The dying child debate technique

A common way to evoke emotion or support for something you
want to happen is to make it a matter of life and death for
a specific person, preferably a child. Multiple times I have seen people trying to get politicians to spend more money on something by parading some sick kid in front of journalists.
The problem of course is that its seldom as simple as these
heart wrenching cases want to you think. And often the examples pulled forth doesn’t hold water as they work both ways.

Now it seems this age old technique is being brought to bear on the issue of intelectual property. It started with a Bilboard article in which a Musician claim that if Creative Commons had been along when he was young then he would be dead of Aids by now. I remember reading it and thinking what a bunch of bullshit the article was.

Well the counter example is now out on
Kuro5hin with a guy telling the story of how patent law is hindering his access to medicine which his life depend on.

Of course neither of the two examples are really proving anything in regards to intelectual property, except to show that the current system creates winners and losers, like any system would. And that in some cases being a winner or a loser is a matter of life or death. I guess the real debate is wether we want life and death issues to be decided on the roulete table of IP reward systems.

Promoting Ogg

Why is it that even people closely aligned with free software or Creative Commons aren’t pushing Ogg encoded videos stronger? Only reason I can think of that isn’t sad is that they don’t have any good tools to create the Ogg files with. Hopefully when we get PiTiVi more widely distributed it will resolve that issue and much more Ogg content will appear. If Pitivi doesn’t cause a large influx of Ogg material being put online I guess I need to start harassing everyone I see posting quicktime, divx, mpeg or real movies.