Why? Well the courts seem to have screwed up badly in dealing with situations where notice was poor. In the case of physical property, ownership rights are clear and well signalled: even if we’re neighbours, the chances of me building my shed/house on your property are very low because the boundaries are very clear and/or quite easy/cheap to ascertain. But if you get a patent registered, and its claims are worded vaguely enough, then I might well infringe inadvertently.

It works OK for chem and pharma because there are formulas that limit the scope of the claim. But its a minefield for patents on software and business methods. Which of course encourages some to craft patent applications in ways that allow them to ambush innovators after they become successful. After the book was published, the Rambus case was finally killed off by the US Supreme Court, so the outlook remains bleak.

Convention over Configuration (CoC), which creates a default towards normal (conventional) things, and Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) which saves heaps of time. The developer we use also refers to Ruby as “self healing”.

Anyway, it looks like a big leap forward by the open source community. Isn’t amazing what you can get free?

In yesterday’s NZ Herald Canvas magazine, Greg Dixon rejoices in the hope that these actions will induce some firms to stop playing music altogether:

So bring on the PPNZ fee brouhaha. Try making ‘em all pay for inflicting bloody Beyonce or Britney on the rest of us and hasten the hopeful consequence: the blessed return of the sound of silence.

I agree entirely, and many people with nuanced musical tastes might share this view: either play what I love, as it is meant to be played, or leave me in peace.

Instead, it seems that commercial (eg retail) music programmers go for broad appeal, and in the process they annoy most people who actually care about music. Cementing the irony, they manage the annoyance risk through the volume, which is why if we ever do luck onto a great track in public, we miss most of it in the ambient clutter.

Here is the question those firms approached by PPNZ should ask themselves:  should I pay for the right to annoy music lovers so that I can offer wallpaper music on people who don’t really care about music? I reckon silence would be definitely worth a shot for broad-based situations like supermarkets.

By raising the price, PPNZ might also find that diversion happens in other ways. For example, those firms that think they have a good idea of their target demographic could just tune into the most appropriate radio station, which has already paid the royalty. And maybe gyms that need highly specialised hard driving music for their workouts will consider direct deals with some of NZ’s enterprising domestic drum’n'bass purveyors?