Life in 140 characters

At home with thousands of records, thousands of books, hundreds of DVDs, and still being accused of "stealing" on twitter, just because I have the same understanding than the Portuguese Republic's Attorney General of the Portuguese law. Next time you see me whining about how frustrating is to try having conversations 140 characters at a time, remember this blog post.

My top 10 of books read in 2012

Like I did for 2011, here is my blog post about the best ten books I've read in 2012. But first, the same disclaimer I did last year:

Unlike with music, and unfortunately, my "books consumption" isn't that high in the last few years, and 2011 was terrible in that aspect: I only read 35 books in the whole year. So, instead of doing a "Top ten of 2011 books" like I did for music, I'm doing a "top 10 of books I've read in 2011".

The difference here is: in 2012 I've behaved even worse, and have only read 19 books :-( Anyway, here's the list (in no particular order):

The "Piracy Is Liberation" saga continues, and I continue as hooked at it as before. As I said last year,

Piracy Is Liberation is a dystopia, sometime in the future, where people live in "the city" and capitalism is the mandatory religion. Instead of explaining it to you, I'll point you to the torrent for the first book (Deicide is number 9) - uploaded and spreaded by the author himself.

So, this year I've read number 10, "Hypertext Consciousness", which is the best book of the saga so far. Book 11 is out now already and I've had the pleasure of buying it from the artist himself at the latest Feira Laica, but still didn't manage to read it...

The other author that visited one year later was Neal Stephenson. Once again recalling what I've said in the past,

If you know me, you know that, on my scale, Neal Stephenson is the best writer EVER. [...] Every Neal Stephenson's book was mind blowing to me - you read each of those books and they actually and visibly change you.

So, this year we have two from him - yay! - "Some Remarks", a very nice-to-read but completely different book from him, since it is an anthology/collection of texts he've written on the most various subjects along the years, and then "Mongoliad - Book 1", which is the first of a series on the "Foreworld" universe that has been constructed by a number of authors, including Neal Stephenson. The Mongoliad books have participation from Neal Stephenson (I've read in an interview to him somewhere that more or less 20% of the text of the first book has his pen), but not every Foreworld media (books included) will have. Anyway, reading Mongoliad book 1 made me want to be a follower of the Foreworld universe, even if I was quite disconcerted about the way the publisher deals with its fans. Let me explain: against all "common rules" in book publishing, Mongoliad's books 1 and 2 had their hardcover edition published after the paperback edition (book 3 have the same release date for both hardcover and paperback). What's so wrong about this (besides the obvious penalization to those fans that are willing to pay more for the limited edition, that will have the chance to start reading the book only later than the others) is that there are three short stories that are only available (on paper, free of DRM) on this editions. Not only that, but worse: all this was only announced after the release date of the first book, meaning that me, amongst many others that bought the (paperback) book on pre-order or in the release date, found themselves in posession of the incomplete edition, being forced to buy the book again (another edition, of course) to be able to read the short story.

But enough of venting about publishers that should know better, let's talk about the rest - and the rest is SciFi... or about it.

You might have heard of "The Hunger Games", and, well, I was sucked into it. After seeing it on the theater (which was actually an accident, we went to see "something" and this was what turned out to be ;-)), we bought the trilogy and read it, three in a row. Not extremely clever or even original, this saga is quite welcome, specially since this kind of themes do not reach mainstream as often as I'd like to...

The British Library has an exhibition about SciFi called "Out Of This World: Science Fiction but not as you know it", and I blame myself for not knowing about it before and travelling to UK just to see it. Anyway, they did an excellent job of summing it up in a book, which is undoubtedly the best book I've ever read about SciFi, and I encourage everyone to grab a copy and read it. Most importantly, if I had to choose "you can only either see the expo or read the book", I'm sure I would prefer the book, so I'm quite happy :-)

The rest:

• Keith Brooke - The Accord
• James Blish - The Quincunx Of Time
• James P. Hogan - Thrice Upon A Time

Copying music and movies on the Internet is legal in Portugal

The news broke out today, but I think this has wider impact and interest than just the Portuguese reader, so I decided to, shamelessly, simply translate the news article that can be found originally (in Portuguese) at Exame Informática.

Only the italics (well, and possible language and translation mistakes) are mine, the rest belongs to Exame Informática.

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At the beginning of 2011, the Portuguese Association for Audiovisual Commerce of Cultural and Entertainment Works (ACAPOR) made titles in the Portuguese newspapers for having presented a complaint to the Portuguese Republic's Attorney General (PGR) of two thousand Portuguese Internet users that used P2P services to share allegedly ilegal copies of movies (by leaving boxes filled with paper prints of "proof", and they were accusing not persons but IPs).

After a little more than one year, the Department of Investigation and Penal Action (DIAP), that has the objective of analyze complaints to PGR that are then forwarded to the Public Ministry, published a devastating dispatch to ACAPOR's pretensions.

Besides the several notes to the procedures followed by ACAPOR, DIAP delivers a dispatch that risks marking the history of the defense of author's rights in Portugal. Here's an excerpt that just arrived to our office: «More over, in the legal point of view, and even if we put in this kind of networks the question regarding the user being simultaneously in the digital environment as both an uploader and downloader of the files to share, we see the actions by the participants licit for private use - art. 75 nr. 2) and 81 b) from CDADC, - even if one can think that when the copy is done the user doesn't stop his participation in the sharing».

While considering that the Authors Rights and Related Rights Code (CDADC) doesn't make the use of file sharing networks (P2P) illegal, the dispatch from the Public Ministry recognizes the merit of ACAPOR's actions for alerting to the need of rethinking the judicial questions related to the defense of the authors' rights of movies, music and software in the digital age. But even in this point the DIAP investigators leave a message - and remind that the defense of the authors' rights must be applied having also into account «the right to education, culture, freedom of action in the cybernetic space, specially when just freedom is limited to the individual being in nothing related with commercial questions, with the profit of the mercantile activity».

In the same dispatch, the DIAP and Public Ministry responsible confess that it is impossible to investigate the distribution and download of illegal copies in the Internet using the IP address. According to the investigators, accusing someone using the IP address as a bases is «erroneous», since the titular of the IP address used in the Net access «isn't necessarily the user in that specific moment, isn't necessarily who shares the work, but the one who has the service in its name, independently of using it or just formally figuring as its holder».

The Public Ministry refers, based on the analysis that it made of the CDADC articles, that only in cases where the author (and we assume no one else, even if the CDADC refers also artists, and producers) expressively forbids it you can consider a crime the public sharing of a work.

The dispatch also implicitly criticizes the way ACAPOR has dealt with the process, highlighting that the association that represents video rental stores didn't present any document showing that the movie(s) author(s) did forbid the «public sharing».

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The article goes on, but this is the important part. If you want to read more about this (also in Portuguese), see also the news at TeK.