chosaq

Blog-a-thon

The EFF recently announced its Blog-a-thon initiative:

Your post can be about anything that represents your personal first step in connecting to the fight for freedom, and it can be in any format you choose: video, photos, audio blog, podcast, good old-fashioned text.

My contribution (in good old-fashioned text):

It was the Spring of 2002 – I was taking a Japanese language course at Osaka University of Foreign Studies and busy reading materials for my graduation paper (15-20 pages in Japanese), which was due for the beginning of September. I had been doing some research about Japan’s copyright system, but couldn’t really find an interesting angle to approach the topic – the (mainly offline) resources I had found were all rather descriptive, or else, suggested a move towards stricter legislation in order to keep the law in sync with the fast-moving internet – “so what?” I thought. As I was sort of stuck, I asked permission for a one-time visit to Kansai University’s library, hoping to find some new, interesting reading materials there. I postponed my visit a couple of times though and continued working on my laptop instead, surfing through the (newly discovered) blog world, and trying to figure out how to use RSS and web standards.

However, the browsing fun abruptly stopped: in a moment of unhandiness, I dropped my laptop and my wireless network card got pushed inside, with undefined pieces of plastic coming out of the PC Card slot (parts of the motherboard, I learned later) – needless to say, the thing stopped working. I slept really bad, dropped off my laptop for reparation the next day, and decided to go to Kansai University’s library, as I had nothing else to do anyway: it was that day I discovered James Boyle’s Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society, and I thought it was brilliant. That was the first click. The second click came a couple of weeks later, when I found Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and was blown away by what I read. I suddenly knew from which angle to write about Japan’s ongoing move to stricter copyright regulations – something that ultimately resulted in this blog.

And my laptop? Was fixed 2 weeks later, with all my data still on it. The price of the reparation was about 80.000 Yen though…

(Blog-a-thon tag: EFF15)