Month: September 2007

Victory for Free Speech and IP Common Sense

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The 10th circuit court of appeals overruled the dismissal of the case Golan v. Gonzalez in the context of works previously in the public domain.

The background is as follows, following the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, the Supreme court ruled that it’s pretty much the exclusive purview of Congress what a “limited time” is under that clause of the Constitution.

However, it also ruled that there could be a 1st amendment challenge if there were an action taken that “altered the traditional contours of copyright protection.”

The Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) brought US intellectual property law in line with that of other countries. In so doing, it removed a number of works from the public domain, and placed them back under copyright, where people who had previously used them found that they had to pay (frequently exorbitant) license fees.

Lawrence Lessig Lessig argued that putting public domain works back under copyright was unprecedented in US law, and hence it significantly altered the “traditional contours of copyright protection”, and overruled the dismissal, remanding the case to the lower court.

This, along with Kahle v. Gonzalez, which argues that the change from opt-in copyright to opt out-copyright alters the “traditional contours of copyright protection”.

My guess is that the current Supreme Court will rule for the rich pigs, but there are a number of people who have reevaluated the role of IP in our society following the Crackberry case.

A Sensible Fix for the Mortgage Mess

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David Laibson has a good start, outlawing the prepayment penalty.

The prepayment penalty allows for “loss leader” loans, because it it offers an incentive to provide “loss leader” loans, because it makes it prohibitively expensive to get out of those abusive loans.

I would add outlawing, or severely limiting, points, which provide a similar incentive.

Congress could do this tomorrow, and it would help a lot of people now and in the future, while not bailing out bad actor lenders.

Bush Intends to Use Nuclear Weapons Against Iran

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Read Larry Johnson’s analysis:

  • B-52s deploying to Barksdale is not unusual.
  • The only time a plane has nukes on it is when it’s on alert, or it’s tasked to move it to a specific site.
  • Barksdale AFB is a staging base for the Middle East.
  • Someone on the inside obviously leaked the information, as mishaps with nukes are kept WELL under cover until well after they are resolved.
    • Why would someone leak this if it were an honest accident?

Mr. Johnson is far more circumspect that I am. The Bush admin not only has plans for a nuclear strike on Iran, it is their preferred tactic.

John Edwards Calls Out Congress on War

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Needless to say, the Washington DC Journamalist press corps will use this to claim that Edwards is too far out there*, but in reality the fact that that congress should not fund the war without a withdrawal timetable is actually pretty safe.

More than 90% of the primary voters, and more than 70% of those folks who are not Republican Dead Enders™ support this. It’s a natural vote getter.

My recommendation to any Democratic presidential candidate is to state loudly and clearly that escalation by attacking Iran is a bad thing. It would destabilize the region, provide popular support to the Iranian theocracy, and put more American lives at risk.

In fact, I would suggest that a candidate should suggest that this is a reason to initiate immediate impeachment proceedings.

What Rox Populi Said: Journamalism

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She has a good post taking just one quote of Andrew Glass, a particularly brain-dead journamalist working for the Politico1.

I would add one thing though, which that good Ms. Populi misses, that Glass screws up on his Swiss neutrality analogy.

He likes to think that the Swiss are a bunch of chocolate and cuckoo clock making people holding hands and singing “Kumbaya”. They aren’t, and they never were.

They gained national identity when they were the most feared mercenaries in Europe. They were not neutral, they were rented for a fee.

Following the abolition of merc armies, they became aggressively neutral, building an impressive citizen army, mobilizing their population, and shooting and capturing anything that crossed their borders.

They had no territorial ambitions, but they were people that you did not want to f$#% with.

1But I’m repeating myself.

Larry Craig Does Not Appear to Be Done Yet.

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It appears that Larry Craig is not definitively out1 as Idaho’s US Senator.

It appears, according to a voice mail left at the wrong number, that his intent to resign is just that, intent, and not a promise.

He’s hired a high priced lawyer, and he will be fighting to overturn his guilty plea for disorderly conduct.

While my initial reaction is, “pass the popcorn”, this can actually be rather significant.

Seeing as how this will going on at the same time that the Pentagon’s “war room” is ramping up it’s likely to suck2 all the oxygen out of the media room, and so this media offensive is likely to get little notice, and hence little traction.

The voice mail mentions that he has support of Arlen Spector, which rather surprizes me, as the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania always bent over backwards3 to support the Republican agenda when push comes to shove4.

It’s possible that Spector had a polite statement of support that was misinterpreted, or possibly he’s trying to queer the deal in order to extract some sort of payback against the Republican Senate leadership by queering5 their efforts on the Iraq war, but I am unaware of any specific bad blood between him and Mitch McConnell.

It will be interesting seeing if the Republicans actually demand an ethics investigation to get to the bottom6 of this.

1Pun not intended.
2Really, I mean it, pun not intended.
3Oh, for Pets’s sake!!!! Pun not intended.
4Oh…I just give up, I’m punning.
5Well, that was liberating.
6OK, I admit it. I have a problem. My name is Matthew Saroff, and I am a punster.

Bush and His Evil Minions™ Lust for Another Terror Attack

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It used to be that reading the New York Times was not like reading HP Lovecraft.

Now, they make the man who is arguably the greatest horror writer of the 20th century (at least the first half) look like a piker, as in this New York Times magazine article. You should read it for yourself, but here are the high (low?) points in this article about former Bush administration official and major right wing legal scholar Jack Goldsmith, and his new book The Terror Presidency.:

  • That the administration unecessarily took a broad “go it alone” view toward executive power.
  • Legal decisions were not made at DoJ, but by the White House Council (Gonzalez), and the general counsel of the Defense Department.
  • These policies, and the policy making process were so out of line that it honked off John Ashcroft.
  • In response to a fairly straightforward legal opinion, Goldsmith’s assisistant said, “They’re going to be really mad. They’re not going to understand our decision. They’ve never been told no.”
  • In response to this decision, David Addington, then Vice President Cheney’s legal adviser and now his chief of staff “You cannot question his decision“.
  • Addington later confronted him and said, “If you rule that waythe blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands.” (Have I mentioned that these people are really paranoid nuts?)
  • He felt compelled to resign immediately after issuing a more restrictive interrogation policy, “So he made a strategic decision: on the same day that he withdrew the opinion, he submitted his resignation, effectively forcing the administration to choose between accepting his decision and letting him leave quietly, or rejecting it and turning his resignation into a big news story.”
  • Goldsmith recalls that Addington (and Addington does not fart without getting Cheney’s approval) saying, “We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court“. They really want another attack.
  • That the badgering of Ashcroft in the hospital was so bad that his wife stuck her tongue at them. (Yes, I know that it sounds mild, but I doubt that she would use profanity if threatened with death)

These folks are completely divorced from reality.

Hat tip to Glenn Greenwald for finding this article.

A Great Post on the Healthcare Crisis

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Read the full article. It’s about the colmnist listening to Sandra Day O’Connor’s concerns about her son and grandson, who is uninsurable.

As I listened, a light dawned: O’Connor and the rest of us with health coverage are also uninsured. We too face terrible, albeit more remote, healthcare risks — the risk that our employer will drop our plan, that Medicare will go bust, that our plan won’t cover our needs, that premiums will eat us alive, that our doctor will stop taking our insurance, that long-term care will wipe us out, and that our uninsured friends and family members will need major financial help.

Hat tip to the Mahablog

Huckabee Surging

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Once again, I am wrong in a prediction. Huckabee is surging in polls.

I had kind of written him off as being too Arkansas, and too formerly fat.

My early prediction was for Brownback, who I think is rather more telegenic, but is going nowhere.

By way of lame excuse, I did not realize that Brownback was Catholic, which is a big strike against him in the Republican primary.

Additionally, I think that Huckabee’s life story has a redemption element, specifically his dropping over 100 pounds and getting in shape.

People love a redemption element, and being morbidly obese is pretty mild as a problem to recover from, compared to something like, bribes, diapers, or men’s room pickups.

Of course, the fact that I was wrong about this is one more reason why my making predictions scares me.

Endorsements and Superstitions

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When Nixon was nominated in 1968, my father said, “Those idiot Republicans, there is no way we can lose now”.

My dad still has a few hundred sheets of McGovern stationary in the house.

I supported Howard Dean, and went to the meetups, and worked on a campaign for state house where the candidate finished 6th.

While I do have a preference on who gets the Democratic nomination, I have this feeling that my explicitly endorsing a candidate would jinx that individual.

So, for right now, I’m being held hostage to these superstitions, and I am quite well aware that this is stupid.