Curiouser and Curiouser! on law

RIAA and the 1st

Thu, 22 Aug 2002 08:39:59 +0100

RIAA suspends DMCA lawsuit as listen4ever ducks. Tanks back to fringes of ISPs' lawns [The Register]

» There is something that I don't understand about this lawsuit (and let's be honest I know *nothing* about law, US or otherwise).

Doesn't it fail on 1st ammendment grounds?

How is it different to the libraries & internet filtering arguments?

I guess the point for me is: why does the fact that the RIAA cannot persue the site authors by conventional means to remove the copyright material give them the right to ask for the site to be blocked?

Can someone explain it?

UK DMCA : it's going to get a lot worse...

Thu, 22 Aug 2002 15:31:24 +0100

UK's DMCA: there ain't no sanity clause. Patent Office "criminalises" netizens, researchers [The Register]

» Blast! Did I miss a meeting? How did we get to this point already?

Oh well trust the UK government to jump in ass first and try and make their version of the DMCA even worse than it needs to be.

For a critique of some of the flaws of the UK DCMA read here.

Fight expansion of copyright law

Mon, 09 Sep 2002 21:19:37 +0100

University to challenge copyright laws - Tech News - CNET.com. Quote: "Duke University's law school has received an anonymous $1 million gift to fund advocacy and research aimed at curtailing the recent expansion of copyright law." [Serious Instructional Technology]

» Way to go anonymous donor!!!

Civil justice in decay

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 10:14:34 +0000

Civil justice system 'close to collapse'. The UK's civil justice system is "creaking at the seams" because of under funding¸ one of the country's most senior judges tells the BBC. [BBC News | UK]

» You know it's got to be bad when judges start complaining on behalf of litigants.

Of course the government could cut costs by taking justice to the streets, Dredd style!

We're lying to you, but at least we're honest about it!

Fri, 03 Jan 2003 15:52:51 +0000

Corporations claim the 'right to lie'. From Common Dreams:

"While Nike was conducting a huge and expensive PR blitz to tell people that it had cleaned up its subcontractors' sweatshop labor practices, an alert consumer advocate and activist in California named Marc Kasky caught them in what he alleges are a number of specific deceptions. Citing a California law that forbids corporations from intentionally deceiving people in their commercial statements, Kasky sued the multi-billion-dollar corporation. Instead of refuting Kasky's charge by proving in court that they didn't lie, however, Nike instead chose to argue that corporations should enjoy the same 'free speech' right to deceive that individual human citizens have in their personal lives. If people have the constitutionally protected right to say, 'The check is in the mail,' or, 'That looks great on you,' then, Nike's reasoning goes, a corporation should have the same right to say whatever they want in their corporate PR campaigns."

[Ming's Metalogue]

The idea of corporations being able to enjoy the rights of 'free speech' strikes me as utterly revolting. Indeed, upon what basis does a corporation enjoy any rights at all?

Attorneys at Bitchin

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 09:20:14 +0000

Brobeck's bubble burst.

Brobeck Dissolving

Brenda Sandburg
The Recorder
01-30-2003

Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison -- just two years ago the most profitable firm in the Bay Area -- is dissolving following the collapse of merger negotiations with Philadelphia-based Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. [more...]

...

Morgan Lewis & Bockius made the right call. While Morgan Lewis needs a strong west coast presence, their culture is 180 degrees from Brobeck's ax-at-the-door culture. It would have been a match made in hell - and I'll be willing to wager that a number of the more progressive lawyers from Brobeck will end up at Morgan Lewis anyway once the dust settles.

...

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

I read all of the article ( "ax-at-the-door culture" above ) and although it was long it was fantastic. It's just like LA law!

Thanks Rick :)

No spam in this tin

Thu, 01 May 2003 22:50:04 +0100

REDUCE Spam Act. Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren today introduced her REDUCE Spam Act. That Act is in part based upon the idea that I have bet my job on. This has led some friends to write that they hope the law is not passed -- some because they believe it won't work, some because they don't like this or any regulation. To the first group, I appreciate the concern, but remain unworried. To the second, I understand the concerns, but remain convinced. The general idea of the statute is that spammers must label UCE, and if they don't, then the law enables a bounty system to pay people who hunt down those who fail properly to label. I've been getting lots of questions about how this would work, and as many are similar, it would obviously help to post a FAQ. It would be great to get more questions beyond the first wave, and a FAQ would certainly help. This final draft does have a nice modification that was suggested by a particularly skeptical friend. The label requirement initially is a simple ADV: in the subject line. There are obvious problems with mandated protocols, and so the modification requires either an ADV: or "an identification that complies with the standards adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force for identification of unsolicited commercial electronic mail messages." This is a nice modification that both creates an incentive for the development of other protocols, but vests that process within a body that so far has resisted capture. I was originally worried that any industry standards group would be open to capture. But I have lots of confidence that the IETF will be able to suss out spammers. The key to this idea is, as Congresswoman Lofgren puts it, that the Act would enlist a bunch of 18 year olds in the battle against non-complying spammers. "Between the 18 year olds and the spamsters," as she puts it, "I'll bet on the 18 year olds." Me too. [Lessig Blog]

Sounds like a good idea and, most importantly, progress in the right direction. How will this work if spam originates outside the US though? A good follow-up step will be to drum up support in the UK and Europe generally.

Chilling

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 10:15:57 +0100

I've been following William L. Anderson's reports of the Duke non-rape case and they certainly make for chilling reading if you have any interest in justice being done and being seen to be done:

...

Lest anyone be surprised that [state prosecutor] Nifong will follow this path, keep in mind that if a jury questions whether or not a rape occurred, his case is dead in the water. Therefore, he has no choice but to pursue this path if he hopes to win. Now, should he attempt to invoke rape shield laws in order to bamboozle a jury, one might give him points on audacity – or even dishonesty – but he will forfeit whatever integrity the man might have had. Any prosecutor who attempts to foist what he knows is a lie is someone who deserves whatever consequences befall him.

...

When you grow up on a diet of Hollywood movies and L.A. Law it can come as quite a shock to realise the depths that the U.S. legal system has sunk to:

...What we see here is that the federal system has become a legal system that exists of the prosecutors, by the prosecutors, and for the prosecutors. When Rudy Giuliani, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, remarked that the Crime Control Act of 1984 tilted the playing field in favor of prosecutors, he was not exaggerating. A legal system that at its founding was set up as a mechanism to ensure rights of the accused has become a system of guilty pleas and show trials, and is more akin to what Stalin enjoyed in the U.S.S.R. than what George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the great William Blackstone helped create more than 200 years ago. [cont...]http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1744()

Strangely I know more about the U.S. legal system than I do the U.K. system. Does anyone know of any libertarian legal bloggers in the UK?