49% of Americans think the First Amendment goes too far. No, there’s not really anything I can add to that.
Category: Politics
Jeff Cooper is an actual law professor, and so much more qualified than I to discuss the legalities of declaring war on Iraq sans Congressional approval. He read the Security Council resolutions I referenced earlier and reports that their goals have been achieved. So there you go.
Parenthetically, and I mention this because it’s been brought up from time to time, Clinton also used the 1991 Security Council resolutions as justification for military action against Iraq. So it’s not as if Bush doesn’t have some precedent. Clinton’s stance was that enforcing the no-fly zones was a means of preventing further Iraqi aggression against neighboring states, which was in fact mandated by the UN. Although the UN didn’t approve the no-fly zones. Muddy waters.
Target demonstrated a remarkably clueless attitude recently by selling various white-supremacy branded clothing. Fortunately, they’ve since pulled the clothing from shelves. Good for them. I’d like to know who designed the stuff; apparently it was Target’s house brand.
I don’t really have any objection to Bush announcing that his lawyers believe he has the authority to attack Iraq without a Congressional vote. I don’t know about the de jure, but I’d bet he has authority de facto.
The legal argument rests primarily on this Congressional resolution, passed last year, which authorizes the use of armed forces against those responsible for 9/11. They’re also citing H.J. Res. 77, a Congressional resolution passed in January 1991 which authorized the invasion of Iraq.
The argument there is that the resolution is still in force; one must admit, reading the resolution, that there was no time limit involved. I have not exhaustively determined whether or not Security Council Resolutions 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674, and 677 have been implemented — said implementation being the specific end for which the use of armed forces was authorized. The Security Council Resolutions are available in PDF, if you want to do your own research. Most of them appear on a quick read to be quite specific to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which had ended the last time I looked. However, there’re also a couple of explicit injunctions requiring Iraq to fulfil its obligations under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and while a first glance at those shows no obvious current transgressions, this is about where I remember I don’t get paid for researching these things.
One counterargument may be found in the form of H.J Res. 109, Proposed House Resolution on Use of Force Against Iraq. Amusingly, it also cites the 1991 resolution. Unsurprisingly, since it predates today’s announcement from Bush, it doesn’t specifically address Bush’s claims.
Anyhow, as I said, I don’t object to Bush issuing press releases about what is in the end just the opinion of one set of lawyers. We’ll see what the judges say, I imagine. I just think if he’s going to make an announcement every time his lawyers back him up on a proposed plan of action, he ought to make an announcement every time his lawyers say “That’s not legal, George.”
Someone’s doing a limited run of activist gas pump stickers. Good design, good wording, and high quality stickers. Not quite as subtle as my favorite anti-SUV sticker campaign. More political than the baby smashing bunch. It’s nice that the guy made sure he included real safety notices on the sticker.
Hey, remember what I said a while back about identity and the ability to mold the reality outside the monitor? Yeah.
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.”
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.
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?