A C Zoom

Copyright law as it exists should have no validity given the technological advances of the past two decades.

Yet, we continue to apply old, inapplicable laws, resulting in quite absurd results.

A jury decided that a woman should pay $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she is accused of illegally trading over the Kazaa Internet service. [:http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10268199-93.html Total damages: $1.92 million].
This itself is completely absurd, but all you have to do is to carry this to the logical next step - she was accused by RIAA of uploading 1700 songs. So the correct award should be $136 million.

Clearly if someone broke a law, there should be some punishment. But having someone, who is most likely not very technologically adept, be accused by RIAA of high piracy, and have the RIAA win in court, shows that the jury award system is quite suspect. The law is the ass here, but will the Congress wake up and change it? No chance - from recent discussions in France and the EU, to the somewhat recent US Congress support for Mickey Mouse support laws, it is clear the all lawmakers are more inclined to listen to the rich lobbyists than to any rational reasoning. Will this absurd $1.92 million, which was really $132 million award bring some sense to the copyright laws? No hope from any law makers anywhere in the world (maybe China, India, or some other country will help here), so in the US, only the Supreme Court is the last hope, though that too is unlikely given the old, conservative heads there (just listen to Scalia protecting teenagers from words that are quite common in middle schools here, but now are illegal on broadcast TV).

It is quite instructive to plot the trend of copyright laws. Progressively this has allowed power and control to be held by the rich and powerful artists and corporations, and the law has completely lost sight of the original goals of copyright.

EFF has many good articles on this, and now they have created a teaching copyright site providing a much needed counterpoint to the one-sided views of the industry (and groups like Metallica, people like the manager of U2, organizations like RIAA, MPAA, and many others).

What is shocking is the way the laws have taken away rights from the people - the law in 1790 started with 14+14 years of copyright, but in 1998 with the passage of the Mickey Mouse act the term is now the life of the author + 70 years! The Constitution's stated purpose of "promoting the progress of science and useful arts" has been upended by raw corporate greed. We now have things such as encryption - so a movie or a song can be purchased but cannot be played if one moves from one country to another. DVDs are crippled so that users cannot fast-forward over parts and notices the industry believes we should watch - even if you just watched it a minute ago, you have to sit through it again. A song cannot be played except on devices that the industry has blessed. Seeing all these hurdles that the industry has thrust upon consumers, which were made possible by exploiting technology in the industry's favor, it seems somehow just that the same onward thrust of technology should cause big problems for their old business models.

So this guy in Florida pulls out a handgun.

Thinks he can stop a two-ton SUV that a thief was driving, with his puny handgun.

Fires his gun blindly.

Kills the woman passenger in the car. Could have killed a bystander, could have killed any innocent person in the SUV. Could have killed the driver, could have caused the SUV to crash and kill someone else.

No matter - this man is home free, probably able to sleep soundly. Sheriff says law allows this person to kill. NRA made the usual "guns for everyone, guns everywhere" noises, supporting this man.

Florida should allow the use of M9 Anti-tank Rocket Launchers to protect against personal injuries, handguns are not good enough. What if the thief could have escaped? No way he could have escaped a bazooka! We want our Bazookas!

I wonder what the pro-life conservative gang up in the Supreme Court will say about this - they just passed a judgment of 10 years in prison for a gun going off accidentally admitting that "it is unusual to impose criminal punishment for the consequences of purely accidental conduct" - and no one was killed - yet they banged the gavel giving him 10 years in prison.

This bozo killed someone with his gun, and future such bozos in Florida and other states will no doubt make similar news in the future. Wonder what the Scalia-Roberts gang up in the Supreme Court would say about this...(well, the answer is easy - they will find some way of saying this time the gun going off was not the trigger-happy-gun-owner's fault).

What everyone already knew is now official - Cheney and Bush, along with help from John Yoo @ dick-i-pedia and others have turned the US Constitution on its head, and have dragged the US into the company of tyrannical regimes.

Cartoons say it well:
World is watching you
Cheney is the mastermind, Bush was "just following orders"

Articles:
The Banality of Bush White House Evil states the core truth - "Torture was a tool in the campaign to exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would support a war that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda."
Torture was useless - Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who questioned Abu Zubaydah in 2002, points out that the terrorist operative provided important intelligence under traditional interrogation methods. This is a point on which the Cheney strategy right now is to raise a lot of confusion.

It is sad, shameful, and even pitiable to see some radio and tv talking heads try to defend this Cheney/Bush policy - torture is something the US should never do, and it is never necessary to do. It was downright cowardly for Cheney (who took five draft deferments himself) and Rumsfeld types who allowed the rank-and-file in the army to stand trial and lose jobs over the Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib incidents when all along Cheney created such policies in the first place. The army did what they were told - policy set from the White House itself and the White House should be the one condemned and not the people in the army.