it takes a village to disarm a child

There was this story on the "Today" show this morning. They were interviewing some woman who videotaped a three year old boy playing with a handgun while his parents drank and took target practice.¹

The thing that they never asked her, but I would have thought was obvious was, "So you saw this three year old child playing with a pistol and your first thought was to videotape it?" (Presumably to use as evidence in a neglect case.) Perhaps she feared that the drunken parents might shoot her. But to me, that action shows just as much neglect. Take the frikken gun away. I'm from West Virginia, and a lot of people criticise us for being inbred backwoods shoeless hicks, but nobody in West Virginia would have let anyone's three year old play with a gun. Period.

(no subject)

This is getting posted all over th' place, might as well put it up here. But it's mostly because I know more than a few folks interested in Intelectual Property Law.

An interesting copyright case:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001765.php

Two brothers that created a parody of "This Land is Your Land" are being threatened with a lawsuit by the current owners of the song's copyright.

Written by Woodie Guthrie, the original copyright states:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

So if copyright exists to protect the interests of the author ...

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(in the course of reading about IP, i found this cool site, http://www.chillingeffects.org/ that helps small web content authors threatened by big corporate legal strongarm tactics...)