> In some other fora, there has been much discussion lately > of the Great Firewall of China, which is blocking Chinese > access to all sorts of things on the Net. Among them are > most of the search sites, especially google.com, and all of > mit.edu. The folks at MIT are somewhat bemused by this, of > course. It's not like there's all that much Chinese > political stuff on mit.edu machines.
"Somewhat bemused" is a quaint way to describe your weaseling jobsworth Noah Meyerhans's attitude to malicious users hosted by MIT. MIT is no position to take any moral high ground over censorship when its anonymizing spamsite nym.alias.edu conducts denial-of-service attacks on public forums by drowning them in crap - just scan through all postings made to rec.folk-dancing with paths leading through lcs.mit.edu, the site Meyerhans manages. Dictatorship by a gang of Ivy League frat boys is not one whit morally better than by the Chinese gerontocracy. > with the search sites in general, and my abc tune finder > in particular blocked (because it's at MIT), this means that > Chinese owners of music would have a lot of trouble > discovering copyright violations. There can't be any. Last I heard China wasn't party to any copyright treaties. It neither recognizes nor enforces copyrights, and there's nothing in international law that says they have to. So they have no rights that could be violated. I suspect Hong Kong retained some special status, otherwise its film industry would have gone down the toilet by now. > Do we have people here who are transcribing Chinese pop > music? Actually, I'd be more interested in the traditional > music, but new music is more interesting as a test case. I have "The East is Red" in the modes tutorial on my website; apparently the tune is traditional. I could put the rest of the book up, I suppose (most of the tunes presumably composed in the Fifties). The Chinese official attitude to it, if they ever found it was there and actually cared, would more likely be that they'd want it taken down as a political embarrassment drawing attention to abandoned principles than any concern over lost royalties. (And getting totally OT: there was a programme on Radio 3 a while ago which I only heard part of, comprising letters from a woman worker in an infernal toy factory in the Shenzhen free enterprise zone; like an update on Charles Denby, Satoshi Kamata or Gunter Wallraff for the new millennium. I presume they've been published as a book; anybody know what?) =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
