Month: May 2014

Your Ukraine Update

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We now have some on the ground media reports that make it very likely that US security consultants (mercenaries) are on the ground in the Ukraine:

The leaks may have more truth in them than I had assumed. Paris Match, a well regarded weekly French magazine, investigated the recent incidents in Krasnoarmeysk in east Ukraine where some para-military gang disrupted the vote on more autonomy for the region by killing two supporters of the federalists. It finds photographic evidence that the gang was led by functionary from the fascists paramilitary Right Sektor:

These images show Andrey Denisenko, one of the Pravy Sektor chiefs, among a group of mysterious gunmen that attacked a voting station Sunday in the small town of Krasnoarmeysk, some 60 kilometres from the separatist « capital », Donetsk. After occupying the local town hall for several hours, the militiamen shot down point blank one local civilian, and killed two other unarmed protesters.

These Pravy Sektor thugs were hired for the “special battalion Denjpr” of the newly created “National Guard” and are paid by oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi.

 But there is an even bigger scoop in this story.

 Jerome Sessini, an experienced war photographer for Magnum who has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places, was in Krasnoarmeysk and made some very interesting observations:

Several witness also said they heard some of the gunmen speaking with strong western Ukraine accents. They also noticed that some of the gunmen appeared to come from the Caucasus area, possibly mercenaries from Chechnya. Other gunmen never spoke a word and seemed foreign to the region. French war photographer Jerome Sessini spent about an hour face to face with the gunmen before they opened fire. « I found that their general attitude and their very precise techniques gave off the impression that they were American mercenaries, or people trained by American mercenaries » said Sessini. « I can’t guarantee this for sure, but I’d give it a 95 per cent, » added the photographer, who frequently interacted with various U.S. security contractors during his years covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A long time ago, when I took part in martial arts competitions, I could tell which dojo my opponents had learned at just by watching their warming up rituals. Someone who’s longtime profession is to observe, identify and document people at war should surely be able to categorize special forces he interacted with along the “schooling” and attitude those have.

Also you have to read this essay by Michael Hudson on the underlying motivations for US and EU adventurism in the Ukraine, where asserts the program of destabilization and austerity (austerity being the EU/IMF deal that Yanukovich rejected):

Finance in today’s world has become war by non-military means. Its object is the same as that of military conquest: appropriation of land and basic infrastructure, and the rents that can be extracted as tribute. In today’s world this is taken mainly in the form of debt service and privatization. That is how neoliberalism works, subduing economies by indebting their governments and using unpayably high debts as a lever to pry away the public domain at distress prices. It is what today’s New Cold War is all about. Backed by the IMF and European Central Bank (ECB) as knee-breakers in what has become in effect a financial extension of NATO, the aim is for U.S. and allied investors to appropriate the plums that kleptocrats have taken from the public domain of Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet economies in these countries, as well as whatever assets remain.

He then a suggestion of how to fix this:

The cure for a rent-seeking oligarchy is to tax away rent seeking and de-privatize public monopolies. What Ukraine’s kleptocrats have taken (and what foreign investors seek to extract) can be recovered by promoting classical progressive policies taxing land and natural resources, regulating monopolies and providing public infrastructure investment, including a public option for banking and other basic services. That is what drove the U.S. and Western European industrial takeoffs, after all.

When reading Hudson’s essay, I realized something:  the role of international finance as a hostile colonizing is not just limited to the former Soviet Union, or 3rd nations.

When we look at Wall Street, and the City of London, they aren’t just business interests who are f%$#ing up our economy.   They are an occupying colonial power all over the world, which while far less mellifluous than Matt Taibbi’s term, “Vampire Squid,” is a better description.

One only needs to look at things like Timken’s Wall Street driven spin off of its steel business (which will eliminate a core competency in its bearing business) to see how the policies of deindustrialization and looting are being applied here.

Wall Street is not just a corrupt and corrupting part of our economy, it is an invading colonial force.

I Think that the FCC Just Kicked the Can Down the Road

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After FCC Chairman, and former telco lobbyist, unleashed a bit of a sh%$ storm when he basically proposed ending net neutrality and relying on the kindness of the FCC in the future.

So the FCC punted today:

Federal regulators appear to share one view about so-called net neutrality: It is a good thing.

 But defining net neutrality? That is where things get messy.

 On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to open for public debate new rules meant to guarantee an open Internet. Before the plan becomes final, though, the chairman of the commission, Tom Wheeler, will need to convince his colleagues and an array of powerful lobbying groups that the plan follows the principle of net neutrality, the idea that all content running through the Internet’s pipes is treated equally.

 While the rules are meant to prevent Internet providers from knowingly slowing data, they would allow content providers to pay for a guaranteed fast lane of service. Some opponents of the plan, those considered net neutrality purists, argue that allowing some content to be sent along a fast lane would essentially discriminate against other content.

 ………

 The proposal also requests public comments on whether and by how much the commission should tighten regulation of Internet service providers. For example, the commission asks whether it should reclassify high-speed Internet service as a utilitylike application, subject to stricter regulatory controls than now apply, and if it should ban certain practices that might impede consumers from getting equal access to all legal online content through their chosen Internet service provider.

So basically, they proposed a tiered internet with protections that depend on whether or not you get a Bush appointed judge, in which case, you are f%$#ed, and also proposed returning ISPs to the status of telecommunications services, (Title II) which would regulate them as utilities.

I think that the intention here is to hope that the controversy will die down over the next few months months, and then they can go with the telcos and cable companies with less public push-back.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation takes a rather similar view of these developments:

There’s good news: the nationwide outcry against the Federal Communications Commission’s troublesome proposal for new Open Internet rules is clearly having an impact. At a public meeting this morning, commissioners were factoring in questions that—according to previous accounts—weren’t on the table only days ago. The bad news: the FCC still is considering a set of rules that will allow Internet providers to discriminate how we access websites with only vague and uncertain limits, endangering network neutrality and threatening the vibrant growth of the Internet.

 We’re still waiting for the full proposal. But according to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s statements at the open meeting, the FCC didn’t take pay-to-play “fast lanes” off the table. Paid “fast lane” access fees threaten the engine of innovation that has allowed hackers, startup companies, and kids in their college dorm rooms to make the Internet that we know and love today. We want the Internet to continue to thrive as a platform for innovation and expression; vague rules that bless “pay to play,” with ill-defined limits, are not compatible with our vision of an open Internet.

The good folks at the EFF also provide a tool, Dear FCC, to help people make their feelings known during the public comment period.

It turns out that there is one unambiguously good thing in the proposal, the FCC has proposed assigning 3 television channels to unlicensed public use:

While FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s fast-lane/slow-lane net neutrality proposal was taking a beating on all sides (even Wheeler took a few whacks at it), Internet companies sneaked through a huge victory when the agency agreed to set aside up to three channels of TV airwaves for unlicensed use.

That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s something that Google, Microsoft and other tech companies have spent years advocating. In the past, Republican lawmakers have mostly shut down those efforts, saying that billion-dollar tech companies don’t need a freebie.

This time it mostly slid under the radar as Republicans were distracted by net neutrality and upset about proposed bidding restrictions on AT&T and Verizon in the upcoming TV airwaves auction.

Most airwaves can only be used by companies or parties that hold exclusive licenses; unlicensed airwaves can be used by anyone. Wi-Fi networks run on unlicensed airwaves, and tech companies have been trying for years to get more set aside for more powerful Wi-Fi networks.

Internet companies recently got a huge chunk of airwaves set aside for unlicensed use. But they also coveted a channel or two of TV airwaves, which are among the most valuable since signals on those frequencies can go through buildings and travel relatively long distances.

With its move Thursday, the FCC basically created a half-mile public beach in the middle of multimillion-dollar mansions. ………

This is akin to the various white space proposals that have been fought tooth and nail by the wireless firms.

If this survives, it will be an unalloyed good, but unless the pressure is kept up on the FCC about reinstating Title II, we are going to continue to have a overpriced and under-performing broadband services in the United States.

Saw Blondie on The Daily Show Tonight

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They did a new song, and one of their standards, Dreaming,

The performance was good, and Debbie Harry’s voice is still good, though she’s lost a bit on the high end of her range.

I will note, I just Wikied her, and realized that she is 68, and she is still smoking hot, and still maintains the New Wave attitude that she, and Blondie pioneered.

Queue the Inflation Trolls

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The Producer Price Index rose by 0.6% in April:

U.S. producer prices recorded their largest increase in 1-1/2 years in April as food prices surged, in a potential sign inflation pressures may be creeping up.

The Labor Department said on Wednesday its producer price index rose 0.6 percent, the biggest gain since September 2012. That built on a March increase that was nearly as large.

The department revamped it PPI series at the start of the year to include services and construction. Since then, it has been surprisingly volatile, largely because of big swings in prices received for trade services.

Still, economists, who had expected only a 0.2 percent gain, saw the latest rise as an indication that price pressure may be building. Officials at the Federal Reserve have long worried that inflation was running too low.

I will note that the trend for this year is still less than 6%, which is where I would set the target, and it appears that their statistical set is kind of hinky, but expect the inflation gnomes to come out and run around with their hair on fire.

Seriously? Chattanooga has the Best Internet in the Nation?

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Actually, yes.

You see,  Chattanooga has a municiplally owned fiber optic network:

For thousands of years, Native Americans used the river banks here to cross a gap in the Appalachian Mountains, and trains sped through during the Civil War to connect the eastern and western parts of the Confederacy. In the 21st century, it is the Internet that passes through Chattanooga, and at lightning speed.

“Gig City,” as Chattanooga is sometimes called, has what city officials and analysts say was the first and fastest — and now one of the least expensive — high-speed Internet services in the United States. For less than $70 a month, consumers enjoy an ultrahigh-speed fiber-optic connection that transfers data at one gigabit per second. That is 50 times the average speed for homes in the rest of the country, and just as rapid as service in Hong Kong, which has the fastest Internet in the world.

………

Since the fiber-optic network switched on four years ago, the signs of growth in Chattanooga are unmistakable. ………

………

EPB, the city-owned utility formerly named Electric Power Board of Chattanooga, said that only about 3,640 residences, or 7.5 percent of its Internet-service subscribers, are signed up for the Gigabit service offered over the fiber-optic network. Roughly 55 businesses also subscribe. The rest of EPB’s customers subscribe to a (relatively) slower service offered on the network of 100 megabits per second, which is still faster than many other places in the country.

Gee.  The private sector, largely unregulated, cable and phone companies deliver what is among the slowest and most expensive internet service in the developed world, and publicly owned providers outperform them.

Maybe it’s because the for-profit companies see preserving, and leveraging, their near monopoly status as more ……… well ……… profitable than improving the quality and price service.

Hoocoodanode?

Shorter New York Times, “We Pay Bros More than Ho’s”

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It was announced today that the New York Times fired Jill Abramson as executive editor.

It appears that this was largely because she complained when she discovered that her pay was significantly less than her predecessor, as well as one of her (male) subordinates:

As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson, who spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, had been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, which accounted for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson’s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy. A third associate told me, “She found out that a former deputy managing editor”—a man—“made more money than she did” while she was managing editor. “She had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.”

Of course, Abramson was good for business, and the paper is “financially beleagered” Sulzberger decided to build a palatial new headquarters for the paper, and use very short term debt to finance this, which required a refinance at junk bond rates from Mexican crony capitalist Carlos Slim, and a sale-leaseback of $¾ million square feet in their headquarters.

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. is letting his sense of entitlement show.

This is Good, But I Expect SCOTUS to Overturn it on Corporate “Free Speech” Grounds

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The NLRB is considering a ruling that would require that businesses allow their email systems being used for union organizing:

The NLRB has issued a “Notice and Invitation to File Briefs” [PDF] in the Purple Communications, Inc. case which could overturn the precedent concerning organizing activities on company email systems set by the board’s ruling in the Register-Guard case during the Bush Administration.

Using the Register-Guard decision as precedent, companies can currently enforce policies which prohibit company email from being used for anything but business purposes. But the current NLRB appears interested in reversing that decision partially due to the increased importance of email in organizing since the Bush era. Another goal is to align the ruling with other recent rulings that helped streamline the union election process.

This is a good idea, but it is a pro worker idea, so I expect a 5-4 decision from the Supreme Court overruling this on 1st Amendment grounds.

After all, if the DC, and the 4th Circuit, Courts of Appeals has already found that a requirement that employers post a notice of labor rights was a violation of the 1st Amendment, and the increasingly radical right wing of SCOTUS has become fairly explicitly partisan, and sabotaging labor organizing rights is good for the Republican Party.

The Washington Post has Done the Impossible

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In rewriting an OP/Ed contributed by Ramesh Ponnuru, some as yet unamed editor has actually lowered the quality of the indicted right wing pundit’s writing.

Speaking to the universal desire of the right wing to excise the memory of Abraham Lincoln from our recent memory, he wrote in the Post that we should go back to calling it Washington’s Birthday.  (I am old enough to remember when both Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays were both holidays, and not spot welded together), and some nameless editor at the paper changed his words in a fairly significant way:

“Getting rid of President’s Day would not be difficult. All we would have to do is start calling the third Monday of February by its proper name under federal law: Washington’s Birthday. That’s the practice state governments and advertisers ought to follow.” The version the Post ended up running struck the third sentence and replaced the second with ”All we would have to do is designate the third Monday of February to mark George Washington’s Birthday.”

As an aside, I had a fair number of discussions about the writing business with science fiction author and editor Ben Bova, and noted that when he was editor-in-chief at Omni,* he had to fire a number of editors who refused to stop rewriting stuff. (He makes a distinction with minor copy edits, and the editor asking for changes from the authors)

Whoever made this change should be fired.  Period.  Full Stop.

*I am not sure if this was an issue during his stint at Analog Science Fiction, but I got the impression that it was less of an issue, probably because the editors were less likely to be frustrated writer English majors.

Heads they Win, Tails you Lose

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Our executive class, Walmart edition:

Sometimes the effects of our social and income inequality are easy to see, but hard to measure.

But not in this case: despite falling revenues, and despite only reluctantly paying minimum wage to its workers, Walmart increased the pay for its top executives. The people who do the labor get little. The people who make the decisions that can cause falling revenues get more (and more and…) Could it be any clearer what is going on?

This is what Thomas Piketty’s theories look like in practice.

………

A key question for detectives trying to figure out who may have committed a crime is to ask cui bono, “Who benefits?” Who stands to profit from a murder, from a crime? That’s often your perp.

In Walmart’s case, it is not its stockholders who profited. Indeed, this has not been a money year for Walmart shareholders. Despite an overall good twelve months for the stock market in general, Walmart stock bumbled due to lower sales growth.

No joy for Walmart’s customers, or its own employees. Walmart cited cuts in federal food stamps as one reason for its weak sales increase. Since they are paid only minimum wage (and Walmart fights vigorously against any increases) and only are given 39 hours a week or less so as not to qualify for full-time benefits, a fair number of Walmart’s own workers receive food stamps.

Good news though for Walmart’s top executives. The company employed some accounting tricks to “adjust” on paper actual revenues to make them appear higher than in reality. On the strength of that “adjusted” performance, William Simon, CEO of Walmart’s United States unit, received total compensation of $13 million last year. Of that, $1.5 million was a “performance bonus,” paid out actually for declining revenues. In fact, six of Walmart’s top executives received a total of $8.42 million in cash incentive payments for 2014 even as revenues fell and the company closed stores. The former employees of those stores, needless to say, did not receive any performance pay bonuses as they fell deeper into poverty.

They don’t get it.

They won’t get it if they are riding in an oxcart to Madame la Guillotine.

It’s Only Metadata, Right?

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As David Cole observes, “We Kill People Based on Metadata:

Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading.

Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”

It is precisely this power to collect our metadata that has prompted one of Congress’s most bipartisan initiatives in recent years. On May 7, the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to adopt an amended form of the USA Freedom Act, a bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans, initially proposed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner. On May 8, the House Intelligence Committee, which has until now opposed any real reform of the NSA, also unanimously approved the same bill. And the Obama administration has welcomed the development.

(Emphasis Mine)

The “signature strikes” that the CIA and Pentagon use are based entirely on metadata.

The next time that you hear of a wedding party being blown-up by a drone, realize that the same thing could happen to you on the basis of your cell phone location data.

The First Rule of Fight Club is ………

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Do not piss off Jon Stewart.

That goes for you, Rush Limbaugh:

With 200-300 school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, and Limbaugh decides to take the side of the terrorists, because Michelle Obama took up their cause.

Stewart is rahter pithy about this:

So that’s our choice: Malala [Yousafzai, who was shot in the face by the Taliban for saying that girls should go to school] or Rush, the quivering rage heap who is apparently desperately trying to extinguish any remaining molecule of humanity that might still reside in the Chernobyl-esque superfund cleanup site that was his soul.

Follow the hashtag, “#F*@KYOURUSH”.

Magnets How do They F%$#ing Work?

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Once again, it’s time to roll the Insane Clown Posse video Miracles, (Completely NSFW) because the Talibaptists are going full ICP Here

One of the joys of Neil deGrasse Tyson and his science show Cosmos, is the way that it makes the heads of the primordial wing of the Christian right explode.

Case in point, they have now come out opposing electromagnetism:

If there is one topic in each week’s Cosmos that sends the Christian fundamentalists into a frenzy, it is evolution.

 You see, scientists understand that most sciences cannot be done correctly if you ignore the scientific fact of evolution. Yet, week in and week out, creationists critique the job Tyson and his team of writers are doing, calling them speculative and misleading.

 Creationists would have you believe that Tyson and his crew are force-feeding viewers a story of evolution dreamed up in the minds of those who simply want to refute God and spread atheism.

 Calling evolutionary biologists names such as “evolutionists”—a word not used outside of the creationists sphere—is an attempt to demean the science as nothing more than a religion; ironically, the very thing they are trying to sell you on.

 This week’s episode, titled, “The Electric Boy” was about scientist Michael Faraday. Faraday’s study of electricity led to some of the biggest discoveries and inventions in the history of mankind, ranging from the electric motor to the discovery of electromagnetic waves that surround just about everything.

 How on earth could creationists be upset with electricity? Well, Tyson had the audacity to mention that Faraday’s discoveries helped us explain how birds navigate the globe using the earth’s electromagnetic waves, and that their brains are evolutionarily wired for such a task.

Seriously. What is wrong with these people, and why do we allow them to breed?

Big Ag Will Kill Us Now

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The good folks at I F%$#ing Love Science point us to a study that strongly indicates that neonicotinoid pesticides cause colony collapse disorder in bees:

A new study claims to have pegged neonicotinoids as the definitive cause of Colony Collapse Disorder. But does the data really justify the conclusions?

European honey bees are incredibly important pollinators. Unfortunately, they’re disappearing at a rapid rate due to a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). What actually causes CCD isn’t completely understood. CCD has confused scientists since it was first described, or had its name changed, in 2006. It is likely caused by a number of different factors, working together – however, there has been a large focus on a certain group of insecticides known as neonicotinoids. In December of 2013, in an attempt to mitigate their involvement, the EU implemented a two-year memorandum on three commonly used insecticides in the neonicotinoid family. Many, including their own government, criticized the science behind the moratorium.

There is a desperate need for new studies to accurately test the different variables involved in CCD. New research from Dr. Alex Lu attempts to peg neonicotinoid insecticides as the underlying cause of CCD. The study set up 18 hives to test the effects of two neonicotinoids, clothianidin and imidacloprid, from 2012-2013. Six colonies were selected from three different sites in central Massachusetts, and sublethal doses of each insecticide were given orally to treatment hives via a syrup solution. Six of twelve treated colonies abandoned their hives while only one of the six control hives abandoned theirs. Neonicotinoids obviously do not help bees, but whether this study has found them to be the ‘smoking gun’ isn’t exactly as clear as many are making it out to be. Only 18 hives were used in this study which is too small of a sample size to control for other variables and definitely too small to form a definitive conclusion as to the affects of neonicotinoids. The way he tests for CCD-like symptoms is not a definitive indication that is occurring. Hive abandonment is not automatically CCD. Honey bees may abandon their hives for any number of different reasons, and this study doesn’t control for any of them.

This is why things like pesticides should be proved safe before use, and not allowed until proved they are unsafe, as is the USDA’s policy in the United States.

This is a small study, and as such, it should not be the sole basis of regulatory policy, but I do think that this is a good justification to throwing a few million dollars at a larger study, before we lose our almond, avocado, apples, peaches, pears, etc.

Our Friends in the Ukraine are Hiring Blackwater

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Guess what? In addition to advising the current government in Kiev, it appears that we have lent them mercenaries from the firm formerly known as Blackwater:

Soldiers from a private US security company with a record of alleged atrocities in Iraq are supporting Ukraine‘s security forces in the volatile east of the country, the German newspaper Bild reported Sunday.

The report, citing Germany‘s federal intelligence agency BND, said 400 of the heavily-armed men employed by the group formerly known as Blackwater were deployed in the vicinity of Lugansk where pro-Russian separatists are seeking self-rule.

The BND declined to comment on the report, while the security company – now known as Academi – dismissed similar reports in March.

Bild reported that according to a BND assessment, US intelligence services had knowledge of the covert involvement of the private soldiers in Ukraine. BND representatives relayed the information to Germany‘s federal chancellory on April 29, Bild said.

Academi was known as Blackwater during its time as key security services contractor to the US government in the war it led to oust Iraq‘s president Saddam Hussein in 2003.

It was later implicated in the killing of unarmed civilians and arms smuggling in Iraq.

This is nucking futs.

I can think of no more inflammatory news than having the most notorious mercenary organization in the real world providing “security consultants” for a government that is already being viewed with suspicion by much of the eastern half of the country.

I think that we have learned that the EU and US don’t care about the Ukraine as much as they want to just f%$# with Russia.

This is not going to end well.

H/t R1 at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

The Federal Circuit Court of Appeal F%$#s Up Again

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In Oracle vs. Google, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeal, aka the “Patent Court”, has once again taken a delusionally extremist position on IP, and ruled that software APIs are subject to copyright. As Timothy B. Lee observes, “The court that created the patent troll mess is screwing up copyright too.”

A few years ago, the database company Oracle sued Google, arguing that Google’s Android operating system infringed the copyright of Oracle’s Java technology. On Friday, a federal appeals court sided with Oracle in the long-running dispute.
The decision seems to reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of how software works. And it could create serious headaches for companies that want to make their software compatible with that of competitors.

Why did Oracle sue Google?

The lawsuit focuses on technical decisions Google made when it created the Android operating system.

 Google wanted people who wrote programs in the popular programming language Java to be able to re-use their code in Android apps. To do that, Google had to ensure that Java code written for other purposes ran exactly the same on Android. But negotiations with the company behind Java, Sun Microsystems (which was later acquired by Oracle), broke down, so Google decided to create its own version of Java from scratch.

 ………

 The trial court judge, William Alsup, sided with Google. Copyright only protects the creative aspects of a work, not its functional characteristics. Judge Alsup ruled that because the names of Java functions was essential to achieving interoperability, they were a functional characteristic rather than a creative aspect of Java, and using them wasn’t copyright infringement.

 But on Friday, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. The court was unimpressed with Google’s argument that function names were functional characteristics not protected by copyright. In the Federal Circuit’s view, the list of Java functions was just another kind of “code” that couldn’t be copied without its creator’s permission.

 The court’s reasoning didn’t impress James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at the University of Maryland. “Not only do they not understand how computers work, they can’t even read,” he says.

 ………

 The Federal Circuit is the court that hears appeals in all patent cases. Over the last three decades, it has shown a consistent bias in favor of patent holders, setting legal precedents that made the current patent troll problem possible.

 Ordinarily, copyright cases in California would be heard by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But because Oracle’s fight with Google also includes some patent issues, the Federal Circuit gets jurisdiction.

 And evidently, the Federal Circuit has a bias toward copyright holders to go with its pro-patent bias.

Needless to say, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals is completely insane, and should be abolished, and the judges on that court should be told to take up knitting.