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Archive for the ‘Law’ Category
Japanese Elegance
Sunday, August 29th, 2010Bravery of the Day: Offending One’s Fans
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010Penny Arcade:
[click for full size]
I traded in games for a long time, there’s probably comics somewhere in the archive about it – you can imagine how quickly my cohort and I consume these things. It was sort of like Free Money, and we should have understood from the outset that no such thing exists. You meet one person who creates games for a living, just one, and it becomes very difficult to maintain this virtuous fiction.
I absolutely agree with this, and I absolutely and without undue irony applaud Tycho and Gabe’s honest bravery in posting a comic likely to offend their somewhat rabid fan base, and yet….
This is what comes of treating your customers like the enemy. They stop being your customers, and become your enemies.
And this is what happens when you treat the artists you love like the enemy. Same-same.
Sick At Heart
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010Clayton Cramer is fighting the good fight against Righthaven, an operation that buys the copyrights on articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, then sues bloggers who have quoted any part of the article. I think they’re using the heinous Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which apparently allows suits for arbitrary amounts of money without first issuing a take-down notice.
Righthaven’s CEO, Steve Gibson, told Reason Magazine, “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues.” [Information Liberation]
in other words, this isn’t about defending the copyright, which in most cases would involve a simple take-down notice. It’s a flat out shake-down.
Cramer’s pretty shaken about this. I’ve been reading him for years now, and I’ve never read anything like this from him:
When this matter is resolved, I’m retiring from all involvement with public policy, and doing my best to disappear. This system is so fundamentally corrupt, evil, and unwilling to reform itself that I no longer care to take any action to reform it or protect it. It needs to burn, and it needs to die. Why anyone would fight to defend a nation that is as corrupt and evil as this one leaves me utterly confused.
Gibson is doing real evil here. Cramer’s one of the good guys in my book, and and Gibson could well ruin him.
I’m going to miss him badly when he’s gone.
Why this story isn’t everywhere, I don’t understand. Cramer desperately needs help, and none of the people and organizations he’s helped are stepping up.
I’m looking forward to Gibson crashing and burning in court, if only someone with lawyers and money turns the tables on him.
More on Righthaven at Techdirt.
Techdirt also has this article on Righthaven’s self-justification.
Per informationliberation, it’s possible that Righthaven is specifically attacking right-leaning bloggers.
Oh, wait, except when, as Media Matters says, they’re specifically targeting left-wingers
Thomas’ McDonald Concurrance, Digested
Saturday, July 24th, 2010The Richmond Times-Dispatch has done the hard work of editing it down, presenting “The Ugly Racial History of Gun Control”.
Via Arms and the Law.
DMCA Drops Another Good Guy
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010Clayton Cramer thinks he’s not making enough of a difference to keep going in the face of frivolous lawsuit thugs like those over at Las Vegas Review-Journal:
Today, The Armed Citizen received informal notice in the form of a media inquiry about a lawsuit against this website and its owners, David Burnett and Clayton Cramer. The lawsuit, reportedly filed in US District Court on July 20th, alleges that The Armed Citizen and its owners “willfully copied” original source content from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
According to news reports, Righthaven LLC has reportedly filed lawsuits against 75 other political websites and/or blogs without prior contact or attempt at resolution. The sites include FreeRepublic.com, the Safe and Secure Internet Gambling Initiative and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
The “offending” entries consist of six stories, some of which were short enough to qualify under the Fair Use Rule, out of nearly 4,700 entries. The six stories are still publicly available on the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s website, to which we linked.
The Armed Citizen has been excerpting articles from newspaper, TV station, and radio station websites for a number of years. If any copyright holders decided that The Armed Citizen had exceeded fair use, they only needed to send us an email. Instead, in a bid to target and intimidate small websites, they have chosen to pursue legal action.
At this time, the future of The Armed Citizen is uncertain, and possibly in jeopardy, thanks to Righthaven LLC and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Their contact information is listed below.
Las Vegas Review-Journal
1111 W. Bonanza Road
P.O. Box 70
Las Vegas, NV 89125Main phone number:
702-383-0211Newspaper office number:
702-383-0264Copy of Lawsuit (As forwarded by a reporter…The Armed Citizen has received no official notice of pending litigation.)
To e-mail David and Clayton, write to Tips@thearmedcitizen.com
Further information:
Las Vegas newspaper sues websites over use of content
Conservative website among 3 sued over R-J copyrights
LV Review-Journal may be violating law with selective copyright suits
REVIEW-JOURNAL SUES ITS OWN SOURCEUPDATE: It turns out that the minimum amount of a controversy filed in federal court involving citizens of multiple states is $75,000 (which is something that I already knew). The lawyers are relying on us to “settle” because they know darn well that their actual damages aren’t even close to $75,000. They might have trouble proving $75 worth of actual damages. This is perilously close to extortion. Interesting discussion of this over here.
UPDATE 2: These lawyers have filed dozens of such suits, always demanding $75,000 (the federal controversy minimum)–and it looks like some people are starting to fight back. I wonder how many people like me showing up and demanding proof of $75,000 in damages before some federal judge tells these crooks to go chase ambulances, like other shysters.
UPDATE 3: I have taken down the entire Armed Citizen blog. It’s just too dangerous. And this blog may go away tomorrow as well. It’s just too dangerous. There are criminal enterprises out there prepared to use the law in ways that it was not intended.
The Armed Citizen ran excerpts of news stories of armed citizens defending themselves. It was an astonishing resource, and its loss is a serious blow to those attempting to legitimize the right of the people to manage their own lives. I visited there occasionally, and the excerpts were just that, unless the story was no more than a few lines, impossible to excerpt meaningfully.
After the above post went up, Cramer followed with two more, preserved here for posterity in case they go away:
There Are Days It Just Isn’t Worth It
I’ve spent quite a bit of the last twenty years trying to make a difference in the political system. Garbage like this below makes me wonder if it is too late to solve this country’s problems, and maybe I should stop trying to make it better. It’s just not worth it.
I’ve decided that the costs of liablity insurance are too high to make this continue to make sense, especially in light of sleazy garbage such as the Las Vegas Review-Journal lawsuit. (And ironically, we are supposedly on the same side.) America is enthusiastically headed into a cesspool, I’m not doing anything that is likely to even slow the downslope speed of destruction. Tonight I will download everything from the blog, and delete everything but this explanation.
Thanks to all the readers who have provided encouragement over the years. America is in a death spiral.
[The words that follow are my own; Cramer is in no way responsible for them and is not aware of them as I post.]
Cramer was one of the good guys; he exposed Bellesiles’ lies (I have the book, Armed America, he wrote in the aftermath of that, documenting that guns have been part of American culture since the earliest colonial days, and establishing that some of the earliest gun laws were aimed at the disenfranchised: slaves, Indians, indentured servants.) He helped write briefs for both the Heller and McDonald Supreme Court cases, and has had the heady experience of being quoted in the decisions.
The most distressing thing about this that he’s not being taken down in the fight with anti-gunners; it’s the damn copyright lawyers, and the thrice damned DMCA that gives them teeth. Cramer is not stealing the works of others in any significant way, he is clearly in the “safe harbour” provisions, but he is still being attacked, and not, I suspect, because of any concern about copyrights, but as outright extortion, simply in the hope that he will cave.
I sincerely hope he reconsiders, and begins blogging again. I could wish that he would blog, be damned to the thugs at the Review-Journal and their lawyers, and be prepared to go out shooting when they came for him, or even allow himself to be arrested as an act of civil disobediance, but he has a family and responsibilities I do not, and has already done far more for the cause than most.
And you know, I think that it is not his responsibilities that stop him. It’s that he thinks America is failing, as an enterprise, losing its compass, and that the fight is not worth the sacrifice.
I hope he’s wrong.
But I fear he’s right.
God speed, Clayton, little though that may mean coming from a skeptic like me.
I pray your light has not gone out, but is only dimmed, for awhile, until the vultures have passed.
Update:
Rob Allen at Sharp as a Marble has picked up on this; lots of good comments there.
Presumption of Competence
Thursday, June 17th, 2010Son of a gun.
No sooner had I posted my “elevator pitch” for liberty, but Billy Beck points me to Wendy McElroy’s excellent expansion of the idea, “A Legal Presumption of Competence.”
A core principle of the Nanny State is that people do not know their best interests and must be treated like children with the State acting as guardian. Indeed, that’s where the word “nanny” comes from. The Nanny State proceeds from the presumption that you are incompetent to administer your own life. Even fully-functioning adults are deemed unable or unwilling to make wise decisions and, so, the state rushes in to fill the void with extensive regulation of every individual’s personal health and safety.
How much transfat or salt can be in your fast food burger? You are too obese, too nutritionally ignorant, too addicted to McDonalds to be trusted. Should you smoke, drink, or chow down on sweets? Of course not! But if you do, then, like a good parent, the State will force you to bear the cost of irresponsibility by uber-taxing your minor vices and imprisoning you for the major ones.
The “wise parent” list scrolls on and on: wear a helmet while bicycling, don’t use saccharine, no public nudity, don’t loiter in parks, monitor your words to coworkers, don’t download porn, take a urine test at work, don’t drive too fast, take only approved drugs and only in the prescribed fashion, strap on your safety belt, pay a tax for the error of fast food, no smoking in public places, register your handgun, don’t use incandescent bulbs, recycle, homogenize all milk, buy health insurance. . . . And, recently, Maine was pushing to eliminate sex-specific bathrooms because separate “men’s” and women’s” rooms discriminate against your gender rights. Yes, where you take a piss is now a matter of state to be debated by legislatures, and all because they want to protect you. Happily, Maine has backed away from politicizing toilets.
It gets better. Read it all.
But especially read this:
There is a word to describes the situation in which another party claims ownership over the body of another: it is “slavery.” As such, the Nanny State is misnamed. Although it would like to project the image of a wise guardianship of children — a sort of stern Mary Poppins who uses a “spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down” — a more accurate image is that of a slave owner. One hand of the Nanny State may be wagging an admonishing finger at you but the other hand is holding a whip at-the-ready.
Slavery. That’s really what we’re talking about here.
Oh, and that’s not all from Beck:
The entire effect — if not the purpose — of a jaywalking statute is to strip the individual of that which he is born with: the principal device with which humans are able and naturally authorized to make their ways through the world.
…
Me? I know how to get across a street. My parents saw to that at an early age.
As usual, Beck gets right to core of the thing, and you should read every golden word.
This was his comment over at Radley’s Agitator article concerning a woman who got punched in the face by a cop over a jaywalking ticket.
John Venlet was talking about “Fort Sumters”, and I was talking about small individual actions, “candles not forest fires”.
This, folks, is what candles look like.
Also notice in the video that damn near every person in the crowd had a phonecam out. No effort to arrest the guy making this video, it would have been futile.
Imagine the woman quoting the Constitution, the law, the Declaration, Locke, Paine, Henry, Jefferson, or, hell, Beck, making a principled stand against a minor tyranny.
Now imagine everybody in that crowd with a gun on their hip, nodding their heads at every word she says and scowling at the cops.
Imagine that freedom, liberty itself, was politically correct.
Hahahaha! What a ridiculous idea! I slay myself sometimes.
Lawyer Show: The Defenders
Saturday, June 5th, 2010Mark Bennett at Defending People points to The Defenders, a show from CBS about two Las Vegas Defense lawyers. Looks to be pretty entertaining:
Bennett comments:
Once upon a time there was Murder One, but realistic TV dramas with innocent defendants have been thin on the ground lately. The problem with the government getting it right all the time on TV (well, one of the problems) is that the people who watch TV get conditioned to assume that the government gets it right all the time in real life. (I once asked a jury panel what their favorite lawyer TV show was, and weeded out the Law & Order watchers while keeping the Boston Legal fans.)
I have to wonder what he’d do with me. I’ve pretty much given up on cop and lawyer shows because depending on the show, I can predict whether or not the defendant in the dock is innocent or guilty. As Bennett correctly points out, most shows are from the cop/prosecutor standpoint, and the defendant is therefore guilty; if he gets off, it’s because of unscrupulous trickery on the part of the defense. In the rare shows and movies standing on the side of the defense, the very existence of the police and courts is an affront to the innocent, and indeed, to “justice and liberty for all”.
I want a show that looks at the whole system, where at least 50% of the time, I cannot know which way the jury decides until the verdict is rendered. On the same damn show, I want cops fudging evidence to close a case; defense and prosecution warring over technicalities without regard to defendant or victim; innocent people getting railroaded because they didn’t know the Magic Dance needed to deal with the police, or tried to act pro se; obviously guilty people getting off because the police acted badly; people being convicted of crimes they’re actually guilty of, but had no idea that their (seemingly reasonable in the circumstances) actions were in fact illegal; juries being held in contempt for attempting nullification or being shocked to find that nullification was even possible for an offense they regarded as fundamentally unjust; judges occasionally being obtuse, arrogant, and vindictive, although mostly patient, learned, wise and just — the whole range of American jurisprudence, good and bad.
Oh, and two more things:
Every now and then, I want to see armed but unlicensed citizens protecting themselves against both thugs and tyrants with unregistered firearms. They can land in court, but I want to see the issue honestly discussed — I am sick to death of disgusted cops rolling their eyes at freely armed citizens, with the implication that of course only cops should be armed. Instead, I want Sir Bobby’s dictum that “The police are the people, and the people are the police” to be a regular mantra.
Finally, and most important, every show, every damn show, should teach the audience something about living under American law and protecting themselves under the Constitution. I am sick to death of learning that honest citizenssubjects help the police with their inquiries by answering every question, and consenting to searches; only crooks remain silent or withhold consent. I want the underlying philosophy of the show to be that citizens are capable of running their own lives, and are competent to understand and exercise their rights and responsibilities if given half a chance; that our current legal system does its best to render citizens helpless children; and that, yes, bad people are out there, on all sides, and game the system for their personal benefit, but that most cops, lawyers, and judges honestly want equal justice under the law — they just forget, sometimes, that liberty for all is the best path to justice for all.
I’ll watch that show religiously.
I seriously doubt I’ll ever see even one movie, much less a regular TV show, taking that stance. I’ve never heard of one.
[update]
No, wait, I just remembered one: Judge Bone on Picket Fences. I didn’t always agree with the man, but he tried, by golly, to judge fairly in very hard cases.
When You’re Wrong, Admit It
Monday, May 10th, 2010Sharp as a Marble Robb Allen swings:
Nominating an Immortal to the Supreme Court is just asking for trouble. They will be there forever unless someone beheads them and will generally rule in favor of laws that benefit the Gathering rather than focus on the effects of laws as they pertain to the Constitution of the United States of America.
… And misses:
UPDATE – It was brought to my attention that Obama has nominated Elena Kagan, the current Solicitor General, to the Supreme Court, and not The Kurgan as I had originally thought.
“Never mind, then.”
Jews in the Attic
Sunday, May 2nd, 2010Joe Huffman provides a clarifying filter:
To the best of my knowledge I am the originator of this test and the name I use to describe it.
…
People tend to understand the importance of freedom of speech and the freedom of the press pretty well and some of the other rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. But the Second Amendment was and is viewed as unimportant and perhaps even counterproductive by many in today’s society. I explained to the others in my little band of activists that I looked at all laws that restricted freedom with a view to the impact it would have in a worst case scenario of our government run amok. Will this law make it difficult or impossible to protect innocent life from a government intent on their imprisonment or death? Although I pretty much made everything up on the spot I told them I called this test my “Jews In The Attic Test”. Furthermore I told them that if it fails this test no further discussion is really needed, the law must be opposed in the most vigorous manner possible.
Some laws that fail the test and why:
- Government mandated ID cards and the authority to demand them at any time. The oppressed class will be unable to masquerade as a member of the neutral or oppressor classes.
- Searches without probable cause. Imagine you are attempting to smuggle your “Jews in the attic” to a safer hiding place. If the police at the roadblock can search all vehicles then you and your precious cargo are headed to the “work camps”.
- Government monopoly on medical care. This is a bit surprising — isn’t it? If it is illegal for you to pay someone for anonymous health care then how can your “Jews in the attic” receive health care?
- Firearm or firearm owner registration. The registration information can be used to confiscate the firearms used to protect innocent life — as it was under the 1938 Weapons Control Act in Nazi Germany.
- Elimination or severe restriction of anonymous financial transactions. The purchase of food and other supplies for your “Jews in the attic” would show up in the records as being excessive compared to what your needs were. Just as power consumption records are used today to catch home marijuana growers.
I’ll note that the recent Arizona illegal immigrant law likely fails this test; I’m not terribly happy about that because I think we’ve got to control our borders.