Candleblog

ANNOYING: According to GamePolitics.com, FCC Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate made the following comments in a speech she gave on December 5th to the Practicing Law Institute on telecom policy and regulation…

With the explosion of educational resources available online, one might think parents would be 100% pleased with the internet’s role in their children’s lives. But surveys show just the opposite: a late 2006 survey that showed 59% of parents think the internet has been a totally positive influence in their children’s lives– down from 67% in 2004.

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You might find it alarming that one of the top reasons for college drop-outs in the U.S. is online gaming addiction – such as World of Warcraft – which is played by 11 million individuals worldwide.

-shudder- The Internets are stealing our childrens’ minds! But gaming “addiction” is largely nothing of the sort, and I look forward to the day when politicians and journalists don’t treat as a foregone conclusion that time spent in front of an electronic screen is necessarily wasted time that’s obviously bad for us.

ANNOYING: Apple is apparently refusing to allow the sale of a comics-reading app for the iPhone because of the content of a comic that premiered on the app.

The implication is that someone at Apple is denying the app’s sale in the app store based not on the application itself, but on the sort of content has run on the app in the past. This slope seems a might slippery.

ANNOYING: New US consumer safety rules could put Emily’s Etsy shop out of business. According Boing Boing…

Crafters are up in arms over a seemingly disastrous unintended consequence of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), which will require lab certification that lead and phthalates are not present in toys or clothes — sounds good, but crafters warn that this means that “a toymaker… who makes wooden cars in his garage in Maine to supplement his income cannot afford the $4,000 fee per toy that testing labs are charging to assure compliance with the CPSIA.”

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The law takes effect on February 10th and the toymakers and small clothing designers are getting very worried indeed.

I guess this is a reaction to the lead-in-Chinese-toys brouhaha last year. I’m hoping Emily can avoid trouble by merely marketing her knitted creatures as “art” rather than as “toys,” but this still seems like a poorly thought-through law.

The Handmade Toy Alliance adds, “if this law had been applied to the food industry, every farmers market in the country would be forced to close while Kraft and Dole prospered.”

ANNOYING: According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Motion Picture Association of America is asking the Obama transition team for more stringent surveillance of the Internet for copyright violators…

This would require ISPs to terminate customers’ internet accounts upon a rights-holder’s repeat allegation of copyright ingfringement. This could be done potentially without any due process or judicial review. A three-strikes policy was recently adopted by legislation in France, where all ISPs are now banned from providing blacklisted citizens with internet access for up to one year.

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Because three-strikes policies do not guarantee due process or judicial oversight of whether the accusations of copyright infringement are valid, they effectively grant the content industry the ability to exile any individual they want from the internet. Lest we forget, there is a history of innocents getting caught up in these anti-piracy dragnets. (Copyfighter Cory Doctorow has wondered what would happen if the MPAA’s erroneous notices were subject to a similar three-strikes law.)

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Thankfully, members of the European Parliament vehemently rejected these measures, resolving that “The cut of Internet access is a disproportionate measure regarding the objectives. It is a sanction with powerful effects, which could have profound repercussions in a society where access to the Internet is an imperative right for social inclusion.” Let’s hope the US government’s decisions on this are as wise.

All annoying links via Boing Boing.