Ukulele Consultant and Ego Kabuki Critic.
Tapwater Jackson has been performing lobotomies with a broken ketchup bottle since 1953.
Occasionally, I am tapwaterj at gmail dot com. But, really, so what?
Quoted in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, 510 U.S. 569 (1994), the 2 Live Crew case.
Just when I was about to give in to the thought that nothing in politics was genuine or a merit-based decision, this happens and restores at least a day of hope for me.
Pride for my friend gives me a lump in my throat. What a beautiful feeling.
Derek E. Bambauer - Brooklyn Law School, The Legal Workshop
Your Internet is missing something.
In India, it’s pornography. In China, it’s political dissent; in France, white supremacist sites; in America, copyrighted material. Countries worldwide are using a combination of legal rules and technological tools to make targeted information disappear from their citizens’ view of cyberspace. This strategy, known as Internet filtering, poses a hard question: when is it legitimate to censor the Net?
According to the story, the first sign of trouble came was about midway through the argument, when Chief Justice John Roberts asked what the difference was “between email and a pager?” (Cue sound of hard slap against forehead.)
At another point, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what would happen if a text message was sent to an officer at the same time he was sending one to someone else.
“Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?’” Kennedy asked. (Cue sound of louder slap against forehead.)
Justice Antonin Scalia stumbled getting his arms around with the idea of a service provider.
“You mean (the text) doesn’t go right to me?” he asked.
Then he asked whether they can be printed out in hard copy.
“Could Quon print these spicy little conversations and send them to his buddies?” Scalia asked.
Maybe the justices are against cameras in the court because when they think of cameras, they think of those huge cameras on tripods with the cloth to cover the photographers and the supernova flash-bulbs.
“Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”
Digital humanism seems a particularly interesting way to frame ownership issues with digital media. This is a perfect follow to “Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars” which I read for the second time last week.
Copyright and the music industry are a cultural anthropologist’s dream come true of consistent bad behavior, technology-chasing legislation, and economic solutions to philosophical problems. This bad boy of copyright law is the perfect vehicle for not only IP education, but a broader legal education on the technicalities of statutory interpretation, economic theory, and legislative reactions to new technologies and mindsets.
“Over the last few months a couple of academics and free culture activists working together in the Communia network have drafted a manifesto about the public domain in the digital age.
This public domain manifesto was launched yesterday and we are looking for signatures (we already have quite a lot of them).
The manifesto underlines the importance of the public domain as a shared resource and established a number of principles for the public domain in the digital age.”
Read the manifesto here.
While I have not yet read the opinions, some of the commentary on the ruling has graphically explained how the court ignored the law to make its 5-4 decision in favor of corporations funding political campaigns.
I think it is appropriate to suggest that the Supreme Court’s ruling would be considered the work of “activist” judges by the GOP, but for the fact that it was in their favor. Funny how that works.
MR. FRIEDMAN: I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I’m sorry. Entirely what?
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh.
JUSTICE SCALIA: What was that adjective? I liked that.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Orthogonal.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, right.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Orthogonal, ooh. (Laughter.)
JUSTICE KENNEDY: I knew this case presented us a problem. (Laughter.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: I should have — I probably should have said -
JUSTICE SCALIA: I think we should use that in the opinion. (Laughter.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: I thought — I thought I had seen it before.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Or the dissent. (Laughter.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: That is a bit of professorship creeping in, I suppose.
