Leaks have emerged from another secret copyright treaty, this one between the EU and Canada. The EU is really screwing Canada with this one, demanding longer copyright terms, more liability for ISPs (which means that it gets harder and more expensive to host anything from a message board to a video), laws against breaking copyright protection (even for a legal purpose, like getting your own files back), and a royalty on the sale of used copyrighted goods (so you'd have to track down and pay the rightsholder when you resold a painting or other copyrighted work).

And all this while Minister Tony Clement has been conducting a consultation with Canadians on what they think Canada's copyright laws should be -- at the same time, Canada's government has been sneakily negotiating two secret copyright treaties that would tie Parliament's hands and throw away Canadians' own Made-in-Canada copyright rules.

While the leaked document may only represent the European position, there is little doubt that there will enormous pressure on Canadian negotiators to cave on the IP provision in return for "gains" in other areas. The net result is that when combined with the ACTA requirements, Canadian copyright law reform may cease to become Canadian. Instead, the rules will be dictated by secretive agreements as the U.S. and Europe tag team to pressure Canada into dramatic changes far beyond those even proposed in Bills C-60 or C-61.

Beyond ACTA: Proposed EU - Canada Trade Agreement Intellectual Property Chapter Leaks

My pal Roger Wood, the mad clock sculptor of Klockwerks.com, really puts the "Ch" back in "Channukah" with this steampunk menorah.

(via Cribcandy)

Former South Dakota State Rep. Ted Alvin Klaudt -- presently serving time for raping his two foster daughters -- is sending bizarre "copyright notices" from prison to news agencies and outlets that use his name in print or online, claiming a "common law copyright" on his name and demanding $500,000 for any unauthorized use.

Proving, at least, that knowing the law is no prerequisite for serving in high office.

A letter and an accompanying document labeled ''Common Law Copyright Notice'' said former state Rep. Ted Alvin Klaudt is reserving a common-law copyright of a trade name or trademark for his name. It said no one can use his name without his consent, and anyone who does would owe him $500,000...

The letter and copyright notice Klaudt sent to The Associated Press carried a postmark of Dec. 11 from Mobridge, a city near his ranch. The notice was signed July 13, 2008, and notarized in Bon Homme County, the location of the Springfield prison. It also included a seal indicating it was filed with the register of deeds in Corson County, where the family ranch is located, on July 31, 2008.

The letter said anyone seeking to use Klaudt's name would have to file a written request 20 days in advance. It also said he would pursue charges and other legal action against anyone who violated the notice.

Ex-Lawmaker Convicted of Rape: Name Is Copyrighted (via /.)

djBC writes, "As you probably know from the steady stream of Holiday mashup albums I've been compiling over the past 5 years, I dig Christmas music, and I keep remixing it. In this case I took the Big D and The Kids Table Christmas paean to Red Sox, victory, drinking, heavy Boston accents and holiday merriment in general, cut it into a hip-hop beat and enlisted rapper Black Element to bust rhymes. Anyway- I finally did it! I made a Christmas single! AND video! Woo! I hope people get a kick out of it and it ends up on some holiday mixes right next to 'White Christmas.' Or something. Directed by Craig Shannon of Imagavision Films.

Wicked Hip-Hop Christmas

The original Big D and The Kids Table video for 'Wicked Hardcore Christmas' (2004)

(Thanks, djBC!)

Tony from the StarShipSofa sf podcast sez, "In the spirit of 'paying it forward', StarShipSofa is rallying the SF/F community around Spider and Jeanne Robinson. Throughout the month of December, the online audio magazine will be releasing an original series written by Lawrence Santoro. While listeners can hear 'Lord Dickens' Declaration' for free on StarShipSofa, one can elect to purchase the ebook with art by Skeet Scienski. All proceeds will be donated to Spider and Jeanne in an effort to support her as she battles cancer. Diagnosed with a rare biliary cancer, the treatments have eaten away at the Robinson's finances as doctors aggressively fight the disease from spreading. This ebook will only be available for purchase through December 31st and is priced at 2.99 GBP, with an option to donate more (in increments of 10, 20, 50, & 100 GPB). Any fan of the Robinson's can attest to their strength, but we hope that through this time of strife, the SF/F community can help them survive through the worst. Thank you for standing with the Robinson's in their time of need."

Aural Delights No 113 Lawrence Santoro Pt 3 (Thanks, Tony!)

Treehugger photographer Matt McDermott happened to be in the right place when the massive climate demonstrations in Copenhagen broke out, and the site has a great gallery of shots of the action.

Whose Summit? Our Summit! Bella Center Erupts in Protest

Steorn, developers of free-energy gadget called Orbo, have managed to survive for six years without having successfully demonstrated the technology in public. It must be some kind of record. But yesterday, an Orbo was installed at the Waterways Ireland Visitor Centre, and you can see a live video stream of the Orbo chugging away.

According to Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy, the Orbo is able to "gain energy from magnets with no apparent source."

Here's more about it, from Steorn's "What is Orbo Technology" page:

Orbo is a technology that creates energy from magnetic interactions. Orbo provides free, clean and constant energy at the point of use.

Orbo is a platform technology that can be engineered to power anything from a phone, to a fridge to a car.

Orbo technology is controversial - science tells us that energy can not be created - yet Orbo does this. Orbo is an over unity technology - it provides more energy out than is put in.

Orbo is a result of many man years of technological development using a "Victorian Science" approach. It is a technology that has been derived phenomologically, through test, implementation and retest.

Three cheers for "Victorian Science," but I don't believe the Orbo can make more energy than it uses. It sure is fun following Steorn's attempts to achieve the impossible, though. If any Boing Boing readers in Dublin have witness the live demo, please share your thoughts in the comments.

UPDATE: the blog called Steorn's Orbo has a good post about why this demo is useless:

Orbo 2009 is similar in its basic design, but the outer ring of magnets are now electromagnets rather than permanent magnets, and these electromagnets are fed by a battery. That battery, it is claimed, is constantly recharged by a small electrical generator attached to the spinning Orbo. The net result, says Sean McCarthy, is that the Orbo produces some three times the energy it uses. The energy that isn't cycled back to the battery is dissipated as heat. Sean's claim may be true — the Orbo may be generating three times the energy it is using, right in front of our eyes. Or, it may not be; there's no way to tell without being an experienced engineer and hooking the rig up to a lot of complex testing equipment. Because there's a battery in the loop, there's just no telling how much energy, if any, Orbo is actually generating. So Steorn may have what they claim. Or they may be lying about it as part of a scam. Or they may honestly believe they have it, but be wrong. There's still no way to tell.

In other words, this Orbo sounds like it's a plain old motor.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing this year, designer Martin Mostböck made this area rug inspired by the moon's surface.

Artist's web site [via Dezeen]

RIP, Roy E Disney, nephew of Walt, son of Roy Sr, at 79, from cancer. Thanks for kicking out Eisner and bringing the company's emphasis back to the Parks.

The younger Disney, born in 1930, worked for the company as a writer and producer. But his most important influence was as a Disney shareholder who led two investor revolts.

In 1984 he led a successful campaign to oust Walt Disney's son-in-law from the company. Nearly 20 years later, he launched another successful shareholder revolt against Michael Eisner.

Roy E. Disney dies (Thanks to everyone who sent this in)

(Image: File:Roy_E._Disney.jpg, GNU FDL, Wikimedia Commons)

There are 172,000 books published every year in the US, and another 206,000 in the UK. Suffice to say, they do not all become best-sellers. But just because a book isn't popular, doesn't mean it didn't deserve your attention. The Guardian staff is trying to give unloved tomes a second chance by naming their favorite books of the past decade that no one but themselves read. It's a great concept, and a couple of these have caught my eye, including:

War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres, published in 2005, is one of the funniest books I have ever been involved with - it's about the author's hapless time as an embedded reporter with the US Marines in Iraq. I think the reason it did not take off as it should was to do with the gap between commissioning it in 2003 and it being written and published two years later: by then the war had got so unpopular with the public that every book about it, brilliantly entertaining or not, was struggling. I hope in time it will become recognised as a classic.

The Guardian: The Decade's Best Unread Books

A small indie record store owner in Ottawa, Canada, has plead guilty to a charge of copyright infringement for importing rare CDs from abroad. Apparently, these discs (which are themselves licensed, as far as I can tell) aren't licensed for sale in Canada, and Canadian law (apparently) bans this kind of parallel importation.

But none of these CDs are actually available in Canada. And no one orders rare, expensive imports unless he's already got the artist's entire catalog. And, of course, the record labels that went after this record store owner (whose whole purpose in life is to sell their CDs) are presently being sued for $60 billion in copyright damages for ripping off artists, and have admitted to $50 million in liability already.

"I can't believe I'm standing here right now," Nolan said outside court. "I've never bought a pirated item in my life."

Prosecutor Rob Zsigo said in an agreed statement of facts that the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), acting as experts for the RCMP, concluded that 294 discs -- including live concerts, imports and CDs without UPC codes -- violated Canadian copyright law...

Nolan said the 100 CDs represent a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of recordings in his collection and that the discs at issue are mostly imports.

An example is a recording of 1950s singer Gale Storm. Big labels don't press them but seniors still want to buy them so he orders them from import distributers [sic], Nolan said.

"I have to have the things the bigger chains don't have," Nolan said. "It's kept my business alive.

"I feel like the RCMP has robbed me."

CD seller pleads guilty to breaking copyright law

My friend Joanna Ebenstein who who runs the engrossing (sorry!) Morbid Anatomy blog was featured on a "Weird New York" episode of the "Toni On! New York" television show. The host took a tour of the Morbid Anatomy Library and saw some of Joanna's favorite curiosities.

The original story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is missing what have become some of the book's most iconic characters and scenes: the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter's tea party, the Knave of Hearts' trial, and several other great moments. Why did Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) add them later? According to Alice scholar Melanie Bayley, Dodgson, a mathematician by day, created the scenes to make fun of edgy math ideas floating around at the time. From New Scientist:

Outgunned in the specialist press, Dodgson took his mathematics to his fiction. Using a technique familiar from Euclid's proofs, reductio ad absurdum, he picked apart the "semi-logic" of the new abstract mathematics, mocking its weakness by taking these premises to their logical conclusions, with mad results. The outcome is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Take the chapter "Advice from a caterpillar", for example. By this point, Alice has fallen down a rabbit hole and eaten a cake that has shrunk her to a height of just 3 inches. Enter the Caterpillar, smoking a hookah pipe, who shows Alice a mushroom that can restore her to her proper size. The snag, of course, is that one side of the mushroom stretches her neck, while another shrinks her torso. She must eat exactly the right balance to regain her proper size and proportions.

While some have argued that this scene, with its hookah and "magic mushroom", is about drugs, I believe it's actually about what Dodgson saw as the absurdity of symbolic algebra, which severed the link between algebra, arithmetic and his beloved geometry...

The madness of Wonderland, I believe, reflects Dodgson's views on the dangers of this new symbolic algebra. Alice has moved from a rational world to a land where even numbers behave erratically.

"Alice's adventures in algebra: Wonderland solved"

Here's a conundrum: The African and European plates of the Earth's crust are no longer pushing into each other, but the Alps (created by the collision of those plates) are growing by about .05 in. per year. At first glance, those facts might make you question plate tectonics. But the real explanation is even weirder.

The Alps grow because they swim in the Earths mantle. Mountains like the Matterhorn or the Zugspitze lose one meter of stone every 1000-2000 years, Sauer reports. Like a melting iceberg slowly rises out of the water to adjust to the loss of weight, the alps rise according to their weight loss due to erosion. Sauer explains, that this was a hypothesis for years, but that it is proven now, because German scientists from the Research Center for Geoscience in Potsdam developed a new method to measure the erosion.

Original story is in German at Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
English summary from the Knight Science Journalism Tracker

Image courtesy Flickr user toprural, via CC

Amazing artists Korin Faught and Savanna Snow sent me photos from Korin's birthday party where they celebrated with the magnificent Jesus cake, above left. It was baked in Los Angeles by their pal Jana Danae Groller who, I've since discovered, makes some of the most insane cakes I've ever seen. For example, look at that Siamese Cat Head cake above right. Just look at it. Jana*s Fun Cakes

Just a coincidence?

Why are these kids so darn happy? Have they been sharing the nitrous oxide balloon with their clown friend? Of course not. They are happy because this gorgeous piece of art by Pete Hawley, along with many more of his feverishly giddy original illustartions for the Merrill Publishing company, were saved from the incinerator, thanks to the diligent efforts of Jean Woodcock.

The full story appears in print edition of Illustration Magazine #22 (thanks for the subscription, David!).

Leif Peng has a couple of excerpts and more of Hawley's work on his blog.

Pete Hawley and the Merrill Company

The gears above are just 380 microns across, or about four times thicker than a human hair. They're being turned by bacteria that are bumping into the spokes. Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory developed the bacteria-powered gears in an effort to develop "hybrid biomechanical systems." The speed at which the gears turn can be controlled by changing the amount of oxygen in the solution. From an Argonne National Lab press release:

The microgears with slanted spokes, produced in collaboration with Northwestern University, are placed in the solution along with common aerobic bacteria, Bacillus subtilis. Andrey Sokolov of Princeton University and Igor Aronson from Argonne, along with Bartosz A. Grzybowski and Mario M. Apodaca from Northwestern University, discovered that the bacteria appear to swim around the solution randomly, but occasionally the organisms will collide with the spokes of the gear and begin turning it in a definite direction.

A few hundred bacteria are working together in order to turn the gear. When multiple gears are placed in the solution with the spokes connected like in a clock, the bacteria will begin turning both gears in opposite directions and it will cause the gears to rotate in synchrony for a long time.

"Argonne Scientists Use Bacteria to Power Simple Machines"

The design in this eight minute British cartoon, "Charley in New Town," is excellent.

'New Town' is an entry in a Central Office of Information-sponsored animated series featuring the everyman character Charley, and promotes an escape from grimy, smoggy towns and arduous commutes to work. With the highly distinctive animation style of husband-and-wife team Halas and Batchelor, this short aims to explain the rationale behind the planning of the new towns, with their enticing offer of green open spaces and a type of housing to suit everyone.

Building skywards - Manhattan-style - is quickly ruled out for us Brits; "Don't be silly, I'd never get me pram up there" pipes up a member of the unseen chorus of unhappy city-dwellers. But considering the urban sprawl now devouring the south-east of England, perhaps skyscrapers were the way to go after all.

"Poor little blighters." (Via Shane Glines)