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Obama DoJ Goes Against Film Companies
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "If one attempted to distill a single prevailing emotion or attitude about government on Slashdot, I think it is fairly arguable that the winner would be cynicism or skepticism. Well here's a story that could make us skeptical and/or cynical about our skepticism and/or cynicism. Chalk one up for those who like to point out that, occasionally, the system does work. You may recall that the US Supreme Court has been mulling over whether to grant the film industry's petition for certiorari seeking to overturn the important Cartoon Networks v. CSC Holdings decision from the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. This was the case which held that Cablevision's allowing its customers to make copies of shows and store them on Cablevision's servers for later viewing did not constitute a direct copyright infringement by Cablevision, there being no 'copy' made since the files were in RAM and buffered for only a 'transitory' duration. The Supreme Court asked the Obama DoJ to submit an amicus curiae brief, giving its opinion on whether or not the film companies' petition for review should be granted. The government did indeed file such a brief, but the content of the brief (PDF) is probably not what the film companies were expecting. They probably thought they had this one in the bag, since some of the very lawyers who have been representing them have been appointed to the highest echelons of the Obama DoJ. Instead, however, the brief eloquently argued against the film companies' position, dismembering with surgical accuracy each and every argument the film companies had advanced."
He knows the opposition's position as well as his so he can counter it up front. If he can't put himself in the opposition's shoes and argue against them, then they're going to suck.
These guys argued the other side forever, they *should* know how to tear that apart now.
Can someone mod those lawyers up? +1 insightful.
paul reinheimer
You think that this is anything other then tactical deception? Seriously. You're not nearly cynical enough. The Obama government, just like the Bush government, was all about control. It's a nice brief, but it doesn't change anything about the new thugs, just like the old thugs.
It's nice to see things happening the way they are meant to happen. While the DoJ employees are not elected by the people, they are appointed by people who are. They are, in theory, supposed to represent the will and needs of the people, not corporations or lobbyists with money. Hopefully this will open up the debate about rewriting copyright and property laws in the age of information and the internet.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
"since some of the very lawyers who have been representing them have been appointed to the highest echelons of the Obama DoJ."
Sometimes people just need a reminder that there is no grouping of people with less principles than Lawyers. We made the assumption that, since RIAA lawyers were hired to the DOJ, that they would find in favor of the RIAA. But it seems that lawyers are almost always megaphones for who is signing their paycheck.
And in this situation, it worked out in our favor.
...is right twice a day. Despite the common belief that the US government is way beyond screwed up, occasionally there is an outbreak of common sense. (Once you stop laughing about the words 'common sense' and 'government' in the same sentence, you can mod me up.)
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
That is like blaming car accident deaths on seat belts(not wearing them/them not existing) rather than bad driving. Lack of regulation is not what killed the global economy. Regulation could prevent it from happening again, maybe, but that doesn't mean a lack of regulation caused anything.
If everyone involved in the lending crisis had done a little homework before buying the loan packages they would have realized that they were paying too much. It was their own free will to buy the crappy loans, no one forced them. Regulation is just forcing people to do the homework + making people jump through more hoops.
Sort of, non-intervention wouldn't necessarily be bad. What's bad is fascism. I know I'll get modded down for it, but the Republicans more or less destroyed the economy through interfering when people wanted to set limits on corporations and stepping out of the way when corporations wanted to interfere with people. Intervening on behalf of corporations against the people is definitely a popular policy amongst fascists, combine that in with the ruthless mindless nationalism and you've got the makings of a party that Mussolini would be proud of. A policy of complete non-intervention would likely work better than that, but still over the long term you'd end up with the upper classes owning everything with the everybody else in indentured servitude.
Grrr. This always pops up here. Lawyers are supposed to represent the client's interest. If the client is RIAA, they are supposed to make arguments that support RIAA's goals and aims. If you're client is the Federal Government (and thus, the interests of the 'people'), you are supposed to argue their views.
What the lawyer actually thinks is correct doesn't have a whole lot of traction here. If the clients arguments or interests are so repugnant to the lawyer that they feel that they can't represent them successfully, they are bound to tell the client, but that's about it. No, it's not perfect, not a great system but it seems to work better than anything else we've come across.
A lawyer well versed in a particular case dammed well ought to be able to argue both sides of the issue. It's what they do for a living.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's a really good point. That's why I advocate turning over all economic policy making to hyper-intelligent, omniscient, perfectly altruistic robot overlords.
Oh, we don't have those yet? Guess we better go with that "regulation" thing.
Sounds like non intervention is good policy. See what it did to the banking system and global economy?
There's a difference between involvement and empire-building. Right now the USA is empire-building, they just don't call it that because it would be unpopular. What we're doing right now is sort of like Theodore Roosevelt's "dollar diplomacy" except on a whole new level of ruthlessness (see also: economic warfare, narcoterrorism). It's definitely empire-building, there is no other good way to describe using covert operations to overthrow democratically-elected governments and replace them with dictators who are favorable to our interests, which is something the USA has a long history of doing from the Iranians to the South Americans. That, by the way, is why the terrorists hate us, why there are so many people who are so desperate that they are willing to commit suicide attacks just to strike at us. It is not because of our freedoms or because we don't require women to cover up head to toe. What they do is atrocious and I am not saying it's right, only that we're not the innocent bystander victims that we like to think we are and that maybe we're having so many problems with these people because of how much we have provoked them for generations.
The surpreme accomplishment of the power-mad fucks who are behind all of this (the "old money" families that constitute the American aristocracy, like the Carnegies, the Rothchilds, the Rockefellers, and the Morgans and others) is that the average American has no idea that any of this goes on. It's hard to oppose what you don't even know about, after all. Next time you hear about a "shadow government" that uses the media and public schooling in order to keep people stupid, well, this is what that refers to.
I suggest you go look up the definition, history, and maybe some examples of fascism, having somebody help you when you stumble over the hard words. Because calling the Republicans "fascists" (at least, while giving the "hey GM CEO, you be fired now, k?" Democrats a pass) is pretty silly.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
This needs to be the main focus of digital rights, at least right now. When I buy something, I should have the right to transfer it to any media form I deem proper for my own uses. Heck, if I wanted to transfer my DVDs to BetaMax, I should have the right (of course, the reverse is also true and the more likely/useful application of this theory).
I was initially skeptical about the alleged, lauded virtue of Barrack Obama, but the more I see of his actions, the more I'm forced to concede that I was wrong, and that in this case, water genuinely has flowed uphill, to use that analogy.
Obama's level of integrity is genuinely intimidating, for the simple reason that an American President is, at this point in history, expected to be a thoroughly amoral and corrupt human being. That he isn't, is rightfully seen almost as a violation of physical law. Bush's degree of evil had almost become reassuring, purely because of its' level of routine familiarity. When he attempted to do something monstrous, it was entirely expected.
Even with Bush aside, it is also a paradox when considered in light of the dynamics of political power in general. Reading Machiavelli and virtually every other treatise on the subject, one is left with the overwhelming conclusion that the single greatest prerequisite of political power is amorality, to the extent that it can be said that an individual's degree of political power will be directly proportional to their level of amorality.
Given this, Dick Cheney is perhaps a more likely example of who we would ordinarily expect to hold the office of President, morally speaking, than Obama. Cheney is, according to virtually every depiction of him, a consciously, willingly, and indeed enthusiastically evil individual. He is, therefore, far more consistent, both from study of political theory in general, and observation of American political history in particular, with the type of individual who I would expect to hold the office of the Presidency.
It is said that within a democracy, a people get the leader they deserve. I'm not entirely sure what Americans have done recently to deserve a leader with Obama's comparitive level of decency, especially given that Bush was so far to the opposite, but even for us outside America, Obama's integrity is certainly very welcome.
It will be fascinating to observe just how far outside of the established, conventional rules Obama is permitted to go.
If one attempted to distill a single prevailing emotion or attitude about government on Slashdot, I think it is fairly arguable that the winner would be cynicism or skepticism.
Yeah right. Like we're expected to believe what you think about slashdot's opinion. You know, it's summaries like this that prove we can't expect much change either from the government OR slashdot... PS: For the HUMOR impaired, the above was meant to be a skeptical, cynical comment. But THIS bit is actually sarcasm.
I am "humor impaired", and you had me there.
But seriously, the comments to my story so far demonstrate that this welcome bit of good news does nothing at all to dampen the raging cynicism and skepticism which seem to be the prevailing winds of Slashdot.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Fascism is supreme belief in the power of the state and/or the party and that if you're "against them" you're "against ."
If you're not with us, you're AGAINST US!
If you don't like Bush, GET THE FUCK OUT OF AMERICA!
If you don't like the Patriot Act, MOVE TO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY!
If you're against the war, YOU'RE AGAINST THE TROOPS!
That's fascism, and those are all quotes I've heard from Republicans, either personally or have seen at demonstrations on YouTube. None of those quotes is made up.
That's fascism, FishWithAHammer. Obama asked GM's CEO to step down and be replaced. It wasn't forced, just like we weren't forcing them to take billions of dollars of funds that would protect America's stake in the international automotive industry. But hey, if they wanted it, they had to make some concessions.
Unlike Bush, who was totally in favor of just giving away ten times as much money with no accountability whatsoever.
But you'd be a fool not to play the scam like everybody else. The rational choice for a person was to treat their home like an ATM, after it was a "sure bet" and if they didn't, they would regret it. Even if they knew it was a scam, they figured if they got screwed everybody was screwed so why not play?
In other words, good regulation can keep a bunch of individuals who are making rational decisions from screwing up the entire system. Sometimes what is right for one person is harmful to the whole. The lending crisis is an example of that.
Maybe we should appoint the judge whose opinion this is?
We?
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Any argument that requires a strong majority of the populace to be an intelligent and rational actor is flawed. At least half of the human race falls below the mean intelligence level. When was the last time high school taught a course that detailed how to get a loan in a safe way, or how to sensibly manage credit? Many high schools don't even require civics courses, preferring instead a selection of "multicultural studies", "introduction to computers", and "remedial English grammar".
Any argument that requires a strong majority of businesses to act in a completely ethical fashion, without external pressures, is flawed. Corporations exist only to extract wealth. Thanks to the de-regulation of the last couple of decades, businesses have been free to take any action that improves the bottom line. They loaned to people with no income verification, to people who were blatantly unable to repay the loans. Predictably, many of these people defaulted on their loans. The credit industry cannot function when the default rate erases any possible profits, and eats into capital besides. This is a case of individual businesses acting to harm the environment (the industry in which they work) for their own selfish gains, a true "tragedy of the commons".
A rational and educated actor would have been able to see 5 years into the future, and know that their income would not suffice for them to manage the repayment.
A rational and educated government would have been able to look back to 1929, and draw lessons from the boom time immediately before the crash that spawned the great depression.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Big government is bad.
That's the Reagan myth which has been handed down, and which has caused our present crisis, that it's okay to have big corporations but not big government. It doesn't work that way. If you're going to have mega-corporations running business, you need big government to regulate them.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Hear hear! Wanna know why Blu Ray isn't catching on? Because I (like many others) have one player in my house that can play those disks. When I get a movie, I often see the DVD sitting right next to the Blu Ray, and I think "well, DVD looks good enough, it's $10 cheaper, and I can play it in any room in my house and on the road in my computer." The Blu Ray sits on the shelf while the DVD goes home with me. It's only by making tech ubiquitous and easy to use, and by changing the laws to make the content that we buy/pay for actually usable that products get sold. DECSS probably sold more DVDs than any marketing campaign ever... and anyone else notice how free, recordable, over the air television (paid for with embedded-but-removable commercials) is catching back on?
If you don't like Bush, GET THE FUCK OUT OF AMERICA!
I anxiously await the departure from our shores of every single person who said the above, now that most of them are hysterically going after the sitting, properly elected President with every bit of preposterous garbage they can pull out of their asses. Seriously, by your own definition, you hate America; please leave immediately. The grown-ups have important stuff to do and your tantrums have grown annoying. Don't make us spank you and send you to bed without your dinner.
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap.
--Jeckler (/. Beta IS GARBAGE!)
http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS327US327&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=define:fascism
A lot of people disagree with you. Fascism is not "primarily" an economic descriptor. Fascism has in fact, little to do with socialism or capitalism. It's a political ideology that the government is best and that they can cure our ills. This can take the form of extreme pressure or crimes against political dissidents, or it can take the form of state-owned monopolies, or other things. Fascism starts with a single kernel of an ideology: our way is best, you aren't part of us, so get the fuck out of our way or join us.
That's it. It's patriotism taken to its most extreme. In Italy, it meant if Benito Mussolini contradicted himself, he was right both times. It means that whatever the government does is right, and if you aren't for it, you're against it and you're hurting (pick at least one): progress, the future, the children, democracy, the nation, the system... Etc.
The extreme nationalism encourages people to accept things like government ownership of things, because after all, if you're not with them, you're against them. And the troops. And the flag. And whatever else.
And let's be honest, Bush's supporters (note I did not say Bush himself) were the closest to fascists this nation has ever had. They were those hyper-nationalistic people you refer to.
What we probably really need is smaller corporations. Another part of the Reagan legacy was to relegate antitrust enforcement and securities law enforcement to a back seat. We need a strong dose of government to start moving away from monopolization, anticompetitive practices, and financial gamesmanship. And to move towards investment in the people who live here, with health care, education, child care, housing for the homeless, etc. Then when we have made some progress in those areas, we can start talking about reducing the size of government. But not until then.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I wish I had mod points. This weak minded PC world of moral relativism must be abolished. Copyright holders demand to be taken seriously and insist others listen to their arguments. I DONT NEED TO, your arguments are worthless because the position you already occupy is outrageous. The stated intent of the law was to promote innovation. Being able to profit from one work for a life time does not do that, it eliminates the need for innovation almost entirely.
Return to the bright bright line and we can have an intelligent discussion listen to each other and hash out the specifics, till then I am for damaging the strength of copyright law in any possible way, including making completely impossible to enforce on a technical level such that everyone is a violator and the entire concept becomes a sad joke. Chances are that we can't come back from that point, which does not bother people like me much so maybe you pro IP types aught to think about giving us some concessions because there are more of us and eventually we will defeat you; yes some of us are willing to whip others into what amounts to an unruly mod to do that.
A power struggle is an awful hard fight to win, once one side has excepted anarchy as satisfactory outcome, and a large enough group of people start to fell that would be preferable to your continued control; that is whats happening slowing in the world of IP. "Information wants to be free," is catching on.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I have no need to hide behind the AC mask. Whoever spreads this trash are pretty desperate. OF COURSE some blacks voted for Obama, just because he's black. It's no different than all the white people who voted against him just because he's black. I happen to be non-black. I'm a veteran, for that and some other reasons, I really WANTED to vote for McCain. So - why didn't I? Well - McCain was far more likely to get my SONS killed than Obama. McCain wouldn't have exactly followed in Bush's steps, but he would have followed closely enough that it wouldn't have made a tremendous difference. Do I really CARE that our president is a funny looking nappy headed non-white? Not much. I voted for him because he understands more about world culture than McCain ever did, or will. The man has lived in places that McCain just flew over in a fighter jet. Tremendously different perspective. The black guy can relate to the world, whereas McCain used the world as a background on which to acquire targets. McCain may not be a pure neocon, but he does believe in much of the agenda of the New American Century. It is McCain's mission to spread corporate control around the world, supposedly for the benefit of Americans, but really for the benefit of those wealthiest 2% of Americans who already have more money than they can ever spend.
With one son in the Army, and one son in the Navy, I really feared for their lives with Bush in control. Obama may or may not commit to some action which puts their lives in peril - but I'm fairly confident that the purpose of that action WILL NOT BE to enrich our wealthiest 2%. That is exactly what Iraq accomplished, with the neocons in charge.
While you bitch and belly ache about the "nigger" in the White House, I breathe a sigh of relief. My own funny looking kids (sans the nappy heads) are far more likely to live long enough to give me some grandchildren to play with.
Bottom line? Fuck off, you cretinous redneck!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
When Obama was elected, one of the things that was most apparent was his understanding of technology and related issues. When he appointed the ??AA lawyers to the DOJ, there was a large outcry from people who believed he was being influenced by his party's traditional media kowtowing.
The specific lawyers who represented the RIAA and MPAA, and are now in the DOJ, are recused for two years from working on any of these types of matters. So they are not supposed to have had anything whatsoever to do with this brief. And from all appearances they did not
I'm wondering if the ??AA lawyer appointments weren't designed to "take them out of the game". If so, it's a brilliant move, IMHO. :)
And both are not tailored to the system our government model was devised to handle.
Our market system was intended to handle millions of small-time companies. Not a small number of really powerful ones. Market pressure between the smaller companies, coupled with their smaller sizes are what is supposed to self-regulate the economy on that frontier, allowing the federal government to do its ACTUAL job, of managing inter-state commerce, and foreign trade relations.
Considering that we currently have the latter condition, with a handful of really large companies, I am greatly in favor of high levels of antitrust legislation to break their market dominance powers, and lower the barriers to entry in the markets they currently control.
However, it is my personal opinion that government really shouldn't be meddling there; I only support it because of the current conditions which require it.