Jeremy Corbyn, unlike vegan Kerry McCarthy, won’t harangue you to stop eating meat

Two lion cubs eat meat, October 2010 by Tambako the Jaguar

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn disagreed with his farming minister Kerry McCarthy’s call to treat meat eaters like smokers via a public advertising campaign, as further splits in the shadow cabinet emerged.

McCarthy, a vegan whose appointment ruffled a fair few farmers’ feathers, had previously told vegan magazine Viva!life that meat should be treated like tobacco, the smoking of which has been campaigned against through government advertising over the last few years.

Yet in an interview with ITV News, Corbyn demurred from her plans, saying:

“I am a vegetarian. I personally don’t eat meat and haven’t for a very very long time. I think meat eaters, if they wish to carry on eating meat, that’s up to them to do so. I don’t stop people eating meat indeed many people that I know very well eat meat often in front of me and I tolerate it with the normal decency, courtesy and respect that you would expect from me.”

In the past McCarthy has described herself as a “militant” vegan, and has been refusing meat and dairy products for the past 20 years, as well as practising vegetarianism for a decade prior to that.

In her interview with Viva!life she said:

“I really believe that meat should be treated in exactly the same way as tobacco, with public campaigns to stop people eating it. Progress on animal welfare is being made at EU level … but in the end it comes down to not eating meat or dairy.”

When quizzed on her views on BBC Radio 4, McCarthy said the world was not going to “turn vegan” while she was in post, adding:

“I have my own personal views on what I choose to eat, but I accept that we have a livestock industry in this country. What I want is for the industry to have the best welfare standards possible, to be sustainable as well as economically viable.”

Tim Bonner, chief executive of the lobby group the Countryside Alliance, said McCarthy’s ideas were “verging on the cranky”, and were “completely out of step with the vast majority of people.”

Image Credit – Two lion cubs eat meat, October 2010 by Tambako the Jaguar

Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload likened to postal service trafficking drugs

Kim Dotcom, July 2013 by Peter Harrison

Kim Dotcom was accused of knowingly profiting from the mass distribution of copyrighted content through his website Megaupload on Thursday, as an extradition hearing against him got underway.

New Zealand and American authorities allege that the Internet entrepreneur facilitated mass piracy by allowing and even encouraging people to upload copyrighted content which users could then stream.

Christine Gordon QC, a lawyer for the Crown in New Zealand, likened the website to a postal service whose owners were concealing the shipment of drugs and profiting from it.

She said:

“One would shut down the post office if those who created and ran it had actual knowledge that they were shipping drugs and go to great lengths to conceal it from law enforcement, and knowingly make money off each shipment.”

Dotcom was also accused of only superficially adhering to takedown notices from copyright holders, while at the same time paying those who uploaded the most popular content.

Gordon said:

“They [the defendants] knew that they paid rewards for specific copyright-infringing material and in some cases they communicated with the rewards claimants and helped and encouraged their activities by giving them special privileges.”

Dotcom sat alongside three co-defendants Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato and Bram van der Kolk in Auckland District Court, New Zealand.

Gordon went on to reference conversations between the various defendants which she claims show they were deliberately hiding their activity from the authorities.

Dotcom is alleged to have told Ortmann in 2010:

“At some point a judge will be convinced about how evil we are and then we’ll be in trouble. We have to make ourselves invulnerable.”

The Internet entrepreneur also allegedly told his co-defendant that logging of chats should be avoided.

Van der Kolk was said to have written to Dotcom:

“If copyright holders would really know how big our business is they’d surely try to do something against it. They have no idea we are making millions in profit every month.”

In order for the four to be extradited to the US the Crown must prove that there is a prima facie (on first appearance) case against them.

Last week Democratic presidential candidate and Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig filed an affidavit saying that the Crown had failed to establish the case.

Megaupload is accused of making USD $25m from advertising and USD $125m from premium subscriptions which allowed users to watch uploaded videos without time limits.

This story was originally reported in the New Zealand Herald.

Image Credit – Kim Dotcom, July 2013 by Peter Harrison

Why ‘Happy Birthday’ is still not quite in the public domain

Birthday Cake, September 2010 by Will Clayton

Most people will have heard that Happy Birthday, the popular birthday jingle, was subject to copyright, meaning that the holders could pursue people for royalties should they choose to sing or play it, at least in a commercial context.

But this week the right to claim royalties was overturned by a ruling from the US District of California, which much of the press said had put the song into the US public domain, stripping Warner/Chappell, a subsidiary of Warner Music, of the right to collect payment.

In practical terms this may well be true, but the specifics are a shade more complicated than that.

Songwriting royalties are divided by law into music and words, which is to say that the tune of a song is treated as a separate entity to the lyrics.

Happy Birthday’s melody was agreed by all parties in the case to have been in the US public domain, meaning that one could already hum the tune without fearing you would have to pay.

What was in contention was Warner/Chappell’s claim that it held the copyright to the words, an argument that was dismissed by the court, which ruled that the group could not back this up.

This led the plaintiff’s lawyers to release a statement announcing that the words were now in the public domain, an angle which most websites reported on as the truth.

Yet whilst the court ruled that Warner Chappell could not prove that it held the copyrights, it did not dismiss the idea that somebody somewhere might do.

This is because the authors of the 1893 tune, American sisters Patty and Mildred Hill, never asserted their copyright over the song’s lyrics, and there is no evidence they transferred rights for the lyrics over to the Summy Company, the first firm to assert claim over the lyric copyright.

Of course, unless somebody comes forward to establish this copyright Happy Birthday will in effect be public domain, at least in the US. It remains in copyright in Britain, among others countries.

A full version of the song’s history, complete with the original lyrics, can be found in a detailed piece by the LA Times, and the court’s full judgment can be found at this link.

Image Credit – Birthday Cake, September 2010 by Will Clayton

Jeremy Corbyn comes to David Cameron’s defence over piggate allegations

Jeremy Corbyn at prime minister's questions, BBC via David Holt

Prime minister David Cameron has found an unlikely defender against the ongoing allegation that he stuck his penis into the mouth of a dead pig during an initiation ritual for an Oxford society.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who the Tories have been keen to brand a national security threat because of his largely pacifist views on defence, told ITV News that he objected to the media’s treatment of Cameron in the wake of a number of allegations from upcoming biography Call Me Dave.

He said:

“The media treatment of any politician on unsubstantiated allegations, be it David Cameron, me or anybody else is wrong. And too much of our media is obsessed with personality politics, obsessed with personal criticism of politicians, and therefore distracting from what are actually very serious issues about people’s housing, people’s living standards, people’s jobs or world peace.”

Even if Corbyn is not too keen on the media’s behaviour, it appears that many Britons find the reports of Cameron’s misbehaviour compelling, with two-thirds telling pollster YouGov that they believed the allegations.

The full interview with Corbyn can be viewed on the ITV News website.

Image Credit – Jeremy Corbyn at prime minister’s questions, BBC via David Holt

Photo suggests Tory government is considering Channel 4 privatisation

Channel 4 Building in London, September 2012 by Loz Pycock

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