"Piracy" has been used to mean, among other things, "copyright infringement" since the 1700s.
Learned Hand, a famous American jurist, used "piracy" to describe copyright infringement in the wee years of the 20th century (I read the case in law school, but I can't find it off hand to cite for you; hopefully my positive karma creates at least a modicum of trust that I'm, at a minimum, not lying outright).
Piracy doesn't just mean the sale of infringing materials.
Beyond all that, did you realize that viewing an infringing work is itself copyright infringement? (Note: I may be misremembering this, but I don't think I am.) Also, if you've ever received a video via email and called your coworkers over to watch the hilarity, you've likely infringed under 17 USC 106(4). Unless the video was in the public domain, which chances are it wasn't.
Hell, if you were around when Slashdot linked people to the Scientology OT documents and you viewed them, you pirated the materials (unauthorized duplication--courts ruled that even loading stuff into RAM constitutes a fixed duplication! Never mind temporary storage on a hard drive for streaming video.).
I think there is case law that states possession of infringing material is infringement. I could be misremembering about that, though.
The point is that our copyright system is so royally screwed up at this point that it is impossible for anyone who has the internet to not have infringed copyright at some point or another. A nation of tortfeasors indeed.
Whilst you most definitely can say that music fulfils a psychological need in humans and provides a lot of pleasure. The reality is, this can be done far better by people coming together, you know singing around a camp fire, or be down the pub for a sing around a piano or even dancing to a live band.
I grew up in Victoria, Texas. There were no musicians there that could give me the level of enjoyment that listening to a Ben Folds Five record did. I'd rather listen to the same Whatever and Ever Amen album over and over again rather than go see an endless stream of HOT TOPIC PUNK RAWK YELL YELL METALLICA HELL YEAHRRRR music. My choices in Victoria were country and whatever the aforementioned lyrics fall into. Now, I like some country, but the pleasure of listening to a Ben Folds Five record for me was unparalleled.
Of course, now I live in Austin, and get to see awesome acts whenever I want.
Also, no matter what you say or think, seeing an orchestral work put on by a small town orchestra is nothing like getting to hear a Yo Yo Ma recording.
I'd love to see him in public. But I haven't yet had the dough to actually attend a performance.
Your main thrust is that the social aspect of music trumps the musicianship of the artist performing. This is hardly always true. Would you rather see me play the boogerhorn live and never get to listen to Itzhak Perlman once?
Beyond that, the record industry once did add something functional: In an age where one could not travel to far off lands to hear music, a recording permitted that. The record industry also pressed records, which was prohibitively expensive for artists to do.
Thus, we wouldn't have any recordings from the 50s without the recording industry, crapeaters though they may be. You might as well say that hard drives are parasitical because it's better to see a series of mathematical calculations done live in a social setting by a group of human beings.
Don't think so (the "words" part). Can you offer something supporting this?
Aside from the lectures I attended in my IP law class, here's section 102(a) of 17 USC (the "copyright" title of the United States Code):
Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
How else do you think a speech would be copyrighted? By writing or recording the speech.
You realize documentaries and unscripted TV and radio are also copyrighted, right? Recall that they do not have scripts, so they must attain their copyright status through the fixation in recorded audiovisual form. A class lecture would be the same.
Of course, the facts the professor utters are not copyrightable. The arrangement of facts and specific words the professor utters are what would be copyrighted, and if the student tracks too close to what the professor says, it would be a derivative work, precisely the same as if you wrote down too closely what was said in a Star Trek episode.
if the words of the teacher are close enough to whatever said anyone else like, say, the textbook (and they must be: he is, gasp, teaching) then he would be also infringing other's copyright
In all my years of undergrad and graduate school, I've only had one professor teach from a textbook, and that professor was the author of the textbook. Most professors in the United States that I know of barely touch what is in the material at all.
In law classes, the only things from a text the professor lectures from are cases, which are in the public domain by statute.
If the teacher lectures the class from the teacher's slides and records the lecture, then the teacher has copyright in the written records, the recording, and the words spoken in class.
If the student takes notes that are pretty close to the words the teacher utters, the student would be creating a derivative work of the teacher's (copyrighted) words, thus infringing the teacher's copyright.
The avenues of argument against this are (as I said in other posts here) fair use and implied license.
That's not entirely true. The student's notes would be a derivative work, infringing upon the teacher's copyright.
Of course, fair use ought to release the student of such dangers. Implicit licenses are another alternative, I'd guess: Implicit in the student-teacher relationship is that the student may keep a copy of the notes he takes during class. This seems to be a fundamental element of education, and I would threaten to fire this teacher if he didn't have tenure, were I president of the university or principal of the school.
Your other argument about ideas not being copyrightable is a true statement, but a student taking notes based on the (copyrighted by virtue of being fixed in a recorded medium) words uttered by the professor would be a derivative work of the copyright. Of coruse, the more interpretation of the words the student employs before committing his thoughts to paper (i.e., before the student notates anything) take it further from a derivative work to a transformative, original creation of thought that does not infringe any copyright.
There's usually at least one person in the class who needs the lecture recorded by the professor because they have a disability of some kind. At least, that was the norm when I went to university.
We are party to a treaty that forbids us from deporting people to countries where we have a reasonable belief that they will be tortured.
E.g., recently we cleared a group of Uighurs from China from Gitmo, but we can't deport them to their home country of China because we know China views them as terrorists and will torture them. Thus, we're stuck.
Seeing as some detainees are from Libya and Syria and such, we cannot deport them (knowing that these countries employ torture).
Keep Gitmo, but make it official US soil. Either charge and Prosecute the POWs in a REASONABLE time frame, or let them go.
First of all, Obama actually did this: Get rid of Gitma, and charge and prosecute the detainees in a reasonable time frame, or let them go. You can read the executive order online.
Secondly, just to get technical, you cannot prosecute POWs. It is a violation of the Geneva Conventions to do so. POW status is a privileged status of war, basically saying that the war-actions you took were legally justified and thus not punishable.
Those held in Gitmo may or may not be POWs. The government is supposed to assume they're all POWs until they've held a status-determination tribunal. If they determine them to be POWs, they can be held until the end of hostilities but not prosecuted. If they determine them not to be POWs, they can prosecute them for war crimes and such.
However, for most of the detainees in Gitmo, they have neither had their status determined (despite the fact that Geneva requires it to be done speedily IIRC), nor have they been treated as POWs. Thus, the Bush Administration's treatment of Gitmo has been in violation of the laws of war. The SCOTUS is gradually getting there, with cases such as Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and such.
Although I suspect we'll never actually get that far now that Gitmo is being closed down. Unless, of course, we actually see war crimes charged against members of the Bush Administration.
That would be nice, but it can be done already. Hell, it might even be possible with the wonderfully hacker-friendly Linksys NSLU2 (the "slug").
Get a USB audio-in and a USB audio-out device (can you get them on the same device?) and flash the NSLU2 with OpenWRT. Surely you can write a very simple program to run on OpenWRT (a Linux) that you can feed a maximum decibel or you can feed it a sample of a program.
This sample would provide an "average", from which perhaps only permit variance of a certain magnitude from the average. Some simple math. Anything beyond, say, a standard deviation from the mean would be filtered down to the maximum permitted (or even muted!).
Run the audio from your devices audio-out to the slug, run the soft, then run the slug's audio-out to your speakers or whatever. This, of course, is not a solution if you use your TV's speakers.
I'm sure someone else can fill in the conceptual gaps. Get on it, OpenWRT coders!;)
This is a very ugly English phrase that I can only figure out Cory Doctorow introduced into the internexicon via BB.
Everytime I hear it, I cringe. I really wish people would stop using "congress critter." I mean, in the US, critters are good things like bunnies and cute animals! It's an overwrought phrase.
No offense intended. There are just some phrases that really irk me, and "congress critter" and "more carrot less stick" both do.
Tell me about it. I never blocked ads on Slashdot until about a week ago, when I finally got fed up with this pattern:
Click some hidden comment
Read
Click "reply to this"
type some long comment
open new tabs to find sources for my assertions
come back to comment
click in textbox to add some HTML
somehow get forwarded to another website because Slashdot's screwy new flash-ad system dynamically loads new ads when you view hidden comments occasionally
go back to previous page
page has been contracted back to the original form, without hidden comments expanded
lost my long comment
So, Slashdot, I block your ads now. I didn't want to. But you screwed up royally.
And to point a couple things out, these ads are all invisible (so I don't see them), and the last one to get me sent me to Think Geek.
Do you support my right to own atomic bombs? Just answer me that one question so we can all see how hypocritical or batshit insane you are, based on whether you say "yes" or "no."
if you don't like your current state, you can move to another one with different laws
I'm sure glad we don't have things like VISAs, green cards, and immigration procedures, then (and different languages)! Because if we did, it sure would be difficult to move to the country of your choice!
Imho he can't do that, he can veto before signing but once it becomes law of the land only either the Supreme Court or Congress can do anything about it.
He can, I suppose, instruct the DOJ not to enforce a law. Recall the old rule of thumb: the legislature makes the law, the courts apply the law, and the executive enforces the law.
The subjects don't even have to be under age. They just have to look underage
[citation needed]
I mean, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, a SCOTUS decision from 2002, says otherwise. The law you're citing is the CPPA, of which the SCOTUS had this to say:
In contrast to the speech in Ferber, speech that is itself the record of sexual abuse, the CPPA prohibits speech that records no crime and creates no victims by its production. Virtual child pornography is not âoeintrinsically relatedâ to the sexual abuse of children. While the Government asserts that the images can lead to actual instances of child abuse, the causal link is contingent and indirect. The harm does not necessarily follow from the speech, but depends upon some unquantified potential for subsequent criminal acts. The Governmentâ(TM)s argument that these indirect harms are sufficient because, as Ferber acknowledged, child pornography rarely can be valuable speech, see id., at 762, suffers from two flaws. First, Ferberâ(TM)s judgment about child pornography was based upon how it was made, not on what it communicated. The case reaffirmed that where the speech is neither obscene nor the product of sexual abuse, it does not fall outside the First Amendmentâ(TM)s protection. See id., at 764â"765. Second, Ferber did not hold that child pornography is by definition without value. It recognized some works in this category might have significant value, see id., at 761, but relied on virtual imagesâ"the very images prohibited by the CPPAâ"as an alternative and permissible means of expression, id., at 763. Because Ferber relied on the distinction between actual and virtual child pornography as supporting its holding, it provides no support for a statute that eliminates the distinction and makes the alternative mode criminal as well. Pp. 11â"13.
And here is the summary of the case provided by the SCOTUS itself:
The Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 (CPPA) expands the federal prohibition on child pornography to include not only pornographic images made using actual children, 18 U.S.C. Â 2256(8)(A), but also âoeany visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image or pictureâ that âoeis, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct,â Â2256(8)(B), and any sexually explicit image that is âoeadvertised, promoted, presented, described, or distributed in such a manner that conveys the impressionâ it depicts âoea minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct,â Â2256(8)(D). Thus, Â2256(8)(B) bans a range of sexually explicit images, sometimes called âoevirtual child pornography,â that appear to depict minors but were produced by means other than using real children, such as through the use of youthful-looking adults or computer-imaging technology. Section 2256(8)(D) is aimed at preventing the production or distribution of pornographic material pandered as child pornography. Fearing that the CPPA threatened their activities, respondents, an adult-entertainment trade association and others, filed this suit alleging that the âoeappears to beâ and âoeconveys the impressionâ provisions are overbroad and vague, chilling production of works protected by the First Amendment. The District Court disagreed and granted the Government summary judgment, but the Ninth Circuit reversed. Generally, pornography can be banned only if it is obscene under Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, but pornography depicting actual children can be proscribed whether or not the images are obscene because of the Stateâ(TM)s interest in protecting the children exploited by the production process, New York v. Ferber, 458 U.S. 747, 758, and in prosecuting those who promote such sexual exploitation, id., at 7
I disagree with almost nothing you said. My only disagreement is with your assertion that there's no such thing as "unlawful combatants" legally, until the US made it up in the past decade.
This is demonstrably false. Simply read the history of the term. You'll find that it's discussed extensively in the international humanitarian law literature. Additionally, US history demonstrates your statement false. One merely need look at a very famous SCOTUS case, Ex parte Quirin, from 1942. To quote briefly,
Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful. The spy who secretly and without uniform passes the military lines of a belligerent in time of war, seeking to gather military information and communicate it to the enemy, or an enemy combatant who without uniform comes secretly through the lines for the purpose of waging war by destruction of life or property, are familiar examples of belligerents who are generally deemed not to be entitled to the status of prisoners of war, but to be offenders against the law of war subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals.
Note that I'm not disagreeing with you that they can be tried. The important thing to note is that they can, while POWs cannot be tried for their actions. This is the distinction that makes POWs "lawful combatants" and others "unlawful combatants."
I think you're asserting that there are only two classes of people: POWs and non-detained persons. This is how I read your comments. Unfortunately, Slashdot's <QUOTE> system seems to be broken for me, so it's difficult to read your full comment without going crazy, so I may have missed something you wrote, thinking I wrote it (since we don't really disagree on much of what you said, it could have easily been typed by me).
Now, we agree on the fact that they should be tried by a "regularly constituted court." The problem is that there is no definition of what this is. The SCOTUS has attempted to address this by pointing out properties of such a tribunal. The Bush Administration has continuously tried to bend the law to afford a bare minimum of procedural protections. I think this is abhorrent. As I'm a law student versed in international humanitarian law (I've even taken part in real cases dealing with IHL), I think the Bush Administration has done some terrible things; chiefly among them, have innocent people tortured.
We're on the same page on most things, you and I. I just sought to point out that there is a class of detainees who are not POWs. The legal literature, both US and international, supports my claim. The structure of Geneva contemplates a class of detainees, with POWs as a proper subclass. The complement of the POW-class within the detainee-class is the unlawful-combatant-class. Of course I realize that GCIII did not get written until after Quirin, but my point stands that the US didn't make up the term "unlawful combatant" in the past decade.
One last thing since I've pulled out my copy of Geneva: the flowchart, according to GCIII, Art. 5 is such:
detain individual,
treat like POW,
use competent tribunal to determine whether detainee has a right to POW-status
If detainee is not a POW, afford Common Article 3 protections.
If detainee is a POW, afford all other protections of GCIII.
You do not have to release a person once you've determined they're not a POW.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. But it failed to prevent
- British invasion (1964-1967)
I agree with the general argument you're making (and I've heard similar from musicians), I have something to say about this
The internet may be the preferred medium for distributing music, but it is decidedly not the preferred format for distributing albums.
Recall that an album has liner notes, cover art, and a relatively lossless digitization of the music.
"Piracy" has been used to mean, among other things, "copyright infringement" since the 1700s.
Learned Hand, a famous American jurist, used "piracy" to describe copyright infringement in the wee years of the 20th century (I read the case in law school, but I can't find it off hand to cite for you; hopefully my positive karma creates at least a modicum of trust that I'm, at a minimum, not lying outright).
Piracy doesn't just mean the sale of infringing materials.
Beyond all that, did you realize that viewing an infringing work is itself copyright infringement? (Note: I may be misremembering this, but I don't think I am.) Also, if you've ever received a video via email and called your coworkers over to watch the hilarity, you've likely infringed under 17 USC 106(4). Unless the video was in the public domain, which chances are it wasn't.
Hell, if you were around when Slashdot linked people to the Scientology OT documents and you viewed them, you pirated the materials (unauthorized duplication--courts ruled that even loading stuff into RAM constitutes a fixed duplication! Never mind temporary storage on a hard drive for streaming video.).
I think there is case law that states possession of infringing material is infringement. I could be misremembering about that, though.
The point is that our copyright system is so royally screwed up at this point that it is impossible for anyone who has the internet to not have infringed copyright at some point or another. A nation of tortfeasors indeed.
Of course, by "hard drives" I meant "CPUs and math co-processors" and other actually-correct things that I meant to say.
I grew up in Victoria, Texas. There were no musicians there that could give me the level of enjoyment that listening to a Ben Folds Five record did. I'd rather listen to the same Whatever and Ever Amen album over and over again rather than go see an endless stream of HOT TOPIC PUNK RAWK YELL YELL METALLICA HELL YEAHRRRR music. My choices in Victoria were country and whatever the aforementioned lyrics fall into. Now, I like some country, but the pleasure of listening to a Ben Folds Five record for me was unparalleled.
Of course, now I live in Austin, and get to see awesome acts whenever I want.
Also, no matter what you say or think, seeing an orchestral work put on by a small town orchestra is nothing like getting to hear a Yo Yo Ma recording.
I'd love to see him in public. But I haven't yet had the dough to actually attend a performance.
Your main thrust is that the social aspect of music trumps the musicianship of the artist performing. This is hardly always true. Would you rather see me play the boogerhorn live and never get to listen to Itzhak Perlman once?
Beyond that, the record industry once did add something functional: In an age where one could not travel to far off lands to hear music, a recording permitted that. The record industry also pressed records, which was prohibitively expensive for artists to do.
Thus, we wouldn't have any recordings from the 50s without the recording industry, crapeaters though they may be. You might as well say that hard drives are parasitical because it's better to see a series of mathematical calculations done live in a social setting by a group of human beings.
No.
Aside from the lectures I attended in my IP law class, here's section 102(a) of 17 USC (the "copyright" title of the United States Code):
How else do you think a speech would be copyrighted? By writing or recording the speech.
You realize documentaries and unscripted TV and radio are also copyrighted, right? Recall that they do not have scripts, so they must attain their copyright status through the fixation in recorded audiovisual form. A class lecture would be the same.
Of course, the facts the professor utters are not copyrightable. The arrangement of facts and specific words the professor utters are what would be copyrighted, and if the student tracks too close to what the professor says, it would be a derivative work, precisely the same as if you wrote down too closely what was said in a Star Trek episode.
In all my years of undergrad and graduate school, I've only had one professor teach from a textbook, and that professor was the author of the textbook. Most professors in the United States that I know of barely touch what is in the material at all.
In law classes, the only things from a text the professor lectures from are cases, which are in the public domain by statute.
If the teacher lectures the class from the teacher's slides and records the lecture, then the teacher has copyright in the written records, the recording, and the words spoken in class.
If the student takes notes that are pretty close to the words the teacher utters, the student would be creating a derivative work of the teacher's (copyrighted) words, thus infringing the teacher's copyright.
The avenues of argument against this are (as I said in other posts here) fair use and implied license.
That's not entirely true. The student's notes would be a derivative work, infringing upon the teacher's copyright.
Of course, fair use ought to release the student of such dangers. Implicit licenses are another alternative, I'd guess: Implicit in the student-teacher relationship is that the student may keep a copy of the notes he takes during class. This seems to be a fundamental element of education, and I would threaten to fire this teacher if he didn't have tenure, were I president of the university or principal of the school.
Your other argument about ideas not being copyrightable is a true statement, but a student taking notes based on the (copyrighted by virtue of being fixed in a recorded medium) words uttered by the professor would be a derivative work of the copyright. Of coruse, the more interpretation of the words the student employs before committing his thoughts to paper (i.e., before the student notates anything) take it further from a derivative work to a transformative, original creation of thought that does not infringe any copyright.
There's usually at least one person in the class who needs the lecture recorded by the professor because they have a disability of some kind. At least, that was the norm when I went to university.
We are party to a treaty that forbids us from deporting people to countries where we have a reasonable belief that they will be tortured.
E.g., recently we cleared a group of Uighurs from China from Gitmo, but we can't deport them to their home country of China because we know China views them as terrorists and will torture them. Thus, we're stuck.
Seeing as some detainees are from Libya and Syria and such, we cannot deport them (knowing that these countries employ torture).
First of all, Obama actually did this: Get rid of Gitma, and charge and prosecute the detainees in a reasonable time frame, or let them go. You can read the executive order online.
Secondly, just to get technical, you cannot prosecute POWs. It is a violation of the Geneva Conventions to do so. POW status is a privileged status of war, basically saying that the war-actions you took were legally justified and thus not punishable.
Those held in Gitmo may or may not be POWs. The government is supposed to assume they're all POWs until they've held a status-determination tribunal. If they determine them to be POWs, they can be held until the end of hostilities but not prosecuted. If they determine them not to be POWs, they can prosecute them for war crimes and such.
However, for most of the detainees in Gitmo, they have neither had their status determined (despite the fact that Geneva requires it to be done speedily IIRC), nor have they been treated as POWs. Thus, the Bush Administration's treatment of Gitmo has been in violation of the laws of war. The SCOTUS is gradually getting there, with cases such as Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and such.
Although I suspect we'll never actually get that far now that Gitmo is being closed down. Unless, of course, we actually see war crimes charged against members of the Bush Administration.
That would be nice, but it can be done already. Hell, it might even be possible with the wonderfully hacker-friendly Linksys NSLU2 (the "slug").
Get a USB audio-in and a USB audio-out device (can you get them on the same device?) and flash the NSLU2 with OpenWRT. Surely you can write a very simple program to run on OpenWRT (a Linux) that you can feed a maximum decibel or you can feed it a sample of a program.
This sample would provide an "average", from which perhaps only permit variance of a certain magnitude from the average. Some simple math. Anything beyond, say, a standard deviation from the mean would be filtered down to the maximum permitted (or even muted!).
Run the audio from your devices audio-out to the slug, run the soft, then run the slug's audio-out to your speakers or whatever. This, of course, is not a solution if you use your TV's speakers.
I'm sure someone else can fill in the conceptual gaps. Get on it, OpenWRT coders! ;)
This is a very ugly English phrase that I can only figure out Cory Doctorow introduced into the internexicon via BB.
Everytime I hear it, I cringe. I really wish people would stop using "congress critter." I mean, in the US, critters are good things like bunnies and cute animals! It's an overwrought phrase.
No offense intended. There are just some phrases that really irk me, and "congress critter" and "more carrot less stick" both do.
Tell me about it. I never blocked ads on Slashdot until about a week ago, when I finally got fed up with this pattern:
So, Slashdot, I block your ads now. I didn't want to. But you screwed up royally.
And to point a couple things out, these ads are all invisible (so I don't see them), and the last one to get me sent me to Think Geek.
Oh, now you're just gettin' all mavericky!
Do you support my right to own atomic bombs? Just answer me that one question so we can all see how hypocritical or batshit insane you are, based on whether you say "yes" or "no."
Hm. They created both the DMCA and the Copyright Term Extension Act. Great Congress there! I could go on...
That's exactly what the shaman said, as he let the guy with a sickness writhe around and die instead of treating him.
Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?
I'm sure glad we don't have things like VISAs, green cards, and immigration procedures, then (and different languages)! Because if we did, it sure would be difficult to move to the country of your choice!
He can, I suppose, instruct the DOJ not to enforce a law. Recall the old rule of thumb: the legislature makes the law, the courts apply the law, and the executive enforces the law.
Stop using 4chan definitions. CP = "child pornography," a legal term. Child pornography clearly covers those under the age of majority in the US.
PS Jailbait is, according to the wiktionary,
[citation needed]
I mean, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, a SCOTUS decision from 2002, says otherwise. The law you're citing is the CPPA, of which the SCOTUS had this to say:
And here is the summary of the case provided by the SCOTUS itself:
I disagree with almost nothing you said. My only disagreement is with your assertion that there's no such thing as "unlawful combatants" legally, until the US made it up in the past decade.
This is demonstrably false. Simply read the history of the term. You'll find that it's discussed extensively in the international humanitarian law literature. Additionally, US history demonstrates your statement false. One merely need look at a very famous SCOTUS case, Ex parte Quirin, from 1942. To quote briefly,
Note that I'm not disagreeing with you that they can be tried. The important thing to note is that they can, while POWs cannot be tried for their actions. This is the distinction that makes POWs "lawful combatants" and others "unlawful combatants."
I think you're asserting that there are only two classes of people: POWs and non-detained persons. This is how I read your comments. Unfortunately, Slashdot's <QUOTE> system seems to be broken for me, so it's difficult to read your full comment without going crazy, so I may have missed something you wrote, thinking I wrote it (since we don't really disagree on much of what you said, it could have easily been typed by me).
Now, we agree on the fact that they should be tried by a "regularly constituted court." The problem is that there is no definition of what this is. The SCOTUS has attempted to address this by pointing out properties of such a tribunal. The Bush Administration has continuously tried to bend the law to afford a bare minimum of procedural protections. I think this is abhorrent. As I'm a law student versed in international humanitarian law (I've even taken part in real cases dealing with IHL), I think the Bush Administration has done some terrible things; chiefly among them, have innocent people tortured.
We're on the same page on most things, you and I. I just sought to point out that there is a class of detainees who are not POWs. The legal literature, both US and international, supports my claim. The structure of Geneva contemplates a class of detainees, with POWs as a proper subclass. The complement of the POW-class within the detainee-class is the unlawful-combatant-class. Of course I realize that GCIII did not get written until after Quirin, but my point stands that the US didn't make up the term "unlawful combatant" in the past decade.
One last thing since I've pulled out my copy of Geneva: the flowchart, according to GCIII, Art. 5 is such:
You do not have to release a person once you've determined they're not a POW.