The Copyright Police

Arstechnica NEWS reports that congress now wants to pass a Pro IP bill to create the Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative (USIPER). What are their jobs and responsibilities? You guessed it... copyright enforcement, Rambo-Style. This has some scary implications. Look at how many people have gotten into hot water over their kids downloading MP3s .... I guess going for a hundred thousand dollars for stealing an mp3 wasn't enough for these guys. Now they want blood :-) ..

I am really starting to wonder if I am the only person that realizes cracking down on piracy 100% is a) impossible, and more importantly b) a waste of money. It is impossible because smart people can always make copies... and they will. It is a waste of money because the majority of people buying or stealing media can't afford the real thing anyway. So RIAA don't pitch a fit when you don't see another 20 billion or so in your pockets for your efforts. But hey, I guess its just one step closer to having everything we download and distribute get tracked by our government. Way to go assholes.

Specifically, the PRO IP bill is intended to:

* Strengthen the substantive civil and criminal laws relating to copyright and trademark infringement;
* Establish the Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative (USIPER), in the executive office of the president, to enhance nationwide and international coordination of intellectual property enforcement efforts;
* Appoint intellectual property officers to work with foreign countries in their efforts to combat counterfeiting and piracy;
* Authorize the creation of a permanent Intellectual Property Division within the Department of Justice to improve law enforcement coordination. The bill would transfer the functions of the existing Computer Crime and Intellectual Property section (CCIPs) that relate to IP enforcement to the new IP division;
* Provide the DOJ with new resources targeted to improve IP law enforcement,
including local law enforcement grants and additional investigative and
prosecutorial personnel; and
* Require the DOJ to prepare an annual report that details its IP
enforcement activities.

"This legislation is an important and necessary step in the fight to maintain our competitive edge in a global marketplace," Conyers said in a statement. "By providing additional resources for enforcement of intellectual property, we ensure that innovation and creativity will continue to prosper in our society."

Bush Family are Nazis?

This has nothing to do with technology but I figured I'd blog it anyways because it has been bugging me lately. I saw a video today with some persuasive evidence that the Bush Family supported the Nazi efforts and even tried to overthrow the US Gov't.

The link is here if you want to see it, Bush Family are Nazi

I have seen other supporting evidence in Zeitgeist too. This link is part 2 of 3. I encourage you to watch the entire film especially part one on religion.

It is pretty scary to reveal exacting similarities between Hitlers rise to power and some of the things in our own government today. It seems more and more that Bush keeps pressing home this idea that we should all be ducking for cover 24/7 and living in fear because of the terrorist threat (as if this was a new thing). Slowly our civil liberties are going to be taken way without any opposition from the scared-public. There is even a new bill congress is trying to pass that cites that the internet is a specific terrorist threat and needs to be controlled and monitored by the government. There will no longer any such things as privacy for the American Public.... anyone opposing these ideas will be systematically removed unless we stand up for our civil rights while they still exist. The biased media stems to brainwash the American public and I see lots of people, even people I know well, fall for nearly everything they see in the "news" without doing any real research on their part.

What are some of your thoughts on this? Should our civil liberties be policed and slowly removed? Should we all be tracked 24/7 to protect against terrorist threats? Does the benefit of being "safe" outweigh that of being free?

A Better Way to Share Documents?

While looking for a better way to securely send design proofs to some of my clients I came across a free site called DocumentReady.com. This service absolutely blew my mind! Trust me guys, this is seriously worth checking out. What does it do you ask? What can you use it for? Well here are my thoughts on that:

Basically the DocumentReady service works by allowing you to upload and categorize documents while assigning those documents to groups of one or more people. And its all done over SSL so unlike emailing attachments there doesn't need to be any concern over security. (Yes, emailing is not secure on most systems... I bet you did not know that did you?).

Don't get me wrong, Document Sharing by itself is pretty uninteresting stuff folks. But this system has some nifty features I never realized I needed until I saw them in place. For one it lets your users provided feedback on each of the documents you upload... this is great for me because if my client wants a change to the proof they simply "add a comment" to the document, I'm notified of it and can make the changes they want. But wait, it gets even better because it also has a version history; so when I upload a new document the old document is kept in a "revision bin" so that it can be reviewed at any given time. I also have a log of when a document was downloaded by a specific user so no more having to listen to "We never got the proof you promised us.... (boo hoo hoo)".

It's also worth pointing out there are differnet types of users you can create. For example you can create a user that is an "administrator" who can have full functionality, or you can create a public user that can download documents from the group, and you can create a public user that can only access documents assigned directly to them. This is seriously rad stuff... once you wrap your head around it.

For kicks, I tested out another one of their features called OCR-Indexing. Basically what this does is convert a scanned document into text, then into a pdf, and then indexes that into the built in search engine that it has. Now, I will admit I have absolutely no need for this, but it is pretty darn cool... and I'm sure someone out there could make use of this. Oh, and by the way, you can also fax PDFs, Word Documents, and Excel Spreadsheets directly from the program. I faxed an Excel Spreadsheet and it came out awesome... I have to admit I was a bit surprised! :)

Anyway, there is a free account you can use after the evaluation but I went with the basic plan because I upload client files almost daily. For what it does its pretty inexpensive in my book and most people can probably get away with just using the free plan.

Has anyone else tried this? How are you using it in your business/organization?

http://www.documentready.com