Ashcroft’s getting itchy again. This time he argues that the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court misruled recently when rejecting Ashcroft’s wiretap guidelines. Spiffy! I can’t actually object to Ashcroft’s objection; he has the right to appeal, after all. I’m just surprised that the USFISC (which hasn’t rejected a wiretap request in years) held up their hands and said “No.”
Month: August 2002
Unbillable Hours is another one of those lawyer-written weblogs, which I find eternally interesting. They set up some kind of cognitive dissonance within my head (“how come busy lawyers have time to weblog?”) and I always like that. The author, whose name I can’t find on the page, wrote a nice bite about RICO and the Catholic Church, which prompted this posting. I also really liked his discussion of sex and law.
The Internet Archive Movie Collection contains a few thousand digitized films from the Prelinger Archives; the latter is a vast collection of ephemeral films. Newsreels, “Our Friend the Bowling Alley,” instructional films, and the like. Check out A is for Atom today.
I will be flying out of the Bay Area, my stuff on a truck somewhere below me, on September 7th.
Lessig responds to Dave. Dave fails to get it. There’s a marked difference between supporting copyright for software in a modified form, and not supporting it at all, Dave.
Declan McCullagh is on some strange Californian “let’s just relax” vibe lately; first it was his suggestion that geeks should ignore politics, and then his suggestion that the DMCA isn’t so bad. The first one, OK, I can see the argument that geeks are better suited to create social change by writing code… although his example is flawed, since Zimmerman went through a ton of political process to avoid being arrested. Declan also forgets the sad case of anon.penet.fi, which was effectively shut down by political pressures. It’s a shame Julf Helsingius didn’t worry more about the politics, no?
Anyhow, the DMCA argument is way further out there, floating somewhere on the deep fringes of reasonableness. Ed Felten did an excellent job of rebutting Declan’s article, so I won’t belabor the point. I just have to wonder what’s up with the guy lately. He was so tremendously sensible during the CDA period.
I try to stay away from entries entitled “Dave Winer has gone barking mad,” but from time to time I suspect I just won’t be able to avoid it.
Background: Dave got miffed because Lawrence Lessig’s big speech included an exhortation to get off your butts and do something about the political arena. Dave, to be perfectly fair, is in fact fairly active in a scattershot kind of a way. He also deserves applause for his rejection of patents, although he couldn’t have actually patented everything he thinks he could.
However, one of the things intelligent individuals are expected to do is understand the concept of generalizations. There is a difference between saying “Hm, that was a generalization and doesn’t apply to me” and saying “I’m not like that, so he was lying.”
Dave fumed for a few days and finally found an old statement he made regarding Lessig. It was bullshit then, and it is bullshit now. Code is not process, it’s code. Prose has two levels: process and the words themselves. Software has three: the process, the source, and the code.
It’s true that Lessig’s original argument is somewhat inaccurate, in that you can learn from observing the behavior of a program. “Hey, copy and paste are good.” But Lessig wasn’t even making an analogy; he was citing an example. Dave didn’t really read the article very closely.
The problem is that Lessig is speaking from a broad base of theory and a deep understanding of the copyright system, whereas Dave is speaking from the perspective of someone who’s always assumed he’s simply entitled to the rights he sees as universal. Unfortunately, the copyright system is not based on universal rights. It’s based on a contract between the government and the creator. Copyright assumes no inherent right to intellectual property; copyright provides the creator with a right to the creation in return for the creator’s work. It is not a method of protecting an inherent right. (In the US. Europe is different.)
However, all that was fairly mild compared to the current temper tantrum. Dave’s accused Lessig of cluelessness, and buying into the authority of the laws. Which is truly perplexing, because those are the laws that keep me from copying Dave’s software and giving it to all my friends.
But what I think Dave is missing here is that Lessig accepts the authority of the process… which is part of what civil disobedience is all about. Thoreau got a lot wrong, but he did understand that civil disobedience necessarily includes getting arrested.
Finally, today, Dave pointed out that the world does get something in return for his copyright. But gah! He misses the point again! To the degree that Dave choses not to patent his techniques, yes, the world does get something in return. However, that is a choice Dave has made and the copyright system does not oblige him to make that choice! The copyright system protects Dave, and Dave has chosen to eschew a portion of that protection. Good for Dave — but how does that make Lessig’s comments about the system wrong?
Tagging this for later use — it’s an implementation of a newish anti-spam concept, designed for qmail but I believe it could be adapted to procmail fairly easily. I want to let it go through a little user testing before I install it, though.
The director’s commentary for the Criterion edition of Traffic begins (literally) with a comment on the typeface used for the subtitles on the opening screen. Helvetica Light, because that’s what was used in All the President’s Men, for the record. How can I not love that particular bit of Soderbergh’s attention to detail?
(The transfer, by the by, is gorgeous. I really want a digital television one of these days.)
What’s it like, being young and suddenly rich? Hard to imagine, for me at least, particularly if you were poor before. The seminar discussed in that article probably comes four years too late, though; you want to catch the rookies before they hit college, because that’s where the special privileges start.
The techniques the NFL uses to guide these kids are nothing special. Not that different from what you read about in “scared straight” programs. They even bring in a former player and current felon to talk about the hell of prison. What’s interesting to me is the reaction of the rookies. That’s where the sociology is.
Oh, and the advice on women. It reads as abominably sexist, but do I think the NFL is deliberately allowing sexist rhetoric in their training sessions? Or do I think that these guys do get targetted by predatory women?
Turn it around. Do you think rich women get targetted by predatory men?
Weird little view into a very weird little world.