Paul's Comments

I have seen some TV advertisements for Celebrex, a brand of pain reliever. I have to wonder, what on earth are the people selling this stuff thinking? The advertisement gives all of the possible side effects, and, in general, is an excellent advertisement telling people why they should stay the hell away from this crap stuff!

I mean, someone tells me that the product they are selling (the generic name is "celecoxib", a type of "cox-2 inhibitor" that attacks one of the problems of arthritis) is just as bad as everyone else's product of the same type (NSAIDs, or "Non Steroidal Anti-Inflamiatory Drugs"), and how all the other products of the same type have all the same horrible side effects and require the same warnings, perhaps that tells me that people need to avoid that particular product! In fact, I'd be not playing up the the fact that these type drugs are NSAIDs; I'd be very cautious of any form of advertising that used the word "AIDS" anywhere near my product! (Unless it was advertised as a treatment or a cure.)

Maybe they were ordered to run these ads because of their own misconduct in advertising it improperly or failing to give information or something. Otherwise, they'd have been better off not running the ad in the first place.

Which brings up another issue: has anyone noticed all of these new 'wonder drugs' where some shyster runs ads to drum up business for some class-action lawsuit over some drug where it damaged people horribly? Presumably the manufacturer knew about it, and either did nothing or lied about it to the government, and now a bunch of people have really bad illnesses (worse than if they had never used that product), that never should have happened.

I've heard one of the big payout items in doing a news feed is to have articles about mesothelioma (a type of cancer you can get from exposure to asbestos), some guy set up a news aggregator and let Google put targeted ads on his site, and apparently some of these people buying click-through ads for people with mesothelioma (again, presumably lawyers wanting companies to sue) are paying as much as $10 a pop for leads. Sounds like there should be some new sort of revelation-type news show: "Big Events: When Lawyers Smell Money".

The deep pockets that drug companies represent attract all sorts of hangers-on and those who either don't like the fact that they make a lot of money, or think that they could do better with the money the drug companies have than their stockholders could. It apparently is also scaring the drug companies, since they've been pushing their private welfare program to give people who can't afford drugs access to them free or at lower cost. They're probably trying to stave off either federal price ceilings, more drug importation from Canada, or the federal government using its purchasing power under medicare and states using medicaid to buy in bulk at a discount.

Somehow the ads for these prescription drug discount programs make me think of some statement on the order of "If you can't afford your heroin, Joe the pusher may be able to help."

I originally started writing this article yesterday but my computer locked up right in the middle of composing this. I got so upset I decided to wait a little bit so I wouldn't be angry when I rewrote it. I don't know if that will make my comments any better or not, but it's probably a good idea.

Viacom's lawyer has an op-ed piece in the Washington Post regarding its suit against Youtube hosting content which includes some of its copyrighted material. There is also the usual Peanut Gallery of comments on Slashdot, of which mine, of course is one, and it essentially repeats this article.

I sent the following comment in to the Washington, Post in response.

Mr. Fricklas' comnents are, for lack of a better term, a whiner who doesn't like the law as written and wants to sue to get something from the courts that the legislature has clearly denied him. His point that You Tube has knowledge of copyrighted content is not relevant. As his own statement has made, Congress gave sites immunity under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act for sites that quickly take down infringing material. He has not said that Youtube is not removing material when requested; indeed, my understanding is Youtube removes tens or hundreds of thousands of reported clips all of the time. Here, also, he is in effect saying that because Youtube has the capacity to remove material either because it is unlawful or in some way undesirable, Youtube is infringing because of the very controls it is required by law to have to remove infringing material! If Youtube didn't have controls to remove the material, I'm sure that then he'd be claiming that it was not properly designed to comply with the law!

He also writes, "Is it fair to burden YouTube with finding content on its site that infringes others' copyright? Putting the burden on the owners of creative works would require every copyright owner, big and small, to patrol the Web continually on an ever-burgeoning number of sites. That's hardly a workable or equitable solution."

The only problem with his argument is that that has been the exact requirement for the past 200 or so years that copyright has existed; the copyright owner is required - and has always been required - to police his copyrights - and no amount of whining about how a requirement - in existence for hundreds of years - to be changed because he doesn't like it is valid. I'd like to remind this lawyer of a comment by the U.S Supreme court regarding how one obtains one's rights over something:

"The privilege... is neither accorded to the passive resistant, not to the person who is ignorant of his rights, nor to one who is indifferent thereto... It is valid only when insisted upon..." McAlister v. Henkle, 201 U.S. 90.

My guess is that this whole lawsuit is nothing more than a bargaining chip so that Viacom can make more money off their content. Since, like so many other whiney losers, he can't figure a way to negotiate in the marketplace, he goes running to the courts to try and get what he can't win at the bargaining table.

Paul Robinson
General Manager

Viridian Development Corporation
Arlington, Virginia

Note: After writing this, I realized a great comment as to what the suit represents. Viacom's lawyer, in effect is saying, "All YouTube are belong to us!"

I have noticed a number of spamming items being posted here as trackbacks in an attempt to get more inbound links. I have since enabled the antispam feature to prevent spammy links in trackbacks. It is a whopping 100+ pages of garbage to refuse to allow in URLs. Also, the system sends me all comments for review before posting. So, if someone wants to post a reply here, and it's spam, nobody but I will see it, and it goes into the trash.

The next step, I think, might be to go after these people for their misconduct. Whether they can be sued or get anything from them is problematic, but at this point I seriously hope to find some way to take care of them, hopefully in a debilitatiting, crippling and agonizingly painful form that they never recover from. Or, if you think that's a misuse of a preposition, let's say I hope some of these spammers are crippled for life and never recover.

This is the first blog entry I have done. I have opinions. Lots of opinions. I have wanted to do a blog for quite a while but couldn't find a blog software package that did what I wanted to do. So I'm going to see how this works.