Quotulatiousness

August 13, 2012

English law in the age of Twitter

Filed under: Britain, Law, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

At The Register, OUT-LAW.COM outlines the things to avoid saying on Twitter:

Debates in Parliament, home visits from the police and distressed celebrities have all left tweeters a little unsure as to what is and what is not acceptable by law on Twitter.

The list of those offending and those offended keeps growing with recent high profile reports referring to Louise Mensch, Tom Daley, Guy Adams, Steve Dorkland, Helen Skelton and Kevin Pietersen. This guide discusses 10 legal risks which apply, or potentially apply, to Twitter, in the context of recent media attention given to the lawfulness of tweets.

This is not just of intellectual interest to those of us living outside England: American, Canadian, Australian, Dutch, Indian, or Zimbabwean Twitter users can be sued in English courts (your country may or may not have laws shielding you from this kind of legal action, but most currently do not: the law lags well behind the technology).

August 11, 2012

The Broadcasting Treaty zombie rises from the grave

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:31

Cory Doctorow explains why we still need to fight against WIPO’s latest attempt to gain even more legal rights over content:

The UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization’s Broadcasting Treaty is back. This is the treaty that EFF and its colleagues killed five years ago, but Big Content won’t let it die. Under the treaty, broadcasters would have rights over the material they transmitted, separate from copyright, meaning that if you recorded something from TV, the Internet, cable or satellite, you’d need to get permission from the creator and the broadcaster to re-use it. And unlike copyright, the “broadcast right” doesn’t expire, so even video that is in the public domain can’t be used without permission from the broadcaster who contributed the immense creativity inherent in, you know, pressing the “play” button. Likewise, broadcast rights will have different fair use/fair dealing rules from copyright — nations get to choose whether their broadcast rights will have any fair dealing at all. That means that even if you want to reuse video is a way that’s protected by fair use (such as parody, quotation, commentary or education), the broadcast right version of fair use might prohibit it.

Worst of all: There’s no evidence that this is needed. No serious scholarship of any kind has established that creating another layer of property-like rights will add one cent to any country’s GDP. Indeed, given that this would make sites like Vimeo and YouTube legally impossible, it would certainly subtract a great deal from nations’ GDP — as well as stifling untold amounts of speech and creativity, by turning broadcasters into rent-seeking gatekeepers who get to charge tax on videos they didn’t create and whose copyright they don’t hold.

August 10, 2012

Drink some rainwater, go to jail

Filed under: Environment, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

A 1925 law still applies in Oregon:

You just can’t make this stuff up. A man in Oregon is currently in jail serving a thirty day term – along with a $1500 fine – for collecting rainwater and snow melt on his own property for drinking and household use. You think I’m kidding? I’m not.

    Gary Harrington, the Oregon man convicted of collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his rural property surrendered Wednesday morning to begin serving his 30-day, jail sentence in Medford, Ore.

    “I’m sacrificing my liberty so we can stand up as a country and stand for our liberty,” Harrington told a small crowd of people gathered outside of the Jackson County (Ore.) Jail.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, who said “This is just a little weird […] But does the fact that I can see the point of the law — preventing people from messing with a watershed area, I guess — mean that I’ve consumed the nanny state kool-aid?”.

August 9, 2012

Individual property rights for First Nations people

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

Canada’s treatment of First Nations people has been a disgrace for decades. After locating them (for the most part) on out-of-the-way reserves, they are mostly forgotten by the media and the politicians until something truly awful happens (like the situation on the Attawapiskat reserve) and then TV crews are dispatched, speeches are made and … usually the amnesia kicks in and all is forgotten.

In the National Post, Tasha Kheiriddin suggests that the time is finally ripe to address one of the root causes of poverty among First Nations people on Canadian reserves: their inability to own property. Band councils hold the land “in trust” for their people, which means there are lots of opportunities for those close to the band council to benefit from the administration of the shared resources. Not all bands suffer from this kind of corruption, but many do. Allocating the land to private ownership by individuals would have many beneficial effects:

This week, the federal government confirmed that it is working on legislation to allow the ownership of private property on First Nations reserves. Some aboriginal leaders, such as former chief Manny Jules, who heads the First Nations Tax Commission, applauded the move. But others see ulterior, sinister motivations at work, as Dr. Pam Palmater, a Mi’kmaw professor in the Indigenous Studies department at Ryerson University in Toronto, told Postmedia News’ Teresa Smith. “The quickest way to get that Enbridge pipeline through our territory would be to divide up those lands into individual parcels because it would be a lot quicker to pick off individuals — especially the impoverished ones. And then, if one neighbour sees that an individual gets $100,000 for his property, then what’s someone else, a single mom, with three kids, living on welfare gonna do?”

It’s easy to imagine situations on reserves that are currently governed by band councils that are less than scrupulous where the best land will somehow end up in the hands of the very people who currently benefit from the council’s favour. That is certainly one of the challenges that any such legislation will have to attempt to curtail (even assuming they can get enough support from existing First Nations representatives and groups to move forward with any privatization laws at all).

There is also no doubt that granting First Nations people full property rights – the right to buy, sell, mortgage, use and develop land – is a worthy cause. It would create an ownership culture, instead of the current system (in which reserve land is owned by the federal government, in trust for its Indian residents), which fosters dependency. It would free individual aboriginals from the too-often self-serving grip of band councils. At the same time, it would create responsible government, should those bands seek to tax property, by making them accountable to the property taxpayers they would then serve.

August 8, 2012

How British libel laws work (and why Jimmy Wales is wrong about them)

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

Tim Worstall explains that Jimmy Wales misunderstands what British libel laws really mean for publishers (and bloggers) in other countries:

The libel law of England and Wales is rather different from many other countries, yes. It’s a lot harder to defend against a charge there, damages are higher than in most other jurisdictions and so on. However, that isn’t the important point. What drags you into that jurisdiction is not where your servers are. Nor where the people who prepared the material, where it was uploaded nor where the company is located. What matters is where was the person reading it located?

Please note, this applies to us all. In all jurisdictions the result is the same. It applies to corporate websites, to blogs, to Wikipedia, to everyone. It is a generally accepted legal rule that publication of digital information takes place where it is read, not where it is “published”. The general logic is that at one point there is a copy on the server somewhere. Then, someone downloads it into a browser window in order to read it. At this time there are two copies, on in the browser, one on the server. This creation of a second copy is therefore publication. And that publication takes place in the jurisdiction of the reader, not anywhere else.

[. . .]

Thus Wikipedia not having servers in the UK, not being a UK corporation or charity, does not protect it from English libel laws. None of us are so protected from them, we are liable under them if as and when someone in England and Wales reads our pages.

[. . .]

But as I say, it is still true that jurisdiction on the internet depends upon where the reader is, not the producer or the servers. It’s not a happy thought that we’re now subject to 200 off legal jurisdictions every time we post something but it is true.

August 7, 2012

Overzealous copyright enforcement

Filed under: Law, Space, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

Even copyright-free NASA footage can be taken down for copyright infringement. Brid-Aine Parnell at The Register explains the fast-trigger-finger-goof:

YouTube was a bit keen in the prosecution of copyright laws during NASA’s victorious Curiosity rover landing yesterday morning, booting the first video excerpt of the livestream off its site for infringing a news service.

NASA’s video coverage and pics are actually generally copyright-free, which made the overzealous bot takedown even more ironic as it pulled the video from the space agency’s channel for infringing on the rights of Scripps Local News.

The problem, which took a few hours to fix, was flagged by online magazine Motherboard, which spotted a message on the video declaring: “This video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds”.

August 5, 2012

Angers still pushing for compensation for Plantagenet murder in 1499

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, History, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

I mentioned this amusing little issue last month. The city of Angers is still trying to get the British crown jewels as compensation for Henry VII’s judicial murder of the last legitimate male Plantagenet claimant to the English throne. Lowering The Bar has more:

What’s the connection between these French people and the English throne? It looks like the first connection that mattered was between Matilda, the daughter of King Henry I, and Geoffrey of Anjou (the county in which Angers was located). Their oldest son became Henry II of England in 1154. After 331 years of exciting adventures, the ruling line ended with Richard III, who was killed in battle by the forces of Henry Tudor (Henry VII). (Since history is written by the victors, Richard III now appears in plays as a murderous hunchback and the Tudors got their own miniseries on Showtime.)

But Angers doesn’t appear to care about any of those guys (especially the hunchback), only about Edward, Earl of Warwick. He had a claim to the throne (he was Richard III’s nephew, or something), but was only 10 in 1485, and judging from this portrait was so poor that he could not even afford to be drawn from the neck down. But Henry threw him in the Tower of London anyway and kept him there until he was old enough to kill, basically, which happened in 1499. He was the last legitimate male Plantagenet.

Angers is sponsoring a petition drive about this 513-year-old outrage and will send the official results to Queen Elizabeth II (House of Windsor) in September. This will coincidentally coincide with Angers’s annual cultural festival. A spokesperson for the city admitted that the petition “had little chance of success” (the original crown jewels were done away with by Oliver Cromwell anyway), but said that the crime against the Plantagenets was worth remembering. According to the report, he also “encouraged British people to visit Angers, which has medieval buildings including a magnificent castle which recalls the glory days of the Plantagenets.”

Tolerance Is Different From Approval

Filed under: Business, Food, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

In his Forbes column, Tim Worstall explains his puzzlement over the ongoing Chick-Fil-A uproar in the US and why tolerance is not the same as approval:

As to the basic point about gay marriage I can only offer my personal opinion: all for it. On the grounds that everyone’s going to understand the miserableness of us middle aged heteros a great deal better after 20 odd years of societally enforced monogamy. Slightly more seriously gay marriage or not gay marriage has little to do with a business column.

What does have to do with a business column is that this whole idea of a market means that we don’t have to care about the personal beliefs of either those who supply us or whom we supply. It’s the very impersonality of market exchange that means that it just doesn’t matter a darn what anyone’s sexual (or indeed any other) preference is. We get to care only about whether it’s a good chicken sandwich or whether the customer has enough money for one.

[. . .]

The other point that occurs to me is that we seem to be separating tolerance from approval in a way that some in the US are not.

Just as background, in the country I live in, Portugal, there is as far as a legal marriage ceremony goes, only civil marriage. Any two consenting adults, in whatever mixture of genders and sexes makes sense to those two individuals, can be married by the State. Religion doesn’t even get a look in.

If you do want a religious marriage, according to the rites of a church, then off you go after your civil marriage and have one. That marriage will be limited by whatever that church decides the limitations upon marriage are. It has no legal effect at all.

At which point everyone tolerates gay marriage but no one demands approval of it. For the two are different. Tolerance being the necessary requirement for a free and liberal society: that you get to do what you want to do as long as everyone else is also given the same freedom to follow their path from cradle to grave. Approval is something else again. I, to take a very trivial example, certainly tolerate the existence of Simon Cowell and his shows but that doesn’t mean that anyone can demand that I approve of them.

August 2, 2012

England: land of history … and archaic laws that still can bite

Filed under: Britain, History, Law, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:50

Do you live in England? Do you live near an old church? Brace yourself for possible bills to repair that lovely old pile of crumbling stone:

Because of the way land was carved after the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, the owners of many houses sited near historic churches have a legal obligation to contribute to repairs.

People living in more than 5,000 parishes in England are subject to the historic “chancel repair liabilities”, which affect properties built on former monastic land.

Most take out a form of insurance against the liability but many so-called “lay rectors” are entirely unaware of the obligation as it is rarely enforced.

But now, after an attempt by the last Government to tidy up the law in the wake of a high profile court case, parishes have been ordered to trawl through land records dating back hundreds of years to clarify exactly who is liable.

A 10-year legal deadline imposed by the last Government is due to expire next year and local parish bodies have been warned they could be legally responsible if they fail to comply.

July 27, 2012

Twitter joke trial comes to the correct result, eventually

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Kelly Fiveash at The Register on the Twitter “bomb threat” case:

A bloke found guilty of tweeting a “menacing” joke about blowing up a UK airport has had his conviction quashed by the High Court today. A collective sigh of relief was heard moments later from comedians addicted to the micro-blogging website.

Paul Chambers, 28, was waiting to fly from Doncaster’s Robin Hood airport to Belfast to see his girlfriend, whom he met on the social networking site, when snow closed the airfield and delayed his flight.

He vented his frustration in a series of tweets to his squeeze Sarah Tonner, now his fiancee, including a suggestion that he had considered “resorting to terrorism” to ensure he could visit her.

[. . .]

Mr Justice Owen and Mr Justice Griffith Williams said in the High Court today that the facts needed to be considered in context, pointing out that the tweets had clearly appeared to be a reference to the airport closing due to adverse weather conditions.

“There was no evidence before the Crown Court to suggest that any of the followers of the appellant’s ‘tweet’, or indeed anyone else who may have seen the ‘tweet’ posted on the appellant’s time line, found it to be of a menacing character or, at a time when the threat of terrorism is real, even minimally alarming,” the High Court heard.

July 26, 2012

The “international sporting event” in “the capital of the United Kingdom”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

Dahlia Lithwick explains why we all need to be careful how we refer to a certain large organized sports extravaganza happening in a major city in England:

At the London Olympics, we’re seeing unprecedented restrictions on speech having anything to do with, erm, the Olympics. There are creepy new restrictions on journalists, with even nonsportswriters being told they should sign up with authorities.

Then there’s the London Olympic Games and Paralympics Games Act 2006. The law was originally aimed at preventing “over-commercialization” of the games, but it seems to have unloosed something of a Pandora’s box of speech suppression. Provisions triggering worries for protesters include sections regulating use of the Olympic symbol “in respect of advertising of any kind including in particular — (a) advertising of a non-commercial nature, and (b) announcements or notices of any kind.” The law further seems to authorize a “constable or enforcement officer” to “enter land or premises” where they believe such material is being produced. It also permits that such materials may be destroyed, and for the use of “reasonable force” to do so.

[. . .]

But it’s not just the Olympic rings that are being protected; it’s also Olympic words. As Nick Cohen recently observed, the “government has told the courts they may wish to take particular account of anyone using two or more words from what it calls ‘List A.’ ” Those words: Games, Two Thousand and Twelve, 2012, and twenty twelve. And woe betide anyone who takes a word from List A and marries it with one or more words from “List B”: Gold, Silver, Bronze, London, medals, sponsors, summer.

Spectators have been warned they may not “broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the Internet,” making uploading your video to your Facebook page a suspect activity. Be careful with your links to the official Olympic website as well.

July 25, 2012

Michael Bloomberg’s call for a national police strike

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:45

At the Simple Justice blog, Scott H. Greenfield explains why New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is so very, very wrong to call for a national police strike:

There are some virtues that come with having a billionaire mayor. He’s not easy to bribe, for example, so you know whatever comes out of his mouth does so honestly. And therein lies the downside when he says something like this:

    “I don’t understand why the police officers across this country don’t stand up collectively and say, ‘We’re going to go on strike. We’re not going to protect you. Unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what’s required to keep us safe,’” Bloomberg said on CNN Monday night.

Within this idiotic comment are two fallacious assumptions. The first is the “war on cops” tripe, that there is a trend against cops, putting them at increasing risk of harm from gun-toting criminals. Radley Balko has beaten that myth to death. Mike Riggs too. It’s a good myth to further a public agenda in favor of order at the expense of law, but it just doesn’t hold water.

The second, however, is the mayor’s encouragement to police to take the First Rule of Policing a step further than ever before, to use their singular authority to hold a nation hostage. This is perhaps the most dangerous idea Bloomberg could promote.

[. . .]

Ironically, the only means of staying this armed takeover, should the police ever come to recognize that they have the power if not the authority to seize control, would be guns in the hands of citizens. No rational person could want it to come to such a battle.

So while a billionaire mayor may be above the influences that drive mere mortals, they sometimes utter the most insanely foolish things that take us to a place we must never go. The day the police, as a whole, think they can use their posts to take our government hostage is the day every citizen will need to dust off his arms. The day a billionaire mayor suggests that the police should use their power to influence our government is a day he’s been in office too long.

Update: Walter Olson at the Cato@Liberty blog:

It’s enough to make you wonder whether Bloomberg is secretly a passionate admirer of the Second Amendment and keeps saying things this outrageous from a covert intent to sabotage the case for gun control.

Chris Selley on the burka’d bottles

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

Following up from yesterday’s amusing story about the Sun News stunt of dressing an underaged teen in a burka and successfully buying booze at the LCBO, Chris Selley gets to the real reason the stunt worked:

Debates about face coverings in this country almost always boil down to policy, not people. Should people wearing burkas have to unveil to vote? We went pretty crazy about that issue, a while back, and probably will some day again (especially if Sun News has anything to say about it). Should Quebecers have to unveil to take a government-run French class? Quebec went a bit crazy about that, and eventually said yes. What about to board an airplane, or to get a driver’s license? Controversies along these lines pop up every now and again and get thrown into the coliseum of Canadian debate, where the right’s and the left’s gladiators battle it out.

Meanwhile, off to the side, you’ll usually find representatives of the miniscule number of Canadian women who actually wear burkas explaining that they have no problem unveiling in circumstances where it is logically required. But they’re largely ignored, because the left wants to fight for a woman’s right to wear the veil (even if she doesn’t feel it’s being impinged upon) while the right wants to take that right away (on grounds of “liberating” Muslim women).

[. . .]

Again, this wasn’t the Sun’s angle. But it seems reasonable to speculate that those LCBO clerks looked at the veiled customer, realized what they ought to do, and didn’t do it for fear of winding up in their supervisor’s office, the newspaper or some kind of human rights court. That’s not healthy at all, and there’s no point blaming Muslim immigrants for it. In pursuing a harmonious, egalitarian, rights-conscious society, longer-established Canadians may have created a fear of making reasonable requests of fellow citizens who aren’t superficially “like” us. That drives people apart, not together. It perpetuates precisely the sort of nonsensical backlash that the Sun’s critics worry about.

Reason.tv: Fan fiction versus copyright

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

“It takes a big studio to make The Avengers, but it doesn’t necessarily take a big studio to write a piece of Avengers fan fiction,” says Georgetown University law professor and fan fiction advocate Rebecca Tushnet. “Big content companies largely recognize that fan activities are really good for them because they engage people.”

The growing popularity of fan fiction, a genre in which fans create their own stories featuring characters or settings from their favorite works of popular culture, raises thorny copyright issues. “Given how broad copyright is now, it’s now possible to say fan fiction is an infringing derivative work,” Tushnet explains. “In order to deal with that…we now talk about fair use, which allows people to make fair, limited uses of works without permission from the copyright owner.”

As a member of the Organization for Transformative Works, Tushnet works to defend fan fiction creators caught in the legal debate between protected intellectual property and fair use.

July 24, 2012

LCBO sells booze to underaged teen in a burka

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

I foresee a rush of interest among teenage boys in temporarily cross-dressing as Muslim women:

Three liquor stores in the Greater Toronto Area recently sold booze to a 14-year-old boy whose identity was hidden because he was wearing a full-length burka and face veil at the time.

The teenager, clad in an Islamic female’s traditional garb of a burka, headscarf and facial covering, shopped in three different LCBO stores north of Toronto last Wednesday.

In each location, the Grade 8 student paid cash for a bottle of sambuca liqueur.

[. . .]

The stunt was co-ordinated and video recorded by Sun News host David Menzies, who has made a career out of lambasting Canada’s politically correct institutions.

Menzies said the unopened bottles — totalling just over $80 — were promptly taken from the teen at the day’s end but suggested the fact the boy was never asked to uncover his face or show photo identification at multiple store locations reveals a deeply ingrained reluctance on the part of Canadian institutions to challenge cultural practices, even when they conflict with broader societal goals such as preventing underage drinking. “The reason why you have to unveil is that is photo ID is absolutely useless if you don’t see the actual face of the person,” said Menzies, adding he came up with the idea after an acquaintance told him he had seen this happen at various LCBO locations.

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