Digital Reproduction Management

A jeweler once told me about why platinum is a considered such a precious metal. He said the platinum industry used to sell almost exclusively to the military for fuses in bombs. Somewhere in the 20C the demand dropped off as bomb-makers found cheaper alternatives. Having lost their biggest customer, this idea that platinum was as/more precious than gold for jewelry was created in the public mind, though he himself found it to be a much worse metal for the purpose. Your link at "Platinum Today" might not be an unbiased view of how useful the metal is.

"The DNS hijacking attack was resolved within an hour, Moore said."

Is that a DNS joke?

And if the floor price for a used game is 35£ that creates a much narrower window for Steam-style sales. You wouldn't price a new copy below a used one.

I'm thinking here of ACTA that uses the intellectual property label around counterfeiting and lumps in copyright violations. I think I'm with you on the idea that copyright has its set of legal rules and counterfeiting another. Increasingly they seem to be talked about in the same terms though that doesn't sit right with me.

"I want to encourage clear thinking about copyright law. Separately, I want to encourage clear thinking about patent law." I have also seen (in these days of international trade pacts) counterfeiting lumped in with copyright infringement and patent violations. I am unsure of how the law looks upon this, but to me it seems different enough. If one illegally downloads a song or a movie and violates copyright, they know it is not an official copy, and are getting an exact copy of the original. I think of counterfeit products as in-exact copies being passed off as official ones. I don't want to put a value judgement on these scenarios here, but point out that grouping this too under "Intellectual Property" is a barrier to clearly thinking about these activities and how they should be dealt with.

No. See here. http://thesocialmuser.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/olympics-started-3000-years-ago-twitter_14.html

But it's only 2012!

Banning people from the Internet will take away "the freedoms of expression, assembly, and association online" in an overbroad and potentially inaccurate attempt to punish piracy.

So I guess the government's position that access to the Internet is as important as freedom of speech only applies to communist countries http://articles.cnn.com/2011-02-15/politics/clinton.internet_1_internet-freedom-repression-expression?_s=PM:POLITICS

I always pictured a black panther http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_panther which isn't the same as a Puma.

It's Jon St. John, not John St. John.

I once signed up for a license to distribute the Acrobat Reader on a CD-ROM my organization was using as a give-away, and I had to agree not to let the program end up in places like Cuba. Now, in the same week I learn about Russian spies being arrested and swapped with the USA, I hear that Microsoft is giving out the source code to Windows 7 to the Russian spy agency. Wow.