Day: December 10, 2007

The more I see news like this, the more I dispair. The world will soon be a place where murder will be swept aside for a much more serious problem. By this, I mean of course the scourge of intellectual property theft.

Drive-by shootings in the inner city? Not a priority. After all, they're all animals and it's just natural selection. But a teenager downloading a non-DRM MP3? We can't have that!!! Throw the book at him! How dare he deprive the RIAA from its hard-earned price gouging?

Bitter much? Oh, yes.

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Christmas is known world-wide as a time for sharing, a time for giving. But for one charity, instead of Santa arriving with gifts, the copyright police turned up demanding money. Why? Because the charity allows children to sing carols on the premises and their kitchen radio is a little loud. You couldnt make it up.

Be under no illusion, being unlicensed to play music to the public is a very serious situation in the UK. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 states that if you use copyright music in public, you have to get permission from every single copyright holder to play their music. Or pay a fee to the right outfit.

Car maintenance chain Kwik Fit is currently tied up in a bitter legal battle with the UK Performing Rights Society (PRS). Its alleged that Kwik Fits mechanics allowed their radios to be played within earshot of the public – a truly heinous crime for which the PRS are demanding in damages.

According to a report, the PRS are at it again. The staff at a charity also received a visit from a PRS officer who declared that because a staff radio in the kitchen could be overheard by the public in their tea-room, they would need a license. The charity, Dam House, which was originally set up to save a historic building and offer community and health facilities, had to have a fund-raising event to raise the money for the license.

However, having purchased a license, this wasnt the end of the matter. The PRS then started asking more questions, and when they discovered that kids sing in a carol concert there at Christmas, they declared that the premises were under licensed. Yes, of course – the PRS wanted yet more money.

We got really worked up when they told us how much we would have to pay this year said charity trustee, Margaret Hatton. They asked us what facilities we had and we think they are charging more because they found out weve got a function room.

The next quote from Margaret really speaks for itself – has the world gone mad?

They told us the only way to avoid paying to sing the carols is if the kids are told to stick to old songs which are out of copyright.

Next thing you know someone will be saying Happy Birthday is copyrighted and you cant sing that to the public in the tea-rooms. Well, unfortunately it is, and legally you cant.

Elaine Hurst, another Dam House trustee explained: We know the recording artists need to be paid for their work but this is ridiculous.

Every TV owning family in the UK has to have a UK TV License by law, the proceeds of which go to fund BBC TV and BBC radio stations nationwide. To charge a charity money because the public can overhear a radio is crazy, especially when you consider the public already paid another license to be allowed to listen to the content coming out of its speakers.

James Watson, the DNA pioneer who claimed Africans were less intelligent than whites, has been found to have more genes of black origin than most Europeans.

An analysis of Dr Watson's genome shows 16 of his genes are likely to have come from a black ancestor of African descent. By contrast, most people of European descent would have no more than one such gene.

The study was made possible when Dr Watson allowed his genome – the map of all his genes – to be published on the internet in the interests of science and research.

“This level is what you would expect in someone who had a great-grandparent who was African,” said Kari Stefansson of deCODE Genetics, whose company carried out the analysis.

“It was very surprising to get this result for Jim.”

Dr Watson won the Nobel Prize, with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, after working out the structure of DNA in 1953. However, he provoked an outcry earlier this year when he suggested black people were genetically less intelligent than whites.

His critics savoured the latest wry twist of fate at the weekend. John Sulston, the Nobel laureate who helped lead the consortium that decoded the human genome, said the discovery was ironic in view of Dr Watson's opinions on race.

“I never did agree with Watson's remarks,” he said. “We don't understand enough about intelligence to generalise about race.”

The backlash against Dr Watson forced him to step down as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state, after 39 years at the helm.

He said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospects for Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”.

The analysis of his genome by deCODE Genetics, an Icelandic company, shows a further nine of Dr Watson's genes are likely to have come from an ancestor of Asian descent. Dr Watson was not available for comment.