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.
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.
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.
. . . and yes, there was a body, but that’s a different story. Solomon talks about the Alabama shooter, before she moved to Alabama:
By now you’ve heard all about the University of Alabama shooter, Amy Bishop, the shooting rampage, the old murder she got away with (the “cover-up” and the connection to now retiring Congressman Bill Delahunt), the letter bomb she likely sent…
Turns out I have a tenuous connection to this woman. You see she used to be the next door neighbor of a good friend of mine in Ipswich (a north shore Boston suburb) for a few years. At the time I used to hang out at his house quite a bit. This was one of those typical suburban neighborhoods with little traffic, lots of kids, smallish houses fairly close together without a lot of fences.
I remember when the previous neighbor moved out it wasn’t long before my friend started complaining. He had a deck in the back of his place that was effectively on the second floor making it very visible to the neighbor’s yard and house. So one day I go over to find that he had erected a wooden privacy fence on the side of the deck facing their yard — and only on that side. So I’m like, “Uhh…isn’t that a little uncomfortable. I mean it’s obvious you put that there just to block only those people.” He tells me he does…not…care. He doesn’t want to look at them, and he doesn’t want them to look. He hates them, as does the entire neighborhood.
Our bad neighbour issues weren’t quite as bad, although we did feel like we were escaping when we finally did move out. And we did have to provide emergency first aid to a severely wounded man who staggered to our front door one night (he eventually died, but not officially of his wounds from that incident). He’d been partying at our neighbour’s house, and an argument got out of hand. But, so far as I know, our bad neighbour didn’t leave a trail of multiple bodies . . .
Yesterday Uzbek photographer Umida Akhnedova was convicted of slandering and insulting her people. Her crime consisted of taking pictures, such as the one on the right, that government officials thought made Uzbekistan look bad. Among other things, The New York Times reports, Akhnedova was accused of “showing people with sour expressions or bowed heads, children in ragged clothing, old people begging for change or other images so dreary that, according to a panel of experts convened by the prosecutors, ‘a foreigner unfamiliar with Uzbekistan will conclude that this is a country where people live in the Middle Ages'” (a misleading impression, since the Spanish Inquisition never persecuted people for taking photographs). The government also charged that Akhnedova’s 2008 documentary about the Uzbek custom of verifying a bride’s virginity is “not in line with the requirements of ideology” and “promotes serious perversion in the young generation’s acceptance of cultural values.” Although her crime is punishable by up to three years in prison, the judge let her go, officially to celebrate the 18th anniversary of Uzbek independence but possibly also because the publicity surrounding the case was tarnishing Uzbekistan’s reputation (no mean feat).
Jacob Sullum, “One Frown Over the Line”, Hit and Run, 2010-02-11
Remember the flute part in “Down Under”? Men at Work now probably wish they’d chosen a different way to highlight typical Australian tunes, as they’ve been ordered to pay costs to the estate of Marion Sinclair for using the theme to “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree” in their song:
Larrikin Music had claimed the flute riff from the 1981 hit was stolen from Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, written by Marion Sinclair in 1934.
The federal court in Sydney ordered compensation to be paid.
That amount has yet to be determined but Larrikin’s lawyer said it could reach 60% of income from the song.
“It’s a big win for the underdog,” said Larrikin’s lawyer Adam Simpson after the judgment.
Sinclair, who died in 1988, wrote the song for performance at a Girl Guides Jamboree in 1935.
Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree has since been sung by generations of Australian schoolchildren.
Oddly enough, I downloaded this song just last week, prompted by a recent Mark Steyn column.
Men At Work came from a land Down Under and in January 1983 they were on top of the world: “Down Under” was Number One not only in Oz but also in the United Kingdom and in the United States, and to this day Men At Work are the only Australian band to have topped simultaneously both the British and American singles and albums charts. A lot of the pop songs from that period you’ll still hear on the Eighties oldies stations: in America, Men At Work were succeeded at the top of the Hot One Hundred by Toto and “Africa”, which is pleasant enough in a bland sort of way; and in Britain they made way in the Number One slot for Kajagoogoo and “Too Shy”, and gosh, it’s years since my fingers have had cause to type the word “Kajagoogoo” and even then it was as a punchline for a cheap gag. But “Down Under” transcended the passing fancies of the hit parade and has become an Australian anthem. There have been other international Oz hits, of course, notably Rolf Harris’ classic recording of “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport” – and, as we always have to point out whenever the subject arises, a truly great novelty song like “Tie Me Kangaroo” should never be confused with a truly atrocious one like Charlie Drake’s “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back”.
But “Down Under” has become a kind of musical shorthand for contemporary Australia
Well, it’s nice to see that sometimes the British government can move quickly on something. As reported on the BBC program Newsnight, a bogus bomb detector has been selling briskly in Iraq (link here). The lead scammer has been arrested today:
The managing director of a British company that has been selling bomb-detecting equipment to security forces in Iraq was arrested on suspicion of fraud today.
At the same time, the British government announced that it was imposing a ban on the export of the ADE-651 detectors because it was concerned they could put the lives of British forces or other friendly forces at risk.
The government promised to help investigate the multimillion-pound deal between the company, ATSC, and the security forces in Iraq.
Iraq has invested more than £50m in buying the devices and training people to use them. Police and military personnel have used them to search vehicles and pedestrians for explosives. But concerns over their effectiveness — and fears they could put lives at risk — have been raised.
Avon and Somerset police officers arrested Jim McCormick, 53, on suspicion of fraud by misrepresentation. A spokesman said: “We are conducting a criminal investigation and, as part of that, a 53-year-old man has been arrested.
The BBC reports that the group Islam4UK will be banned under the Terrorism Act:
A radical Islamist group that planned a march through Wootton Bassett will be banned under counter-terrorism laws, Home Secretary Alan Johnson has said.
Islam4UK had planned the protest at the Wiltshire town to honour Muslims killed in the Afghanistan conflict.
The government had been considering outlawing the group — Islam4UK is also known as al-Muhajiroun.
A spokesman for Islam4UK told the BBC it was an “ideological and political organisation”, and not a violent one.
Mr Johnson said: “I have today laid an order which will proscribe al-Muhajiroun, Islam4UK, and a number of the other names the organisation goes by.
The strength of the government’s move may be judged by the next statement in the report: “It is already proscribed under two other names — al-Ghurabaa and The Saved Sect.”
So, Islam4UK will be “banned” . . . in the sense that the organization has to come up with another alias, but the group itself will suffer no other hardship? Perhaps I’m missing the point of this little exercise.
A twitter update from BBC News (titled, interestingly, “BREAKING NEWS – PLEASE CLONE”), links to this sure-to-be-updated report:
Stop-and-search powers ruled illegal by European court
Police powers to use terror laws to stop and search people without grounds for suspicion are illegal, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.
The Strasbourg court has been hearing a case involving two people stopped near an arms fair in London in 2003.
[. . .]
Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 allows the home secretary to authorise police to make random searches in certain circumstances.
But the European Court of Human Rights said the people’s rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated.
The court said the stop and search powers were “not sufficiently circumscribed” and there were not “adequate legal safeguards against abuse”.
Ah, those Ohio wine drinkers . . . they must be consuming wine at much higher than the national average. How else can you account for the state government legally imposing limits on how much wine you can buy each year?
As laws go, Ohio’s limit on wine purchases appears to be simple:
“No family household shall purchase more than 24 cases of 12 bottles of 750 milliliters of wine in one year.”
That’s 288 bottles per year — plenty for most people. But it raises questions if you’re a collector, entertain a lot or just prickle at the thought of another government regulation.
How do they know how much wine I buy? Why do they care? How many cases have I purchased this year?
Of course, the limit isn’t really a limit: there’s no mechanism to track your actual purchases from retailers, Ohio drinkers, it’s only to limit sales direct from wineries to consumers. This limit was introduced after the US Supreme Court decision a few years back which struck down state-level restrictions on shipments from out-of-state wineries.
In several ways, it’s a typical bureaucratic response to a non-issue, providing work for several new civil servants, requiring uncompensated form-filling and legal compliance on the part of the sellers (over and above the normal requirements for selling alcohol), and being remarkably ineffective, to boot:
All wineries or importers for wineries that produce fewer than 250,000 gallons per year pay the state $25 for a license that allows them to ship directly to customers here. They have to pay the state’s alcohol and sales taxes. They also have to tell the state who received the wine — and how much that person got.
The Ohio Division of Liquor Control, which receives the reports on wine sales from the S permit holders, uses the reports to determine whether someone might be violating the purchase limit, said Matt Mullins, a spokesman for the division. “It’s the division’s interpretation that it’s related to the amount of wine shipped from an S permit holder. That’s what we believe the intent (of the law) was.”
The reports are due each year in March, he said, and the first came last year. No one was flagged as a violator.
If the reports did show that someone had purchased too much wine by mail, Mullins said, the information would be turned over to the Ohio Department of Public Safety Investigative Unit, which enforces state alcohol laws. The law allows a fine of up to $100 if someone is found guilty.
I’m not at all in favour of this sort of legalistic bullshit, but if they’re going to go to the effort of setting up this system, it’s farcical to — a year or more after the fact — track down a “perpetrator” and then fine them “up to $100”. A hundred bucks wouldn’t pay the state for the time and effort to track down that criminal mastermind who legally ordered an extra case of wine . . .
Of course, the statist’s response would be to substantially increase the fines, rather than dismantle the whole ridiculous tracking system.
In a bold move in the wake of the latest terrorist bomb attempt, the government has pounced . . . on the bloggers who reported on the TSA’s response:
As the government reviews how an alleged terrorist was able to bring a bomb onto a U.S.-bound plane and try to blow it up on Christmas Day, the Transportation Security Administration is going after bloggers who wrote about a directive to increase security after the incident.
TSA special agents served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott, demanding that they reveal who leaked the security directive to them. The government says the directive was not supposed to be disclosed to the public.
Frischling said he met with two TSA special agents Tuesday night at his Connecticut home for about three hours and again on Wednesday morning when he was forced to hand over his lap top computer. Frischling said the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn’t cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo.
There’s updating your church to appeal to modern attitudes, and then there’s this:
Thou shall steal after all! Holy row greets fatherly advice from York vicar
Church of England priest Tim Jones preaches it’s OK to shoplift, though it’s best from a big retail company not family businessIn issuing the 10 commandments to Moses atop Mount Sinai, God was pretty unequivocal: “Thou shalt not steal.”
However, there’s good news for anyone whose passion for pilfering has hitherto been tempered by the eighth commandment: according to one Church of England vicar, we can steal after all.
Father Tim Jones, the parish priest of St Lawrence and St Hilda in York, told his congregation on Sunday that certain vulnerable people face difficult situations.
“My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift,” he said. “I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither.”
Well, that pretty much seals it, doesn’t it? Any other commandments we can dispense with — with the blessings of the Church of England?
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