Kader Arif, the European Parliament’s rapporteur, resigned over the issue this past Friday. Emil Boc, Prime Minister of Romania, also resigned, though it’s not entirely clear if it was directly due to ACTA, stating:

“I do not hold any information on the circumstances in which Romania has adopted the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.”

TRANSLATION: “I just sign stuff.”

Similarly, Poland has put ratification of the trade agreement on hold. The Slovenian ambassador to Japan, Helena Drnovsek Zorko, apologized for signing ACTA. In a written piece translated into English, she admits that she signed it because her government told her to, and “out of civic carelessness” in not bothering to understand what ACTA meant before signing it.

A spectacular mess.

UPDATE: Germany is refusing to sign ACTA for now.

Validating censorship by saying it’s ‘just business’ is repugnant behavior in a modern society, equivalent to keeping the peasants uneducated in the Dark Ages. If that’s ‘just business’ then you need to redefine how ‘just business’ works because it’s ‘just broken.’ There can be no compromise with this line of thinking.

SOLUTION: Tor is software which allows users to reroute IP addresses, circumventing censorship.

“Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.” – V for Vendetta

“Young high-growth companies have created 40 million American jobs in the past three decades thirty years – and accounted for all of the net new jobs produced during that period.”

A worthwhile cause, no doubt. Everyone wants to see an end to this depression. But I’m concerned with Case’s attention to detail here. Let’s face facts, his leadership of AOL is questionable.

And the truth is, we haven’t stopped SOPA. It’s being resubmitted under the auspice of a trade act. Declawed, but fangs still.

There’s work yet to be done.

“The people who run our cities don’t understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit. The people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff.

“Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours, it belongs to you, it’s yours to take, rearrange and re-use.

“Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.”

“Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.”

Graham’s referring to the story wherein Hollywood seems to be cast in the role of the villain.

I don’t believe Hollywood needs to die, but it does need to contract. Desperately. How could anyone look at the cost of some Hollywood films and not say ‘enough is enough.’ Especially in light of the global economic crisis.

Ever see the science fiction film Primer? One of the best sci-fi movies I’ve ever watched. Cost: $7000. Memento, one of my favorite films, cost $3 million to create. It’s all about the story.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself.

Words are ideas and ideas can be sharp or fuzzy – fuzzy ideas lead to fuzzy thinking. An obstacle to using language precisely is that words often have multiple definitions, and many words that have a specific technical definition also have a colloquial use that is different than the technical use, or at least not as precise.

This morning marks the first morning of true winter. Bundled in scarf, gloves, coat – I made my way to work. Breathing is the most difficult part. I used jog quite a bit in my youth, so breathing is something you train yourself to do properly to get the most out of your body.

This was entirely different. The cold literally sucks the air out of your lungs while riding.

It’s going to be an interesting winter.

And I’m hoping, crossing my fingers they’ve watched the gravity surrounding that shift when it altered the music industry, bloated in bureaucracy and gluttonous on CD profits. The music industry couldn’t make the Change when the distribution model shifted and the great disruptor, the Internet, pulled it away from them.

Now, on the slow road to disintermediation, the storytellers find themselves creating a new model, with all the uncomfortable growing pains of doing so. And while Apple and Amazon rush to provide publishers with an infrastructure, acting as a digital middle man, history has shown us what happens to middle men in the digital age.

One story should be dancing around the collective minds of every publisher right now: what’s my role in this brave, new world?