Yesterday in my web design, the lecturer was a guest speaker. This particular guest speaker is my college's IP attorney, and as we are designing websites, our professor feels that we should be suitably aware of the issues surrounding IP so as to not get sued. At first, I was highly skeptical as a similar talk my high school librarian gave last year was almost totally propaganda in favor of IP-protection and the wonders it does for creative works. That said, I listened to the whole talk, and I'm glad that the attorney delivered the facts straight without injecting too much of his own opinion into the discussion, and he made it clear that we should be aware of IP laws mainly for our own defense (and not necessarily to clog the system with more IP). Whenever he did (occasionally) inject his own opinion into the discussion, he made it fairly clear that he thinks that the current state of IP is a mess and that the current copyright term is way too long for its own good. All I want to say is that I'm glad there's at least one IP lawyer out there who understands that the status quo is bad without being blinded by the powerful interests in the field of IP.
On a totally unrelated note, I have come to the realization that the reason why some widgets on this blog don't look right is because I am using these new widgets on a very old template. I can't even take advantage of the new Blogger Template Designer to tweak it. For this reason, there is going to be an overhaul in the way this blog looks; though I will try to preserve the current look and feel, it will be a more current template so that I can use widgets without having to deal with things like overlapping text. I hope to finish this by the weekend.