Quotulatiousness

March 1, 2010

UK Photographers . . . act now, or lose your rights

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:52

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public in the shot, that person has the right to demand either payment — if you wish to publish the image — or that you do not publish it.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 23, 2010

BBC accused of bias in euthanasia debate

Filed under: Britain, Health, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:00

The BBC’s decision to broadcast Terry Pratchett’s speech on euthanasia tribunals is cited as evidence that the corporation is acting as an advocate on this highly emotional issue:

The Care Not Killing Alliance accused the BBC of flouting impartiality rules and adopting a “campaigning stance” in an attempt to step up pressure on the Government to legalise assisted suicide.

The decision to broadcast Sir Terry Pratchett’s speech advocating “euthanasia tribunals” in full earlier this month was an example of unbalanced reporting, the alliance claimed.

Lord Carlile, chairman of the alliance and the Government’s independent reviewer of terror legislation, has demanded a meeting with BBC bosses to seek answers over the “biased” coverage.

In a letter to Sir Michael Lyons, the chairman of the BBC trust, the Liberal Democrat peer also raised questions over the corporation’s failure to inform police that a veteran presenter had confessed to killing his lover on one of its programmes.

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

February 3, 2010

Canada’s economy judged (marginally) more free than the US

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

H/T to Power Line blog for the image.

December 15, 2009

Nanny state now to come with pop-up warnings

Filed under: Britain, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:36

Just in case you British internet users weren’t already aware, the government may start including pop-ups whenever you access an out-of-country social networking site. Nice of them to at least warn you that your internet usage will be monitored for quality and customer satisfaction (the customer in question is the government, BTW):

The ACPO document, obtained by The Register, suggests the government may “minimise or discourage or give ‘pop-up’ warnings as regards to communications services within the online environment where there is evidence, presented to a Circuit Judge or Secretary of State, that allowing the public access or use of specific communications services could make them vulnerable to fraud, the theft of personal information or other attack”.

ACPO does not explain the technical details of its plan, but points out that “measures already exist to minimise the availability of potentially illegal content”. However, it cites the Internet Watch Foundation’s blacklist of international URLs carrying indecent and abusive images of children, suggesting a parallel list of social networks, forums and real time messaging sites judged to be risky could be created.

The proposal was drawn up by ACPO’s Data Communications Group. The group is chaired by Jim Gamble, the chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which is responsible for policing paedophiles on the internet.

December 11, 2009

Changes coming to England’s over-generous libel laws?

Filed under: Britain, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

For the aggrieved, suing in London has been the way to go, due to English laws which strongly favour the plaintiff. This may change, as the laws are being reviewed:

England has long been a mecca for aggrieved people from around the world who want to sue for libel. Russian oligarchs, Saudi businessmen, multinational corporations, American celebrities — all have made their way to London’s courts, where jurisdiction is easy to obtain and libel laws are heavily weighted in favor of complainants.

Embarrassed by London’s reputation as “a town called sue” and by unusually stinging criticisms in American courts and legislatures, British lawmakers are seriously considering rewriting England’s 19th-century libel laws.

A member of the House of Lords is preparing a bill that would, among other things, require foreigners to demonstrate that they have suffered actual harm in England before they can sue here.

December 4, 2009

More good news on reining in the out-of-control HRC bureaucracy

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

Colby Cosh summarizes the results of the Alberta Queen’s Bench decision on the Boisson case:

So how stands freedom of the press in Alberta after Thursday’s Queen’s Bench decision tossing out the Boissoin human-rights panel ruling? Justice E.C. Wilson’s reasons establish two big things, pending some higher-level judicial review of Alberta’s human-rights regime:

1. The Charter of Rights can’t be used willy-nilly by content creators in magazines and newspapers as a shield against tribunal oversight, but

2. The tribunals have to confine themselves strictly to the powers granted them by statute, defer to Charter values, respect the presumption of innocence, and in general act a lot less like a cross between a military junta and a three-ring circus.

In 2002 Red Deer preacher Stephen Boisson had written a sweaty, sulfurous letter about the Great Gay Conspiracy to the local daily paper (pause for ironic smirk: it’s called the Advocate). Among other things, Boisson denounced the spectacle of “men kissing men”, which suggests he may not know his way around the synoptic Gospels too well. In any event, a panel of the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission found him guilty of discrimination-by-the-word, and he was subjected to a fine, prior restraint on his future speech, and a demand for a written apology.

November 25, 2009

I thought Obama was going to be better than Bush on privacy issues

Filed under: Government, Law, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:04

Perhaps I was misinformed:

The Obama administration is seeking to reverse a federal appeals court decision that dramatically narrows the government’s search-and-seizure powers in the digital age.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan and Justice Department officials are asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its August ruling that federal prosecutors went too far when seizing 104 professional baseball players’ drug results when they had a warrant for just 10.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ 9-2 decision offered Miranda-style guidelines to prosecutors and judges on how to protect Fourth Amendment privacy rights while conducting computer searches.

Kagan, appointed solicitor general by President Barack Obama, joined several U.S. attorneys in telling the San Francisco-based court Monday that the guidelines are complicating federal prosecutions in the West. The circuit, the nation’s largest, covers nine states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.

November 24, 2009

Friendly reminder to UK readers: you do not have a right to remain silent

Filed under: Britain, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:28

A fascinating story about a case in Britain where the government’s shiny new powers under Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) have been used to jail a schizophrenic man for refusing to divulge the passwords to access his files:

The first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record.

His crime was a persistent refusal to give counter-terrorism police the keys to decrypt his computer files.

The 33-year-old man, originally from London, is currently held at a secure mental health unit after being sectioned while serving his sentence at Winchester Prison.

In June the man, JFL, who spoke on condition we do not publish his full name, was sentenced to nine months imprisonment under Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). The powers came into force at the beginning of October 2007.

[. . .]

Throughout several hours of questioning, JFL maintained silence. With a deep-seated wariness of authorities, he did not trust his interviewers. He also claims a belief in the right to silence — a belief which would later allow him to be prosecuted under RIPA Part III.

November 23, 2009

Digital Economy Bill should be called Digital Disenfranchisement Bill

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:16

The proposed British legislation called the “Digital Economy Bill” is going to be very bad news, says Charles Stross:

I’m a self-employed media professional working in the entertainment industry, who earns his living by creating intellectual property and licensing it to publishers. You might think I’d be one of the beneficiaries of this proposed law: but you’d be dead wrong. This is going to cripple the long tail of the creative sector — it plays entirely to the interests of large corporate media organizations and shits on the plate of us ordinary working artists.

Want to write a casual game for the iPhone and sell it for 99 pence? Good luck with that — first you’ll have to cough up £50,000 to get it certified as child-friendly by the BBFC. (It’s not clear whether this applies to Open Source games projects, but I’m not optimistic that it doesn’t.)

Want to publish a piece of shareware over BitTorrent? You’re fucked, mate: all it takes is a malicious accusation and your ISP (who are required to snitch on p2p users on pain of heavy fines) will be ordered to cut off the internet connection to you and everyone else in your household. (A really draconian punishment in an age where it’s increasingly normal to conduct business correspondence via email and to manage bank accounts and gas or electricity bills or tax returns via the web.) Oh, you don’t get the right to confront your accuser in court, either: this is merely an administrative process, no lawyers involved. It’s unlikely that p2p access will survive this bill in any form — even for innocent purposes (distributing Linux .iso images, for example).

As I’ve said before, we’re rapidly moving to a world where it will be difficult to have a normal life without network access . . . this bill will create a new underclass of non-persons, all to benefit the dinosaurs of the media conglomerates. And introduced by a _Labour_ government, no less.

We are already at the point where it is a reasonable and sensible thing to say that access to the internet is a human right (at least in the west). Mandelson’s three strikes provision will deny innocent people access to the internet (for all it will take is accusations that do not need to have proof), which for more and more people will be the practical equivalent of being exiled from the country. No internet access would mean children can’t get access to school work, parents can’t get access to their bank accounts, and everyone will be cut off from large parts of their social circle (more and more people depend on email, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to stay in touch).

Due process? That seems to have been lost in the rush. Proportionality? That’s been gone for years.

November 3, 2009

Challenge to human gene patents allowed to proceed

Filed under: Law, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:25

A judge has allowed an ACLU challenge to two human gene patents to go to court:

The first-of-its-kind lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law claims that the patents violate free speech by restricting research.

U.S. District Judge Robert W. Sweet of New York, in ruling that the case may proceed to trial, noted that the litigation might open the door to challenges of a host of other patented genes. About one-fifth of the human genome is covered under patent applications and claims.

Sweet wrote:

The challenges to the patents-in-suit raise questions of difficult legal dimensions concerning constitutional protections over the information that serves as our genetic identities and the need to adopt policies that promote scientific innovation and biomedical research. The widespread use of gene sequence information as the foundation for biomedical research means that resolution of these issues will have far-reaching implications, not only for gene-based health care and the health of millions of women facing the specter of breast cancer, but also for the future course of biomedical research.

The case against the patent office and patent-holder Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City is the first to challenge a patented gene under a civil rights allegation — in this case the First Amendment.

October 30, 2009

Cory Doctorow on Britain’s ill-advised ‘3 strikes’ move

Filed under: Britain, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

Cory Doctorow would have the British government do something other than their idiotic ill-advised move to enforce the “three strikes” rule:

Peter Mandelson’s proposal to disconnect the families of internet users who have been accused of file sharing will do great violence to British justice without delivering any reduction in copyright infringement. We’ve had 15 years of dotty entertainment industry proposals designed to make computers worse at copying. It’s time that we stopped listening to big content and started listening to reason.

Since 1995 — the year of the WIPO copyright treaties — the entertainment industry has won extrajudicial powers to enforce its rights without the need to prove a case in court. “Notice and takedown”, as the system was called, was supposed to stop copyright infringement on the web. It gave rights holders the power to compel internet service providers to take down material simply by stating that it infringed their rights, and obliged those providers to act or face liability.

A decade and a half later there is no indication that this has reduced copyright infringement online (certainly there is more today than there was in 1995). And, predictably, a system that allows for legalised censorship without penalties for abuse has itself been abused.

We are already at the point where it is a reasonable and sensible thing to say that access to the internet is a human right (at least in the west). Mandelson’s three strikes provision will deny innocent people access to the internet (for all it will take is accusations that do not need to have proof), which for more and more people will be the practical equivalent of being exiled from the country. No internet access would mean children can’t get access to school work, parents can’t get access to their bank accounts, and everyone will be cut off from large parts of their social circle (more and more people depend on email, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to stay in touch).

Due process? That seems to have been lost in the rush. Proportionality? That’s been gone for years.

Justice is (belatedly) served

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

A short summary from The Guardian:

The Pennsylvania supreme court has dismissed thousands of juvenile convictions issued by a judge charged in a corruption scandal.

The high court today threw out more than five years worth of cases heard by former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella. He is charged with accepting millions of dollars in kickbacks to send youths to private detention centres.

The court says that all the convictions are tainted and that the youths may not be retried.

This is very good news for the young people who were railroaded . . . one wonders if a class action lawsuit can now be prepared against the state for the wrongful imprisonment?

October 24, 2009

QotD: Canada and freedom of expression

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:26

Some Canadians are rather touchy about criticism from Americans regarding freedom of speech in Canada. The irony of this touchiness is that the Canadian Supreme Court has based its free-speech jurisprudence, at least in the context of antidiscrimination concerns, in large part on the theories of left-wing American academics such as University of Michigan professor Catharine MacKinnon. The Canadian left has a penchant for importing left-wing ideas from the U.S. and elsewhere, adopting them as public policy, and then accusing anyone who objects of being "anti-Canadian" because these policies somehow define Canadian identity. I like Canada a lot myself, but I should hope that there is more to Canadian identity than national health insurance, gun control, and aggressive hate speech laws.

David Bernstein, “Touchy Canadians”, The Volokh Conspiracy, 2003-12-05

October 22, 2009

Wage controls for high earners

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:44

As if the government hadn’t inserted itself into too many things already, they’re now retroactively deciding that some corporate executives need a pay cut:

The Obama administration plans to order companies that have received exceptionally large amounts of bailout money from the government to slash compensation for their highest-paid executives by about half on average, according to people familiar with the long-awaited decision.

The cuts will affect 25 of the most highly paid executives at each of five major financial companies and two automakers, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan has not been made public. Cash salaries will be cut by about 90 percent compared with last year, they said.

Oh, this is going to go just great, because — of course — there’ll be no negative effects of this bold move, right? Nobody will make different decisions in future out of fear of the government second-guessing them after the fact and reversing or modifying the call.

Uncertainty is the worst enemy of a free economy: you have to have some confidence in the stability of the legal structure in which you have to work in order to make rational long-term business decisions. As I wrote back in March,

The economic picture is unsettled, which sharply reduces the dependability of long-term and even short-term forecasting. Businesses depend on forecasting to make investments, create jobs, increase or decrease production, and pretty much every other part of their operations. Uncertainty is normal, but high levels of uncertainty act to depress all economic activity . . . and the US government playing kingmaker with the heads of major corporations is a hell of way to create more uncertainty.

The specific merits of the Richard Wagoner dismissal are unimportant compared to the extra measure of uncertainty injected into the economy as a whole. If President Obama and his team can dismiss Wagoner, why not the heads of any bank accepting government funding? Why not other corporate officers (corporate directors have already been ousted at government whim)? At what level does the government’s self-created new power stop?

The direction the US federal government has set will do nothing to settle economic worries, and much to increase them. The clear belief on the part of the administration is that they are better able to pick the winners and losers of economic activity of which most of them have no practical experience. That is a modern definition of hubris.

Brain farts like this latest one just introduce huge amounts of uncertainty into the long-term plans of every company. This is no way to encourage recovery.

As several people have noted, if Barack Obama’s administration was determined to destroy the US economy . . . what would they have done differently?

It’s not a clever satire

Filed under: Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:58

John Dvorak thought that this was “meant to be satire or commentary (or is it?) on where London is heading with it’s multiple cameras on every street and where the former East Germany was. And were we could eventually go if we aren’t vigilant.” I don’t think so:

The link provided goes to the LAPD website. Creepy.

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