As a kid there were two things that encouraged me to explore new worlds and learn English: rock music and videogames. Some days ago in Venezuela, my place of birth, they started to enforce a law to practically ban videogames., with fines from 30.000 to 60.000 US$ and prison time from 3 to 5 years for those who import, sell, distribute and (use?) videogames. That is very sad for me, as Venezuelan and as a gamer. I feel they are closing a way for kids to learn English with games to have more and better opportunities than the ones who don’t develop language skills (it is important to note that before the current generation of game consoles, which are multilingual, we had the same North American releases, in English). The major driving force behind the law is to protect children from violent games, a thing in itself very plausible, but is a total ban we are talking about, ignoring any age rating system that exist or the rights of adults to enjoy these products as well.
The law’s name is Law for the Banning of Videos and War Toys. It is no secret that there’s a huge problem of crime and violence in the country, this is one of the premises supporting the law, as the congress state that “there are scientific studies that prove there is a notorious influence on the future citizen’s conduct and the activities they do in the games”. But how about the incendiary speeches of most of the politicians in the country? And the possession of guns among the civil population and the shootouts in the slums? How about the continuous acquisition of guns, weapons, planes, submarines, etc? The almost declarations of war with neighboring countries?
The politicians at the congress indicate that this law “is not going to solve the problem of the violence, but it opens a space, a positive scenario for the discussion in different areas, nationally and internationally”. These statements only show the shortsighted criteria used by the politicians to make this law, how do you open a space for discussion with a total ban? It’s like in the United States with the prohibition, you only encourage the creation of illegal channels and businesses which is way worse as history has proven. As a gamer, I had to cope up with the problems of distribution of games in Venezuela, there are no GameStops, so there were independent importers who could charge you up to 140 US$ for a game and about 900 for a console (these were numbers I found out between December-February when I went to Venezuela), now with all videogames related economy being illegal, how much should be the price for an original game?
As many of the country’s laws intended to censor something, the solution is to ban, to punish or close, like they did with the radio stations they closed, with the television channel they had the luxury to close two times, can one be critical? No, the government won’t even try to find a middle ground, to cite a Venezuelan politician: we have a clash of classes.
Some could say that the law is not a total ban, but it’s so vague, so we can be talking about that stomping on goombas or racing a kart while throwing turtle shells is violent and war-like.
So it’s Game Over and no Continues left, it’s a sad, sad day…
judamasmas’ comment: this was a really amazing presentation, I liked it a lot. I also think is important to take into account that the users of the library could create valuable content and that this same content can be part of our actual collections. I think we have some lessons to learn and some features to import from the worlds of open access and social networks, because our way of building collections may not be very attractive by itself and funding is getting more an more difficult, just to cite two reasons.
Special Session on Services
The BitTorrent Protocol
Some aspects of its history, development, images and public relations (specially with copyright holders and defendants) are now legendary and even mythical between Internet users and tech geeks, such as the attempt to buy the micronation 
The prosecutor was unable to prove the .torrent files brought as evidence were actually using The Pirate Bay’s tracker.
After the trial, Sveriges Radio P3 News organised an investigation that found on April 23 that the judge Tomas Norström had several engagements with organisations interested in intellectual property issues. Peter Danowsky, Monique Wadsted and Henrik Pontén from the prosecution side are also members of one of the organisations, the Swedish Copyright Association. Several legal experts have commented that the judge should not have taken the case because of the potential conflict of interest, and that there are grounds for a retrial. As of April 23, Peter Sunde’s lawyer Peter Althin has already put in a request for a retrial. Such requests would normally be handled by the Swedish Parliamentary Ombudsman, but as the case is under appeal for other reasons, it will be taken up in the Svea Court of Appeal.
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It was very nice to be in Valencia for a few days, and finally know Spain, its splendid weather, noise, only comparable to that of Caracas, to see the “fallas” in the streets and see and know special people in Congress, such as Emilia Currás, Blanca Rodríguez Bravo, Tomas Baiget, Jesús Tramullas, Rosa San Segundo, among others, most important figures and heavily cited in the Spanish literature about Information Science. I share with you 
El podcast titulado “Programa de Desarrollo de Competencias en el Uso de la Información” recoge en estilo reportaje la experiencia en Alfabetización Informacional de la que he sido parte al trabajar en la Biblioteca Pedro Grases de la Universidad Metropolitana en Venezuela. A continuación encontrarán enlaces a los tres episodios que lo conforman en formato mp4 “ipod ready” y flash para una mejor visualización en línea.
