Letter to my MP Tony Baldry

Dear Tony

The internet is global. There are millions of pages out there. The way that people find things is by using sites that index those pages, e.g. Google, Bing, etc and this includes specialist indexers like Pirate Bay. It is just a search engine, it does not host or download copyright material. It is no different from a site that indexes, for example, only academic papers.

So I am afraid I consider it very wrong that Pirate Bay has been found guilty of inducing the downloading of protected works. Google does exactly the same. Not only, but that it has been found guilty in a jurisdiction outside its home location.

The judgement is also frightening, that the networks which carry our internet signals (ISPs) should intercept them and block those that certain industries or governments fined objectionable.

Copyright infringement is simply by the two people: one who provides the material and the person who downloads it, the channel of communication cannot be guilty. Nor any indexing site that helps us navigate the internet.

I hope you will come to see the problem in this light and press for our laws on copyright be updated for the internet age.

Regards

Antony Watts NOTE: its now 14-5-12 and he has NOT replied...

Internet freedom attacked again

Pirate Bay

I have to say that I don't use Pirate bay for fear I might be downloading copyright material.

But where would the material come from if I did use it?

Not from Pirate Bay.

Let's get the argument clear: breaking copyright means copying and distributing a person's work without their permission. Pirate Bay does not do that. They do index other sites that host copyright works. These are offered by these sites for downloading. If the protocol used for downloading bit torrent, then the sites that the actual download comes from are many none of which is Pirate Bay, but a bit from here and a bit from there.

We are faced with these issues:

- The internet is global , you cannot enforce local laws about it

- Information out there is found by indexing and search, e.g. by Google

- Copyright is not broken by indexing and searching, but by copying from the indexed sites

So why do people put up copyright material on their sites? To make money by advertising, because they think its amusing or simply don't understand the issues, or because they are frustrated at not having legitimate download sites they can buy the work from? This last one is feel known as the main motivator for music and movies to be available from lots of sites.

So, lots of copyright material held on sites illegally is motivated by the lack of legitimate hosting sites where you an purchase it, particularly music and movies driven by the industries outmoded business models which release movies by country, by channel, by time. The internet is global, if a movie is released in USA but not in UK, then people in UK are going to want to see it, and they are motivated to illegally download it.

Accusing Pirate Bay of secondary guilt is simply wrong for free speech. The claim that the harm to copyright works can be equated to harm to physical products or to people, e.g. by an incitement to murder or promotion of physical copy-products which may be unsafe or break someones Intellectual Property rights, is wrong. Any laws that are interpreted to mean that it is illegal to index internet sites is wrong.

Try prosecuting Google not Pirate bay, they index many more sites with copyright protected works listed in the search results, just as does Pirate Bay. If Google is legitimate then so are other search engines. All of them make money from advertising.
The illegality of downloading a copyright work without permission and possible payment is between the hosting site and the downloader, nothing to do with any index which enable you to find the work on the global internet.

Radio Low Pass Filters

I have found a really useful number of tables for making Low Pass Filters, mainly used for suppressing harmonics from the output of amateur radio transmitters. Here are the charts:



Basic filter configuration, input and output are 50R.



These are the values recommended for each band.



Here is the data for the most common toroid cores, from which you can decide the core to use and the inductance per 10 turns.

This is the formula to use to calculate the number of turns required.




And this is the smallest toroid to use for a given power capability.

Fundamental changes

It seems to me that we need to make two fundamental changes.

First to reform the banking business - more service not product, stop the money go round, e.g. CDS. Stop pouring good many after bad - if you make a poor investment you must be allowed to loose it, e.g. housing equity versus mortgage loans.

Second to change our gaze from making money as a life goal, to making wisdom or intellectual achievement as our life goal. After all we are better designed to think than just shove money around.

Lots of Amateur Radio circuits

Here's a bunch of Amateur Radio circuit ideas, none have been tested!

A two SA612 receiver: The first is a mixer amplifier feeding the IF crystal filter, followed by a second as mixer/beat oscillator giving an audio output



An unusual receiver with a balanced detector, an audio amplifier and a local oscillator using a CMOS invertor



Here's a mixer using a CMOS switch. With as RF preamp and audio amplifier.



What could be simpler? a one transistor radio. With a balanced mixer and simple VFO



Now something different: an electronically tuned ATU, for receive only obviously.



Lastly an SWR meter, with easily wound torrid transformers

Torroids from torrid.info:

Money - I have a theory about that

Maybe we have got everything the wrong way round? Incessant publicity or news mongering these days insists that financial markets want Europe to fix things. It seems that we have all borrowed too much, but the corollary of that is the someone lent us too much, and who was it? The banks!

So maybe the right way forward is for Europe to fix the banks? And there is a lot to be said for that. After all money belongs to society, it is something we have created to allow us to trade. It is not a plaything for banks to make their financial instruments, or products. Finance is after all a service not a productive industry, they have no such things as products, and should only provide services. And they are not very good at that.

Most of their business just involves swallowing up capital, making it go round and round faster, if the capital becomes too scarce then they avidly look for other ways to get or create some. For example, inflated house prices, they get millions on their books in assets by promoting higher and higher, bigger and bigger house prices and bubbles. Credit cards and loans and sharks - again a licence to print more money, and they regularly lend 10-50 times more money than they actually have, its called leverage.

Then if they make a mistake and some of their loans go bad, that is we don't pay up, then they bully us for more money saying their will be a global crash. Maybe but it might be just what is needed. The problem is how to protect you and me and our savings, no problem to write off our debts! Thank you!

Its just that the banks take little or no risk on their loans, you buy a house, it belongs to them as they just advanced the money on a loan and kept the deeds. You start to pay it back. Now the market in houses falls and your house is not worth what you paid for it - more common to day than you might think - you are in what they call negative equity, you do not have the asset value to pay off your loan. But the banks has lost nothing, they still have the value of the loan you signed up to. Surely they should take a risk too? If the house market falls, their assets should also have lower value? No?

Money I repeat is ours not the banks. We earn it, we spend it, they just facilitate it going round. The huge debts built up today are a misuse of money and entirely the banks fault.

UK's lost moral compass

As a society we have a choice: open or police state.

And I am talking about surveillance: CCTV, Internet, mobile phone… all of these are increasingly being used to survey people's place and actions. The actions may be criminal, but that is in the spectrum of society. Not all of society is good. And punishing the bad is not a way to reform society. Even prisons now focus on reform of the individual rather than punishment, the re-enforcement of moral values.

UK has more CCTV cameras than any other country in the world, they are used for viewing the most absurd activities: like emptying the wrong things into a wheely bin.

Internet surveillance is reaching increasingly across all of us, when we thought we had finally a tool to improve society's communication and understanding, the UK government want to treat it with special concern and monitor all communications. They surely are stupid, the internet is just like standing talking to a friend on a street corner - or is that illegal now too?

Mobile phones are widely used to track people, as long as you have your phone switched on it spends an amount of time polling for the nearest cell tower, so that it knows where you for are any incoming phone call. This information is all in a computer and accessing it provides a way to track you. Even shopping complexes are using it now to track shoppers as they go round and build a view of there activities.

So it is time to say NO. We do not want to be tracked and monitored. The intrusion outways the risk of non-detection and crime prevention.

There is a better way to improve society: that is to improve our moral education. This is the job of churches, mosques and other moral or religious establishments. A challenge that they are not facing up to today. When we elect (sorry appoint) a new archbishop of Canterbury soon, let's keep this very much in mind.