“How can you have 56 percent of Americans in support of fully ending the drug war, and zero senators in support of it?” asks Doug Fine, investigative journalist and author of new book, Too High To Fail.
Fine sat down with ReasonTV’s Tracy Oppenheimer to discuss his time spent in the cannabis capital of California, Mendocino County, and why he thinks this drug can help save the American economy. And it’s not just about collecting taxes.
“The industrial [uses] may one day dwarf the psychoactive ones. If we start using it for fermentation for our energy needs, it can produce great biofuels,” says Fine, “already, cannabis is in the bumpers of Dodge Vipers.”
August 22, 2012
Reason.tv: Can legal cannabis revolutionize the US economy?
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August 20, 2012
Punks as snobs
Always willing to explore the contrarian position, Brendan O’Neill explains why Pussy Riot’s legal issues have gotten so much attention in the west:
Pussy Riot’s closing statements in their trial for blasphemy confirmed that they have not only inherited the original punk movement’s thrashing guitars and in-yer-face sensibility; they have also effusively embraced its art-school snobbishness.
Punk, in its original incarnation, was always as much a screech of rage against the “sheeple” as it was a two-fingered salute to the powers-that-be. Think Johnny Rotten wailing “They made you a moron!” in the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”. “Don’t be told what you want / Don’t be told what you need”, sang Rotten, expressing the core belief of punk — that the vast bulk of the masses, effectively everyone except the punks, had been moulded into a moron by the man.
The same snobbish thinking animates Pussy Riot today. In her closing statement, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova bemoaned the “enforced civic passivity of the bulk of the population” in Russia. She said the Russian regime “easily manipulates public opinion” — which sounds like an attack on the regime but it is also a sly salvo against the Russian masses, who must have minds like putty if they can be so easily manipulated. In contrast to this civil slavishness, Pussy Riot are all about “authentic genuineness and simplicity”, said Tolokonnikova.
[. . .]
Now we can see why Pussy Riot are so popular among many liberal opinion-formers here in the West — it is because both share a view of the little people as less culturally sophisticated and more easily forced into conformism than the commenting, bohemian, punkish sets. But of course, making snobbish statements and singing rubbish songs should not be a crime. Pussy Riot should be freed from prison immediately and allowed to continue expressing their loathing of Putin’s regime and their disgust with the Russian masses.
August 19, 2012
ESR on the limits of “lawfare” for Apple
To put it mildly, ESR isn’t a fan of Apple’s lawfare approach to competition:
It’s beginning to look like Apple’s legal offensive against Android might backfire on it big-time. Comes the news that Judge Koh has declined to suppress evidence that Apple may have copied crucial elements of the iPad design from prototypes developed by Knight-Ridder and the University of Missouri in the mid-1990s.
Those of us aware enough of computing history to be aware of early work by XEROX PARC and others have always been aware that Apple’s claims of originality were highly dubious. Apple’s history is one of adroit marketing and a facility for stealing adapting ideas from others, wrapping them in admittedly excellent industrial design, and then pretending that all of it originated de novo from the Cupertino campus.
The pretense has always galled a little, especially when Apple’s marketing created a myth that, footling technical details aside, the whole package somehow sprang like Athena from Steve Jobs’s forehead. But it didn’t become intolerable until Apple began using lawfare to suppress its competition.
The trouble with this is that there’s actually a lot of prior art out there. I myself saw and handled a Sharp tablet anticipating important iPhone/iPad design tropes two years before the uPhone launch, back in 2005; the Danger hiptop (aka T-Mobile Sidekick) anticipated the iPhone’s leveraging of what we’d now call “cloud services” in 2002-2003; and of course there’s the the Sony design study from 2006, described by one of Apple’s own designers as an important influence.
If only Apple were honest about what it owed others…but that cannot be, because the company’s strategy has come to depend on using junk patents in attempts to lock competitors out of its markets.
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August 17, 2012
Even Guardianistas are puzzled by Assange’s Ecuador gambit
There are few newspapers who have been as supportive of Julian Assange in his legal plight than the Guardian. When even Guardian columns find it difficult to figure out why he turned to Ecuador, we’ve moved into a different universe:
Julian Assange’s circus has pulled off another breathtaking stunt: he has won political asylum in Ecuador. Assange’s flight from Sweden, a decent democracy with a largely excellent justice system, takes ever more absurd forms. After the decision of Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, the Swedish Twitterverse filled with mocking jokes.
Assange has few fans left here. On the contrary, his unholy alliance with Ecuador’s political leadership casts a shadow over what was, despite everything, his real achievement: to reveal shattering news through the revolutionary medium of WikiLeaks.
Patiño praised Assange as a fighter for free expression, and explained that they had to protect his human rights. But Ecuador is a country with a dreadful record when it comes to freedom of expression and of the press. Inconvenient journalists are put on trial. Private media companies may not operate freely.
President Rafael Correa is patently unable to tolerate any truths that he does not own. Reporters Without Borders has strongly and often criticised the way that media freedoms are limited in Ecuador. Assange is a plaything for the president’s megalomania.
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The police war on photographers and videographers: the Canadian front
Karen Selick in the National Post confirming that Canadian police are also under the impression that their work cannot legally be photographed:
What have cops got against cameras these days? Increasingly, people are getting arrested, charged or even assaulted by police officers, merely for attempting to take photos or videos of officers at work. Often, police simply command people to stop photographing. Scared into thinking they must be breaking some law, citizens comply.
When Polish visitor Robert Dziekanski died after being tasered at the Vancouver airport in 2007, police seized the now famous video made by witness Paul Pritchard, who had to hire a lawyer and threaten court proceedings to get it back.
[. . .]
There is no law in Canada that prohibits people from openly photographing police. Section 129 of the Criminal Code prohibits “wilfully obstructing” police in the execution of their duty, but it is hard to imagine how standing by peacefully and videotaping as police searched the premises and piled up items for seizure could be considered obstructing. After all, the police themselves were videotaping on Ms. Jones’ premises — but selectively. They probably didn’t capture themselves ordering her friend to refrain from taking the pictures she was legally entitled to take.
That same day, three other search warrants were executed at the homes of other individuals the CFIA suspects of conspiring with Ms. Jones to save her healthy sheep. At Michael Schmidt’s residence, all cell phones were immediately confiscated. When a visitor from outside arrived with his cell phone, Schmidt’s wife borrowed it and took photos of police inside her home. Officers seized the phone even though it was clearly outside the scope of the warrant. They returned it three hours later, with the photos erased. When the victim of this apparently illegal seizure objected, police responded, “We can do whatever we want.” But of course, that arrogant response was not permitted to be recorded.
[. . .]
Police must be made to understand that being on duty or executing a search warrant does not transform an officer into a petty dictator with carte blanche to issue arbitrary orders to everyone in sight. Police cannot do “whatever they want.” Citizens have the right to hold them accountable for their actions. Personal cameras are important tools in implementing that right. Bullying people out of using them must cease.
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August 13, 2012
PQ promises to “strengthen” language laws in Quebec
It’s mind-blowing that a minority in Canada are legally oppressed by their provincial government, but in Quebec, it’s just language business as usual. The opposition Parti Quebecois, who brought in the language law in question, are promising to make it even more oppressive to non-French-speaking Quebecers:
It’s an easy political move for Marois. It will appeal to her separatist base and thoroughly annoy the anglophones … which will also appeal to the base. And given that the stated intention of her party is to go pick fights with Ottawa and drive a wedge between Quebec and the Rest of Canada, it’s a good plan. Language politics are always hot-button issues in Quebec, and Marois is pushing those buttons gleefully.
But it is interesting to note her position on the issue. Marois holds that the Liberals, under Premier Jean Charest, have not done enough to promote the French language in Quebec. From the perspective of the PQ, that’s almost certainly true. But Bill 101 is a creation of the Parti Quebecois. The provincial Liberals have certainly left it intact and haven’t dared to try and strengthen it, but fundamentally, Bill 101 is a PQ law. If it isn’t working, that’s not Premier Charest’s fault.
The bigger issue, of course, is that such a law already exists. Uninformed citizens in the Rest of Canada would be rightly horrified to learn that such a bizarre, anti-democratic law exists in their country at all. Bill 101′s intrusions into the private interactions of businesses and the decisions of individual families are justified as being necessary by Quebec nationalists to preserve the primacy of French in Quebec, but to anyone who is not a language warrior, seem more like a cross between a French tutor and a Orwellian nightmare.
Of course, tougher laws will still not accomplish the intended task: forcing everyone in Quebec to speak French at all times.
English law in the age of Twitter
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).
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August 11, 2012
The Broadcasting Treaty zombie rises from the grave
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.
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August 10, 2012
Drink some rainwater, go to jail
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?”.
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August 9, 2012
Individual property rights for First Nations people
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.
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August 8, 2012
How British libel laws work (and why Jimmy Wales is wrong about them)
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.
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August 7, 2012
Overzealous copyright enforcement
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”.
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August 5, 2012
Angers still pushing for compensation for Plantagenet murder in 1499
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.”
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Tolerance Is Different From Approval
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
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.
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