The Prime Minister’s website, number10.gov.uk, has recently been revamped; it now runs on the WordPress blogging/CMS software (which incidently is pretty good — I use it myself). However, the government might be embarrassed that they’re breaking copyright law.
If you look at the HTML for the website, you can see that the cascading style sheet is at the URL http://www.number10.gov.uk/wp-content/themes/networker-10/style.css.
The first few lines of this file are:
/* Theme Name: NetWorker Theme URI: http://www.antbag.com Description: An adsense ready theme from Antbag.com. Version: 1.0 Author: Anthony Baggett Author URI: http://www.antbag.com/ */
On the Antbag website, there’s a list of downloadable themes, which includes the NetWorker theme. Downloading the NetWorker theme, and opening the zip file, I see that it contains a file license.rtf that says it’s licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. This license requires that if you use the work, you must attribute the copyright holder, and you must include a copy of the license or its URL with every use.
So while the number 10 website is allowed to use the NetWorker theme, they must say they’ve done so on their website, and say that the theme is licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. But if you go to the Number 10 website’s copyright page, there’s no mention of it.
Incidently, this is the same British government that is talking about severing the Internet connections of people who break copyright law by downloading files on P2P networks. Because the government are not hypocrites, I’m sure they will now either drop these plans, or disconnect themselves from the Internet.
(via: The Yorksher Gob, the rousabout, Dizzy Thinks)
UPDATE: Anthony Baggett, who is the author of the NetWorker theme, says that no-one approached him for permission to remove the attrribution. So Number 10 is committing copyright infringement.
The problem with this reasoning is that Russia is a far greater threat to the West than Iran is, for the following reasons:
1. Russia has more people and a larger economy than Iran, therefore the foundations of its power are stronger. (For the same reason, China is a far greater long-term threat than either Russia or Iran).
2. Russia has more of all categories of weapon (tanks, aircraft, warships, missiles, nukes, etc) than Iran does.
3. Russia invades European countries. Iran doesn’t; indeed the Islamic Republic of Iran hasn’t invaded any of its neighbours.
4. Russia is an internally repressive regime to a larger extent than Iran is, e.g. Russia’s behaviour in Chechnya is far worse than anything Iran has done to its minorities.
5. Russia holds to the principle that European countries shouldn’t be allowed to have independent foreign policies — for example, it it opposed to Ukraine joining NATO, regardless of whether the Ukrainian governmentt or people think it’s a good idea. Iran, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t have a position on Ukraine joining NATO.
6. Russia assassinates British citizens in London; Iran doesn’t.
For these reasons, to the extent that the West has to choose between opposing Iran and opposing Russia, it should oppose Russia.