New Zealand has had a look at how the US software patents work and the mess they’ve made of things, so they’ve written up a bill stating that software is unpatentable.

NZCS News – – NZ Computer Society.

This shows how from every $1000,- of revenue, the average music artist makes around $23,- out of which the record company then recoups ‘expenses’.

” In a traditional loan, you invest the money and pay back out of your proceeds. But a record label deal is nothing like that at all. They make you a “loan” and then take the first 63% of any dollar you make, get to automatically increase the size of the “loan” by simply adding in all sorts of crazy expenses (did the exec bring in pizza at the recording session? that gets added on), and then tries to get the loan repaid out of what meager pittance they’ve left for you.

Oh, and after all of that, the record label still owns the copyrights. That’s one of the most lopsided business deals ever.”

RIAA Accounting: Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales | Techdirt.

Of course, Hollywood does this too but on a much larger scale.

Which is why we need copyright laws – to protect the big companies. Screw the artists!

Star Wars creator George Lucas is trying to stop a company from making a high-powered laser that bloggers around the world have dubbed “a real-life lightsaber”.

The laser is cool, but isn’t called a lightsaber by the producer. It’s bloggers that made teh comparison.

This goes to show how outdated copyright law is: the original star wars movies stem from the 70s and Lucas is still scraping the bottom of that barrel… let him work like the rest of us and come up with something new!

A lot of people are blaming Lucas and calling him a douchebag, but to be fair, it’s the law that’s allowing him to do this, so even though he’s stretching things, he may be within his rights. The system needs to change to make it clear that this kind of thing is ridiculous.

via George Lucas, Star Wars creator, tries to block ‘lightsaber’.