After years of trying to cloud the public mind by calling it “piracy” instead of “unauthorised downloading,” key copyright industry reps are starting to realize that “piracy” actually sounds kind of cool. So now they’re lobbying for the even less intellectually rigorous term “theft,” which describes an entirely different offence, enumerated in an altogether different section of the lawbooks.
This has all the dishonesty of calling everything you don’t like “terrorism” (or as my friend Ian Brown says, it’s like rebranding jaywalking as “road rape”).
Cory Doctorow, “Entertainment industry sours on term ‘pirate’ — too sexy”, BoingBoing, 2010-03-18
March 19, 2010
QotD: The term “pirate” is too sexy
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March 18, 2010
Adding “ordinary” criminals to the sex offender registry
The sex offender registry in most jurisdictions doesn’t work — at least, it doesn’t work to deter re-offence and it almost certainly doesn’t work to protect the public. What these registries do quite successfully, however, is to continue punishing the criminals long after they have served their sentences.
People who appear in these registries have a long list of prohibited activities, most frequently requiring them to stay a certain distance from schools (which often means there is little or no choice for where they can live, work, or travel, as the legallly mandated distance exceeds the average distance between schools). Ordinary ex-cons have great difficulty getting employment even in a growing economy, and the situation for identified “sex offenders” is close to impossible.
As a general rule, having your name added to the sex offender registry is as close to a life sentence as possible, but with no hope of parole and no hope of even a semblance of living a normal life.
Georgia apparently thinks this situation is not only fine, but they’d like to add non-sexual offenders to the registry too:
Georgia’s Supreme Court is upholding the government’s right to put non-sex offenders on the state’s sex-offender registry, highlighting a little-noticed (but growing) nationwide practice.
Atlanta criminal defense attorney Ann Marie Fitz estimated that perhaps thousands of convicts convicted of non-sexual crimes have been placed in sex-offender databases. Fitz represents a convict who was charged with false imprisonment when he was 18 for briefly detaining a 17-year-old girl during a soured drug deal. He unsuccessfully challenged his mandatory, lifelong sex-offender listing to the Georgia Supreme Court, which ruled against him Monday.
Under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2007, the states are required to have statutes demanding sex-offender registration for those convicted of kidnapping or falsely imprisoning minors. The Georgia court ruled that the plain meaning of “sex offender” was overridden by the state’s law.
If it’s your world view that criminals should never be forgiven for their transgressions, then this sort of deliberate act is understandable. It’s morally indefensible, but it’s understandable.
March 15, 2010
March 11, 2010
Food follies: the pinNaCle of idiocy?
The food police are after your salt:
Some New York City chefs and restaurant owners are taking aim at a bill introduced in the New York Legislature that, if passed, would ban the use of salt in restaurant cooking.
“No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption by customers of such restaurant, including food prepared to be consumed on the premises of such restaurant or off of such premises,” the bill, A. 10129, states in part.
The legislation, which Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, D-Brooklyn, introduced on March 5, would fine restaurants $1,000 for each violation.
I can only assume that Rep. Ortiz has no tastebuds, as the diet he’s prescribing would be bland, bland, bland. There’s also little chance that it’ll be passed into law, but you can consider it a shot across the bows of the restaurant trade . . . or a ranging round for the next salvo.
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March 10, 2010
Some things never change
I was looking though some old postings and found this little gem, which is as true as ever:
It is a sad real-world fact that most legislators, when presented with something they do not understand, almost always attempt to ban it. This probably started with the first neolithic fire-tamer . . . who was probably beaten to death with sticks when the tribal shaman saw it. Senator Hatch is showing all the finely nuanced reactions of Ug the caveman here.
This was in reaction to Senator Orrin Hatch introducing a bill to make peer-to-peer file sharing illegal back in 2004.
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March 9, 2010
Opening the door to arbitrary punishment
Cory Doctorow talks about why the proposed “three strikes” internet ban is such a stupid idea:
If persuasion doesn’t work, raise the taxes
New York City is moving ahead in their war on junk food, with a new proposal to add a significant tax to the sales of carbonated pop:
[Mayor Michael Bloomberg] described the soda tax — equivalent to an extra eight pence on a can — as “a fix that just makes sense”, saving lives and cutting rising health care costs.
“An extra 12 cents on a can of soda would raise nearly $1 billion (£663 million), allowing us to keep community health services open and teachers in the classroom,” he said on his weekly radio programme on Sunday.
“And, at the same time, it would help us fight a major problem plaguing our children: obesity.”
David Paterson, the mayor of New York state, has already proposed a soda tax but it was dropped last year following a public outcry.
H/T to Chris Greaves for the link, who said “Let’s see now, prohibition didn’t work, so let’s try something different!”
Of course, the proposed tax would be very popular in some areas: all the retailers outside NYC who would be able to reap significant additional sales to New Yorkers who didn’t want to pay the sin tax.
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March 4, 2010
The jokes just write themselves
By way of Kathy Shaidle’s blog, a court case that was custom-designed for certain political campaigns:
A 45-year-old woman, charged with ending a domestic dispute by killing her 26-year-old husband of five days, is a registered lobbyist for a group fighting domestic violence.
Arelisha Bridges was ordered held without bond in the Fulton County Jail. She is scheduled for a preliminary hearing later this month on charges of felony murder, murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony.
Officials said Bridges claimed she was unemployed. But records show she is a lobbyist for an organization called the National Declaration for Domestic Violence Order; its Web site says the group is pushing legislation to create a database of those convicted of sex crimes or domestic abuse.
And remember, guns don’t kill people: lobbyists for anti-domestic violence groups do.
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March 2, 2010
SWAT forces now spend more time doing non-SWAT policing
Or, more accurately, militarizing the sort of police activity that ordinary police officers would once have done:
. . . last year Maryland became the first state in the country to make every one of its police departments issue a report on how often and for what purpose they use their SWAT teams. The first reports from the legislation are in, and the results are disturbing.
Over the last six months of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times per day. In Prince George’s County alone, with its 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once per day. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, 94 percent of the state’s SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended.
Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that’s just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war.
It’s easy to see how this happened, all over North America, not just in Maryland. Increasing perception of the dangers of the drug war fed the demand for more SWAT-type forces in more and more police departments. Once in place, extensively equipped and expensively trained, the police authorities needed to justify keeping these teams active and involved . . . that is, they couldn’t pay them to sit around waiting for a hostage-taking or a major drug bust. They needed those officers to be out doing things — preferably media-friendly “big” things.
Even in the most dangerous areas, there are only so many situations that rationally require the heavy hand of the fully-armed SWAT team, so the incentives were already in place to expand the role from the original (and relatively rare) combat-style deployment to other, less dangerous (but often more mediagenic) crime fighting.
Anyone in the army can tell you that even in wartime, the majority of soldiers don’t get shot at: they patrol, they train, they do various military and non-military activites. For policemen-as-combat-troops, there are even fewer chances to use all their expensive equipment and training. The temptation to use the SWAT team for less and less dangerous activities is overwhelming, which is why you get the lads and lasses in bullet-proof vests and army helmets appearing even for non-violent misdemeanor offenses.
The choices for law enforcement are not good: disband your SWAT team and run the risk of not having the resources on hand when you actually do need that kind of force, or stay the course, keep the SWAT team(s), and keep them busy so it doesn’t look like you’re wasting a big chunk of your annual budget on inessential services. The bureaucratic instinct is to avoid courses which carry a potential result that could reflect negatively on the organization — which is why you rarely hear about police departments giving up their SWAT teams.
March 1, 2010
UK Photographers . . . act now, or lose your rights
Philip Dunn has all the bad news, photography-wise:
Photographers to lose copyright protection of their work
This startling and outrageous proposal will become UK law if The Digital Economy Bill currently being pushed through Parliament is passed. This Bill is sponsored by the unelected Government Minister, Lord Mandelson.
Let’s look at the way this law will affect your copyright:
The idea that the author of a photograph has total rights over his or her own work — as laid out in International Law and The Copyright Act of 1988 — will be utterly ignored. If future, if you wish to retain any control over your work, you will have to register that work (and each version of it) with a new agency yet to be set up.
I had wondered where Lord Mandelson had picked up his “of Mordor” sobriquet. Now I know. Oh, and it gets even worse:
Photographers are to lose all effective rights to take photographs in public places.
Not content with taking away photographer’s copyright, another section of this Government is proposing sweeping changes to your freedom to take pictures in public places.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has deemed that a photograph taken in a public place may now be considered to contain ‘private data’.
This means that if you take a picture in the street and there is a member of the public in the shot, that person has the right to demand either payment — if you wish to publish the image — or that you do not publish it. In fact, according to the ICO. There does not actually have to be an objection, it is up to the photographer to ‘judge’ whether the subject might object. Now work that one out if you can.
You may think this won’t affect you . . . but if you’ve got a camera in your cell phone or MP3 player, it’s going to have an impact. Contact your MP now and explain that you don’t approve of this drastic change in the law and try to get it tossed out before it becomes law.
February 25, 2010
EMI launches appeal over “Down Under”
Following up from earlier this month, EMI is appealing against the decision that Men at Work plagiarized a popular folk song in their 80’s hit “Down Under”:
Papers filed with the Federal Court in Sydney listed 14 grounds for appeal and stated songwriters Colin Hay and Ron Strykert did not breach copyright.
It said similarities may be noted only by a “highly educated musical ear”.
[. . .]
EMI Music said the inclusion of the melody was, at most, a form of tribute to the tune.
In its appeal, EMI also argued that the Girl Guides Association of Victoria state actually owned the copyright, as they sponsored the 1934 Girl Guides song competition for which the song was written.
The decision seemed odd in another way: lack of proportionality. The “offending” part is a very small section of the song, which would not seem to justify awarding 40-60% of the profits from the work to the plaintiff. Perhaps Australian law allows it, but it seems to be an attempt to “right a wrong” by inflicting a disproportional penalty, rather than an equitable one (that’s not to say I think the decision was correct, just a comment on the initial finding).
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February 23, 2010
Why do people pirate DVDs and Blu-Ray discs?
Because of this kind of crap:
Click to see original
But maybe I’m misunderstanding why they all do it: instead of trying to warn me off from illegal activity, perhaps they’re actually trying to get me so irritated that I’ll go ahead and pirate it — and then they’ll swoop! It’s a society-wide legal entrapment scheme!
H/T to BoingBoing.
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February 21, 2010
It sounds like the correct answer to the legal question
It’s surprising that a dispute over the use of open source software in a model railway application would be the one to set the legal precedent, but that is what happened here:
Although some people viewed it as a tempest in a teapot, the long-running legal case Jacobsen v. Katzer stirred up some seminal open source issues. We first reported on the dust-up all the way back in August of 2008, noting that the dispute centered around — of all things — model train software.
Specifically, Jacobsen had developed JMRI, the Java Model Railroad Interface project. When Katzer built the code for the project into proprietary model train software, deleting existing copyright notices within the code, Jacobsen filed suit. Now, settlement documents are available online, and the end of the dispute points to a final victory for open source licenses.
The settlement documents show that Katzer will pay Jacobsen $100,000 over 18 months, cease using the JMRI code, and not attempt to register domains using the JMRI name. Previously, the legal dispute had gone all the way to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is the last legal stop before the Supreme Court. As Lawrence Lessig noted in a post, when the Court of Appeals upheld the Artistic License that governed the use of JMRI, it was “an important victory” for free licenses. Lessig noted that the decision had broad implications for many open source licenses.
Just because someone allows the use of source code freely does not mean you can, in effect, file off the serial numbers and pretend that it’s all your own work . . .
H/T to Craig Zeni for the link.
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February 20, 2010
Prohibition’s victims of US government poisoning
Deborah Blum talks about something I’d only heard a little bit about — the US government’s deliberate poisoning of illicit drinkers during Prohibition:
Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.”
The US government hasn’t shown that it learned (any of) the lessons of Prohibition, and there have been documented attempts by government agents to contaminate drugs on their way to American destinations. Perhaps the best known was the use of airborne spraying of the herbicide Paraquat to make Mexican marijuana more dangerous to consume. Rumours abound of other, more recent, attempts to poison other drugs on their way to the States.
