sucking my thumb. He did not tolerate that with his own kids…

I do remember the swimming pool, though vaguely now, and the slide into the pool that I was a slightly too young to take. I remember the breakfasts in the hotel, the parasols made of straw, the deck-chairs on the beach, the sandals I was wearing that for once did not irrate me (I hated the metal locks that pinched my skin).

But most of all, I remember eating my first hamburger. I was small. It was big. And it combined a multitude of tastes, every fragment of a second a completely different one. The huge, raw onion rings that made my eyes water. The clear sour gurks. The sweet of the tomato ketchup and the mayonaise. The texture of the grilled meat.

Later, when I was a little older and got to order my own snacks, I sometimes ordered a hamburger, but they were always a little flat compared to that first taste.

Still, the worst was yet to come. During the early 1980s there already were a couple of imported fast-food chains in the Netherlands, but Mickey D’s took the country by storm. I don’t know what exactly they did right, but suddenly all the kids had to eat there. It cannot have been for the food, which was almost entirely tasteless. No taste, and no texture either.

A lot of snackbars were struggling those days, because an important part of their clientele stayed away. And they seemed to have responded in part by making their hamburgers just as mushy and bereft of actual taste as the crap served under the golden arches.

And so a good burger has become something that I can only enjoy at home, when I make them myself. They are not hard to make if you stick to the formula.

OK, so the last of my blog entries is the worst I ever wrote.

First, it is imprecise. By putting up this list, I seem to be suggesting that the best food I ever ate was junk food.

Quite to the contrary!

However, of certain categories of food, I could apparently best remember when junk food stood out.

And of course, listing eating experiences without the actual experiences is pretty meaningless. Why did I like that burger/wine/etc.?

Brrr…

Hamburger: my first one, on Mallorca, in 1972

Wine: Chiroubles, in The Garlic Queen, ca. 2001, Amsterdam

Milkshake: the ones in the Protestant Military Home in Oirschot, during my service (1989-1990)

Herring: served in Café Het Sluisje in Nieuwendam (Amsterdam), ca. 2002

Stew: cooked over an open fire and under a thunderstorm, near the Linge River (if I remember correctly) and containing loads of sand, ca. 1995.

Of course, most of the best food I ever had was home-cooked, and stories go with the five above.

DIY is a weird business: it takes a normal concept (building a house) and turns it into something special. It does this, because people in the West have stopped building their own houses. Construction has become a specialty.

This means that from the point of view of the carpet, paint and DIY stores, not just their goods, but also their knowledge has become something valuable:

- “Do I need an undercarpet with this carpet?”

- “Of course you do.”

Does that mean I need the undercarpet? No idea.

Shopping for the new place has made me take a new, fresh look at my own web building business. Websites are funny things: everybody has a fourteen year old cousin who can make them a website for the price of a new mobile phone, or an iPod. But on the other hand, you know that there are websites that cost millions to make. What’s the magical difference? How do you know you have made the right choice for a supplier? Where can you find honest advice?

The answer is of course, as with DIY, that if you invest time, the answers are right there for the taking. But if you had time to invest, you would not be looking for the right supplier in the first place.

It will take dozens of years (probably beyond the lifespan of the web itself) before people will have figured out the web. Until then, suppliers like me should work to build trust, and to earn that trust.