Category: Legal, Laws, and Regs

Categories
Legal, Laws, and Regs

On Human Rights

Read the following very carefully before you react to any one specific piece of information.

I don’t think there’s been any action the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) has taken that hasn’t angered somebody, but one thing I’ve always seen in this organization is its adherence to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Even if this action means protecting those who are advocates of hatred and despised almost universally.

Case in point is the now famous planned march in 1977 of Nazi supporters through Skokie, Illinois — a community that was predominately Jewish, with an unusually large number of Holocaust survivors.

Is the Nazi organization a despicable organization? Oh, yes. Personally, I have no tolerance for the organization in any way. Was this planned march cruel and heinous? Oh yes, it most definitely was. However, by the laws of our Constitution, no matter how we feel about the Nazi organization, its members had the right to march if they obtained the appropriate permits.

When the Nazis were blocked, the organization contacted the ACLU to seek help in upholding their constitutional rights. The ACLU accepted the case and in what is now a most famous bit of irony, a Jewish lawyer was assigned to support the Nazi party’s claims, David Goldberger. In another bit of irony, at the time, the ACLU was lead by Aryeh Neier, a German whose family had been killed because of the Holocaust.

Neier was to later say in defense of the ACLU action:

Keeping a few Nazi’s off the streets of Skokie will serve Jews poorly if it means that the freedoms to speak, publish or assemble any place in the United States are thereby weakened.

Goldberger himself later said:

I don’t think I’ll ever look back on it without remembering the pain it caused…. The hardest thing was being at odds with people for whom you had strong feelings of empathy.

The ACLU successfully won for the Nazi party their right to march. However, the Nazis never did march in Skokie, staging a protest in Marquette Park in Chicago instead — their preferred venue.

No legal precedent was set. No momentous turn in history was achieved because of the actions of the ACLU. The only victory was a moral one, in that the ACLU demonstrated the true spirt of Freedom of Speech.

I have tried to model my standard regarding equality and freedom of speech based on the actions of these two men and others like them. To speak out for the oppressed when the oppressed is beautiful, or popular or innocent or winsome is noble. But to speak out for the oppressed when they are ugly and abhorrent — that is true equality.

Categories
Copyright

Creative Commons

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

According to Dan Gillmor, the concepts and technology behind Napster are continuing despite the recent resignations and layoffs at the company.

In particular, Gillmor references new organizations and technologies being introduced at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference this week, including Creative Commons — a non-profit organization dedicated to “…the notion that some people would prefer to share their creative works…”.

Lawrence Lessig is Chair on the Board of Directorys, and technology team members include Lisa Rein and Aaron Swartz, both of whom I have worked with in past and current writing efforts.

What do you think? Would you dedicate your creative effort to the public domain in the interest of sharing? Technologists have been doing this for years with software; now the door opens for creative talents in other fields to share their work.

Will photographers, writers, musicians, and artists in other media buy into this concept?

Creative Commons: A bold new venture.

Categories
Copyright

What are you willing to give up?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Internet Radio is at risk due to CARP — the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel. There’s also a new bill being put forward before Congress that would make copying watermarks and holograms illegal.

Dallas News is issuing “cease and desist” orders against online sites for deep linking.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation — the main watchdog against copyright abuses is working overtime just to keep up with all the attacks against free speech.

Personally, I splurged and bought myself a CD, which I can’t afford, and then proceeded to find that I can’t play it on my computer because it’s one of the new copy-protected CDs.

Motion Picture Industry. Disney. The recording industry. AOL Time-Warner. Newspapers. Magazines. Cable. Sony. Television. Pieces of the creature we know as The Media Monster Machine.

And to fight this we’ve had a day of silence on Internet Radio, letter writing campaigns to congress, and discussions of a march on Washington.

I’m curious — what would you be willing to give up to fight for a more balanced viewpoint in regards to copyright law implementation? What would you be willing to give up to send a message to The Media Monster Machine?

Would you be willing to give up movies? Including Spider Man? Star Wars? Would you be willing to give up Radio, traditional or Internet-based? How about TV, would you give up sports and movies and Six Feet Under or Buffy or Sex in the City? Would you be willing to not buy that new CD, DVD, or VHS? Would you cancel your newspaper and magazine subscriptions?

What would you be willing to give up?

When you consider that people actively fighting any of the copyright legislative abuses add up to less than 5% of the total population of the country, marches and letter writing won’t have much of an impact on a congress whose main interest is in being re-elected to office.

However, when you consider that this same 5% of the population is made up of people representing a major purchasing power, particularly when it comes to cable, electronics, music, movies, and other items dependent on a larger than normal discretionary income matched by a larger than normal interest in entertainment and gadgets — then you begin to see the shadows of a hammer strong enough to beat against the box the media industry is trying to create.

The question is, though — what are you willing to give up?

Categories
Just Shelley Legal, Laws, and Regs

Steal this ashtray

I know it seems at times as if Jonathon and I have become weblogging’s first tag team. I can’t help it — he finds these interesting things and makes these extremely open observations, and my hands go to the keyboard and I feel compelled to add my own observations to his. I have no control over this process.

Case in point: Today Jonathon discusses a weblog posting he found where a person, Michael Barrish, describes his initial reaction to critical comments:

1. Attack the accuser
2. Minimize the wrong
3. Defend your character

It would seem that the Michael Barrish’s girlfriend wanted him to help her steal a Duck Crossing Sign. That’s not the story. He ended up not stealing the sign. That’s still not the story. He received several critical emails from readers. However, even that’s not the story.

What is the story is that the Barrish didn’t steal the sign because he didn’t want to get caught, not because stealing was wrong.

My philosophy is, I’ll steal signs with my girlfriend but I won’t get caught.

And when he received emails from people saying that stealing is wrong, he tried to justify his actions. However, he faced his own moment of truth:

It’s worth noting that I’ve never been one for the rule of law. Fact is, I respect the law only in the sense that I can be punished for breaking it. The only laws that matter to me—and these matter quite a bit—are the ones I make for myself.

One such law or rule (this may sound strange in the present context) is that stealing is wrong, particularly when one steals for what Jay Perkins calls ‘unnecessary and idiotic reasons.’ And it doesn’t matter that one’s accuser is a righteous jerk, or that little harm comes from the theft, or that one is fundamentally moral. It’s still wrong.

What saddened Jonathon was Barrish’s final statement:

Of course I’m not just speaking about duck signs here, nor only about myself. The same self-serving logic used to justify petty theft is used to justify the destruction of the planet. People do what they want, then find reasons to justify it.

Bullshit. This is absolute and total bullshit.

Yes, some people will do selfish acts and then seek to justify their actions. However, most people, and I count myself in this group, making me a “goddamn paragon of rightousness”, follow our moral codes without any equivocation.

What Barrish failed to realize is that by saying this problem is a global problem, he’s absolving himself of any responsibility for his action and his reaction to the criticism he received.

“People do what they want, then find reasons to justify it.”

Bullshit.

Yes, I am not always law abiding. I walk against a red light when no car is around. (In Boston, the cops are suspicious of you if you don’t.) And I have been known to exceed the speed limit. And I’ll fib if someone asks me if I like their new dress and I think it’s the worst piece of crap.

But I don’t steal. I don’t cheat on my taxes. I screw up my taxes, constantly, but I don’t cheat.

I don’t break things, except by accident. I have found things and returned them, intact, to their owners. I point out billing errors even if it benefits the store. I’m kind to small children, pets, and don’t throw garbage out the window. I conserve electricity, I bought a small car with good gas mileage, I recycle.

I respect and value my friends, including my weblogging friends.

“People do what they want, then find reasons to justify it.”

Bullshit.

Time to tie this one back to an earlier topic: This might surprise you all when I say this, but there is no “justification” for the suicide bombings or for the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. My seeking to understand the reasons behind these acts is NOT the same as seeking justification.

Somehow, the two — justification and understanding — got tied together. I’m extremely glad that this issue arose because I just now realized that I needed to say this. I needed to say the words, “There is no justification for the suicide bombings”. But I’ll still seek to understand.

Justification. There is no justification for not following your own moral code. None. To say otherwise, is nothing more than a justification for your justification, and is equivalent to not having any moral code at all. Just a few rules that you conveniently “forget” from time to time.

Self-righteous paragons of the world, stand up and be counted.

Categories
Legal, Laws, and Regs

Religious Freedom 2

From Dave I found the references to news stories about the Church of Scientology’s use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to get Google to pull links to pages of well known anti-Church of Scientology web sites, such as Clambake (Xenu), from the Google databases.

Regardless of my feelings about Scientology, this one act puts them beyond what is reasonable and right for a church within this country. Sorry, let me re-phrase this — within any country filled with people who supposedly value personal liberty over the dictates of an organized religion.

No one person can solve all the problems of the world, it’s true. All individuals can do is take a stance, and hope that enough others will join with that person, to make a difference.

I’ve put the link to Clambake prominately above my Plutonian list, and it will remain there until the politicians in this country finally realize that they don’t have a clue in how to work with the Internet and fix this law, or until Google comes to its senses and realizes that it has a moral responsibility to the greater needs of humanity — the right of any organization to be heard!

P.S.In the meantime, the route will be indirect, but Clambake will hopefully still get hits for the word “Scientology” from Google, via my weblog. Might not place as high in the ranks, but they’ll be in the database.

Update: 3/22/02 Google has restored most of the Clambake pages, including the front page. ZD Net. I’ve removed the link to Clambake since they are now back in operation.