Link roundup: porn and piracy

Where in the past I would have done quick insta-posts on these items, lately I've taken to throwing them in my Evernote notebook, in the hopes that they will be resources for more substantial Bellman posts down the road. Now, I am thinking that's unlikely, so here they are all in a rush.

1. Evernote! I highly recommend this service. It is free, it has a Mac client, a Windows client, an iPhone client, and a web interface, so I have my notebook everywhere I happen to be. importing and organizing information is very easy. And if you need something to push you over the edge into trying it, notes with images are scanned and put through text-recognition routines so that you can search against their contents. Pretty slick! It highlights the portion of the text that it thinks features the word I searched for:


2. I think some of my friends might be criminals.

An Iowa man was convicted of possessing child pornography last week because some of the books in his vast collection of Japanese manga (comics) appeared to depict minors engaged in sexual acts
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39-year-old Christopher Handley, an office worker, was brought up on charges of possessing child pornography in 2006 when customs officials seized a package for him. It contained several manga, some of which were "lolicon" that showed what officials said were children being sexually abused. There were also images of bestiality. Handley has a huge collection of manga, and only a few are lolicon. He also had absolutely no child pornography of any description in his house or on his computer.

Nevertheless, Handley entered a guilty plea. According to Threat Level, it was simply because his attorney had exhausted all other options:

"It's probably the only law I'm aware of, if a client shows me a book or magazine or movie, and asks me if this image is illegal, I can't tell them," says Eric Chase, Handley's attorney.

Ruh-roh. If this extends to literary descriptions, I better return my copy of Lolita to the public library!

3. Piracy is a moral imperative. Eskil Skeensburg is an interesting fellow. He's developing a game called "Love" by himself that might possibly revolutionize the way games are developed, and is quite likely to be a fun game. But I also like reading his blog, which is mostly about developing the game, but meanders around to topics like,

It is a duty not a right to break an unjust law.
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The only way to find pirates is to monitor all peoples communication.

The only way to stop piracy is to deprive people of all communication.

Either someone can own a message and stop others form saying it, or we have freedom of speech.

These are the stakes. Don't think it is about someone getting payed. The financial well being of me and all the artists I love is insignificant, compared to the basic rights of a human being. Supporting artists is one thing, stopping people form exercising their rights like freedom of speech or taking away peoples right to privacy is another.

I used to think that supporting artists was the right thing to do. Now I'm asking, do I longer want to financially support organizations who use my money to lobby governments and courts to take away my basic rights and freedoms? [Have they] made it morally wrong for me to pay, in their quest to force me to pay?

Yes.