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Canada Upsets the American Music Industry for the second time in 110 Years

By Tom Koltai

(Our previous article was the first upset.)   This time, Canadians have made the top ten list of countries that are “out to get” the content industries.   They share this dubious honour with the following countries. Priority Watch List (Links retrieve country specific pdf reports.)         Argentina         Canada         Chile         Costa Rica [...]

MUSIC PIRATES IN CANADA….(1897)

By Tom Koltai

Dug out from the archives of the New York Times….. June 13, 1897 NYTimes   American Publishers say they are Suffering by Copyright Violations There-Steps Taken for Redress.   “Canadian pirates” is what the music dealers call publishing houses across the line who are flooding this country, they say, with spurious editions of the latest [...]

The Dollar, The Oil and Sun Tzu – Part II – Financial

By Tom Koltai

When young men reach the age of 17, (in Australia) they obtain their driving licenses. Then they buy a cool car (death trap) that isn’t worth the money that they or their parents paid for it.   The next three years of their lives are spent “tricking” out the car with the best mag wheels, [...]

Free Barbeque – Your Tax Dollars at Work.

By Tom Koltai

A few months ago I blogged about the cost of entertainment and how even a weekend surf at the beach was likely to cost car parking fees, barbeque facilities use fees and of course, GST on the ice, petrol, esky contents, (surf) board wax and zinc cream.   In other words it’s hard for the [...]

Koltai Musings or A Solitary Pigeon amongst the ACTA FatCats.

By Tom Koltai

Sometimes you can read a paragraph and skip right over important words. It is not till later that something in the brain clicks and says “Whoa”!   The other day I quoted a paragraph from wikileaks:   In 2007 a select handful of the wealthiest countries began a treaty-making process to create a new global [...]

The Doomsday Clock reads 5 MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

By Tom Koltai

Yesterday, a leading Australian Academic suggested the fortifying of the Australian National Broadband Network with anti EMP measures.   My response was that it was pointless as the public wouldn’t like Valve Radio powered wifi routers, and that we should just send flowers to everyone around the world to make them like us.     [...]

ACTA – Number of the Beast or 1984 – Part II

By Tom Koltai

Introduction For those that havent read the first article in this group – I highly recommend it for complete understanding of this article. ACTA – the Number of the Beast or 1984. http://www.perceptric.com/blog/_archives/2009/4/11/4150002.html There is a strong presumption in US law favoring openness of government documents for a reason: People have a right to know [...]

An Interview With The President Of The Australian Pirate Party

By Chris Gilbey

As regular visitors to this blog would know, we have a keen interest in how networking tools and technologies are being used to aid communication. One of the principal tools that we have watched and undertaken extensive research in is how P2P is used in conjunction with content of all kinds. The positioning of the [...]

Yo Ho Ho Me Hearties.

By Tom Koltai

Tomorrow is the end of the world. For Foxtel at least. Well, as far as having me as their number one unpaid critic. You would think that with all the coverage I was giving them, they would have given me a “comped” account. But no, they ignored me – mostly. Apart from when they took [...]

The Reason Why P2P Is Going To Be Critical Technology

By Chris Gilbey

The use of P2P in enabling information to flow quickly and efficiently at the edge of the network without requiring central distribution or control is going to become more and more relevant to maintaining social cohesion as time goes by. Currently we live in a world that has famously been called “flat” because of global [...]