The UK government is considering amendments to copyright law, and the right to parody is one of the amendments being considered. This is an exception the US already have in their laws, and allows the use of copyrighted material for parody (e.g. Spoof songs, campaigns, commentary).

The government last considered this in 2006, but lobbying by incumbent industries prevented a change. Read the Open Rights Group’s article for more info, if you’d like to add your voice to the debate in parliament.

We have one more week to tell policy makers that we need a right to parody. You can help by *writing to the consultationcopyrightconsultation@ipo.gov.uk *to tell them why you think this is a good idea.

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This article is very pessimistic about the games, but lots of interesting data points. I had no idea so much military would be involved in protecting The Olympics.

During the Games an aircraft carrier will dock on the Thames. Surface-to-air missile systems will scan the skies. Unmanned drones, thankfully without lethal missiles, will loiter above the gleaming stadiums and opening and closing ceremonies. RAF Typhoon Eurofighters will fly from RAF Northolt. A thousand armed US diplomatic and FBI agents and 55 dog teams will patrol an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city by an 11-mile, £80m, 5,000-volt electric fence.

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This article gives a pretty good run-down of where our wonkey calendar comes from. And also how leap-years resulted in the loss of 10 days, which I’ve separately heard caused ‘revolutions’ (or at least wide-spread grumbling) by the populace for their days stolen from them.

It’s bizarre to me that the whole world seems to use the gregorian calendar and 24-hour day, but we can’t agree on daylight savings time, or other measurement units.

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A more reasonable take on the issues outlined in the oatmeal comic, that recently caused a stir, than Andy Ihnatko’s response.

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Cute

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The government body issuing warnings for (accusations of) copyright infringements, for France’s three-strikes law, has been caught infringing copyright twice. If they get caught again, will they remove themselves from the Internet?

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