Why did you write your first paragraph in US legal jargon? It doesn't apply here. The BBC article explains that police superintendents already have the right to forcibly extract DNA from more or less anyone they please, and the bill will give inspectors the same privilege.
CCTV cameras scare me. On the whole I agree with David Brin that they're inevitable, but keeping them under police control is not good. Over the past couple of years ther has been about one case per month of tapes mysteriously disappearing when people claim to have been battered by police officers. And just to make things worse, it's illegal to make private Rodney King-type recordings: videoing the police in public can lead to convictions for stalking, and camcorders are often conviscated.
This is not to say that most police officers are thugs or anything. It's just that in my lifetime whenever the authorities have demonstrated their unfitness to wield power, the home secretary (whoever he may be) has responded by giving them more. An interesting question, which has not yet been properly investigated, is how easy it is to forge DNA evidence.
Even better - IIRC, it was actually to fulfill a condition in an international treaty, part of the GATT round.
Not so. The copyright industry invariably claims its abuses are required by the WIPO. Members of Congress apparently don't bother to read the treaty, and rubber-stamp whatever absurd legislation passes their way.
It reminds me of the 'de facto declaration of war' on North Vietnam in order to uphold the South's independence as guaranteed by the Geneva Accords. Even ten seconds' examination of the agreement would have revealed that it guaranteed the unity of Vietnam. There is an important lesson here for lobbyists.
Oh, they would have to be simple. Otherwise, we couldn't find them.
Complex laws are sometimes easier to find than simple ones. The periodic table predates quantum electrodynamics. Diabetes was well known before the discovery of insulin. Mendel had to work out all those complicated rules about different crosses before he discovered genes.
Third, how in the hell did michael come up with this analogy of researching sexual disorders being banned by the law? It makes me wonder if he actually read the article, since the definition of "sexually explicit" comes nowhere near banning research of sexual disorders (at least those along the traditional disease lines -- I suppose some kinky sex disorders might fall into this category,though).
The definition includes "any description... of sexual excitement, sexual conduct...", among other things. So anything on the subject of erectile dsyfunction is out. Anything on sexual transmission is out. Anything on conception is out. Reading down a little, I notice fetishism is included in the definition of "sexually explicit" even when it is entirely implicit. I like the definition of 'sadomasochistic abuse': "actual or explicitly simulated flagellation or torture by or upon a person who is nude or clad in undergarments, a mask or bizarre costume, or the condition of being fettered, bound or otherwise physically restrained on the part of one so clothed". It seems like a pretty complete description of televised so-called wrestling, although it does also include things like crucifixes.
I expect agency heads will issue blanket permission for activities such as doctors using medical records. I'm more worried about the hundreds of normal things which fall under the broad definition given. Even if people realise they need permission, no agency head will have time to approve everything in writing.
If the State of Virginia wants an official policy against viewing sexually explicit content, let it have one. It doesn't need to pass a law for every little internal administrative decision.
What do you do if someone is mailing you unpleasant jpegs? You can't show your boss or the admin, or even reread the messages to work out whence they came, without written permission from your agency head. If the head grants permission (which he won't if he's the person harassing you), this fact will have to be made available to the public. Do you really want everyone in Virginia to know you're receiving abusive pictures?
It's not "State's Rights" -- it is "employer's rights" to set and/or restrict the duties of the employee. The fact that the employer is the State of Virginia serves only to confuse the issue.
Surely not. The Commonwealth of Virginia can set and/or restrict its employees' duties without passing laws. And if employees do something their employer doesn't want, that's not usually a crime.
This is just as ludicrous the second time around. Medical information about sexual disorders is not pornography.
Exactly. The act doesn't mention pornography - the ban is on "sexually explicit content" defined as:
(i) any description of or (ii) any picture, photograph, drawing, motion picture film, digital image or similar visual representation depicting sexual bestiality, a lewd exhibition of nudity, as nudity is defined in 18.2-390, sexual excitement, sexual conduct or sadomasochistic abuse, as also defined in 18.2-390, coprophilia, urophilia, or fetishism.
Medical resources, especially resources dealing with reproductive health, often contain descriptions of sexual conduct, etc.
Think about this: if you have a sexual disorder, do you really want to be treated by a doctor who thinks he can find information on your problem at www.bigtits.com?
No, but I do want to be treated by a doctor who is allowed to keep up to date with MEDLINE.
I am not a lawyer, street or otherwise. But I'm sceptical of some of this. For reference the order, of the 22nd of May, as translated in the Center for Technology and Democracy link, is:
YAHOO Inc.: to take all necessary measures to dissuade and make impossible any access via yahoo.com to the auction service for Nazi merchandise as well as to any other site or service that may be construed as an apology for Nazism or contesting the reality of Nazi crimes
YAHOO France: to issue to all internet surfers, even before use is made of the link enabling them to proceed with searches on yahoo.com, a warning informing themof the risks involved in continuing to view such sites;
continuance of the proceeeding in order to enable YAHOO Inc. to submit for deliberation by all interested parties the measures that it proposes to take to put and end to the trouble and damage suffered and to prevent any further trouble
You wrote:
First, Yahoo are offering a service into France... If Yahoo were merely offering a service that French citizens happened to be able to pick up, things might be different, but the existence of yahoo.fr means that this particular train left some time ago.
Yahoo! offers the yahoo.fr service in France, but yahoo.com is a service offered in the USA that French citizens happen to pick up. Yahoo! has never disputed French jurisdiction over the content of yahoo.fr. Surely French law applies to yahoo.fr and US law applies to yahoo.com, but not vice versa? I can imagine that France might have a Helms-Burtonesque law which prohibits companies from trading in France if they sell Nazi relics abroad, but as far as I know, it doesn't.
Right, that's cleared up. Now, secondly, it's an important principle that the law does not compel anyone to do the impossible. If there were genuinely nothing that Yahoo could do, a French court would never fine them. It would end up simply ruling that they could not offer the service in France (reread what is meant by "offering a service" above).
As noted above, Yahoo! doesn't offer the service in France, but that isn't stopping the fines. As for compelling Yahoo! to do the impossible, there's a big difference between it being impossible for Yahoo! to stop French people looking at yahoo.com auctions and judge Gomez knowing it's impossible for Yahoo! to stop French people looking at yahoo.com auctions. Judges have been known to err on technical questions far removed from their domain of expertise *cough* Kaplan *cough*. You and I, most other slashdot readers and at least two of the court's experts realise that point 1 of the order can only be achieved by closing the auctions site, weeding out all Nazi-related items, or disconnecting France from the Internet.
Yahoo removed the Nazi auctions from yahoo.fr, but placed a link reading "If you want to research more about this subject, please visit yahoo.com". This seems a bit blatant to me; they were attempting to comply with the letter rather than the spirit of the ruling and ended up complying with neither.
The link was there already, and the judge did not ask Yahoo! to remove it. See point 2 of the order.
Second, the court ruled that Yahoo could and should have set up their site so as to refuse requests from French IP addresses or which came from clickthroughs from yahoo.fr. Yahoo's defence against this (a similar line of argument is implied in the article above) was that such a ban would be easy to circumvent using an anonymiser.
Which ruling are you referring to? The first ruling ordered the actions mentioned above. The second order repeated the first, without modification. It did not rule that Yahoo was now allowed to merely block some French access to Nazi-related auctions.
This misses the point. The point is that someone who goes to the trouble of using an anonymiser and avoiding yahoo.fr, is pretty clearly intentionally buying Nazi regalia in the knowledge that it is illegal to do so in France.
Your point, not the court's point. The order was to 'make impossible any access', not 'make impossible unintentional access'. Besides, how many times have you unintentionally typed 'Waffen SS' into yahoo.fr's auction search, then unintentionally searched for it again on yahoo.com?
Finally, Yahoo could have put a banner on the appropriate pages warning that material was made available which was against the law of France, but refused to do so. I have absolutely no fucking idea why they refused this one,
Swearing is less informative than a quick glance at the documents:
Whereas Yahoo France maintains that it has fully complied with the terms of our order of 22nd May 2000 by modifying the link referred to by the plaintiffs, by installing the warning mentioned in the order on several other links, by advising surfers of the terms of use of the service which are accessible to users when they log on to Yahoo.fr and which can be viewd on all Yahoo.fr pages with effect from 3rd November 2000, and by amending the general terms of use of the service to include a message exceeding the requirtements of the court order of 22nd may 2000 and worded in the terms of the new Article 6.2;
However, Judge Gomez explained he wanted the warning displayed on every link to yahoo.com, not just on the link displayed after searching for material outlawed in France. This seems to have come as a surprise to yahoo.fr, since the second point of the order appeared to mean the warning should only be displayed on relevant pages.
Why should France be any different than Nazi Germany or Budesrepublic? France is in Europe; it follows European traditions of government: the divine right of kings, the omnipotent state founded on racial purity or upon the knowldege of the iron laws of history, the will of people as embodied in Il Duce, etc.
I don't see how France's law can both not differ from Nazi Germany and also not differ from the Bundesrepublik. These states have very little in common constitutionally. And FYI, France cut off the divine right of kings very sharply over 200 years ago and the state has been unusually tractable by strikes and other public protest since 1968. It is more racially diverse than most European countries, with large black and Arab minorities, does not claim to have any Marxian insight into history, and is a democracy. Having said all that, I don't agree with this law.
Yahoo wasn't forced to pay its taxes by a government, folks. It was forced by its own lawyers and accountants, who were afraid that America would impound the assets of yahoo.com
They're not really pusillanimous assholes, just greedy, shortsighted fools...
So anyone who complies with any law is a greedy, shortsighted fool?
Yahoo! was forced to make most of these changes to its auction system. It was not forced to countersue at substantial expense and with no hope of damages. And Yahoo! knows when that case is heard it will be attacked by some (I hope not all) Jewish organisations in the US and pilloried by the media. It would be nice to think that some of the people whose rights they're defending will defend Yahoo!
Curators of the Science Museum in London measured Babbage's surviving components and found them to be well within tolerances. However, he had to pay an awful lot for them. Their conclusion was that he could have built the engine if he'd had less determination, and compromised on the specifications (e.g. by using 10-digit denary numbers instead of 30). But Charles Babbage was a very stubborn man.
The Science Museum has successfully built part of Difference Engine No. 2 and is now working on its printer.
The complaint for declaratory relief is quite interesting, especially for those who doubt which side Yahoo! is on. It raises some interesting questions, such as:
Why did Judge Gomez choose two non-Francophones for the three-member advisory panel?
Why would a Briton describe the reengineering as 'half-assed' and not 'half-arsed'?
The Yahoo! auction page is described in the translated judgement as 'the largest vehicle in existence for the promotion in (sic) Nazism'. That makes it sound like the Hindenburg.
>They did the same with audio tapes, VCRs, cd burners, and DVDs.
>
>Is it illegal to copy them? Yes.
What law in what country makes it illegal to copy audio tapes, video tapes, CDs and DVDs? Last I heard, every jurisdiction in the world allowed these to be copied for fair use.
This has the blessing of the FCC, the backing of all the major broadcastors, and
all the major electronics producers (my emphasis).
Try reading the article:
But now the Consumer Electronics Association, which represents manufacturers, says it's asking the FCC to make the license document available for public comment and proceed from there to make changes in it. The trade group has a list of complaints about as long as the 34-page license itself. The biggest beef is that consumers, who already are wary of buying expensive new TVs, will be less inclined if they think they won't have any control over what they can record.
-----
Nobody is upset (well except for some geeks) over DVD region coding...
That's because nobody (well, except for some Americans) buys region-locked DVD players.
3)There is no clear "bad guy"...when the customers bitch about the expense of a pay per view world, the FCC will blame the broadcastors for demanding this protection, the broadcastors blame the equipment manufacturers for designing the system they have to use, and the equipment makers blame the FCC for forcing them to use the standard. Even if one of these groups gets hit hard by the public to change back to the old analog system, all three would have to agree.
The broadcasters 'have to use' the standard, but it's their choice whether to make a particular program uncopyable. They can hardly say they're forced to charge $x per viewing, where x>0. And abandoning the war on copying would not require reverting to analog. The FCC could just remove its endorsement from this particular standard.
Does anyone have any technical information on the standard (like even its name)? [I N S I D E]'s description is superficial and jokey.
> does omegadan.com net and org sound like a business to you?
If it's not a business, why did you register it in the commercial domain?
Re:Responsibility and censorship
on
Nazis on Napster
·
· Score: 1
>It's not censorship unless it comes from a government agency...
WTF?
So when censorware blocks its critics, that isn't censorship because the government doesn't require it? When heretics were burned in the Middle Ages that wasn't censorship because it was church law, not the state? Please stop trying to arbitrarily redefine words and write something constructive (or nothing).
Furthermore, how is this relevant? This music is banned by governments, who are trying to stop Napster from distributing it.
nothing to do with Big business or online music.
on
Nazis on Napster
·
· Score: 1
>Some races are just better at certain things than others, and it will always be that way.
Evidence? For the first assertion, I mean - the second is obviously false.
>Africans are great runners and atheletes,
Some are, some aren't. Ditto Europeans, Asians, Americans, Australians...
>asians are good at math,
Some are, some aren't. Ditto Australians, Americans, Europeans, Africans...
>and white people just seem to have the ability to live in almost an climate...
Oh, yeah, that would explain why the Horn of Africa was so healthy for European colonists, and why the Vikings in Greenland thrived through environmental changes that wiped out the Inuit. [/sarcasm]
>I know that sounds a bit sterotypical, but sometimes sterotypes can be true...
Like the stereotype that all racists are stupid, perhaps? There have been some very accomplished racist scholars in the past (JBS Haldane, for example), but they seem to be pretty thin on the ground here.
Why do you say involuntary filtering is not censorship? In the USSR printing the Koran (or, more famously, the Bible) was forbidden, and it was also illegal to bring a copy from overseas. If the first restriction was censorship, why wasn't the second? In any case, this law does not (usually) apply to either the sending end or the receiving end of a communication. It applies to an intermediary. Even if filtering is not a kind of censorship, it doesn't follow that:
>Thus, this bill does not threaten anyone's 1st amendment rights in any way.
IANAA, but doesn't the First Amendment forbid Congress from abridging free speech? If I'm not allowed to say something to the general public, or to my children, or on the phone, or in English, or in a squeaky voice, that is a restriction, even if I'm still allowed to say it in some specific way to some select subset of the world's population. (The fact that I would not be the person committing an offence if the communication took place does not mean that the law would not affect my rights. For example, if there was a law preventing officials from registering me to vote, my right to vote would be affected.)
Pedantry aside, your idea of community censorship sounds both disturbing and disgusting. 'Communities' are stifling enough already, without giving them the legal power to censor what their members may read. Although if you just mean that people should be able to use the library without having goatse.cx displayed everywhere they look, I have no quarrel with that. But that has nothing to do with community standards: it doesn't matter whether 100% of the community dislikes it, or 50%, or 10% or 1% (the Slashdot community). And no federal or even state law should be needed for that - is it a federal offence to shout in a library? I suspect not.
I think you are remembering the German who tried to register a name like teenpenpals.com (or.de perhaps) for teenagers to exchange messages. The registrar rejected the application because 'teen' was reserved for 'adult' sites.
Slashdot Mirror
CCTV cameras scare me. On the whole I agree with David Brin that they're inevitable, but keeping them under police control is not good. Over the past couple of years ther has been about one case per month of tapes mysteriously disappearing when people claim to have been battered by police officers. And just to make things worse, it's illegal to make private Rodney King-type recordings: videoing the police in public can lead to convictions for stalking, and camcorders are often conviscated.
This is not to say that most police officers are thugs or anything. It's just that in my lifetime whenever the authorities have demonstrated their unfitness to wield power, the home secretary (whoever he may be) has responded by giving them more. An interesting question, which has not yet been properly investigated, is how easy it is to forge DNA evidence.
In both cases, I was pulled over for trivial things, like failing to use a turn signal at 1AM on a deserted street.
If the street was deserted, who pulled you over?
Not so. The copyright industry invariably claims its abuses are required by the WIPO. Members of Congress apparently don't bother to read the treaty, and rubber-stamp whatever absurd legislation passes their way.
It reminds me of the 'de facto declaration of war' on North Vietnam in order to uphold the South's independence as guaranteed by the Geneva Accords. Even ten seconds' examination of the agreement would have revealed that it guaranteed the unity of Vietnam. There is an important lesson here for lobbyists.
Complex laws are sometimes easier to find than simple ones. The periodic table predates quantum electrodynamics. Diabetes was well known before the discovery of insulin. Mendel had to work out all those complicated rules about different crosses before he discovered genes.
Well done, you've done both at once!
That depends whether the State likes them or not, doesn't it?
Police are exempt.
The definition includes "any description
I expect agency heads will issue blanket permission for activities such as doctors using medical records. I'm more worried about the hundreds of normal things which fall under the broad definition given. Even if people realise they need permission, no agency head will have time to approve everything in writing.
What do you do if someone is mailing you unpleasant jpegs? You can't show your boss or the admin, or even reread the messages to work out whence they came, without written permission from your agency head. If the head grants permission (which he won't if he's the person harassing you), this fact will have to be made available to the public. Do you really want everyone in Virginia to know you're receiving abusive pictures?
Surely not. The Commonwealth of Virginia can set and/or restrict its employees' duties without passing laws. And if employees do something their employer doesn't want, that's not usually a crime.
Exactly. The act doesn't mention pornography - the ban is on "sexually explicit content" defined as:
Medical resources, especially resources dealing with reproductive health, often contain descriptions of sexual conduct, etc.
Think about this: if you have a sexual disorder, do you really want to be treated by a doctor who thinks he can find information on your problem at www.bigtits.com?
No, but I do want to be treated by a doctor who is allowed to keep up to date with MEDLINE.
You wrote:
Yahoo! offers the yahoo.fr service in France, but yahoo.com is a service offered in the USA that French citizens happen to pick up. Yahoo! has never disputed French jurisdiction over the content of yahoo.fr. Surely French law applies to yahoo.fr and US law applies to yahoo.com, but not vice versa? I can imagine that France might have a Helms-Burtonesque law which prohibits companies from trading in France if they sell Nazi relics abroad, but as far as I know, it doesn't.
As noted above, Yahoo! doesn't offer the service in France, but that isn't stopping the fines. As for compelling Yahoo! to do the impossible, there's a big difference between it being impossible for Yahoo! to stop French people looking at yahoo.com auctions and judge Gomez knowing it's impossible for Yahoo! to stop French people looking at yahoo.com auctions. Judges have been known to err on technical questions far removed from their domain of expertise *cough* Kaplan *cough*. You and I, most other slashdot readers and at least two of the court's experts realise that point 1 of the order can only be achieved by closing the auctions site, weeding out all Nazi-related items, or disconnecting France from the Internet.
The link was there already, and the judge did not ask Yahoo! to remove it. See point 2 of the order.
Which ruling are you referring to? The first ruling ordered the actions mentioned above. The second order repeated the first, without modification. It did not rule that Yahoo was now allowed to merely block some French access to Nazi-related auctions.
Your point, not the court's point. The order was to 'make impossible any access', not 'make impossible unintentional access'. Besides, how many times have you unintentionally typed 'Waffen SS' into yahoo.fr's auction search, then unintentionally searched for it again on yahoo.com?
Swearing is less informative than a quick glance at the documents:
However, Judge Gomez explained he wanted the warning displayed on every link to yahoo.com, not just on the link displayed after searching for material outlawed in France. This seems to have come as a surprise to yahoo.fr, since the second point of the order appeared to mean the warning should only be displayed on relevant pages.
I don't see how France's law can both not differ from Nazi Germany and also not differ from the Bundesrepublik. These states have very little in common constitutionally. And FYI, France cut off the divine right of kings very sharply over 200 years ago and the state has been unusually tractable by strikes and other public protest since 1968. It is more racially diverse than most European countries, with large black and Arab minorities, does not claim to have any Marxian insight into history, and is a democracy. Having said all that, I don't agree with this law.
Compare:
Yahoo wasn't forced to pay its taxes by a government, folks. It was forced by its own lawyers and accountants, who were afraid that America would impound the assets of yahoo.com
They're not really pusillanimous assholes, just greedy, shortsighted fools...
So anyone who complies with any law is a greedy, shortsighted fool?
Yahoo! was forced to make most of these changes to its auction system. It was not forced to countersue at substantial expense and with no hope of damages. And Yahoo! knows when that case is heard it will be attacked by some (I hope not all) Jewish organisations in the US and pilloried by the media. It would be nice to think that some of the people whose rights they're defending will defend Yahoo!
The Science Museum has successfully built part of Difference Engine No. 2 and is now working on its printer.
>They did the same with audio tapes, VCRs, cd burners, and DVDs.
>
>Is it illegal to copy them? Yes.
What law in what country makes it illegal to copy audio tapes, video tapes, CDs and DVDs? Last I heard, every jurisdiction in the world allowed these to be copied for fair use.
Does anyone have any technical information on the standard (like even its name)? [I N S I D E]'s description is superficial and jokey.
> does omegadan.com net and org sound like a business to you?
If it's not a business, why did you register it in the commercial domain?
>It's not censorship unless it comes from a government agency...
WTF?
So when censorware blocks its critics, that isn't censorship because the government doesn't require it? When heretics were burned in the Middle Ages that wasn't censorship because it was church law, not the state? Please stop trying to arbitrarily redefine words and write something constructive (or nothing).
Furthermore, how is this relevant? This music is banned by governments, who are trying to stop Napster from distributing it.
>Some races are just better at certain things than others, and it will always be that way.
Evidence? For the first assertion, I mean - the second is obviously false.
>Africans are great runners and atheletes,
Some are, some aren't. Ditto Europeans, Asians, Americans, Australians...
>asians are good at math,
Some are, some aren't. Ditto Australians, Americans, Europeans, Africans...
>and white people just seem to have the ability to live in almost an climate...
Oh, yeah, that would explain why the Horn of Africa was so healthy for European colonists, and why the Vikings in Greenland thrived through environmental changes that wiped out the Inuit. [/sarcasm]
>I know that sounds a bit sterotypical, but sometimes sterotypes can be true...
Like the stereotype that all racists are stupid, perhaps? There have been some very accomplished racist scholars in the past (JBS Haldane, for example), but they seem to be pretty thin on the ground here.
Why do you say involuntary filtering is not censorship? In the USSR printing the Koran (or, more famously, the Bible) was forbidden, and it was also illegal to bring a copy from overseas. If the first restriction was censorship, why wasn't the second? In any case, this law does not (usually) apply to either the sending end or the receiving end of a communication. It applies to an intermediary. Even if filtering is not a kind of censorship, it doesn't follow that:
>Thus, this bill does not threaten anyone's 1st amendment rights in any way.
IANAA, but doesn't the First Amendment forbid Congress from abridging free speech? If I'm not allowed to say something to the general public, or to my children, or on the phone, or in English, or in a squeaky voice, that is a restriction, even if I'm still allowed to say it in some specific way to some select subset of the world's population. (The fact that I would not be the person committing an offence if the communication took place does not mean that the law would not affect my rights. For example, if there was a law preventing officials from registering me to vote, my right to vote would be affected.)
Pedantry aside, your idea of community censorship sounds both disturbing and disgusting. 'Communities' are stifling enough already, without giving them the legal power to censor what their members may read. Although if you just mean that people should be able to use the library without having goatse.cx displayed everywhere they look, I have no quarrel with that. But that has nothing to do with community standards: it doesn't matter whether 100% of the community dislikes it, or 50%, or 10% or 1% (the Slashdot community). And no federal or even state law should be needed for that - is it a federal offence to shout in a library? I suspect not.
I think you are remembering the German who tried to register a name like teenpenpals.com (or .de perhaps) for teenagers to exchange messages. The registrar rejected the application because 'teen' was reserved for 'adult' sites.
>...there isn't ANYTHING out there that 'effectively blocks most objectionable content.'
Block everything but a list of government-approved sites. That presumably was the intention from the beginning.