The conduct of signals intelligence is a war measure. The fact that so many in government want to conduct signals intelligence against the populace at large makes it clear they regard us as an enemy.
Maybe the discussion of copyright (and for that matter patent) terms misses the point. If the law followed the plain meaning of the Constitution "by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries," The rights wouldn't ever be secured to publishers, and corporations would only be able to hold the rights to things the corporation produced -- yes that's possible, movies tend to not be the product of a single individual, and industrial research labs invent things through group effort.
The original point of that clause was to authorize Congress to make analogues in American Law of the then still-innovative British Law of Queen Anne and Statute of Monopolies of 1623, which replaced the old custom of the Crown granting copyrights and monopolies to printers and favored noblemen or guilds and limited monopolies to authors and inventors respectively.
It would be harder for publishers (record companies included) to screw artists if the right still inhered in the artist, rather then being transferable to a publisher in toto as a condition of publication.
No. I'm suggesting, for instance, that shouting down school choice as "racist" on the plea that it would deprive minority-serving public schools of resources, when ordinary African Americans support the policy in public opinion surveys because it would give them the chance (at least) of sending their kids to better schools -- the countervailing argument -- is an abuse of language which serves the interests of expansion of government (objectively the main goal of the left) and public service unions (who donate to the left), but not the interests of racial minorities, and is akin to "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength".
I'm suggesting it's an abuse of language, irrespective of the race of the speaker, though if the speaker claiming school choice is "racist" is a white liberal, I think your point applies (see above).
Yeah, kids think that having a zero-marginal-cost digital copy of a work isn't theft. What matters about the public domain is its use in derivative works and public performances. Had moneyed interests *who are neither authors, nor composers, nor songwriters* not managed first to alienate copyright from the actual artist (the point of the "...to authors and inventors..." was actually to *not* give Congress the power to grant monopolies to publishers and manufactures, but *only* to authors and inventors -- the point of the the British copyright and patent laws the American Founders were looking at when the wrote the Constitution) by making it into salable "intellectual property", and then replaced Anglo-American copyrights of fixed terms with French-style "life plus" copyright terms complete with droits d'auteur to allow suppression of derivative works, our culture would be much richer.
The public domain is not about being able to have it in your iTunes play list, it's about being able to play it in a cover-band, to retell the story from a different point of view (Remember Margaret Mitchell's literary estate's attempts to suppress "The Wind Done Gone" a retelling of "Gone with the Wind" from the point of view of the slaves? Yeah, that came out right in the end, but the author of the retelling should never have needed to go to court and pursue appeals), to use elements of the existing culture in new cultural works without permission from someone who purportedly represents the "interests" a long-dead previous contributor to our culture, but is really just after monopoly rents for something that they didn't actually create.
The word "racist" is now Newspeak and means whatever it serves the interests of the left for it to mean at any given time. It can mean the same as in English -- a person who believes people should be treated differently according to their skin color or ethnicity, or who believes one race is superior to another -- or someone who advocates a policy the left opposes on the plea that it will harm racial or ethnic minorities (even when the policy if prima facia race-neutral and even if there are countervailing arguments, rejected by the left, that it might help racial or ethnic minorities), or even simply a white person (cf. the claim "all whites are racist" often heard in the halls of academe).
Signals intelligence is a war measure -- the vigorous conduct of which against foreign adversaries I strong support. The desire of many in government to apply it to the American citizenry is an unwitting admission that they regard the populace they are, in theory, elected, appointed or hired to serve as an enemy.
My discipline in mathematics, category theory, has already done it. Our preeminent peer-reviewed journal is Theory and Applications of Categories. Authors retain copyright to their own papers but grant permission to the journal to offer the papers in perpetuity on the web and maintain print archival copies in several locations. The infrastructure is provided by Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. Just like commercially published journals, academicians donate the editorial services and refereeing, and mirable dictu no one is collecting monopoly rents on the donated labor of academician.
The problem is each discipline has to step up and create peer reviewed journal run entirely by academicians in the field who aren't venial and out to collect monopoly rents for themselves.
Actually, the Europeans are just following America's lead on this: we are the ones who started this notion that our laws apply to non-citizens outside our borders Julian Assange and Kim Dotcom are but recent examples.
I think the failing is not stupidity, but arrogance.
Perhaps he can champion legislation to make that so...
These remarks being made at the end of tax filing season are beyond risible. I invite Rep. Sensenbrenner to actually file his own Federal Income Tax and find a way to do it without using the internet. His office can then start working on legislation to make it so one doesn't need to use the internet to file one's Federal taxes.
A modest proposal: Trump could pardon Edward Snowden, and offer him a top position in the administration overseeing intelligence matters. Besides really sticking it to the intelligence community that seems bent on, if not destroying his administration, at least destroying any chance of rapprochement with Russia -- the only upside I ever saw to a Trump presidency -- this also has the virtue of shocking and surprising everyone on both sides of the political divide.
More seriously, whatever you think of Trump and Flynn, as an OpEd in The Telegraph (UK) asked is it right for the permanent apparatus of the intelligence services in a liberal democracy to be using leaks to the media, rather than passing information to appropriate authorities (in the US case, Congress) to bring political appointees and thereby harm an elected government? Divorced from the personalities involved, the answer is very clearly "no", and therefore the answer is "no", even if it's General Flynn who's being brought down, and Donald Trump who is being harmed in this particular instance.
Having a government agency sit in judgement over what can or can't be published rather misses the whole point of the First Amendment. Enough factual matters bearing on public policy are matters of controversy that giving a government board the power to suppress what it judges to be false is tantamount to creating a government censorship board. (As an example under the Trump administration, publishing "value added" climate data with imputed data in the polar regions and adjustments downward of past temperatures made on the basis that some new measurement technique gives different results, might be suppressed as "fake news", while under the next Democrat administration publishing any raw climate data that doesn't provide prima facia support for the notion of potentially-catastrophic anthropogenic greenhouse-gas induced global warming might be suppressed as "fake news".)
And, of course, when "fake news" means people circulating parody articles mistakenly thinking them to be real news, how exactly is the FTC to deal with this? Obviously by banning parody! (It's the only way to be sure.)
Perhaps all companies subject to NSL's should make a practice of keeping them on a server used only for governmental communications and secured with a trivial-to-guess username and password so amateur hackers who have not been issued a gag order can "hack" the governmental communications server and pass them on to wikileaks.
That big expose about a gang rape by a fraternity at U.Va.?
The anachronistic Microsoft Word documents Dan Rather tried to pass off as early '70's National Guard documents about George W. Bush?
Or just nitwits passing off pieces from The Onion or Onion-wannabes as actual news because they don't know better?
As the old tabloid motto said "inquiring minds want to know."
Somehow, I suspect it's only the last one. Maybe an education system that actually educates people with a view to the fact they might actually have to make policy decisions, at least in the voting booth, if not in elective office, rather than just "to get a good job" is the answer, rather than an attack on the First Amendment. As Will Rogers used to say, "In American, anyone can grow up to be President. . . it's a risk we all take." (The same goes for Senator and Congressman.)
Indeed. And like "Nazi" it's used both as an accurate descriptor of some people's tyranny-promoting ideology, and as a pejorative to silence those the left deems to be beyond the pale.
This strikes me as staggering ingratitude. The law applicable to the handling of classified information explicitly criminalized negligence and as such contains no mens rea provision, yet Comey used a purported absence of ill-intent on the part of Sec. Clinton in her routing of e-mails, including many containing classified information, and some marked (C) for classified, through her insecure private server.
Of course perhaps she's right. Her treatment (contrast with that of a decorated Marine who sent one e-mail containing classified intelligence through an insecure channel in an ultimately vain attempt to save the lives of fellow Marines in Afghanistan) reinforced the impression that Washington elites have placed themselves above the law, and may have spurred some otherwise lukewarm voters to pull the lever for the business/entertainment elitist rather than the political elitist on November 8th.
Full disclosure: I'm a #NeverTrump Republican who didn't vote for either of the wannabe Caesars.
Now let me get this straight, a government grant of a monopoly, to wit a patent, is property, but a government grant of an oligopoly, to wit a taxi medallion, is not. That in sum is Judge Posner's finding (and he was the one who called patents property in his ruling, though he also claimed that taxi medallions are not a grant of oligopoly rights, even though that is precisely how they functioned in most major cities until the advent of Uber and Lyft).
This lawsuit seems to me to be a natural result of the intellectual corruption inherent in reifying government granted monopolies as property, seen in the phrase "intellectual property".
I have a feeling there would be no news story if the Border Patrol agent had been whiling way the hours with fantasy football or computer solitaire.
The line from Milton was originally an expression of a particular form of protestant piety, but describes a great many government (and non-government) jobs in which merely being present in case something happens, in which case one must deal with it, is nearly the whole content of the job. I am guessing that the Border Agent in question had such a job.
While we might hope that such Federal employees would do something more uplifting (of the mind, not the nether regions of the anatomy) than watching porn (for instance reading Milton's poetry) while waiting for something to happen that must be dealt with (e.g. an illegal border crossing), it seems churlish to deny them their preferred legal amusements as they while away the hours simply because a residual Puritanism persists in our generally libertine society. If other computerized amusements would have been acceptable pastimes for the employee during idle times, then, indeed, the fact he was not prevented from engaging in his favored amusement of watching porn is on the Federal agency.
Anti-theater not actually an example of "moral panic" at the new
While the anti-Edison piece is a comparable example to the "moral panics" over comic books, D&D and video games, the denunciation of the theater is not.
Anti-theater attitudes have their roots in the conflict between Christianity and paganism (cf. the scandal caused by Justinian marrying an actress* and the ancient canons forbidding Christian priests from attending theatrical performances) and revive periodically (cf. Cromwell closing all the theaters in England).
*Admittedly if Theodora's attitude toward sex was as recorded in Procopius's Secret History there was adequate reason to be scandalized by someone marrying her, but the polemics of the time were directed at her having been an actress.
On the post: Trump Doesn't Understand Surveillance Powers; House Votes To Give Him More Of It
Signals Intelligence
On the post: Copyright Maximalists Throw In The Towel On Term Extension; Admit That Maybe Copyright Is Too Long
...to authors and inventors...
The original point of that clause was to authorize Congress to make analogues in American Law of the then still-innovative British Law of Queen Anne and Statute of Monopolies of 1623, which replaced the old custom of the Crown granting copyrights and monopolies to printers and favored noblemen or guilds and limited monopolies to authors and inventors respectively.
It would be harder for publishers (record companies included) to screw artists if the right still inhered in the artist, rather then being transferable to a publisher in toto as a condition of publication.
On the post: Once Again: Expecting Social Media Companies To Police 'Bad' Stuff Is A Bad Idea
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm suggesting it's an abuse of language, irrespective of the race of the speaker, though if the speaker claiming school choice is "racist" is a white liberal, I think your point applies (see above).
On the post: Hopefully For The Last Time: The US Has Zero New Works Enter The Public Domain On January 1st
How does it matter? (in answer to the First Word)
The public domain is not about being able to have it in your iTunes play list, it's about being able to play it in a cover-band, to retell the story from a different point of view (Remember Margaret Mitchell's literary estate's attempts to suppress "The Wind Done Gone" a retelling of "Gone with the Wind" from the point of view of the slaves? Yeah, that came out right in the end, but the author of the retelling should never have needed to go to court and pursue appeals), to use elements of the existing culture in new cultural works without permission from someone who purportedly represents the "interests" a long-dead previous contributor to our culture, but is really just after monopoly rents for something that they didn't actually create.
On the post: Once Again: Expecting Social Media Companies To Police 'Bad' Stuff Is A Bad Idea
Re: Re:
On the post: The Spy Coalition In Congress Rushes Through Plan To Keep The NSA Spying On Americans
Signals Intelligence
On the post: NY Times Uncritically Says Fake News Debate Supports Chinese Style Censorship
Fake news like...
On the post: Scientific Publishers Want Upload Filter To Stop Academics Sharing Their Own Papers Without Permission
Re:
The problem is each discipline has to step up and create peer reviewed journal run entirely by academicians in the field who aren't venial and out to collect monopoly rents for themselves.
On the post: Austrian Court's 'Hate Speech' Ruling Says Facebook Must Remove Perfectly Legal Posts All Over The World
Re: Europeans
I think the failing is not stupidity, but arrogance.
On the post: Bad Take: Rep. Sensenbrenner's Response Over Internet Privacy Concerns: 'Nobody's Got To Use The Internet'
Perhaps he can champion legislation to make that so...
On the post: Oh, Sure, Suddenly Now The House Intelligence Boss Is Concerned About Surveillance... Of Mike Flynn
Thoughts on Flynn and related matters
More seriously, whatever you think of Trump and Flynn, as an OpEd in The Telegraph (UK) asked is it right for the permanent apparatus of the intelligence services in a liberal democracy to be using leaks to the media, rather than passing information to appropriate authorities (in the US case, Congress) to bring political appointees and thereby harm an elected government? Divorced from the personalities involved, the answer is very clearly "no", and therefore the answer is "no", even if it's General Flynn who's being brought down, and Donald Trump who is being harmed in this particular instance.
On the post: Bad Idea Or The Worst Idea? Having The FTC Regulate 'Fake News'
Re:
On the post: Bad Idea Or The Worst Idea? Having The FTC Regulate 'Fake News'
Rather misses the point of freedom of the press
And, of course, when "fake news" means people circulating parody articles mistakenly thinking them to be real news, how exactly is the FTC to deal with this? Obviously by banning parody! (It's the only way to be sure.)
On the post: Cloudflare Finally Able To Reveal FBI Gag Order That Congress Told Cloudflare Couldn't Possibly Exist
A modest proposal
On the post: Rep. Marsha Blackburn Says Internet Service Providers Have 'An Obligation' To Censor 'Fake News'
Now which fake news would that be?
That big expose about a gang rape by a fraternity at U.Va.?
The anachronistic Microsoft Word documents Dan Rather tried to pass off as early '70's National Guard documents about George W. Bush?
Or just nitwits passing off pieces from The Onion or Onion-wannabes as actual news because they don't know better?
As the old tabloid motto said "inquiring minds want to know."
Somehow, I suspect it's only the last one. Maybe an education system that actually educates people with a view to the fact they might actually have to make policy decisions, at least in the voting booth, if not in elective office, rather than just "to get a good job" is the answer, rather than an attack on the First Amendment. As Will Rogers used to say, "In American, anyone can grow up to be President. . . it's a risk we all take." (The same goes for Senator and Congressman.)
On the post: Why Twitter's Alt-Right Banning Campaign Will Become The Alt-Right's Best Recruitment Tool
Re: Let's at least be clear about terminology
On the post: Hillary Clinton Looks At Her Campaign's Many Missteps, Decides To Blame James Comey For Her Loss
Ingratitude
Of course perhaps she's right. Her treatment (contrast with that of a decorated Marine who sent one e-mail containing classified intelligence through an insecure channel in an ultimately vain attempt to save the lives of fellow Marines in Afghanistan) reinforced the impression that Washington elites have placed themselves above the law, and may have spurred some otherwise lukewarm voters to pull the lever for the business/entertainment elitist rather than the political elitist on November 8th.
Full disclosure: I'm a #NeverTrump Republican who didn't vote for either of the wannabe Caesars.
On the post: Judge Posner Smacks Around Cabbies For Thinking That Cities Allowing Uber Violates Their 'Property Rights'
Property
This lawsuit seems to me to be a natural result of the intellectual corruption inherent in reifying government granted monopolies as property, seen in the phrase "intellectual property".
On the post: Border Patrol Agent Caught Watching Porn On The Job Blames The Internet Filter For Not Stopping Him
They also serve who only stand and wait.
The line from Milton was originally an expression of a particular form of protestant piety, but describes a great many government (and non-government) jobs in which merely being present in case something happens, in which case one must deal with it, is nearly the whole content of the job. I am guessing that the Border Agent in question had such a job.
While we might hope that such Federal employees would do something more uplifting (of the mind, not the nether regions of the anatomy) than watching porn (for instance reading Milton's poetry) while waiting for something to happen that must be dealt with (e.g. an illegal border crossing), it seems churlish to deny them their preferred legal amusements as they while away the hours simply because a residual Puritanism persists in our generally libertine society. If other computerized amusements would have been acceptable pastimes for the employee during idle times, then, indeed, the fact he was not prevented from engaging in his favored amusement of watching porn is on the Federal agency.
On the post: Another 19th Century Moral Panic: Theater
Anti-theater not actually an example of "moral panic" at the new
Anti-theater attitudes have their roots in the conflict between Christianity and paganism (cf. the scandal caused by Justinian marrying an actress* and the ancient canons forbidding Christian priests from attending theatrical performances) and revive periodically (cf. Cromwell closing all the theaters in England).
*Admittedly if Theodora's attitude toward sex was as recorded in Procopius's Secret History there was adequate reason to be scandalized by someone marrying her, but the polemics of the time were directed at her having been an actress.
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