Kudos to CEREAL AT MIDNIGHT for some excellent content on his blog and Youtube videos. His Youtube video on COLLECTING MEDIA IN A DIGITAL WORLD…. absolutely essential viewing.
http://www.cerealatmidnight.com/
Freedom
The most important news story of our digital age?
If you are not donating to the EFF, are not a card carrying member, and you consider some of the violations of personal liberties as well as continued inability of companies to safe guard our data, a concern at the least, and more accurately an outrage… EFF is the one fighting for your freedoms. And the one that needs your support.
Read up on FCC’s historic capitulation to big business (again… similar to when they just GAVE huge swaths of the public airwaves over to the private sector) as they now give unfettered manipulation powers to already grossly entrenched and competition squashing monopolistic entities (your ISPs).
And find out why the fight is not over and what you can do to help.
Go here…
Two Chills
I saw two things yesterday that gave me chills.
One happened early in the day when I was traveling through the east coast of the United States. I was driving and I looked up and I saw it, and it undoubtedly saw me.
How could it not? That is what it is designed to do.
It was the stuff of fiction, of dream, and perhaps more truly… nightmare, made real, made concrete… made manifest.
In fiction you would have called it perhaps the Eye of Sauron, if Tolkien’s lore holds sway, or perhaps Big Brother, if Orwellian references are not lost on a world moving dangerously sideways. But in fact it was more amazing and horrific than both those references.
We sometimes do not realize we live in the future, are the future that endured, of a bloody and brutal 20th century, and while that is not the future yet, of flying cars and jet packs and conversing with aliens, the future we are living,… of cloning, and test tube babies, and sexual reassignment, and genetic modifications, and decision making machines designed to kill men, and engineered diseases, and ethnic cleansings, and endless wars, and information super-highway, and super social media, and entertainment systems in most homes that are one code-write away from being constant surveillance and data gathering/marketing tools, this future is as miraculous and as horrifying as any scifi tale of invasion.
It is more terrifying. Because the future we live in is plagued with countless terrors, we are not so lucky as to have a single bogeyman. No… our corporate-beholden governments create countless destroyers of man’s liberties and mankind’s lives, not just one.
I was driving and I saw something that should never float above an American city, or any city, floating there. I saw the Eye of Sauron, I say again, because it sounds romantic, but more… because it feels most true.
I saw this:
And it is a sight that I fear that all of us will be seeing, if we do not with all oppose it. For all the talk of not abusing the rights of the people, the fact is, that is what the blimp is designed to do, its very existence over American cities is an affront to the idea of a government of the people. What I saw in the sky yesterday was Ferguson and Palestine writ large, it is a show of force, it is the act of an occupying army.
Too much to make of it? I fear its existence is proof that we have made too little of our liberties. And time is running out to make more.
And what was the 2nd thing that gave me chills? That night I watched Lawrence Olivier and Gregory Peck give blistering performances in a movie that in 1978, almost 40 years ago, was the height of fantasy, but today feels as close as the next news cycle. I’m talking about THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL.
Between facts that feel like fictions and fictions that feel like facts, the ground feels precarious, and the watchful skies… deserving of being watched.
Perhaps we should watch… together.
News You Can Use
Here are a couple articles that caught my eye:
NSA Surveillance Scandal: Snowden In Moscow, Asks Ecuador for Asylum
What occurs to me is Snowden is not the name we should be concentrating on, or the one that should be on the run. It’s the NSA names that signed off on the illegal spying that should be the names of the hour. Names to admonish and remember.
and lest the NSA have all the fun…
Confirmed: The FBI is Spying on the US with Drones
The interesting thing about drone technology is, quite like science fiction stories of yesteryear(fact being forged out of fiction), they are no longer restricted to the size of small robot controlled planes high in the sky. Increasingly they are the size and contour of innocuous things like insects.
Seriously. I would not joke you. Look it up, I’ll wait.
Hmm-hm-hmmmm-hmm …. duh-da-da da … Ah, you’re back. So looked it up have you? All proven? Good.
So, Take a close look at that next dragonfly buzzing around, it may just be time to say… cheese. :).
Civil Liberties? Human Rights? Privacy? Where or where have they gone. :).
Maybe there is a simple answer to the preservation of these endangered concepts like liberty … fighting for them. Every way we can… fighting for them. They must be preserved by seeing a wrong, acknowledging it as such, and acting against it.
Snowden, whatever his believed goals, did more right than wrong, in putting morality before money, and conscience before corporations and the corporate stranglehold on American policy. And before any of this gets better(this being our steep slide to totalitarianism and slavery) we must… all of us… make judgments about what we allow to be done in our name, by a largely hidden minority, who hide behind letters like… US.
United States.
Who the hell are they to hunt and kill and torture under that cloak? Under that mask, under that lie, of the United States. I am the United States as long as I pay taxes to the fiefdom. And I see the spying programs as illegal at best, and Snowden as a necessary byproduct of a culture of lies. As a man who sees the truth, and has the temerity… to believe the governed have a right to the reality of the machinations that govern them.
We must all of us judge what is done in our name, and if found wrong… resist it.
And whether that wrong be called Schutzstaffel or its progeny of the NSA, Darpa, Homeland Security, our response to it must be the same…
Resist it.
FOLLOWING THE FOLLOWERS Episode #3a: The EFF
Well the first two episodes of FOLLOWING THE FOLLOWERS was well received, so I thought it was worthwhile to kick out episode #… THREE!!!!
This new segment basically will select four or five followers of this blog (thanks to all of you who are now following this blog) and/or blogs I follow and just promote particularly interesting things I find on their pages:
Okay onto the promoting 🙂 :
I’m a paid up card carrying supporter of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and I have to say I consider them an essential organization for ANY OF US who have an online presence or make use of this wonder we call the internet and the digital age.
Quite frankly our elected representatives are out of their depth when it comes to protecting the rights of their constituents in the digital age. They surrender our rights to the lobbyist/snake oil salesman with the slickest line, and the fattest wallet.
The EFF discusses just this in their coverage of the recent passage of the CISPA in the House of Representatives.
“U.S. House of Representatives Shamefully Passes CISPA; Internet Freedom Advocates Prepare for a Battle in the Senate
“Today, Internet freedom advocates everywhere turned their eyes to the U.S. House of Representatives as that legislative body considered the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act.
For the second year in a row, the House voted to approve CISPA, a bill that would allow companies to bypass all existing privacy law to spy on communications and pass sensitive user data to the government. EFF condemns the vote in the House and vows to continue the fight in the Senate.
“CISPA is a poorly drafted bill that would provide a gaping exception to bedrock privacy law,” EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl said. “While we all agree that our nation needs to address pressing Internet security issues, this bill sacrifices online privacy while failing to take common-sense steps to improve security.”
The legislation passed 288-127, despite a veto threat from Pres. Barack Obama, who expressed serious concerns about the danger CISPA poses to civil liberties.”
—By Dave Maass and Mark M. Jaycox
Read the whole story, and much more here. And when you’ve read enough to get you good and fighting mad. Join the EFF and support those who are fighting for you!
For reasons of ease of reading we’re going to split this latest installment of FOLLOWING THE FOLLOWERS into bite-size chunks, Enjoy this one and another one is on its way!
Short Film: FIRST THEY CAME
FIRST THEY CAME
Great little short film/psa courtesy of the excellent site NO FAT CLIPS.
Site has not been updated in a while with new content, but hopefully it will be updated soon. because it is sites like this that should be the future of media on the web.
Sites that allow you to view and stream and download in open-source formats, and are moderated (in other words free of vulgar or ignorant comments) offer an environment that should be popular, rather than the unmoderated, profanity prone You-Tube.
Sites such as NO FAT CLIPS. See for yourself!
PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID and Walks across Hell
BILLY: You know, I believe ole Pat has lost his sand.
DEPUTY BELL: You ought not to talk about him that way. You and him used to be pretty close.
BILLY: He ain’t the same man… He signed himself over to Chisum and every other goddamned landowner that’s trying to put a fence around this country. Hell that’s what you been doing, ain’t it, Bell? Selling us out and getting fat.
Which version of PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID should you see?
You didn’t know there were multiple versions? Unfortunately there are.
This is why I dislike multiple versions of a film. A film is a touchstone to a culture, it’s one of those key moments where you could say ‘I saw Star Wars’, and all of you can agree what the movie was, and what scenes you loved. You can have a conversation based on a shared cultural memory, a shared moment that in the crosstalk, connects us across time and across class or ethnicity or gender. That’s the very core of culture, these communal touchstones that bind us. That bind us all.
“Billy they don’t like you to be so free.”
And multiple versions of a film take away from us having this easy cultural shorthand with each other. Because the films and the moments that should bind us may not be there, depending on the version of the film we saw.
PAT GARRET AND BILLY THE KID unfortunately is like that. Depending on which version you see will determine if you walk away thinking it’s a masterpiece or overrated, bordering on inane.
There’s the TURNER MOVIES 1988 cut that finally restored the movie to its full length, and then there is the inexplicable 2005 version.
Avoid watching the 2005 version first, as your introduction to the movie, as it is… in ways deep and decisive, a betrayal of what the film is (If you listen to the commentary on the 1998 version, by ‘experts’ on Peckinpah that I typically find interesting, you hear the art by committee, art by consensus, ‘back seat’ driving and editing that leads to the butchered 2005 version. People who confuse being fans of a creative person, with being able to create in that person’s name. And as the 2005 version shows, that’s just not the case). Let’s just take the opening scene as an example, where, if you lose the power of that… you might as well just turn the movie off.
Jailer: Repent you son of a bitch.
Billy: Sweet Jesus I repent.
Jailer: Not till you taste the fear of the lord! I’ll show you! I’ll take you for a walk across hell on a spider web.
—(This is one of the great iconic lines of the film, of any film, and the actor (not the writer) came up with it, similar to how Rutger Hauer added the best line in BLADE RUNNER, the monologue about ‘tears in rain’. And the above line, “A walk across hell on a spider web” is completely cut out of the 2005 edit. Whoever the moron or morons are who are responsible for the 2005 version they should never work in film… ever. In fact I would sign off on a good stoning! 🙂 It’s one of multiple lines they either change, or yank out of the film. Unbelievable that someone could think they were doing anything but butchering the film by making these changes. Amazing.)
The 2005 version cuts the heart out of that first scene. The risqué joke that Billy and Pat share, removing some of the pauses and freeze frames, and shortening the conversation, and cutting out the pivotal final exchange of:
“he’s my friend”
“he aint no more”
“I reckon”
That exchange, the moments between those lines, and Billy’s quiet acknowledgment that times may indeed… have changed, is essential to the next scene and the rest of the movie.
It’s like they want to rush the movie, and that flies against the very heart of the film. Allegories and myths should not be rushed.
It’s a film about the pauses, what is not said between characters, it’s about a jail-break staged unlike any jail-break in any film, ever. Where it’s not about the jail break, it’s about a town, and a time, and a song, and a held moment of myth. It’s about the history that these two… once friends, share. That story is told in much that the 2005 version cuts out.
It’s a film that lives in the pauses.
“She was laughing like the devil when I caught her, but she was smiling when I left her.”
PAT GARRET AND BILLY THE KID is, in the purest sense of the word an existential movie, a movie (not a biography, Peckinpah is not interested, and neither are we, in the reality of these men, but in the mythology, in the romance) that is not about rushing to the next scene, but a movie that in the pauses and in the held shots says something about existence; and the 2005 edit of the film, doesn’t want to give it the time… to exist.
I’m saying avoid the 2005 edit, and stick to the 1988 Turner version with all those scenes still there (Both versions are available in the same box set available here
To see any other version of PAT GARRET AND BILLY THE KID is not to see it at all.
BILLY: To ole Pat. Sherrif Pat Garrett, sold out to the Santa Fe Ring. How does it feel?
PAT: It feels like… times have changed.
BILLY: Times maybe, not me.
WARNER BROTHERS, CASABLANCA, PIRATES, and The Rights of MAN?!
You know, after a hellacious week of giving people what for, nothing relaxes me more than curling up with a nice nature DVD. Attenborough’s LIFE, or in this case the documentary SHARKWATER.
So here I go, I put in this DVD to relax, while planning the latest update for the blog, and more mundane things like bills, when what the heck should come on the screen than one of those pirate warnings. You’ve seen these idiotic videos, that if anything only makes me want to do the exact opposite just to give it to them for interrupting my damn movie.
However I had not seen this one before.
This one used scenes from CASABLANCA to make an anti-pirating commercial. Excuse me? WTF?
You’re going to use one of the greatest movies ever made like a 2bit whore to sell your political or corporate viewpoint?!!
(And it is worth noting that the FBI warning on these DVDs, having very little to do with any sane legal system. A sane system would say to the studios “It’s not our business to ensure your corporate profits or protect your corporate losses. That’s a civil case… at best.”. Instead in the corrupt America we live in, the FBI warning is a product of studios making their commercial and corporate whims into laws. Using a system, not designed for corporations, to pass corporate whims and lunacy as Federal laws. Such a thing can not be looked at, by anyone rationally, and not see it as something… obscene)
You want to show violating rights is wrong, by using a commercial where you violate artistic rights?
Is the paradox lost on the studios?
Where do we draw the line? Next we use Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s images to praise one candidate for President and put down another? Where do we draw the line?
Both Bogart and Berman were deeply humanistic and activistic people, Bogart stood up against the McCarthy Witch-hunts. Bergman spent her days, after the lights of Hollywood, feeding and fighting for the poor.
I don’t think either one would have signed on in life to do a commercial for some companies new generation witch-hunt. And I don’t think they sign over those rights in death.
Because they did a popular movie, and you own the movie, should not then translate into you re-purposing their images to sell either your political agenda, your new vacuum cleaner, or your poorly made or counter-productive pirating campaign.
Those actors didn’t sign off on that, and weren’t paid for that. And this push to extend ownership beyond the exact product they created… to ownership of their likenesses… reeks. It is immoral. That, if anything, is true pirating.
They purpose not this end, when they purpose their services.
It sets an ugly an abhorrent precedent, an argument that flies in the face of Warner Brothers Anti-Piracy message. Warner violating with impunity the artistic integrity of their own film, and the rights of the actors.
Unless you’re paying them, their images, not their likenesses but their actual images, should not be re-purposed to create a new item, inherently different from the item they signed on to produce.
In many ways it’s like rewriting someone’s autobiography or a writer’s novel. For an actor all they have is the work, the images they leave behind. So to then insert them convincingly in a commercial, is just as wrong as inserting them into a porno.
It’s a violation.
And to not understand that, is to be very young, or very stupid. Or an executive.
Is piracy wrong? First I think it is an idiotic term, unless you’re at sea. Now if you’re talking about the copying of copyrighted DVDs, I think it’s a tempest in a teapot. If Warner Bros and other studios embraced their customers rather than criminalizing them all in advance (which is what me having to sit through an FBI warning or one of those stupid commercials on a DVD I just bought or rented… is doing. It’s saying to the consumer we’re going to treat you all as guilty until proven innocent) they would realize most people are happy to pay and own, a quality and reasonably priced product.
But there’s the rub, quality and reasonable prices. All companies want to do today is give you the least they can, for the most they can.
I’ll tell you what is wrong… Warner Brothers and all the studios like them are wrong, they are dinosaurs trying to survive in a changing technological society where big studios are increasingly superfluous. Rather than try and survive by being better and winning customers through innovation and great products, they instead want to survive by removing from you… choice. By scaring, suing, legislating, themselves as a law that we must fear, and bow down to, and pay tribute to because they are using the FBI and the courts like their personal thugs,
Warner Brothers should be glad people think enough of their work to desire it. Because the alternative is… people stop wanting… ANYTHING from them.
The consumer may start saying “You know what, there’s a lot of choice out there, despite Warner Brothers attempt to eradicate choice, why don’t we just stop buying or supporting anything Warner Brothers?”
Can you imagine that. People just get fed up of being treated like dogs by Warner Brothers, and just say to them, ‘you’re that worried about your intellectual property? Well you keep it then. You keep it all. We already have the memories of all the decent movies, keep anything new. Keep your DVDs, keep your games, keep your movies, keep your books.’
And after a few months of them not having to worry about patron or pirate, I’d love to see how their effing tune changes. They’d be crying for someone to think enough of their movies to sell bootlegs on the streets of Nepal.
It’s about perspective. And the perspective the studios and record companies and media oligarchies must come to, is that of earning customer business and customer goodwill… rather than attempting to lock in customers through terror.
Because here from these subtle fights, do great things grow.
And they are things the studios will not like at all.
As simple a thing, seemingly insignificant a thing as a tax on tea changed the face of the world, Today’s corporate atmosphere of pushing and prodding, with every move a crime, and in every hand a club… cannot do less.
There is a war of terror coming, that much the media ‘talking heads’ have right. But it’s not one of religions. It’s one between the mindless stupidity and greed of corporations… and the very rights of man.
And it is a war, that in the waging the rich will lose. And the poor, who have only lives to lose…and pushed to it… can only win.
So a wise man would say to the rich… ‘now may be a good time to stop pushing’.
Something to think about. :).
A SOPA Bullet and 29 Gunmen: Meeting your Destiny on the road you took to avoid it
“Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against – then you’ll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We’re after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”
-from Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
It’s not enough to defeat bills like HR 3261 (the Stop Online Piracy Act, which sounds like it might be a good thing, but is anything but. The full text can be found here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:h.r.3261:)aka SOPA; the bill would criminalize much of what you can do on the internet today, would allow big business to shut down sites and blogs with impunity. With no real burden of proof necessary.
Just an email or a call. And concepts such as free speech, or more to the point, anti-big business speech, can be shut down… as if they never existed.
So it is not enough to just defeat this Bill.
It’s not about this one bill. It’s about giving them reason to fear… drafting the next, and the next, and the next.
This is just one bullet you’re dodging in this bill. It is not enough to dodge this bullet, you have to take out the gunmen.
Remove them from positions, to be able to fire that gun at you again. Stop them from firing more bullets. Because what they know, what any good gunman knows, is… you can’t duck them all. They shoot enough bullets, and at least one is going to hit you. To take you down.
And what they are trying to take down is nothing more or less than your ability to resist… being owned, being controlled, being terrorized, being enslaved… to big business. They want to be able to do, whatever they want… unchecked.
And with enough bullets dressed as bills, they’re on the road to… turning back the clock.
To the killing of liberty, and the hard-fought dream… of America.
So you don’t try and just duck the bullets, you stop the shooter. You stop him hard.
You stop him so hard, that God himself will blink.
There are 29 gunmen, who signed the bullet called SOPA.
There are 29 assassins.
Assassins of liberty, at the onus of big business and big business dogs such as the RIAA and MPAA to be sure… but Assassins none the less.
You may want to look over the below names. See which ones come from your state or a surrounding state. Which ones are representing themselves rather than you. And do your part… in un-employing them.
Rep Smith, Lamar [TX-21]
Rep Amodei, Mark E. [NV-2] – 11/3/2011
Rep Baca, Joe [CA-43] – 12/7/2011
Rep Barrow, John [GA-12] – 11/14/2011
Rep Bass, Karen [CA-33] – 11/3/2011
Rep Berman, Howard L. [CA-28] – 10/26/2011
Rep Blackburn, Marsha [TN-7] – 10/26/2011
Rep Bono Mack, Mary [CA-45] – 10/26/2011
Rep Carter, John R. [TX-31] – 11/3/2011
Rep Chabot, Steve [OH-1] – 10/26/2011
Rep Chu, Judy [CA-32] – 11/30/2011
Rep Conyers, John, Jr. [MI-14] – 10/26/2011
Rep Cooper, Jim [TN-5] – 12/12/2011
Rep Deutch, Theodore E. [FL-19] – 10/26/2011
Rep Gallegly, Elton [CA-24] – 10/26/2011
Rep Goodlatte, Bob [VA-6] – 10/26/2011
Rep Griffin, Tim [AR-2] – 10/26/2011
Rep King, Peter T. [NY-3] – 11/3/2011
Rep Larson, John B. [CT-1] – 11/30/2011
Rep Lujan, Ben Ray [NM-3] – 11/14/2011
Rep Marino, Tom [PA-10] – 11/3/2011
Rep Nunnelee, Alan [MS-1] – 11/3/2011
Rep Owens, William L. [NY-23] – 11/14/2011
Rep Ross, Dennis [FL-12] – 10/26/2011
Rep Scalise, Steve [LA-1] – 11/14/2011
Rep Schiff, Adam B. [CA-29] – 10/26/2011
Rep Sherman, Brad [CA-27] – 12/7/2011
Rep Wasserman Schultz, Debbie [FL-20] – 11/3/2011
Rep Watt, Melvin L. [NC-12] – 11/3/2011
Rep Terry, Lee [NE-2] – 10/26/2011(withdrawn – 1/18/2012)
Rep Holden, Tim [PA-17] – 11/30/2011(withdrawn – 1/18/2012)
Rep Quayle, Benjamin [AZ-3] – 12/13/2011(withdrawn – 1/17/2012)
That is your mission, and your duty, and your calling if you choose to accept it. To say no, to all the people who would betray you.
To attack the Assassins of Liberty.
“Sometimes a man can meet his destiny, on the road he took to avoid it.”— The International
Enemies of the State: The Shadow and Metropolis and Ebay vs the Supreme Court, Alex Kozinski, Oracle, MPAA/RIAA and Google??!
The logo belongs to the brilliant website shadowsanctum.net, and I urge you to check her site out here. It’s great!
“Dead Cobras are better playthings than live ones.”
—The Shadow in THE TEMPLE BELLS OF NEBAN
“My reward, like yours Commissioner, is in protecting the defenseless from those who have not learned… that crime does not pay.”
—The Shadow
The TEMPLE BELLS OF NEBAN is a very intriguing Shadow episode from 1937, over 70 years ago at the dawn of the age of radio, starring the inimitable Orson Welles. And I highly recommend people seeking it out, and giving it a listen.
It’s not the best sounding recording available, but you can clearly hear why this show was an immediate hit, as the Shadow spars, almost lovingly, with a beautiful Indian dancer, whose powers may rival his own.
You can listen to a copy here.
And It’s also worth mentioning these shows only exist because of collectors, what today we would call filesharers, or bootleggers, these shows and thousands like them only exist because of the loving collector who recorded them off the air and kept them and shared them for the love, while the very companies that produced them, could not erase the tapes fast enough after the initial airing, seeing no long term value/profit to them.
I’m saying it’s ironic that what companies race today to make illegal, is the very people who have preserved the intellectual property many of them today… build their fortunes off of.
They seek to make illegal… the people who we need. The ones who keep things alive not for the money… but the love.
How lucky we are to have these recordings. Unfortunately thanks to Congress and the Supreme court working in tandem to put the rights of businesses above citizens…not only are clear Public Domain concepts like the Shadow radio show and pulp novels no longer in public domain, but they’ve recently upheld a law that allows the REMOVAL of certain foreign based works (Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (“Section 514”), which restores copyright protection to certain foreign works that were previously in the public domain), including compositions and the works of silent film directors such as Fritz Lang, out of Public Domain.
How the hell does Congress perceive they have the right to do that? Or does the Supreme court support them in that?
Fritz Lang is taken out of copyright today, what happens tomorrow… Poe? Shakespeare? All so companies can get you to pay, pay, pay.
And making this a one two punch, the Supreme Court has recently upheld (by failing to overturn the 9th circuit court ruling) Software companies rights to stop you from reselling your software on grounds of— well honestly the grounds make no sense— basically it’s companies intent on destroying the secondary market of used resellers, a huge and vital part of any economy, so they alone determine what in essence can be sold. And more, they alone can profit.
The story reads in part:
“The Supreme Court is refusing to review a federal appellate panel’s decision that software makers may use shrink-wrap and click-wrap licenses to forbid the transfer or resale of their wares.
Without comment, the justices on Monday let stand a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that is another erosion of the so-called “first-sale” doctrine, which the Supreme Court began to chip away at last year.
The first-sale doctrine generally is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement. It usually allows legitimate owners of copyrighted works to resell those copies.
That 3-0 circuit court decision means copyright owners may prohibit the resale of their wares by inserting clauses in their sales agreements. Autodesk had done that with a version of its popular AutoCAD software. The San Rafael, Calif. company sued to enforce those terms in its sales agreement and prevailed.
The Motion Picture Association of America and Software & Information Industry Association, whose members include Google, Adobe, McAfee, Oracle and dozens of others, urged the appellate court to rule as it did.”
–This is from the excellent guys at WIRED (it’s not lost on me that WIRED unfortunately is owned by CondeNast, one of the companies particularly active in chipping away at Public Domain), and the full story, along with other shocking abuses and erosions of liberty can be read here.
This ruling by the 9th circuit court, inherently cripples and destroys a healthy monetary model, in favor of a model geared entirely on creating a monopolistic system, and an entrenched protected powerbase that flies in the face of a free enterprise system.
The idea that I can’t, or you can’t resell something you bought, is itself an overstepping of liberties, and an infringement on liberties, so great as to be in and of itself… criminal.
Where does it end?
You do this first with the used software market, what is next? You can’t sell used DVDs? You can’t sell used books? You can’t sell used cars? You can’t sell used houses? At what point are you bankrupt of owning and controlling anything you purchase? Even the air you breathe, the food you eat, everything eventually gets leased to you?
Absurd right? We’re on an absurd and dangerous path.
This is a law that must be challenged and thrown out. And stands once more as clear and present proof that the congress and the supreme court are in the pocket of big business.
And that we have become a country at the mercy of crooks and liars and cowards and scum and thieves.
We have become a country, at the mercy of our neutered Congress and our spade Supreme Court.
The purpose of government is not to protect business at the expense of the citizens, it is to protect citizens at the expense of business.
It is not the job of government to insure the status or the livelihood of Sony or Microsoft or Disney. Businesses come and businesses go. Most of the business around at the start of the 20th century didn’t make it to the end of the 20th century, and that is how it should be.
And part of it is we have 20th century judges ruling on 21st century cases, and quite frankly they are out of their depth.
These are people who can barely turn on a computer or send an email, and yet they are the defenders of the slippery digital slope, and preserving liberties in this brave new field of law. And the judges often rely on opinions of ‘experts’, which is to say the very people that have a stake in seeing laws go their way.
So increasingly judges are deer in technological headlights, and rule when in doubt with the big named company they think knows what they are talking about.
Example?
Alex Kozinski, one of the highest judges in the land. And the chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, that allowed Software companies to make resale of software illegal… This is how technologically savvy this guy is…
The following is an excerpt from the LA times:
“Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, acknowledged in an interview with The Times that he had posted the materials, which included a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. Some of the material was inappropriate, he conceded, although he defended other sexually explicit content as “funny.”
Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.”
—By Scott Glover
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 11, 2008
This is the judge of one of the highest courts of the land? And shaping the laws that bind us all?? He doesn’t even know how the web works and he’s defining the legal length and breadth of it? Not even getting into the moral implications.
It is a sad and dangerous pattern, when our rights are given away at a whim.
Businesses are here to serve the people, and when they fail to do that, or choose not to do that, they deserve to fail. The very opposite of what is happening.
Case in point, Obama’s bailout of Wallstreet? Forget Wallstreet. Bail out the homeowners, and the unemployed and underemployed. Generate new business in the vacuum of businesses that don’t want to pay American taxes, or hire American employees at a live-able wage. These companies, Exxon, Shell, take billions of dollars out of the United States, but have a fit if you talk about raising the minimum wage, or paying workers $20/hr.
But we have a corrupt Congress and a corrupt Judiciary, so we bail out billionaires and aggressively tax, broke and breaking, American citizens to pay for that immoral bailout.
Our Congress and our Judiciary are crooks.
Except… that’s not true.
We have corrupt or incompetent people in Congress and the Courts, but the disease is not the man.
The idea of Congress and the idea of a Supreme Court, are good ideas.
There are people in Congress and the Courts who are there because they believe in this under attack idea of.. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
But they get lost, their good lost in the bad. We owe them more than that.
And how do we do that?
By naming names. Specific people vote these abhorrent laws into being. And they count on being a nameless part of a mob, just as the RIAA and the MPAA are klan hoods for companies doing under the shelter of their hood, things they would shy from by themselves or in the brightness of day.
It’s not enough to say Congress passed this and the Judiciary allowed this. We must name names, of those who in our darkest hour went around putting out lights, as well as those few who stood against them, and tried to light candles.
We must name… the enemies of our state. So we remember them, and push for their ousting for their crimes against us. It’s not enough to just concentrate on who is or isn’t president, we must concentrate just as hard on who we fill Congress with, and the courts.
Enemies of the State.
Enemies of the People.
We must name our betrayers.
Heroic Times 