XVI FEIRA LAICA

XVI FEIRA LAICA
Dias 26 e 27 de Junho
14H-20H
Bedeteca de Lisboa | Olivais | Portugal

Now with sixteen editions, the biggest Portuguese independent fair returns to its most regular place, for two days of cultural fair trade, networking and music. Highlighs in this edition for the concerts going on during the event, activities for kids with Mini-Laica (opportunity for kids to trade things they don’t want anymore) and story telling; the traditional second-hand stall (books and records); the “Science Is My Mother” wall in the expositions space in Bedeteca and a typography workshop by Oficina do Cego.

Poster by José Cardoso

I'm going to be there during all the event, in Noori Records' stall, and invite you to also come and say hi. More information (in Portuguese) can be found at Feira Laica’s website. See you there!

Piracy talking? Hush! (Or how Google doesn't like what I have to say)

Last month I wrote about "piracy" - you know, the non-authorized download of copyrighted content - in this blog post. For it, I made a poll, using blogger tools (that uses a Google service to create polls), where I was asking questions about "what would you do if you couldn't do non-authorized download of copyrighted content". The options were something like this:

• I don't do non-authorized download of copyrighted content
• If I couldn't do it, I would buy everything I now download
• If I couldn't do it, I would buy some things I now download
• If I couldn't do it, I wouldn' buy anything I now download anyway

I now came to my blog to see something else (don't ask me what, I can't remember), and I just noticed the big 404 you probably see on it:

I don't know why the poll was deleted, I heard nothing from Google regarding it, but I'm surely not going to quit doing this just because Google doesn't like my polls. No, I'm creating another poll. For the record, and I have nothing but my word on this, last time I've checked more than 40 votes where in it, and 0 of them were in the "I would pay for everything I download if I couldn't download it" option.

So, here's the poll, again. If you had voted previously, please vote again, and help spread the word... Thank you.

[UPDATE:] And then, the Google poll is back online. Just to be sure, please vote on both...

Poll about "piracy", please vote and spread the word

OK, I'm asking and pointing out for years about the fact that so-called "scientific studies" "proving" that "piracy" ("unauthorized" download of copyrighted material) is bad (like this latest about how many VAT countries are arguably loosing thanks to "piracy") always have the same (and biased) flaw: they assume - obviously wrongly - that each downloaded without authorization piece of copyrighted bits (whatever they are: movies, music, books, software,...) would be a sale if the person didn't have the chance to download it. In other words: these studies assume that you would buy every crappy movie or album you download from the pirate bay if, well, the pirate bay wasn't there. Which I wholeheartedly believe is utter crap.

So, since nobody does nothing about this (yes, I'm criticizing the journalists out there), I decided to do something myself. I know this is not scientific, but I spread the challenge: get me a scientific study about this and I'll use your data. Until then, well, this is what I've got. I wish I had at least 100 votes to give some meaning to the results, so, please spread the word about this poll. Thank you.

PS -> The poll is on the right sidebar of this blog. If you're reading this via RSS, please go to http://mindboosternoori.blogspot.com. There's also a direct link to the poll.

Thank you.

[UPDATE] seems that the good folks from Google decided they didn't like the poll, so they took it down. Last time I've checked, more than 40 votes where in it, and 0 of them were in the "I would pay for everything I download if I couldn't download it" option. A new blog post about this will come soon.

[UPDATE 2] A new blog post about this, and with a new poll, not hosted by Google, is here.