SUBMISSION ON THE TRANSPACIFIC STRATEGIC ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES

To: Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade

Introduction

This Submission is from Nathan Torkington, an author, musician, and software professional whose address is […].

Summary

I strongly oppose any proposals to extend the term of copyright, entrench digital rights management, assign investigation or enforcement powers to rights holders beyond those already in law, or otherwise use copyright law against consumers and artists. I also strongly oppose any interference with parallel importing.

At the New Zealand Open Source Awards, David Cunliffe (the then Minister of Health as well as of IT) literally tapped me on the shoulder and asked whether I’d be interested in serving on HISAC, the Health Information Strategy Advisory Committee. The health system in NZ, he said, might benefit from some of the open source and collaboration work that I do (he had been to Foo Camp the previous year and I think he pictures me as surrounded by a cadre of buzzing connected technophiles who do amazing things). “Sure,” I said, and that’s how I found myself in Wellington last week, attending the inaugural HISAC meeting.

Way to go, National Library of New Zealand! They’re the latest addition to Flickr Commons!

My friend Aaron Swartz writes about the increasingly-evil OCLC:

Not satisfied with controlling the world’s largest source of book information, it wants to take over all the smaller ones as well. It’s now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library.

Today I was on the National Radio show Nine To Noon. It was nerve-wracking beforehand, but fun once it started. The podcast of my appearance needs some context: she’d been teasing future segments, which featured a gentleman who took casts of people’s bottoms so they could see it; Kathryn said “I’m sure many people prefer to think they have no bottom” and then introduced me. So that’s a long-winded way of saying that when the first words out of my mouth are “I have a bum”, it’s not a total non sequitur. Links follow.

Auckland Even when I’m well stoned on a tab of LSD or Indian grass, you still look to me like an elephant’s arsehole surrounded by blue-black haemorrhoids, The sound of the opening and shutting of bankbooks, The thudding of refrigerator doors, The ripsaw voices of Glen Eden mothers yelling at their children, The chugging noise of masturbation from the bedrooms of the bourgeoise, The voices of dead teachers droning in dead classrooms, The TV voice of Mr. Muldoon, The farting noise of the trucks that grind their way down Queen Street Has drowned forever the song of Tangaroa on a thousand beaches, The sound of the wind among the green volcanoes And the whisper of the human heart. Boredom is the essence of your death.

November 7th is World Plone Day, when the Plone community will run outreach events around the world to “promote and educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using Plone in education, government, NGOs, and in business”. There will be activities in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. Get out there!

In case you’re interested but don’t follow O’Reilly Radar, I’ve recently made a few posts there about the mortgage dramas:

• Effect of the Depresson on Technology
• The Connected Economy
• Torkington’s Law

Reading A Curriculum for Cybernetics and Systems Theory, I found some thought-provoking and sometimes inspirational quotes. I’ve collected them below:

• “When we try to pick up anything by itself we find it is attached to everything in the universe.” — John Muir
• “I throw a spear into the dark – that is intuition. Then I have to send an expedition into the jungle to find the way of the spear – that is logic.” — Ingmar Bergman
• “Lovers of wisdom must be inquirers into many things indeed.” — Heraclitus, 5th Century B. C.
• “You have about 10 minutes to act on an idea before it recedes back into dreamland.” — Buckminster Fuller paraphrased by Stewart Brand
• “Tool: Something with a use on one end and a grasp on the other end.” — Stewart Brand
• “If you cannot think of three ways of abusing a tool, you do not understand how to use it.” — Gregory Bateson
• “Big whorls have little whorls / Which feed on their velocity, / And little whorls have lesser whorls / And so on to viscosity.” — Lewis F. Richardson
• “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.” — Tolstoy, quoted by Joseph Ford, 1985, in “Chaos: Solving the Unsolvable, Predicting the Unpredictable”
• “Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent.” — Freeman Dyson
• “Words challenge eternity.” — Horace
• “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” — Thomas Pynchon
• “When the looms spin by themselves, we’ll have no need for slaves.” — Aristotle

James McGlinn emailed me a great reply to my piece on the business cofounder shortage in NZ, and he’s finally posted it. You should read it because I agree with everything he says.