The third draft of the FTAA is now online. The Revised Intellectual Property Chapter, FTAA - ALCA - ZLEA - FTAA Draft Agreement - 2003 - Chapter XX, is still crawling with brackets (meaning there is no agreement), and Art. 13, which I criticized recently, is unchanged — but now it seems the whole chapter may be optional!
Not Geniuses has links to summaries of the overall course of the negotiations. It seems to have gone in the direction of ‘FTAA a la carte’ — and the IP provisions appear to be among the optional ones.
Of course this means the US will step up its pressure to put IP rules into bilateral trade agreements, but overall this is still progress.
The film does not shine
It’s a ripoff, they say
Which we knew in advance
From the adverts they play
Anyone who mistreats a children’s classic deserves what they get. The Cat in the Hat was one of my favorite books when I was little, and I enjoyed reading it (over and over) to my kids when they were little.
The reviews of the new Cat in the Hat movie are scathing, and I’m not at all surprised: When I was in New York last week, I saw an advert on TV for some product in which the movie version of the Cat in the Hat explained to two stock children (‘Gee Cat, thanks”) why they should use this cleaning product instead of others — Cat in the Hat, big spot on wall, get it? Ick.
Stands to reason that anyone who would prostitute a children’s icon like that lacked the sympathy with the material to make a good movie. Let’s hope they go broke.
Update: The marketing is much worse than I ever suspected.
David Pollard (who has a wonderful, wonderful Blog called How To Save the World asks, Is the Blogosphere Sexist?. I think it’s a fine essay, but I wonder if it’s the right question.
First, I’d like to know, ‘Compared to What’? I teach on a faculty that has far fewer women then men, so I’m prepared to believe there is a fair amount of sexism remaining in society. (On the other hand, we have had three female Deans in our fairly short history, including one whose ghost all but still walks the halls, so it’s not all bad news here.) So the question may not be “are blogs sexist” but rather “to what extent to do blogs replicate or transcend existing patterns of behavior”.
Obviously, it would be great if we could show the flowering of public discourse to be a Habermasian public sphere operating without coercion or prejudice. But that is not very likely. I’d settle gladly for the news that the online exchanges are relatively less sexist and relatively less irrational.
No one in his right mind thinks that blogging, or the Internet in general, is free of strategic behavior (like, for example, frivolous threats of lawsuits). It stands to reason that when we “go online” (actually write stuff for public consumption), we are more or less ourselves. But it’s also conceivable that, as group norms evolve online, and as communities of discourse form and re-form and cross-pollinate, we can grow and change, and collectively become more than what we were.
Here’s hoping.