All of the stuff on MySpace.com is the same stuff that generations of kids talk about F2F, surreptitiously pass around in class, and keep in their diaries. Grownups are just shocked to see it.:-)
Cane toads are mildly notorious for their toxin's recreational psychedelic effects. Devotees literally lick a toad to get high. I wonder if vanguard toads have evolved better defenses in the form of more potent toxin?
The "logical" reaction to this study is to delay puberty by chemical means. That would be consistent with Western civilization's tendency to extend the dependency phase of its offspring.
Compulsory schooling was invented in part to extend adolescence. The age of mandatory schooling has risen consistently. The amount of education one needs is hardly relevant. Only the years one must spend in school matter.
"Child" labor laws prevent adolescents from gaining economic independence. It's nearly impossible to become self-supporting before the age of 18 in the U. S. There are moves afoot to raise minimum drivers licensing age to 18 in some States, keeping adolescents dependent upon parents for transportation even longer.
In Italy, it's customary for sons to live with their parents until they marry, often late in their 20s or early 30s. In the U. S., moving back into the nest after college does not carry the stigma that it used to. The rising cost of living, student loans, tough job market, etc., have extended the period of economic adolescence.
Now comes a study showing that it would be in your child's best interests to delay the onset of his puberty. "Although (parents) may have no control over when their child experiences puberty," I'm sure there's a pill for that, or soon will be, and now the thought of searching for it is being planted. Also note that so-called victimization was less common among "those who reported having higher levels of attachment with their parents."
A matriarchal bias seems to be at work in this prolonging of dependency, especially male dependency. Most schoolteachers are female, and every one of them is trained to encourage emotional dependence. This study claims that a boy who has mainly female friends is not victimized as often. (I wonder if the researchers examined any of the ways that girls victimize boys?) And most blatant of all, "females are really good for men," Piquero said. "Women seem to help curtail men's bad experiences."
I find this research rather sinister.
Seriously, laws which legislate morality are never successful without an oppressive regime to enforce them.
1. No type of law can be successful without a "regime" that "oppresses" violators by enforcing the laws.
2. All laws are legislations of morality. Morality is a generally accepted code of conduct peculiar to a given society. In South America and the Middle East, bribery is moral. In China, skinning dogs and cats alive to make them taste better is moral. Here in the U. S., neither pratice is moral.
From the article:
"If I bought a CD that had DRM" -- the software that blocks duplication -- "I would obviate it," Chernyak says, carefully. "If there are laws I believe are wrong, I will break them."
Yes, that's incompatible with any law firm's work.
1. Under federal law, (18 U. S. C. 2251 et. seq.) definitions of child porn are limited to visual depictions, i. e., images. You can write anything you wish about minors.
The problem with "fictitious minors" is that since the advent of sophisticated computer imaging technology, nearly everyone charged with child pornography has claimed that the images did not depict real minors.
2. In Free Speech Coalition v. Ashcroft (April, 2002), the Supreme Court overturned sections of 18 U. S. C. 2256 which defined as porn any image that "appears to be" or "conveys the impression" that it is of a minor, even if no minor was involved in the image's creation.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-795.ZO.ht ml
3. Congress responded in March, 2003, with a new definition (18 U. S. C. 2256(8),(9), & (11)), that criminalizes any porn image that is "virtually indistinguishable" from an "identifiable minor."
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/analysis.aspx? id=11865
4. 18 U. S. C. 2256(11) says, "This definition does not apply to depictions that are drawings, cartoons, sculptures, or paintings depicting minors or adults."
Bottom line: don't make your fake porn so well that an ordinary person using ordinary means of inspection can't tell if it's fake or real.
This leaves a lot of room for protected depictions of apparent minors engaging in sexual acts or just standing around naked.
The new definition of "fictitious child porn" has not yet been challenged in court.
I consider Sony BMG to be a burglar and a vandal.:-) If its crime was kiddie porn instead of crappy, overpriced music, then it would be charged with producing and distributing copies of music. It's a licensed manufacturer and distributor of CDs that contain music. Wholesale distributors to whom BMG sells CDs are not licensed to manufacture more of them.
But BMG does not "produce" music in the sense that you mean. Musicians do that. They perform the original work of creative expression. Musicians don't make or produce music; they do music. The really bad musicians can be said to commit music.
Brian Hill, the perp in this case, did not commit kiddie porn. He made copies of kiddie porn that someone else committed. He is not being prosecuted as if he committed kiddie porn.
Those who committed the porn - that is, enabled and/or participated in sexual acts involving children and the original depiction of those acts - would be charged with the same crime as Hill plus sexual abuse of a child, child endangerment, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and probably other crimes that I don't know. I hope that satisfies slashdotters' sense of justice.
But in any case, Hill, and everyone who has downloaded or burned kiddie porn, made more kiddie porn.
It's pretty standard negotiation strategy. You make a high offer and see what results you get, then back down incrementally until your revenues and profits are optimized.
So would you be comforted if the next version of Websters defined "theft" to include "copyright infringement"? This would move an entire class of crime from civil to criminal. That's a huge shift.
The meaning of words can change. The law should not change with the meaning of the word. The law should only change with the changing of the law by legistators.
Absolutely right. When construing a statute, judges do indeed consider what its words meant at the time the statutes were written. Their overriding objective is to determine the intent of the legislators who wrote the statute.
The meaning of the word "make" used by the appellate court has been in common use since the Middle Ages.
"Amateur jurisprudence"? The phrase is senseless.
OK, Miles, what do you imagine jurisprudence is? You've failed to get the definition of any other legal term correct so far. I can't wait to see how you fumble this one!
Before one can declare a law good or bad, one must decide what the law means. That is what courts do.
Three Michigan courts have agreed on what this law means: the district, circuit, and appellate courts. Each of the lower courts' decisions was rendered by one judge. The appellate court consists of three judges, who are unanimous in their decision. That's a total of five judges, all presumably experts in Michigan law and the general practice of law, who concur that copying child porn from a hard drive to a CD-R constitutes making child porn within the meaning of the relevant statute. That's quite good enough for me, especially in the absence of any coherent argument to the contrary.
Is a law bad because it criminalizes the making of child porn? I dun tink so, Lucy!
Is there a difference between making mountains of child porn and distributing it all over the Earth, and making a single copy that is never shared with anyone else? Of course there is. If a law imposed the same punishment for both degrees of violation, then it would be flawed. But such is not the case here.
The Michigan law provides a penalty of "not more than" 20 years and/or a fine "not more than" $100,000. It does not mandate a fixed sentence of 20 years and $100K regardless of the degree of severity of the violation. The law allows the specific punishment to be tailored to the specific crime.
That is a good law, by any standard.
Is there something bad about a law that allows a defendant to be put at risk of severe punishment for what may be a relatively minor violation? Absolutely not! Only the actual sentence received can be judged as too harsh or lenient.
All three courts (and 5 judges) ruled properly that the defendant can be charged with making child porn.
There is nothing bad about the Michigan statute as it is written.
What's special about burning is that the court was asked to rule on burning. Had it been asked to rule on downloading, it would have reached the same conclusion. Downloading makes a new, addition copy of a file.
1. There is more than one judge on the MI appellate court, and the decision represents their consensus.
2. One never moves a file from hard drive to CD. A new copy is made on the CD, then the original is deleted from the hard drive.
3. The ruling was on the definition of "make," not "reproduction." That definition exactly fits what the defendant did.
You have completely ignored the normative/policy aspect to my introductory comment.
Of course I have. How Canada writes its child porn laws is of no significance in this U. S. case.
Dave - The defendant inarguably increased the amount of child porn in existence...
Miles - This illustrates the perversity of attempting to interpret the provision with no sense for its purpose.
It illustrates your ignorance of the provision's purpose and your unwillingness to read the court's opinion, which discusses the provision's purpose. Whoever causes the amount of child porn to increase will be punished severely. That's the provision's purpose.
Child pornography can only *possibly* cause harm to the child-victims (and perhaps their personal contacts) and arguably its viewers (cognitive dissonance). *Re*production without distribution by someone already in possession cannot possibly exacerbate the offence. This is a pretty clear signal that "reproduction" should not be read into the definition of "production".
All three of your declarations are flawed.
1. Children who have not yet been victims or pornographers are harmed by the existence of child pornographers. They live with the threat that they may be seduced by pornographers or their customers. Their relationships with all adults are impaired by this threat. The obvious solution is to eliminate child porn. That's why Michigan's law severely punishes anyone who increases the amount of child porn in existence.
2. Reproduction of child porn makes more of it available. Even if it is not actively distributed, more of it means more chances for it to find its way into the hands of others inadvertently. Such is the legislative reasoning. Hence the severe punishment for reproducing child porn.
3. Once again, you wrongly claim that the court substituted "reproduction" for "production." The statute, which you still don't seem to have read in the court's opinion, criminalizes the production of reproductions from original depictions of child porn and from other reproductions of such depictions.
You still don't understand the workings of "ejusdem generis." It has nothing to do with giving a "shared meaning" to a list of items. It only restricts general references to a list of items to items of the same kind as those in the list. For example, "cars, trucks, buses, and other vehicles." If a reference is later made to "vehicles," it cannot be applied to planes or boats, because they are not land vehicles.
The "mental element" of this case certainly is irrelevant. The appellate court was asked by the defendant to decide only one question: whether the burning of child porn to CD-Rs constituted "making" of child porn within the meaning of the statute. The defendant's state of mind at the time he burned the CD-Rs was not at issue, so the court could not rule upon it. (The defendant's state of mind will be contested at trial, no doubt. "I thought I was only moving one copy from hard drive to CD, not making a new copy!" But it is irrelevant to this case before the appellate court.)
Strict construction grants the benefit of any doubt about a statute's meaning to the defendant only if doubt exists. The appellate court found no room for doubt about whether burning child porn to CD-Rs constitutes "making" child porn, based solely on the literal meaning of the words in the statute and a clear understanding of what happens during "burning:" a new copy of the subject matter is made.
All of your amateur jurisprudence that isn't wrong is irrelevant.
What jury??? The case has not even been tried yet! All these appeals are about is whether or not the prosecution can charge the guy with making kiddie porn!
So shouldn't just downloading it to a hardrive be considered making a copy of it
Of course. Before you downloaded, there was no copy of the file on your hard drive; after downloading, there is a copy of the file on your hard drive.
What if he ripped the hardrive he downloaded it to out of his computer? Would that then turn into making a copy?
No. You simply moved the same file from inside of your computer to outside of it. Do you make a copy of a magazine when you move it from a shelf to a table?
You didn't bother reading the opinion, which quotes the law under which this guy was charged verbatim. The law - which this court did NOT make - criminalizes making kiddie porn; making copies of kiddie porn; and making copies of copies of kiddie porn.
Slashdot Mirror
It's application will be in outsourced customer service, of which medicine is only a subset. Buy stock now!
All of the stuff on MySpace.com is the same stuff that generations of kids talk about F2F, surreptitiously pass around in class, and keep in their diaries. Grownups are just shocked to see it. :-)
From TFA:
:-)
(Note: These figures exclude psychology and social sciences, such as economics, that are often counted in S&E totals.)
And we accuse Asians of inflating their S&E figures?
The first four benefits come standard with every wife. The final three are benefits only to guys.
Cane toads are mildly notorious for their toxin's recreational psychedelic effects. Devotees literally lick a toad to get high. I wonder if vanguard toads have evolved better defenses in the form of more potent toxin?
His firing was a blessing. There MUST be a better job waiting for him!
The "logical" reaction to this study is to delay puberty by chemical means. That would be consistent with Western civilization's tendency to extend the dependency phase of its offspring. Compulsory schooling was invented in part to extend adolescence. The age of mandatory schooling has risen consistently. The amount of education one needs is hardly relevant. Only the years one must spend in school matter. "Child" labor laws prevent adolescents from gaining economic independence. It's nearly impossible to become self-supporting before the age of 18 in the U. S. There are moves afoot to raise minimum drivers licensing age to 18 in some States, keeping adolescents dependent upon parents for transportation even longer. In Italy, it's customary for sons to live with their parents until they marry, often late in their 20s or early 30s. In the U. S., moving back into the nest after college does not carry the stigma that it used to. The rising cost of living, student loans, tough job market, etc., have extended the period of economic adolescence. Now comes a study showing that it would be in your child's best interests to delay the onset of his puberty. "Although (parents) may have no control over when their child experiences puberty," I'm sure there's a pill for that, or soon will be, and now the thought of searching for it is being planted. Also note that so-called victimization was less common among "those who reported having higher levels of attachment with their parents." A matriarchal bias seems to be at work in this prolonging of dependency, especially male dependency. Most schoolteachers are female, and every one of them is trained to encourage emotional dependence. This study claims that a boy who has mainly female friends is not victimized as often. (I wonder if the researchers examined any of the ways that girls victimize boys?) And most blatant of all, "females are really good for men," Piquero said. "Women seem to help curtail men's bad experiences." I find this research rather sinister.
... is whether the toilet paper should unwind over or under the roll.
Seriously, laws which legislate morality are never successful without an oppressive regime to enforce them. 1. No type of law can be successful without a "regime" that "oppresses" violators by enforcing the laws. 2. All laws are legislations of morality. Morality is a generally accepted code of conduct peculiar to a given society. In South America and the Middle East, bribery is moral. In China, skinning dogs and cats alive to make them taste better is moral. Here in the U. S., neither pratice is moral.
From the article: "If I bought a CD that had DRM" -- the software that blocks duplication -- "I would obviate it," Chernyak says, carefully. "If there are laws I believe are wrong, I will break them." Yes, that's incompatible with any law firm's work.
1. Under federal law, (18 U. S. C. 2251 et. seq.) definitions of child porn are limited to visual depictions, i. e., images. You can write anything you wish about minors. The problem with "fictitious minors" is that since the advent of sophisticated computer imaging technology, nearly everyone charged with child pornography has claimed that the images did not depict real minors. 2. In Free Speech Coalition v. Ashcroft (April, 2002), the Supreme Court overturned sections of 18 U. S. C. 2256 which defined as porn any image that "appears to be" or "conveys the impression" that it is of a minor, even if no minor was involved in the image's creation. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-795.ZO.ht ml
3. Congress responded in March, 2003, with a new definition (18 U. S. C. 2256(8),(9), & (11)), that criminalizes any porn image that is "virtually indistinguishable" from an "identifiable minor."
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/analysis.aspx? id=11865
4. 18 U. S. C. 2256(11) says, "This definition does not apply to depictions that are drawings, cartoons, sculptures, or paintings depicting minors or adults."
Bottom line: don't make your fake porn so well that an ordinary person using ordinary means of inspection can't tell if it's fake or real.
This leaves a lot of room for protected depictions of apparent minors engaging in sexual acts or just standing around naked.
The new definition of "fictitious child porn" has not yet been challenged in court.
I consider Sony BMG to be a burglar and a vandal. :-) If its crime was kiddie porn instead of crappy, overpriced music, then it would be charged with producing and distributing copies of music. It's a licensed manufacturer and distributor of CDs that contain music. Wholesale distributors to whom BMG sells CDs are not licensed to manufacture more of them.
But BMG does not "produce" music in the sense that you mean. Musicians do that. They perform the original work of creative expression. Musicians don't make or produce music; they do music. The really bad musicians can be said to commit music.
Brian Hill, the perp in this case, did not commit kiddie porn. He made copies of kiddie porn that someone else committed. He is not being prosecuted as if he committed kiddie porn.
Those who committed the porn - that is, enabled and/or participated in sexual acts involving children and the original depiction of those acts - would be charged with the same crime as Hill plus sexual abuse of a child, child endangerment, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and probably other crimes that I don't know. I hope that satisfies slashdotters' sense of justice.
But in any case, Hill, and everyone who has downloaded or burned kiddie porn, made more kiddie porn.
It's pretty standard negotiation strategy. You make a high offer and see what results you get, then back down incrementally until your revenues and profits are optimized.
So huge you didn't even notice it, did you? :-)
See http://kb.iu.edu/data/aliv.html
The meaning of words can change. The law should not change with the meaning of the word. The law should only change with the changing of the law by legistators.
Absolutely right. When construing a statute, judges do indeed consider what its words meant at the time the statutes were written. Their overriding objective is to determine the intent of the legislators who wrote the statute.
The meaning of the word "make" used by the appellate court has been in common use since the Middle Ages.
"Amateur jurisprudence"? The phrase is senseless. OK, Miles, what do you imagine jurisprudence is? You've failed to get the definition of any other legal term correct so far. I can't wait to see how you fumble this one! Before one can declare a law good or bad, one must decide what the law means. That is what courts do. Three Michigan courts have agreed on what this law means: the district, circuit, and appellate courts. Each of the lower courts' decisions was rendered by one judge. The appellate court consists of three judges, who are unanimous in their decision. That's a total of five judges, all presumably experts in Michigan law and the general practice of law, who concur that copying child porn from a hard drive to a CD-R constitutes making child porn within the meaning of the relevant statute. That's quite good enough for me, especially in the absence of any coherent argument to the contrary. Is a law bad because it criminalizes the making of child porn? I dun tink so, Lucy! Is there a difference between making mountains of child porn and distributing it all over the Earth, and making a single copy that is never shared with anyone else? Of course there is. If a law imposed the same punishment for both degrees of violation, then it would be flawed. But such is not the case here. The Michigan law provides a penalty of "not more than" 20 years and/or a fine "not more than" $100,000. It does not mandate a fixed sentence of 20 years and $100K regardless of the degree of severity of the violation. The law allows the specific punishment to be tailored to the specific crime. That is a good law, by any standard. Is there something bad about a law that allows a defendant to be put at risk of severe punishment for what may be a relatively minor violation? Absolutely not! Only the actual sentence received can be judged as too harsh or lenient. All three courts (and 5 judges) ruled properly that the defendant can be charged with making child porn. There is nothing bad about the Michigan statute as it is written.
Take a writing class.
You'll find case law and precedent aplenty in the Michigan court's opinion: http://tinyurl.com/cxzsy
Uh-huh. And what about music pirates' argument that they help create demand for a particular musical work by giving it broader exposure?
What's special about burning is that the court was asked to rule on burning. Had it been asked to rule on downloading, it would have reached the same conclusion. Downloading makes a new, addition copy of a file.
1. There is more than one judge on the MI appellate court, and the decision represents their consensus. 2. One never moves a file from hard drive to CD. A new copy is made on the CD, then the original is deleted from the hard drive. 3. The ruling was on the definition of "make," not "reproduction." That definition exactly fits what the defendant did.
You are mistaken if you think you can make a derivative work without the permission of the original work's copyright owner. http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.html#who
You have completely ignored the normative/policy aspect to my introductory comment.
Of course I have. How Canada writes its child porn laws is of no significance in this U. S. case.
Dave - The defendant inarguably increased the amount of child porn in existence...
Miles - This illustrates the perversity of attempting to interpret the provision with no sense for its purpose.
It illustrates your ignorance of the provision's purpose and your unwillingness to read the court's opinion, which discusses the provision's purpose. Whoever causes the amount of child porn to increase will be punished severely. That's the provision's purpose.
Child pornography can only *possibly* cause harm to the child-victims (and perhaps their personal contacts) and arguably its viewers (cognitive dissonance). *Re*production without distribution by someone already in possession cannot possibly exacerbate the offence. This is a pretty clear signal that "reproduction" should not be read into the definition of "production".
All three of your declarations are flawed.
1. Children who have not yet been victims or pornographers are harmed by the existence of child pornographers. They live with the threat that they may be seduced by pornographers or their customers. Their relationships with all adults are impaired by this threat. The obvious solution is to eliminate child porn. That's why Michigan's law severely punishes anyone who increases the amount of child porn in existence.
2. Reproduction of child porn makes more of it available. Even if it is not actively distributed, more of it means more chances for it to find its way into the hands of others inadvertently. Such is the legislative reasoning. Hence the severe punishment for reproducing child porn.
3. Once again, you wrongly claim that the court substituted "reproduction" for "production." The statute, which you still don't seem to have read in the court's opinion, criminalizes the production of reproductions from original depictions of child porn and from other reproductions of such depictions.
You still don't understand the workings of "ejusdem generis." It has nothing to do with giving a "shared meaning" to a list of items. It only restricts general references to a list of items to items of the same kind as those in the list. For example, "cars, trucks, buses, and other vehicles." If a reference is later made to "vehicles," it cannot be applied to planes or boats, because they are not land vehicles.
The "mental element" of this case certainly is irrelevant. The appellate court was asked by the defendant to decide only one question: whether the burning of child porn to CD-Rs constituted "making" of child porn within the meaning of the statute. The defendant's state of mind at the time he burned the CD-Rs was not at issue, so the court could not rule upon it. (The defendant's state of mind will be contested at trial, no doubt. "I thought I was only moving one copy from hard drive to CD, not making a new copy!" But it is irrelevant to this case before the appellate court.)
Strict construction grants the benefit of any doubt about a statute's meaning to the defendant only if doubt exists. The appellate court found no room for doubt about whether burning child porn to CD-Rs constitutes "making" child porn, based solely on the literal meaning of the words in the statute and a clear understanding of what happens during "burning:" a new copy of the subject matter is made. All of your amateur jurisprudence that isn't wrong is irrelevant.
What jury??? The case has not even been tried yet! All these appeals are about is whether or not the prosecution can charge the guy with making kiddie porn!
So shouldn't just downloading it to a hardrive be considered making a copy of it Of course. Before you downloaded, there was no copy of the file on your hard drive; after downloading, there is a copy of the file on your hard drive. What if he ripped the hardrive he downloaded it to out of his computer? Would that then turn into making a copy? No. You simply moved the same file from inside of your computer to outside of it. Do you make a copy of a magazine when you move it from a shelf to a table?
You didn't bother reading the opinion, which quotes the law under which this guy was charged verbatim. The law - which this court did NOT make - criminalizes making kiddie porn; making copies of kiddie porn; and making copies of copies of kiddie porn.