Last month I gave a presentation to the Commerce Committee in Wellington who were considering the Copyright Ammendment Bill. I was representing the NZOSS position that the Technical Protection Measure clauses being added to the Copyright Act would act to undermine other additions which make time shifting and format shifting legal. The new TPM legislation also affects the right of resale, and will essentially allow big corporates to put patents around content delivery in order to control distribution.
In a previous article about the pain of professional photographers I suggested that professionals would be forced to give away the copyright of photos they take due to competitive pressure. In the past the negatives were held by the photographer, or more correctly the photographer held copyright and didn't assign it to the client. This meant they controlled reprints. Over the weekend I made a discovery; that professional photographers have indeed begun to give people copyright ownership.
Extreme programming has a problem. It works very well for contract development where there is a clearly identified user who can guide development, but works poorly when there is no day to day access to a user. I also believe that the deemphasis of design has taken us back to coding without a vision of where we are going.
It is a sad day. After paying money for a professional account on Flickr they have now locked me out of my own account. The only way they will let me back into my account is to join up with Yahoo. Yahoo of course are scum. I would rather give my personal details to jack the ripper than Yahoo. The terms of service of Yahoo basically claim license to do whatever the hell they like with my intellectual property. Anything touches Yahoo servers and they have license to use, distribute,copy, modify and publish in any medium they want anywhere in the world.
Software is hard. This video is more or less the "Software is Hard" Chapter of Appland, describing how effective software development methods have been in the past.
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