Slashdot Mirror
Copy That Floppy, Lose Your Computer
Over the weekend we posted a story about a new copyright bill that creates a new govt. agency in charge of copyright enforcement. Kevin Way writes "In particular, the bill grants this new agency the right to seize any computer or network hardware used to "facilitate" a copyright crime and auction it off. You would not need to be found guilty at trial to face this penalty. You may want to read a justification of it, and criticism presented by Declan McCullagh and Public Knowledge." Lots of good followup there on a really crazy development.
I for one welcome our new computer-nabbing overlords.
The link to the EFF in the article is http://slashdot.org/href=, which doesn't work for obvious reasons.
I predict that many Republicans will oppose this bill, not because they are opposed to the idea of protecting an industry legislatively, but, becuase the industry that they would be tasked to protect is one that generally opposses them. I mean, what happens to the big bad liberal media if it goes belly up because it is obsolete? Kinda hard to make pro-socialist stuff, if your target audience doesn't want to pay for it...
This is my sig.
Excuse me while I gather the virgin sacrifice and assemble the pentagram required to solve your problem
In case you missed the message, Don't Copy That Floppy!
(warning: may cause eye strain and/or brain damage)
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
Ever hear of something called the Magna Carta? If not then you should read it.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
In china copy a computer and you lose a floppy!
Since the intarweb is used to facilitate copyright infringement, the gov't can seize the entire series of tubes!
Maybe because were missing a crucial step our laws seem to have. Mainly, be proven you did the crime before you do the time.
This seems to skip a step and go right from accusing to jail-time and or long legal battles to even prove it wasn't you. What happened to due course in US?
The difference is be accused of the crime, get the punishment and your computer auctioned off, regardless of guilt.
Back, in the USSA....
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
An entire new agency in charge of stopping copyright violations. Wonderful. I am SO glad to know our government has its priorities straight.
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
Here is the EFF Link that should be in the article summary: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/12/pro-ip-act-increase-infringement-penalties-and-drastically-expand-government-enfor
If someone on my schools network downloads an illegal mp3, then the RIAA has the right to confiscate and sell every single router, switch, and hub between the two people... clogging the tubes is bad enough, but taking them away and stealing them?
Live life to the fullest. It's not that life is short, but that you are dead for so long.
In the United States of America
You are guilty
There is no need to prove you innocent.
It is customary to be convicted of crimes in court before the penalty is assessed.
Amendment V
No person...shall...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
I understand here that "due process of law" is actually being changed to make this legal, but I feel that the following serves to define "due process of law" in a way:
Amendment VII
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
Just once I'd like someone to call me 'Sir' without adding 'You're making a scene.'
leave the US while you can. Serious.
:)
Well, let's see what happens in the next elections. If the people lose, you're welcome to establish here below the Bravo
governement of the people, for the people and by the people?
It seems like all we hear about lately is new laws to benefit big corporations.
Fuck 'em.
US has officially jumped the shark.
Sorry, this just disappoints me so much, that the one time world power that represented freedom and was a beacon for what the rest of the world aspired to become, has sunk down to these sort of horrible government controls.
Laws are meant for the good of the people, I think this crosses the line.
welcome our new "You steal my song, I steal your computer(s)" copyright-protecting overlords.
Fuck us over some more! We love it! Whip us! Beat us! Make us write bad checks!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"Kevin Way writes Kevin Way writes"
This is just another way that the government sets up to forcibly remove your money and property... Lawmakers will draft up every law they can think of, knowing that a certain percentage of people will "break" the law, slowly weaseling honest citizens out of their money through the back door. In this case, what do you want to bet they would make a killing selling the seized computers like they do with seized vehicles?
Based on other laws coming out in the USA in the last 8 years this isn't so bad. It just means you should do your copying on the latest most expensive machine in the local shop, report them then pick it up at auction for buttons.
Even more so: since you do not have to be found guilty, I think that would very clearly be an unconstitutional Government "Taking" denial of Due Process. It's one thing to ask if corporate lobbiests have a grip on the government but quite another to ask ARE THESE PEOPLE COMPLETELY MAD?!
The difference is that the US Constitution specifically prohibits this sort of search and seizure:
Takeaways are:
1. You MUST have a warrant before performing a seizure of someone's computer.
2. It is not up to Congress to decide to give a broad search and seizure privilege. Search and seizure is reserved for the Judicial Branch of government, and may ONLY be invoked when probably cause has been presented under oath in a court of law.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Now that you have had all your computers confiscated, you are ripe for conquest...
Wait, they've got stick with a nail in it! Run for your lives!
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
For the past five to ten years, lawmakers have passed an incredible number of laws that the courts had to sort out as unconstitutional. It's almost as if they abandoned sensible work for a "let's try everything and see what works" attitude.
Really, is it just my perception or has the number of stuff that was made a law only to be killed by the courts as unconstitutional skyrocketed? I really wonder, why that is.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This is absurd. There's no point in even debating that.
I think it's the (RI|MP)AA asking for the moon - that way, when they tone down their demands they won't sound as absurd.
Look at it from this perspective: how much resources do you imagine the FBI is dedicating to copyright infringement given the number of embarrassing gaffes that the entertainment industry is making? The entertainment industry wants a government department with powers similar to the FBI but dedicated purely to copyright enforcement. Such a department could not reasonably refuse to assist in arresting some relatively innocent granny because they have higher priorities.
You DO realize Bush has already suspended Habeas Corpus right? For "terrorists", in theory, but wait till they amend this law to label people who do "illegal copying" (or anyone who does anything that deprives any big corporation of profits) as an "economic terrorist".
Although the US courts have blasted him and congress again and again over that, he keeps going at it.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
This make sense to me in some ways. I know people who were caught poaching fish (catching more than their license allowed). They had their fishing rods taken away, as well as their boat, and the truck that they towed the boat, and just about anything else that was even remotely involved in the crime. It may seem a little excessive, but it's quite a deterrent. Getting your computer taken away for sharing copyrighted content seems to be in alignment with most of the other laws I've seen. Now if this is excessive, than maybe all the other consequences for a lot of other laws are also a problem, but that's a different issue.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Are you guys aware of the drug-related asset-forfeiture laws? Seems like the tools of the "War on Drugs" are being used in the "War on Copying". Talk about a "War on Freedom"...
In the hopes that this post will not be disregarded, I have to say that I am not in favour of draconian copyright laws, such as those currently proposed in Canada (my home), or the ridiculous penalties applied in the US ($10,000 per song!), and I am worried that DRM will have the long-term effect of making our culture inaccessible to future generations (back with the folks who didn't write anything down).
Globalization and outsourcing are removing most of the jobs that involve physically producing something from North America. Look around your house and imagine what you would have left if everything that was made elsewhere was removed. Those jobs used to be the backbone of our societies; with them gone, we are moving to "intellectual property" (usually meaning charging repeatedly for the same product, such as a movie or song) and "service jobs" (usually low paying and temporary).
Like it or hate it, if no one pays for ideas, then all that is left is low-end service jobs and the eventual failure of our way of life. I think they are doing a very poor job of selling the idea of buying ideas, but the politicians and corporations who are terrified of a world where we only pay for music and movies once do have a few good points mixed in with their nonsensical terms and anti-copying advertising.
I look forward to a day when we can have reasonable copyright laws and periods, no DRM and affordable prices that people can pay to reward creators at a reasonable rate. Perhaps my children will live to see that day, but I doubt I will (and I'm only 29).
cheers,
Andrew
Nothing new here. Civil forfeiture has been a feature of the War on Drugs for a long time; extending it to the War on Copying is an obvious strategy. The "great" thing about civil forfeiture is that the defendant isn't you, with all of your rights; in a twisted bit of legal sophistry, it's the property itself being sued by the government.
I'm sure it will be just as successful in stopping copying as it was in stopping drug use. (I'm just waiting for the violent black market in bootleg DVDs to develop.)
"History repeats itself: First as tragedy, then as farce." - Marx got that one right at least.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
...and stupid acronyms?
"Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property": PRO-IP
I mean, the shorthand name is useful in a way, since it (in this case, at least) gives you a pretty good idea of what the thing is about - but it really seems like the long form has no purpose other than to create the acronym. Specifically, "Prioritizing Resources and Organization" for what reason regarding "Intellectual Property"? "In Defense Of" might be nice. But then it'd spell "PROIDOIP", and we can't have that...
Now what I wonder is, what would happen if some new malware came out that would make a user's computer seek out and download random torrents? Man, that could be some real chaos, right there... (Oh, and I'm sure WHIPER would be simply heartbroken about it as they take the hapless victim's computer away to fund their agency...)
Bow-ties are cool.
I am sure this will fix everything, no worries here.
Looks as if the Media Industry is unstoppable, there is only one thing to do. Stop the money from reaching their banks, dont buy their products, dont listen to their music, dont see their movies. It will be 6 dull months, but then it is over and remember that there are independent music and film. Play Open Arena om Linux
This just gives more "guns" to stop any real publication of criticism. /Will the computers be taken by the Firemen?
You write something the NeoCons/Republicans don't like, they invoke this; You may not be guilty of any "Illegal" copies, but the computers are still gone. This is the modern version of Nazi Germany's book burnings.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
it's been suspended in the UK for a long time, ever since the introduction of fixed penaltys for certain offences that can just be handed out by police officers, or general busy boddies employed by councils.
one example would be a man who was handed a £60 fine for littering when he threw a used match stick out of his car window.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Hm... Lobby, lobbier, lobbiest...
OK, it all checks out... You can go about your business. Move along.
Bow-ties are cool.
in law already... if you are fishing without a license, they can technically take your boat and all your gear for example.
At least they didn't say it would "brick" the computer. Baby steps, folks.
Yes, because with drug seizures, .* registration, etc.. the point isn't to Think of the Children, the point is gov't income.
Look at civil forfeiture law in the US. The government can sue your property and is given the ability to seize and sell your property based on a mere probable cause that the property was used for criminal purposes.
http://www.isil.org/resources/lit/looting-of-america.html
No one uses floppies any more, despite their conveniently rhyming with the word "copy".
Cute headline though. Too bad you decided to be cute instead of being clear and correct.
Are you suggesting that here, in the Land of the Free(TM), that the government would seize and auction off your assets for a copyright "crime" even if you haven't been adjudicated as guilty? Oh, come on.....next you'll try to tell me that they'll seize and auction your car and keep your cash if they even suspect you of having drugs! (Chuckle) Yeah....like that's gonna happen....
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Download some MP3s at work. In comes the MAFIAA, seizes all computers and your company goes down the loo. Whether the company has anything to do with it is irrelevant. Guilty 'til proven innocent. Well, even if proven innocent, the hardware is gone and won't come back.
Is that how I should imagine this?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's nothing new here. The DEA has been seizing property for the last decade or longer, and placing the onus on American citizens to prove their innocence. So now the administration wants to extend it to property used in copyright violations as well. Civil Asset Forfeiture (google it, or here's something from 2001 to get you started: http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/6/27/191414.shtml ) has not been overturned yet as it relates to the drug property. Why would anyone expect it to fail in the copyright arena? Face it, you have no right to property under the American constitution as it is currently being interpreted by the legislative and judicial branches.
Now, without a trial and conviction, your computer equipment can be seized by the cops and sold to supplement the donut/hooker/beer petty cash fund. This is just fucking great. I'd love to see this shot down, but I doubt it will.
And I love the "justification". The fact that the US doesn't make anything *real* anymore is not my fault. Ideas are great and all, but when your only product is ideas, and you've outsourced the manufacture of real, durable goods to other places, you will eat your own dog food eventually. I laugh at how they tossed counterfeit meds in there -- nobody will vote that down during an election cycle. "The senator from your state voted *against* protecting seniors from counterfeit medicine on the internet!" Nevermind that they're trying to kill out-of-country medication purchases *anyway*.
Anyone know where I can get a free (or cheap and paid anonymously with cash) shell account overseas where I can SSH in and compile/run TOR? This is getting fucking ridiculous.
Method of processing duck feet
..that the BusyBox developers could have Verizon's servers seized for the GPL violations?
I can't wait.
(Not that I really expect that would ever happen even if this became law. We all know there's one law for the people and another for the corporations (and yet another for the politicians).)
What I'd really like to see is a constitutional amendment (that's what it would take) that automatically bars an official from re-election if he or she proposes, sponsors, or votes for legislation like this which is prima facie unconstitutional (they've violated their oath of office to uphold the constitution).
But I don't expect that to happen either.
-- Alastair
In addition: Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Nobody challenged it when "drug dealers" were deprived of their money and belongings, without due process.
This is just the next chapter.
Given the do the crime bit, I know to have a law declared unconstitutional, you have to go to court, which ostensibly means you have to violate the law and put yourself at risk.
Would it be possible file a class action lawsuit against congress for passing unconstitutional laws (derliction of duties, public endagerment, etc)?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
C'mon malware authors! Start making RIAA/MPAA PCs run bittorrent! With Vista, you can do it!
I mean, you can't have your stuff taken away just because somebody accuses you of some crime, can you?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Bow-ties are cool.
any time soon. particularly when payper liesense stock markup FraUD corepirate nazi advertiser fed robbIE shills for them with every..other made up storIE.
corepirate nazi execrable costs outweigh benefits
(Score:-)mynuts won, the king is a fink)
by ourselves on everyday 24/7
as there are no benefits, just more&more death/debt & disruption.
fortunately there's an 'army' of light bringers, coming yOUR way
do not be afraid/dismayed, it is the way it was meant to be.
the little ones/innocents must/will be protected.
after the big flash, ALL of yOUR imaginary 'borders' may blur a bit?
for each of the creators' innocents harmed (in any way), there is a debt that must/will be repaid by you/us, as the perpetrators/minions of unprecedented evile, will not be available.
all is not lost/forgotten/forgiven.
no need to fret (unless you're associated/joined at the hype with, unprecedented evile), it's all just a part of the creators' wwwildly popular, newclear powered, planet/population rescue initiative/mandate.
or, is it (literally) ground hog (as in dead meat) day, again? many of US are obviously not interested in/aware of how we appear (which is whoreabull) from the other side of the 'lens', or even from across the oceans.
vote with (what's left in) yOUR wallet. help bring an end to unprecedented evile's manifestation through yOUR owned felonious corepirate nazi glowbull warmongering execrable.
some of US should consider ourselves very fortunate to be among those scheduled to survive after the big flash/implementation of the creators' wwwildly popular planet/population rescue initiative/mandate.
it's right in the manual, 'world without end', etc....
as we all ?know?, change is inevitable, & denying/ignoring gravity, logic, morality, etc..., is only possible, on a temporary basis.
concern about the course of events that will occur should the life0cidal execrable fail to be intervened upon is in order.
'do not be dismayed' (also from the manual). however, it's ok/recommended, to not attempt to live under/accept, fauxking nazi felon greed/fear/ego based pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking hypenosys.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?
"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."
"Do the crime, serve the time. What's the difference?"
I accuse you of copyright infringement. Hand over your computer, please.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
These numbers are completely ridiculous. Estimated costs in dollars are always nebulous and hard to disprove, but I find it hard to believe that anyone can justify the 750K jobs number.
Considering that the movie studios & music business seem to be doing just fine despite these "increasing global economic costs" I find it hard to believe they're going to be hiring 3-quarters of a million more people to do the exact same amount of work they're already doing.
The only jobs this bill is going to create are the Intellectual Property police that staff this new agency. And since they're going to be funded through seizures of private property, it's hard to see how that will act as anything but a leech on the economy.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Dan Glickman, is that you? C'mon, Danny! Stop posting AC!!! We wanna HUG YOU...
Dork.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Technically speaking, Bush hasn't suspended habeas corpus because the current legal theory is that the "terrorists" don't have any constitutional rights (and thus no rights under habeas corpus). "Can't suspend something you never had," says the Bush administration. Of course, this is currently being hotly contested in the courts.
For actual examples of the President outright suspending habeas corpus, look at President Lincoln in 1861 (as a response to unrest due to the American civil war) or President Grant in 1871 (in response to KKK actions).
The part I love most about these articles, is the money they say they lost. They assume that every downloaded song would have been purchased, which is obviously false. I doubt many people could afford their music archives if they paid a dollar a song or 10 dollars an album. I mean, the fact they have a 160GB iPod should be evidence that the industry thrives on piracy in some forms, and gets hurt by it in other ways. What ever happened to a band playing live shows to make money? I mean, the industry can put out junk, market it, and people buy it without the band every being seen live. Now they can't do that with the Internet, and it might actually be improving the quality of the music we get. I know of records that have 2 singles and the rest sound like filler, but that seems to be going away because if the whole album is not good, people just download it. Seems like improvement to me.
"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.", as Sinclair Lewis said.
I don't want to politicize this thread, but keeping the government small and out of my business is my priority. This is the reason I am voting for Ron Paul. Really, can he do any worse than GWB?
from http://www.wikiality.com/Dennis_Kucinich
They're not "undercover cops" or "plainclothes policemen". Call a spade a spade - they're God damned Secret Police, no different than the Communist KGB or the Nazi's Secret Police. If "crimes" like drug possession, gambling, and prostitution weren't crimes there would be no reason or excuse to have Secret Police.
So now you have a "crime" that's a civil matter and you forfeit property without compensation or trial. Thank you, "Partnership for a Drug Free America". I hope your God damned children become needle junkies you fucking assholes, because drug laws make their becoming junkiest MORE likely. Marijuana doesn't lead to harder drugs, marijuana LAWS leas potsmokers to harder drugs.
How far does this slippery slope slide? I love my country, I hate its government. Perhaps one day my descendants will again have a representative government, rather than the one party plutocracy it has become.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
Due process is out the window since the War on Drugs. And some folks challenged it, but the difference was, no one "liked" the drug dealers... when Grandma loses her computer to the government... people might start taking the 4th amendment seriously. But I doubt the sheeple will notice. Such is life after soma.
At least they had a warrant (such that it was...) when they stole the drug dealers' property. Now they don't even need that to grab your stuff.
scared yet?
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
So? That hardly even begins to matter in today's US courts.
Today, the police can seize your car, your house, and your money, including your bank accounts, on the mere "suspicion" that they may be related to drug or terrorist activity. After that, they are not required to return them to you (even if they never even charge you with a crime), and are free to auction them off and keep the money.
It's your burden to prove (to a hard degree of proof) that they are not related to drug activity, in order to get them back. And the police can keep appealing that (on the public dime) until you give up.
This is merely a small extension of that principle.
There was (and maybe still is..) a Federal law (and probably copycat state laws) allowing law enforcement to seize assets that they believed were tied in to (either bought with proceeds from or used in) drug trafficking. No conviction required. They seize your assets and then you have to go to court and prove to the government that they weren't a product of drug trafficking. Nice, of course you can't pay an attorney since they have seized all your assets...
I don't remember, but the Supreme Court may have ultimately overturned this as a violation of search and seizure or of due process of law, but it stood for a long time and IMHO is a much grosser civil rights violation than any CIA torture or rendition of non-citizens.
The police will probably hold the item in custody until they make a decision one way or the other.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"There is always an easy solution to every problem -- neat, plausible and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
You DO realize that this particular gem of a law was authored by both Republicans AND Democrats. Of course you do.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
...the floppy copies you!
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
There is always a process by which things like civil asset forfeiture can be challenged.
Trouble is, in so many cases, the people having their assets seized are actually guilty
(usually drug possession or tax evasion), and giving up property can yield better results
than trying to defend oneself from a position of guilt.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
...when bigass companies like Verizon violate the GPL copyright provisions that joe government will seize all of Verizon's stuff? Or just nail small fry college student downloaders and single moms and flea market disk resellers? And will the government be auditing all the "closed source" code out there now looking for copyright infringement?
Members of the House Judciary Committee
Of course, the media industry thinks the world owes them a living and control over everyone else's property, so it seems a little harsh to judge the slashbots too harshly over this.
It's not merely an accusation, think of it more as a preliminary injunction.
In Copyright terms, a preliminary injunction can be granted by the courts for Copyright owners if they can prove 1. A substantial likelihood of copyright infringement and 2. "irreparable harm" should the alleged infringement continues to persist (while the court case is going on). Hell, the injunction hearing can be heard through an ex parte motion, which means that the other side doesn't even have to be there.
I'm thinking this new Agency is going to need at least SOME evidence to adhere to a standard similar to the substantial likelihood one in order to take away someone's computers. Personally, I don't think the court is going to stand for it either way. There's always enough remedies in place for Copyright infringement including the injunctions mentioned above, actual damages (and profits), statutory damages, and other non-damage remedies such as the right to destroy the alleged infringing copies of work (which sort of seems like what's at issue here, theoretically the owner of a copyright can ask the court to seize and destroy any and all of the infringing works, which could conceivably be a computer in this situation, although the main issue is that the majority of these remedies are available AFTER a court trial).
-E
Some people might say "Well good, perhaps THIS will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and motivates Americans to start pushing for copyright reform," but the problem is the entertainment industry will push and push and push until people push back. Then they'll back off just a hair and we'll be stuck with all the crap that came up to that point.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
RICO is older than the drug war. Much older. Still unconstitutional, and still upheld by SCOTUS.
"I see you have made your choice....
...now lets see you enforce it".
/oblig quote. honestly, it was all I could do not to type TMYTYGTTMSWSTYF, I could only *just* resist.
The Way Of The Slashtard:
Whine and cry and threaten move to New Zealand with the rest of the cowards but really don't do anything but post to Slashdot.
The Way Of The Force:
Actually work (ooo! that word!) against the congressboobs who write Hollywood's legislation for them.
The Way Of The Dark Side:
Federal has new saboted 12ga slugs that are accurate to 200 yds.
You pick
That is because I like computers.
I look forward to buying on auction the dual SLI equipped nerdcore liquid hydrogen cooled dual quad processor mothership built by someone who did not fancy spending $15 for a preowned game.
For that matter, what the hell does "prioritizing resources and organization" mean? How does one prioritize organization?
Why not call it the "Bill for the Creation of a Department of Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement". No acronym required!
The funny thing is, this isn't like the PATRIOT act or the Protect America Act where they're dressing up a repugnant law to look pretty for the ignorant masses. They're not trying to fool anyone by naming it the PRO-IP law.
It is a law designed to protect current IP holders' hegemonic right to profits forever. If you don't like that idea, you're not going to be lambasted in the press for not being PRO-IP. (You're going to be lambasted in the press for being a communist hippy with no idea how the world works, but that's a different issue.)
It's time for a new law the "Name Bills For What They Do, You Jerks" act of 2008 or NBFWTDYJ if you prefer.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Coming next: Judge Dredd overlords.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Introduced and sponsored by them, perhaps, but most assuredly written by lobbyists and their corporate masters.
"Any computer or network hardware used to "facilitate" a copyright crime could be seized by the Justice Department and auctioned off. The proceeds would be funneled to the agency's budget. The process is called civil asset forfeiture, and typically the owner does not need to be found guilty of a crime for his property to be taken. "
So what's in place to stop ANY possibility of 'grab anything you can with any excuse to fatten up our budgets' seeing as these seizures will sidestepping due process.
US has officially jumped the shark many times. If I were to pick 1 time as the defining moment when everybody realized the USA wasn't the country it once was I would say its when the torcher in Iraq came out. (Combined with the policy supporting it, the continued support, the raping of children, and how it was NOT isolated.)
That single policy and major leak was a defining moment.
Perhaps 2nd would be the 2004 election, where some foreign media actually had open criticism on the intelligence of the american public for the 1st time. That result affirmed everything the government did represented the american public's will or at least they thought the good out weighed the bad (or their elections don't work and they are a banana republic.) Or perhaps 2nd was the Iraq war for oil scam.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
AT&T Unix source code was somehow put in some national security list. Basically if you were caught with a copy of the source without having had paid or part of some University that paid the $60,000 source license, the Secret Service would come with guns drawn and seize every piece of electronics equipment on the premises.
There is little documentation that this had even happened and almost none of the victims ever received there hardware back.
http://www.chriswaltrip.com/sterling/crack2l.html the Chicago Task Force were now convinced that they had discovered an underground gang of UNIX software pirates, who were demonstrably guilty of interstate trafficking in illicitly copied AT&T source code. &
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/cs/cs/archive/CS142_SP96/notes16.html
This finally ended with Steve Jackson Games that managed to sue them for a similar seizure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._United_States_Secret_Service
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Right. And when the courts find you not guilty of any wrongdoing, the police will have "misplaced" or "lost" your PC, and as a funny little coincidence, Officer Rob's 12-year-old daughter Stacy will just have received a new PC to play "Barbie's Magical Adventure" on.
Fifth amendment;
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Key here is "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." So if they take it they have to pay you. Auctioning off my computer would be "public use" as the public is using it to gain revenue.
The constitution is communist hogwash, out of touch with the real world. Now mod me down!
We can only hope that someone in the White House downloads an MP3 and have all computers, routers, and other network devices removed. This will fix it fast. I will bet Bush's daughers download lots of MP3's.
This argument quietly assumes that Americans are the only ones capable of making intellectual property. Problem is, we have no monopoly on intellect. Go take a look around a Graduate School Near You.
It also is an economic strategy that depends on enforcement. Why on earth should another country enforce our IP laws? With no other economic resources, what kind of incentives can we possibly give them? All that remains is the use of force. As this last option is hideously expensive and ultimately paid for with tax dollars, even it is not sustainable.
Unconstitutional? True. But that never stopped them from pulling this shit on nonviolent drug offenders for the last too-many-years.
so if someone searches on google for 'photoshop crack' does that mean that all of googles kit gets auctioned off ?
could be a nice little earner that might help the U.S. economy survive O.P.E.C's transition to the Euro , for a day or two .
Toodle-pip
Amias
[site]
It may not be long. When you increase the criminal penalties on a black market item, it actually increases the violence because it drives away the more casual dealers and attracts the more hardcore criminals who are more willing to take risks.
Coming next: Judge Dredd overlords.
and the council of ASBO.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
all that cisco gear up for firesale auction..!
No, it's just a God damn piece of paper. Jeb's brother said so.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Violates 'Search & Seizure' clause requiring due process before seizing private property. I can't see how this would ever survive a constitutional law challenge.
Note that the government doesn't grant licenses to operate computers (like they do cars), so that argument is bogus.
dave
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish without a valid and current fishing license, and he can buy your boat cheaply at the police auction.
When they auction off the computer that was allegedly used to breach copyright, are they going to wipe the hard drive, or arrest the sucker that buys the computer at auction for being in possession of an unlicensed/underlicensed copy of Windows.
People at Harvard do illegal file sharing. Now the government can take all their computers! Woohoo! I bet they have nice stuff. They can go there on their way to MIT!
The government is going to have absolutely awesome computers. And the beauty of it, is they can sell them, then go back and impound them later! Sell them again and again and instant $$$ Budgest crisis? Solved! Funding wars against the rest of the world? PAID FOR! Impound and auction, rinse and repeat!
I've seen this kind of logic applied to people who are arrested for DWI offenses. Some local governments have passed laws allowing for the seizure of the person's car, even if they're not convicted yet. I'm guessing it's an overzealous DA assuming that if the person is picked up in the first place, the only way they couldn't be convicted is if the defense was able to prove a procedural error or use some other loophole.
Personally, I think that's the stupidest logic out there. People agree with me too...many of these rules have been shot down as unconstitutional. My opinion of this set of laws is that DWI is a victimless crime until you hurt or kill someone. When that happens, sure, convict them for the connected crime(s) they committed. After that, feed 'em to the ambulance chasers. The poor schmoe will be sending all his license-plate-making money to the victim's family until he dies.
However, I notice that the same kind of crazy public reaction that DWI creates is also being created by content owners in this case. I don't want to sound like I'm defending it, but here's the problem. People who advocate stealing copyrighted material use every justification in the book:
- Music sucks anyway.
- Movies suck anyway.
- Content costs too much for the value.
- Artists are rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
- The industry really isn't losing money.
- The industry refuses to adapt their business model.
- Etc. Etc.
I'm not an advocate of copyright violation, and I would suspect that if you made your living creating content, you wouldn't be either. Imagine how some of those shareware authors feel when they see cracked copies of the stuff they worked to build on everyone's computer just because someone didn't want to throw them a $49 registration fee. And when it comes to movies/music, there's lots of broke actors for every over-the-top-rich Brad Pitt.z`
I'm sure this law will be overturned, but I see why it has come to this.
Would it be possible file a class action lawsuit against congress for passing unconstitutional laws (derliction of duties, public endagerment, etc)?
Generally speaking, no. You can only sue the (Federal) government when it decides to allow you to sue it, and the exceptions are defined pretty narrowly. While maybe you could argue that doing something blatantly unconstitutional is tortuous, it'd be an uphill battle. (Cf. "Federal Tort Claims Act")
Pretty much the sole remedies afforded to you by the Constitution if you don't like what the Government does (aside from a violent insurrection, which isn't really given to you; you always have it as an option, albeit a suicidal one) are bitching and moaning to your elected representatives, and voting.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Guilty until proven innocent, shoot first gather facts later, etc. are an extremely dangerous way to conduct law enforcement, though fortunately that can't happen in the United States because the Founding Fathers wrote protections against it in the constitution. Oh wait
This is the same crap as the drug seizure laws. Everyone thought--great, take the houses, cars, property of the drug dealers. However, what's ended up happening is people are having their cars seized because a friend had a small amount of pot. Worse yet people are having large amounts of cash seized with the attitude that you must prove yourself innocent. It doesn't matter that no drugs were found or any evidence of drug dealing, just the fact that you're carrying a large amount of cash is considered a crime. And good luck getting it back!
Friends, our freedoms are being eroded away while we stand by. According to the Supreme Court, municipalities can grab your land under imminent domain to sell to Wal-Mart or someone building condos. Police can seize your cash for no reason other than you're carrying it and now they want the right to seize you computers on the claim that you might have illegally downloaded something. It's got to stop or this really will be a police state.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Don't copy that floppy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xfqkdh5Js4/
If Microsoft violates the gnu public license, then all of their computers can be taken away!
People challenged it, they just all lost. Often times when people are warned about slippery slopes, they will counter, "This is the furtherest thing from a slippery slope," right before sliding down to the bottom
Another bureaucracy! When you think about it, under the current system of law we're all violators. For example, I backup my music directory to xdrive. Ooops, I made a copy that anyone I share it with can access.
When will we finally come to the realization that our government has been fully co opted and corrupted by corporations?
We're on the same wavelength - I initially had included the 4th Amendment in my original comment.
However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this would probably be followed to a tee in this scenario...only the probable cause would come from some potentially bogus IP/date/time data acquired (most likely sans subpoena) from an ISP as the behest of the **AA's legal goon squad, and would be used to get a quickie warrant issued by the "right" (translation: sympathetic to corporate interests & a cronie of the administration) judge.
As I type this, I feel like I should be wearing a tin foil hat, but honestly, it seems too cut & dry to be too far off.
Just once I'd like someone to call me 'Sir' without adding 'You're making a scene.'
Plenty of people have complained about it when it was done for drugs.
I was at an infragard meeting where some LE person asked for feedback about a similar proposal he wanted enacted for child porn. I submitted comments suggesting that it was a terrible idea.
Civil forfeiture laws are a terrible idea. They corrupt law enforcement and people do not get proper due process under this system.
If a judge doesn't want someone to access something that enables a particular type of crime that someone has been doing, they can make not owning or using that enabler (say a computer or a fishing boat) a condition of parole. And if they want to punish the person with a fine they can choose one that makes sense rather than one that is randomly based on what property was nearby when the person was apprehended.
then what?
people upload at a friend's place, at a cafe computer, off an unprotected wifi signal... they use proxy servers, there are sources in foreign countries...
my point being, the law seems to be 3 steps behind reality. the old geezers are thinking about the "problem" of media piracy in this sort of dragnet era fashion
it seems like unenforceable posturing
there's a definite learning curve here, and all the old people in the law making apparatus of this country seem seriously ignorant
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They're simply hoping that 80 year old grandmothers and single mums won't be mounting Constitutional challenges.
I think there should be a special class of judgement that SCOTUS can invoke against legislators, where a law is so obviously a violation of the Constitution, that the legislatures are fined millions of dollars and/or sent to prison for years for intentional violation of citizens' civil liberties. As well, where it's revealed that lobbiests were involved in the drafting of said legislation, they also are fined and sent to prison.
But of course, we know that Jesus loves money, loves lobbiests and despises liberties.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Note the perfect parallel: The very industry that goes crying to the government for help "enforcing" their intellectual property "rights" especially where computers and the Net are concerned is working at the very same time to be sure that the actual creators of the core of the intellectual property most currently at risk from file sharing - TV shows and films - get next-to-nothing when their creations are sold, via the Net, to the public.
If the studios where willing to pay the writers of the stories they sell on a comparable scale for Net releases as they currently do (quite prosperously for themselves) with TV and movie theater releases, then we could believe this is really about making sure that we have plenty of good, creative content flowing into our culture by rewarding it well. Instead, we have an industry asking for massive government subsidy for their copyrights of materials they at the same time insist on their right to distribute without the traditional and fair compensation to the actual creators. (Compare the music business, where musicians have never been fairly paid except for a few megastars.) It's like saying we get healthy forests via government favoritism towards logging companies whose main goal is to clearcut our forests at least expense to themselves. Here we're to get healthy cultural content by subsidizing media companies - sparing them the expense of private copyright enforcement they've shown they can easily afford - whose main goal is to seize content from its creators at least expense to themselves.
If the government's to be involved at all here, we should just nationalize the buggers and pay artists a fair stipend proportional to the viewership their peer-to-peer distributed creations receive. Not that I'm in favor of that; government shouldn't run the culture. But that's just the point. Government should stay far away from this mess.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Yep, all you can do now is live in fear. It's no longer about being a good citizen. Given enough time, they will eventually come and make an example of you.
So, when is someone going to confiscate the Internet? Or rather the infrastructure of the Internet, I'm pretty sure every router has seen at least one packet of copyright infringement.
So that means in light of last weeks MPAA violation of Xubuntu in their "University Toolkit" they can have all their computers confiscated and auctioned. Cool. Seriously though, do corporations get the same penalties applied, they violate IP all the time...
MPAA violation, see: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/03/mpaas-university-wir.html
And Congress and the entertainment lobbiests believe that they are above Constitutional restrictions and that Jesus gives them the right to protect extinct business models.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/13/sonys-rootkit-infrin.html
Close examination of the rootkit that Sony's audio CDs attack their customers' PCs with has revealed that their malicious software is built on code that infringes on copyright. Indications are that Sony has included the LAME music encoder, which is licensed under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL), which requires that those who use it attribute the original software and publish some of the code they write to use the library. Sony has done none of this.
So, based on the proposed bill - how much of Sony would have been auctioned of I wonder...
What they want to do here is NO different than what is already being done in DUI law http://duiblog.com/. Ever hear of 'DUI Roadblocks'? They clearly violate your right against unwarranted search and seizure but are done anyway. I guess our government is looking for yet another source of revenue and are taking DUI law's lead in throwing out your constitutional rights in copyright infringement law.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
You're assuming that the cops never make mistakes or are completely honest.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
The 4th amendment to the US constitution, that authority that describes the limits of federal law, emphasis mine:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'm having a lot of trouble reading this in any way at all that can justify trial- and conviction-free seizure and disposal of a citizen's property.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Some 14 year old gets pissed at his school so he sneaks into the deans office and copies an illegal copy of Office to the server. BAM the entire school district looses all IT equipment and are slammed into the stone age...
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
how can they auction off or destroy evidence before Trial and before the defense gets there own look at it?
Also as this is being done from a criminal stand point there is much higher standard of evidence then in a civil Trial.
There may also be big constitutional issues with this.
This country has been heading to the crapper slowly but surely.
Corporate interests have become indistinguishable from Political interests.
The IRS can seize all of your property and sell it without proving themselves in court. You are guilty before being proven innocent. The damage is done and even if you become vindicated, it is next to impossible to get compensation from the IRS anyways. They don't have to pay interest for their mistakes.
It is well-known that MAFIAA are penetrating people's computers and sniffing around constantly. Now instead of sending lawyers and subpoena letters (which is failing) they are bypassing the law entirely by creating a whole new arm of the government. This new agency can basically tear down your door, steal your electronics, auction of your property to pay for itself, and screw the average citizen.
Now you have to be afraid of even surfing the web or going to youtube, or sharing any data of any kind.
Read Dark Rivers of the Heart by Dean Koontz. Not only is it my favorite book by him, but it's not really horror at all, but a modern story about confiscation laws in a government gone awry.
Ever complain when they infringe upon the 2nd?
.gov to infringe the 2nd, you can't complain when they come for the other 9.
If not, or if you've ever encouraged the
It sure seems like civil forfeiture laws should be unconstitutional, at least in part -- due process is most definitely not being served. Have any of these laws ever gone to the Supreme Court? By now it seems like they should have; so either they did and SCOTUS is okay with them (in which case notch another mark on the it's-time-for-revolution-o-meter), or they somehow haven't yet.
Anyone know?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Intellectual property and copyright are not even in the same time zone.
Copyright is something meant to protect authors, artists, and inventors from being ripped off.
Intellectual property is quasi-property. It's a concept or idea that is a concept of something tangible which is intangible.
They are not related at all. I don't see how films could be copyrighted or IP. If they are copyrighted, they are not IP.
and, if they are IP, they cannot be copyrighted.
They're using their grammar skills there.
As a de jure geographical monopoly of law (at least), government *is* inherently evil.
Thomas Jefferson would disagree with you. But hey, he just wrote the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government
This is my sig.
A lot of perfectly normal people enjoy killing kittens.
I've never seen it brought up in an election campaign.
This is similar in nature to the law that allows the DEA to confiscate property that was purchased with money obtained from, used to transport, manufacture, or market, illegal narcotics. They have taken planes and automobiles without even charging the owners of the equipment with a crime.
Yes, I think a Libertarian Randist like Paul could be a helluva lot worse than Bush. Bush is just an alcoholic puppet, Ron Paul is a lunatic with damn little understanding of history, economics and politics. The only thing that would really keep a maniac like Paul in place is that Congress would fight him at every turn.
Why people are so addicted to this crazy bastard is quite beyond me. He speaks rubbish. Libertarianism is a fantasy. The closest I know of to a Libertarian state was the US until the Civil War, built largely on Maddison's and Jefferson's ideal state, but the idea of a minimalistic Federal government proved incapable of properly dealing with the economic disparity between the Northern and Southern states and its most obvious effect; slavery.
Abraham Lincoln killed American Libertarianism, and needed to to preserve the Union.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
First, this is merely a bill in committee, not a law. Get out and lobby your senators and representatives against it, BEFORE it is voted on. That way, you don't need to leave the country.
Second, what this measure seems to imply is a pushback against ISPs to provide better security and screening against STEALING. The gov't can't regulate the internet, but you can penalize the companies that have access to it, if they do not institute adequate measures to block traffic. The new agency is not going to go after the little fish. I think this is designed to go after the pond, so to speak.
There are no major party candidates who will appropriately serve the people. Those that are against torture are voting for crap like this, and those that are against crap like this are voting against health care, and those that are for health care and against this crap are all in third parties. The problem is that the people aren't aware of these issues, because their lives are flooded with jingoism and irrelevancies. Of course, as Thomas Jefferson put it: When the people stop caring about public affairs, the government becomes wolves and the people become sheep.
Palm trees and 8
So if an angry employee wants to get back at his boss, he can just accuse them and they will automatically lose all of their hardware and never get it back?
You could destroy businesses like that.
Question: where are these hundreds of billions of dollars in "lost sales" we keep hearing about? If the sale was lost, surely the money must be sitting around *somewhere*. Do we all have a few grand just sitting around the house that we've "saved" from sharing media?
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Amendment 5 - Trial and Punishment, Compensation for Takings. Ratified 12/15/1791.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Excuse me while I gather the virgin sacrifice and assemble the pentagram required to solve your problem
Marijuana doesn't lead to harder drugs, marijuana LAWS lea[d]s potsmokers to harder drugs.
Bingo. When a kid buys pot,he has to basically seek it through underground channels. The same channels that also traffic Meth, Crack, Heroine, etc. When you start going to various dealers you quickly realize that you're knee deep in the drug underworld, and you can ask for pretty much any drug you want and you will get it.
If you just had to flash an ID showing you're 18 or 21 or whatever to the guy behind the counter, you'd be all set. I would prefer that gas stations and grocery stores not sell marijuana. but perhaps Head shops could apply for a license the same way as a restaurant applies for a liquor license, and can be turned down under the same criteria. If the state, county or township doesn't want it there, then they can ban it. And let adjacent regions pull in the tax revenue instead. This is how alcohol sales works right now, where dry counties lose sales as people just pick up their beer at stores over the border.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
pal, you are forgetting that they are going to do it WITHOUT needing to PROVE that you have committed an offense in the first place !
it violates habeas corpus of personal property concept.
Read radical news here
the consequence of libertarianism, while getting government "out of your business", is that corporations are ALL OVER your business like white on rice.
In fact the consequence of libertarianism is that you are pretty much owned by the corporations.
Trendy (aka Naive and shortsighted) political positions such as libertarianism are not the answer.
We've lived libertarianism before, it's why we have a lot of the laws on the books we have (like 40 hour work week, no child labor, consumer product safety rules, etc).
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Interesting. A net surplus was also the case when Stalin was starving farmers to death so that he could obtain a net surplus... The parallels are surprising... and not totally irrelevant:
As far as healthy food is concerned, it is mostly imports, because most of our domestic food is corn byproduct and genetically engineered to be more productive (translation: less nutritious).
The most hilarious part of genetic engineering is that they spend more R&D money, to produce higher quantities of less nutritious food. This has the double wammy effect of causing the same quantities of food to increase in price and of requiring that more food be eaten to supply the same nutritious value, increasing the waistlines of the US while simultaneously emptying our wallets.
The whole situation reminds me of The Trouble with Tribbles.
For those with absolutely no idea of the reference (Who are you and how did you get that slashdotter's password?), in The Trouble with Tribbles, the Klingons poisoned a couple of grain (quadrotriticale) transports with nutrition blockers which would eventually build up in a person's system to the point where s/he could stuff him/herself and still die of starvation.
Resistance is futile. Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. You will become one with the morgue
Big brother doesn't have to watch you, he's got his cousin - Big corporation.
That's not true. It's actually parchment. Much more durable.
.sig withheld by request
In Norway, when the police seizes computers (or pretty much anything else) you are almost guaranteed to not get it back. It does not matter if the charges against you are dropped or if you are found innocent, they usually don't give back anything after it is seized. Normally it is sold in a police auction in order to cover the costs of investigating you. So even if you are innocent, they burn you.
So then this isn't about Republicans or Democrats, but politicians and corporate lobbyists. Singling out one party for laws like this is pointless.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
This is so obviously against the constitution that there really should be an oppertunity for it to be struck off before they even waste time voting on it.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
1) This is also a violation of the 7th Amendment's right to jury trial. 2) This is different from the fish poaching example because poaching is done outside of one's home. This would be unlawful search and seizure within one's home and thus a direct violation of the 4th Amendment.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Due process is out the window since the War on Drugs.
I'm sure a lot of people have no idea what you're talking about. This started because state police in many states were empowered to seize property, without due process, and *pocket* the proceeds. This created an environment where almost every state cop in the US, where this was implemented, was actually a criminal. Several states, after a decade or more of complaints, finally started to investigate.
It seems it worked like this. Cop sees nice expensive car. Cop pulls over the car. Cop claims you are a drug deal and plants evidence. Cop seizes you car and everything in it. You are arrested. Drug charges were often dropped. You car and all your property within the car is sold at auction. Cop pockets all of the proceeds. Normally out of state cars were the preferred targets, leave you little recourse. And in the end, who wants to champion "drug dealers." States only started to act when it was found that the majority of the "drug dealers" fit a certain profile such as "affluent retirees" passing through the state.
States such as GA, LA, MS, and AL were especially bad. The solution was to tell the police to stop it. They couldn't simply arrest all of the criminal cops because in those four states, as much as 90% of the state police would be behind bars. It was thought that created too much of a risk to public safety to put criminals in jail.
So chances are, if you've been ticketed by a state policeman in these states, you were ticketed by a criminal that has commit more crimes than most any criminal currently convicted, sitting in jail right now.
Both are supposed to be level headed organisations that sift through the detail and make sensible decisions, but both throw their responsibilities over the wall and leave it to the courts to figure out the mess.
When Congress pass laws these days, they do this based on what will give them the best sound bites with the least effort. USPTO just cranks out patents as fast as they can. Both are abdicating their responsibilities.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Also, I ran into the following on-target quote just now on Neatorama, and I hopped right back here to append it:
- Ernest Benn, publicist (1875 - 1954)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In the country formerly known as Soviet Russia, the animal formerly known as a kitten says waste to a non-ninja mammal formerly known as you.
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Image:Killerkitty8qa.jpg
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Please look at the very loose definition of terrorist defined by the laws in question. basicly it's so loosly defined that anyone off the street can be called a terrorist and loose all his/her rights.
You are in fact the delusional one. A government that kidnaps people, never gives them a trial, tortures them, covers it up, and starts unprovoked wars of aggression...yeah it IS that bad already. You can't even take care of your own sick people or soldiers that come back with arms and legs missing. Oh but you're an American! A corrupt totalitarian government could NEVER form in your country, you're all too smart to for that. Wake up, it's happening right now, it's been happening. The smart ones are leaving.
oh hey that's a top quality shitpost there, A+ to you
We've had similar laws enacted to fight illegal drug trafficking and the net result is an actual increase in these activities. I'm sure the same thing will happen with piracy. It's just another excuse for the State to gain more powers and collect more taxes.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
this will cut into Microsoft's business model, as they spread their software by making it easy to copy and crack. Office became the "defacto" office product because you could install it on multiple machines without bothering to buy more copies(never done that myself) ahem... now everyone uses it so they crack down (a little) on the "illegal" copies; and Vista would not be as plentiful as it is right now had they not leaked the "OEM Bios" cracks, so that all the "borderline" people could test it, until SP1 that is... so what will Mr. Balmer & Co. do with this one.... hmmm???
For those that say bullshit, there have been copy protection schemes for disks(cd and floppy) for a very long time, microsoft has never used them. They have come to understand that if you get them using it in one place they come to rely on it in another. How many offices do you think are running the "Home and Student" versions of Office 2003 and 2007?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Emigration stats to prove this?
The people I have heard on the Internet (Because nobody in real life really supports him) preach about transparency and bold ideas. They probably would have voted for Spitzer in NY, and then been oh-so-shocked to find out about trooper-gate, harassing phone calls to opponents, accusations of threats and sorta-stalking, his real-ID-compatible plan for illegal immigrants to safely register for IDs.
::waving arms in the air:: there. Point is, they rarely can define what he stands for and neither can he.
When you ask them what Paul stands for, they claim that THEY know, and if anyone else wants to they need to google it because it's all out
Listen to him talk about the gold standard, the war on drugs, how big state government is better than beg federal government, his theories on reducing the bureaucracy... anyone with a medium understanding of economics, history, evolution (as a concept not strictly in the creationism v. evolution sense) or consequence can start poking holes in his theories.
Totally brilliant. [+1, said "Sheeple"]
But anyhow, talking about the rights of a US citizen, I'm surprised nobody has brought up what constitutes a "reasonable search and siezure". Pulled over in a traffic stop, cop finds baggie of weed on your friend? How'd that happen? Either the cop claimed (falsely or not) to smell pot, or one of you gave him permission (perhaps implicitly) to perform a search. Indeed, know your rights!
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
> Impound and auction, rinse and repeat!
And each time a new retail copy of Windows and Office will be required to be installed because the EULA does not transfer.
Was this sponsered by Microsoft ?
...any computer or network hardware used to "facilitate" a copyright crime and auction it off. So this includes entire ISPs and root DNS servers?Your ad here.
So I guess Verizon could have part of its hardware base seized by the copyright infringment on BusyBox...
And, since there is not even need of actual guiltiness, we could go on and request the seizure of all equipment of MPAA.
If it were *actually* a deterrent, it they wouldn't have been poaching, would they?
Don't go! We'll be stuck here with the people who can't spell!
Ahh, the crazy shit that persons of either party put into law in order to get campaign contributions during an election year. I propose we hold a public referendum that, when passed, makes an amendment to the constituion which makes it inherently legal to go up to any congressmen and slap them for their stupidity.
death penalty for corruption or incompetence of any sort. and funded campaigns with no added money. then, you take money, you die. if you dont want to do the job to help advance our country / planet, kindly fuck off and let the ppl with a clue to the front please.
-.no
As if the government isn't already bloated enough, they're trying to add yet another agency to Waist citizens tax money. I have this one simple question....Who is going to pay for this??? I'm sick of paying for this crap. Where in the United states constitution does it give the Federal government the write to enforce this? "a little rebellion now and then is a good thing for America" - Thomas Jefferson
The enlightened minimalist founders knew slavery was wrong but protected it (via federal government power) for the sake of expedience. To suggest that slavery is a result of minimalist governement when slavery is one of the few things a minimalist governement would - in theory - prevent is beyond disingenous. Further, a large economic disparity continues. Agribusiness cut its own balls off by outlawing any products that were superior AND relying on slave labor instead of innovation. That aside, the world rolls on just find with disparity. Cost of living often makes up for much of the disparity.
I hope you're not implying Dems == people
:(
People == people. IMHO, Ron Paul's the only one who can save the US from becoming totalitarian - but then again, it's only my opinion.
Regarding that other poster who said that I was for running away from problems instead of solving them, no, I'm not. That's why I said "if". You can give the system a chance and see if you truly can solve those problems in the democratic way. As I'm against a civil revolution, I don't know of any solution short of leaving that country.
Unless... perhaps the jewish way could work. Have children. Have as many children as you can, and make sure you raise them with your ideals so they become the majority. Wait, that didn't work in ancient Egypt, they had to flee anyway
Sigh, I don't think the sheeple will be enough pissed-off for a change until it's too late.
I saw a paper recently illustrating how a "careful" person might typically break copyright law many times every day (eg replying to an email and quoting the original in the reply). Anyway the point being that if copyright was actually strictly enforced then everyone would be guilty. If anyone has a link to that paper it would be great.
The GP used the word dulisonional, it has to be a spoof.
The Land of Life (of Servitute to greedy corporations), Liberty (Unless the someone shouts "terrorist", "government protest", or "lack of obsene corporate profits") and The Pursuit of Happiness (if you are a corporation bribing, aka lobbying the proper government officials).
The people of the USA have basically had all liberties and due proces taken from them, first in small doses then in larger doses more visible to the point the US Constitution is basically a joke. The people can do one of two things:
1. Take it up the rear end and love it, or
2. Stand up to it and say "no" like human being who still believe in the constitution (if it hasn't been totally shreaded yet).
We'll see which the people the USA decide. Perhaps they could use from lessons from the French who still know how to fight for and protect their rights. Unfortunately the people of the USA have so far been relatively uninvolved with politics worrying about things at home and on TV. Guess what? This IS your home and reality television is anything but real.
'Imagination is more important than knowledge' - Einstien
There's a bit of a problem here.
1) Before your trial, all of your assets are seized.
2) Therefore you can't pay an attorney...so you probably lose if they try you.
3) You can't appeal the verdict without:
a) Paying a rather expensive fee for the appeal, and
b) The appeals court accepting the case
4) If you appeal, you can't appeal based on anything that wasn't raised as an issue in the original trial...where you had a lawyer who was either unpaid or chosen by the govt. (aka public defender).
5) If the appeals court decides against you, you must appeal to the District court. (I think I have this right. Possibly this step is skipped.) All of the caveats WRT the appeals court apply again (if I haven't separated into two what is really one court).
6) Now you can appeal to the Supreme Court. They refuse to hear most cases that are appealed to them. They will generally only agree to hear cases where the decision that they will make is politically acceptable. They are also quite expensive, and all of your assets were impounded before step one.
Because of this, your only hope is if some organization, e.g. the ACLU, decides to get involved very early in the process. This rarely happens. It will essentially never happen if you represent something unpopular, because the organization depends on solicited funds.
Also notice that each of these steps takes multiples of years. You're trying to swim upstream, and all levels of the government offer increased resistence when you do that. If you were trying to plead guilty the case might be decided within months, but since you are opposed to the govt., it will take years to decades even if you are *eventually* successful.
So, no, these laws haven't yet gone to the Supreme Court. I doubt that they've ever gone to an appeals court. Remember that step one is to strip the defendent of the ability to pay for lawyers.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I certainly do. In another thread in this discussion, I mentioned politicians in a very general way. Both parties in the US are really on the same side in the end: that of the corporations.
The situation isn't quite as bad in Canada or the EU, but it's getting worse here too.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
Time to move. USA==One big jail. You either a perp, pig or guard.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Where did I ever state that slavery was a product of the Jeffersonian/Maddisonian model? Clearly it was not responsible for slavery, which as an American institution, long predated the United States. It was incapable, however, of actually dealing with slavery as it increasingly became part of a the political and ecomonic disparity between the industrialized northern states and the agrarian southern states.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What does Jesus have to do with this? Even if 1/2 of congress claimed Jesus was their justification, it does not make it so.
The Bible presents Jesus spending quite a bit of time railing against The Establishment, greed, and injustice.
And I think that anyone would be hard pressed to define the current state of affairs as _just_.
Except NONE OF THAT MATTERS.
YOU PERSONALLY can have your computers siezed on the basis of the word of
some junkie or criminal scum trying to save his own ass. It doesn't matter
that you're some sort of copyright boy scout with a halo over his head.
None of that will help you.
You are now in the same exact position as that guy that has his entire
bedroom full of bookshelves with nothing buy music and movies downloaded
from bit-torrent.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Only if one assumes that the only possible interpretation of the Constitution was a fundementally libertarian one. I'll grant you that Lincoln did bend things quite a lot, but then again, in his mind, the village had already come apart and he was out to restore it. What was the alternative? Let the Confederacy actually form a legitimate government?
Congress and the courts had been going back and forth on slavery for a couple of decades, and within the context of the government of the day, the states pretty much could do what they pleased on the matter, which lead to serious problems in the matter of interstate commerce (the return of escaped slaves who made it to non-slave states) and of the rights of freed slaves (ie. the Dred Scott case). What had been demonstrated by these issues is that the slave and free states could not find adequate agreement and that the Federal government, as it functioned up until that point, could not come up with a meaningful solution. The only solutions were dissolution of the Union or the remaking of the Union. Lincoln was on one side, the Confederacy on the other, and the result of their conflict redefined states rights and the powers of the Federal government forever after.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/petition/press20050508.shtml Crap now what?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Uhh, yeah, I was with you up until this point. For better or worse SCOTUS has issued lots of highly unpopular decisions in it's history. Hell, the GP even mentioned a recent one.
the ACLU, decides to get involved very early in the process. This rarely happens. It will essentially never happen if you represent something unpopular, because the organization depends on solicited fundsI'd disagree with this too. The ACLU has defended people accused of possession of child pornography before. Doesn't get much more unpopular then that.
(I agree with everything else you said)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Change routers so that at least one packet of every file goes through a government network as well as that of the various large copyright holders. In this case the internet has to route into the problem.
You can add local municipalities which are also adding to forfeiture laws. Here in wonderful So Cal, you can also have your vehicle seized when suspected of soliciting a prostitute or street racing.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Passing laws that put completely-fabricated limitations on supply does, in fact, preserve jobs.
Specifically, it preserves jobs that should not be preserved. It further creates a great deal of economic waste that looks like prosperity when properly summarized.
Laws like these are really a boon for rich parties who don't want to see their empire vaporize in the face of technological progress.
If no one pays for ideas, maybe that means the ideas suck, in which case the idea producers should be in a different line of work.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Repeat after me.... 9/11 That is all.
Hey, I'm waiting for the say when they impound crosswalks for being used in the commission of jaywalking.
These laws are designed to replace the less and less popular war on cannabis.
Just like the head of the FBI's narcotic enforcement came from alcohol prohibition enforcement, I'm sure that those involved in the next war on the American people will come from cannabis prohibition. Other drugs won't provide anything close to the confiscation-resources that todays police organizations and prisons will need to stay in operation at current levels and continue to grow. Perhaps C. prohibition ending is premature, but it's looking closer with, at least, medical approval -- and when that happens, the whole fraudulent house of cards the anti-freedom lobby has concocted against the harm of marijuana will fall apart -- especially the nonsense about cannabis smoking causing cancer.
It doesn't. No more than chewing gum causes mouth cancer (as chewing tobacco does). The cancer is in the tobacco (most likely the deadly poison, nicotine, a natural, powerful insecticide). Doesn't matter what form you take it -- still is shown to cause cancer, but so far, no form of cannabis consumption is associated with an increase in cancer -- especially true for smoking! Among other studies, the largest was Kaiser Health Care's several year, 60,000+ member study that showed no increase in cancers among marijuana smokers. More than one study has shown a lowering of cancer-cases in those who smoke cannabis over those who abstain, but the figures are usually "close", and are quietly ignored.
Anyway -- the police need their forfeiture/confiscation income -- it has provided the largest police budget increase with almost every town now affording "SWAT" teams and even mid-size towns financing things like police helicopters with the forfeited money.
Forfeiture should be considered a denial of property (punishment) without due process.
If this new law comes into effect -- police will have a new tool to go after anyone who's machine gets "infected" as well as those offering open-WiFi access points, and likely those even used to "discuss" illegal file trading (discussion of illegal event with anyone = conspiracy under federal law). This could be used with a VERY broad brush...*ug*
USIPER? More like USURPER (of due process).
Seriously. Though they claim this will only be used against commercial level infringers, we know in practice that isn't how it works. Shit, look at one of the worst, most underhanded peices of legislation in the last century, the TREASON..I mean PATRIOT act - the claimed "Oh, it'll only be used against terrorists" and we find that theyare using it against regular criminals AND as the basis for wholesale surveillance of all Americans. "Oh, it'll sunset in 2005;" yeah, we knew that one was bullshit.
This is the same thing. You'll have some asshole cop or fed (no, I am not saying all or even most of them are assholes, but there are plenty) looking for charges on someone who will decide to take their computer on a fishing expedition.
Eventually the entire population of the world will be criminalzed and marginalized in one way or another. I wouldn't believe it if I wasnt living in these times.
> Tyranny is god's way of saying, "Someone's gonna get SMOTE!"
"Smitten", buddy.
Smite: I'm going to smite you for your poor usage of the word.
Smote: I just smote you for your poor usage.
Smitten: You have been smitten for your poor usage.
If you dunno how to use Elizabethan English, you prolly oughtta avoid it.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
They are pro-feminist pro-women's rights hell holes. No thanks. USA isn't much better.
What's it going to be worth when they get out of prison in ten years?
Coming from a fucking inbred retard like you, means little. "riddence"? "dulisonional"? Fucking twonk.
Now I understand what John Conyers had in mind when he explained that "impeachment will distract the Congress from other, more important work". This is the law that is obviously needed far more than the impeachment.
Unfortunately, as your computer was used to facilitate Sony's copyright infringement, the bailiffs will be around shortly to collect it for auction.
"What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms." --Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, 1787.
Be gone from my sight or prepare to feel my flaming wraith!
well, yes and no. A fixed penalty is more a protection racket - pay us £60 & admit liability and we won't prosecute you, if we do prosecute you you'll probably have to pay £600 - just classic extortion. But it is however just an opportunity to avoid any further action if you know that you're guilty - you're free to not pay it and say "go on then, prosecute me" (the point being that it'll cost you more to defend against the charge, even if you're found not guilty, than just coughing up).
The real scandle, however, if that to administer the system, you have to know who someone is to issue them a ticket, thus any police officer or council busibody can demand name & address from anyone who they want to hand a fixed penalty notice to on pain of, get this; a £5000 fine, 6 months in prison, or both. Time was that it was nigh on impossible to just demand someone's name and address on the street in Britain, you'd have to arrest them, thus requiring a stack of paperwork and a damn good reason for doing it, but now any council busibody who wants to make any frivolous accusation of a minor offence can do it.
The solution is that ALL prosecution and defence costs (including lost earnings, travel, inconvenience and emotion damage) should be charged to the person issuing the notice if the victim is found not guilty.
oh, and for a worse example, a woman in Cardiff was given a fixed penalty notice because her grandchild dropped a crisp from his pushchair whilst waiting at a bus stop.
An interesting note from your link:
Note that Conyers is the current chairman.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
If you were btten by Bob's dog, you could either sue or charge the dog, and in the latter case have it whipped to death for assault.
Oddly enough, this was less effective than suing Bob, as he could just keep buying new dogs.
It's no longer legal in the British system, but it sounds like it's back in the U.S., but only for non-living pets (;-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
What does Jesus have to do with this? Even if 1/2 of congress claimed Jesus was their justification, it does not make it so.
I'm right, you're wrong. God told me so himself.
Uhh, yeah, I was with you up until this point. For better or worse SCOTUS has issued lots of highly unpopular decisions in it's history. Hell, the GP even mentioned a recent one.
That which you say is true, but so is what I said. They do make politically unpopular decisions, and they also try to avoid doing so. They're busy, and they must usually be selective about what cases to accept. The current court has been less protective of individual liberties than any court in recent memory. (I'm not sure I agree with some of the decisions of the Warren court, but they *did* at least *try* to be protective of individual liberties. Sometimes, admittedly, with less than stellar success.) the ACLU, decides to get involved very early in the process. This rarely happens. It will essentially never happen if you represent something unpopular, because the organization depends on solicited fundsI'd disagree with this too. The ACLU has defended people accused of possession of child pornography before. Doesn't get much more unpopular then that.
(I agree with everything else you said)
Again, it's a matter of frequency. The ACLU does take on unpopular cases...but it tries hard to limit them as a percentage of what it covers.OTOH, all of this is based on my perception of what's happening. I haven't done research on the statistics. I *do* observe many clearly vile instances of injustice that the ACLU doesn't get involved with, and it's not always because they don't think they could win. They're dealing with a kind of triage, because there are many more cases of injustice than they can possibly deal with. They are *forced* to be selective in what cases they tackle. So they tackle the ones that they think are 1) important, 2) winnable, 3) not too unpopular. Then if they've got a bit of slack, they pick up a few of the others. (Again, this is just my model of how they work. I could be wrong.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"I just line up and gun down the people who don't agree with my politics." - Ernesto Che Guevara
Yes, it is, but just what does it deter? This kind of stuff deters having faith in property rights; it doesn't deter crime. Remember: you don't have to be guilty of anything, for seizure to happen and be permanent.
The Inquisition was financed the same way -- from the assets of their victims. It should be axiomatic that it is impossible for such an agency to be impartial or just in their enforcement.
"No, man, it's dry. Want some coke?"
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Is the case of Donald Scott the one you're talking about? I've never heard of this and would be interested to know. I bet others would as well.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Is that your solution to life's problems? Run away from them?
I see you're no Einstein.
Recently the MPAA widely pirated some software written by commercial software developer Matthew Garrett. Verizon recently has publicly and repeatedly violated the copyrights of many software developers working on a widely-used product called Busybox.
If this bill passes, wouled we see Verizon's and the MPAA's Internet infrastructure and all the developer machines used to build and distribute those illegal warez confiscated and auctioned off?
(Note to trolls: Matthew Garrett is a commercial software developer in the sense that he gets paid to code. That he gets paid is orthogonal to the licensing, if any, attached by his employer to the code he writes.)
|/usr/games/fortune
Here's my first problem.....the way you're stating this, the majority of cops are cruising around with a trunk full of cocaine just waiting to frame the innocent. Yes, there are cases where evidence has been planted, but in the ones I've heard of there's usually a stonger motive than "I want to confiscate your car". Unless you cite a good source, there's no way I believe it's that rampant.
In what jurisdiction does the cop get the proceeds of auctioned property? I've never heard of this being practiced in the United States. The state gets the proceeds, and depending on where, it could go either directly to the police budget, or the general budget. Again, unless you can cite this, I'm having a hard time believing it.
I would suspect that corruption on that level would attract both federal investigations, and media attention.
I get the feeling that what you've got is some half-remembered anecdotes about evidence auctions, and a general dislike for the police.......
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
Yes, that's the case I was referring to. Thanks for posting the link.
Has this practice been stopped, or is it still going on?
But all that aside, even if it did happen, I'm rather failing to see exactly how this was a violation of Habeas Corpus, which is a law that protects you against being detained without due process.
Baby with the bathwater.
You focus on one big bugaboo, that probably required something beyond pure libertarianism in order to correct. Now that the problem is corrected with no similar problems on the horizon, much less in sight, you claim that libertarianism can't work -- completely ignoring the multitude of problems that arose as side-effects of the original break from libertarianism.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If they actually form this proposed Federal Information Property Bureau they've been talking about, I'm seriously going to start looking for a new country to live in. It's been bad enough lately that I've been tossing the idea around, I just haven't found anywhere that I like better yet. Mostly I'm looking for someplace with a good tech sector, good privacy rights, and preferably no censorship of any kind. I used to think Canada might be feasible, but more and more they're looking like a clone of the USA. Sometimes I wonder if they're not passing some of this stupid regulation in the USA just to keep ahead of Canada on abusive laws.
So, anyone got any suggestions for places to live? I've thought about someplace like Norway, or maybe Iceland, although at the very least I'm a bit concerned about the language barrier, being a native English speaker and not entirely certain I could handle mastering an entirely new language.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
You are painting a false dichotomy here. The choice isn't between idealistic libertarianism and extreme corporatism. The choice is between a world where the government becomes increasing controlling and dictatorial and a world where individuals are free to make there own choices.
Many of the abuses of the industrial revolution that you cite were the result of corporations buying off corrupt politicians to get what they wanted. It took a massive uprising of individuals to transform both corporate and governmental policies. The government was as complicit in the abuses as the corporations.
In a truly libertarian society, the government would not have the power to act in the best interests of the corporations as they do today. It is even possible that many large corps would not even be able to exist in that environment. The reality is that our current political system heavily favor those with the $$$ to buy what they want, including legislation. Idealistic libertarianism would not be the perfect solution, but a good dose of libertarian common sense injected into our currently corrupt system would help tip the scales in favor of the Average Joe.
I'm having a lot of trouble reading this in any way at all that can justify trial- and conviction-free seizure and disposal of a citizen's property.
So get Ron Paul on your local Republican ticket or something. When was the last time you saw the constitution without big government bootprints all over it?
the idea of a minimalistic Federal government proved incapable of properly dealing with the economic disparity between the Northern and Southern states and its most obvious effect; slavery.
I'd say the idea of a minimalistic Federal government was exactly what allowed slavery to end in the first place.
A couple quick questions from someone who must have "damn little understanding of history":
1) When did the South stop dominating American politics?
2) Given that your most optimistic answer to (1) could be "well the 2000 and 2004 elections were really close, so I'm sure it'll stop any day now", wasn't it a great thing that the Northern states were allowed to abolish slavery one by one, because the minimalistic Federal government didn't override state decisions on even such important matters?
I'll grant you that sometimes oppressive nations are so bad that invading them and deposing their governments is worth it; but if the United States didn't need to annex Nazi Germany or the Japanese empire on moral grounds, I'd be willing to bet they didn't even need to re-annex the Confederacy, or even keep armies there for longer than necessary to assist in the evacuation of and reparations for it's former prisoners.
Not that I for one moment believe that the new law would be enforced any more fairly than the rest, but since the MPAA, RIAA, and Verison (amongst others) have all been found to be willfully violating copyright in the last year, they should think very carefully about supporting this! If they do not oppose this vigorously, it will demonstrate that they truly EXPECT that the law will not apply to them.
Just to add to the fun, this forfeiture will be a civil court matter meaning a reduced standard of evidence. Further, these civil forfeitures employ the ludicrous fiction that it is the property rather than it's owner that's being sued, so you may not even get to be heard in court first (that right is only granted to the defendant, that is, the computer in this case). I realize fully that this paragraph is absurd enough to be mistaken for a troll, but do research it! The court cases actually read as (for example) U.S. vs. 3 PCs and a router.
The effect of the above is that property may be siezed based on only probable cause and the (former) owner must somehow prove it was NOT used for copyright violation (or drug trafficing, etc) by preponderance of the evidence. That is, guilty until proven innocent.
So in service of some property rights of some people, all other property rights are null and void.
i was sure it was hemp paper. or am i getting that mixed up with another document?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
This is just anothe shot in the new war on pirates. This is like the war on drugs, only we are all pirates now, even if we never shared anything. Perhaps this will be felt by all soon.
New Zealand, Iceland (bit of a village, tho'), Finland.
Live in a real society outside the US for any time, and you'll wonder how any one would put up.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Even if you:
Think he is an idiot.
Disagree with every aspect of his platform.
Think libertarians are idiots.
Don't have faith in his foreign policy.
Don't believe in a protectionism, isolationist foreign policy.
You should vote for Ron Paul.
Why? Because on the scale of small government big government, the U.S. has gone so far towards big government that its terrifying. We live in a police state now. In many situations you are guilty until proven innocent. You can be punished BEFORE your trial. Worse, the government is trying its best to be able to gain the right to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens.
Where does Ron Paul come in? Because he's the only potentially electable candidate who doesn't support this kind of shit. The previous paragraph of "scary shit" is bipartisan . Consider that TFA is going through a democratic congress.
Ron Paul, at least, is the only candidate who will bring _some_ balance to this level of rights violation. A centrist is _not_ the answer, because our policies have gotten so out of control. We need someone with some backbone, someone who will tell the DEA to stand down, and neuter the Justice Department. Perhaps even someone who could reorient the resources of the executive branch towards real security rather than the mechanisms of a police state.
If Ron Paul were to be elected, in 4-8 year he would be gone. A centrist would take power; maybe Hillary Clinton, maybe someone else. The country could be run on an even keel, and if you are a fan of liberal economic policies we could get back on track to building a welfare state. But in the interm, Dr. Paul would be able to cause a substantial amount of turmoil for the forces building a police state.
We, the average citizenry, have nothing to benefit from in a police state. Regardless of whether you are a libertarian or a socialist, it is necessary for us to elect a candidate who will stop this from happening. We can worry about economics and social welfare at a later date; we've got to stop this onrushing Orwellian nightmare first.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Perhaps regime change stops at home.
Libertarianism can't work because no society would suffer it. The only experiment (and I hesitate to even call the Jeffersonian-Maddisonian model capital-L Libertarianism) failed when it had to deal with a major, divisive issue. The minimalistic government was held hostage by its own philosophical underpinnings and could only react as various issues like escaped slaves and Dred Scott battered it. By the time Lincoln was elected, both sides were at an impasse and the only solutions were secession or a war to bring back the Confederacy.
Human societies don't work the way Libertarians think they do. They never have and never will. There's also the real issue with Libertarians; I don't trust them. I think they're greedy, self-serving individuals who want the State to stay out of their pockets. They don't want a society capable of using its various powers (and that includes governments) to solve problems. They have a fantasy government system whereby they are legally and morally off the hook for doing anything but benefitting themselves. "Oh well, if that's important, people will *donate* money" is a pretty common Libertarian line.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Newsflash: Ron Paul's not a libertarian.
He wants to take power away from the Federal government, and allocate even more of it back to the individual states.
And yes. He's an absolute nutjob, although I do feel that he'd be very difficult to corrupt (read into that however you may...)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
He looks like a States Rights libertarian to me, something the Republicans pretend to be when its convenient for them.
As to whether he's corruptable or not, the only thing that frightens me more than a corruptable politician is a self-righteous holy man. Ron Paul is just such a man, and it also looks like he's supported and surrounded with swirly-eyed Yes-men who go out unto the world to preach the Word According to Paul with a frightening religious fervor.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I would say that this removes the last reason to not put thermite in your computer with a mercury switch that triggers it if you don't disconnect it before moving it. I mean seriously. Then at least they wouldn't be able to use it as evidence against you, and if you happen to have some sort of off site secret backup then you won't have to worry about loosing everything.
Is it bad to fear the government charged with my safety more than I fear the terrorists they are claiming to protect me against?
Calling a sword by a pretty name is no more than adding perfume to poison.
I'm collecting links to the actual bill.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
This should be something you can do in Perl. Attach it to the release button and send the editor on duty an email for pass / fail. This isn't rocket science guys.....
In USA, people are elected by the government.
1. have an election, keep counting votes until desired outcome is achieved
2. ???
3. Profit!
$
Stop pirating! It's an easy way around the bill, around the **AA nightmare, around the corporate lobbyists, etc. Just stop doing it, and everyone will calm down a bit. If you hate the **AA so much, why don't you just boycott them? And if you really like their work, why not just cough up some cash for it? Surely that's better than this legislative circus.
As a side note, I'd like to point out that the title is incredibly biased and inaccurate. They imply that by copying a piece of media is illegal. It isn't, only copying the content on it in certain circumstances is illegal. The media is completely interchangeable and optional. It should be "Copy that movie, lose your computer" or something like that. It at least wouldn't be woefully inaccurate.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
"You are painting a false dichotomy here. The choice isn't between idealistic libertarianism and extreme corporatism."
I stopped reading at that point, because anything you said after this was based upon false assumptions. I was not creating a dichotomy - i was dealing with cause and effect. The cause is libertarianism, the effect is a power vacuum. That power vacuum is then the cause of the rise of the power of corporations as they fill that power vacuum. IT is true that they are not the only party that could seize upon that power vacuum, but given the current state of the US and that we're talking about libertarianism in the US it is the most likely chain of events, and it is consistent with united states history.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Police (Emphasis mine)
Oh, I guess you're wrong then.How do you know their unrepresentative? How do you know you're not making the same mistake that so many before you have made, in assuming democracy is broken because it doesn't represent your view on $RANDOM_ISSUE?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Ahhh,
The Ad Hominem.
Ron Paul is a lunatic with damn little understanding of history, economics and politics.
Ron Paul may not be an unequaled sage; there are most likely students of history, economics, and politics who are superior to him.
These people are not, however, in our government. Obama is a toll. Hillary Clinton, though quite bright, fundamentally doesn't understand the long-term strategic mis-steps the U.S. has made in the past 50 years. That being said, both Obama and Clinton have a much better grip on reality that the rest (as in non-Paul) of the Republican slate. McCain, Huckabee, Giulani, and the rest have no clue on basic things like immigration, economics, foreign policy, and religion.
Does Paul say stupid things some times? Yes. However, if you do some research, you'll see that he is far more knowledgable about the issues he speaks about that his contemporaries, and many of the things that he advocates are sane, sound policy decisions.
For example, the DEA, and the drug war, is a ridiculous mess. If the only good thing that came out of a Paul Presidency was the end of the drug war, the U.S. would be a much better place.
The same is true of the IRS, which is also a complete mess. Keep in mind that Paul who advocate a replacement such as a sales tax, which is the sort of mechanism that European economics use (they call it a VAT).
Our government has gone through large scale reformations before, and survived. Recently, even; look at the Department of Homeland security, which has completely reoriented the operations of domestic law enforcement, and the USCIS, which is a newish entity replacing the INS.
I, for one, am willing to trade the possibility of the free market failing in providing economic equality in exchange for strengthening of our civil liberties, the end of the drug war, a return to a more conservative foreign policy, pursuit of a balanced budget and trade, and a complete overhaul of our insane tax system.
Who are you to call me a lunatic, and why are the risks involved in moving to what I believe to be a "better" government any worse than the shitstorm the democrats and republicans are currently driving us towards? The vast majority of the electorate has delved into the issues far less than I have, and the vast majority of the congress, and every _other_ lunatic running for President, is a good deal less informed than Dr. Paul.
Either you are a hopeless optimist, and like the direction this country is going in, or you've become so conservative and a afraid of change that any large-scale reorientation of the government is terrifying to you.
Hell, I'd excuse people like you if you had a candidate who would restore our liberties without pursuing radical economics changes, however, given the current slate of possibilities on both sides of the aisle, no one other than Kucinich and Paul defend civil liberties that way they need to be defended.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
If someone as dedicated, intellectual and powerful as Jefferson had a belief, it should be expected that his actions would reflect those beliefs. So, either he was talking out of the other side of his mouth--believing that slaves were not "men" at all, a truly Evil and humanity corruptung belief which was commonly held at the time--or he was a flaming hypocrite. Neither are good character traits
Sometimes you can see past a time that is better than the one you live in. Sometimes when you do, you can also see that you have to take baby steps to get there. Jefferson's vision of inalienable rights and that all men are created equal stands as a vision that we, even today, have not completely lived up to. So, while his actions are not perfect, by any stretch, the vision remains a worthy goal, and working towards that goal, I like to believe, is one of the reasons and faiths upon which the United States exists.
So, it doesn't matter that Jefferson was a hypocrite that he owned slaves. As a practical matter, had Jefferson tried to put emancipation on the table in 1776, there would have been no revolution and no United States. He had to have the southern states on board, in particular, Virginia.
I mean, come on, we're beating up on Jefferson when almost 200 years later, blacks still couldn't eat at the same places in most of the country, and, it took until -this- generation to have a credible black candidate for President. Even today, you often hear about black quarterbacks being athletic, and white quarterbacks being smart, as if, a white guy can't be athletic and a black guy can't be smart. Instead of pointing at Jefferson's flaws, maybe we should read his words, for that they are, and remind ourselves that we need to live up to them too.
This is my sig.
And moderators believe that the grandparent deserves -1 flamebait and the parent deserves +1 insightful. It is indeed a crazy, mixed-up world.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
It conflicts with other laws or causes harm to other truly unrelated individuals? For example, a physician keeps electronic medical records on a computer which the police believe may have been used to violate copyright. Every one of his patient's medical records are then auctioned off to the highest bidder in violation of HIPPA? (Not to mention their medical care is compromised and their health threatened because of lack of access to their health history?)
The human rights of the slaves be damned? Is that what you're saying?
There's nothing quite as amusing as seeing one of Ron Paul's acolytes trying to sound reasonable. Read the parent to see exactly what I mean.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The Second Amendment is the passage that allows you the resources FOR that violent insurrection that was mentioned in the GP post...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Undoubtedly, a test case will be made. It will work its way through the court system and this legislation will be found to be unconstitutional my the US Supreme Court. By this time, this ill-conceived idea will have cost both the victims and the public millions of dollars. Its a shame that we can't get the MPAA and RIAA to post some sort of bond to cover the damages caused by these sorts of shenanigans.
Have gnu, will travel.
what will happen next is: the riaa will sue EVERYONE
they seize and sell EVERYONES computers - AFTER INSTALLING KILLSWITCHES
then, 2 years later they activate the killswitch and BANG - thats the end of the internet
still the CD sales won't go up again, but drop to 0 - because without PCs, pretty much ALL businesses go bankrupt - everyone is unemployed, noone can afford a CD anymore... so all the labels go out of business, too... but at least piracy is gone... THANK GOD!!!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Let's change YOUR emphasis to MY emphasis:So no I'm not =P
How do you know their unrepresentative?
Because the President's "approval rating" is less than 30% and Congress' is even lower than his. If Congress and the President represesented us, their approval ratings would be above 50%.
They sure as hell don't represent MY views.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The passage you emphasized is something which does not belong to the definition of "secret police".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
RTFA. This is confiscation in the same manner as it is applied in when property is confiscated for drug offences. The police take your stuff, auction it off, and then you go to trial.
If the MPAA or RIAA think this will boost their sales they are for a big surprise (as far as I think).
I'll result to buying EVERYTHING used. CD's/DVD's/software. I should be doing it already but this will push me right over that cliff.
But if your emotions are getting the best of your reading skills, that's easily forgivable in this context.
FUCK OFF AND DIE PAULTROLL! Go join the goddamn flying saucer cult!
Jesus! And they used to call the Democrats "moonbats"!
"You non-gun nuts don't care about any of the amendments and don't try to uphold anything".
/other/ faceless member, no need to even prove that you're referring to a majority or even a significant portion of that group to back up your claims.
/beforehand/ for such blanket statements to have any value.
I can say that because it's easy to anonymously poke out at a faceless group and assign any attribute you like to them, whether or not it's true. Because it's not directed at a specific person you don't get an outright denial, just because you could say you were talking about the
It's making bold statements at everybody and nobody at the same time. "Americans support the War in Iraq". See how easy it is? So what if it's false for the majority of Americans? I can keep going: "Soldiers rape and kill". "Frat people are self-absorbed narcissists with no compassion for non-members". "Slashdotters think overlord jokes are funny, original, and not at all repetitive." "The French are cowards"
It's much easier than realizing that even though you may be able to group people by a characteristic, it's only valid for that one characteristic and actual people are far more complex and heterogenous than simple blanket statements. Stereotyping by groups is nothing new, it's been done by skin, by sex, by religion, by country, pretty much anyway you like. It's not useful unless it's actually true, and that truth would need to be proven
"Anonymous coward"...how fitting.
I used to be proud of my country. I honor the people that fought and lost their lives to create and maintain this country. Now I'm almost ashamed, because of what we are becoming.
Being vocally unhappy with where we are gong, when do i get labeled as a dissident and detained? That is the next stage of our eventual collapse as a 'free' society.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The government is by the people for the people.
Well I suppose one out of two isn't bad.
But let's think about this for a second. "Secret Police" is the wrong term because it does imply that it helps maintain power, rather than actually executing justice. Undercover police are the other way around. Using "Secret Police" gives the wrong impression.OK, fair enough. They are currently due for a change. Talk to me after the next elections, and we'll see then.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Not quite true; there was an outcry that
led to scaling back some of the forfeiture law,
in the last decade.
Even my Republican Representative voted for
to remove some of the most onerous provisions.
He also says he can define anyone he wants as a terrorist.
I can understand where in some situations this might be necessary. Enacting martial law in times of war (civil or otherwise), suspending certain civil rights momentarily (with clearly defined renewal requirements) can be justified.
Saying "terrorists don't have rights" and then defining a terrorist as "anyone we name a terrorist" amounts to saying "no one has rights".
Finally, the idea that in the US, only "US citizens" have civil rights is an affront to every humanist and enlightenment thinker. This isn't the Middle Ages, guys, but the 21st century, and human rights applies to every human being on this planet (or others for that matter).
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
Some people are just looking for a nanny state. So we should ban alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and ice cream, salt, red meat, all dairy except lactose-free non-fat milk, peanuts, wheat gluten, etc.
Taxes are too stressful, we should automatically deduct what you owe from your bank account.
children should be raised by professionals at a government operated center for the first 10 years to avoid any psychological trauma.
notice that some of these things I say are Right wing issues, and some are Left wing. But they are all ideas that fit well into fascism. Some will offer you Democracy and Capitalism, but will really have Fascism in mind. And others will offer Socialism or Communism, but again are only interested in Fascism. That is where the needs of society and community are assumed to be whatever the State wants them to be, and the rights of the individual are completely ignored. People don't stand up and proclaim that fascism is their answer, they generally sell the idea as protecting society.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's quite easy to explain. They don't sue the person, they sue the person's property (e.g. The United States of America vs $124,700 in United States Currency). Where does it say that property has the right to be secure in itself? (Quite similar to a Scam in Nomic)
Furthermore, they bridge over the others using civil, rather than criminal, court.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
From the House Judiciary Committee's report on the bill:
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI), Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-TX), Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA), and Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Tom Feeney (R-FL), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Steve Chabot (R-OH), Steve Cohen (D-TN), Ric Keller (R-FL), Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), and Robert Wexler (D-FL) introduced the "Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property ("PRO IP") Act of 2007" to combat what they say is an increasing problem...
How I wish it was a single-party problem; at least the solution would be clear. The sad truth however is that legislators of all stripes are in on it. Even worse, so is the judiciary (including the Supreme Court, in decisions like this ), the branch "whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void" [The Federalist, No. 78 (A. Hamilton)].
This statement suggests that you don't know what Lincoln did to the Federal Government once the South seceeded. What he created could not, by any standard I can imagine, be called a "minimalistic" government. He was pretty much the author of the large Federal government that, whether strictly Constitutional or not, intruded to a great extent Federal powers into the individual States (in short, Lincoln is the author of the modern American republic).
Now we can debate whether that has created a better or worse government, but if we start with the basic position that Lincoln had that no State had any unilateral right secede and that he was within his powers as the Executive during an insurrection to take on extraordinary powers (such as the suspension of Habeas Corpus) that he did. I think there are rather good arguments to be made that Lincoln, in his quest to reunite the Union, paid little regard to the Constitution when it got in his way, and set the pattern that many Presidents have since.
The fact is that the minimalistic libertarian-styled Federal Government that Madison had invisioned and that Jefferson had seen as the ideal state could not solve the economic and social dichotomy that slavery embodied. The impossible situation of permitting the individual states to decide on slavery, while having to support the weight of such Constitutional requirements as interstate commerce (permitting slave owners to seek escaped slaves even into free states). This minimalistic state tried, but its hands were tied by States Rights, and thus it reached an impasse that was only broken when Lincoln's election so infuriated and emboldened the Slave States that they seceeded.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Since when has the constitution stopped congress from creating bills for bad laws to be passed on to the president to sign into law? Its not even really designed to *stop* them.
Constitutionally Its the job of the supreme court to strike bad laws down ( if they feel like hearing the case that is. if they are not in the mood, well you are just screwed )
Its also our job to vote out the people who even propose such nonsence. And failing that, rise up and take control by force.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
However, we do have a job lot of 300,000 home PCs in excellent condition waiting for one lucky bidder - just uninstall the Sony rootkit and they're a bargain!
No one in the Union even thought of the Confederacy as a legitimate state, but rather as a pack of secessionist rebels unwilling to recognize the democratic will of the majority. For the Union, the Civil War was about restoring jurisdictions that had never had a right to secede in the first place. Certainly the Constitution afforded the Slave States no legal right to do so. So, under that operational theory, the Civil War and Reconstruction were not a war to reabsorb and correct.
By all accounts, there were many even in the Confederacy who knew that slavery was unsustainable. Robert E. Lee certainly felt that way (not that he wasn't a racist, but by comparison to some of his Confederate counterparts, he was a milder variety). But you will open a rather ugly kettle of fish that has no absolute answer if you ask whether any jurisdiction within a greater sovereign state has a right to secede. In some cases, as with Kosovo, there are certainly very important and compelling justifications for doing so, but by the same token, would that apply to, say, Quebec?
Ultimately the Union won, the Confederacy was wiped out and the Slave States restored, and, sadly, it was a further century before the descendants ex-slaves really began to accrue much meaningful benefit from a bloody and destructive war.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Framing is critical.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)
This statement suggests that you don't know what Lincoln did to the Federal Government once the South seceeded.
You misread what I wrote. My point was that slavery started ending long before Lincoln - and if it hadn't been for the minimalistic Federal Government Lincoln changed, it wouldn't have been possible for the Northern states to start ending it.
That, I am forced to hypothesize, is why you answered neither of my questions. Your attack on decentralized government for ending slavery in only some states depends on ignoring the likelihood that a centralized government might not have ended it anywhere.
Want to get modded down? No? Then shut the fuck up.
Slavery may have been dying, but the social, ecomomic and political forces would not give it the time to die a natural death. I'm sure there were plenty of people in both the North and South who hoped that if they could just drag things out, compromise by compromise, that eventually the institution itself would become such an anachronism that it would disappear on its own. The problem was that the Jeffersonian government ran out of time. Britain had pretty much wiped out the global slave trade and the remaining moral foundations of slavery by the 1840s. The entire economic system of the agrarian South (and let's note that this was what Jefferson viewed as the best socio-political model) was on its last legs.
In fact, just to show you how much distance there was between the North and the South, the entire question of Lincoln's campaign and election were seen completely differently by the two "solitudes". In the North, he was viewed as the man who was going to bring the parochial southern states into the modern age, eliminating slavery and the gentryism in favor of a more industrialized, efficient system that was being adopted throughout the Western world. In the South, he was viewed as a man who would violate the Constitution, trod over states' rights and destroy the Founding Fathers' intentions for how the US was supposed to work.
There had been attempts at compromise, but they only put off the inevitable. Sometimes that's the way things work, and there are two paths, a handshake before parting, or a no-holds-barred deathmatch. There was no middle ground for the United States when Lincoln was elected.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Nope, I'll simply do what they do.
Rent it or lease everything. The feds can have all of Dell's property.
It's what the drug dealers do, they lease their cars, and all their crap belongs to the rent to own places. they get raided they lose nothing but lots of local businesses do.
There was a big article in the detriot free press about it this past year how the laws that take the drug dealers property dont work.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
As to whether he's corruptable or not, the only thing that frightens me more than a corruptable politician is a self-righteous holy man. Ron Paul is just such a man, and it also looks like he's supported and surrounded with swirly-eyed Yes-men who go out unto the world to preach the Word According to Paul with a frightening religious fervor.
Your points might sound even remotely sane if *all* of the major party candidates weren't far worse in every way.
"Oh no Ron Paul will destroy the country"
Hot tip, Sparky, the other candidates are all self-righteous holy men as well with the difference that there isn't even anything good any of them are standing up for. They stand for all the abuses and excesses of the Bush administration and their sole means of differentiating themselves is by promising to do even more of the wrong things.
You might be right about Paul, but you're completely failing to address the batshit insanity that completely defines *every single one of the other candidates*.
First they came for the terrorists - "Yay lock em' fuckers up! forever"
Then they came for the drug dealers - "Scum! Dont waste time on trials, just lock em up"
Then they came for the music downloaders - "I'll show you a well armed militia. Its WAR!"
From the Justification linked article: "Our founding fathers understood the importance of innovation so well that they specifically provided strong protection for intellectual property in the Constitution itself," said Rep. Feeney.
where in the constitution is that exactly? what pray tell does it say?
While he the grandparent was uncouth about it, he is right, Ron Paul has a lot of bad ideas.
Ron Paul runs on a platform of states rights and openly says it is so the states can remove those rights currently protected by the Federal government. There is nothing in the earth or the stars that proclaims a state government would be any more sane with guaranteeing our freedoms than a federal government. In fact if you go into the South you'll find state's rights as an excuse for racism as much as anything else, if you go to the bible belt you'll find state's rights as an excuse to teach creationism Christianity using public funds while ignoring the scientific aspects of evolution that would be just as if not more important to a growing mind. Ron Paul doesn't want to limit the government to protect the citizen he wants to limit it to restrict the citizen.
Ron Paul runs on a platform of strict-constitutionalism but he supports amendments to tear down the Full Faith and Credit clause (src: http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul207.html). He wants to limit the ability of the supreme court to protect separation of church and state, the right to an abortion, the right for people to have sex with whomever they wish (be it man and women out of wedlock, or woman and woman, or a married couple getting a little freaky) and even the right to marry. (src: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.300.IH:;)
Ron Paul wants to return the legislating of environmental policies to states, but fails to recognize that pollution in one state can cause serious or worse implications in other states.
Ron Paul wants to remove the IRS, but seems to have no firm plan on how to make up lost funds. In some places he has said he won't replace it with anything, in some places he claims to use what amounts to a regressive tax policy to replace it meaning people who make less end up paying more percentage-wise (this is in direct contradiction to reforms suggested by billionaire Warren Buffet).
Again in his currency policy he is unclear, he wants to return us to a system similar to the gold standard and even endorsing multiple currencies. He seems not to recognize the strength of having one clear currency and the fact hat our economy has been for the most part more resilient because we stopped using the gold standard.
There are a number of other issues with his platform, but I'll end on a conciliatory note with the parent. If all RP does is stop the drug war we will be better off, because if he does even 1/10th of the other things we will not be better off.
----------
Just your ordinary BOFH
http://killertux.org
Australia should be soon reversing some of the stupid policies it has implemented to benefit the USA.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
My computers don't have floppy drives :-)
Insofar as it is accepted by the federal courts of appeals, yes. It's an incredibly stupid interpretation, but no less valid because of it. That is, until one or more cases make it to SCOTUS, then we shall see.
I don't suppose they'll agree, though. The Supreme Court enjoys federalism and open interpretation of the Constitution. After all, it's how they snagged Judicial Review.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
vote in paul, he won't allow crap like this. Or buy some guns now. You may need to defend yourself.
Just another idiot looking for any excuse to whine that everything is Bush's fault and everything Bush says is wrong. "The Constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper", "The Constitution is just a goddamn piece of parchment", yeah, whatever. Bush Bush Bush Bush.
Chuckle.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Let us review first principles. Democrats and Republicans are merely two wings of one party, the Money Party. The problem is that too many people (look in the mirror) are doing too well to care and do not wish to forfeit their CPT's (careers, properties, and toys). Nothing will change until these understand that economic freedom without political freedom is a mockery of both. These have adopted the 'Chinese model' by default. Until there is a manifestation of both virility and liberty mindset (a.k.a. testosterone and alcohol dehydrogenase), these might as well bend their heads down to the work and produce, because these have through negligence have let the 'nail that sticks up' to be hammered flat.
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
Most songs on my iPod are larger than that what data can you really fit in a floppy disk so what fuss about?
Taxes are too stressful, we should automatically deduct what you owe from your bank account. In Canada, and South Korea (the only countries where i have (officially) worked, the government does deduct taxes from your paycheque automatically. it is a great convienience. and in canada, they usually get the amount wrong, and at tax time, they mail cheques to you. the only loss to the citizen is the 16 cents or so of lost interest. big whoop. and in your nanny state proposal, you left out gambling and lotteries. Personally, I would support a ban on tobacco and hard alcohol, on the condition that we got weed completly legalized out of the deal, and i could still have my cold delicious beer. i think i could live life without my scotch, but i could only do it if i were high all the time.
-I only code in BASIC.-
The 40 hour work, if it's even still alive, mandates only that your employer pay you more if you work more. It says nothing about how many hours they can require you to work. Even so, the 40 hours have become bog-standard in many professions.
You are quite free to "home-school" your children on the farm where they all have chores to do all day long. Yet for some reason most people choose not to. I think you could completely repeal child labor laws and see no measurable increased incidence of actual child labor.
By the way, I have never lived libertarianism and neither has any living American. I'd like to give it a try.
Unfortunately Scandinavian countries have allow almost no immigration, and just take a very minimal amount of skilled temporary workers and refugees. Sigh...
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
You bought a car. You left it in your garage but somehow lost the keys.
So now you have a perfectly working car but you can't start it, this is where my car analogy breaks down.
In the real world, you could go to the dealer or a good locksmith and pay them a small fee to make you a replacement key.
However in this situation the manufacturer of your car (Microsoft) does not allow end users to buy or make replacement keys. In the Microsoft world if you lose your key, they insist on you re-purchasing the entire car.
So you did the next best thing and found a shady locksmith who would give you a key. Not only that, you discovered that you could keys for all sorts of cars from this shady locksmith, and if you were not careful a virus and some trojans as well.
Our ancestorys have lived libertarianism, we don't need to live something ourselves to learn lessons from it - we have good historical documentation of the conditions and the consequences.
We don't have to live fascism to understand the problems with it, libertarianism is no different.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
...for an advice. I prevent this sort of issues by writing the key on the CD itself. That way they can not be separated.
Rust takes effort to collect. Iron(III) oxide in a suitable granularity can be purchased cheaply from suppliers of materials for ceramics workshops.
This is extremely scary to me, and serves to point out huge flaws in the US justice system and government as a whole. It has saddened me, but also encouraged me to act.
I love this. "In fact the consequence of libertarianism is that you are pretty much owned by the corporations." I have a breaking newsflash for you dumbass. You have have been owned by the corporations for a long time. Do you think the Democrats will save you? The Republicans? I have another news flash for you (wait for it)... They sold out a long time ago.
The only way a revolution would work in this country anymore would be to have it start during the Super Bowl halftime, be sponsored by Doritos and Mountain Dew, led by Jessica Alba and over with in 45 minutes.
As I type this, I feel like I should be wearing a tin foil hat, but honestly, it seems too cut & dry to be too far off.
Look at this realistically. What you're describing is but a minor extension of the legal tactics the RIAA has been using for years.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Unlike the first part which gets "interpeted" to deprive 'enemy combatants' of their 5th amendment rights... there are absolutely no exceptions for property. It will be struck down as unconstitutional the first time it goes to court. It is black letter law. There is no ambiguity AT ALL with regards to property. To say it another way... your property is safer than you are. You can be Jose Padilla'ed away by the DHS death squads, but your property is sacred.
It will probably be the usual choice. The choice between evil or stupidity.
At the same time, "It's easy to be philanthropic when you're spending someone else's money" is also a pretty common libertarian line.
Simply deciding everything by simple vote is no panacea. You have to have some ability to enable people to "vote with their dollars" or you'll stray far away from efficient usage of resources.
Further, just because something can be done at the federal level doesn't mean it should be done at the federal level. It's perfectly possible for organization at the national level to do nothing more than add an additional layer of bureaucracy to the top of the pyramid and at the same time increase institutional inertia beyond prudence without providing any increased efficiency or other value in exchange. Department of Education is a pretty good example.
That said, While I agree with many of the libertarian ideals, the actual Libertarians always seem to fall a bit short of sane.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Otherwise, I suppose I would have had to learn to play the accordion.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
...any computer or network hardware used to "facilitate" a copyright crime and auction it off. So this includes entire ISPs and root DNS servers? I don't see why not. And of course they'll have to dig up all that fibre. Looks suspiciously like network hardware to me.May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Lobbeasts are even more dangerous than lobbiests.
I had the same thought. Good book, too.
What also tends to be forgotten maybe that Major Labels desperately want people to believe that their artists are good and valuable. In a sense these laws tend to make people think that these companies sell something of value instead of some other artists on some other small labels or some out of print lost classic, etc. If people are not shown to be wanting their product then maybe that would be bad business. They desperately need people to want their music but when people share artists that are unknown to most people or are on small labels that cuts the large label out of the market. Competition maybe driving them into obscurity, for many years specific artists and specific ages have dominated the recording industry, this has recently changed and become less prevalent due to home recoding technologies and the internet. These older artists and business critters feel no longer in control of their fans, so they resort to lawsuits and threats in an attempt to scare people away from other artists or internet communications. Maybe these RIAA critters would rather abuse potential uses of technology by creating "class war" with teirs of privelege and one class with the rights to do whatever they want, namely one involving themselves. In the industry you can find fairly common the practice of artists sharing recordings of their projects with one another, this has always existed even prior to the net there were huge underground bootleg vinyl presses. The idea that these practices can stop because new technology exists seems a bit misguided and ignorant of historical precedent, tapes, DAT, cd, etc. These technologies can be considered both legal and illegal, depending on your point of view and frame of mind, as well as political or religious persuasion. In some societies music maybe something akin to dangerous devilish nonesense. We don't need this kind of ignorance anymore than we need the ignorance that seeks to restrict free access to information in societies such as the west. All of these restrictions maybe bring about more problems and distortions of reality into narrow possibilities. If you can restrict what I see or hear, you can manipulate my mind, if you have the power to manipulate my mind, you can brainwash me and make me buy, worship, or kill for access to what you provide by your ability to restrict or control my access to it. Religions have much in common with science and politics. If you can convince people that they are small, unimportant and insignificant you can also convince them that you have the answer to what troubles their hearts and minds. Do what thou wilt...not do what I wilt, as most politicians or religious nutjobs prefer to exclaim. It's up to you to think about who really has control over your own mind and your own society, letting reactionaries lead you into their grasp will only cause them to tighten their grip. I'm sure or certain that as technology advances it will begin to seem almost magical and began to take on a mystical experience, if not already, these people are trying to sue their way into being priests of an era to which they don't belong. Most of the art and music that has been created over the past 10 to 15 years fundamentally differs from anything that occured during the last 50 years, just pick up a WIRE magazine if you are unsure of what I say. Art and music today doesn't fit with a model of the 1950's. We live in a world that maybe changing so rapidly for the foreseeable future that to try to arrest this change will only serve to increase it's exponential growth. Maybe these critters at the RIAA are just as scared of the future as your average middle eastern muslim, does that mean we should accept thier arbitrary distinctions of reality just to make them feel good, so they won't sue or attack us? Of course not. Maybe they will have to come around to the way the world evolved without them instead, maybe these are just the birth pangs of something far better, far more vibrant and eclectic as well as just. Maybe freedom brings with it resonsibility to accept those with whom you curren
Dear American geeks, If I were you, I'd move to a free country. Uncle Sam has gone mad and started treating his children very badly indeed.
Whether you want to accept it or not, you have created a false binary choice by saying the only 2 powers are government and corporations. The power vacuum you fear, ideally, would be filled with the power of millions of individual citizens exercising their rights of self government, and state and local governments handling the governance that was originally granted them by the Constitution. There is a valid discussion to be had over whether individuals are willing or able to do that at this point, but it is the expectation of Libertarianism, and the foundation of our Constitution.
It almost sounds like you have an anti-corporate bias and believe that the government exists to protect us from the evil corporate interests. But you forget that the government has its own history of abuses, that are backed by the rule of law. It is this kind of abuse that the founding fathers sought to protect us from. I am not a hardcore libertarian, and if you had opened your mind and eyes to read a little more of my post, you would have seen that I said complete idealistic libertarianism is not a solution. Libertarianism does have some valuable ideas that are about putting more responsibility on individuals, and creating a less intrusive, controlling government.
When a variation of this happened to me about 2 years ago (a "new" m/c I bought from Dell for my son - actually, one of the previously reconfigured jobs from their factory outlet - came with an Office package partially installed but not activated, and no key was provided), I first phoned my supplier (i.e. Dell). "Can't help - you need to talk to Microsoft." (WHAT?!?! I bought this m/c from you and you can't or won't help me get the software working?).
Anyway. To cut a long story short, I called MS support, expecting to get turned down flat. To my amazement, they were not only sympathetic but very helpful, generating a number of different keys for me until we had one that worked, and let me finish the install. All for no charge, and with absolutely no evidence that things were remotely as I claimed.
I'm no big fan of Microsoft (that's an understatement - what I think of MS as a corporation, and its tactics over the years, doesn't bear repeating in polite company) but in this matter at least some anonymous "they" in their support area was , either on their own initiative or as a matter of policy, not only helpful but went far further than I expected to resolve my problem - and I took my hat off to them. (Whilst vowing not to buy from Dell again - it's amazing how easy it is to put a customer off dealing with you...)
Yet again you're putting words in my mouth and you're ignoring things I've said. Notice i said that there were other players of power, but the most likely one to gain control is the US in the void left by a lack of effective government is corporations. "Inidividual citizens exercising their rights of self government" - THAT'S GOVERNMENT. Some citizens may be willing, but they are not able, that is why citizens form governments - unrealistic expectations, and naive assumptions, get you no where.
I have an anti-bad-corporation bias, there are good corporations out there: you don't hear much about them because they go on day-by-day not bothering anyone. Anyone who doesn't recognize that bad corporations exist, and that since they're large entities there is a power disparity that government must step in and protect it's citizens from being abused by, is being intentionally blind. Government does exist to protect it's citizens: including against abusive corporations - it's a required for capitalism to function, and it's required by the very concept of government. Yes the founding fathers did seek to protect us from the abuses of government: things such as the government foisting religion on people, torturing people, spying on it's citizens. These are all real american values and yet in the current political climate they are held to be unamerican due to a disinformation campaign ran by certain radio and TV stations - yet another case in which the "free market" has harmed democracy: the government failed to live up to it's responsibility to protect it's citizens (from politically motivated disinformation for the sake of manipulation - Vice President Henry Wallace had a warning about that exact thing happening).
Libertarianism does have a few good ideas, however it's entire platform is those ideas taken to an unhealthy and untenable extreme. Making governemnt less intrusive and more efficient it is a good thing: however gutting the services it render to it's citizens such as police protection, roads, utilities, consumer protections, education [requisite for a functional democracy and economy], etc are not good. The libertarian platform does much more of the later. (I am not saying that government is doing those things to the best of it's abilities at the current time).
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Sure american citizens are allowed some weapons but I don't think that helps you very much in organising a revoloution.
Anyone who gets caught trying to arrange a revoloution will be labeled as a terrorist and treated as such and they will probablly get caught long before they get big enough to challange police/military forces who have both access to better weapons and better training as well as a very large number of men.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
No, they're "secret" precicely because they're in disguise. The words I highlighted make it clear that the phrase can be used in different ways in different contexts; e.g. the word "sometimes", which you seem to conviniently gloss over.
If he's a cop pretending to not be a cop, he's keeeping the fact that he's a cop secret. He's secret police.
If you are my age, back when you were saying "love it or leave it" I was saying "change it or lose it". If you think the US isn't a police state, you haven't had any run-ins with the police.
Ask a black man; he would know better than my whate ass.
They're police, they're secret, I don't give a rat's ass what wikipedia says.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Taxes are too stressful, we should automatically deduct what you owe from your bank account. In Canada, and South Korea (the only countries where i have (officially) worked, the government does deduct taxes from your paycheque automatically.
and in the USA and in the uk too.
it is a great convienience
It also makes people think far less about the large chunk of thier money that goes to the governement. This is a boon for those who support big governemnt.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I agree. As to the taxes, I don't think they should come automatically out of your bank account, but I have no problem with deducting income tax from my paycheck. It should be voluntary, however.
But government is more about less choice for people.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
PCP is dirt cheap. It doesn't take much heroin to get someone high who isn't addicted.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I can think of some made up reasons too, that's why I asked for verified cases of laced weed.
PCP is a dissociative and dissociatives aren't very addictive. I don't know the exact doses of heroin but heroin is expensive even if it's a newbie dose. It's much better better to sell it to someone who wants heroin maybe even a heroin craving newbie.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
In the US you have to fill out a tax form. The employer is obligated to perform deductions, depending on the type of employee you are. (basically what socio-economic class you belong to)
The US has a voluntary tax system. Where you can calculate what you owe, and submit your results. If you don't then there are steep fines. I think the only thing voluntary about it, is that you can choose the pay more. (You can also just mail the US Treasury department a check, and they will quickly accept it)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
A hit of crack is way cheaper than a joint these days. A some of it has to do with crack being way easier to smuggle than cannabis.
It's quite common to see "killer weed" out on the streets, some of it is intentionally disclosed as being "killer weed". Other times it's just ditchweed that someone is trying to pass off as the real thing by adding adulterants.
Just some random hit on google:
"The officers recovered two tinfoils containing marijuana laced with PCP..." -- http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=dc&navby=case&no=943012a - USA v. Michael A. Whren
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Do you have any specific complaints like: historically this has happened and Ron Paul says it'll happen this way. Or going back to the gold standard would be horrible because deflation would stop all consumption.
I would like to know because I am a libertarian and I did not acquire my views lightly. Any real criticism is welcome. Opinion doesn't mean much to me though. Are you suggesting that libertarianism leads to slavery?
Yeah it's crazy, the state closest to the libertarian ideal became the richest country on earth. That's much worse than all other ideologies put together. No I'm not saying the ideology is the only factor but Hong Kong and Singapore are fairly good examples that economic freedom works well even without much natural resources. Why social and economic freedom wouldn't work together is beyond me. I also haven't found a cut-off point where more freedom leads to less prosperity. If you have, please let me know where. All data I've seen indicates that more freedom is better.
That really doesn't do it for me, sorry. We are talking laced marijuana sold as unadulterated marijuana not random seizures from someone who may have knowingly have bought or even added adulterants themselves.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
But, as I also said, he doesn't carry the same stigma of the secret police tag
Which is why you have so much trouble with the term. "Sexual assault" doesn't carry the same stigma as "rape". And why do you think gays decided on that particularly unoffensive word?
Personally you can call it a "pointy shovel" all you want, but a spade's a spade. If you don't like the fact that we have secret police, work to change reality. If you would prefer to ignore the reality you would do better to filter out my slashdot comments, because I call 'em as I see 'em. I don't deliberately piss people off but I won't mince words, either.
They're secret. And they're police. Ignor it or deal with it, it's pointless arguing with you.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
You're kidding? Wow, that's cool. Last I heard it was nearly impossible, but looks like I was misinformed. What about Norway?
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
I don't have time to respond to all your point at the moment but I would like to touch on a few things.
You seem to be taking a very conservative view of what we can do to fix things in this country. Basically, any big changes sounds bad to you. If you take this road of "staying the course" that we're currently on then I think this country is in for ruin in the next 2 - 20 years. Our dollar is taking a nose dive, most countries around the world now hate us to varying degrees, we're spending money like a drunk sailor with an unlimited credit card and there is almost no end in sight, and our civil liberties are being flushed down the nearest toilet (I could go on for hours but you get the point).
Now, if there isn't someone who is willing to come in and say "STOP!" and start reversing the direction then we are headed for a fate equal to the Romans or something similar to what happened here 231 years ago. I believe some like Ron Paul is needed to steer us back on course before we go over the precipice.
Do I think all his ideas are great? Hell no! I think some of his ideas are terrible. However, do I think any of the other candidates (with the exception of possibly Cusinich (sp?)) have a snow balls chance in hell of steering us back on course? Absolutely not!
So taking what's available out there today, I'd much rather take my chances with Paul. At least he's a straight shooter and will tell us what we NEED to hear and not what we WANT to hear.
BTW, I think that the balance of the three branches of government, if they are functioning properly, can keep him in check so he doesn't do too many "wacky things".
We have four boxes with which to defend our freedom: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.
The adulterants cost less than good quality marijuana. Crack and PCP are so very cheap. Logically it must happen, even if I can't find a Google link of people openly buying drugs and testing them. (which would generally be illegal)
We know that cocaine, heroine, etc are almost always "cut" with another cheaper substance. And there are a lot of cases of fake drugs being sold as well. I've seen plenty of people on COPS get busted for look-a-likes that they were trying to sell.
I assume the adulterants that guy added was so he could turn around and sell the pot. I don't think the fairly large amount he had on him was for his own personal use. (and in fact they charged him with intent to distribute, basically slapped him with drug dealer laws)
I don't have any desire to convince you one way or the other. This is not a debate. But I can continue to make comments about hypothesizes of altered cannabis, because it is logically and scientifically sound. And generally accepted. I do not have the resources to start an investigation to prove it to you, and just because *I* can't find something on Google does not mean it doesn't exist. I haven't been able to find my old high school friend's email on Google, but that doesn't mean he doesn't exist either. It just means either Google doesn't have everything, or I'm not that good at searching.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Offtopic name calling is all you can do and you attack my literacy?!
I'd rather be smart and poor at english than a stupid 'literate' anon coward.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news