h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

However, I still enjoy Netflix. I'm just hoping they get their streaming selection up to the point that I can drop the discs. I'm paying around $20/month and it's just not worth it at the rate I'm actually watching things. I'm sitting on the discs usually for 3-4 days before I get around to watching them, which means I'm basically getting only 4 discs per month and I might stream one or two programs. (Recently was catching up on That Mitchell and Web Look, but it expired on 1 Jan so it's only available on DVD now.

Sheesh. Change that checkout to rental. You'd think I'm a librarian or something.

Whatever it was I had had these waiting lists, too. Lots of times I had to wait a long time for a video to arrive. And I wouldn't know for sure what was coming sometimes.

There are so many copyright issues these days. Even libraries get sued sometimes for showing films without a special license. And the copyrights for e-books is seriously complicating things. I like modern technology, but...

Copyright and its derivatives is getting to be a serious pain in the fundament these days. Leaving aside all the file-sharing stuff which has been done to death, and the endless lawsuits around patents, it's out of control even in my own area of expertise. Hardly a week goes by without stories of one brewery suing another over a trademark infringement, usually citing confusion by consumers as a basis, when to anyone with a modicum of common sense it's perfectly clear that the two aren't related.

Here's a really silly one. A while back someone decided to cross an IPA with a stout and came up with a black IPA. Oh, some said, but don't you know that IPA stands for India Pale Ale, and how can you have a black pale ale? It's an oxymoron! Okay, we'll call it a Cascadian dark ale because these veers feature American hops and most of those come from the Pacific northwest near the Cascades. It has become an accepted beer style.

Well, now a brewery is gearing up its lawyers because it says that it trademarked 'Cascadian' and no-one else can use it.

Don't even get me started on copyrighting human genetics

In this case Cascadian is an adjective,a descriptive, not a proper noun. It would be the noun that is copyrighted. People who file copyrights on common words or descriptive words really annoy me.