Cheerful Curmudgeon

You may not be aware of some of the insanity which current copyright laws create in many countries, not just the United States. Here are two songs which you may think are free and clear but which are, in fact, copyrighted and subject to royalty payments:

Happy Birthday to You

The Chicago-based music publisher Clayton F. Summy Company, working with Jessica Hill, published and copyrighted “Happy Birthday” in 1935. Under the laws in effect at the time, the Hills’ copyright would have expired after one 28-year term and a renewal of similar length, falling into public domain by 1991. However, the Copyright Act of 1976 extended the term of copyright protection to 75 years from date of publication, and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 added another 20 years, so under current law the copyright protection of “Happy Birthday” will remain intact until at least 2030. (from Snopes.com)

Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree

In February the [Australian] Federal Court ruled the iconic Aussie band [Men at Work] plagiarised part of [it's 1980s hit Down Under], which was penned in 1979 but only achieved worldwide success after a flute riff was introduced to the track two years later. Larrikin Music said the band stole the riff from the children’s song Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree which was written by Melbourne teacher Marion Sinclair for a Girl Guides jamboree in 1934…. Larrikin owns the rights to the song and had been seeking up to 60 per cent of Down Under’s profits as compensation. (from the Australian Broadcasting Company)

Y’all be careful out there. Just because it has been 75 years or more since that little ditty was written, doesn’t mean you can’t be ordered to pay royalties if you sing it or even just riff a few bars on your instrument.

Back in the Old Days, I had to pay for computer time on Michigan Terminal System (MTS) at the University of Michigan. It was a simple system: the more you used, the more you paid. MTS charged for CPU time, RAM used while your program was running, disk space used to store your files, I/O used to read and write your files, pages printed, cards read (yes, real punched cards!), and time logged into an interactive terminal. In one of those It-Makes-Me-Proud-To-Be-A-Taxpayer moments, the USPTO has granted a patent to Amazon for exactly the same system: USPTO Grants Bezos Patent On ’60s-Era Chargebacks.

I thought you couldn’t patent prior art? Clearly, I’m wrong.

Facebook added the proverbial last straw with its latest privacy faux pas. It has demonstrated, yet again, that in pursuing it’s goal of selling advertising, Facebook places very little importance on our personal privacy. Remember that, while Facebook ostensibly is a web site designed to help people connect with like-minded people, in fact Facebook is a business which derives it’s revenues from other businesses, not from it’s subscribers. In plain English: Unless you are paying big dollars to Facebook, you are not Facebook’s primary audience.

Don’t believe me? I just spent half an hour tightening up my Facebook privacy settings; it was a bewildering maze of pages and checkboxes and pop-up windows. I thought maybe I was just dim, that it couldn’t be as hard as it seemed to be. But no; it really is that hard. The New York Times counted the words and discovered that Facebook’s privacy policy is longer than the US constitution!

The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options.

Users must decide if they want only friends, friends of friends, everyone on Facebook, or a customized list of people to see things like their birthdays or their most recent photos. To keep information as private as possible, users must select “only friends” or “only me” from the pull-down options for all the choices in the privacy settings, and must uncheck boxes that say information will be shared across the Web.

The last straw was discovering a page which allowed my personal information to be shared with third-parties (advertisers and other businesses) when my friends do stuff, not because of my own actions. Here is the page, after I turned everything off; all of the boxes had been checked when I first came to the page.

Just one example: I am perfectly happy allowing my friends to know my birthday but I was angry to discover that, when a friend of mine “visits a Facebook Platform application or website,” my birthday was revealed to the business running that “application or website.” That’s just not right; I did not give my permission for this. I do not want it to happen. Facebook added this “feature” and began giving out this information without asking me.

In response to that discovery, I have done a couple of things. First, I took the time to go through every Facebook privacy page and tighten up the settings. My friends can still see stuff about me. The friends of my friends can also see some stuff about me. To the extent possible, I have blocked business’ abilities to obtain my data. Second, I have removed all of the data which I do not want publicly shared. Since I cannot trust Facebook to keep it private, I no longer store those data in my Facebook profile.

If you are reading this on Facebook, you should know that Facebook is posting a copy of my original article. I actually wrote this on my own blog at www.CheerfulCurmudgeon.com and I invite you to visit the site directly. Facebook does not copy everything from the blog and you are missing good stuff by staying in Facebook and not coming over to the actual website.

I choose to control access to my data, sharing it only with the people that I trust. Facebook has proven, time and again, to be a very untrustworthy arbiter of our data.

Sometimes (often) XKCD hits the nail squarely on the head.

Candy and I are shopping for a new refrigerator. The good news is that we don’t need to spend as much as I feared we would. The bad news is that shopping for a fridge is worse than choosing a breakfast cereal. The manufacturers and stores seem to create as many models as possible just because they can. Did you know that Sears sells 85 refrigerators between 16 and 19 cubic feet in size?!

Most annoying, though, is that you can only get the cool “features” like better organizing bins and shelves if you buy a bigger box. There are only two of us; we don’t need a 26 cubic foot fridge. Here in the good ol’ U S of A, some folks still seem to believe that bigger is better. T’ain’t so.

I know that many of you like to play the games on Facebook. That’s definitely cool. What isn’t cool is when you get ripped off for real money in the process.

Examples Of Scams:

A typical scam: users are offered in game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey. Four simple questions are asked. The answers are irrelevant. When the user gets to the last question they are told their results will be text messaged to them. They are asked to enter in their mobile phone number, and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they’ve done that, they’ve just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription. Tatto Media is the company at the very end of the line on most mobile scams, and they flow it up through Offerpal, SuperRewards and others to the game developers.

As you can see in the image below, nothing in the offer says that the user will be billed $10/month forever for a useless service.

Another scam: Video Professor. Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD from Video Professor. The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them. Most users never return them because they don’t know about the extra charge. Woot. Again, sites like Offerpal and SuperRewards flow these offers through to game developers. See here for more on the Video Professor scam.

Of course, there’s no mention of any of these payments in the offer itself.

You can read the rest in the Washington Post’s article, Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell. Y’all be careful out there!

We have many opportunities to experience both good and bad customer service. Rarely, though, do we bump into extremes at both ends of the spectrum in the course of one technical support issue. Doing so makes both experiences all the more poignant.

I use a Garmin GPSmap 396 coupled with a hockey puck sized XM Radio receiver in my airplane. The combination gives me NEXRAD weather radar in near real-time, with my current position and course superimposed. It has proven invaluable in keeping me safe and well clear of thunderstorms. Recently, the weather got “flakey,” sometimes I would receive it and sometimes not. On an August flight back from Wisconsin, when I was flying along the front edge of a line of rain and thunderstorms, the NEXRAD radar vanished and I could not get it back. After experimenting on several follow-up flights, I determined that the problem was heat related: when the XM receiver had been on for 30-40 minutes and got hot, it stopped working.

I called Garmin and asked whether they wanted the XM receiver back with or without the GPS unit and how much it would cost to repair/replace it. The Garmin rep, for whom American English was clearly his primary language, asked what model antenna I had and I told him that it was the old, original GXM 30 and that it was almost four years old. He immediately offered to replace it with a new GXM 40 for free under warranty. (I looked it up later; the GXM 40 retails for $268.) I shipped my broken receiver to Garmin on Wednesday and had the replacement on my doorstep on Friday. That’s amazingly awesome service, Garmin. Thank you!

I just phoned XM Radio to have the old receiver removed from my account and replaced with the new receiver. I got a woman who spoke English with such a thick accent that I had trouble understanding her. She then informed me that this “service” would cost me $15. Excuse me? Garmin just replaced a very expensive piece of broken equipment at their expense and XM wants to charge me $15 to type an eight letter radio ID into their computer?!?! Talk about petty. Worse, she then tried to “up-sell” me to a lifetime music subscription for “only” $399.99. I was flabergasted but did manage to recover my voice and tell her how angry I am that, after paying them $75 per month for weather, XM has the gall to charge me  an additional $6 for music. Truly apalling.

Garmin: I have had several of your products over the years. All have performed wonderfully. This is the first time that I have had to work with your customer service and I am thoroughly impressed. You’ve got a very, very happy customer who will certainly return to purchase more of your products.

XM Radio: The aviation weather “service” that I receive from you is overpriced and the additonal charge for music is insulting. I have had to make several calls to your customer service over the last four years and every one has been, without exception, infuriating. Were there any alternative source of cockpit weather data, I would drop you in an instant.

Health care reform is about people, not money. Specifically, it is our opportunity to assure that all Americans have access to good health care, not just the lucky 4/5ths of us. If your mom came to you for help getting medical care, your first response would be, “How can we make that happen?” Your first response would not be, “Gee, all the options are too expensive so, sorry, but maybe next year.” Your mom and your neighbor and the person across town who you don’t know are all living, breathing human beings who deserve the same quality access to quality health care.

From LiveScience.com, U.S. Life Expectancy May Have Peaked:

A team led by Harvard’s Majid Ezzati published these findings today in the online medical journal PLoS Medicine. The analysis — the first to look at mortality trends county by county — is based on mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau between 1959 and 2001.

…

[The team found that] life expectancy rates rose for most of Americans over the last four decades by about six years, from an average of about age 71 to age 77. Yet a sizeable portion of the population, mostly in rural regions, saw those modest gains level off and even reverse starting in the 1980s. This is in contrast to all other industrialized nations.

It is disturbing that our government has assured that all Americans have access to electricity and telephones and we are working hard on getting broadband internet access into every home but we do not assure that everybody gets good health care.

I have a proposal to reduce the cost of groceries very significantly, something which I think will be welcomed in this goofy economy. We will form grocery buying cooperatives, essentially grocery insurance programs, which will amortize the costs of groceries across all buyers, lowering the costs for all and protecting people from the “oh shit!” moments when they might need to buy extra-ordinary amounts of food, like for a wedding or bar mitzvah.

If you are a member of a grocery insurance program, you will show your membership card at the cash register and will pay a fixed amount of money for your week’s groceries, regardless of how much you need that particular week. Based on some research that I have been doing, I believe that through careful negotiation and the buying power amassed by a large membership, the grocery insurance programs ought to be able to obtain groceries from local supermarkets for as little as 35-45% of “list prices.” These savings will be passed on to members through lower membership fees and lower weekly at-the-cash-register fixed payments.

Membership in the grocery insurance programs will be a neat perk which businesses can offer to their employees. I know that, as a business owner, I am always looking for ways to compensate my employees which do not impose additional income tax burdens on them. The grocery insurance program membership fees would be deductible expenses for the business and, I hope, would be “carved out” by the IRS and not considered taxable income to the employees.

All in all, I think that this will be a tremdously adventageous program which will help Americans.

I can only think of a couple of small problems but I’m sure that we will quickly get them straightened out.

1. About 46 milliion Americans, about 18% of us, will not be able to join a grocery insurance program, primarily for one of three reasons: 1) they are unemployed, 2) they have jobs but their employers do not choose to offer this perk to them, or 3) they have reputations for eating too much food and are ineligible.
2. Grocery list prices, the prices marked on the shelves and actually paid by the 46 million people who are not grocery insurance program members, will be 2-3x higher than today’s prices.
3. Individuals who want to join a program on their own (not through an employer) will need to pay significantly higher membership fees and won’t receive the tax benefits.

Let me reiterate that these are tiny problems. About 82% of us will be unaffected by them and will actually see our grocery bills go down so, in the balance, this is all for the good.

Does this sound ridiculous? Why? We Americans buy health care exactly as described here.

As I predicted in Google Chrome to Replace Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux (September 2008) and again in Step 2: Google Chrome to Replace Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux (December 2008), Google is moving to replace the operating system, not just the browser. What changed two days ago is that Google is finally being up-front about it, instead of masquerading their plans as “only” a browser.

In Introducing the Google Chrome OS on the Official Google Blog, Google writes,

We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends….

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010….

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web….

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year….

What does this mean to you? Several things, all good if you a) use your computer mostly for stuff on the web, and b) like to save money, and c) don’t mind that virtually all of your files will be “elsewhere” instead of stored on your own computer.

1. Turn on your Google Chrome OS based computer and, within a very few seconds, you will be up and running on the web (using Google Chrome, of course).
2. No (or at least few) worries about viruses and Trojans which exploit Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, or Microsoft Office. You will have the security of Linux without the geeky requirements that you actually understand Linux.
3. You will be able to run this on existing hardware, which ought to breathe new life into old machines.

The kicker is that, in Google’s grand vision, all of your email, letters, documents, spreadsheets, databases, etc., will be stored on Google’s servers. You will use GMail for your mail and Google Apps instead of Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org. If you are big, you will use the paid versions of these apps. If you are small, ads might be in your face all the time. It is not coincidence that GMail and Google Apps came out of “beta” the same day that Google introduced Google Chrome OS.

Is this good for you? How much do you trust Google? It is certainly cool technology, certainly priced right, and certainly convenient.