I lived in New York for five years, and I agree with you: it's very easy for even residents there to mistake East for West or (to a lesser extent) North for South when getting out of the subway.
What's nearly impossible, though, as I said in my post, is mistaking West for North.
How could anyone lose track of cardinal directions in DC, even for a moment? It's built on a NS/EW grid, with the streets named on a number/letter system. It's got a giant phallic symbol sticking up in the exact middle (which is at 16th street NW, okay, but that still shouldn't affect one's sense of north vs. west).
The only place I can imagine where it would be harder to mistake west for north would be Manhattan, with its street (EW) vs. avenue (NS) distinction being impossible to miss.
Just to clarify, becasue the lede is quite misleading: this is not a "Texas court". State courts (e.g., the courts of Texas) do not handle patent infringement disputes or remedies. This is a Federal court located in Texas. The scope of the injunction is therefore nationwide. The fact that it's in Texas is a red herring -- its only significance is that this particular Federal Court (EDTx) has a history of being extremely friendly to patent holders.
AFAICT, the actual article has nothing to do with piracy. It's just about lowering transaction costs in your licensing business by using a standardized (CC) license instead of hiring lawyers. Doctorow seems to be addressing companies with media assets who are generally CC-friendly, but who are nervous about how to monetize the idea and so stick exclusively to non-commercial CC variants. The article describes a model whereby a for-profit media licensing business model can be built using modified CC licenses. That's it. He's not talking to Hollywood. He's talking to people who already know what CC is and think it's a good idea, but also want to make some cash off their media assets. I mean, Christ, it's in the first paragraph of the story.
Clearly they don't understand very much, because if they did they'd see that censorship is a tool that's very useful to totalitarian regimes, and a dual purpose one to boot: silencing opposing points of view and hiding their own crimes & vices.
Again, I don't disagree with you. But are you really going to stand up and defend the right of the Hutu Power guys running the radio station to broadcast the locations of Tutsi "cockraoches" to the roving machete-rape squads? And if not, then where is the line being drawn between reasonable and unreasonable censorship? Is Lou Dobbs calling for Mexican immigrant concentration camps on FOX News closer to the Hutu Power boys, or closer to Thomas Jefferson? I think it depends on context: if the US were to see an drastic upswing in hate crimes targeting immigrants, I can see how curbing that kind of incitement could be justified. Germany has a very specific context when it comes to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, obviously. I live in Canada, which has much more restrictive hate-speech laws than the US, and yet there seems to be more accountability, transparency, and free discourse up here than in the US (where I grew up), and people are much nicer to each other as well. My primary reason for opposing hate-speech laws in the US is because I know that they would be drafted and enforced to protect specific politically powerful interests, rather than marginalized groups. I really do think that this is an area where the right balance struck by the law depends a lot on context.
However when the website chooses, without compulsion and of its own free will, to favour one party over another that's wrong.
You know what else is wrong? Selling people's personal information and bombarding them with penis enlargement pill ads in exchange for allowing them to send email to their friends.
Here's the bad news: private companies do things that aren't very nice, but not illegal, and actually pretty much inevitable in a capitalist system, all the time. To compare them to the Nazis every time they do things like this is, maybe, not so helpful. It might lead to a certain loss of perspective and make the speaker and listener both worse off for it. That's all I'm saying.
Had Hitler not been imprisoned and seemingly "martyred" for his beliefs, he wouldn't have written Mein Kampf, and the Nazi party, unable to find a martyr to rally behind would slowly fade away...
Agreed. Henceforth, we shall stop imprisoning people who do bad things, lest they become martyrs to the cause for which they were imprisoned, thus creating a fascist movement dedicated to (murder/rape/jaywalking). Indeed, we should instead imprison those who do GOOD things, creating martyrs who will inspire virtue in the populace! And all men shall walk on the water, and swim upon the land. Huzzah!
In other news, your historical counterfactual is ridiculously overstated, as is the argument it tries to support. Look, I'm not an advocate of censorship, but I understand its appeal to Germans, who understand fascism and the cultural forces giving rise to a bit better than, I daresay, you seem to. America today is much closer to fascism than Germany, despite the wonderful (I mean that sincerely) protections for speech afforded by the US constitution.
Note also that this story is not about government censorship, but about some guys running a website that shows you ads and sells your personal information in exchange for letting you talk to your friends and post pictures of your boobs. As The Dude would say: this isn't a First Amendment thing, Walter.
There are plenty of people alive the lived under them and remember a time when openly joining a political party other than the Communists meant jail time.
Dude, totally! And like, someday Germans will get to tell their kid about how joining a party other than the officially sanctioned ones could, like, totally result in not being able to get your Facebook feed updated with official party event invitations! You could only get invitations to events from some other person setting up a non-official facebook group for the party, which meant you wouldn't get the little blue background bar invites in your facebook feed! And sometimes the javascript didn't work right to update your Twitters, so you'd totally have to get it sent to email instead! Dark times, dude, dark times.
I'm sorry, but: do you really not feel that these comparisons are maybe just a little bit silly?
Outlawing thought certainly sounds crazy to me. But I have those "American 1st-Amendment sensibilities"
I won't argue with you, because I don't disagree. But if this is the issue with which people have a problem, then their beef is with German law and politics at a pretty deep level. Germany is much more restrictive about who gets to be a political party than, say, the US. Of course, they can point to this policy as one of the reasons their political discourse -- unlike that of the US -- isn't dominated by white supremacists (Glenn Beck, Strom Thurmond), religious fanatics (Scientologists, Christian Dominionists), and so on. Which, I have to admit, is a pretty appealing upside.
Also, just to clarify: yeah, I think this is a dick move (although I'm too lazy to read the details, so I could be wrong). But then, I remember Facebook having a whole passel of election-related gizmos last fall that only included the Republican and Democratic parties. As a supporter of neither of those parties, I naturally took this as further validation of my belief that Facebook is a stupid toy run by and for trivial people. You know what I didn't think, though? That FACEBOOK = NAZIS!!1!
Sweet! So far this thread has produced comparisons between a social networking site's account deletion policy and both 1) the Nazis (see above) and 2) the Stasi. Can I get a Joseph Stalin up in here? Some Genghis Kahn metaphors? Or have those already popped up below my filter level?
If you have a sufficient sized following and your trying to get into power to improve your country why should you be treated any different than the rest of the political parties?
Here's a hint: they probably don't let white supremacist or neo-Nazi parties sign up for accounts, either. Because expressing those kinds of opinions about how to "improve your country" is illegal in Germany. Which may offend American 1st-Amendment sensibilities, but given Germany's history, I can't say it's such a crazy policy.
So while I agree with you that the Pirate Party deserves to be included, the very broadly inclusive policy you've described would never -- and could never, legally -- fly in Germany.
Sorry, maybe I misunderstand your comment, so let me make sure: are you seriously comparing the account deletion policy on a social networking site to the Nazis? Please tell me I've misunderstood. Please.
The U.S. government cannot prevent you from sharing particular content online, but the site that you use for hosting the content may.
... because that company is in danger of being sued for copyright infringement, which is a cause of action created by Federal statute and enforced by Federal courts (whose officers are paid with Federal tax dollars). So, the federal government is enforcing a censorship law. I don't see how you've argued around that basic fact.
I agree with you that Youtube is under no obligation to accept videos that infringe copyright, or any videos at all for that matter. But that doesn't mean that federal copyright law isn't acting here to censor Constitutionally protected speech.
The problem is that AP doesn't want to stop Google from indexing them, they just want to be paid more.
Exactly. Like I said in the AP story two days ago:
It's even more ridiculous and pathological than that: the AP is simultaneously whining about how aggregators link to their articles and also about how search engines DON'T link to their articles. This is typical schizophrenia from an industry that is in hysterical denial because the world has changed and their business model no longer works. They can't even articulate what they want; they just want to go back to the way things used to be, when Mommy used to play with them and feed them all day. Embarrassingly infantile.
A friend of mine tells stories about her little brother, who used to hate taking a bath as a little kid, alternating between "I'm freezing!" and "It's burning my skin off!" every few seconds as excuses to try to get out of the tub.
It's even more ridiculous and pathological than that: the AP is simultaneously whining about how aggregators link to their articles and also about how search engines DON'T link to their articles. This is typical schizophrenia from an industry that is in hysterical denial because the world has changed and their business model no longer works. They can't even articulate what they want; they just want to go back to the way things used to be, when Mommy used to play with them and feed them all day. Embarrassingly infantile.
Re:Facebook?!
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That being said, it may well be the case that "social applications" -- email, instant messaging, and so on -- expanded the PC market significantly. I suppose the only absurdity, then, is to equate Facebook with "social applications" (which had their biggest effect about ten years before Facebook showed up).
Facebook?!
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Social applications made everybody from grandmas to 14-year-old girls want computers â" in a three-word-nutshell, Facebook killed TV.
I'll take any odds that the saturation of the PC market graphed against the rise of Facebook (in, what, 2004?) shows absolutely no support for this absurd statement. I strongly suspect that PC sales more or less level off before Facebook even gains any real traction; to support this statement (that Facebook "made everybody... want computers"), you'd need to show exactly the opposite. Seriously, this is just a silly claim.
Used cars are sold all the time. It has no bearing on new car sales. If those people could afford a new car, they would buy one.
I guess you think that those auto-plant workers should just starve to death, huh? If you buy a used car, you're taking bread out of the mouths of the children of every assembly-line worker in Detroit.
"Legal principles" are not synonymous with laws. No new laws were created in either of the cases you mentioned... Both decisions are firmly based in the pre-existing civil laws.
"Legal principles" are indeed "synonymous with laws". Really. I promise. This is how the common law works. Not every law springs from a statute. This is particularly true of civil law (as opposed to criminal law -- note that "civil law" is something that exists in common law jurisdictions as well as civil law jurisdictions -- you seem to be confused about the distinction between the civil vs. criminal and civil vs. common), but also occasionally of criminal law as well. Contempt of court, for instance, is a common-law criminal offense. Most of our torts have been enforced for centuries without being codified by statutes. Indeed, most of the statutes and codes codifying things like commercial law are distillations of common law rules that have been enforced for a long, long time by the courts. You have the historical tradition exactly backwards.
neither of those facts can be rationally interpreted as indicating that a court has any true say in what a law "ought" to be
Statutes need to be interpreted with reference to the constitutional scheme under which they exist. This means that one needs to impose particualr constructions on the statute to make it accord with the framework in place: i.e., one needs to determine what it "ought" to mean.
Common law courts can also invent new legal principles out of whole cloth. Most of our law was originally formulated this way. It continues to happen all the time: in the area of copyright law in the US, for instance, both the Sony and Grokster cases imported new concepts ("staple article of commerce" and "inducing infringement") into the law of copyright which had not existed before, and that were not found in any statute.
Like I said: if you don't understand the operation of the common law, you should read a book about it.
Using a constitutional law to overrule an illegal state law (as in Loving v. Virginia) is different to declaring copyright illegal.
"Illegal" doesn't really mean anything other than, vaguely, "contrary to law". Saying that an unconstitutional law is "illegal" makes as much sense as any other use of the word. And striking down an unconstitutional federal law (like the Copyright Act) isn't particularly different from striking down an unconstitutional state law (like Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute).
Also: what happened in Loving, IIRC, was that their marriage was not recognized in Virginia after they moved there, and they sued the state (hence "Loving [plaintiff] v. Virginia [defendant]") for whatever benefits they were being deprived of. It was not a case of criminal prosecution with the defendant pleading that the law under which he was prosecuted was unconstitutional. Although that happens too.
The court is just there to interpret laws, and activist rulings undermine democracy.
You should read a book that explains the system of common law that governs jurisdictions like the UK, US, Canada, etc. Then you would be less uninformed about how said system works, and how the common law system is perfectly compatible with democracy; indeed, how early conceptions of democracy (on the US constitutional model) embraced the common law system as a check on the excesses of the executive and legislature. You seem to think that living in a civil law jurisdiction would provide you with a more perfect democracy; if that's true, I encourage you to move to France or Quebec and keep us posted on the dramatic enhancement of your democratic experience.
Slashdot Mirror
I lived in New York for five years, and I agree with you: it's very easy for even residents there to mistake East for West or (to a lesser extent) North for South when getting out of the subway.
What's nearly impossible, though, as I said in my post, is mistaking West for North.
How could anyone lose track of cardinal directions in DC, even for a moment? It's built on a NS/EW grid, with the streets named on a number/letter system. It's got a giant phallic symbol sticking up in the exact middle (which is at 16th street NW, okay, but that still shouldn't affect one's sense of north vs. west).
The only place I can imagine where it would be harder to mistake west for north would be Manhattan, with its street (EW) vs. avenue (NS) distinction being impossible to miss.
Just to clarify, becasue the lede is quite misleading: this is not a "Texas court". State courts (e.g., the courts of Texas) do not handle patent infringement disputes or remedies. This is a Federal court located in Texas. The scope of the injunction is therefore nationwide. The fact that it's in Texas is a red herring -- its only significance is that this particular Federal Court (EDTx) has a history of being extremely friendly to patent holders.
Agreed. I thought this was "News for Nerds", not "News for 13-year-olds with Down Syndrome".
What next, a ./ story about Mattel's upcoming "Own Your Own Real-Life My Little Pony" contest?
AFAICT, the actual article has nothing to do with piracy. It's just about lowering transaction costs in your licensing business by using a standardized (CC) license instead of hiring lawyers. Doctorow seems to be addressing companies with media assets who are generally CC-friendly, but who are nervous about how to monetize the idea and so stick exclusively to non-commercial CC variants. The article describes a model whereby a for-profit media licensing business model can be built using modified CC licenses. That's it. He's not talking to Hollywood. He's talking to people who already know what CC is and think it's a good idea, but also want to make some cash off their media assets. I mean, Christ, it's in the first paragraph of the story.
Again, I don't disagree with you. But are you really going to stand up and defend the right of the Hutu Power guys running the radio station to broadcast the locations of Tutsi "cockraoches" to the roving machete-rape squads? And if not, then where is the line being drawn between reasonable and unreasonable censorship? Is Lou Dobbs calling for Mexican immigrant concentration camps on FOX News closer to the Hutu Power boys, or closer to Thomas Jefferson? I think it depends on context: if the US were to see an drastic upswing in hate crimes targeting immigrants, I can see how curbing that kind of incitement could be justified. Germany has a very specific context when it comes to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, obviously. I live in Canada, which has much more restrictive hate-speech laws than the US, and yet there seems to be more accountability, transparency, and free discourse up here than in the US (where I grew up), and people are much nicer to each other as well. My primary reason for opposing hate-speech laws in the US is because I know that they would be drafted and enforced to protect specific politically powerful interests, rather than marginalized groups. I really do think that this is an area where the right balance struck by the law depends a lot on context.
You know what else is wrong? Selling people's personal information and bombarding them with penis enlargement pill ads in exchange for allowing them to send email to their friends.
Here's the bad news: private companies do things that aren't very nice, but not illegal, and actually pretty much inevitable in a capitalist system, all the time. To compare them to the Nazis every time they do things like this is, maybe, not so helpful. It might lead to a certain loss of perspective and make the speaker and listener both worse off for it. That's all I'm saying.
Agreed. Henceforth, we shall stop imprisoning people who do bad things, lest they become martyrs to the cause for which they were imprisoned, thus creating a fascist movement dedicated to (murder/rape/jaywalking). Indeed, we should instead imprison those who do GOOD things, creating martyrs who will inspire virtue in the populace! And all men shall walk on the water, and swim upon the land. Huzzah!
In other news, your historical counterfactual is ridiculously overstated, as is the argument it tries to support. Look, I'm not an advocate of censorship, but I understand its appeal to Germans, who understand fascism and the cultural forces giving rise to a bit better than, I daresay, you seem to. America today is much closer to fascism than Germany, despite the wonderful (I mean that sincerely) protections for speech afforded by the US constitution.
Note also that this story is not about government censorship, but about some guys running a website that shows you ads and sells your personal information in exchange for letting you talk to your friends and post pictures of your boobs. As The Dude would say: this isn't a First Amendment thing, Walter.
Dude, totally! And like, someday Germans will get to tell their kid about how joining a party other than the officially sanctioned ones could, like, totally result in not being able to get your Facebook feed updated with official party event invitations! You could only get invitations to events from some other person setting up a non-official facebook group for the party, which meant you wouldn't get the little blue background bar invites in your facebook feed! And sometimes the javascript didn't work right to update your Twitters, so you'd totally have to get it sent to email instead! Dark times, dude, dark times.
I'm sorry, but: do you really not feel that these comparisons are maybe just a little bit silly?
I won't argue with you, because I don't disagree. But if this is the issue with which people have a problem, then their beef is with German law and politics at a pretty deep level. Germany is much more restrictive about who gets to be a political party than, say, the US. Of course, they can point to this policy as one of the reasons their political discourse -- unlike that of the US -- isn't dominated by white supremacists (Glenn Beck, Strom Thurmond), religious fanatics (Scientologists, Christian Dominionists), and so on. Which, I have to admit, is a pretty appealing upside.
Also, just to clarify: yeah, I think this is a dick move (although I'm too lazy to read the details, so I could be wrong). But then, I remember Facebook having a whole passel of election-related gizmos last fall that only included the Republican and Democratic parties. As a supporter of neither of those parties, I naturally took this as further validation of my belief that Facebook is a stupid toy run by and for trivial people. You know what I didn't think, though? That FACEBOOK = NAZIS!!1!
Sweet! So far this thread has produced comparisons between a social networking site's account deletion policy and both 1) the Nazis (see above) and 2) the Stasi. Can I get a Joseph Stalin up in here? Some Genghis Kahn metaphors? Or have those already popped up below my filter level?
Here's a hint: they probably don't let white supremacist or neo-Nazi parties sign up for accounts, either. Because expressing those kinds of opinions about how to "improve your country" is illegal in Germany. Which may offend American 1st-Amendment sensibilities, but given Germany's history, I can't say it's such a crazy policy.
So while I agree with you that the Pirate Party deserves to be included, the very broadly inclusive policy you've described would never -- and could never, legally -- fly in Germany.
Sorry, maybe I misunderstand your comment, so let me make sure: are you seriously comparing the account deletion policy on a social networking site to the Nazis? Please tell me I've misunderstood. Please.
Not to mention that the typesetter they give to run the thing you always tells you you're out of ink when you've still got half a barrel left...
... because that company is in danger of being sued for copyright infringement, which is a cause of action created by Federal statute and enforced by Federal courts (whose officers are paid with Federal tax dollars). So, the federal government is enforcing a censorship law. I don't see how you've argued around that basic fact.
I agree with you that Youtube is under no obligation to accept videos that infringe copyright, or any videos at all for that matter. But that doesn't mean that federal copyright law isn't acting here to censor Constitutionally protected speech.
Exactly. Like I said in the AP story two days ago:
A friend of mine tells stories about her little brother, who used to hate taking a bath as a little kid, alternating between "I'm freezing!" and "It's burning my skin off!" every few seconds as excuses to try to get out of the tub.
It's even more ridiculous and pathological than that: the AP is simultaneously whining about how aggregators link to their articles and also about how search engines DON'T link to their articles. This is typical schizophrenia from an industry that is in hysterical denial because the world has changed and their business model no longer works. They can't even articulate what they want; they just want to go back to the way things used to be, when Mommy used to play with them and feed them all day. Embarrassingly infantile.
That being said, it may well be the case that "social applications" -- email, instant messaging, and so on -- expanded the PC market significantly. I suppose the only absurdity, then, is to equate Facebook with "social applications" (which had their biggest effect about ten years before Facebook showed up).
Social applications made everybody from grandmas to 14-year-old girls want computers â" in a three-word-nutshell, Facebook killed TV.
I'll take any odds that the saturation of the PC market graphed against the rise of Facebook (in, what, 2004?) shows absolutely no support for this absurd statement. I strongly suspect that PC sales more or less level off before Facebook even gains any real traction; to support this statement (that Facebook "made everybody... want computers"), you'd need to show exactly the opposite. Seriously, this is just a silly claim.
If we refuse to break our windows, then the terrorists have won.
Used cars are sold all the time. It has no bearing on new car sales. If those people could afford a new car, they would buy one.
I guess you think that those auto-plant workers should just starve to death, huh? If you buy a used car, you're taking bread out of the mouths of the children of every assembly-line worker in Detroit.
Remember: RESALE = THEFT.
"Legal principles" are not synonymous with laws. No new laws were created in either of the cases you mentioned... Both decisions are firmly based in the pre-existing civil laws.
"Legal principles" are indeed "synonymous with laws". Really. I promise. This is how the common law works. Not every law springs from a statute. This is particularly true of civil law (as opposed to criminal law -- note that "civil law" is something that exists in common law jurisdictions as well as civil law jurisdictions -- you seem to be confused about the distinction between the civil vs. criminal and civil vs. common), but also occasionally of criminal law as well. Contempt of court, for instance, is a common-law criminal offense. Most of our torts have been enforced for centuries without being codified by statutes. Indeed, most of the statutes and codes codifying things like commercial law are distillations of common law rules that have been enforced for a long, long time by the courts. You have the historical tradition exactly backwards.
neither of those facts can be rationally interpreted as indicating that a court has any true say in what a law "ought" to be
Statutes need to be interpreted with reference to the constitutional scheme under which they exist. This means that one needs to impose particualr constructions on the statute to make it accord with the framework in place: i.e., one needs to determine what it "ought" to mean.
Common law courts can also invent new legal principles out of whole cloth. Most of our law was originally formulated this way. It continues to happen all the time: in the area of copyright law in the US, for instance, both the Sony and Grokster cases imported new concepts ("staple article of commerce" and "inducing infringement") into the law of copyright which had not existed before, and that were not found in any statute.
Like I said: if you don't understand the operation of the common law, you should read a book about it.
Using a constitutional law to overrule an illegal state law (as in Loving v. Virginia) is different to declaring copyright illegal.
"Illegal" doesn't really mean anything other than, vaguely, "contrary to law". Saying that an unconstitutional law is "illegal" makes as much sense as any other use of the word. And striking down an unconstitutional federal law (like the Copyright Act) isn't particularly different from striking down an unconstitutional state law (like Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute).
Also: what happened in Loving, IIRC, was that their marriage was not recognized in Virginia after they moved there, and they sued the state (hence "Loving [plaintiff] v. Virginia [defendant]") for whatever benefits they were being deprived of. It was not a case of criminal prosecution with the defendant pleading that the law under which he was prosecuted was unconstitutional. Although that happens too.
The court is just there to interpret laws, and activist rulings undermine democracy.
You should read a book that explains the system of common law that governs jurisdictions like the UK, US, Canada, etc. Then you would be less uninformed about how said system works, and how the common law system is perfectly compatible with democracy; indeed, how early conceptions of democracy (on the US constitutional model) embraced the common law system as a check on the excesses of the executive and legislature. You seem to think that living in a civil law jurisdiction would provide you with a more perfect democracy; if that's true, I encourage you to move to France or Quebec and keep us posted on the dramatic enhancement of your democratic experience.