Mr Speaker

Thought Thieves

thought thieves"Think about it: how would you feel if you saw your hard work being passed off as the property of someone else?" I'm sure the folks at Apple have been pissed about that for years. Perhaps they could take the opportunity to enter Microsoft's short film competition on intellectual property theft: "Thought Thieves"

Yep, if you've put a CD you own on your iPod, or taped Home and Away to watch when you get home, you are not just infringing copyright - you are a thought thief.

Thankfully, with Microsoft leading the way on Digital Rights Management, they can be our very own thought police. In fact, thanks to juicy chunks of the Free Trade Agreement we got - you wont have to be afraid of accidentally making a backup of your songs. Windows wont let you. And if a naughty song manages to gets on to your mp3 player, DRM will delete it for you. So you've nothing to fear.

And don't worry about the rights to the short film you make getting into the hands of those evil thought thieves - the thought police handled that in rule 7 on your entry form:

I will formally licence on terms acceptable to Microsoft, all intellectual property rights in my film and agree to waive all moral rights in relation to my film if requested to do so.

They thought of everything. I just hope they got permission to use that title from Orwell's publisher.

2 Comments

  1. Wow, i didn’t even know i had “moral rights”!

    Wednesday, May 18, 2005 at 3:02 pm | Permalink
  2. Is posting that logo on your blog a thoughtcrime?
    Better watch out before the Ministry of Love comes after you =)

    Saturday, May 28, 2005 at 1:41 am | Permalink
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