Tag: law

What was the court thinking?

I came across this article about a couple discovering that they are actually a half-brother and half-sister.  As devastating  as these news were to them, there is not much for us – people who don’t know them.  We’ve heard the stories before and will most likely hear more in the future.  But there was one bit in that article that caught my attention.

Once he found out about James’s birth about four years later he proceeded with a legal battle to gain access to his son, The Mail on Sunday reported.

The court ruled that James should have no knowledge of his real father or have any access to him.

Really? WTF  was the court thinking?

Road tax and MOT obsolete

The rumour has been going around for some time, but until now I haven’t heard anything credible.  OnThisIsland.com linked to an article Cyprus Mail about the new law regarding road tax and MOT paper disks – they are obsolete.  Furthermore, having them displayed can get you in trouble.  Not only they obscure a tiny useless part of your windscreen, but traffic police can issue a 50 EUR fine for you.

The article, dated April 8 2010, says:

Ioannis Nicolaides, Head of Technical Services at the Road Transport department said the law was passed in parliament three weeks ago and came into effect two weeks ago.

This means that quite some time has passed and traffic police can easily switch from warnings to actual fines.

I don’t have MOT displayed on my windscreen, but the road tax I will remove tomorrow morning.  And, also, being a “computer guy” this is just music to my ears:

The discs are now obsolete, as all registration data is computerised and ready to hand for road traffic police.

SPAM : It should be opt in, not opt out

Cyprus Mail reports that environmental commissioner turned his attention towards piles of SPAM – advertising leaflets distributed by numerous companies to people’s house, mailboxes, and cars.  The initiative to regulate this is very welcome.  However:

Theopemptou insists that a law should be passed to regulate leaflet distribution in streets, cars and post boxes in order to protect the public and prevent the pile-up of waste. One possible measure he recommended was the creation of a special stamp that people could put on their cars, which would indicate that they do not wish to receive advertising material.

I think that SPAM should be opt in, not opt out.  In other words, it’s the people who WISH to receive the advertising leaflets should indicate that they want to, not the other way around.  You can see how well it works in email vs. RSS and Twitter.  In emails, people just send you loads of junk with an option to unsubscribe from it.  First of all, you already received the junk. Secondly, you need to receive the junk to get an option to unsubscribe.  That’s just not fair.   It doesn’t work.  Opt out.  In RSS and Twitter it’s the opt in.  You don’t get anything until you actually subscribe or follow.  Which is all up to you.  And that’s how it should be.

Legal and educational systems are lagging behind technology

I’ve mentioned this many times before and, I guess, I’ll need to mention this ever more – the technological progress of the recent years (the digital world, yes) has left many systems of our society behind.  Educational and legal are the most noticeable.   Here are a few words in the insightful and funny video (originally from the Ted.com – a place of many more insightful videos).  Here is a quote from a recent Boing Boing post showing the state of the legal system:

… pictures of Ford cars cannot be printed. Not just Ford logos, not just Mustang logos, the car -as a whole- is a Ford trademark and its image can’t be reproduced without permission.

On copyright, fair use, and free speech

TechCrunch has an excellent cover of the “photograph in the video” story that has been going on all over the web in the last few days.  Basically, somebody wrote a funny song and made a video for it.  In that video a bunch of images were used including one that was downloaded from Flickr without permission of the photographer.  The photographer got really pissed off and such.  The video was re-edited to remove the offending image, but there was plenty of discussion on how is right and who is wrong in this story.  Some really important questions on copyright, fair use, and free speech were asked, and some really smart people tried to answer them.

The rights of the copyright holder have always been balanced against the more fundamental right of free speech. And free speech in the Internet age, more so than ever before, goes way beyond words and text. The way people express themselves on the Web increasingly involves images, video, animations, and other rich media, often in mash-ups of pre-existing works. That is how people communicate today. Both copyright law and industry standards need to evolve to take that into consideration.

While I support the (copy)right of the author to command the usage of his or her work, I think that this particular case wasn’t handled properly by the photographer.