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Broadcast Flag Sneak Not Attempted
Trizero writes "THOMAS, one of the best sources for Congressional action on the Internet has shown that no amendments occured to the CJS Appropriations Bill. Monday, Slashdot covered the EFF announcing a rumor that a senator was attempting to sneak an amendment to bring the Broadcast Flag into law. From THOMAS (scroll down to the bottom): "6/21/2005:
Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies. Approved for full committee consideration without amendment favorably." Translation: No one attempted to sneak the Broadcast flag into law." Update: 06/22 18:55 GMT by J : The EFF's new Activism Coordinator, Danny O'Brien, sees this as a victory for swift citizen action. Impressive numbers. Nice work by EFF and Public Knowledge, and everyone who raised their voice.
So, the Broadcast flag wasn't smuggled into law within the CJS appropriations bill, as threatened earlier.
The question now is: why not?
Discuss.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Don't start jumping up and down. This won't be the end of the broadcast flag...
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
One of the most needed pieces of legislation in this country is a Federal-level law that states the amendments and provisions of a bill must directly relate to its topic. I know a few states have this now but Congress uses this backdoor to get all sorts of shady and illegal legislation passed every year.
Either that, or REQUIRE that every piece of legislation be read in full on the House floor by Gilbert Gottfried, and on the Senate floor by Ben Stein before it gets voted into law. If you haven't heard it both screamed and droned, it can't be signed into law.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
But the coach did signal for the Statue of Liberty play. The quarterback then decided to go for the play action...
Whether this is similar to Y2K ("Nothing happened! Complete waste of time!" "Idiot! It only didn't happen because we did all that work!") or like the Tiger Repellant ("What's that?" "A tiger repellant" "What for? There are no tigers in Atlanta" "Exactly. Works pretty well, huh?") is difficult to tell from the point of view of an outsider.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Why ask hard questions? It was presented as a rumor, and due to the seriousness of it, it needed to be published. It's not like any harm came out of it. And more likely, it may have actually prevented harm by keeping the sneak from occurring.
The RIAA did something similar in the 90s when it snuck in "work for hire" legislation, which made all recording artists mere "work for hires" without any right to retain or obtain copyrights on their songs.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
>So which bill....?
Exactly. Some MPAA congresstooge will slip it in under the cover of night, as it were.
On the other hand, consider the possibility that the story was leaked as a trial balloon, to see how much attention it would get. They'll put it out again every couple of months, until we all decide that a broadcast flag is inevitable.
Considering how many people think digital TV is some kind of constitutional right, I suspect we'll get a broadcast flag along with subsidized digital TV -- to protect our way of life, fight terrorism, and to save the children.
The MPAA will get their broadcast flag, and the government will borrow money from my kids to pay for it.
sigs, as if you care.
Perhaps it is time for those of us who care about preserving fair use, and copyright reform, to stop being reactionary and be proactive. Perhaps it is time to put our energies, and (more importantly) monies into lobbying for the legislation we want, and not just stopping the ones we don't.
I'm not saying it would be easy, just that it is time to add this to the conversation.
What do you know I wrote a novel
Attaching an ammendment like Real ID or Broadcast Flag will not slow the process. So maybe the CJS Appropriations Bill was not an ideal carrier for Broadcast Flag since appropriations bills tend to be the most debated and delayed.
"THOMAS, one of the best sources for Congressional action on the Internet"
That would be correct as:
"THOMAS, one of the best sources on the Internet for Congressional action"
English is a language with positional importance of words and phrases. Some verbs, like "action", more closely associate subsequent clauses as objects of their meaning than do clauses that preceed those verbs.
--
make install -not war
"Why do we, as American citizens, have to keep a close eye on everything that our elected officials do so that they do not sneak unlawful provision into law."
Complete the well-known phrase or saying: "The price of freedom...."
Getting the nonsense stopped is harder than it sounds.
The US Congressional procedures are very strange. Bills are created by committees; they don't usually go to the floor until it's been approved by the committee. After that, it's tricky to change the bill.
Most deliberative bodies have a "motion to split", which allows you to take a bill and chop it into pieces and vote the separate pieces. The US Congress rules of order don't have a motion to split. That means that you actually have to amend the bill to remove offending language. On the floor, debate and amendments are limited.
The point of not having the motion to split is to allow compromises to be enforced. If somebody says, "OK, I'll let you have your restriction on cadmium disposal, but only if I can have $15 million for my district to build roads." If you remove one piece or the other from the bill, the compromise falls apart.
It's hard to make compromises in a 435-member House (or even a 100 member Senate). That's why bills come out of committees, where there are usually a dozen people at most. In theory that also allows them to be experts (or at least have experts on hand) in transportation/defense/telecommuncations/etc.
The point is that your senator has less than 1% input into most bills. In theory he makes up for it with more than 1% input into other bills, depending on seniority. Of course it never works out that way, depending on favors he's done, whether he's in the majority or minority, etc.
So ultimately even when it comes down to the up-or-down vote, your senator could be forced to say, "I'm going to vote against this entire bill guaranteeing proper nutrition for kittycats because I don't like the broadcast flag that's gotten crammed into it." And when he runs for re-election, the opposition says, "Senator Bob vote to starve kittycats!"
The Republicans absolutely REAMED Kerry in the last election because of this. It's one reason that Senators haven't been elected to Congress in forever: they end up leaving these long track records of voting against things they agree with.
It didn't help that Kerry fumbled the answer, "Well, I voted for that bill before they crammed all that pork into it" (the correct answer) came out as, "I voted for it before I voted against it," and the election pretty much ended right then.
So Senators on the committee have massive power to write legislative pork and do favors for friends. That won't go away without a rewrite of the rules. Sadly, you'll discover that whatever party has 51% of the vote is not likely to vote to change the rules, since it tends to limit their power.
Viva la revolucion!
I'm not finding the amendment anywhere in the proceedings. Maybe I'm missing it, or maybe I'm missunderstanding what you're saying, Mr. Coward. Would you be so kind as to elaborate, and perhaps provide a link?
How about instead of term limits on Congress, have "space limits" on laws... in conversation with a lawyer friend of mine, he admitted that he doesn't even know all of the laws IN HIS AREA OF SPECIALIZATION! I asked him how we could justify, "ignorance of the law is no excuse" when even a trained professional, whose job it is to know the law, doesn't know the law. He had no answer.
No, we don't need term limits on Congresscritters. What we need is a Constitutional amendment to the following effect:
The sum total of all laws currently in force as enacted by Congress must be less than 50,000 words, with *no* references to external sources allowed (that's approximately 96 pages).
If Congress wants to put something new in, that's great... but they'll have to take something out. Furthermore, it does a terrific job of (a) allowing the average citizen to understand what the laws are and (b) forcing the law to be concise, well-thought-out and well-written, and most importantly, a statement of general principles that are to be equitably applies across the board - not one riddled with loopholes.
For reference, the US Constitution, including all amendments and enumeration of amendment numbers, clauses, phrases, sections, etc. is a total of 7,709 words (as counted by copy/pasting into MS Word). It's pretty freaking clear on the general principles of law involved (some of the amendments less so).
Just a thought.
The U.S. flag has 13 stripes, not 12. Please fix it.
Can we pretty please title it "Read The Full Bill Act"? I just want senators hollering "RTFB!" at each other.
If government can't be effective, it might as well be entertaining.
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
while there's a lot of artistic photography that certainly falls into your description, i think it's a stretch, at best, to claim that a wedding photographer's photograph is capturing the photographer's previsualized concept on film.
In fact, i'd say it is the wedding photographer's job to capture the wedding couple's previsualized concept of their wedding on film as accurately as possible.
In the specific case of wedding photographers, I would consider them work for hire. In the case of someone like Ansel Adams, however, I would definitely consider it an artistic work that the photographer should hold a copyright on.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre